Sep 17, 2019 City Council on 2019-09-17 1:00 PM

Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, September the 17th, 2019. It is 1.03 p.m. We're going to move down through our work session agenda for this afternoon. The first item is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Do we have any citizen comments on consent agenda items? Seeing none, we'll move on to agenda item number two. Requests for clarification of agenda items listed on this agenda. Council Member Briggs. So I would like to, we had a citizen request to pull item P, so I'd like to pull that one. Item which one? P. P as in Paul? Paul. Okay. And I'd like to also pull AC, which is the solid waste and recycling changes. And then I have a question on V as in Victor, which is the integrated pest management plan contract. I was looking for a list and I couldn't find it. It did say pesticides and I know that on our list we included trichograma, I think it is. But what that is is it's tiny wasps that kill moths and butterflies. And I am curious to see if this is on this list and included in this contract because I'm actually not in favor of using that. Okay. Especially since we're a Monarch city. Anybody here to answer that? Okay. Hello, I'm Russell Cook. I'm Parks Manager with Parks and Recreation. The wasps, yes, they are on the list. And that was one of the recommendations by Howard Garrett for the DENIA pilot program, organic program. Okay. Thank you. I am absolutely not in favor of using those. So I'd like to pull this item, please. Which one is it? V. V as in Victor? Yes. And if you could just share a little bit, I mean, either Councilmember Briggs or staff, if you could just share a little bit about what these wasps do or why they were included. I mean, I really don't have a whole lot of information about that. So we can either talk about it now or it's being pulled. We'll just, is it okay if we just, we'll just hear it at the, we'll hear it at the meeting out there. Yeah. Yes, Councilmember. And during that, if there is an alternative that can be used to not kill moths and butterflies, then I'd like to hear that too. Because I really would be in support of this. I just recently found out what that is. Thank you. Okay. All right. I believe I saw Councilmember Ryan. Yeah, I've got a question on item AE on the permit fees. This isn't for parks, right? No. Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Two questions. One, we now have a new business license, and I'm wondering, we've had situations in the past where we've implemented something new and then years later we end up with a company that no longer is in compliance with where they're at. And how is this going to be down the road? Is this existing businesses will have to come get this or is this something that will continue on? I'll get that answer for you. Okay. And then my other question is, find it here again, there is a gas well development flat that is based on number of lots and I'm trying to figure out how we use plots with gas wells. That's determined. Which, which item is that? That is that's on a F. So, I think I want to pull both would like to pull both AE and AF for individual consideration, mainly just that we can because it's a major change in how we budget and would like to be able to speak to that. Okay. Yes, because remember Davis. If I could have item x pulled, I just need to recuse from that one. Okay. No staff report on that. Anyone else. Let me make sure I've got the ones that have been requested to be pulled. I'm showing item P, which is schedule fees for cemeteries are we wanting a staff who pulled that. Did you want a presentation on that or I'm just a little presentation I it was a citizen request to pull it so just to have a little bit more detail for the public. Okay. And I've got V as in Victor. Who, who did you pull that one. Yes, and that's the. Okay, that's the, the wasp one right. X that's pulled just for to recuse. Okay, so no, no presentation. And then AC presentation required on that for AC. Well, it would be good anytime we can educate the public on the changes coming up. This is the new solid waste and recycling that the fees are not changing, but we are changing some processes. Okay, so you just want somebody to describe the changes, or just to put a slide up. Okay. Of the, of the changes. Okay. Sounds good. In a E. Councilmember Brian. What would you like on that. Well, I had had those couple of questions. I apologize for not having gotten them in. So just the answers to those questions. Yeah. And the main reason for pulling is just to be able to make a public statement that, Hey, look, we really did a lot of research on this to come up with these figures. Okay. All right. And then AF, is that the same? Same thing. Okay. Any other clarification of agenda items or any agenda items wishing to be pulled from the consent agenda? Okay, seeing none. We'll move on to our work session report. Work session 3A. We're going to just sort of move it down the queue. Because they, it's my understanding that DC, are they here? Oh, they are here. Okay. All right. So we'll move forward and we'll receive report and hold discussion from representatives of Denton County Transportation Authority regarding agencies operations and transportation services within the county and city of Denton. Give Raymond a little bit of time so he can catch his breath. Absolutely. Mayor, members of the council, Mario Cannas, our deputy city manager from time to time DCTA representatives have come to council to make presentations. The last time that Mr. Mr. Suarez came was last November. Soon after he was appointed CEO DCTA, Mr. Suarez, along with his staff attend on a regular basis, the mobility committee. So they do have been providing updates along the way, but this would be a good opportunity to bring the full council up to speed on all the various activities happening with with the agency with so many changes that have occurred with legislation, the budget, etc. Staff changes. I thought it would be a good opportunity to have Mr. Suarez just give you all kind of a state of affairs of what's going on with DCTA. With that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Raymond. Right, just for you, Mayor in the public that this is not a pending matter. This is just an update. So I will be remaining in the conversation. Okay, thank you. Clarification. Thank you, Mayor and members of the city council. It's great to be back. I've been in the position, literally, just a year now, September 14, I think was the day that I actually took over. And I've been on vacation for the last couple weeks. I just got married in Quebec, Canada. So, unfortunately, Marissa Perry was going to be here, our CFO, but her child got sick. So I'm, I'm working without a net here today, but I'm going to provide you an update on basically everything that's been going on DCTA spend a little bit of time on the budget and that we've been briefing the board on and I'll open it up for any questions thereafter. So, 2019 was quite a year I really believe in in theming the year so that staff can kind of rally around an idea concept and try to motivate folks and when I when I signed the contract with the board. I said this is going to be a year of change and I had no idea how much change you were actually be going would be going through but it's been significant. And here's some of the major changes that we've gone through in the first year. I deemed it a year of change because we knew that there obviously was a leadership change but we're going to go through a legislative change which was going to completely transform our board, how we operate board members have been coming and going we have bylaws we have new government governance structure that we're working on with bylaws and with organizational changes and how we govern and measure ourselves. We're going and have been throughout 2019 making organizational changes, changes in leadership. We stood up a local government corporation to take back some of the control from a private provider DCTA has historically provided transit services or bus services through a third party transit operator first transit. It's created some challenges over the years we've had significant increases and and mistrips and service issues service efficiencies and we've tried just about everything we could. With the existing structure so we decided to create a local government corporation which is a nonprofit organization to move all the employees under that to separate the employees from direct operations and control of DCTA but to provide an opportunity for us to move forward as we start thinking about how we transition. Into 2020. We spent quite a bit of time looking at all the innovative services that are available in the marketplace a lot of micro transit mobility on demand. Scooters bikes you name it there's a lot of mobility services out there. And one of the things that that became apparent to us is that these companies while they're innovative and technologically advanced it doesn't necessarily equate to. Stability and perfect example as you recall maybe a year year and a half ago there were a lot of bikes and in and around. Denton and Louisville and now most of those bikes are gone and now you have scooters and some of those companies have been acquired some have gone out of business and so going bleeding edge isn't necessarily the best thing to do, but we recognize that there's a lot of opportunities to improve mobility. And so we decided to do is go out and instead of selecting a handful we decided to approve the majority of the providers that are out there so that we have the flexibility moving forward to work with any and all providers in the marketplace and then another major tasks that we've been. Undertaking over the last year is really looking at our our expenditures positioning ourselves for the next year but really trying to slow down on some of the initiatives at the past board based on feedback that we're getting from our stakeholders. And trying to be conservative about our financial plan strategy trying to free up as much net available funds to the bottom line in our long range financial plan and prepare for the new guidance from our board and our stakeholders as we start thinking about the strategic initiatives and what we want to do moving forward. And then ultimately one of the major questions that was asked of DCTA was to start tracking costs by city by type of service and to make sure that whether we're contracting for service or providing direct services that we can allocate costs by city by type of service and so that's not easy to do. That's not something that most transit authorities have done. Frankly I don't know of anyone that's done that in the past but we were up to the challenge and we've been working on that and we should have a cost allocation model very very soon. So that's what's been happening in 2019 and 2020 we're deeming it, let's see what happened, there's a slide that's not in here, well we're calling it the year of change and transformation. With the new board of directors, it's apparent that we certainly need to be more effective, more cost effective, more resilient, and we need to apply all these new technologies to delivering services into our stakeholders and so one of the big initiatives this year is to do a couple things. One is to address the cost allocation model but more importantly to completely transform the way DCTA does business and we're going to be doing that through a new process and so we'll be going out to an RFP, we've met with the three city managers, we're going to make sure that we're going through what we're calling a transformation process. Todd's mentioned in the past he does this and continues to do this, efficiency studies, but we're taking it beyond just looking at efficiencies and we're trying to figure out how to not only be more efficient but more effective with our services and apply all these new mobility strategies and we think it's long overdue for this agency so we're pretty excited about it. We're working on developing the RFP. One of our executives has come back from medical leave, Nicole Rector-Cram and she will be leading this initiative along with myself to make sure that we're moving it forward. As I mentioned, we're going through the new bylaws restructuring those and looking forward to a new engagement strategy and a new direction for DCTA heading into 2020. So what does that assessment look like? Well, we're going to assess our current model which is to conduct analysis, critique how we're doing business, look at best practices, missing services, and where there's underutilized bus service and every transit authority that hasn't gone through this type of initiative with fixed routes. It's very common when you have fixed routes that you have peak service, you have non-peak hours where you're not as efficient and it may make sense for us to take some of the current fixed route services that we have, turn those into on-demand services and zones. We've already done that around the airport here in Denton and Lewisville. We've created a lakeway zone around the Hebron station. It's been very effective and we've seen ridership growing and the intent is to bring in a consultant or team of consultants to look at not only how we're doing business from an administrative perspective but operationally as well and figure out what kind of changes are needed. In some cases we're going to need to make some additions, there might be service gaps, we'll change some things and then certainly we'll have to look at eliminating some of the excess costs as we become more efficient moving into the new model. And the hope and the intent is that we'll be saving money, we'll be more efficient, we'll implement the best track, best services, we'll have metrics that we're able to manage against and better policies and procedures. And the cost allocation model that we're currently developing will go hand-in-hand and dovetail with how these new costs and new services will be allocated to our member cities and to the cities that contract services from DCTA. So where are we? What are the next steps? Well, we're currently looking at RFPs that have been provided by the city manager of Denton. We're creating the scope of services, we'll be going out in the next month. My hope is that it should be a pretty quick turnaround and then this fall we'll be working with the consultants to start looking at our changes. Now, this is going to be a comprehensive change. We're expecting to have significant changes in Denton and Lewisville, possibly in Highland Village, but a lot of that service is already on demand. And it will need to be rolled out over a period of time and I'm not here to project what time frame that will be on because we have to work with the consultants to figure that out. And then we'll move forward with the evaluation. I'm not sure why this is doing what it's doing with the headers. My apologies for that. So to give you an update on some of the communications initiatives because we are hearing consistent feedback from our councils and from particular writers that they're not able to get information about DCTA. I just wanted to cover some of the different things that we're doing to collect feedback. We do customer surveys. We do public open house meetings quarterly. We have social services roundtables in Lewisville and Denton that we do quarterly. We have online apps for customer engagement. We have citizen advisory team meetings both in Lewisville and Denton. We have a transit tracker, website feedback form, social media, customer service care. We have a lot of different ways that we communicate with customers and some of the digital and traditional communication channels you can see here. But we make a very strong effort in trying to get out in public forums to try to create forums for getting information back from the ADA community. We work very closely with the veterans, basically different outlets for reaching veterans about different services. And so we have many different channels in order to disseminate information but also to get feedback. And we've heard some questions about passenger amenities around benches and shelters and why we can't add more and we were actually trying to add quite a few of the benches and shelters on our major routes. We do have challenges in doing that at times because we have to make sure that they're ADA compliant. We can't just put a bench or a shelter if there's not connectivity to a sidewalk or road. And so we've come up with a comprehensive list of all the different opportunities that need to be funded. However, because of this transformation project that we have over the next six months, we're very hesitant to be putting in shelters and benches because if we go to more on-demand service, it's a virtual stop. The vehicle actually comes to you, not to a particular location. And frankly, fixed route service is becoming less attractive, especially in suburban environments where zone service actually is more effective. It does require an app at times or it requires a location where citizens can go to a particular location and the vehicle will go by there depending on whatever service standards that we put in. So while we're hearing requests for adding bus stops, it's probably not financially prudent to be doing that over the next six months while we're re-evaluating these services. And I'd hate to say that any one particular route is guaranteed to stay the way it is. We'll likely not only go through an efficiency study and evaluation with a consulting firm, but we're also bringing a firm in to help us look at all of these new innovative services and figure out what's the most effective way to provide services in a particular area. Conventional fixed route doesn't always work best and we're finding that to be applicable in many parts of Louisville and Denton as we move forward, but we want to make sure that we're doing that in a methodical way. Part of moving to this local government corp was really centered around having a little bit more control over operational efficiencies. We had a significant amount of turnover which ultimately results in on-time performance issues. You can't pull a bus out if you don't have a driver in there and if you get a driver, they're not familiar with the route, they can get confused. So one of the things we want to make sure of is that we were reducing our amount of open positions because open positions ultimately returns into a lot of overtime. And so we were seeing that in our financials where we were spending a lot of money in overtime, we had morale issues. So as we brought in the North Texas Mobility Corp as a local government corporation, we've seen a significant downturn in open positions, we've seen improved morale. I'll get into some of the benefits and why we did what we did, but we also improved operator pay and improved benefits and we'll talk about that in a bit. So I'm very pleased with where we're trending. But what that also did is it gave us the opportunity as we start transitioning these services from more of a direct service to on-demand, which likely will be privatized, it gives us a little bit more control about how we transition those services over. And then lastly, regarding the passenger input, there's several different resources for requesting information, lodging complaints. There's certainly, you can go online to our website, there's a go request process that you can fill out online, which is a simple form. You can also contact our customer service department and get a hold of somebody so they can ultimately provide that direct connect and execute a go request on behalf of the person that's either lodging the complaint or is looking for information. And that number is 940-243-0077. So there's all kinds of ways for people to communicate with DCTA. We try to take an active approach with our citizen advisory teams and getting information out to folks in many different ways, including social media. We have somebody that really focuses on communicating with people on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. So I want to move on to an overview of the long-range financial plan. And as I mentioned before, staff has spent a lot of time working on this year's budget. I'm happy to say that this year we're bringing a budget that's less than it was the year before in operations. There's capital expenditures that happen from year to year that increase or decrease, but we're really trying to focus on. And the commitment that we had made to our board was that for FY 2020, because our board just got seated a couple of months ago, that we were going to bring back a budget that was not any higher than last year. But that said, we've increased services on the A train to add midday service. We've had increases in vision and health care for the operators because that was one of the big issues that we've had. But we've been able to find savings through the budget process to make sure that we're not increasing our costs, that we're actually trying to decrease our costs. At the time that we presented this budget to the board, it was $340,000 less than the prior year on the operating side. But we've added, based on conversations and requests from the City of Denton, we've added some operating costs to provide a new service for dealing with some of the transient and homeless to provide better connections to some of the social services. And so that's added about $70,000 back, but we're still under budget from year to year. So looking at the overall budget, there's two things that we want to make sure that we're doing. Not only looking at the next fiscal year, but also looking at the long-range financial plan and how the budget will inform the long-range financial plan. The long-range financial plan is also impacted or influenced by the strategic direction of our board, which is to say that as we think about economic development or adding routes or changing services, it will have a long-term impact on our financial planning processes. To start the process for budget, we really look at starting with our financial policies, and these are some of the major reserve policies that we have in place to ensure that we have adequate reserves, whether there be a downturn in the economy, sales tax projections don't come in the way they're expected. We have a major issue like back in 2015 when we had a significant flood. These type of financial assumptions are built into our long-range financial plan in our budget. So we have a fund balance reserve of three months of operating in case there's a downturn. We have sales tax stabilization at a 3% annual sales tax increase. Now each city, and typically what DCTA does is much like other transit authorities, is we look at not only what we're doing in our local economy, but what other transit authorities are doing around the country. And we found that as an example, I believe for 2020, the city of Denton is using 4% sales tax growth. The city of Louisville for 2020 assumes no sales tax growth, and Highland Village is somewhere around 2.2%. So we made an assumption around 2% sales tax growth. This says that we have a stabilization of 3% in our annual sales tax, and so that kind of gives you an idea of how we handle sales tax. We also try to ensure that we stabilize our fuel fund because there can be sweeping changes depending on what's happening. I think just recently there was an attack in the Middle East on one of the large oil fields, and it's impacting up to, I've heard, somewhere between 5% and 10% of the world's oil reserves or being impacted, not reserves, but the output in Saudi Arabia. So those types of issues can spike fuel costs. We've been fairly conservative over the last few years, and gas and fuel has actually stabilized and been fairly low. As a matter of fact, the state of Texas is some of the lowest fuel in the nation, with the Dallas-Fort Worth area actually being even lower than the state. We also have a capital replacement and infrastructure maintenance fund, and we have an internal debt service coverage ratio that's a financial coverage ratio to make sure that we can pay back what we owe, and that's a ratio of 1.25%. Good financial stewardship suggests in transit that you should have around 1.5 or better, so this is more aggressive, but I think it's financially prudent for us to have it at that level. So go ahead and change in that position of the agency. Raymond, if you could, because I think we might have some questions. This looks like it's a good break. We're going on to the financial component, so any questions up to this point? Councilmember Briggs? So we were talking about the fuel stabilization fund. Do you have any plans, and you may go in this in your presentation, to use electric vehicles or switch to any type of electric buses or vehicles? I would love to do that. Thank you for that question. I would love to do that. The infrastructure cost is very significant, so what we've been doing over the years is watching the cost, what the industry is doing. So many of the transit authorities around the country have been using federal dollars to pay for the vehicles, and they've been heavily subsidized. And the vehicle cost isn't necessarily the issue, it's the infrastructure cost. The infrastructure cost is all the substations and the powering in order to do that. So most of the transit authorities have been testing, if you will. They've been phasing it in a handful of buses going into electrification, and most of the transit agencies have had fairly larger fleets than DCTA. With our transition and when we look at the number of routes that we provide that really require big buses, which is where most of the electrification has been happening, we really haven't seen that the tipping point as far as the cost versus the return on investment is making sense for DCTA. But we're staying very active with regard to electric and hydrogen energy buses because hydrogen energy actually has a much longer range. There's funding that's coming up through the Volkswagen, there was I think it was over a billion dollars or so of funding that has become available because of the issues that Volkswagen had. So we've been paying attention to it. We were a little hesitant also because the technology for DCTA to take that plunge, we didn't want to do that unless we recognize that the technology is very stable and that it's easier to maintain and so from a cost perspective we just haven't felt like it's the right thing for us to do yet. And given all the other issues that we've been trying to address from a priority perspective, we've kind of put that one a little bit on the back burner, but we've been paying attention to it. >> Councilmember Armitage? >> Yes. So a couple of things. One, I want to make sure that I got that customer service number right, 940-243-0077? >> Yes. >> Okay, great. Got that in my phone. I wanted to thank you for spending some time with a constituent of mine who's a writer of bus route 7. I believe that that's the route that goes from Oak Street, at least that's where she takes it to her job at Walmart at Razor Ranch. And as you know, that route has undergone some changes that make it really difficult. >> It's a challenge. >> Yeah, and again, you have been there, so I'm just going to say a little bit about this for those who are listening, who might not know. One of the places it stops is at MHMR, and it stops at a, I would say, not disabled, accessible part of that area. And people have to walk or shuffle quite a distance to go to MHMR. And then for those who are going to work at Walmart or any one of the Razor Ranch area businesses, they get off. It takes a kind of a roundabout way on the service road on the highway and then drops them off at Waffle House. And there's a pretty treacherous walk from there under the bridge. So anyway, you know all that. But I'm mentioning that to say thank you for being there for her. And I, too, rode that route with her because I wanted to experience it first. Or actually, I should say, in my car, I drove her to work so I could experience that route, but she had me go that way. And we saw the people waiting for MHMR. So given that you know the problems are, you've taken the time to, you know, travel with a constituent. What do you propose for the solution? Because it's unsustainable for the folks at MHMR and the folks who work in the Razor Ranch area and have depended on that route. Thank you for that. The biggest challenge is to try to get a big bus along Bonnie Bray, which is where it's supposed to travel and then continue on its existing route. Because there's been some street repairs that have been going on and continue to go on, it's very challenging for the bus. Well, we actually had to take it through a different route. So there's a couple of issues with it. One is that, and the other is the vehicles coming off of 35E northbound and cutting across to get over to University in the right-hand lane to turn. It creates a heavy congestion. I did, actually, after she came here and talked to the City Council, I became aware of it. I drove her around on the vehicle to actually, in my personal vehicle, to understand what the challenges are. I think she became aware that some of the things she was asking us to do were virtually impossible to do with a bus. And so it's been a big challenge. I don't know if there's an easy answer. We're certainly going to take a look at it. I believe that as we go through this zone, I recognize what her issue is, and I agree that it's not an easy walk. Because she's getting dropped off on the west side of 35E, has to cross underneath the bridge, go across over to Wal-Mart. And the connection between Route 7 and Route 4 haven't been ideal for her shift. But we're certainly looking at it. So I wish I could say we could solve every passenger's problem, but we're certainly not ignoring her. And I've made a commitment to her that we're going to continue to look at it and see what we can do. I'm just hesitant because it's a very significant process to change a route. And there's no real good answers for how to get her from that particular location without an improved connection between the Route 7 and the Route 4, without going to a zone service, which we think may actually be the right thing to do. So we're going to continue to look at it. And when we decide to make a change, unless it's a minor change, it can take up to four months, because we have to follow a federal process to make sure that we're not impacting other riders. Every time we make what seems sometimes as just moving a bus stop a few hundred feet or a hundred yards, we're impacting somebody else that may or may not want us to move it. And so that's been the big challenge. And thank you for answering that. And I realize, obviously, the Bonnie Braid construction, that's a big issue. That's not avoidable. I want to speak also to the fixed route issue that you mentioned. I'm thrilled with the fixed route idea, but I also want to advocate for the retention of those -- I'm sorry, not fixed route. On-demand route. The opposite. On-demand. Thank you for going on-demand. I'm thrilled about that. I want to advocate for the necessity of certain fixed routes that serve like Route 7, which serves a number of people who depend on it to go to work. Or, as in the case you mentioned, those routes that serve the homeless community are daily bred, but there are other routes that serve a certain number of people in our workforce going to work. And as for MHMR, I wanted to see if, at the very least, and I understand that it takes time to change where the stop is, but to have that stop closer to MHMR, to have it be a covered stop, because so many people with disabilities and I got to see their people waiting with nothing. That would be one stop that would seem to me to be good for a fixed route, because there's a built-in clientele for it. Also, you mentioned having a consultant to look at which routes to go to on-demand versus fixed. I'm sure you plan on doing this anyway, so I'll state the obvious. Your best consultant is the people who ride the bus, and they will tell you, so I hope that you have focus groups and listen to them. Anyway, those were the main issues that I wanted to mention, but again, I understand that there are certain unavoidable problems with that Route 7, but at least having a bus that can go down University and having a stop at MHMR where people with disabilities are not put in such a position. So thank you for that. We will likely have a hybrid, some fixed routes, some zones. We may actually have some routes that are routes during part of the day and zones during other parts of the day. So I don't want to kind of forecast what the solution is, because we don't have the consultants on board. So we're going to have efficiency consultants. We're going to have transit experts looking at that type of service and figure out, and we will absolutely have focus groups. That was one of the reasons that at the start of the year I felt it was very important that we start reaching out, embracing the CAT teams more, creating these social services round tables so that we can get veterans, we can get people from MHMR and everybody involved. And so it's not the first time that they're going to a meeting with a consultant saying, "What are we doing here?" So we already have those processes in place. And thank you, and wonderful. And DCTA is so essential, so let me and us know what we can do to help. Speaking of veterans, I have one more thing. Yeah, it's about -- I've got some comments, too, but it's been about seven minutes, so if we could wrap it up, I'd appreciate that. I understand, but, you know, all of my low-income constituents depend on this. Well, I'm not saying you can't speak. I'm just saying let some other people have an opportunity, and we can come back and answer those questions later. Okay, so I've got a question for later about the Veterans Center. Okay, thank you. So Raymond, on the fixed route seven, that's a large bus, do you have an idea of what the ridership is on that overall? Mayor, I wish I had the recall on the routes. Well, my question, sort of the thrust of the question, is I know that they've opened up Bonnie Bray to a two-lane road, and so I certainly would want to think that, depending on the ridership, if I understand the large buses are too long maybe to take those curves -- I mean, there's pretty sharp curves there at that interchange temporarily until they get the roundabout finished -- to see if there's an opportunity to substitute, depending on the ridership, and it's a little bit more smaller and maneuverable, it would get you back on sort of the regular route because you can go down. You can go down Bonnie Bray. It may not be possible, but I just wanted to just throw that out. Yes, and actually it's an excellent question. We asked that question, or it was asked of us, by the person you know, and the ridership is actually fairly significant at peak, and so it's a question of peak, off-peak. We want to serve it with the airport zone so that it can also be served to connect from -- we actually dropped people off at Presby in the large bus, and then there's a little shuttle service that goes from Presby over to MHMR, and so that last leg we're trying to serve. But again, that wasn't our typical route. It just turned out that that was the best way we could serve it. We'll take another look at it for sure. I appreciate that. Thank you. Any other questions at this time? Yes, Mayor Pro Tem and then Councilmember Meltzer. So I think you answered one of my questions regarding the shelter, and so I'll wait on that and just see how that goes. And I do want to frame -- thank you for touching on it. I do want to touch on that same constituent of everybody here. I mean, we're all elected. And so I think the kicker is I looked at it, and I think the delay is about 15 minutes, right? I think -- I just want to frame it properly, right? So that drop on the west side of I-35 and Route 4, they would carry you to where that -- exactly right in front of Walmart, et cetera, is 15 minutes. And I don't think that that was -- as much as I give you a hard time, I just want to frame it right, right? And so that is the frame. That's the window. It's not this huge, giant miss. It's a 15-minute window we're talking about that apparently is a problem that it doesn't match up with our schedule, whatever that is. But it's not a -- it was presented as though there's no option that would carry you to the other side of I-35. The challenge is to not diminish what this passenger has alluded to is on schedule, it looks great. Okay. But then reality happens with all the construction and the delays and traffic. And so those may not match up perfectly where she's missing her trip opportunity. And so -- and that's not every day. It just depends on the time of day, the traffic, her particular shift and when she's trying to get there. And I -- again, I rode the route with her. I drove her around it. We looked at the schedules. We've -- it can be a challenge, but you are correct that it's not a significant delay. But at some times, depending on whether those routes connect properly, she may have to wait to the next bus. And she can't do that because it could be 40 minutes before the next bus comes by. So she chooses to walk. And I think you're spot on. I don't want to -- I want to give it its due, absolutely. Thank you. But I think you're absolutely -- your other point is true, too. If we adjust for -- those adjustments are going to be punitive to someone else, right? And so there's -- that's the intricacies. And that's kind of -- but I'll tell you candidly, the way it was presented, there was no bus that traveled from west of 35 to east of 35. It connects with the 4. Yeah, right. And so that's kind of -- and you're right. I mean, the timing, there's -- heck, we're all experiencing traffic. So yeah, that was just -- I appreciate that insight on that. And I look forward to seeing what you come back with. But help me understand this as well. Is there not -- does the 4 not stop at Ector on 380 right across? I guess it's a block and a half from MHMR? You can look it up. I'll have to look at it. Based on the schedule, I see there's a stop at Ector and University. The challenge is that we're not -- because the stop is there, it doesn't mean that we're actually stopping there right now. Sure. I'd have to take a look at it. Sure. Yeah, I'd just be curious to know how far we're trying to adjust for. Sure. Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah. So we're going to have kind of a big one, a medium, and a small. We'll try to be succinct. You know, before your tenure, Mr. Soros, I'd say the big observations were rising cost, decreasing ridership. Yes. So now is it primarily -- you know, would you say strategically the goal is just getting the costs out, or are you also still looking to increase ridership? That's a complicated answer. The answer is simple. Of course, we want to continue to increase ridership. We need to reduce cost. The system is too inefficient right now. It's not the right type of service for the communities that we serve. And I've been saying that for a couple of years now, that we have big buses where small buses are more efficient. They can get up and down the roads quicker. They can get in and out of traffic. You go to on-demand. That's not required to be on a fixed route. You can maneuver around the issues with the roads being under construction, so it's going to make it much more efficient. We've actually seen an increase in ridership on the Connect service this year. We have a 14% increase on the Connect bus service year-over-year, so 11 months through 2018 versus 11 months through 2019 on the Connect bus service, as we refer to it. There's a 14% increase here, and in Louisville, it's actually up 28%. So we've seen some nice growth there. Now, that zone service that we put in is part of that as well, so we're seeing some nice growth. Part of that is not necessarily just riders. It's actually because we've had a fare change that was intentional. We actually reduced costs or reduced the fare, and you would think, "Wow, you reduce the price, you're going to have less revenue," but in fact, it usually has the inverse, which is you have increased revenue, which is what we're seeing. So we're actually seeing average revenue per rider going up, and we're actually seeing more ridership. What you don't see is those increases when you aggregate it all with UNT, because UNT is actually decreased by 6% year-over-year, and that's primarily due to-- The ridership or the revenue? The ridership, and it's predominantly for two reasons. They've added significant student housing on campus or near campus, and they've actually seen a reduction in enrollment year-over-year, and so that's some of the-- It's unfortunate because we've been seeing year-over-year growth in our ridership on UNT, but we've actually seen a reduction this year so far. What led me to ask the question was, with the discussion of on-demand, it makes intuitive sense to me that you've had the growth where you have, if you've become more convenient, that convenience is a barrier. So as your consultant looks at substituting, like in routes 1, 2, and 3, substituting on-demand at times or in places for fixed, I would think wait time would be critical. If people are now waiting, say, five minutes because they're conditioned to schedule, but if it goes to 15 minutes for on-demand, it's not exactly on-demand anymore. And obviously, there's a huge trade-off in expense to be able to get there in two minutes, but if the goal is still to, in part, to increase ridership, I would just ask that wait time be factored in. That's going to be the big challenge. We're going to have to look at the routes and dissect those. There's times a day. We have students living all over. They ride not only UNT, they ride fixed route, and they go in a lot of different places. And where on-demand is very effective is when--and there's a nuance. So yes, you're correct that 15 minutes is worse than five, but not necessarily. And it depends because if I can look either on my computer or on my phone and know that the vehicle is going to be there, then I don't have to go walk out and wait on a bus and do this and wonder where it is, whether it be fixed route or not because of the delays. And so there's a convenience factor that goes along with on-demand that people can plan around that 15 minutes so they can do other things, maybe sleep in a little bit longer, grab something to eat, and then the vehicle meets them when they need it. So there's a major convenience factor. Bus stops and schedules have always been a major barrier in transit. There's no question. I'm a big advocate for these types of services moving forward. Can I go ahead and ask my medium and my small? Sure. And these are, like, ignorance questions, and I'm sorry to burden, like, the head person with answering these, but I don't actually know what the difference is between zoned and on-demand. If I don't know, I imagine others would like to hear that. Yeah, there's--they're used interchangeably. In a lot of cases, it is a problem in our industry. A zoned service basically means that you use technology to create a fence, a geo-fence, right? And you can literally go in and street by street, click your mouse, and you create a zone. And there's vehicles that operate in that zone, and so they can go anywhere and everywhere in that zone. They may be able to go from that zone to the next, but they're just not completely on-demand. It's kind of like Lyft, you can get on it, and you can go anywhere you want from here to the airport. And so zone service signifies that you're operating in a zone. If you want to travel in that zone, your price and your fare is associated with that, and there's parameters around how you operate your service in that particular zone. I appreciate that explanation. You're welcome. And just the last little narrow one, maybe I ought to know, but what's in the numerator for debt service coverage? In other words, it's the ratio of what to your debt service expense? It's the amount of available funds to cover the debt. So you've got revenue-less other operating expenses. Revenue-less operating expenses, your net available funds that can cover your debt. And why are you comfortable with -- thanks for that -- and why are you comfortable with one-and-a-quarter versus the standard one-and-a-half? It can range from -- we've seen 1.2 to 1.75. It's really what the board feels is comfortable and what we see our exposure, and there's no calculus. It's more -- Yeah, it's a risk management comfort thing. It's a risk management issue, because the more you -- what happens is if you raise that, it means that you're restricting more cash, and you may not need to do that. And so it's just a comfort zone. You're leaving a little more aggressive. Yes. All right, thank you very much. You're welcome. Council Member Arnett, you had one more question about veterans. Yes, and that is regarding the new veterans facility in Denton-on-Carroll, if you're familiar with it. Yes. Are there any plans in the works to get a bus stop there? Well, because we're so close, as we've been talking about, to reinventing our service and service strategies, we're going to bring that into the fold on our next route service implementation and figure out how to best serve that. Wonderful, thank you. You're welcome. Okay, so long-range financial plans, policies, and what's built into this year and future years. So change in net position, bit of an eye chart. I apologize for that. Operating revenues are up, the operating revenues are -- the majority of that is bus and rail fare box recovery we're seeing, and we've assumed some slight increases in fare revenue, mainly because we just want to be conservative. We don't want to increase revenues under the assumptions that we're going to -- typically in transit what you see is when you change services, revenues drop and ridership drops for a while until people get used to it. It's just a comfort issue. And so the overall expectation is that we didn't want to increase fare revenues, but we have added some midday service and rail, so over 2021 and beyond we're expecting to see some increase in midday service. That's probably the biggest request every time we go out and do customer surveys and we get feedback is there's not enough service frequency to meet up with the green line and to get people back and forth in the middle of the day. So fare revenues are up slightly. Again, working with UNT, their expectation is that -- they're not quite sure exactly what's going to happen with enrollment as they're dealing with the 21st century and a lot more online services and things of that nature that are impacting ridership. Operating expenses are slightly down year over year. As I mentioned, that 342 is actually what we presented to the board the last meeting we have introduced, the board approved, adding a ninth route temporarily and that's to deal with the -- not deal, but provide services for the homeless and making sure that we're connecting social services better. But there's a contingency on that, and that contingency is that MHMR -- I'm sorry, our Daily Bread and Monsignor King actually open -- stay open for an hour more on each leg so that we can actually provide that connection and it's beneficial. Otherwise, if they're not open later, then it makes more sense for them to stay where they are. A lot of them are at the DDTC and other locations and they wait for it to open and then that service comes online. But that's planned in the expenses. So that's about a $57,000 increase 'cause it's for nine months. The annualized amount is a little over $70,000, but we think that service will help. So I'm gonna move along to operating revenue on bus. You can kind of see where -- what the average fare rate is, the projected ridership. There's, again, a small uptick in fixed route ridership, and we felt that we should keep it conservative based on the amount of changes that we're gonna be making over the next year. And your bus operations, passenger revenues year over year, you can see are slightly increasing. Contracted services are all of the different services that we provide to UNT, NCTC, Frisco, and McKinney -- McKinney Urban Transit District. Raymond, real quick on that, just for clarification. You said that the North Texas contract or ridership -- I don't even know if y'all break it out into average fare per rider. It's in one of these figures? Because I think -- Fixed route. It's in the what? Fixed route. So is that $490,000? Is that a yearly ridership projection? Because if it is, I don't think North Texas is in there. No, you're correct. Yeah. I don't think it's up there. That's the reason. Right. Sorry, Mayor. Yeah. No, I'm just curious if y'all -- but you don't have to try to answer. It might be just something you get back to us on. With that, how do y'all figure out, you know, either the cost per mile or cost per ride or whatever? Right. Not a problem. Well, we have a total contract value, so that's pretty easy for us to do. So we can get back to you with that. Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you. Sure thing. Yeah. Operating on rail revenue slightly up. Again, that's primarily due to the additional service that we're adding. I think the biggest challenge and/or opportunity for us with regard to rail is leveraging our rail stations and doing some economic development and actually increasing opportunities for people -- we have to create destinations for people to go there. And it's something that's going to be very strategic and important for us in the conversations that we've been having with our board about what we can do to increase ridership. You can do all the marketing in the world that you want, but if it's not where -- if there's not destinations for people to either live, work, or play -- and we've seen it on the TRE. We've also seen the reverse on TxRail, where the city of Grapevine is seeing significant increases in sales tax revenue. A lot of people are coming from Fort Worth and from the airport over to Grapevine, but they've built a billion-dollar development right in the heart of Grapevine, right at the station. Of course, they already have the entertainment district there. North Richland Hills has done the same in advance of building the line, and they're seeing some fairly robust -- not necessarily ridership. The ridership is pretty good, but the actual revenue generation off that rail line has been very significant to the city of Grapevine and North Richland Hills so far. Federal and state grants -- these are the major grants that we get for bus preventative maintenance, rail preventative maintenance, and you can read the rest. Those are the preponderance of the operating grants that we receive. We are, in 2021, actually become available in 2020 for what's called fixed-guideway assistance, which is about $2 million of grant assistance that we've already programmed in the financial plan, but we likely won't be able to actually tap into those federal dollars until 2021, and so that's where they're programmed on the operating side. On the capital side, we have positive train control that's nearing completion, cross fingers and toes. We're in what's called revenue service demonstration, which is actually testing in a live environment with passengers on board. We have to do a consecutive number of runs. I think it's around 360 or 370 runs without any issues. We're about halfway home, and my hope is in the next two months, barring any issues, that we will achieve revenue service demonstration, and then we go into the next phase, but that's how much money's grant-wise is programmed for the first phase of positive train control. Now, when we put in positive train control, it slows the system down because people -- the system requires you to slow down in certain areas, and so we submitted for a grant. We received $4 million to make improvements in the next phase. That $1.5 million is what's programmed into the next phase of making improvements so we can gain some of that speed back on PTC. Those are the major drivers. The other two are fleet-related, and this is to buy vehicles, which come with 85% funding from the federal government, so we're paying 15 cents on every dollar. We need to buy more smaller vehicles so that we're not burning fuel, and it's much more expensive to maintain big buses. The 2020 allocation is there as a placeholder, but we're not really going to move forward with that until we figure out what our plan is with these mobility as a service, and some of these private companies can bring vehicles themselves. They might be able to buy them cheaper. They may be more efficient, and so we have it programmed, but we're not necessarily going to spend this money at this point. And then the hike and bike is the last segment that connects from College Street to just south of the lake, Highland Village Lake Louisville Station, and that's a project that's being implemented by TextDOT. That's the federal grants that are assigned to that project. It should be complete by the end of the year. I'm sorry. Councilmember Briggs? So are these reoccurring grants every year that you depend on for your... The operating grants are, the capital or not. They're specific to the project. Okay, so for 2020, along with the sales tax or the tax from the cities, you'll get around $6 million. Correct. On top of that. Correct. And some of that funding is based on a very challenging calculation that I don't know that anybody knows, including the feds, how the formula actually works. They plug it into the system, but a lot of it's based on ridership and what's going on in a particular region and how they apportion those funds. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. So I want to go back to the TexRail because we've talked about this a ton. It's a pain point for me is the ridership on the train. And I did go visit Hebron, 121 station, that complex and kind of got a feel for that and understand that driver a little better. But when I look at TexRail, it's kind of counter to everything that the business models, right? So, one, you would say there has to be something that drives that North Richland Hills is not really known as a driver. I mean, it's a busy area, no question. But I just don't understand. I'd ask you to help me understand what we need to do. Besides, we're not in the development business. We can't develop as a city. But we can set rules and stuff in place. I get it. But I guess I challenge that that's the driver. And to frame it, the trains started and it was free. They started charging and ridership went up. And so it's not a -- and you sent the article in advance that there's retailers in Grapevine singing its praises. Hey, this is happening because of the rail. So there's an obvious partnership there. So I'll just -- help me understand that further. I know you've touched on it. But whatever you could say that what's behind that trend, best you can tell. I'm not saying that you have an infinite knowledge base there. But I just want to hear you as far as what's missing. Absolutely. Thank you. Retail has actually shown, for some of the folks that have established around, I would say within a mile of the station, Grapevine has a very strong entertainment district already there. And they've built hotels and they continue to build. They have a master plan around that platform. And what you've heard is probably what I've heard, which is from some of the owners of the establishments around that area, that they've seen increases in sales as high as 25%. Bear in mind that TexRail operates -- their model is they operate seven days a week, roughly 22 hours a day. The first, which is a very high cost of operations, but because they're connected to the airport, they wanted to make sure -- because the airport almost runs 24 hours a day. It's not just people that are traveling back and forth. It's all the people that work there as well. So that's a very, very large employment base on one side. You have a very large employment base on the other side, which is downtown Fort Worth. And so they felt like it was incumbent upon the service to provide 22 hours a day of service. So when you look at the number of days per week, seven days per week, and you look at the amount of average daily ridership, which is around, depending on the month, 30,000 to 40,000 riders, you're looking at about 1,000 riders per day. Now, it's a brand new service. My expectation is that that service will continue to grow. People will get more comfortable using it, and you will see growth in that area. So they have two major employers on each side that anchor both ends, and now you have the entertainment district of Grapevine that's already at that station. So what it does is it creates a lot of shorter cycles between people that would wait four or five hours. They might want to take the train and go over to Grapevine, which we're hearing from -- that's not me saying that. That's what locals are saying. And the businesses around the area are saying they're seeing major upticks because people are using it on the weekends as well. And so high frequency of service, destination points, major employers on each side that are open, the City of Fort Worth is open, entertainment, restaurants, all those things at the T&P and at the ITC, which give them access into downtown for 18 hours a day basically. And so -- and then you put an entertainment district right in the center of that, and it's going to be very, very fruitful. So I've been a big proponent, and one of the reasons that I don't agree with our past practices, which is to figure out where we can put money into projects so that we can -- and it's not something that DCTA was doing in any way that's not consistent with other practices. I've worked at DART, and you do the same thing. You program the money into future projects. What we were programming the money around was not focused on rail ridership. And when you look at rail ridership, if you look at your endpoints, the first thing you ask is, well, how easy or how hard is it for you to get to your endpoint so you can get on that rail vehicle? And what have we built around it? And this is not something new, and I'm very happy to come in the future and present literally shots of around the world where it will become very apparent what rail lines are successful and which ones aren't. If you look at the TRE, you can see that there's many stations that have had no growth in 30 years, and their ridership has not grown. And then you can look at other overhead views, and it doesn't take a graph. You can literally see the density around the stations in Canada and the U.S. and say those have high ridership, and it's because they have live/work/play around those stations. And we can work together to make those types of projects work through land acquisition, through RFPs to make it easier for developers to come in. I think Denton is the end of our station is a perfect location for high growth in the future. We just need to start working together to make that happen. When you look at a couple of the stations in Louisville, you're starting to see some increases, and there's projections for more because there's a lot of development happening around the stations, and I want to see the same thing for Denton. Thanks. That's my barometer. I had a question. Yeah. Yes. This is a real pragmatic follow-up to your discussion about fare rates, bus fare. This is about -- my question is about not so much the rate, but the actual punch cards. And I was wondering if there's any plan in the works to update that method, which can -- as you know, it works if there's not a big line, but if there are a lot of people and where you have to have the date punched, the month, the date, et cetera, AM or PM, it can take a long time. So what are -- So Darts, I want to say five years ago, embarked on a project to automate a lot of their fare payment system. It's part of GO-PASS, but they've introduced a peripheral, if you will, called VIX, and what that -- VIX. And VIX is it basically -- it's not called the VIX card. It's part of the GO-PASS system. But what it is is there are transponders. They've installed them on all of their stations and on their buses, which will allow you to use a fare payment media, much like you see in major cities around the country, where you can go to over 150,000 outlets in the area, and even if you don't have -- if you're not a banked customer and you go into a 7-Eleven and you can add money to this card. So you can use cash to add it to the card, and then you can use it as just like a tap-on, tap-off card. So we were part of that implementation. However, with the relationship of DART, they wanted to implement the system. We rolled out the same ticket vending machines on the platforms, and we've learned over time that we need to let DART get that thing settled and working and working well before we make the investment in moving over to that. But we're at the point where we can certainly consider it. We just have so many things on our plate. It's a matter of prioritization. And while it's something that we could certainly look at, I don't know that 2020 is the right year, likely 2021. And how long has DART been using it? They just -- they've implemented it. I don't know that they've gone live everywhere. They're still working on it, working out some of the bugs. I don't think they're in phase two of that project. I can give you an update and let you know exactly where they are. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Member Davis. And then let's go ahead and just let the presenter finish the presentation, and then we'll queue questions up. So these are kind of budget questions. If you could go back to your net position slide. And then I'll have a question for the next slide, too. But starting on this one, so I'm noticing that Fairbox, of both services, is about 2% of total revenue. And I don't ask that question to propose that Fairbox is ever going to cover the entire service, especially when you talk about the debt service we've got. But first of all, when you look at the on-demand zone, obviously you're not budgeting right now for the on-demand zone services. You're budgeting based on your current fixed routes. Is that correct? We're budgeting, and we're assuming a small decrease in cost associated with implementing that on-demand. But it's a little bit dangerous to assume how much savings we're actually going to have. So to your point, what we try to do is assume that our existing fixed route will cover the cost. Why would we do it if it's costing more, other than it's more effective? Can you tell us just in a nutshell-- I know you have a consultant coming in to fine-tune some things. But can you tell us in a nutshell what the fair structure of like an on-demand or a zone service is and how it's different from the pay a buck 50 and ride the bus? I think what we have to look at is buck 50, ride the bus. You look at some of the other services that we provide that are as much as-- it's the cost, not the revenue. So it's not $1.50. Maybe I don't understand the question, because you pay $1.50, but the service, depending on the type of service, if it's on-demand, for ADA, as an example, could be as much as $40, $48 to pay for that trip, the cost associated with it. Right, I'm just asking the fair structure, not the associated cost. So the fair structure typically-- well, on Lyft, depending on the zones, they average less than $10 per trip. When you look at fixed route service, it can cost as much as $48 to $60. I mean, when you fully burden all the infrastructure and administrative services and all that, the average is about, I want to say, $100. Gosh, I can't remember if that's per passenger. It's not per passenger. It's per-- I can't remember the metric. I feel like we're still ships in the night. I'm asking about the fair structure. The fair structure. What will a customer pay for a ride that-- A customer, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, I apologize. OK, I was on the cost side. Well, they're related, but I would like to know. Yeah, I think-- well, that's certainly-- it depends on what the policy is by the board. The board can set the fair structure, but to not avoid your question and try to answer it directly is if you are-- so one of the things we do is we provide transfers. So if you pay once, just because we force you to transfer or you need to transfer, that transfer typically is free. So what we've done with some of the services is we set the payment to our existing fair policy so the passenger's not paying any more to get to that destination. Can I interrupt you? Yes. I don't think they have enough information because what you're asking is if there's an on-demand, sort of like what they're doing in Arlington, what's the average cost or what's the fare that someone may pay on an on-demand to get from point A to point B versus what the fixed rate cost is. I think-- is that the thrust of your question? No, no, sir. Well, the reason why I asked the very pointed question about how much will the customer pay is because we were talking at cross purposes. My original question was, what is the fare structure? How do we figure out? If I punch in Uber, Uber will tell me where I go. My question is, can you just tell me yes or no, will the average customer switching from a fixed route to on-demand pay more than $1.50 to ride DCTA service? Is it fair to assume that they will pay more for an on-demand service than for a fixed-- It's possible. I don't want to give you an answer and then not give you the right answer. So I think it's correct. I believe in some cases it's $1.50. It depends on the fare structure that we have today because depending on whether you're-- I hate to give a consultant answer, but I'm not saying it depends. Council, we're going to-- if you could get back with him on that because they don't know, because they don't have a consultant, that also is set by the board. Yes. And I think the member cities also have a say in what kind of fare structure-- How much do you want to subsidize? --we want to do that for. So I think that answer-- I don't think you're going to get the definitive answer you're looking for today as far as it may be-- well, the answer is it may be less, it may be more. But since we haven't done the study, they haven't done the study. And we did that in Highland Village. We actually did that. The city of Highland Village agreed to subsidize the passengers so they were paying no more for their service than what they do today. And it depends how many people you got riding in that one route. I mean, there's just all kinds of things that go into that. I understand completely. And I'm not trying to box anybody into a particular-- what's the fare going to be in the next budget year? But this gets to my next question. My question is, when we talk about the vouchers that we provide through a lot of our social services, are those typically vouchers that an agency is paying full fare price for? Or is that some of the-- the DCTA provides just gratis to certain agencies? The preponderance of those are discounted. They're not free. In some cases, we may, for a particular initiative, we might give some free fare vouchers, but not typically. They're paying for-- they're paying a discounted rate, which is standard in our industry. It's not-- there's not a standard fee across the industry, but it's standard that elderly disabled veterans-- again, that's a board policy who actually gets subsidized fares. And there's been cases where cities have been-- or transit agencies have allowed so many free services, it's very hard to pull those back. But where it's appropriate, then, we certainly would consider doing that. On your next slide, that goes to my next question. You have projected ridership on fixed route at 490, 825. Do you know-- and if you don't, that's just fine, but just off the top of your head, do you know what percentage of those or some number of those are either the discount service folks or contract service folks, UNT, NCDC-- That's something I'd have to get back to you on. Do you have any kind of ballpark on what kind of number those are? Less than 50%, more than 50%? I don't think the fixed route includes any of the contract ridership numbers from what I-- No, it would be the discounts. Like, how many are elderly, disabled, homeless? I can certainly provide that in short order. I can't do that today. Here's the thrust of this line of questioning, and I appreciate Mary letting me ask my line of questions. When we talk about fare box revenues that represent 2% of total revenue, and we're talking about folks who are primarily, in my assessment, receiving a discount, or that $1.50 fare is a lot more dear to them than it is to the budget of the DCTA, I would like you to consider and speak with the consultant. I know they're going to talk to stakeholders also. But at one point, I start to wonder, why are we charging for bus service? What is it really affecting our bottom line if we're heavily subsidizing the service anyway, if we are heavily subsidizing certain kinds of riders anyway, if we're going to move a lot of these kind of work-a-day, go-in-your-shift-work job kind of folks over to an on-demand service anyway, then if we're right-sizing buses, why are we charging the buck 50 for somebody to make it down to our daily bread or wherever they're going? Okay. I really want to get moving on this, so if you -- go ahead. Is it a real quick clarification question? Right. Well, just to add to that, and for information to come back to us, because today is the first time I really heard subsidizing from the cities, and so with us paying in $12.8 million in 2018, I'm just wondering what part of that is subsidizing or if it's on top of that. That's all I wanted. Okay. It's part of our operating -- it's already part of our operating budget, so it's actually -- the word "subsidy" doesn't always sound great, but if it's at a significantly lower cost than providing a bus and with all the operators associated with it, you're actually reducing your cost of operation by subsidizing a fare, and that's where a lot of this on-demand really comes in, where you have multiple buses, multiple operators having to just go around in a -- let's say in a circle, the routes a circle, whether people get on it or not, whereas with a on-demand, that vehicle goes to a passenger that's requesting a ride, and so one of the biggest issues for every transit agency around the country is from every board that I've been associated with or heard of always gets the question, "Why are those buses running around here empty?" They're just spewing smoke and clogging up traffic, and that's an issue, and it's been one of the biggest barriers in transit. It's inefficiency of peak versus off-peak, and so that's where this on-demand really has an opportunity. By subsidizing a ride to the passenger, even if you made it free, in a lot of cases, it's less expensive than having operators and buses going around in circles and burning gas and fuel and maintenance. I have quite a bit of information, so what I can try to do is just go through -- -Yeah, we've had the presentation that we can refuse, so if you can just give us a brief overview, and then what we'll do is we'll have questions at the end, and so as we've reviewed the information prior to the meeting, if there's questions, then -- -Okay, I believe I talked about sales tax being focused at 2%. The average gross that we've been seeing is 5.3%. We project, so for this year, we have 2%, and then we have, for the next four years, 4% programmed and then 3% thereafter in our long-range financial plan. It's something that we're gonna continue to look at. We'll look at our member cities, have conversations with them as to what they think their sales tax projections are going to be moving into the future. I will say that from bus services, I'm not gonna touch on a lot of this other than when we look at -- the way DCTA is staffed, it's based on full-time equivalent positions. That gets a little bit interesting when you're looking at the actual service and how we break up the service by route when we're looking at the operators, and so it fluctuates depending on how many full-time versus part-time jobs you have, but from accounting -- generally accepted accounting principles, you look at full-time equivalents, and we've made some changes, moving some folks out of the contracted services and not a lot of them, but overall, in the agency, we've balanced out. We have zero FTE growth between our contractor and DCTA. I'm kind of handling a couple of slides at one time, but the biggest thing that we needed to do is make sure that we were paying competitive rates. Now, a lot of our operators have to have a CDL, commercial driver's license, to operate. They go through training. It's very challenging to drive a big bus around some of these corners. The minute you get them trained, if you're not paying well enough, they go elsewhere, and that was adding to the turnover, and so our average rate has gone up about a dollar -- a little bit over a dollar per hour, but we've seen a drastic reduction in the amount of turnover that we've had, and that's the average rate that we're paying our operators. On a 20,000/80-hour annual equivalent, it's right at a little bit under $40,000 a year to drive a bus. That's $36,000, so about $37,000, $38,000 a year. We've had an increase in our health care. We wanted to make sure that the operators had vision care and benefits. When we were looking at how much it made versus the cost of their health care, it was over 30% of their pay, so you can imagine how enticing that would be to take on a job as a bus operator when you're not getting paid very much and a third of your income's going towards health care, and that's helped. Our increase of $643,000 was part of the collective bargaining agreement. For those of you that were on council, you remember that we were having a major sticking point prior to last year with the union and getting them to agree to a new contract, and this was a major benefit, and I think everybody's a lot happier with morale up. On the rail side, we have a nine-year contract. We're in the fourth year of that contract. It's a competitively-bid project. Prior to that, contracting with Dark, it was significantly more expensive. I want to say it was about a million and a half to two million a year more expensive. It's been almost four years, so I'd have to go back and look at the numbers, but the