Nov 19, 2019 City Council on 2019-11-19 1:00 PM

welcome everyone to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday November the 19th 2019 it is 102 p.m. we do have a quorum I'll now call this meeting to order we'll move through our agenda items for this work session our first agenda items and item is citizen comments on consent agenda items do we have any requests for clarification of agenda items listed on this agenda councilmember Briggs so I have three first one item F about the development contractor for HR green I'm wondering if the renewal cost is covered in our new fee schedule it is and the point of this is simply to provide about a six month extension while staff goes through a new RFQ process to open up that vendor but it is it is budgeted for and was accounted for in the new fees okay thank you I I'm wondering if mayor you can kind of explain a little bit more about this agreement sure well I'm gonna pull it number one okay because the the grant was already submitted I think it was the application was sent yesterday and so they were wanting letters of support not necessarily financial support but it didn't necessarily rule that out but support letters from the different sponsoring entities of DC TA and I'd said I can't do that unilaterally I need to go ahead and get council approval to do that so since it's already been submitted I'm glad you brought that up I'm just gonna go ahead and pull that for no action because I think it's a moot issue now yeah okay and then item J for the TCEQ I'm wondering when we approved all the waste contracts recently if this fee was accounted for some of the money that we were shown is making like if that if that fee that we pay for TCEQ for waste disposal was subtracted from from some of that we we looked at this is an item that is incorporated in the budget on an annual basis along with our water waste water fees to them as well well I just meant specifically because it's about waste disposal okay so we agreed on several different contracts to increase that disposal so that means if the disposals are going up then our fees are going up and when we approve those and saw well we can make this much money where was that taken out of what we saw and I'm just curious the fees that as part of the putter page you're wondering if the 94 cents per ton was included or excluded in this yes it was included so we we capture it as a full cost but then on a quarterly basis we pay that back out to the state as part of the state required fees okay so the putter plate contracts that we saw and incorporated this expenditure that we're seeing yes okay thank you okay thank you and last one sorry it's item K it's a correcting a mistake in an ordinance that I voted no on and so I'm curious if I vote to correct the mistake does that move my original vote or is that how does that work you're just agreeing to correct the mistake no no it wouldn't be correct in the contract this is actually a non pro tongue to put it back in the position that the contract should have read it's my understanding from HR that they included a clause in the contract in my contract that did not pertain to me but pertain to the city manager I was told about it I requested this item being there in the matter in trying to ensure transparency and to make it known that this is not what Council and I agreed to so I asked for that to be put on there so voting in favor of this is not in favor of the contract it's voting in favor to delete that clause that's at the end of the paragraph that's in the ordinance okay thank you that's all okay I think we need to mr. City Attorney you said we need to pull is it C yes sir yes mayor earlier this morning our office was contacted by the fire department that the there is a they found out that the name that the official name of the grant is incorrect it's not after in the second line it reads 2019 UAS I city of Denton fire EMS rescue task force grant the correct name is after the city of Denton is specialized regional response team sustainment all other information is correct including the most important the grant number three four two one zero zero two I advise the department as well as this council that we can proceed forward to vote on this item you will be getting a substitute ordinance and by voting on this item I would recommend that it be pulled for IC and voted that way okay any other clarifications yes so it's been just to be just to be clear just to be sure it's been pulled yes pulled for individual consideration yes anybody else okay all right then we'll move down through our work session reports agenda item 3a excuse me receive report hold discussion and give staff direction regarding the employee residency survey results and other cities residency incentives information good afternoon mayor City Council Tiffany Thompson director of human resources here today to go over our results of our employee residency survey and then results of our incentives for other cities so just a little bit of background in September council gave us direction to research what cities outside the DFW Metroplex offer for employee residency incentives council also wanted to know why employees choose where they live and what are those influencing factors so we launched a survey at the beginning of October HR staff attended multiple department meetings also held the survey during our open enrollment meetings to make sure we captured all employees who may not have access to a computer we had about a 50% response rate to the city survey so first off our research yielded for the outside DFW Metroplex employee residency incentives there's only a few cities and states that offer certain incentives it's definitely influenced based off what's going on in those certain cities so Detroit is definitely the most gracious one who offers a sale tax and foreclosed home to police officers who live outside the city for a thousand dollar down payment and then up to $150,000 worth of grants for renovations Little Rock offers 5,000 incentive payments for new employees who buy a home and move within the city within one year of being hired New Jersey has a statewide residency requirement initiative that if you live in New Jersey do have to be employed in the state so with that requirement they offer ten thousand dollars zero interest loans to purchase or rehabilitate a home in the city where they work in Milwaukee was definitely the outlier they have two different types of salary structures for non-resident city employees and the resident city employees the only difference with that is they offer a three percent difference in pay so if you live within the city you get a three percent difference and then San Antonio has two different type of zero based interest loans the purpose for this is to increase the city recruitment to the to work for city of San Antonio and they're also trying to revitalize their downtown program so they're offering those incentives to revitalize the downtown area so our survey results for the city again we had about a 50% response rate for the the survey 42% of our employees responding to the survey live within the city this is very close to the actual which is 44% of our employees live within the city and this also represents the positions in the city that responded to the survey so what are the most important factors about where to live as indicated by our employees number one a short commute to work safety and crime is important schools in the caliber of education we can provide to our children affordable housing and then also town or city size if you don't live in Denton where do you live so the number one response was Sanger then crumb Aubrey Corinth and Fort Worth a lot of the cities that were indicated were smaller cities other cities that we had on there were Little Elm, Pilot Point, Argyle, Decatur and Ponder so a city employees are choosing some of them are smaller cities that surround didn't to live in if they don't live in Denton and then why don't you live in Denton number one is affordability and then one of the reasons for that is they're able to get more for their money in those smaller surrounding cities that they choose to live in country and small town just through discussions and knowing the staff that works here a lot of our city employees have land and animals and so they choose those smaller surrounding cities to live in and the next three factors definitely intermingle with one another family schools established roots so we may already have our children established in the previous schools that they're in don't want to uproot them they're involved with a civic organizations in the communities that they live in as well and so these three factors definitely tie into one another and then lastly what incentives would motivate you to move to Denton and so our number one responsible was will not move our employees definitely appreciate the autonomy and flexibility to be able to live where they choose to live affordable housing definitely goes back to being able to live in some of the smaller communities where they can get more for their money and just like council has care and concern to remedy the homelessness our and city employees also echo that concern and listed that as their top three reason as an incentive to move to Denton lower property taxes and then a pay raise so based off of our survey results from the organization at this time staff isn't recommending any incentives with that we definitely appreciate the opportunity to weigh in on the discussion and I'd be happy to answer any questions councilmember Amater yes so I have a number of questions maybe I won't ask them all at once first of all I really enjoyed seeing the results reading them some of them you know if I had made a hypothesis some of them are things I would have guessed others like remedy homelessness I wouldn't have guessed and that's that's a goal a goal of the city councils too so I was wondering if any of the cities that you mentioned in the early first first line that that offer incentives I know that you don't list any incentives in preschool child care summer child care but was that looked into or or does it just do other cities not do that it we research what what cities offer regarding residency residency incentives and these are what what we were able to find we didn't get down we weren't able to find child care or discounted child care rates as an incentive I'm not very many cities again offer those type of incentives it's definitely based off of what's going on and those respective locations well I know I would love to you know to know maybe it's a feature point of of those the sit staff who don't live here who don't want to move how many of them have young young children I would I would just wonder if that was a factor because I know that it factors in obviously wasn't listed as one of the reasons but I know that that's a big part of the the affordability factor yeah that definitely tied into a family there's often obviously a myriad of responses in that family which is child care it could be a single-family income number of dependents is influencing factor so that's kind of rolled up into that family dynamic response I think just I'll add you know for now just a reflection that I mean one thing that this tells me from a personal note is that even that even our staff who don't live here their senses of you know what can be done to help make our great city better our are similar to at least my own and I know a number of people who I talked to and I do believe that we have a number of places in Denton that have the kinds of advantages that Sanger has as far as rural life on the on the outskirts and if not as much affordability as they have in Sanger but you know maybe that's something that even if we decide not to do an incentive that we can think of that when we're thinking about you know they updating the 2030 plan and thinking about preserving rural rural areas on the outskirts okay Councilman Briggs thank you for doing this and thank you council for allowing the survey to to be given so we said there was a 50% response so how many of how many surveys we we have 1,509 employees and we had over 700 responses okay to the survey that's pretty good mm-hmm yeah very good and so for me I I wouldn't mind exploring some more of like what Little Rock does or and if we had the the option there it's not that everybody has to use it and it's not mandated it's just there in case somebody wants to buy a home in the city and it especially with affordability being an issue and then affordability being one of the reasons why they don't live in the city it may it may inspire someone to move here that wouldn't necessarily if they're coming from a different if they're a new hire and they're coming from a different city looking around I'm not necessarily thinking about people that live without already here in their homes established moving back in this is just something for future so I I would not be opposed to exploring a little bit more of what we can do and if we had something how often it may be used Councilmember Davis I appreciate the information I think it's good to know about our employees and how they feel about how things are going in the city and the reasons they do what they do to me this is kind of a solution in search of a problem I see when you look at this list Detroit is just hemorrhaging people it's got tax foreclosed homes that it can essentially give away because of the glut of foreclosed homes they have there a number of these other cities New Jersey kind of statewide thing but some of these other cities are losing population they have reasons to bring people in we're already growing I don't know that we necessarily in creating an incentive we're not really competing with anybody besides ourselves and maybe if you look at the list Sanger and Aubrey and we're not going to be a Sanger we're not going to be an Aubrey we're not going to offer the same kind of experience at those cities offer you know we didn't see Richardson or a Keller or a McKinney on that top five list because the folks who want to live in that kind of city and work in that kind of city already do that they live here and they work here I think when you look at the councilmember armeter's point about the things that would motivate you to move to Denton those are the things that would motivate anyone to move to a city so I don't know that we necessarily have to single out employees as the group that we need to move into the city we just need to make Denton the best that it can be regardless and people will either choose to live here or they won't I just don't see the benefit and spending a lot of time thinking about making our people or incentivizing our people to live inside the city limits when we need to probably focus on just making the city better for everybody regardless whether they work for us or they work for the other larger employees that are located here yeah I'll just one closing comment is that I don't know exactly what the reason or the desire was for this I've heard anecdotally that sometimes people think that if if employees for the city don't work in the city somehow they care less about the city I haven't heard that from anybody here but I've you just that's sort of the only reason I would think that this would even be an issue because I'm all for people choosing where they want to live and where they want to work and I and in no way believe that just because someone doesn't live in the city that somehow they're less connected less committed in fact it could almost be the exact opposite because they have an opportunity to reach ours they have an opportunity to have some space and and things such as that so appreciate the information thank you very much thank you real quick real quick because yeah we I think we've decided that this is probably where this is oh yeah yeah no I just said there was another request that I didn't want to get too much time my first questions so in addition to knowing about and I can follow up with a staff request curiosity about small children of just some of the people who submit who responded to the survey and as possible to to do that who has small children I would also like to know in the I could just for a moment now these are requests that you're going to ask to be put on the list to come back in the council vote on that if it takes more than two hours well my understanding is I haven't heard anybody say that they want to move forward with this item or incentivizing employees to come in so I'm not sure why we would be asking staff to do further research oh yeah no yeah so this is just my personal request if it turns out it would take more than two hours then it'll come back to all of us so this is the so you're making so you're making a personal request on an item that has already been decided by council it's just it's about just take a second date so I'm asking to I would like to know some data on this and if it will take more than two hours it will come to all of council that's our accepted policy so anyway sorry about that so on on slide I believe it's number three with it where it has position in the city and live within city minute of limits I would like to know what a member armature I apologize this is gonna have to be submitted in writing anyway could you could you please wrap it up because we've resolved this issue if you want to submit a request please submitted in writing as per our policy mayor mayor I will but sorry most of this time has been taken up with you asking me questions this will be very brief it's a very simple question I would like to know how this breakdown intersects with live within city minute limit so you know in other words of you know managers and super in other words of that 57% of that 42% how they break down in the different categories there's a a general kind of stereotype that I honestly don't know if it's true or not and would be interested to know that well that they you know the people at the top making decisions don't live in city of Denton I honestly don't know if that's true for everyone I don't even know if it matters or is an important council member armature but I would like to know we're going to close this topic yes please submit your request in writing your question has taken longer than my interrupting you so we're going to move on to the next agenda item please submit that in writing thank you Tiffany thank you yes did public safety include fire and police yes ma'am awesome sure did agenda item 2b receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding the implementation of an exclusive pedestrian phase in the traffic signal operations of the downtown intersections at Oak and Elm Oak and Locust Hickory and Elm good afternoon mayor members of the council Brian Yon traffic engineer glad to be here today to talk to you about traffic signals and cars and pedestrians and how we propose to make a few of them work a little more safely together before I get into our proposal I'd like to talk a little bit about how signals and pedestrians and cars operate together so historically when the vehicle pulls up to a stop you got a red light when you get the green light to go the pedestrian movement in that same direction basically if you're east-west the east-west pedestrian gets the walk sign so what that proposes of a introduces a conflict between somebody who's making a left or a right turn off of a street onto a side street at the same time that a pedestrian stepping off the curb so if you're if you're stopped at the red light you get a green and you're making a right turn the same moment that you're beginning your movement into the right turn that pedestrian is potentially stepping off the curb a lot of times we're not looking at each other and we end up with a conflict between the pedestrian vehicle recently last several years we've been implementing what we call an initial pedestrian interval so we give the pedestrians the car pulls up he's got a red light the walk signal comes on for the pedestrian five or six seconds before so that pedestrian gets out into the crosswalk very visible better opportunity for the drivers to see that pedestrian as they begin their turn when the right their light goes green so that's the one of the improvements that we've made you can see that in several intersections in town however there are certain combinations of high pedestrian volumes and high turning movements where even this is not an adequate safety measure so what we're proposing is an exclusive pedestrian phase at those the four intersections that were listed so basically what happens is the walk signal somebody pushes a button and this it's as important it was as a potential change the button has to be pushed to activate the pedestrian phase all of the walk lights at the intersection come on at one time you can cross east west north south any direction you want to no vehicles are moving cars all have read there are no turns on red signs posted so we've eliminated literally all the conflicts between the pedestrian and the vehicle so the opportunities here are are much more improved for safety you don't have that conflict and it actually increases the efficiency as well not a new concept originally used in the 40s however after the world war two the United States became very auto centric everybody one car one person and it fell out of favor especially in larger urban areas but as we see this complete streets initiative become more and more popular we're seeing a resurgence in the utilization of an all-ped phase again trying to prioritize and prove and enhance the safety for pedestrians and motorists at signalized intersections what does it offer well again it increases the convenience for people walking they have a better feel like it's it's more inviting the safety is enhanced and again this complete streets we're trying to get people out of their cars and feel comfortable about walking around downtown or any other areas of town this goes a long way in promoting that pedestrian activity increases increases the visibility as I described the pedestrian is moving by itself thought everybody is crossing we're not at this time promoting however we are providing an allowance for a diagonal cross the intersections that we're talking about are not set up for ADA requirements for a diagonal cross we don't have the ramps in the right place that's step two of the Texas to step that we're looking at but we're providing enough time that if somebody wants to cross diagonally again there's no vehicle moving there's no turns may being made no rights or lefts on red so we've got that entire intersection area for pedestrian activity with nothing else going on again we can reduce the overall pedestrian crossing time because they don't have to wait for the vehicles turning sure you've seen pedestrians get out and especially for a left turn where the car can actually move a little faster than the pedestrian if they're traveling in the same direction the car will get to the far lanes to make his left turn before the pedestrian potentially the pedestrian has to wait for the car vice versa we can make the vehicular movement just as efficient and shorten that required time because now they don't have to wait for pedestrians crossing so as that light turns green there's no pedestrian in your way you're free to make a right turn or left turn or go straight again only vehicles are moving at one time and only pedestrians are moving at one time so the downsides it can increase delay so we are introducing a new phase we're stealing some time from the vehicular phases to give to the pedestrian phase but again we increase the efficiency so it's kind of an offset and it really depends every intersection is different we researched the implementation disease in other cities and a lot of places like to use big intersections a lot of places like to use small and it really just depends on the combination of turning movements for vehicular activities and the pedestrian volume so we have the magical mix the right combination this is going to work and we believe it will around the square it does eliminate the turns on red so if you're a right turn on red you have to wait so that you don't again conflict with the pedestrian movement and the one-way streets the left turn on red is also restricted so you don't have that conflict with the pedestrians making a left turn and so you may introduce some driver frustration just again it's a trade-off we're trying to improve the safety and we may infringe on what other people you know are used to for their normal driver behavior I have a staff assistant here who has actually driven one of these and only show you so this over the summer I had the fortune to go to Victoria Canada which was a lot of family had a great time as a family but they're one of the things that you'll notice is there's people walking almost everywhere they'll come from the side streets they'll come at the intersection and just start walking it's very busy narrow lanes I'm driving a vehicle with three kids my mother and father-in-law and my wife and that was one of the most nerve-racking things I've done just trying to navigate in that area now the one thing that we really enjoyed though was this intersection here this intersection it's only been an operation for about 30 days when we drove through it was the first one in Victoria what we noticed immediately upon driving through the intersection it was very orderly so that chaos we saw everywhere else where pedestrians are trying to get in front of a car car trying to figure out if pedestrians moving should I go before them should I get in front of them that chaos came to a halt at this one intersection it was very intuitive so the first time we get there pedestrians get a they get to go in all directions and I'm stopped everybody else has stopped I honestly felt way more calm and way less frustrated because I knew when I got my turn there was no pedestrian I'm trying to figure out are they going is that gonna be a potential conflict am I gonna have to wait and all these other cars are behind me which is also that kind of edging up motion you see a lot of people do when they get to a stoplight and then they're gonna make a turn they kind of edge forward a little bit they're trying to see a little better they're trying to get started a little faster one of the things that I felt is just from a personal experience was at this one intersection I didn't have that feeling at all that kind of almost aggressive feeling kind of pacified so it was a calming measure because I knew I was gonna get my turn and I got it in very short order it was honestly one of the quickest traffic lights that we stopped in when we were driving through the entire downtown area because you'd like Brian said the green times were fully for the cars the red times were only on demand when the pedestrians were there and they were there very often so it made a huge impact and just calming traffic tendencies it gave the pedestrians clear time for them to have a priority in that crossing and it just made things that much safer again bring in a little bit of order to what is inherently a kind of a chaotic scenario at certain points so again the four intersections that we're talking about our oak and locust oak and elm hickory looks and hickory down the four corners of the square so we we feel that we've got the right combination of pedestrian activity and a lot of turning movements as people circle the square looking for parking looking for a restaurant or a destination let's you so here's a little bit of a timeline some of it historical and some of its moving forward we have presented to the Main Street Association the Traffic Safety Commission the DEDC the Mobility Committee we're here before you today on Thursday night we're taking this on the to the committee on persons with disabilities and then we're hoping to implement assuming we are approved ready to move forward today this Friday so we're looking we're ready we've got everything in place to install the required signage and the timing and the controllers at those signals to activate Friday morning so a little bit about the program we're going to again hopefully with approval move forward Friday and we're going to operate this as a as a pilot program for five to six months we want to get enough time so that people have ample exposure to both the pedestrian portion and the vehicular portion so we're we're going to be constantly observing we're going to be in the field staff will be we'll be monitoring the signals and the timing if we need to tweak something we can we're going to be interfacing with the pedestrians the the Public Affairs Office has got a tremendous website and and info package ready to roll out again asking for trying to receive as much input as we can from business owners from people who are driving it from people are walking it just want to get a sense of is this a positive for the community is it a negative are they indifferent we're going to be assessing that data as just constantly we're going to bring it back in the spring for your consideration we'll give you the feedback and our assessment of the success of the program and then council will decide whether or not to leave this as a permanent program or or to terminate so first I want to say I love this plan I wasn't satisfied with the giving the pedestrians an edge plan it felt like you know you get a little head start in the race of you know playing chicken against the cars so I'm I'm so thrilled with this thrilled to see it in the agenda and the approval of the previous previous committees I I don't know how other drivers will feel but I too I feel also like Todd s just mentioned it you know concerns me not only as a pedestrian and as a mother with kids who they're getting older but they're still shorter than everybody else so visibility not as good but also as a driver as mr. SS was saying it gives me anxiety as a driver you know that when the light says I can go I feel like it doesn't really mean I can go and I like what I like about this from a child safety point of view also you know it shows kids that when the light when the signal says you can walk it actually means you can walk it actually means it's safe to walk so it makes sense it's something you can explain to a kid what I would I am glad that we're doing a test phase shorter test phase because I will be curious to know how people feel about the timing you know whether pedestrians feel like they you know they have enough timing or like they have to wait too long for cars or or vice versa so it'll be really interesting to see the results I think five or six months that sounds reasonable to me so thank you saw this in mobility and I think it's really worth worth trying you know the idea that everything stops when you walk is just intuitively very appealing I kind of hoped when it got bumped on the agenda last time that would it would have allowed you to get to the committee on persons with disability before but I gather Thursday that didn't happen on the original plan date so my direction would be to proceed subject to you know getting an okay from that group and as far as they're not being I did issues that just haven't occurred to us fine with those kind of issues a lot of times it just I'm not sufficiently sensitized enough to see them so and and if there's gonna be or assume there'll be communication back to us after that meeting I think it'd be great if at that time we also saw what the signage will look like because it's this is this all depends on everybody getting it so they will get it because they'll see the action happening okay so just quick we are on the agenda as an item for direction from COPD and then in addition to the no turn on red signs we've got these a-frame signs that kind of give the pedestrians a little bit of guidance on push the button go for what you know walk no cars will be moving so we're we're trying to do a little bit more than just the standard vehicular signs we've got the we're gonna leave these a-frame signs we've got one on each corner of all four intersections we've got 16 signs only going out there I think just turning the dial more the direction of pedestrian friendliness in that area you know I know it comes at a cost for movement through and vehicles but I think that's the right direction to turn the dial there yeah so we kind of went into depth more in mobility and ask a lot of questions but I had a few that I wanted to follow up on because I know that we went through and did changes downtown already for pedestrians and we took away the push button so now it automatically is phased in and people can just go and now we're going to reintroduce back to the push button is there is there not a way to build this end of the cycle where you don't have to push the button we can program it by time of day but what we're trying to what we were trying to do is is not have to predict whether or not there's a pedestrian waiting to cross because it does take 15 to 19 seconds of just what would then be just dead time okay because there's no there's no sensor to tell you how you know like the vehicles we can actually tell if there's a car waiting there so with this system we don't have any other sensors for pedestrians they actually want to push the button and that allows us to not run it when we don't need it and it allows us to not run it on off peak times deep nights when there's just not any pedestrian activity at all we don't want to take it away from the driver experience if we don't have to and have we I know we talked about extending the length of the pedestrian time so that they can make it all the way around is that correct well I think what we've got in place right now is you can make between the walk and the don't walk you can go either diagonally or two legs before you get this the hard don't walk sign you get the flashing don't walk you'll see you'll be able to make two crossings you know I don't we're not going to go all the way around but we'll get you from one corner to the diagonal corner if you if you can if you're able to you can certainly walk diagonally now again the ramps the accessible ramps are not set up that way right now and they would have to be reconstructed in the future if we wanted to implement that diagonal crossing or promote the diagonal crossing but I think our timing is substantial enough to make or to allow to cross one street and then another before the hard don't walk comes up well I would since this hasn't gone to disability yet I would like for that to be talked about with them to make sure that the time would be okay and you talked about the the ADA ramps for the diagonal which I think is really important which is going to help make this successful and so if it is implemented do we have funding for the reconstruction of those ramps and what timing would that be have we thought about that I I don't think we're there yet okay I think we could consider I mean we have bond money we've got so that that question is part of what we're working through right now we absolutely want to see how this is implemented first but we'll know quickly within the first month how this appears to be working if it's working then we would absolutely move into that next phase of where's the money to make all those modifications to do the diagonals as well until we get a little bit of time in this scenario I wouldn't want to get too far ahead of it okay we do have some kind of plan yes there are avenues to explore to make that happen yes it's not a huge investment but it would be a disruption from the construction standpoint okay I have two more questions on page 4 of 14 it shows the crosswalks larger and more prevalent do we plan to do anything to our crosswalks or just leave them the same so we'll in this pilot program we're trying not to make any physical changes and got we've got adequate crosswalks right now if we go to the diagonal then we would want to not only introduce the diagonal crossings but we'd have the opportunity then to come back and remark wider crosswalks for the the normal crossing locations as well but with this pilot program we're trying to be candid because it's a pilot we don't want to have to undo something if it doesn't if it's not successful we're trying to do as little physical change as possible so right now we're going to leave our crosswalks as is and if we determined that we want to go move forward with the permanent program and introduce those diagonals then we come back and remark those crossings last question because when you push the button now it makes the beep to say that it's okay for someone to cross in each way I think has a different sound or symbol so if in this pilot how is that going to work if you will all of them make the same sound at the same time right we'll have the same indication right now I think it says safe to cross or safe to it there's a there's a message and it's localized based on volume for where you're standing but with this with this pilot program all of the speakers are going to be saying the same thing at the same time okay yeah thank you okay I've got a couple of questions you said something I want to make sure I have some clarification on that you don't want this system to be operational all the time that you want to see it in peak times where this will work but that so my understanding is this this is all or nothing I mean if we're on this system whether it's 8 o'clock on Friday night or 3 o'clock in the morning or are you saying that somehow this is going to be timed to where it's it's one protocol at one time and one protocol at another no that's that's not my idea at all what I think what I was responding her question is can we program it so you don't have to push the button and I said yes we can but we really would rather prefer the pedestrian to push the button to make sure we know that they're there right what we don't want to do is run this head phase it's just like when you see a green light coming up and there's nobody in that on that street and you're like why is that why they have green so we don't want that driver frustration our pro our plan is to to run this all the time but it's always going to be pet activated so when if at 1130 or 130 in the morning somebody comes up and pushes the button they're gonna get that seg crossing but they're not gonna get it by default they have to push the button but it'll stop traffic everywhere not just if it's one person on one corner you got it stops it everywhere that's that's the protocol otherwise it would be too confusing so as far as you said that the goal is to get a pedestrian at two crossings in other words get him from one corner to the opposite diagonal corner within one cycle right what is the timing set for vehicles in other words is it set to it for a vehicle when it's vehicles time to travel that they can get through two turns and out the other you know it's sort of the same kind of paradigm just on a bigger scale you're wanting to get the pedestrians across the diagonal we'll be able to get a car going down making going straight turning left on one of the streets to get off the square proper is it just going to be one just going to get them through one light so currently they the intersections run free in other words they're not coordinated and they will not be coordinated with this program so you're gonna have that you're gonna have each of the four corners they're running independently so if when a car gets a green indication if he turns left and he's northbound on a locust he's still gonna be subject to the he's coming off a hickory he's still gonna be subject to the oak signal and it's a toss of a coin where they're gonna get which is the same way it is today okay and my next question is sort of there's a lot of construction going on around the square on elm locust a utility construction some other things that are really affecting I think just business traffic at the square I mean went and ate there yesterday in a restaurant that is always crowded and I think there were maybe five people in there and so I want to make sure that we're not over burdening our square with with changes that will continue to impact the businesses in a negative way so I don't know if this will or not I just would hate to continue to put things on when we're already doing a lot of work around that are keeping people in some respects from parking their vehicles and walking to the square I just say that I don't know if this is going to do that I just want us to be mindful of it that's all I totally agree and we will be again as I said we'll be in the field if we start to see vehicular cues building we'll adjust adjust the timing we're gonna be monitoring okay great for sure thank you councilmember Davis so I'm kind of in the same boat I think this is a good pilot it'll be very interesting to gather the data and see if this makes a difference or if it doesn't there are times especially times of the year you know when the weather is nice you could see it having big impact there are other times of the year other times a day or you just don't you could see a lot of driver frustration from the one guy on one corner pressing the button so he can walk one leg that he might have been able to make after all the cars clear and every every lane shuts down to be able to do that so I could see it kind of from both perspectives I don't think I would have been able to support even the pilot program if it was not button on demand if it wasn't completely driven by there's actually a pedestrian there instead of an empty cycle for pedestrians I'm also very interested in the data for another reason I think this is this is a good way to kind of reimagine our downtown and how we look at our square and focus away from cars I'm a lot less concerned about people being able to get all the way from Eagle to 380 on Locust than I am with people being able to stop and eat a burger or shop someplace and that kind of stuff so I like the focus away from cars on the square or at least balancing a little bit better and giving pedestrians a little bit more prominence might even be our gateway into two-way streets just as a final note my late father was a highway engineer I have empathy for Todd's children I sure was fascinating hearing about every intersection every bankman okay anything else all right thank you very much appreciate it very presentation we'll move on to agenda item 3c receive report hold discussion to give staff direction regarding proposed city initiated zoning changes bear with me while I pull up a presentation good afternoon mayor members of council Ron Mingida development services principal planner today we're gonna be talking about city initiative rezoning and why are we here as you all know in April of this year we adopted an update to the development code with that update included a new lineup of zoning districts with that zoning district we needed to transition that to our current zoning map and that was done through a transitional district transition chart following that we learned that there were some issues non-conforming uses that were generated based on that transition chart so the city initiated some city initiated zonings in May in June and in July we addressed some non-conformities along I-35 I-35E north as well as University loop 28 and May Hill as well it was when we had a public hearing with regards to a particular property that there was some comments received there was some opposition from property owners that were not in favor of the rezoning we pushed through we got those zoning changes approved however the council wanted to have a work session to talk about city initiated rezoning and that is really why we're here today is to seek your consideration or your direction on policies as it relates to the city initiated rezoning so we've got three considerations for council to consider hopefully we can come to direction at the end of this presentation one should the city