Jul 21, 2020 City Council on 2020-07-21 1:00 PM

Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, July 21, 2020. The time is 1.05. We have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order. I want to welcome everybody back from our two weeks off. We've got a good agenda ahead of us, so I look forward to the meeting. Our first item on the agenda is citizens' comments on consent agenda items. We don't have any callers, but we do have some that filled out the online portal. So I will read that for agenda item 4A, consent agenda item 4A, which is consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton approving and authorizing city managers designated to execute an interlocal cooperation agreement. We had one person making a comment and they were against agenda item 4A. 4B on the consent is consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton approving and authorizing the city manager or is designated to execute an interlocal cooperation agreement between the City of Denton and Denton County for fire protective services. We did have one person who made an online comment and they were against that. And I believe this is 4P, 4P, which is 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 Flycast Partners, Inc. for renewal of sharewell software licenses. We had one person making a comment on agenda item 4P and they indicated support for agenda item 4P. So those are all the citizens comments on consent agenda items. So we will move to our next agenda item, which is request for clarification of agendas listed on the agenda, of items listed on the agenda, I'm sorry, any clarifications on the agenda. Councilmember Briggs. >> Mayor, just one question, was there any reason that they were against on the consent agenda or was it just, did they just list against? >> The form that I have just listed as against, there may be some comment in the online portal, but I don't have those and those will be, I believe those will be part of it as well. >> Okay. So I have a few questions on the consent, some clarifying questions. >> Sure. >> I want to ask a question about E. So I know that we've been following along and I'm really happy with the progress on the testing kits for our department. I know it's been a priority. And so my question is, is this continued testing of the remaining kits and would this also be for assaults on campus, this contract? >> Do we have Chief Dixon on the line? Oh, Chief Padgett. >> Yes, this is Deputy Padgett. It would not include kits for on campus. We won't be testing kits submitted by the University of North Texas Police Department. It is for ongoing testing of kits that the Denton Police Department has in its possession. >> Okay. And I know that we have been making substantial progress on that. Do you have an idea of what number is left? >> We have our original number, we have 26 unsubmitted kits left. And then we have a number, we just did an inventory, a complete inventory of all of our kits. And we have a number of partially tested kits that will need to be sent back and completed. >> Okay. And those would be covered in this contract? >> Yes, ma'am. >> Okay. Great. Thank you. The next question I have is item G, on the $7 million cost for decommissioning for Gibson Creek, has this been set aside, I'm trying to remember, in our budgets, or what budget this is coming from? >> It would be the electric budget. Is Tony on there? >> Yes, ma'am. This is Tony Puente. Yes, ma'am. It's already been paid to TNPA, and TNPA is holding that in reserve. >> Okay. All right. So it's already come out of our budget. We don't have to find the money for it. >> Yes, ma'am. And we do have all the other expenses that the city would be responsible for decommissioning in our five-year plan, and they'll be coming to council as part of the budget. That is also included, there's about $88 million in TNPA's budget already that's included in this item. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. >> Yes, ma'am. >> Mayor, I have just a few more. >> Sure. >> On item M, about real estate appraisers, I'm just, I'm curious, is it strange that we don't have any local ones here that may know the market better? And is it, do they have to be outside appraisers, or is there someone in our legal department that could do this? >> Deanna, are you on the line? Laura Morales. >> Yes, this is Laura Morales from Real Estate, and we went ahead and posted those appraisals or those qualifications for appraisals, and pretty much cast out that net pretty far. We were able to get about six or seven of those appraisals that were qualified. So I know that purchasing casted that net pretty far out. They may be able to give you more specifics on that. If not, I can certainly respond to that. >> I guess my question is, is it the same as a real estate appraiser on the outside of town? Is it the same market just as well as somebody who may be local? >> Yes, as qualified appraisers, they will have to be very familiar with the market, yes. >> Okay. And it's not something that we can do internally? >> That's correct. >> Okay. Okay. Thank you. That answers my question. >> Councilmember, Councilmember Davis. >> I have a quick question on Elle. I'm just curious if we're updating the SCADA system at one plant, is that the same SCADA system we already have in place at the Louisville plant, or will we have an upgrade there as well at some point in the future? >> Hi. This is Kenny Banks, General Manager of Utilities. Can you hear me? >> Yes. >> Okay. Great. I'll do my best to try to answer this question. But I believe that the Louisville system has been upgraded, the TND is kind of an old architecture that no longer allows for Windows upgrades. And so we've been kind of systematically looking through our SCADA system and ensuring that we've got the most up to date. This is just one aspect of that process. >> Great. That answers my question. I appreciate it. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Oh, Councilmember Briggs. >> Yeah. I still had two more. >> Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I apologize. >> That's okay. On item N, about the traffic counting, which is really great, I know I've requested several speed studies in neighborhood streets and get those daily. Would this look at that type of situation? Is that what this is for? >> That's Todd S., this city engineer. It actually covers a broad spectrum of things. The speed study, just part of it, it's really for traffic counting in regards to intersections, supporting any traffic counts we might need for neighborhood street calming. It's a variety of issues that it really covers, and it gives us two sources to go to instead of just one. >> Okay. All right. Great. So the last one I have is O, about pest management, and I'm wondering what we're spraying for. It says inside and outside, and if the outside spray will harm beneficial insects. I do know that we have several really great lizards and ducks outside of City Hall, and I just want to make sure that what we're allowing or using won't harm them. >> Yes, ma'am. We would require our pest control services to use pesticides that meet the requirements that were passed already by the council, and certainly not impact our wildlife around the facility. It's more for the other types of pests that we would like to keep out of the building. >> Okay. Thank you. I'm sorry. I do have one more. It's the very last one, and I may pull it, but I'm looking for an answer, because I know that Parks, under this organization, sustainability moves under Parks, and it's been pointed out that they have two different missions, and I know, can you address City Manager's reasoning behind this, and also will sustainability still be its own separate department? And one of the concerns that I have, and that has been emailed to me, is that Parks follows a cost of service model, which we approved on council, where everything has to have its cost, and I know that Clear Creek has been free, and a lot of our educational programs for sustainability has been free, and so I just want to make sure that we don't have any plans for those following under that cost of service program for Parks in this intentional move. >> Now, as we worked our way through reorganizing, given the fact we're now in almost 200 positions, one of the things that we had to take into consideration were those divisions that do very like work, so really, we look at sustainability in terms of its programming aspects, which already has huge synergies with Parks, but there's also the regulatory part of sustainability that I'm going to leave under Dr. Banks, so to make sure that that component remains very integrated with environmental services, so we don't see any major changes to its mission. They're already working very closely with Parks. There's absolutely no intention on our part, anyway, to move it forward to more of a cost of service approach. It's just simply the fact that those skill sets are very similar, and Gary has a great track record of working through these programs and integrating staff like that. Very similar to the thought process behind KDB. >> Okay, so what the current programs won't fall under or be moved under the model that we use? >> There is no reduction, change in the service levels, just simply the ability to create some synergies between Parks, KDB, and sustainability where it's possible, so this was actually something that we've been working on for a few months now. >> Okay. Thank you. No need to pull it. >> Okay. Thank you, Dr. Arometer. >> So a question about that one, Z, does the committing to the organizational chart, the new organizational chart, include a validation of any positions that may be non-renewable, or is that a separate issue? I just want to see if the voting yes to that is saying -- is a reflection on any positions that are not renewable, because it's not entirely clear to me, you know, which positions are going to be renewed or not, and that may not have been decided. >> The organizational chart is kind of separate from the positions that are going to be backfilled, if that's your question. The way we set up the budget process, and we've just finished going through all the dry runs this morning on that, you'll be seeing in each department where the position reductions were in terms of their organizational charts, and if any services at all have been affected. So there's a slide that answers that question on every department director's presentation to you. >> Okay. Excellent. So that will be covered in the budget. >> Yes. Anybody else? We got a couple -- Councilmember Meltzer. >> Yes, I'd like to pull out item E for -- so I can recuse. >> Okay. All right. Councilmember Armitage? >> Yes. And I also need to recuse for item E, which is why I blanked my screen when there was a question on it. Sorry. I came back late. I didn't know when that would be over. I also want to pull G and H on T and PA just for public comment and questions, and I wanted to pull Q for public comments and a separate vote, and I just had a brief question on K. >> Okay. >> Go ahead. >> Okay. Is the staff member who's there who's able to answer there? >> Yes. Cassie Ogden and Frank Wilson are both on the phone. >> So I just wanted to confirm and also to thank you all, just to confirm to make sure that my understanding is correct, that for this labor contract, it looks like that you didn't just go with whoever is paying their workers the least, and I just wanted to say I noticed that. I wanted to make sure if, you know, my reading is correct, and if you could just say a little bit about what considerations you took into account besides just the cost. >> Which agenda item are you on? >> This is about the, I think K is the one, the temporary labor contract. Let me see. Yeah, labor finders, temporary labor services. >> Okay. All right. >> This is Cassie Ogden, Director of Procurement and Compliance. So for temporary labor, yes, we did evaluate on probable performance price and how well the vendors would meet our specifications. We did have an issue with the previous contractor not being able to provide the service, so that's why we're back in front of you asking for this contract to be approved. But yes, we did provide in the backup the rate of pay for each assigned level of employee or laborer. >> Well, excellent. Thank you. >> Does that answer your question? >> Absolutely, and I really appreciate that. Thank you. >> Anybody else? Is Tony, Councilmember Davis? Just a couple to pull, I didn't mention them earlier, A and B, I need to pull for recusal, please. >> We might as well just pull the whole consent agenda. >> Well, we're not quite there yet. >> Okay. All right, so what I've shown so far of pulling is A, B, E, G, H, and Q. I mean, who pulled Q? Councilmember Armitage, okay. So did I miss any? All right. Is Tony still available? >> Right here, sir. >> Hey, Tony. I just had a couple of questions on agenda item G, a consent agenda item G, which is the municipal power agency ordinance or approval of the amended budget. So you said that the $7 million for '20 and '21 have been paid to TMPA, is that correct? >> That's correct. >> That's come out of the utility funds. >> Out of the electric fund. >> Yeah, so that's been budgeted and built into the rates. Now, that's for the decommissioning portion? But that doesn't equal all of the decommissioning costs that we would have to pay if that's the route that it goes, is that correct? >> That's correct. The total estimated expense from TMPA is about $88 million, and so the city's portion is about 21% of that amount, and that's what's included in the DME's budget going forward over the next four years now. >> Okay. So about $17 million. >> Correct. >> $17 to $18 million. >> Correct. >> Okay. Fantastic. Okay. Thank you. >> Yes, sir. >> All right. Anybody else on the items for clarification on the agenda? >> Mayor, on item G, I sent you an email. There's a posting issue which won't prevent it being considered, but I would ask that you pull it to IC. >> It's already being pulled. >> Okay. >> You're talking about Consent G? >> Yes. >> Yeah, it's already being pulled. >> Well, I just want to point out that that should read fiscal year 2021, and that's actually a result of -- it's an internal software problem that staff is looking at trying to get fixed. We weren't sure why that happened. The backup and everything is correct, so you've met the posting requirements to take action on, but I would point that out. >> Okay. All right. Thank you very much. All right. Anybody else? Any other comments on clarification of agenda items? All right. We'll move in through our work session reports. Work session 3A is receive a report, hold a discussion, give staff direction regarding an update on the council-related milestones at the Green Tree estate subdivision. Councilmember Briggs, did you have a question or comment? Okay. Sorry. Mayor, members of the council, Mario Cannas, our city manager, let me pull up the screen. Which one is it? Let's go ahead and share. Can you all see it? >> Yes. I believe so. >> Okay. All right. Mayor, members of the council, Mario Cannas, our city manager, this presentation is being translated in Spanish, so I will speak slowly and just have a few slides, and then we'll also make some comments about an email that we had received late yesterday evening and this morning that would like for your consideration for today. So on May 12th, just to recap from a couple of months ago, the city council extended the emergency declaration to July 31st of 2020 for Green Tree estates. As part of that declaration, no new customers at the subdivision could establish temporary water service with the city, voluntary courtesy inspections would need to be completed by June 12th of this year, and the City of Ninton would -- cost of extending the May line would be paid if one property owner connected or one property owner paid by July 3rd of 2020. That has occurred, and so that process has begun. Again, as part of that, on July 31st, 2020, just before midnight, the emergency declaration would end, and that also causes the temporary water services to cease there in Green Tree estates. Since the last work session when we met back in June, mid-June, there have been a total of six property owners that have paid the water tap meter and impact fee to the city. City staff and the water department has extended the nearest water main line to the neighborhood boundary and has installed a bank of eight meters. The remaining meters can also be installed once property owners pay the requisite fees. Since July 17th, 2020, as of last week, there has been some clearing of brush, the trimming of trees, and minor street grading has occurred there at the subdivision. At this point, or at least as of last week, no plumbing applications -- excuse me, no plumbing permit applications had been received, and no excavation for the plumbing lines had been performed up to this point. And I'll be able to elaborate a little bit here shortly on that. So in summary, as of last week, as mentioned, there have been six property owners that have paid the requisite fees. There are still eight remaining properties that have not taken steps to connect by paying the fees. Of the eight -- or excuse me, eight of those households have created water accounts in their names, as you all had requested them to do so back from May when we presented at that time. Because the bank -- the meter banks, two additional meter banks have been installed and the line has been extended, residents may -- can pay the tap, meter, and impact fee at any time. And again, as mentioned, once those fees are paid, any additional meters can be installed relatively quickly. So we're ready to go. As of last week, 62,000 -- a little over 62,000 of the 100,000 has been expended for this effort. And this also includes that extension of the water line, it was approximately $9,200. That's included in the $6,015. And as mentioned, through the current declaration, residents will lose temporary water service as of after July 31, 2020. So discussion in next steps. If we're going down this path, we owe you another update next Tuesday if you all believe it's necessary. If -- we also would provide you another update on August 4th, which would be the week after the emergency declaration would end. Any connection to the city's water system is dependent on three things. Payment of the fees, which we've discussed at length with the community and with council. Doing the customer service inspection, which would be required at any new connection point. And also doing the private connection to the meter, which would be conducted by a plumber. And as mentioned again, that as of July 31, under the current declaration, temporary water services would stop. So to give you an update, yesterday evening and this morning, we had received an email from the community advocates that are assisting the residents at Green Tree Estates, along with an email this morning from the plumber that has contracted to do the work there at the subdivision. They have requested an additional 30-day extension of the declaration to basically end September 1st of 2020. And the reason behind it is that the residents, along with the community advocates, are working with the property owners there, along with Mr. Roddy, that through the private ownership of the streets, it is my understanding that they are conducting some survey work and they're trying to determine the appropriate easements that need to be put in place so that the lines that are being installed by the plumber can be done appropriately. It is also my understanding through building inspections, and Scott McDonald is in City Hall and can speak to that if needed, but the plumber is needing some additional time because they've realized that the work is a little bit more extensive than what they had originally planned. They are having to run lines quite a long distance from the meter bank, and so just some additional time, the topography, the conditions in the grading of the road just would require some additional time. So based on the emails that we had received yesterday evening and this morning, those emails have been sent to you all so you could see what they were requesting and why. And so, again, just wanted to pass that information on to the council based on that recent news that we had received. It is also my understanding that the plumber will be connecting at least one resident who is closest to the meter bank on the east side of the subdivision. I believe that work is to be completed, if not this week, early next week. So progress is being made and building inspections can attest to that. So with that, I'll turn it over for any questions or comments that you may have of staff. >> Okay. Thank you. Mayor Potem. >> Mario, candidly, I'm not going to say much, and my focus is going to be pretty pointed. So you received an email from the plumber that precedes this from A&M Plum, let's see. So that's on June 16th, and there was expletives in there, and there was accusations in there, and I need to understand if we've received any -- you requested an apology. Have we received that? >> I did. I mean, he apologized directly to me. So you know, in my opinion, it's water under the bridge. I know emotions are high, and there have been concerns out there. And so, you know, at the end of the day, we're just trying to get the project completed and working with staff. And I know Scott McDonald, our chief building official, along with his staff, works closely with this plumber on other projects around the city. So you know, again, I'll just leave it at that. >> Okay. And then one other thing. Who scoped the work? So the work -- you're talking about the meter bank, the additional work. Is that something that the city scoped, or did the advocates or the residents kind of say here's where -- who missed on the estimation? So obviously there's a miscommunication on estimation. Whose miscommunication is that? Are you talking about when the meter banks were originally installed back a couple of weeks ago? >> Well, no. Just specifically his statement is that it's more work than anticipated. Who laid out what was to be done that then was not properly calculated? >> Okay. Well, you know, again, I have not spoken to the plumber directly. My understanding is they're working directly with other entities to try to help and assist that work. So -- >> That answers my question. I just want to make sure the city didn't -- we've been asked -- and here's the -- in summation, we've been asking to work hand in hand to avoid these very things. And we've been shut out. And I disagree with the email that said this is unforeseen. We've all talked about the easements regularly. And this is not new. So that email is -- mischaracterizes something that we all knew was coming. So anyway, those are my questions. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember Brueger, did you have your hand up? Yeah. When we first came on then councilmember Armitage. >> Thank you, mayor. On the extension request, is it for all 14 or just the 6? >> Based on the way the email was written, I would assume it was for the entire subdivision but the original folks of 14, because they want to continue providing additional -- would request to have water continue to those that are being served at the moment. >> Okay. And through that extension, those other individuals would still be allowed to join in the process throughout the extension? >> Yes, ma'am. >> Okay. So it's my understanding there's two property owner-occupied that are still working -- that may be still working towards getting that to happen. >> Yeah. I'm remembering the last time we had the conversation and a lady called and said she would like to do it but was having a hard time coming up with the money. So okay. All right. Thank you. >> Councilmember Armitage? >> Yes. So first I want to thank Mario for your answer to the question about the email. >> If we also could remember -- and I forgot -- but it is being translated. So if we could -- you'd be mindful of that. I'd appreciate that. >> Thank you. So thank you, Mario, for answering the question about the email from the plumber. I wanted to just state for the record in response to Mayor Pro Tem's comment to clarify, there was only one expletive in that email, and it was a word and the Spanish is mierda, but it was the English word for that, and it was specifically about plumbing, you know, and this is -- when you're talking about plumbing, this is a thing you're talking about. So it was -- what I thought was actually kind of a lighthearted way to try to ease the tension. So I just wanted to make sure in case people listening haven't seen the email, I'm imagining an expletive-filled email. It was referring to something that you don't say in polite company, but that plumbers see all the time and are not as shocked by as the rest of us. So about the volunteer work of clearing the brush, I just wanted to publicly thank all the volunteers who came out there. It's really amazing work, and one of the residents showed me photos, and it's quite wonderful so thank you to everybody for that. I wanted to ask, so about the easements, which, by the way, even though, you know, it was expected that easements would be an issue, I myself was not prepared for and delighted by such a solution to the easement issue. So I was wondering if either staff or anyone from the community or advocates and anyone who is on call would be able to elaborate a little more beyond the presentation about, you know, what we're looking at in terms of the easements, because that was a big kind of mystery and sticking point, and we seem to have really gotten somewhere with that. I'm not quite sure, you know, we're just trying to get -- we're trying to make sure that, and I'm sure the property owners want to make sure that whatever assets are put in the ground are protected, and so that their -- people know where their lines are when they need to get repaired or, you know, going forward. As mentioned before, we have been speaking with the community advocates and the residents since the early beginnings of these discussions about for them to be able to determine the ownership of the roads and where the lines could be laid, so that really has been a private matter between the residents and property owners there and whether it's Mr. Roddy or others that may lay claim to that ownership of those lines -- of those roads. So that has been an ongoing discussion, and it was really up to the residents to determine how much risk they wanted to have with where those lines are laid on that main road there in the subdivision. Okay, well, thank you, and if -- do there happen to be any community member -- Green Tree residents or advocates who are on call who are going to be speaking to us? I don't know. No, this is a work session, so that's not been prepared for. Okay. I mentioned that because, as you know, in the past, you know, residents have spoken in advocates at some work sessions, so I didn't know if this meeting was different, but anyway, I'm just really happy to hear that. It's not different? Okay, so nobody had requested -- I have no idea. I just am saying that if people speak at work session, that's an exception to our rules of procedure. So no. So go ahead. You may proceed. Thank you. So anyway, so I'm pleased about the easements, and I would, of course, advocate for an extension of the due date until the 1st, as they requested, to make the securing of these easements possible, to make the hooking up of residents to water possible. I think it is wonderful. I was very nervous that there might not be a resolution to this easement question, and I'm thrilled that this is being done, so thank you to everyone involved. I wanted to ask, finally, about those who have not paid. Has anybody of any of the residents -- and, you know, please don't, obviously, name anybody. I don't need to know anything about them. I'm just curious. Has anybody of any residents or property owners who have not paid requested a payment extension or said that, you know, they want to pay but they need X amount of time? To the city, I'm not aware of anyone. I believe that there is a property owner that is working directly with LULAC or maybe even the Cosecha de Movimiento of Denton to assist in some funds to make that payment, but no one's requested an extension of time that I'm aware of. >> Okay. Thank you. That was all. So, again, strongly encourage that we say yes to that extension. I'm thrilled about the easements. Looks like this is coming to a close. >> Councilmember Davis. >> Thank you, Mayor. Real quickly, Louie, the plumber, I was really pleased when I saw that he had signed on to the project. I've seen him at the company and him personally a lot before at my house, and if he says it's complex and that it is more complex than expected, you can take him at his word. And unfortunately, it's frustrating, of course, on our end to say that we've been saying for months that it's a complex plumbing situation and that the easements would be very complex and come to find out the professionals agree with us. So just to clarify really quickly the last point that we were talking about on payment extensions. Going forward with this meter bank in place, it should be like any other place you could drop a meter in the city, right? Anybody going forward, there's not some deadline on July 31st that if you don't have a meter there, no meters will be allowed in the future. Is that right, Mario? >> That's correct. All that does at the 31st just stops that temporary provision of water, the three times a week of filling those containers by a truck. That's all it is. Particularly with regard to the extension, my questions are about who's left out there out of the 14 that have not paid for a meter, that don't currently have a plan or a way that they're going to be able to get a meter or plumbing run to their house. And those properties, even the properties that have paid for a meter, what's the mix of tenants and landlords? What's the mix of homeowners who we could reasonably expect that they're going to be on the hook for their own meter, or those properties that are left where a landlord is the one, not a GoFundMe or a community effort, but the landlord is the one who's supposed to be paying for water service to that house. Do we have a good idea of how many of those are left, or if it's mostly homeowners that have paid the fees, or what the picture is there? >> It is my understanding that most of the actual property owners that have paid the fees, I think there is one property owner that is out of the area where a person that's renting is there. So five out of the six are, I believe, are property owners. One is a rent or occupied property, but obviously the property owner has paid that. And based on my understanding, there's two more residents or two more property owners out there that have yet to pay and connect, and one of them, I think, will be doing so sometime next week, and the other one, we're just not sure yet. So if that happens, then we will have, I believe, eight out of the 14 that will have paid to connect. >> From what you've just said, does that mean that the majority or almost all of the remaining properties that are not connected are not owner-occupied, that those are? >> That is correct. >> Okay. Thank you. That's all I need to know. >> Yeah. >> Councilmember Meltzer, did I see your hand? >> Yeah. So if they're not owner-occupied, are they still able to create water accounts in their name, or do we have any indication of their intentions? Because I feel like I'm hearing somewhat contradictory accounts as we sort of try to guess the frame of mind of those who we haven't communicated with. We see that they haven't created water accounts in their name, but it seems to be -- we seem to be interpreting the advocates as saying they all have the intention of moving forward. Can you help me sort that out, Maria? >> Well, as far as -- >> Do we know anything about their intentions? The six? >> Right. The six, we don't specifically ask that of LULAC and of the intentions of the remaining that have not. And again, that's when they replied back and said two out of the remaining -- two out of the eight do have -- potentially have intentions to pay one for sure and one's an unknown, and the remainder is just -- it's just not known, sir. We just don't know what their others -- what their intentions. They could establish water service in their name, but again, that ultimately will either end July 31st if nothing changes, or will end August 31st if you all extend it at your next meeting. >> So my impulse would be if -- let me take a step back. When we set the date that we currently set, the tenor of the discussion, as I took it, was that we wanted to see some action happening. It was an earlier date that some of us were comfortable with, but the majority supported that date and wanted to see some action, and we're seeing action. And my impulse would be if somebody's in the process and requests a 30-day extension, that we should support that, but that if they're not in the process, not. But I would include being in the process, taking the step of creating a water account in their name, because it's not really an obstacle to doing that, and I think that'll help us find out something about their intentions. >> Anyone else? Councilmember Bryan, and then go ahead. >> Thank you, Mayor. I believe we did a cost of service analysis on what we should know by now with the number of trips that we've made, what it costs to allow those trucks to continue, and part of the discussion the last time was to just have them pay the full cost of service to have that delivered, and, you know, we set this hard date, the last go-around, and that's where I'm at right now, is that the city would continue, but it wouldn't be under an emergency declaration that we would continue to provide that at that full cost of service to those residents. So it's not being a burden on the other rate payers, and that's kind of where I stand on that. >> All right. Quick question, and it's been brought up about those who haven't come in or had any discussion about payment, because I understand there, and Councilmember Davis, I understand that you said it's the landlord's duty to come in and request that type of infrastructure installation, which is the meters and things such as that from the city, and I understand that. It seems like most of the obstacle in the past has been the finances, but now this is just something that I've heard, it's something that I've seen on the Facebook page, but that there was a GoFundMe set up for, I think, some particular residents out there. I think when I read it, it was up for six or seven, specifically, residents, whether they're homeowners or renters, I don't know, but that the funds were fairly substantial, which in some ways would be able to cover several of those. Do we know anything about that, Mario, as far as, I mean, I mean, that's certainly a private matter, but I think my thought is we have action because we set a deadline. I think if we'd have set a deadline of November, we would not be where we are here today, and I have no issue moving forward with a 30-day extension, providing water service out there. I will say that I have a slight issue with providing water service to people who have not already taken some kind of action to show their intentions, but since it's only 30 days, I don't have an issue with that because it seems like there's some financial opportunities for those who can't. Now, if they can't work it out privately among all the different private parties, that's really up to them. But come the end of September or the end of August, if we're in the same position again, I will regrettably have to say that I will not be in favor of extending the water service to those who have not taken some kind of step far beyond just opening a water count, where we've got people who have made some payments, where we've got work that's scheduled. So that's where I am on it. I don't have an issue with extending it to the 1st of September, just letting people know that if it comes before us again for these reasons, then those that have not taken any movement towards any payment, actually, of the fees, I'm not going to agree to a further extension for those who have not taken any additional action. So any other questions or comments? We got to give directions. So Councilmember Briggs, and then we'll go to Mayor Pro Tem. Sorry, I had to unmute. Mario, I thought that in the presentation, it said that everyone did transfer their name under a water account. Is that not? No, ma'am. We gave them the option, not the option, the directive based on what Council had given us back in May. And so we made it pretty clear through pieces of correspondence, and I don't believe everyone has done so. Okay. All right. Well, I too am okay with the extension until for, is it 30 days? Yes, ma'am. 30 days. Approximately 30 days. Right. While the homeowners work out the issues with the plumber. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Mario, could you help me make sure I'm tracking right? The declaration is so that we can access the private roads. Is that correct? Correct. But that was at a time when we weren't talking to the owner and the owner wasn't talking to the other residents there. Correct. Is there not an opportunity to create some type of agreement that doesn't live under this extended declaration? Can we not just have a service agreement of some sort with the owner now that he's talking everyone? I'm going to look over to my city attorney. That could be done. But what everyone needs to understand is it comes back to the question of who owns that road. We would need to have everybody who would have an interest in the road sign off on that agreement and we have no idea who that is. Got it. Okay. Okay. And Mario, could you help me reconcile the timeline again? So the extension would be from July to July 31st to September 1st? Basically what it would be is the way it's stated now, the emergency declaration would end at 1159 on the 31st, which is a Friday. So on August the 1st, we would not be delivering water the following Monday, the following week. So I would assume the declaration would begin at midnight on August 1st and terminate August 31st at 1159. Okay. And so we have a number of meetings between now and then that we don't have to take this action today. We have another update. Well, we have one in August after the fact and we have one next week. Well, because the way the ordinance is written, it would expire at the end of July. So what we would recommend is that we would bring an action item to your next council meeting, the 28th, to ratify, if you all give consensus to move forward with this, to ratify that extension so that way it's certain and we can then proceed as normal, per se, and then it would then expire at the end of August. Got it. Thank you. Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, so I've already given my direction. Just wanted to say about the fundraiser, yes, it's a private matter and it's my understanding that even though it was intended for a limited number of people, that there were some other people, members of the Green Tree community, who, you know, had asked to be included afterwards and it was worked out and everything has been worked out with them as I understand it. So again, I'm not representing that, but that's my understanding. Yeah, my point of that comment wasn't to emphasize either inclusion or non-exclusion, it was simply to say that the main impediment over these last almost a year has been a financial impediment and right now, from my understanding, that it may not cover it all, but I think there is some funding to cover a majority, if not most all, of the costs associated. And as far as the complication of the plumbing, this is not that complicated. The complication is the length. The complication is the linear footage. The complication is, is there a homeowner, is the owner of the road saying that, you know, you got to be careful not to mess up certain parts of my land? I mean, so basically, it's digging a ditch and putting the plumbing lines in and making sure that they're per city code. It's all these other factors as far as what the homeowner or the road owner is requiring that's making this complicated. And also, I think it's good, I mean, I've heard it anecdotally that they are, they have figured out who owns the roads and that they are working with that individual to ensure that the easements that are created are properly recorded and properly under specific legal descriptions that it's done in a way that provides protection for everyone and the way it should be done. And that is through the legal process and proper recording in the county deed records. So I think that by the end of August, we'll see a tremendous amount of activity out there and also find that hopefully several other people have been able to sign up to install the meters and to put the line in. So direction is, it seems like we've got two or three, we all okay with extending it or if you could just signify by thumbs up extending this, giving staff direction to extend this till September the 1st. Okay, all right, looks like we've got four. And so we'll move forward with that, with that consensus. Okay, so Mayor with that, we will, I said, as I mentioned, we'll bring an action item at your next meeting, we will not have a work session, because there's nothing to really report outside of that. And then we would not be bringing a work session to you on August the 4th, we would probably wait until further into the month of August to give you all an update on how things are progressing. Sure. Yeah, I would, I would hope that we on on next week, if we could have an update just on if people have signed up, and if the work is commenced, because I think that come the end of August, this decision is going to be potentially different than the decision today. And so I think it's imperative that we continue to let people know about that moving forward so that there's no there's no decision that there's no sense that you can't say we didn't talk about it. Councilmember Meltzer. Can we just get a running tally in the Friday reports, you know, of the 14 signed up happening. Okay, separate account, etc. Mayor Pro Tem. Can I get a clear understanding. So those are in favor understand and still agree for another 30 days, kind of to john Ryan's point that the other ratepayers are going to subsidize this neighborhood to the tune of $385 a week for another 30 days. That's that's baked in. And so I want to make sure everyone understands. That's part of it. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Mayor Pro Tem Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah, I know that there's $100,000 authority that was set aside to address specifically the emergency of which 62,000 has been expended. So we're still within the authority that set aside to cover the emergency Councilmember Davis. Real briefly, when we get updates, and I know some people were offended that I wanted to know names, what I needed to know before it was property owners in future updates, can we have an update on the mix of property owners versus tenants who are going through this process with us because there's going to come a time we thought it was going to be the 31st, but now it's going to be the end of another month, there's going to come a time where people look around and their neighbors have good running water, and they don't and they need to know that it's their landlord's fault that they don't have good running water. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem. Just a point to make sure I'm clear, we're Mr. City Manager, we're taking the $100,000 and paying for the delivery service versus it being caught up in the rates. Yes, it was essentially has the same effect, but it was set aside out of that fund to deal with this particular situation during our emergency declaration. So we there was a budget established last December, and this continuing to draw from that $100,000 that was $100,000 that was set aside. But it's it all comes from rate. It's all rate payer base. I mean, that's right. It's a it's set aside, but it's that's right. The origins the same. Got it. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. So is are all the 14 individuals paying for the water currently for the for the actual water? I mean, is anybody not paying anything at this point? Let me let me hold on for a moment, Council Member. It is my understanding that they all are paying. Okay. All right. Thank you. If we could get just in the next status update when you give us a status to just verify that because I know in the past there might not have been of course we have now and within our utility covid response that we're not obviously turning off water, but it'd be important to know if that is still true. You bet. All right. Okay. Any other comments or questions? All right, then we'll move on to agenda. Let's take a five minute break and then we'll come back with our next agenda item, which is agenda item 3B. Welcome everyone back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on July the 21st, 2020. The time is 212. We're reconvening to go over our work session reports. Our current work session report is work session item 3B. Repeat, excuse me, receive a report, hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding an update to the city of Denton's covid-19 response. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council, Sarah Kickler, Chief of Staff. One second while I pull up the presentation. And just as a reminder, state law requires that if we're doing a teleconference, video conference like this, that when there's a slide presentation on the screen, that there'll be no questions because we have to be able to identify or they have to be able to see who's speaking. It's my understanding that as the feed goes out, the only thing that goes out to the general public is the slide, is that correct? That is correct. Thank you, Mayor. Okay. So this is our standing work session item to provide an update to the city's response to covid. We felt a number of these work sessions through the past few months with City Council. By way of reminder, the city does currently have a local disaster declaration and an order. Both are in effect through August, through the end of August. However, in the order is a provision that requires businesses to have a health and safety policy that is in effect through August 4th currently. So today we have three brief updates for City Council in regards to some intergovernmental updates and update on our outreach and education on the face covering orders, both the local and state orders. And then lastly, just a city facilities and programs update. So go ahead and jump into the first part of the presentation. We actually have Dr. Matt Richardson with the Denton County Public Health Department that will be joining briefly to provide a quick situational update and answer a few questions. So at this time, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and invite Dr. Richardson in, provide an update. There he is. Dr. Richardson, how are you? I think I'm fine today, Mayor and councilmembers, I appreciate some time this afternoon to give you a quick briefing. I need to start off my presentation with a quick apology that I owe to you, Mayor and to Mayor Pro Tem Hudspeth as well. I was on vacation last week and I think you both reached out and I neglected both of you accidentally. And so I was going through emails and texts today. And so many apologies, I owe you both a phone call. So yeah. No, you're good. All right. We will get to really the current status of COVID-19 disease transmission in Denton County as we are aware of it at Denton County Public Health. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to explain briefly what the screen is. This is going to be our COVID-19 stats page on Denton County.gov. You go to Denton County.gov, you will see there's a COVID-19 banner. And if you click on that, this information is highly transparent. It is updated every day at 4pm along with our press releases. And so this is really the latest and greatest place to go to get information not just about Denton County, but the city of Denton as we know it to be with Denton County Public Health. And so I would just encourage the public to go to this site. I think we have lots and lots of website hits every day, many, many from the city of Denton. We're proud of that. We're glad that we have so much community engagement. But I'm going to go through a quick tour and then I had some questions. I know that I think you asked, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem also asked a question and I'll try to answer those and then at the end, I'll be happy to answer questions from the council as a whole. All right, I'm going to share my screen and we'll just go through it quickly. And can you confirm, Mr. Mayor, that you see the splash page, Denton County COVID-19 statistics? I can confirm that. Yes. Fantastic. Look at that technology as it is intended. Okay. So Denton County COVID-19 statistics, we do have a total confirmed case count of 5098 again at 4pm today that will rise. We do have 45 deaths that have been reviewed and I want to remind the council and the public that the deaths are reviewed, the documentation, medical documentation is reviewed by our health authority, our chief epidemiologist, and on occasion by myself to confirm a progression of disease and a COVID-19 diagnosis with laboratory, a confirmed laboratory result. So I think there's been throughout the spring and summer, there have been concerns about inflation of numbers. And I would just highlight and emphasize that that is not the case at Denton County. These deaths have all been verified as COVID-19 related through multiple avenues and through multiple review levels. And I think that's important. Also, the total confirmed cases are viral tests. They're not antigen tests and they are not antibody tests. They are viral tests, the PCR, polymerase chain reaction, and the nasal pharyngeal swab. Those tests are still the gold standard and that is what Denton County has reported since inception of COVID-19. You'll notice there are an active and a total recovered numbers there, active and recovered. We did change our methodology for recoveries. We are hyper conservative in that methodology. The state allows a 14 or a 32 day time elapse and then the state allows local health departments to automatically note someone has recovered. We use interviews, case interviews in our epidemiology case investigations. We use case interviews, patient interviews, as well as an algorithm that is eight weeks, not four weeks, but eight weeks post symptom onset. So it's either we speak to you directly or we have an algorithm that automatically classifies you as recovered post eight weeks of symptom onset. I would highlight that recovery does not always mean total symptom resolution. It means no longer communicable. So the word recovered is a bit misleading, but it's sort of the epidemiological and the national vernacular as opposite of active. So think dormant really, when you think of COVID-19 recovered because some people are having the loss of taste or smell and that symptom, which is a symptom, that has been elongated for many weeks, sometimes longer than eight weeks and that some patients have not resolved. And so anyway, that's what that is active total recovered, you see the total confirmed and total deaths. All right, as we move through the website, I won't do, I won't do each. We do have a map that lists cases by zip code and it does also list by cities. If you see the tabs in the middle of my screen, so zip code cities and unincorporated, if you click there, you can hover and click on those shaded areas if you are interested. Okay, case demographics, this is getting a lot of attention as well it should. Case demographics, really want to call the council's attention to the tabs below the chart. We have cases by age range, deaths by age range, cumulative counts by transmission, confirmed cases by race and ethnicity, and COVID-19 related deaths by race and ethnicity. We also have those dichotomized by gender, by sex, and so the first tab I would just highlight zero to 19, we have over 500 cases, we have roughly 550 cases of zero to 19. We do in our cohort of 20 to 29. That's our largest cohort of cases and that is a concern. This cohort seems to be very effective at transmitting disease. I would note that this is also the cohort that continues to grow and through June, this was our fastest growing age cohort. In July, all of the other ages are following suit. So when the reopening happened, the 20s seemed to be asymptomatic, asymptomatic, and having positivity first and now what we're finding is additional age ranges are quickly following suit. Again, behind the leaders of the 20s and then followed by the 30s. The deaths by age range, our largest cohort by death is in the 60s. Our second is 80s plus, so that's 80s, 90s and our centenarians. So you see there, we have 12 deaths in the 80s plus, but we do have 17 in the 60 to 69. Someone asked me earlier, it was either in a school district presentation, board meeting or county, I can't recall now, but they were asking if this was age adjusted or population adjusted, and it is not. These are just gross data. These are not adjusted in any way. So obviously we have more 60 to 69 year olds than we do 80s plus, but these are not age adjusted or adjusted by gender or race. These are just raw numbers. Okay, confirm cases by race and ethnicity. So this is cases, our Hispanic and Latino or Spanish origin is over sampled. So we do see really a risk factor of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin. We do have 12% that are unknown, black is within a percent or two of county population and in white is underrepresented in case demographics. Death by race and ethnicity starts to approximate the population with Hispanic or Latino origin still a little bit over sampled. Black under sampled, white under sampled and maybe Asian over sampled, but these numbers are so small that anybody with a statistics course would say that not a lot of information could be drawn from the COVID-19 related deaths by race and ethnicity, because again, those sample sizes by race and ethnicity, very, very small. But that's really interesting information in case demographics, and I would urge the public to visit that daily. If you're interested, transmission by type, we have several categories here, confirmed case contact. I would note that the majority of those are household contacts. Some are from work, but again, the majority are confirmed case contacts. We do not dichotomize work versus home. With 5,000 cases, it gets very difficult to start to pinpoint. This was easier in March when we had so few cases, and the contact tracing was very, very detailed. But with our workload and with the global pandemic and the situation it is, Texas in particular, that contact tracing is becoming less and less precise because we really can be getting exposed anywhere. We talk about confirmed case. Sometimes people know that they came in contact, obviously, if it was a household contact. Sometimes at work, not always, and then obviously as we move about the community, whether we're going to the grocery store or some type of community event or venue, that is possible. So confirmed case contact, that's when a patient tells us they know where they were exposed. Local transmission is sort of the shoulder shrug in that we're not sure where you got it. We, again, ask you about where you've been, but if we can't pinpoint, that is categorized as local transmission. There was travel, especially early on, there was travel associated cases. We still do ask if people are staying close to home and if they're working from home. We do ask if they've traveled outside of their residence and their community. And so we do continue to record that, although that's a lot less practical and a lot less useful now in July than it was obviously in March. And then for those individuals that do not complete an interview with us, those individuals are classified as undetermined. Okay, confirmed cases and recoveries by location. This can happen in a chart or in a list. And so I would just note that you can tab through those. We do have the active cases and recoveries. I think that's important. One of our concerns is the positivity rate. So many times people ask our increase in cases, and we have four tabs here that are helpful. Cases by date reported, that's a lot of variability because of the way labs report to public health, the way that our staff, we don't have a full complement of staff on the weekends. And so there are fewer case investigations being performed on the weekends. So you're going to see some jumps and some variability. So the cases by date reported is not as useful as some other metrics. Still, it's important. Our total caseload last week, we had 950 positives. The week before that, we had 658. The week before that, we're 649. So last week, we had a huge jump in numbers of positives. And then you can see in the weekly percent positivity, we had a huge jump in the positivity rate. So the week prior, two weeks ago, was 11%. So 11 out of every 100 tests were positive. Last week, 15 out of every 100 tests were positive. Sometimes the public asks, is it just, and I think we've seen this in the national rhetoric, national conversations, this is just a function of additional testing. Well, we have a metric for that on our website. We have weekly countywide testing counts. So you can see here, we had roughly the same numbers of tests performed last week and the week before, but we had a whole bunch more positives. So that's a definitive statistical no. The increase in positivity is not due to increase in numbers of tests. It was the percentage or the ratio of positives to test performed. And so that positivity rate, very much a concern. We actually exceeded the state of Texas. The last week, the state of Texas was at 15%, Denton County last week was at 15.5%. So always a bad sign when you exceed the statewide average, I think. So that's a very much a concern. Now, if you're looking for a silver lining, I think the next part is a bit of a silver lining. We talk about daily hospital capacity. So I'll mention the first tab is total occupancy. And I'm going to remind the council and the public that total occupancy is staffed beds. These beds are reported by the hospitals to the statewide Regional Advisory Council on Trauma. That happens daily. And so these beds are reported to that agency. We just take the data and then report it on our website for transparency. And so the total occupancy as of yesterday was 56% of staffed beds in Denton County were occupied. We do not dichotomize this by city. So I've had some questions. This is just countywide. Type of case of occupied beds. This is one of my favorite graphs. This shows you the dark, dark blue is confirmed COVID-19 admissions and the lighter blue is other illnesses. And I would just note that this is something that you can manipulate on the website. You can actually look at the legend and you can X out that number of other illnesses. So if you want to erase the illnesses outside of COVID-19 and just look at COVID-19 census and how it has grown, you can do that on the chart. It is interactive. And so I would note that in after the stay at home orders, May was relatively quiet, averaging 25 to 20 COVID-19 admissions in hospitals. June may be even quieter with between 15 and 20. And then as June started to, especially if you looked after Memorial Day, three weeks after Memorial Day, allowed for incubation, there were additional cases. That's when case counts in Denton County really started to accelerate. So did COVID-19 admissions. And then as you look at the chart, we went from at the beginning of July, we had 55 and then yesterday we had 95. So really doubled our admissions from the very end of June, the beginning of July, doubled the admissions into hospitals. That's not good. And yet when you look at total hospitalization, COVID-19 is still a small percentage relative to all of the admissions. We also track ventilator usage. And the great news there is we roughly are using, again, 17% of the total ventilators available. So I know ventilators is part of that hospital capacity and our surge capacity that we monitor daily. And so Mr. Mayor, I can open that up for questions. I can stop my share, but that is our website. I would just really encourage everyone to dig into those numbers. This is a bit like building a race car during a race. And so as we have additional data available, we do add this. This is an evolving site, but we're busy. And so we're trying to do the case investigations of over 5,000 cases. We're trying to do the contact tracing and we're trying to be transparent on the data that is available to us and to the community. We're really proud of that, but we're still aware that it's not as much data as we would all like or the data points that we would all prefer. And so we're trying to work with preferences as available, but really trying to get the basics of the metrics that we share with the state and the federal government and we focus on that. So with that, I will answer questions. All right. We'll go with Councilmember Armitage. Yes. So several questions and thank you for that. I checked the- Councilmember Armitage, before I get started, if you have several, if you could just ask maybe two so we can get a rotation of the council members, because Dr. Richardson's time is somewhat limited. I mean, he is still working for the county. So I just want to make sure all the council members get a chance to ask at least a couple of questions if they so desire. So yeah, I appreciate that. I will pick two. Okay. So the two are, would you say, based on the increase, the numbers we're seeing and I believe as of yesterday, I guess at four o'clock yesterday, it was 1,000 in the city of Denton, which looked to be the highest in the county, if I'm remembering correctly, would you say based on what you're seeing, do you feel that you can say that is our mask ordinance working, not working, unsure, or it would be harder to, or sorry, it would be worse without the mask ordinance, and if the answer is we don't know based on the data we have now, can you suggest what measures we could take to, what measures you would recommend to troubleshoot a mask ordinance, I'm talking about the city mask ordinance, not the state one, because that's one we have control over, to kind of troubleshoot to see what's working and what wouldn't be working from a strictly, you know, public health perspective. Is that one question? That was one question. So that's a challenge. The challenge is really pinpointing the reasons and the causes of local transmission. So the masks we believe are effective. Compliance with masks seems to be a variable between communities, between households, between neighborhoods, between companies. So that's a frustration for all of us, I think. It's a frustration for you, for us. I went to a big box store this weekend and my daughter was with me. My daughter is quite the rule follower in our family and she noted she was visibly perturbed and angry. I was proud as a dad, but she was frustrated by the lack of face covering compliance, and I think we're all frustrated by that, and that does contribute to additional cases. There's no question about that, that asymptomatic individuals or symptomatic individuals are effectively transmitting the disease outside of a face covering or a face mask. So I applaud your local ordinance and I applaud efforts to increase compliance, and I do grieve the lack of compliance in individuals that choose not to, and I do believe that that has an effect, and that effect is additional morbidity and ultimately mortality, and that's frustrating for all. It's also annoying. Masks are just, it's not fun, but we do believe it's effective, and I think the CDC highlights that. We've seen additional studies in June and July that are highlighting its effectiveness. I think the WHO continues to highlight mask and its mask use and its effectiveness. So yeah, I'm with you. I can't tell you definitively if it's working or not. We think it's better. It's a little bit like insurance. You can't prove a negative, right? We don't know what could have happened necessarily. We believe it's helpful, but it's not enough. Okay. Well, thank you, and that makes a lot of sense. So I will, with reluctance, I'll skip my question about home ventilators, because I know I can follow up with email and take your time in responding. I was wondering if you would speak to, you know, for those, if you could have a message for people who really feel physically uncomfortable wearing a mask, whether they think it works or not, right, they don't want them wearing masks, would you say, and do you have any suggestions for us on how we can emphasize, you know, if you stay at home, for those of us who are fortunate to have a home of any kind, an apartment, a shed, a mansion, a home is like a giant mask for you and your whole family, you know, how can we, how can we, what's this, what have you seen that works about encouraging people to stay at home when they can, when they can, you know, promote such as, I'll just throw this out, for instance, you know, promoting having groceries delivered, for instance. Right. Yeah. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, because I know you're looking nationwide and worldwide. I wish, I wish I had magic terminology or the ultimate card to play when it came to public education and talking about public health interventions, you know, we've struggled as a discipline in public health, whether it's smoking, whether it's HIV, STD prevention, you know, public health messaging, I wish that we could educate people on the importance of staying at home and physical distancing, so when you ask about people that cannot wear a mask, I would come back with, well, alright, so the hand washing is, is still, oh my goodness, you know, stop me if you've heard this before, washing your hands, because you touch your mouth and your face and your eyes, washing your hands, still preeminently important, and in this physical distancing, so if you cannot wear a mask, if you are physically unable to wear a mask, you need to stay away from people you don't know, right? That's just, that's the common sense of it, and being reluctant to do that, or declining to do that, is risk, and sadly, in a pandemic, and in a county of 5,000 confirmed cases, and many, many, many more undetected cases, if you're not wearing a mask and you're not physical distancing, you're compounding risk, not just to yourself, but then if you get the disease and are asymptomatic, you're compounding it to others, and so I would just say, if you can't wear a mask, stay away from folks, and part of that's being at home, part of that's just being very cautious in a larger venue, and I wish I had something, again, more magical, but that's just the common sense of it, and sadly, we don't really have much to add. There is no, I'll wish for, you know, a force field from science fiction, but until then, here we are. Well, thank you, then that makes sense to me, I appreciate that, and I just encourage people who don't like wearing masks, stay at home as much as you can, if you're lucky to have a home, and if you don't, you know, please seek our nonprofits for help. Amen and amen. Okay. All right, Council Member Meltzer, then Council Member Briggs. So if we could get very broad compliance, if people really got in the spirit of it and, you know, willing to make that sacrifice to their comfort, what would you expect to see in the data and how soon, you know, and is there any indication of the date of any impact of the mandates that are in place now? We're not seeing it in Denton County. We're not seeing much positive impact of anything, right? So our cases are increasing and our positivity is increasing. So I don't see a lot of positivity, to coin a phrase. I don't see a lot of positive impact from ordinances or other interventions, sadly, and that remains a frustration. I will say that just from a purely scientific and technical standpoint, a stay at home order worked. And I would say that you can see that in our chart of COVID-19 admissions and you can see that in our case reporting. So the stay at home order worked. Now the problem is, of course, it had some long-lasting effects that were unintended consequences. Obviously, the economy, I think there's some mental health concerns, I mean, there's just a cornucopia of variables that were impacted by a stay at home order. It did have the desired effect of minimizing disease transmission. So that was marvelous. The negative, the downside, obviously, the economy and some of the negative effects to society in general. And we're going to see those unintended consequences throughout the summer and the fall. So we could do the same, right? I think Hidalgo County did this yesterday. They reported 35 deaths and they reported 524 cases or something similar. I would just say that from a public health standpoint, if we have that kind of case reporting rate and that kind of mortality rate in a day, we're going to be recommending from public health draconian measures that could include something like a rollback and really a stay at home order. We would be recommending that. I'm not sure legally that the county can mandate it. The governor took away some of that county authority, but we would highly recommend it if we did mirror the situation in like a Hidalgo. Luckily, thankfully, we don't have that today, but just know that public health would recommend something like that should our environment change. And we're watching that daily on our website. If I could underscore the first part of the question, what results do you think you would expect us to be able to achieve if we really had very robust compliance with the mask wearing mandates that exist? Because I think you're sort of implying that compliance is spotty, not what it could be. Do you feel that it's plausible to get something like shutdown-like results just from compliance with mask wearing or not really? I think it's technically possible and not practical. So I think that physical distancing, if we were hypervigilant on physical distancing and we were hypervigilant on facial coverings, we didn't get six feet or closer for two minutes or longer without a facial covering, and then when we were, we still minimized that interaction. I think we could approach a stay-at-home situation. It doesn't seem practical and it doesn't seem realistic, but I think scientifically, if that were to happen, I think we could approach a stay-at-home disease transmission mitigation. Thank you. Council Member Briggs. Thank you, Dr. Richardson. So I just have one clarifying statement and then just a question, and it's about the county jail, and I reached out to Denton County Public Health with a message, and they showed me and sent me to some places where I could find some data, but just a couple of follow-ups. So I'm under the impression or heard that Denton County Public Health is responsible for the treatment and the medicines inside and of the facility, and I'm just wanting to clarify that. And then also, if you could talk about how the data is reported on the statistics page, it says that there's 15, and I don't know if that's active cases, and I'm not sure out of how many tests that were given in the full facility. And then, and also under that same umbrella in the facility, are the individuals required to follow the same guidelines like with masks and hand sanitizer and distancing? Okay, let me see if I have all these. So the first is yes, Denton County Public Health is in charge of jail health at the Denton County Detention Facility. So we do, that falls under the public health umbrella. So we are in charge of the health and welfare of inmates for Denton County, that Denton County facility. Your second question about testing, so we do list by facility. I will note that the testing recently, the state of Texas coordinated testing for the facility because we had reported some initial positives. And so the entire workforce and the entire inmate population was tested. The state of Texas coordinated that, and so we depend on them to then give us those results. And they're depending on their laboratory to report those results. And my understanding is that's in process. You may know that there were lots of delays in labs, and that was over a thousand tests. And so lots and lots of volume. We do these mass drive-through testing events, and we're running anywhere from four to eight days of reporting. And so I think there has been some delay in some of that reporting, and I think that's just a function of volume. But when we get those numbers, we will be reporting that on our website, and we will be attributing that to the proper facility. And what was your final question? Well, it just has to go with the guidelines. And so if on the 15, if one of those tests positive, are they isolated and removed from the group? As best as possible, right? So in a jail situation, that's sometimes less feasible. So when you have a few cases, we can isolate them to a negative air pressure room in the jail infirmary, and we're able to do that. I think if those cases grow, then we sequester and do what we call cohorting, which is you cohort positive cases in a pod. And so we cohort inmates together to have tested positive, and we do that to the best of our ability. Obviously, with asymptomatic transmission, that's not perfect. So if someone is symptomatic prior to this mass testing, we wouldn't know about them. As we get the test results, then we can cohort appropriately. Of course, the problem is people are being let out of jail, and the people are coming into jail, right? And so we don't have the resources to test everyone at the point of entry. That would be 30 tests a day. And so that's a struggle for us. That would be $3,000, and that would also be additional staff time when I know the Denton County Sheriff's Office, I think they have maybe over 60 vacancies at the jail. So everyone's under a staffing shortage when it comes to law enforcement and certainly detention facilities compounded with just an inability to keep up with the volume of ingress and egress out of the jail, again, with 30 bookends a day. Those individuals are not tested up front. They are tested if they are symptomatic. So if they are reporting signs and symptoms of COVID-19, we do test them as part of the jail health response. We do test them at that time, and we cohort them until we have that result. Okay. So everybody gets a mask, you said? I think you would have to communicate with the sheriff on that, but I'm not sure about masks for inmates. Okay. Thank you. Did I see? Council Member Davis, did you have your hand up or did you just do something else? Okay. Council Member Ryan? Thank you, Mayor. Dr. Richardson, I know both our city ordinance and the state ordinance have exemptions for people with health issues or mental or physical health issues. When we talk about compliance out there, how do you recommend people handle it who do have those concerns? And I'll elaborate with what I did this weekend. I'd go to the big box store. It's a place where I probably should have gone earlier in the day to help my social distancing a little bit better, but because they, as of yesterday, were going to start requiring masks, I thought I'd try and figure out how well I could do, so I put the mask on as I entered the store, and I put my pulse ox meter on. By the time I got back to the produce section, I was down to 91 on my O2. So I pulled it down off my nose, just kept it over my mouth only, and it took a couple minutes of just sitting there to get back up to about 94, 95. What do individuals need to do? To further my situation, my wife doesn't drive, so she would have to Uber to go to a store and ride with two different individuals, which actually increases the potential for exposure. So on pulse ox, I would just note, I think scientifically we would be interested if you took a long walk through the store, if you started, and then when you ended, what your pulse ox typically is. I don't know how much of that to attribute to a mask, right? I know that several studies have said that the flow of CO2 out of the body is limited and the pulse ox isn't always affected. So I don't know, that's a sample size of one. But your question of what do people do, I think we do our best, right? And so if you can't tolerate a mask, then back to the earlier question, maximizing that physical distancing, maximizing your time and distance away from people in a large venue like that, and in pre-selecting, much like you said, a lower volume time, it's terrible to get up and go to the grocery store first thing in the morning, you know, when it opens or if it's 24 hour to be late at night, that's not ideal for anybody necessarily. But boy, it sure does assist you in that physical distancing. And so we make some of those recommendations, they're not perfect, but wear it as long as you can, and stay as far apart as you can, and go to those places at times where fewer people are there to greet you, right? Okay, Mayor Pro Tem, do you have any questions for Dr. Richardson? Yes, sir. So really, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Dr. Richardson. And I apologize for not getting back to you. Like I said, I was out of town and I saw that today and I apologize. No worries. No worries. Yeah. No, I'm glad you're able to get away briefly, you deserve it. So my question is really around the county jail and if there is a reporting mechanism set up similar to what you did at the state school, both, you know, you talk about the state institutions, there's a connectivity there, and just kind of a individualized or a kind of a, that's categorized differently to kind of disseminate that information. It is and it's on our website and it is on the facility tab under confirmed cases and recovered by location. So that is on the facility tab. Got it. Thank you. Yes, sir. Yeah. Dr. Richardson, I have a couple of questions. And again, I'm glad you were able to get away. I knew that that had to have been the situation because you've always responded promptly, so I'm so thankful that you're- Well, and I'll promise you, away is a relative term, right? Well, that's true. Yeah, away from the phone and text messages, so that can be away. Do you have any kind of thoughts about, because we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of cases since I think I looked at some data like May 24th, it was like about 12 or 1300 cases, and then we've got, I guess, close to almost over 5,000 as we're approaching if we don't have over 5,000 now. But when you look at the morbidity rate and then you also look at the hospitalization rate, that doesn't seem to be matching up with this level of increase in cases. Do you have any ideas about what that tells you? That's been something that we've been thankful for, that our hospitals were just not seeing some of the commensurate hospitalizations that other communities are seeing. We're also not seeing the mortality, and again, we're reviewing, I think we have a handful of deaths that we're reviewing this week as well, we reported three yesterday, but we're still not seeing the case fatality rates that other counties are seeing, and we don't know exactly how to attribute that, but we do believe it's accurate. So I've texted, I mean, we have this data that we get from the state, and I verify with hospital administrators weekly for sure, and just say, is this, you know, what we're seeing is reported, I want to verify with boots on the ground that we're somehow not getting something reported, or you know, we want the validity and the veracity of the numbers to align with the anecdotal conversations, right, and the administrators say that the numbers are exactly correct. So you're right, we're not seeing with these additional cases, the additional hospitalizations. I would say though, and I have a huge asterisk here, our concern is always that hospitalizations are going to lag, people are going to get sick, there are going to be additional cases, days are going to progress, and people are going to get worse and worse, they're going to go to the hospital, and then of course, you worry that those hospitalizations as they go up, that you're going to have some commensurate fatalities. So you, you know, you're, we're all very concerned that with additional building cases, that this is a harbinger of things to come. The good news is, we've seen now really upticks in the last three weeks, and while the hospitalizations have increased, they have plateaued for the last 10 days. I don't know why, but that is the reality. And so we're thankful for that. But if that changes, we're going to highlight that, and we're going to make recommendations on additional levers to pull, right? So we might highlight additional restrictions and recommendations to hospitals on what they can and can't do to preserve the function, the infrastructure. All of those things are still in play. All of those options are on the table. Today, you're right, the caseload doesn't, isn't reflected in hospitalizations or mortality, and we're thankful for that. Not sure what to attribute it to, unless we're on the leading edge. The leading edge has been leading for a few weeks now, but we're still, we're still watching and we remain vigilant and surveillance is key. Quick comment, and then one last question. First of all, thank you for just the presentation on the website, because I think that basically has all the data that probably most anybody could ask for. And so even the questions that I had that I sent you, if I would have looked at that, I would have found the answer to those questions. So I really appreciate that, that educational opportunity. And I just forgot, I just lost my second, oh, I know what it was. So Councilmember Armitage talked about a thousand cases in Denton. Now that's from day one where we started measuring them to now. And I think it's probably in the website somewhere, because I think I remember, as you put it up there, seeing it, just couldn't get to it as far as with my cursor, because it was a shared screen. Of that, how many based upon the new algorithm or the algorithm that the county is employing, what is the number of active cases in the city and what are the number of recovered cases? Because I think you said that shows that on that website. It does. It does. That's a tab. I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen one more time. And we'll keep the conversation until you come back. It's just, I just want to, yeah, here is the screen. This is the confirmed cases and recoveries by location. And we do have this listed. So you can click the list tab. We have a chart, you can hover, or we have a list and this is updated. So there are a thousand total cases, but 531 recovered. So there would be 469, I guess, active in the city of Denton. And that is, that is part of our algorithm. And I would highlight that's also part of our interviews. So that information is not only a formula that does include a person to person interviews by our epidemiology team. Okay. All right. I think I really want to limit it to council member two questions if we could, because I know his time is valuable. Council member Davis, you have not asked a question. Did you have a question that you wanted to ask? Yes, sir. I think my questions he answered in his presentation and then also in response to some of the questions already asked. Thank you. Okay. All right. If we could send additional questions to him via email, that would be great, because I'm sure we could stand, we could spend another hour asking you questions because number one, you provide such great information, but thank you so much again for the website. Do what? I'd put you to sleep in another hour. I don't know about that. All right. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Richardson for joining us and appreciate all that you're doing and the county's doing through this, through these unprecedented times. Thank you. We appreciate the partnership with the city and please, we remain available. Call me anytime. And again, apologies for not returning those emails and calling time and we'll, we'll get back to you. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you very much. All right. So we'll resume with staff presentation. I think we had more presentation. Did we not? Yes. And I'll try to move through it as quick as I can. Okay. So these next few slides, I'll go through quickly. This is in regards to Governor Abbott's face coverings order. So he did issue this on July 2nd. So this information has been widely communicated across the state, but just wanted to take the opportunity to kind of review the details of the order with council quickly. So this is in, it was issued on July 2nd. It became effective the next day on July 3rd and that is until further notice. It would require a subsequent order by the governor either to amend, rescind or supersede that. And so until further notice, individuals in the state of Texas must wear a face covering over their nose and mouth in public spaces. However, there are a few exceptions to that order. You'll see the language at the top. It does say you must wear a face covering wherever it is not feasible to maintain six feet of social distancing from another person, not in the same household. So that does provide some lack of clarity there. And then there are a few exceptions as well, and I'm not going to go through all of these. I think these have been widely communicated as well, but did want to point out that there are more instances in the governor's statewide order of when an individual does not have to be wearing a face covering. Also included in his executive order GA 29 was some language regarding warnings and violations. So it does require that someone that is in violation of this face covering requirement, they must receive a verbal or written warning for their first violation. Even upon a subsequent violation that could be punished with a fine not to exceed $250. It also does specify that no law enforcement or other official may detain, arrest, or confine in jail any person for a violation of this order. After issuing the order, his administration updated all of the open Texas checklists. So they are available at open.texas.gov or at the Department of State Health Services site seen here on the screen. And I just took a screenshot of a few of the first of the open Texas checklist. These are very helpful. It does specify more details in regards to each individual industry, business, or service. So these have been very helpful for us as well as businesses that might be operating to know what are the recommended minimum health protocols. In addition to his face covering order, he also issued a proclamation to his existing GA 28 order. And this proclamation gave mayors and county judges the ability to impose restrictions on some outdoor gatherings over 10 people. And so there's a little bit of confusion. It's not just 10 people. There are some exceptions. So for those businesses or services listed specifically in GA 28, they would be exempted. So that's in paragraphs number one, two, or four. Some examples are a swimming pool, some outdoor recreational sports leagues, and so forth are contained in those paragraphs number one, two, or four. So you may see gatherings in excess of 10 people in our community, but they may be specifically allowed by his GA 28 order. And then there also, you cannot be in groups larger than 10 unless it is in the minimum standard health protocols recommended by DSHS, which I just showed on the previous screen in regards to the open Texas checklists. So for example, wedding, venue, receptions, there's a whole checklist on that. There's a lot of different protocols around how you cannot be in a group larger than 10. For instance, you cannot seat tables with more than 10 people in a wedding venue. So there's just a lot of different differences between the various businesses and services that are available right now. And so that's the first part of the presentation. Mayor, would you like me to continue or take it down for questions? Let's just take it down real quick for questions regarding relating to what you just presented. Council member Armitter. Yes, I have a question, I guess this would be really a question for legal about the issue of how detaining an individual is defined. Because there is controversy over whether detaining someone could under certain circumstances be defined as just stopping and talking to someone, allegedly. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are if you feel kind of comfortable weighing in on that issue, because there's a lot of controversy about it on not being a lawyer, a police officer, I don't know. But I do know that what detain means, legal term means something kind of different than a colloquial sense of what detaining means. Rushing up on some of the criminal law background, many years ago, it's going to really depend on the facts of the incident. There is a host of case law that talks about this that has been set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court, but again, it really centers on the actual facts or circumstances of each individual case. So it's difficult to give you a precise answer. So as a follow up question to that, I know that the county sheriff has objected to it on those grounds, our police department have a view on it and an approach to it that you might not know. I don't know if they'd be willing to share on that subject. But you see a lot from different sheriffs across the state, across the country as to how they interpret certain orders. All I can say is that some of their interpretations aren't consistent with the law, but then again, a lot of it revolves with exactly how the orders are written. And ours here that was issued by Greg Abbott has raised many questions about the language that he used. And so it is very difficult to not just for city attorneys and prosecutors who are involved with this, but also for our police officers to determine what exactly did the governor mean when he used the term detain. Does that include what is called a Terry stop, which is what usually happens when you get stopped by a police officer for speeding or running a red light? Or does it mean something more? We don't know what the governor intended. And as far as you know, the governor, I guess I could ask this to Sarah as well. The governor has not responded to clarifications on this issue because I myself have not been able to find answers, only further confusion on the subject. No, he has not. I think many municipalities are in the same position that we are in just in terms of the lack of clarity in the order. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for this portion of the presentation? Councilmember Meltzer. I guess this is for the city attorney, too. It's a little bit provocative, but potentially so. Is it a reasonable assumption that the governor intended to have a structure of warnings and fines that could not be issued? I can't speculate as to what the governor was thinking. And I know that if you saw Scott Houston's TML update yesterday, you can see a lot of the questions, including what you've raised as something that we just can't tell right now and we need clarification. Okay. Anybody else? All right. Let's continue. So would like to quickly review some of our education and enforcement regarding the face covering orders. So not only the local order that we have here for the city of Denton, that businesses must have a health and safety policy and post signage that face coverings are required, but also on that statewide order. So I'm not going to review all of this. This was reviewed previously with council just in terms of all the communication efforts that are ongoing to reach out to our community as well as businesses. We have updated the FAQs on our website. So it contains information in regards to both the local and state orders. We've also continued to prepare various flyers and signage, which we make available for businesses on our website and also during our in-person visits. And then in addition, we've tried to develop a social media campaign with some creative themes to try to promote face coverings, wearing face coverings. So masquerade around town, you'll probably see much more of that coming out through our social media channels. And then for education and enforcement of the local city of Denton order in regards to requiring businesses to have the health and safety policies, we reviewed this strategy with city council on June 26th. So you can see the slides to the right are those that were reviewed with education being the primary focus. As that time when the order, the order was first issued on June 26th, and it became effective on July 2nd for the local order. So I split up the engaged and service requests that we have received with regards to concerns of individuals not wearing face coverings in businesses or businesses not taking the appropriate actions as specified in the order. So this first period was just that grace period where businesses were beginning to implement and get their policies going. We received 52 requests through the app and phone, and most of those were clarification regarding the order or not understanding that it hadn't become effective yet. And then through the last two to three weeks, since the local order has been effective, we've received over 118 requests. And we have been reviewing those as a staff team each morning, very briefly. This consists of development services, code enforcement, public affairs, legal, fire marshals office and police as well, just to kind of review the concerns that are coming in and try to come up with a thoughtful approach of how we will go out and reach out to those business owners and maybe some creative recommendations we have of how they can achieve additional compliance with face coverings and their businesses. So for example, you know, some of them just posted a sign, but they had moving glass doors. So could they put sandwich boards out in front of their business when they're open? I'm just trying to think of different ways of doing everything possible we can to educate the public and the customers on the face coverings order. So overall, when we're doing these staff outreach visits to the businesses, we are witnessing compliance with the orders. There are very few individuals that are observed without face coverings, and they may have an exception or a reason why they're not wearing the face covering. And the businesses have been very receptive to our visits so far and looking at taking additional measures to enforce or to achieve their own compliance. We were asked if staff could start to do stricter enforcement or actually conduct enforcement sweeps. We would not recommend that approach at this time. One, first, because we're seeing, you know, generally compliance with the orders. Secondly, the businesses have been receptive, and we've seen more businesses and major retailers even locally and across the nation require face coverings in their businesses or they would refuse service. And so that actually is very helpful when the business requires that our police officers can go in and do a trespass if the business owner refuses service to someone. So that is a very effective tool that we would still have available. In regards to the strict enforcement or sweeps of trying to do that against GA 29, just try to provide some information on the screen about how that would be challenging to really conduct those wide enforcement mechanisms. Just due to the lack of clarity in GA 29 in regards to having to issue a warning to make affirmative identification of the individual to issue that warning, potentially not being able to detain an individual. So if it's not a consent contact, there might not be a legal tool of how to get that identification from that individual. So there's just a number of reasons of why that might be challenging to do strict enforcement at this time. But we'll continue to do all of the education that we can in working with the businesses and the other enforcement tools that we might have at hand, as well as try to learn if anything further clarification might come out from the Governor's office about what we can do. And I think most cities will continue to kind of push to see what is possible. Okay. Would you like for me to take down this? Yeah. Let's just see if there's any questions on that. Council Member Briggs. Thank you for the update. So on the 170 complaints, do you have an idea of how many of those the city actually, the city went and visited? I can go back. We'd have to go back through each one. I would say a majority of those that have come in from July 2nd to July 18th have been in person. The ones before July 2nd or maybe more phone calls or reach back out to the resident just because the order hadn't been in effect yet. Because I know our priority is on education and that's what we're focusing on. And so of those that you have been to, have there been any repeat callers or repeat places that staff has had to visit? I'd say there'd be a handful of some that we have had repeated visits to. Not many. And at that point is where we would, and actually in a couple, we've moved it higher up their management chain to kind of get more attention to the repeated concerns that we were having and trying to find some different solutions of maybe how they could achieve higher compliance with the order, whether that again be signage or if it's having a staff member at their doors at the high volume times, just trying to work with them to find different solutions. Okay. Thank you. Did the recommendation of our question about sweeping come from staff or council member or is that just something that has been going on in other cities or? I'd say it was both and we did receive it from a council member. However, we also, some individuals have put repeated concerns into Engage Dutton and are somewhat unhappy that we're able to take our harder stance. So we have seen that concern come across and we've, in those instances, tried to reach out to that individual by phone and really explain all of the things that we were trying to do. Okay. Thank you. Council member Armitage. Yeah. So I wanted to thank all of the staff involved with this, you know, first go through and again, as Dr. Richardson said, you know, we don't know what it would be like without a mask ordinance. It is really hard to gauge how much it is working. So I know, but I know that, you know, our numbers are rising and we have to address that somehow. I have some, you know, questions and suggestions based on feedback that I've gotten, very helpful feedback from members of the public who have used the Engage Dutton app and had some problems with it that I would not have anticipated, but I understand now that they mention it. And I think, you know, it would be very helpful to troubleshoot it. Number one, some people, well, first of all, as you know, you know, a lot of people still don't know Engage Dutton is the way to do it. I try to keep spreading the word. I know other council members are, and it would be, I think, helpful if there could be some sort of a temporary change in the Engage Dutton app so that when you go there, instead of just saying, you know, I think there are two buttons to that you can press, and I love how streamlined it is, there's make a request, and then there's something else. I forget what the other option is, but a lot of people, so I hear, you know, I've heard from, I don't know, maybe like eight or 10, so that's not a scientific sample, but it makes sense to me when they go to the Engage Dutton app, because there's no button there that says submit a complaint about, you know, a business and a face ordinance violation, people feel like they're in the wrong place. So I have assured, I don't know if other council members have to, you know, assure them, yes, this is the right place. You click request, and that's what you do. So if there's a simple way to just either add a, no preference as far as I'm concerned, either add a third button, which wouldn't necessarily be necessary, saying a request to report a possible violation or a concern about COVID in a private business, or to just simply change that request button to something else that would just make it clear that, yes, you are in the right place. Secondly, that because people understandably don't, you know, both members of the public and some businesses still don't understand exactly what the law, what the city law does and doesn't consider a violation, and there's a lot of confusion between the city law and the state law. I think it would be helpful to have both a link there on Engage Dutton to the city law, maybe to the state law, too, since there's confusion, and it might be helpful for the staff members who are answering those calls if people would have to go through a kind of a checklist, okay, that would say, well, not instead of writing what your concern is, but did you see, you know, are you reporting this? Did you see this? Did you see that? And also letting people know the following things are permitted, right? In other words, if social distancing is happening, you don't have to wear a mask. Councilmember Armitage, if you've got suggestions for Engage Dutton, instead of, I mean, we've got a lot of things going on here. If you could send those to them via email, and because that's really sort of all from this. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. One reason I'm mentioning this is because members of the public, you know, I mean, people have expressed anxiety about this, so I'm curious to know what kinds of troubleshooting, you know, measures people are considering the possibilities of. Councilmember Armitage, did you turn off your video feed, because I don't see you on the screen. Oh. Okay. Is that back? Yes. Okay. Sorry about that. Yeah. So I'm not sure if my sound was off, too, but I'm just wondering, I was throwing out some things, and I can send the rest as a follow-up email. Yeah. I could, because we've got some other council members who have questions, if you could, if you could. Oh, I understand. And we're going to come back around to you. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. No, just because this is important, and this is the first time we have together to discuss this with the public watching. Well, I understand, but it's also important that we hear from other council members and that we get through these meetings. So if you could make your comments and questions very concise, it would be greatly appreciated. Okay. So what kinds of troubleshooting measures and changes are possible to the Engaged at NAP for further educating of the public and to, you know, to help staff enforce it at the same time? Okay. Well, again, if you could send those questions to staff and let her, well, I know what you're asking, but you're asking what things can be done, and you're asking the staff to make these questions on the fly, and I'm saying, give them your questions, let them create a response that they can distribute to all the council members in writing so that you'll have something that if you need to send it out to the public via whatever social media platforms, that's fine, but this isn't about, I mean, I don't want to spend so much time on these kind of technical aspects. If you could get down to the questions that are not necessarily engaging certain technical aspects of Engaged at NAP and provide those to them in writing, we wouldn't have to try to keep up with all these, so your cooperation would be greatly appreciated. Okay. I'm going to move on to Mayor Provence. I can barely hear you. Okay. So, but what I was wondering is, just as far as the Engaged at NAP is concerned, is it possible for staff to change things, because some of our technology, it is more complicated than it would seem to change things. That's kind of my general question. How much can staff change? I can give you a brief response. We are pretty limited in the app, because it is a software that we purchase. However, I have a few ideas, just hearing the intent of your question. I think we can come up with some minor modifications that we could add maybe a panel to the request type where it would say to learn more, visit here. I think we might be able to do that. I think we might be able to do more education of when we're promoting the app, just dual education there. So we'll come up with some ideas and get back to you. Wonderful, wonderful. And I would love for us to have a community, what's the name of our subcommittee on these kinds of issues. It's been so long since we've met. Community engagement, community engagement meeting to specifically discuss this, okay. If you could ask for that and concluding items, that would be wonderful. I'm going to go on to Mayor Pro Tem right now because we can come back to you if you have additional comments or questions, but I'm going to go on to Mayor Pro Tem. So thank you, Mayor. So my question is, I don't know that, well, first, I'm not okay with all that being done without coming to council. I don't know what the process is for that and I don't know what the time layout for that is, but obviously it's up to the body. I'm just putting it out there that I don't think we should go, staff should do a lot of work on the representation of one member of this body. I think we all need to have that conversation and a look at that cost because of the size of staffing, et cetera. And that takes me to my next point. I don't know that we should be encouraging people because I voted against it for this very reason. So those that supported it, they supported it in theory because it was more of a push towards education, not a focus on enforcement. So to pivot to enforcement, it seems disingenuous when it should be a matter of the purpose is to educate and that's the goal. And so if someone were to approach me and say, it's not being enforced, I would say absolutely. I had a problem with that as well and the purpose is to educate, not to then say, yes, receive that concern for a citizen and then inflame that by saying, I'm going to now create other ways for reporting and never mention education. So I put that out there and that's from memory, but I do have serious apprehension to staff putting in a lot of time without the entire body weighing in and approving that. Okay. All right. All right. Any council member Davis and then council member Ryan. This is a good time to mention as somebody who voted for the mask requirement even before the governor put his into place, I'm not interested either in engaged in turning into a report your friends and neighbors app and putting a big red button on the splash screen of engaged dentin for you to report people who aren't wearing a mask if it's just like a health code violation. If the restaurant you're at has something that's not, it's gross and needs to be reported. You report it. The city goes out there and addresses it. If it's a continued problem, then we go through the same process and we do what we can to enforce, but enforcement is never the goal. If we put it out there to our citizens, download the app, click the red button and start reporting people left and right that, that really changes the intent of the entire thing. And I agree with the mayor pro tem that that is not the message we need to send as a, as a city or as a, as a public, as a government, as keepers of the public trust, we're supposed to be educating and Matt told us a little while ago, excuse me, Dr. Richardson told us a little while ago, city ordinances are not going to think, be the thing that makes or breaks this virus, uh, voluntary compliance with face mask and looking out for other people are going to be the thing that changes it. Okay. All right. Uh, council member Meltzer. Oh, I'm sorry. Council member Ryan. Yes. Go ahead. Council member Ryan. Thank you, mayor. Uh, similar question to what I asked Dr. Richardson as far as they're on the same line. I should say is the city is going out to do enforcement. Are we doing it strictly education to the business? And are we seeing, cause I know I call ahead before I go to any store to see what they're requirements are at the time, uh, you know, some of them say, you just have to talk to the person at the door and explain what, you know, that you do have a medical exemption. Some of them are dope. Unless you have a mask on, you can't come in period. You know, and again, I try and do, you know, the, uh, curbside delivery as much as possible, but there are certain things, you know, I'm not going to let somebody else pick up my produce for me, uh, cause I'll end up with the worst stuff on the shelf, uh, but what, what is the city doing in that regards? So the primary focus is on the education with the businesses. Um, just trying to see if they have the proper signage posted, um, what other measures have they put into place, um, whether that be a staff member at the door and so forth. Um, so it is really a visit and outreach and conversation with the businesses. Usually when the, um, concerns come in, um, it's just generally, I was at this business saw people without masks, um, I'm concerned. And so then we follow up with the business to learn what are their current practices? Um, do we have other recommendations for them and are they minimally meeting, um, you know, having a policy and posting signs? Yeah, I just want to point out that Dr. Richardson did not say that the solution would be voluntary compliance. He said no such thing either for or against voluntary compliance. You know, what he said was that, that he wasn't seeing compliance that was showing up in any notable way in the data and that he was saying that what had worked was a shutdown, but he was saying that relying on compliance wasn't practical. Now I would, uh, I would express the opinion that it's much more of a council, uh, deliberation issue to judge what's practical or not. I think putting the whole economy, you know, on the credit card is pretty impractical too. Uh, and, you know, yeah, three weeks or a month ago, we said our emphasis should just be about education. People should understand this is what we need to do. Uh, I'm open to suggestions, but, you know, I would just say in the interest of expressing what we in fact heard was that cases are going the wrong way. Uh, and you know, if we can do nothing, that is always an option, uh, but I believe that if we do, it will inevitably be taken out of our hands. Uh, and we will see a shutdown, which I really, uh, feel we should do everything in our power to avoid. And what's in our power to avoid that is to get control of the numbers and, and by, uh, you know, expressing to the public a degree more, more firmly, that it's not just a suggestion. It's actually got the force of law. The governor's mandate is not an education program. It's a mandate. Uh, and if we, you know, we, we have the authority to issue a warning, um, you know, and, uh, and I don't think that we're doing anybody any favors if we're not indicating, uh, to the public that this is for real and, you know, that we really want to keep debt and open. So that's, that's some thoughts. Okay. All right. Um, all right. Anybody else? Okay. If you want to move to your next, uh, slide, two final slides, um, just a quick update on city facilities and programs. Um, so we did release a press release on July 5th, um, that, uh, announced some modifications to city facilities. And this was as COVID cases were increasing, um, we wanted to reduce the possible risk of transmission within our city facilities, but also make sure that our staff stays healthy and we can have the continued continuity of services in the event, um, that city staff are impacted by COVID. Um, so just quickly, um, city hall right now is closed to the public and open by appointment only. Um, city hall east, um, the majority of offices remain closed to the public, uh, except for municipal court and customer service. Um, they have in-person access, although it might be limited to make sure that we can have the proper social distancing. Um, the police headquarters, um, the lobby is closed until further notice. And then for the Denton public library, um, all three locations right now are offering drive up, um, for items that have been held. And then secondly, they're also offering appointments, um, for various services and including computer and internet use. Um, and those three libraries again are all open for a pickup, um, and appointments. Um, parks and recreation facilities, um, all tennis courts and driving range is open for general play. Um, the tennis and golf programs are currently suspended, um, but staff is considering relaunching these programs later this week. Um, and then there are some additional programs that are planned to expand on July 27th, um, which would be, uh, outdoor, uh, sports instruction. So sand volleyball, basketball, skateboard, and soccer. And then lastly, the animal services center, um, continues to be open to the public by appointment only. Um, so just wanted to quickly review, um, the adjustment and modification of city facilities, um, and that will continue, um, until further announced. Okay. Uh, is that your final, at least, uh, slide presentation? All right. Uh, questions, comments. Council member Briggs. So my comments are kind of about the facilities, um, whenever the conversation about school opening came up, uh, someone reached out and was wondering if we could use our facilities and partner with Denton ISD, um, for internet use, computer use, wifi. Um, since then the governor has, um, put out a statement or some funding for the schools to make sure that students have that access. Um, but I just want to see if we're involved in those conversations and if, if there's a chance to, to do that, um, eventually. And the next thing I also wanted to, um, ask about facilities, maybe for, um, using our facilities for testing, I, I sent a message to, um, judge Eads and Dr. Wilson and copy the city manager on it about, um, a baseline for testing our teachers before they get into the classroom to, um, help ease the, the comfort for the teachers and the students and the parents. Um, and I, I haven't heard back, um, anything on that, but I was wondering if the city manager could Is this, but how, how is that a, I guess, help me understand how that's a policy issue here for the city. I mean, if you're asking that the DISD, uh, test all their teachers, I, I'm not understanding how we as a council, uh, what, quite frankly, what we have to do with that. Well, our students are residents of our city of Denton. Okay. Our children are part of our responsibility and the parents are stressful and I was trying to come up with a solution to help them feel more comfortable sending their student or their child into a classroom and if they know that teacher has not tested positive for COVID, it may ease some of that, um, that uncomfortableness. I was, um, someone just had asked me about it and I'm letting council know that, that I Okay, that you reached out and you let your concerns, that you let your concerns be known to the county and the school district. Yes. Okay. All right. Great. Uh, any other questions? Uh, yes, so, you know, I too, uh, have, uh, DISD, the, uh, staff and students on my mind. I know that our jurisdiction is city of Denton, but as council member Briggs mentioned, you know, that includes every Denton, uh, child and their families who are in Denton public schools, staff members of the schools, including, including, but not limited to teachers and whole communities. Uh, so I think it is crucial that we, we, um, and we'll find out soon, by the way, what, uh, DISD decides to do about, uh, the, uh, having, uh, online only or as TEA now is allowing them to do or having, uh, both in-person school and online option, but regardless of what they decide, there is a big need for childcare. Um, and I, uh, am imploring, uh, my colleagues on city council for us to, uh, talk together, uh, about approaching DISD and talking about how we can put both our, our brains and our, our limited legislative jurisdictional, uh, powers and the money that we have, um, tax dollars from families for Denton issues, uh, to help people who want to have their children at home, which makes it safer for those who have to be in school and safer from the teachers. And that will be a need regardless of what is decided. So for me, childcare is now more than a life saving issue and I want us to commit, uh, to helping financially and, and legislatively as we can with the ISD, uh, on that, but to do that, we'll have to get together with them. So I would like to try to get consensus on that, uh, if you could, um, because I don't know if that's necessarily, I mean, I don't know if we're here to, uh, I guess if you want to have consensus on that, but to me, that's not really the thrust of this presentation. If you want to submit that as a one minute request to, to provide some type of funding with the ISD for childcare, I certainly understand that, but I don't, I don't see how I don't think there's time for that. That is why I have been waiting, uh, for, for today. Um, and parents and teachers, of course they're, they're focused on also in the district and the state. Um, but I think it's important that we show them that we are thinking of them today. Uh, and, and, and time is really of the essence. Um, maybe I'll call for an emergency meeting if we can't talk about this today. Um, but we don't have time because the way our numbers are going, uh, you know, to wait for a one minute pitch and then seeing it to bring it forward to a work session. Um, it, it, you know, it's, it is, it's really a frightening situation. Uh, and, and so we, we really need to get a handle on it now. Um, and I don't want to just throw it on the ISD's lap. I wish the state was helping them out more. Okay. All right. I appreciate that. Okay. Any comments, any comments on, uh, Council member Armature, do you want, do you want comments on that or do you have something else? Um, well, yeah, I, I wanted, I wanted to know if any colleagues were interested in, in having a consensus on that now. I know in the past, kind of when, when, when each of us have proposals to take, to put forward, you know, sometimes we have, uh, someone will pitch a proposal that is related to a work session topic and we'll kind of go around the council member armature. I guess this is, this is very unusual because there's no, there's no background, there's no data, there's no talking points. There's well council member armature, with all due respect, you posted something three days ago and your justification for it was because you didn't want to catch anybody by surprise. Well, right now what you're doing is you're, you're putting forth something to us that I don't know if I don't know if I have an issue with council member armature, if you will let me finish, please. I don't know if I have an issue with talking about it, but I don't think we're, this is the place to talk about it. This particular meeting with no facts before us, you're just bringing up a concept. Now, if you're requesting that staff try to get together and create a joint meeting with DISD and the city council, I totally understand that. Well then we can, we can say staff, would you see if there's an opportunity to do a zoom meeting with either the DISD board or DISD staff, uh, either with the council and the school board or with the respective staffs to discuss this issue? Okay. I understand that. Yes. An emergency meeting. I think that would be wonderful. Yes. Okay. All right. Uh, well, we'll, we'll ask staff if they, if they, if there's any opportunity to do that, I'm sure that DISD has, is their ultimate priority, the safety of the teachers and the children, just like everybody, just, just like everybody does. So I'm going to, I'm going to recognize mayor Pro Tem. Uh, he's, he's been waiting patiently. Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, I just, yeah, I don't have enough information to move forward. And I think, and I just want to be clear on the record so that everyone watching this understands. Denton independent school district is 200 square miles. It is double the size of the city of Denton, which is 100 square miles or miles or however you phrase it, but it's 200 to 100. And so I need to understand what role what's being discussed is because there's multiple cities. There's a little way. I mean, there's just no context. And it's, it's absent the context of the fact that the school district is larger than the city proper. And I need people to understand. Council member Armature, please allow him to finish. Thank you. And, and I'm, so I just need people to understand because I don't want it to, again, misinformation generates a lot of emails and confusion. We have to be clear and concise in what we communicate because our citizens, the teachers, the administrators depend on that. And so it's important to understand there's multiple cities and there's no budget capacity for the city to bankroll something for the city and inclusive of the city of Lilliam, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a bigger conversation than what it's what it's been presented as. And so that that's my, I just don't understand what's, yeah, we're way, we're way out of, I don't know if we're way out of posting, but we're way out of subject matter jurisdiction is what I'm going to call it here. So I want to, we're going to, we're going to put this and, and if the, if the city manager wants to have that conversation, because I'm getting emails about, you know, people are, you don't just need to, we're not going to be paying for that just for DIS, DTS. So we're, we're not going to create a situation here. We're trying to find solutions. And if, and if there's some opportunity to collaborate with the school district and council member Armature, I would encourage you to get whatever your thoughts are to city staff so that they can forward those on for discussion if that's what happens. But we're not going to take the time to discuss it here because we can't make any decisions here today. So if we have some other comments, which I think there are some other comments or I've got some comments about the COVID-19 response in the city of Denton, that, that we can have control over and jurisdiction over. I would welcome you and let me recognize you. Any other comments, recognizing me or, oh, no, do you have, well, council member Briggs, and if you've got something, I'll come back to you council member Armature council member Briggs. This is about the jail facilities. I know that earlier we heard that they weren't sure about masks in Denton County. I'm just curious because I know that we have a lot of individuals who love to make masks in Denton. Is there a way or would the jail accept, this may be a question for the chief next, but except mask for the inmates in our city jail? Okay. All right. I think you'll, we'll just have him address that in the meeting. Yep. Council member Armature. Okay. So, uh, so several other issues. Um, I would like to know, uh, if any of my colleagues, uh, would be interested in, uh, in get in getting a report from economic development, um, because I don't want to waste their time with it. If there's no interest in this because time is of the essence on, on, uh, on coming up with, and these are, this is a two pronged approach, one, uh, a way, uh, to, to help local bars and breweries, which have been shut down, uh, by the state. Um, but they can still sell their products. Uh, so what, uh, uh, tools are there and how are we limited in economic development, um, in, in helping to, uh, promote, uh, the, uh, uh, you know, what, what our local local bars and breweries have to sell. Uh, so I, I would be curious to know if there is consensus for looking into that on council. If there's not, I don't know. Okay. Council member Armature, uh, with, with all due respect here, what you're asking for is very similar to our one minute pitches. What you're saying is, is there a consensus? You're giving a one minute pitch and then you're asking for the city council to weigh in on it. And I simply would ask that you go through the process that we've prescribed, whether you call it an emergency or not, we're still moving forward. Uh, if you've got something that you want to send to the city manager and you're asking the city manager for information and to look at something from economic development, if it doesn't take two hours, then no one minute pitches is, is needed and they can, they can take care of it at that level. So, um, I would really hope that you would continue to follow those processes that we've all agreed upon. So if you don't mind, if you don't mind sending those to the city manager, uh, your request to the city manager and we'll work through that process as we normally do. Okay. Sure. Sure. But again, because I'm thinking about resolving, uh, and providing relief for this, this COVID situation, I have been waiting for today to have discussions. Well, council member consensus and, and I will remove those discussions, those topics from the table if there's not, but I, but I understand what you're saying. Well, council member Armitter in response to your statement, you've been waiting two weeks. Why have you been waiting two weeks? If this was so important to you had every opportunity to send these requests to the city manager, the city manager could have already, this, the city manager could have already been working on it and probably had a response back prior to us even having this meeting. So I, I'm a little confused. Thank you. And I will explain that is because I didn't want to waste staff's time. Well, council member Armitter, this is the process, it's not wasting staff's time. We've had this process. And so if you would follow the process, I think it would be greatly appreciated. I will continue. I've never been in a COVID emergency before, so I'm trying to, you know, do a country as well. If you waited two weeks, it doesn't seem like much of an emergency. So if you have some other comments, please move on. I'm sorry. That's not fair, sir. I was not waiting. I've been very, very active responding to individuals. And what I've been telling them on this issue is that I cannot respond until I see if there's interest on council. But that's not, that's not a true statement council member Armitter. Okay. It's not a true statement. You can respond before you have consensus from council. So if you could move forward, I'd appreciate it. Okay. So, um, uh, what I wanted would want to know from legal, um, you know, to what extent, uh, can we tighten our ordinance to require either our emergency ordinance or the faith face covering ordinance, um, you know, to require that, uh, businesses, uh, follow the CDC guidelines, which according to the CDC are just, it's kind of a recommended best practice. It doesn't have teeth to it, uh, to notify all employees. If there has been exposure to COVID within ADA, of course, within ADA and HIPAA guidelines. So that's a CDC recommendation you're probably familiar with. Um, and I know that the reason I'm asking is because I know that, uh, I have heard of two individuals who reported to engage Denton, not realizing that this was not something that was covered by our mask ordinance. Uh, they were told that this is not a city issue, uh, and they didn't understand. So I had to explain to them, um, that it's actually not required by city laws, state law law or federal laws. I understand it, uh, that businesses do this, but since it's a recommendation, I would strongly request that we add that to our ordinance. If that is legally possible again, just letting them know that there has been exposure. Okay. So council member armature once again, we don't have an action item. I don't believe on the agenda today to modify our emergency order under the COVID we do for green tree, I believe. Uh, but we don't, we don't even under under green tree. So if you could get these questions to legal and legal as they do every week, sends out a legal status report. I was wondering if I could get a, well, if it's confidential for a reason, I mean, he's giving us legal advice. That's what you're asking him for. So if, if you can get those to him and if he can get them to the city council, then the city council has the process whereby if we want to look at amending the ordinance, we can do that. But none of us have any information here. You're using, I don't know, I don't know why council member armature, excuse me. I don't know why I really don't know why you have not submitted all these prior to this meeting so that we could at least have some information regarding what you're requesting. So if you, if you have further requests in the same nature, if you had previously, if you could, if you, if you could submit those to the proper city staff so that all of us can have information and to be able to discuss accurately and fairly with what is being asked for and what the the pros and cons are, I think nobody on this panel is opposed to that. So if you've got additional requests like that, I'm going to ask that you submit those because we're not going to continue to take time to try to put all this out there when we could, when we've had two weeks off when staff could have been working on these. So if you could submit those to the proper staff, I would appreciate that because we've got a big agenda ahead of us and we've got a lot of things on our plate. And so if you have some changes to the ordinance that you want to make, please submit those to the city attorney and he will provide those in a legal status update. Okay, I will absolutely do that. But I will say things are changing every day. So anyway, think, think. Okay, anything else? Council member armature? Yes. If you could make it really briefly, I'm going to go to see if there's any other council members. Okay, so I would like to know if these things are not possible. Now, if we cannot in this work session, so I apparently was a misunderstanding on my part that at work sessions, we can direct staff, but we're session that's a COVID update, we could direct staff on just about anything as as a body that is pertinent to a COVID emergency. That was my understanding based on things we've done in the past. Okay. So now that it's not as my council member, I'm not going to let you get by with that inaccurate misrepresentation. The things that have come before the city council, whether we want to changes to the ordinance, this council has usually had background information on that on those particular situations. And if they weren't, we got background information. So you can proceed forward. Okay, thank you. It was, you know, my misunderstanding that information on these issues is kind of all around us, just like these COVID numbers. But I will I will definitely follow up on with with staff on that. So let's see, I guess really all of my questions for for today are not relevant, although others questions are. But I I had had been planning on if the numbers had continued to increase. And if it if it was, if there was not interest in strengthen strengthening our ordinance and coming out, I was curious to see where my colleagues would stand if people would feel that there was a need to tighten up our ordinance. If not, then I think, you know, based on what Dr. Richardson said, and based on what I see of the trend of the numbers, and school opening soon, I see that unfortunately, what I think we need is to petition the governor to ask for an emergency shutdown on our own terms with that would come with emergency relief that we need. And I do not have a specific plan drawn up for that, because I wanted to wait till today to hear the report from that Richardson. I've been waiting every day to hear if there's been news from the ISD to EA, which changes every day. But I'm guessing that you're probably going to say, and I will accept that, that we cannot discuss that now. And that I have to, you know, submit something in writing to to staff. Is that is that correct? I'm not I'm not sure what you're asking for. If we can have consensus on whether or not whether or not there's consensus seeing whether or not there's consensus right now, to ask the governor to petition the governor for the permission to do an emergency shutdown for only city of Denton for only city of Denton and asking him for emergency relief. I know Flower Man just got some small relief, you know, our numbers, I believe are higher than theirs. You know, for asking for emergency relief with that. I happen to believe although it's I don't think that that we're able to discuss this now based on what you're saying, but that we need to be prepared if there's consensus for that, be prepared for him to say no to emergency relief, and we need to be able to assist our residents, even if you know, my colleagues don't don't feel that we should be doing everything we can to get all to help workers be able to afford to stay at home. I think everybody would agree. In fact, I know everybody agrees that we want everybody safe and sound. And so I don't think we can really continue to rely exclusively, or I shouldn't say exclusively, but but so much, you know, on state and federal funds coming because we know it's going to get worse and more expensive and more. So Councilmember Armitter, what are you asking for? So you're asking to put on a future agenda item under COVID update to discuss about whether the city of Denton submits a letter to the governor to ask for our local control to be able to quote unquote lock down or shut down the city. Is that what you're asking? What I'm asking for is for my colleagues to weigh in on that. Because if there's not interest on that, then I don't want to lose my time. I wish you know, I appreciate that. I do. I wish you would have had that same sentiment before you posted on Thursday of last week that you were going to ask for a lockdown today. I wish you would have had that same sentiment and respect for your colleagues and for the citizens of this community where it created a lot of anger, a lot of anxiety, a lot of frustration. We've got we've got several emails, many, many emails of people fearing that the city council today is going to order a lockdown. The post was made without any context of legal authority. It was made without any context. In fact, what somebody sent to me was that your explanation was I didn't want to surprise anybody. If you didn't want to surprise anybody, then if you would have brought it up today, we could have had a discussion to say when do we want to put it on an agenda. People would have heard that that's not what we're doing. Instead, you surprised everybody. I told staff, Sarah Keakler can testify as soon as I wanted this, I talked to the city manager. I'm not talking about surprising staff. I'm talking about surprising your colleagues and more importantly, most importantly, most importantly, surprising the community. So I certainly have no issue with putting on a subsequent COVID-19 update unless the unless the majority of the council members today want to talk about it, sending a letter to the governor. I don't have a problem with that being I don't have a problem with that being on a future agenda. I just wish that instead of getting out in front of things that we all would make sure that we're all doing our best to manage this this pandemic. We're doing our best to create in this community, a sense of safety, a sense of trust, a sense of that we are doing our best and what we are able to do. And I just hope moving forward, people will take that into consideration. So I'm going to pose the question to the council. Is there any is there any desire to talk about