Feb 25, 2020 City Council on 2020-02-25 12:00 PM

Welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, February the 25th, 2020. It is 12.02 p.m. We do have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order. Our first work session item is citizen comments on consent agenda items. Do we have any blue cards? We have none for the consent agenda. Request for clarification on agenda items listed on this agenda. Any request for clarifications for agenda items on this agenda? Seeing none. All right. We'll move on then to our work session reports, which is agenda item 3. 3A is receive report, hold a discussion, and give staff direction regarding the Human Rights Campaign HRC Municipal Index overview and overview of federal and state civil rights law and research of comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinances. Yes. Can we wait until Councilmembers Briggs and Hutzpeth? Well, I'm not sure where... Can we switch to the next one? I know Councilmember Briggs is here, but I'm not sure where she is. There she is. But no, we're going to move forward with the agenda. Okay. Everybody knows when we start. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I think we should wait, let staff get through its presentation, her presentation, until we have questions. I don't think it's going to take that long, and then we'll be more comprehensive in our deliberation. Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council, Sarah Keettler. I'm the Chief of Staff here to present today on nondiscrimination ordinances. Before I go into the presentation, I just wanted to provide a brief outline of what will be covered. It's really broken up into two parts. The first part, I'll give some background and context that might be helpful in your discussion. I'll kind of review the Human Rights Campaign Municipal Equality Index scorecard. Staff had previously presented to Council in 2018 on that scorecard, as well as an overview of federal and state law, and how those agencies are interpreting federal and state law. And then I'll move into the second part of the presentation, which is really going to focus on providing an overview of each one of the cities that has a comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinance in Texas, and that is Plano, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin. And then finally, we'll allow for Council discussion in any direction that you'd like to provide to staff. So jumping right into the background of the work session history, staff did present in August of 2018 an overview of the HRC Municipal Equality Index scorecard, and this is a tool that can be used to see how inclusive municipalities are being to the LGBTQ community. During that presentation in August of 2018, staff asked Council for any direction to work on any further items or next step. We had received direction to form an anti-bullying policy for our city facilities and services. Staff drafted that, and Council approved that in December of 2018. Most recently, Council Member Davis had presented a one-minute work session pitch for Council to discuss a comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinance for the city. That's why we are here before you today. So again, as background, here is the HRC MEI comparison. Denton is shown in the first column here compared to other cities in Texas in the DFW area. Not going to spend too much time on this, but I thought it would be helpful just as a quick review. So there are five categories in the scorecard. Categories two through five, these items that are shaded in blue here, are things that are directly within the municipality's control and relate to municipal operations or services. So municipality as an employer, the services that we provide, our law enforcement agency, as well as leadership and advocacy efforts that elected officials may take. The first category that's shaded in green is really those items that relate to public policy, and it is where Council could adopt citywide laws prohibiting discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity in the areas of private employment, housing, and public accommodations. So you can see from the first column, we do not receive any points in this category. The cities that do are the four that I had mentioned in the previous slide for Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Plano. The other area where the City of Denton currently does not receive points in the scorecard is in category two of the municipality as an employer. There are two items originally which we do not receive points for on, and that is healthcare benefits. While the City of Denton does offer healthcare benefits for transgender healthcare needs, including mental healthcare and hormone therapy, the plan does not include those areas related to surgical treatments, so we do not receive any points in that category. The second main item underneath that category as municipality as an employer is we do not have a city contractor non-discrimination ordinance. So that would require that we require our city contractors to adopt non-discrimination policies specific to sexual orientation and gender identity. So I'd like to move into some background on federal and state law. In each one of those areas referenced for a non-discrimination ordinance starting with employment. So there is both state and federal law that prohibits discrimination in employment practices based on a number of protected classes that are shown here on the screen. It does not, neither Texas law or federal law prohibits expressly on sexual orientation or gender identity. And I should mention also under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it only applies to employers with 15 or more employees. And there are some exemptions that can be granted such as religious groups that are performing work connected or in furtherance of their religious activities. So although it's not expressly prohibited on sexual orientation and gender identity, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, has taken the stance that sexual orientation and gender identity are covered under sex-based discrimination. That means that they are investigating, mediating, maybe even litigating on behalf of individuals that have complaints of sexual orientation or gender identity. And right now there are actually three cases before the Supreme Court which are challenging to see is it covered, is it in fact covered under sex-based discrimination, is sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in fact covered under that sex-based discrimination class. These three cases, there's one on gender identity and two on sexual orientation. They were heard together, the oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court in October of last year. It would be expected that probably sometime later this spring the decisions from the Supreme Court would be ruled. So moving into housing, again there is state and federal law that prohibits discrimination in housing on a number of protected classes. And this is really in three categories of housing practices from the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings. Again, sexual orientation and gender identity are not expressly included. However, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, does encourage as individuals who identify as LGBTQ if they experience discrimination or they're about to experience discrimination to file a complaint as it may qualify under sex-based discrimination. And they provided a couple examples on their website, but I'll just read one example that HUD feels would be covered under sex-based discrimination. So a transgender woman is asked by the owner of her apartment building not to dress in women's clothing in the common areas of the property. This may violate the Fair Housing Act's prohibition against sex discrimination, which includes discrimination based on nonconformity with gender stereotypes. So moving into the last area of public accommodations, Texas actually does not have a state law in regards to public accommodations, but there are other states that have further laws for public accommodations. So we would fall under the federal law, which is Title II of the Civil Rights Act, and states that all persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of goods, services, and facilities. So in general, public accommodations include businesses, but not all. There's some exemptions and categories, or buildings that are open to or offer services to the general public. So examples of where public accommodations may be are hotels, restaurants, and places of entertainment, those things that involve commerce and the provision of goods and that are open to the general public. And this act has not been amended to include sexual orientation or gender identity. As far as enforcement, the federal Department of Justice could bring a lawsuit under Title II if they believe there's been a pattern or practice of discrimination in violation of Title II. So since federal and state law has not expressly prohibited on sexual orientation and gender identity, some local governments have decided to pass non-discrimination ordinances to add protections for those classes that are not expressly covered. So this could be sexual orientation and gender identity. I've also seen it include other things, such as US or military veteran status, marital status, student status, source of income, we've had source of income, you know, veterans, I think housing, mentioned before. And according to the Movement Advancement Project, and this is an independent nonprofit think tank that supports equality for all, as of January of this year, there are about 20 states and at least 295 municipalities that have decided to extend those protections expressly on gender identity and sexual orientation. And then I'm gonna move into kind of now going over each one of those cities that are in Texas that prohibit unemployment housing and public accommodations. Generally, these ordinances will mirror what you'll find in federal and state law. So they'll mirror what's found in the Fair Housing Act or in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act for employment. So in order to help guide the discussion, we kind of looked at each ordinance and decided to break it down into components. What are components that we see in each one of these ordinances? And what would staff need direction on in order to even develop an ordinance if that is the direction from counsel? So quickly, you'll see on each slide, it'll be kind of broken down into these different categories. But generally, some of the questions that may come up, what classes are protected under the, would be protected under the ordinance? Is it just sexual orientation and gender identity, or does it again extend to include other classes? How are they defining employment housing and public accommodations? Is it differing from federal or state law? What are they exempting broadly from their entire ordinance? Or is there exemptions by each section? So exemptions for employment, exemptions for housing may differ. Moving down into then kind of the process, if an ordinance were established, how would complaints of discrimination be filed, and then how would they be reviewed? What would be the timeliness? How would that process work? Moving into investigation, who of city staff would review and investigate complaints? And what would that investigation look like? Is it review of evidence? Is it interviews with both parties together separately? Is it interviewing of witnesses, on-site investigations? What reach would we have for investigations to determine if there's cause or reasonable cause that discrimination occurred? If it appears that discrimination has occurred, what would mediation look like to try to resolve that between the parties and come to an agreement? And then if mediation could not be, if it could not be resolved through mediation, what would be the enforcement for someone who engaged in an unlawful practice of discrimination on that ordinance, what would be the penalty? So I'll start out with the city of Plano. So Plano adopted their ordinance in December of 2014. It's called the Equal Rights Ordinance. And it prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. And those classes that are protected by federal and state law, as well as extending to cover U.S. military veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, and gender identity. In their ordinance, they have broad exemptions for seven entities that are completely exempt from the ordinance. The first one here is religious, political, and nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. In their frequently asked questions section, they said that these four entities in this first bullet point were exempts to allow for constitutional and statutory freedom of expression and religion issues. In addition to those, the U.S. government and state of Texas and its agencies are exempt, and any private clubs are also exempt from the ordinance. They're also very expressly stated that public restrooms are exempt underneath public accommodations. So in practice, since the ordinance was passed in December of 2014, they've received nine official complaints, with the last official complaint being filed in 2016. Zero of those nine complaints have reached the required level to warrant an investigation. And so just going over a little bit more about how the city would handle complaints, if it's on behalf of something that's covered by federal or state law, they will simply refer it along to the federal or state agency that should handle it. If it is not covered by a federal or state agency, or those agencies refuse to look into it further, the city could then form an investigation panel to do its own local investigation. It would consist of a five-person panel, with three director-level staff appointed by the city manager, and two rotating external business community representatives. And then the city attorney or his designee would serve as legal advisor. This has not had to take place, as none of the complaints have reached the level of investigation for this panel. If it were to meet, they would schedule meetings together with the complainant and the respondent, and then they would schedule separate meetings with each of those individuals. If they determined through that process, the panel determined through that process that it's a reasonable cause that discrimination occurred, the respondent can actually ask for a religious accommodation, and this is under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1999. So that may be granted to the respondent underneath that state law as a defense they can claim. If not, the matter would be referred on to a neutral third-party mediator that would be paid for by the city to try to mediate that. If an agreement cannot be reached, it would then be referred to the city attorney's office for review for possible criminal enforcement. So it is important to note that the city attorney's office would have that discretion just depending on the facts and evidence of each case and the legal burden required for criminal enforcement, as with our other citations that we handle through municipal court. So it would be a Class C misdemeanor, a violation of the ordinance of up to $500 per fine. So next, I'm going to move into Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin, and they're a little different than Plano in that each one of these cities actually has some authority from federal agencies to administer, enforce, and investigate complaints against federal law. So I just wanted to point that out now, and I'll kind of explain that as I go through each of them. So Dallas adopted their ordinance back in 2002. It is called Chapter 46, and it was related to prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations. It was amended in 2016 to add gender identity and expression. And so this whole Chapter 46 is only on sexual orientation and gender identity. Dallas also has a fair housing ordinance, but it's a completely separate chapter, Chapter 20, and they are certified as a federal fair housing assistance program agency, which means that they can investigate complaints against federal fair housing law locally, and they have that authority expressly from HUD. After going through an application process, and there is a lot of things that have to be done in order to become certified by HUD, some of that information was included in your backup in the agenda information sheet. Before Dallas, in Chapter 46, there are broad exemptions for a religious organization as well as the U.S. government and state of Texas, and then there are also some specific exemptions underneath each section related to housing, employment, and public accommodations. Since the ordinance was first adopted in 2002, there have been 91 complaints filed under Chapter 46 related to sexual orientation and gender identity that averages out to about five complaints per year on the basis of those two protected classes. Again, the city of Dallas is a federal fair housing assistance program, and they do have an office of fair housing and human rights with four fair housing investigators on staff that are trained to look into matters of discrimination. And these investigators also would handle any complaints under Chapter 46. So, there's a number of things that outline how the investigation would take place, including conducting a full review of the evidence, examining records, and interviewing witnesses. And then if it, again, appears an unlawful practice has occurred, they would attempt to conciliate, city staff would attempt to conciliate the complaints and reach an agreement with both parties. If they are unable to do so, the case would be referred to the city attorney's office, and the city attorney's office would determine whether to proceed with prosecution of the complaint in municipal court. So moving on to the city of Fort Worth. Fort Worth has Chapter 17 of their municipal code as human relations, and this was adopted more than 50 years ago. It was amended in 2000 to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and then also again amended in 2009 to add gender identity. Fort Worth is not only a fair housing assistance program agency with HUD, it is also a federal fair employment practice agency with the EEOC and has been for more than 40 years. So Fort Worth has the authority to investigate locally both complaints against federal fair housing law and employment laws. There are no broad exemptions for the entire human relations chapter, but again there's some specific exemptions underneath each section. For example, for religious organizations or private clubs. And then Fort Worth's ordinance is very specific that public restrooms are exempt. We looked at some of the data of the number of complaints that have been filed in Fort Worth, and in fiscal year 2018 there were a total of 272 complaints filed with their office, and that's all complaints, so that could be housing, employment, public accommodations on any of the classes. When we were looking into the data a little bit further from their fiscal year 2018 report, there was only one charge that was on the basis of sexual orientation, and that was a fair employment charge filed with the office. Also Fort Worth has a diversity and inclusion department. They have nine full-time staff and two part-time staff, which includes investigators, coordinators, intake specialists, and admin as well to help oversee the investigation process. And then the staff of that department is actually supervised by an administrator that reports directly to the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission, which is an appointed body by city council. They also have the investigation process where they're doing the initial review to see under what authority do they have to investigate the complaint. Is it underneath their authority as a fair housing assistance program agency, or as a fair employment practice agency, or is it under local ordinance? If they do, depending on that authority, they'll begin their investigation, including interviews, documentation, investigations, and reports, and they will try to solve it through conciliation. And if they're unable to, it could be an offense underneath the ordinance of a fine of not more than $500 for those that are violations of local ordinance. So moving into the last city, the city of Austin has a Title V civil rights chapter with six individual sections. Austin, like Fort Worth, also has authority to investigate housing and employment charges on behalf of HUD and EEOC. They have no broad exemptions in their chapter, again, but some specific exemptions. As far as complaints that have been filed, since 2005, 78 official complaints have been filed under local ordinance. Those are things that are outside of their work as a FAP or a FEPA. And so that equates to about five complaints per year that are based on classes that are protected by Austin's local ordinance and not as their work as a FAP or a FEPA. Under their agreements, here you can see with HUD and EEOC, they investigate or conciliate about 160 cases per year as their work as those two agencies. This is handled by Austin's Equal Employment Fair Housing Office. They have seven full-time staff, and they also have a Human Rights Commission in Fort Worth, which is an appointed body by city council. They go through a review and an investigation, and again, will attempt to settle if possible. If they are unable to, the case would be forwarded to the city attorney for prosecution in municipal court or other civil prosecution as allowed by state law. So that would be as their work as a fair housing assistance program or a fair employment practice agency. So that was a lot of information coming at you fast, but I'd be happy to take any questions in regards to those cities, and then ultimately want to seek if there's any direction for staff to take next steps. So that concludes your presentation. Okay. All right. Council Member Riggs. Do we know if Denton Housing Authority or Denton Affordable Housing have added any of these into their policies? I do not know. We did reach out to our HUD representative to learn if we could have the number of fair housing complaints that are filed within the city of Denton. They did not have that information to share with us in terms of just number of complaints. Right now if someone would call into the city and says, "I believe I'm a victim of discrimination based on fair housing law," we would help refer them to HUD to file that complaint. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Meltzer. Not a question, just sort of an opening salvo. As we search for consensus to see where this body is, as one of the members who was interested in having this work session, I'd just like to indicate a couple of areas that I'm not necessarily interested in going into. I don't think the culture is at a place where government can effectively do much regarding bathrooms, and we saw that other cities have landed there as well. I think people are going to have to kind of work that issue out on a kind of individual basis for a while before I think we can do anything really helpful. And then with respect to religious organizations, what I have to say about that is more within the non-discrimination with respect to religion. I'm very supportive of the language that Council Member Davis originally teed up, which was to express the assumption that religious organizations would be understood to be able to affirmatively discriminate in favor in hiring of adherents of their religions. To me, that's common sense that a mosque should be able to hire Muslims, really any advocacy organization you'd expect to hire people who advocate the tenets of that organization's mission. So I wouldn't so much be interested in a -- depending on where we land on sort of everything else -- in a carve-out related to those other protected classes, but rather to focus on the affirmative right of a religious organization to hire people who adhere to their tenets. Okay, all right, Council Member Armitage? >> You mentioned that the Dallas ordinance has extensive religious exemptions. I was wondering if you could detail some of those, as well as the religious protections -- I said exemptions, protections, whatever you want to call it -- protections for freedom of religion that exist under federal and state law, as well as those ones you mentioned from the Dallas ordinance. >> Sure. Dallas broadly exempted any religious organization. They are not subject to this ordinance and a complaint cannot be brought against them. That is the same with Plano, just flipping over. Religious organizations are also broadly exempt. In addition to a religious organization being broadly exempt, an individual could claim a defense under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, in Plano's instance, claiming it was against their substantial belief in religion and that it was hindering that. There is a law that exists in Texas, and so Plano was specific to mention that. I'm not sure how it would be handled in the other cities. I think it could also be a claim of defense, as well. >> And so in Dallas, there have been no claims against religious organizations because they're so broadly exempt. >> They're exempt. >> Okay, thanks. >> Council Member Davis? >> A couple of questions, this is a good slide to be on. For Dallas and these other cities that are participants in federal enforcement, do they receive federal funding for that partnership or is it all local funding? >> They do receive partial funding from HUD and EEOC as they're doing activities on behalf of those agencies. They receive funding in different ways. It's really based upon the number of complaints or investigations that they're handling. I have information from, I believe it's, let me find it, from Fort Worth that had, in relation, I'm sorry, the city of Austin, or actually, yeah, this is from Fort Worth, I'm sorry. Just to share a little bit with you about what terms, what funding, if it's a full investigation with a determination, HUD would reimburse $2,800 per investigation, and then there's different categories, again, based upon what would be reimbursed. For EEOC, they reimburse $700 per investigation. So they provide some resources and even HUD's up front to say we'll help with training, but there still has to be that commitment from the local agency to provide the resources necessary to have substantially equivalent laws, policies, and procedures to what HUD would have, which includes not only staffing to handle those processes, but also legal staff to handle if there needs to be prosecution. >> So the primary financial burden still seems to fall on the local authorities. >> I think that would be accurate. >> My second question relates to the criminal enforcement. When a case gets referred to or an investigation referred to the city attorney, do we have any numbers in each of those cities, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin, that do refer complaints ultimately to their city attorney? Do we know how many of those based on these criteria have been referred to the city attorney and how many of those have been actually prosecuted by the city attorney? >> Do not have that information with me at hand. I think for Fort Worth, we would be able to give that to you. They have a pretty public open report in terms of the number of cases that are filed or resolved each year, so I think we would be able to get that data for you for Fort Worth. >> You may or may not have the answer to this question, and if you don't, that's just fine. Does it seem like most of these complaints, I mean, if you just kind of go through the flow chart of a complaint, does it seem like most of them are resolved at the initial intake, at the investigation, or at the mediation stage, that most of them don't make it all the way to a city attorney referral? >> I think it all depends. When we were surveying the cities, we did try to ask around mediation how many are resolved through mediation, and a lot was their response are resolved in that stage where they're sitting down. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Briggs? >> So on the Supreme Court cases, it was listed under employment, but will housing be affected one way or the other, if that's changed, or will it specifically apply to employment? >> Aaron, do you want to help me weigh in on that? >> It really depends on how the Supreme Court rules. I mean, there's various ways it can make a broad pronouncement that sexual orientation and gender identity are broadly protected under law, or they can choose to only address that specific case under those sets of facts, or it could not rule, or rule the opposite, but it's not a protected class. There's many ways the Supreme Court can rule. It just depends, and we'll just have to wait to see how they ruled. >> So they can address it broadly, not just case specific? >> They can, but I think that based on the posture that these are, these are employment discrimination claims, and so if they were to make a decision in favor of the plaintiffs, then it would probably be most likely limited to just that. It does not, that would be persuasive for use in HUD actions and other types of federal discrimination. >> Thank you. >> Councilman Melcher. >> I don't know if you'll be able to address this, but we have the advantage of not exactly blazing a new trail here. These ordinances have been on the books for years over a decade in Fort Worth, so we have the opportunity to see what the experience has been. We've seen the number of complaints, but I wonder if you've been able to pick up qualitatively whether they have found the ordinances to be helpful in terms of protecting those against discrimination that was intended to, whether they found it overly burdensome to administer, whether it's been difficult or not for businesses, just what has the experience been of living with these ordinances? Do we have any way to get some insight? >> I think that would be very difficult for me to weigh in on because I think it all depends on who you would ask that question. All I can kind of go over is the facts that were presented in terms of the number of cases that are coming through each municipality. I also know it's probably not as large of an impact to Dallas, Fort Worth, or Austin who have these offices established where they have trained staff that know how to handle review and intake and then an investigation and then bringing it forward to the city attorney with a recommendation of do we believe this is a reasonable cause that discrimination occurred or not? They're a little bit more trained and specialized in those areas having those offices for some time. >> Yes, so I feel ready to give my direction at least to show my hand. I am very impressed by the Dallas ordinance and I appreciated this presentation. I really like the extent of their broad religious exemptions and they make really clear what those exemptions are and protections under state and federal law and really firm that up. I'm impressed knowing that no complaints have been brought forward towards religious organizations and I want to thank Councilmember Davis for bringing this forward. About his leadership, I think we wouldn't have reached this point so I'm very pleased and I think we're on the right side of history in moving forward with this. >> A couple of questions. More fact-based so I can understand sort of the data. On the specific ordinances, you talk about the number of complaints, like Plano there's nine that were specific to the ordinance adopted in 2014, zero had really gone past the investigation stage. >> That's correct. >> Plano is probably more closely matched to the city of Denton as far as -- I mean, they've got almost double the population, but okay. City of Dallas, since 2002, there's been 91 complaints, 40 employment, 38 housing, 12 accommodation, one retaliation, so those are specifically related to the unlawful discriminatory practices relating to sexual orientation. >> And gender identity, correct. Those are specific to Chapter 46. Those numbers do not include any underneath Chapter 20, the Fair Housing Ordinance. >> Gotcha. Okay. City of Fort Worth, in FY18, this is just one year's data. >> Correct. >> All right. 93 housing complaints, 172 fair employment charges filed and seven public accommodation complaints. What does that data represent? >> That represents all complaints filed to their office. So all complaints of discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations, regardless if they're underneath federal, state, or local ordinance. >> But is that regarding strictly sexual orientation and gender identity, or is that all? >> No, that includes all protected classes. >> So we don't know what the breakdown is of that. >> We do. We didn't take a look closer in the report. There was only one charge that was filed on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. >> Okay. >> And that was a fair employment charge. And that was in fiscal year '18, so it could vary from year to year. >> I understand. >> We're just working with the report that's available. >> All right. So I just wanted to make sure we got the data. And Austin, I'm not concerned with that. I want to go back to sort of the legal landscape. And so Mr. State Attorney, I mean, I'll tell you where I am. I'm real hesitant to give direction to craft an ordinance when we are so close to the Supreme Court ruling on this very issue that we're talking about. The EEOC, number one, is enforcing those particular complaints, which I think the Plano ordinance when I read it, it said if there's another jurisdiction that handles those complaints, you just refer them on. You don't even process them through your ordinance. So I'm certainly okay with that because we don't need to create a whole bureaucracy like Dallas and Fort Worth because I just don't think -- I mean, their number of complaints are small as it is. And secondly, so -- and then housing, HUD, Housing and Urban Development, they've said encourage people to bring forward. Now, 10, 15 years ago, this law would not even have been close to being settled. But today, we're literally months, if not days, away from getting some clarity on this particular issue, which my hunch is it will be more narrowly construed on the Supreme Court decision because of just -- that's just how they do it, unless they just figure they'll just go ahead and resolve this issue altogether. So we could have some real clarity on which direction to go based upon their decision. So my question becomes, Mr. City Attorney, if, for instance, the Supreme Court comes back and decides that sexual orientation and sexual identity is not a protected class under the EEOC and they just limit it to the EEOC, is that -- does that preempt -- I mean, is that basically stating as law, at least up to that point, that any ordinance, state, local, federal, that tries to enforce -- in other words, is exempt if they try to include those classifications as a protected class or is it just saying in those cases or just depends on how they word the opinion? For employment purposes, basically, the EEO, if the Supreme Court comes back and makes broad pronouncement that it is not a protected class, then for purposes of employment discrimination, any ordinance or state law that has protection for gender identity or sexual orientation would basically be preempted by federal law -- by the U.S. Supreme Court pronouncement if they make a very broad pronouncement in that way. Or if they specifically say to the EEOC or if they even make it broader, either direction, if they make it broader, either direction. Yes. Exactly. All right. Okay. All right. Then on, let's see, on the criminal aspect, so EEOC is hearing these complaints, and I think I read in the backup they've had $4 million or so worth of either judgments or payouts or something in that regard. The city, whether it be the city of Denton or anybody else, if we determine it's a criminal complaint, we are limited to what? Under Texas law, it's a fine-only offense, it's a class C misdemeanor, so we would basically prosecute on that a violation has occurred on this particular day in the city of Denton, and if the jury or judge agrees after a trial, then the defendant, the offender would be fined up to a maximum of $500. Okay. And is the burden as far as if it's a criminal trial, reasonable doubt, unanimous verdict if it's a, if the jury is the fact finder, that still all applies? Since it's a criminal charge, beyond reasonable doubt is the standard in which the jury or judge must be satisfied that the, in this case the prosecution has met their elements of the offense to that standard. Okay. All right. Let me look through here real quick, just to make sure. So yeah, just to make sure that, so Fort Worth only had one based upon sexual orientation and gender identity, as far as that for 2018. Yes, that's correct. Okay, all right, that's all I have, Council Member Briggs. So I have direction, but I also have something that I wrote that I want to read, it shouldn't take very long. Sure. So what we are talking about today is not breaking new ground. There are at least 295 local governments across the states that have non-discrimination ordinances that not only protect individuals regardless of sexual orientation, but also protects them no matter their gender identity. We are not talking about doing something that will be revolutionary, untested, or leading in the nation. What we are talking about today is long overdue and is putting Denton on level ground with other leading cities in our region and nation. This is about ensuring that our community is inclusive and values people for who they are. This is about ensuring that Denton has a level playing field for our most important asset, our people. When we talk about making this community that values and protects people, we are talking about ensuring that Denton builds a stronger, more competitive foundation for economic development and prosperity. Economic development is more than incentivizing gas stations and storing frozen chicken. Economic development is about inclusion and placemaking. It's about laying the groundwork for all people and not just certain classes of citizenry to create, earn, provide, and to thrive. If we are a place that values all of its people, then we are a place where people want to be. We are a place that better attracts and retains talent. It makes us more attractive place not just for people to put down roots, but for businesses who need talent to put down roots as well. So while the Supreme Court awaits June hearings, which is what I heard maybe earlier, which may help address this issue at the federal level, I would like for us to begin to craft a draft ordinance which is consistent with the policies of our neighbors, including their exemptions, here in the Metroplex, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Plano. That's my direction, and I would like to continue the conversation about what more specific exemptions we would allow, and because, like we heard, this federal ruling may not even address housing, which is happening and it's a real issue, and so I don't think it would be a waste of our time to at least look at that. So what I'm hearing you say is because when you say consistent with the cities around us, they're very different. Those ordinances are very different. And so I really don't know what that means. It sounds like what you're saying is let's just have another work session to begin to hash out the exact terms of the ordinance. Is that what I'm hearing? Right, yes, but including the talking about the different exemptions, most of the exemptions, religious organization, a lot of them are consistent within most of the ordinances around regarding religious exemptions, which would be a place for us to start. All right, okay, before Council Member Meltzer. I share the view that I think the model that would most likely, of those presented, that would most likely fit us would be Plano's, just in terms of not creating, I mean, the others are just larger cities that have different authorization. And so the incremental, they don't have an incremental staffing issue, so I think Plano may have found a workable way to administer it. Broadly, well, I actually have a question, yeah, I do have a question for City Attorney regarding what the federal government might do. You suggested a moment ago that if they said something or another is not a protected class, then it would be preemptive, but is it also possible that, because I didn't anticipate that answer, is it also possible they may say it's not a protected class by the federal government, which would leave open other actions by other levels of government? And that was why, I mean, it's possible, and that was why I prefaced my comments, depending on how they rule, because the Supreme Court will find different ways to rule, the broad pronouncement limited to such facts may be reversing, or actually reversing, or bending back to the trial court to develop a better factual record. I mean, there's so many different possibilities, and so it's very difficult for any of us, any attorney, to give you any kind of definitive answer as to how they might rule. So okay, that's very helpful, actually. My main feeling about the fact that the federal government is going to act on this is that that's sort of the federal government's business to do, may affect us, may not, but that our focus, you know, we're not here to judge the Supreme Court of the U.S., you know, this is the Denton City Council, and I'm motivated by Denton issues, and the two that are salient to me in this area are the, you know, we have a number of people who, you know, are telling us that they, you know, they, or people they know, you know, are presently experiencing discrimination and that there's no, you know, sort of firm legal backbone for them to defend themselves in housing and employment. So you know, a present issue for our residents, and secondly, you know, that we're a city that has aspirations to grow and attract employers, and you know, at this point, you know, the corporate world is firmly on the non-discrimination page, and you know, we're, there are dozens of businesses that have come out and said, we would like you to take action in this direction, including our own convention center, because they know this is sort of the hallmark of, you know, being welcoming, which you've got to be if you expect employers to come. So regarding specifically Denton's issues as a diverse and increasingly diverse place where people need equal protection and a place that wants to grow, I feel we do have a legitimate basis for acting. So I'm inclined to see if we can find a consensus behind ordinance language, and as I said, you know, I think Plano's model is probably the most, you know, doable. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I first want to thank staff for putting this massive amount of information together. I know some of this was as easy as picking up the phone, but a lot more of it was combing through ordinances and kind of pulling teeth to get some of these reports. I also want to thank the community advocates we've heard from. I know my fellow council members have heard from as well, easily hundreds of people in the community with all different kinds of perspectives, all different kind of viewpoints, and then of course everybody who tuned in last summer to the public event that we had where we heard some of those diverse viewpoints. I also want to real quickly touch on a couple things my colleagues said. The first, there were a number of questions. I had some myself about the number of complaints in different places. I want to really caution us against using the number of complaints, putting too high an emphasis on that, just because we know that certain things are under-reported, especially in vulnerable populations. We know that people don't necessarily rush to the police station to report crimes. They don't rush to a federal agency or a city agency to report everything that goes wrong. So I want to kind of caution us there on thinking that I don't want anybody to think and no one has suggested that if there aren't complaints someplace that there aren't necessarily problems. The other thing I want to push back a little bit is something I heard that one of the benefits to having a nondiscrimination ordinance would be to kind of show the value we place on our people, and for me, I suppose that has some importance, but I also don't want to give any kind of implication that if we do not have a nondiscrimination ordinance that we somehow don't show adequate value in our people or that we don't love and support our neighbors just as much as some other city. There are plenty of good and valid reasons for a city not to have a nondiscrimination ordinance. There are lots of very progressive cities in the state of Texas that don't have ordinances, and the reasons they don't have those ordinances, I suspect, are some of the things we've talked about today. Resource allocation, federal preemption, or if not full-on legal preemption, it's typically a federal issue, and even some of our cities that we've seen in this presentation today, they use federal resources and the furtherance of federal statutes, and then this kind of dovetails in with what they're already doing on a federal level. I would also think that one of the reasons we don't see some of these other cities getting into this territory is one of the big cities you don't see on this list, the city of Houston, had a very negative experience, and I don't think anybody on either side of the ordinance that went into effect in Houston and got legislated, litigated, back and forth, I don't think anybody involved in that process would say that that was a positive thing for the city of Houston. So, when I look at the staff presentation and the information we now have to hand, three things jump out at me. One, the timeliness of a Supreme Court opinion. I think the mayor hit the nail on the head. We may have some very good, very clear answers from the Supreme Court pretty soon, and one of the things that folks who have looked into this issue will note, that a number of circuits are already interpreting Title VII to include sexual orientation in gender identity and some other things under that protected class of sex, so we may have some very good answers very soon. I would be very comfortable with waiting for a Supreme Court opinion if we need to. If that makes some other members of the council more comfortable, I'm very comfortable with that as well. They are the authorities. I'm fine waiting for their opinion. The other thing that hopped out at me from the presentation was the cities that are doing the local enforcement are already, they already had a regulatory framework for these things. They already had investigators and offices and support staff to go through an entire investigative process, and then they added classes to their existing process, so I agree with Council Member Meltzer when he says Plano is kind of more like, and I think the mayor said it as well, Plano is more like the situation we are in. We are not a federal partner in any of these other enforcement. We don't get any federal money for enforcing fair housing or fair labor standards or any of that kind of stuff. And then the last thing that jumped out at me was something that Intel staff did this research. I had never read any ordinances myself. I hadn't found it. This mediation option, this conciliation process that some of these cities are going through, I would be willing to bet that one of the reasons that you don't see, you don't hear on the news, somebody gets a $500 fine in the city of Dallas for a discrimination complaint is because they have a robust mediation and conciliation process. I can tell you, as somebody who spends his day job enforcing criminal laws, you do not change hearts and minds enforcing criminal laws. You do not heal a community enforcing $500 fines. You heal a community and you move the community down the road in conversation with that mediation process, with the conversation and all of those sorts of things. And then on the back end of that, when you look at criminal enforcement, what a burden to put on a city attorney to say you have to stand in front of a judge or jury and prove beyond a reasonable doubt why someone didn't get a job, or why someone didn't get an apartment, or one of those things. There's a reason why when you see lawsuits over those kind of things, discrimination, that's a preponderance of the evidence standard, that's a very different standard than beyond a reasonable doubt. As someone who works with that standard every day, it is very high and your proof is very difficult sometimes. And then imagine the position you put your city attorney in, if your city goes all the way through an investigation and you hand it to the city attorney, and the city attorney as the legal authority says we don't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot go forward with this complaint. And then your city attorney is there in the newspaper headline as the person who stopped the investigation into discrimination in your community. That is an enormous burden. Trust me, prosecutors deal with that on a daily basis also, making that hard decision. And I don't know if our community would react well to that. So all of that said, thank you for indulging the long-winded direction there. I think I'm most comfortable with the city of Plano's basic parameters, their exemptions and the fact that they call out the Texas law that's going to get cited if this ever goes to litigation is very prudent. I think they point out something that should be very clear to anybody who follows religious exemptions in Texas, the first amendment is supreme. It trumps everything else we've got. And that's not just true in Texas, that's true in federal law. So Plano's exemptions, I think they're the best written. I also like their process up until we get to criminal enforcement. I'm just not there on criminal enforcement. I don't know, it creates huge burdens for the city without creating a meaningful deterrent to discrimination. If someone really is a hard-hearted bigot and they're not going to let somebody have an apartment or a job for the reasons that we've talked about, a $500 ticket is the cost of doing business. We're not going to change anybody's hearts and minds with a $500 ticket. So I'm okay with everything up to including the mediation and conversation process. I'm not okay with criminal enforcement. I'm going to try to get people who haven't weighed in first. Mayor Pro Tem or Councilmember Ryan, you got any comments or because we're starting to go back around the horn two or three times for some of us? Councilmember Ryan? Well, and I'm in agreement that until these Supreme Court cases are heard, that it doesn't make sense to have staff start working on crafting an ordinance when in the next couple of months that ordinance may have to be recrafted in a different way. I was unaware until we got the backup that the EEOC was actually prosecuting and that HUD is also looking at it in that same direction right now. So until that answer comes down, I'll say put it on the table. Mayor Pro Tem, any comments at this point? No, not at this point. Councilmember Romer? Yeah, several things. One, I want to point out that the Supreme Court ruling, as I understand it, only applies to employment and not to the other categories and that, as I understand it, it is only about interpreting the current law and not about making a new law like as we've experienced here in Denton with preemption, House Bill 40, which was a new law that exempted our fracking ban. This would not be, no matter what the ruling, that kind of preemption situation. I want to say, secondly, as happy as I am that we're having the conversation and considering and comparing these different options, I could never support the Plano ordinance and I want to explain why. If you talk to people in the transgender community, in Plano, in the state of Texas, in transgender rights advocates, they believe and I agree that Plano leaves transgender rights behind and most LGBTQ identified people who I know do not want their own rights protected at the expense of the explicit exemption of some other group's rights. That is what many people feel. In fact, when it first came out, the human rights campaign even said that they wouldn't defend the Plano ordinance because they saw it as a transphobic ordinance. That's my opinion on Plano. As far as enforcement, finally, I wanted to say we have currently a fair housing coordinator and we have had no complaints come forward, complaints be made by the city to HUD through our fair housing coordinator. We actually have an enforcement mechanism that has been and staff that has been underused and I think that we're in a great position to be able to use the enforcement and the staff that we already have that we've been underusing. I'll add, in case it wasn't obvious, that is why as far as what I said about the Supreme Court ruling, that's why I don't think that we need to wait until the Supreme Court ruling to go forward with this. Councilmember Armitage, I don't think anybody here knows exactly what the Supreme Court is going to rule. It could be narrowly tailored, it could be broadly tailored. In your comments you said that it's going to only apply to the EEOC. We don't know that. In your comments you stated that the HRC comparison chart that they wouldn't even defend it, I see on this chart they give the Plano ordinance 27 points out of 30. I really get, I really get, it's very curious when I hear people talk about policy statements that seem to almost be shame-based, shame-based in that, you know, if you don't do this then you're somehow doing this, that you don't care about people if you don't do this. I hear that somehow the economic development program of our city has been rendered down to gas stations and frozen chicken. Well, I will tell you, the sales tax dollars that we receive from one of those and also the jobs that would be provided by the others, I hardly would say that it narrows down to gas stations and frozen chickens. So I just want us to be mindful of we're talking about people's lives here, not just the people who are sort of promoting this ordinance, we're talking about everybody's lives and we all need the respect that we all do. So I have no problem continuing the discussion, but I sure hope that it won't be clouded with such hyperbole that really does nothing to promote something that's in the best interest of the entire community. And if the Supreme Court is going to rule on something, we've already had an experience where we did something and it was preempted and we should have had that fight and we did have that fight, but we are two months away from getting guidance on how to best craft, if we desire an ordinance, how to best craft that ordinance that will stand up and be enforceable. And Councilmember Davis, I hear what you're saying about the number of complaints and I'm the only one that brought that up. I'm not saying we base our decision on this on the number of complaints, I just want the data to be clear. But I also want it to be clear that if there's underreporting on EEOC claims, you are going to be much better off filing an EEOC claim than you're going to be filing a claim with a municipal organization. Because number one, they're either going to push it to the EEOC or you get $500 if it goes to a criminal trial. So I don't have a problem continuing the conversation. My direction is to look at the City of Plano's, to look at it more intently, more specifically, because I think that more accurately reflects what the City of Denton can do. But I really hope that we can do this policymaking business in a way that doesn't necessarily have to throw all these kinds of, number one, inaccuracies, and number two, sort of policy jabs that weren't agreed to in the past that sort of cast an overshadowing brush on what we're doing as a city. Councilmember Briggs. So I agree. I definitely don't want to play with people's lives, but there are individuals being discriminated against in our city because of what they look like and who they love. And so that is why I'm in favor of continuing the discussion. And I don't mind working from the City of Plano as well, and it's a good starting point. There are some really good things in it, and there are some things that we need to work on specific for our city that I think this council could do. I appreciate all the comments, emails, letters from everyone in our community on both sides. And the issues that I heard were employment and religion, and I think that the Supreme Court will come down and discuss the employment and will give us some guiding points, but as we continue to have this conversation, we can talk about housing and public accommodations, and there's other areas that we can continue the discussion. As far as economic development, we compare ourselves with other cities around, and I don't think there's anything wrong with putting ourselves on equal playing field when we're talking about attracting people and jobs to our community. Councilmember Briggs, I don't disagree with you in that. I think that's a very valid statement and a good policy statement that we can have a really strong discussion about. My concern and my objection comes to these kinds of other ad hominem comments that really don't have anything to do with the discussion. And so my direction is, I think we need to wait until the Supreme Court rules so that when we start talking about this decision, we can use the City of Plano as a sort of a template, depending on how that decision comes down, because it will directly impact our discussion. And to move forward, to try to craft something that we have no idea what's going to happen in just two months at the federal level, it's going to take staff time, it's going to take council time, and I guess I'm willing to do it, but I see it as very, very inefficient. So my direction is to wait to even continue this conversation until we have some guidance from the federal authorities to see if we can even do this in some of the areas that are important. The housing, the employment sector has already been covered. People can still go, they can go to the EEOC. That's not a myth. If you feel like you've been discriminated against based upon these classifications, you can go file a complaint with the EEOC tomorrow. So that's my direction. I understand. I just want to take a summary of where we are on direction so that when we get to that consensus we can move forward. So Council Member Briggs, you're okay with moving forward now with the discussion, not withstanding the Supreme Court's decision? Council Member Ryan, it sounds like you're more inclined to give direction of let's wait until the decision comes down and then we can revisit and determine how do we want to craft something from that decision. Council Member Armitage, your direction is move forward right now, but not based upon the Plano ordinance, based upon some other ordinance. Well, I'll say this, I'm okay with going forward with whatever template and modifying it from there, but I could not ultimately end up approving of something of an ordinance that looks like Plano that has those transgender exemptions that they have. That's a great -- I appreciate you bringing that up. Could you tell me up there which one of those exemptions you're talking about? Because I don't know. More than anything else is the exemption of public restrooms, which are one of the venues of discrimination that are most commonly faced by transgender people. Okay. So that's the primary -- that's the one that you referred to in your previous comments, as far as the exemption. Yeah. And by the way, about human rights campaign, I mentioned that they initially were not going to support it. But they eventually did. I mean, they've given it points. Clear. Okay. All right. Council Member Meltzer. Yeah, I think what we can productively do, even while we're sort of waiting for direction, particularly if there is interest among several of us in exploring the Plano model for good and for bad, is just a deeper dive on what their experience has been. Let's hear from Plano's chamber. Let's hear from the community of advocates, what has worked, what hasn't worked, so that we are in a position to build on what has worked and prove what hasn't and adjust as needed for what comes down to the federal level. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem, time to weigh in. Yeah. So I have questions then. If we're looking at Plano, I think the exemptions, if you're a homeowner of three houses or less, is that correct? You're excluded? There are some exemptions, yes. Some of those appear in some of the other ordinances as well. Right. And they're actually mirroring what's in the federal law. So what's part of the Federal Fair Housing Act. So there is various exemptions sometimes for small landlords. If you're living in part of the unit and you're renting out another unit, there's various exemptions by that. Right. Okay. And San Antonio's ordinance? San Antonio does have a non-discrimination ordinance. It only covers housing and public accommodations. It does not address private employment. Correct. And tourism in San Antonio, they've done well in that regard? I can't answer that. I'm assuming. And then this is just comment. We crafted an ethics ordinance from scratch and that's come with its challenges. And then what is the cost to implement a investigative component here in Denton? That is really difficult to answer. It just depends on how an ordinance would be established, on what it would cover, what would be exempted, if you wanted to become a federally certified agency or not. But we would have to demonstrate if we'd want to be one of those agencies to HUD or EEOC that you could handle the administration and investigation of those complaints in the same manner that they would at the same level. So it would just take a lot more work to even cost out what that would be. And what is staff proposing regarding subpoena power? I don't know if the city attorney can answer that either right now. I don't think we even got to that point of discussion. Basically, this presentation is to sort of give us an overview of the field and what other cities are doing and to give staff direction on from this point what direction do we move as far as the specifics of what you just asked, subpoena power, as we did with the ethics ordinance. We talked about that once we sort of got an idea of some of the more higher level concepts that were involved. And so for me, I think I'm going to venture out and say from a unique position in this discussion specifically, because all my life there's been issues I've had to deal with, and I think I'm sensitive to those concerns, but I'm also sensitive to the business owners and the homeowners, and I don't know that that's any better, right, to have a carve out for someone who don't, because they only own three homes, all of a sudden they can do things that are less than great. I look at, I focus on results a lot, and I focus on the fact that Dallas scores a 100, but had two to three transgender individuals murdered. So they have a great score, they have a great process, but is it effective is my concern. You look at Plano, Plano, we're going to model their ordinance, but they had a council member that was censored for making insensitive comments on Facebook towards a minority organization. So for me, I focus on results and getting things done that protect our citizens. And so for that, I need to understand the cost, I need to understand what subpoena power we have or are going to have. I can't have a conversation with a business owner going forward to say, we'll figure it out, you know, but can we get their records, can we get their phone records, can we get conversations, you know, and so that really, I need more information if I'm going to give direction to move forward. So at this point, with that absent understanding how much it costs and how much staff time it's going to take to work up to that cost, I'm just I don't have enough information to give guidance. I just want to do what's effective. And I think that, again, I'll hammer home that I don't really, really I've had 47 years of understanding discrimination, and I've had a wealth of firsthand experience. So I really don't need to get educated on that component. I understand that very well. My component is understanding how we roll out a policy that prevents people from being murdered because of their lifestyles, and that is we've been successful in that regard as a city, our councils have comported themselves well, for the most part, when it comes to these issues, and that's what I'm focused on. Okay, so question for you, Mayor Potem, because it seems like the line is, do we wait to continue the discussion prior to a Supreme Court ruling or do we go ahead and move forward with the discussion and then when that comes out, if it impacts our discussion, then we make some kind of adjustment. And to me, discussion entails what you're describing, in other words, specific details, specific costs. I mean, I think that's all part of not let me ask for a question of clarification. When you say costs, do you mean the cost to move the conversation forward, or are you talking about the cost if it's implemented in running the program, implementing the program, and if it comes to it, enforcing an ordinance? What are you referring to in cost? Both. Both those instances. Because for example, we just received an email from staff that we spent eight hours researching decibel levels that equate to, so I mean, I think we have to be mindful of the cumulative effect this has on our staff and the ability to be effective. And so yes, it would be both. Okay. All right. So you're unable to give direction on whether we continue the conversation before or after the Supreme Court ruling. That's not something you can decide at this time. You know, that's absolutely a guiding principle, but also before that is how much is this going to cost, right? So if -- I understand -- that's just how I put them in order. And I think it's going to be moot once you get to Councilmember Davis anyway, you know? But that's -- I at least wanted to say something for those that want to, you know, beat me up about something. Okay. All right. Well, I won't beat one of those, but go ahead. Councilmember Davis has also called on me to speak. My question might be helpful to him as well, but -- To who? To Councilmember Davis and to others who have spoken, because I'm just to piggyback on questions that Mayor Portem has raised. You want to speak or you want to yield your time to Councilmember Mills? If he has a question, that's fine. Okay. All right. Thanks. As we've heard so far, do you have a rough idea of how much staff time it would take to support a further conversation? I think that's a fair question. That's a little difficult to answer. I know we spent some substantial staff time just doing this research and surveying of other municipalities. We'd have to really take some time to go back and estimate how many hours, just depending on what the scope is, and then also looking at what would the cost be to implement such an ordinance. For Plano, this is in theory how they've laid out their panel and how it would look like, but because they've only had nine complaints and none of them have actually reached that investigation stage, it's really difficult to tell how much staff time may be redirected to implementing this process or what staff time we need -- what staff would need to be added in order to handle this by the ordinance of standards. Just as a benchmark, you may have already told us even, do you have an idea of how much staff time went into preparing for this review? Bigger than a bread box? Forty hours. Okay. All right. Just as a benchmark. Thanks. Councilmember Gaines. Thank you. I'm not going to throw anything at the mayor pro tem either because I think you raised a good point, so we absolutely have to talk about resource allocation. My direction would be I'm comfortable with waiting for the Supreme Court ruling, and I know that some of my friends ask me why. Why wait? Why not do it now? If you listen to -- if you read the briefs and if you listen to the argument, we really do not know where they're going to come down. It was a Title VII -- a series of Title VII lawsuits. They were asking Title IX questions. They were asking bathroom bill questions. They were all over the place. We really have no idea where they're going to be and what the impact of that decision is going to be. It could be very narrow, it could be very broad, it could be nothing we expect. And then as far as what we do in the interim, I'd leave that to the city manager and how he best -- how he thinks his staff time is best spent. I think if and when we pick it back up, I am looking more closely at the Plano ordinance up to and not including the criminal prosecution. To the Mayor Pro Tem's point, I am not interested in virtue signaling, I'm interested in results as well. I'm interested -- I'm not interested in what scorecard we score well on or poorly on. I'm interested in results as well and I think the community conversation and mediation piece of what Plano does and what some of the other cities do as well