operators done a great job. They run it about 98% to 99% on time with the rail. It doesn't seem like that sometimes because we have issues, but when you think about all the hours that they operate, it's fairly consistent. So what we bring to the board is the annual allocation of what they bid over the nine years. They have a specific amount they charge for miles and hours of service and employees, and that's this year's allocation. Full-time equivalent on administrative, that's where it is. As I mentioned before, there's-- when we balance out operator and our transit agency, we've had no increase. We're bringing about 1.5 FTEs to our side, but they're coming from the transit operator side. We just want to make sure that we had the intellectual property and the people around data analytics and our reporting so that we had consistent reporting criteria and measures and metrics, so that's what we've done with staff. Fleet replacement is a major block of funds that are being allocated, as I mentioned, for 2020. There's 85-15 on the grant to replace some buses, so we're going to replace some big buses with some smaller vehicles that can get in and out of the service area much quicker. We need to do that. We have some vehicles that are going out of service or beyond their useful life, and then the fleet replacement for 2020 is going to be put on hold until we figure out what we're doing with the rest of our service. Other capital improvement projects, there's some $80,000 for laptops. It sounds like a lot, but it's not really the physical hardware. It's the applications that are proprietary to the rail vehicle. The scheduling software is being repurposed for training for social services, so we can do train-the-trainer so more of the people that need to write our service can actually do that, but you can see these other projects that are rolling over from the prior year, the upgraded fare payment. A project is the one that I was talking about before. The money is there. We're going to likely use some of that for the transformation project, but there will be likely plenty of funds left over to implement some of this new smart card fare media technology to get away from the punch cards, because I want to see that go away as well. I'm going to move on for expediency. I guess that's too late, right? We have an improvement plan, transit safety improvements. We allocate money every year for safety improvements. We don't necessarily have a specific project, but we've already identified some rail crossings where we'd like to see some improvements, so we're going to be allocating some of that money this year and next year toward those to make the trail more safe and those crossings more safe, and I've already talked about the hike-a-bike trail. We're going to be doing that in the last leg so that we could all ride our bikes from Hebron all the way to downtown Denton. Maintenance on rail. The rail system's over seven years in operations. We're going to start seeing more cost. Now, in the original plan, we had $2.5 million. I personally went through the rail operations plan and scrubbed it, and that's where some of the funds that were built into the plan actually dropped down to net available funds so that we can do other projects with it, but that's the allocation for next year. Those are the types of projects you can see below it, what we're going to use it for, and I'm going to move on unless there's questions about that. I mentioned positive train control, two phases. We're almost finished with phase one. Phase two gives us the ability to make improvements on the project. That's 80% funded with federal dollars, so about a million dollars of local funds, and what we're looking at doing is increasing the speed of our vehicles, adding some additional technology to break up the segment so that we can actually move faster across the entire segment, but that's what that money's allocated for, and then the infrastructure acquisition fund is for us to use to either acquire land around the stations to make it more advantageous, either add parking or build a facility that could actually help improve ridership. One of the things that we're looking at in Lewisville is an administrative office. We've had universities interested in potentially relocating to the stations, and so those are a lot of ideas that we need to look at and to have some funds available that if and when we want to do something like that, that we can do that. Otherwise, those dollars can be reprogrammed for other things. Brownfield remediation, where we have our rail facility, was an undocumented landfill. We certainly couldn't develop around it. We have roughly 55 acres, so I made it a priority to get the environmental studies done, which we've completed. This is just the residual funds that are left to finalize the report and file some paperwork with the appropriate regulation entity to make sure that we can actually repurpose the land and either sell it or use it for other purposes moving forward. And then outstanding debt, this is residual from the development of the rail line. This is the amount of debt that's left to pay off and the bonds that are required, or basically the financing that's required in order to pay off that outstanding debt. And I believe that is it. Okay, Councilmember Armitage. Yes, a question about the salary. So you mentioned the average is $18 for bus drivers. Yes. $18, I forget what it said, $0.53, something like that. I was wondering if you could speak to what the lowest rate is for a starting bus driver and then if you could speak to differences if you have part-time versus full-time, what those differences are. Sure, I'll do my best. It's around $14.50, I believe, is the initial start. And before you -- so when you come in for training, it's around $14.50. Once you pass the training process, it goes up. We used to have a six-year scale. So you had to work six years in step progressions before you got to the top pay wage, which is roughly $20, and I can't remember the exact amount, and then I want to be misquoted. So I can get those exact numbers to you. But one of the things we did is we went from a six-year progression table to a five-year progression table to accelerate people through that process quicker. And so the starting wage is around $14.50, and I believe it goes close to $21 is the top. Thank you. You're welcome. Mayor Pro Tem. Yes, sir. So a couple of things, so when we toured last, you and I, we looked at Med Park, and I'm curious, any thoughts there on that giant parking lot that's doing nothing? Well, we've been thinking a lot about trying not to look at it as a big parking lot that's doing nothing as to what it can do, and tried to have conversations with all the universities. One of the things that's interesting is that when you look at the universities, they send a lot of students into downtown Dallas for medical training, because we don't have practicing hospitals that do that here. And so when we look at a live-work-play opportunity, what we don't want to do, and one of the challenges is, the easiest thing to do is to build a bunch of apartment complexes, because you have land, and you can get a developer, and they know that model. But apartment complexes by themselves don't yield more ridership necessarily. They're just located easier access to a highway. But when you look at the hospital that's there and you start thinking, what can you do with universities and hospitals and the natural opportunities, there's opportunities for universities to start working with the hospital to create a hospital district where you're educating and you're training and people live there. Then housing becomes mixed-use development is probably a more logical approach. We've had a couple of developers that have approached us that were interested in building housing, but that's all they were interested in doing. And so I'm very eager to work with the cities and with developers in putting RFPs together in the future that actually look at these pieces of real estate. There's a little bit more, I think, preparatory work that needs to happen with the board or the hospital to see if they're interested, because one of the issues is that it's not just saying, oh great, let's move all that education from downtown Dallas up here. Why are we sending students all the way down to downtown Dallas? It's a long way for them to go. But you have to have the physicians and the educators available to do that sort of thing. That's Med Park. There's other potentials, I believe, at the DETC that are entertainment business district related. There's been some interest already in the last, I would say, six months that are very encouraging. And a lot of that in downtown, I think a big trigger in that is to work with UP Railroad on the rail yard, that lay down yard, because it's a lot of -- there's safety issues, there's natural pedestrian barriers between the entertainment district that you have on Hickory in that area versus the DDTC. And so trying to clean that up would be a very good thing and a very good way for DCTA to get involved in helping the city prepare an area for economic development moving forward. Okay. And then, if I may? Sure. First, briefly, I want to say thank you for whosoever leadership, and I'm sure it's a team effort, but the offer for the state fair rides I share with that, and I think that will be -- hopefully people will take advantage of that opportunity, but I think that's a great program. And I appreciate your leadership and whoever helps make that happen to kind of extend those offers. And then lastly, you've talked about it before, gave your heads up. Just want to -- can you give us some sort of timetable when the board is going to look at the amount of sales tax dollars going in and when there's an opportunity to evaluate if there's a rebate opportunity? I mean, we're -- again, we're 12 million. Louisville's 13 million. Sure. It's just -- and it's just going to keep going up. Sure. So I want to make sure that we give the financial plan to distribute the budget and the financial plan this year to the cities so that you can see the amount of unrestricted cash that has already moved to the bottom line. But by state law, we have to use the funds for transit-related or transportation-related projects. It can't just be a rebate because that's not what this tax was initially enabled for unless you change the legislation. But what we can do is we can work with the board to come up with projects, many of which we're talking about now, is can we invest in complete streets projects, corridor improvements where we have buses. There's a lot of things that we can do that can potentially offset what the cities put in. But one of the primary factors of that is making sure that the costs that are being allocated by city, everybody's getting their fair share so they know how much sales tax they're putting in, what benefits they're getting back, and then based on the amount of service that we're providing, is that the right amount of service that you want or not? And so it really is a process that we have to go through, in my opinion, over the next six months. And we've been dealing with a lot of blocking and tackling, trying to get the organization restructured. Why I like what we're doing with this transformation process is it's going to reimagine how we deliver service, hopefully to reduce cost. It's going to help us reduce our costs that are in our operations and some of the capital infrastructure decisions that we're making. And I want to work with the cities to drop that money to make it available for us to do more strategic initiatives. And that's where I think the board's going to have to be instrumental over the next six months to bring together and start talking about what is the vision for our rail stations? What is the vision for our service by city, and how are we going to attract more people? Because when you look at the competitive nature around the world, the larger corporations are usually looking to relocate where there's mass transit and that it's effective and efficient transit. It's not inefficient, and I think we have a great opportunity to do that. So my hope would be that over the next six months, as we get a better strategic vision from the board, we get the plan together with the consultants, and we know what it is that we want to do and when we want to do it, that we'll have a better feel for how much money we can put into other projects that might allow the city to use funds that they currently have on other things. Thank you. You're welcome. Mr. City Manager, I think, and I'll email you, but the gist of it is I think Raymond makes a good point. If we, what I'd like from you is maybe a snapshot of a street remodel, so that's moving power lines, that's moving water, sewer, whatever it is, kind of what those funds would be able to be used for and what you can, right? So then if we're looking at making a complete street and there's all these, here are the core elements we see normally. These one or two can be used to utilize those funds. These one or two cannot be utilized. I just want to process that better. I think that's a good point. Thank you. Council Member Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. I like the direction that things are going in. I'm looking forward to see what the consultant report comes back at. One of my biggest concerns over the years on the train service is the fact that if you're heading northbound, you've got to be there by 830. That's your last chance to come up here. Yes. And, you know, an hour later to go southbound is 930 and with our entertainment district in the downtown area. There's only on Friday night you had one more train, but it's two hours later and people aren't going to want to sit around for that long. So hopefully they'll include some of that in there. I did want to say that the changing dynamics was brought up at the transportation summit the other day that in the last four years, four years ago at DFW, it was 0% Uber and Lyft related carries and now they're at 22% Lyft and Uber related carries. So that's the way that the future is going is that on-demand zone type service is the only way to really compete with that. And what's interesting is that it used to be looked at as a competitor. I think arguably you could say it is a competitor. It's taking rides from transit. However, Uber and Lyft, I want to say two years ago actually joined the American Public Transit Association, APTA, and there's been a lot of collaboration because I think they recognize, all of us are starting to recognize that a lot of the trips that transit currently provides, we probably shouldn't be providing. The private sector can do a better job of that. But Uber and Lyft and these microtransit providers aren't going to provide every trip the most effective way. And transit does have a role. It's just probably not as big a role everywhere all the time. It really is marrying where you have high density, more traffic, and having more zone service to where it feeds it and it makes it more efficient. So that's the hope and I appreciate your comments. Thank you. I just have a couple of questions on slide 16. Which slide is that, Mayor? It's the bus service full-time equivalent staff summary, that one. Yes. My question is geared more towards the data on my left-hand computer, right-hand computer. Yes. So on total service miles, I think that's for the buses, is that correct? Yes. Does that include the contract services like UNT, Frisco, and the other ones that we have contract services with, do you know? I believe it covers all fixed route bus services, not the on-demand. Yes. If possible, maybe in, you know, sometime in the future, in the next week or so, if you could just sort of get back to the city manager with something that could be distributed to the council, a breakdown of those service miles. How many are Denton Connect, how many are, you know, just sort of break it down into the contract services and the specific member cities, and also the same for the total service hours and also the total bus fuel costs. Because I know that it looks like Denton is more than probably 60% or close to 60% of the service miles. At least that's what it shows. I don't know, but if that's including contract services for UNT and some that are outside the city of Denton, it'd be interesting to know what that is. Okay. I appreciate that. So break out UNT, break out contract services. Okay. Any other questions? And I think the questions on the fares are an interesting one, and I think as we get the consultant on board with the on-demand to see what that is, I know when we looked at the pilot program in Arlington, now this is a different model in the sense of their contracting directly with the ride share, where this would be through DCTA and some type of RFP or what do we call it, the MM something source? Mobility service, yes. Mobility service, yeah. That they set their own fare, and then, of course, their proposal was based upon, okay, if you're bringing in this much money, whereas, I mean, hypothetically, I mean, you could set that at what you want just depending on, and that would just change the cost. So I think we're going to find out a lot more information as we get that out, because I understand the gist of your question, and I don't disagree with it. I don't either. Any other comments, questions? Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Be careful going back. Okay. And thank you so much for your time. Let's go ahead and take about a five or ten minute break. Thank you very much. Welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, September the 19th, 2019. It is 2 52 p.m. We're going through our work session reports. We are on agenda item 3B, receive report and hold a discussion, give staff direction regarding a policy to receive reimbursement for uncompensated charity costs. I'm sorry, charity care costs for emergency medical services. Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. I'm Christine Taylor from the fire department. And we're going to talk to you about accepting a charity care policy. So currently the city participates in the Texas ambulance services supplemental payment program. It's a federally funded program administered by Texas Health and Human Services Commission. And the goal of the program is to offset the portion of the loss incurred when providing services to uninsured patients. So our average transport costs are one thousand one hundred forty six dollars. Payments from uninsured patients typically around eighty five dollars. So the city has a remaining uncollected balance of a thousand sixty one dollars per uninsured transport. Right now, of our patient makes roughly twenty seven point twenty five percent of patients within the city are currently categorized as uninsured. Participation in the program has reimbursed the city approximately two point eight million dollars since we began participating in fiscal year 2014 15. And we're estimating for this fiscal year to bring in seven hundred fifty thousand dollars from participating from this program. And this does go into the general fund as a revenue. So why do we need a charity care policy? So the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid CMS are now requiring a charity care policy to continue participation in the program. This includes a couple of different things, a methodology change and methodology changes on how they're going to calculate that reimbursement. And we also need one because we do not have one in place. The changes that CMS is mandating are that we classify patients now and reimbursements will only apply to patients classified as charity care versus the entire uninsured category. Methodology changes will be based on expenses versus charges. So in our prior reimbursements, we would send in what our charges for the year were on ambulance costs. And now that's going to change to expenses related to emergency medical services. Program changes are effective October 1st and entity participation is going to be the date that we begin with adoption of a policy. So if we are not able to adopt a policy until November, we'll be eligible for 11 months of participation in the program versus 12. So further policy requirements. So first, the first and foremost in the policy, the patient cannot have insurance. The patient does not have a high propensity to pay, which is determined through the insurance discovery process and a payment predictor model. Those processes are currently already in place through our third party billing company that we contract with. They already use a payment predictor model. And so Change Healthcare already does that payment predictor model for us, categorizing those uninsured patients. Once a patient is classified as charity care, collection efforts must cease. And any remaining patient balance after reimbursement will receive a billing adjustment, such as with Medicare or Medicaid payments. These are the major program differences between the current and the future program. So once an uninsured patient is transported, that remains the same. They still go through insurance discovery and payment predictor classification through the third party billing company. Then the change here is in the old process, collection efforts continued with these uninsured patients. We offered payment arrangements or any attempt to collect. In the new practice, collection efforts will cease. So as soon as they're categorized, the city and the billing company will make no further attempt to contact them. When the payment is applied under the new model, charity care patients with the remaining balance will receive a billing adjustment. So if a patient owes $100, is classified as charity care, and we receive a 75% reimbursement, we'll apply that $75 to their account and the $25 will be adjusted off. Whereas in the past, that $25 would have gone on to collections. Any non-charity care patients, we just wanted to reiterate that the city for ambulance billing makes payment arrangements on any outstanding charges and payment arrangements are as low as $10. There's no amount on that. They don't place a timeframe that has to be paid within 12 months, 24, as long as patients continue to uphold their arrangements. It can go as low as $10 a month and no interest or late fees are ever assessed. So next steps are we are looking for direction to continue or discontinue participation in the program. A reminder that this program has typically brought in $800,000 worth of revenue to the general fund. And if recommended by council, staff will place a resolution on the next available city council meeting for consideration and approval. >> Council member Elser. >> Is this coming before us because Medicare and Medicaid have now asked that we have a policy? >> Correct. >> Okay. I mean, is there any realistic scenario or any reason why we would ever not do this? >> I don't see any reason we wouldn't. It does help with taking care of those uncompensated costs that the city wouldn't otherwise be compensated for, reimbursed for. >> Okay, thanks. >> Council member Breaks. >> So I have a list here. I'm just going to read them really quick and you can address them or not. So these are ones that I took down. So are we reimbursed for all of the people that use the service that qualify? >> No. >> Okay. >> So what happens is we submit an application and so we would send in, okay, we've got $500,000 worth of patients classified as charity care. All other cities that participate go in that pot and then it's allocated based on how much money they have. So typically in the past we've received between 45 to 55% of what we've requested. >> Okay. Because that answers my next question was is there a maximum reimbursement amount? So it's just whatever is allocated? >> It depends on the allocation and then how many entities submit for the reimbursement. >> And what do we do with the -- if only 55%, what do we do with the other if they are actually considered charity care? Do we just write it off? >> It's a billing adjustment. So it's the same -- they'll go under the same scenario that Medicare and Medicaid patients are currently under. So if you're a Medicare patient and we submit your claim, Medicare is going to pay what their rate is. And then that remaining amount goes under billing adjustment and the patient doesn't owe anything else. This will fall under the exact same standards. So if you owe a balance and we get a 50% reimbursement, that remaining balance will be adjusted off and the patient will no longer owe it. >> Okay. Just real quick. And so you mentioned charity care qualifications and that's a third party. Is there three things, two things, what -- or is there a form? I looked in the backup and I didn't see it and I'm just curious what's the difference. I mean, if -- because all uninsured aren't necessarily going to qualify as charity care. >> Correct. >> But they're still going to be uninsured, so. >> Yes. And that's why we're still going to maintain that if you don't qualify for charity care and you are an uninsured patient, that we will have the payment arrangements as low as $10, no interest, no late fees. The model that Change Healthcare uses, they do use Experian. They run a soft credit check. They look at demographics. They look at income and they're -- they're placing them into categories of you have a low propensity to pay, a high propensity to pay. So if you fall in that where you've got a higher credit score, you've been paying your bills, you're not going to qualify under the charity care. But anyone in our area that doesn't have an address, doesn't have the income, has a lower credit score, they're going to fall into those low to medium categories and be classified as charity care. >> Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Arbiter and then Councilmember Meltzer. >> Anyway, so first of all, thank you and thanks to the fire department for the service you provide, which is healthcare. And I was wondering, and I don't expect you to be able to answer this now, but this is just something that I would like to see in the future as we roll this forward. I should say I'm supportive of it. I would like to know, of our fire stations, which serve more of our, what is soon to be called charity care patients, you know, which I used to think of as uninsured and I realize now aren't the same thing. You know, that's something that I kind of have a sense of anecdotally, but I don't know if my anecdotal sense of it is right. So, you know, anyway, that's information that could help us and maybe as we start collecting this information, this data through the charity care, we'll have some better information, more details about which of our constituents citywide in which areas have the biggest healthcare needs. So anyway, that's something that I would like to see moving forward. For our patient transport records, we do document which medic responded to them, which would correlate which district for the most part and to the call area that they responded. So as we go in and we're tracking those patients as charity care, we would be able to report, here's the charity care pool and which district, which medic responded. Excellent. Thank you. I would love to see that data on that. Thanks. Thank you. Just make sure completely track this. Do we pay anything to participate in this program. We do have a consultant that does help us prepare our application. He goes through and reviews helps us pull that information together. I do have that cost. A lot less than $800,000 I assume. Yes. That's okay. And so other than the consultant to help us on this, the only sort of material factor on the other side of the ledger be that we forego whatever collections we might get from these unlikely to pay. Correct. And I did some research on that in anticipation of that question. And we're sending over about two to $3 million worth of collections to the per year for the collection agency of this uninsured category, and we're getting about 5% of that back. Now you're going to make me do that math. 5% of the $2 million. So collections in general for the city are very low. Are very low for EMS billing in general. So $800,000 reimbursement in order to forego an expectation of $100,000 collections. Okay. I know enough. Thank you. I did pull that we pay the consultant 8% of what we receive back in the reimbursement. So since we participated in the program, we've received $2.8 million, we've paid him $225,000. So annually the expectation would be $64,000 on $800,000. Yes. So it's foregoing $100,000, paying $64,000. On one side of the ledger, $800,000 reimbursement to the plus. Correct. Thank you. Yeah. So just a clarification for myself. So the transportation cost is $1,146. So we've been talking about charity and let's see the charity care and then uninsured. But for those who are insured, is this covered by insurance? It depends on their policy and their coverage. So we have some patients that their policy will cover 100% of their transport and we have others that only cover a portion and then the patient is left with a remaining balance. It depends on, I haven't seen any of them alike. Several patients that have those additional policies typically are the ones that have 100% covered, but most have a set amount that they're going to pay for EMS fees and not cover the entire bill. Yeah, I think I'm familiar with some insurance not covering any of it as well. And there are some if you don't, if you opt into a plan, a lower plan and that wasn't part of your coverage, we do have some people where emergency services are not covered. Just a follow up for the city manager, and I know that we've talked about this before, but when we talk about the homelessness data and what that costs to the city, is this this amount when someone's actually or will it now when someone's meets those charity care qualifications? Will that be used in the calculation of cost of the city for the like end of service use to the taxpayer? I don't understand your question. Okay, so when we talk about cost of the taxpayer for someone who is homeless as police, jail, EMS, will this give us better data on that? If they're actually qualified. It could if we're, depending on how it's being tracked. They are going to categorize that group as a no classification as the patients that come through and we can't verify an address they didn't give social or whatever. So I'm not sure that would 100% capture the homeless population but that is how they're being categorized if they were unable to provide any identification and no address. I mean that may be helpful to us when we talk about the investment we make at the upfront to try to prevent this from happening. So if you could track it year over year and compare it to the investment that we're continuing to make adding new programs you may we may be able to just come to some correlation there. Thank you. That tracking though would only begin with this policy so we only have data coming into this year. So quick question on the fee consultants fee. So, what I'm hearing you say is at the end of a year or I mean, is this a one time y'all create the application, or you send in your application for reimbursement. Is that like a one time per year thing and you're collecting all the data, and then you collate an application with all your data. You give it to the consultant. The consultant reviews it makes recommendations. Help me understand what's occurring for 8% of our reimbursement of revenue I'm just curious, the consultant is actually preparing that application for us. So, the one that we actually just completed it was for fiscal year 1718. So he, they provide it for a number of cities in the area so they're collecting all that data since that's a list of this is what I'm looking for. He reviews all of that looking for what he's seen and based on information and then submits that application on our behalf. That is definitely something that could be brought in house if the 8% is an issue but we've had great success with getting approval through the program. Just because you submit an application doesn't mean you're going to receive reimbursement. So he is the most up to date and successful on getting those reimbursements through. I'm not suggesting it be brought in house, I'm just, I guess my question, and you could provide that offline, is exactly what is the scope of work. Okay, we can do that. And the time that's being spent doing that. I mean, if it's 10 hours. Right. You know, or if it's 100 hours, it's just, I just want to understand exactly what we're getting for that. And just so that I understand from a, let's just take a really easy example. So right now, somebody takes a is transported. And it's a, I'm just gonna say a $2,000 bill, $1,000 bill. Okay. They, according to the methodology we're currently using, they have a low propensity to pay. And so we would submit for reimbursement. Of course, we're submitting for reimbursement our charges currently but then now we'll have to go to expenses which means our cost. Yes, which will be greater. So there's a possibility of a greater reimbursement back to the city. So let's take the $1,000. So let's say we submit a cost of, let's just say a thousand bucks. We submit a cost of $1,000. Currently, charges or costs. Currently, if they don't qualify for the reimbursement as we're doing it now, then whatever they pay us, we continue to bill them the balance and take it to credit collection after a certain amount of time. Correct. After a certain amount of time of credit collection, does it eventually, does the city report those to a credit bureau or no? Yes. Okay. So if they, so that's that one leg. If they do qualify as low propensity as we classify them now or under this new charity care, then let's say they pay, let's say they don't pay anything. And we've got $1,000 out there. Then we submit that in this application that this consultant prepares. And you're saying that on the average we may get half of that back. So if we're getting $800,000 back on average, that means we're submitting close to $1.6 to $2 million worth of reimbursable either charges or slash costs that we're asking for. Okay. All right. And then the difference now would be the uncollected amount on the charity care classification is there's no collection efforts. There's no reporting to a credit agency. It's just the balance is adjusted to show a zero balance. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. All right. Okay. Any other questions or comments? And the direction is, I believe, probably to move forward with making sure that we still stay eligible for this. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Great presentation. Appreciate it. All right. We'll move on to agenda item 3D. Oh, I'm sorry. 