today, this sense of sending a letter or do you want that on the next COVID-19 update, because that's different than the request you were making before the request you were making before most of it was getting staff opinion. So, I mean, so I put it before I put it before my colleagues. This was a request that was made. And of course, we've all received many, many, many emails on this very frustrated about how this has been rolled out national conversation. So Councilmember Briggs. Are you wanting to know if we're I'm ultimately not in favor of a city shutdown. So is that or are we asking if we know if we're saying we want to send a letter to the governor for the authority to have a shutdown to me, that means we're wanting to have a shutdown. If we don't if we don't think there's a shutdown needed right now, then I don't see any reason to begin to send something to the to the governor. I don't I don't think we have anywhere near the financial resources we need to support our citizens and businesses through it would come with come with a request for relief as well. Well, and this is what I'm saying. See, this is what I'm saying. Nobody in the let's take a five minute break. We're going to take a five minute break and I'll be back. Welcome back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on July the 21st at 404 p.m. We're reconvening talking about agenda item three C Councilmember Briggs I believe you had the floor at the time of the break. Yes. So I said was that I wasn't in favor and I am inclined to have this conversation now so that the people who wrote us and who were concerned can settle their their concerns so they wouldn't have to worry for a whole nother week. Okay, that's fair. Yep. All right. So basically, but the conversation you're talking about though is I mean, first of all, is the city attorney on he'll be on we don't have the authority at this time to call a shutdown even if a consensus of this council wanted to do that. We do not have the authority to do that. We haven't had the authority to do that. It's been all over the news of cities much larger than eyes asking for that authority, and we do not have the authority. So this discussion isn't going to be about whether we're shutting down or not. Because if the community needs to know, no, we are not talking about shutting down the city period. What's been amended is the request that was different than the post, which is to write a letter to the governor to ask for the power to ask for a shutdown. So so I want to make it very clear and I appreciate that Councilmember Briggs and if this is all the discussion we have on it, I want to make it very clear unequivocally that this council is not talking about shutting down the city. All right. So if we have if you want to have further discussions beyond that and regarding a letter sent, I will tell you, I'm not in favor of sending a letter to the governor at this time. Because number one, we haven't really had a conversation about it, where we've set some things aside to talk about it and to look at the data and things such as that we just got presented data today. So I think that this was an unfortunate situation. And I'm glad that the community can have clarification at this moment that that is not going to happen. And that this agenda item was not even on the agenda to discuss a quote unquote lockdown. All right. So any other discussion on that issue? Mayor Pro Tem? I just want to join in and saying yeah, no, I appreciate your statement, because I think that will allow and I would ask, I'd take it a step further though and ask the city manager and staff to put together some sort of statement to at least harness what you said and push that out because it was inflammatory. And I think it's just important that we at least lay give some context to say here's what the governor has stated cities can can't do. And then here's what was said, here's reality or something along there, just to stave this off in the future. I mean, because it is, it just puts people through too much. And if we're not meeting for a few days, then it just it creates too much angst in the community. So I think we need to educate them that when you hear this, be aware that the governor has protected us against that. And it's no different than in other other states where it's preventing, you know, governors, you have governors, suing mayors. I mean, this is just preemptive to make sure we're all on the same page for the betterment of our citizens. Yep. All right. Councilmember Davis and then Councilmember Melcer. Thank you, sir. Very, very briefly. I think two of the things to remember one, anybody who's concerned about the kind of numbers we need to see to justify that sort of action needs to go back and listen again to what Dr. Richardson said, he compared us directly with Hidalgo County and told us that the kind of things where he would be, he'd need to see before he recommended that kind of action. Secondly, people, members of the public need to know that policy in this city is not set by one council member and it's not set by what anybody posts on Facebook. It's post, it's set by what we come to a consensus to do and what we can do within the bounds of the law. I also just a point of privilege or inquiry. I wonder if staff has the ability to mute council members who don't stop talking over others or interrupt others when they're trying to speak. All right, we'll address that. We'll address that at some point in the meeting. Anybody else? Oh, Councilmember Melcer, I'm sorry. If staff would indulge me and put the presentation back up, I'd like to look at page 12. Is this the slide you're referring to? Page 11, 10, and 11. One before that. Go back one. Yeah, and can you zoom in on the poster on the upper right? I don't think I can, but I can read off. Is this the website you want to? Gee, I really would love people to see that. There's no way to do that. Yep, tech services help me out. Look at that, technology. If you could zoom in on that and put it in the middle of the screen. The reason I'm asking for this, you just got to scroll up a little bit or something so people can see that poster in the upper right. Yeah, to me, that is a great staff effort and for my preferences, a perfect distillation of our preferred policy. Keep Denton open, masks required. Those two thoughts go together. And it doesn't say masks suggested. As I mentioned before, we'll go on and on. This is a governor's order and has the force of law. Masks are required. So keeping Denton open. Councilmember Melcer, we have a slide up and we need to pull that slide up because you're talking. We need to pull it down based upon the statute. Okay, that's fine. Go ahead. I understand your point. Thank you. Anyway, that's my point. I think that's a great distillation of preferred policy. Keep Denton open, masks required. I don't favor closing Denton. I favor keeping Denton open, but the requirement to do that is to get control of our numbers and there is something we can all do and it actually has the force of law. So I do favor, you know, we've had several weeks now of education only. I think we've got to at some point, you know, look to how do we get to greater compliance and that may involve issuing warnings. You know, hopefully that's enough, but it's serious business and it is to keep Denton open. Okay, thank you, Councilmember Melcer. Anybody else? Councilmember Amater? So a couple of things. So number one, I will send to staff and ask that it be sent to council. The email that I sent the day that I decided I wanted to ask for this, which shows that it was also discussed about whether or not to do a one minute pitch request. We talked about the possibilities and I was told that it would be okay to bring it up here. I wasn't told anything other than that about that. I wasn't told we could vote on it or anything like that, but I just want to clear my name that I told staff, maybe even before I told my own husband that this was sadly what I thought we needed to do at this time. Councilmember Armater, I want to make it clear. None of my comments are aimed at saying that you did not have an opportunity or the privilege or the right to bring up to council in today's meeting. Mine is based upon that you posted something of your intentions and that's all. That's it. It has nothing to do with what you sent to staff. It has nothing to do with what staff sent back to you. So I just want to make it clear to you and the public as well that in no way am I saying you should not have brought it up. What I'm saying is based upon your own words that I saw saying why you posted it on Thursday was so that you didn't surprise anyone. Well, anyone contains a lot more people than just a couple of people on staff and the city manager. So in no way am I saying that staff did anything wrong or that I'm just simply saying I hope in the future that instead of doing these things on social media that we can have a real time discussion so that everybody's hearing the information at the same time. So you can send out any emails you want. Staff can send us the emails. I believe staff also said that we informed you that we don't have the authority to shut it down. So for me, it's not about clearing any name. Whatever you need to do to feel comfortable, I understand, but I just wanted to make sure that I was clear on my comments. Okay, thank you. And so my next question is can we have consensus to petition the governor for emergency relief now for child care, for our bars that he has shut down and for those service industry workers? Council member Armitter, we still don't have any information about what you're trying a consensus to petition the governor for these three generations. When you ask for a lockdown or a shutdown, I think every council member that is on this video conference or this video meeting understands exactly what is being asked for based upon our experience in the past. I'm saying though that you're asking for okay. Is there anybody interested in sending a letter to the governor asking for emergencies, child care and or emergency for the for the bars that that is there? I mean, I don't have enough information to even make that decision. So I would need more information in order to make that decision. Council member Briggs. So I do know that there was a letter that was sent to the governor from Stuckey about reopening the bars. Is that is that I mean, because I'm in favor of having that discussion on signing on to that letter. Well, is that what you're asking for? Okay, okay. If we need to put a COVID update on the next meeting, and if we need to discuss this, because I don't know what the content of the letter is, I don't know what the letter is, I don't know what letter we're talking about sending. So again, Council Member Armitter, if you could get with staff, and you could make your requests. And if you have something that you want to be presented to council, I think that history has shown and policy and practice that that gets done. So if we could just move forward from so if you have recommendations, or you want letters to the governor, if you would send those on to staff, let the legal department vetted to make sure that we have the authority to do that. They'll send it out in a status report, or we'll put it on an agenda for discussion on a COVID update. That would be very helpful, because then we would all know exactly what we're deciding. All right. Any other questions or comments? Okay. Council Member Ryan, yes. I'm sorry, Mayor. I meant to bring this up before Council Member Armitter spoke this last time. And I just want to say I'm in agreement with you and the Mayor Pro Tem is on the issue of, you know, the numbers just aren't there. I also listened to the Dr. Richardson's report to the county this morning. Denton County is half of what the state rate is on number of cases per thousand. And that was my point a while back on the mask. When I voted against the mask coordinates to begin with was the numbers just are not there. When you look at the numbers that count, the number of cases might be going up, but the hospitalization, yes, it went up some. But was it enough to get to the point that some are asking for now? Absolutely not. This is, when you're talking about five cases per thousand people in the county, to me, it's just a little beyond where we need to be. We didn't have masks required, per se, with fines back when we had the shutdown, yet the business I'm talking about trying to go to are the same business I went to at that time because they're all considered essential businesses. There was a fairly good amount of people who did wear their masks, and it was the fact that people quit wearing them as a reason that the steps have been taken that have been. But I'm absolutely against petitioning the governor for any further power for the city. Dr. Richardson does not work for us. He works for the county. It's not a decision for us, in my opinion, to begin with. Okay. All right. Okay. Anybody else? Yes. Councilmember Davis. I want to put just a little asterisk and caveat on everything that we've said today. The county releases results every day at 4. We just heard that there are 218 new cases in the county. That's a new record for a daily increase in 54 new cases in the city of Denton. Dr. Richardson told us, after everything he told us about numbers and what he wants to see and what he has to see, he told us that we as individuals and we as public policy makers have the ability to prevent a future shutdown, just like Councilmember Meltzer said just a little while ago. So I'm imploring everyone who's listening. I know they've been paying close attention to this particular agenda item. Please do everything you can. Please stay home. Please wear a mask if you can't stay home. Avoid that little extra errand. Every little bit helps. Otherwise we're going to find ourself with another governor state mandated shutdown that we can't do anything about. That's right. Councilmember Briggs. Yeah, I'm just Councilmember Davis. Did that information just come out? Yeah, just just a little while ago. Okay. Thank you. All right. Any other questions? Mayor. Yes, I'm sorry. Just one thing before you wrap up the conversation. I think Councilmember Briggs asked a question earlier about some of the emails that she's getting. So I do have a meeting scheduled either tomorrow or Thursday with Judge Eads and Superintendent Wilson and I'm assured Superintendent Wilson, if they anything he needs from us that in terms of partnerships, requesting dollars, whatever, you know, we're there for him. So it's just more of a matter of what what services he in the support he thinks he might need. But I'll keep you informed if there's any specific asks from us. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And I do want to I want to emphasize what Councilmember Davis said. I mean, Dr. Richardson gave us a pseudo metrics, you know, he compared it to a county where they had I think he said was at 35 deaths. And that I think that was in a single day. And I think 500 cases. So if we don't want to get there, then we need to take the steps necessary, which is mask up, wash your hands, and social distance. And for those that struggle with that, I just ask and implore you that if we don't, we are going to have another shutdown. And it's not going to be one that's going to look like the one did before. Alright, it's going to be probably longer. And it's going to be more impactful because then it's one on top of the one we had just two months ago that people are still trying to recover from. So I'd simply ask everyone to do their part. No, Matt Richardson didn't say that we're going to voluntarily Dr. Richardson didn't say we're going to voluntarily get out of this. But what he did say is, all the rules and regulations, and all the things that the governments can put in place, and unless people are willing to also comply, it really is not effective. So I appreciate the robust discussion. I think it's important that we let our citizens know how serious this matter is. All you have to do is take a look around and see what everybody else is struggling with and see what the school district was struggling with, and what parents and teachers and everyone is struggling with. We'll move on to the next agenda item, which is agenda item three D receive report hold discussion on police department information session. Excuse me, there's an item C as well. Oh, did I miss it? Oh, sorry. I missed item C. So chief, you're you're not up yet. Receive report hold discussion give staff direction regarding internal audit of COVID-19 response disaster reimbursement. That's where I got confused. I saw the same same name. I apologize. Thank you. Thank you for that Councilmember Meltzer. Hello, Mayor and City Council. I'm sorry, I was on mute and I did not realize it. Oh, that's all right. I'm Madison Rocha, staff auditor for the city. And I'm here to present our first audit of the city's COVID-19 audit response or response audit series. And this audit focused on disaster reimbursements. So we evaluated the city's controls over disaster related expenses to maximize COVID-19 related reimbursements. And as part of this audit, we generally reviewed how COVID-19 expenses were tracked, if there was adequate support for these expenses, and the process for submitting these expenses for reimbursement. So I'll begin by discussing the identification and Oh, I'm sorry, my screen isn't moving. There we go. Here we go. Okay. So begin by discussing the identification and tracking process. So finance has developed and communicated a process that allows city staff to flag and track COVID-19 related expenses in the financial system. We found that this process has generally been ineffective. Based on sampling, we found only a few instances where a transaction was not identified as COVID-19 related when it potentially should have been. We did find several instances where the expenses did not have adequate documentation to describe how the transaction was COVID related, which are detailed in the table. It should be noted that capturing expenses that are not COVID related may create inefficiencies, but does not necessarily impact the city's ability to be reimbursed. That being said, we recommended that finance release additional guidance to employees on what expenses and work are considered COVID related to potentially help weed out non reimbursable expenses before they get to finance. Based on their management response, finance plans to send updated communication regarding the tracking of COVID expenses to departments in the coming weeks. So next we reviewed the documentation for COVID related expenses to determine if it was adequate. In general, there must be proof that a purchase was approved and that it actually occurred for it to have adequate documentation. We found that expenses were generally well supported. However, there were a few inconsistencies. For some purchase orders, the requisition form was incomplete or inaccurate, which made it difficult to tell if the procurement complied with procurement regulations. During the audit, these documentation issues were corrected and we verified that all COVID related purchase orders complied with procurement regulations. However, purchasing should continue to ensure that requisition forms are complete and accurate to facilitate the reimbursement process. In addition, we found that purchasing had used certain purchasing strategies to provide further assurance that the city received the best value for scarce commodities like masks and thermometers and more. For P card transactions, about 8% of the transactions did not have adequately detailed receipts. According to their management response, purchasing has requested the necessary documentation for these purchases from the departments. For payroll, we found that many time cards had not been signed as required. This time was appropriately approved in the city's timekeeping system. However, it is important to ensure that the time cards are eventually signed to avoid the risk that any reimbursement submissions are rejected. It should be noted that part of finance's reimbursement packet submission process involves identifying and correcting these inconsistencies, but this process had not yet been completed during the audit. So finally, we found that finance had designed an adequate process for compiling, reviewing, and submitting a disaster reimbursement packet. As of June 1st, finance had not yet submitted any reimbursements. However, a plan has been developed and presented to council that focuses on maximizing reimbursements. The city has established the disaster finance plan for FEMA reimbursement, which is the official reimbursement guide for the COVID-19 disaster. We found that this plan is generally focused on weather-related events and does not outline the reimbursement packet preparation or submission process for pandemic events. Based on their management response, finance intends to update this plan to include clarification on these processes in the fall of 2020. So in summary, we issued a total of four recommendations to two departments, all of which were concurred. Based on their management responses, we believe these issues will be adequately addressed and we will verify them in a follow-up review. So I'd like to thank finance and procurement for their time and responsiveness during these unprecedented times. Now, I'll open the floor for questions. - Okay. Questions for Council Member Armitage and then Council Member Briggs. - Yeah. Can you explain how it's possible for the names of the businesses that received financing, the care funding financing under a certain amount, that their names are not revealed? I believe it's federal policy. I know it's not up to the city or state as I understand it, but that quite surprised me. Is that, I don't know if from an auditor point of view, if you have a perspective on that also over a certain amount, the names were revealed of the businesses that got the federal assistance but not the exact amount just arranged? - This audit specifically focused on the purchases that the city had made in response to COVID. So I don't know that I could speak to the federal funding for private businesses. - Okay. Thank you. - All right. Council Member Briggs. - Thank you. Hi, Madison. Just for clarification and to wrap it up, did you find any of these concerning enough to where reimbursement would be a question? - No, we did not. I think generally we found that the city has a very good process that they're following. We found a few inconsistencies, but not really any that were concerning. And we think they'll probably be, they probably would have been caught by finance though they didn't, we don't know that for sure. - Okay. Perfect. Thank you. - Any other questions? All right. Okay. Thank you, Madison. Appreciate that. Thank you so much. - Thank you. - All right. Now we'll move on to agenda item 3D, which is receive report, hold discussion on police department information session. - Thanks, Mayor. Chief Dixon is just getting set up here. - All right. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council, Frank Dixon, Chief of Police. I'll be pulling up a presentation to show you. As we go through, I'll have some natural breaks in there to take questions. So we're not trying to put all the questions in one point. - Okay. - Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. - All right. Is the screen showing for everyone? - Yes, sir. - Okay. We'll get started. So with the overview, I just wanted to go over our mission, vision, value, and core value statement. We're going to go over our organizational chart and staffing. We'll give you some crime and administrative data, and then we're going to close with some internal affairs history and a summary. And we're really going to walk you through from when it comes to the data and the stats from about 2015 to present. We're really going to focus on what we've done since October of 2018 to present. This should be no secret to anyone on council. We've talked about this before, but we really want to make sure that the community understands that our new mission statement really focuses on making Denton a safe, sustainable, and livable city for everybody. And we want to make sure that we keep victims safe while holding offenders accountable. We got the last part of that in some collaboration with the International Association of Chiefs of Police that the city brought in to talk about our response to strangulation and sexual assault, family violence, things of that nature, in early 2018, late 2017. And one of the things that they came back with is to make sure that we let the community that we serve know that we truly want to hold our offenders accountable while keeping victims safe. Obviously, in the last five or six months, the sanctity of human life has been a big talking point, but we had this in our vision statement long before that. And the sanctity of human life is the foundation by which we serve, and that should be for every police department. And then, of course, our core values being the pride motto is something that we have held on to prior to my getting here in October 2018, and something that we continue to do today. So when I got here in October of 2018, our organizational chart looked like this. We had Assistant Chief Bobby Smith that was the interim chief of police at the time. Frank Padgett was the deputy chief over operations, and Chris Summit was the deputy chief over investigations. As you can see here, we had our internal affairs unit. It reported to Chief Summit, who then reported to Chief Smith, who then reported to me. One of the first things that we did in November 2018 is we moved internal affairs out from under deputy chief and had them report directly to Assistant Chief Smith and then directly to myself. We also moved our crime analysts out from a bureau, and we made them under Chief Smith as well, as well as our community resource officers. When we looked at what we wanted out of our police department, we wanted to make sure that we were being very intentional, very focused, and we were doing things collaboratively, not just internally, but externally. We talk about what procedural justice looks like, and we wanted to make sure that we took care of both our employees internally as well as the community we serve externally. A big piece of that was not driven by us, by me. It was driven by the employees of the police department prior to my arrival in their conversations with both the police executive research forum and with the city manager and his staff. One of the things that they spoke to was the lack of internal communication. They spoke to the lack of their perceived equity and how discipline was being meted out and cronyism, good old boy system, and how some things were functioning internally, and that was prior to my arrival. I want to make sure that everyone understands that some of the changes that we've made, in fact, a lot of the changes that we made were driven by our own employees. They weren't driven by myself, the city manager, or anyone else. As of June 20th or June 30th of this year, our staffing, our total sworn staffing authorized 195 positions for a department total of 254.23. We have a non-sworn of 59.23, and every time I present this, we ask what that .23 is, and that is our part-time seasonal crossing guards. One thing that I've been talking with the city manager about, essentially from the first day coming here, which is again part of the national discussion of reimagining police departments, defunding them, moving funding around, was I wanted to create a mental health division, and it's something that we're moving to do right now. Now, we did accelerate the timeline on it because we took this opportunity of kind of transitioning some existing vacancies that we have, including some frozen positions, and creating a mental health division that's going to be staffed with five licensed clinical social workers, one existing sergeant, and six police officers, including our two homeless outreach team members, because as we all know, there's a natural intersection between what our homeless outreach team does and mental illness. So we're working towards completing our job descriptions on those. Those jobs will be posted, and probably the most interesting thing and exciting for me is that this unit is going to be managed by a civilian mental health professional, which is going to be a huge shift from a sworn standpoint. It's not typical that you have sworn police officers reporting to a civilian manager, but in this instance, they are the subject matter experts, so the day-to-day operation of the mental health unit is going to be under the guidance of this manager that we're going to be hiring who will report directly to me. For a lot of different reasons, but the most obvious is I want to make sure that as this team gets off of the ground, that they are staying focused, they're staying very intentional on what they're doing, and that they are following kind of what my vision is for this moving forward. The police officers are going to be plain clothed. They're not going to be in uniforms. And I took kind of a hybrid model between what some other cities are doing, most notably San Antonio. Houston has a great mental health division, as well as some in the northeast and northwest. So we're going to make a hybrid function of them. They're going to be in plain clothes and unmarked cars. We know that many times when police officers arrive on scene of a mental health call, they're coming, one, they're bringing a gun to that call. No matter if there's one involved prior to us getting there, if there's a weapon involved or not, we're bringing one with us. Two, our uniform, just by sheer nature, has a tendency to put some people on edge. And obviously, if you're suffering from a mental health crisis, that's going to just exacerbate that or has the potential to do that. So these are going to be our first responders for those types of calls. We're also going to have them be able to do some limited follow-up and guidance kind of in the same vein as we have our victim service counselors doing, connecting people with resources post-call, and then doing follow-up weeks and months later to check up on them because I think we have a duty, as we are also part of the community that we serve, to make sure that our community members are being taken care of. So I'm really proud of being able to talk about this a little bit today and where we're going. So that leads us to the conversation of what is a police department, what does policing look like moving forward. We are going to continue to do what we've been doing the last 18 months, and that is a never-ending agency-wide reform-based review of our police department. We continually try to seek out, identify, and address things that are going to help us to become a better police department. Are we perfect? No, we're not, because we are policed. We're staffed by human beings, myself included. I make mistakes every day, so our police officers are going to do the same thing. It's all about us working together with our community and becoming better. So with that, I'll stop before I go into the proactive approach in how we're addressing crime. If there are any questions, let me pull this down. Okay. All right. Questions? Council Member Armitage, then Council Member Briggs. Yeah. So this is about the mental health response. One, I was curious if you wanted to share, have you received any pushback on having, on the idea of having trained officers report to a civilian? No outward pushback, Council Member Armitage. I know it's going to be a shift, right? But they're all going to be reporting directly to me. So in essence, they're still reporting to a sworn person myself. Excellent. Thank you. And can you speak to, and this is kind of a two-pronged question, one, at the level of dispatch, how is it decided in dispatch whether something is a mental health call or not? Do they ask certain questions if they're not getting information? Because I know sometimes it's not clear. It could be or it could be not. So I'm curious about that at the level of dispatch. And two, how is it, can you speak to how it's determined? So I understand that you've got on this team, there's going to be six officers, six trained officers and six mental health professionals. How do you, is it decided for each call based on what the kind of call is or the triage, how many officers would come along on a call with mental health professionals? Would there be one officer there as backup just in case something goes wrong and is beyond the mental health and issue gets violent? So if you could speak to in either order at the level of dispatch, how either thing of those factors are determined? Sure. They're both great questions. And actually we sent our homeless outreach team and our supervisor down to Houston, Texas to spend some time with their mental health division. They brought back a lot of really good resources for us. And right now we're actually looking at how we can take some of the things that they have implemented in their communication system and roll them into ours. So they are asking the more appropriate questions as it relates to mental illness and crisis response. So that's the first part of that. And I hope that answered that question. The second part is these officers and the mental health clinicians are going to be paired together. So they're going to be working together every day as partners. They're going to be assigned to work the same hours as our patrol shifts are, because we know that these calls are happening 24 hours a day in our community. And they're going to be responding as appropriate. Now how they respond is going to be determined on what information that they're getting from the 911 caller and while they're in route to the call. There may be times where they're going to have to have a more uniformed officers present, but maybe not in sight to supplement them. There may be times that they can go by themselves and do it. And there may be times where, you know, the clinician can go up and make an approach by themselves. It's my hope that as they get trained together as a team, that our officers ability to respond is going to excel. And that them, they as a team going out working every day, they're really going to be able to get to the heart of the matter. And it's not that mental illness is a criminal offense, but that we need to get our folks the help that they need so they can be productive members of our community. Okay. Any other questions at this stage of the presentation for Chief Dixon, Councilmember Briggs? Yes, go ahead. Hi, Chief. It's good to see you. So the mental health division, that's fantastic. I'm glad to see that I've, I've seen other cities at NLC talk about implementation of this and the successes that they have. My question is, I think we had a conversation about it a while ago, but just an update or follow up, is there any, like mental health notification software for individuals or officers who are coming in contact with someone and it may just allow them to know, you know, this, this individual is autistic or on the spectrum? Is that something available? Yeah, that's a great question. We're actually here about the launch the Take Me Home program. And it's going to be launched in the early, I think the first or second week of August. Actually, we're going to be getting that messaging out to the community here soon. It's going to really offer up the opportunity for people to call in and send in pictures of their loved one that's suffering from mental illness, autism, dementia, whatever the case may be, to give us their likes and dislikes, places they like to frequent when they leave home. And again, our hope is that we get that information on the front end so we can proactively go out and look for these folks and we'll return them back to their families safe. Oh, thank you. Chief, real quick question on that last answer. Is that information confidential? In other words, is it maybe it's a question for the city attorney? Is that information subject to open records request? Because it contains obviously some sensitive information. So is that information, Mr. City Attorney, that based upon some exception, either HIPAA or something else that we're able to not have to release? Yes. So if the city attorney. Oh, yeah, I thought the city attorney. Oh, go ahead, Chief. Go ahead. Go ahead, Chief. I'll take this one for him. It is going to be protected information. It's going to be just related and it's going to be only kept for protected law enforcement purposes only. Okay. Great. Thank you. Appreciate that clarification. Any other questions during this portion of the presentation? Okay, seeing none, you can proceed. So now we'll talk about how we're starting to approach and address crime and a couple of things that we re-implemented was a CompStat model. We actually call it DIN stat for DIN and intelligence sharing meetings that we're having. What are the goals of CompStat? Obviously, we want to get out timely and accurate information. We want to make sure that we can deploy resources very rapidly, but effectively. And we want to make sure that we have, we close that loop by having relentless follow up. It does no good for us to go out and target burglary of vehicles, burglary of businesses, et cetera. If we're not constantly going back and re-evaluating, were we successful in not just dispersing or displacing that crime, but in we want to go and eradicate it. And if we haven't done that, then we need to keep that process going until we can come back to the table and say that. When you're looking at crimes like burglary of vehicles for example, those are typically crimes of opportunity where you have groups going around and trying unlock doors or they're using other methods to get into cars at late at night. So this is something that we have seen a great success of so far, but more importantly than the CompStat was rolling into our intelligence sharing meetings. This really links up at the base level, our officers, detectives, crime analysts, and our lieutenants who are managing patrol shifts on the street so they can go out and we're not just reactively responding to crime trends. This is an ongoing intelligence sharing and analysis weekly. We're leveraging technology much better than we have before because we've been offered the opportunity to get more technology and we're using that to really transform it into actionable knowledge, things that we can go out and really hit on. And that's from repeat offender information. We're getting better suspects identified quicker. We're getting crime trends identified and we're being able to go out there and have a targeted plan and not just throw police officers out at random areas looking to stop crime. We're being able to make better informed decisions on how we go out and combat specific crime issues, but more importantly, the offenders. As we went back to 2015 to present, we wanted to look at what does our part one crimes look like? And our part one crimes consist of assault of offenses, murder, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and then they also include burglary theft and motor vehicle theft. As you can see the trend line from 2015 to present, there's been a for murders kind of gone up and down. Our peak prior to 2019, having five last year was four in 2016. And then year to date this year, we've had three murders in our city. All of those have been solved. Sexual assaults, you'll see a very rapid increase from 115 to 147 in 2019. I would like to think and I would like to hope that some of that is because we really did a concerted effort of reaching out to our community and really encouraged that our survivors came forward and brought information to us and being able to go out and let those survivors know that one we're going to start from a position of believing them. We're not going to shame them into reporting or try to victim shame or blame, but to have them really come forward. So we have 85 year to date right now. We're hopeful that we're going to continue to have some good working relationships with both the University of North Texas, as well as Texas Women's University, and even North Central Texas College, although their campus is very small, they still contribute greatly to our community, nonetheless. The big driver for us this year so far has been aggravated assaults. They have gone up dramatically since about mid May. At the beginning of the COVID outbreak, we saw a sharp decline in pretty much all of our crime. It flattened out very quickly. We began as an anomaly in the North Texas area that our crime really flattened out. Unfortunately, as the pandemic has drawn on, there's been questions about why have our aggravated assaults gone up. I think if you're paying attention to the news that's going around right now, you're seeing people be more on edge. They're being much more agitated than they were before. Being away from loved ones, being not able to travel, you're seeing road rage incidents go up. We had one just this past Friday where someone pulled a gun on someone else because they got cut off pulling into traffic. So tempers are very short. People are not looking to talk things out. They're really becoming a little more violent and exhibiting that a little bit more than usual. Our burglaries, on the other hand, have sharply declined during the pandemic. We're kind of on track to be just shy of our numbers last year. I hate making that statement because as soon as I say that, they're going to go up. But when we're looking at motor vehicle theft, that's been a big driver in our city for the last couple of years. We're really hoping that the increased partnerships that we have had in the North Texas area, not just with our state and local partners, but with our federal partners, will really help bring more resources to our city to help disperse, displace, and eradicate this crime a little bit at a time. Here's just another chart showing the total violent crime and total property crime. Property crime is our main driver in our city, but we cannot and we do not look past violent crime because we know if we don't have a safe city, if there's not a feeling of our citizens feeling safe, it's not going to be as sustainable. You're not going to have the vibrancy. You're not going to be able to bring business here an opportunity. When we're looking at our calls for service each year, we're looking at them by category. Our officers are responding to about 105,000 calls for service every year. That's been our trend since 2015, just over 575,000 calls for service. When you're looking at all calls for service traffic stops, which are initiated by our police officers, they rank number one with 8,200, just over 8,200 per year. Speak with officer, that can range from anything from someone wanting to get information on how to, a court process to helping them get belongings out of a house to being lost. Burglar alarms also a big driver for us, much like a lot of other cities. The majority of those burglar alarms are false alarms. When you look at dispatch calls for service, you're looking at, again, speak with officer being up there with burglar alarms and then disturbances. Then officer-initiated calls are going to be traffic stops, follow-ups, and then speak with officers as well. They're top three. Our top 10 crimes reported to date. If you looked at this list, I'm betting that most of these wouldn't have been on your personal list if you're looking at them. Burglar vehicles going to be a big driver for us, going to continue to be. But then our theft of properties, assault, family violence is up there very high. Then criminal mischief, DWI, that has not flattened out at all, even through the pandemic. We're on pace to be at least at the same level of cases worked last year with DWI in our city, if not a little bit more. And alcohol and public intoxication is always one of the high drivers as well. So with that, I'll stop after that before we get into financial sustainability and open up to any questions that you all may have. I have one just real quick, and it's real basic. Describe to me, I mean, aggravated assault just real briefly, what exactly does that entail as different from assault? That can be a threat of assault with a weapon, whether that be a club, a bat, a gun, a knife. That can be an actual stabbing. That can be being struck over the head with said pipe, knife, gun, et cetera. So there's typically a weapon or a threat of a weapon that puts you in fear for your life. Okay. All right. Thank you. I believe I saw Councilmember Davis and then Councilmember Armitage, then Councilmember Briggs. No, Mayor, I'm glad you asked that question. That's my question as well. I think a lot of people think of aggravated assault as, you know, one step below a murder and they see that big number and they get really worried about it. But thank you for explaining that huge range. It could be anything. Somebody flashes a BB gun at somebody and threatens them with it all the way up to a very serious injuries and everything in between. Great. Okay. Councilmember Armitage? Yeah, I was wondering about hate crimes. How far down on that list, obviously not in the top 10, but how far down on that list is hate crimes reporting? And I understand that there