Jun 23, 2025 Public Utilities Board on 2025-06-23 9:00 AM

Good morning and welcome to the regularly scheduled meeting for the City of Denton Public Utilities Board. Today is June 23rd and it is 9 a.m. and the meeting is called to order. Our first item of business is presentations from members of the public. Are there any presentations? Okay moving on to the consent agenda. Mr. Chairman I'd like to pull item B. Okay we have a question on item B. Are there any other items commissioners have questions on? Bees and boy, yes. I'd entertain a motion for the remaining items. We have a motion and a second. All in favor say aye. Passes unanimously and now item B. Consider recommending adoption of an ordinance at the City of Denton authorizing approval of the first amendment of the contract between City of Denton and DKJ concrete construction for not to exceed amount of five million two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Good morning. Casey Bowles water and wastewater filled operations division manager. Good morning. I have what may be a particularly dumb question but utility cut restoration service. Yeah so this is a contracted service they restore the asphalt the concrete and sod or landscaping when we dig up a water line or a wastewater line for repair. Okay so this is restoration of a cut that was planned and made by the utility department. Corrects planned or unplanned. Oh well what's an unplanned cut? An emergency a main break after hours a sewer line collapse something like this. Okay so kind of standard run-of-the-mill stuff then. Yes sir. Okay well thank you very much that's my only question. Move to approve item B. We have a motion. Do we have a second? Thank you Susan. All in favor say aye. Passes unanimously. Now we'll move on to items for individual consideration. Our first item for individual consideration is approval of the June 9th minutes. Do we have a motion to approve? Lee has a motion is there a second? I'm sorry Robert moves Lee seconds. Sorry about that. All in favor? Passes unanimously. Item B for individual consideration. Consider recommending adoption of an ordinance considering all manners incident and related to the issuance sale and delivery of up to $142,565,000 in principal amount of Denton City of Denton general obligation refunding and improvement bonds series 2025. I believe we're also going to have a presentation on the next item so we'll also consider recommending adoption of an ordinance considering all matters incident related to the issuance sale and delivery of up to $254,050,000 in principal amount for City of Denton certificates of obligations series 2025. Thank you. Good morning Randy Klingel Treasury Manager. Before you today I have a presentation for our bond ordinances which are the last item that sets us up to go to the bond sale later this summer. So the last time I was here before you you recommended and then I went to council on May 20th for the notice of intents notice of intents are required for certificates of obligation and so with your recommendation council approved those on May 20th we published those in the Denton record Chronicle on May 21st and May 31st sorry May 24th and May 31st and we also put that on our city website you know it'll be there until the bond ordinance in July. The July date for council also meets the last requirements 46 days after the first publication on May 24th. So mostly what I have for my presentation today is showing you the notice of intent dollars to the bond ordinance dollars today and the bond ordinance dollars are the ones that will be represented represented in the bond sale. So for the solid waste fund they had no change from notice of intent to bond sale with 11.1 million dollars. The water department they have three slides just as they did last time and you'll see the changes if there are any between notice of intent to the bond ordinance total. So they remained at their 80 million point six eighty point six million dollars. Wastewater has two slides showing their project list for the capital projects and they also remain the same from notice of intent to bond sale at seventy seven point one million dollars. Last we have the electric fund which reduced a little bit from forty seven dot nine to forty four million flat for the bond ordinance. You see the changes there for their land and building construction. They reduced that and removed it completely out of their project list. So for solid waste you have the eleven million one hundred and twenty five thousand seven hundred eleven then for the total utilities you have the two hundred one point seven million with solid waste and the utility totals coming at the two hundred and twelve point eight million dollars. In addition every year we look at the possibility of refunding to find the savings in the very last issuance that we can call and so this year we have a potential to refund some of the 2015's which include the utility funds that you see here and we're looking at a potential saving of one point three million dollars. So the total CO bond sale for general government solid waste and all three of your utilities with issuance cost which includes sharing that with the GEO sale so this seven point five million is shared with the other bond sale as well so the GEO and the CEO go together we are built together for those for this total will be two hundred fifty four million fifty thousand dollars. So next with your recommendation I'll go to council on July 15th to pass the bond ordinance and then on July 23rd we will go to sale and we expect the proceeds on August 26th. I'll have any questions. Are there any questions? Just one quick one on the refunding what was the interest rate difference I know that there's one point three the refunded bonds are four point four the projected interest will be three point five five. Okay thank you. Also the question on that three five five rate is that how is that compared to our recent history of bond rates last few years? They were higher than that last couple of years. Okay so. I don't have an exact rate but I can review that if you'd like and get that back to you. But they're trending trending a little better than they were? A little bit not much. Okay. Just kind of waiting to see you day by day. Thank you. Any further questions? Chair would entertain a motion for item B. I'll move approval on item B. Susan Parker motions. Lee seconds. We have a motion and a second. All in favor of recommending adoption of an ordinance for the issue and sale and delivery of up to 142 million five hundred sixty five thousand dollars in general obligation refunding and improvement bonds? Please say aye. Motion carries unanimously and on to item C. Do we have a motion? Mr. Newquist moves. Do we have a second? Mr. Rayner seconds. Okay all in favor of recommending adoption of an ordinance? Started this pattern of reading the whole thing so I guess I'm gonna stick to it. Related to the issue and sale and delivery of up to 254 million fifty thousand dollars in certificates of obligation. Please say aye. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. On to management reports. Mr. Chair, members of the board, just a few items here. The first one is we provided you a memo from the water department of regarding Stephen Gay's reappointment to the upper Trinity regional water district. Stephen's been on there since 2021 so it's good continuity for the city to have a representative on that. I don't know if there's anybody here if you have questions but and then going on to future agenda items as you know today we had planned a kind of financial update that has been postponed that'll be part of the July 14th budget workshop process and of course then July 28th still the date that we would anticipate that the board would consider recommending approval to the council making recommendations to the council on the various budgets and then regarding new business new business action matrix we don't have anything on there so certainly happy to take any new ones on if you have any but with that happy to answer any questions. Thank you. I read the paper last week ten days ago that a proposal was presented to the City Council concerning an additional gas power plant natural gas I was just curious I knew we had talked about it earlier this year but I didn't know we had moved to this point in the game and I was just curious as to what what are your thoughts yeah I'm gonna make sure the city attorney is okay with me providing a response here so well if this is not appropriate I'd like it for the next meeting but definitely if you want to just provide an initial kind of statement of fact that would be okay but any sort of additional discussion would need to be postponed to next meeting yes so so we presented to the council on June 3rd the same presentation that we did here and then on June 17th we discussed with the council the possibility of exploring or researching whether or not acquiring an existing generation facility out in the Urquhart market might be beneficial for the city or looking at any potential acquiring a proposed facility you know there's been a number of facilities that have been proposed to the Texas Energy Fund they're going through various kind of phases of that there's been some that have dropped off and so so we believe that there might be some value to acquiring a facility such as that you know mentioned to them there's only two nuclear facilities and that that would be unlikely there's a number of colon lignite facilities but I think from our perspective well we think that purchasing something like that and then remediating the the environmental issues could be quite costly but there could be a good kind of alternative and you're taking a kind of a dirty facility and converting it to something else CPS energy did that but again I think the the economics of that might be might be more than we probably bear and there's over a hundred existing natural gas facilities in the in the market we talked a little bit about that I provided them a list of of those again at this point we don't have any any specific lead on any facility but certainly based on other sales that have happened in the market we think that might be a possibility for that the goal of that would be simply to to get something on the ground faster to meet our ongoing deficit between our peak load and the dispatchable generation that we have today the count the direction that the council gave us was basically to kind of move forward with with researching that and so we're still having some internal conversations about how we would go about doing that but certainly the presentation was was an hour-long presentation I'm happy to bring that back here to you and kind of go through that if that's what the board would like I'm not sure what questions I can ask counsel for what to be on the next I'd like to I'd like to I saw it on TV so it was it was great but and I'll yield to you Mr. Chairman as to what what what steps or what items do we should we be looking at I mean are we looking at purchase if I can speak along this line are we looking at purchasing a plant I'd like to know about that we're looking at construction I'd like to know about that how far can I ask these questions before I'm in trouble so all those questions would need to be brought back either in a memo or a future work session and I have no problem with that I'm just asking the question but you can give direction as to what you want Tony to bring back okay well I'd like to know I'm really intrigued about possibly are we looking at buying existing which I would think time wise would be wonderful if we've got the kind of money were you were looking at such at how much at what and I'd like to know where what step of where you're at that we would need to be involved with I mean are you is there still quite a bit of more research needs to be done before it's going to be brought to us I just kind of and if so what is that time frame so we can be ready for it and for the next meeting madam counselor if that's all right Susan did you just pretty much the same thing I don't know what I don't know how to ask for can I ask about the scale size of purchase it sounds like we have a lot of questions on this topic so I think we need to just bring it back at the next work session sounds good I'm happy to bring back a work session item and try to go through as many questions you have that yeah and I did I missed the presentation so yeah I'd love to see the presentation I'm also curious about process because four weeks ago we were talking about a six month planning process and then to your shopping process and so it feels like we we jumped ahead six months and you know how does how does this fit into our the plan that was laid out in May yeah if there's a fire sale I think it's prudent we jump on it but I don't think that's the case a power a power fire sales who knows whatever I appreciate it that's what that's all any other questions or items for future agenda or new business we are adjourned