is going to get us so much further down the road than some traffic tickets. So that's my direction for what it's worth. So let me make a suggestion. Because I think the cost question, because really the cost question, unless that's pursued and distributed to us, I mean, it doesn't get answered really until -- I mean, it doesn't ever get answered unless we have a further conversation. So I think this time will go by fairly quickly. I would say in the interim, I think if the council members could send to a staff liaison just questions, comments about either what they aspire for the ordinance to be or just comments on the city of Plano's or whoever to say, hey, these are my thoughts based upon this. Now, they're not going to be distributed to council because that could possibly create an open meetings violation, but at least it gives staff a direction on what do you -- what do we bring back when -- we're going to have this conversation again, whether we have it before the Supreme Court or whether we have it afterwards. We're going to have this conversation again, and I think for efficiency, if we could just get to -- like if one of us is the only one that wants to look at the public restroom exemption and everybody else, I think, Councilmember Meltzer, as you stated in your sort of opening remarks, if everybody's saying we don't really want to deal with that, you know, we don't want that part of the ordinance, that's important for staff to know, to not necessarily -- and staff can make that determination upon the comments. They don't necessarily need the conversation, and then if we want to change that, we can. But I just think it's good to give staff what our thoughts are and our comments are because we're going to have to do that anyway, notwithstanding when that time is here, and we can always revisit this. I mean, we could -- you know, we could say, hey, let's put it back on the agenda if things aren't moving, if we don't see any movement at the Supreme Court. I mean, so this isn't necessarily etched in stone. I think what we need is -- and what I've heard is we'd like to have more information, but we'd like to have more information about what we want to see as potentially part of the ordinance, and we would be here all day if we were going to just have that discussion. So I think it's best communicated to staff in writing, and it gives them some direction. And they can always create a caveat of this was asked by some councilmember but wasn't really reflected in the comments by others. And then I agree with Councilmember Davis. You know, Mr. City Manager, you certainly understand the discussion here, and how do you parse out staff's time? I mean, 40 hours is a lot. That's one week for one person. But this is good information, and I think it's been a good springboard for our conversation. And I'll be honest with you, before the backup, I wasn't aware of the EEOC hearing those complaints nor of HUD's willingness to hear those complaints. I knew of the Supreme Court cases, but I didn't know what the timetable was. So I really appreciate the presentation material because I think it's really helped us have a more efficient conversation here today. So we really don't have a consensus on that regard as far as when. So I think we'll just move forward with getting staff comments. If you could get a review of the costs, the first thing may be to distribute it to council so that that may create some additional conversation that would give us direction on the timetable. But I'm going to say let's move forward with those comments, and then if we reach a consensus where we want to have that conversation prior to, we can do that as well. I mean, Council Member Armitage. I just wanted to just take a moment to thank staff for those 40 hours really well spent. This was really a great presentation, really informative, and I really hope we can move forward on this, but regardless of what happens, I just want to recognize that effort. Really good for the City of Denton. Okay, anything else? Do you understand sort of what we're doing? Because if not, we'll clarify it more if we need to. I think between Sarah and I, we can get there. Okay. All right. Thanks. That's a great answer. Okay. Thank you very much. Let's go ahead. We've been at it for about an hour and 25 minutes. We'll come back and move forward with the rest of our agenda. Welcome back, everybody, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, February 25th, 2020. It is 1.37 p.m. We're back on our work session reports, work session 3B. Receive porthole discussion. Give staff direction regarding the 2020 mobility plan update with a focus on the eastern area of the city. And the last one that we'll be discussing is the southern portion of the city, is that right? We saved the best for last. Fantastic. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yes, we did. Hello, Mayor, City Council. I am Pamela Mutul, traffic engineer for the city. So today, Mark and I will be focusing the discussion on the eastern area of the city. And as previous work sessions, we will be providing the major updates for each of the plans. As for the mobility plan purpose, I just quickly wanted to mention how the City of Denton is developing so quickly that the project team, we want to move towards adoption at the same rate. We want to establish, we want the final version of the thoroughfare plan to be the preferred new alignments. So we're going to dive into the draft thoroughfare plan. So this is the east area of the city. So we're talking about just south of Sherman and north of I-35. Outside of the loop, it's fairly developed, so those are minor updates we're proposing. And east of loop 288, we wanted to focus this discussion on regional connections, including freeways and primary arterials. So we have five major updates we would like to touch on. The first one is US 380. So based on the model and what we're projecting for the daily volume by year 2045, we're anticipating up to 70,000 vehicles a day. So we are proposing for the section of US 380 east of Gisling Road to be classified as a freeway to limit the access and preserve that right away for the future. This is supported by the state, and the state is also planning to include this bypass and provide a direct connection for US 380 to loop 288. A couple things on this bypass, there has been a feasibility study conducted for it. We are matching a schematic plan that's already developed by TxDOT. And thanks to this bypass, we're expecting about half of the traffic to utilize this and avoid the center of the city. So it's going to reduce the congestion, improve safety for these intersections just west of Gisling Road. Councilmember Riggs. Is there currently a neighborhood right there? There's some development, and with our alignment, we are avoiding some of the buildings. All alignments as part of the mobility plan, we are moving towards minimal impact to existing development. So the third update, the Ganser Road extension, is a fairly new update that we incorporated for the thoroughfare plan. We are proposing a freeway east of Sherman, and this is based on fairly recent discussions with various agencies, cities to the east, that there is a need for an alternative route on the north of US 380. So this would be a regionally significant road, and we are supportive of it and we are recommending it as part of the thoroughfare plan. The fourth update is Cooper Creek Road extension. So the 2015 plan, it had as a primary and secondary arterial, we are proposing to continue the primary arterial classification north, so it connects with Mayhill, so it would be discontinuous. It would provide a major road for the new development coming north of the city, and alleviate congestion for minor roads like secondary arterials and collectors in this area. And the final update is the Post Oak Road extension. The 2015 plan did have it as a primary arterial, it's the same classification we're proposing. We are just providing minor updates. We are using an existing road, Gisling Road, as that connection to US 380 based on already planned development east. We are straining the alignment, and we are very supportive of this primary arterial by 2045, but in the combination of Loop 288, Mayhill, and Post Oak, these are going to be serving 100,000 vehicles a day. So they're going to be supportive of each other, and meeting the demand for the side of the city. Any questions? Any comments from Davis? It almost looks kind of different on a couple of different slides, and so I wanted to ask about it. King's Row at the Loop, right now it kind of takes the dogleg, and then you cross the loop on the western side, it kind of takes this weird curve, because you're on a hill, and then on the eastern side, I guess to cross over you have a traffic light. On one slide it looked like both sides were a collector, with no real change in the intersection, and then on another it looked like it was something different. So do we know, or could I maybe get an email or something later with if TextDOT is going to redo that intersection for us, if we're going to end up with, there have also been some fatalities at that intersection too, that's why I ask about it. Okay, yeah, I can definitely look into it, and I'll send you an email. Thank you. Chancellor Meltzer. So back on the 288/380 bypass slide. Yeah. Yeah. My question is really just not whether there is other development there, but just kind of what is there. On the one hand, a case can be made, I presume, that that's going to have a huge mobility benefit, which I don't know, I mean it's just cutting a corner, but there's a benefit I can see, especially with what it connects to, but on the other hand there's some kind of a give up, and I don't know what kind of, it's just a line on a map right now, but I don't know what kind of natural resources are there, or neighborhood, or what, so I think those values need to be understood and weighed. But I also don't know if it's up to us, if that's TextDOT plan, we may be able to express a point of view, but you know, I'll wait till you have to say, Todd. Todd asked the city engineers. This little piece here that is cutting the corner, so to speak, 380 is going through a substantial redesign by the state where it will be what we call a controlled access freeway, basically on ramps, off ramps, full freeway, one 380 from McKinney all the way over to Denton. And this segment here, so if you recall a few years back, there was a lot of discussion about truck traffic going down University Drive, and it wouldn't take the loop to divert around the downtown area. One of the things that the state is proposing as part of this is that the 380 alignment would turn north, and then tie into loop 288 with the main lanes. So that would force any trucks that are coming through town to actually have to physically exit the highway to make a conscious decision to come in downtown. Their preferred route's gonna take them around the north side of town along the loop, 235. So that was the premise of what the state was thinking when they were looking through this alignment, is how do we make that work? So this piece is generated by the state, not so much us. It is well along the concept path, and we can figure out exactly where they are in the environmental clearance. I do know that there is quite a bit of industrial development in the area, and their proposed alignment, they're trying to stay away from as many of the businesses as possible. There are some treed areas in there, there's some potential ESA in the area, and that would all have to be part of their environmental clearance, how they address that. I imagine we'll hear more about it in the mobility committee, as well, but I'm sure all council wants to hear. Any other questions? So thank you very much for your feedback, and I will hand it off to Mark. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of the council. My name is Mark Oliphant. I'm the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the city, and I'm going to speak to you about the bicycle and pedestrian plan for the east side of the city. On our first slide here, we have a side-by-side comparison of the existing bicycle plan that's on your left, and what sort of infrastructure we have on the right. You'll notice there's a lot more in the plan, but that's sort of the purpose of plans, is that we are very inclusive there, and we have worked on some of the priorities of the plan, so that's the comparison of what we have right now. He just started. Do you have a question on the bicycle plan? Okay. Go ahead. It was just on the slide, and at the beginning of the discussion, I just wanted to ask, we got an email asking why aren't bike lanes and shared lanes being differentiated? Why do we just have the on-street versus off-street? Yes. Well, so we had a conversation about that internal to our team, and we were just trying to go for more simplicity in how we present it, which is the two categories of on-street and off-street. We are moving away. The old plan did have a lot more of the Sharrow on-street, which we're moving away from on this one. We can. This is actually a question that's come up multiple times as we move through the mobility plan updates, and one of the things that I would ask both council and the public to keep in mind is this is the culmination of a bunch of conversations with both the public and with councils we engage in this on our current draft. We'll be updating this draft based on your feedback and then a second round of public feedback, so while these comments continue to come in, we're not actively updating the map until we finish these conversations, and then we take that into account when we go to the public with a revised map showing more of these other more detailed items that people are asking for. That's why you're not seeing them on these slides, is this is the draft as was presented to the public last fall, and now it's coming to council. We'll revise that before we go back to the public with these additions and tweaks and modifications. Okay, so the plan is to add the Sharrow? We will get the clarifications as we hear what people are most interested in. Absolutely. We'll move on to the next person. Okay. Thanks. All right, next here we have a side-by-side comparison of the previous map, 2014 plan map for bicycles, and then on the right is the framework, the alignment of what we are proposing for this most current map. You'll see it extends much further into the eastern area of the city. Some of our goals here were connectivity, east, west, north, south, kind of a grid network we have going, safety, of course, and connecting with other infrastructure, so things like the green belt trail, which is on Corps of Engineers property, but it's a state park when it's eventually open so that we have these broader connections from the city to the outside. So that is the general alignment that we're looking at. As Todd said, this can change a little bit, but this is the main design, the main points of what we're looking at for this system. And then here there's been discussion about integrating our plan with the Parks and Rec master plan for their trails, so we just have added a few segments here, and the labeling is a little funny because we're still working on integrating this, and it's still in a brainstorming working draft form, but essentially what those do is add connections in some of the riparian areas along streams and things like that, and yeah, connections. So that is what we have currently for the bicycle plan, that's what we have there. - Councilmember Briggs? - So I brought show and tell. I have a wonderful map here that I picked up when I was in San Antonio, and we get asked a lot about stress level, right, for bicycles and pedestrians, and they have a bicycle level of traffic stress, specific map, and is that something that we can do on this plan? - It is something we can do, it is something that we're working on. I have a couple hidden slides that talk about that a little bit, I don't know if I'm titillating you with teasers here, so we have been working on, we do have some of that, it's in a very draft form, but yes, just a little background on that. This is a fairly new way of approaching bicycle and pedestrian planning in that you rank infrastructure based on the expected level of comfort, so it's something that we are working on. I have sent the draft materials that we've received from Mark and Salt and I have forwarded those along to some of our helpful citizen reviewers and so forth to take a look at. - Okay. - So. - You can borrow this if you want to look at it. - Yes, ma'am. - Yeah, I just want to thank you for working on that, and just to say how important I think that is and how meaningful, especially for the potential riders who would be best served by a low stress bike network. These are the riders who are not, and before I got on council, I was definitely in that category, didn't even know what, I could imagine what a protected bike lane would be, but these kinds of words didn't really mean as much. I think don't mean that much to people who are not bike experts but who are just wanting to know, much like if you're going on a hike with some kids, you want the easy one or you're going skiing, you want the bunny slope, and this points out in the clearest way, I think, the kind of issues that really matter to people more than these different kinds of distinctions among the, at the various levels. - Brian John, Traffic Engineering. I just want to add to what Mark said. The total concept of the bike level of stress wasn't even introduced until 2012. That's the first paper that described a categorization of stress levels. So when you talk about how do we apply this, these are brand new concepts and really haven't even been adopted by NACTO or AASHTO or FHWA, maybe for two or three years. So as he said, we're involving our consultant in preparing this stress level and associating that with each of the routes that we're proposing. I think we'll have something to roll out probably about the time that the next public meetings go. So I think that you'll see that coming, but it is a new concept and kind of, it's a challenge to convert what we had from 2015 and roll that into the, how do we map out areas of green, or I don't know if my analogy, my head is like a ski resort. So you've got green, blues, and black, and you have to have a network of all of those. And so that's what we're doing, we're identifying what routes that we're proposing can be low stress or are low stress, and some of those routes that we're proposing might not be. So you'll see that, I think, coming out in the next couple of months with the next round of public meetings. That's everything I have for the bicycle portion. So I'm going to continue onward with the pedestrian plan. So first here, what we're seeing in yellow is these are the existing sidewalks in this eastern area of town, decent sidewalk coverage. Next this has the existing sidewalks, again in yellow, but also in this blue color are other sidewalks that are either funded, perhaps through the bond, they're in the midst of the construction process or something. So these are going to happen, whether anything changes today, those are going to happen. And so green and blue on this map, we will have those areas covered for sidewalks. And so as part of our analysis, what we did is we took that and compared it to the street system to come up with the areas where we are missing sidewalks currently, and that's what this map shows. The two colors are both areas of missing sidewalks, but as part of that, we also ranked sidewalks based on their characteristics, how close they are to certain infrastructure. So the red is what we would consider higher priority sidewalks under this analysis, and the yellow lower priority, and so that's due to things like proximity to elementary and middle schools, higher volume roads, the universities, things like that. And finally, this map shows all of those different layers so that you can see what sidewalks in what area fall under what category. Council Member Briggs? Would this plan also show safe crossings where it's good to cross safe, or would we be looking at mid-block crossings along the same plan, or is that too detailed or something? Yes, that is at a greater level of detail. At this point, this is a long-term, wide-scope planning document, and so many of those specifics to an individual intersection or something will be determined at the design phase. At this point, yes, it's kind of at a higher level, broader thinking, but there will be an accompanying text document with this that discusses different laws and best practices for pedestrian safety crossings and stuff like that. So on the mobility plan, if a road gets expanded or updated, then those intersections more than likely would be addressed at that time? Yes, and that funding is included, part of the projects, which is a great way to get everything improved. Thank you. Council Member Ryan? I don't know if I said both on the pedestrian and the bike plan that future infrastructure for roads does not necessarily get reflected on here, such as Post Oak, Geesling. It's going to be a future arterial through our city, but yet we're not including it on our sidewalk and bike path. Is there a reason why that's not there? So specifically, I think the assumption is that any time we rebuild the roadway or extend a roadway, we're going to have sidewalk facilities. Whether or not it's an appropriate on-street bike or off-street bike, I think what Mark and I can certainly speak to that in this plan. But I think, and then we did get verification, I think there was a question last time about sidewalks along state facilities and the state is, they are bound, not bound, they are constructing sidewalks on both sides of every facility that they build or rebuild. But I think the assumption would be that any time that we extend or build a new roadway, we're going to include those pedestrian facilities. I would just recommend then, as this map goes forward, to include those on there so that we see the totality of the infrastructure. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. Well, I have a couple of questions regarding exactly that. So if I look at this, I look at 377, just on the other side, so that's just to the east of 288 and there's not as much planned sidewalk, but there is, and we've talked about this before along R35, there's significant planned sidewalks. So can you just kind of help me see the total picture and project that a step further to say if we consolidate resources, I'll leave it vague on purpose, around the Luke 288 area, sidewalks around 377 would be significantly important. So just kind of looking at a holistic, realistic plan for the city, help me reconcile less sidewalk 377, more sidewalk 35, with future plans for the city, et cetera. So my response is going to be the same. I think that we may have missed some areas on our mapping, but our proposal certainly along all of our state corridors that we're going to have, eventually, sidewalks on both sides of the facility. So if we don't show the sidewalk, all the portions along 377, we can go back and add those because we certainly want to reflect that in our long range planning. The same with 35 and 288. Now 288 right now, without frontage roads, it's a challenge to build a sidewalk. So once those frontage roads are in, because you really don't want to have pedestrians next to a 70 mile an hour roadway, you want to have them next to the lower speed, lower class, which would be the frontage roads. So as TechStock constructs those frontage roads along 288, they will be constructing sidewalks. We've been told they will be constructing sidewalks. So I think, let us go back and revisit and revise our map because I think everything that's on system, we can reflect full pedestrian facility. Everything that's got a number designation is going to have, ultimately, sidewalks on both sides. >> And then how do you, that's good to know, and how do you reconcile, or how do you prioritize those, right? What's the policy for, how does this council give direction or understand, I guess it starts there, how do we understand what the priority is currently and if we want to shift things. For example, if you come back with a map and I'd like to see Mingo yellow all the way, you know, as far as it goes, you know, or at least to the loop, but those are kind of things that how do we understand, understand the overall goal, right, but then how do we understand how it's structured or tiered or prioritized so that then we can give input. >> So I'm going to let Mark respond to the ultimate prioritization. The only twist I'm going to add with on system projects is that we need to work with TxDOT as they propose reconstruction. It probably would not be in our best interest to go out and build a sidewalk on portions of 377 that they're going to literally rebuild in a year. That would not be our best expense of our dollars. So with the on system projects, we need to coordinate with TxDOT as far as what their reconstruction, if they're not going to touch it for 10 years, then maybe it makes sense to go put a sidewalk now in those places where we need it. But only let Mark respond to how we prioritize. >> And before you, could you give me a working definition of on system? >> TxDOT, anything with a number, 288, 377, 77, 35, 428, 426, anything that has a number designation typically means that we don't own it, and we may help maintain it, but it belongs to the state. >> Perfect. Thank you. >> So just one clarification I would add is that certain parts of 383, 77, especially down here where you see the red, recently TxDOT renovated 377, 383, these parts of town. Years prior, sidewalks were not a priority for sidewalk, or for the state, they just weren't. So that's a change in philosophy now, for sure, as they've run into various scenarios that they're understanding they have to account for that as they go. So going forward, that would absolutely be a part of the discussion that we have with the state, but we do have identified certain segments where the state's already widened the roadway. We'll have to end up working with the state. Now, whether that's a combination of them helping to fund or us funding it, but they can't give us permission to get there, I don't know the answer to that one yet. >> Okay, and so but the hybrid, that's the priority you're speaking to? >> Right. >> Yeah. And so let's just go with that. So the red is priority, obviously not all going to get done at once. How do we kind of get a look into what, if it's a funding-driven kind of priority or we're already partially designed, that sort of thing. You know, how do we, because for example, McKinney Street, I know there's sidewalks planned from downtown to connect those segments, but I don't know where that falls on your on the list of things that you're going to actually get underway. >> Right. Our priorities have been to start with those safe routes to school. We talked about that with the 2019 bond program, that those were our first targets was to make that first quarter mile to school. As we have a two-mile busing radius to every elementary school and middle school, the first quarter of a mile was the first place to start. And then we would move out to the half mile and to the one mile. By the time, just thanks to the proximity of schools, by the time we hit the one mile progression, then we've pretty well closed the gaps throughout the city. So that was our preeminent theory there. But that also has to ultimately be dovetailed with the ADA transition plan. How do we get people with disabilities to be able to move safely along that infrastructure? That's still something in the works. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Davis. >> I just want to thank the mayor for mentioning McKinney. I happen to drive that road every day. And wherever that falls, maybe we can say safe routes to the bus station, safe routes to the jail, too. Because every day driving that road, there's somebody walking in the road bed because they have to go around a gas regulator or something, or a telephone pole. So that one needs some sidewalks. >> Any other questions for this presentation? All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. >> All right. We'll move on to agenda item 3C, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding the concrete line channel on North Concrete through Quaker Town Park. >> Did you have a question before the presentation starts? >> I just wanted to say something before it started. >> Okay. Go ahead. >> Yeah, because this was something that I asked for and requested, and it came from something we discussed on committee on the environment. And as the presentation goes, and I appreciate all that you've done, but it wasn't anyone's interest on the committee and for me bringing it here to continue to do this immediately without the PEC-4 drainage being in place. This was brought up so that we could discuss it as that gets done. We could make a decision for design and try to see where the funding comes from in the future. So the way that this presentation is, it seems like one of the options is to continue to do it immediately. >> I appreciate that. So I guess my question is, because I know when you made the request, obviously there wasn't that much specificity on this. And so did you relay your -- I don't want to say parameters, but your desire of, hey, this doesn't -- not something I'm advocating for directly right now, but as this gets done, to think about this as an option, did you relay that to staff in that regard? >> Well, we talked about it on the committee on the environment, and the reason I asked for it to come here was so that council could have a full discussion on the future of it. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> But I guess my point is, because what -- you sort of gave a qualifying remark saying that the presentation, as presented, I hate saying that, but seems to indicate, as I sort of interpreted as I was reading it, that there was an advocacy for -- not an advocacy. The presentation was, do we want to make this decision to replace this concrete liners? And if that wasn't the case, then somehow there was a -- I hope in the future we can communicate more clearly our council request, because if that's the -- I didn't get that from this, and so I'm just -- this is a great example of when we make these requests, if we think we need to give some additional parameters to help staff in what they're bringing back to council, that we do that, because what I'm hearing you say is the presentation that's going to be delivered isn't really what you're saying you were asking for, what the committee on the environment was really asking for, is that correct? >> Well, the understanding was that it was something possible after the PEC 4 was complete and taking out of the floodplain. So that was my understanding on when this could be done, and that's one of the options down here. >> So let me make a little bit of a clarification. So this particular part of the PEC -- of Pecan Creek is not directly connected to any of the improvements with PEC 4. >> Okay. >> On the opposite side of downtown, any improvements that would have to occur with Quaker Town Park impact North Pecan Creek and Pecan Creek itself, well upstream of where Pecan Creek Tributary 4 ties in. We are looking at this entire area, because this goes all the way up to the North Lakes Parks when you actually examine the entire system, and you'll see it in the presentation. There's significant blockage in the channel downstream all the way down until you get into Carl Young Park that impacts how this area floods. So all we were really trying to get to was we had been asked what was the -- what would it be to take the concrete lining out. So we were presenting the possible alternatives based on just what we understood the question to be. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> So that's my point in that apparently there was a misunderstanding somewhere because you thought it was with PEC 4, and this doesn't have anything to do with PEC 4. So it's going to be sort of a little unusual, but this was your request? >> Yes. >> So we can still hear this request, not an issue, but it doesn't sound like based upon what you just stated in your opening remarks that this is sort of on point with what you had wanted to explore. >> Well, it would -- we can continue the conversation because it will have to do with policy change and something that is important to council in the future. >> Policy change of what? >> Well, the concrete channel out here in the park. >> Well, and I appreciate that, but this request and this presentation is predicated upon a request made by you at the one minute, and there was enough who said we want to hear the presentation, but what I'm hearing now is that this presentation either wasn't exactly what you were trying to allude to at that moment, and that somehow this presentation is going to be something that we consider -- so you're ready? I'm not going to say we don't want to hear the -- but let's hear the presentation, but I don't want this to turn into a long discussion because this isn't coming before the council based upon what we sort of voted on and what was sort of understood. So yes, Council Member Davis. >> Speaking solely for myself, this is pretty on point with what I wanted to hear, which is what are our options for Quaker Town Park, and hydrologically it's all connected, and I didn't really think about that because I'm not an engineer. For me, this is pretty on point with my interest at Quaker Town Park and the water channel. >> Sure. Okay. All right. And that's fine. We have this procedure for one-minute pitches that we agree to, but what we're finding is that sometimes we're not giving enough information in those one-minute pitches to really laser focus on what the request is and what the council has given consensus to look at. So I think we're probably all interested in Quaker Park drainage, but that wasn't necessarily how it was presented. But let's move forward, and we'll see where the presentation takes us. Thank you. >> Well, good afternoon. My name is Noreen Halchright. I am a senior engineer and the flood planning administrator for the city. We are here to discuss the concrete line-in on North Pecan Creek that goes through Quaker Town Park. Here's Quaker Town Park. So we have North Pecan. This is what we're talking about, the concrete line-in that goes from Bell all the way up. This was constructed in 1963. Basically it's held very well and very little maintenance through the years. Quaker is right through here, which is outside the door or outside the window. That is mostly earth and channel. As we all know, there's a lot of flooding issues that we had. I think these were taken in the 2007 flood. >> Which was a very unusual -- I mean, what was it? It's a 100-year flood for that area. >> Yes, it was. So option one would be to remove the existing concrete line-in along North Pecan Creek. Obviously the pros would be more natural looking. It would have water quality benefits. The cons are that it's -- we wouldn't be changing anything, any hydraulic improvements to it. Also the concrete line-in ranges from two to one to three to one slope, so if we went to an earth and channel, we'd have to go to a four to one slope for maintenance and mowing, which would widen the top of the channel and possibly replace the pedestrian bridge that crosses it because we'd have to have a larger structure. In ultimate conditions, this channel will reach over six feet per second, which is what we consider erosive. So generally we have to do something else when like either concrete line or do some detention upstream, something to slow down the water. Another thing is with earth and channel, it will raise the water surface elevation by a little bit, that .2 feet, but the senior center is right at the BFE right now. So a small raise could make a difference. So at this cross section, you can see the blue line, that's the existing concrete line in the water surface elevation, and this is the approximate area of the senior center, and that slight raise would kind of take it over the top. The other two lines are if we do downstream improvements, so this particularly at the railroad. So even if we leave everything as is, the blue line, the dotted blue line is if you do the railroad improvements, that would be the water surface elevation, and the red line would be if we did go ahead and do an earth and channel up through Quaker Town Park and we did the railroad improvements. Here's an example of the two. So here we have North Pecan, which is concrete line. As you can see, it's dry, while concrete is still holding water. One of the issues is if we have another storm following this one, North Pecan is prepared to take and convey that water, where you can see through the whole banks, where while this is still trying to drain, if we had another storm following it, you don't have the capacity. So it will overtop its banks sooner. Real quick question on that previous slide, Noreen, where it says still have an undersized channel to handle 100-year improvement, no hydraulic improvement. So to remove the concrete channel without any improvements downstream, you have no improvement in hydrology, but if you improve downstream, even if you leave the concrete channel in place, you have an improvement in hydrology. Yes. Okay. Yes. Just to make sure I'm tracking, would it be fair to say whether or not we make a change if our goal is to make sure we can handle a 100-year event, we can't stay where we are? No. Neither option one or two at this, without doing anything, will improve the hydrology. Doing the downstream improvements, particularly at the railroad, would help this. And I have a secret slide, too, that shows the concrete, and that's a little more dramatic. We can see it. Well, and that's my point here, is that -- and I appreciate your words about this is directly on point, but we're going to be talking about something that wasn't even really within the parameters of the request, and that is eventually we're going to have to have another conversation about hydrology at the railroad. How do we -- if they really want to make an improvement, that's how we do it. And that's probably another conversation a little bit more in-depth. Okay. Thank you. So another option through here is doing the reinforced concrete boxes. Very low maintenance. It's the most expensive option. But reinforced concrete lasts a really long time. It's self-cleaning. You really don't have to do much with it maintenance-wise. Obviously, we'd have to remove some trees. One of the estimated would be seven 10-by-10 boxes through each one, so it's a pretty large footprint. It is big. Yeah. And then there's also a 36-inch sewer line running through Quaker Town Park, so the possibility of having to relocate that, if -- depending on where the boxes are. There's gaming baskets. It's more of a natural. But as far as Quaker Town Park is concerned, it might not be a good idea, because with the two-to-one slopes and the rock and everything else, we'd have to fence the top of it, and you'd lose a lot of park area. Is this similar to what we see -- I think it's the concrete along -- is it woodrow? It's woodrow, and it's -- we did that drainage, and it looks like there's purpose pavers on the slope, and then I think there's a fence across the top. Is that -- No, that's pavers. Okay. This is kind of like chicken wire rectangles with rocks in there. Gotcha. I know what you're talking about. We have a few of them in the city, but they're not vegetated. We can go with the option of vegetating these and give it a better appearance. Okay. Yep. Thank you. Another option is we can do a combination of some sort of boxes through north and -- north Pecan Creek and then Pecan Creek, and then do some sort of amenity as a retention-detention pond. Here's kind of an example I just pulled of, you know, what it could look like. Sure. It's one of the things I wanted to reiterate with the -- both option five and option three, where we talked about the boxes, where they would -- the boxes would extend all the way through the park. One of the advantages of those options, while they're the most costly, is you can actually reclaim more of the park. So you could put grass over the top of that, and now you actually have more viable, usable space on the park. So I know, speaking with Gary Packin, that's definitely something that the park is interested in having more green space that is truly usable and not soggy or wet when we have, like, the arts festival or several other events throughout the year that's in the park. It would give more space to the park to actually use. So it's another benefit that wasn't included in the slide. Okay. Okay. Vice Mayor Davis. And maybe you've anticipated this question. Is there an option or a detention pond option that doesn't include reinforced concrete? I mean, is that a -- if improvements are made downstream, could -- could it be earth and channel, maybe with some reinforcement in certain places, and then also have the detention pond, or does the detention pond, as you're modeling it, require the reinforced concrete vaults? Or the boxes? No, it's more for an option to, like you were saying, to reclaim a lot of the park space. But to get the earth and channel to be able to hold the 100-year event, it would have to be a wider channel than it exists in. Which means you're taking away park space. Yeah. Yeah. It's the boxes that provide the additional park space. Right. Exactly. So this is the comparison chart of the cost of construction versus 10-year maintenance. I think House Member Davis had a follow-up. Just to the point about park space, at a certain slope, I mean, I would say if you look at arts and jazz, the concrete is open, usable park space the way that people use it. So yes, we would have more level surface. You can set up booths and play a soccer game and that kind of stuff, park space. But I would say, with the father of young children, creek bed is usable park space. And if it's at a sufficient slope, you can use that space. It can be attractive and useful. House Member Brooks. Yeah. So I feel the same. Part of the reason I've brought this up is the stream restoration. There's cities doing it everywhere. It revitalizes and protects our watersheds. There's many benefits to removing a concrete channel and putting it back naturally. One of those is kids playing in the creek, which they do in the concrete during the arts and jazz, and allowing it to go back to its natural state. And one of the original reasons I brought this up is when we have this park, this area designated historically, when it was Quaker Town Park, it was actually a natural stream. And so that was another reason why I thought maybe it would be really great to get it back to its historical aspect. And then with the opportunity of building a wider bridge that's not so narrow for people to cross over back and forth. Yeah, we definitely would have to have new pedestrian bridges with a wider top width. And it would have that water quality benefit, but we definitely would have to make sure that we incorporate maintenance into it, because as we saw with the concrete, it's eroded and it's hold water. So we have the issue of capacity to make sure that we can still convey the water downstream or into a detention pond. And so in regards to maintenance, because I saw an amount of what it would cost. So are you saying that it costs that much yearly to maintain what we have here that's natural? So the option one, which is to remove the concrete line and regrade vegetate, and the new pedestrian bridge were estimated to be a half a million dollars. So the 10 year maintenance, I spoke with our drainage department to get like a kind of a linear foot cost of what they're doing for earth and channel sources concrete. As far as the maintenance cost, this is about $14 a linear foot is what they average for earth and channels to maintain them. The concrete channel, it's about $1.50 a linear foot. The concrete boxes, it's really minimal. Like I said, they're self cleaning and they're pretty low maintenance. Green baskets are a little bit a little bit more than a concrete line, but not quite as much as an earth thing because you're not mowing them. And then the retention pond and detention pond, I basically put within a 10 year I figured we can't going to have to dredge it at some point to kind of give it back its capacity after sediment has deposited there and fill it up. So I will say that I was I did know that this would not really be possible without the downstream improvements. And so this was something that once those were made, or if that decision was made, that this would be an option for us to discuss. So I will say that I didn't know if this was going to be the downstream. I mean, that has to be a decision that we make before we can even really have this conversation. But so I'm in favor of creating it back to its natural state once those improvements are made. And I'm in favor of that as well. I really appreciate this presentation. I also like the pictures and I learned a lot from it. And I would suggest, I'd be curious to know what others would think about this, because these kinds of issues tend to come up around Jazz Fest when our park, of course, we got people in the park all the time, but that's when it's really full with people. And that's when you start hearing about flooding issues and the bridges, which a lot of people would agree need changing anyway, but I think it would be neat to have some sort of display, just letting people know what the city is considering, what the options are over there at Jazz Fest, during the Jazz Fest, and maybe something where people could write in their input. I know in the past, I think it was last year, that we had an interactive public art type thing from the city that's right out there, it used to be there. But I think that would be a good time and place also to get public input on that. Council Member Meltzer. My impression, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that if we actually did do the downstream improvements that are indicated at different points here, that the set of pluses and minuses would