continue with city initiated rezoning and only address non-conforming uses and structures two should the city continue with city initiated rezoning with addressing non-conforming structures and uses but also include the properties that are undeveloped and and and redevelopment potentially or should the city discontinue city initiated rezoning and let the property owner submit zoning change request applications and let development occur naturally so that is the the question that with questions that we're seeking direction on excuse me on but before we get to that portion of the discussion I wanted to let you all know that staff's recommendation is that the city be proactive and consider all of the following criteria and items that you see here listed regarding city initiated rezoning the first one of course we want to address the non-conforming uses and structures these are through the transition chart properties that are commercial but because the transition chart they were zoned residential we want to correct that because obviously that's considered a non-conforming use another example is lot size and lot I'm sorry building square footage minimum we want to make sure that we address those and those are considered non-conforming structures established conditions this is another item that we should consider in that these are neighborhoods I'm gonna use an example Lakeview Ranch they've reached out to the staff and they would like to rezone their property from our to to our one they're an established neighborhood they want to keep it our one and they feel that they feel that that is their zoning district surrounding zoning districts these are properties that are zoned again through the transition chart or through previous zoning changes where the surrounding zoning district encompass it all encompasses it all around or just partly around it changing the zoning to the surrounding zoning district will not change the conformity but it will at least in it will increase its conformity and will be consistent with the zoning district surrounding it protect existing neighborhoods an example of this is the area next to the mall the mall as you all know is zone mr mix use regional there are neighborhoods there that are residential do we want to see a mix use regional adjacent to those residential zoning districts we propose that they be zoned transition from mr to maybe an SC which is a lower height maximum to a residential zoning district that's an example of protecting an existing residential neighborhood location corridors we've got a lot of corridors in the city Dallas Drive is an example Fort Worth Drive is an example those are currently zone mixed-use neighborhood which they should be zone suburban quarter again suburban quarter meeting more commercial related zone kind of related uses commercial nodes are on Teasley for example Teasley and Hickory we know that those are major intersections that's a major major intersection those should be zoned for suburban quarter uses that allow for commercial uses special study areas the downtown currently the downtown the D tip area extends all the way to exposition we know that there's opportunities that we can look at to extend further east there is a buffer natural buffer there with the creek that can extend more towards an MD and makes use downtown currently it is zone MN which is mixed use neighborhood the land use element and the future land use map this is one of the factors that we look at when considering the zoning changes we have business innovation as a as a future land use designation further north of town west and north of town we've got mixed use regional which is around the transit center in the Med Park area those areas are potentially areas that we should zone to be consistent with the future language map neighborhood community and regional draw there's the difference in zoning district in each of the zoning district in the development code there is a purpose each of the zoning district serves a purpose the HC the MR each the highway corridor MR mix use regional should be along highway corridors because they're a regional draw for uses the car dealerships the hospitals those are regional draws community draws these are your University Drive people that want to visit Kroger or some other the businesses along University that's going to draw from the community neighborhood is mixed use neighborhood that is around the universities around the downtown people that walk and bike to these businesses come from that neighborhood that that's a neighborhood drop and last is the public comments throughout the public hearing process the public meeting we've had outreach efforts we've heard from over a thousand participants we've collected all of that information that data we've compiled it in this spreadsheet and we're using that as part of our analysis to determine which zoning areas or areas we should zone obviously the property owners that were participating that are valid are very involved in that in those comments before I get to the next slide I prepared a comment list of comments and I'm just gonna read to articulate and to be a little bit more concise I'm just gonna read it so it's as short as I can make it as a professional planner and in collaboration with other staff members the city should be proactive before thinking work with property owners to implement the city's comprehensive plan we should refer to the city's vision statement the preferred growth concept our future land use map as decision as tools and guidance in decision-making we should think of zoning is not just a way to represent what's on the ground but also to what the property could and should be zoning should be used to protect an area from incompatible uses but it also should be used to set expectations enhance an area and develop the city and promote economic development I was asked once recently what makes Den unique and I think some of that discussion we had earlier in this work session to me it's the great down there are great downtown the great unit two universities we have and now a great college that we have downtown but most importantly the citizens of Den but then should also be known for its great schools it's shopping experience recreational and employment opportunities a diverse housing stock and an outstanding public safety and public service that we do here and then Ron can ask you a question sir the comment that you started out with yes sir is that who's that from that's from me and staff okay all right so this is that that is the official statement of staff is that is that what I'm hearing that's that's my professional yes staff statement as it has a planner yes okay there's two different there's two different things in there so I know that it's your it's your personal sentiment right but is it representative are you saying that you're representing officially that that statement is the statement overall within the planning department that you're representing this statement based upon that that's what you're authorized to do yes okay yesterday I was at a meeting with a few staff members talking about sustainability and the facilitator asked what do you love about den what keeps you up at night about your job what I said was I like what I loved about den was that we have a great opportunity and potential for growth what scares me is the questions are we ready for this growth are we gonna be ready for this growth are we gonna be sustainable not only economically environmentally but also socially socially so one last comment and I'm gonna just leave it here is working with our citizens our property owners the city should be proactive and zone for what we need so with that I'm gonna turn it back to the council and ask these same questions staff would like to recommend to continue the great work that we did with those previous city initial rezoning's and choose number two and that is to continue to address our nonconformity but also to look at how we can zone properties both to redevelop and as well as to develop that concludes my presentation I'll be happy councilmember Davis and councilmember Meltzer could I hear a little bit from either from you Ron or maybe from city manager anybody else kind of the genesis of this work session item and are we are we getting some criticism that I'm unaware of for our city reinitiated zoning's is there somebody out there who feels like we've gone outside our lane and we're doing for instance the difference between correcting nonconforming uses or adapting to the nonconforming uses as opposed to the proactive long-range plan kind of stuff how did how did this particular item end up here there was a agenda item a couple of months ago where we had a number of residents to voice concerns about the city initiated rezoning's there were the first several rounds that we went through were real simple cleanups you know and obviously each time this the staff initiates these resilience attract they do reach out meet with the public that sort of thing but there was some concern about are we creating issues there unnecessarily should these issues wait these rezoning's wait until a property is ready to develop from a planning perspective and from a overall comprehensive plan perspective it's always easier to have the policies vetted by council and you don't address at that time so you have a comprehensive plan that's already been vetted especially when you've had the kind of massive rezoning changes that have happened in the in the city so I think staff got a little gun-shy at that point we had some the last controversial one just basically wanted to be sure that council was still okay with them bringing forth city initiated zoning changes that reconciled with the new zoning code versus waiting for those to come in and if that was really the genesis of this this agenda items they wanted to be sure you were comfortable with that approach continuing I like being proactive I like option number two I like the recommendation that staff has made I think it's really difficult to plan for the entire city based on you know the kind of the lowest common denominator a bad experience with a particular parcel or a particular zoning case I don't think should derail our willingness to be proactive and to think into the future I would say maybe that the lesson learned from that particular zoning case is maybe staff shouldn't be afraid to in my opinion my own opinion bring those city initiated cases forward but at the same time staff should not be afraid to say this is not the time for this case or you know what this particular or somebody's going to develop here they're going to need to bring their own zoning case and and make their own case in front of the council and P&Z as opposed to neighborhoods for instance a neighborhood wanting to rezone that's an excellent example of time that the city should get behind the neighborhood and help them preserve what they have and not make them pay you know a bunch of fees and engineering and that kind of stuff when we have a particular developer who's looking for a particular rezoning and trying to kind of get it on the cheap maybe that's a time we don't bring that forward and I think it's more case by case than you just shutting off the tap completely yeah I was also curious about where this is coming from to me it's just sort of so foundational we might as well also talk about is it a good thing to have police or fire or parks or libraries it's just that is what planning is and it inevitably you know generates conflicts and things that need to be resolved and hopefully we do that in as sensitive a way as possible and you know hear everyone out but to me too is sort of obvious thank you yeah one to address those I think the if I recall correctly that conversation it was it it's a scenario where you have a piece of property that was a lower level and then through a change it ticked up to where you could it introduces more opportunities for the property or opportunities to sell a different kind of product and then we come in and say hey we're gonna put you back where you were you're like no no I like this new one you know so that's kind of the what I recall was a kind of conflict do it ticked up a bit and that was appealing to the property owner but then we came back behind and said hey that was kind of a mass sweep now we're gonna bring it back in line and then that was kind of the resistance like no I don't want to go back to that from memory but that's that's a scenario where there's a where there's a conflict with what's right and what the property owner wants to do and so staff looking at it trying to get right back in line and the property owner saying I don't know if I'm I want to go back there so but my question I'd love for you Ron to speak to more why non-conforming uses are bad or why that's kind of what's the negative of the negative effect of having non-conforming uses are creating non-conforming uses sure in obviously recent months we've heard from a number of property owners and this is just to bring up the the response we've heard from property owners or business owners along Dallas Drive we've heard property owners from Teasley Drive they have businesses there now an office a retail office and then a business center along Dallas Drive well the transition transitioned them into an R7 because of the NRMU zoning district and I know there's a lot of acronyms there but basically it put them in a position where their uses are no longer conforming what we're trying to do is bring them to conforming so that they're able to continue their business but also to expand on their business or what they're doing on that property so really is to bring them back to status quo but also put them in a zoning district that's that's where they can expand and continue what they had always planned on doing thank you so I got a couple questions needless to say Councilmember Ryan Briggs and I spent half of our last year's lives it seemed like talking about all this so so I want to go I'm gonna go back in reverse of what you just mentioned I thought we put in the code that this code could not create that if a non-conforming structure was created because of the change in the code that it really didn't create a non-conforming structure am I did I did I miss something on that it might have just been residential right that only applies to single-family duplexes and counts that that if so if we put them in something that I sure thought we addressed that maybe it was with SUPs or something like that I thought so what you're saying is we really didn't address it with the business community correct all right which okay so I'm gonna say that I'm not in favor of option 2 and I don't think that's any secret to anybody that has worked with me in this room and it's been with us during the meetings and that's nothing against staff nothing against it's just because what what I'm realizing is is that first of all if we've created a non-conforming use we need to figure out a way to correct it because we've basically now put someone in a much worse position than they're in before we did our rezoning because we have specific rules regulations regarding non-conforming uses if they're destroyed over 50% of your value you can't rebuild them and we put in an exception for that for a single family but I guess we didn't do that for businesses which we could do that wholesale on a code level and really resolve a lot of these issues without having to go back and do all these initiated zonings so I just want everybody who's for option 2 if you're here when it happens I want you to be willing to admit it because I don't believe that we need to be predicting based upon the 2030 code and trying to go in and rezone properties to conform with that when nobody's come in and asked for it because I will tell you there are specific developers in this community that if those issues come before the council like they've come in the past sometimes they're getting voted against not because of the project but because of the people involved number two if a project comes before this council that the city has asked for initiated zoning but the council doesn't agree now we've was wasted a tremendous amount of time when maybe the owner wasn't necessarily needing to do that at that time I just think it's not just to me it's not about being proper people say well the mayor isn't wanting to be proactive why I reject that I think what the mayor's saying is that I trust the process and I trust the process that when individual property owners want to come in and get a rezoning we've got a very clear and defined process to do that and we can apply the same factors and variables that we would apply at a proactive process to a owner initiated process which to me would be would seem more palatable instead of us going out and saying so that's my thought on it I'm probably more for for for number one initially because we've created a problem with people at our rezoning we need to make sure that we correct that as far as discontinuing city initiated zoning changes I don't know if I would go that far as to say that but I just really trust that when property owners want to rezone their property and they come in and staff applies the values and it comes before the P&Z and it comes before council everybody's got a buy-in and honestly it's going to sound odd coming anyway I think this favors this proactive favors property developers and favors their ability to get through the process easier less expensive not without the same public process but I just think that not to say I want to make it harder on them but I want to make sure that that process stays in place and with this I don't feel comfortable yet I could get comfortable but I don't feel comfortable yet that that policy that overarching public policy of you know we want everybody to stand on their own because we can still analyze properties and we do do we not at each zoning request compare it to the 2030 plan we do so we do that already this isn't something new that we're doing because what I'm understanding you to say is okay we're gonna look at the 2030 plan and if it says this is the right this is what it says this should be then we're gonna go in and look at do we need to go ahead and proactively rezone some of this to facilitate this kind of development in this area my only concern with that is if you go back and look at our 20 2000 2000 plan or 2010 or 20 whatever the city very rarely over a 20 or 25 30 year period is going to develop so consistently with a vision of a plan that was 20 years ago it you may not want it to develop like that by the time you get to that so I just think that sometimes we're trying to take a plan that's more visionary and force it in a into a marketplace that that may not be exactly where it is and mayor and just to just to clarify my response it's one of the factors we look at it's not just the only one so there's there's a lot of different things sure okay right and that's really my that's probably some of my hesitation I'm going to try to use as light of word as possible because it doesn't rise to concern or issue or but I understand that planning is in the business of planning but also private property owners are in the business of saying hey what's the best thing I want to do with my property and I just trust the process as it is maybe archaic I could be totally wrong and if I am I'll be the first to admit it yep go ahead and then okay and yes you're right I mean yes we've heard from property owners we've heard from dogs but we're also hearing from residents as well as business owners so just want to you know let you know that it's not just one group it's it's a variety of what are the residents saying I mean we we took pretty great strides to protect residential neighborhoods in this rezoning what a resident was a residential neighborhood representative saying that they don't like about my current process like you well not necessary process but the zoning they have they would like a better or you know match the consistent the future land use Lakeview Ranch they want to go from R2 to R1 in fact they want to go even bigger but their lots don't allow them to go to an RR because the minimum size is five acres so their default or their their choosing is R1 so that's what residents are saying we've got small business owners that are now you know are seven and they would like to be an MN or something but we created that non-conforming use did we not on the on the MN some of them yes yeah but the R2 they simply transition from NR2 to R2 what they would like to do is go further back into being on one so that's that's one example of a resident and that's and to me that's not necessarily a city initiated proactive zoning request that's a neighborhood coming to the city and saying hey we would like for you to consider this instead of you if the city went out there and said to that neighborhood without them even requesting it we think you need to be zoned this so I don't have any problem if somebody's coming and saying hey will you work with us in this regard and so I don't know if that fits into any one particular it's probably a hybrid of number two it's probably a hybrid which I can I can get on board for that I think it's more the in advance of redevelopment and development because I can tell you at this day is there's a whole different wide range of philosophies and thoughts about development and redevelopment and I hate to just get people in the lurch in that regard yep Councilmember Armitage so first of all thank you for this and I really loved your speech actually got a little choked up which I never thought I would would happen hearing just someone say you know why they like being a city planner so so did Scott so do and you know and we I mean we haven't always by we I mean you know I sometimes you know disagreed with certain proposed city initiated zoning changes but you know to go back to a you know touch on councilmember Melzer said and some of what councilmember Davis said it's you know it's the question we're being asked here is not so much about you know are there certain city initiated zoning changes that we disagreed with sure and on my part there were but you know do we think we should take a city planning approach or a piecemeal approach and you know any anyone who has been to city that is known for its lack of city planning can see in a number of ways you know I don't mean to trash those cities because every city has something really special about it but it's it's really unfortunate to see that and you know you can't go back and replan can't so anyway I strongly support number two I would add you know not only include properties in advance of redevelopment development but also include neighborhoods but I know that we kind of are planning on doing that already with the I forget what it's called now you know but the the notification and you know hearing plan of keeping neighborhoods and neighborhoods informed so you know I feel that you know some of the criticism that came with city initiated zoning was at least from from from from neighborhoods was really not quite understanding what was going on and you know they get this letter in the mail they don't quite know what it means I mean this is all stuff that we can work on so I was wondering if you could speak to how and you can answer all of these at once number one is actually I'll divide them into two when you say that the future land use map is that the same as saying the the 2030 plan right future land use map that comes from 2030 plan yes it's a it's it's included in the dam plan 2030 yeah it's it's part of the land use element yes yeah okay awesome and that's what I that's what I was assuming that that's what I was telling me I I love that idea I think it's really important and actually some of the maybe even all of the cases where I've disagreed with the city city initiated zoning is where I thought in my opinion that it didn't conform with the you know with that that map in the 2030 plan and I was wondering if you could speak to you know does how how's housing diversity and historic preservation fit in to that overall picture I understand that just because those two weren't listed it doesn't mean that they're not they're not part of the big picture you know for me all these these three things are totally compatible the 2030 plan more housing diversity especially in the city center and historic preservation but wondering if you could speak to that certainly I didn't mention that it in the the note that I heard the comment I prepared diverse housing stock and that is from multifamily all the way to large you know lot subdivisions and everything in between so the diversity the variety of housing options should be something that the city should look at and that is spread throughout the development code in regards to now we have single-family dwellings we've got town homes we've got duplexes we've got triplex fourplex multifamily and also now tiny homes and all their housing options so certainly we want to encourage that and that's why we put in the development code and that is something that we as a city should have is a diverse housing stock for all levels of ownership I agree thank you and the historic preservation is our be in line with preserving our heritage in our national housing stock awesome thank you I think a hybrid of number two is probably in line I worry about too much overstepping or not enough public input on certain areas if it's if it's right now still an RR and we're thinking oh well that's a transition those are the types that I think we're that we really need the public input and should not be city initiated what what I'm looking at is if we are rezoning for a non-conforming that we're not ending up doing spot zoning because of that and that's where you have to look at the right the bigger picture of it but an example of something that was discussed in in the committee was those who know on Hickory Creek Road right behind the sprouts is a goat farm and it was discussed whether to go ahead and rezone that for housing and that's the type that I'd have a hard time going with but if you have some spot along Teasley itself that needed to be readjusted those I'm fine with right in just to your point councilman Ryan when we're looking at spots but we should also be looking at overall area you know so if we can address that certain property and look at a higher level of that area and zone it appropriately that's certainly something that we look at we'll look at as well I just wanted to just get clarification on your comment regarding public input we will be contacting property owners we will be meeting with neighborhoods it's almost like a zoning case and we will present all of the findings we collect to the council so that you all can make that decision on ultimately if that property or properties would be rezoned well and as I recall the one that did get turned down you had property owners who were opposed to the change and that was the reason for us denying that one and sorry to cut you out there the explanation there was we didn't hear from them till later in the process had already begun so we will do again our best to work with property owners as much as we can get that before we bring forth something forward so yeah I'm I'm part on number two as well but I think we need it needs to be done very carefully I I don't see anything wrong with vision and planning but I also like the mayor said I'm concerned that some of these could be more in favor of the developer and up zoning but having that process in place still for the residents and the people in the area and council to go through all of that comforts me a little bit more I I recall some of our conversations and remember looking at the map and we talked about industrial areas and there's some you know right in the middle of the city and it's an opportunity to say hey this could be you know better somewhere else and and if we don't start planning envisioning now then we may not ever get there so I'm okay with number two but I also also think we need to be very careful on on how we how we do it understood I think it always comes down to cases a big chunk of our work here is going through these individual cases that arise they but I would be interested in knowing if we're having this sort of very general philosophical discussion because we've we've created a bunch of cases I also had the impression apparently wrongly that we tried not to create non-conforming uses but I remember that we did have one case where there was a business that had been operating for years I'm sorry I don't remember the name but maybe you'll remember but that would you know would no longer be able to continue without some action on her part so you know I don't I don't think that was the intention I think the intention of city initiated zoning in general was to kind of envision paths going forward but not to you know not to create problems for people on the ground that you know already there so if that if that's true that we overlooked that problem then maybe I'd have a more focused conversation the future about that so I'm still even after the conversation still good with number two but I think it's important that we've had this conversation because I don't think we want to put a bunch of nuance nuance out there and ask staff to interpret the nuance but at the same time each of these cases comes before counsel and if if we are concerned about going under number two and overstepping then that's exactly what we're exactly over here for that we can we can dial that back and to the concern about helping developers the purpose would be in some of these instances to make things easier for developers it's incentivizing them to build certain things in certain places and for me that's the kind of core of zoning that you know if you're somebody looking to cite some multifamily then you're going to look where you don't have to go through a zoning case first and then maybe consider some other options so I don't see it as helping the developers in a way that's not appropriate I see it as incentivizing them to build where we intend for them to build the again the neighborhoods were a good example of a time that the city ought to be stepping forward on behalf of our residents and not making them pay through the pain engineer resurvey all that kind of stuff I'm aware of another case well you said Lakeview did you mean ranch ranch estates or is that it's that different that was when we did initially but right the other one is like view so ranch estates was a good example of a time that we had they thought they were r1 the whole time they thought but then when we rezoned when we did the table they went to r2 from in r2 and they really just should have been r1 the whole time and it was right for us to step in and start that zoning process for them so I for me this is just kind of the crux of what zoning is about as you decide from a 50,000 foot view where things ought to be and you plan for that eventuality and then you know when there's friction inevitably there's going to be friction in one way or another then that's exactly what we're here to sort out so I'm still good with number two I just trust that staff will know which cases really ought to be coming forward and which ones shouldn't and also know where to pump the brakes and and not to continue if their city initiated there there will be many opportunities along the way to say you know what the city is no longer pursuing this just like an applicant may decide we're no longer pursuing this my only caveat to that is I don't think any city initiated zoning should come before this council where it's a down zoning of somebody's property if they don't want it I mean there's no reason for you that to even come before this body and I think it did at one point which that's okay we recognize it that's just not that's not the way to do it and and I understand what you're saying about development and that we want to incentivize and I'm not saying I don't want to incentivize them but I also don't want to provide this perception that somehow that there's a there's a favor there and also that if somehow the city doesn't initiate a zoning in an area that that will disincentivize somebody from coming forward to ask for rezoning others well you're not doing this so does that mean you're not going to support it I just think we got to be really careful when we start talking about you know staff sort of being the gatekeeper for what comes before us or what is the percent of course every case is going to come before this council of course it is and we're going to get to decide that but that's not I don't think what we're talking about we all know that I think what we're talking about is how much leeway do we provide at the staff level to really set perceptions out in the marketplace and that can affect the marketplace and I think we have to be very careful of that as a municipality because I trust the marketplace I trust it'll it'll it'll do what it needs to do and if it's doing something that this council doesn't agree with that's fine but I just trust that that whole paradigm so but no matter what happens with number two I don't think that anybody should because and the point being there was a big push and a big concern or question on why certain property didn't get down zoned before this process because of a project that's going in there and that's my fear is that if we want to give somebody more than what they've got and suggest that and go after okay but if we as a city try to take away on our own volition or our own initiation I'm gonna stand with the property the property rights on that one every time every time okay so it sounds like number two sir you certainly have had feedback on how to wield that authority or not I did no no I got it yeah we got it yeah yeah and and y'all did it and y'all did that in the city initiated zoning you you heard the committee you were concerned as well so in no way I don't want you to construe my comments or any comments here as to saying we don't trust you we don't believe in you I think it's just you know making sure that we're all on the same page and we're being mindful of the power yes that rests within that process yeah that's true you bet okay thank you thank you very much you bet let's go ahead and take a quick break we've been at it for about an hour and a half we'll come back and we'll knock these other two out about welcome back everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council it is 2 37 p.m. we're moving through our work session reports we are on work session report item 3d receive report hold discussion provide staff direction regarding incentivizing gray water systems using impact fees for the relationship between gray water systems impact fees and infrastructure planning and banks I'm general manager of utilities going to move right into this presentation there's a little bit of background on April 19 an informal staff report was provided regarding the relationship between green building practices and impact fees and then on September 10th the request was made by Councilman Meltzer for additional information regarding reduction of impact fees based on gray water usage or gray water systems and then the full council requested staff to present at a future work session item this was postponed from the last council meeting due to time constraints and so we're here today to bring it to to the council so a little bit of background about impact fees impact fees are designed to recover costs for providing capacity to serve new users and as such you you've got a very complex relationship between estimating population growth land use development weather and overall water demands one of the things that we've talked about with with you all over the course of the last several years for example is our decreasing gallon per capita per day water usage which is great for the city because it reduces our overall capital planning demands and allows us to push off that capital of those capital programs into the future so impact fees are really calculated by combining water demands and those population estimates with our capital planning information and we use that all to determine the capacity needs of the system so one of the critical aspects of this is that we have to design and plan for and implement based on maximum demand so the maximum demand plus an additional capacity as a safety factor is is really the design standard for both water and wastewater systems so that when we do reach that peak demand on that August day in dry conditions we're able to convey the water plus a safety factor so the impact fees are charged to the developer or the builder at the time of the meter installation and these are likely included in the cost of the lot or the cost of the building and ultimately passed along to the end buyer we do grant a reduced impact fee assessment for a single family residence that's less than 1300 square feet it's located on a lot less than 6,000 square feet in recognition of the reduced demands that are likely for systems of this residences of this size and that reduced assessment is equal to one-half of the single-family rate so gray water systems redirect water from certain home uses within the homes and divert those into drip systems for irrigation it's very important to to recognize that state regulations require that these are placed into a drip system and not through a standard sprinkler system that would broadcast the the water there are both pressurized and unpressurized drip systems the unpressurized are the more common of the two and have a tendency to be less expensive so by using this type of a system for the purposes of irrigation it is possible to reduce water usage for the residents but we have to keep in mind that that that water usage usage reduction is only through a drip irrigation system so unless you have a full lawn drip irrigation system which is typically a buried system those are fairly uncommon and and so what we're talking about here is mainly if not exclusively going to be landscaping and not what you would consider to be irrigation for your typical lawn could you just I might have missed it what do you mean what's the definition of gray water gray water is basically water that's used inside the home for certain purposes that is allowed by state law to be diverted to use for irrigation so predominantly it's going to be bath water sink water lavatory water clothes washing but not toiletry usage and things of that nature so basically the the gray water systems can reduce that usage but again it's going to be predominantly if not exclusively based on landscaping and not lawns and our irrigation usage tends to be our largest type of water consumption that's during the summer months so since our wastewater usage is for our customers is calculated based on metered water use I just want to point out that the City of Denton applies the customers average use during the winter months of December through February to minimize that influence of irrigation on your wastewater bill so the wastewater is not metered the water is metered and so we apply that winter average to make sure that someone isn't overcharged on their wastewater so staff did quite a bit of research on impact fees as incentives for these types of systems we were unable to find any programs on a national search that incentivized gray water through the use of a reduction of an impact fee we did find programs that offered rebates to customers for installing laundry to landscape which is basically just a type of gray water that is exclusively related to laundry use and programs that offered permit fee assistance for gray water systems and certain programs that offered rebates for underground pressurized gray water systems to to landscapes so in discussion with the local builder we did reach out to a local builder that installs these systems asking if there was any information to demonstrate a reduction in water use at this time that information was not available the local builder directed us to an installer who installs locally and also works nationwide on gray water systems and staff was able to talk with this individual and the communication that was received was that in create increased education for citizens and inspectors was the best first step in this individual's opinion and that in his experience permit fee relief or rebates were the only incentives that he had encountered so we put together a small table based on some of the programs that we were able to find I will point out that a lot of these have a tendency to to be located in areas where there is very significant concern with water supply so Santa Clara California Water District they have a gray water to laundry to landscape and they offer a 200 to 400 dollar rebate this is not in any way related to impact fees it's just a rebate from the rate base city of Tucson also has a similar program they'll pay for half of the cost of the system up to a thousand dollars Austin has information on the website on their website on these programs including some educational info but they do not offer an incentive the state of California as a whole as a washing machine systems and they encourage those by simply not requiring any permits San Angelo does have the gray water systems identified as a conservation strategy in their plan but they do not offer any incentives for those types of systems Santa Fe New Mexico does offer some rebate programs up to 175 for a laundry to landscape program and then the city of Denton does offer educational classes for developers and citizens but that is the there is no monetary incentive for the program so our research findings these systems can reduce demand but demand reduction is very difficult to estimate because it's influenced by water usage of the homeowner and the overall irrigation demands as people move into the home if someone moves out we can't assume that their usage patterns or usage of the system is going to be the same they are only allowed through pressurized or gravity operated drip irrigation systems so these applications as stated in most cases are going to be for landscaping only and not for lawn irrigation and the key issue here is that impact fees are really based on the capacity to meet those peak demands and we cannot assume that we can consistently reduce peak demands by the use of a gray water system and so therefore we cannot model a capacity reduction to get to the idea of mathematically being able to come to calculate what we could reduce an impact fee on based on these systems so reducing impact fees would essentially lower impact fee funds for gray water systems with lower impact fee funds for needed capacity that would ultimately result in existing customers paying for a portion of the capacity needed to serve new customers so the monetary benefit that is derived from these systems is really related to the direct reduction of water cost for irrigation but those costs are going to vary based on landscape water needs and and weather as well as as in-home usage of the water system since the wastewater bills are based on the winter average wastewater bills would be unaffected by the use of a of a gray water system and the one of the interesting things that we ran across is depending on the type of the gray water system the characteristics of the wastewater discharge could be affected in other words by diverting some type of water usage away from the traditional wastewater system and into the gray water system you're essentially creating a more concentrated waste that leaves that residence now we don't anticipate that that would be a big deal on unless there were a large number of these systems but it is something to keep in mind because our overall treatment capacity and even our conveyance systems are based on what's considered to be normal strength wastewater so that's based on the amount of solids biological and