3C. Receive, report, hold discussion, and give staff direction regarding city participation and charitable contributions through the Amazon Smile Foundation. Who's up for that? Oh, there she is. She's stuck around on me. Good afternoon. I'm Jamie Lindsay. I'm the compliance officer and I'm also the procurement card program manager for the city. And thank you in advance for your time. I think this will be a brief presentation on the Amazon Smile program. And this program is not about how big you smile when you receive your Amazon packages. This is actually about charitable giving. So today I am seeking direction on city participation in the Amazon Smile charitable contribution program. I will provide you some background and overview of the program in case you're unfamiliar. The potential city contributions, organizations, and give you some options for direction. So we were initially made aware of the Amazon Smile program because we received a letter from a local organization requesting city participation. And they also requested that we direct our contributions to their specific organization. So we wanted to be responsive to that request. So we began researching the program and potential contributions. We didn't feel like this was a sole decision of the role of the P card management. We did want to be transparent with participating in this program because it would be citywide. So we did bring this to the sponsorship committee in July and that committee ultimately asked for us to bring it forward for full council consideration. So that's why I'm here today. We do have some additional information since we met with the sponsorship committee. We did reach out to eight area cities asking if they participated and if they did how they selected the organization. We received five responses and those five responses they all said they did not participate in the program. I want to be clear that it's not that the program was negative in any way. It was just that they were simply unaware of the program. So the slogan for Amazon Smile is you shop Amazon gives and that pretty much is the gist of the program users of the city's Amazon account which would be the P card card holders shop for business needs that they would be purchasing on Amazon anyway. And point five percent of eligible purchases of the purchase price would be donated to the organization of their choosing. There is an alternative site or portal. It is smile dot Amazon dot com, but that offers the same products, the same pricing, the same experience as the parent Amazon site. So there are no changes there. There is no additional cost to the city and I want to be very clear and that there are no direct funds coming from the city to the organization. It is the Amazon Smile Foundation making the contribution, it is just based off the percentage that the city is spending. So here are some examples of potential city contributions. If you look at FY 17 18 we had an approximate spend of two hundred and thirty five thousand dollars with Amazon so that it would have been almost twelve hundred dollars in contributions if they were all eligible purchases and we are trending a similar way for fiscal year 18 19 which we are obviously still finishing up. And this amount does seem like a small amount in the grand scheme of things but to an organization that relies on charitable contributions this could be significant to them. So I just wanted to show you the mechanics of selecting an organization. This is a one time setup unless the user makes a change. So they log in the first time and they are prompted to select an organization. They can choose one of the spotlight charities or they can do a search for any criteria to select their own charitable organization. And this is saved at the user level and that is something I will talk a little bit more in a bit. But this really is a set it and forget it thing again unless they want to make a change. So when we did a search for the most inclusive search of just denton that gave us seven hundred and seventy five results. That's obviously a lot. So we tried to scrub that down a little bit and we made sure we only included local organizations actually in the city or county and that gave us four hundred and fifty seven. And this is what we brought to the sponsorship committee. Since then we have narrowed that list some more quite significantly. We looked at organizations and these are all five oh one c threes that we have existing contractual or sponsorship relationships with. So that narrowed that down to thirty nine and that thirty nine list of thirty nine was provided in your backup. So the benefits of participating obviously is charitable giving. So it's giving back to the community. It is that simple setup and it's pretty automated once the selection is made and there is no additional cost or again direct funding from the city. Some challenges we can educate and strongly encourage staff or users to participate and select specific organizations but I've confirmed with Amazon that we can't really verify who is participating which organization they've selected if they change the organization. So those are some challenges from administrative level if we wanted to verify any of that information. So the direction we're seeing seeking is twofold. It should the city participate and if yes how should the organization be selected based on the challenges that we've determined and had confirmed with Amazon. We feel that the most simple recommendations are one to opt out of participation or to opt in and ask users to select one of the thirty nine organizations with which we currently partner. And with that I will answer any questions or give more info. Did you have a question. Council member. Okay so the inside kind of at first I was curious if we were going to actually the city of Denton was going to be the Amazon smile one and then we get that into an account and then distribute that. But this is just into each individual user that has a P card that orders through Amazon would choose one of the list of the thirty nine organizations are recommending correct. Okay okay and so if if we did that and we took that amount it would and everybody went equally it would be around twenty eight dollars per organization for the time period. And again we can't really enforce participation we can't we don't necessarily have a way to check right now who's participating in which we're going to be the organization they've selected Amazon took that as a recommendation on their end to maybe make available in the future. But we don't have that capability but yes we could try to spread it out. We just why we thought just the most simple way would be to let them choose off the list. And are those thirty nine organizations are they part of our sponsorship program. We looked at any kind of relationship you already have so it may be a sponsorship relationship it may be contractual that it's all the five oh one C three's that were included on the Amazon side and that we also already partner with in some way. Thank you. Thank you. Just a quick question then a follow up. How many individual users are we thinking this and this would impact P card holders are you P card holder side card holders who we believe are using Amazon on a pretty regular basis so the P card holders we have are about four hundred. So it's quite a significant number. A lot of those don't use Amazon and maybe people out in the field they're actually going to storefronts but we do have a lot using it. We had sixteen hundred and sixty nine transactions in seventeen eighteen. So you could roughly divide that out over users but I can't give you an exact number of who's consistently using it off the top of my head. And you mentioned enforcement a while ago and I know in the presentation kind of the thrust of it was you know we can't enforce that someone would opt in and choose one of these partners but that also means we can't prevent them from choosing somebody else. A faith based charity they're affiliated with or Susan G Komen was one of the featured ones. So it could be that a city user could could just there's no other than going through each individual user's account. There's no way at all to see from the top level how this is getting allocated. Correct. There could be people using it right now and we don't know. Good thing is is that the organizations are vetted through Amazon to a certain degree. They have to be a five oh one C three and good standing with the IRS. You know what they have certain qualifications but no we can't verify that. Let's see. Councilmember Ryan, councilmember Meltzer, councilmember Archer. I like the idea of this program, a lot. I probably, well we can't, as you said we cannot tell them what to do. I was probably encouraged we can strongly encourage, and I would say, somewhat I would like us to encourage based on the department that it's in. If it's Parks Department they give to the Parks Foundation. If they're if you're ordering for the animal shelter you're giving to the DSF. But yeah, I definitely like this I use it myself. And if you log into Amazon, because you've already signed up for Amazon Smile, it will. The screen will go to just one box up there saying do you want to switch over to Amazon Smile, so. Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah, I had planned to ask whether we know if people are using it now and we don't know anything about anything to do this and never will. So this is just about whether we send a nice note, right, encouraging people to patronize certain charities. I don't know. I can't care that much. Sorry. Councilmember Archer. Yeah, and thank you. I wanted to make that same point that people might be using this, this now. So, I also wanted to to highlight three causes that help us do our job as a city, of course a number of nonprofits do as well to mentioned by Councilmember Ryan, the DSF, the Parks Foundation, also friends of the library. And anyway, secondly, I wanted to ask if so since we last. This last came to the subcommittee. It's funny I'm not actually remembering if this came to the hot fun subcommittee or if it came to the committee on citizen engagement but one of the subcommittees. The hot fun sponsorship. Okay, thank you. It came to one of the subcommittees. You know, since then, we've gotten a report as a council on the P card audit. And so, you know, I just wanted to just to just to state that, you know, I would hope it's so obvious probably needn't be said but that that given you know the concerns about use issues with use of P card in the past and kind of changes being implemented now I would hope that people meaning well don't purchase something from Amazon, knowing that okay this will go to a good cause when it would be best purchased somewhere else according to the new P card policy probably doesn't need to be said but now I'm thinking about this with that P card audit in mind so maybe just to kind of run it run this by the auditor I don't know if he's seen it I'm sure he'll won't have I'm sure he'll say fine but you know just to make sure that these two initiatives are, you know, working nicely with each other not in conflict, but I support this I think it's wonderful. And we do have a new card monitoring service it's a third party we just contracted with that is actually doing even more in depth looks every month at our PC spend. So we would pretty easily see from the reports they're providing if our expenditures and Amazon started spiking up, and we thought it may be related. But we have that resource now that would that would probably let us see that a lot more easily. Wonderful, wonderful. I'm not saying I anticipate that just want to make sure that these two initiatives are on board with each other. Thanks. Mayor pro tem and then customer. My direction would be to opt out, opt out or just leave it at their discretion the individual employee because I just think the lack of controls leads to a slippery slope when you're trying to hold someone accountable. So you're trying to audit and you're saying oh my goodness you did this well, we're not going to cover all scenarios and so it just puts the employee I believe in the hotbox, so I think we can have a list available we can consult but I don't want to make it anyway, restrictive, because I think that can then be punitive. In retrospect, if someone took issue with what you did, then, and that's not codified then it becomes, what do we do, you know, and just leads to just be so due to lack of controls, either. Wide open. Here's our suggested list, by all means, or then just not opt in. Cast member Davis. So, my kind of knee jerk reaction in the hot buns committee was to opt out, one because we're talking about a pretty small amount of money, and two, because there is no, there is no way to hold folks accountable. If we can, we can encourage, we have a program that we want everybody to be with. But there's absolutely no way at all to enforce it there with the program. If we, if we do go forward though and we do want to opt in. I think we need to narrow it down even further from the 39 organizations that's a lot I like the three we've already talked about, and if I'm missing one that we have a kind of a more direct relationship with we've talked about parks, we talked about animal shelter we talked about libraries. If I'm missing any off the list. I don't think so I think those are the three that directly support city functions. But 39 just seems like a whole lot. If we're going to let folks do it then we have to give them very I think very clear direction on how it's supposed to work. Otherwise we might as well not do it. A couple questions. So I understand exactly what is being asked. Currently, there's no way for us to know, or can we know who's participating in this just right now. We don't know. No. Moving forward with let's say option to can we know who's participating this right now. No, what we can do is educate I don't think people are aware of the program right now so if we did want to educate people on it we have monthly P card training we have other communications that go out that we could educate and encourage it somewhat promoted, if they're already using it for the purchases. But no we cannot verify. So if we opt out. Does that prevent anyone from continuing to use it. And if the direction is opt out. And we have we find out if somebody's using it which I'm hearing, there's no way to find out either from Amazon, or from our processes. I asked Amazon specifically if there was any way to report on it and they said that's a great suggestion but not at this time. I mean, so the thing the difference would be is we wouldn't necessarily promoted or educate staff if we opted out we wouldn't be pushing that to them. Well, I mean somebody's using it. I would at least like to be able to say hey here's some organizations that are helpful to the city, but that doesn't mean anything they could choose whatever organization they wanted as provided by Amazon whether we would think it's a good organization or not. Councilmember Meltzer and then Councilmember Briggs. Given that there really is no kind of policy to be had per se. I'm also okay with a nice note saying, hey this exists and if you choose to use it, FYI these are some things that that help the city. If this changes in the future and it becomes a more controllable thing. At some point, I hope we consider the idea of creating a dent in foundation that's capable of receiving contributions, a 501 C3. And, you know, in the future that would be a great destination for those funds and then it, you know, goes into a variety of uses. Yeah, I was gonna say I mean, I don't really know what the difference of opt out and opt in and I mean it's kind of the same thing except one we educate the people, you know, using the P cards that hey if you, if you want to do this, you can use these which I'm in favor of I mean if they can do it anyway if we're not saying no you can't do it then we should at least let them know which which organizations that would directly benefit us and if that's, I know that if you divide it between 38 that's not very much $20 but if you only have three or four, you know that that could be significant for one of those organizations. Okay, so it seems like the direction is educate the main question is what does the city as an official, I'll say policy, provide as far as the list of the organizations, and that seems to be something that's there's been a couple people say hey let's pair it down to more than to less than 39. We're happy to do that that was just we were trying to get the list a little smaller. Take a crack at that and then, you know, we'll send it around and see if there's any questions. Yeah. Yes, I want to consider if there are ones that directly benefit police and fire as well as mentioned. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. City of Denton Mosley road landfill. Good afternoon mayor members of council Brian burner director solid waste for the city of Denton to appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about our Mosley road landfill. Be talking about the current condition of the landfill, discuss some what needs to be done to manage some repairs that are impending at the facility, discuss some future usage of the landfill and then prevent identify the potential financial impacts. Mosley road landfill is a facility that was operated between 79 in 1985 by the city of Denton. It's about 40 acres it was based on from what I understand the second landfill that are place that we formally put garbage from the citizens. This facility was permitted by then the Department of Health and has still operated or still contains the permit number 13 even though it's gone through what's called a voluntary revocation of the permit, which means it's formally competed its closure and post closure monitoring. And basically there's no other regulatory aspects assigned to this. We're not accepting any wasted facility. It is closed current conditions at the site because of the decay that normally occurs with with trash. There's been some subsidence at the site. As a result, they're selling and ponded water issues when the water runs off it has caused some erosion. Interesting part about this landfill is it is located in Denton County, not in the city of Denton, and it's bounded on the northeast and south sides by the city of crossroads and the access to the facility is through the city of crossroads on their, their streets. A little bit about where it is located here. See right here is 380 this is 377 going up Kruger. Krugerville and Aubrey. If you know where the discount tire is and such it's located basically just directly south from this facility within the red marks is what's owned by the city of Denton. That's the permitted area, the disposal areas within this blue area. What's off to the east all the way into Lake Louisville is core of engineers property that is not in the city of crossroads either. About a year ago, we had contracted with Parker Smith or Park Hill Smith and Cooper engineering to actually go out do an assessment report, identify some repair alternatives to potentially affect the situations that we're finding at the facility. In the area, we must do something to help protect the facility and of itself. If we did nothing, I mean basically would be $0 to the this to the city. The worst case scenario is a complete relocation of the waste which was close to 40 million. That is cost prohibitive with so it leaves us two options actually just going in and doing a slides a side slope repair a little more than a million dollars or doing a full repair of the cap at about 3.7 almost 3.8 million dollars in the decision on what we need to do here is really driven by the future use of the property. If we're going to let it set fallow, that may be that may have we approach it one way. If we're going to do something different with the facility, we'll make another decision. The use of land over closed municipal solid waste landfills is actually managed through 30 KC chapter 330 sub chapter T of the sub chapter T rules by the state. Basically, you can do use the top of landfills for a lot of things with the exception of anything that may have an enclosed structure. So in case there's methane gas, you don't have methane gas trapped inside the structure or boring or penetration into the facility so that you're not promoting the conduit of. Water, gases, other things in and out of the structure. When if we decided to sell this property, we would have to give notice to the any potential purchaser that we were compliant with sub chapter T rules. Some I do have Gary packing over here with parks and recs as we talked about the future uses of the site recreation seems to come way to the top. In that we're going to have to affect the cap going in, doing some grading, putting some additional soils in the area. It made a whole lot of sense to possibly look at it in use that related to the recreational use in this area. We've talked with some local recreational organizations. We could put a mountain biking course out here using the existing foliage. We couldn't plant trees on top of the landfill, but again, we could grade it in such a way that would provide a exciting ride in the area. As I talked about earlier, these two areas right here are actually owned by the Corps of Engineers. We cannot extend the bike paths into the Corps of Property because they are considered vehicles and vehicles are not allowed on Corps of Property. So we could potentially enhance this by including some hiking trails. Therein we could encompass the Corps of Engineers property and potentially have a by use property or extend some existing hiking trails throughout the facility. So there's a lot of potential uses of this property as we move forward. As I talked of earlier, access into the site is actually through the town of Crossroads via Potter Shop Road to the east. When we originally reached out to Crossroads to talk about the potential of using that, they actually requested the City of Denton pay for a complete reconstruction of the access road, estimated cost of about $600,000. We have actually gone out and done a preliminary assessment of the property and of the road. And currently, engineers, again, they haven't done any penetrations in the area, but just visually inspecting the condition of the roads. They feel that there's about 10 years worth of life left in the road. We could do an overlay, and that would actually take care of any potential impacts that we may incur on this property. Again, we've researched this through our legal department. We have no legal obligation to compensate City of Crossroads for any impact to these property. We have property in there. We have to have access. We have the right to be there. So again, we have options to consider. Either we pay for reconstruction of Potter Shop Road. We work with Crossroads to try to figure out some incremental impact for the road. Or we just recognize our right to use the road and proceed forward. We did take this to the Public Utilities Board on September 9th. They had asked and concurred that we should proceed with the full repair of the cap. And they considered working with the Town of Crossroads on some sort of amenable funding improvement for the site. So the next steps, again, we would recommend proceeding with option three, the full repair of the cap. It helps with long-term stability. We would move forward developing specifications with the onsite stabilization and actually set grades for future recreational usage and bid the project for an award. We would also seek direction to start working with the City of Crossroads on our site access and potentially partnering to work with them to develop this as a recreational facility that we could partner in in on in future years. So with that, I would be able to answer any questions you might have. Member Armitage? So I was puzzled when I saw this and saw that it's not located in the City of Denton. And I am inclined to recommend against doing this because of all the needs that we have here. In our parks department, by here I mean City of Denton, you know, purchasing land in City of Denton, you know, building up our existing recreational facilities, lowering the costs, et cetera. So if it was -- and one thing I was waiting to see if there would be additional information with this presentation as to if there's any liability in, you know, not fixing it up or -- and it seems clearly that no. Otherwise, I would think that our, you know, our legal department would let us know. So in that case, you know, I would say we do whatever we would need to do to make it saleable and we sell it. A number of other concerns that I have, too, but that's kind of my main, you know, view on this and concern. And if you have anything to address, if I've misunderstood anything, please let me know. Have we -- I'm guessing that this is not even on the ETJ area, is it? No. So there's no possible way to ever connect this to the city. No, it's not contiguous to any part of the City of Denton. But yet on three sides, you've got crossroads. Have we approached crossroads to see if they are willing to work out a deal that we sell it at a reduced cost based on what improvements need to be made that they could add it to their park system? I have talked with their town administrator and I brought that up and got no real clear direction from her on that question. So we can go back and we can address that again. Okay, because that would be my direction would be to get in touch with them, start working out some negotiations, because to get it off of our books would probably be the best thing for us. Okay. Thank you. So have we been receiving complaints about the property? No. No. Okay. 3.7 million is a lot of money. It is a lot of money. And especially I mean, it's it's our asset, but it's in the middle of a of a separate town with no clear connection. Honestly, though, when I see land, it's going to be increasing in value. It's very important for me. I mean, I see all the it looks like it's a nice piece of property. So I'm not really inclined to say go sell it just yet. But I am curious on how long like if we were to turn it into bike lane dirt, dirt bike lanes, trails, how long would that be down the road, per se? I mean, because I know that that's something that I've heard people asking for is, you know, bike lane, bike trails, dirt trails. And I don't know any other place where we could have them here. Again, just just a loose estimation. It'd probably take us about six months to get the design work done and then another year to actually do the work on the property. So within 18 to 24 months would be at a point that we could actually start putting the bike trails on the property itself. OK, so that's not that far away. No, it is not. OK. A couple of questions for you. And then I have a question for Gary also. First one, we're talking about a repair cost today right now. Will there be future settling? Do we anticipate that there's going to be additional repair necessary in the future? Obviously, we did something happen with the settling of the waste to get us to this point. Is what we're talking about doing now for the three plus million dollars the end of it? Is that the full repair and we won't see any problems or do we anticipate for future repair? When the landfill was originally closed, it was closed pursuant to the regulations that were in place in the early 80s. We're now in 2018. Those engineering requirements are much more robust. Would be working to comply with an engineering standard was consistent with what we see now. So to answer your question, you know, erosion would be and water would be handled through synthetic raceways off the property. So the engineering controls that we put on site would be managed in such a way that it would minimize any potential or future settling or erosion or anything else that we were finding currently at the property. Okay. He also mentioned we can't plant trees there. Is that because of the penetration of the -- That is correct. And is that you can't plant trees to a certain scale or there's just no -- there's not to be any kind of addition of vegetation that could put roots down past a certain depth? No, there's going to be a very good stand of grasses and other things on the property. But, again, the very intensive root structures that we find with bigger trees and things of that nature that penetrate that cap, that's not what we're looking for. So we could have trees and there are trees currently around the edge of where the landfill is currently located. But on the landfill property, we will not have trees. And I did add a question for Gary. But if there are other questions, then I can let Brian answer those. I do, but I can wait if there are other questions for Brian. Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Try it one more time, Gary. Just get up and sit back down. Okay. That's all that I had on -- Council Member Melcher. Yeah. Mine are probably going to go to Gary, too. So I don't know how you want to work that. But I'll tell you, before walking in, I was of a mind to figure out how to sell it to Crossroads for $1 and let them spend $3.7 million to get 70 acres, 74 acres. But you're kind of making me think. What would the total price tag be to get it to the state of being a regional destination mountain biking location? That is a Mr. Packin question. Gary Packin, Parks and Recreation. I guess I'm going to start a little bit earlier and then follow up with your question. During our master plan process, we had been meeting with our local mountain bikers during one of our meetings, and we've had subsequent meetings with them. We actually took both a group of mountain bikers out here as well as disc golfers to look at the property. The downside of that is that there is a lot of area that's wide open with no shade. So the area that Brian's talking about that we can't put trees all up in here is treeless. There is some really great topography down here in this corner. And we were trying to find other locations that we could put mountain bike trails. Now, there is one site that the city owns that we looked at on Hartley Field out there that was for future purposes that may not be needed, that we're looking for potentially mountain biking out there. It's larger than this parcel. That's in town. It's connected. And the group like that much better than this one. So that's why we shifted and said, well, if mountain biking isn't their first choice, could it be used for hiking? And that's when we looked at this slide here in addition to the fact that the Army Corps didn't want "bikes," vehicles on that land, that we could work with them on this piece and then even possibly cross Mosley into this section to actually get out to the water with trails. So that would give us additional trail costs. Now, to do hiking or biking trails, I had a contractor just give me a rough estimate, and he figured between $75,000 and $100,000 to cut in the trails, depending on if there's bridges, trailheads, anything, parking lot needs to be paved. That wasn't included. That was just to do the trails through the woods and through the open spaces. About $600,000 for the rest? Parking? For that. Parking and so on, about $600,000? I didn't get pricing for that. Okay, thanks. Okay, I think the only people who have not spoken before we have a second round is Mayor Pro Tem. You have any comment? I've got a few comments. No, I'm listening. So I'm trying to take it all in. A couple questions for whoever can field this. So what I heard was this was permitted under 1985 rules and regulations for TCEQ, and we've maintained it under those rules and regulations, but what we're saying, this cost of $3 million and/or the cost of $1 million is to bring it up to some regulation as if this were permitted under the current rules and regulations. Is that correct? The permitting was actually in the 1970s at the Texas Department of Health, so earlier than that. What we're trying to do is address settling, erosion, water that's coming off the facility right now. We do know that there are people illegally accessing the property right now. There's some liabilities related to trespass. But other than that, what we're trying to do is to control the water that's on the property, reestablish the cap that's on the property, and maintain it over a longer period of time. Is that our legal obligation under the rules that we are bound to, I guess is my question? We're required to control any offsite drainage that comes from the facility itself. The water that is being pounded and then it's percolating through the cap and coming out the other side, there is some repair work that we do have to address with that, correct? Is that the million dollars? That is the million dollars, correct. And if that's our legal obligation, and I'm understanding that is correct, that that's our legal obligation, that we have to -- and is that under that 1970 permit, or is it just you can't let water -- it's not naturally the natural flow or topography run onto your neighbor's property? I mean, is it per the permit regulations that we -- The permit has been revoked, so this is a closed facility. We are no longer bound under that permit. It is now an environmental issue that we are looking at. Okay. And so is that an environmental -- so what environmental regulations are controlling that from our perspective? For that, I'd like to call Deputy City Attorney Katherine Kylsten. She's been working on this issue with solid waste. I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? Sure. I'm just trying to understand, based upon the presentation, there's a couple of costs. Well, first of all, there was an option to do nothing, which it said beside it, not viable. Now, I don't know if that means not legal, or it's just we can't not do it. Then there's two other sets of costs, one's for just a temporary repair, and the other's for a major rebuilding of the cap. And so it seems that there's other environmental regulations, other than the expired permit of which this was originally issued for, that we are bound to, that we are legally bound to, that we have to adhere to. And I'm trying to understand, if so, what are those, and if not, then okay. I would like to be able to answer that question for you. The issue that I worked on for solid waste was related to our requirement to compensate the city of Crossroads for any damage to the road. And so on the question that you're asking, I think Brian has more information than I do. Okay. I apologize for that. No, no, you're good. Yeah, yeah. And again, I'm not an attorney, but I have been in this business for quite a while. And again, what we're dealing with is, from a stormwater standpoint, runoff water is allowed to leave your property, can flow from your property as long as it does not impound or create additional damage. What we're talking about is water that is seeped into the cap and then percolated out the side. So it has been affected water, and as such it has to be controlled. What we're trying to do is get back to that situation where we're controlling, first of all, the percolation, but we also want to enhance the runoff. So all we're dealing with is just rainwater as it exits the property. Now, that $1 million, you know, that will temporarily fix the property. But again, based on our engineer's estimate time period, it's only about a five-year repair, and we'll be back in the same situation in about five years. The $3.75 million estimate is actually a longer term, 20 to 25 years, or longer depending on how the maintenance occurs and is enhanced and maintained on that property. Do we know when we've had to do this prior to now? What's the history of this site? What have we spent on this site if it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago to address this same issue that we're looking at today? I want to ask Randall Morse. He's our landfill manager currently to come forward. He probably has the most history with the Mosley Road Landfill. Good afternoon. Yeah, to answer the question, we went out there four to five-year-ago timeframe and did some minor repair out there on some of the erosion to answer that question. But there's, you know, like Brian says, there's a lot of differential settlement out there, which is actually causing, you know, ponding water on top of the landfill allows it to percolate down through the cap and seep out the side. It needs attention. It's going to need some attention. So if it were running off of the cap, that's not an issue because we're able to have the water run off. You're saying it's the percolation that's creating the issue. So on its face, I'm going to really struggle to say $3.7 million. If you look, this is an aerial. This is not good for a bike path. There's really no – there's very little topography except down here in the bottom. You can't have any vegetation. I'm surprised that the land hasn't been reclaimed just by nature with trees. I mean, good heavens, you've got seeds blowing all over the place. I'm surprised that – do we have to cut them down if they're out there by nature naturally? In that this is closed, we don't. But as we go – if we're moving forward to maintain this property formally, then yes, we do have to remove it. Okay, so if trees grow, we've got to cut them down if we move forward to maintain it, which I think we really don't have an option but to move forward to maintain it from what I'm understanding. So we are – if the trees need to be cut down, they'll get cut down. Yeah, I think we have other needs in the city that – I mean, what I'm hearing is $1 million gives us five or six years. Yeah, it might cost us a little bit more. We might find some alternative ways. But I can't see spending almost $4 million for the repair. Then somebody gets out there with a bobcat and cuts a couple of trails. But it's basically just flat. Is that my understanding? It's got a little topography with some – a little settling and ponding. But is it basically – I see the topo – I see the topo readings. Yeah, again, where the landfill is here, that's probably 30 to 40 foot above the rest of the area that was used for borrow and fill, you know, soil mining in the area. But again, as you get closer to the creeks and stuff down in here where the runoff is, there is some interesting topography. Yeah, I can't support, at least without any more information, the 3.7, especially having heard that we have some other land that might be better suited for that, that it does have a contiguous connection to the city. This is just one of those things that, you know, 50 years ago we learned, you know, how to do things. And that's how all these regulations and all these best practices have evolved and putting something out here in the middle of nowhere that has no connection. So it's the water percolating out the sides because it's ponding – On the top. In other words, if you – if you have the – where the ponding is, if you get that to where it runs off, then that's not the issue. Correct. It's when it's seeping out – Correct. – the side. Okay. All right. All right. So there's no monitoring of methane? No. There's no – There's no groundwater monitoring. So if you were to sell this to someone and you're saying structures can't be put on it basically, is that right? If you put structures on there, they have to have certain methane monitors built into them. They have to have certain ventilation systems. So, you know, you never say never, but again, this would be a non – any structure you put on there would be not for non-residential purposes. Right. And then also, no matter whether we have it, Crossroads has it, or anybody has it, you can't put trees on it. I mean, if we sold it to Crossroads, they couldn't come in and say, "We're going to plant 500 trees on this property." Correct. They couldn't do it. This is forever in this configuration. Unless you do something – you