look significantly different. So you know, first tell me, am I wrong about that? No. So if we do the downstream improvements, that cross section was on North Pecan Creek. So you can see it lowered below where the senior center is, and I show you, I have a section that's along Pecan Creek, and it's a little different because, okay, so here is the city hall, this, you know, that, take the middle one, because this is the lowest adjacent ground, highest adjacent ground. So as it is now, we have the blue as existing conditions, and the red is if we take the concrete line in downstream of it. Those are the two differentiants there. We do the downstream improvements, it improves, but it doesn't really take the library out of it. The library is still lower. And the reason is that we're doing existence. So if we go this path, we'd have to improve the capacity of this channel as well. So just to make sure we can take that water surface elevation lower than the library. The one thing I would keep in mind is that regardless of what you do to the downstream improvements, while it may lower the floodplain elevation, you're still going to have the same amount of maintenance that has to be done. So the maintenance costs, depending on what you actually put back in its place, doesn't really go away. It just carries on. The major impacts are the risks to the city, to existing city infrastructure, like the library, city hall, civic center, the senior center. That's what goes away when we start removing those downstream impacts. For my small brain, it would just be a whole lot easier conversation if we saw the summary given that that's already in place. The decision tree is kind of complex, right? I think what's become clear is like, oh, we better be looking at those downstream improvements because that seems like we've got to face that down either way. The other question I'd have is, and I'm willing to wait for the answer until we have that later conversation, is with some of these options, does it have a similar floodplain economic development improvement potential like the PEC-4 where areas that are already commercial but that are kind of underdeveloped would have potentially much greater value and could that sort of be brought to bear on the cost, right, if you can unleash a lot of value? Could it generate? You're talking about on the -- not the disk, but on the downstream portion of these improvements or something. Well, no, actually. I was talking about this. Nobody's going to be developing in the park. I agree. I strongly am against development in the park. I wasn't trying to corner you on that. I'm saying I'm trying to clarify what you're talking about. No, no, no. I'm just joshing with you. But just, you know, does it create floodplain improvements outside the parking areas that are sort of not at their full potential that are commercial? I'm not talking about developing Austin Street, you know, by a TWU or whatever it's an established street, but where it's commercial and could -- just to say a little more on that, the thought is, does that create enough added value that generates property tax that helps deflect some of the cost? So on this slide here -- Yeah, because I think that question's outside the scope. Yeah, we're way -- we're sort of straying outside of what -- And I said I'd be willing to take the answer when we have that second conversation. Yeah, yeah. So maybe I'll have to. Thank you. Mr. Chair, if I could, to kind of help out this conversation, I think we've got a very acute cost estimate for what the policy decision would be if we made these improvements in the park. But it sounds like council, if they wanted to pursue that through a policy, we really need to be looking at much larger areas than this to give you, I think, to Council Member Meltzer's questions, that, you know, better cost estimates. Right now, you've got a very small portion of a project, but I'm not sure even what the boundaries of that project would be and what the total cost is. We may have several of these types of projects in the city that'll come up through a stormwater master plan. I mean, Todd, do you have -- So as part of the Elman Locust project -- I know I'm getting a little bit outside, but it's just a tease-up. Yeah, I really -- look, I really want to -- All I'm trying to -- Rain it because this was a very specific request, and I don't want this thing to start straying way outside the boundaries. I'm not going into details. Yep. What we're looking at, what the city manager just alluded to, and we'll be able to bring something at a later date that talks about overall economic impacts to the area, floodplain impacts. Good. Council Member Davis. So I think I can bring it back in. And we are working on a parks plan, and additionally, we're working on a stormwater master plan. What I would like to see, and I think my direction, just speaking for myself, would be that we pick what we want this park to look like, and we engineer around that, knowing that that's the goal, and the city engineer says, oh, this is impossible, then we don't do it. But knowing that it's the goal of how we want the park to look, then we know what our downstream improvements are, we know what our upstream improvements might need to be, if there's any impact we can have upstream, and I think that's the separate outside-of-posting conversation. I think today, though, we can have the conversation about what our preference would be for this park, work that into the park plan, and then when it comes down to -- I mean, none of this is funded -- when it comes down to bulldozers and bonds and however it's going to happen, then we have the discussion about, I'm sorry, your plan that you have on paper isn't going to work out because we haven't made the downstream improvements yet. Okay. So your direction is? My direction would be that we have earthen channels for both streams and a detention pond. Okay. All right. Anything else? Yes. You're looking at me like I'm crazy. No, earthen channels as well for me. Same here. Yeah. I reject that just simply because this conversation is predicated on a big if, and that is downstream. We've looked at -- we've had to put concrete channels in some places because people's houses and fences were eroding, so -- and if I'm -- go back to the cost, please. So now, first of all, we've not talked about retention pond with an earthen channel. This is the retention pond with the RC boxes. So this conversation is really premature, quite frankly, and if you -- if we want to come back with a holistic approach that we can properly post, that we can actually get into a comprehensive discussion because we're trying to pick a solution without even identifying the problem, and that's not how we need to do this. There was a specific request about removing concrete channels and leaving it in its natural state, and I think we've been given the options. However, the options we've been told is it depends. It depends because it seems like any of these really doesn't improve the hydrology of the park. And as far as putting more -- if you put in the boxes and you have more park area, whether or not -- and you said something about it being soggy when it's raining. So if it's soggy and rainy, if you've got grass on top of the concrete boxes, culverts, it's going to be soggy and rainy. And if it's a bridge that's an issue, and depending on how far we off on the comprehensive discussion, we can talk about a bridge. But this conversation, I think, is very -- is micromanaging a problem that is much larger than that. It's nothing on staff. It's just one of these situations where we didn't know what -- you know, we're going to talk about it. Now we understand that it really needs to be included in a more comprehensive conversation. So I don't even know -- I mean, we can talk about earthen dams with a detention pond, but that option is not even up there as far as what the costs are, what the improvements are. So my suggestion would be, if this is the conversation we want to have, do we need to fill out another request -- one-minute request to discuss the whole hydrology of this, or do you have enough direction? It sounds like the Council's -- I think we've got enough direction. There's going to be -- in the next few months, Todd's going to be bringing back the stormwater master plan for Council's discussion anyway at a series of workshops, probably not as extensive as what we've done with the mobility plan, but I think that's probably more appropriate because what I'll ask them to do is to work on identifying, you know, the projects out there that we could talk to you about in a little bit more holistic fashion. I think you're right. We're getting bits and pieces here, but anything that we do that really makes a significant impact out there is going to probably be just as costly in a bond program as a road program. I mean, there's going to be three or four of them out there. You could easily start hitting nine figures. Yeah, it would be -- because we're saying we're going to give you direction based upon X being done, but I think Council Member Meltzer had a good point, and that is, if X is done, does that change this whole equation because we've not really looked at this problem within that framework. So I just don't even know how we can give direction here, Mayor Pro Tem. No. I just want to give -- so looking forward, right, because I agree that it's pointless to talk about something upstream, but looking forward -- because if staff is going to come back, I want to give you my questions in advance. Well, Coach, I want to make sure this is inside posting. I want to make sure that, you know, we've heard staff's comments, but do we need to just close this out and then bring back another work session to discuss this more -- I mean, I just -- I want to make sure that we don't divert this conversation into a larger conversation because that's not what this conversation was originally requested to be. Right. That's one way to proceed, and if some of those questions that the Mayor Pro Tem has are outside the scope of this posting, certainly that can be distributed to staff via an email after this meeting. Right. I think I can -- I think I can make it fit. Let me make sure. Okay. I'd like to understand how the lining of this -- the channel here would affect businesses downstream in bringing those out of the flood zone. I want to understand how the earthen dam here could help us avoid a conversation with Union Pacific on widening downstream, and I'd like to understand how the earthen dam here would affect the property values in the flood zone across the creek there. Okay. That's my approach. Okay. Just wanted to respectfully disagree just a little bit because if we'd had this conversation in the context -- this very particular conversation in the context of a parks plan or a stormwater plan, we would have said, "Well, now we're nitpicking and micromanaging." This is a particular issue that multiple council members have expressed a clear preference for earthen streams, and so if all that we've done today is express that preference, I'm satisfied with that. I don't want -- I don't want staff to feel like they wasted their time in bringing this presentation. I found the information very useful, and just, again, stating my preference for earthen streams anywhere in the town that we can, especially in our signature space that we use for festivals. Okay. All right. Councilman Ryan, any comment? Okay. Yeah. Let's look at a -- and when it comes back, obviously, you've heard that one of the options will be maintaining an earthen dam, earthen drainage, and all the positives of that and all the negatives as far as, you know, erosion and things such as that. Okay. Thank you very much. All right. Okay, we'll move on to agenda item 3D, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding audit follow-up of the procurement process audit. Hello, I'm Madison Rorschach. I'm a staff auditor with the City of Denton. Just give me a second to pull up my presentation. So I'm here to present our six-month follow-up of the procurement process audit, which was issued originally to the city council in August of 2019. So follow-up reports are intended to provide information on what changes have been made in response to an issued audit. This review was based on the recommendations and management's response, which was originally compiled in the procurement process audit, as I mentioned. In general, we found that the division has made significant improvements to their compliance monitoring processes. In particular, there have been three process improvements that we're going to discuss that address the risks we identified in the audit. These include requiring additional information at the requisition stage, implementing an electronic bidding solution, and changing the sole source purchase documentation. So to begin, purchasing now requires departments to submit additional information when requesting the purchase of goods or services through a requisition information form. This form allows the division to better assess if the requested commodity is nearing certain regulatory thresholds for bidding, or if the city has already contracted for the commodity. In general, we found that this process has significantly improved compliance with state law for purchases between $3,000 and $50,000, and purchasing has provided adequate training for these process changes to department staff. In addition, purchasing has performed three-year spend analyses for all departments to identify consolidation opportunities, which provides further assurance that expenditures greater than $50,000 are appropriately bid. As part of the audit, we found that the division has initiated negotiations with at least five vendors based on the results of these analyses. So next, during the original audit, we found that bids were typically received in Excel via email. This potentially allows for bids to be opened before award and shared or changed. Since then, the city has implemented a new electronic bidding system that ensures bids cannot be opened prematurely, and the system also maintains a record of all bid activity. The implementation of this system has greatly improved bid security. We did find that not all solicitations reviewed had adequate detail to explain the evaluation score. However, purchasing has now begun using the new system to document these details. A future follow-up audit will determine if this process is adequate. Additionally, state law requires that issued solicitations include the criteria by which the submissions will be evaluated. We found that all bids reviewed had included evaluation criteria, and that purchasing had informally adopted standard criteria for request for proposals, which is shown on the slide on the right. Finally, Texas law exempts certain purchase types from its competitive bidding requirements. These sole source purchases require special attention from purchasing to ensure that the city is compliant with the law. Currently, purchasing requires departments to justify all sole source purchases using a sole source justification form. Once this form is submitted, all sole source purchases are reviewed by the solicitation review committee. We think this process has generally improved the department's documentation of sole source purchases. However, we found that several completed forms specifically mentioned other available vendors for a commodity. Some examples of this can be seen on the right of the slide. We were unable to find documentation of the due diligence that purchasing staff conducted to ensure that these purchases met the regulatory exemption requirements. Purchasing has recently revised their sole source justification form, which may improve this documentation of due diligence. In addition, the new electronic bidding software has facilitated the issuance of intent to sole source purchases, or intent to sole source notices, which provides further documentation of due diligence, basically. So in summary, the recommendations from the audit were broken up into five sections, as shown in the table, and we found that the division had not made progress on only two of the recommendations, which the first one is the use of commodity codes. So Texas law prohibits municipalities from using separate sequential or component purchases as a means of avoiding bidding requirements. Without commodity codes, the city may not be able to determine if expenditures for the same commodity are being divided among suppliers. So this type of monitoring would provide further assurance that the city is complying with purchasing laws and could result in additional volume discounts. And the final recommendation was the formal adoption of RFP criteria, which should be addressed in the updated purchasing manual that should be coming to council soon. So we feel that additional follow up work is needed, but as I said earlier, significant improvements have been made. So thank you for the study, and I look forward to those non-implemented recommendations being made very soon. I have two questions, one about the sole source issue and the other about commodity codes. So can you go back to the slide where you have the two examples of the, yeah. So am I understanding it correctly that it was found in an application or a form for sole source that there were references in that the sole source form to the existence of other sources? Correct. Okay. So yeah, that kind of blew my mind. I was wondering if you could speak to what those examples were from and provide council with whatever documentation you have on those. I'd just be curious to see. I can provide the justification forms to you after the meeting. That would be great. I believe the first one that's talked about here was some sort of sewer pump that they referenced that there was another vendor. In all these examples, they usually continue on to state this is why these vendors are not adequate, but because there is an existence, there should be additional due diligence from purchasing that should be documented so that we can say we did enough research to know that this is a sole source. And I believe the second example on here is about like a library software off the top of my head. But as I said, I can provide you all the justification forms. Yeah. I'd just be curious. Thank you. And then the other, so I'm convinced that commodity codes, you know, but by what you say about the other major issue with billing that still stands out with purchasing, I'm convinced that commodity codes are necessary, but I'm still learning about what they are. And I was wondering if you could kind of speak to what commodity codes are, how they would help, how using them would help with this problem. Yes. So commodity codes are basically just a number that's assigned to a specific type of good or service. So like construction materials have their own specific commodity code, asphalt might have one specifically for tons of asphalt per se. So when you're monitoring from a purchasing standpoint, you can look at, if you have commodity codes in place, you can look at, okay, how across vendors, what commodities have we bought? If we bought over $50,000 of asphalt, we can say, oh, we should contract for this if we haven't already. We probably have contracted for asphalt, but that's kind of how they would be used. So we ensure that we're not unintentionally making those purchases as components, essentially, which would potentially violate the competitive bidding requirements. Excellent. So it's a tracking mechanism, and these codes would be internal, I mean, for that we would make our own codes. No. So sorry, there's national, there's a couple different types of classification systems. I believe in the original report, we recommended the NICP codes, but that's in the original report. Okay. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay. All right, then, agenda item 3E, which is receive report, hold discussion, and give staff direction regarding an investigation of the Bonnie Bray Road and Scripture Street roundabout construction. Hello. Hello. I'm still here. I'm Madison Rocha, staff auditor, I'll be presenting our findings from the investigative report of the Bonnie Bray and Scripture roundabout construction. So I just want to start with a little bit of background on the project. So on July 18th, we received a complaint about the project citing improper planning and design during construction, which they claimed resulted in a waste of city funds. We investigated these issues during our capital project's administration audits, which have yet to be released. So in short, this project was inherited by the current staff in 2017. Around November of that year, staff presented the Bonnie Bray 4 project to the city council as it had been conceived by the previous engineering department. Council gave direction at this meeting to minimize the right-of-way take and increase safety due to the proximity of McKenna Park. After receiving this direction, staff conducted a traffic study to verify that the project as it was conceived originally was appropriate. But this traffic study resulted in a redesign of the project, which caused the department to break it down into part A, which was the roundabout, and part B, which is basically south of the roundabout on Bonnie Bray to I-35. So the roundabout project, part A, also included major utility improvements in the area, including water, wastewater, and drainage. And the construction contract for the roundabout was awarded in May of 2019. So based on our review of the design and construction processes, we identified five major findings, which are broken up into kind of two sections. So we'll begin with issues in the procurement process. So we found that there were two instances where work was conducted and in one case completed before price was formally agreed upon. So for reference, the typical process would involve agreeing on price, receiving authority and the appropriation, and then the work would begin. So this procurement, the way it was conducted, might leave the city vulnerable to being overcharged because the work's already done. So it's difficult to determine what delayed the price agreement. However, engineering staff has stated that this delay was at least partially due to the contract on the contractor. So then the second issue in the process, in the same two instances, work was conducted and significantly completed before it was authorized by the appropriate authority. Allowing contractors to perform work before it is authorized may inappropriately obligate the city to pay the contractor, which could potentially violate state procurement regulations and places the city at risk of litigation. According to engineering management, waiting for authorization would have significantly delayed the construction project. This is because operationally, the waterline work, which was authorized by the change order, had to be completed before the paving work, which was authorized by the original contract because you have to build the road on top of the waterlines. So now I'll move on to some unplanned costs that we identified as part of the investigation. So about $45,000 was spent to redesign the construction plans after the bid was opened, the bid for the construction contract, which indicates it was unplanned. As shown in the slide, this redesign was caused by a communication breakdown within the department and the city's inability to acquire two right-of-way parcels prior to the construction start date. In addition, about $13,000 was charged to the city by the construction contractor for standby costs, which indicate that the contractor could not work due to construction site conditions. Based on documentation, when the contractor began excavating the site, they found that several franchise utilities had not been relocated, despite the city's attempts to ensure that this work was completed before construction. In addition, they received the redesign plans shortly after construction began, which may have impacted their schedule as well. And finally, about $55,000 was expended to construct and then remove a temporary roadway, which was constructed to alleviate traffic issues caused by the construction delays. As stated previously, these delays were primarily due to incomplete utility relocations, which affected the project schedule for about three months. So in summary, we found that steps in the procurement process were performed after the fact in order to ensure construction began on time. However, we identified several unplanned expenditures, about $68,000, that were primarily caused by construction delays due to incomplete utility relocations. Finally, the remaining $45,000 of unplanned costs appear to be due to a communication breakdown within the engineering department, which may indicate some supervisory issues. So I can take questions now, but I also believe Todd has a further question. Yeah, I think there's a staff response, so we're going to go through that before we take questions. And I'm going to apologize, I should have looted this beforehand, so we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. All right, Todd Estes, City Engineer. To remind everybody of some of the turf that we've already covered both as a council and as a staff, Bonnebrae Phase Four, and I apologize for the sniffles, I'm fighting off a cold today. Bonnebrae Phase Four, which is the segment from I-35E North up to Scripture, was funded in the 2014 bond program. That project had been laid out one way. We came back to council a variety of times to discuss what would be the impacts of shifting the entire roadway to the west to minimize any home takings, to shift it back to the east, what was the safest possible route. There were multiple presentations to council to try to arrive at what's a singular scope and path forward for this project. All the while, staff was still trying to make sure that we achieved getting the intersection complete, which is the most complex part of this project. The intersection at Oak, or not Oak, at Scripture and Bonnebrae complete while we still had development occurring on the northwest corner. We were trying to stay outside the school timeframes, knowing that there was an abundance of additional traffic anticipated beyond the summer of 2019. So as far back as the spring of 2017, we were projecting to get the intersection done in 2019. Our preference at that time would have been to do the entire road and also to do the waterline work, which if you recall, in spring of 2019, we came and council authorized the north south water main phase two project. Phase three runs underneath this stretch of Bonnebrae all the way up to the intersection. As a part of that project, we were trying to get the utilities in well in advance of doing any of the paving so that we wouldn't have to come back and then take out brand new paving to put utilities in and then repave again what we'd just done. As a consequence, north south water main, which was supposed to go in line with this intersection improvement, rerouted the major pipeline around this project to keep the intersection on schedule, but we still had 20 inch and 16 inch water lines that had to be moved and were part of the original north south water main. So that was all in one project at one time intended to be done before the intersection. We'd had multiple conversations with the franchise utilities well in advance of all this as well, just to make sure that we had all of our I's dotted and T's crossed before we got to construction. With that being said, there were several things that we also did bring back council's attention. We did have project management staff that were trying to be very aggressive in pursuing that intended schedule, getting the utilities complete before the intersection went to construction. And when we came to council in May of 2019, we informed council that if we go forward with the project as bid, for some reason staff had taken out that utility portion and they were going to try to change order into a contract we already had with north south water main, phase two, which is almost a mile south. So the leadership of the department understood at that point, you can't tie those two change orders together, verify that with legal, there's no way we can connect those two projects. So we made any decision to come back to council and say, we know there's a change order coming. It should never have been dissociated with the project. Should we go forward with the project at this date, knowing that there's a change order coming or should we not? And at that point, the direction was let's go ahead and go forward knowing a change order is coming for the water line. At that point, we anticipated the price of that water line to be around $400,000. We eventually found out that the price of the water line itself was right around that mark that was change ordered into this project. We continued to do the design work, the redesign work, which would have had to have been designed any way you look at it when you merge the two projects together, whether we did it after award of this project or before award of this project. But there was also some redesign work that was completed because franchise utilities were not moved. So we had to work around ATMAS to still try to achieve the same delivery timeline, which cost significant redesign, part of that $45,000. We ever repeatedly tried to get that information on what it would cost from the consultant, but didn't receive it until into July. Once we did get that, we turned it around very quickly. The consultant did work at risk to try to continue to make the project move and achieve that deadline that we had set to maintain opening of the intersection as early as possible so we could get full access back to the hospital, the medical buildings, UNT, take some of the traffic load off of the residential neighborhood as quickly as possible before school starts. So all of those things went into a sequence of events where the contractor continued to move forward with his part of the project, understanding that until he was given any kind of change order authorized by council, he wasn't going to get paid for that work, but it was an effort to make sure that we continued to deliver the project on time. Unexpected redesign, we just visited about that one. We have done a few things here in light of this presentation or of this project to make sure that we don't miss out on some of those opportunities where we could have caught this issue way before we ever got to construction. So we've instilled some of those parameters. We call them peer reviews. That's where we get a chance for stakeholders and departmental leadership, city leadership to get a look at the project throughout key milestones of the project in the design phase so that we can capture some of these scenarios where someone might think let's take advantage of this opportunity and somebody with a little bit more broader insight not so down in the weeds has a chance to say, well, is that such a good idea? Let's think about all of this. So we're instilling those things into the development of the project to make sure that doesn't happen. One of those items, the two parcels that were referenced that were taken for this project, that acquisition, regardless of whether we had gotten that acquisition up front, it would have been ideal. We just got more of the roadway done that's part of Bonnie Rae Phase 4B. That acquisition, whether they actually occurred before this project or not, it really had no bearing on the overall execution of the entire Bonnie Rae Phase 4 project. Notice of delay. Oddly enough, I remember this $13,000 standby, it was due to one utility line that nobody knew was there. It was actually MCI, anybody here remember MCI? So we found an MCI cable, we could not figure out whether or not that MCI cable was actually servicing anybody. We didn't even know who to call for the longest amount of time. We could not touch that private franchise utility without having this delay. All that being said, so many of these delays were overcome by the contractor and staff in an effort to try to make sure that we maintained safety for the public and we still tried to deliver this project on time. We lost about 10 weeks in the overall execution of the project due to franchise utilities still being in the way and us still trying to construct utilities, construct roadway around them in the same vicinity as they were. Net difference is when the contractor finally fully had control of the site, he did complete in 12 weeks a fully usable intersection. And the temporary roadway was again back to that safety impact to the public to make sure that we had an open bonny bray for the school to start when it was obvious we were delayed so long that we couldn't get the intersection in place because of those franchise utility relocations that we put the temporary roadway in. Net, if you take the overall project cost with the water line included, we were expecting about $3.4 million for that project. When you net out the total change over cost, we were right at about somewhere between 5 and 10%, which on most projects, if you can stay within 5 to 10% of change, you've really done a pretty good job getting those projects delivered. All right. Yeah, so my question was for auditing. Yeah, so it's pretty general as a statement and a general question. So I had voted against this project because of my objection to the direction that council had recommended, which involved taking from the side that had residences on it instead of the other side. But that said, I still feel responsible and want to know, and you've done a good job of laying out the issues and staff, our engineering staff did a good job of explaining what happened in some recommended future practices going forward, but I'm wondering if you can speak to, if you feel comfortable speaking to, what is what you feel from an auditing perspective is the responsibility of city council to respond to this kind of situation? As I said, I feel responsible even though I voted against it. So what do you recommend in dealing with this particular situation outside of the issue which both presentations have addressed of what can be done moving forward to make sure things like this don't happen again? Would you like to speak? In this particular case, I mean, in construction, road construction, delays are going to occur and unanticipated situations are going to occur. City council can set up some, give some parameters within which if staff is within that parameter, empower them to make decision and come back later, but there needs to be some kind of set parameters so that if it is going to be exceeded, the staff needs to come beforehand and get permission from the city council. And so you recommend it's exceeded by a certain dollar amount to come forward to council? Those are the parameters that city council needs to decide. Okay. Do you have any suggestions for that that fit within the parameters for say the procurement RFPs or would it be a separate, would it be outside of those dollar caps? Well, those are the policy decisions and that city council has to make. I'd just like to remind the council because the thing that's been missing with this whole discussion is context. During this time, council had staff running all sorts of scenarios in this intersection. Public was getting very uncomfortable because the number of news stories coming out and what was happening. We were all getting emails from the hospitals, getting emails from UNT. I had UNT personally reaching out, wanting to talk about this. Todd pivoted, moved the water line forward. He did disclose it to you ahead of time. We didn't get a lot of pushback. We didn't think there's a lot of risk, but I think the point with this is he was still able to run those scenarios, not worry about those two parcels in order to get that roundabout put in and have as little impact on that intersection of scripture and Bible as possible. I don't think any amount of policies or procurement is going to deal with that. There are going to be times when the council asks us to go above and beyond and we spend time and start eating into UNT schedule that those policy discussions are prerogative. We can't plan for that in a purchasing policy. I think that context is completely absent here. I think as Umesh said, with these big road projects, you're always going to have some strange thing like the MCI thing come up. There's always going to be something different, but this council wanting to really make sure a majority of you were comfortable with the impact you were having on those properties in that neighborhood in the park. That's your call. We're happy to do it, but at the same time, we've got to balance the business interests and try to get that construction out of there as soon as possible. I just don't want that to be lost in all this because we're sort of selectively looking at subjects instead of remembering the entire context as it was. Can I follow up to that? Yeah. I feel that having a cap would seem to ... I mean, it wouldn't prevent any of these scenarios from coming up, but it would seem to me that it would automatically bring these issues to us with a clear ... Once they've reached a certain objective point, I'm wondering ... I think he did better than your cap. He told you exactly what it was going to cost and move forward because we got no push back from the council. For me, I would feel more comfortable moving forward with just an objective number cap where instead of a matter of making an individual decision ... Instead of staff having to make individual decision, it would be just like these other things that we vote on where anything over this amount has to come forward. Yeah. I'm going to repeat myself. He was very clear with the council in terms of what it was going to take to get the project back on track because all of us were taking some heat and he gave you the budget at that time and said, "We'll be back," in a very specific fashion. I don't want it to seem like some parameters would have necessarily helped this situation. He gave you the estimate and said, "We'll be back in a month or two to get your formal approval on this," because we were trying to get those roads open before school started. I completely understand. Councilmember Briggs and then Mayor Proctor. Thank you for the lessons learned slide. That's very helpful. My question is about the notice of delay, the unplanned cost, and I know you mentioned ... I was going to ask about the utility, but you mentioned MCI, and you can't really plan for utilities you don't know about, but were there any that we did know about that caused some of this delay? Yes. As I spoke about earlier, we had been working with both Frontier, Spectrum, and Atmos months in advance, at least a year in advance of this. We're going in May of 2019. We have to go to construction that summer. They were still not out of the way. Even when we awarded the contract and we sat them down with a kickoff meeting and said, "Hey, we are going. We need you out of the way. It still took time for them to mobilize. That 10 weeks we lost was waiting on Atmos and Frontier and Spectrum to get out of the way. See, this is a really big issue for me. This is something we need to address. I don't know if we can charge them back for the delay on the project, if that is something we can do, but we're going to have a lot of construction going on, and there's a lot of utilities that we have to worry about, and this can't happen on every project because it comes out of our taxpayer money for the delay. If we have to push everything until those are completely all done so that we don't have these delays and the contractors are waiting and waiting on the clock, then I think that might be something we need to discuss. A cap, I'm not so sure in this instance, but the utility locations is what I'm concerned about. I think it's a couple of things, we are having regular meetings with both staffs, especially Atmos, and they're getting better. I think one of the things Todd's, his last bullet up here, which is an important one, we are in the point where we're trying to design our road program another year or two out in advance, which does a couple of things important to us. We're still rebuilding our credibility too with Atmos. There was one of the things a couple of years ago when I sat down with them, Mario and Todd, and I sat down with them, they had spent hours and hours and brought in numerous crews years ago for the city to help facilitate our road program and then we didn't perform. They were very upset about the effort that they had expended and we were not able to perform that work, so they viewed it as lost investment. We started meeting with them over the last couple of years basically saying, look, here's our next bundle coming, we're getting it for the council, we're telegraphing it to you, putting our credibility on it, we will be there, we need you to step up and perform with us. It is a major issue for us and we have even offered to help offset some of the costs of their own locates because we knew that especially after the explosion in Dallas that their staffing had been diverted to Dallas, but we did not want our residents paying for it. So it's an ongoing conversation, I think the design package and making sure that when we get to a 30%, 60%, 90% design, that means their utilities have been accounted for and we can get those out of the way. So we're getting better at this, but just trying to get both of our utilities synced up and rebuilding that credibility with them has been a major issue. So a comment for the auditing department, I appreciate the information, but I gotta be candid, I do not appreciate the last sentence. The fact that you would reflect and say that it could potentially mean a management issue, I think that's out of scope, right? I think that's not really part of what your department's task to do, give opinion on managements, performance, and just kind of opine in that way, I think that is subjective and a bit out of bounds, if I were them that would be upsetting to me, it just rubbed me the wrong way. The data, great, but not to, I mean we're all working together here and so I think that just so you know my thoughts. Again, this is important to me because I think in a different way to understand the entire scope of things. We have one member here at this table that would advocate for waiting to bring it to council and then at the same time would raise the issue that $13,000 of waiting fees is a problem. Which one do we want? I'd rather keep moving and limit the $13,000 fees in an imperfect world, you're at impasse with those two, and so that's how I would reconcile those two versus saying have the contractor wait, continue to pay $13,000, heaven forbid if it's a summer when we're not meeting for a period of time, that fee just keeps churning while they're waiting to get in front of us. I don't think that does the taxpayer a good service. Then putting it in further context, the internet per Google was invented in 1983. I lived on Bonnie Bray Street before it was widened to its current capacity now. So you're talking predating the internet, these lines under the street, because that first widening, when I lived on Bonnie Bray, the hospital was houses and horses. So we experienced that widening firsthand, which would have been the last time someone's under scripture street. So it predates the internet, but yet we're supposed to know what is under there with 100% certainty. I just don't believe that to be doable or feasible or realistic. So given that scope of things, I think, again, we absolutely need to fix the policy things, but I think it's important to understand what we were up against as far as planning the lines, et cetera, and put it in context and have reasonable expectations and not assume that we all have x-ray vision and can see beneath the street with 100% certainty. So that's my two things, didn't like the comment at the end. I like the path forward and I absolutely don't support a, there's measurable, sure, but we have to give the city manager and staff what they need to avoid $13,000 fees for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Contractors sit in there and we're paying them. Then we're going to take just one or two more comments and then we're going to move on from this. I appreciate everybody's work here. I think my takeaway is that everybody did their jobs. Engineering got us a road built. It was a complex project and we got it done. Even with the delays that were outside our control and that particular part of the overrun was $100,000 or so, those particular fees, I think engineering performed superbly there. I think at the same time, audit was tipped off to something. They looked into it. They brought us back the information. Now we have some lessons learned. Everybody did exactly what they're supposed to do. At the end of the day, for me, this is a lesson in the things that our city is doing well and the ways that we can do better on each subsequent project and then the city manager just laid out for us a program of how we're going to avoid this in the future and do better than we ever have before. I think kudos all around is really the headline. John, any comments? Real quick, customer barmiter, oh no, hold on, customer barmiter, not customer melter because you've already spoken. Yeah, actually along similar lines, I think it's fine and good that we have a way to put stuff under the microscope. I think we're finding bigger fish to fry in this particular example. I think it's good that we understood it, we'll build on it, but I think that the actions were well within management discretion. I like the proposal that there's a periodic update of things that moved out of range. I don't even know if it needs to be monthly. I hope it doesn't need to be monthly. I think quarterly probably ought to cover it depending on the volume. I just want to speak about my views on what -- on the value of auditing. So I disagree with Mayor Pro Tem's comment that the recommendation on management and opinion on -- that there might be a management issue is outside the scope of an audit. I think that anything that creates risk, potential risk, is within the scope of an audit, and I think that we're all here, all of us, for the public