chemical demands of the of the waste so if a large number of these were actually used it is possible that the conveyance and treatment processes would need to be redesigned but as I stated it's unlikely that that would be the case unless there were a large number of these systems so our recommendation is to promote gray water systems by increasing education regarding the potential benefit and use of these systems and just because they're they're a bit of a rarity in this in the city they are allowed there is state code that allows for for their use we just we feel we need to ensure that plan reviewers building officials and folks in the various departments that would be involved in permitting and facilitating the installation of these systems are up to speed and and understand how these systems are put in place so that they can be installed inspected and approved in an efficient manner that's not to say that that isn't happening now it's just that this is a fairly rare system in the city right now and it would always in my opinion be a good idea to kind of make sure those processes are in place so that we can get one of these through rapidly that is the end of my presentation and I'll be glad to answer any questions anyone may have Councilman Routzer first thank you so much for your staff for putting the time into diligently absolutely and a few questions it's very helpful for me to understand that it's a network and it's a network capacity is driven by peak right I get that what drives peak peak is basically driven by the average amount of demand for the citizens during the time of what we would either model as a peak day or peak month so it's it's averaged across the entire system and that allows us to plan on a per capita basis and then do the math to see what that peak demand actually would be I guess I meant sort of more concretely like is there a certain part of the time of days certain part of our ordinary rituals that we would associate with peak it usually your it's more about the the weather patterns that exist and it's usually about the the timing of irrigation so typically our peak demands are going to our peak demand day for example is going to occur in a July to August time frame and it's going to have a tendency to from a peak standpoint to occur sometime around I'd say approximately six o'clock onwards as people start ramping up their area the irrigation so let's try does drive peak absolutely and so now keep in mind that that we have peak days throughout the year and so they aren't necessarily going to be driven by exclusively irrigation but what we have to plan for is that peak irrigation day because that has a tendency to be our largest demand factor so that's I actually didn't expect that answer because you're saying that that this doesn't look like it would necessarily affect peak but you're saying it's mostly about irrigation is so I kind of thought oh I let me go a different direction is it is it a policy goal to reduce usage or just generally or just peak usage I'm saying like only in these places that are really experiencing like drought or you know just for Denton it's it's a little bit of both I would say usage gets to the idea of of the water rights that we have and generally how we plan for future demand peak day is really about our treatment capacity how we balance the plants how we store water in the system and how we size the system so we can meet that demand so it's it's both it it just deals with different parts of the system okay and just last point that you kind of inspired me to ponder here are we sort of hiding a natural incentive by the way we calculate bills could would conceptually would it could it make sense to not not go to not try to increase anybody's bill but just normalize them around total usage including irrigation time so that then if somebody did do a you know a gray water system like that or laundry to landscape that they would experience a benefit right I think we actually do that because we have an inverted block design and so as the usage of the of the water during the the summer months becomes greater the amount you pay for denting per gallon increases and so if you had a system like this that would be in place our first block for example is zero to fifteen thousand gallons so that's four dollars and fifteen cents for one thousand gallons if you had a system that prevented you from or allowed you to manage so that you didn't get into that next block and still met your irrigation demands then it would lower your bill okay well that'd be an important point to you know try to communicate simply you know in the education that you're recommending absolutely thank you I'm just my last comment on slide two the correct title is not councilman it's council tron 5,000 okay I'll make that change I'll repost so I have just a few questions here and there should be pretty short answers as you mentioned in your presentation earlier that are we see our water usage declining correct and so my question is it has it continued to decline every year or has it leveled off a little bit even increase it has continued to decline but it's a situation where we're we've had some relatively mild years and some relatively well spaced rainfall events in the summer months and I this is a trend that we're seeing nationally and certainly in this state and so I think this is a very real trend I just don't and I think it's related to plumbing fixtures and high-efficiency washing machines of various types but it and honestly smaller lot sizes for individual homes is driving it as well so but at the end of the day I still don't know that we can separate out the weather trend for what we're seeing here so the decline continues but it'll be interesting to see what happens if we get a very dry year if it ticks back up again I think it's a very real trend and it's a great trend because it shows that we're being efficient with our water use and this allows us to to really manage our capital program a lot more effectively because we don't have to worry about those larger demands coming in and so how many of the systems do we have in our city gray water systems I don't know the exact number there are a couple of developments that are out there I can get that information for you it's it's not many but we have we have more rainwater harvesting I believe then we have wastewater system at least the last time we we checked and do you know about the golf courses like Robson do they do they use gray water system for their landscaping I'm not familiar with that I know that we've got a couple of contracts with the with the water systems and this is getting a bit off-topic but we have a reuse system within our wastewater plant and what we're doing is we're treating effluent and instead of discharging that effluent lightly chlorinating it and putting it out for irrigation uses we have a couple of golf courses on that we have some large water features that are on that and we use it for some of the our own city operations and so our our intention there is really using that as a water conservation strategy we're we're about a half million gallons per day on average of usage of that water okay well that may explain because whenever I talked about gray water system some residents thought that they weren't allowed and they're not real familiar with them but right thought that they just weren't allowed in the city right right no they they are allowed there's state code that we have to review and then there's some local plumbing that we've got to take a look at but they are allowed and so you had on there part of you could go back to the one to have planning reviewers go through it and education yes you know because we just updated our code are there any current challenges in that code do you see for this if somebody wanted to add a system I I don't I don't think so what I what I think is the challenge is just making sure that everybody's familiar with it enough to make the process efficient so it's just we very rarely get these these types of requests in for a system like this and so it just it's not something that people deal with on a routine basis and and I think it's something that we need to kind of brush up our skills a little bit on thank you so first of all thanks for their presentation I myself would support a small rebate program to start to see if it yields any any more people doing this in addition to the education but obviously if if I'm a minority them in a minority but I would also love love to see possibly a pilot program in you know in city parks and looking for us to do gray water and in conjunction with rain water collection because even though there are two different things it's both for the same purpose and I also wanted to mention I'm glad that you addressed our water rate structure because that's is one thing that I really like about it that it it encourages conservation because you're charged more you know not only during certain times but also the the bigger users are charged more and so I think that's good for for conservation is can you speak to you know how the our water conservation plan our water ordinance it fits into a gray water policy it I was looking it up it looks like the last time we updated it was 2014 but that might just be that that's the last you know that that's just that I haven't seen anyone since that right I'll look to the city attorney to see if I'm off are we past posting on that or oh I see on past posting yeah yes I can I can get you that information okay okay well maybe can you speak to you how that fits fits with the goals of the water ordinance as you as you know it or is that something right we have a variety of water conservation strategies that we've identified gray water was not one of those but we're certainly not opposed to it and we have the ability to to implement those programs within the city we have a variety of programs in that plan that we do have adopted and and are working through those some of those deal with more efficient park irrigation for example to get to your previous point the I it's a rarity to see a gray water system in place in conservation plans in this area simply because it's not a common practice around here I would not be surprised if there were a handful out there of drought contingency and conservation plans that do have it as an adopted strategy it's just because they're so uncommon you really can't receive a lot of reduction in volume and that's always what we're looking for we're looking for the largest reduction and in volume usage for the programs that we can implement yeah yeah thanks and and that makes sense what you know and that that was the reason why I mentioned the water ordinance and I know we can't talk about it now because off posting but I look just glad that I look forward to coming back to that and looking at it and and thinking about strengthening it to reduce our water our water usage customer run to retrofit to a gray water system is not too common as I understand is normally built with the with the structure into kind of self incentivizes because it is going to save some but the the tank size is limited so correct if if that gray water over fills that it's going to go back into our system regardless so that is correct during rainy periods you're definitely going to still see that I think the second part of what you put up there is more important and that's the drip irrigation that's that's the saving grace for the water part of it right and if there were a portion I was I would think about incentivizing it is lawns on drip right I personally have my front yard is all on drip right so again gray water systems are they take care of themselves a little bit but it's it putting in that drip irrigation that it's about two to three times as expensive as a regular system right whereas you're only looking at the cost of a tank for gray water right yeah and you're absolutely correct it's retrofitting those because you have to have separate plumbing is a very expensive proposition and so the I've only seen these my personal experience in situations where it's been a you know built into the home as it's being constructed yes that's member Davis so I just want to kind of piggyback on what councilmember Ryan and Armitage are both said I would be in favor of looping this into our conservation strategy and even looking at some small rebate programs either for lawn drip systems or for gray water systems however as we kind of look at what a rebate would look at look like I'd be fine with that you know because we can't predict exactly what the savings are going to be for us on the system I think it would have to be small I'd have to be like some of the other programs you showed us hundred dollars two hundred dollars three hundred dollars something like that it's not going to be a huge incentive for folks but what we've seen some of our other incentives is even if the incentive is not monetarily very significant the education piece that comes along with that as we push out the incentive can be really big and people can see you know you know I'm sure I'm getting a hundred dollars back on this but more importantly I'm saving myself money in the long run on my side of town in particular there are a number of peer and beam homes so it's not as difficult with a peer and beam one-story home to go back and retrofit a gray water system and then also a drip irrigation system I know at my house it doesn't just keep the flowers alive which it doesn't do a great job at that we don't do a great job at that but it also keeps our foundation moist which in some parts of town is very important so it may be that some people may not have a great use for the drip irrigation keep the flowers alive but they may have a need for for watering the foundation which is a big deal in some parts of town anything else yes I I too would like to see maybe a small rebate or have that discussion on what what it would be and I think this is something we can add as we're talking about updating our sustainability plan I don't think that should get lost in the conversation here when we saw the water goal and we saw that it's significantly below maybe we can talk about that adjusting it as well so this should should come back to us I think in the discussion for sustainability but I'm open to offering a small rebate okay anybody else yes I'll join in that consensus bring something back to us okay thank you okay we're moving on to agenda item 3e receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding roadway impact fees good afternoon thank you mr. mayor members of the council pretend they smoke I am the deputy city engineer and talk about the roadway impact fee this is this is a follow-up there was a previous presentation and work session item that came in front of the council October 7th that we had a detailed discussion about several items how the roadway impact fees are typically calculated what was in the 2015 study how the ordinance was set up and quick overview of this presentation and this work session item recap on a couple of issues and couple of important summaries from the previous presentation just to refresh the memory then go through a answering all the information that was requested during that work session item and then come back with the options so as you can see there's a map there are service areas we looked at this map briefly in the last presentation but there are five service areas and depending on each of the service area a roadway impact fee is assessed within that service area so this is a quick summary of how we left off the last discussion we looked at the existing adopted rate for single-family residential units for all of the service areas we looked at the 2015 eligible recovery fee from the study itself then we looked at the increase in cost due to construction inflation in the last four years between 2015 and 2019 and then we developed a an eligible recovery fee for 2019 which is higher than the one that was in the study and then there was a recommendation by staff to charge 50% of that study so that was the past there were several questions additional information requested by Council and primarily at circle ground what are the growth estimates what were the estimates within the study itself and what are we looking at what are we seeing currently on the ground in the last four years how much impact fee are we collecting how many capital projects have been implemented or are under construction as compared to what was envisioned in the study and then last but not least an actual sheet that shows how this roadway impact fee is calculated for each of the classification so I've included I've distributed the sheet that shows the schedule but we'll come to come to that a little bit later I'll go answering each of these questions so what is the growth if you look at single-family residences currently we are here in 2019 the estimates in the study is this red line so the study the 2015 they estimated that it's going to grow a certain way currently between 2015 and 2019 we we pull the permits that are being pulled for these new developments and based on the permits we have we have data from from 2015 this point to 2019 we we are above the estimates that were used in the study and then based on this particular four-year we're projecting another five years out at a straight line so as you can see the single family units are coming in at a higher rate than what was estimated in the study similar graph here for the multifamily we had estimated about two thought a little over 2,000 units coming in between 2015 and 2019 we were seeing higher 2,800 and then similar projections on this so if we combine both of them on an average we're seeing about 1,100 above the projections just the amount of permits that are getting pulled and you can see the trend keeps on increasing as new new growth comes in and housing comes in and you can see just based on the applications for in the development services world and planning services we're getting a lot more projects that are coming in so what does it constitute typical average impact fee collected through the growth that we're seeing for residential we're seeing about approximately 700 little over 750 units and single-family and 600 little over 600 multifamily units on an average coming in between 2015 and 19 so we've used the adopted rates and this is the total collection on an average year annual basis you're collecting a little over two million dollars in impact fees just from the residential development itself now going to the capital project side of things so what was anticipated in the 2015 study there was a whole host of projects that are listed in the study which could be funded through the impact fees and then the added capacity in vehicle miles that these projects would add once once we implement the projects they would add the added capacity you can see we have we're in progress of several projects about 14 total that have added capacity to the network and we're moving forward with these projects I'm gonna zoom into the area be particularly you can see between the city and textile projects we are addressing several you can see textile projects us 377 currently under construction FM 2181 or cheese Lee after a break we're going back and it will be under construction pretty soon and then you can see city projects you have Bonnie Bray we've completed phase 1 phase 2 is going to council tonight for award so we're that will the construction will begin soon on phase 2 which is vintage bonnie Bray phase 3 we're already in the utilities portion of it we'll be moving to construction soon on that and then Hickory Creek is under construction as well so you can see a lot of these needed connections are under construction so what was what are we collecting as a whole as a city including all service areas you can see some areas are doing a little bit better just to growth potential in certain areas and the growth is higher you can see service area B and service area E bringing in a lot of a lot more growth and a lot more impact fees 2 million and longer 2 million so you can see the total impact fees to date that we've collected is six and a half million dollars what we have used the money for and how much we have started using them on larger project we've added some money to mayhill project as well as Hickory Creek Road alignment larger we've we have allocated or we have reserved the money it's being spent right now but we've reserved the money for these projects which is a little over three million dollars so six and a half came in a little over three million who were already reinvesting in our street program one of the questions that was asked was a full schedule and you have a full schedule I can pull it up here and go through the detailed steps and each number if everyone's interested but a couple of things I do want to bring up the adopted rate or the adopted ordinance had a 25 percent discount on non-residential trips so anything that was non-residential office industrial shopping center those trips were incentivized by 25 percent there was a discount to attract more businesses I think that was the thinking at the time and also the industrial rate was capped at the warehouse rate so warehouse typically generates very few trips and the general light industrial number of trips are higher but the rate the charge rate for or the impact rate for the industrial was capped at warehouse so we're charging less if we look at some of these columns these are the larger columns are the different alternatives that we have looked at the first one is the current adopted collection rate and it shows a list for all the available land uses that could possibly come within the city and are eligible for roadway impact fees then we came up with the second alternative we looked at the increase due to cost inflation in construction so what what if we started collecting and just to cover that inflation piece what would be the roadway impact fees for each of these different alternatives and then finally there were two other alternatives one will be the 50% of the 2019 which is what the staff had recommended last time around note that the 25% discount and industrial cap still remain on this alternative whereas this alternative has not none of those restrictions all the discounts are being removed in the last alternative so what would be this is just a slide to show you an example of what the fees would be if if 200 units residential subdivision came in currently they're paying about four hundred thousand dollars as impact fees if we adjust it to the cost inflation they will be paying five hundred and sixty thousand if we so on and so forth move to the last with just 50% of recoverable you can see that they'll be jumping between eight hundred and one point five million dollars for impact fees for two hundred units similar similar calculations around here with medical office ten thousand square foot medical office coming in these are the impact fees currently they're a little over fifty thousand they'll be paying close to hundred and fifty five between hundred and fifty five and two seventy six in in these two alternatives you can see the range because the if you go back there is a range within each of the so if you so each of these zones are different when you look at the maximum fee that that's that's why there is a range within within each of those alternatives so zone B has the lowest recoverable fee and the highest is zone E so if you go back that's why there is a range on those alternatives that between zone B if they are differently assessed it's not it's not kept at 2,000 words differently assessed and there will be a range so this is just an example and then finally there these are the three alternatives that we talked about this is the existing adopted rate this is the inflation cost recovery currently for 2019 and then the 50% of 2019 that was the staff recommendation list and with that any questions so are we talking now just to the end of the year or is this presentation for because I remember last present last time we talked about it it was just to get us through the end of the year and then we were going to come back and talk about it again so this is up to a point where the next mobility plan and the new road way impact fee is up is implemented now ability plan we're still going through the phases most likely that I can see that adopted sometime in summer next year and after that the roadway impact fee discussion will begin and come to council so I can see there is a gap of anywhere between 8 and 12 months between now and when the new roadway impact fee would be adopted based on a new mobility plan so I have a few more should I go now or just wait okay so is it possible that since the different service areas cost lower that we may be incentivizing development in areas that cost less currently it's all capped at 2000 but if we start charging them differently yes that may impact how the areas coming and developers may choose one one versus the other so then we'll be behind in that section the way they impact these are so for if you look at service area B it's completely developing so most of the development land is taken out that's why the and the amount of infrastructure that's needed was low that's why the fee was low so it depends on available land and the proportionate infrastructure needed so irrespective it balances itself out so learning that we have caps and discounts if we were just to remove the cap and the discount without increasing the fee so much until we come back and talk about this study how much would that make a difference that would dirt couple things that would impact all the non-residential so 25% increase in their fees and the general light industrial will be impacted the most there will be one category because it's capped at a warehouse you can see some of the numbers are pretty high so those two aspects will change and then we can definitely calculate those numbers and provide that I'd be interested in saying instead of raising fees just kind of removing the discounts what that would do for us just to get us through so we're not raising and then either you know raising again that would be interesting for me to see and I saw you had a slide with refunds and you had an amount there and I was just wondering if you could talk about it for a second so currently don't have any idea and Todd can talk about that so if you recall here were a couple of months ago we came to council where about a residential subdivision Beaver Creek homes on the north side of town where there was an initial staff agreement because at the time that was the process that if impact fees were not going to be collected because of infrastructure that was being constructed and that subdivision did construct some infrastructure that was on the roadway mobility plan that they would be credited so staff had sent an email at the time said that they would credit those impact fees unknowingly because it wasn't well documented then billing inspections when they came in to pull house permits they were being charged those impact fees it wasn't caught until the end of construction and then we reimburse them for that I remember that presentation thank you so that's where this shows up okay yes my mom true so I was gonna recommend something pretty similar to what council member Briggs mentioned first of all I was I I didn't know about this industrial cap so I was I was shocked by it and I I definitely don't I I'll put a positive form I am definitely in support of doing away with that industrial cap these you know big heavy trucks and big heavy impact on streets so to me you know that seems like a no-brainer so just take me the caps and discounts I love that idea but I do worry about you know the the impact of of kind of you know raising the fee I'm looking at the fourth column and looking you know especially in those residential categories which includes also you know senior adult housing and senior living which I believe is a real need in our community and also for you know daycares primary schools and and high schools at least for publicly funded schools I don't know if some cities distinguish you know between public versus private you know but I certainly for the for the primary middle and high schools you know for for daycare I would I wouldn't want to raise anybody public or private a dime and then also medical you know because of the the public need so I I definitely support doing away with with the cap and kind of coming back and looking at these other categories and seeing because you know I would be against raising it for for residential and some of the other categories and subcategories as well maybe making some you know distinguishing you know between for instance first for schools for me personally anyway not for preschools but to distinguish for the elementary middle and high school distinguished between the public and private so the taking off the discounts is an increase in those fees correct so we are increasing fees on that on that sector if we were moving okay just want to make sure we understand that it because it doesn't seem like it was presented that way but yes we are increasing the fees on those particular categories but say for the other the other areas they would stay the same oh no no I understand that but I mean you would I think a comment was made we're not reducing fees we're taking off the discounts but we are increasing the fees on those particular ones I've received a lot of push but first of all let's let's make sure we understand that this is a way that we can either promote manage growth or we can kill manage growth because we've had I don't know about y'all I've had several emails about from from projects both residential and commercial that said if the recommended fee structure went through things are going to probably come to a screeching halt very quickly when you start adding seven to eight thousand dollars to a single family home or seven thousand dollars per unit for a multi-family project you got 200 units that's one point something million dollars and as it may seem a little detached but these types of policies impact how we're able to keep the tax rate either up or down or provide for the services that keep the burden off of also residential if we don't have any growth in this city or limited growth it's not like our expenses stop and the growth of those expenses stop so we have to have a balanced approach so I'm certainly going to be very hesitant to go with the recommended portion quite honestly because I just think that's it's it's just too much at one time and projects that are in the works whether the discounts there are not I mean it's still for those other categories when is the next impact fee ordinance do or when we're supposed to look at it per statute when is that typically roadway impact fees are reviewed every five years so you look at your mobility plan you look at you impact these and update them where are we in that cycle we're currently redoing our mobility plan so we'll be right at five-year mark when we go next year in front of council and present it as a revised world went back the end mobility plan so in a year we're gonna come back per statute and have this conversation again about impact fees and things such as that and discounts or no discounts or something like that honestly for the sake of just predictability and for projects that are on the ground and things such as that I'm for just keeping the status quo until we come naturally into that particular cycle I think they've made that cycle for a reason that is to visit every every five years I think we just that's what we that's the ordinance we passed that's what people have to have relied upon that's in the queue and if we're only a year out you know if we were two or three years out I would say okay but we're probably not looking at have you done a calculation on what the anticipated difference is of revenue between if we kept it the same and if we got even just the inflation portion within that year timeframe how much additional funding that would be any idea it's very dependent upon how much construction actually goes versus what's actually in the queue to be permitted it's almost impossible to determine that if you look at where we have been it's very much on a project by project basis where the impacts would be okay because they're assessed at the time that the permit is issued is that correct first you're assessed at the final plat and they're collected based on permit okay so especially in the case of residential homes we don't collect any impact fees until a permits pulled for the home to be built right right but they're assessed at plat which means if there's a change if they've plotted it prior to that and they're assessed that doesn't affect an increase in fees does not affect correct okay mayor pro tem yeah no I'm still at the same point I think we should correct it for what's the word inflation and also I have a question so either Todd pre tem can you help me understand the premium we're paying so because contractors are so busy there's a number associated with that traditionally is there normalized kind of percentage that we've seen that that's been added on that you know staff is called I was not staff but in presentations to go away for you whatever what is that kind of because of just everyone being so busy what is that the current construction inflation rate is right about 1% per month localese nationally it's between four and five percent annually but locally it's one percent per month so so that's where I fall I fall on the inflation number and then even if we accounted for some of that additional cost because everything is so busy if you're 5% or so so I did the math 8% puts you at just over 40,000 so that's $600,000 or you could go you know 5% which is round numbers 25 to 30 thousand dollars which puts you you know whatever whatever that math is 50 55 580 thousand round numbers and so I think that is fair I think we're saying I think it's undeniable that inflations happened and so I don't think any builders or anything would would go kicking and screaming about that and they're bidding on projects so they know the premium that's placed on on projects and labor and etc so I think that's the number for me so at a minimum I think we should capture inflation come back in a year and revisit that and maybe it stays static at that point but I think to no one would deny I don't believe the inflation costs and the change and so all that's almost just a straight carryover whether someone agrees with the bump up or not and then I think that gives the because I've heard the same really that blind corner is what kills right I think that is that we have to fix we have to act because not knowing is a problem and so we have to be and I was ready to ready then ready now to support a consensus if it at least gets us where we're normalized for inflation question yes there was a couple comments about removing the discount for industrial and warehouse or something like that non-residential non-residential yeah caps for removing anything caps or discounts for non-residential is your proposal of the inflation this figure that they're talking about does it include that caveat or is it's keeping those in place yeah keeping those in place I mean that number is I mean that's I mean that's what did you say nine percent on the discount is 25 percent 25 percent on non-residential yeah and then the industrial development is capped at the warehouse rate which is basically 30 percent yeah plug that into a calculator just want to make just want to get some clarification on that so that if we come down to a consensus we understand exactly what we're yes on the councilman may not have made a request clearly enough but I had hoped that we'd see kind of holistically all the proposed increases you know that we've been looking at in this recent cycle you know remember when we looked at increasing the developer fees back then I you know I was frankly a little nervous about that as well I you know could see the potential benefit of risking you know tapping the brakes a little bit I took some comfort frankly you may or in your assessment that it's not a that it wasn't a meaningful increase on the scale of those projects and you know I worry a little now like wow is there sort of no limit on that I mean I take your point advisedly but but how is I'm curious I'd be curious to know if we've seen sort of demand changes in response to those increases I don't really know what the effect is other than sort of our add or remove judgment of fairness and cost recovery but what's the impact that we're having on demand in what aspect I just try the permits permits I mean I know we get a report on permits I don't have permits are still increasing we're way beyond where we've been in the past and that's in on top of taking water and wastewater impact fees to their maximum limit earlier this year so I mean you know I my going in thought was along the lines of member attempts that you know it's maybe inch are we into this but I wonder are we you know is the market kind of telling us we're correct in monetizing the growth it's not slowing down a bit so I don't know I mean I I might as not yet made up I'd be happy to your work or discussion so I want to kind of not change the spirit of that tweak what I had initially said to adjust to some other things that have been said because I didn't comment on the the inflation category I so number one I want to say I would be okay with increasing for inflation for construction cost inflation except in the residential and medical and like I said the the primary middle and high school public part of the industrial category and and I just want to make a case for you know getting rid of that industrial cap because you know if you look at the difference from our current collection rate to you know what is in the last column I mean that is such a huge discount and it's and I understand that you know there's an argument that well you know getting more industrial that's good for our tax base but also getting more for it for impact when you look at all we spend on roads you know look at our bond package to fix up a lot of it has to do with just road maintenance and all we spend on that so that's pretty good for our tax base to you so you know I would wonder I mean do we you know if we really want more industrial if we have how much more industrial we have room for and whether our roads can handle it so I'd also be curious you know if you could speak to why you know what why that cap was there in the in the first no idea I have no idea that was levy there yeah because I mean I was just I'm just shocked by it but I you know respectfully I don't I don't buy the argument that it's good for the tax base I actually think the opposite that it's better for the taxpayer to get you can actually see that play out on Jim Crystal Road as we're seeing more industrial development in that sector we're woefully behind on impact fees in that area to keep up with the truck demand heavy trucks absolutely do have an impact on the roadway with more and more truck demand in the area we just we're not capable of putting that roadway yeah yeah and actually that's exactly the area I thought of the first time I went to tour the fracking sites I popped a tire around there I mean that in itself isn't proof but I could feel I was on Billy you know and I mean this was you know years ago but it's you know somebody pointed out to me yeah it's not that nobody it's not that those roads are being ignored it's just that you've got you know all these big trucks driving over it again again so councilmember Armitage could you maybe more clearly articulate exactly what you're saying you would like to see at least at this point I think I think does that make sense to you I think staff is probably clear but um so what I was saying is I definitely want to do away with the industrial cap because I think it's it's better we really making an impact positive impact for the taxpayer and I'm okay with adjusting for inflation in in all categories except residential medical and not so much all of institutional but in that institutional category any daycare Center and public primary public middle school and public high school all right so those that you just listed you want those to stay the same yeah because I mean for me that's something and I realized that that means if we're not adjusting it to inflation it's almost like giving them a discount you know and you know I'm okay with that because I see that is just a great public need for the public good and and yes it's true construction costs are going up across the board but wages aren't increasing you know to go along with it and so for that reason because of what those needs are all right Councilmember Davis and then so like some other members of the council I'm a lot more comfortable with something that's pegged to a tangible you know a inflation or a multiplier of inflation or something like that I'm less comfortable with something that is a percentage of all the available money percentage of the maximum that we could possibly charge you in the statute that that one is less it's a lot less easy for me to justify to a developer and I want to take a note note versus to second that we talked about developers and a lot of times especially in this conversation that means the big developers 200 multi 200 single-family units or whatever but we're also talking about the doctor who built an office on his own dime took out his own loan in my neighborhood and had to pay fees to do that had to pay permitting to do that and that's been nothing but good for the neighborhood and that's just a local small business of a particular type so I don't want to get lost in the developer conversation that for some projects this could be a very significant increase and I also for me I think it's a good idea to take away the the industrial captive warehouse I think we've kind of somewhere lost the reasoning behind that we don't really remember or know what our thinking was there and kind of the same for the 25% I guess the case could be made maybe for the 25% discount for non-residential that we want to incentivize commercial I don't know that this particular fee is the best place to start playing economic development I don't know that we get our bang for our buck in filling with this and making so for that that reason I disagree a little bit with the council member our mentor about you know a discount here or carve out there I would rather just have the fees as they are without trying to play a little bit too much economic development or gaming this particular fee too much I think we have better more direct ways to do that I could be convinced otherwise if there's a really solid case for why a particular business a particular use needs the incentive to be built into the roadway impact fee I think if you talk to most people with projects they just want the fees to be as low as possible whether or not $10,000 here or theirs can incentivize them to do this kind of project in Denton versus that kind of project in Denton I don't I don't really know that's my right do we know why the the cap was on the industrial it was just there I can I'm fine with removing the cap and the in increase to construction cost inflation since we are so close to reevaluating everything in the mobility plan coming up next year I think that's a nice easy step to take as opposed to trying to get up into you know do we do 50% did we do 45 or anything there so since councilmember Davis brought up the medical office I just went and looked and so a general a light industrial would only pay this is currently five hundred and eighty seven dollars in impact fees right and so somebody who wants to do a medical or dental office building would pay five thousand three hundred and eighty seven dollars now I just I don't think that's very fair I mean if we're