know, if you remove the waste or reconfigure the waste on the site and cover it, but no. Okay. Very helpful. Very helpful. And since you haven't spoken, we'll let you and then we'll start round two. Thank you. Who could speak to the Corps of Engineers restrictions to – about the property to the west? So generally, what can we – what can we do to the – because the list of what you can't do is probably my long – what can we do as far as access to the lake? So we had talked to them, not specifically about this property, but other pieces on Lake Louisville – or on the lake that we were discussing for possible linear park trails. And we had talked about extending those trails for, you know, biking purposes and all that. So they did not want hard concrete. They wanted soft surface trails. And we specifically asked them about bikes on something like this. And they said, we classify those as vehicles, and the way this land is classified within our inventory is no vehicles. So we couldn't have bikes out there either. So that's why we provided a mountain biking version without the Army Corps property. If it was decided that that wasn't the best use, it's not the recommended use by our mountain bike group, that if we wanted to make it hiking, we could go here. We'd have to figure out how we'd cross Moseley Road with lights, maybe something similar out front here. If people were hiking and they wanted to go out to the lake, then we would work with the Army Corps to install trails out there as well. And so – but when – access, is it limited to a one-foot trail, or could you clear a space and put sand down? What – you know, what are your options as far as what that could look like at the actual lake? Yeah, we didn't talk specifically about width. Our trails, we're looking at 10 feet as our standard. But it could be soft surface, whether it's just dirt. It could be mulched trails, but no concrete. Okay, so here's my thought. Can I ask one question of clarification on that? And just real quick. Yes, sir. Does that mean – because there's a lot of trees out there. They're not going to let you come in there and clear-cut trees for a trail. We wouldn't cut trees. We'd be working around, you know, clearing out. Yes. Yeah, no, because that's my thing. If we were able to clear – in all things. I mean, I think that fiscally, if we could recapture some of the money that we're going to put in to fix it, that's the lure for me. So then listening to the conversation and just doing – understanding traffic patterns. Right now, people drive right by this location to go to Lua Elm, to that beachfront property they have just on the other side of the bridge there. And so – and just for various activities, you know. And so I think if somehow the citizens of Denton have access to the lake that is somewhat managed – not just – I don't know that there's value in just the trails. And I don't know that you can – I mean, you know, I don't see that type value. But if there is access and they allow some sort of space to where we could – citizens could access the lake from this property, then I think it becomes appealing to me. And I think if we did that work, it may make it easier to sell, too. Because then Crossroads has a, you know, Lua Elm, smaller version, stuff they can do on the lake and have access to the lake, you know. And maybe just makes it more appealing to sell. So for me, the end game is, I think, to get it to where we can sell it. And so that's why I was curious if we did some of that front-end work and did some – so a million dollars, let's say, around numbers to fix the cap. And then some investment into working with the Corps and then package that to say, now Crossroads, you have this kind of – it's more turnkey, hopefully more appealable. I don't know. I think there would be more discussion with the Army Corps that we could have to furl some of that stuff up. Right. Thanks. Councilmember Briggs, can I ask a real quick follow-up on that just to get some clarification, if that's okay? So we see these walking trails and this yellow line extended out – I'm trying to get my bearings here. Where am I? Where's the original track? Right there. Okay. And so you're saying this new boundary is – okay, now I know where I'm going. This new boundary is – is that something we purchase or is that something we say, hey, Corps, will you let us use this? Yeah, we would have to work with the Army Corps for some sort of a lease agreement. But it doesn't give you access to the lake. No, so – You've got a road right there. Yeah, so we would have to put some sort of crossing in here to get people from this – from a trail that is – sorry, I keep going the wrong way. You know, let's say right here, cross at this corner to get into this property, to get into this side. But you wouldn't have your trails and everything in there. That's still going to stay as rough as – I mean – We could put trails in here, too. Okay. I mean, this is both Army Corps properties, so we could talk to them about both those parcels. Thank you, Councilmember Briggs, for your accommodation. I appreciate that. Yeah. So could this ever be a landfill again? I mean – No. No. No, we would – I mean, in order for this area to be used as a landfill again, we'd have to go back in, go through the whole – the entire permitting process. We would have to put in a brand-new synthetic and clay liner, and it just isn't cost-effective at that point. Well, I mean, I know, because we've had conversations about ours eventually running out – Right. – and what do we do, and then we have this old landfill. So I was just seeing, you know, if there was any reason to hold onto this property and hearing Mr. Packins say that the bicycle group has preferred another location compared to this one. Mm-hmm. Then I am for doing the minimal amount of work that we have to do to this area, since it's not even in our city limits. And then we can just hopefully move forward on another piece of property for the bike trails. Councilmember Davis and then Councilmember Armitage. So I really want to commend staff for trying to make a silk purse here. There's just so – so little that we can actually do with the property, as we've said, you know, lessons learned many years later. I'm a little concerned about the money we've spent already on consultants on getting this plan for bike trails and hike trails together, because it just – for me, it really is a non-starter. It's – well, I see – well, that was my Gary question from a while ago. Can I ask you that question now? I see a firm's name down here at the bottom of the presentation. So have we spent – That gentleman was – he's a biker. Okay. And so he donated that time just to throw that together. Excellent. He was one of the people that came to our public meeting just to give us some ideas. Excellent. Well, I'm very glad to hear that. And then I commend you even more so for trying to find uses for this property. I mean, for all the reasons we've talked about, though, this is so isolated from town. Its use is so limited. I don't see any purpose in doing anything further to this property other than what we absolutely have to to make it safe. If Crossroads has interest in it, I can't see – I can't see putting it on the private market, the private real estate market. I don't see that there's going to be a market for it. But if they've got interest in some portion of the property for recreation purposes in their own town, I'm fine with that. But otherwise, I think our best option, frankly, is to repair and leave it fallow and concentrate our parks dollars inside city limits. Councilmember Riggs. I mean, I'm sorry, Councilmember Armitage. I apologize. So I'm feeling – relieved at what I think is the consensus that I hear shaping, but we'll see how it goes because I was really concerned about this. I want to mention two things that I hadn't mentioned before. Actually, three. So number one, about kind of building on a land or redeveloping a landfill, you know, there are all sorts of kind of concerns having to do with things that were dumped, you know, in addition to and beyond methane and the things that were not allowed to build here, you know, what other kind of toxic stuff is there. So this is not what I would want to see, even if this was in City of Denton as a destination to build on. I'll mention that, you know, I myself would rather that this had come to us as kind of more of a blank slate thing. Hey, there's this land, what do you all think you should do with it, you know, versus such a, you know, well-developed presentation with the pictures of people hiking and biking and stuff. You know, like Councilmember Davis, I'm relieved to know, and I was going to ask about it, the consultant, so I'm relieved to know that we didn't spend money on that. But, you know, I would just, as far as I'm concerned for something like this for next time, would just kind of appreciate more of just a question about what do you all think should be done, this is one possibility. And I'll just leave it at that for now. Thank you. I just want to intervene there. You know, I'm not going to shut the staff down from bringing forward what I think are creative issues. So I appreciate where you're coming from, but I really have appreciated the fact that they think very differently than we do. And I think as a council, it's always easier for you to, you know, to give your input on these ideas and their creativity rather than spend your time brainstorming. There's just, it really is, I think that a lot of our great ideas have come from, you know, their creativity and things that certainly would not occur to me. And this just happened to be a coincidence with Gary putting the strategic plan in place. He's got a number of groups out there that they want more services in the quality of life in this community. So I would probably disagree if the council doesn't like the ideas and say, hey, thank you for your time. But I do agree with you on not spending a lot of money, you know, before we move forward. But we work very hard to encourage their creativity on this staff. And I don't want to do anything to send the message that we're not open to that at all times. Can I? Of course, of course. So, yay for creativity. Yeah, this is, I should say, you know, my comment very specific to this project in particular. So, yeah, and thank you for mentioning that. I wouldn't want to say anything to give anyone the impression that our staff should not come up with ideas about things to do with property. In this particular case, this is what I personally wish would have happened. I will mention as far as hiking goes, you know, that we've got, and in fact, Gary, you and I, we went hiking together on a wonderful local trail here in city of Denton that I didn't even know existed in one of our parks. It was called to my attention by a resident who had some concerns about the area. So we've got a number of great places to hike and bike here, not, I guess, a mountain biking, you know, facility. But, you know, I mean, maybe we don't need that. Maybe what we need is to let everybody know more about all the great hiking that we have here in city of Denton. Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate all the comments. I know that just by my experience on council, if this had come in a different presentation of, hey, what do you guys want to do? A lot of our questions would be go back and see if you can find a creative way to deal with this. So it's everybody's own personal preference and taste on each presentation. I appreciate it. But I do have a question when I thought about this. The site is seventy five acres. Is that correct? That is correct. Forty with the field proper on it. But the whole seventy five is subject to the rules and regulations that you're talking about. In other words, if you've got thirty four acres that are the if you could pull the map back up. So when you say, you know, those those things that you couldn't do mining, boring structure or so forth and so on. Correct. Is that for the entire red boundary area or is that just whatever that color is for the inside of that area? It is just for this area proper. Any area that does not have waste placed on it is not subject to subchapter T rules. OK, well, I'm going to say that. So that's very interesting because this is a large piece of land with that half of it is not subject to what you're talking about. And it's and it fronts up to core property. So it's very conceivable, correct me if I'm wrong, based upon the rules and regulations, as you know them, that somebody could come in here and say, well, I don't care about putting a house in that. What is that color? Is that fuchsia? I don't know. What is that color? We'll call it blue. Call it blue. All right. All right. I don't know. So they would be restricted from putting something per these regulations in that blue area. But somewhere else on the property, they would have the opportunity to decide, oh, this isn't subject to those kind of regulations. Then I can do that. Is my understanding correct on that? Yes, it is. Well, I think that changes the whole nature of the conversation, because what you're saying is somebody could go out here and now they would be responsible, though, after purchasing it for what you're describing. And that is the percolation that that would be correct. OK. All right. OK. Fantastic. It's very helpful. Thank you. Yes, Councilmember Briggs direction on the road. I don't really want I don't think we should spend the six hundred thousand on the road. Neither do I. OK. So it sounds like the consensus and correct me if I'm wrong. Even if we found some way to work with the core that for right now, spending the amount of money to just do the repair and do as much as you can with that million dollars to prevent that seepage, is that what I'm hearing? Mayor. Well, I'm hearing. OK, Mayor Pro Tem. Yes, but I would like to could we could someone reach out to the core and then follow back up with what not clear cut. But if there's if there's how much access, spacing, that sort of thing, I'd be curious. That's going to go into my decision is what because it's only 16 miles out of town. Right. And so not even that eight miles out of town. And so I'm curious what they'd allow us to do on the lake proper that section that's not ours. Just what what they'd allow us to do. Thanks. Councilmember Ryan and Councilmember Nelson. Thank you, Mayor. I would prefer that we have the more talks with Crossroads first, because as you point out, there is a large portion that could be developable by the city for a rec center or something like that. But with this property being so far out, not connected to our town, I just don't feel like it's proper that we that we spend more than absolutely necessary in. You know, again, that can be part of the negotiations. We know that we need to spend a million dollars. We take a million dollars off the cost. Let let Crossroads buy it for a million dollars less and then they do their repair. Yeah. Well, I know how I mean or something on that. No, I understand. Crossroads does anyway. Yes. So what you're saying is that have that sort of contemporaneous conversation that we've got direction to spend the money. But if we can talk to Crossroads, hey, is there an interest? What would create an interest? What do we need? You know, some talking points, some interest based negotiation in that regard. And I don't disagree because you don't really have anything that's lost. Councilmembers. Yeah, I'm aligned with that. And, you know, whether you kind of hold off on the expense and just give in as a condition, you know, whatever works best. But if if they don't end up having interest, we're imagining an interest on their part. Now, if that doesn't end up happening, I don't see any reason not to see what the private market would bring. I mean, lots of creative people out there. How what kind of timeline are we on for the repair? Again, we've been looking at this for a year now. We need to address it. But again, there's no clock ticking that we have to do it today. All right. Well, it sounds like direction is when we get ready to move forward on the repair, the option, whatever it was, option two, I think it was, but that there's some other things to possibly. So I think what I'm hearing is talk to crossroads, also talk with our real estate department, see if they have any idea of if there's any market for this. My hunch is when you know that you're going to have to maintain the seepage as an individual private property owner. I mean, if we're spending a million dollars, I mean, somebody else is going to have to do it. And I don't know who's going to be and you can't plant one tree in that area. So but I think you have the direction that you need. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. But let's take about a five minute break and then we'll come back and wrap up the last two items. Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, September the 17th, 2019. It is four twenty three p.m. We're on our last two work session agenda items work session three eat, receive report, hold discussion and give staff direction regarding the proposed amendments to the naming policy guidelines for city buildings, facilities, land, or any portion thereof. Good afternoon, Gary pack and Director Parks and Recreation. Heather Gray is going to jump up here and give the presentation, but I just wanted to introduce it. This is an existing policy that is from 2012 that we've made some amendments to. She's going to talk about some of those. This is the same presentation that you had back in May. We haven't made any major changes to it yet. Right now we're in a collection information mode. We did have we were invited to Dean your neighborhood meeting a few weeks ago and got some good feedback from them. We have a public meeting scheduled for next Tuesday evening, the 24th to gather feedback. If Council would like us to have some additional meetings in the community, we're more than welcome to do that as well. But that's that's kind of where we're at and we're going in a quick nutshell. But I'll let Heather jump up and go to the presentation that will be available for questions. Good afternoon, Heather Gray, Parks and Recreation. As Gary mentioned, I'll be reviewing the originally proposed amendments, which were first brought to you back in May, as well as going over the existing policy as it is now. So the naming policy is an existing policy. The full title is the naming policy guidelines for city buildings, facilities, land or any portion thereof. It's an existing policy that already includes guidelines for naming after an individual, an organization or for purchasing naming rights. Earlier this summer, we proposed a few minor amendments which were added. They were meant to add clarification. Those amendments were we defined. We added a definition for naming rights as the current policy did not have a definition in it. We clarified that naming rights could be purchased, but for a defined period of time as determined by city council. We specify that once the naming rights term has ended, the facility may be renamed and we propose an updated user friendly application form, which was converted to PDF form. Just kind of the background on how we we got to today. About a year ago, council requested naming opportunities be available to help subsidize the cost of city assets. So Parks and Recreation took the lead on researching and proposing amendments to the policy. The amendments I just discussed on the last slide were proposed to Park Board on February 4th, and those amendments were approved with a five zero vote. On May 6th, we gave a presentation during work session. We discussed the current policy as well as the proposed amendments. The direction was given to move forward with the amendments as proposed. So then we place a resolution on consent agenda for June 18th. At that time, the voting was postponed and the item was pulled until we could gather additional feedback. And then, as Gary mentioned, by request, we did present to the Dena Neighborhood Association on August 26th and we did get some feedback, which I will kind of try to summarize for you. Some of the feedback we received was we had citizens ask about not selling naming rights for any vertical construction. Another citizen asked if we could just not sell naming rights to any city office buildings such as City Hall. We were asked if we could not sell naming rights to organizations whose primary source of income is from the sale of alcohol. We were also asked if council could reinforce or if we could add something to reinforce evaluating moral character whenever naming after an individual. We were asked to add a statement that said that when naming rights were purchased that council was in charge of the disposition of funds. And then there was one citizen concerned about the city competing with other nonprofit fundraising. So just a general overview of the existing policy. It states that naming opportunities include city buildings, facilities, land, or any portion thereof. It provides consistent citywide guidelines for naming after an individual, an organization, or for selling naming rights. It outlines situations when naming can reoccur, and it also outlines the approval process. So as I mentioned, there's three main sections that are covered in the existing policy. And in this chart, you can see a summary of those. So for naming after an individual, this is an honor type situation. The individual must have been a resident of the city of Denton and be deceased at least five years. They should have been of good moral character and made exceptional contributions. If naming after an organization, this is again an honor type situation. That organization should have made exceptional local, state, national, or world contributions. And the achievements from that organization should represent a lasting legacy to the city asset they are being named. In the current policy, it does have a section on purchasing naming rights. The current policy reads the city asset may be named through fundraising, campaign, donation, or by purchasing naming rights. If an individual were to purchase naming rights, they must be of good moral character. Organizations wishing to purchase naming rights must be compliant with all laws and local regulations. And then finally in the existing naming policy is the approval process. The first step in the approval process is an application, so citizen or organization would submit an application that goes to the city manager. And then it's referred to city council. The next step would be the review phase in which council may appoint a seven member ad hoc naming committee, which includes two members of any impacted advisory board. And then finally is the approval process. The naming committee would provide a recommendation to council, but the final decision ultimately rests with city council. So as Gary mentioned on our next steps, we are on the schedule for next Tuesday for a public hearing. And just to clarify, we're not asking for a vote at this time. Our intention is just to gather additional feedback. And then based on that feedback and direction from council, we're hoping to update the naming policy again and then bring the updated version back as either a resolution or as individual consideration per council's direction. Just an example of something we would use the updated policy for. We're currently working on the new dog park, so this would be an opportunity for us to seek out possible naming opportunities for the new dog park. Questions anybody? Councilmember Armitage? So it sounds like the DENIA, just based on what you said, the DENIA group, there was a lot of concern about primarily with the idea of purchasing naming rights, is that correct? Yeah, there were some concerns about purchasing naming rights. About could it be for vertical, should it be for vertical construction? Should it be for city office buildings? Are we going to be competing with other, you know, with nonprofit groups if we do this? Those were some of the general concerns. And can you speak to the extent to which that feedback from the DENIA group was incorporated into this latest? So right now, at this time, we don't have any additional amendments. These amendments were proposed back in May. We haven't made any additional changes at this time because we're hoping to gather all the feedback and then work with legal on proposing these amendments. Okay, so this is the same exact ordinance that we saw back in May. That's correct. And we're not asking for a vote at this time. We're just asking to gather feedback. Oh, I understand. Yeah, that I understand. Yeah. Okay, that's correct. Councilmember Melcher? Have we always followed these rules, particularly the deceased five years? So I don't know. I don't think so. So I can't answer that clearly. I can say that Vela, I'm not sure if that actually went through the official process, but obviously Dr. Vela is still alive. So that was named after him. So this actually gives us an opportunity to get things cleaned up and start kind of from a new direction. And we would actually put together a list of inventory of parks. When we have names of parks, I assume we're just named by the lot that they were or what staff has called them based on where to go to maintain certain things. So I think there's a lot of parcels that haven't been given formal names. So what we would do is identify a list of properties that could be available for council consideration, general public that someone called and said, hey, I was looking for a park to name this resident after. Then we would have that available for them for consideration. And then the application would be online and then they could start that process. So I have some issues with city buildings being included, but I look forward to the public hearing and hearing what people have to say about it before I dig too deep into it. But have we been approached by any organization, individual or corporation so far that wants to do this? Great question. So, you know, I think the assumption is there's organizations or businesses beating down doors to give you money to name a park after them. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think you have to go out and mine that. And, you know, Louisville has a good example. Toyota, Louisville Park they have. It's a sports complex. They have a dog park there. They have a train kind of theme. That was roughly ten years ago. If I recall correctly, it was a million dollars for ten years or 1.5, one of the two. And you haven't seen a lot of that take place. So, you know, if we're fortunate to find someone that has a passion for Denton, that grew up here, that wants to reinvest in this community, then that's an opportunity that they could have. It's not an easy process and there's not a lot of that activity going on. So you'd have to really go out and start looking pretty aggressively to try to find somebody. Or just get real lucky. Councilmember Davis. So I appreciate the amendments. I appreciated the first time around when they were presented because it helps clarify a policy that's been on the books for a long time. I like that City Council is the safety valve, you know, that ultimately City Council has to approve these things. I don't think there's much danger of, you know, City Hall brought to you by Budweiser in the near future. We do have about ten miles from here, an entire city that renamed itself after a corporate sponsor. But I don't necessarily see Denton falling into that same trap. However, I think there is still some concern in the community for that sort of thing. So I know we have the public hearing. I don't know if there's will for this on the rest of the council. For myself, I think I'd like to see another public meeting about it. The difference being that people can interact a little bit more. And I think honestly they can hear staff's perspective a little bit better in a town hall kind of meeting format rather than just a public hearing. I know you had the DNA group. Not everybody knew about that. Obviously catered specifically to one neighborhood organization. But I'm more concerned about the perception of this policy than I am really the policy going forward. I think we've got a good start on it now. I'm more concerned about people misunderstanding what it's for or how it's going to be used. Or, for instance, when people say they're concerned about competing with nonprofits, I don't really see a big danger in that because we're talking about different things. So I'd like the community to have the opportunity to have that conversation. Yeah, I correct me if I'm wrong, at least the amendments that were brought back. Was it in May? Yes, sir. There's not a whole lot of difference between our current naming policy and sort of what you all propose. So a lot of it's it's just clean up. It's not necessarily major policy differences right here. Yes. But I think I'm with Councilmember Davis. A public hearing is a very different format than a meeting like you all had a genius. So if there's a way to maybe schedule more of a entire city inclusive meeting, I don't think you need to go to each separate neighborhood. But something that says, hey, we're going to talk about this. So here's here's the meeting and then we can receive some feedback for that. And then we can also have have the public hearing. But the city council in the end, I mean, you asked, has this been enforced? And I believe if I recall correctly with Dr. Bella, that most likely was a city council. I want to say override because you can make exceptions to this policy. And and he was his name was brought forth by LULAC and then his tenure here in the city. So I'm real OK with the city council is, as you said, Councilmember Davis, sort of the the final arbiter of this. And I think probably so, as Councilmember Meltzer. And if anything, my comment was more to the point of that was a good thing that we named it for Dr. Bella. So, you know, the fact that there's a way to do that and not just have that rule. Right. You know, I think it's important. I was at the meeting as was Councilmember Ryan. And I would share this is just from that neighborhood and a few people came out. I could sort of read the room. It was a feeling that with the purchasing of rights that it felt not very then not very original and independent. And so I, you know, I I'd be interested in whether the community wanted to at least establish some kind of very high threshold. I doubt market value for the impressions would be enough. You know, it would have to be like no child ever goes hungry. And then, therefore, we go to work at what a burger City Hall, you know, something that big. OK, so basically information. Councilmember armature. So just to weigh in, because previously I had just asked a question. I agree that we need to have another public hearing. And my own personal opinion is that I don't think that we should have naming rights for sale at all. For the reasons Councilmember member Meltzer said I know I know you weren't necessarily speaking for yourself, but reiterating your sense from the meeting. But I agree that that's not very, very Denton. I'm not worried that we're going to be like have a situation like dish Texas, but at Toyota Park, you know, that's a possibility with something like that. And I don't want that for Denton and I don't think others do, too. OK, sounds like I mean, the direction is basically a potential additional meeting other than the public hearing. And then we'll get the feedback and see what you guys present next time. OK, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, we'll go on to our last work session report, which is three F, which is receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction on pending City Council requests for information. I know hasn't started yet. I'm good. All right. Good afternoon, Stuart Birds. I assistant to the city manager. We're going to talk briefly about the pending council request and go through those. Just as a form of reminder, this is how we got here through the retreat and kind of subsequent conversations there. So we'll take the request, estimate the time and then schedule it during this work session item. Each council meeting and then up to seven requests will be reviewed per meeting. We have three of them today. And so I think that you're familiar with the process. And so we'll just kind of jump right into them with item number one. Today was requested by Mayor Pro Tem HUD Smith. It's elected officials serving on community boards. Councilmember Amater has a procedure question. Yeah, so just quick procedure question. Are these assigned based on the order in which each individual council member made the requests? Is that how it's decided which to bring forward which week from which council? So we had the outstanding council request list that was presented at the retreat and then later as well. And people cleared off certain issues that they didn't want represented on that list. Those that remain were going through from the oldest to the newest. And so the one for you today was the second one on your list. Last week was the first one on your list. Okay, great. That was my sense. I just wanted to verify. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. That's a great question. Thank you. Okay. Go ahead. Rosa, are you ready? Okay, perfect. All right. Yeah, so the gist of this, it's pretty straightforward. It's on economic development by, for example, on that partnership board, you see the same presentation. Council members get to vote twice. And so really just I've seen no traction. I brought it up a number of times. But I would like this body to reevaluate the time allocation and reconcile the leverage that council members have to vacillate on their decisions. So you can make one decision at a board leading up to this decision on council. And so it's just kind of lends itself to be, one, a little heavy handed in the room of people knowing that it's coming to council. And then two, it gives you two bites at the apple to then vacillating your decision, which I think you can do outside of sitting on a board. So hoping we would consider reworking some of the boards. All right, let's get it reset. Like this. Okay. We're just going to start with Councilmember Briggs and we're going to come across the area in this swing around the horn. Yes. Council. Yes. You get the last word. Councilmember Briggs. So I feel like we kind of discussed this at our last Ed joint meeting briefly, but we didn't talk about it on all the board. So I'm willing to talk about it again. It's my favorite per se, but I'm willing to hear the conversation. Of course, for me, it's just it's kind of like we view our council committees where we just hear an item before and we're either, you know, forward at that point or not. And then it comes to us as well. So I'm willing to hear the conversation that you want to have. Right. Councilmember Davis. I agree. I think I'm willing to have the conversation. If it's if it pertains to other things besides the E.D. board, that example for me, the couple of things you listed as weaknesses in the current system, I think are strengths. I think it's important to have council present in those meetings. Otherwise, it's the Economic Development Committee of the Chamber of Commerce. If we're not there, if we're not an equal partner in that, then we're just asking the Chamber of Commerce to present these incentives to us or to ask Jessica to come present them. And I don't think we're fully participating in that process. So I like the way, for instance, the E.D. board is set up now. If there are other boards that we need to think about, you know, council representation, I'm open to that conversation. If it's just a workshop on E.D., then I don't necessarily need that. Councilmember Meltzer, any comment? I'm supportive of the proposal, therefore, of the discussion, although my flavor of it, as I mentioned when we talked about E.D.P.P., would be to have council members participate in an ex officio capacity. In other words, be part of it, be part of the discussion, but not in the vote because we'll get our votes here. Councilmember Armitage? I would rather not have the discussion. I believe that this is -- because this is public money, taxpayers' money, and council members elected by the taxpayer to have input in it, I think it's okay to have input twice, even three times. It's important. Councilmember Ryan, I guess I'll get to that one. Go ahead. Well, I think at last Monday's luncheon with the E.D. board, it was pretty clear that I felt that it was almost necessary to have that continuation of information coming -- flowing through the council members, and I think that I don't really see any need to alter that current structure. Are you saying that as it applies -- there's a little bit more time -- are you saying that as it applies to all boards, or are we just talking about this one particular board? Because this is the request, this one board. If I'm not -- okay, all right. Yes, he's got a such as, and I don't see any difference on any of the other boards. I don't mind having the discussion -- quite frankly, it's hard to keep up with what boards have what council members on them, so I certainly -- I mean, I could come out in an email or informal staff report as to that, but I'm okay with the current structure. I have struggled in the times when I've been on those boards where you're in there making a decision, then you might have further information, and you might be making a different decision at your council because -- but, yeah, that's just -- that's the nature of the process. So -- but certainly don't have a problem with the conversation. Okay. All right. Very good. Thank you. Yep. The next item is Denton County MHMR funding. It was requested by Councilmember Armitour in August of last year, and staff did provide an informal staff report. About this, that report contained background on funding for housing units, the Human Services Grant funding, and behavioral health leadership teams. Do you have a question about -- she's up. Oh, yeah, you have to. Yeah, she's still got a -- yeah, go ahead. So thank you. And thank you for staff. I want to thank Pam Gutierrez, who's the head of MHMR, who's been before us, requesting that the city help contribute to MHMR in the way that other cities have done. The last time this came out before council, it was mentioned that, well, the county takes care of MHMR, and that's true, and I think it's great that they do, but there's a lot of need, as you can see, in the report. And as Pam has said very eloquently, they serve the people in the city of Denton. They're in city of Denton. We don't have a public hospital that belongs to the city. This is as close as one that we have. It serves major need, and they really need money from cities to do what they do and to serve the people that they serve, including our homeless population, veterans, pretty much everybody. Your time's up. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs will wait until -- okay, it's reset. Yeah, so I am interested in having this as a work session to figure out in what ways we can help. All of their beds are full. They're turning patients away. We have the officers come and take them to MHMR, and then they just turn around and release them back onto the street because they don't have room. So I am willing to hear how we can help and if we can help as we have done with our supplemental request for ODB and Monsignor King. I'm interested in the conversation, but at a bigger scope to look at countywide funding of this in the ways like we do Children's Advocacy Center that each entity within the county starts looking at putting in a certain amount towards this because I'm a big proponent of MHMR and mental health services. Councilmember Nelson and then Councilmember Davis. Along similar lines, it aligns with one of the priorities that we said were our eight priorities for the year, which is a countywide approach to homelessness. And I think with this as with everything else, it's got to attach to a city purpose that we already have. I mean, otherwise we become, you know, we're not we're not just like a foundation. There are so many social service organizations, you know, that do great work and truly have needs, you know, and we could we could review them and feel moved to act every week, and legitimately. So, but I think to stay within our role, we've got to attach it to city objectives. In this case, it does attach Councilmember Davis. So my only concern about this item and the reason why I can't support a work session on it is that it doesn't really have very clear direction. It's basically let's have a work session to talk about didn't county and meet tomorrow funding and where they get their funding from and how we can help. And it's just very open ended. If there's a specific project or some of the things that we've worked on with them before, if there's a specific heavy lift that only the city of Denton can really help with, I'm all in favor of talking about that kind of thing. But just kind of having a session to talk about the the difficulty that the mental health community has in funding services and all those kind of things. I mean, that's maybe like a luncheon topic or something, but that's not necessarily a work session where we could hope to accomplish a goal by the end of the conversation. If we've got something where we've got a goal in mind and we want to talk about that, that I can very much get behind. But just an open ended free flowing conversation. I don't think so. Mayor pro tem. Yeah, no, I couldn't think of I mean that basically those sentiments are mine. I just don't know what it means. Right. I understand that that they need funding as do a lot of organizations. I understand that it's a county wide issue. Absolutely. But I just don't understand what we're being asked to tackle. And I was hoping to hear that in the one minute presentation to kind of narrow that specific ask. And so it leaves me wanting and that's why I didn't rank it higher on the old form is just I don't know what that means. And so obviously there's enough traction to have the conversation. So hopefully between that, then and now, pardon me now and then there is a refining of what we're going to be discussing because I too don't want to have said, you know, we're not going to solve all problems in a work session on a Tuesday. I share the sentiments of both mayor pro tem and councilmember Davis. This is a county issue and we've had the behavioral health leadership team for many years, and I think that's really where the thrust of this conversation should begin and then as it as it matures and moves forward to come before all the cities in the county because this is a county this is a county wide issue. They did make a presentation on a citizen's report. So, I mean, at that time we didn't we didn't necessarily take action so it's not that I'm opposed to the conversation I'm opposed to having it at the city level, prior to us having it at the county level, because it is Denton County MHMR. And I want to make sure that that we have the input from our county representatives and from the other members in the city member cities of the of the county as to address this issue and I think part of what we're doing with Monsignor King will also go to addressing some of this issue of mental health. My time is up. Got one more I believe. Yes, sir. Finally, item number three is from Councilmember Melter to request to expand the downtown TIF grant categories to include applicants wishing to make improvements to meet accessibility requirements for people with disabilities, I'll point out that this was a request for a discussion not to actually take this action right now. The discussion of expanding the downtown TIF grants. We recently spoke about the downtown TIF, and about our desire to use it for capital type projects that improve the appeal of downtown. The TIF includes the downtown grant program that in recent memory has been used for facade enhancements on the square. I can hardly think of a better way to make downtown more welcoming than to make more of it accessible to all visitors, including disabled visitors, especially with our aging population. Almost every family or extended family includes someone with a wheelchair or walker that can't navigate steps and narrow doorways. The ADA calls for businesses to be accessible, and that's been true for nearly 30 years now. But the reality is that the economic barriers for cash strapped small businesses often mean that accessibility projects just don't get done as much as the owners might like to. My proposal is simply to allow downtown businesses to apply for downtown grants for accessibility projects just as they do today for other façade improvements. >> Okay. Go ahead, and then we'll come back this way. Go ahead, Councilmember Briggs, and then we'll come back. Counterclockwise. >> I am in favor of hearing this. We do need to have a conversation about the TIF, which this can be included as part of. I just think we need to have a larger overall conversation to begin with, and I feel like we should just include this in that conversation. So I'm definitely in favor of that. >> No comment. >> I strongly support this. I think it's a great idea and a great use of public funds for public need that would benefit downtown. This money's there already, so let's use it for something that meets public need. >> Councilmember Davis. >> I also support having a conversation about this. The only reason why I'm speaking up to agree with Councilmember Briggs is that TIF is a big conversation. I want to make sure that there's support on the Council for making this a part of that big conversation. I don't want it to get lost in the noise. >> Yeah, no, I think there's -- speaking of bigger conversations, I think the -- it was very informative for me, and I think staff would do well to educate everyone on the ADA and its modifications, its changes through the years. So a ramp that is compliant in 2015 may not be compliant in 2017, but you would have to revamp every sidewalk, every access every year to, you know, to try to achieve that. So I think it's -- I need to -- I think it's a good goal. I think I'd like to have the conversation. I'd like businesses to have the opportunity to have some sort of matching grant, but also I think it's important to frame the conversation to say there's no place on earth that's 100% ADA compliant across all spectrums because it changes and you can't afford to go back and tear out what you did one year and replace it the following. >> Okay. Yeah, I'm only in favor of this conversation in the context of a larger conversation. I'm not in favor of those funds being taken out of the general TIF fund is what I call it. If it were an additional factor in the grant program that we budget $100,000 for, okay, I certainly can have that conversation, but I think we need to have a larger conversation. And also, I mean, I think, Councilmember Meltzer, we were discussing something on the TIF a while back, and, you know, you had pointed out that we were talking about it, but we hadn't sent it back down to the TIF board, so I think that's something that we need to also bring back to the TIF board specifically because they're going to want to have a bigger conversation about the TIF as well, but we certainly need to, and I think this will be just part of that conversation. I think it would be an inefficient use of time to have it specifically about this without the context of the broader TIF policy and just moving forward with information and how do we want to tweak it moving forward. So that's it. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. That will conclude our work session items. I will now convene the closed session at 446 p.m. We will consider the following items. Consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071. Deliberations regarding real property under Texas Government Code Section 551.072. To this meeting of the Dent City Council on September the 17th, 2019 is about 631. Our first item on the agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. and Texas flag. Please stand if you're able. Okay, we have one proclamation for Constitution Week. You'll come on up, Barnett, and introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about Constitution Week. Well, my name is Suzanne Barnett, and I'm the Regent of the Benjamin Lyon Chapter, National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. And today marks the 232nd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. It's also the 64th anniversary of the Constitution Week. And it's the 20th time we've read the Constitution publicly. And we missed you today, but we'll get you next year. Okay. Thank you. We have Councilmember Briggs as well. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. All right. Well, this is a proclamation by the Mayor of the City of Dent. Whereas our founding fathers, in order to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity, did ordain and establish a Constitution of the United States of America. Whereas it is of the greatest importance that all citizens fully understand the provisions and principles contained in the Constitution in order to effectively support, preserve, and defend it against all enemies. And whereas the 232nd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution provides an historic opportunity for all Americans to remember the achievements of the framers of the Constitution and the rights, privileges, and responsibilities they afford us in this unique document. And whereas it is the privilege and duty of all Americans to commemorate the 232nd anniversary of the ratification and convention of the Constitution of the United States of America with appropriate ceremonies and activities. Now, therefore, I, Chris Watts, Mayor of the City of Denton, Texas, do hereby declare and proclaim the week of September the 17th through September the 23rd, 2019 as Constitution Week and urge all citizens to study the Constitution and reflect on the privilege of being an American with all the rights and responsibilities with which that privilege involves and further to vigilantly protect the freedoms guaranteed to us through this guardian of our liberties. Thank you so much. Our next item on the agenda is presentation, excuse me, presentation from members of the public. Our first item under that is 3A, 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'll move on to agenda item B, which is received scheduled citizen reports from members of the public. We have one from Catherine Lusgarden regarding the Climate Action Week. If you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. >> Is this for you? >> Yeah, they'll pull it up if we could have the overhead, please. >> All right. Mayor Watts and council members, my name is Dr. Cathy Lusgarden, 11809 Sutherland Drive. >> Could you pull the mic down just so that we can hear you? >> Sorry, we need to start again? >> Yes, that'd be fine. Thank you so much. No, I'll apologize for interrupting you. >> Okay. My name is Dr. Cathy Lusgarden. I live at 11809 Sutherland Drive. Next Monday in New York City, September 23rd, the United Nations will host a climate action summit. Attending this summit will be leaders from business and government from all over the world. Their purpose is to accelerate the actions that will be needed to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Since the Paris Agreement three years ago, young people around the world have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands demanding meaningful climate action. The UN secretary general states that this summit is partially in response to the student movement. This same youth climate movement will lead a week of global climate action. And it kicks off this Friday, September 20th, with the global climate strike. This is expected to be the largest climate action globally in history. Like other workers who strike for higher wages, these students and youths are striking all across the United States and the world to demand that world leaders and the fossil fuel industry change course immediately to avoid a climate catastrophe. They're walking out of classrooms to take to the streets. They ask that all the rest of us, millions of people, walk out of their homes, walk out of their workplace, as long as they're not serving a critical role at work on Friday, September 20th, in order to show our support for the student's global climate strike. A significant goal on Friday is to halt business as usual in order to call attention to the fact that we are in a race for our lives. And under business as usual, we are losing this race. For this one day, don't go shopping. Don't do any banking. Cease all your business as usual activities. Instead, be at the UNT Library Mall at 11 o'clock on Friday. Now, I want to tell you what the global climate strike is not. It is not a protest. It is not an attempt to create chaos. This is our youth grabbing the world and shaking it and saying, do something now before it's too late. They only asked that you come and hear their plea and stand with them. It's a giant pause button to focus all our attention on the climate emergency. Now, here's why I came here tonight. You are the leaders of the city of Denton. You should be there at the UNT Library Mall at 11 o'clock with those students. Hear their plea and pledge to take action. Even better, bring your family, bring your neighbors, bring your friends, bring your coworkers. All of us should be there with them declaring publicly our own acceptance of responsibility for this crisis. New York City's school system has even dismissed classes for the day to facilitate participation. Most importantly, afterward, the Denton City Council must rededicate itself, commit to taking a fresh look at everything. Everything is on the table. What more can we be doing as a city to halt this climate crisis? Maybe we should have white roofs all across Denton. That's up to you, but please join the global climate strike and then take action. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on to agenda item C, which is additional citizen reports. We have two. This is commonly referred to as our open mic section. The first speaker is Sam Alphonse. Is that correct? Alphonse. I'm sorry, sir. You'll come down and state your name and address. Your time will begin. Good evening, members of the City Council. Two topics. One, DCTA Transit Authority. It's been several instances of passengers that was disabled and regular passengers have not been customer service friendly. Me, myself, I almost fell off a ramp because a driver was pushing me, well, I mean, was like coming towards me and whatnot in an aggressive manner and almost fell down. I have reported several other instances to the supervisors, but the bare minimum was done. All these things have been documented. And not just me, there's been several other riders that's not legally blind or whatnot have been not taken care of by the Transit Authority. The Transit Authority is supposed to be able to help passengers get to work, doctor's appointments and stuff like that. I know we're not entitled to that. I know I'm not in New York City or Chicago. This is a smaller town. This town is smaller than Dallas County. But this town, like any other town, you guys up here, I know you'll do the best that you can do with what you have. And we need to do better as a community. You know, we need to be better and do better and not just for us, for the youth, too. You know, and I challenge you to make it better, not just for me, but everybody else that comes around me, even people in the audience there. I mean, because like I said, Denton has a lot of potential and we can do better. The last thing I'm going to address is the thing for inclement weather. I came here a while back with some other brothers and sisters and the inclement weather shelters have been very good for the most part. And it saved my life three times. And other people with health conditions, like myself, I'm diabetic and I had three seizures. I mean, three comas almost that, you know, that saved me. Two was in the police department. My blood pressure was 700. That's coma. And six, they took me. If it wasn't for those shelters, I would have been in the ground and other people that have been affected by this. Another one of my brethren, he had a seizure and one of the drivers didn't want to let the ramp down and was raining. I had to almost yell at him like a drill sergeant to get him to put down the ramp. And my answer is not just describing the other one. The driver had been suspended for those actions, those CAS actions. Now, it's hard for me to even fathom that somebody would have somebody in triple digit weather. And if I had a dog, if I was to not have the dog water, I would be in chains for animal cruelty. What about human cruelty? I mean, I know everybody has a moral compass, but something needs to be done about that. Is a human life, no, is an animal life worth more than a human life? Correct me if I'm wrong, people. If I'm wrong, I'll shut up now. Like I said, we are brothers and sisters. We all breathe red. It doesn't matter about gender, occupation, whether soldier or no soldier, nurse, doctor, we are all children. No matter what denomination that you claim, whether it be Jah, Allah, whatever, or Christianity or Jehovah, we are all his children. So we need to act more like brothers and sisters instead of savages. Our next speaker is Ed Sofe. If you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. My name is Ed Sofe. I live at 1620 Victoria Drive in Denton, and I'm representing the Denton Drilling Awareness Group. I want to thank you and staff for what I think is a great first step, looking at the gas well setbacks, a great first step in a comprehensive review and assessment of the entire ordinance. The reason why I see this as being important, this revision and reassessment, is because there are some issues that I think need to be addressed, and they're issues I think you already know about. First, notification to new home buyers of proximity to well sites is inadequate, as presented in the current ordinance. Line compressor stations are not addressed in the current ordinance. Soil testing and mitigation measures should be required, if necessary, when schools and athletic fields are built within the reverse setback distance of 500 feet. It's established that gas well operation hydrocarbon emissions can travel 500 feet and further. So I think it would be wise for the city to look at continuous air monitoring of well operations that are 500 feet or closer to protected uses. Basic clarification is needed for activities such as "redrilling" and "workover operations." These are not clearly defined in the ordinance. And that's about it for that. Another thing that I'd like to speak to is the fact that on September 22nd, Sunday, Dr. Zachariah Hildenbrand from the University of Texas at Arlington will be speaking from 2 to 4 at the North Branch Library. Dr. Hildenbrand has done extensive study of setbacks and the efficacy of those setbacks exclusively in the Barnett Shale. I quote him as to what he will be covering. He said, "I will be covering the overall environmental implications of unconventional oil and gas development, air, soil, and water, and the steps that can be taken to improve the environmental stewardship of this industrial process." So I wanted to let you know about that meeting because I think it will be very informative. Thank you again. Our next agenda item is Agenda Item 4, which consists of budget items for individual consideration. We'll move on to Agenda Item 4A, "Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, levying the ad valorem property tax of the City of Denton, Texas for the year 2019 on all taxable property within the corporate limits of the City on January 1, 2019, and adopting a tax rate of .590454." Good evening, Mayor and Councilmembers. David Yans, Director of Finance. I have a very brief presentation that will cover all four items, so I'll go through the presentation and then can answer questions at any time along the way. Is this all for the budget items? Correct. Do I need to call all four of these? Yes. I'll go ahead and call them. Okay. Let me call these right quick then, David. Agenda Item 4B, "Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, approving the 2019 tax rolls and providing an effective date." Agenda Item 4C, "Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, adopting the fiscal year 2019-2020 annual program of services budget." Agenda Item 4D, "Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, ratifying the adoption of the fiscal year 2019-2020 annual program of services budget." And we'll need a separate vote on each one of these, correct? That's correct. All right. Thank you. So obviously this is the date of budget approval. It's been a long process to get to this point. You can see the dates that we've been tracking along the way up to this point. The most recent items were the public hearings that we've had the past couple of meetings, two public hearings on the tax rate and one on the budget itself. But obviously the process for the budget starts early in the calendar year, and then we go throughout the department presentations up to these high-level presentations we've had with council over the last two or three months. So excited to be at this point, and I'll touch on some of these high-level slides, and obviously can get into any of the detail if you'd like at this point. So we are adopting the budget before you is at the effective tax rate. When we had the proposed book, the recommended budget August 1st, we were slightly above the effective tax rate as we worked with council and looked at the development fees and other revenue sources, we are now at the effective tax rate. So you can see that 3-cent decline decrease from our current tax rate down to the 59 cents that's now up for adoption. Over the past few years, we've now decreased our total tax rate. Over the past four years, almost 10 cents in total as we've been focused on the effective tax rate each of those fiscal years. We have shown the rollback rate there as well for comparison and then what we project the rollback rate to be next year with the new legislation. So again, at a very high level, you can see the general fund budget of a total revenue of $136 million, and property tax making up the biggest piece of the pie at 35% of our total revenue in the general fund, sales tax at 30%, and then from there our transfers within other funds and our permits and fees make up the biggest portions of the remainder of our revenue in the general fund. Our expenditures by department are listed here as well. The total expenditures in the general fund are $136 million for the budget for consideration. The biggest portion of the general fund budget is obviously public safety. You can see fire and police there make up almost half of our total budget, with parks coming in third as our third largest department in the general fund, and then many of our admin and planning and development departments coming in after those. So obviously stepping back, the budget encompasses more than just the general fund, so you can see our total budget for consideration is $1.2 billion, and the largest pieces of that are devoted to our capital program. You can see our current capital that has already been approved noted there, and then also the new funding for approval tonight as well. General fund makes up about 11% of our budget, and our largest operating fund is our electric fund. While we're staying at the effective tax rate on the property tax side, we also have no increases for consideration in our utilities funds on residential customers, so we have that noted there where they are showing the average monthly bill for residential customers unchanged this fiscal year. And that's all I have for this this high level overview, but would be happy to answer any questions. Was that for both all agenda items for a through for D, correct. Okay. Any questions on the presentation on any of the agenda items because then we will proceed to to vote on them individually Councilmember Meltzer recognize you for agenda item for a. I'm, I'm prepared to make a motion but I can, you know, I can wait a third. I'll make the motion since that's our new process. So on a, it's the tax rate. So, first of all, I just want to express appreciation for the city manager and staff and for my colleagues for coming together behind a program that's fiscally disciplined, and yet covering important needs for public safety as well as significant step forward. In addressing our emergency shelter needs within a rate that does not target a tax increase for existing structures so that having been said I move approval of the tax rate in item a. Councilmember Ryan. Second, I have a motion and second for agenda item for a councilmember Briggs. So I wanted to make a comment here. I am in favor of this tax rate and comments that I've heard from the public are, you know, it's some comments have been what is that too low Are we going to be able to sustain that with the rate staying so low and some of them of course are, you know, it's it's too high so I feel like we're, we're pretty good in the middle and with the slide that you posted the other day of the rate being the same as it was 15. Years, and our city since the rate has been what it is now that we're proving, and I think that's pretty significant. So, I want to thank you and staff and the city manager for for this, the effective right. Oh, and I also want to thank Nick for coming to my meeting and speaking. Thank you. Yeah, and I just want to echoes the sentiments shared by both my colleagues for agenda items A through D I won't speak on each one but it's it's always arduous process and long and tedious and I commend staff, David you and your staff and Todd and your staff and just putting this process together three years ago. I think it really has made it streamlined I think it's made it more transparent. I think it's certainly provided Council the opportunity to have more input, and we're doing this in a way that is going to have the least impact tax wise on our citizens but without cutting services really increasing services it through some of the supplemental programs that are much needed so hats off to you and I really appreciate your leadership and the staff your staff leadership and just their commitment to the process and to the division that this council has shared with you all. Are we have a motion and a second for agenda item for a anybody else wishing to speak on this item. If not, let's vote on the board please motion carries seven zero agenda item for be considered option of Nordic of the city of Texas approving the 2019 tax rolls and providing an effective date. Chair would entertain motion Councilmember Ryan, move approval of item for be okay. Mayor pro tem second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item for be any discussion. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries agenda item for be carries seven zero agenda item for see, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton adopting the fiscal year 2019 2020 annual program of services budget. Councilmember Meltzer. Move approval. Councilmember Armitter. I had a comment. Did you want to take the second? We can. Mayor pro tem. Second. All right. We have a motion to second. Councilmember Armitter. Yeah. So I just wanted to say that, you know, I have mixed feelings about this budget. There are some items that I consider really important. Items that I have expressed public disapproval about and then there are some things that I consider public needs that I think should be there instead of other things. I'm going to be voting yes to this. Because it's a process that we come to collectively and I don't think any one person will be happy with every single thing on it. But I just want to say out there to members of the public that, you know, I encourage all of you to watch previous work sessions and to ask each of us and have conversations with your council members on, you know, what issues in here do you like? What don't you like? And to please let us know, you know, even after the fact because we represent you and we can't do this without your input. So that's all. Thank you. Thank you. Any other discussion? We have a motion and a second for agenda item 4C. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 4D, I believe, is just a ratification of what we just did. Is that correct? Just saying that we intended to do what we just did. Yes. All right. Our legislation hard at work. Legislature hard at work. Okay. Agenda item 4D. Councilmember Ryan? Move approval of agenda item 4D. Councilmember Briggs? Second. We have a motion and a second. Discussion? Mayor Pro Tem? No, just wanted to take this opportunity, one, to echo what was said earlier than the earlier items, but also to point out for those that may not track along. So Tony is in finance department and David runs with the finance department, while Tony then runs the finance department and general manager for DMV, and he's in charge of our couch, cushion, et cetera. So, I mean, I just want to give credit, what credit's due to the city manager, and you just kind of see these constant in-department or switching department kind of growth patterns, and it's a lot of savings and efficiencies in the city baked into this budget to allow us to do what we do. And so I appreciate his leadership and staff kind of responsiveness and those that he's brought on. And I take pride in the fact that even if you look at the Denton Record Chronicle article, when they listed the salaries, we were the only entity that had a vacancy because of those efficiencies. And so it really goes a long, long way, and it's to the betterment of the citizens and allows us to do a little more than we would have been able to do ordinarily. So, just really grateful for his leadership and staff's responsiveness and being willing to accept extra duties and doing them well. So, thank you. Thank you. Any more discussion? We have a motion and a second for agenda item 4D. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Thank you. Moving on to our consent agenda. Chair would entertain action on consent agenda. Council Member Briggs. Move approval of consent agenda items except for item P, AC, AE, AF, X, and V, which will all be separate items. What was the first one? P. P, okay, P. I believe I got them all. Yeah, okay, so let me make sure I've got those. So it's except for approval except for items P, V, X, AC, AE, and AF. Yes, sir. All right. Council Member Davis. Second adoption of the consent agenda. All right. This is a motion for the consent agenda. Save those that have been listed as being pulled for items for individual consideration. Let's vote on the board, please. Agenda item 5 passes unanimously. We'll now move on to those items that were pulled off the consent agenda as items for individual consideration. The first one is agenda item 5P. 5P is considered adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton adopting a schedule of fees for cemeteries and use of certain park facilities, superseding all prior fees in conflict with such schedule. Mayor of City Council Gary Pack and Director of Parks and Recreation wanted to share with you just a few changes in our schedule of fees that we have proposed in our budget. If you go to exhibit that was provided in the agenda, I'll go over those briefly. Our special events deposit is part of our new special events ordinance that was passed a few months ago. That is a deposit that is refundable to the customer at the conclusion of the event. In two new fees, industrial park, we have some events that use that for special activities. We did not have a rental fee for that, so that is $65 for that entire park space, as well as the new North Lakes dog park that's being constructed right now. We have a small pen that we intend to have available for the community to rent for dog birthday parties. That's $65 as well. And then our park contractor, this was actually a fee that was based off of a percentage, and we changed it to an hourly rate of $15. It's the same fee to the customer, the client that actually rents it for Camp Gladier, those types of things. When they have specials, they'll have people that are coming for free, so technically we don't get any revenue for that, so that's why we flipped to an hourly rate. And two just clarifications that we didn't have noted in there. At the water park, we have two pavilions. We have the fees that are $75 and $150 for those pavilions, but the additional hours are $50. That has been staff's practice. It just wasn't noted here for those additional hours. We just want to make that clarification. And that's all the changes we've made. >> Okay, sure, sure, sorry. >> Yeah, Gary, on the water park pavilion, I want to make sure I'm reading this right. It's $75 per hour? >> Yes. It's $75, and then for additional $50 for every hour after that. >> Okay, thank you. >> Okay, Councilmember Armitage? >> Yeah, so the money for the dog birthday parties, does that go just right back to parks? Does some of it go to animal shelter or something like that? >> No, it goes back to parks budget. >> Okay. >> Yes, ma'am. >> Has anyone had any of those yet? >> No, we haven't started the process. >> Okay. Any other questions for staff? All right, Councilmember Briggs? >> Yeah, and just on the cemetery fees, all of those are the same, that they're consistent, nothing has changed. >> Yes, nothing has changed in the cemetery fees for this year. That's correct. >> Thank you. >> Mayor Pro Tem? >> Move approval. >> Councilmember Ryan? >> Second. >> We have a motion and a second for approval for agenda item 5P. Any more discussion? Councilmember Armitage? >> Yeah, I'll just say, somehow I didn't notice the dog birthday party thing. Anyway, I'll be voting yes for this, but I would hope that maybe in the future, if this comes to us, we can kind of put some of the money of that, even some sort of percentage, either towards animal shelter or shelter for humans, something like that. It's just one of those things that, given all our public need, thank you. >> Councilmember Meltzer? >> I just don't want to let this go and have something accidentally get committed to ordinance if it's an error. This is something you'd be way more inclined to know for sure than I am, but I went to the water park, I rented a pavilion. I'm pretty sure it was 75, the choices were 75 or 100 for three hours or four. Not that it was 75 hours. >> I can double check that. >> I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have done it, to be honest. >> I'll double check that. >> We'll check them before we vote, I think. Actually, just to take a little pressure off, I'll move to table the item for later in the meeting until we confirm that point. >> Okay. Motion to table or postpone takes precedence over the motion on the floor. >> Over any motion, yes. >> Okay, so we'll need a second for that. I see Councilmember Davis. We haven't gotten a second, so I'm just going to move down through the request to speak until we get that. >> My request to speak was on the item itself, so I will not be seconding. >> Okay. Mayor Pro Tem, you have motion, so I don't think you're going to be seconding it. >> No, I'm not. And I'm just confused. Can that not be done administerial after the fact? I mean, is it -- this isn't -- am I misunderstanding? >> If I believe I understand your question, is that something that we can go ahead and vote on the ordinance, but if it's in the ordinance like that, in order to change it, would that still have to come back to Council, or would that be something that administration could change, Mr. City Attorney? >> If what gets adopted today is presented by Gary is approved and you later find out that Councilmember Meltzer was correct, that would have to come back as an amendment to that ordinance. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Councilmember Barmatter. >> I second Councilmember Meltzer's request. >> Did you have an answer for that? >> No, not yet. >> Okay. All right. All right. Okay. We have a motion and a second for the motion to table. Do we need a -- that can just be till whenever? >> Till some such time during this meeting when Gary notifies the Council that he has an answer. >> Yes. >> So I guess my question on that is, I mean, we're going to move past this agenda item. So how are we going to come back to this agenda item unless somehow there's a signal that he's ready and then I would just call the agenda item once again? >> Yes, because by tabling this, you haven't taken any action on the item. You're just bypassing it and move on. >> All right. Okay. All right. So we have a motion and a second to table this item until such time we receive some clarification by staff on the hourly rate for rental of the water park, pavilion, et cetera. So if we could -- we got the motion to table on the board. So let's go ahead and vote on the board, please. Motion carries four to three. So we'll come back and revisit that to get clarification. We'll move on to agenda item 5V. As in Victor, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, a Texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager or purchasing agent based on signing thresholds to execute a contract with Justin's seed company, et cetera. And we do have a card to speak. So we will -- after staff presentation, we'll take public comment and then we'll discuss. >> Good evening, council members. Laura Barron, assistant director for parks and recreation. So I have a little bit of information on a question that was raised earlier today during work session. This bid does contain a list of beneficial organisms that are recommended for purchase in our park system. Beneficial organisms are used to control pests, to encourage pollination and to improve soil health. Different types of beneficial organisms include insects, plants, bacteria and fungus and nematodes. And the strategy that this helps us achieve are the biological and cultural methods in maintaining our park systems. These beneficial organisms can be used to attract other beneficial organisms into the environment and they can also be introduced into the environment. The specific question that we received on the trick of grandma wasp eggs, these particular wasp eggs are a natural predator to moths and butterflies. And what it does is it helps to control plant and leaf damaging caterpillars and worms. So it actually targets them in a preventative measure when they are eggs and during that initial larva phase and it affects less than 1% of the species. They're used in our park system to control borers, leaf worms, army worms and web worms. We do have an alternative product that's on the list under our natural and organic product list and that's Pure Grow Bug Stop. The active ingredients in that is 40% cinnamon oil and 10% clove oil. The other 50% are inert products. This one acts a little bit differently. It does kill on direct contact. It targets insects, so not during the egg or larva phase. It is nonspecific though to moths and butterflies, but it is B-safe. So there's some pros and cons to this particular alternative. It's currently being used for aphids, mites, leaf miners and whiteflies. But in larger or increased concentrations, it can be effective against caterpillars and worms. Okay. Councilmember Armitage. So you're saying that the alternative is safe for bees, but not necessarily for the caterpillars that turn into butterflies or butterflies? It's nonspecific in its target on moths and butterflies, whereas the wasp eggs only target less than 1% of that particular species. Okay. And this is part of the program that's recommended by the dirt doctor, Howard Garrett. Yes, but he's currently working with us specifically on our Dena Park project. However, these types of alternatives that are natural and fit that biological and cultural method can be used throughout our park system, and that's the goal. So I thank Councilmember Briggs for removing this item from the consent agenda because of concern about wasps and butterflies, us being a monarch city. I'm concerned about this issue too, and thank members of the public who had called it to my attention. When this method was decided on, was there a request for proposals for organic methods, and that the dirt doctor was the winning bid for that request for proposals, or was he kind of singled out because of his methods? So the dirt doctor came to us through our focus group. We actually had a member of our focus group during the implementation and revision process of our IPM program. The focus group actually recommended that we work with him because of his knowledge and being known for his natural organic programs, and that's how we started to work with him. His professional services was much less than the threshold for putting that out for a professional services bid, since he's working with us in just this one park. Okay. So there wasn't the request for proposal process, it was through a focus group? We were following the recommendation of our focus group, yes. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Meltzer? Thank you. I just don't really understand what you mean when you say it targets 1% of the species, and what I'd be listening for in your response is whether it doesn't affect the caterpillars that become monarch butterflies. So it does not affect mature moths and butterflies. These specifically, these particular wasps are microscopic, two to three of them can fit on a pinhead, and what they do is they attack the egg and the larva, so it's preventative. They don't, they can't, just because they were so small, they do not attack an adult moth or butterfly, so that's how they're used. And when I say that they only affect 1% of the species, there's about 180,000 different butterfly and moth species, and this one only attacks about 200 of those different species. Just, if I can follow up just to clarify, and are the monarchs within the subset that it does attack? I believe it does in the larva and egg phase, yes. Thank you. Okay, Council Member Davis, did you have a request to speak? I'll wait. Okay, all right. Okay, any more questions for staff before we take public comment? Thank you. John Holman is up to speak. If you'll state your name and address, your time will begin. Thank you. I'm John Holman, 3212 Holly Creek Street. These are for you guys, I print out a bunch that you can have. First of all, thank you very much for your work with the parks, if you're concerned with the parks and the trichogrammas and catching that. Keeley pulled the consent agenda, I'm basically going to read it. Pull the agenda item V, one reason is the monarch butterfly city, we're a monarch butterfly city, we mentioned that. And so it does kill the monarchs in the larval stage, which is a great time to kill them if you want to get rid of them in it. But the dirt doctor is not actually a doctor, is the one that recommended that. And so there's a conflict with Denton's interests and commitments there. And it raises a red flag that then makes me and probably others and more and counting look deeper into what else is going on. It may be in conflict with our goals as a city or commitments that we take on, like we're going to be a monarch city, so we have to be careful. We don't betray those commitments. There's other areas that show improvement. So seeing that red flag, there's other things, namely, I'm most concerned with soil health and pesticides in children and expectant mothers especially. It's the first item here is that children and pesticides don't mix. There's evidence from Harvard and all kinds of other reputable places that this is absolutely not good for our children. After it's on the ground, even if it's not, you have to stick it in anyone's face or anything. My daughters, too, and brought these wooden blue wood chips to me right in the playground at Avondale. And here, daddy, here, and bring them to me. Okay, yeah, and that night I'm researching for this stuff that I'm concerned with and found that on the Denton IPM, they're blue because they're sprayed heavily with toxic pesticides and it infuriated me and that's another reason I'm here. And I've about had enough with it, honestly. And so any way that I can help to other people's children to avoid any kind of risk like that, that's what I'm going to do. And I do that through education. Agriculture is changing, landscape management is changing. We've now discovered that you can increase soil health so well that the ground is alive until we kill it with fertilizers and pesticides. And so our whole program for food production as well, not just Denton. Well, Denton's just so ugly. It's very widespread that you're keeping things alive that want to die and you're killing things that want to stay alive. And so it's this philosophy that we need to work on. So if we concentrate on soil health, like I would like another meeting with parks and rec staff, non-toxic neighborhoods who knows a lot about healthy soil, promoting healthy soil. And any council member that wants to be present and maybe an assistant city manager to gain some traction on this. I know that's beyond the scope of just being the trichogrammas, but like I say, that's the red flag and there's my time. So I would love a meeting. Appreciate it. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. So did you have any knowledge on the oil as the substitution from the trichogramma that was suggested? Any familiarity with that? No. Okay. Thank you. There was, Council Member Malmertor, were you, did you have a request to speak? You don't? Yeah. I'm asking you to. I took it off. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Move approval of item V. Council Member Davis. Second. All right. We have a motion and a second. Council Member Briggs. Yeah, so I'm just going to comment here because I am really glad that we're looking to get rid of the chemicals and we've decided to do that. But I don't know that I take one person's plan and idea for this, especially one where we're going to put these wasps in our parks and our community that attack the larvae and the eggs of the butterflies that we want to nurture and grow in our city, the monarch city, and we're also a pollinator city. And part of the definition said, well, it encourages, but it also kills pollinators, so I just, I can't vote yes for this, and I wish that we would find another alternative for what this plan was going to do, because I don't necessarily think it's going to be beneficial for our city as a whole and our pollinators. Council Member Davis. So, the difficulty I'm having with this conversation is that monarch butterflies, all kinds of butterflies, have many natural predators, birds, ants, other kind of wasps, ants and wasps that we don't bring into the environment that are just there naturally. You know, if you're going to restore a section of the prairie, you couldn't just introduce buffalo and prairie dogs because they're cute. You have to also have the wolves and the black-footed ferrets and all of that. Many years ago in the west, we started wiping out wolves because we didn't like predators. They weren't as nice as the prey, and now we are overrun with deer and we don't have enough predators. So, this kind of becomes a circular argument of natural management of our parkland. To me, this is a natural predator. It attacks pests that we don't want. Yes, there will probably be an innocent monarch harmed in the process. It is not going to be a huge detriment to our monarch population. I think this is a piece of a larger puzzle, and I think it's, for me, a welcome piece. I think that's how we move past using the inorganics and chemicals and all those kind of things. So, that's why I support the item as it's written. Honestly, if I had a single concern about the bid that we're voting on, and you can see it all, anyone who's playing along at home can see all of the items we're talking about in the backup materials, it's that we're paying almost $11 for one praying mantis. You give me some time, I'll go get you a praying mantis. But overall, we're moving in the right direction. I think this is the right thing to do, and so I'll be voting for it. Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, I'll say just to respond to that respectfully. Butterflies are natural, and wasps are natural, but there's nothing natural about importing predators in that quantity and putting them in a place where they don't naturally exist. And when we do that, it can affect the whole ecosystem. In fact, that's the intention here, to affect the ecosystem. I'm concerned about this issue, and while I applaud the Parks Department for everything that they've done to move towards more organic methods, I'm thrilled that we voted to get off glyphosate. Members of the public have been really helpful in calling my attention to a number of ways in which we're still using pesticides that we've introduced as substitutes to the glyphosate. And other ways, like this, that we're doing some things that could be harmful. So I'm going to vote no to this for reasons that have been said, but yes to the spirit of moving forward towards a more truly organic and non-toxic parks methods. Councilmember Ryan? I would have to say that I can't think of something that's more organic than a wasp. I mean, it is an insect life. I've been using methods like this for years. My feeling has always been as long as the wasp doesn't build its nest within 10 foot of the door, they're welcome to build their nest. When I moved into my house, there were no wasps nests. I've got a couple of them that actually help with controlling the ecosystem in my yard, along with lizards and other such things. So this is a step in the right direction to get away from the chemicals, and to me, I will be voting yes on this. Councilmember Meltzer? I'm supportive of the general direction, and I'd like to, I'm willing to hear if I've misunderstood the issue, but let me at least try to offer an amendment, a friendly amendment, if it would be acceptable to move approval with the exclusion of the Trico grandma wasp eggs. Because there was an alternative that's available on the list, and it would take away a particularly controversial item. So before I recognize or ask the movement and seconder on that, I guess I have a question of clarification for staff on that. Because on the, if you could put the slide back up that shows the alternative. I don't know how to pronounce some of those words on that slide, but non-specific to Lepidopetra? I mean, whatever that, what is that? Lepidoptera. Those are moths and butterflies. So when you say non-specific, that means they can take care of anything. They'll, this particular alternative will affect. It's not limited to what they target, and these are, because it's a contact product, it will target them in the adult stage. Many of these moths and butterflies, unfortunately, can also cause problems in the caterpillar and worm stage, and that's where we see issues. And I also want to make clear that these would not be introduced unless there's an identified problem. So again, we're going through the complete process that's outlined in the IPM program, and that actually goes for all of the products that are included in this bid. They are not used unless we go through the complete process of identifying what the issue is, identifying the pest, looking into different factors such as the environment, the level of infestation, the location of the pest, and then going through that process of can we handle this through a biological mean, can we handle this through a cultural mean, can we handle this through a mechanical mean, and if the first three answers are no, only then do we go to that chemical product. So just because they're on this list does not mean that they will be used. These are just tools in our toolbox to combat a pest, whether it's an insect pest or whether it's a weed pest. That is what the IPM process is. So question, with some indulgence from the movement second, I just want to flush out a little bit of this information, because there's been some things said that certainly everybody's right to state their personal opinion, but we've talked about that Denton is a monarch city. So my understanding is, so I'm not an expert on monarch butterflies or any butterfly. All I know is I remember in elementary school we had the caterpillars that ate the mulberry leaves and we watched them form a cocoon and then come out to be a moth. I do remember that. But part of what the problem is with some of these, in the larva or caterpillar stages, they eat and damage leaves. And I think if I remember correctly, I thought I saw in there something about either milkweed or something like that that somehow, and I know that milkweed is a staple of, at least I thought I read, either for the monarchs or something. In other words, this could also benefit some of the things that we're trying to achieve. So I can't accept the alternative only because it's more broad. In other words, it would have a more damaging effect from what I'm hearing you say, potentially, if it's used on all species, not just the ones we're trying to protect or what we're trying to promote and provide an environment for the migration. Because Monarch City is also about migration. It's about adults, monarch butterflies, migrating south back to Mexico. The alternative affects adults, no matter what it is. So I'm not okay with that. I appreciate the clarification. That's why I said I wasn't sure I understood the issue. So that was helpful. I'll withdraw the offer of the amendment. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Who's -- just to -- I need to be updated. Who suggested the IPM management program? Why are we -- how did we get in that arena? That's a great question because I was actually here a little over a year ago with a bid for products to use in our park system when the issue of glyphosate first came up. And that's when we really recognized that our IPM program at that time had not been touched since it was originally adopted back in 2001. So we really felt like this was a great opportunity to go back and reevaluate the IPM program because there had been so many advances in the different methods of maintaining our park system. That had not been looked into or included in an IPM program. So it really just started with this exact same type of item on a council agenda, which was the products that are used in our park system. So this body asks to update that and implement that -- revisit that program, which that's what you're doing. Correct. And then here we are again, taking issue with that program. Generally speaking, we're not taking issue. We're asking questions, researching, doing our due diligence. But either way, I just wanted -- I needed that refresher. Thank you. Okay. Councilmember Briggs. Yeah. So yeah, we were here and we were talking about putting poison on the community garden, which our residents use to grow their food. And we decided as a body not to do that anymore. So that's what got us here. And so I appreciate all the work that went into it. And then for me, hearing that all of a sudden that it kills the larvae and the eggs of the, you know, the pollinators and we are trying to bring back pollinators to our city, it was very frightening, honestly, for me personally. I am glad to hear that you said it's only going to be specific if they're needed in an area. When I first saw it, I thought, well, if it expands from more than one park, then it was going to go all over the city. And I don't know about the life cycle of these WASP or if it gets out of control, if we can stop it. Like, if you could just call me on that, I would be more inclined to vote for it. I just don't know if we can reel in after we set them free. Like, I don't know. I don't know the actual life cycle of this particular insect. But I mean, we can definitely take a look at that and see what, you know, what that is. What I do know is just why we use it, the specific pests that we see in our park system. Those four that are listed there are the most predominant ones. And again, that in terms of the number of species, it's limited as compared to some of the other alternative yet natural products that we have or other methods that we can use. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, just wanted to respond to a comment made earlier. I've been very, very public about, you know, my own kind of personal education on this issue and the role that members of the public, including people from Food Not Lawns, have helped to educate me. And about our own IPM program that, yes, I voted on. At the time, I was so happy to get off glyphosate off Roundup, and I was thrilled that organic substitutes, you know, had been mentioned as a possibility. I thought we were going to look into it. And afterwards, people started letting me know about what some of these issues were, and I started asking the questions. So, you know, of course I wish I had known all these things from the very beginning, but sometimes we don't, and I'm just grateful to members of the public for helping us do our job. I'm not too proud to admit that I know more now than I did then. I'm still proud to have voted against glyphosate. I wish that I knew more about Finale, the substitute. I wish I knew more about what some of the issues are with, you know, using solid waste, human solid waste products as top dressing, etc. So I just want to mention that hopefully for the last time, yes, I did vote on. And I'm also really pleased with staff for, you know, bringing this forward, and I hope that we'll have our mind open to changing our minds and educating ourselves about issues that we voted on. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> I'm going to call the question. >> Is there a, we need a second on call the question, do we not? I think we're doing this two-thirds vote. >> Yes. >> Yes. Yeah. So is there a second for calling the question? >> Second. >> We have a second for calling the question. If we could clear the vote board so that we can, I don't know if I want to take a hand vote on this one. So we had Mayor Pro Tem, we had Council Member Ryan. So it's my understanding, is there going to need to be six votes for this to pass to call the question? It's two-thirds, six votes. >> It'll run up to six, yes. >> Okay. All right. So we have a call to question by the Mayor Pro Tem, a second by Council Member Ryan. It takes six votes to end the debate and move towards our motion, if I'm correct on that. So let's vote on the board, please. So if you're voting yes, that means you're wanting to end debate. >> I'm sorry. I don't understand. You said if we're voting yes, what? >> If you're voting for the call of the question, that means that to call the question means you terminate debate and you move straight to the vote on the motion, underlying motion. >> Okay. If the call of question fails, three to four. Council Member Meltzer. >> Yeah, I appreciate your description of the sort of sequence of steps you would consider before using the different materials available. Is your intention to continue having dialogue with groups such as nontoxic neighborhoods and to continue to learn and take in new information as we embark on this path? >> Absolutely. And there's several organizations, several resources that can provide information on the different types of natural, organic, cultural, biological, you know, there are just a variety of different programs out there. And again, a variety of different organizations that provide information concerning this topic. So yes, we're definitely open to learning from each one, seeing what they have to say in terms of this particular program. Again, we've been approved and are moving forward with specifically the IPM program. We're currently under a contract with the DINA pilot program and want to see that through as we've started it and have also committed to continue to follow up with updates with our original focus group that helped us go through this process and put a tremendous amount of work and effort into the system that we have now. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Briggs, I saw your name. Did you withdraw it? >> Well, it kind of answered my question. So this is just -- it's kind of a path forward but willing to change as we go along. So it's not necessarily -- approval of this plan just means we approve an alternative plan. And so looking at it that way, I feel more comfortable knowing that if something we're doing isn't working, that we can go back and reevaluate the plan. >> Absolutely. And part of the IPM program actually calls for an evaluation. That's the very last step, is to evaluate the steps that you took, determine whether or not they were effective, and document that. And we have always been very clear that this IPM program is evolving. It's a living document. And we can always make changes as needed. In fact, many cities do. They have the IPM philosophy, which allows all of these different methods, including chemical, but they are, you know, depending on the city, they put restrictions on the type of chemical. That's one way that you can adopt that program to meet your city's needs, your municipality's needs. >> Okay. Thank you so much for the last year of bringing this together and involving the public. We're not -- if we waited until we got it totally right, however that's defined, we would still be trying to figure out how to kill the weeds without Roundup or Glossophate or whatever it is, not a product. And I trust that you've heard the concerns of, you know, the council on certain species of butterflies, and I certainly know that if we can learn all we know about mosquitoes and West Nile virus, that we can learn about, you know, what's the habitat for these type of eggs, and we can certainly ensure that we don't employ or deploy certain types of regimens that will be harmful to that. So it's not as if we're just going to go out and release these things into the air indiscriminately, because I know that that's not how the park staff works, and I certainly know that based upon how we've dealt with our West Nile issue and mosquitoes and things such as that, that everybody's looking for the best practice to preserve the most interest for our citizens. So I trust that. I think it's been proven over time, and I appreciate your hard work on that, and I appreciate the discussion we've had here today. We've got a motion on the floor and a second for agenda item five, V as in Victor. Let's vote on the board, please. Yes, do what? No, he withdrew it. Yeah, he withdrew it. Motion carries six to one. We're moving on to agenda item five X. Let's go ahead. Take a quick five minute break. We'll come back and pick up the agenda items. Welcome everybody back to this meeting of the density Council on September the 17th, 2019. It is 752 moving through our consent agenda items that were pulled through individual consideration. We're on five X. I don't believe there was a staff report on that. So please let the record reflect that Councilmember Davis has recused himself. Councilmember Ryan approval. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. We have a motion and second for five X. Let's put on the board, please. Take another vote. Oh, there it is. Motion carries six zero. We're going to go ahead and chair would entertain. I believe we have an answer to the question. Councilmember Meltzer. Yes, I moved to bring was it item P. Back from the table for consideration. All right. Do I have a second for that motion? We've got a vote on this too, don't we? Yep. All right. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. We have a motion and a second to to remove item five P from the table and bring it back to active status. Let's vote on the board, please. Oh, is that right? Yes, we need to hear the answer. Well, no, we're bringing it on the table so we can hear the answer. Yeah. We're taking it off, bringing it on. I don't know, depends if you're hungry or not, I guess. Okay, motion carries seven zero. So we're back to agenda item five P for the sole purposes of getting that question answered on the rental for the water park. City Council Gary Pack and Director of Parks and Recreation. So the item we were talking about was the small pavilion, which is the party pavilion, which is $75 per hour. And the corporate pavilion is $150 per hour. Each of those are $50 an hour additional. So for instance, if you wanted to rent the small pavilion, it's $75 plus 50 plus 50. If you wanted the large pavilion, it's 150 plus 50 for two hours. So it would be $200 for two hours. What Councilmember Meltzer was talking about were the cabana rentals, which are rented in three hour increments. Okay. So that's that's where the confusion came in. No, no problem. Councilmember Meltzer. Yes, it looked very much like a tent to me. And it was and it was delightful. And I move approval. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. We have a motion to second for five P. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries seven zero. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for getting that for us. We're going to move on to agenda item five A.C. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Texas, establishing the rates for solid waste and recycling collection service, providing for repealer, et cetera. Who who pulled this one? Okay. Any specific questions or direction for staff as far as the presentation? Well, any anytime we have an opportunity to show the changes that that we're making, I thought we should take it with a slide. Okay. All right. Good evening, Mayor, members of the council, Brian Burnett, director of solid waste. Appreciate the opportunity to come talk about our upcoming solid waste and recycling rates for 2019 2020. As you saw previously in our rate presentation, we do have some rates, changes proposed at the landfill. Again, rates for Denton residents will not will remain the same. However, non Denton residents and businesses using the landfill will pay a forty six dollar per ton rate. So it'll be a two dollar increase over what they're paying now. You will actually see a reduction in appliance electronic items to ten dollars per item dropped off at the facility. Uncompacted waste and compacted waste will be aligned with a cost of service rate. And we use use that only when the scales are out of order. And the best of my knowledge, we have not used those rates in decades. However, it's important for us to have that just in case catastrophic failure does occur. We have removed tires and crushed concrete from our rate schedule because we're discontinuing the acceptance of tires and we no longer sale. Crushed concrete because we discontinued that program earlier this year from residential standpoint to improve routing efficiencies and to basically maintain some rate equity. We have several items proposed for changes. We're going to introduce a yard waste subscription service with no excess charge for a dollar a month. If you're going to be using craft bags or if you purchase a cart for twenty dollars, you'll have a fifty dollar, excuse me, fifty cent a month subscription charge. You'll be allowed to put out as much yard waste material. Again, yard waste is anything that is organic that will fit inside either the cart or the craft bag. So your limbs, sticks, yard trimmings, hedge trimmings, things of those natures, those nature and will basically instead be doing a house to house drive by every house once a week. We'll be going point to point, which is much more efficient. Also, by using these methods, we will we should decrease the amount of injury that we're currently seeing in our brush crews with regard to our brush piles. Currently, it's a seven dollar a yard. What we want to do in excess of four cubic yards, but trying to identify yardage estimates in the field is extremely difficult. So what we want to do is continue to include four cubic yards or less within the monthly bill. However, if there's a pile larger than four cubic yards, first four cubic yards are collected free and then anything in excess of that is billed at a quarter hour increment of seventy five dollars per hour, roughly eighteen and some change every fifteen minutes. Again, from a residential standpoint, we will be discontinuing the seven dollar excess refuse charge. So any any garbage that is not in your car will not be picked up that week. It can either come out to the landfill. You can work with your neighbor possibly to use their capacity. But again, that that we will not be stopping and getting out of the truck to reload carts from a bulk waste standpoint. We're going to include two two items per collection. So per week included in your rate. Previously, it was just for four items a year. Anything beyond two items a week will be five dollars per item collected. And again, it's a table is an item. A set of chairs is an item. Just of doors is not a chest and seven doors. It's that that is one item. Also, for a cost of service standpoint, we're going to change our same day cart change out fee from sixty five dollars down to fifty aligned with with the cost of service. Couple things that we have implemented to push this material out. We have developed a customer service waste and services. Recycling guide should be coming out of the printers today and hitting the mail towards the end of the week. So either Friday, Monday or Tuesday, residents will be receiving information with regard to our change of service, including trash recycling, home chemical collection, bulky items, brush, yard waste. And that also has a little tear off piece there that you can cut off and put on your refrigerator. Wherever you keep your important city information to remind you what is and is not included in our programs as well as what how to to recycle correctly in the city of Denton. Similarly, we've recently updated our solid waste recycling page to be a little more robust to drive and define the materials that we are accepting through our new programs here. In addition, we have actually included an app called the Waste Wizard. So at the bottom of most pages, basically, if you have a question, type in the material and it will tell you how it's managed within the city program here at Denton. For example, you type in grass clippings and it'll tell you, you know, collection this requires citizens to opt in, call customer service at eighty seven hundred to set up the service. You can rock opt out at any time fees will apply. And this is what what yard waste is grass clippings. It tells you about set outs and how it needs to be set out and the works. Anything that you think you you need to learn about getting rid of in either garbage is recycling. This will answer the question. And if it doesn't immediately answer, the question has a button says, do you want to submit to staff to find a way you can put that in? And some of our staff members will actually go and research the best way to manage that material. So in and we will get that that updated into in the Waste Wizard. Finally, from a commercial standpoint, we've had several recommendations to include a bulk waste charge from a commercial standpoint. This is to address like apartment complexes that you may have a move out excess furniture that won't fit in your regular garbage dumpster. What we can do is come out for a trip fee of twenty dollars and then a per item fee of five dollars. So mattresses, chest of drawers, anything that's left. Again, we will come out and again on a subscription or on a call in service will come out and manage that material as bulk waste as opposed to having to put it in your dumpster. With that, I appreciate the opportunity to present the changes and answer any questions about that. Councilmember Briggs. So thank you for the presentation. You're welcome. So where are the residents supposed to take tires now? Any tires, any business in the city of Denton, which will take that sells tires, will take tires. Ideally, you do not need to take your tires home when you get them changed. They need to stay at the facility, but if you have an extra one at your house for whatever reason, you can take it there. Again, it will cost a fee, but they can take it for you. OK, and I appreciate the waste wizard. I've used it and I've already shared it multiple times. Last question. For me, I really want to make sure that it's easy to opt in and opt out. I know that we've talked about it a little bit, but having an option on the website where you can click in or on an app. And I know that right now I found out it's not feasible, but hopefully you're looking into it and it'll be easier to do for the residents in the future. Well, we are currently looking at several software solutions in solid waste, and hopefully one of those will contain an option that we can provide some secure customer service back and forth. OK. Councilmember Pro Tem? Quick question. Yes, sir. So the craft bags, is there anything to help someone bridge that gap? If they're used to buying a roll of plastic trash bags at X amount, the craft bags cost more, however so slightly. Is there a way to help bridge that, or is it just they have to either purchase from us, purchase from Home Depot, is there any thought to that? Yeah, I mean right now they're available. I mean, any place you're currently buying your plastic bags, take one step over, you'll probably find your craft bags. So they are there in stores in Denton today. As far as the cost, there is no anticipation to subsidize any cost or cost differential. OK. Thank you. Councilmember Ryan? Thank you, Mayor. When will, because this takes effect October 1st, when will customers be able to call in to opt in? Currently, we are working with our customer service, trying to build the application in our paradigm system. We have a call in with them tomorrow to finish the drop down application that allows them to build the route. So we currently have everything on our side ready to go. The carts came in yesterday. So we're ready to push them out. Once we start building those routes, we'll be pushing that material out. And again, we'll have a phase in period over the first quarter of this year. So October 1st, we're not going to stop completely collecting yard waste. We'll be working with education and working to get that out so that as quickly as possible, everybody that needs to opt in will be able to opt in. OK. That's good to hear because Tuesday is October 1st and that's my collection. We're looking at it every day, too. Councilmember Davis? I want to take just a quick second. Thank you for your innovation in this area. Thank you for looking at things that make our rate structures more equitable. I know, for instance, the craft bags and yard cart are not unanimously accepted across the city. My father-in-law, for one, would rather stick with his plastic bags and doesn't want to have to haul another cart. But I appreciate that you're giving us the opportunity to even those of us who maybe put out a bunch of bags of leaves to be more equitable in our fee structure and that we spread that wealth around. So I appreciate that. I also want to point out that the valet service is a part of this. Are there innovations that you've undertaken in solid waste? So I just want to thank you for being creative and thinking outside the box. Well, I appreciate that. And it is a team approach. It's, you know, the entire solid waste department is putting their head together to make this happen. I appreciate all their hard work in making it so. Mayor Pro Tem? Move approval. Council Member Ryan? I will second. I also want to say that for those who want to keep their plastic, using plastic bags, you simply store them off to the side. You get the cart. You dump enough bags in to fill up the cart. You roll it out. And then the next week you take and dump some more plastic bags into that cart. Okay. Thank you. We have a motion to second for agenda item 5 AC. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 5 AE. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton adopting a schedule of permit fees for permits. Who pulled this one? What's the extent of the presentation you would like? I had a couple of questions during the work session. So that's more question than answer? Yeah, one was regarding the fact that we've added a new category, which is referred to as a business license, which I believe is actually just replacing something, but I want to make sure that the public was aware of that. And then the other one is I believe is actually on the second item. Okay. On AF? Yeah, AF. So if you want to call it because the presentation is probably going to cover both of them and then we can vote on them separately. Let's just do them one at a time. Yeah, just his question on the business license. Absolutely. And I did prepare the presentation for both questions and I'll walk through that. Yeah, we'll call it -- we'll walk through the second question when we call it. Okay. Yeah, just go ahead. Absolutely. So just a little background on this, that we had presented a preliminary cost of service study for the fees, worked with Matrix Consulting and performed a detailed analysis of where we're at. We came back on August 20th and provided a work session to discuss the results and directed staff to move forward with the proposed fees. So specifically to business license, the business license is a change in terminology. So what we do currently is we have a certificate of occupancy that we use for all new structures, as well as when a business changes its location or goes into a location, we also issue a certificate of occupancy. All this is separating clarity that the business license is for a business at a specific location, a specific business, rather than the certificate of occupancy to utilize a building to the building code and the parameters that go along with that. So we're not reissuing certificates of occupancy for the building, but just merely a business license. Councilman Ryan, any comments or does that satisfy your question? Yeah, that satisfies me, and I'm glad to see this because the term certificate of occupancy for a business to move in always seemed very strange when they were just taking over another business that was already existing and already had a certificate of occupancy. And especially in the multifamily world, you think nobody can move in until you've got a certificate of occupancy. When that would change hands, you had to get that before you could get power turned on. And so this is kind of clearing up the terminology. Okay. Thank you so much. You may stay put. Chair, would entertain any action on this agenda, item 4E. Councilmember Ryan? Move approval of item 5AE. Mayor Pro Tem? Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 5AE. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 5AF, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, adopting a schedule of fees for the development services engineering departments. Councilman Ryan, you pulled that as well, your specific question on that one. Yeah, my specific question on this one was in regards to in the schedule, it talked about lots for gas well platting. And if you did 1-10 and 11-20 and et cetera, and it just seemed odd that we would have more than one lot for a gas well. Yes, sir. Well, along with this, the gas well development plat has been in our ordinances and our current gas well ordinance. We're not changing the gas well ordinance. However, our consultant did provide examples of what we did with plats. So all of our plats are treated the same way. If there's any change in state law, then, of course, then we're accommodating that. But our ordinance ultimately provides that you're only allowed to have one gas well pad per lot. So in essence, our fee schedule will retain the same. So it will be a $5,492 fee for a gas well plat. We haven't done anything since 2014 with this. Councilmember Davis? So everyone here on the day, us and you, are aware that we received an email earlier in the day from someone representing the Denton Community Development Alliance. And I understand you've already agreed to meet with them. You've met with them many times before, and you've engaged the development community in this process. But after that meeting, after you guys get together again and discuss some of their specific concerns and kind of walk them through the process again, if you wouldn't mind getting back to us with an email or an ISR on some of their specific issues and some of the things that were brought up in the email, just so we kind of close the loop on that. Absolutely. I'll provide the information to the city manager. He likes to stay in the loop on all of that. Of course. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Councilmember Ryan? I want to point out that both the previous item and this item are why we were able to stay within the effective rate and why we were able to add many supplementals. And I'm glad that we did the study to figure out what these rates should be because if you look through the items, some of them went up, but some of them also went down in price. And with that, I will move approval of item 5AF. Councilmember Meltzer? I second. We have a motion to second. Let's vote on the board, please. Oh, Council, before you did that, Councilmember Draggs? So I just I want to say thank you for bringing this to us to adjust the fees. And when we heard the presentation, we learned that the taxpayers had been subsidizing the development in this for a while now to millions. And so I appreciate this and we're just right sizing. I know that it's going to be an adjustment period, but I appreciate you meeting with the development community and look forward to hearing some more feedback. Councilmember Monica? Yeah, so three words, cost of service. You know, it's a great explanation for why these fees are the way they are. And so I too would love to hear any concern that anybody has. But once you've got a cost of service argument, it's hard to argue against that. And as Councilmember Briggs said, you know, the taxpayers have been subsidizing that. And so to me, it's fair. And I'm very grateful that you have adapted the fees in this way. So thanks to staff for these new fees. All right. We've got a motion in a second already for agenda item 5AF. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 7-0. Thank you, Scott. Thank you. Moving on to agenda item 6A, consider nominations, appointments to city boards, commissions and committees. You have the nominations in your backup. Any questions for staff? Councilmember Briggs? I move to approve the nominations. Councilmember Davis? Second. We have a motion in second. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 6B, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton and Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation authorizing city managers as they need to execute approval documents under the joint operating agreement. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Council. I'm Smith Day here from DME, and I'm here to bring you -- well, I have -- actually, this one is B, and I also have C as well. I do have presentations for each, unless you're -- had quick questions. But if you'd like to proceed with the presentation, I'd be happy to do it either way. Sure. Just a real quick presentation on the matters would be great. Thank you. All right. This will be 6B. And what -- yeah, we'll just take them one at a time, so just a presentation on 6B and then we'll -- Certainly, certainly. What the origin of this is, is according to the joint operating agreement with TMPA with four member cities, anytime there's a 20% or more budget increase at TMPA, that triggers a requirement that each city's council approve and ratify the TMPA budget. So the TMPA board has presented this budget and passed a resolution putting this forward to all four cities. So what this is, is the city didn't share, and the big driver of this particular year is the decommissioning of the Gibbons Creek power plant. So the Gibbons Creek power plant suspended operations as of June of this year completely. There's no sale of the plant yet, and -- but there is a decommissioning that needs to happen with the plant. TMPA has three core components. That's the plant, transmission, and the mining operation in Grimes County, which has been shut down for quite some time. As far as the overall scale of what's going on at -- involving the power plant, you've got a large area of acreage. This is the plant itself, so you're talking about tearing all of this infrastructure out. There's a coal pile that was there. You're talking about remediating that, and also the ash pond. So it's a tremendous amount of work that comes into decommissioning. TMPA has based this decommissioning -- this budget on a no-sale scenario. That means that it's basically -- TMPA is doing it yourself here. So if they are able to get a party to get involved with some kind of trade-off on sharing the decommissioning costs, they would do that. But right now, it's their plan on a no-sale scenario, which means it is in a do-it-yourself scenario. That means TMPA would bear the full responsibility. Decommissioning is a large capital, an intensive project. It involves decontamination, demolition, scrubbing debris, disposition, environmental remediation, and permitting. So what are we looking at specifically? The increase here for fiscal year '20, we're going to $13 million, and then fiscal year '21, $38.8, $22.8, $17.9, and fiscal year '24, $24 million. And so the total of decommissioning you're looking at, $104 million for TMPA would be looking at. The bulk of that is this line item here, the decommissioning project itself. As you can see, this jump up to $8.7 million is the big driver, and the total package on that five-year run is $87 million. Here's as far as the DME share and how it breaks out with the City of Denton. This year, fiscal '19, our share was based on this $5.4 million, and so that was the '18-'19 fiscal year budget. And so that increase that you saw for fiscal '20, that jump is from the $5.4 to the $13 million. So Denton's share is 21.3% or $2.7 million. This amount is also in your budget package. It was presented to you by DME. So staff's recommendation is that the budget be increased to improve for all member cities, and TMPA is responsible for the decommissioning. It's a regulatory issue, so environmentally, we can't escape that. This work will have to be done. Our share is 21.3%, and therefore staff recommends the approval of the item. Councilmember Briggs? Where is the money going to come from? We've budgeted in the DME operating budget for the next few years. We've basically switched course and are not anticipating that the transmission assets is going to get sold anytime soon, so we're taking a more conservative budget approach. It's why we didn't pay off the scrubber debt last year, so we had the cash here in case we needed to plan this way. Mayor Pro Tem? Move approval. Councilmember Ryan? Second. Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, I want to thank the city manager and staff for adapting to the realities, which turned out to be different than how they were predicted. Originally, under previous administration of both DME and the city, Gibbons Creek was going to be sold, and the gas plant was going to pay for everything. Gibbons Creek would pay for itself, so there is a cost, but I will say that I'm glad that we're sharing that cost with other cities, because it's a big figure that we're paying. It's an even bigger figure that everybody's paying together. So I know it takes more time to do things with a bunch of other cities, but it does defray the cost. So that's the bright side I can think of. But anyway, thank you very much. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 6B. Let's vote on the board. Motion carries, 7-0. Agenda item 6C, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton authorizing the mayor to act on the city's behalf and executing an amendment to the joint operating agreement, the JOA, by and between and among Texas Municipal Power Agency. Okay, it's me again? Yeah. All right, this also involves the MPA. This is an amendment to the joint operating agreement. The joint operating agreement was put together by the four member cities in 2016, and it's been amended a couple of times, obviously, and this is the third one. Again, the board of TMA/PA has authorized this amendment and requested that each city member approve, which is per the joint operating agreements, the rules. The summary of this amendment, it's a housekeeping, some housekeeping items, basically. The main, the first one really clears up ambiguities that the TMA/PA board is going to participate in all involvement of decommissioning, and that includes all member cities that were ever involved in the power plant. So because one of the cities got out of the last year, the power sales contract, there was this ambiguity where should they should be in there, but no, all four cities that were involved since day one for 40 years are involved. The next item, it exempts certain financial commitments from the requirement to attain approvals of all the entities. So what happened was, is that as you saw with the budget, the previous item, the budget item, whenever there's a 20% or more increase, all four cities must ratify and approve. Well, when it comes to a specific area involving the reclamation of the mines, the attorney general of Texas did take an exception to that. They were concerned that if there was a, and this is a performance bond, that if one of the cities had a degradation in their credit rating, that would trigger some cash from all the other cities, that a city could say, "Hey, I don't want to do this," and that was a backdoor way of avoiding the obligations all the cities through TMA/PA already agreed to. So the attorney general took an exception to that. This is a cleanup of that to make sure that just for this, for the bond, the performance bond obligations, that the cities can't essentially have a pocket veto under that. So the third item would allow TMA/PA to sell part of the mine property in piecemeal fashion so that it's not an all or nothing situation where they have to find one buyer to do it all, to purchase everything. They can find multiple buyers and piece it out over time, so long as the conditions are that they reserve the proper ingress and egress to get to the areas they still need to do work on, and those are the three major cleanup items. Councilmember Briggs? So on item number two there, the special, is it likely that there will be a 20% increase over that? I can't answer that. This was a precautionary. It wasn't triggered by, "Hey, this is a likely thing." It was just the attorney general said, "If this ever happened, we take exception to that." So we'd appreciate if you closed that off, and that's what TMA/PA had to do. Let me give a little explanation on that, if I could. Okay. Basically, what this is trying to do is to avoid one single member city preventing TMA/PA from acquiring the necessary bond release to release the mine land in order so that it can be sold. So this is very important because we've got about 10,000 acres in the mine, and as we're getting these bond releases from the state, it allows us to go then and have an ability to sell it, whereas if one member city said, "We're not going to approve this," well then it sort of puts a wrench in the whole project, which the plan all along, I don't know if I agree with the characterization that the plan was to always sell the plant. We obviously wanted to sell the plant, but there's also understanding that the plant may not sell, but we also knew that the mine was attractive land that could be used to help offset some of those costs. So you would not want a member city to hold up bond release of the mine. Okay. Thank you. You bet. Mayor Pro Tem? Move approval. We have a motion. Council Member Ryan? Second. Let's vote on the board please for agenda. Any discussion? Seeing none, let's vote on the board for agenda item 6C. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 6D, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, a Texas municipal home rule corporation authorizing the execution of a real estate sales contract between the city as buyer and Denton independent school district, a Texas independent school district as seller for the purchase of a 2.703 acre track of land, more or less being situated in the BBB and CRR company survey. And Council Member Davis has recused himself for this item. Mayor, members of the council, unfortunately my presentation is unloaded. I thought it was loaded this evening, so. Oh, this will be a fairly quick presentation. Very quick. Mario Cannizzaris, Deputy City Manager. Mayor, members of the council, thank you. Thank you. All right. Back in business. Again, Mario Cannizzaris, Deputy City Manager. Mayor, members of the council, here to present some information related to the Daybreak Building that we would like for your consideration in purchasing. To give you an idea of the general area of this facility, it's located at 401 North Elm. It was a former grocery store many years ago. I believe it's a former office building or office space that was used primarily before, previously before the school district purchased it. It's just located about two blocks west of City Hall. Give you a little bit of background and history. The school district purchased the property back in 2017 for about $4 million. It's approximately 2.75, 2.7 acres in size, just a little over 28,000 square feet the building is, and it's in current configuration. It allows for about 143 spaces for a parking lot. Originally, DSD, when they purchased it, intended it to be used for their information technology and adult education classes. However, over the last couple of years, or earlier this year, based on just some cost concerns that they had, also with the fact that they had some flexibility at some of their other facilities, they chose to move those operations to those other locations and opted to sell this property. Along the way, the school district also opted to remove the asbestos that was located on the building itself and have completely demolished the interior all the way down to the studs. So it's a shell of a building at this point, and I'll show you a picture here in just a moment. Over the last number of months, Superintendent Jamie Wilson met with our city manager to discuss this facility specifically to see if the city had any interest in purchasing it, knowing that we were looking for space for development services operations, along with being able to move some of our other operations under a single facility. And so knowing that this facility is close to the downtown area and close to city hall, the superintendent reached out to the city manager to see if there was interest. In those discussions, there was, there has been interest. And so along the way, the school superintendent indicated that if the city would reimburse them for the cost of the property, along with any of the investments that they've already made to the property, along with some interest earnings and costs that they had incurred in the neighborhood of about $4.5 million. So to give you an idea, this is the facility in its current state. The interior has been completely cleaned out down to the studs and the interior columns. The exterior, as you can see, some of the exterior facade has been removed because of the asbestos. So as I mentioned before, the facility is a complete shell. So basically a blank canvas for any type of use from an interior perspective. So far, the city has commissioned to appraise property appraisals. One was conducted earlier this summer and the other one was completed just a couple of weeks ago. The first one came in at $4.1 million as an as is condition. The second one, just a couple hundred thousand dollars, $300,000 below that, $3.8 million. We've also commissioned a phase one and phase two environmental assessment. Based on the information provided, there are no signs of any soil contamination or any groundwater contamination found on the site. So it's a clean site. Along the way, our city attorney's office have been instrumental in putting together the contracts, working with DISD and their council to make sure that the city is protected along the way through this transaction if the council goes along with the recommendation. And so they've been very helpful to generate the documents and negotiate the finer legal points between the two entities that benefits both parties. But the city attorney's office has been very helpful in this process. So along the way, there's some benefits that we think that are important for the purchase of this building. Number one, if the bonds pass this coming November, we believe that we can incur some cost savings in that process. Once the facility is renovated, we can actually move a portion of our police operations over to the daybreak building so that we can go ahead and begin accelerating the construction of the existing police department. It allows us to work on that facility along with the substation simultaneously as opposed to being done in a sequential fashion. By doing so, it allows us to look at the lease facility that our staff is currently in. We currently are paying approximately just under $500,000 on an annual basis in just lease payments and an additional $55,000, $56,000 in utility payments. So by moving into this facility where we would own as opposed to lease, we would actually be making an investment to actually have property that's owned by the city as opposed to the lease. As I mentioned, the building's a shelf of a facility, so as far as the renovations, it would not take as long as if we were building something brand new or having to go from the ground up. So we believe that we'd be able to get utilization of that facility pretty quickly. The other benefits, not to highlight everything, but to highlight a couple more things, is it allows us to obtain about 200 additional parking spaces in the downtown area for public use, especially for special events and other businesses along the downtown. When those spaces fill up, there would be additional spaces in close proximity. And as I mentioned, it's close to City Hall, close to right across the street from the downtown square, so it maintains that downtown presence. And finally, being able to consolidate several city operations under one roof to improve the customer experience, not only for the residents that's coming in to obtain a building permit or get guidance on a remodel of their home or whatever type of work they need to do from a construction perspective, but also our development community as well. So they're not having to go from building to building to get responses to their questions and review other documents. So what's been done so far in some of the next steps, last week, we briefed you last week in closed session about this development. You all gave direction to proceed forward. As a result, the city attorney's office, as I mentioned, had been very helpful. They've completed the negotiations and completed all the contract documents between the two attorney's office, between us and the school district. We're here tonight to see if you agree with everything, to direct, to recommend approval of this property. And if so, the finance department would come forward to you all sometime in October or later this fall from a certificate of obligation to pay for the actual purchase of the property. We would then work with our engineering folks to do an RFQ for design of electrical and the landscaping of the parking lot. And then finally, we would issue an RFQ for design services for that facility so we can go ahead and begin designing and building of that property along the way and do it in the most expeditious fashion. So with that, we recommend approval of the purchase of this property at $4,498,781. >> Council Member Armitage? >> Yeah, a question about the cost and the plans for electrical. To what extent has staff considered the possibility of solar panels on the roof, both for environmental reasons also, to keep the cost down because of the big electric bill? >> We can certainly incorporate that as a design option as an adult, so absolutely we can certainly consider that. I just can't give you an answer that we're going to do it, but I think we can certainly work with our design team to make sure that that's an option. >> Excellent. >> Mayor Pro Tem? >> A few years ago when -- >> Oh, no, no. >> Sorry. >> Yeah, he made a motion, so I was going to recognize that and then, yeah. >> Move approval. >> All right. Do we have a second and then we'll have debate? Council Member Meltzer? >> I'll second. >> All right. Council Member Ryan? >> Sorry, Mayor. A few years ago when we had a substantial flood in that area, a sleeping lizard that's across the street was hit pretty bad. The post office, Chamber of Commerce, have we been able to determine if that building was a high enough level that it was not affected by that flood? Or have we done enough drainage improvements to correct that issue? >> We are doing the engineering to make sure that that doesn't happen in the future for this facility. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Any more discussion? We have a motion and a second for agenda item 6D. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 6-0. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. We're going to power through the public hearing instead of taking a break because I know we're going to power through it. Can I say power through it one more time? Agenda item 7A. Hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, approving a citywide rezoning to coincide with zoning regulations adopted under the newly revised Denton Development Code, et cetera. I'm going to go ahead and open the public hearing so that it's just open, then we'll take staff presentation, then questions, and then public comment. >> Great. Thank you, Mayor, members of council, Ron McGinn, principal planner with Development Services. Just a quick summary of where we are today. This slide here illustrates the public hearings that we've held for the DDC update and the draft zoning map, as you all recall. On April 23rd, the city council considered adoption of a DDC update and approved that update. With regards to the draft zoning map, the public hearing was open but was continued to August 6th. And the purpose for that was for the city staff to go forward with some city initiated rezonings to address some areas that was of concern. We held two groups of city initiated zoning changes back in June 11 and July 23rd. You all considered groups one and two. On August 6th, the date that we postponed this draft zoning map for consideration, we held a public hearing. At that public hearing, the item was continued to today, September 17th, and today we are having the public hearing. We're hoping to close the public hearing and consider the new official zoning map of the city of Den. Just for your information, the official zoning map of the city will take the zoning district transition chart. That chart is available in your backup. It illustrates what zoning district it is today and what it will transition to per the new DDC, the 2019 DDC. Just to help illustrate this further, all existing plan developments will go to PD. Also, those that were zoned or rezoned with conditions that we've held through this process or through the zoning amendment process will also go to PD. Overlays in historic districts will transition to overlay districts in the new map. Master Plan Community, this is something new, will transition to Master Plan Community in the new map. Again, that's something that was not in the initial zoning transition map. We are including this as part of this consideration. Again, the Master Plan Community will transition to MPC as part of this zoning map. Lastly, I've already discussed this, the city initiated zoning changes that we heard again June 11 and July 23 will transition as part of your consideration. Again, back on June 11 and July 23, those zoning changes will go into effect on October 1, and so will this map. In essence, we're lining this all up as part of this effort to update our development code and our zoning map. With that staff, I'm sorry, staff's recommending approval. Also, the Planning Zoning Commission has also recommended approval of the citywide zoning map 7-0, and I'll staff for questions. >> Any questions for staff before public comment? Seeing none, public hearing's already been open. So, anyone wishing to speak on this item, please come down and state your name and address. Your time will begin. This is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak? All right, seeing none, we will close the public hearing. Chair would entertain discussion and/or motion. Council Member Bryan? >> Move approval. >> We have a motion to approve. Council Member Davis? >> Second. >> We have a motion and a second for agenda item, what is this, 7-8? Yeah. Any discussion? Seeing none, let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries, 7-0. Concluding items. I'm going to -- I don't usually open up with a concluding item, but I'm going to. If -- Brandon, could you -- could you just come in here just for a second? Just want to let everybody know, as you might already know, based on the backup, that Brandon is moving on to bigger and better things within the department, something that he's been wanting to do for a long time. So, you will no longer be providing the services you do during the council meetings, is that correct? >> That's correct. >> So, I just want to thank you for your service to this body over the many years. I think you said you've been doing it for 14 years. >> Yes. >> And I've been here for 12. So, you've been doing it longer than I've been serving, and I really do appreciate your service and commitment to this community and this community, but also to this body, to ensure that order is kept and to provide that level of protection and safety for the public and also for us. So, I want to thank you so much and wish you the best in your new adventure, because I know you're going to do very well at that. >> Thank you. >> You bet. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> Okay. So, yes, I'm going to miss you. Also, Blues Fest is this weekend, and I've already sent in the request formally, but I want to just ask here just to let you know that I'm asking. I know that our intent for the IPM is to do natural and organic, and then there was a comment earlier about still using something toxic on our playgrounds, glufosinate, and so I just wanted a quick little write-up on if we're using that and if we are, why, and can we stop? >> Councilmember Armitage. >> Yes, in the Scheduled Citizen Report, Ed So from the Denton Drilling Awareness Group made some additional recommendations that council consider for our gas well ordinance, and so I would like those to be considered next time we discuss gas wells. >> Mayor Pro Tem. >> So community announcement wise, there's unfortunately former Mayor Ray Stevens' wife passed away. The wake was tonight, couldn't make that, but the funeral is tomorrow, 10 a.m. at First United Methodist Church, for those that did not know that was coming up. And then secondly, September 19th, North Texas Giving Day, and I'll be there early, judging people's beards, so come out and hang out on the square, that's a lot of fun. Other community announcements, so Nancy Thaddeus has a lecture, that's a TWU event, and that's going to be, so I bought my tickets already, that's at 730 on the same date on the 19th, 730 a.m. at Ashton Gardens in Corinth. So I look forward to that, and if there's still tickets available, I'd encourage people to go to that. And then following the TWU vein, Dian Baker Field, the softball field, there's a ribbon cutting, that's Saturday the 21st at 12 p.m. And then lastly, and most, semi-most important, Roberson Ranch has their bingo night, we went last year, it's amazing, it's 1 p.m., it's a lot of, it's family friendly, so bring your daubers and get after it, so it's good, thank you. >>Councilmember Davis. >>I don't have any bingo nights to announce. Thank you Mayor Pro Tem for mentioning North Texas Giving Day, I wanted to plug that as well, and then let the public and my colleagues know I requested ISRs or work sessions, whichever is most appropriate. I brought a couple things this evening and sent those over to the city manager. One is taking another look at our cemetery fees, not for undoing what we just did tonight, but maybe making some comparisons. If we've done that in the recent past, maybe looking at that if there's already an ISR in existence, but finding the basis for some of those cemetery fees and making comparisons. And the other is on, I'm asking for some time hopefully in front of the council to talk about matching grant programs for community public art and community trees from the Tree Fund. >>Any other concluding items? Seeing none, if not, we will stand adjourned at 8 47 p.m.