good. We're not here for ourselves and looking out for our own feelings, and so we should always be thinking about the public's tax dollars, where they're going, and I think that engineering staff did a great job responding and not taking any of this personally because we're all in this together. I also didn't hear that the audit was taking issue with these complications that happen, which are just a part of many construction projects. So I just wanted to make that clear, and I hope that I'm not alone in that. Okay. Just a couple of comments, and then we're going to wrap this up. Appreciate the information from the audit. They did what they are charged to do. There was a complaint. They looked into it. They brought forward data. They brought forward some of their opinions on that data. Finally, we want to make sure that work is authorized and that we have costs in place. I understand how that happened, but I think we've got a process moving forward, but let's again make sure we put this in context. First of all, I just discount the $55,000 for the temporary road. To me, that's what it costs, fair enough, but that's not a cost that to me is some kind of an overrun, an overcharge, because there were people at this table who were really putting a lot of pressure, and there were people before us speaking to us before the council during the council meetings about why is this intersection not open? And so I commend you for being able to keep that open, even though we still had some franchise relocations beyond our control we couldn't do. So I think there are lessons learned all the way around, but you take out the $55,000 and you got $45,000 because of $13,000 for delay, which I'm not going to accept that being laid at our feet, $45,000 for some kind of miscommunication. Folks, if in a $4 million project, you have $50,000 that somehow you're doing pretty good. I mean, we want it to be zero, but let's put it in context. My only concern and observation was let's ensure that as we move forward that we do have the proper authorizations in place, but I will say this to you. When that comes forward, and in order to ensure that those occur, and it creates a delay of two or three weeks, and people are beginning to complain, let's just make sure we remember this particular project because all the risk was not borne by the city and those two kind of oversights. I mean, the city doesn't bear the whole risk of that. If you're doing work without having necessarily what you want to get paid for that work, you bear a risk as well. Is that not correct, Auditing Department, Mr. Auditor? Is that not correct? Okay. So I appreciate everybody's work in this effort. I think this is the way we learn, this is the way we improve our process, and this is the way the process should go. And I think we're better for it, and I think we have some good processes or improvements to processes moving forward to avoid this in the future. And if something happens to where it's going to delay a project because we can't get the contractor to give us pricing, council can know about it so that when people call us and wonder why the project's delayed, we can tell them. Anything else? Mr. Mesh, yes, yes, yes. Complain was about waste. Right. And we did not conclude that there was a waste. That's correct. That's right. Yep. I appreciate that. That was in the report, but I do appreciate you bringing that forward specifically at this meeting. Thank you for doing that. You bet. Thank you, Mesh. Okay. We'll move on from this agenda item. We're going to move the closed session to the end. So we're going to go through -- this part of the council meeting is going to be very quick. It's going to be very quick. We've got consent agenda and I think one item for individual consideration. So I know that two council members have an engagement this evening, but I think we're still within the time parameters, time parameters of that. All right. Then let me get to my agenda so we can call the special call meeting. Where's my agenda? What do I do with it -- you got an agenda, let me borrow your agenda. I just had it, I don't know -- got it for stuff written all over it. Here it is. I'm sorry. Thank you, Aaron. All right. We will now -- following the work session, the city council will convene in a special call meeting at 3 23 p.m. on February 25, 2020. First item on the agenda is the consent agenda. Councilmember Briggs? I move approval. Second. Councilmember Davis? Second. All in favor of the consent agenda, please signify by raising your right hand. Motion carries 6-0. Councilmember Armitage was out of the room for the vote. We'll move on to agenda item for -- items for individual consideration, which is 2A, consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, a home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with Handgartner Commercial Inc. for the renovation of the Denton Tennis Center and a contract with Mart Inc. for the American Legion Hall Senior Center. Good afternoon, mayor, councilmembers, Laura Barons, assistant director of parks and recreation. I have Jason Barrow here with us tonight as well. He is our athletics manager, and together we're going to give you just a very brief overview of this project. We have two projects that are before you that were recently bid following your direction. One of them is the building for the tennis center, and then the second is the American Legion Hall. So I'm going to let Jason briefly go over the tennis center building with you. Good afternoon, Jason Barrow, athletics manager, let's get started here. So this is the side of the building that we're going to be remodeling. It's the old annex building on the corner of Riney and Windsor, and it's -- the square footage is about 3,700. It's currently been used as a preschool for the North Lakes Rec Center. They've been using it as kind of like a satellite location, and we're designing it to serve as our new tennis programming building for lessons and tournaments. So here to give you an idea of where it's at in regards to some of the other projects we've recently completed, the Vela Complex and the dog park. This is an elevation drawing of the rendering of what the building will look like after the construction is complete. Here's what the plans are for the inside of the building. We've added showers to the restrooms. We've remodeled them to make them all EDA compliant. We've added storage, meeting rooms, space for concession cells and registrations for customers. There's a lounge for parents that are waiting for their -- for the kids while they are having lessons and office space. So the original bond package in 2014 was for just under $3.7 million. The cost of the tennis center building came in at just over $600,000. We had a little over $14,000 reallocated for the design of the building. So it brings our total spending for this project, which would include the courts at a later date. We're still working with the USTA on the -- getting the design approved for those courts. So we've just heard back from them today, actually. And we're still working with our facilities, is working with them and getting that approved. So we're estimating completion in 210 days from notice to proceed on the building. And that was it. If there's not any questions. >> Any questions? Councilmember Briggs. >> I do. It might be just because of this, too, but we've had conversations and more in-depth discussion on both of these projects and the design of them, right? And so this is just the approval of what we discussed before in a work session a while ago. Nothing has really changed. >> No, nothing has changed. It's -- we bid these separate -- or we bid them together hoping to create some savings. And it turned out that using two separate companies was going to work in our favor financially. So that's why we're just bringing it back to you all. >> Is it okay to approve two separate contracts under one? >> Under the same caption? >> You can, but I think the contract is one contract. And so that would cause -- we would have to bifurcate it and probably get them re-signed. Oh, there are two contracts actually -- >> Under one item, two different people. >> Yes. You can do them separately. You can bifurcate them, because there are two contracts here and there's -- >> I think the question is in this one caption, if someone makes a motion in a second and it's approved because it contains two separate contracts, is that permissible? Or do we need to -- >> Do you contract separately? >> Because there are two different -- actually two different scope of work, I would recommend to actually vote on each one separately. >> Vote under the same -- >> Under the same caption, yes. >> Okay. All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay. All right. Any other questions? Oh, wait. You've got another presentation. >> I'm going to go over the American Legion Hall, ALH. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So ALH is located at 629 Lakey Street, and we have two buildings that are impacted by this construction. First is the north -- I'm sorry, the south building, which is the original building built in 1957, and then we have the north building that was built in 2003. Both of them are running at about 2,500 square feet. They are connected by an open breezeway that's this little piece right here in the middle, and both have open structures. So aside from an office and a kitchenette in the south building, they are completely open buildings. The south building is primarily used for drop-in passive activities like card games and dominoes. It does have a little computer lab set up in it. It is primarily used for meeting spaces and events, and it also serves daily lunches through the SPAN program. The SPAN program has been relocated to the MLK Center during the duration of this construction period. Couple of pictures. This is the south building. You can see we've got some foundation issues there. It is an open space area. The computer lab are these tables set up across the back end of the building. The kitchenette is actually behind this set of tables right here. And then this social area, television viewing area, is actually in this corner over here. The north building serves our fitness programs. It is also used for meeting spaces and events. It does have a pool table in it, and it has an attached exterior bathroom that's accessible from the outside only. That's about 700 square feet. It's not included in the original 2,500 square feet that we looked at here just a second ago. Interior of this building, again, you can see that it's a wide open space, have a couple of treadmills set up in it, tables and chairs. The pool table also has a little seating recreation or social area here in the corner. And then this is the breezeway that connects the two buildings. So back in the spring of 2017, we did tour both facilities with the city manager and had a building and site assessment report conducted. It identified several issues, primarily on the south building. The foundation issues were of major concern, and there were also several comments about the usability of the two buildings and the functionality of them and servicing programs. At that time it was recommended that the building, the south building, be completely reconstructed rather than renovated. It was actually going to cost more to try to renovate the building than it would be to tear it down and reconstruct it. The north building will just be renovated. Staff and users met with the architect and discussed the programming and the building functionality. We also held community meetings at the MLK Center, where we got input from several of our citizens and, again, users of the facility. And we also utilized surveys to gather additional input on future programming and facility utilization. This is the elevation drawing for the remodel/reconstruction of that north and south building. This is what the floor plan is going to look like. We are retaining open space on the southern portion of the building so that we can continue to utilize that for the heavily rentals that we have there, for birthday parties, we have a lot of family reunions. So that open space will remain. We'll also expand on the kitchenette. We've got some storage, much needed storage space that will be available to us now. Down the northern part of the building, that's going to be remodeled and increase the functionality of it. So now we'll have dedicated space for a computer lab, a classroom, for other programs, a fitness area, and then the men's and women's bathrooms there are still going to be in the same spot. And then this is the exterior men's and women's bathroom that serve the park itself. We will also have a terrace added on the exterior portion of the building that's accessible from both the north and south ends. The original funding for this project, when it was thought that we would just be remodeling the building, was at $829,000. As we began to go further into this process, we obviously knew that we were going to need some additional funding, so an additional $1 million was added to this project. You can see the breakout of where that money is coming from for a total of $1.8 million. Upon approval of this bid, we'll have 270 days of construction with the notice to proceed. Just a little bit of overview on the bid process itself. Both the North Lakes Tennis Center building and the ALH were bid together. The proposal was sent out to over 500 contractors. We had nine proposals that came back to us. After evaluating the proposals, lower pricing was achieved by actually keeping the project separate. What you have before you for your consideration is an award to Mart Inc. in the amount of $1.5 million for the ALH and $601,000 for, again, the tennis center building. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Just my own personal take on this issue weighing in. I'm glad that these are separate contracts. I am very excited about and supportive of the American Legion Senior Hall rehab, and I have, just being consistent with my view I have expressed previously, though it's been a while, don't feel comfortable with this kind of investment in a tennis shop, so I'm going to be supporting the one, the American Legion Senior Center, and not the other. For clarification, only the tennis shop isn't the full amount that we saw. It's only the 600. Yes, ma'am. Right. The rest of it will have to fit within the bounds of what's been approved for the tennis courts. Correct, for the tennis courts. The exterior portion, yes, ma'am. That was just a follow-up question. So I noticed that part of the front building has already been demolished. Is that included in the price, the total price that we've seen, or is that something? Of the project for ALH, yes, ma'am. Okay. All right. On the bids, I noticed that there were two companies from Denton, local companies that bid the project, that didn't get it because we were looking at cost. Were there points or anything awarded for local companies bidding on the projects, or did we just strictly go? I don't even know if that's something that- I'd like the purchasing address, yes. We do, or have done? We do allow local, Lori Heal, purchasing manager, yeah, we do allow for local preference, but in these cases, I think they're all within the state of Texas, and I'd have to get back with you on the exact percentages also for that. Okay. Yeah. I don't know how that looks when that's included, if it's local meaning Texas, or local meaning Denton. The last question I have is about the bathrooms. I guess, I'm assuming the ones that are in the inside, they're going to be new, but the ones on the outside, the exterior, are the ones that you're not going to do anything to? Well, the men and women's bathroom on the interior, they're actually not moving. Those are there now. So, there might be just some minor updating to them. Right. Yes. So, they're not going to be completely remodeled or even moved. We're going to continue to be in the same location as they are today. Oh, yeah. I'm not talking about location. I just want to make sure that they're going to be, because this is going to be all new and nice. Yes. They'll be updated to some extent. I want to make sure that it's going to be consistent with the rest of the design. Yes. The interior, yes. Okay. Thank you. I just want to make sure that everyone's going to be really clear about what the tennis center is going to be. I mean, we're using the term pro shop and all that kind of thing, but I very much support this project. It's going to be an enormous boon to our rec programs. I get asked very regularly about our tennis facilities and upgrades at tennis facilities and more opportunities for young people to use tennis facilities. This is not like Federer and Agassi and somebody operating a pro shop. This is a rec support and an excellent use of a building that hadn't probably been in good use since it was the Y, so I think this is a great project. So I just want to say how excited I am about American Legion Hall. I sure appreciate staff, city managers, work, and my peers moving that forward. With that, I do have a question. These versions had kind of the circle drop off lane, did that live into this iteration or not? I don't know. No, it no. There was at one point, I believe a covered drop off, but the impact to the available parking was an issue that was brought up by staff and also by the users. They were wanting to retain as much parking as possible. If I recall correctly, some of those conversations, it was going to have to, it was going to take out some parking for that. Okay. And so will there be better ramp access to the building because now it's kind of steep and kind of disjointed right there at the front, there'll be some kind of new configuration? I'll have to get back to you on exactly what the elevation on the sidewalk and so forth looks like, but yes, this is primarily focusing on the building. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Meltzer. I was here newly on council in May 2017 when this came up and just a couple of points that I recall being made and some being presented. This senior center is in far worse shape than the senior center in the other neighborhood. As I recall, and I don't know if this is still true or I suspect it is, it was the most frequently rented city facility for kind of life events in the community. And also the original building, just as an expression of sort of demand for it, was built at no cost to the city. It was built as a gift of American Legion, you know, returning veterans. So it'll probably be worked on at least a third Juneteenth since then, but I'm pleased to see that we're at this point and I'll certainly be supporting. Okay. Anybody else? All right. Chair, to entertain action on these now two items. So they need to be, I just want to make sure I'm clear. They can be proposed to be approved, but they have to be approved separately, but within the same caption. Yes. Okay. All right. Mayor Pro Tem. Well, then I will move approval for, let me get my number right. Item 2A regarding the American Legion Hall Senior Center located at 629 Lakey Street and the amount of $1,563,000,000, no, Aaron's shaking his head no. I guess you'd have to combine both contracts equal $1,563,000,000. Is that correct? No. No. No. The American Legion is the $1,563,000 and the tennis center is $601,000. Okay. You were correct. Okay. So can I just pick up there? Yes. Great. Move approval for that amount. The 1,563,000,000. That is correct. For the American Legion. Yeah. Council Member Melser. I second. All in favor of the proposed motion for agenda item 2A, motion has been seconded for approval of a contract between, well it doesn't say between, yeah it does. Well for the American Legion Hall Senior Center, remodel in 1,563,000,000. All in favor of the second time by raising your right hand, motion carries unanimously. All right. Council Member Davis. I move approval of the contract with Hand Gartner Commercial Incorporated for the Denton Tennis Center building at 1117 Rainey Road and the not to exceed amount of $601,269. $601,269. Great. Council Member. Second. Ryan. Second. All in favor please signify by raising your right hand. All opposed by like sign. Motion carries 6 to 1. Moving on to our next agenda item which is 2B, consider nominations, appointments to city boards and commissions. Council Member Briggs. I move approval. Council Member Davis. Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 2B. All in favor please signify by raising your right hand. Motion carries unanimously. Concluding items, any concluding items? Yes, Mayor Pro Tem. So I believe it is, yes, it's the 28th, that luncheon, there's your beautiful luncheon at the embassy suites that is a great opportunity to celebrate those that have been through, survived, etc., cancer. So I think that's just kind of a great community asset. Anybody else? I've got one. I want to express my support based upon the events of last week for the Denton Police Department and for the Texas Rangers and for the investigation, the full and fair investigation that they are conducting upon tragic set of events in our city. And I support the policy of the Texas Occupation Code 1701.660 that states, "Except as provided by subsection A1 and B, a recording created with a body-worn camera and documenting an incident that involves the use of deadly force by a peace officer where that is otherwise related to an administrative or criminal investigation of an officer may not be deleted, destroyed, or released to the public until all criminal matters have been fully adjudicated and all related administrative investigations have been concluded." One of those exceptions has already been fulfilled. It's my understanding that the family did view the body cam. And the police department, excuse me, the Texas Rangers have the authority to execute any of those other exceptions, but I support a full and fair investigation and look forward to the findings of which this body, if need be, will act upon once that full and fair investigation, those findings are made public. Any other concluding items? Council Member Davis. I concur with the Mayor's sentiments. Any other comments? Council Member Mayer Pro Tem. Yeah, I want to go on record the same. I think I support, I want Chief Dixon to know that's important that we do things the right way. Mayor Pro Tem, I mean, Council Member Ryan. I just want to go on record as well as being in support of the police and the process has been going forward. Council Member Armitage. I just want to go on record as well as saying I also support doing things the right way, and sometimes we just have a different opinion of what's the right way to do things, but I strongly support our police department, our law enforcement, and I join with their condolences to the family. Anybody else? All right. We will now adjourn this open session. We will now convene in closed session at 345. We will consider the following items, consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071, deliberations regarding real property under Texas Government Code Section 551.072, deliberations regarding personnel matters under Texas Government Code Section 551.074.