if I'm reading this correctly just going down with with the list so that's one reason I proposed getting getting rid of that industrial users are heavy users I think they should be charged the same if not if not some if not more so I am still sticking with that but I would like to see some more data on that and how that would help or not help I'm not sure I'm definitely not at what the proposed is at the 50% recovery rate I've had emails and had discussions and it is a lot at once and I'm also against the increase on projects that are in the queue I know that there's a lot but that those projects have been planned with the money that they have and it just it wouldn't be right to go up and increase that after they've faced their whole project on an estimate that they've already been given I wouldn't want to be a part of that so if if this council decides to increase the fees at all I think there should be a date set and it should be a hard date kind of like how we did our code so that there's no surprises Mr. C manager well I would like to ask Todd to kind of explain to council also there's another side of this discussion that's how impact fees are credited back to developer you know and and I think that's part of the conversation that tends to get left out this was implemented as excuse me as I understand is because there was so many disputes going on at the time between developers and staff what was required outside improvements and so the idea was is the developers had a choice they do get these credited backs they're not paying them every time and I just think it's important for the council to understand how these work because that that tends to get lost in the in the whole discussion of impact fees a lot of times they can avoid these by just simply building the off sites otherwise if the fees are so low there's no incentive at all for them to build the off sites it's easier to put that on the backs of the taxpayers and I think that piece of this conversation has not been attacked and and it's very real so prior to the roadway impact fees there was a perimeter street construction requirement and that was something that any street that borders a development however link that however long that link is there was a certain amount of that roadway that was required to be built by the developer the state also requires by statute a percentage of that is only of that cost is only what the response of the developers responsible to pay based on their development so they've increased the total traffic demand on that roadway and the perimeter street requirement they're only required to pay that that was bogging down a lot of that conversation between staff and developers they try to make those cases back and forth what's your proportionate amount versus what I feel it I mean it was a nightmare so where cities have gone to the roadway impact fee is this study the basis for the study that the roadway impact fee was developed on answers the statutory requirement of what is that proportion amount of traffic that's generated by development and that that long complicated calculation that pre temp brought to four was exactly that reason that answers that question so that we're no longer arguing about your proportionate amount versus what I consider your proportion amount of the construction cost of this roadway to be it also allows you if there's an improved improved roadway in that same service area we're allowed to then say well okay instead of your traffic is going to go in a variety of places I can't possibly predict the total number of places that increased traffic is going to go but I have a service area that will reasonably be impacted by that increased demand and it may not be just this road that has recently been improved and it gives us the flexibility to take that money and then put it into a roadway that's also being impacted it's on the mobility plan and then we can turn around and invest that money into those roadways as well so it allows us to then handle that increase in development across the board and minimize a lot of that staff time and I think from a practical perspective we are perfectly okay you know moving forward with the inflationary cost I mean you all know the cost of the type of cost increases that we're seeing in our CIP and why we've had we've had to come back to you and repeatedly discuss that I also think to Councilman Meltzer's point we were probably we were certainly early adopters of the you know the building permit fee rationale that is certainly going to start changing in the next year to as we see more and more of our city fellow cities capped with their taxes under the new legislation you're also going to see more of an in more of a shift to the impact fees as well I live this in Arizona and it's going to happen in the next year or two so if the Council is wanting to finish the mobility plan kind of watch to see what happens with the market overall we probably have a very different conversation in a couple of years so a couple things so when I'm looking at the current collection rate for industrial and it's based upon per thousand square feet of gross floor area that 587 if that if that didn't have any discount or any cap or whatever what would that be we're getting it can you restate that we were busy trying no no sure overcome our technical issues here under the current collection rate column you go down to the industrial row and you've got all these that say thousand square feet gross floor area you get this is the price per thousand square feet of gross floor area if that were just based upon like it is with residential your your mileage I mean there's no discount no cap what would that figure be give me a second and pull up a spreadsheet that calculates that quickly because I just want us to look at I mean what that impact would be I mean not saying we don't we keep it but if it's small then we need to understand that if it's large we need to understand that as well roughly right now the discount given is 70% okay so who's good mathematician 587 multiply that times what we're divided by one point something or what what's that divided by 0.7 you'll come up with that number somebody somebody do that real quick about 3,500 or something like that 587 times what they're divided by 0.7 0.7 838.57 I guess that's what you would add to it all right I think we got the numbers backwards do it divided by 0.3 that would be the number sorry 587 is a start we needed the accountants in here David why aren't you doing this for us putting the same back in we all took algebra one where let's put it up on the whiteboard let's get our 587 is apparently 30% of X right 1900 okay all right okay all right so that's helpful just to understand what that what that impact is and also and I don't have an issue with the going with the inflationary rate all right but does that mean that when we come back or y'all come back next year and you decide on these road impact fees that somehow every year you're going to be willing to come back and adjust for inflation on the road impact fee that I mean if that's the case that's fine but so I'm not I'm not opposed to the number my concern is the paradigm that we're using or the precedent that we're setting to say so is this road impact fee really a road impact fee for five years or is it just a starting point to where it can come back and be adjusted every year based upon something but I don't have a problem with the with the 2800 and taking the discounts off and just using that column going down because as you can see it's I mean it's a it's a little bit of a difference but our discussions I just wanted to answer your question a little bit the answer is no our discussions is when the the mobility plan is updated I'm I'm less optimistic than freedom I think 12 months may be pretty aggressive given some of the meaty policy issues you're gonna have to deal with but once that's done we're probably gonna be in two at least two fiscal years down the road is my guess and we will have a discussion in terms of where the market is what our actual costs are what's on the plan and I think at that point council can get some I you know can have this similar conversation with what percentage of the overall costs are you comfortable recouping and it's going to be a very different conversation we're recommending today based on actual actual costs and what we're seeing out that it's gonna have to be done based on new development coming in well but you're still gonna have a column that says here's your totals whether it's 2019 20 or 21 and here's the total that according to our calculations were allowed by statute right to charge and we want 50 percent 75 percent 30 percent I mean what whatever is worked out in that form right you'll be you'll be somewhat confined by market I mean it's it's not going to be as simple as what water and sewer is where you've got specific projects we've identified the next five years we're going to have to add significant capacity those plants and we can see where growth's pushing us in there you're going to you're going to have but we'll be able to set the table and have a similar conversation but it's ultimately at the end of the day whether the market constraints out there where's your comfort level in terms of based on the current pricing that we're seeing okay so I appreciate you bringing that up because whether we look at it as a multiplier of inflation or whether we look at it as a percentage of the maximum both of those are somewhat arbitrary like one of them is just the maximum that's allowed by statute we do some math on it the other one is assuming that our base rate that what we're talking about right now was was prudent at the time and is still prudent now to use as a multiplier I'm much more comfortable all around as a policy decision and conversations with developers saying you know we think this is the amount of money it's going to take to do the projects that have to happen in each of these zones and that's why we set the rate here so I understand that that's not fully cooked we're not ready for that conversation yet and will be we get the mobility plan so I'm I appreciate that conversation because it helps me see this as a that this is the most complex look we can take at this issue right now but in the future it will need to be based on facts on the ground and what we actually the amount of money we're going to need not the amount of money that we're kind of doing some math with okay before before we I just want to check to test the room so far so it seems like we've got at least a several myself included I think customer husband I think Davis now so y'all just correct but okay so hold that so taking the increase for construction cost inflation column and increasing that increasing the fees representative that column except for removing the 25% discount on whatever that was and then the cap on warehouse against industrial whatever just removing all discounts all caps and just letting them stand based upon the calculations that would be in there if you didn't have them there okay do we okay I just want to sort of see if we have a consensus on that who's okay with that I'm okay with that I need to see that can you go to a slide the slide that's so in my understanding it would be this middle column yes and then less the discounts is how much no there's no discounts there on the no there's no discounts there no that okay perfect yeah okay I'm tracking yes okay so it's not looks like we're there but we're gonna go ahead take a few more comments and then we'll go ahead and close this agenda item yes customer yeah just yes I'll be brief and I think this is too blunt of an instrument to think we can micromanage all these different incentives it's just not that you know determinative and and doing nothing doesn't face our reality so it's a step so you're okay with that I was wondering if staff or city manager would feel comfortable addressing you know to what extent could a difference in the construct construction inflation cost be made up for by moving in some of these categories and maybe it's a moot point because we've got the consensus already but I'm also just it's helpful for me to think about the kind of that the bigger picture and moving forward you know make up for that by moving to the 50% of recovery fee you know for the industrial category I don't think we can I think there's such a difference in terms of volume patterns I'm not sure we could sit here and give you a credible answer with that I mean you could you could have hundreds and hundreds of single-family homes built and dozens of you know so it just it's too much of a variable there for us to give you a guess we could defend okay thanks and then kind of another question I had also just a moving just moving forward and thinking about this holistically you know are there other any other cities or any precedent for within the residential category treating different kinds of residential differently so having yeah is it the answer no for it okay okay all right I think you've got direction oh did you have a comment well I just wanted to say it Mike my direction was to remove the cap and the the discount but stay where we were right that was where I say yeah you're not for the inflation construction cost inflation call for right now I wanted to see more more data on that okay okay thank you very much appreciate that all right we will go ahead and call the closed session but then we'll take a meeting and we'll take a break right before that we will now convene in closed session at 356 will convene in closed session pursuant to a Texas government code section five five one point oh eight six which is competitive matters for public power utilities and consultation with attorneys under Texas government code section five five one point oh seven one everybody this meeting the Dent City Council it is what is today November the 19th 2019 it is 634 p.m. we'll move through our agenda our first item on the agenda this pledge of allegiance to the US and Texas flag please stand if you're [ Inaudible Remarks ] [ Inaudible Remarks ] >> Anybody who wants to come stand with you, anybody? Yeah. Okay, well, whoever wants to, yeah, you're invited. Whoever wants to, come on down and -- absolutely, absolutely. Yes, please. So how many of you really love our downtown square? [ Applause ] So if there was any one person in this community that has contributed to the square being what it is today over the many years of hard work and dedication, it's this woman right here that's done that. Absolutely. [ Applause ] Well, you did have a lot of help, I understand that. But I know that it's been your passion and your heart for many, many years. And so thank you so much for that. We're going to get a chance -- we're going to have everybody introduce themselves. And then I'm going to read the proclamation, and I want to give anybody a chance that wants to talk, to talk, because I think this is a very special day in the life of our city, representing and recognizing a very, very special lady for what she's done in our community. I'm going to just go start down here. Oh, my goodness. I didn't know I was going to have to do this. Hi, Julie. I'm Herbert Hall. I'm the director of UNT on the square. So clearly, I've had many dealings with Julie. We go back way beyond that. Some of these things I will just leave unsaid today. But just -- she is a consummate professional, as you said, a total advocate for this community, and just a wonderful person on top of all that. So, Julie, thank you. Thank you, Herbert. My name is John Cartwright. I have a business on the square, and that's how I first met Julie, and getting my business up and running and applying for grants for -- our first odd improvement, our sign. But recently, I've become very, very close with her. I've kind of gotten really involved with our Main Street Association. I'm currently the president. And this is an area that I really have gotten to know you and your value and understand what all these other people -- everybody in our city understands how Denton's soul is its downtown, and you are the soul of our downtown. And I just want to say thank you to the bottom of my heart. Thank you. And I'm Christine Gossett, and I work with the Denton Main Street Association Convention of Mr. Bureau, and I also have known Julie and worked alongside her, for her, and with her for over 20 years. So, Julie, thank you for being a great mentor and a great supporter of women. And thank you for helping me through some tough times. You were a great boss when I had you as boss. And we are going to miss you, but we know you'll be downtown. We will remain partners. Yes, I'll go ahead and take the chance to say something now, too. I came down here because I wanted to show you that I support you, and I am very appreciative of all that you've given to the community. I know you've given 100% for a really long time, and I'm very thankful for that. Any time I ever needed something or had any questions, you were there. And so, it has not gone unnoticed, and I appreciate you, and I'm going to miss you. My name is Jason Boudoir. I'm the CEO of Jasadi. We're an IT company on the square. I'm also on the marketing chair for DMSA, or Denton Main Street Association, and I'm on the board of the Chamber. And Julie, I mean, I remember almost seven years ago when our company first moved to downtown and had a wonderful meeting with you, and I didn't know at the time that you were going to be such a wonderful partner for businesses downtown, but I can say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything you do for the community. It will forever change downtown, and your passion and your drive for downtown and for businesses and being a constant partner with businesses and people is amazing, and thank you for everything you've done. Hi, I'm Jack Thompson, and I was council member from 2003 to 2009, and you are certainly the one that we were keep pushing to get the square up and going and really moving, and it's been wonderful, the things that you have brought to pass. We do thank you so much. I want to read the resolution and give you a chance to say a few words. Oh, no, of course you are, of course. I really appreciate you all being up here tonight to really support her. Resolution and appreciation of Julie Glover. Whereas Julie Glover has served the city of Denton from October 1, 1996 to November 29, 2019. Julie moved up quickly as economic development program manager. And whereas the city of Denton has been fortunate in having enjoyed the dedication and contributions made by Mrs. Glover and her efforts to serve the city of Denton by performing her duties in an exceptional manner. And whereas Mrs. Glover performed many essential functions for the city of Denton, including serving on many committees, such as the Holiday Lighting Committee since 1994, Denton Convention and Visitors Bureau Advisory Board since 2000, the Industrial Street Pop Festival, Geezer Palooza since 2013, and the Peterbilt Pride and Class Parade from 2017 through 2019. And whereas Mrs. Glover received her bachelor's degree from Texas Woman's University in journalism in 1998, followed by her master's degree in business administration from Texas Woman's University in 2007. And whereas Mrs. Glover is a recipient of the Texas Historic Commission's Annis B. Reed Award of Excellence in Community Heritage Development in 2015. That same year, Mrs. Glover was awarded the 2015 Texas Downtown Association's Susan H. Campbell Award for Professional Excellence. And whereas Mrs. Glover assisted in starting a few of Denton's very own events, which are still annual events. In 1994, she initiated the Acoustic Lawn Jam, the Dog Days of Denton, and the Thursday Twilight Tunes. How many of y'all go to some of those events? Absolutely. Absolutely. She also started the Arts and Autos Extravaganza in 1999 and the Make Music Day in 2017. There were some larger projects that Julie was a part of too. Too many to list, but a few of those were the 1998 through '99 Square Capital Improvements, the West Oak Historic District, the Downtown Master Plan, Historic Preservation Officer 1998 through 2008, the Denton Art Walks of Fame, Little D Bike Racks, Historic Tax Abatement Policy, and the Downtown Reinvestment Grant, just to name a few. And whereas in the past and present, she has served and is an essential member of the City of Denton support staff, has always served above and beyond her duties, has earned the full respect of her fellow colleagues and citizens of Denton, and the loss of her services will be keenly felt. Now, therefore, the Council of the City of Denton hereby resolves that the sincere appreciation of Julie Glover is felt by the citizens and staff of the City of Denton, be formally conveyed to her in a permanent manner by reading this resolution and to the official minutes of the City of Denton and forward to her a true copy. And be it resolved, too, that the City of Denton does hereby officially and sincerely extend its thanks to Julie Glover for her successful career at the City of Denton and wish her well on all her future endeavors. Let's give her a big round of applause. [applause] Okay. I'm going to give you a choice. Do you want this word or the last word? Because I want to see if there's any council members that want to speak. And do you want to speak before them or do you want to speak last? I can go first. Okay. All right. If you're going to make me. Well, we're not done with downtown. I'm just going to say that right now. We're still going to keep working on it. I'm still going to be involved in some ways. And next stop is Cozumel. Wonderful. Wonderful. Just give my council members a chance. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. Again, she makes it look so easy. But I really was enlightened by the emails I'd get to say, hey, business development meeting here. We've got to do this. We've got to do that. And so the work behind the scenes that business owners have seen and others may not know is amazing. I can't say enough about Geezer-Palooza. That thing is awesome. I mean, that is just a good time if you've not been. She she's heard me early and often talk about the reinvestment grant and how fine I am of of all things included there. And then so really, it's just I appreciate what you've done foremost behind the scenes to make everything look fantastic. And, you know, customer facing. So thank you very much. Yes. I'd like to say just one thing I've always appreciated about Julie. She probably didn't know that I noticed this is at Twilight Tunes. You're always enjoying the music. And it's that's something I've never been able to do is to host a party and enjoy it at the same time. It's awesome that you can do that and just to to do all this planning and then to just be able to enjoy the best that Den has to offer in the arts at the same time. So really, I appreciate that. That has meant something to me. And congratulations and thank you mails. Yes, that's my answer. I think it's clear from everything you've heard that so much of what we love about them is, you know, really what we love about you. And our loss will be because of Mel's game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, days like this are always bittersweet because there's no one that's going to be able to fill your shoes. Absolutely not. And we so appreciate you basically restoring the character of the square and of our city. Because and I won't say it, but the square was not always like that when I was growing up. The square was very, very tough and rough and had some establishments that were quite interesting that would not fit in today. Yeah, yeah. It's bitter because we'll miss you tremendously and what you bring to our city. But we're happy for you that you're going to start a new chapter in your life and wish you all the best. And we fully anticipate to see you and to use your expertise and your historical knowledge. That's the thing that you have is just the context of so many years of service and what works and what doesn't work. We'll miss you and good luck and cause a male and look forward to seeing you back again. So let's give her one more real round of applause. Thank you. Okay, our next item on the agenda is presentation from the members of the public. We could roll the review of procedures for addressing the City Council, please. 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 don't have any scheduled citizen reports, but we do have agenda item, additional citizen reports, commonly known as open mic, and we do have two cards for that. So our first speaker is Eva Greco. If you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. Eva Greco, 802 West Oak Street. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. In the last meeting, I spoke about public speaking at meetings, and in a work session, it's three minutes. Right now, it's four minutes. I really don't think that the public should be limited. This is our forum. You know, we elected everybody sitting up here, well, most of the people sitting up here, and this is now our forum where we can speak to you, we can present our issues. Okay. It seems like I try to look how many committees are formed, and I couldn't every time I turned around. If there is an issue, it just seems to me like, let's form a committee. We elected you up here to work out issues that are presented to the city, okay, representing us, the citizens here, not to form committees. So if I have an issue and I call City Hall about it, oh no, you have to contact this committee, or you have to contact that committee. I'm contacting my elected official for a city issue. You know, we need to think about this more. And I've noticed there is something called a luncheon meeting, where council members order lunch and a lot of food, more than is needed at our expense, the taxpayers, we pay for this lunch. And from what I understand, most of this food is just thrown in the garbage, because there is way too much food ordered. Okay, if the council chooses to have a luncheon meeting, you bring your lunch, you know, or you pay for it yourself. It's not fair to the citizens. I want to thank everybody on the mayor council for hearing me out. Oh, and I just wanted to make a quick mention of, I'm going to write this down, on the corner of West Oak and Ponder, right by the intersection, there's a pretty deep dip right there. There was a sign that, you know, let you know there's a dip ahead. The construction workers have removed that sign and put big orange sign, you know, construction work. And I walk up to the store on Hickory quite often, you can hear the cars, 30 miles an hour is the speed limit, and you could hear them. The sign is not there. And they're hitting their cars, they're scraping and it's causing damage to people's vehicles. Okay, so I just wanted to make you aware of that also. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Next speaker is Mr. Willie Hutzbeth. Please downstate your name and address, your time will begin. Mayor and city council, my name is Willie Hutzbeth, I live in 623 Newton. I wasn't going to talk about, well, the presentation that was made earlier about the square and how wonderful it is. The elephant in the room is, there is a Confederate statue in the middle of that square. And I've heard about the years that someone has been working on that square to make it a better place, but that Confederate statue was not mentioned. There's nothing done about that Confederate statue. I presented this issue to you, and by the way, the Confederate statue bothers me because it involves slavery. Let me explain to you about slavery because I guess many people don't know about it. Let me tell you from my perspective what it's like. You imagine, I can't even sleep on my side in my bed for very long, and it's a comfortable bed. Can you imagine coming across the ocean on one side using the restroom on that position on each other for several days? That's just one thing that we went through. But yet, you're honoring the square, and you didn't mention that statue which says the Confederate issue is alive and well, and we are prominently displaying that figure to show our respect and honor for what happened in that Civil War. Not me. The question I have is, on the statue says, "Our Confederate soldiers. Who is our?" It's certainly like me, but it's on the square prominently displayed. Show this picture, please, that I have up here. Would you, ma'am, would you show this picture? Put your camera on this. Do you think it had the overhead, please? This was given to me by someone who said, "This is probably what you're talking about." I feel like that young black girl standing there looking at that towering emphasis that I have to walk through and bow down to. Now, come on. I'm here at the City Council to say, "You can't keep sitting there highly elevated and looking as though you're really respectable and whatever else goes on with the office without giving a statement. What do you think about that square and this being there?" You need to say something. You need to not just sit there every week and it go on like it is, and you say to me, "It's the county's problem." Hogwash, it's our problem, or it's my problem. Maybe you honor that. Women, little girls, caged up and brought out for sexual favors. Men beaten into submission. That's slavery. That's what this represents. You need to say something. Secondly, I wasn't going to say anything about that, but I just get frustrated when you just sit there and you act like everything is okay. I'm suffering. I've suffered all my life because of this color that I have on my skin. I don't have anything to do with it. Heck, I would have made myself purple if I had something to do with it. That's another story. Anyway, the homeless situation. There are people who are living outside behind my house. You keep talking about it as though they're going to go away. I want you to realize that there are some people behind my house, and I've talked to them. I said, "Keep your area cleaned up." That's just one area that they need help in, somewhere to stay. I go over there often. How many of you have been to any homeless place and just stood up there with those people? Let those people alone help me help them keep a place to live. Thank you. All right. Okay, we're going to move on to the consent agenda. Sorry about that. I just left my lights on, and so I'm going to try to get somebody to turn them off on my card. Consent agenda, Council Member Ryan. Mr. Mayor, I move approval of the consent agenda, except for items C and I. Okay, and so C will be pulled for an item for individual consideration, and I believe I is just being pulled altogether. That won't be considered. Correct. Okay, all right. Mayor Potem. Second. All right, so we have a motion and a second for the consent agenda. Approval of the consent agenda, except for agenda item C, which will be taken up as an item for individual consideration, and then agenda item I, which is being pulled altogether. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries, 7-0. We will now take up agenda item 4C as an item for individual consideration. Consider a resolution by the City of Denton authorizing the City Manager to apply for and accept the 2019 UASI grant in the amount of $144,137.31. And it's grant number 342-1002. Good evening, Mayor, City Councilmembers, Kenneth Hedges, Fire Chief. This was a simple mistake on the title of this grant. The grant number is actually right. This was language used from the 2018 process. So on your update ordinance, it should read, in lieu of Fire EMS Rescue Task Force, it should read specialized regional response team sustainment. All right. Okay. Councilmember Ryan. Move approval. Mayor Potem. Second. And that is approval of -- Mr. City Attorney, that's the approval of the -- Substitute resolution. Substitute resolution. Is that correct? Correct. Councilmember Ryan, is that second? Mayor Potem? Yes, sir. All right. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries, 7-0. We'll now move on to agenda item 5, which is items for individual consideration, consideration of the use of eminent domain to condemn real property interests. And we do have a public speaker on that once we have staff presentation before the vote. Agenda item 5-L is consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton determining the public use, need, and necessity for the acquisition of various fee simple tracks, permanent easements, et cetera, generally located along Mayhill Road. Mr. Councilmembers, good evening. Paul Williamson, Capital Projects. Before you tonight for your consideration is an ordinance authorizing staff to acquire various interests and properties for this project. Purpose laid out is really a follow-up of the work session briefing on the 4th to improve safety. The true quiet zone for the railroad and increased mobility and flood control. The location map showing where the interest will be seeking. On a favorable motion, I guess we'll suspend for the speaker. Yeah, let's do that. Let's go ahead and have the public speaker and then we've got to, I believe, show the legal description and at the same time someone is reading the motion. So, yeah. Are there any questions for staff at this point? Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, so can you explain why eminent domain for the public? Well, in the case here, we're asking, we're seeking authorization to acquire the interests, whether it be through negotiation or eminent domain. We're going to seek to acquire all these through negotiation. And if negotiation efforts fail, then it's the police power to acquire these interests for the public use of this roadway and flood control. Okay. We have a public speaker, Kevin Nelms. Mr. Nelms, if you'll come down, yes, and state your name and address and your time will begin. Hello, my name is Kevin Nelms. I live at 3403 Shatterbrook Court in Denton. And what else am I supposed to tell you? Oh, that's good, yes. Okay. Name and address. And I might not need to be here, but I have, I guess, 40 acres over on May Hill Road now. And Paul and I, I guess the last time we talked was a year, a year and a half ago or something like that. And basically a little story. I had 50 acres in the city, bought 10 acres. And then for some reason, because they wanted to change it, they changed the routing of it and they needed less, more acreage or they need less acreage, whatever. But there was an, they needed to make it an even trade. When we moved the alignment, they needed more acreage. So I gave up three acres on the other end of the property. So now they basically want to go back to the old alignment. And what I'd like to do to make it even is just take that three acres back instead of selling the approximate three acres. Well, anyway, I gave away the three acres. I traded it. And I'd rather just make a trade instead of going public on main. And I just want to get on the record to say that. And I think it'd be a lot easier because I did that domain thing before. I came out quite well. I got about 10 times the money I was offered. But still, I'm not really looking for money. I'm just looking to kind of go back where we were, if possible. I'm willing to negotiate on that. OK, that's all I want to say. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. OK, thank you. Thank you. OK, see no speakers wishing to ask any questions. So, Paul, if you'll come back and I guess you're going to read the legal description and we'll display the survey or the legal up on the screen as well. Is that correct? Yes, mayor. With a favorable motion, I'll go forward through the slides. OK, gotcha. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. I move that the city of Denton, after having made the offers required by the state law, use the power of eminent domain, if needed, to acquire various fee simple tracks, permanent easements, and temporary construction easements generally located along the 2000 block of South May Hill Road, south to the intersection of South May Hill Road and Colorado Boulevard. And being situated in the David Hugh Survey, abstract 646, the D Lombard edition, and the D Lombard Survey, abstract 784, all in the city and county of Denton, Texas, and being more particularly described in Exhibit A to the ordinance now under consideration and on the screens overhead. Now being displayed for the audience, all of which are for a valid public use necessary to provide for the expansion and improvement of May Hill Road and a municipal street, a roadway located in the city of Denton and for flood control and storm water improvements necessitated by such flood control to serve the public citizens of the city of Denton. All right, is that sufficient. Yes of the survey. Yes reading the motion. Thank you, sir. Councilmember Ryan. Second. We have a motion and second for agenda item five L. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries five to two. We'll move on to engine item six a consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton the Texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with image net consulting LLC through the Department of Information Resources cooperative purchasing network. Good evening council city manager Melissa craft from the chief technology officer. Just to give you a little background on image net and the printer strategy around August twenty nineteenth. We spent some time creating an evaluation committee that was made up of technology services purchasing the city manager's office to research and evaluate printer options. Right now is that was ongoing. The Canon printer contract was expiring. I think that gave us an opportunity to look at centralization and consolidation and also take advantage of new technology that was underway. We also did a site walk through and develop technical specifications in September and October. We went through the competitive procurement process. We did look on the Texas Department of Information Resources cooperative contract. We also looked at other vendors too and vendors that were recommended by their cities. We did present this to the city leadership on the importance of trying to centralize our support instead of having it in a decentralized way in November of twenty nineteen. We looked at contract negotiations with image net and today we're here seeking council approval for awarding the contract. Current versus proposed we are having quite a bit of pain points right now we have one hundred seventy four identified nonstandard printers and personal printers are not networked just from a cyber security perspective. Patching and keeping keeping them up to date has been a challenge. On average we spend anywhere from a week and a half to two weeks of personnel staff time supporting these printers. The consistency and service has been a pain point just looking at our purchases in the last twelve months for toners and personal printers. You can see we spend roughly one hundred forty K for toner around forty one thousand on personal printers. One thing to note on personal print costs you know it's twelve times the cost of everyday color on the network and two times the cost of black and white. So if this proposal were able to leverage there should be packets on the on your area that kind of shows what the everyday color looks like and true color with some of the newer technology we can kind of set policies and parameters to only enable departments that really need true color. But for departments for instance like tech I don't need the fancy color I just need color variation. It costs the same as black and white so there's definitely an opportunity there for savings. Right now we don't have a printer policy or centralized way to manage those printers. So it causes again that kind of that support burden and also that the patching and keeping up with the cybersecurity of it. Some of the benefits would include reducing a print cost. We can set parameters also be able to report on it on a monthly basis and see our overall usage as a city from a paper standpoint. Right now we're unable to do that. We did do a two month study to try to you know take a snapshot in time to see our current usage. Also by being able to standardize those devices we do reduce the support burden of multiple vendors and models. Currently there's anywhere from three to five vendors that help service the printed contracts so there's results in delays and toner maintenance and support. Also some of the key neat features of secure printing by us getting rid of personal printers so if someone needs to print a secure document or something of private whether it's a status sheet personnel development plan or any disciplinary document or anything of that nature that you don't necessarily want the general public to see. With these new devices you can only allow that person to access it. Also it supports the city goals of efficiencies responsibilities of sustainability. Currently the recycling of toners depending on the department and how that's handled. With this contract they would recycle it for us and also fill it as you go so we can set those parameters once it gets to a certain percentage to go ahead and backfill. Right now people just tend to stockpile some of those prints, the print toner. Here's our current annual contract based on with Canon. So our support staff times around 18 weeks, around 242K. Our annual proposed is around 236K. While there is a cost savings there, this is a very conservative savings. You know we feel as we're including some of these newer technologies such as pop-up reminders before you print, setting a centralized policy for all printers, reducing the true color print, we anticipate that to be greater. A good portion of that is the usage of toner. As you know it's not really the printer that costs a lot. It ends up being the toner and the maintenance of it. So here's a snapshot on the vendor comparison. I will say there's been a change on the slides for NAFTEK. There is a wrong total amount. It should be 409077. As looking at the three vendors, ImageNet was the most cost effective. ImageNet also provided some of those key functions we're looking for such as centralized management, the security aspect of that, a color print alternative such as the true color versus everyday color, being able to auto order, excuse me, auto order toner and recycle them as part of the scope of work. Here's our project estimates year over year. It will be 236K over year over year for a grand total of just slightly over one million. We are adding 10% contingency. This is based the 315,000 black and white and on-network color that's based on historical usage taken to two months snapshot in time. So there's a potential it could be less as we're implementing some of these newer features and functionality. We have the information ImageNet, their headquarters in Oklahoma City, their local offices here in Carrollton, their leading provider for printers. They're currently used at UNT, TWU, City of Arlington, City of Garland, Denton ISD, Keller ISD and McKinney ISD. We're seeking approval for adoption and I may take any questions you may have. Councilmember Briggs has a question. Yes, thank you for the presentation. So how long have we been renting printers? So previously the contract was handled by RepoGraphics. I do know the last two cycles they were leased. I would have to defer that to RepoGraphics before that. But, you know, one of those things, it's one of those end devices you don't think of. You want to use it so it goes out. You would do that maybe on your personal printer. But these are one of the things you want to keep up to date and it really goes back to just keeping the patches up to date with the Microsoft patching. What tends to happen with some of these older printers that we have, because we do have some printers that are six, seven years old, anytime we do a Microsoft patch it breaks the connection and the person calls. It's an endless kind of cyclical process. So the more we can keep it up to date, the more secure it will be for us. So we've done that cost comparison on purchase, rental. I have a couple more questions. Yes, sure. So, and just to clarify, toner, ink, recycling, all of that is included in the price? Yes, ma'am. Okay. That's not a service being offered now, so that'll be great for us. Okay, thank you. Councilmember Davis. Just very briefly, you've used the term a couple times, personal printers, and I saw a couple reactions in the audience. Could you clarify for us that those aren't personally owned, privately owned printers being maintained by the city, that those are like a printer someone might have at their workstation or at their office that's not on the network? Yes, sir. What we consider personal printers is a printer in someone's office, but it's city owned and city supplied. But you still, as far as the cost, it's about 12 times as much as what we do for a normal printer that's in a centralized, located area. Okay. Councilmember Armitage. Apologies if this isn't in the backup and I couldn't find it, but is each of the existing printers kind of being replaced printer by printer? As far as just the number of actual machines? Yes, so we're replacing 60 of them. We did add a contingency of around 30 as we're getting rid of the printers in the office, what we consider personal printers, you know, to make sure there's enough capacity throughout all of the buildings. There's an industry best standard, 40 square feet per printer, so that was kind of taking into account as we were kind of looking at our cost options. So 90? Yes. Okay, and so industry standard meaning like for a government, for a municipal government, and so it's done, it's per square foot? Yes. Not like per department or? It would be per square feet. So for instance, city hall, there's going to be a shared printer between city manager's office, procurement, and the general folks that are in this area. So that's kind of what we're looking at. Okay. Okay, thanks. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Is there a per click charge? Is that why you're calculating the 315 black and white? Is that how they, or is it unlimited clicks and it's just a flat rate? So it's not a limited clicks. It's going to be dependent on print per page. So the toner is based on, you know, this toner would print 10,000 pages of black or this toner would print 5,000 pages of color, so it's going to be dependent on the toner. So we did have to take, you know, an estimate of toner consumption as part of that. And that's what this line item is. You know, we're assuming 315,000 black and white and color for one year, one year usage. And then the click cost, does it go up based on usage or it just stays flat? That should just stay flat, from my understanding. I do have the vendor here. I just want to confirm. Yes. But I'm not speaking on a term. Thank you. Okay. Seeing no other questions. Chair would entertain action on this item. Mayor Pro Tem. Move approval. Councilmember Ryan. Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 6A. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Moving on to agenda item 6B, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton at Texas Municipal Home Rule Corporation, repealing the entirety of Division 3, we're out of way construction, Article 2, Construction and Repair, and Chapter 25, Street, Sidewalks, and Public Places of the City Code of Ordinance, etc. Hello. While I navigate through here, I'm Haley Salazar, Traffic Engineering Department, and I am here today as part of our efforts to move forward on the adoption of Article 2, the construction portion of our right of way ordinance. Let's see here. All right. Sorry about this. Here we are. So, as a city, our top priority has always been to maintain the safety of our vehicles and pedestrians traveling through our rights of way. And that includes the time when the right of way is under construction. But currently we lack the teeth we need to enforce safe and effective construction in the right of way. And that's because we're operating under this Article 2 right here. It's not very robust, and it's lost some of its relevancy as it was written over half a century ago. The City of Denton has changed a lot since the 1960s, as have the players in our right of way, as have the technology available to track and monitor activity in our rights of way. So what we propose is to repeal this Article 2 right here and replace it with this much more robust, up-to-date Article 2. And just to be clear, when we're talking about Article 2, we're talking about construction in the right of way. Backhoes, boots on the ground, barricades. We're not talking about use, such as storefronts, patio furniture for outdoor seating, walkability. That is a different portion of the ordinance, and we'll bring that forward on a later date. So it's just construction today. A little bit about the methodology we used to craft the new Article 2. To save time and money, we looked at other Texas cities, similar to Denton, that had recently successfully gone through the exercise of updating or creating a right of way ordinance. We took the best and most relevant portions of their ordinance and used that as a foundation to craft ours upon. Now, part of this ordinance does include fees, but once again, we did not work in a vacuum. We referenced these other ordinances and used their fees as a yardstick to set our fees by. So the next steps are that we hope to move forward and adopt this Article 2 and then have it in place by the first of the year. Any questions? We do have a couple questions. Councilmember Briggs. So I'm glad to see this coming to us. It's a long time overdue, but I do have a question because a lot of the time we get complaints and I see it myself and I've made a few complaints about construction signs and debris left in the right of way or pedestrian access being blocked. Does this ordinance address that in any way requiring anyone who's doing construction on roads or buildings to provide an alternate access for pedestrians? As far as alternate access and walkability, that's a bit of a different portion of the ordinance, but during construction, we've actually implemented some unique measures that I think are kind of neat. I want to move back up to this fees and penalties slides here. So if you look on the City of Denton at the very bottom, it says barricade fee, and it looks a lot higher than what you'll see for the other cities that have barricade charges, but ours is actually a deposit. And so it's an incentive to come and remove those barricades and things impeding pedestrian safety in the right of way. And so they'll actually get that money back. And so that's one of the measures we're taking in the ordinance to help kind of alleviate that issue. So just to clarify, I think I heard you say that they still can block that access, but if they remove it, they get $500 back. I'm just trying to understand. No, that $500 is for them to come and remove those materials when they're in the right of way when they're done. What will it be part of this right of way ordinance? It's a much more clear permitting process than what's there today. That process will be in place by January 1 when this is effective. That process also includes a traffic control plan, which includes pedestrian routes, pedestrian routing, along with detour routes for vehicles and bicycles. So that would be part of that review in order to get their permit. Okay, good. Thank you. Councilmember Archer. So I'm really excited about this, and especially because of ADA access and the difference it'll make for accessibility. The most recent encounter I had with their limitations of our previous ordinance was when and you know what I'm going to say, a someone who is legally blind fell into a hole that was left from a construction site right by the square. And it had fence a little fence around it but it was this that orange plastic stuff that could be cut with the kids scissors and it was about this high useless and he had a kid came. So, had there been even a physical barrier, but even with a physical barrier someone with a wheelchair. Anyway, so you guys did an awesome job. I was ready to go fix it myself. But you, you, your team went when you fixed it, what I'm wondering is, you know why not go with this San Antonio model and kind of charge for the day per day for a barrier with with that give it even more teeth. The teeth is really built into the penalties themselves currently where the ordinance really gives us the ability to permit, and then come. I can go in, it specifically says the city engineer can go on site and basically ask you to move or stop what you're doing. But there's nothing that says they have to get out. And it says they have to do something to correct the issue. So the penalties in and of themselves are set up in such a way that city can levy a penalty up to $500 if they're within the right away outside their permit operating without a permit in a scenario where it's not a health safety welfare scenario much like the trip hazard fall hazard. It could go up to $2,000 a day, if they don't take care of that infraction. Thank you. Yes, I move to approve. Councilmember breaks. Second. Let's vote on the board please for agenda item six B. Motion carries seven zero. We'll go to agenda item six C, which is consider approval of a resolution city of Denton Texas home rule municipal corporation, authorizing the use of construction management at risk delivery method for the construction of public safety facility. Please let the record reflect that Councilmember breaks will be recusing herself. Good evening mayor city council I'm Cassie Ogden director of procurement and compliance here to ask your approval for using the construction manager at risk for our public safety facilities. So as you may remember, Chris squadra from peak program value held a discussion with council on June 18 to discuss different procurement methods. At that time, council directed us to keep pursuing those methods. So with the, with the approval of the bond by the voters, we are here to ask for your approval of the construction. The CMAR process. So the CMAR process, as you may remember, it provides transparency of the bids by the for the subcontractors, it, it really helps us control project costs and delivery schedule. I approve tonight. This is our, this is our timeline for implementation. So we will advertise the RFQ this month will work on evaluating the submittals and hopefully be back to you in February for contract award. So I'm seeking approval to adopt a resolution, authorizing the use of the construction manager at risk delivery method for the construction of the public safety facility. And that is it. If you have any questions. Council member Melzer. Call the work session. Well, this part of it that never really completely made sense to me, and I imagine it might be true for members of the public as well. We're talking about a project that take place over a long period of time. We hear consistently about how construction costs rise over time, 1% per month. So why wouldn't it be to our advantage to lock in bids at the beginning of the process, why wouldn't that be more of an advantage than the flexibility that that you seek in the proposal. I don't, I guess I don't really understand what you mean by locking in the bids at the beginning. Yeah, I think the advantage of this situation was it's the ability to provide our budget to the contractors, making sure that they can manage and re-bid the subcontractor bids on more of an interactive basis. We have that enhanced control. When you put a project out for bid, you've got to either take those bids, reject the entire project, or perhaps add just a series of alternates. This allows you to have much more control over the subs and control those project costs, which is where we've seen a number of our projects really get stalled, is having hard bids and not the ability to negotiate with the subs. So that's really the advantage of this method, as well as locking in your price up front. So you're able to negotiate, value engineer those prices, and it really gives the contractor the incentive as well to make sure that they're locking in a solid bid process as possible with the subs as well. That's because the trades tend to be where you see the movement in these large projects. Well, and if I may, you're less likely to see change orders. So if you're doing a hard bid for a project, if you're doing low bid, we're most likely coming back with change orders depending on what happens in the market. With CMAR, you're less likely to see those change orders. So the price that you approve at the beginning is more than likely going to be closer to that price at the end. I think that was something that Mr. Squadro demonstrated pretty well to the council during the workshop, was how much more budget certainty these CMAR projects tended to have on the front end because of the lack of change orders. So that is probably the other major issue here, is just that certainty when we're issuing debt to these projects. So it's certainty because you're negotiating leverage with the subcontractors is greater than the inflation pressure. Yes. Construction overall. Thank you. Councilmember Arbiter. Yeah, so I just want to say, you know, anyone who's listening, it's probably hard to understand exactly what it is just from hearing it as presented. And what was his name again? Chris Squadro. Yeah, it was a really fascinating talk. And I learned a lot from it. And I don't know if it's possible to kind of put that, his talk from the work session up there, you know, retroactively in the backup. But if not, you know, maybe someone send me an email, remind me of the date, you know, so I don't have to search around for it and I could save it. But really interesting talk. And my, you know, layperson's way of summing it up would be basically to say that he showed what I have suspected, you know, with no evidence is that this this rate of the rising costs, construction costs is on the one hand, it's real. But on the other hand, it's artificially inflated by subcontractors and working together. And it's basically getting so it's kind of a game that they play. And you're getting somebody in there who knows the game and to kind of beat it and save save money for the city and get better prices. So it's really great, great for the taxpayer. And it is his talk really explained to me, kind of demystified the mystery behind this, you know, this this rising cost of construction. So, should I move approval? Yeah. And so with that, I move approval. We have a motion for approval of agenda item 16. Councilmember Ryan? I second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 6C. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries six with one absentia. Moving on to agenda item 6D, if someone could let Councilmember Briggs know that she can return to the council chambers. Agenda item 6D is considered adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton authorizing the expenditure of funds for the payment of wholesale transmission charges in the total of $7,219,975.36. Good evening Mayor, Council, City Manager Terry Nalty, Assistant General Manager at DME. This expenditure that we're asking to authorize is for the transmission expenses that we pay to the ERCOT market for movement of power from our renewable energy facilities that we have under contract and the market to serve our load. Our annual cost to ERCOT is approximately $16 million a year. However, that is offset by about $44 million a year that we receive for the cost of debt and expenses associated with the transmission system that DME has built. With that, I'd answer any questions. All right, any questions for agenda item 6D? Councilmember Briggs? Yeah, so forgive me if this is something that you've gone over. So is this is the city paying for use for transmission outside the city? That is correct. As part of the ERCOT market, we actually pay other transmission owners for their fixed and operating costs associated with the system that is the non-Denton system. We consume about 0.5% of the energy in the state of Texas in ERCOT, and that 0.5% is our load ratio share of the remaining transmission operator's costs. Okay, thank you. Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, can you speak to the difference between what these costs were before and after the gas plant? I realize you weren't here before the gas plant, so maybe the answer is no. The plant has absolutely no bearing on this. This is calculated strictly on the basis of the percentage of the load that you're serving compared to the total load served in the entire ERCOT market. So whether we were serving it from the deck or whether we're serving it from the market or a renewable resource, this charge would be the same. Okay, and even that's like including additional transmission lines and substations? Those costs that we've incurred are recovered through that $44 million payment that we received from the rest of the market for those transmission and substation facilities that we've built to enable wind energy from West Texas to get through the Denton area to get to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Okay, thanks. Councilmember Briggs? Thank you for making that clarification. I kind of wondered the same thing. But is it, so then is this part of the, is it the T-cost? So we're making this expenditure, but we will be getting some of it back? Correct. Okay. T-cost is transmission cost of service. And again, all we're doing is paying the other market participants our share of the cost to operate that transmission grid. Thank you. Any other questions? Seeing none. Councilmember Ryan? I move approval. We have a motion. Councilmember Davis? Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 6D. Let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 6E, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, a home rule. Municipal corporation authorizing city manager to execute a contract with Pavicon Public Works for the construction of South Bonnie Bray Street widening. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of the council, pretendation of deputy city engineer, and I have a quick presentation talking about Bonnie Bray and Vintage. So the limits of the project, Vintage Boulevard starting at I-35W all the way to U.S. 377, and about 1,800 feet of South Bonnie Bray, a short segment approximately a little over 500 feet on this side and another 1,200 feet on the north side. So that's the extent of the project. We're widening that from a two-lane facility to a four-lane divided facility. So the engineer's estimate was estimated at $14.5 million. We received 10 bids, and the lowest bidder was Pavicon at $11.6 million. As you can see, some of these construction firms that have been low are already in the area, and that's why you see the impact or see the likelihood of them bidding it lower because they're already established on several projects within the city. This is CIMA, that's U.S. 377, Zachary is Mayhill, and 2181. Regal is Bonnie Bray, phase one, and DDM is currently working on Bonnie Bray scripture. So you can see some of these already in town, and that's why there are lower bids. Here's a quick schedule for the project. We're in front of council today, and then we move to pre-construction in a couple of weeks, and the project timeline is about approximately a year to get this thing completed. Recommendation, we recommend adoption of the ordinance to move forward and award the contract to Pavicon. >> Councilmember Meltzer. >> Thank you. First, I'm pleased to see that number of bidders. I think that's up considerably from what we're used to seeing. You kind of went quick on who's doing what currently. Is Pavicon a new vendor to us? >> No, they've been around, I think I can't see noting up there, but they've worked in the city before. >> Okay. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind, it's a little more than tangentially relevant. Can you describe just at a high level our QC process, how we would test for phosphates and underground springs, underground conditions at frequent enough intervals to avoid the road buckling early in its life? That's a concern that I hear from people, and if you can describe at a high level, QC measures we would take to avoid the road buckling too early in its life. Because we intend the life of the road to be something like 30 years with proper maintenance, yes? >> So typically, we do go through geotechnical testing. When we define these cross-sections of roadway, we take core samples along the segments of the roadway to identify the soil conditions. And based on the core samples, the geotechnical engineer defines what kind of moisture content, what kind of compaction is required. And based on that, the design recommended for each of these segments, so yes, we go through a process of identifying and doing our homework before we move forward. >> And the city does that, right? >> Correct. >> The paving contractor doesn't control it. That's our engineer. >> We've already designed it to match the existing conditions out there. >> Thank you for that explanation. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> So on the list, it says pre-construction meeting. Is that a neighborhood meeting? Did you have any neighborhood meetings with the vintage neighborhood? >> So yes, we did have neighborhood meetings with the vintage. And one of the feedbacks that we had received that they were not for a wider segment of vintage. So this project was slightly modified and we're down to four lanes divided facility at this point. As far as the pre-construction meeting, it is more for the contractor and public works inspection team to get to know the project. >> So the design was lessened from the impact on the neighborhood? >> Correct. It was previously moving forward as a six lane divided. Now it's a four lane divided facility. >> And was that run back by through the neighborhood? Or is that what they were asking for? >> That's exactly what the neighborhood was concerned about. >> Thank you. Councilmember Amater. >> I just wanted to thank that neighborhood for moving down to four lanes from six lanes if you're watching neighborhood. >> Any other questions for staff? Councilmember Ryan. >> Move approval. >> Councilmember Meltzer. >> I'll second. >> We have a motion and a second. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries six to one. Moving on to agenda item F and we'll take a break after this agenda item. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas by Home Rural Municipal Corporation authorizing city manager to execute a contract with Jagle Public Company for the construction of McKinney Street, phase two. >> Again, this is the second project that we're moving forward with the construction, McKinney Street, phase two. The limits of the road are between loop 288 all the way to Grissom. There is the main roadway segment is to North Fork Road, which is right about the entrance to this residential neighborhood. And then there is a segment that needs construction as far as sidewalk and a 12 foot path on the north side. So that's part of this project as well. So the overall project is widening the facility to a four lane with a, from a two lane to a four lane along with a center turn lane as well as additional pedestrian and trail facilities. So there were four bids received in this particular case. The bid came in below the engineer's estimate. The lowest bidder was Jago. And the estimate was 11.5. The bid came in at a little under $10.5 million. Here's a quick construction schedule. You're with council today. We move forward with a pre-construction meeting pretty quickly, which is for tomorrow. Part of the reason for this project to move fast is we do have to be under construction before the end of this year per the funding associated with this particular project. And so the contractor within his contract has to get the construction going before December 12th. So he should have his mobilization and, you know, roadway signs up and running before December 12th. Recommendation staff recommends adoption of the ordinance and authorizing the contract for Jago Public. Could you go over the funding for this a little bit? Because this originally was a text dot road and we took it back. And so they had some funding to apply to this project. And then I believe we received more. Did we receive more funding from COG or is that just all estate funding? So this project has been on the books for a while, especially the way the funding was set up. This project in its entirety began all the way from Woodrow to Grissom, with Woodrow being the section closer to the downtown area. When text out received the funding, it was almost 10 years ago. And since the funding that was received about 18 million dollars was a very low amount at the time to get the road fully completed or fully constructed, there was a lot of back and forth. Ultimately, two years ago, this road was handed over to the city with the same amount of funding. So the 18 million dollar amount never changed. It was just given passed on to the city. So the city took over the road and the 18 million dollars of funding. And based on the actual assessment of how much can we build in the segment between Loop 288 and Grissom was the only possible segment that we could fit in. The priority was given to the segment primarily because of the high school and the pedestrian path and the safety aspect for this particular segment. So that's why the segment was chosen and the funding has never changed. It has been limited to 18 million dollars. So this project is completely funded and ready to go? Correct. Through text out. Okay. And this contract includes the Mayhill-McKinney intersection? Actually, this contract does not include the Mayhill-McKinney section. That intersection was pulled out. We're trying to expedite that through the Mayhill project. Okay. But it does include sidewalks on the opposite side that weren't put in yet? Correct. It includes sidewalks on both sides, a 12 foot trail on the north and a sidewalk on the south side. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Armitage. So I'm going to be voting no to this, but there are some things that I like about it. So I just want to make clear what I'm voting no to. So I like that it's funded by text out. I like the biking, pedestrian infrastructure, and I think it's a good bid. It's a good little bid in a local company. What I worry about is these expanding from two lanes to four lanes. I realize it's not six lanes, and I understand that it makes things faster, but for me, it comes at a cost for safety. So anyway, that's why I'm going to be voting no, safety and pedestrian and bike quality, just kind of general quality of life. But I do appreciate those measures. It's better for them. Okay. Any other questions? Seeing none, Councilmember Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. I want to thank staff for their diligence on getting this in before the end of the year. This item was actually brought up at the Regional Transportation Council this last month and got kudos for the city for having gotten it in with the extension to the 31st of this year. And with that, I move approval. Councilmember Briggs. So anyone that has driven on McKinney Street at least two times a day when Ryan is getting out knows that this is desperately needed, not only for movement, but also for safety for the sidewalks on either side. So I will happily second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 6F. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 6-1. Let's take about a five or 10-minute break. We'll come back and start our public hearings. Welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council with 756. And I appreciate staff changing out the clock there in the back for me so I can read it pretty easy. Appreciate that. Going on to our public hearings, 7A. Hold a public hearing. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton amending Section 1.7.8, rezoning with overlay conditions under prior regulations of the Denton Development Code. And because this is a public hearing, I will go ahead and open the public hearing. We'll have staff presentation, council questions, and then public comment. And then we'll move forward. Sounds good. Good evening, Mayor, members of Council, Ron McGuida, Development Services Principal Planner. For your consideration, this evening is a code amendment related to Section 1.7.8, again, related to the properties that are rezoned with overlay conditions. As you all know, back in April of this year, we updated our development code. With that, we also created a section related to these zonings that were approved with conditions. Those transitioned to PDs. What we're doing tonight is clarifying which standards and which regulations they fall under related to the remaining standards and regulations. And again, Section 1.7.8, it refers to the original ordinance authorizing the rezoning. That implies the 2002. However, our chart that we considered, the council considered back in September, it refers to the 2019 development code as far as what remaining standards and regulations apply to. The staff is aware of 45 properties that have this rezoning specifically with overlay conditions that transitioned to a PD. Again, we're here to clarify which development code governs all remaining zoning regulations and design standards. With that, the staff is proposing the following. As you see here, we are stating that any property that was rezoned with overlay conditions under the prior regulations shall be designated as a PD, which we've established. Shall be governed by the conditions. These are the conditions that the council approved in the ordinance authorizing rezoning. All remaining district regulations and design standards shall be governed by the base zoning district and development standards of this DDC, which is the one that was adopted in April and effective October 1st of 2019. With that, that is the proposed code amendment. The Planning Zoning Commission heard this in recommended approval, 6-0. And that concludes my presentation. I'll be happy to answer any questions. Council Mayor Meltzer. So when I read the proposed language, I interpret it to mean that it would get rid of all overlay restrictions. And I understand it does not mean that. Can you explain why that language does not mean that? That's correct. It's separated by two sentences. So what it's saying is that any property that was rezoned with overlay conditions shall be governed by the conditions listed in the ordinance authorizing that rezoning. So those will still apply. All remaining other regulations will be reviewed under the 2019 development code. That's what that second sentence is saying. So all the conditions that were approved with the rezoning will remain per that ordinance. However, all the remaining regulations that were not included in that ordinance will fall to the 2019 development code. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. Can you tell me a little bit why this is before us today? Sure. It's really there's a conflict. There's a conflict in where the the readers reading the 2002 code versus the 2019. We're clarifying that we want to make it clear. It is a 2019 development code that all remaining standards and regulations apply. So that is really the purpose of this is to clean up section 178 to read as follows. And that's the purpose of this code amendment. And I know that during our code process, we had outside municipal legal. Right. Have they reviewed this? They have not. But our legal department has. Okay. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions for staff? Seeing none. Thank you. Appreciate it, Ron. This is a public hearing. Anybody wishing to speak on this item? Please come down and state your name and address. Your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? Seeing no movement, we will close the public hearing. On agenda item 7A. Councilmember Meltzer. I move approval. Councilmember Ryan. Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 7A. Let's vote on the board, please. Motion carries 7-0. Agenda item 7C. Sorry, 7B. Hold a public hearing. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton amending section 1.3.4. Conflict with other ordinances and criteria manuals. I will now open the public hearing while your staff presentation. Thank you, Mayor, members of council, Ron McGinn, development service principal planner. Second code amendment for your consideration this evening. It is related to the criteria manuals. Again, quick background, development code adopted. Update that is in April. With that adoption, there were some regulations that were either revised, updated, or simply removed as part of that update. One of the things that we can -- what we figured out when we are preparing these criteria manual updates, we noticed that those procedures that were once in the 2002 code did not carry forward in the 2019. So what we are proposing tonight with the code amendment is really to bring back those procedures and to clarify the authority of the criteria manuals. So those sections that was read into record or is proposed to be part of this code amendment is section 1.3.4, as well as establishing a new section, which is section 2.11, to place back those development criteria manual procedures. So 1.3.4, as you see per this slide, we are proposing to have it read as follows. The whenever provision of the DDC conflicts with the criteria manual adopted by ordinance by the City of Denton as established in section 2.11, 2.11, including but not limited to those listed below. It's not something that the council is considering tonight, it is just really the language in which it illustrates or specifically provides that authority of the criteria manuals. The second section is an establishment of section 2.11, and it is that procedure that we were talking about earlier, and this is just an outline of what is included. The full section is in your backup, it has a purpose, it has minimum standards and responsibility, it has a procedure, one where a criteria manual is initially approved, and one where an administrative update of a criteria manual is conducted. It also has an approval criteria in which the council uses in their consideration when considering a new criteria manual, as well as an update to an existing criteria manual. Planning and Zoning Commission also considered this code amendment, recommended 6-0, and I will stand for questions. Questions for staff? Council Member Rice? Just one, the site design was stricken through, did that go to another area? Yes ma'am, administrative criteria manual is where those items will be now housed. Okay, thank you. Any other questions for staff? Seeing none, the public hearing was opened, so this is a public hearing, anybody wishing to speak on this agenda item, please come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? Seeing none, we'll close the public hearing. Council Member Briggs? I move approval. Council Member Davis? Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 7B, let's vote on the board please. Motion carries 7-0, moving on to agenda item 7C, hold a public hearing, consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton, amending subchapters 1, 6, and 8 of the Denton Development Code, relating it to applicability, gas well drilling, and production reverse setbacks, definitions, and procedures. We'll go ahead and open the public hearing, we'll take staff presentation, council comment, and then public comment. Alright, good evening, Haley Zygurski, Development Services. So I wanted to start with a little bit of background for everyone in the room regarding how code amendments proceed. The code offers three methods by which we can have a code amendment, either staff initiated as we just saw with the previous two presentations, or by recommendation of the Planning and Zoning Commissioner City Council. This particular amendment has been the product of many work sessions and discussions with council and falls under that third category. Just to remind everyone of the timeline that this has gone through, we started with work sessions back in September of 2018. There were two additional discussions with council before this ended with a work session at the Planning and Zoning Commission in October, and then finally the Planning and Zoning Commission held a public hearing regarding these amendments on November 6th. Again, just to make sure we're all on the same page moving forward with the discussion, I wanted to review the current setback types that are in the development code. There are two main categories, those that apply to gas well drilling and production sites, and those that are applicable to protected uses, which are called reverse setbacks. So the drilling and production site setback is measured from the pad site boundary outwards to protected uses or residential lot lines. And there is a subset of that called a minimum setback through which an operator can request a variance to reduce that standard down to the minimum, which is either 500 or 250 feet. The reverse setback is kind of the opposite of that. It's measured from the protected use itself towards the boundary of the production site. So the request before you this evening is to hold the public hearing and consider amendments to subchapters 1, 6, and 8, specifically looking at increasing reverse setbacks and associated procedures. There are four main categories that I've divided this into that we'll go through one by one. First will be the setback discussion. Second would be nonconformities, and then variance and relief procedures, and then some minor amendments to our subdivision procedures that go along with those variance options. I did want to frame this also in the context of the criteria for approval for a code amendment so that we keep those in mind as we move through this. The code requires that we look at these five criteria, whether it's consistent with our comprehensive plan and other applicable city policies, whether there's conflict with any other provisions of the DDC or code of ordinances, whether it is necessary to address a community need, necessary to respond to a change in conditions or policy, and then whether it's consistent with the general purpose and intent of the DDC. So starting with setbacks, this is just a matrix showing where the code is today. So we again have those three broad categories of setbacks. You'll see that reverse setbacks are currently 250 feet in all instances. This is what that same matrix would look like with the amendments. So as counsel discussed at work session and provided direction for that reverse setback would increase to 500 feet in all of those categories. And then we're introducing a fourth type of setback in the same spirit that operators currently have a minimum setback they can request a variance for. We will be introducing a reverse minimum setback through which a protected use owner or developer could seek a variance to get down as low as 250 feet. Associated with those changes are a couple of definitions. So the existing definition of reverse setback would be amended to reflect that there is now a separate category for minimum. And then we would introduce a new definition for minimum reverse setbacks. And that would be the minimum distance the protected use or residential lot must be separated by a surface owner from an approved drilling and production site or from a gas well within such site after administrative relief or a variance is granted to reduce the setback. And then the final item with regard to setbacks that we're looking at an amendment for is simply a clarification. The code currently has those requirements for how setbacks are measured. It applies from the exterior point of a proposed structure to be occupied by a protected use towards the gas well site or from a residential lot line. When looking at a public park, which is a protected use, that doesn't necessarily apply because there aren't always structures to be occupied. So we're looking to provide clarification that for the purposes of measurements of parks, the measurement would be taken from any improvement such as a building, playground equipment, pools or splash pads, ball fields or pavilions, but not including flat work such as parking lot sidewalks or trails. So again just wanted to summarize this part before we move on to the other items and see if you all have any questions regarding the categories before you regarding setbacks, which is the increase in reverse setback, the changes to definitions and then clarification for parks. >> Yeah, can you just speak, can you go back to the slide that shows the difference between the setback and reverse setback? And can you just speak to for the reverse setback, what is it, the wall of the building, it's only permanent structures that count, right? >> It's the structure that is defined as the protected use, so a school for a new residential subdivision, it would be from a lot line, but for say existing platted lots, it would be from the residential structure. So it's the protected use structure itself, unless park as we just discussed would be. >> So that would be like the permanent structure, the permanent building, not a fence. >> It would not apply to a fence unless say it's a residential lot line and that fence happens to be on the lot line. >> Okay, all right, seeing no further questions. >> All right, so the second category I wanted to address was nonconformities. We talked about this pretty extensively through the work sessions. If you all recall in August at our last work session, there was general direction that council was interested in trying to find a way to prevent the creation of nonconformities with the adoption of this ordinance because we looked at the numbers and it would be a total of just over 1,000 potentially nonconforming uses with this increase. So in response to that, staff drafted this language that would be added to subchapter one. This would allow that the gas well reverse setbacks as increased by this ordinance would not cause any existing legally established protected use or residential lot to become nonconforming. It would be deemed as a lawful site feature lot or structure, provided that it is not closer than 250 feet from the drilling and production site. So again, that would not assist any sites that are nonconforming to the 250 today would not be affected by this. It would just be those falling within the 250 to 500 foot range. We defined that legally established would also include any protected use structure site feature lot or a lot that is part of a project under chapter 245 of the local government code. So that would allow all of the projects that are in process today that might be affected by this to have the same protection from becoming nonconforming. I did want to note that as we discussed at the work sessions, our legal counsel does not recommend approval of this option. There is concern about kind of bifurcating the nonconformities so that if someone say that was at 249 feet from a gas well would not be able to rebuild their home if it were destroyed under our current code, whereas someone next door or across the street slightly further away would be able to rebuild because they would be considered lawful with this language in the code. Yes, go ahead, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Haley. That was one of the reasons. The other reason we didn't recommend this is because this particular provision is drafted is because you're creating different types of nonconformities in the city. So if you have the luxury of living within 250 and 500 feet from a gas well, you'd be able to rebuild if your home is destroyed. However, if you're a business or any other type of nonconformity anywhere else in the city, if it is destroyed, you will not be able to rebuild. So that was the other legal reason why we didn't recommend that this provision be added. Thanks, Aaron. So kind of option two, if you will, you'll notice in your backup there were three different options for subchapter one. So this is ordinance exhibit A2 as provided in your backup. And this is an option that staff is recommending that would allow some protection for those nonconformities. So those sites that are within 500 feet or the protected uses would become nonconforming. But with the addition of this language that is actually from our 2002 development code back into the 2019 code, they would be potentially allowed to rebuild by going through the Zoning Board of Adjustment. This almost exact language was contained in the 02 code, so it's been in effect across the city since that was adopted. It was removed in the 2019 code with a stricter provision added that you simply could not rebuild if you were destroyed by more than 50%. So by adding this back in, it would allow all nonconformities, protected uses, and other uses in the city the ability to go to the Board of Adjustment and seek to rebuild their site after some sort of accident or natural disaster. The Planning and Zoning Commission had some concerns with this language and they felt that there was conflict between this and the minimum reverse setback provisions. They actually also wanted to make this more liberal applicability as well to allow people to rebuild without having to go to ZBA. Just rebuild by right if your site is destroyed by accidental or natural disasters. So that became option three for subchapter one. This is the Planning and Zoning Commission's recommended language. Again, it would be even broader in scope than what staff was recommending because it would not require the Board of Adjustment approval to rebuild. So in this case, the only nonconforming structures that couldn't be rebuilt were voluntary demolitions. Everything else could be rebuilt by right and this would be applicable citywide. I have a real quick question on that. So in my understanding that is this in the oil and gas well ordinance and so we'd have two different standards or are they saying change the current standard we have to this standard? Current standard citywide, subchapter one is applicable to any nonconformity. Are we considering that? I mean, if we're changing the oil and gas ordinance, is this part of, is option three something that we would include in that particular part of the code or is it somewhere else in the code? It's in a different section of the DDC. It's not in the gas well ordinance. So even if we wanted to change that tonight, are we posted for that? Yes, you are posted for that. All three of these options would be housed in subchapter one. And so just to summarize those, I wanted to kind of put them in a matrix for you all to see them side by side. The original council requested option again would be within 250 feet everything would remain nonconforming as it is today. So those could not rebuild anything between 250 and 500 that would be deemed legal if it's a protected use nonconformity of the gas well setback. Those could be rebuilt. And again, this language is not recommended because of those bifurcations between the different types of nonconformities that we discussed. The second option is the staff recommendation, everything within 500 feet would become nonconforming. However, all of those protected use or other uses that are nonconforming to other code provisions could then go to ZBA to rebuild their sites. Same process that was in the 2002 code. And then option three, an orange exhibit 3A to your ordinance is the P&Z recommendation that everything within 500 feet would still become nonconforming, but they could rebuild by right. And then all nonconforming structures again would be able to utilize this process. It would be applicable citywide. So I wanted to pause here and see if there were any questions, concerns about these three before moving on. Any questions, comments? Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, one question. So help me reconcile P&Z's recommendations. So when we vote, if P&Z did not support staff's recommendation, they supported their own, what is the voting requirement? Does that trigger a supermajority because they did not line up with staff's recommendation? Is it a negative word? It's only in the event that there was a negative recommendation that would trigger the supermajority vote. This was not a negative recommendation as far as with P&Z. For the entire ordinance. For the entire ordinance, exactly. But they, okay, I don't get it, but okay. So question, the recommendation coming to P&Z includes option three? Correct. Their exact motion was approval of subchapter six and eight exactly as presented to them and then option, or sorry, subchapter one, they recommended modifications to allow rebuilding by right. So that's their recommendation coming forward for us. If we don't agree with that, it doesn't require a supermajority. If they said we're going to, we issue a recommendation of denial, whatever's in that, what was in that ordinance, then that would require a supermajority. Council Member Davis. So question for the city attorney. I think I understand the concerns with option one and the different types of nonconforming, different standards for nonconformities as opposed to, you know, inside the radius of a gas well as opposed to somewhere else in the city. Can you help us understand why that's a particular problem? Is it that we're treating different things unequally and we're vulnerable to certain liabilities there? Is it that it is an equitable argument? Help me understand. There's both a legal and a practical. The legal is that by creating two different classes of nonconformities and treating them differently, you potentially raise an equal protection argument. Especially when you're dealing with somebody's home, business, livelihood, the liability increases. The more practical argument, it would be if a person, maybe a homeowner or a business that's not next to a gas well, their structure is demolished completely and they find out that they can't rebuild like they can if they're within 250 to 500 feet from a gas well pad site. Then they will probably ask yourselves, the manager, myself and staff, why are we being treated differently? And that's more of a practical argument that would be raised. Well, from the equitable argument, we at one point said you could build within 250 feet. And now we change it. And if something happens, then you can't rebuild if it's destroyed past a certain percentage. So I would say that's probably a pretty good equitable argument. OK, anybody else on this? Seeing none, OK. All right, so the third component to these updates would be with regard to variances. Currently, the gas well ordinance contains various options for a gas well operator to seek a variance from that gas well drilling and production site setback down to the minimum setback. There's three options for operators. One of those is going to the Board of Adjustment. The second is obtaining waivers from all of the property owners that are within their setback radius. And then the third is an administrative relief procedure that has very limited applicability. So we kind of modeled these after that. This slide here is simply showing you where in subchapter six we would provide the cross references to these new procedures that we're offering. So in the permitting section if someone were to go look, they would find reference to the applicable procedures for protected use to seek a variance. So the first process that would be applicable to protected uses would be that standard hardship process that goes to ZBA. So we would update the language there to apply to affected property owners that could be allowed to seek this variance. And then we would provide criteria for approval for that. There are five standard criteria for approval for all ZBA actions. Those would still apply. These three would be in addition to those. And those three conditions would be the reasonable use of the surface of the subject property by the owner or developer. The availability of alternative site designs or subdivision layouts. And then finally compatibility with any existing gas well development site plans or plats. So we have to ensure based on other sections of the code that access to gas well sites is not removed. This is just a snapshot of those five applicable criteria that would apply to any ZBA action. Again, those would all still be in effect here. We're proposing no changes. And then the second process is mirrored after the operator's administrative waiver process. So we wanted to provide an administrative relief mechanism. This applies in very limited instances where a site is 50% or more encumbered by the reverse setback. So there would be two provisions that they would have to meet both of those. That first would be the 50% effect on their site. And then the second would be rather they can demonstrate that they've used all of the available alternative site designs options within the DDC to maximize their buildable area. So this would allow staff to provide, if they meet these criteria, to provide a reduction from 500 to as low as 375, which is half the difference between the requirement and the minimum. But by requiring that they go through these alternative site design criteria, we can ensure that if they can obtain the same results and get down to only 450 feet, say, we wouldn't have to approve that as low as 375. So we wanted to provide some criteria to make sure we're not giving more than is necessary. So for a residential subdivision, those criteria that we would allow them to apply is our cluster subdivision standards. Citywide, those are an option for sites that have over five acres and rezone to a planned development. As we'll see in just a moment, we propose to strike those two requirements and allow them to use those cluster subdivision standards, which would then allow them to shrink lot sizes, provide reduced setbacks within the lots and things like that to capture the same, close to the same at least, number of lots within their subdivision by reducing that 500 to as low as 375. For any other protected use, we created kind of a modified version of the minor modification process that was introduced in the 2019 DDC. That process allows staff to approve up to a 10% increase in any of the zoning requirements. So we modified that for things that seemed most applicable to developments that would be affected by a gas well setback. So they could then modify building height or building coverage by as much as 20% or decrease the unit size or number of required parking spaces by as much as 20% to capture, again, more developable area on their site. Just looking at those two side by side, again, the standard variance process would allow the 500 foot to be reduced as low as 250 going through ZBA and meeting the hardship criteria. The administrative relief option requires that they meet the 50% affected area on their site threshold and demonstrate that they've utilized those site design standards to maximize development and minimizing the need to reduce that setback. And that would go as low as 375. So again, just wanted to pause and see if there were any questions regarding variances specifically. >> Can you tell me or remind me how the 375 feet came into play? >> Certainly, that is modeled after the administrative option for gas well operators that allows staff to approve a reduction that is down to half of the difference between the requirement and the minimum setback. So using that same methodology here, half the difference between 500 and 250 gets us to 375. >> OK. >> All right. >> Any more questions? >> All right. So related to the variance options, we did again need to modify a couple of things within the cluster subdivision procedures to allow for those sites that are more than 50% affected by the setback to not have to meet the citywide minimums for cluster subdivision. So within the applicability section in subchapter eight, we would be removing that minimum parcel size of five acres. And then within the review and approval criteria, we would strike the requirement for them to rezone to a plan development if their site is more than 50% affected. I don't suspect there are any questions here, but wanted to provide that opportunity. >> Councilmember Briggs, you're still up. >> Well, I'm still up, but you went through that really quick. I didn't even have a chance to look at it. And my question is, are we making changes to the cluster subdivision section of our DDC? Is that what -- is this what this is -- >> Only in these two limited instances. It's merely providing the applicable cross-reference for sites that are trying to utilize the standard that are affected by the gas well setback. It's removing the requirement that they have at least five acres because many sites wouldn't have that minimum size. And it's removing the requirement that they rezone prior to utilizing these standards just in these instances. >> So if they have a gas well on their property, the five acre minimum goes away? >> If their site is more than 50% encumbered by the reverse setback, the gas well wouldn't have to be on site necessarily. >> But if they're not encumbered, then the five acre requirement stays? >> Still applies, correct. >> Okay. Any other questions on this item? On this particular subset of this item? >> All right. So I wanted to run through the criteria for approval and bring us back to what the code requires for these actions. The first requirement is consistency with the comprehensive plan and other city policies. Our Denton comprehensive plan, Denton plan 2030, has a section on gas wells and speaks specifically to the incompatibility between this industrial use and what it calls sensitive land uses or protected uses. So this would fall within the parameters of providing greater compatibility and consistency between those uses by providing a higher setback distance. The comprehensive plan does not specify any range or specific distance for what that separation distance should be. The second criteria is whether it conflicts with any other provision of the DDC or municipal code. We didn't identify any conflicts by making these amendments to subchapters six and eight. However, we wanted to point out that the version of subchapter one, the original option, which would be preventing creation of nonconformities, would create conflict as we discussed by creating those different subsets of nonconformities that would be treated differently throughout the city. And again, for that reason, staff is not recommending that particular option. The third criteria for approval is whether it's necessary to address a demonstrated community need. Again, just bringing us back to how this all started, council identified that there were concerns of compatibility between these uses and protected uses specifically related to community health and safety as well as other nuisance concerns such as noise, lighting, truck traffic. And generally felt that the 500 foot setback would be more protective than the 250. And that was originally based on the results of the Fort Worth Air Quality Study that we discussed at work session. The fourth criteria is whether it's necessary to respond to a substantial change in condition or policy. There hasn't been a change in policy, however, this is a different council than we had in 2015. And you all, through the work sessions, identified that you see the need for a higher setback than what was first adopted in 2015. And then the fifth criteria is consistent with the general purpose and intent of the DDC. If you look through the purpose statements at the very beginning of the 2019 development code, you'll find statements regarding the protection of public health and safety promoting the general health and welfare of the citizens and encouraging appropriate use of land. So this would fall within those parameters. We did provide notification in the newspaper and on the city's website for this code amendment. There were four written responses that I received prior to the Planning and Zoning Commission. I printed out copies and passed those out to you all. I believe you've received them previously but wanted to make sure you all had them. And just to summarize, again, we're looking at four major changes with regard to sub-chapter six, increasing reverse setbacks to 500 feet, revising definitions, clarifying measurements at parks. In sub-chapter one, we're looking at any of the three options provided regarding non-conformities. And then, again, within sub-chapter six, providing variance and relief procedures either through ZBA or through an administrative relief provision. And then in sub-chapter eight, those minor amendments only for those specific instances where someone's applying for administrative relief, where we would modify the procedures and applicability for the cluster subdivision standards. So staff is recommending sub-chapter one, option two, which is exhibit A2 as provided with your draft ordinance this evening. The changes in sub-chapter six and changes in sub-chapter eight provided in ordinance exhibits B and C. The Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval of this five to one. They did have a modification to sub-chapter one. So, again, that's provided as ordinance exhibit A3, if you wish to look at it. And then sub-chapter six and eight, they recommended as presented. I'm happy to stand for any questions. >> Councilmember Briggs? >> No. >> Okay. >> No, that just won't go away. >> Yeah, I'd like to clarify a little bit of the history, isn't it the case that reverse setbacks were actually decreased at one point along the way from 2014 to today? >> I'm not aware of the exact number in 2014. I know they were first introduced in 2010. I believe that was 250 feet. >> It's been 250 since 2010. >> Okay, I had the impression that at one point there was a movement. So, in any event, in all that time, just sort of indicating the penalty for not reaching agreement is that many years have passed and it hasn't changed. Also, you referenced the Fort Worth study, and this is something I understand but might be helpful for others to hear. The Fort Worth standard is 600 feet, but can you explain how that's substantially the same as what's proposed here at 500 feet? How can that be? >> Yeah, certainly. So, Fort Worth requires that the measurement for their reverse setback be taken from the wellhead location. So, their measurement of 600 feet from a wellhead to a protected use through our analysis using our GIS software. We found that it was generally consistent with 500 feet measured from the edge of a pad site due to the fact that the wells are typically located within the central portion of a site and there's 50 to 100 feet of maneuverability on all sides typically. So, roughly similar measurements taken from different points. >> So, 600 feet from the wellhead versus 500 feet from the edge of the pad. So, the end result is approximately the same? >> Correct, generally consistent. >> Also, just to backtrack and give a little history, I had said in recent months that I wasn't necessarily for doing more or for doing less, I was for doing science. I'm kind of filling in the public on this, we know this, that we got an estimate for doing a study of our own. The estimate was $2 million and two years to execute. There wasn't support for doing that. The reason we're talking about Fort Worth is that it's based on the same geology, the same -- and it's therefore viewed as potentially more defensible. So, one question I have is, and this I think is probably more properly a question for Dr. Banks, is that study -- has the science changed since the Fort Worth study done? Is there something improper about the way it was done? Is it out of date? Is that a valid reference point for us today? >> I will defer that to Dr. Banks. The study was done in 2011. The approach that they use, I would deem to be still scientifically valid. The methodologies have not changed. The modeling is consistent. The standards that were used, particularly the ESLs, the environmental screening levels, or effects screening levels, pardon me, have been revised. I went through the list today. It's a very extensive list of compounds that they used for their analyses. I was not able to review every one of them, but the one -- I tried to hit the major compounds of concern, benzene, acrolein, formaldehyde, toluene, ethylene, et cetera. Those appear to either be at the same levels or at a higher level of safety, if you will, in the more current studies. And so I would say based on the effects screening levels that were in the study, the concentrations that were observed and modeled, and comparing that to the 2016 values, again, I didn't do all compounds, but I did the ones that I felt were the most important. They appear to be consistent, or it could even be argued that the 2011 values, or a couple of the parameters, were actually a little bit more conservative. Thank you. Councilmember Armitage. Oh, Ken, don't leave. Don't leave, Ken. Question for you. So you're talking about the Fort Worth study, and the 2019 Colorado study recommends 2,000 feet setback and says that 500 feet is extremely dangerous, even within that 2,000 feet, everything from nosebleeds to cancer clusters. So can you speak to what is it about the Fort Worth study? What year was that again? That was in 2011. Yeah, 2011, that's better than the 2019 Colorado study. You're looking at a completely different geology. You're looking at large-scale drilling operations where you have many, many wells on a single-path side. It's just not consistent with what's going on in the Barnett Shale. A lot of the drilling operations within Colorado are a mixture of oil and gas. And so it's just, in my opinion, the consistency with the type of geology that we have in this area, the type of drilling that is done in order to yield minerals from that geology, suggests to me that the Fort Worth study is more applicable. Well, so obviously, Fort Worth is closer than Colorado, but I do know that here we have lots of gas wells in a very small cluster, in a very small space. And I know that they have fracking, we have fracking. Right. So anyway, yeah, thank you. I've got a question, Dr. Banks. Maybe it's for Councilmember Arnter. Councilmember Arnter, you were referring to the Colorado study done in 2019 that was a follow-up to the 2017 study. Is that the study you're referring to? I'm not sure if it's a follow-up to the 2017 study or it's just its own study. Have you read that study that you just quoted? Yes. In fact, I just, I sent it to the city manager at the beginning of this meeting because I knew that either you or Mayor Pro Tem would ask me for it. Could you help me understand, because I'm looking at the executive summary of that study. And there's nowhere in the executive summary where it talks about any recommendation. I do, and I'll read the sentence out loud. It says, it's too long, but at 500 foot distance for a smaller number of chemicals, et cetera, benzene, I don't even know if I'm pronounced most of these. It says, particularly caused by a factor of 10 or more during oil and gas well development activities, particularly during flowback activities of small well pipes, those highest predicted acute exposures decreased rapidly with the distance from hypothetical facilities, but remained above guidelines leveled out at 2,000 feet under a relatively small number of oil and gas development scenarios. Our identification of these estimated exceedances of acute health guidelines is highly conservative in that these highest estimated exposures occur when the highest chemical emissions are highly concentrated by "worst case meteorological conditions" onto a hypothetical person who is outdoors or in a highly ventilated area, which might happen only rarely. And then it goes on to talk about at 500 feet, some of those were under the guidelines. So when you say that it recommended 2,000 feet, unless you can point me to another page, I've missed it. So there are like 200 pages and I can put you to a different summary of it. Essentially, and so I'm not a scientist, but we're talking about risk and we're not talking about certainty. And so any of these studies, including the Fort Worth study, you know, they're looking at risk. So none of these studies are actually, if any study said if you live this close to a fracking site, you definitely will get cancer, you know, or even if you live this far away, you definitely will be safe, then I would be really suspicious of that study. I think every, you know, every respectable study should be making conservative estimates like that and have exactly those kind of qualifiers about a hypothetical person, a hypothetical situation and risk. And, you know, when we do risk analysis, even financial risk analysis in the city where we're kind of considering this, the same kinds of factors, not predicting the future, just questioning what is the risk and is it worthwhile? Sure. And I don't necessarily disagree with you on that. I've just, you stated that the study recommended a certain setback distance and I was just wanting to, because I thought I might have missed it in the study. So if you had a page number or a reference, I certainly was wanting to read that. So I could say it says to me that, as I understand it, that there is risk even within that 2,000 feet. So, and definitely 500 feet, you can see, you know, it's kind of divided by, you know, non-cancer risk, cancer risk. And the risk starts at, you know, it is at 500 feet, there's high risk. Okay. No, I just was, I heard something that I was trying to make sure that I didn't miss it. So, I mean, we can have a different opinion about what it says, but I thought I heard you say that it recommended, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't misreading something. Yeah, no, I probably said that. I guess you could change that too, that it says that it's risky, 500 feet is risky. And, you know, 2,000, I think anybody would think anybody reading this would see that should be 2,000 feet. Okay. All right. Okay. Any other questions? Before we open the public comment, I think I opened the public hearing. First of all, I want to thank you, Haley, for that was a very concise presentation on a lot of moving parts on an important issue. So, thank you so much. I thought it was very concise, very efficient, and really laid it out well to really help me understand what the issues were and how we try to move forward. So, thank you for that. All right. This is a public hearing. I've got several cards who wish to speak. I have several who do not wish to speak. So, we'll go through the ones that wish to speak first, and then we'll just read the other ones into the record. Catherine Lustgarten, if you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. And I'll try to stay true to this process. I'll try to call the next speaker so they'll be ready. The next speaker will be Margaret Neal. And if I somehow mess this up and skip you, just raise your hand, shout out, "Hey, you missed me." I'll make a correction. My name is Dr. Catherine Lustgarten, 11809 Sutherland Drive. Mr. Mayor and council members, I'm mainly here tonight bringing my background as a veterinary radiologist. In my profession, I was licensed for the medical use of radioactive materials. In order to obtain that license and maintain that license over many years, I was required to agree to a very stringent set of safety requirements and procedures and training of my employees. The purpose of those restrictions and requirements were to assure public safety. And they were not directed only at safety of myself and my employees, but actually most importantly for the safety of the innocent bystander. The innocent bystander might be the person in the waiting room down the hall from my office. The innocent bystander might be the person who parked their car closest to my end of the building. So people who had no vested benefit from the presence of radioactive materials and the risks that entailed. Safety precautions required structural changes in my clinic building. They required daily and sometimes more than daily monitoring of radioactive levels in various spaces within the clinic building. That monitoring could only be done by quite costly instruments. So the effect of implementing those safety precautions was to add a considerable expense to my clients who came to me seeking treatment and procedures for their pets with these radioactive materials. The State Bureau of Radiation Control does not issue exemptions, variances, waivers. Your procedures are either safe, ensure the public safety, or they're not. And in particular, they did not appreciate a request for, please don't make us do this thing, which is really expensive because that impacts the cost to my client and may require that they can afford to have this procedure done for their pet. So the cost to the end user is really not a valid consideration in establishing what is a safe practice and what is not a safe practice. I want you to remember that phrase, the protection of the innocent bystander. So mixing land that has gas wells on it with land that's going to have buildings on it, the person who decides to go ahead and have a house there or build a business there is not the innocent bystander necessarily. Ten years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, somebody else is going to live in that house or operate that business. They're the innocent bystander. I ask you to protect the innocent bystander with your gas regulations. Seems like we've got a couple of questions for you. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Really quick. Thank you very much for your comments. But I do need to note, does your home fall within the 200 feet, 250 feet or 500 feet of a existing well? Thankfully, it does not. I do live in Robeson Ranch. There's a lot of gas wells there. My home is more than a thousand feet from the nearest gas well. I would not have bought that house had it been otherwise. Thank you. Councilmember Armitage. Thanks. I appreciated your comments about minimums and variances, how those don't exist in the world you were just describing. Have you seen any scientific justification or public health justification for minimums or variances? I certainly haven't, but I'm not sure if maybe I'm not looking in the right places. You're asking in reference to gas wells? Yes. Unfortunately, I'm not educated in that. But I have attended some seminars and talks from experts in the impact of gas well and other oil industry contaminants and the impact on the health and safety of nearby humans. And it's my understanding that 500 feet is not considered an acceptable safe distance. And I would ask that you not pass an ordinance that allows that close of a proximity to an occupied building in a gas well. Thanks. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem? Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate it. Margaret Neal is up next. And then Sharon Spice, sorry, Sharon Spice. All right. My name is Margaret Neal and I live at 731 Hillcrest. Thank you for letting me speak tonight. At the same time, I have to say it's really sad that I'm speaking again tonight. As I was preparing for this, I jumped into my Google Drive and I pulled up all the documentation and just all of the records that I have about this particular fight in this city. And I'm almost in tears right now just the frustration I feel and the anger that I feel that we can sit here and we can say 250 feet, 500 feet. It is just logical. It is just you do not have to be a scientist to figure out that 500 feet is unacceptable to be that close. There are plenty of studies out there that have shown that and they keep on finding new stuff as they go along. So let me, sorry, again, I'm emotional about this. This all began actually. I know that a lot of people think it started about five years ago, but actually we started talking about this in 2009. I don't think there was anybody that's on the council now that was on the council when all of this started. And in my memory, I guess as I'm getting older, I just it's not as clear as it used to be. But going back in and reading, you know, going to EPA meetings, going to the TCEQ, going, you know, all all of the things that were done, raising money in the neighborhood to get the air. We came to the city and we said, hey, you know what? There are about to be these wells at Razor Ranch and we'd like to have baseline air testing and we'd like to have we'd like to test the water before it. Would you all be willing to pay for it? Of course, that was a no. So we went around and we raised money in the neighborhood and we still have those test results. And since then, some of the things that have happened in 2015, I think there was a lightning bolt that struck a gas well that was low producing. And caused a fire. And I believe that we had to have a crew from Houston come up because our fire department wasn't able to handle it. I know that there was a former city council member that lived in the neighborhood that was right there that could feel the heat of that explosion. You know, on the walls of her home, two hundred and fifty feet, five hundred feet unacceptable. We asked for a thousand feet back in 2013. I have my PowerPoint presentation and at that time we went in and we looked at other ordinances from area cities like Grapevine and Colleyville and Highland Village in Southlake. And they weren't afraid of the lawsuits. They went ahead and they put stuff into place and they said, you know what? The health and safety of our citizens is the primary concern. It is not the dollar of the middle rights owners. That is unacceptable. And just to throw a little of oil onto this fire right now, I have a new story about in 2017 there was an explosion in Firestone. And it had it was a gas line, a pipeline that had been improperly cut off underground and left connected to a nearby gas well. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that they found the town of Firestone had hadn't done enough to ensure that the neighborhood was safe before allowing homes to be built nearby. It's the first time that an outside agency has assigned culpability to the town of Firestone for that explosion. So how angry are the citizens of Denton and how long have they had that anger? So when some tragic thing happens that we've already seen the possibility is able to happen. I work at Geyer. I know we have gas wells that are less than 100 feet away from the baseball stadium. You know, a couple of questions, I believe, for you. Mayor Pro Tem. Similar question. So I'm just, is your home currently 250 feet or 500 feet? No, my place of employment is in my home is I would say maybe a thousand feet. Okay, thank you. Councilmember Briggs. The cities that you mentioned with its thousand feet, was that, do they have a thousand feet setback and a thousand feet reverse setback? Oh, what we asked for back in 2013. The cities that you just listed off, like you said, for a thousand feet. So I'm wondering if it was for a regular setback and then reverse. I'm pretty sure it was a regular setback, not a reverse setback. Councilmember Davis. In your own mind, in the some of the research you presented and your own research, how far a reverse setback do you think is acceptable? Minimum 1500 to 2000 feet. And even then. And in your own mind, and I'll let others speak for themselves, in your own mind, why do you suppose the city is tonight considering 500 feet as opposed to 1500 feet? I think that my understanding is that 500 feet is better than 250 feet. But why not 1500? Why do you suppose the city? I think they're afraid of legal actions. What types of legal action? I mean, were you around during the fracking ban? Sure. I'm asking your understanding of what our legal challenges would be at 1500 feet. My understanding? I'm not really, I guess I'm not sure. That usually comes at us. I can't tell you why y'all are fearful of legal action. I just know that that has been historically the way the city has responded. Sure. I guess my concern is if the charge is going to be that we're concerned about legal action, whether the community is aware of what our legal risks are at every successive foot that we go further out. Could you explain those to me? So I'll ask each person that speaks tonight the same question basically. What is your understanding? What do you think the risks are for the city legally? No, I'm asking you, can you explain to me what those risks are? It sounds as if you understand that. So it's been in the backup materials, but we'll take that up at the appropriate time. Okay. Okay, Councilmember Armitage. Procedurally, can I speak to why I believe we reached that 500 point or would that come later? Well, we've got about 20 speakers. So I'd like to get through the public comment and then you could, I think you could, we'll probably be discussing some of that. Okay. I'll make sure to make sure to mention that. Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Sharon, if you'll come down and state your name and address, your time will begin. And then the next speaker will be Jim Moffitt. Hello. Here we are again. I feel like Margaret. We've been through this and it just baffles me. My name is Sharon Spies. I live at 7501 Stallion Street here in Denton. And I too came here and spoke about the fracking ban and we all know how that ended up. So I'm going to start off, if I can put this up. This is kind of what the reasonings why I think we need to table this now, not approve the 500 feet and why we need some more work done on it. But if we could get the overhead, please. One of the items on there is I think it's number five is the line compressor stations. That's kind of where I'm going to speak mostly about. But I agree with everything that's on here. I think these are the things that we need to include in our ordinances. We've needed this for a very long time. So I'll try to go through this pretty quickly. I believe councilmember armature. This is a informational staff report. So one of the questions on here was put down about the line compressors. And I believe our city attorney said that the Texas Railroad Commission regulates those. And so we don't need to have anything in our ordinance because it's covered by the Railroad Commission. If that's kind of what I'm reading this correctly, I don't agree with that statement. And I think it has nothing to do with HB 40. And this document right here is five pages long of Fort Worth's ordinance on line compressors specifically. And these ordinances have been approved starting in 2009 and the latest addition to it has been 2016. Fort Worth has not been challenged at all through the HB 40. So I don't think that the HB 40 is a valid excuse for us not to have strong ordinances. I think the main reason we need have strong ordinances is the health and the welfare of the people that live in this city. Myself and all of you included. Some of you were here in 2014. Some of you weren't here in 2014. But it's a problem. And Dr. Hart's conversation about the Fort Worth study, and I'm not familiar with that. But what he was saying was that the health and safety was not affected. You guys have to remember this poor kid that lived in vintage who had to wear a gas mask inside his house. His doctor told him to wear the gas mask inside his house because he couldn't breathe because of the chemicals that were coming off of the gas well that was 187 feet behind his house. So that's no way for a child to live. These kids were getting off of the bus. Their parents were with them. They were running from their bus into their house because of the air. In 2014, when I first came into learning about this, I went out to one of the sites where they were drilling a little bit deeper. I stood in the middle of the street and I doubled over and gagged. I had to get back in the car. The lady that brought me there was a nurse. She helped me get back in the car because it was so extensive. So I want to say some of these things in the Fort Worth ordinance. Just highlight them pretty quickly. The PD plan development zoning district setback, the boundary all lines, compressor sites, and PD zoning district shall be set at a minimum of 1,000 feet from a protected use. The distance may be reduced to 600 feet when written waivers are obtained from 100%. That was your time. So if you guys would look through this ordinance that Fort Worth has, it's five pages. So what we have is nothing. And we really need to do a better job. Okay, thank you. Councilmember, Mayor Pro Tem. Quick question. So is your home or a business or do you own a dwelling that's within 250 feet or 500 feet of existing well? At the moment, no. Thank you. Councilmember Mouser. Would you mind, Mayor, as chair, if you just acknowledge the fact that there's already a future scheduled session to take up the question of whether council will explore a long list of other related items that aren't part of this. Sure. I think you just made that announcement. Yeah, it would be okay if I did that. And Mr. City Manager, when is that scheduled for? December 3rd. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Mr. Moffitt. And then after Mr. Moffitt is Carol Soave. If you could state your name and address, your time will begin. I'm Jim Moffitt, 505 Oakbrook, Louisville, Texas. I'm here because I do spend a lot of time in Denton. It's a good place to come and visit. And I have groups that I work with here. But I'm here because of not everything that happens in Denton stays in Denton. And I am primarily concerned about ozone and its relationship to methane as a prime component in the atmosphere that causes ozone to be a problem. Now, I didn't pay much attention to it until 1998, and I joined the group with children with asthma, people with breathing impairments, and elderly people. And it's not good for anybody. But that was 1998, and we haven't been compliant since 1990, which you may or may not know about. In 2015, the North Central Texas Council of Government had a meeting with the TCEQ and people presented. And Dr. Robert Haley presented a report with 16 other doctors about how the standard was, at that time, was 75. They moved down to 70, and everybody was complaining. And they said 60 was the absolute maximum, and it should probably be 50. That's what their study showed. So anyway, but not much has been done about it. And there's a recent occurrence. On the 14th, the Regional Transportation Council had a meeting. And I can show you the evidence of some of those things. Yes, this is how it's been traveling for the years. In 2016, it hit an absolute low peak, and now it has started back up. And 2018 was significantly higher, I mean 2017, significantly higher on an individual. And this is North Central Texas, where there's 20 monitors. Denton County has only one, Denton South Airport. And there's the nature of the thing that there's quite a bit of variations away from that. Over the county, there's significant differences in concentration, whereas this is only measured at one spot. And so people have different exposures as it is. But this shows that it has reached the peak, the bottom. And then this document shows more clearly what the 2016 was like versus the 2017 and the 2018 units were. And 2019, the year isn't over yet, but that's probably a good representation of what it will be. So where does methane come into it? There's components in the atmosphere, and it's primarily volatile organic compounds, nitrous oxides and sulfur oxides. That's one part of it. The second part of it is sunlight and heat. The third part of it is air stagnation. Now, methane is going to be associated with air stagnation, and it's going to be associated with the volatile organic compounds. The EPA is making efforts to not monitor methane as it comes out of the ground or in any of the processes, and certainly not to cause anybody to have to do anything to minimize their amount of methane volatile organic compounds that's going to affect the ozone issues. So just personal concerns, it's related to this. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Thank you for coming up today, Mr. Martha. And so my question is the same. Do you have a home or businesses 250 feet from existing gas well? No, I don't. It's probably well more than a thousand. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. Hello. You mentioned something about not compliance or not compliance. The EPA ozone compliance, yes, the EPA ozone compliance. It was shown in this one chart that 75 parts per billion was the standard in 2008. They have not met that yet. Two years ago at an energy summit meeting that Dr. Burgess has every year, the member of the COG at that time assured us that it would be in compliance by 2020. So it looks like that's not going to be happening. So you're speaking about our region, the North Texas region? The region, yes, especially Denton consistently is at the high end of the concentrations. Every year it's been the highest except for 2018 and one monitor in Houston beat us out. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Carol Sof is up now and then Ben Hattash is up after Ms. Sof. Carol Sof, 1620 Victoria, Denton, Texas. As of April 1st, 2018, Texas law dictates that any residential and commercial structure with both sleeping areas and gas or fuel burning appliances must install and properly maintain carbon monoxide alarms. This warns the people inside a structure from breathing in toxic air. The city has the same power to install air monitors outside on existing wells to measure methane and toxic chemical air leaks. We do not monitor gas wells in the city. We only inspect them once or twice a year depending on their priority status. The city also has the power to do soil testing around existing gas wells to measure any toxic chemicals or metals in the soil that may have spilled or leaked during the fracking process. These two things, monitoring and soil testing, could warn a person living, working, or going to school near a gas well about the pollution that may affect their health and safety. This is allowable under HB 40. We have a legal department that we have asked to look into these protections that could be added to our ordinance. All the public heard in response is why we could not have these protections. Instead of working on a plan to better protect our citizens, we are only given excuses of why we cannot do something. Our hands are not tied on surface issues. We have basic rights to a healthy and safe environment. A 500 reverse setback is not safe. You cannot compromise the public health and safety. Tell us what we can do. Let's work together on this and not put people in harm's way before they get sick with asthma and cancer clusters show up. The facts are there in peer-reviewed studies that these wells are dangerous, unhealthy to live near, and don't get any better with age. Let's have a plan that gives us a healthy future. We can't ignore these recent studies. They are the facts that you should be making your decision on. A recent study stated living 500 feet or closer to a gas well exposed people to cancer rates eight times higher than the EPA threshold. This was the Anschutz Health Center in Boulder, Colorado, University of Colorado. This was the 2018 study. I brought up the monitoring and the soil testing because I feel that that should be thought about when you consider the 500-foot setback because fracking is a heavy industry and we don't know if they spilled or left toxic metals, materials, chemicals in the soil where somebody might have a house that has a garden or a play yard for their kids or if there's going to be a playground there or if a well near a school has these materials in the soil. I think there should be monitoring on every well. We don't know if they're leaking, how old they are, how they were put in. These were out in the country. They weren't monitored like they were in the city. Now you're going to have people living 500 feet from them and they should be not just inspected once a year. They should have monitors on them. And it's only safe to put somebody, I think, now with the studies coming and it's even going to be more, 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet. Thank you. There's a couple of questions, I believe. Sure. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you very much for your comments. Sure. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure. And question, is your home or do you own a home or business that's 250 feet from one? No. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Councilmember Armitage? Do you know about the legal risks? No, just kidding. I'll let Jessie ask that question. So I actually wanted to ask you about the soil testing and the air monitoring. I wanted to ask the city attorney because we got a note from the city attorney saying that council would be off posting to talk about these things. So may I ask a member of the public who's raised those issues? Again, you're venturing into a topic that is off posting. The mayor and the city manager, upon asked by Councilmember Meltzer, answered that that topic as well as the ones that were on the list provided by speaker earlier are all going to be part of the work session on December 3rd, which those questions could be properly asked because it'll be properly posted for that discussion. Thank you. I do understand that, but I had thought it was going to be on for today. I was disappointed it wasn't on for today. It seems like we had time to have that discussion today. But anyway, thank you. I will obey that, I guess, for now. Thank you. Councilmember Davis. Very quickly. Thank you for your time and attention to this issue, and thank you for the time you spent helping me better understand the issue and educating me on this. But same question I had for the earlier speaker. Why is it that you suppose in your own mind that the city is considering right now a 500-foot setback as opposed to a 1,500-foot or 2,000-foot setback? I don't know because many of these conversations that have happened with the city and staff and developers, the public was not involved with. And may I say something that might help in this situation a little bit? My husband and I worked on the IPM program here with the city. And Laura Bairns, who is head of Parks Department, headed that committee. And we had a lot of people on there, just a lot of different people, kind of feeding into the ideas of how we could improve the IPM program. She came out and she said, "We're not going to have an IPM program here that is good. We're going to be the best. And we're going to work toward something that's better than what everybody else has." And I think we should think that way with this, too. We've got to think forward, we've got to think about the future. And the way to do it is to get more people in the room to discuss this and to say, "Well, we've got a problem here. You know, let's try and work it out." Instead of, it seems like it comes to the public at the last minute. And we have to come down here and prove our side. And we feel very defensive, you know. In this committee that we had with Laura, we had beekeepers, we had natural gardeners, we had everybody. And everybody had great ideas. And it just kept getting better and better. And we dealt with getting roundup out of the city. And nobody said, "Ooh, ooh, are we going to get sued?" You're sort of on the IPM, which we're way off-posting, but I wanted to give you some time. It's positive. You know what I mean? Yes, yes. Yeah. Councilmember Davis, did you get your question answered or do you need some further clarification? I did. Thank you. Okay, all right. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Next, and then up would be Matthew Fry. Hey, I'm Ben Hutash. I live at 925 Sierra Drive here in Denton. And I'm opposed to these amendments to the ordinance because I don't think they do enough to protect the citizens. So as Denton grows and we grow out west and we get into kind of the proper Barnett Shell where there's already all these wells, I mean, we need to get these -- sorry, I'm nervous. I haven't been here in a while. But all the science is pointing to the 1,500- to 2,000-foot setbacks, and it would be a lot easier to do the right thing now before it's all developed than waiting to deal with it in the future. I think the issues of the homes that would be out of compliance, I think staff and y'all can figure out what to do with what's already been built. And we can -- oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Let me look at my notes for a second. And once we get a protective setback in place, I think that all of these issues can start sorting themselves out because when you do this industrial process to the land and you extract some wealth from underground, you impact the value of the surface. And they're sort of double-dipping by being able to build the houses all the way up to 250 feet or 500 feet. And when you sell a pad site, you just need to be compensated enough to make up for, I think, all the houses that won't be there. And, you know, okay, I kind of jumped around in my notes. So on September 22nd, the Denton Drilling Awareness Group had Dr. Hildenbrand out, and he does some pretty amazing studies, real boots-on-the-ground sort of work, where he's taking soil samples and water samples and test well water samples. And something that was really interesting, he said he was driving around with an electric vehicle with a mobile, like, mass spectrometer, and he would just noodle around all the country roads that he could around well sites that are being drilled, ones that are being stimulated, and ones that are just active, and was able to make this big GIS map of all the different spikes of chemicals. And he threw out the 1,800-foot number for, you know, some of the, whatever the bad cancer-causing ones are, the benzines or something. I don't know. I'm not good at telling other people's stories. But it's very impressive. I'm hoping that he'll come back to Denton, and we can get maybe a few more different council people to come check him out this time. And fight for, okay, okay, the legal thing. So we're going to be, you know, the fight for local control is a pretty scary threat, and it seems like last time we bailed out because we thought we weren't the venue to fight the place. But I haven't seen any -- I don't know where the right venue would be to fight the state. You know, somebody has to make a stand, and whether it's us winning a Supreme Court ruling against the state of Texas or it's us getting the peripheral fire hoses on us, all those are the steps towards, you know, protecting the rights of the citizens that I think is going to have to happen one day. -Councilmember Hussbett, Mayor Portem. -I think you did great, by the way. You did outstanding. But I do have a question. So do you own a house or a business within 200 feet of existing well? -I've written a house my dad owns, and it's not next to a well. We chose to not be there. -Sure? No? All right. Thank you. -All right. Thank you. Let's take about a five-minute break, and then we'll come back and resume our public comment. -Welcome, everybody. Back to this meeting of the Dent City Council on November the 19th, 2019. We are on agenda item, I believe, 7C. We're in the public comment portion of our public hearing, and I believe the person who was up next was Matthew Fry. Is that correct? Yes. And then after Matthew will be Francis Punch. -So I have a PowerPoint. -I'm sorry. What was that? -I have a PowerPoint. -Is it loaded up? -It's loaded. It's ready to go. -Okay. All right. -Okay. So my name's Matthew Fry. I live on Highland Park Road in Denton. In 2014, my research team was funded by the federal government through the National Science Foundation to analyze the evolution and development of setback distances in Texas. And some of you are familiar with some of my findings from that research, and Dr. Banks also has presented some of those findings to council members in the past. So this slide is a Google Earth image of the pad site on Nail Road. In 2013, the top image, it didn't look like much, but after 2015, it looked totally different. And that was the well that was first drilled after the band was removed. So with these images as a backdrop, I'd like to begin my four minutes, a little bit less, and I don't mean this with any disrespect to anyone, by noting that no one, not the rural commission, not the oil and gas industry, not city staff, not anyone in this room, and certainly not a new home buyer, has any idea of what a reactivated gas well pad site inside Denton City limits will look like in the future when or if the leaseholder decides to drill again. By that time, drilling likely will be quite different from how it was in 2011 in Fort Worth. What we do know, however, is that the intensity of surface and subsurface activities on pad sites in North Texas have increased over time. And I'd like to talk about how drilling activities have changed in Denton and what shale and unconventional production look like today. In research we published in 2017 on reverse setback distances in Denton and Tarrant counties, we compiled a comprehensive data set of 1,131 gas well pad site dimensions from six area municipalities, Fort Worth, Arlington, Burleson, Grand Prairie, Kandale, and Denton. These are the only cities in the area that kept records of pad site dimensions. The rural commission does not. We used the rural commission data then to determine the number of wells on each pad site. And so as you can see from the years going from '98 up to 2013, we found that the size of pad sites and the number of wells on pad sites increased. Both of these are outcomes of new technology and drill rig mobility as well as railroad commission easements on the spacing requirements between boreholes. We also know that horizontal laterals of the boreholes steadily increased over the same time period, so that the amount of fracturing fluid and the truck traffic and scale of activities also increased during this time period. The take-home message here is that the type of drilling that occurred in 2001 when Denton adopted its first drilling ordinance was not the same type of drilling that took place in 2014, and that the intensity of activities on barnet shield pad sites inside municipalities has increased over time. So as many of you know, after the drop in oil prices in 2015, active drilling in the barnet declined, and no wells have been drilled inside Denton city limits in three years. So we don't know what this is going to look like, but we have an idea about what to expect. So in a study by Kropisch et al, you can see the change in wells from the '90s and 2000s on the left to the new multi-well sites on the right that have from 30 to over 40 wells on them. If we look at -- and I realize I'm running out of time -- if we look at the Eagleford Shale, you can see that the average wells are 16 on pad sites. And then, of course, if we look at the Permian Basin, it's a whole 'nother game. And I'm done with time, but I'm not done with my presentation. Are you available or are you able to just provide a copy of that PowerPoint electronically to somebody or is it proprietary information? >> This? >> Yes. >> No, I just pulled it off the line today. >> Okay, okay. >> Yeah. >> Now you said you had a PowerPoint presentation, I thought, is what you said. >> No, this is it, just these slides. >> Oh, okay, gotcha. All right. Okay, thank you. There are a couple of questions. Councilmember Armitage? >> Yeah, I was wondering if you could speak to the -- about the minimums and variances in the proposed ordinance today and, you know, from your perspective, you know, if you see any point to that and also I was wondering if you'd seen any of the gas well monitoring studies that have been recently done here in City of Denton as to kind of leaks of our local operators and, you know, where and when they occur and et cetera. >> Okay, so I've seen the reports of different leaks and I followed that. I'm not aware of the scale of that or anything, I just know that that's been there. >> There's a lot of them. >> Yeah, in terms of the variance, it's a pretty standard move to have a variance, right, because it's an out to have the variance and it gives you a legal out. >> You mean you the city or -- >> You the city. >> You the city. If that's my understanding of it. >> Thanks. >> Mayor Pro Tem Pacific, pardon me. >> Thank you. >> Yes. >> You said Highland Park Road, but you didn't give your -- the street number. >> 16006. >> And so do you own a -- I was curious, do you own a home or a business within 250 feet of a existing well? >> There are 880 homes within 250 feet of gas wells in Denton and that was in an earlier presentation. Mine is not one of those. >> Okay. And I thank you for your noting lateral drilling because I think that's something that has not been touched on as much but is significant. So I appreciate that information. >> Councilmember Briggs. >> So that's kind of my question. So your prediction or what you're talking about could happen in the future is more wells on even just the smaller area. So the pad site doesn't have to grow for more wells to be drawn on it? >> Sure. I mean we didn't know what it was going to look like here in 2001. I don't think we know what it's going to look like at some time in the future now. So the intensity has gone up on sites. We know that the largest operator in our city right now is Eagle Ridge. They do not have a good track record with the city. They do not have a corporate social responsibility statement. If they reactivate their wells, I doubt that they would be too concerned about neighbors and they're going to do as much as they can on the pad sites that they have. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Frances Punch. Come down and state your name and address your time again. Frances. I don't see Frances here. There's two names on this one. Daniel Garza and Hattice Saleh. [ Inaudible ] Okay. Let me go back and read these. Frances Punch was in opposition. Garza and Saleh were in opposition. The next one up would be -- is it Curry Hawkins? If you'll come down, then the next one up will be Jody Ismard. So just state your name and address. Your time will begin. >> Good evening. My name is Curry Hawkins and I lived at 7204 Reagan Place, the colony in Texas. And I come down here tonight to speak to you all in the council simply because we breathe the same air. I'm breathing the same air you do. Last month, I testified in front of the EPA in Dallas at one of the only hearings that was given here across the country. At that hearing, I heard a lot of stories, some of what I've heard tonight, of individuals near gas wells describing just what the lady earlier described as going out into an area a couple of hundred yards away from their home, doubling over and getting a nosebleed. I heard lots of stories like that that day from people all over the country. So I don't think it matters what the geological makeup is, where the well sits, or what you call it, methane, benzene. It's all the same. It's poison. It's poisoning our atmospheres, poisoning the air. I live 30 miles from here. How do I know what I'm breathing? A gentleman earlier talked about ozone. All this stuff is combined. So if wells aren't being monitored, and we don't understand what's coming out of them, and we're talking about 250 feet, 500 feet, 1,000, it's still all the same. Mr. Leal here is talking about structure damage. These wells are just time bombs. At some point, there could be a serious accident. You know, that's what happened on 9/11. They kept telling them something was going to happen. They kept ignoring it. And this is usually what happens a lot of times. It keeps getting ignored until people get killed. And right now, people's health is being affected. And this is about public safety and public health. And I think you all should put that in front of you when you consider this setback. And I do think that 2,000 feet is good enough. It just needs to be held in safety and think of the safety of the citizens. Think about the air that you're breathing. And know that the people of the First Nations of this country warned us about this. We were warned a long time ago about this. You know, but it's about money. You know, it's about money and not necessarily about citizens. And I thank you for your time. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem has a question. Thank you for coming here from the colony and speaking to us today. I do have a question. So is your home in the colony? Yes, it is. Is it 250 feet or 500 feet from a well? Oh, fortunately, I'm in a green belt. Okay, great. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Jodi Ismert is up. And then after Jodi is Larry Beck. Jodi Ismert, is it on? Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Jodi Ismert, 819 Anna Street. And I'm in opposition to this item because the 500 feet is simply inadequate based on sound scientific findings. I applaud the city council for opening this item to discussion and for reviewing the current reverse setback. This conversation has been sorely needed since the 250 foot reverse setback when we reestablished it in 2015. I was at the council chambers that evening when it was voted in and have felt since that we needed to review it. Back then, we were told by our council that after HB 40 passed, that our only tools left to protect residents were setbacks and zoning. With zoning, we still separate heavy industrial areas from residential areas for good reason. But even though gas well operations are heavy industrial processes, we have yet to use the tools at our disposal to adequately protect citizens. 500 feet is not adequate protection and scientific literature and peer reviewed studies provide evidence for this. Since 2011, enough time has passed that we are seeing evidence of health impacts out of the latest research. We should base our decisions on the latest research and not on outdated 2011 arbitrary decisions by Fort Worth. Almost a decade has passed since then and council can be presented with the latest research if it desires and if it asks. When Dr. Hildebrand came to Denton to give his presentation, he presented some of this new evidence. In his findings and in what he provided, he did see significant health risks and he presented them. There was increased prevalence of lower AFGAR scores in infants born to mothers living within 8,000 feet of well operations. He talked about cancer clusters, which you guys have already heard of, due to some of the chemicals used in fracking and well operations. He showed us an image of a site where a blowout had sprayed hydrocarbons 1,000 feet from the well killing all of the foliage in its wake. In the Barnett Shale in North Texas, a blowout created a burn crater of 750 feet. That's 250 feet greater than the setbacks we're proposing today. 500 feet is a little farther than the distance of the length of a football field. I don't think that anyone here would believe if they sat at the goal post with their children and knew that the well at the other end of the field would explode, that they would continue to sit there and feeling safe. If you wouldn't feel safe remaining there in that hypothetical situation, then why would you allow homes and schools to be built the same distance? Do you feel you are adequately protecting families from well operations? Your role is to protect the public good. That is a role of a council person. Setting a more adequate setback would benefit everyone and is your responsibility to do so. Adding protections like monitoring for those within unsafe zones is also your responsibility. We require so many other public safety measures while well operations still go mostly unregulated and have very inadequate public protections. We need soil testing, monitoring of wells continuously. I also need to say that I speak here from the stance of using sound science. I believe in evidence-based decisions. I believe in using facts and data. I think that even though the 500 foot is more than 250, sound science says it is still deeply inadequate to protect humans. I'm grateful for this conversation, but it's simply not adequate to protect the public from impacts of well operations. The recommendation by experts for public health, according to a Delphi study by Brown Lewis Griner in 2016, was actually 6,600 feet. We are asking for 1,500 to 2,000 feet. I'd also like to mention that this is a reasonable request. Better isn't the enemy a perfect, a 500 feet, but 500 feet isn't really better because it's still well within the explosion area. It doesn't adequately protect, and that's what we are advocating for, just to adequately protect citizens. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. Jody, thank you. Thank you, and question, do you own a home or a business within 250 feet of an existing well? No, I don't. The closest one is near Spencer Rodents, a little over a mile away. Okay, thank you. Councilmember Davis. Same question as before. In your own mind, why do you suppose the city is tonight considering a 500 foot setback as opposed to 1,500 feet or more? I think there are probably a couple of reasons, one of them being HB40. However, with HB40, we still have these as a tool. Surface rights are not included in HB40, so this is really one of the only tools that citizens have. It has not been contested in other cities as far as setbacks in zoning. They have not come back and tried to sue the cities, so I think we're okay with that. Another reason would be regulatory takings. I think that that might be a consideration for future building. However, currently within 1,000 feet within the city of Denton, you're not going to see a problem. So as far as 1,000 feet is concerned, I don't think you're going to see any lawsuits. As far as future building is concerned, I don't necessarily know if it's a regulatory taking because I'm not an attorney, but I do believe that protecting the citizens is our first duty, and it's not the duty of council to protect developers necessarily. It's more the duty to protect the public good, and the public good is something that is just not included in the conversation when we have these types of discussions, and it just needs to be. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Larry Beck, and then up next is Rhonda Love. Get your name and address, and your time will begin. Good evening, Mayor, city council members. My name's Larry Beck. I live at 2301 Pax Noe here in Denton. As you consider how best to fulfill the purpose of our newly developed city codes as it regards gas wells in subchapter six, please do so with a purpose laid out in subchapter 1.2 that states, among other things, to promote the health, safety, and general welfare of the city's inhabitants and preserve and protect the natural environment while improving the city's image. I would hope we'd feel compelled to make sure that, one, the facts about these wells are based on current scientific research, and two, the information that often gets omitted or ignored as we write our ordinances and codes are fully weighed in order to ensure our purpose spelled out in subchapter 1.2 is genuinely acted on. I've come before this council before to address what I feel is a bad faith act where there's been a reluctance with some of our city leaders to push for the safest gas well setbacks that current science shows to be inadequate in its present state. I appreciate that an increase in 250 feet on reverse setbacks is meant to symbolize a good faith act for those, but for those of us who've seen the current research, the distance still is far from adequate to ensure the quality of life our citizens expect. The Fort Worth study that is used to validate the 500 reverse setback is suspect on several levels. I've pointed out that a peer-reviewed study that sought to determine if legal setback distances between well pad sites and the public are adequate in these shellplates, including the Barnett shell, that found that the majority of the setbacks distances in these areas are not derived from peer-reviewed data, data-driven analysis, or historical events. They are a compromise between the governments, the regulated community, environmental and citizen interest groups, and landowners. To give further credence to these arbitrary setbacks, I refer you back to your work session on July 16th of this year. In that work session, the city attorney informed us in his presentation that HB 40 was written by the oil and gas industry and therefore their definitions and word uses apply here. He further explained how a single individual in the State House of Representatives, a downtown mayor who also owned land with lots of gas wells on them, determined all by himself that the 1,200 foot setback in his town in 2013 was too extensive and that a 1,000 foot setback was more reasonable, a distance he boasted that has worked just well for those who live there. I went on to document the facts about how the TCEQ and the Texas Railroad Commission operate in service of the industry, petrochemical companies, and that most people who serve on or run the commission are pretty upfront about their view that the oil and gas business is not just an industry to be regulated, but a constituency to be served. And this was brought out by Professor David Prindle, political science professor at UT Austin who wrote the book "Petroleum, Politics, and the Texas Railroad Commission." "I know you all to be decent people and respectable people. I have no doubt you would not intentionally do anything that would only unduly put our citizens in harm's way. It is the evidence mounts as to the health and safety threats of productive gas and oil wells that fracking has developed and where state regulators are apparently showing more concern about the economic factors of this industry than they are the hazards they pose for all of us. I have yet to see the consensus needed to mount an effort to diminish the threat. I sincerely hope that if the City Council fails tonight to muster enough votes to create greater setback distances than these amendments are proposing, that you at least implement measures that enable the city to gain the citizens' trust through such actions as continuous air monitoring near homes, soil testing prior to new construction of schools and parks, and consulting with science and health experts about the health and hazards associated. In conclusion, one's use of their land is considered sacrosanct within certain parameters, but that privilege has to be a giveaway to others within our community when that use poses a certain health risk and is in close proximity to where we live and raise our children. None of us lives in a vacuum, and our actions will impact others for better work. Thank you." "Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem." "Mayor, I can give you a hard time because we served together on P&Z, so is your new palatial estate that you live in now, since you moved, is it 250 feet, or do you have a business or anything within that 500-foot range?" "No, Councilman, I don't, but I'm not here for myself. I'm here for all the people that can't be here tonight. They'll be negatively impacted by this. Each and every one here should be." "That's a good adjustment. Thank you." "Councilmember Davis, same question as for the other folks. You kind of made some references in your comments there, but why do you suppose it is that we're talking about 500 feet tonight as opposed to something else?" "Well, to be honest with you, Councilman, I'm not sure because I don't think HB 40 covers reverse setbacks. I don't see why we couldn't do 1,500 to 2,000 feet, so your guess is as good as mine." "Okay, thank you. Thank you, Larry. Appreciate it. Rhonda Love, and then the next speaker will be Ed Soph." "Thank you. My name is Rhonda Love. I live at 1921 Holly Hill Lane, Denton. I don't think I'm near any active gas wells or even capped ones. I could save us all some trouble and say what they said and sit down, but instead I'm going to read you a few remarks. I had made copies for you, but I've had to amend them as other people have talked. So I'm going to talk to you tonight with having had the benefit of teaching and doing research for 34 years in the area of public health. There's a major principle in public health which I've actually spoken to you about before, and it's called the precautionary principle. And I think you should use the precautionary principle in your decisions about this matter and actually in your decisions about almost everything. The precautionary principle says that actions should be taken to avoid or diminish harm to humans and the environment when it is scientifically plausible that the purported harm may threaten human life or health, be serious and effectively irreversible, imposed without adequate consideration of the human rights of those affected. What potential harms exist in the event of a leak or a blowout? I think you know them. They're innumerable and we've been through them before. Damage to property, physical injury up to death from fire and explosions, pollution of air and water, harm to first responders, et cetera. Denton has experienced both leaks and blowouts with damage at least to property. It's plausible to believe that such leaks, blowouts and damage could happen again and that we should take action to prevent it if we're going to use the precautionary principle. Fort Worth has adopted 600 feet as a safe distance. Some have argued that Denton should adopt the same distance, but why would we repeat such an error when research tells us that 1500 to 2000 feet is the only distance that provides protection? What is it that is preventing counsel from making decisions based on the precautionary principle or at least on a principle of first do no harm? Yes, you might disturb developers. Yes, you might face legal action from somebody. But council members, please do the right thing. Your job is to protect the public, not special interests, and to act courageously, not fearfully. Human history is absolutely full of examples when we did not apply the precautionary principle to our behavior. For example, we knew about exposures to UV radiation, to asbestos, and to benzene very well before we ever acted. And many people were harmed, the environment was harmed, and some people are dead as a result of our lack of action. We know that methane leaks are dangerous. We know that explosions are dangerous. Thus, I suggest that we follow the precautionary principle and act now, not later. Thank you very much. Council Member Armitage. So, precautionary principle question for you. When you weigh the risks of takings claims from developers and property owners and loss of legal action against the city saying this is a taking versus these health risks you talk about, why do you come out, as I presume you do, saying that the health risks are greater? Or why do they mean more to you? Well, I don't know that they have to be greater for the precautionary principle to be applied. The precautionary principle says that if it is plausible that human health is affected, then you must act. It's not balancing risk. That's unfortunately your job. Or fortunately for me. That's a very good point. Thank you. But I believe very strongly, I wouldn't be surprised, that you're here to protect the public health, not protect developers, not protect legislators, us, the public. Thank you. Thank you. I see no other questions. I think you answered Mayor Pro Tem's question and sort of preempted him from asking that question. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Okay. Mr. Soph. I don't get one from Jesse. I think I got it. And then Brian Beck is up after Mr. Soph. Good evening. Ed Soph, 1620 Victoria Drive in Denton. Thank you for your time very much. If you walk from here to the intersection of McKinney and North Locust, you will have covered approximately 500 feet, the distance of the proposed reverse setback. To go back, in fall 2013, the city sued a gas well operator to stop drilling and fracking on pad sites within 500 feet and less of residences that had been platted before the adoption of the 2010 gas well ordinance. And that ordinance had mandated a 1200 foot regular setback of new wells from existing homes. The city lost that lawsuit and was unable to protect the families living at the meadows of Hickory Creek because of the operator's vested rights, which were established in the plat language of those pre-2010 gas well permits. Moving forward, in a July 16, 2019 presentation to council that was said, quote, "City staff estimates that a significant percentage of all gas well drilling plats and gas well permits issued before 2010 contain the same or similar plot note and gas well permit language as those wells by the vintage neighborhood." That significant percentage must be defined. Exactly how many of Denton's 290 active wells were platted and permitted before the 2010 ordinance? Where are they located? This information is essential because a proposed reverse setback of 500 feet would be disastrous when a vested existing pad site that can drill more wells or refrac existing ones is surrounded by new homes that are only 500 feet away. Will there be future neighborhoods subjected to what the families who lived in the meadows at Hickory Creek went through? We'd need this information, too, so that staff, council, the development community, and gas well operators can work together to explore safer and more protective options, such as the capping of low-producing wells, a greater reverse setback distance, and continuous air monitoring of wells within 1,500 feet of homes, as recommended by scientific and health impact studies. Future development around gas wells should not jeopardize the public health and safety. A 500-foot reverse setback is simply unacceptable. We all, city officials and staff, developers and well operators, we all know that the closer one lives to a gas well operation, the greater the risk to health and safety. It is in everyone's best interests, everyone's, to postpone the vote on the proposed 500-foot reverse setback until the essential information regarding the vested drilling and fracking rights of pre-2010 ordinance plats is available. That information and the resulting dialogue with stakeholders about it will benefit and protect our future health and safety. Thank you. Any questions for Mr. Self? Councilmember Davis. Come on. Come on. I already talked to the boss. That's good. Oh, boy. Councilmember Davis. Sorry, I don't have anything pithy to say about it. Thank you for your advocacy and leadership on this issue. Thank you for keeping it in front of us and keeping it on the radar. I think you know my question. In your own mind, why do you suppose the city leadership is up here tonight talking about 500 feet as opposed to 1,500 or 2,000 feet? Say the question again. In your own mind, and you've been at some of these meetings, you've stayed abreast of the issue, why do you suppose we're talking about an ordinance at 500 feet for a reverse setback tonight as opposed to 1,500 or 2,000 feet? Well, quite frankly, there is the legal aspect, but what strikes me more is the fact that there's been, to my knowledge, no dialogue with the developers. By this, I mean rather than legal telling us what we can't do and we'll be sued, et cetera, et cetera, which is their job. I'm not bothered with that. But has legal taken steps or city staff taken steps in their meetings with developers to explain to them our concerns and possible liabilities that they might have in the future because of being too close to homes? That's what really bothers me, and I wrote city folks twice asking, have you had dialogue with the developers about what we're talking about? And I never got an answer. Did you have a follow-up or? Yeah, just real quickly to follow that up. I've had a number of meetings with developers, and I've disclosed those to the city manager's office. And when the issue comes up, what do you all suppose your legal remedies are if this were to pass? They get pretty tight-lipped because that's what their lawyers tell them to do and not reveal their legal strategy. So there has been conversation and dialogue. It's just maybe not quite as at the forefront of some of the other conversations. Well, that's good, and I hope there's more. There has to be. Thank you. Thank you. Brian Beck and then up after Mr. Beck is Matt Bruneta. Hi, I'm Dr. Brian Beck, 124 Mill Pond Road here in Denton. So I'm not going to rehash some of the information, especially that Dr. Frye introduced. One of the things I think we need to consider is that we're sort of obfuscating and merging different guidelines here. We're mixing setbacks and reverse setbacks. And while I understand that HB40 may have some impact on setbacks and gas well operations and the Redwood Commission may have some impacts on that, to my knowledge, and again, I'm not an attorney, the reverse setbacks are not addressed by that. So you could make the reverse setbacks whatever you felt like within guidance and code. The other thing I want to address is some of the issues of money. Let me address the impacts from some council members. And that is, no, I don't live within 250 or 500 feet of a gas well, but my children go to a school that's within 250 to 500 feet of gas well operations. And so I kind of take that a little personally because they're there eight hours a day. It's longer with pre and post school activities. So in regards to that, I think I do have a vested interest, regardless of the fact that my property itself does not. In regards to takings, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I do know that there are established federal guidelines for when takings, especially of a noxious use, fall under the police powers. So in that case, those are allowed takings under federal guidelines. So again, I'm not a lawyer, I leave that to city council and legal to establish what those are. But in those conditions, those are appropriate. And some of the other financial things that I wanted to bring up to council's attention, it's been asked, why do you think we're afraid? I think that there is a little bit of a risk of versity to potential takings claims. I ask that you consider remediation claims. I know that, for instance, the XTO Energy case with the EPA in 2014 was a $3 million remediation claim. That's well in excess of a lot of the fees that we've been discussing for studies for takings related property rights and things like that. And if there were a number of remediation claims made on us by angry citizens with the EPA, that would be troubling. And in addition, I know that we have HB40 covering subsurface activities. But in no way does that supersede things like the Clean Air and Clean Water, which are federal acts. Again, I'm not an attorney, but it's my understanding that Supremacy Clause says that the federal guidelines supersede state guidelines. So I think that we are seeing part of the financial equation when we address takings. We're not addressing health impact and remediation studies when we have issues like that. You can go to EPA and look at current cases, and those are on the order of millions of dollars for remediation. So I wanted to bring up some of those financial implications that we sort of danced around a little bit tonight, but we hadn't really addressed. And that's really all I had to say. I don't want to repeat what other people have said. Mayor Pro Tem has a question. Correct me if I'm wrong. Do you serve on the P&Z force? I do. I just want to say thank you for that. I appreciate your service. All right. I see no other questions. Thank you. Appreciate it. The next speaker was Matt Preneta. State your name and address. Your time will begin. Do you need the overhead camera? In a minute. Matt Preneta, 1225 Tulane Drive, which is not within 500 feet of a gas well or anything like that. Gotcha. So I'm going to start off by being a little bit controversial probably for everyone else in the room. When this came before planning and zoning, one of the questions that we had was, of course, 500 feet is not ideal. But considering where we've been for the last 10 years, it would most likely be a better launching position to get from 500 feet to 1,000 than it would be to start from 250 all over again. So I supported the measure for 500 feet. Having said that, I do want to point out to what we've got here on the overhead. One of the things that struck me, this was a slide that was given to us when we were considering how to vote. And the thing that struck me the most was that if you look at Denton Proper, almost everyone that lives in Denton Proper already benefits from a 1,000 foot reverse setback. These little lines here are orange, yellow, blue. The blue shows what a 1,000 foot would do. And the thing that struck me the most was what we've actually got here is that most of these are in undeveloped areas, and these are going to affect our future Dentonites. So what we're actually doing by refusing to put in a 1,000 foot setback is creating a separate class of citizens for future Dentonites. Which means that existing Dentonites will have protections that future Dentonites won't have. And if we do that, we're exposing future Dentonites to something significantly more dangerous. And my thought is, when we consider the cost of takings and things like that, when we start seeing cancer clusters show up in those areas in years to come, we're going to be exposing ourselves to liability because right now, we know that people closer to fracking wells and everything get cancer at a rate more high than anybody else. Because of that, oops, don't look at my coat. It just went out all over the airways, my friend. It's a city issue device. Okay, all right. But anyway, because of that, we are exposing these people to greater liability. And when we do this, I have to say this, when we discuss liability and when we discuss the fact that our decision right now is not based on science, and that we haven't made a move to make a decision based on science, what we're being is negligent. And if we make a decision that's arbitrary and negligent, once again, because this is on the record now, we're all discussing the fact that this is possible negligence. You guys have to make a decision to make a future decision that's more in keeping with the health of our future detonites. So while I do want you guys to vote for the 500 foot, what I would ask for is somebody on council to make a friendly amendment to have not just a yes vote, but to add on a vote to actually spend that money to do scientific research to make a more informed decision. And it may not be this council that comes back and makes that decision, but it's incumbent on you guys to make sure that we have full data and comprehensive vetted scientific data to make the right decision. Because once you do that, if people wind up with cancer clusters within being 1,000 feet or something like that, you can always say we were made aware of the dangers. We addressed the possible negligence, and we did diligence to make sure we protected you and didn't create a second class of citizens. The existing versus the new, which would then be second class citizens that are more or less apt to get cancer. And that's my presentation. Thank you. Any questions? Seeing none. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Those are all the blue cards I have wishing to speak. I've got some cards not wishing to speak that I'll read, but this is a public hearing. So whoever hasn't filled out a blue card who hasn't spoken, you're certainly welcome to come down, state your name and address, and your time will begin. Anybody wishing to speak? I'm going to call the names out. Karen Devaney is in opposition. Jack Thompson in opposition. Gretchen Nendorf is in opposition. These are thick cards. Janice Bigby is in opposition. Diane Leggett in opposition. David Martin in opposition. Karen McDaniels in opposition. Herbert Hall in opposition. Lee Ann Todd in opposition. Fran Witt in opposition. Michelle Lin in opposition. Oscar Ventura in opposition and Leslie Burkett in opposition. Do y'all want to wait until after the public hearings close, y'all requesting to speak? Okay. All right. Okay. Anybody else? I think that probably covers everybody that's still here. If not, one more call. Anybody wishing to speak? All right. Thank you. I will now close the public hearing. I'm going to, based upon our procedures that we established in the past, Councilmember Armitage has been signaled as a mover well as this got started, so I'm going to recognize her and then we'll recognize the speakers as that moves forward. Councilmember Armitage. Yeah, I wanted to make a motion to postpone to an event certain and that is the, or maybe an event uncertain, I don't know, but to move till the date when we, when and if we have that discussion about the recommended additional gas well safety measures that was going to be last week and that got moved to next week instead of this week being the discussion about whether to have the discussion or not. So I'm not talking about that discussion on the third, but if we decide to have that discussion, which I certainly hope we do, which I originally thought that we had consensus for, that is the event relatively certain, I don't know what you call it, that I would like to move it to. So your motion is to postpone till, till we have our works, yeah till we have our work session on those additional gas well safety measures for the reasons, you know, brought up by many of the speakers here and many of the emails we received. All right. Thank you. We have a motion for postponement till an event certain of an additional workshop. Do we have a second on that motion to postpone? Do we have emails. I'm going to call one more time. Okay, well I've got two people in front of you so. Okay, sure. So, are you wanting to postpone because the 500 feet you're not comfortable with without knowing what the other options that are going to be. So it's going to make a difference on the 500 feet for you. Well, so I'm already against the 500 feet. But I want us to first have this discussion that we're not not allowed to even address today because it's off posting. And that is, you know, a discussion about air monitoring and soil testing and having an expert come to speak and the notification process and compressor compressor station monitoring. All right. All right. Well, well, I need a second or I'm going to kill the motion. I mean, I need a second because it's been sitting on on the table for a while. So, and I recognize her because she was the first one to to request to speak. So, yes, comes from another. All right. I'll second. Okay, for the purpose of being able to speak about it, or actually to ask a question about it. And I think this is a question to city attorney. Is there anything about any action we would take on this item tonight? Either for against at one level or another level that would prevent us from taking action on any of the other items that we're taking up on the third. No. Thank you. Okay. Is is the customer Davis is your comments related to the motion on the table? No. All right. Councilmember Meltzer, you still showing a request to speak as you've spoken and you second that's on the underlying issue. All right. Have you or did it was that for you're pointing to. Okay. But it's not regarding this particular motion. Okay. Councilmember bar mature. Yes, I wanted to address. I agree with the city attorney on that. You know, it's not so much that that this would prevent anything as I understand it. But it's because we haven't is members of the public has mentioned today. And we've gotten some emails talking about how we haven't really addressed these issues about monitoring. And in an opportunity, I mean, we've talked about these things a little bit in work session and over the years. But recently, since I've been on council anyway, we haven't had a chance for members of the public to come forward and really talk about these issues in an open meeting. So I think it's important that we have a discussion about the health risks and what we can do to really beef up protections and monitoring. Before we have a discussion about how far away to be from a how far away and new development should be from existing well. Because so far, you know, we've mostly talked about takings claims and things like that. And it's the public who's brought these thankfully health concerns to the forefront. OK, we have a motion and a second for to postpone to an event certain being an additional workshop on the items that have been mentioned here tonight. OK, so let's vote on the board. Motion to postpone fails five to two. OK, Councilmember Davis, do we have the ability to easily displace a slide from a previous presentation before council? If not, I can just pull a prunita and ask somebody to put my iPad down on the slide. What slide are you looking for? It's slide number seven from our July 16th presentation. If you could pull that up while I'm saying a couple of things that be very helpful. Thank you. You know why she's doing that. Let's just take a real quick five minute break and let them have a chance to do that. And we'll come back and take that up. Welcome back to this meeting of the Dent City Council on November 19th, 2019. It is ten twenty four p.m. We're at work. Excuse me. Agenda item seven C. We have closed the public hearing. We've had staff presentation. Now we're in council deliberation. I believe Councilmember Davis had the floor before the adjournment recess. Thank you. So the question that I asked a number of the speakers, some of them kind of preemptively answered the question. But the question I asked is why do you suppose the city is here talking about a five hundred foot setback today as opposed to a thousand foot setback? I can speak mostly for myself, but I can also speak to some of what you've already seen in the public record and what you can see in our meetings, our previous meetings. And what you're looking at here on the screen is a slide from our meeting on July 16th of this year when we first really started taking up this issue. I'll also point out the city did not take up this issue for a long time. Some of the speakers pointed that out. This issue would not have come before us nine months ago. Some things have changed on the council. And here we are having the same conversation today that just eight or nine months ago would not have had the votes even come before the council and go on the agenda. So why are we looking at five hundred feet as opposed to fifteen hundred or two thousand feet? For me personally, it comes down to three things. Surface rights owners have a right to develop within reasonable regulation. They have a legal right to do that and they have an equitable right to do that with reasonable regulation. Mineral rights owners have a legal and equitable right to develop their mineral rights with reasonable regulation. I think just about everybody can agree on those two things. And those two owners are not often the same people. Some places in Denton, the surface owners and the mineral owners are the same people. Sometimes they conflict against each other because they're two different entities. But then the third principle that everyone spoke to tonight that I know we agree on, the further you live from a gas well, the better it is for you and your family and your neighbors. The city has to balance those things. We don't always get to decide which of those things gets the preferential treatment. Sometimes the state decides for us, like we saw with HB 40, and HB 40 does not really enter into the setback issue. Those of you who brought that up, very correct in that we still get to control our own setbacks. We get to control our land use for the time being. However, sometimes the courts decide what the balance is between those three things. And when you look at the difference between a 500-foot setback and the numbers of acres that that takes in, and the dollar value of those numbers of acres, and then you go to a 1,000-foot setback. I'm not even going to touch the 1,500-foot setback because if you look at the values at 1,500 feet, you see a total land value that approaches the entire annual budget of the city. Not the general fund, not the ad valorem tax, DME, water and wastewater, everything. So for me, as a steward of the taxpayers' money and a steward of their health and safety, I have to balance those things. I have to look at this and conservatively, let's say we're talking about a takings claim. Some of the speakers mentioned that. That if we encumber land, we can be sued by that landowner. They're not necessarily big developers. They could be churches. They could be families. They could be your neighbors now. Any landowner could sue us for encumbering their land and taking value away from it because they're not able to do what they want to do with it. And the value of that land could be as high as what we're looking at on this slide. So it's not a few million dollars. It's, by some estimates, half a billion dollars with a B. I don't undertake this decision lightly. I didn't ask for the City Council to consider this issue lightly. 500 feet, a 500-foot setback is what I can reasonably support when I balance those three things. That's where I'm at. Council Member Meltzer. First, I have a question, Mr. Mayor. Procedurally, will it be possible for us to have more than one vote on more than one attempts at this? Or would it be a one-and-done situation? I want to defer to the City Attorney on that one. I guess it would really depend on what exactly you're getting at. Are you referring to the different options for the Exhibit A that are presented that if somebody makes a motion to take one? No, let me clarify. I'll make a little statement first to give context. This situation, safety and health protections were not improved in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and here we are in 2019. The main number I care about is four. If we don't achieve a majority, then nothing happens. And I do not agree with any speaker who says it's better to have 250 feet as it currently is versus something that's been proposed. On a symbolic issue, I'm happy to take a symbolic action. This is not a symbolic issue to me. It's people's real health that's at stake. And I'm not personally willing, if I can avoid it, to walk away with no improvement. So I think it's possible that there may be motions that fail at levels that some members can't vote for, that they won't support. I personally could vote for a 2,000 foot setback, a 1,500 foot setback, and that may come up. I'm not making the motion at this moment. But if the motion fails, I want the opportunity, if possible, this is the point of my question, to come back until we find consensus. Because I know, or I feel strongly from having been through the repeated work sessions, that there is a consensus possible for action. And it would be a shame if we leave without taking action. So that's the point of my question. >> In that regard, I guess, hypothetically speaking, if somebody made a motion, it was second, that accepted the other staff's recommendations. But with respect to the reverse setback proposed 1,500 feet, and it was second, and a vote was taken, and that failed. Then, to me, it does not mean that the entire item is dead. It tells me that there was no support on the reverse setback, and what staff has recommended was the 500. >> Could a subsequent motion be at a different setback? >> At a different setback, yes. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Riggs. >> Can I ask some questions of staff? >> Sure. >> Okay. Thank you, everyone, for staying and speaking. So I want to understand more about the process, because part of my concern is well-set, I mean, pad sites that are already there, and homes that are within 250 feet. We already talked about, I think Mr. Fry said there's around 800 homes within 250 feet, and didn't already. And so I just want to logistically think through the process. So if there's a pad site there, and they can drill another well, that's going to happen, right? No matter if we have the 500-foot reverse setback or the 1,000, I mean, they can go back into that pad site and drill the well. >> It could happen. >> Okay. >> Would be my best response, that if it's a well site that has an approved gas well plat, has an approved number of wells on that plat, and they haven't drilled them all, then yes, it's my understanding they could do what their plat entitled them to do originally. If they've already achieved the number of wells permitted on that plat, they would then need to go through the 2015 ordinance process that was the gas well site plan. And in that instance, if they meet the technical requirements of the code, meet the setback for an existing pad site, then they could potentially do the site plan process and add additional wells. >> Okay. So I'm very concerned about those homes at around the 250 feet that are going to have to go through that industrial drilling and all the nuisance. So do we know our normal pad site dimensions? Are they just all one of the same? This may be a question for legal, or are they all different? >> In my experience, they're all very different. >> Yeah, they vary in size. If I had to say if there was anything, it's probably going to be a 300 by 300 is probably a larger percentage would be, but that percentage is not going to be 50 or anything. It's going to be what they typically depict on the gas well plat. >> But it's going to be more than likely one well, I mean, if not currently, then potentially. Because what we're talking about here is future. And so if we're concerned now about the situation of somebody coming in and drilling 250 feet around a home, then what we're thinking about today is a situation where we avoid that in the future. Because what we decide now, it's too late for them, unfortunately, right? And that's really sad and dark, but it is. And I would like to know if there's a way for us to vote for all the three options separately. >> I don't know how that's going to happen. >> It's all one. Because for me, I'm not in favor of the variance, and I have a little bit of issue as I discussed in the work session about staff. I understand the administrative process, and I've had people reach out to me who are actually in that position. And I understand that, but I don't know that I want it to be in the ordinance. And for now, though, for the 500 feet, and I'm keeping my focus on that question at hand, and I want to take this opportunity in this moment in time to increase, because we can, to 500 feet. It's more than the 250, and I know that we've had speaker after speaker say, don't do that. But it will be an improvement, and I have been in situations with previous councils where moving from 250 to 255 feet would have been 6-1 to deny. And so I know it doesn't seem like progress, but it is, and so I'm willing to vote for the 500 feet tonight because it's going to make a difference for the future developments. Even if there's that little moment in time where if another council comes in and wants to expand it, if we can protect those future residents, even 250 feet more, I'm willing to sit up here and do that. So I would not like to not vote on all of it, but I can't because I'm not inclined. I'm not in favor of the variance. Okay, Councilmemorandum. So I don't like the very minimums and variances either when it comes to public safety. I had two questions for staff. One, so somebody asked me, asked recently, does our gas well ordinance distinguish between active and cap wells when it comes to reverse setbacks? And I thought I knew the answer was, and it became increasingly unsure, and now I realize I really don't, that I've been assuming that there's just no distinction made between them and gas wells. A gas well, but it could be just because something I'm missing or that issue hasn't come up for me on council since I've been on council. So could you answer that? Certainly, so the gas well ordinance, the majority of it, and the setbacks would apply to active sites. Now those wells could be inactive at the moment, temporarily shut in and not producing at that very moment. But once all of the wells on a pad are plugged and all of the equipment is removed and the site is brought back to the conditions required by the Railroad Commission, the setbacks would no longer apply. So the ordinance currently does not speak to any separation distance required from a plugged well. Wow, well so I was, and thank you for that, yeah, so I was dead wrong, I assumed wrong, and I quickly start to realize I was wrong. So I'm really grateful for whoever asked that question. And that is something that I think we should include too, because you know, you plug a well and whatever was underground is still there underground. And that's what creates the risk of explosion. So I think it's really important that we do that. And the second question I have is something that somebody brought up today, and that is, I believe Jody brought that up, about, you know, why is it that we don't zone fracking as industrial activity, or just gas wells? Why isn't it, we have this whole, this class in zoning that, I mean, that says that, you know, you can't just build a single family residence, you know, right next to a rubber plant or asphalt plant. You know, why, why are gas wells special? So it is classified as an industrial land use and falls in the industrial portion of our land use table within the development code, but it is a use that is permitted in all zoning districts with all of the same standards applicable citywide. So every component regarding production activities, setbacks, all of that are kind of use specific standards in the new code that apply to that use. Is there any other industrial category that's like that? Is gas wells special in that regard? I answer that question, and the reason why is as the cities have recognized, the gas is where it is. It's underground, and in your scenario you would have to label the entire Southwest city as an industrial use to achieve what you want to do. The problem is that that's not how the land, what we have used as a comprehensive plan as well as the zoning ordinance, we don't zone the entire region as an industrial use. The gas is under the Barnett shell, and it's going to cross as many different types of properties and uses. And based on oil and gas law, the mineral state has the right to extract and add those minerals and to develop them. And so under that kind of line of thinking, it does not matter if it is within an industrial zone, a residential zone, a commercial zone. The mineral state holder has the right to produce those minerals within, and then there's reasonable restrictions that can be placed upon by the state, but that is the way the law operates. Yeah, and you mean that's the state law? That is actually a long line of cases that come down from the Texas Supreme Court to the Court of Appeals. Yeah, yeah. So thanks for explaining that, and I know that's true, so I'm not disagreeing with that being the law, but it makes no sense to me from a rational point of view, and I think that it really, from a city planning point of view or public health point of view. But, but thank you, both of you for answering that. Councilmember Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. And that segues well into my question. Can you go to slide nine on today's presentation. I think we can all agree that gas wells are an industrial use they are something that if we had our druthers if we could do it that way we would, we would only allow them to be done in an industrial area. And my question is, this is probably for the rest of my fellow council members. I thought that our discussion was to raise reverse setbacks to match existing setbacks, so that they were in both directions. It does a couple of things in this chart here we are raising in industrial districts, the reverse to 500 foot, but yet the well can come within 250 feet. And so from, from that, as we look at where all the wells were on that previous slide much of that is in our industrial area of town. And what we're finding in many of the subdivisions that are coming in right now is they're buying out the gas rights and capping off the wells because the number of the price of the land is such that it's more economical for them to buy that gas well out. To get capped off and get it off the books and be able to develop more of that, that area, and I think that we'll find that trend continue. But I do have concerns about having a reverse setback that's greater than what the developer, what the gas drilling company has to have. Councilmember Davis, you've been on cue for, I think, the motion. So, yes, cute up for two reasons one to add to my earlier remarks I talked a lot about the money aspect that was one of the three things I neglected to mention also the Fort Worth study. And something Councilmember Meltzer said earlier that the Fort Worth study measuring 600 feet from the wellhead is roughly analogous to us measuring 500 feet from the pad site so I based my decision tonight. Also on that particular study, and I think some of my colleagues do my motion and my intention is to make this motion and then some of my colleagues may have amendments that they want to offer based on some of the previous comments and my motion is to adopt the staff recommend a staff recommended amendments to the ordinance as they've been presented. Okay, so I think that's option a two, if I'm correct. Let me pull that up for you. I believe that's correct the way you referenced it. We have motion. Councilmember, I'll second. All right. I need to have the request to speak cleared off so I can know who's up and who's not sorry. Yeah, no, Councilmember monitor if you could clear your name unless you requesting to speak. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. All right. So, customer monitor. Go ahead. Yeah, so I want to address a couple questions that were that were right brought up. One kind of most recently in about, you know, why don't our proposed reverse setbacks equal that setbacks. As I recall somebody here please correct me if I'm wrong. That, you know, when we had that work that work session discussion I don't know if we had a full Council that day or not. But there were some of us I don't even I don't even remember who was who I remember which where I stood, but I don't remember who else did where. Some of us thought that, and I was one of them, you know, we should have equal setbacks and reverse setbacks raise the setbacks to, but we didn't have the support for that and then somebody pointed out, you know, we're, there aren't going to be that many more drill new new well sites so it would be more symbolic than anything else to raise the, the setbacks, and, you know, to match to whatever we wanted to cover much we wanted to raise the reverse setbacks, and that made sense to me. So, I was okay I was okay with that, you know, for the sake of consensus and kind of a similar explanation as again as I recall, as to why 500 as I recall. There were three of us who wanted a reverse setbacks higher than that. And, and we were in terms of consensus three in a work session you know that's not consensus as far as giving direction to staff. And as I remember you know Councilmember Davis said it you know as he said tonight. Well, you know, farther you live from, from a gas well, the safer you are. And he mentioned 500 feet as his limit capital 500 because as I recall for the same reasons that you mentioned tonight concerns about takings. And so that was it so in other words it's a kind of, it's a political answer, and not a strategic answer. I'm sorry, not a scientific answer. That's why we ended up with that but I'm glad that we did, and because now we're here today and we get to hear all of you and have this discussion. So, I just just wanted to clear that up. Anyone please correct me if I'm misremembering anything about that. Councilmember Meltzer. I'd like to amend the motion to keep the CBA review which I think is, which is the staff recommendation, but to eliminate the administrative review. So, that amendment takes precedent over the motion on the floor requires a second. Councilmember Briggs. Second. Right. So do we need to clear the. Oh, I want to begin amendment is welcome. Well we got a vote on one. So we're going to be voting on the amendment, as presented by Councilmember Meltzer which is to basically do away with the administrative appeal. And Councilmember Briggs okay let's load on the board on that amendment. That amendment fails. Councilmember Amature. I was going to make an amendment, but. Go ahead and make a motion to amend. Yeah. Okay, make a motion to amend. Okay, so I make. I move to amend to. I actually know you know what I'm going to take that off up because I'll leave that for somebody else I want to see how this goes. Okay, we have a motion and a. So we're going to come back to the, we're going to come back to the original motion on the table, which was a motion to accept staff recommendations. And the motion was seconded I believe by Councilmember Briggs. Tim, did you have a comment? Yeah, I have a question. Can you just, so my focus is the 1000 homes that are currently conforming. How are they affected by staff's recommendation? That would be the process where those homes would become nonconforming, but all nonconforming structures within the city of Denton would have the option to go to ZBA to rebuild if they were more than 50% destroyed by accident or natural disaster. But all nonconforming structures within the city of Denton would have the option to go to ZBA to rebuild if they were more than 50% destroyed by accident or natural disaster. So $250 is what we're imposing on 1000 people. Okay. And is there an administrative option to that or the only option would be ZBA for nonconformities the only option is ZBA. Got it. Okay. So can I make my comments now I can do them later. Well, we've got a motion on the floor. Yes, I can. So we're ready. So, yeah, so my comment is this. I'll continue to process for the next few minutes that I have on the 250. I think that's, I find it interesting that on November 15, this body declared a state of emergency for a neighborhood that consisted of 50 people. We're going to affect today, 20 times that with no, no concern I've heard no one else talk about those families. And that's troubling to me. And it's it's hard for me to get around. It's hard for me to get around the fact that 20 times that number. We're going to test them with $250 but we're going to offer free road construction, free water, free barrels for another community. So where's the equity in that. So, it's just troubling to me. And I have to. When you're talking about balancing interest. I think those here are very well represented, and I think there's a segment of people that aren't represented here. I think when I look at it I've been consistent since I ran first time in 2011 before the gas well, you know, I lost because I said it was a state issue, I believe. And so I think this same group was was very passionate, very action and, and I appreciate them our plot information, I absolutely will act on that information but I absolutely think that those 1000 homes that did nothing wrong. All they did was do what the city said they could do. And this body within break that commitment, and that that's hard for me to get around. And especially when we declared a state of emergency for 20 times less than that. And so, the actions need to be consistent. I believe this body needs to send a clear message. And so that's the, that's the troubling part for me. So I will continue to deliberate with the time I have left. Councilmember Nelson, regarding the previous comments were in this case, this is different than the other case in that we're also weighing the impact on all the rest of the people as well. I understand their pertinent sentiments. I would like to go ahead and, for the sake of having there be a vote on this question, offer an amendment to change the setback to 1500 feet. We can vote on the emotional pass or fail. All right. Second, have a second for that. Did you say setback reverse setback change the reverse setback, the number to 1500 feet. Can you say that again. Okay, okay. Can we, can we pay attention to what's happening here. I'm not talking about you. I'm just saying if we were on our computers and all that and we're not listening, then we're not understanding what's going on. So, the amendment is to make a motion to amend it to 1500 foot reverse setback and I'm looking for a second. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. And so it says, are you making an amendment. Yes, but I'm confused because on here it says Jesse and Keely. That's an amendment. It's an amendment. So the amendment gets voted on. So yes, I second that amendment. Okay. So we have an amendment on the floor that's been motioned and seconded to change the reverse setback to 1500 feet. Let's vote on the board, please. I'm sorry. Okay. And I click. Yeah, you're on. Okay, good. That was what was confusing me. Motion fails for three. All right, anything else. Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, just succinctly. It was said that one of my peers is thinking about the rest of the people versus the as though the 1000 households and aren't affected. I don't understand that I guess but and so I just want to, I did not want to be silent on that because I don't think that's accurate statement. Everyone, it's a municipal water company. So, people are affected either financially or resource wise there's effects across the system. And so I just I don't understand that. So I did want to have a clear record that I disagree that I think those 1000 families and the fact or 1000 homes and the fact that they may have a water leak that prevents them from that would then prevent them from moving back in their home potentially would then affect that children, the children in those homes would no longer be able to go to the schools that they belong to because they can't rebuild their home. What if they can't get a loan, Mayor Pro Tem is this is this related to the motion. Yeah, it is, because one statement just before was said that it doesn't affect other people and so if you're talking 1000 homes that that would have children would have work consequences, and so I just disagree with that. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna shut this down here soon. Remember rigs. All right. Anybody else comment, because I haven't said anything but I'm going to say a few words. First of all, I appreciate everybody, everybody coming out. I have a motion, or does the comment come first. Okay, is it an amendment. No, it's an emotion. It's a motion. Okay, but we've already got an underlying motion on the table. Okay, it's only if you are making an amendment or motion to postpone which we've already had. Okay, that went off the board so I didn't realize it was too long. Got it. Okay, thank you. Appreciate everyone coming out sharing your thoughts. I was telling somebody that has transported me back to June of 2014 but there were a lot more people here and a lot more people out there. I'm going to be honest, and first of all I reject the notion that if we accept 500 feet that somehow that's negligent, and it's arbitrary. I've read these studies that you all that Ed that you sent me. And when I read the executive summary on one of them, the one that's quoted with the 2000 foot setback, there's 500 feet all throughout that executive summary about not exceeding guidelines being under guidelines. One of the studies that was passed out and that was sent was the one from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that was sent to us that said it was a more recent study. It was a 2015 study above and beyond what the four study was. Well, when you read the study, the data was collected in 2008 through 2010. So I'm just when when I read these, I don't know if I necessarily come to the conclusion that 500 feet, albeit let's face it. Yes. Is it better at 1000 or better at 2000? Sure. But I don't think 500 feet is necessarily an unsafe distance based upon the studies that have been sent to me that I've read. So the great thing is we can all read those. We can ask the people that are peers who are more knowledgeable than us, and we can come to our own conclusions and opinions. So and when I hear a 1500 foot setback, if there are if there are 1000 people affected with a 250 foot reverse setback, it's probably in the right way to do it. But you multiply that times. What is that? Five, six by six. If you go to 1500 foot setback, let's just say it sort of is proportional. That's 6000 homes that now if something happens, if if a natural disaster comes through and destroys it to greater than 50 percent, they're going to have to go through to Zoning Board of Adjustments, which I would be surprised if they weren't approved. I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say these people are going to lose that opportunity, but they still have to go. So I don't take this decision lightly. I'm glad we've had the discussion and I don't think this is the end of this discussion, quite frankly, in that regard. But but I don't feel that I'm settling on some distance based upon a political calculation. I've read the literature that has been sent me. I will tell you that for sure. And it's not just it's not just gone into a trash email slot. I mean, I've printed it out and I've read it. So and I appreciate you sending it. And in no way does us having maybe a disagreement on some of those issues mean that there's any disrespect, I don't think, either way. So I'm glad we're having the discussion. I'm glad that we're moving at least in a direction that is providing a greater reverse setback. I guess, though, too, honestly. And I appreciate Mayor Pro Tem you saying that there's there's well represented the people who share similar ideas and approaches and beliefs about this issue. And I appreciate you coming out. I sure hope that when we had this discussion again, we can hear from those who may share a different type of approach in the sense of they want to be able to buy a house where they want to buy a house. And they want to be able to make choices where they want to make choices based upon the information that they can they can research and that they can have. So that's all I have to say about that. Councilmember Armature, unless you have a really quick statement, we're going to go ahead and take a vote. Yeah, it's quick. I would like to amend to include cap wells. I'm sorry. I meant to include cap wells. Okay. All right. We have an amendment to include. So help me understand that. So that basically everything that goes that our gas well ordinance says about setbacks, active wells is also is just true for wells in general, including cap wells. Keep in mind the gas is still underground. So risk of explosion. So this is no different. Okay. All right. We have a motion to include cap wells in our current gas well ordinance. We do have the motion board. So if somebody wants to make a second, they can push their second button. Okay, motion does for lack of a second. Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah, I'd like to hear more. Not now about the issue of cap dwells. I don't understand it as well as I would hope to before taking action. And I'd like to suggest that perhaps it wouldn't be too big of a stretch to include it in the list of items that we take up. It's not what we talked about before when we look at the list of sort of affiliated issues. Okay. All right. All right. Councilmember Briggs, I was just going to say the same thing. The notification air monitoring the next if we could add that to the list, because on the fly, it's I don't even really know what we're talking about. But I'd really love to have that discussion to be true to our process when we have that discussion with those items that were coming back where there was already the one minute, if we could just put that on the one minute, and I don't care who sponsors it. But so we can just make sure we stay true to the true to our process. Councilmember Armitter. Is that from a previous request to speaker? Okay. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor to accept staff recommendations for as stated in the presentation. We've got a second from Councilmember Briggs. The motion was made by Councilmember Davis. Let's go ahead and vote on the board. Motion carries five to two. All right, that concludes at least brings us to our last agenda item, which I believe is the concluding items that correct. So concluding items are Councilmember Husband, Mayor Pro Tem? Okay, nevermind. I didn't know if you were cued up for concluding items. Okay, Mayor Pro Tem, go ahead. Yeah, thank you. So for those listening, there is the turkey roll this Saturday bike rally. So come on out. That's and it starts near it's Immaculate Conception Church starts out there. Please drop by or register online, participate. That's all day Saturday. And then also Saturday evening, there's the Tales from the Heart Banquet. And it's regarding a book about veils. Veil is her name, a young lady that was nine when she passed away due unforeseen. And her family has a fundraiser and a benefit. And it looks like it's going to be a great event. So that's this Saturday evening as well. Okay, Councilmember Armitage. Yeah, I just wanted to say tomorrow is a trance day of remembrance. And I'm really sad that I teach a night class Wednesday night, six to nine. And so I can't be there because of my job. But my heart will definitely be there thinking of lives, lives lost and the lives that we can still save. All right. Thank you. Councilmember Briggs. So I just wanted to tell everybody and say I went on a ride along with the Denton Police Department last Saturday. And I want to thank Officer Downey for letting me ask tons of questions and possibly be a little bit annoying to him. But I recommend that everyone do it. It was a fantastic experience and I did learn a lot. And I want to thank our Denton Police Department and just say for every negative event or situation you hear about, there are thousands of positive ones that happen every night that go unnoticed. And so I just wanted to say that and give a thanks for for that. And also I'm leaving first thing in the morning and a couple of hours to go to NLC and I'll be there through Saturday and I'll be making updates on the presentations that I attend. Great. Councilmember Ryan. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to remind anyone who's listening that Thursday evening is Beaujolais and more. And this year is being held at the North Texas Fairgrounds. It's a slightly larger venue than what we've had in the past over at the Civic Center and please come out and enjoy some grape wine, beer and food from multiple restaurants here in town. And I want to echo Councilmember Hussbuth on the turkey roll. I will be there in the morning collecting money and out in Valley View for the afternoon handing out bananas and cookies and water and Gatorade. If you could say where is the Beaujolais tomorrow or Thursday? Beaujolais is on Thursday evening at the North Texas Fairgrounds. And tickets are available at the door? Yeah, tickets are available at the campus theater. This is the one fundraiser a year for the building maintenance for the campus theater. Thank you very much. Seeing no more further requests for concluding items, we'll stand adjourned at 1107.