could be, you know, overlaps or something could be aggravated assault plus hate crime. So our hate crimes in this city didn't even register. In fact, I can't even think of a hate crime that we took last year. We did take those two bias based incidents that happened at Rubber Gloves and then over at Arvis House. I think it was Arvis House. So and thank you. You know, so on Friday night, there was an aggravated assault and, you know, police responded right away. It was with a gun, but nobody was harmed, thank goodness, but it was traumatizing. And the one of the victims in the situation wants to fight, wants to, is anxious to talk to the investigator, waiting to hear back and believes it to be a hate crime. And so she asked me to ask, because I didn't have the answer and I'm curious to hear from you, you know, what someone can expect or what do you think someone should know if they believe that what happened to them is because of their identity, a possible hate crime? Can you kind of take them through the steps about reporting what they should emphasize, what kind of questions they could be asked or won't be asked? Absolutely. That's a great question. So I am familiar with the cases you're talking about and I do know that the detectives are following up on that and Chief Smith is here actually taking notes as we're talking. So if you feel like you've been the victim of a hate crime or a bias based crime, make sure that you remember the things that were said during the assault, right, or during the incident. Was there a certain language used that about your identity, about your race, your creed, your color, any of the protected classes? Was there anything that led you to believe that that happened? But ultimately, it's going to be in what was said prior to, during and after, how you felt, and then what the investigators can put together because it all goes back to what was their intent. And sometimes that is a sticking point with people because the law does not allow for what we assume to be a certain crime for that to be true. So there is no simple answer, unfortunately, on what would get it over that threshold. It would just take a combination of all those and then our investigators presenting that to the district attorney's office for prosecution. Okay. Council member Briggs. On the list, the sexual assault was 85, and I'm curious, you did mention the colleges. Does that include all the incidents that happened on all the campuses or are those kept separate? Those are separate, the ones that happen on campus that the university police departments respond to are not part of our reporting numbers because these are the ones that our police department are in charge of. At some point, would that transfer over if it became something more or no? So because of the Clariac, the universities get these stats every year because they have to report them by federal law. They have to report them also as part of their campus. So I don't want to speak for them, but I believe that these numbers are rolled in some way, shape, form, or fashion in the reports that they give out. Okay, thank you. Council member Meltzer. It's a really interesting question. Do you think it might be helpful, chief, at some point to appear or at some intervals to see that data rolled up with the university police and ours just in terms of identifying the patterns? Because it's got to be a fine line sometimes. I'm sure we see activity near the schools, but there's got to be some interaction there, right? That's a great question, and our investigators work with the other investigators at both UNT and TWU on a regular basis. So they're having these conversations because it's not public, they are having them and they do meet. I can tell you factually that whenever they think that there may be a trend occurring, they come together and they discuss those to make sure that we don't have, you know, the last thing we want is to have any kind of pattern or series going on in our city, because like you said, there is no border keeping someone from coming on or off the campus coming into the city and back out. And if I may, I just want to take the opportunity to also express support, high hopes and admiration for your move on the mental health division and I want to underscore nobody forced you into that, nobody pressured you into that, it wasn't about funding things. You saw there's a better way to handle a certain range of activity and you had the vision to try to do it in an innovative way. I really appreciate that. Okay, any other questions for this portion of the presentation? Alright, you may proceed Chief. I'll try to do a Shanika Mayo some justice here when I present this. If I don't, she'll get after me. So one of the discussion pieces right now is how public safety represents a big chunk of the general fund. Now, while that may be true, the didn't police department represents about 26% are adopted budget for FY 19 20 39. I mean, $35.9 million, but it's very important and I want to make sure that I'm clear is very important to understand that 80 almost 85% of that, excuse me, is salaries, wages, pension, healthcare and overtime. They're 8% tech service payment that we pay every year for our technology. Vehicle maintenance is probably one of the most important items on here. If you don't have sustainable vehicles, you have no police department, you have no police officers on the street. And then our operational costs, we've gone to great lengths over the last year and a half of really streamlined in our uniforms. We've changed over to one uniform provider, one contract, one sole source contract and we're seeing some great benefit in doing that. And then our service agreements and training. When you talk about the training that your police officers receive every year, I want to make sure that I don't allow this opportunity to pass by. Texas Commission on law enforcement standards for the state of Texas requires that law enforcement officers have 40 hours of training every two years. Over the last year and a half, our officers have averaged between 70 and 80 hours of training per officer. So when you hear that, just know that we are making training part of our culture, part of our way of life. We're really pushing to have more very directed training, more intentional training. We'll get to a little bit more of that here in a second. And then we do use a good part of the capital improvement program for our annual vehicle replacements because we know that we can't just go out and fund replacing what a police patrol package vehicle would cost just out of our general fund budget. It would be near to impossible without really inflating that. So I want to make sure that you all know that. And then when you look at what are our priorities with our budget, probably the most important one that we have really focused on is focus and intentional training. We have really gone to great lengths to make a comprehensive annual training program. We've increased greatly our professionalized training. Two of the most important that we've done this past year is our fair and impartial policing training. We brought in our partner agencies close by to allow some of their training police officers coming to be trained the trainers. We had about 22 of our personnel attend this. They're going to be able to give this training not just to the Denton Police Department, but to other police departments close by. The second one is our human relations training is typically known as sexual harassment training. That was another big one for us internally is really balancing what we wanted our police officers focused on. And I've said this from day one, literally from day one, if we can't treat one another inside the police department with dignity and respect, there's no way that I can expect that they're going out treating our community like that. So I want to make sure that we don't lose sight of we need to stay focused both internally, as well as externally, when we're dealing with both our police officers and our community. We just completed a comprehensive staffing study by the matrix group out of California, they'll be coming back here in the near future to present their findings to you, the council. That was something that was big on my part when we were talking about bringing them in. I did not want to be the one presenting it to you because one, it's not my study and two, you're going to expect that the chief of police is going to stand before you and tell you he needs stuff. If you find a chief that doesn't tell you that they need things like people run. Leveraging technology is another big thing that we're looking at we're about to launch spider tech, which is a customer service delivery app. When our police officer dispatch to a call, it will send an automatic message to that person calling either by email or via text and let them know that Officer Dixon is responding to your call. This is your case number, he should be there in the hour. If for whatever reason the officer is held up, they have to go to a higher priority call, they get a flat tire, whatever the case may be, they'll get an update saying that the response has been delayed. This is the reason why and an officer will be there. More importantly is at the end the conclusion of the call when the officer leaves, it will tell them that Officer Dixon is now preparing your report. When it is in queue to be assigned to a detective, it will tell the complainant when that transition occurs. But most importantly, it will give them a survey to give us feedback on not only how we did responding to it, but how communications did, how the 911 operator did along the line. When you're looking at policing as a profession, I think we do a poor job of getting immediate feedback from the customer, which is the community. This is going to hopefully bridge that gap and close it very quickly. And then again, the effect of deployment of equipment, meaning updating our vehicle maintenance schedule and updating our equipment for our people. They can't be effective out there working for all of us if we don't give them the tools that they need to do that. And because it's the budget, I'll stop there if anyone has any questions. Councilmember Davis. Chief, you talked just a little bit about equipment and resources and this kind of things. And I know there's some concern in the community about the types of equipment police departments use as opposed to militarization or federal sources of equipment. Can you speak real briefly to that? What does Denton have? What do we often deploy? What do we not have that people are sometimes concerned about and that kind of thing? Absolutely. That is a great question. So one of the concerns that communities across the country have right now is militarization of police departments and it is not lost on us. Although we do have riot control equipment, we do have gas, we do have less lethal munitions, we have taken a very intentional stance on how we're going to approach our protests here in our city. And I think that it has shown from May 29th when we had our first one to present that we have had very little problem. In fact, we have had to arrest only two people directly associated with the protests downtown and only one outside of the downtown area. And a big part of that is not just because of the posture that we took, but it's because of the hearts of the police officers that serve the city taking upon themselves to go out and have very intentional dialogue with those out there that are protesting. Because at the end of the day, I said this before, we are part of this community. And the same concerns that U.S. community members and council members have, we share with U.S. police officers. This is a watershed moment for us and we can either choose to move forward together or we can move backwards falling apart again. So we totally understand the concerns and the worries that the community has when it comes to militarization of police departments. And we're not going to deploy any of those things if we don't have to. And if we do end up having to, it's only going to be to preserve life. Because we don't want, we definitely don't want people getting injured in our city. >> All right. Anybody else on the budget? Councilmember Armitage? Or the presentation? >> Yeah. This is just a question. What -- can you speak to the department's policy on -- I don't know -- the need for broken windows policing or community policing, having people out and about versus having a -- come when called only, kind of more like what the fire department does. They don't go around asking is there a medical emergency here? Is there a fire here? If they see something, you know, then there's an obligation. But so what -- is that something that you kind of as a chief have thought about in -- both from a budget point of view and from a meeting the needs of a community point of view, maybe moving to a more, you know, come when called only model. And if that would be a better way to use limited resources. >> So that's a good question. And we have looked at how we can respond better to our community. What I will tell you is I have met with community members over the last couple of months who have repeatedly told me that they have not seen police officers enough in their community, in their neighborhoods driving around. And when you're talking about how do we combat burglar vehicles, burglar businesses, in part, it is deploying police officers more strategically, smarter, using information and using data to guide that. And it's not just, like I said before, a shotgun approach of just throwing police officers out there in the community. They need to be out there policing with a purpose. Because our community doesn't want less policing. They just want to be policed the right way. And policing the community the right way is doing it with them, walking alongside them and not being an occupying force coming in and dictating to them what's going to happen in their neighborhood. >> Councilmember Amater? >> A follow-up question to that. Is there a trend in either, you know, parts of the city, race, ethnic demographics, you know, differences in income level, apartments versus homes in terms of from where you're getting the request for more policing. You know, when people say I want to see more police in my neighborhood or things like, you know, suspicious vehicle reports, do those happen to come more from certain demographics than others? Or is there are there no statistically significant trends? >> So when you're talking about which communities are asking to see us more, that's across the city, most recently the conversations I've had in southeast Denton where we've had community members asking to see us more out in the community. And I want to make sure that I'm being very clear. It's not us out in the community stopping people. It's not us out in the community arresting people. It's seeing the police officers that they also pay taxes for out in their community, driving around proactively protecting them, keeping them safe. This is from across the board. We get calls for service for suspicious vehicles. Typically, those kind of go in line with where we're seeing patterns of burglary vehicles, burglary residences or nonresidences. Those kind of go hand in hand when you're seeing suspicious vehicle calls. So I think, you know, more to your point of being reactive, completely reactive to only going into neighborhoods after the crime has occurred and they need a response isn't really what we're seeing from the communities wanting at this point. >> Okay. Mayor Pro Tem? >> No, I was just going to echo that. I was just pulled over, quote unquote, by a neighbor in southeast Denton and said that exact same thing and kind of hammered that home that it's almost verbatim. So I've been hearing that regularly. And I don't know -- the question for the chief is, I don't even know that that captures the work the officers do with the neighborhood meetings. So, for example, Sedna or Forest Ridge or East Oaks, those at the time were regular monthly meetings where you would get that same report and/or people would hold their questions until then. But still, I don't know that that even bakes into your numbers to echo what you're saying. >> And unfortunately now with the pandemic, we've been really limited being able to be out in the community as much as we need to be and want to be. But we're going to start a virtual town hall and we're going to do it very specifically going from neighborhood to neighborhood, moving that around the city so we can make sure that we have neighborhood input on what policing looks like moving forward in our city. And again, it's -- everything that we're doing, we're trying to be collaborative with the community in doing that. >> Okay. Councilmember Riggs? >> A follow-up question to the pie chart here about the priorities and the staffing model, the consultant that's going to come talk to us. I know that since you've been here, we've been talking about being short on officers and having to try to fill those and making exceptions so that we can get officers in positions. But hearing that and knowing that we're -- there's still room to grow. And there's increased requests for involvement in the community and for traffic mitigation. And then I also just heard you say it was over 70 hours of training or something like that. And then we divide that into the officers. I mean, is there -- is that concerning? I mean, is that something that the consultant's going to talk about? >> They're going to talk about all of that. And the great thing is we're not in a horrible place right now, but we have a lot of growth that we can do. And we're really going to get better moving forward. So I think it's a very exciting time for us collectively. >> Okay. All right. Thank you. >> All right. If there's no more questions on the financial part, let's take a quick five-minute break, and then we'll come back and pick up the presentation. Thank you. Welcome back, everybody, to this meeting of the Denton City Council on July the 21st, 2020. It is 5:27 p.m. We are working through our work session report agenda item 3-3-D. So, Chief, you may proceed. >> Yes, sir. Moving on. So increasing accountability and transparency. Again, this isn't a topic that's new to any of us. It is a topic of national interest right now, of very high national interest. Again, we go back to training and enhancing training efforts, and as you're going to see when we start talking about accountability and transparency, one of the biggest pieces of the accountability piece for me is to make sure that we're also focusing on what training we can give our employees to help them become better. Because if they're making mistakes, if they're making judgments that are causing them to be held accountable, I want to make sure that we are closing those training loops and training gaps to, again, put out the best police officer that we can for our city. We expanded our department-wide training opportunities. The most important one was we really focused on our field training program this past year. And we're still working on, and unfortunately, because of the pandemic, the timing of the pandemic, we were about a month away from having some very specialized training occur here with the field training program. Obviously, that's taken a backseat to the pandemic. But we're transitioning from a hybrid style of field training to the San Jose model of field training, which is a very structured way of training our new officers when they come out. But more importantly, it's getting our field training officers more focused training, making sure that when they're out there, they are carrying out our mission, vision, and values. They're implementing that in every phase of their daily activities with our new police officers. And then we're going back and we're taking quarterly looks at our field training officers as well. And a big piece of that was making the comprehensive annual training plan for the entire organization and designating one full-time officer that's doing nothing but developing and re-implementing our defensive tactics curriculum. When we looked at how can we enhance our training efforts, we did a gap analysis and a training needs assessment. Dr. Richard Williams, who we were lucky enough to get here, he's a retired lieutenant out of the New Orleans Police Department. He's in charge of our accreditation and compliance. He has done just a fantastic job of going back and really looking at data and doing that gap analysis and looking at what are our training needs for our organization? How can we be more focused about it? What do we have to give our officers statutorily through TECOL, through legislative updates, et cetera? What does a Texas Police Chiefs Association require for us to participate in their recognition program, which we were early on in trying to get, if you want to, in layman's terms, look at it as state accredited? And a big part of that was conducting focus groups, both internally and externally. So, Dr. Williams went through the entire organization, meeting with every facet of it. It was very focused, say with our SWAT team, our detectives, our sergeants, our lieutenants, our chiefs, and then meeting with external stakeholders from DISD, from business community downtown, Children's Advocacy Center, friends of the family, really going out and finding out from all these different focus groups what's important to them. We did a department-wide anonymous survey, and then we prioritized what are our long-term and short-term training goals, which really got us to focusing on this, the Texas Police Chiefs law enforcement best practice recognition program. It's a voluntary process, although I have a feeling in the next legislative session it won't be voluntary any longer. It was one of the things that the president brought out when he had an address in the Rose Garden about a month, month and a half ago, or one of the things that they were going to address on a federal level is the potential of having all 18,000-some-odd police departments in the country either have a state or a national accreditation. This will satisfy that. We are currently in process of doing this. It's a very long process, very detailed, and we have to show compliance with the 166 best practices in the state, and out of that 166 best practices, there's 12 critical areas within law enforcement that we look at, and when you look at them, it should be no surprise to us why these are the 12 critical areas. Use of force is at the top. Emergency vehicle operation and pursuits, that's one of the most, if not the most dangerous things that our police officers do on a daily basis is just drive. They're in vehicles at least 40 hours a week driving around our city protecting us. Arrest, search and seizure, they have a tremendous amount of responsibility and authority. Police officers are one of the only, if not the only people in this country that can take away a person's rights without having to go through any kind of process of doing that, so we want to make sure that we're up on that. Care custody and restraint of prisoners, sexual harassment, selection and hiring, off-duty conduct, domestic violence, both our response to and anything that involves employees with our agency, our complaint and internal affairs management, narcotics, SWAT, high-risk warrant service, dealing with the mentally ill and developmentally disabled and property and evidence management, so when you're looking at those 12 critical areas, it's really no surprise why those would stand out. And then again, back to the summary of findings back in 2018, the summer of, when we looked at our policy and procedure updates, we looked at inconsistent investigation process or at least the belief thereof, the belief that there's a lack of consistency for determining special assignments and the perception of disparate discipline and accountability. The previous internal affairs process, and again, this isn't from me, this is from our employees, they felt that there is limited oversight and consistency. If the violation was sustained or policy violation was sustained, the bureau commander would make a recommendation to the chief of police, and then the chief of police would make a finding and then serve the involved employee. Minor nature complaints were investigated and exposed by the employee's chain of command, and then serious nature complaints were investigated by internal affairs. And probably the most significant that I saw when I got here in October 2018, we had our internal affairs investigators not only investigating the complaint, but they would provide the conclusion whether it would be a sustained complaint or not. So the very first thing that I did was I took that out of internal affairs. I did not want our internal affairs investigators to have the additional burden of determining whether or not a complaint was going to be sustained or not. That is for ultimately myself as a chief of police to do, but more importantly for the entire chain of command from the sergeant, the lieutenant, the bureau chief, the assistant chief and myself. So we restructured how we do our internal affairs process. This is how it happens now. Whether it comes from a citizen or internal, it is assigned to internal affairs. Chief Smith looks at every single one of these. He makes it determined if it is something very minor in nature, i.e. an employee is late to work, a uniform violation or something like that, an officer was rude on a traffic stop, then he will assign that to a lieutenant for investigation. He again on the back end gets those investigations at the end. He vets them. He reads them, reviews them. And if there's any questions that he needs clarified or other things that needs to be done, he'll send them back. At the very end, those will go up to myself and then we'll determine whether those are sustained or not. If there is something that internal affairs conducts the investigation into, they send the final findings to the chain of command. I then convene what I call a pre-disciplinary review hearing with the entire chain of command. We come into my conference room, although now we're doing it remotely. And I start with the lowest ranking person in the room, which is typically the sergeant. And I not only ask them after seeing the investigation, do they want, do they think it should be sustained or not? And if it should be, why? One of the biggest points of learning for especially our younger supervisors is not just that an employee is getting disciplined, but the why behind that. And they need to have an integral part in that for both their growth and their employees as well. So once we determine whether it's going to be sustained or not, I set what I call a disciplinary review hearing where we call the involved employee in to my conference room. They can have a representative from either association, they can have legal representation, and then the entire chain of command is in there and we convene a board. At the very beginning of that board, I asked the involved employee if there's anything that they want to let the board know that either A, we haven't asked or they want us to know. After we give them an opportunity to tell us that information, the board has an opportunity to ask any clarifying questions. And then at the conclusion of it, we have the involved employee and the representation step out of the room. We reconvene again to determine whether or not the investigation is going to be sustained or not and then what that discipline will be. And again, I start with the sergeant and work them up to myself. Once we have determined what the discipline will be, we'll call the involved employee and the representation back into the room. And then I will give them that discipline in the moment. So they're not left wondering what's going to happen. It's a very involved process, but I think it's a very fair, very open, transparent process when you're talking about internal equity. And there's four dispositions that can be made. Exonerated, the alleged action did occur. However, it was consistent with our policy. Unfounded, the allegation is false or not credible. It can be sustained. It's supported by the preponderance of the evidence as occurring and it's inconsistent with our agency policy. One of the things about having an administrative investigation, I only need a preponderance of the evidence. I don't need any clear and convincing standard. I don't need anything other than a preponderance of the evidence. Not sustained insufficient proof to confirm or refute the allegation. And then there'll be times when we find that there's a policy issue, meaning that had our policy been more clear or been better, that the policy violation would not have occurred. And then when we went back and we looked at what were our complaints of employee misconduct from 2015 to present, as I said earlier, we had over 525,000 contacts with our city in a five-year period, which averaged about 105,000 calls for service a year. Out of those, we had 539 complaints, which is 0.1%. Out of that 539, we had 324 that were sustained. What's very important to know, and I want to make sure that I'm being very clear here, is internally, we had 60% of those complaints were internally driven, meaning that either a supervisor caught something, one of the managers caught something, or in reviewing the actions of one of our employees, we saw something else that we then launched an investigation into. Externally, we had 215 of those complaints. 215 from our city, which is a far cry less than that 0.1%, and that only represented 40% of our overall complaints. Now, some people will look at this and they'll say, "Well, is our city, is our community afraid of reporting it? Do they not trust that the police are going to police themselves?" Well, if you look at 84% of those internal complaints, we sustained on ourself, 84%. So 271 of that 324. I would submit to you that we don't turn a blind eye. The level of accountability in the Denton Police Department now is higher than ever before, and if you ask, I'm sure that you will find that some officers within the police department feel like discipline has gone up dramatically in the last two years. As you can see, our complaints have trended up. This year, they're very low at 25. That's a great sign for me for a couple of different reasons. One, and my greatest hope is that things are normalizing now. The shift in our mission, vision, and values is starting to take seed and starting to kind of organically grow through the organization, which is our ultimate goal to the pandemic and the lack of contact with just other human beings. And then we really don't know besides that, outside of that. We want to break down and look at our allegations by ethnicity and race between 2015 and 2020. Now, while our city is comprised of about 11 to 12% African American or black, we had 46 complaints. So we had 21% of those complaints in that time period. So remember, we're talking about 215 complaints. 21% of those were by our black residents. 17 total by our Hispanic. 115 by and large, the most. And then our Asian other at only four. And then the unknown not listed, that 33. A majority of those are going to fall into the white category because you have in demographics, white, other, white, Hispanic, and then unknown. So when we went back and looked at those, those are the numbers that we found. When we looked at our top five complaint allegations that we have investigated over the past five years, again, they're probably not going to be the ones that you would think that you're going to see up here. Performance related are by and far the bulk and those are internally generated. Operation of police equipment and police vehicles being second. Some of that is that's going to be a mixture of both internal and external attendance related, internal discourtesy is going to be a combination of both. And then service complaints are going to be from the community. And those service complaints can be from anything from an officer was just courteous or they didn't get to my house in a timely fashion or I wasn't satisfied with what happened at my house. When we talk about accountability, one serious allegation that we had since my coming here, we had an unbecoming conduct case that resulted in my issuing an indefinite suspension, which in civil service terms is a termination that was sent to arbitration by the affected employee because they have that right to take it to arbitration and went through that process and it was affirmed through the process. So they were dismissed. In the same time period, we had now 16 suspensions between one and 16 days. 12 of those 16 have been from myself since October of 2018. We've had three indefinite suspensions, two of those I have given out and we've had two employees that have resigned while under investigation. So because of current state law, we can't release anything that is under a day off or more. But I thought it was very important that council understands that not only do people get days off, but we take a great deal in documenting and this is going back to again, 2015, verbal counseling, document and counseling, written reprimands. A written reprimand is just short of a day off. Performance improvement plans, something that I really want us to focus on moving forward these next two performance improvement in training. Because again, if we're not making a concerted effort of fixing the performance behaviors of our police officers, we in essence are failing them when we're putting them back out on the street. So with every discipline case that comes across my desk, we make sure we tie a training component to it. Because the last, the very last question I asked the chain of command is, is this person salvageable? And if you're telling me they're salvageable, then we're going to give them the training to make them successful. And then use of force complaints in the last five years, we've only, I don't want to say only, I shouldn't say only. We've had 14 of those. We've had three of those sustained. And those three were from, those were internally driven. And those resulted in days off ranging from since I've been here, two five day suspensions, one documented counseling. And that was because two officers did not verbally announced before simultaneously deploying a taser. So there wasn't any egregiousness in it. They just didn't live up to the standard. And then the rest of those that you saw from 2016 and 2015 on here that are represented here. And then there's been a little bit of talk about lawsuits, what lawsuits have happened with the police department. So in total, the city has had 39. The didn't police department has had 16, but it is extremely important to pay attention to the fact that almost every single one has been dismissed in the process. They have settled one excessive force complaint from 2014. They settled one in 2017. They settled another one in 2017 for a pedestrian that was struck by one of our police vehicles and then settled one in 2018 from an employee that was an internal matter, not related to any type of use of force. And again, this just recaps that again. So it does say that there's two excessive force cases that are pending. And those are one that was just filed this year from a case, I want to say from 2017 or '18. And then there's one other that is out there from 2017, I believe. So before closing out for the last sets of questions, I want to kind of give a summary of activity. And we've been a flurry of activity since 2018. When we tried to go back and make this as concise as possible, there was just really no way. We left off a lot. And I'll just leave this up here for a couple of about a minute or so and then go through the next three pages. We stopped at three. If I had to pick out the most important on these was starting a peer support program to promote officer safety and wellness internally. Luckily for us, and it was only by the grace of good fortune that we designated a Homeland Security Coordinator about a month before the COVID pandemic started. And Officer Sarah Keith has just done a phenomenal job of taking on that task and very rapidly getting educated about it. She already had a lot of training behind doing that function and she just done an amazing job at that. Some of the things that were in process before I got here that just recently gotten implemented was the implementation of a new computer aided dispatch system and a record management system. I was very thankful that that was already in process when I came in because it is not easy to do. Relocating our special victims unit over to the served in campus. So they have a joint multidisciplinary unit over there. And then the training on the bottom. Internally, we moved internal affairs out of the police department. They are now officed on the opposite side of the building over by where the parks department was or still is to some extent. And that was really to open up just another avenue for either employees of the police department or our community to come in and meet with internal affairs without having any fear of having to walk to the police department. We also opened up two anonymous drop boxes. People can send emails to internal affairs. There's a link on our website, commendations or complaints. We have town halls that we have every once in a while, probably once a quarter. I meet with the chiefs advisory committee. I meet with both association presidents and vice presidents every month. We continue to hold those internal and external focus groups. We have brought community members in to sit on selection boards for detectives to go to family violence, sex crimes. It's very important to me that we have our stakeholders in that process as well as having survivors. I can't think of a better person to determine whether a detective needs to be working a sex assault crime than a survivor of a sex assault. And then we're going to continue with our community engagement initiatives. Some of them, they started out of nowhere. We were working a robbery initiative and we had two of our police officers take it upon themselves to work with the library department to make a mobile library last summer. Unfortunately, they couldn't do it this summer because of the COVID, but that was born out of us really being focused on stopping robberies in a certain part of our town. The elementary school lunches, that was just a big hit both internally and with the kids this past year. And then of course, us taking part in the MLK March the last two years and then taking part in a pride event last year. And again, unfortunately, this year we couldn't do that because of the COVID restrictions. But it's really getting back to us being a part of the community and policing with it. So with that, I'll open it up to any questions that you all may have. Okay. All right. Questions? Council Member Moutzer. Thank you so much, Chief. I'm often in a position where I want to share, where I find I want to share an opinion that I have that then police department is not like what people see on TV, not like Minneapolis or Los Angeles. We've got these really heinous events. And I don't know that for a fact, but I believe that to be the fact. And my question to you is, is there a way to benchmark the data that you've presented us here if other cities are as transparent, you know, against other cities where, you know, in a Camden, New Jersey where they had to dismantle the whole police department and start all over and so on, you know, how can we see that, how we, how we really are, you know, versus conditions that that might require just some extreme actions? That's a great question. And it's a very complicated answer. I think one of the things that we have to do collectively is we can't get caught up in what's going on. This isn't a one size fits all approach. You're talking about anything to do with criminal justice reform. There's a lot of things that we do very well. There's some things that we need to improve upon. We have to stay focused on not making any rash decisions to do something that at the end of the day is going to hurt us all and hurt our community by implementing something that's shortsighted, not well thought out. And it's just in response to what everyone else is doing. Because I can tell you that we do have a tremendous amount of very special men and women that work here, they live here, they grew up here, born and raised here in the city of Denton that are now out serving each and every one of us every day. Yes. Council member Meltzer. Yeah. Well, okay. So take your point on not doing one size fits all. I'd still be interested if there is a way to benchmark, but if I can go into a different topic for a moment there. Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, another thing that I'm sure won't be a surprise to you is that, you know, we hear even in Denton that people of color feel anecdotally, feel overpleased or profiled, not to the extent of necessarily of these horrible excessive use of force situations, but where they feel singled out. And is there a way to, first of all, do you believe that there's anything to that yourself? And is there a way to measure that in terms of activity? Is it disproportionate? How would you address that whole concern? And do you think there's, it's a valid concern? It absolutely is a valid concern. And this is why in the communities that need the police more, when you see increased presence because of complaints about, say, a house that's having some illicit drug activity at it, part of our struggle as police departments are how do we focus on that house and gain the evidence that we need to close it down without negatively impacting the good people that live around there? Because in every instance, there's great people that are caught in the immediate surroundings around that house that we're looking at. And in order to do that, unfortunately, we have to find how can we balance doing that while still unintentionally stopping people that we probably wouldn't stop otherwise, but doing a better job of explaining why. A lot of the time, the communication is the piece that we're lagging in our profession when we're trying to explain to the community why we're doing things. So I think we get better at bringing the community in to have those discussions on the front end when they're bringing complaints to us, but doing a more concerted effort in the middle of that investigation as it goes along and updating the community and letting them know that progress is being made. You know, by the way, we may stop some of you along the way, but if we do, we're going to make sure that we explain to you why we're stopping you. And because they're going to feel like you're stopping me if we're not using my turn signal, that's not really a valid reason to stop you. Well, if we're trying to connect activity to a drug house, that may be one method by which officers are using to make legitimate legal traffic stops on vehicles to identify persons. Hopefully, that answered most of your questions. I mean, you know, it's a big topic and it's probably not going to stop in this conversation. I just rambled just a little. Back pre-COVID, people do my job, you know, used to knock on doors and talk to people. And, you know, the kinds of stories that people harbor as and feel were race related, you know, you kind of you kind of will never know. But people feel that maybe they were that they were more visible, you know, and therefore were stopped in traffic, just not related to anything in the neighborhood or biking not on the sidewalk, you know, they just seem to feel singled out. And my suspicion is the only way you can ever really get under that is with statistics, at least as a starting point, you know, to say, are we disproportionately acting on, you know, some parts of the population more than others? So I don't know if you can put that all into a question. But if you see where I'm going, no point well taken. And I can tell you that I myself have been stopped for reasons that probably weren't legitimate throughout my life. And you're never going to get rid of that perception. That never goes away. That's just a sad reality that we live in being policed by human beings that have bias. We all have biases, right? So if we're doing a good job of keeping our employees accountable for their actions, we're giving them training, but there's no amount of training that's going to change someone's heart, right? So we've got to make sure that we're staying on top of not just the training piece, not just the accountability piece, but the monitoring piece in between, which is why our supervisors are having monthly meetings with their employees, because I don't want a small, seemingly very small thing to manifest itself over time, because we have chosen to ignore that seemingly small thing. If we can identify and address that early on, then hopefully, A, we can either get that employee the help and the training they need to become better, or we can identify a true problem employee, either to select out or we select them out. I'm getting feedback from somebody. I think it probably helps that you bring personally, not just incredible degree of professionalism to managing this, but also degree of empathy for people who truly experience that. Anyway, thank you. Mayor Potem. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief. Great presentation. And to Council Member Meltzer's question, the answer is the part you can't measure is discretion. That's always the buzz. That's the word. Officers have broad discretion. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that. So you can't -- there's no measurable for that, and it's just life experience, and you just kind of -- it's one of those things. You manage. But, Chief, I don't know if you want to expound on it, but I want to touch on a couple of things you shared that really jumped out at me. I didn't understand the value and the importance until going through the FBI Citizens Academy when you highlight that you have the tourniquets kits out there for all the officers. Do you want to expound upon that? Because I think that is -- having listened to presentations from doctors at Parkland, that is absolutely amazing, and I appreciate you leading that effort. So I want to open the door for you to talk about that a bit. Well, you know, when you talk about tourniquets, it's not just for our police officers to use on themselves as self-aid, buddy aid, but we have had at least one occasion since I've been here where we had a police officer say the life of one of our community members with his own personal tourniquet because that community member was bleeding out. Had that officer not chosen to do that, that community member would not have made it home to their family. They would have died unequivocally. So given, again, given the tools, Nalaxone is another thing that we have given our police officers, and we have saved three lives in about the span of four weeks from those persons that were suffering from opioid overdoses. So when we're giving those tools to our police officers, it's not just for them to use on themselves, but to use in the community for the community. Yeah. No, thank you very much. And then also another thought, I watched the citizen -- the ad hoc committee, and they mentioned the newsletter or something, kind of sharing that information. And I want to give you a thought I had listening to you. I think it would be great for people to maybe for the staff or to work in some landmark cases, you know, so people can understand the challenges in your job. And I know Jesse gets it as well from his job. But for example, you know, you think you're working a drug house where you can't even, you know, the Supreme Court says you can't take the drug dog to the door, even to, you know, smell underneath the door without all the probable cause. And so I think there's sometimes people think, well, all you have to do is just, but there's a prohibition against that or a law that prevents that. So I just leave that as a suggestion that maybe there's some landmark cases that go against kind of the layperson's approach to what the laws allow that may be, you know, just little nuggets that may be kind of -- because I know it -- I felt -- I learned that in the city of Denton Police Academy, you know, and kind of went through that. But there's just some really neat information or useful information that could be disseminated, I think, that would help us as a city communicate to our citizens. So thank you. >> Okay. All right. Okay. Councilmember Briggs? >> Chief, I have one question and then a comment. So on the allegations investigated, there's all allegations, but is -- does Internal Affairs investigate sexual harassment within the department or is that something that HR does? Does that come outside of the department? >> So whenever we have an allegation of sexual harassment, we do a joint investigation with human resources. What I don't want is for human resources to do something that's going to compromise a GERD issue or a Chapter 143 issue that's going to prohibit me from disciplining said officer should an allegation be found to be true. There's completely different rules that human resources on a city level and that I have to make sure as the Chief Executive Officer of the Police Department, and I want to make sure that those two are always in concert with one another. >> Okay. I didn't see it on here, so I was wondering what process that followed. So thank you. And I want to take a moment to say thank you for all you've done for the department since you've gotten here. This has been a really great presentation. And I appreciate seeing all the progress. >> Thank you. >> Okay. All right. Councilmember Armitage? >> So a question about training and another question, another issue. So as you mentioned, everyone has bias, and that's true. It's my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, that implicit bias training, that it is optional or it is one of the ways that officers can kind of get credit for training, but it's not required of every officer currently. Is that correct? >> No, that's incorrect. So we hand selected officers to go to the train, the trainer course, because I wanted to make sure that the officers are going to be putting that train out to the rest of the organization. One, they understand the importance of doing it. Even the ones we hand selected, we made sure that they wanted to do it because there's one or two that weren't comfortable doing it, so we didn't force them into it. So they want, they have a need, they have a desire to carry that train out to their peers, and we're going to roll that out, and it is mandatory for every person in the Denton Police Department, sworn and civilian, they're going to go through that, and that's just one component, because we're not going to just give training one time and then put it in a closet. We're going to update it. >> Okay. And thank you. I wanted to clarify, because I had heard that before, and then when you mentioned that there were 20-something officers, you know, that had done this, I wasn't clear, so thank you for clearing that up to me, for me. So you had talked about and mentioned in one of the slides the Homeland Security Supervisor Officer. Can you explain what that job involves for the department and what the need is for that? >> Absolutely. So it's an emergency management coordinator for the police department that does similar to what the fire department's emergency operations person does, what Mike Penaluno used to do before he retired. So they work in the emergency operations center at the city. Sarah spent a long time every day over there, beginning of the pandemic. She's liaison with not just the fire department, but with the health department, other organizations external to the city, and she's been just phenomenal getting us PPE, getting us testing when we needed it, liaisoning with the fire department to get us access to some of the things that they have over there, really staying on top of what CDC recommendations are coming out as those change the numbers that we're seeing locally. And it's not just limited to this pandemic. When I created that position, I was thinking more of what's our disaster response look like, because traditionally in our country, you know, we had a tornado that touched down here about a year ago. Luckily it didn't do a lot of damage. It kind of hit and took back off. But my thought was when I created that, what would have happened if that was an EF3 tornado that cut a path through our city? We need to have someone that's up on the emergency management that can help me, because I can't be everywhere at one time, that can help me manage that, manage the coordination, manage the response, and do that in a way that when we're bringing in external stakeholders like FEMA, and we're looking at how are we going to reimburse the city potentially on the back end, how can we make sure that we're taking care of all those steps? Because it is unbelievably cumbersome to roll back 18 months and try to recreate all the things that happened during the pandemic, to try to get back all the expenditures, the personnel time, if we can do that in front of it, it makes it so much easier when you're looking at getting reimbursement. But more importantly, when we come back and we want to have a debriefing of that to learn what we did well, what we didn't do well as a city. Well, thank you. And thank you for explaining that. As you know, when a lot of people hear Department of Homeland Security, even being aware that that's not all that they do, a lot of people think immigration enforcement and ICE here in Texas, people think of SB4. So is there any connection between that role in any of those other aspects of Department of Homeland Security? No, she's not part of the Department of Homeland Security. She's our Homeland Security Manager here, so Immigration Operations Manager. Thank you. Thank you. And so I want to make that clear and just to because and I don't know if you want to, how important it is to keep that name. But just that for some people, especially when you consider that, you know, this is the person who deals with COVID response and when, you know, Latinx communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID. Seeing those words are frightening and it has nothing to do with Department of Homeland Security. So anyway, but thank you for that. Thank you. Certainly. Any other questions or comments? Thank you, Chief, for the very for a good presentation. Very comprehensive. Thank you for the data. It's very helpful and for just putting it out there for the public. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Appreciate you. You bet. And Mayor, we've got a work session on I think it's August 3rd, the Council lunch session, we're going to be presenting the Council or the Police Department budgets in much more detail. So we're hoping to use tonight is just sort of answer some of these questions about everything Chief Dixon and his staff have been doing, where we're going to be recommending resources going that sort of thing. So that that's sort of the the methodology and the rationale we've been using. But I'd also like to thank Chief for everything he's been doing lately. He's shown tremendous composure during the last several months and great leadership. So appreciate everything he's doing. Well, and I appreciate the comment earlier in the presentation that I think is by Council Member Melser that these things have been ongoing, that it's not been something that's been pressured. It's been since he's gotten here, he's really wanted to bring best practices to our department. So I appreciate that. It's been very helpful. Okay, we're on agenda item 2E, review, report, hold discussion, give staff direction on appending City Council request for work session discussing the formation of a Community Oversight Board test with publicly reviewing and responding in a timely fashion to all complaints filed against Denton Police Department by members of the public, etc. Good evening, Mayors and Council Members. If you would please give me a moment while I pull this up. Council Member Ryan, did you have a question I thought I saw you raise your hand? No, Mayor. Okay, sorry. I'm just, it's like an auction. I meant to do it off to the side. Yeah, keep your hand down if you're not bidding. Okay. Good evening. This is Rachel Bothert-Mendosa, Assistant to the City Manager, and tonight we'll present the City Council pending request for information. Just as a little brief reminder to those that may be watching with us, we have up to seven requests per meeting, and we have one per Council allowed. I'll introduce each one. Tonight we have one, and the elected official that made the request will have up to one minute to describe and justify the request, and the remaining elected officials will then have up to one minute to provide feedback and indicate their support. And we will respond to all requests where a consensus of Council is established. Tonight's request is from Council Member Armenter. Have it there for you. I won't go through the entirety of it, but just as a little bit of background there in the staff information portion, we do have, there's quite a bit provided in your backup in the AIS, and there was also a link to an article that she requested be included, and there was also some more information provided in the legal status report from last Friday. And there we are. Yeah, give me just a second to get my stopwatch up. We don't want the alarm clock app, so we will. Okay, Council Member Armenter, when you begin, I'll start the timer and you'll have one minute. Okay, so I am proposing for the second time a community oversight board of 100% civilians, and in my request, I gave some suggestions as to the kind of thinking that I myself would like to see going into the makeup, but it is entirely up to a city council to determine the makeup of such a committee. I want to underscore that under state and federal law, a community oversight board can only recommend to either police chief or city manager. Okay, so they have whatever authority they're given is authority for access and whatever, however much their recommendations are weighted is circumscribed largely by state and federal law. So I know that a number of, I know that the one of the two police officers unions is very scared of this, and I just want to encourage people really not to... Okay, all right, your time's up, Council Member Armenter, not to worry. Yeah, your time's up. Thank you. Okay, who's next? Anybody? Council Member Briggs? Yeah, so I think I have a minute. So I just wanted to say that I was disappointed to see the item turned into being a DEB item, and it took away the ability to have a conversation about something that was requested by our community members, and I'm also resent the fact that by asking for a work session, we are not supporting our chief, our police officers, which I do, I have, and I will continue to do. I'm not in favor of this proposal as it is, and I disagree with details that Deb has listed, but I do believe we need a work session on what an oversight board is, what they do, and it's kind of similar to Dallas. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and I still have a lot of questions about it. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem? Oh, let me... Hold on. Okay. Whenever you start, I'll... Thank you. I wouldn't say... I think that scary... What the police association is scared of, and I think it's rightfully so, in the details, I encourage everyone to read it, and the fatal flaw for me is it lists that primary decision factor is color, so color-based... Color discrimination or... What's the word? I'm losing time. But we can't base employee decisions based on color. No decision in this world, in this policing world, should be based on color. We just talk about profiling people, and now this advocates for profiling those that would review them. So it has several fatal flaws, but those two, that color analysis is a real problem and should be stricken, and that's the reason for concern in the association and in the community. Okay. Thank you. Anyone else? Councilmember Davis and then Councilmember Meltzer. Thank you, Mayor. I think Councilmember Briggs put it really well, and Mayor Pro Tem followed up really well. The issue, the devil's in the details here. We have a use of force committee. They got an excellent presentation on the 16th of July from the police chief, his staff, the city attorney who's tasked with police discipline issues. I've linked to that on my Facebook page. I encourage anybody to go watch that meeting. It gives a full explanation of how police discipline works even more in depth than the chief gave us. The idea put before us today is to put every single complaint, no matter how minor, having nothing to do with use of force, every single complaint to this civilian review board. That's not something available to us under state law and police disciplinary law. You can't go around revealing people who are under investigation or in a disciplinary process. You can't go around putting their names out publicly to a city board. To my knowledge, no city in Texas has what is being requested today. I think we ought to let the use of force review committee... Okay, Councilmember Davis, time's up. Thank you. That's it. Yep. Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah, well, that was a good segue anyway, because my primary feeling about it is we've got the use of force committee that has some really important voices represented on it. You've got NAACP and LULAC and MHMR. You've got people like Katina Stone Butler, Jamel Butler. You've got Dr. Carmen Cruz. I think that the correct stance for me now is to listen. I don't want to give that committee the feeling like, "Well, council's really already decided what they want to do and what they want to recommend." I think we should be listening. Then let's see if they want to take us in that direction and build on what comes from them. Okay. Councilmember Ryan. Yes, ma'am. I agree with the other comments that the devil's in the detail on this. I find it interesting that it comes right after the chief's report. To me, we've got one of the finest police departments in the state, not the nation. The improvements that he's been making on a great police department, to make it an excellent police department, were well detailed today. There's absolutely no way I could support anything that are in any of the details of what was presented by the council member today. Okay. I'm still trying to figure out. I don't think I've heard anybody supportive of this specific request. I'm not either. I was discouraged by the request, but also know that's what we're here for. She made her request, and that's the process. I can't support that request as presented to think that we've got a good process in place with the Use of Force Committee to see what comes out of there. And then I think also to see if there's in the meantime, if also the police chief together with police staff and together with the city manager and the like, if they have some ideas that they would like to present as well. So I'm sure we're going to have this discussion. It's just not under these particular details that have been presented. So it looks like that this request fails to gain a consensus. So we will not be having a work session at this time based upon this specific request. Alright, we've got that concludes our work session items. We've got a couple of closed sessions. So I will now convene the closed meeting at 6 23 p.m. on July 21st, 2020. And we will deliberate regarding Texas Government Code section 551071, which is consultation with attorneys and also deliberate under Texas Government Code section 551.074, which is deliberations regarding personnel matters. So if we could now clear the meeting of those non essential personnel. Welcome everybody to this meeting of the didn't City Council on July the 21st, 2020. We do have a quorum. So I'll call this meeting to order at 749. I apologize for our late start. We just had a work session that went over in a couple of closed sessions. So the first item on our agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance to the US and Texas flag. If you'll join with me and stand and we'll pledge allegiance to the flags. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Now we'll pledge to the Texas flag honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to the Texas one state under God one and indivisible. I don't believe we have any proclamations or presentations today. So we will then move on to our third item on the agenda for the regular council meeting which is presentation from members of the public. Do we I don't think we review we haven't been reviewing the procedures for addressing the city council. I believe so we'll we'll just move forward with our agenda item B which is receive reports from member of the public two methods. One is pre registration. I do not believe we have any pre registered speakers we did have but that speaker called and said that I believe they would reschedule or they canceled. So now we'll move on to our open mic portion of our agenda item which we have I think three speakers and they will get four minutes each. And as we know that because it is an open mic session portion of our agenda we are not to have dialogue with them except for the exceptions listed in our agenda and in the policy. So we will bring on our first caller a caller. This is Mayor Chris Watts. You are on with the density council a public meeting and we are at the open mic portion of our public comment. And so you'll have four minutes and once you state your name and address I will start you start your time and when the time's up I'll let you know. Thank you mayor. Thank you council. My name is Michael Gilbert and my address is 300 grassland drives in Denton. And the reason that I called in and wanted to talk was regarding ID 20-847 which is the police oversight board proposal. I believe that this would be terrible for our community safety and cohesiveness. I think it would allow untrained and unelected individuals to have unchecked influence over our police departments and its investigations and I believe that it would further promote this unity in the community. I'm all for having some kind of diversified oversight board but the systemic discrimination and implicit bias this proposed board would possess would guarantee that any objective findings would never come out of it. And I have two main points I'd like to hit on to kind of expand on that. The first main point is the makeup of this board. According to the agenda information sheet it stated that the board should consist entirely or primarily of people of color. I think that the idea that this board would only possess certain ethnicities and minority groups while intentionally excluding other racism groups does not represent or serve the community well as a whole and only works to further divide our city. The solution to fighting systemic racism cannot be by creating more systemic racism in my opinion. Does this proposal really move us towards equality or do we want to go back to the days of hierarchy where race and other attributes determine your standing and civilization. I think this proposal is a welcome mat for that kind of thinking. But I don't just want to talk about the ethical complications of this board. I also want to talk about the unfettered power this board would possess. And again according to the agenda information sheet the oversight board would need subpoena power for witnesses the authority to interview officers within 48 hours of an event unfettered access all DPT complaints records data and case files body camera footage 911 calls and also crime scene access. This amount of power is completely inappropriate for a civilian as unfounded and not necessary. Allowing an untrained civilian onto a crime scene immediately after the crime occurs would actually in my opinion put the victims court case at risk due to the potential for contamination of evidence and also the ability to interview a police officer less than 48 hours after an incident is wildly inappropriate and does not take into consideration the officers mental health needs. On top of that the last thing that we should be doing immediately after an incident is give detailed information to a public citizen that has as far as I can tell no documented accountability to prevent the spread of such information to the public. And this can include potential information obtained prior to the presence of legal counsel and also carries the risk for potential spread of HIPAA information. Ultimately there's nothing stopping this. I'm going to refer to this as the echo chamber of a board for going to the public demanding an unjust decision on officers livelihood and freedoms before decision has been made by DA or jury. The influence of public opinion has an influence on the outcome of certain cases and has resulted in unfair and unjust outcomes for police officers and citizens alike. And we've already begun seeing it happen in Atlanta, Los Angeles and many other cities across the nation. Due process and law exists for a reason and we must work to improve within that structure. Police officers are citizens too and should maintain such constitutional rights in my opinion. I don't believe that this board would be able to respect those boundaries. In conclusion if we really want to fight discrimination, police brutality and anything of the like then we must do it as a community as a whole without compromising constitutional freedoms. Creating more laws based on intersectional differences between citizens is not good policy and only results in more division and unrest and I hope that you consider removing this item from consideration. Thank you. Okay. All right. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate the call. Absolutely. Thank you. Do you want me to stay on or? No, no, no. You can. Yeah. We're not allowed to discuss or deliberate because of open meetings laws. Okay. Sounds great. Well, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate all you. Thank you. Have a good day. All right. We're waiting on our next caller. Oh, Councilmember Davis. Yeah, Mayor. Under open meeting laws, we are allowed to make a statement of factual policy. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Do you have a statement of factual policy? I do. The proposal that was just brought up by the caller was a proposal by one council member, a singular individual. It was rejected this afternoon in its current form by the rest of the council. We may discuss some sort of oversight board at some point, but a majority of the council rejected the proposal that's been making the way around its way around Facebook. Okay. All right. Thank you, sir. All right. I did see the caller pop up. Is the caller there? Yes, caller. Welcome. You're on with the Denton City Council during Denton City Council meeting and our public comment portion of our agenda. This is commonly referred to as open mic, which means that you've got four minutes once you state your name and address, but at the end of your time, the council will be unable to deliberate or discuss questions with you simply because of the state of the law, the Texas Open Meeting Acts and this agenda item. So once you state your name and your address, I will start your time and let you know when it's up. All right. Thank you. Oh, yeah. My name is Matt. Yeah, my name is Matt Solomon. I live at 1404 Paco Tre in Denton. An issue that has come to my attention, it's a bit of a concern, is that people are moving. This is peak season for people to move to another house or another apartment. And the reason for this concern is that folks may be potentially moving to locations that are potentially contaminated. And I wanted to see if there was any interest on the council in creating a not necessarily a mandate, but set guidelines for sanitation of a residence as well as one thing in an effort to ensure that in case they are moving from a contaminated location, that they are not moving themselves and contaminate things into a location that isn't contaminated. And we also want to, and I also want to make sure that, you know, folks aren't moving into locations that are potentially contaminated if they are moving from one location that is not contaminated. And we also want to make sure that people who are moving in with roommates, that seems like a permanent situation we're going to have here in town. We want to make sure that people aren't moving into houses with contaminated people or a contaminated person is not moving into a house with those who may or who are not contaminated. And I bring it up because it's all in an effort to fight the spread of COVID. And we also want to make sure since public health and safety are constantly at risk, we want to make sure that all of that is making the bud by ensuring people can get around safely seeing how as we want to make sure that our altered daily lives are made a little bit easier. And I just proposed that that funding come from any and all agencies such as police departments and other like agencies that may have a bit too much in their resources tank in an effort to ensure folks have extra time to not only gather their things but clean their things, clean their residences, and also for landlords and property owners to make sure that these places are safe for people to move into all in an effort to again promote the flattening of the curve. Okay. Does that conclude your remarks? Yes, it does. Okay. Thank you very much for calling in. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So we'll move on to the next caller. Hello. Yes, caller. You're on with the Dent City Council. Public portion comment of our City Council meeting. I'm Mayor Chris Watson. Once you start your once you state your name and address, I will start your time and you have four minutes. Okay. Hi. It's Jennifer Lane and I'm in Denton 76205. And I'm calling mainly just to kind of draw attention to an item that came up during the work session today as a result of Mark Richardson's outstanding presentation. At the very end of that, I believe it was Council Member Meltzer reiterated something that Mr. Richardson had said, which was that yes, the science would, scientifically, yes, if you if you observed strict mask wearing and strict distancing, that indeed it could prevent a shutdown as the numbers rise or if the numbers rise, but that this is somewhat impractical because people aren't really following it and that therefore our mask mandate and the distancing and the educational program, all of this needs to go together to really push people in the direction of doing the right thing so that a city shutdown, another one isn't complete lockdown, isn't necessarily going to come, which is looking awfully close to arriving, sadly, because we didn't stay closed long enough to get a continuous downturn during the spring. So I wanted to point that out. And then also I didn't hear anybody speak before me, but I did see on the agenda there was some reference to a council member speaking with people outdoors but not being necessarily willing to meet one-on-one indoors. And what we now know is that the chances of picking up the infection outdoors at a distance masked is virtually none, whereas indoors for any length of time unmasked particularly is very great that gyms, churches, bars, these are the most dangerous restaurants, perhaps are the most dangerous, most risky places because one tends to sit there and be there and the virus is there and spreading, whereas outdoors it dissipates much more quickly and the droplets break up and so on. So I wanted to just point that out, that those two things that convening outdoors seems not to have pushed things further but meeting too soon, too many people too closely indoors is really dangerous. This, of course, has bearing on the upcoming school year and other aspects of life that we'd all like to return to but are at the moment on the knife's edge. So that's really it, just to kind of really draw attention to that point I think that was made in the work session that might not, as many people might not be attending to as they would the evening City Council meeting, that really people must distance and must mask if we are to avoid a shutdown and even then because of the unreliability of people doing it, it's only if we really do it can we have a chance to avoid shutdown. Thank you. Okay. Thank you caller. Appreciate that. Appreciate the comments. You're welcome. Okay I don't believe we have any more callers for open mic. So we will now move to our next agenda item which is the consent agenda. And so Chair would entertain action on the consent agenda Council Member Briggs. I hope I get this right. I move to approve the consent agenda except for A, B, E, G, H, and Q. Yes. I believe that's correct. All right we have a motion. Council Member Ryan. I'll second. All right we have a motion and a second for approval of the consent agenda except for items A, B, E, G, H, and Q which will be taken up as items for individual consideration immediately upon action on this agenda item. All right so I will poll the council. We have a motion and a second to approve. Council Member Armitter. Yes. Council Member Briggs. Yes. Council Member Ryan. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem. Aye. Council Member Meltzer. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Mayor Watts is an aye. The consent agenda items save those that have been pulled is approved unanimously. We will now go to those individual items that were pulled as items for individual consideration. The first one is agenda item 4A. And I believe Council Member Davis has recused himself. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton approving and authorizing the city manager or his designee to execute an interlocal cooperation agreement between the City of Denton and Denton County. I believe we have a presentation on this so the chair would entertain any action. Council Member Ryan. Move approval of item 4A. Council Member Meltzer. Second. We're having a motion and a second for agenda item 4A. Council Member Ryan, how say you. Aye. Council Member Meltzer. Aye. Council Member Briggs. Yes. Council Member Mayor Pro Tem Hudspeth. Aye. Council Member Armater. Yes. Mayor Watts is an aye. So that motion carries six to zero. We'll move on to 4B, which I believe Council Member Davis has also recused himself from agenda item 4B. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton approving and authorizing the city manager or his designee to execute an interlocal cooperation agreement between the City of Denton and Denton County for fire protection services. Council Member Meltzer. I move approval. Council Member Briggs. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second for approval of agenda item 4B. Council Member Meltzer, how say you. Aye. Council Member Briggs. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem. Aye. Council Member Armater. Yes. Council Member Ryan. Aye. Mayor Watts is an aye. That motion carries six to zero. We will now invite Council Member Davis back into the meeting and there he is by magic. All right, we've got, let's see, next agenda item for individual consideration from the consent agenda was agenda item E. I believe we've got a couple of recusals on that as well. Council Member Meltzer and Council Member Armater. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton authorizing the city manager to execute an agreement with and expend funds to the University of North Texas as a contractual consultant in the amount of $40,840 under the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. Council Member Davis. I move approval of the item. All right. Council Member Briggs. I second. All right, we will take a vote on motion and a second to approve agenda item 4E. Council Member Davis, how say you. Aye. Council Member Briggs. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem. Aye. Council Member Ryan. I'm sorry. I just, I looked over at City Manager and almost said Council Member Hellman, but that would have been a quite a faux pas on my part. I apologize, Mr. City Manager. I just had to share that kind of brain freeze with the community. Mayor Watts is an aye. So I believe that ordinance carries five to two and that was for agenda item 5E ID 20-1238. I'm going to probably go ahead and start calling out the ID number. Some of my colleagues who I've seen run the meetings, they call out those ID numbers. So I'm going to go ahead and pick that up just so that I can be consistent with my colleagues. All right. So the next agenda item we have that is pulled is Adam G, which is considered option of an ordinance of the City of Denton, Texas, a homeroom municipal corporation authorizing the City Manager as a designee to execute approval documents under the Joint Operating Agreement of Texas Municipal Power Agency. And before we take any action, we do have a public speaker on this one. So we're going to invite that caller in. Caller, you are on with the Denton City Council for our items for individual consideration, which was pulled from the consent agenda for agenda item 4G, which is the posting for the Texas Municipal Power Agency. So once you state your name and address, I will start your time and you'll have four minutes. Caller, are you there? Caller, are you there? Caller, are you there? Caller, are you there? Caller? All right. We're going to take it one more time and then we're going to go on to the next agenda. We're going to take a caller. Are you there? All right. Okay. Yeah. You are there. Okay. All right. If you'll state your name and address, your time will begin for agenda item 4G that you've signed up to speak on. Yes, my name is Jennifer Lane, Denton, Texas, 76205. And I think it's mainly questions that I have about this item. I was under the impression that there would be discussion of the item before public comment. Okay. Well, if you'll if you want to go ahead and ask your questions, then once the call is terminated, we might be able to answer those questions in the discussion. Okay, so this is consent item 4G that was pulled regarding TMPA. Would you be able to let me know what the intention is for this coal plan? I don't think I don't think there's necessarily an answer for that. That's that's not really the subject matter of this particular posting. So that's not something that I mean, I personally don't like operating agreement. It's a joint operating agreement regarding funding and setting aside money for funding for decommissioning costs, which would be the city of Denton's portion. So I'm going to quit talking because I mean, your time. So yeah, that's okay. Thank you. I would just say that I would support decommissioning. Thank you. And I would support the city funding that. Okay. All right. Thank you, caller. Appreciate that. All right. Council would entertain or chair would entertain any action on this item. Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah, first, I want to underscore what you just said, Mayor, that this is a budget budget ordinance that assumes decommissioning does not assume a sale and operation. And I move approval. Okay. All right. Councilmember Armitage. I had asked to pull it because public comment and to get questions answered. So I was just wondering and I'll probably be happy to second it, but I was wondering if you could hear from from staff on just to, you know, explain to what extent does, you know, does this guarantee that decommissioning is going to happen? Or is this just budgeting for it with the plan that didn't happen? Well, before the staff answers, this is not a vote on either disk decommissioning or the sale of the unit. So I just want to make sure that the public understands that. Yes. Yes. And so my question is, you know, we just could get an explanation on so that both I myself and the public are aware, you know, what what isn't and isn't, you know, being agreed to in this budget. In other words, this is not necessarily a guarantee just because decommissioning is mentioned in the agenda item and that is the plan that that's going to happen. Or is it if someone could just speak to that so that the public can have a clear sense and I can have a clear sense of what you know and what you don't know? Is staff on the line? Tony, go ahead. I'm here. I'm here, Mayor. Councilmember, this budget includes the plan to decommission the plan and all the associated remediation costs and activities associated with that. There are ongoing discussions with the prospective buyer. Those discussions are still ongoing. TMPA at this point has not made a recommendation. Once there is a recommendation on a prospective sale, then that will then come back to the public utility board and the city council for consideration. But at this point, that is still in negotiation. And but this budget here is the more conservative approach and that we assume all the costs for decommissioning of that plan. All right. Okay. All right. That was my understanding and I second. All right. So we have a motion by Councilmember Meltzer and a second by Councilmember Armitage. Councilmember Meltzer, how about you on that motion? Well, we lost him. There he is. No, I'm back. Go ahead, Councilmember Meltzer. Yes. I said I. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. I got distracted. Yeah, I got distracted. Councilmember Armature. Yes. Councilmember Davis. Aye. Councilmember Briggs. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem. Aye. Councilmember Ryan. Aye. Mayor Watz has an aye. The motion carries unanimously 7-0. Moving on to agenda item 4H as an item for individual consideration, consider adoption of an ordinance authorizing the city manager or his designee to execute amendment number two to the transmission operator maintenance and construction service agreement between the City of Denton and the Texas Municipal Power Agency. And we do have, okay. All right. We did have a call, but we don't. All right. So, yes. Chair would entertain action on this. Mayor Pro Tem. Move approval. Councilmember Ryan. I second. Any discussion? Mayor Pro Tem, how say Councilmember Armature. Yeah, if we could just to get a public explanation from staff and layperson's terms exactly, exactly what this, what this means. Okay. I'm sure, uh, Mr. Montes will be joining us here shortly or someone else. Oh, someone else. Yes. Go ahead. Yes. Good evening, Mayor. Mayor Pro Tem, Council. I'm Smith Day with Denton Municipal Electric. And this item is a continuation of a, an agreement that we've had for a few years now. Uh, TMPA owns several pieces of transmission equipment in and around the City of Denton. Those are interconnected with the city's transmission system. And a few years ago, we had entered into this agreement because out of convenience for both parties, TMPA and ourselves, it was easier for the City of Denton being so close to the equipment to operate and maintain it. And we're a first responder for that equipment. Operating it gives our controllers, our transmission controllers a view into, into the, our system, a better view into our system, better situational awareness. And it's been a win-win for both entities. And it only involves transmission, strictly poles and wires. There is, there is no generation or mine or any of the other TMPA components attaches. Okay. Any other questions? All right. Was there a motion in a second? I don't think there was there a motion? Council Mayor Pro Tem and then Council Member Ryan. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. It's not even too late yet. Uh, all right. Mayor Pro Tem, how say you on this item? All right. Council Member Ryan. Aye. Council Member Meltzer. Aye. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Armitter. Yes. Council Member Briggs. Yes. All right. Motion carries unanimously that conclude. No, we've got one more queue. We've got one more. Um, this is agenda item four Q consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton at Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation, authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with WILPWR Rides LLC. All right. Uh, any discussion on this? I don't believe we have any public callers. Any discussion? Go ahead Council Member Armitter. Is Chief Dixon on the line? Yeah, we have both Chief Dixon and Terry Cater who can answer any questions. Okay. Whoever, uh, would prefer to just answer the question. If you could see, uh, to the need for, uh, for, for these motorcycles and, you know, replacing, um, uh, whether or not they're, they're replacements, new additions, are they primarily for, for traffic? Go ahead, Terry. Uh, Fleet Superintendent, uh, I'm just going to speak to the fact that these are scheduled replacements and they are out in the year 2022, 23 and 2324. The current fleet of motorcycles are 2017, 2018 models and we'll be operating them for, for several years yet before they are replaced. There are no fleet additions planned in this agenda item. Okay. Any other questions? Council Member Armitter? Yeah. Just wanted to say, um, I'm going to vote no to this with the thinking, uh, preparing for, uh, the, uh, to provide relief in the emergency situation that we have. So I'm thinking of what are our immediate needs. So since if we don't have a need for this until a little while from now, I feel like in my safe holding off on this. So I just, yeah, that's why I'm going to be voting no. All right. Council Member, Mayor Pro Tem. So I have a question of clarification. Uh, in other words, this money would not be spent until it's needed. Is that correct? That money would not be spent until it's needed, but this item is not just for replacement motorcycles. It's also for ongoing maintenance and repair. The city staff is not, uh, trained and we do not have the specialty tools to work on the Harley Davidson. So only about $300,000 of this would be planned for replacements and that's several years out, but the remaining money would be spent as needed for current repairs on the currently wonderful. I appreciate that. I appreciate that clarification. Thank you so much. Uh, Council Member Armitter. So is that a package deal expense? So we have to, the deal is for the future vehicles plus the ongoing maintenance and one, they can't split it up. Well, no, we generally will set these contracts out for three years. We get the best price we can from, uh, Harley Davidson through the bid. That also covers, uh, you know, acquisition as well as maintenance. So that's why it's all, uh, one contract is it's much less efficient and, uh, doesn't make as much sense to tighten it and do multiple RFPs. Yep. Yep. Okay. Great. Thank you. All right. Mayor Pro Tem, you made a motion for approval. I did. I don't think I've called for a second yet. Is there a second Council Member Ryan? I'll second. All right. We have a motion and a second for agenda item for Q. Mayor Pro Tem, how say you? Council Member Ryan? Council Member Armitter? No. Council Member Meltzer? Aye. Council Member Davis? Aye. Council Member Briggs? Yes. Mayor Watts is an aye. Motion carries six to one. Now we're moving on to that. That does conclude our items for individual consideration that were pulled from the consent agendas item. So now we'll move on to agenda item number five, which are items for individual consideration. And, um, so, uh, Mr. City attorney and Mr. City manager, I've misplaced the, the order of the agenda items when we get down to the annexation. So as we get there, just remind me. Um, all right. So agenda item five a is consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, uh, Texas home real municipal corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with Rizikon for municipal safety and training services in a three year not to exceed amount contract for 2.155 million. Mayor and council, can you hear me? We can. All right. This is Sarah Hensley, assistant city manager, and I have a very brief presentation for you in regards to safety services contract. Um, and I'll go through this, uh, rather quickly and, um, and then can answer questions at the end. Oh, when I arrived here, Oh, went back. Hold on just a second. It went ahead of me. Let me go back. There were somebody clicked it without. There we go. Um, we had a safety office internally here in the city. It was staffed by three general safety staff, two that were working out of municipal electric and one that was working in solid waste. Um, we did an assessment, sort of an internal assessment, looking at the skill set and how we were addressing our issues related to safety and found rather quickly. We had a very limited skill set. Uh, we were seeing a large amount of issues from a, um, our reports, our safety and incident and accident reports. That was a really disjointed operation. We didn't have any metrics, no real standard operating procedures and those that we did have have were outdated and missing. Um, DME and other city department staff were raising serious concerns at skip level meetings and other meetings in regards to lack of training, particularly in the area of line and pole safety as it relates to DME trench safety, digging safety, uh, bloodborne pathogen trainings and other areas that are serious to the work that we do here in this city. When you have large pieces of equipment and you're moving, um, and digging holes, this is a serious concern. The lack of safety equipment and monitoring as well as the inventory system was not, um, not, uh, up to par. It was also outdated. And to give you an example of that, just to let you know, so for instance, when they order the gloves for protection, when they're working on the lines, those gloves have to be checked on a regular basis. They do get outdated. And so those are of serious concern. Uh, we, the city went through a request for proposals to get a safety assessment. So to not only reinforce what we believe was happening, but also to have an expert in the field, look at where we needed to go from a safety perspective. And, uh, we conducted that in October of last year. And a company called Rizzicon out of Novi, Michigan was selected who worked under the city manager's authority to conduct this review. They began the assessment in January of 2020. It engaged different levels of our staff and ask a lot of questions. They did safety surveys with the different frontline employees. And what you see before you are the findings, not all, but some of the findings that were, uh, that came about. There was no data collected. And again, the information was not strategically utilized. We had no real record management system. So we had no idea who had what training when and what, and, um, how long it was valid. We didn't do any job hazard analysis, which will help us know to what extent the different jobs we need to provide more training, what types of equipment. And again, the record keeping of that, the safety efforts were reactive instead of proactive. And, um, that is always not a good thing when you have a large workforce and you're dealing with everything from moving dirt, digging holes, laying lines and hanging electricity, uh, the lack of involvement and support in the field for our workers. And then of course the policies and procedures and protocols that drive that work were, were non-existent. So the city asked them to stay on and assist us with the development of some standard operating procedures and policies because we desperately needed them and also work with us on some specific training needs right away. And so they did that in the form of a boot camp from an OSHA boot camp training and then some other training on how to, um, avoid incidents and accidents and some of the basics. During that time, we had the VSP, as you know, uh, program that many of our employees have taken advantage of. And then we had a retirement, which created a huge void and we had no safety staff other than a couple, I believe, uh, one with solid waste and we had one that remained at, uh, DME. Uh, so Rizikon provided those services for us on a interim basis until we could look at what we needed to do. We decided to go out again and, and, uh, reach far and wide with another RFP to compare what it would look like if we provided those services in-house versus an option to contract. And the city was in need of a very comprehensive safety service approach. And we looked at the possibility of bringing a certified contractor and staff on board to help us. We received two qualified bids. One of those happened to be Rizikon. Um, and so we're proposing, uh, that if we move forward with this, it would be the selection of Rizikon and we would actually eliminate a few positions there because we'd be going with an outsource for three years. I wanted to share with you though, just a little bit of our pie charts here to look at how we have seen an increase in our incidents and accidents and equipment claims. This starts with 2017 and you can see from an auto, the blue is the auto, the orange is the general liability, the silver is the property, and then the yellow color is workman's comp, worker's comp. And you can see how over, over the years here, we've seen to have risen in some areas and decreased in others, but we did go up significantly in the auto, um, incidents in 2018 from 2017. In 2019, it went up again to 284. And again, these are all the things that have driven us to look at another opportunity to not only provide a better safety environment for our employees, but to also look at economies of scale and efficiencies. And here at 2020, you see where we're down a little on our auto accidents, but we have still some work to do in, um, in the area of worker's comp and also our general liability. General liability are things where, well, we may, um, damage someone's property when we're doing the work, um, sometimes claims against the city from our, our staff that are working on things. So here's sort of your operating and savings. As we did this request for proposals, we saw that it was costing us almost a million dollars, $903,000 a year to have our own safety staff. Now while, um, we have some that knew a little bit about safety and were certified in that area, the majority, uh, several of them were not. And so Rizikon's annual expense is approximately 200,000 less. And then you can look at the overall savings through a three year contract. The recommendation by staff is that we move forward and that council approve a contract with Rizikon for three years. They will be the responsible party for hiring already certified and trained safety staff who are certified in areas of industrial safety, um, driver's safety, uh, health and safety issues that, um, will come already on board with that training after three years. And it will take us three years to really get back to where we need to be. After three years, the city can reevaluate our position and look at whether or not we want to bring those safety services in house. Questions? Okay. All right. We'll pull the screen down then. All right. Questions? Thank you. Council member Armitter. Uh, so thank, and thank you, sir, for that presentation. Um, I, I'm strongly in support of this and, you know, I'm speaking as somebody who very often is, uh, asking, why are we contracting out when we can do this in house, when we can have our staff do this. Um, but this is a situation, uh, where, you know, our, our staff have been endangered by, uh, the way we had been doing things, uh, for a long time. Uh, and you know, if there's one thing that the nation is thinking about now more than ever before, it is worker safety. So I'm very proud that, that we have learned from, uh, from these mistakes. We have assessed them. I strongly support this. I want to ask, and I assume the answer is yes, but, uh, is there a plan to within this three year period, collect the same kind of data, uh, and, and assess it that we saw in this presentation? Absolutely. And actually even more to look at what kinds of incidents and accidents and categorize them, look at where the training specific needs to be added so that we're training our workers in those specific areas related to those incidents and accidents. And so we plan to hopefully come back with you to in three years, actually yearly to give you an update on our numbers and how we've improved in the overall safety for our employees. Thank you so much. So I, I would like to move support, but happy to wait for. Okay. All right. We'll come back to you on that. Council member Briggs. Thank you. Council member Amateur for asking about data. Cause that, that was going to be my question. I'm glad to see that we're going to continue to do that, but are we setting goals? Um, do we have goals like in, in reduction so that we know what we're working towards? And if this contract is, I mean, you know, 0.1%, does that mean that it's satisfactory to us to keep going? I mean, every yearly we're going to look at this, even though the contracts for three years is there, um, is, are we going to be doing that, that type of research? Yes. As a matter of fact, the company that I've been working with two of the leads and we've set some goals already in what would be a contract if it's approved, but what we're going to look at is the highest level of incidents and where they're occurring. And that's where the folks will be. And then we'll start to do percentages of reduction in those areas. So we can see if it's auto accidents, what is it that's happening? How can we train? It's also a culture shift here in our organization about safety. So there's a, there's several different metrics we're going to be focusing on. I look forward to being able to come back before you in a year and share with you the improvement I'm counting on that this has been able to do and to, and more importantly, to protect our workers. Yes. Council member Briggs. Yes. I have a question for our city manager. How long was this, um, this department created? I mean, I mean, I'm just, I'm curious. I don't remember that. What was it? The internal safety coming to present, present to us. Was it just one office or the individuals within a department or there was a subgroup within human resources, overseeing safety and risk. And one of the first things I asked Sarah to do when she joined our team last year was just kind of get some fresh eyes on it. Take a look at this particular area. Tony and I in particular had been receiving concerns at DME and from our utilities. We had a couple of pretty scary incidents, one with a employer that almost got run over by a backhoe and another one that got hurt out on an electric distribution line. And we actually had the employees coming to us saying, look, we will help design the training. We're not getting sufficient training. It's been years and years since our, our protocols have been updated. And when you have a workforce actively reaching out and wanting to be part of the training program versus fearing it, most, most places are not that excited to have it. It just really spoke volumes to us. So we, we brought Rizikhan in and said, look, we really need to understand the facts, what's going on in these departments. It wasn't pretty in terms of how the programs had been designed over the years and enforced. We've reinforced with our supervisors, our management teams, our directors that this is serious. Worker safety is a top priority. So we, we've asked for new policy manuals to be put in place, safety protocols. We actually have employees now wanting to sign up and get to the training courses because they're hearing such good things about how the information is presented and that sort of thing. So this is really a great win for our employees and really driven by the fact that they felt comfortable enough to speak up to us and say, look, we know it can be better. We're not happy. And so we, we peeled everything apart. Sarah and the team that she put together has been working closely with Rizikhan to do the needs analysis. So we do have a jumping off point, can assess how they're doing. I have a follow up. Sure. Thank you. Thank you for explaining that. Cause I, I just wonder, you know, seeing how I guess bad it was before. I'm just wondering how long that, that was allowed to continue, but I'm glad we're looking at different ways to handle the situation to work for safety. I saw this company was out of Houston. Well, they, how is it going to physically work? Will they send people here to work within our city? Is that so, so the main companies that are out of Novi, Michigan, but what, what the beauty of this is, is we enter into an agreement with them and they actually hire the staff and they will be on site here and work under the direction of the assistant city manager. So a director will be hired and then they'll have a training specialist and then two other people that work directly with the one staff that's left in solid waste and the one that's over in DME that has the experience with the pole and line safety. And then they're here on site and part of our organization, they just are being paid through a contract. And these are people that come with a master's degree, would come with a master's degree in occupational health and safety and those kinds of things. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. Chair would entertain action on this item. Mayor Pro Tem? Move approval. Councilmember Armitage? Second. We have a motion and a second for agenda item 5A, 5A ID 20-1301. Mayor Pro Tem, how say you? Aye. Councilmember Armitage, how say you? Yes. Councilmember Briggs? Yes. Councilmember Meltzer? Aye. Councilmember Davis? Aye. Councilmember Ryan? Aye. Mayor Watts has an aye. Motion carries unanimously. Moving on to agenda item 5B, ID 20-1389. Considered option of ordinance of the city of Denton appointing John Cashman as the city auditor for two year term beginning on the seventh day of September 2020. I don't believe we have a presentation on that. Mayor Pro Tem? Move denial. Do we have Councilmember Meltzer? Yeah, I'll second. All right. So we have a motion and a second for a denial on agenda item 5B. So Mayor Pro Tem, how say you? Aye. Councilmember Meltzer? Aye. Councilmember Armitage? Yes. Councilmember Briggs? Yes. Councilmember Ryan? Aye. Councilmember Davis? Aye. Mayor Watts has an aye and that aye is to deny the appointment and the contract on agenda item 5B, ID 20-1389. All right. We'll move on to agenda item C, which is ID 20-1246. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton and Texas Home Rule Municipal Corporation authorizing the city manager to execute a contract with Stripe A Zone, Inc. for pavement markings. Good evening, Mayor and members of the Council. This is Brian Yon, city traffic engineer here to talk to you about something I'm sure is near and dear to each and every one of you. That's right, pavement markings. So let me get that. Can we all see the presentation? Yes. Okay. Yes. So one of the main objectives of our traffic operations group is to maintain and install pavement markings to provide a safe environment for cyclists, pedestrians, motorists of all types in city right-of-ways on city roadways. We do not have the resources to accomplish all of this with city staff. So we typically will contract the majority of the marking, maintenance, and some installation every year. The strategy change that's represented in this contract is the direction that we're going to be taking in the future. Previously, we've been piggybacking on other cities' contracts. I think the current piggyback is with the city of Grand Prairie where they have prepared a bid for markings and we simply adopt their pricing and their line items. So moving forward, we decided that we would like to prepare our own bid documents, include all of the line items that we feel that we need and extend it for a three-year period rather than have to basically be at the mercy of another city's renewals, et cetera. So that's what we have done with this contract. We've included literally every item that we can think of, not only for our own department but for other departments such as streets, utilities, airport. Our goal with this contract is to have something that is available to all departments of the city for pavement markings and then even parking lots and city facilities. We don't have to bid those. We can simply go to this contract and get the benefit of the unit prices that we've negotiated through this contract. So typically our focus on an annual basis for maintenance and installation will be schools, the GISD campuses and the crosswalks there, the UNT and TWU crosswalks as well. And we've got just a myriad of intersections that all need maintenance and I'm sure you're all aware, some of our markings we're not keeping up. So what we're trying to do is ramp up our contract and get some better pricing, make our dollars go farther and that's what this contract represents. Our recommendation is to approve the three-year contract with StripaZone in support of that goal of improving, maintaining and installing clear and safe markings throughout the city. So if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer. Okay. Any questions? Council member Briggs. So I remember having this conversation, I guess a few years ago where there's some of the stuff that we do in-house, but we have a separate contract. Are we still going to continue to do some of it ourselves along with this contract? And then my other question is when we do large road contracts, is the striping included in that or is that something that we have to do come in separately on top of to like bike lanes and crosswalks and striping? Is that something like a separate package? So let me answer the first question. Yes, we will continue to operate our own striping equipment. We have a fairly new paint truck and we will continue to do that, which we can with our staffing resources, but we don't have the equipment to install. If you'll remember in the discussions, we talked about the materials called thermoplastic. It's a hot, basically sprayed on plastic and that lasts a lot longer than the paint. So we typically will contract out that for our larger maintenance contracts. The second part of your question or the second question there, it really depends on the project itself. If it's a large CIP project, it probably will be bid as part of the overall contract. Some of the other departmental activities, like the streets department, if they resurface, sometimes they'll defer to us to operate or to replace the striping. Sometimes they'll put it in the contract. What we wanted to do is just give an option with this contract so that if the streets department goes in and resurfaces or the water department goes in and replaces a line and they obliterate some markings, they don't have to bid it. They don't have to, if they're just going to put back what was there or if they're going to put back something different, we already have a contract available and ready to use. So that's, that was the intent of that three-year contract with Stripizo. Okay. And you did say they would do bike lanes? Yes. We can do the bike lanes or we can contract those or that can be part of the overall construction contract or the repaying contract. There's a number of different ways we can accomplish that. Okay. Any other questions? Council Member Armitage? Council Member Briggs, I'll come back to you. I didn't see that you had a follow-up. I was going to move approval. Okay. All right. Go ahead, Council Member Armitage. So if you could just explain why staff can't do the striping. You mentioned it. I think it is, as you mentioned, from what I understand from the backup, it's a matter of numbers that we don't have the numbers. Is that correct? Of just kind of just boots on the ground to do this work? It's not about lacking equipment or costs? It's a combination. So the majority of the pavement markings that you see around the City of Denton are thermoplastic. And that requires a different piece of equipment than what we own. We own a paint truck. So it's the paint and the reason we bought the paint truck was specifically for the smaller jobs and to allow our crews to assist the larger contracts, larger reconstruction of paving contracts. Once that new surface, that new roadway surface is in place, our crews are on site. We can go out and put down a paint marking immediately and it looks good. It just won't last as long, but it will last long enough for the contractor who's going to do the final or the permanent markings with thermoplastic to come in and put basically the final coat on, the permanent finish. But to your the first part of your question, we don't have enough staff or equipment or really budget to do the entire city the way we'd like to. So we're just trying to get this contract is trying to stretch our dollars. We're getting a little bit better unit prices and we were previously and we're just trying to maximize what we can get on the ground every year. Okay. All right. Council member Briggs. You were muted. I move approval. All right. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. All right. We have a motion to second and I do want to just make a comment about that. I'm going to incorporate into this about the street striping. I hope everybody has noticed that street striping is occurring and maybe is completed. I don't know that the status of it, but on the reconstructed portions of Elm, the reconstructed portions of locust and the reconstructed portions of Dallas Drive. So my hats off to getting those projects striped pursuant to staying in posting for this particular agenda item. So we we have a motion and a second council member Briggs. I say you on agenda item C, which is ID 20-1246. Say yes. Mayor Pro Tem. Aye. Council member Melcer. Aye. Council member Davis. Aye. Council member Armitter. Yes. Council member Ryan. Aye. Mayor is an aye. So agenda item five C 20-1246 carries unanimously. We'll move on to agenda item five D. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, a home rural municipal corporation authorizing the city manager or his designee to execute a contract with S H I government solutions Inc. And this is for ID 20-1233. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. All right. I was going to say we couldn't hear anything. So I didn't know if you're muted or not. So there you are. All right. Thank you, mayor, council, Scott McDonald, development services. I'm delighted to be here this evening with you to discuss the land management software upgrade to give you a little bit of background. The the department had made a supplemental request in fiscal year 18-19 for $500,000 for implementation for new software. And in 1920 we seek approval for 300,000 for supplemental for maintenance for a software upgrade. In April of 2020 the bids were rejected on the RFP due to the cost, the implementation period and the associated timelines and the economic conditions that existed in the city. Today, we're here to have council consideration for an upgrade to the current solution that we're using. So to just give a basic overview of what we have for a software solution, what we have today is antiquated. It was developed over 20 years ago. It is very confusing for our customers. We receive many complaints. What we're looking to do is upgrade to a single solution. The new interface will be much more intuitive for our customers. It provides a single portal rather than using two different software solutions. It will provide greater mobility for our inspectors and it provides the ability to have templates that will modify ultimately the workflow for all of our staff both in the office and the inspectors in the field. Currently, we integrate with a software solution called Project Docs. Project Docs is how an individual uploads plans. Those plans have to be uploaded prior to someone paying for the application and track it. So they're using the two different solutions. This software solution will provide a single portal. Someone will apply, upload their documents, and they'll be reviewed with the solution that we're using now which is called Bluebeam. The software itself provides very limited functionality for reporting, dashboard, matrix. It's, again, antiquated, outdated, and certainly needs to be updated. It'll use a more current platform. We're using a host or a server currently which is due to be upgraded and this will be a hosted solution which will be just much more current with what the standards are that are used across the city. Again, this solution has been around for 20 years. It has outlived its usefulness. This hosted solution will be evergreen. So ultimately, it'll be updated just as any software updates come through rather than having to come back and request additional upgrades. To give you just an example of what this software solution looks like today, it's similar to a Microsoft 3.1 version if somebody is familiar with that back in the day. It is very clunky. It has a lot of drop-down lists. It's not very intuitive. So the customer interface gives them kind of a, somewhat of a portal to look at. The other screen on the right would show you what it is that our employees are working through. The updated solution provides us greater reporting functionality. The customer interface is much more intuitive for them. They're able to get to all of their items. They can look at permits. They can look at their application fees, schedules, and then our inspectors will be able to automatically be routed, will have the ability to know what stops they've done because they can upload that data at real time. The costs as far as where we were at, again, indicated our supplementals that were approved for implementation was $500,000. The annual maintenance was $300,000, which was a total of $800,000. Our upgrade cost and implementation for this solution is $103,000. Our annual maintenance is $84,000 for a total of $187,000. It's a net savings of $612,000 over what we were proposing to spend. And ultimately, it's just a net increase of $14,000 annually over what we're doing today using two solutions going to a single solution. Staff recommends approval of a five-year contract, and that amount would be at $523,000. $103,000 of that is a one-time implementation fee, and $84,000 is the annual maintenance for that solution. We expect to begin working on it as soon as we can get through this. Software provider is, again, currently what we're using, and we hope to have it completed within six to nine months. I will stand for any questions. Okay. All right. If we can pull the... There you go. Any questions? Councilmember Armitter? So, I'm... Thank you for the presentation, and I'm convinced that the software for development needs upgrading. What I would need a little more convincing of is why now? You know, could this wait 'til next year? And again, I'm thinking given the emergency that we're in, you know, what is the need for this this year within the next, you know, six to nine months versus, or this year, you know, early next year versus at some time in the future? We've been attempting to work on this software solution for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, we have some security issues with our IT department. So, the concerns over the server that we have as old as it is has to be upgraded, and it has to be upgraded soon. That's one component. The second component is that we've been receiving fielding complaints with the development community for years, and we've been trying to come up with a solution as indicated that we went through and approved this originally in the budget in fiscal year '18-'19, trying to get a solution. As a result of the economic conditions, we did ultimately back down from where we were at. We're not necessarily settling for a solution, but it's only going to cost us that $14,000 over what we're currently paying to have a more state of the art. It gets off of our city server, so it's a hosted solution that, again, provides for the security concerns that our IT department has, as well as the concern with the loss of the server. I would just add to Scott's explanation to you, Councilmember Armitage, that it's also keeping our word to the development community. When we decided to go to a cost of service philosophy last year, basically, a couple of things that we promised them is that we would put the tools in place to get them out of our processes quicker, to communicate with them quicker, and provide better tools. We've actually built the cost of the system in our cost of service study and our development impact fees, or our development fees. It's not a surprise to them they need this tool as we've taken development services more virtual. Thank you. Okay. Councilmember Briggs, and then Councilmember Ryan. Mr. Hellman just pretty much answered my main question, was that I figured when we did the cost of service update, I wondered if this was involved in that. And I know that since I've been on council for five years, we've been looking to try to upgrade and try to improve the system. So why is it going to take six to nine months, did you say? Like once this is approved, it will be six to nine months before it's implemented and can be used? Is that what I heard? Yes, it's, it's due to the age of the software system that we have today. It's, it's, is the same software provider, but it's a completely new system because it's a hosted solution. It'll be a little easier as far as migrating the data over, but it is still a challenge because they're, they're just really going to have to export data and then convert it and put it back into a new solution. Okay. Thank you, Mayor. Scott, I think you just answered what my question was. And that is right now I can go back, I can go into track it and I can see any permit that's been pulled on my house or any, any place, any address in town. So all that data will get exported and imported into the new cloud based system. Is that correct? We intend on migrating all of the data. Okay. Any other questions? Council, Mayor Pro Tem. No, I'm just going to move approval. All right. We have Council Member Ryan. I'll second. And, and I just want to say this. I've been on this council a long time. And this is something we've been needing to do for a very long time. That screen that you just showed brought back memories of trying to navigate permits, scheduleings and the like. I'm glad we've got it. But if this can, if this can make it much easier to where it can be found, how it can be entered, what a, what a wonderful opportunity for, for our growth and just for efficiency in our city process. So for anybody that's used that system, I saw Council Member Ryan nodding with a little smile of agreement. It's, it's, it's been quite an interesting process. So thank you so much for that. And, and for bringing back, I think, a, a financial, a fiscally responsible solution compared to what we were looking at prior to that. All right. We have a motion and a second for agenda item D, agenda item D. Mayor Pro Tem, can I say you? Aye. Council Member Ryan. Aye. Council Member Briggs. Yes. Council Member Meltzer. I just want to make a comment before voting. I recently toured an infill project down in Southeast Denton near the cemetery. A lot that didn't have a house on it before. And it's got an accessory dwelling unit behind it, a four bedroom house. And with the, with the fees that we have, you know, voted to increase, and I wholeheartedly support it to, to recover costs, fees on that property were something like $20,000. This is for the entire upgrade of our whole approach here, an additional 14,000 a year. I'm a yes. All right. Council Member Davis. Aye. Council Member Armitter. I'm going to vote no, but I do see the need for it. I just, just think we should be pinching our pennies for now and postponing. Okay. All right. Mayor Watts is an aye. So I believe that motion carries six to one for ID 20-1233. Moving on to agenda item three, five E ID 20-1337. Consider approval of a resolution for the appointment of one member to the board of managers of the Denco Area 911 district and declaring an effective date. Do we have a presentation? Yes, we did. Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, and council. I'm pulling up the presentation here. Sure. Okay. Again, my name is Suzanne Coletta. I'm the public safety communications division manager and the item for consideration that I bring for you this evening is nomination of a Denco area. A member to our Denco Area 911 board. A little background here. The Denco Area 911 district was created in 1987. It's governed by a board of managers appointed by the county, participating cities and the Denton Fire Chiefs Association. Each year the term of one of the two members appointed by the municipalities expires. The term of board member Jim Carter expires on September the 20th of 2020. Mr. Carter has served two terms and is seeking reelection to the board. On April the 24th of 2020, an informal staff report was submitted requesting nominees for the Denco board of managers. Since no nominees were sent to staff to be placed on council agenda, no nominations were sent to Denco. Three nominees were selected by the participating cities. So on June the 1st of 2020, the city received a request from Denco that the city vote for one of the slated nominees and then notified Denco of the council selection by July the 31st of 2020. The nominees on the ballot are Brandon Barth, Jim Carter and David Terry. Okay. Yeah, if we could pull the there we go. So basically you're needing a nominee from us or consensus on a vote to select one of those three. Yes, sir. That great council member Davis. Mayor, I move approval of the draft resolution or back of materials with the name Jim Carter inserted as the person we're voting for. Okay. All right. Council member Briggs. I'll second. All right. Any discussion? All right. Council member Davis, we've got a motion and a second for agenda item E which is 20-1337. Council member Davis, how say you? I council member Briggs. Yes. Council member Ryan. I council member Armitter. Yes. Council member Meltzer. I Mayor Pro Tem. I Mayor Watts is an I so the motion is considered and voted unanimously to I guess that's to apply our votes for Mr. Jim Carter for the DENCO 911 board. All right. Thank you. Our next agenda item is 5F ID 20-1367 consider appointing a nominating committee to recommend appointees to serve on the Economic Development Partnership Board. Evening Mayor and council members. Jessica Rogers, I'm just pulling up the presentation. All right. All right. Good evening, Mayor and council members. Very quick item for you to see. Jessica, if you could activate your camera because I think whoever's speaking needs to be seen. I'm not seeing. I'm seeing the screen. I'm just not seeing your usually the there you go. Yep. Okay. My apologies. No, you're good. All right. So, um, this evening for your consideration is to appoint the nominating committee that's required each year to recommend nominees to serve on the Economic Development Partnership Board. This is required by the Economic Development Partnerships Board Ordinance 2017-203. Under the ordinance, the nominating committee solicits nominations, contacts the potential nominees, confirms their eligibility and willingness to serve and presents the slate of appointees to city council for consideration. The nominating committee is made up of two city council members and one member of the Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has nominated Marty Rivers, who's currently the Economic Development Partnership Board chair and in his last term on the Economic Development Partnership Board as their nominee. And just this came up last year again. So we wanted to mention this that nominating committee members are qualified for appointments to the Economic Development Partnership Board. So tonight for your consideration is appointment of two city council members and one member of the chamber to serve as the 2020 nominating committee. All right. Any, yes, Councilmember Armitage? Yes, I would like to nominate Councilmember Briggs if she's willing to serve. Okay. Anybody else? Who's currently serving? Councilmember Davis and Councilmember Briggs. Councilmember Briggs, do you have a question you just raised your hand saying who's serving? Well, I am serving and my question was, I don't know if I could be nominated if I'm currently serving. Yes, that's the statement that I made that members of the nominating committee are eligible to be nominated for consideration for positions on the Economic Development Partnership Board. So last year, for instance, Councilmember Davis served on the nominating committee and was ultimately selected as the city council representative. Go ahead. Yeah, because so Councilmember Briggs, what I'm hearing you say is that you're currently serving and it's not a nomination for you to serve on the EDP board. This is a nomination to serve on the nominating committee. So go ahead Councilmember Briggs. Yeah, so I would I would love to continue to serve on the economic on the board and would feel more comfortable not being on the nominating committee, but would like to put my name in to to be on the board. Okay. All right. Councilmember Davis. Thank you, Mayor. Two things. When I was put on the board last year, I was fulfilling an unexpired term. So Councilmember Briggs and I are both both up and would be I'd be willing to serve on the board again. I think it's a valuable experience for me and I think I add something to the board and I would nominate Mayor Watts to be one of our representatives on the nominating committee. I see the groan when it was you and I and Marty last summer. I thought that was a really good good group and then the names that we had I thought were were good. So, you know, and you thought you're getting out of this stuff, but I don't have to accept the nomination. No, you don't. Okay. I will. Okay, so we've got one we and I will make a nomination. Yes, Councilmember Melcer. Oh, we we got you back. My purpose is to entertain you to keep your way. Well, you're about to nominate someone. I'll just say I don't know who you're going to nominate. But I did that job once before and perfectly happy to do it again. If you have somebody else in mind, that's fine, too. Well, no, actually, Councilmember Melcer. That's that's who I was going to suggest. So I would. Yeah, I would. And we still can't see you. But that's okay. We can hear you. That's all right. So we have Councilmember Melcer and Councilmember Oh, myself, Mayor Watts nominated for to be on the nominating committee for the EDP board. Any other questions, comments? Need a chair would entertain action Councilmember Briggs. Okay, I move approval of the nominations of Mayor Watts and Councilmember Melcer. All right. For clarification purposes, you do have to nominate the chamber nominee. Okay. Yeah. I would also like to nominate Marty. Thank you, Jessica, for that clarification. All right. So do we have a motion? Do we have a second? Councilmember Davis? Second. Alright, we have a motion and a second for ID 20 dash 1367. Those nominees being Marty Rivers, Mayor Watson, Councilmember armored, Councilmember Meltzer, excuse me. All right. Councilmember Briggs, how say you? Yes. Councilmember Davis? Aye. Councilmember Meltzer? Tempted to say nay. But I'll go aye. All right. Councilmember Armitter? Yes. Councilmember Ryan? Aye. And Mayor Pro Tem? All right. All right. Agenda item three F 20 dash 1367 passes unanimously. Let's take a quick five minute break. We'll come back and pick up with G. Everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council. On July the 21st 2020. It is 919 p.m. We are going through our agenda items. We are on agenda item five G, which are items for individual consideration is ID 20 dash 686. Consideration to consider, excuse me, nominations appointees to the city boards and commissions, etc. There is not a staff presentation. We have the backup. We have the nominees and their corresponding committees that they're being nominated to and who's nominated them in our backup. So unless there's questions, the chair would entertain some action. Or action on this item, not. All right. Yes. Councilmember Davis? Move approval. Councilmember Meltzer? Second. All right. We have a motion and second for agenda item five G. Councilmember Davis, how say you? Aye. Councilmember Meltzer? Aye. And can you see me now? Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Yes, sir. We can. Yep. Councilmember Ryan? Aye. Councilmember Armitter? Yes. Mayor Pro Tem? We are we are we are voting on. It's F. No, it's item G. Boards and commissions. Nominations. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Okay. All right. Councilmember Briggs? Yes. All right. We have a unanimous decision and approval for agenda item five G. I. D. 20-686. We will now move now just to give the council a little housekeeping item H. We're going to hear that. And then and then we've got to take the order of going down to public hearings on item B. And Mr. City attorney, is that a is that an action item for us? Voluntary petition? Is that an action item on item six B? Yes. No, it is not. It is just a public hearing. That's okay. And then on action on item back to item five I. That's not an action item except for the first reading. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. All right. So that's the order we're going to take these because they need to be taken that way to be valid. All right. So we'll move on to agenda item five H. A. 20-0002. Under adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas regarding municipal services agreement. I believe we have a very quick presentation here for this one. Yes, Mayor. Mayor, member council, Ron Megida, principal planner with development services. I've got a short presentation I'd like to share. There we go. So this item is the first of three annexation items that you'll be considering or you'll be hearing this evening. This is primarily for the municipal services agreement for the birch track annexation petition. The request is to consider this municipal services agreement between the city of Denton and the birch family farm LTD, which is represented by Richard birch. It is approximately 140 acres, 140.6 acres that you see here on the right outline in yellow. There are two tracks, one on the east side of vintage Boulevard. The other one is on the west side. And also part of this consideration for council is the approving of the schedule of annexation. This particular property is part of the DH4. It currently has a non annexation agreement. However, because of the proposed development, the applicant is pursuing a petition for annexation in order to develop the subject site, subject property. The applicant or the property owner is proposing to develop the western track as a single family detached dwelling with approximately 110 dwelling lots, residential lots, comprising of 43.6 acres. The subject eastern track, which is on the other side of vintage Boulevard is approximately 96.9. That will remain undeveloped as it is within a floodplain area and will not be developed with with this proposed development. The municipal service agreement that is in your backup covers the following services that you see here. I won't read all of them, but it just addresses that is all of the services that the city provides. The schedule for the annexation is as follows. You see that there are the three items that we will be discussing here tonight. The municipal services agreement, then we will go to a public hearing and then at the end, the first reading of the public of the ordinance itself. Following these items, we will then reconvene or have a second reading of the ordinance on August 25th of this year. That concludes my presentation. I'll be happy to answer any questions and I believe the applicant is also on the line if there are any questions of the applicant. Once we run just real quick. Mr. City attorney, I just wanted to add some more information to what Ron presented. Those of you who have been have witnessed the way annexations the city has conducted in the past are probably wondering why are we adopting by separate ordinance in municipal services agreement, which is what this is. And that is because in 2019, the state legislature amended the annexation law to require for voluntary annexations upon request of the property owners to enter into a written agreement for the provision of municipal services with the city. And so that is what is here before you. So for going forward with voluntary annexations until the legislature decides to change the statute again, you will be seeing these ordinances for municipal services agreements. Okay, real quick question. Ron, I thought I saw an overlay where it looked. Did I hear you right? Are they doing a single family development or just one single family home? Single family development. Okay. Lots. All right. I thought I saw that. So I just want to make sure I heard that right. Okay. Any other questions for staff? All right. Chair would entertain a motion on this item because this is one that we have to approve first, uh, before moving forward. Uh, Mayor Pro Tem. Move approval. Council member Ryan. A second. All right. I have a motion for approval of agenda item 5H 820-0002. Mayor Pro Tem, how say you? Aye. Council member Ryan. Aye. Council member Briggs. Yes. Council member Meltzer. Aye. Council member Amater. I was hoping we'd be able to wait to hear from the applicant and ask questions, but you're saying we can't, that by the process we can't. No, no. The applicant, I just understood that the applicant was on to answer any questions that were posed to the applicant. So if you have a question for the applicant, we can certainly bring them on. Sorry, I thought you just needed a motion in a second. I didn't know we were going to go through the whole. No, they weren't. They weren't. I haven't had an indication that they were necessarily wanting to speak, but they were available if there were any questions. I'm sorry. So is it too late? I'm fine. No, no. I mean, uh, Mr. City attorney, we're still okay to take public comment in the midst of a vote, correct? I would recommend that if questions or if this council wants to allow questions of the applicant, now that you started voting, that you would stop and let, ask the questions and then redo the vote. Okay. Got you. All right. Okay. Yes. If we could, if we could pull, if we could bring the applicant on the phone, please. And we are certain that the applicant has been queued up for the phone where is available. Hi, this is Randy Rivera with McAdams. Okay. Uh, all right. And are you representing the applicants on this, uh, uh, agenda item? Well, I am, but he is also on the phone. Um, and, uh, would like for him to be available to answer the questions as well. And his name is Rob Bettencourt with Dana. Okay. All right. Gotcha. You bet. All right. I've been told he's on. Okay. Council member Armitage, you had a question. Thank you. So yeah, I was just wondering if you could kind of just give us the, uh, the, the human side of this story from, from your point of view. Uh, you know, how is this? Cause when I see voluntary annexation, I mean, clearly, you know, it looks like you want to go ahead with this project. This is your project. Um, I'm so wary of annexations. I want to hear it, you know, from the horse's mouth, so to speak. So if you could just say just from your point of view, you know, why you want an annexation as the property owner. Okay. This is, uh, Randy. I wasn't sure if Rob was going to be able to speak to that. He's had, um, technical difficulties speaking in this form before. Um, Randy, are you there? This is Rob. Yes. Yes, Rob. Hello council, mayor pro tem council members. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Yes. This is Rob Bettencourt with Zainal land development, uh, two 18 west wall street, grapevine, Texas. Uh, we're bringing this before you this evening, um, as a request by the land owner. We are the developer contracted with the land owner for the development of the property. Um, so I think just to address, uh, the question council member armator, uh, the, the land owner wishes to annex the property for, for the development as proposed single family. Okay. Yeah. I'm getting some instructions, um, that there may be a delay between the zoom meeting and someone on the phone. So, uh, I just want council to be aware of that so that, uh, it's not like there's some kind of tech, uh, technical difficulty or anything like that. Okay. Uh, yes, council member armator, go ahead. Yeah. And so, and, uh, just can you explain, so they want annexation so they can get the city services that come, they come with it? Yes, that's correct. As a part of the development, um, the, the development plan and the construction of the project would bring the facilities to the site. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And then, so those were my only questions for the applicant. Then I had a question for staff, but I don't know if any other, we'll go with, we'll see if any council members have questions for the applicant while we got them online. Any questions for the applicant or applicants representatives as we have them on the line. Council member Briggs. Thank you. Yeah. My, my question was for staff, but while he's on, um, or she, there's a, it looks like on the plat, there's a gas well on there, but there's homes on top of it. Is that just going away? Um, is that just going away? Cause my question was in the municipal services agreement, I didn't see anything about gas well inspections. It just said inspections and permits. So, um, I guess to the, to the developer, were they, is that going away? Is there a gas well on the property and to the city, if it's not going away, would that be included in the municipal service agreement under our, um, our, our contract that we have for inspections? Go ahead, caller. Go ahead. Uh, Rob Betancur again. Yeah. So do we address the question that the well has been abandoned and we've provided staff with a copy of those documents, uh, from the, uh, railroad commission. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. All right. Uh, anyway, now I do have a clarifying question on that. Abandoned means it's been, um, it's been capped or plugged. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. And I didn't see, I was looking for the plaid in the, in the, um, I was looking for, uh, I think Ron, it's what you put up, but so there, are there homes that are surrounding that? And if so, how close to the old well head are they? There will be lots surrounding it at this stage of just annexation. Uh, we have not, you know, we have this conceptual plan that we certainly wanted to get in from a view so that we, you know, you could understand what the intent was. Uh, but that'll be fine tuned through the zoning and planning process. Yep. Okay. That's right. All right. Good deal. Any other questions? Um, council member Armitter. Can staff, uh, can staff speak to, because I know, I mean, there are a number of gas, gas wells in the general area. Um, does the, even though we're not voting on the, the, uh, plan for the homes, I just wanted to have a sense of, you know, would it, would putting, uh, homes here be any, uh, uh, issue with, with our new reverse setback? I'm not talking about the capital on the property, but surround, you know, surrounding gas wells. Is it, is it safe for that or is that just something that at this stage in the process? Cause this is an annexation council member. I mean, uh, the city attorney, I think has a, has a comment. I just wanted to let you know that that question is premature because this is the annexation and it's specifically just municipal services after their annex, assuming the council goes forward and annexes the property, they will have to come before you for an initial zoning request. At that time, the questions about the reverse setbacks will become, will come into play. Well, it's not, it's, it's also just sort of outside of posting, uh, I mean, mostly I wanted to make sure, uh, that I wanted to make sure that the applicant is aware and has checked this all out. And I assume that they have, you know, uh, before getting into, you know, cause the annexation, well, we've just, we understand. We've just heard that this is out, this line of, uh, posting. I know, but I'm trying to, it's, it's outside of posting council members. So that means we have to stop discussing it. So, uh, mayor pro tem move approval. All right. We have a motion. Uh, do we have a second council member Melzer? Second. All right. So we have a motion for agenda item eight, two zero dash zero zero zero two, which is five H mayor pro tem house. Say you, all right. Council member Melzer. Council member Ryan. Hi. Council member Briggs. Yes. Council member Davis. Council member Armitter. Yes. And mayor Watts is a I, so the eyes have it motion carries unanimously seven zero. We will now move down to our public hearing portion of the agenda for agenda item six B. I will call that it's a two zero dash zero zero zero two a hold a public hearing and consider a petition for voluntary annexation of approximately 140.607 acres of land generally located on both sides of, uh, vintage boulevard and west of Fort Worth drive. Point of order mayor. Do we need to call a and postpone it or we okay? Just skipping it. Well, I'm going to come back to the public hearing portion because I'm just skipping here because we still have to come back up to I. So yeah, I'll come back through there and we'll do that. Yes. Yep. Yep. All right. Is there a presentation for it? Yes, there is. Yes. Yes, mayor. Um, council. This is a quick presentation, just to present the same item, but as a public hearing, um, won't go through all of this again. But again, the 140.6 acres as you see on the right. Um, the future land use designation for the subject property is partly low residential and rural areas. Uh, currently the zoning is obviously not zoned and that's why it's shown in white. That will come after if the council do does decide to annex property. The initial annexation. I'm sorry. Initial zoning will follow, um, won't go through the background. You've already seen this slide as well as the schedule. Um, that being said, that is the end of my presentation. Again, we'll be happy to answer any questions that you all may have. Okay. And this is a public hearing, so we'll open the public hearing. We do have a couple of callers wishing to speak. Any questions for staff? All right. Seeing that we will now open the public hearing and now this is there's no action on this item. It's my career. Is that my understanding? Mr. City attorney, there's no action, so therefore we'll take the public comment and close the public hearing and move on to agenda item H back. That's correct. Yeah. So yeah, we need to, uh, I'm gonna open the public hearing on agenda item six B, which is a two zero zero two eight. And so we will now hear from our callers. Oh, I need to keep time. Can you hear me? Still waiting on the callers. I'm here. Oh, okay. There you go. All right. Okay. Yes. Caller. You're on with the Dent City Council on agenda item six B. And once you state your name and address, your time will begin and you will have four minutes. Thank you. This is Eric Pruitt, 2111 Westwood drive. I'd like to remind you of some items in our long range plan didn't plan 2030 action 3.1.4. Develop a strategy for evaluating zoning and comprehensive plan amendments for long term physical impact and didn't plan 2030 action 3.10.1 established procedures to conduct fiscal impact analysis to evaluate the potential short and long term impacts of future annexations and other land use decisions. Also, the DDC 2.4.5 E nine starts to implement these goals by requiring applications to minimize adverse fiscal impacts. But we have no clear fiscal impact policy or strategy to evaluate development applications, annexations or zoning requests. Both the vintage birds track and sage book developers contracted an external firm to provide some fiscal information, but the vast majority of the content in these reports focuses on short term rather than long term impacts. They are not an impartial analysis and use outdated known inaccurate methods to estimate liabilities and costs assumed by the city as a result of these developments. These studies by the developers claim that breaking in fiscally ground city manager has stated that, quote, there is not a residential subdivision built that stands on its own. End quote. This can't both be true. So we have a clear choice. We can either ignore it and plan 2030 and continue sprawling development without looking at its long term costs, likely requiring higher taxes on our children. Or we can press pause on annexation and rezoning in this area in order to remain true to the Denton plan's 2030 goals of establishing a clear strategy for long term fiscal impact analysis. I urge the second option. We have an environmental policy to address other actions in our long wage plan. We have a gas well policy. We have a traffic impact policy. We have utility planning and public service and facility planning policies. We don't have a long term fiscal analysis policy. We simply expect everything to work out. Your vote later this year to set a tax rate is highly constrained by the development policies in previous decades. This policy decision will determine tax rates set in future decades. Please consider the long range implications of your actions. My comments here apply to both this and the Sagebrook zoning request, but I don't want to belabor you twice. So please consider them for both items. Okay. All right. Um, okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Eric. Thank you. All right. We the next caller. Caller, you're on the line and I can hear the old recording from the previous callers. So if you could turn your radio or TV down streaming the meeting and once you state your name, okay. And once you state your name and address, your time will begin for agenda item six B public hearing. And we are in the public hearing. So once you start your name and address, your time will begin. You have four minutes. Yes. Thank you. Jennifer lane, um, Denton Texas 7 6 2 0 5. I would like to have heard a bit more of what Eric Pruitt was having to say. I do agree with him that the city council needs to be, um, in charge of the urban development in Denton, not developers. And I long for the day when the city will take that responsibility and that role. Um, and it will become less haphazard. Uh, I don't have anything against this particular request at all. And I don't know how long it might take the city council to develop a long range fiscal plan, but I do think that it would be advisable to do that before annexing any more property. We've had some unpleasant, some pleasant, but some unpleasant surprises over the years. Um, seeing, you know, from this exact sort of decision that it's hard to see what the unintended consequences of it might be, but I appreciate that those were brought forward and I think they should be brought forward by planners that are paid by the city, not just random citizens calling. It's not right that we have people in our community that knows so much more or have so much more in depth idea of what urban planning should look like than, um, is really going on with our tax dollars. So, uh, I would urge you to do the right thing and whether you approve this one or not, uh, to really move forward and get, uh, urban planning into the hands of the city staff and city council and out of the hands of just whoever comes with a project that they would like to, um, take our resources. So thanks. Thank you. All right. Any, any other callers for this public hearing? I see no, uh, additional callers for this public hearing and this is not an action item. So, uh, having completed the public hearing, I will now close the public hearing, uh, council member Armitter. I just want to confirm with staff just to make sure I understand. So this, this is the, uh, public hearing for the voluntary annexation and the zoning would come later. Is that correct? Right. Right. Yeah. So, um, I, I just, I want to let both callers know, uh, you know, that I share, um, their concern about zoning. Um, and, uh, you know, I'm concerned, I will be concerned to, uh, uh, about, about a number of issues including, including gas wells and, and, uh, future long-term city planning, uh, for right now, the way, the way that I see it, I'm curious to know if my, my colleagues see differently and staff, if, if you let me know, if I'm, um, if there's something that I'm missing, uh, uh, about, about the pro, the process, um, that, uh, when, if this is a part of the city, uh, then we would actually have more control on what's going to happen here than, uh, if it was not. Okay. So is that, is that fair to say? Well, I guess, uh, and I'm going to, the last part I believe does apply to this particular agenda item, but I, I really, I really want us to stay on topic here. I don't. Oh, sure. Sure. I was just, I was just speaking to the callers concerned, letting them know, I hear you and I want to, um, I, I, you know, I, I, I'm concerned about all of that and we'll take that up under zoning. I just wanted to make sure, um, you know, that I wanted to say my reasons why I'm going to vote yes to this completely voluntary annexation. Well, this isn't a vote. This isn't an action item. I know, I know, I know, but when, but it'll eventually come forward. Okay. And I want to ask, I want to take advantage of this moment to just get kind of staff to confirm that, um, that, you know, we would not, there would be no discussion, a future discussion of zoning. Um, if there was no annexation, correct mayor, I can, I can go ahead and please confirm that. And yes. Um, I guess a couple of things, a lot, a lot of the issues that have been brought up tonight, they arguably could or not within posting of an annexation, but the, these are all issues that we, they warned this, this particular petitioner, uh, we're working with them on a development that's fairly close here. They're well aware of our city standards. Um, and you will be able to weigh in. They're very aware of the council stance on policy direction that we've been given. I think the other thing I want to kind of put out there, we are Richard and I, and this is pertinent to this particular issue. Richard and I have been discussing and are in the process of developing a, um, a matrix for the council to work through to assess the financial impact of these subdivisions. I take a little bit of umbrage to the way Mr. Pruitt characterized this particular issue. He's correct that, that no property, that property tax for any residential subdivision is never going to float the, the, the expenses there. However, with an appropriate fiscal model, we've got lots of those from around the country, which we're trying, we will be bringing forward to you at some point. You do take into consideration items such as skill over benefits, that sort of thing. So we're getting very off traffic. Yes, we are. And I want to get a number of extraneous issues here. All right. Thank you. Yeah. We're, we're, we're through talking about that. I mean, that can come up at a different, somebody can put in a one minute request to talk about that. Um, okay. So there's no action item here. So we've closed the public hearing. So we're going to move back to individual item for individual consideration, which is I, which is, is also not an action item. Uh, it's conduct the first two readings. I'll read it, uh, agenda item. I, a two zero dash zero zero two, uh, B. I think I accidentally called that one. Um, oh yeah. Okay. Wait a minute. Is that, is that right? Yeah. I thought we already, I thought I did that one already. Anyway, conduct the first two readings of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas, announcing approximately 140.607 acres of land generally located on both sides of vintage Boulevard. Do we have a, do we have, yes, we do mayor. And I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. I mean, just jump to the actual ordinance, uh, caption that, um, I'm going to read on record, uh, for the first reading. Uh, this is an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas annexing approximately 140.607 acres of land, generally located on both sides of vintage Boulevard and west of Fort Worth drive to the city of Denton, Denton County, Texas, providing for a correction to the city map to include the annex land and providing for savings and cause and an effective date. Um, with that, um, that concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Okay. All right. Any questions? Does that satisfy the first first two readings or the first reading? Mr. City attorney? Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Uh, seeing no questions, and that is not an action item. So that that action that agenda item has been completed. So then we now will move on to our public hearing portion of our agenda. And six a understand is being requested this ice and be postponed to a date uncertain. So Mr. City attorney, do we need to take any action on that or can that just be moved from the agenda? No action is necessary. It can just be moved from the agenda. Council member Briggs. I do have a question about this, um, because I know that we have people following along, looking on our agendas, wondering about it. So will they be re notified? And does this item have to go back to P and Z before it comes back to us? Mayor, this is a Ron McGee, a principal plan with development services. I am managing this project. Yes. If this project goes forward, uh, it will be on re notice for both planning zoning commission and city council for the rezoning, um, request. Okay. Okay. Thank you. All right. Okay. So we've we concluded a public hearing six B prior. We'll move on to public hearing six C hold a public hearing and consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton, Texas regarding an initial zoning of planned development district on approximately 128.94 acres and a zoning change from residential six are six district to plan development PD on approximately 14.19 acres. Right. Good evening. This is Haley's. Can you all hear me? Uh, we can. But if you could activate your camera as well. I know we see the presentation. There we go. All right. Good evening. This this is case PD 21 for Sagebrook. The request before you is a kind of two fold. Um, it is an initial zoning request for planned development district on approximately 128 acres of land and is also a rezoning request from our six, uh, to PD on 14 acres. The total site is approximately 143 acres. It's located, um, in the area shown in yellow on your map, just south of all red road west of South Bonnie Bay, Bonnie Bray Street and west of Fort Worth Drive. So this is a look at the zoning comparison. Um, you can see on the left, the current zoning is a mix of the placeholder are our designation. If you all remember this property was recently annexed into the city. Um, and then you have the are six district along Fort Worth Drive. The proposed zoning would be a PD for the entire 143 acres. This is just a look at the some of the proposed standards for the PD before we dive into their site plan a little more closely. Um, what they're proposing is a district that would permit only single family dwellings, um, park and amenity center uses, and then the accessory and temporary uses that are currently permitted in our six district that are typically associated with single family development. Um, looking at the dimensional standards comparison for the two, um, you can see the PD district is very similar to the base zoning of our six. The only real differences would be an increase in the front yard setback from 10 ft to 20 ft and an increase in the individual lot landscaping standards. Um, whereas the DDC just requires one yard tree, this would have an enhanced, um, regard enhancements, including a two additional trees on corner lots, as well as requirements for foundation plantings around the homes. They're also proposing an increase above and beyond the minimum 5% open space. They would have 9% overall for the PD. So this is a look at their layout. And before I go into this, um, I just want to give you a little bit of background on this site. If y'all remember back in January, this project came before you as a work session to give you a kind of an overview of what they were proposing. If they were to be annexed into the city. Um, the site plan is largely the same, um, over the past couple of months, as we've gone through the public hearing with the planning and zoning commission, there have been some changes and I'll walk you through, um, how those, um, changes have evolved and the changes to the site plan as a result of the PNZ hearings and some input that we received from the neighbors during that process. Um, but the plan you see before you shows 490 lots. Um, there is approximately 6.9 acres of open space in the two areas that are shown in yellow. Um, so there's a primary amenity center open space down here that would have trails, a pool, as well as a pond feature that exists on the property today. And then there's a second primary open space up in the corner that would again feature a pond and walking trails. There's a total of 12.96 acres of open space that would be managed by the HOA, including additional open space, um, in the Northwest corner of the site, as well as this central spine through the middle of the neighborhood. This area shown in blue, uh, features a walking trail that you can kind of see there in yellow with some enhanced landscaping that would provide a direct pedestrian connection from the future city park to the north of this site, um, to this area, to the south of future brush Creek road that would be dedicated to the city for future trail extensions. Um, this area in down here, south of brush Creek road totals about 15.3 acres. Um, some of the other key features of the site, the area shown here in red is the location of a plugged gas well. That well is within an HOA open space, about 30 feet from both the right of way of this residential street, as well as the future alignment for all red road. Um, and then finally, the other key feature here is this extension of brush Creek road. Uh, this was the subject of much debate at PNZ. If you, um, if you read through the backup or even watch some of those meetings, originally this road alignment was further south and aligned with this barn on the adjacent property after hearing from the neighbors and hearing those concerns from the PNZ commissioners about that proposed alignment, the developer worked extensively with the neighbors, with the city's engineering department, um, to shift this roadway so that it misses that barn. As part of that negotiation, this area outlined here in purple, that is about three acres was excluded from the PD. If you remember this original request went all the way to the Western, um, side of this site, this area is now excluded and would be conveyed to the neighbors. So looking at, at how all of that has transpired through PNZ, um, this is the original, uh, proposal that came before you all during that January work session. It was originally brought to PNZ as a public hearing. And again, due to this road alignment that, um, aligned with that barn and the neighboring property, um, some significant, uh, work was put into kind of evolving this plan over the last couple of months. So the plan, um, just below that is the one that went to PNZ on June 3rd. Um, again, there were concerns, there was debate regarding this. Um, so the developer went back to negotiations with the neighbor and, and ended up with this design. Um, and if you'll notice, the neighbor actually provided a letter of support, um, and said that they're no longer opposed to this request as they were originally with both of these layouts. The key features of the site, including these large amenity spaces you see were maintained as well as the central trail. Um, and to look a little more closely at just some of the thought that went into the, um, the amendment here with regards to the road. Um, these are some of the key factors that staff and the developer were looking to, um, to accomplish with that road alignment as they worked through these negotiations. Um, the curvature of the road, um, there where Brush Creek would meet all red was tightened pretty significantly. It was originally about a thousand feet, which is a very gentle sloping curve, um, considered very safe by our engineers for the design speed of that roadway. It's now at the minimum of 750 feet, so it still meets our standards, but they did tighten it up and allow it to move further away from that barn. Um, the road is not going over the gas well. That was a concern of our engineering department and they were able to meet that. Um, they still maintained a significant amount of open space within the neighborhood. They were really trying to maximize that for the subdivision to have that, um, you know, very heightened sense of amenities and open space and trails. Um, so they, that was reduced over the renditions of this plan, um, but it's still about 13 acres and still well exceed the city standard. There is still also 15 acres that would be conveyed to the city for future trail extension south of Brush Creek road. Um, one of the concerns and one of PNZ's ideas was why not put the road through, through the middle of the neighborhood where that trail was shown. Um, they wanted to avoid bisecting the neighborhood to create that cohesive sense of character, so they were able to maintain that with these, um, changes that they made. And then they also minimized the effect to the neighboring property. It went from about six acres of the neighbor's property that would have been affected by that future, uh, Brush Creek alignment to 1.5 acres. And throughout all of these changes, there were no changes to the proposed uses or dimensional standards for the PD. This just shows you the phasing that is proposed. This is proposed to be approximately an eight-year build-out. Phase one would be shown here in green, 151 units. It would provide this connection, um, from 377 of Brush Creek up to the primary entrance. It would create that central spine that would connect up to Allred Road and the future park. Um, phase two would be here in the northeast corner. That would be another 135 units. And then phases three and four would be the western half of the development, um, with another 204 units between those. Um, so with the plan development, as I'm sure you all have seen now, um, since we've adopted this new code, there are two sets of criteria that get applied. There's the general criteria that apply to all applications. Um, I won't go through those in detail, but they are outlined in your, in your backup, and I'm happy to discuss them if you'd like. Um, but just some of the highlights. The project is consistent, um, with the Denton Development Plan. Um, it, with the, um, it is consistent with our, um, annexation service agreement that was recently adopted. Um, it's, it's consistent, although slightly changed, with what was shown at the previous work sessions. They are proposing a logical phasing, um, that would also allow the road to be phased in as each piece of the neighborhood develops. Um, it's not expected to generate any significant adverse, uh, fiscal or environmental impacts. It is compatible with the surrounding development pattern that's expected to evolve in this area. And there is adequate infrastructure available and that will be extended to serve the development. Um, there are also six specific criteria outlined in the DDC that are applicable, um, just to plan developments, and I'll go through each of those in a little bit more detail now. The first criteria is consistency with, uh, the Denton Plan and the Future Land Use Map. Um, this site has, uh, kind of a dual designation. You can see on the map the eastern portion in the, uh, the pink color is designated for neighborhood mixed use. Um, that's a designation that would apply to a little bit more intensive areas with commercial, uh, moderate to high density residential and service uses. And then the balance of the property in green is designated for rural areas. Um, this typically applies, uh, to farms, ranches, or very low density residential development. What you can also see on the map is that there is a large mixture of, uh, future land use designations in this area. There's a lot going on in South Denton as you've seen recently with Hunter and Cole Ranch. Um, so just within this area that's, that's about a mile and a half between 377 and I-35, um, we transition from neighborhood mixed use to rural, but also we have parks, moderate density residential, and even community mixed use, which is a very high intensity designation, um, all within about a mile and a half area. So this, this development, um, falls kind of within the mid-range. It's about 3.4 dwelling units per acre. So it's right there, um, kind of at the cusp between low and moderate density residential. And it's fitting for this transitional area. So we found this, um, to be consistent with the character that we see evolving in this area as Hunter and Cole Ranch develop. It's consistent with the density found in other neighborhoods, such as Country Lakes and Carnegie Ridge, um, and would be, um, a compatible transition from, uh, from the rural uses that we see on the east side of 377 to the higher intensity that we'll see along I-35 as Hunter and Cole Ranch develop. The second criteria is rather the, uh, proposed PD complies with the Denton Development Code. As we looked at earlier, they're proposing to comply with the DDC, exceed its standards in a few key areas, um, such as landscaping and the front yard setbacks. Um, but anything that's not specified in the PD document, uh, they would default to the DDC standards and would be in compliance with. The third criterion is rather it provides for a greater building design, um, greater amenities and connectivity. Um, they are proposing to follow all the design standards of the DDC. Um, as I mentioned, they do have some enhanced standards with regards to landscaping, um, that would provide for those additional trees, um, additional foundation plantings and things of that nature. Um, they are proposing an enhanced amount of amenities. Um, we require 5% open space for most residential developments of 10 units or more. What they're proposing, um, has about 12.9 acres total of HOA amenity space with those two primary areas with trails and pools and things of that nature that we saw on the plan. And then finally, with regards to connectivity, um, this development would significantly improve, um, both auto and pedestrian connectivity in this area. The extension of Brush Creek, um, as you all have looked at with the mobility plan update is a very much needed east-west arterial for Southern Denton. Um, with this extension of Brush Creek, we would also be relocating a railroad crossing from 377 and Bonnie Bray, um, down to Brush Creek. So that would be eliminating a current unsafe, um, kind of very awkward railroad crossing to a new improved, uh, more well-aligned, um, connection there. They also have that internal, uh, 10-foot wide north-south trail that would connect the future city park to the trail area or the area south of Brush Creek that's being dedicated to the city for future trails. So it would also increase the pedestrian connectivity and tie in with the overall trail system that our parks department is working towards, as well as the trails throughout Hunter and Cole Ranch. The fourth criterion is, uh, for residential uses, rather there's compatible buildings uses and consistency with the character of the area. As we kind of saw with the future land use map, this area is intended to have a mixture of residential densities. Um, this is, um, consistent with those. It's also consistent with the, uh, density that we see in other neighborhoods in Southern Denton, such as Country Lakes and Carnegie Ridge. Um, it's right there within the low to moderate density residential that we also expect to see in most of Hunter Ranch. Um, the plans that they show also reflect, um, standards for landscaping and fencing, um, that would buffer between this area and the railroad tracks and also buffer around the perimeter of the subdivision, um, to provide, uh, for a very nice drive along future Brush Creek Road with, um, you know, perimeter walls and, um, enhanced landscaping along that area. The fifth criterion isn't necessarily applicable to this. It's, uh, for non-residential uses, rather they're appropriate, um, in terms of the location and planning. The only non-residential uses that would be proposed here would be those amenity features and the dedicated park space. And the sixth and final criterion has several sub-components that have broken down. Um, it's rather there's public facilities to support the development. Um, so the first of those is, uh, schools. So I did reach out to Denton ISD and they provided the expected student generation, uh, for this development. 113 elementary students, 59 middle school students, and 74 high school students would be expected based on the number of lots. Um, Denton ISD indicated that, uh, McMath Middle School and Denton High School both have existing capacities to support that number of students today. Borman Elementary does not have the capacity at this time. However, um, it wasn't necessarily a concern because this is projected to be an eight year build out. So there, there could be plenty of change, uh, within that time to accommodate. Um, it's also likely that there will be additional elementary schools built in this area with Hunter Ranch in the future. And this site could be rezoned into those at some point in the future as well. Uh, with regards to fire and PD, um, you can see on the map here, there is an existing fire station that is well within the eight minute or less response time boundary that is targeted. Um, and Denton PD indicated that this would not have a significant negative impact, um, on their response times in this area and indicated that also with their new facility being built up near the fire station, that would be enhanced in the future. Um, with respect to utilities, the blue lines on the map show existing, uh, water facilities. The dash blue line is a water facility under construction. Um, so there's adequate water to serve this area. It will be extended throughout the development. Um, with regards to wastewater, the red lines on the map indicate current sewer lines. You can see the closest connection is down here along brush Creek road. Um, the developer plans to work with the city and has already begun, um, working on the plans to extend this line down brush Creek road across three 77 with that new crossing, um, here and then extend throughout the neighborhood. That line would also be oversized so that it could accommodate, um, future development in this area. And if you, um, as development progresses here. And then finally, with regards to streets, um, there's, there's several components here. You can see the mobility plan as it currently exists today does show brush Creek road crossing this property. They will be dedicating the full right of way for that, um, that extension and they'll be building, um, the northern half of that road across the frontage of their prod, uh, as the project develops in each phase. Um, again, the city's been going through that, that traffic study that you all have looked at extensively. Um, we know this is a much needed connection. So that will be a significant improvement for this area. Also with this development, uh, Bonnie Bray south of all red road is intended to be abandoned at some point in the future. The existing railroad crossing, as I mentioned earlier, would be abandoned when this new crossing is established at brush Creek. This alignment would provide for a much safer intersection than what we currently have here at the railroad tracks at Bonnie Bray. And the city is intending to improve all red road in the near future as the Southwest park property develops. So that would also coincide with this development. Um, the primary entrance for this development will of course be off the arterial roadway with their secondary access point on all red. Uh, looking at parks, there is of course the, the future Southwest park just immediately to the north of this property that they're providing that trail connection to, um, the city's currently in the planning of this park. Um, along with this, I've also mentioned they're proposing to dedicate that 15 acres south of brush Creek road. Um, so that there would someday be trail connection from this park through the neighborhood and to the south of here, um, which, um, through the parks trail master plan, um, we'll hopefully someday see extended throughout the floodplains of the city. And then again, through Hunter and coal ranch to provide that overall pedestrian and bike mobility park dedication and development fees would of course apply at the time of platting and permitting with, for this development. Um, and then finally, I wanted to touch on the fiscal impact analysis that was provided to you all in your backup. Um, this was originally conducted when this property first came in for annexation, um, in 2019. Just some of the highlights of that, um, current property tax revenue for the property with, with its ag exemption was estimated at $377. Um, the estimated annual tax revenue with this development would be, um, about $967,000 with the estimated incremental revenue of 87,000. Um, construction and sales taxes were expected to be, um, about 8.4 million related to permits, inspections, and impact fees, and then sales tax at 1.2 million. Um, all of this of course compares, uh, with the qualitative impacts that development that we've also seen, um, some of the key features there being that they plugged the gas well on site in anticipation of this development. They're dedicating and constructing, um, a fairly large segment of brush Creek road, which is a much needed arterial for Southern Denton. They're significantly, um, helping to improve the railroad crossing. Again, the current crossing at Bonnie Bray is considered unsafe due to the kind of awkward angle of alignment there. So that would be a substantial safety improvement. And then we're also seeing that increase in parks, trails, and floodplain conservation with this development as well. Public notification, uh, was done regarding this request. You can see on the map here, um, there were some oppositions provided in your backup from properties across Bonnie Bray. Um, I wanted to point out that the property shown in, uh, the hatch, the green hatching on the map was the neighboring property that they worked with, um, throughout the P and Z public hearing process. That neighbor was originally against this at the first public hearing for P and Z. And they've since provided that letter of support after working with the developer to, to slightly shift the alignment of, uh, Bonnie Bray and with regards to this three acres that are being conveyed. The applicant did hold a neighborhood meeting, um, back in January when this, they first started this process and started the annexation. They had about 12 attendees at that meeting, um, and, and went over the plans much as they did at your January work session. So staff is recommending approval of this request as it complies with the criteria within the DDC for, uh, general applications as well as for plan developments. And the P and Z also recommended approval of this request six to one. And I'm happy to stand for any questions. Okay. Um, if we could pull the presentation down, uh, questions, and then we've got some, uh, I think we've got some public comment or we've got the applicant standing by council member Briggs. Thank you. Um, yeah, just a few questions. Um, on the, uh, three pictures it shows, I guess that there's original layout, the June 3rd, and then the proposed, um, there's each section, it looks like there's more houses built and less green space. Was that to, was that to accommodate something? Cause I didn't think that the road ate into any, um, any development plots, but it looks like they continuously kept taking away some green space to add more. Well, so there were, um, the, the net change in loss in lots was only one. Um, the original plan had 491, this one's at 490. Um, the change with the shift in road alignment by believe was about, um, 190 feet or so, um, total. So they did shift into an area that had lots, um, proposed within it. Um, so to make up some of that loss, they did shift some down into the open space. Um, the total loss in HOA open space down there around the amenity center, I believe, um, was just under two acres. I think it went from about 14 acres total HOA space to about 12.9. Um, so there, there was some loss, but overall, um, the, the number of lots did not shift significantly. It went down by one. Okay. All right. Um, my next question is about the school. Um, I know you said in there, we're not worried about it because it's in phases, but if right now they're saying they're at capacity and can't meet that, um, what happens during phase one if there's kids that need to go to school? Um, it's my understanding. I'm sorry. Assuming we go back to school. Yes. Um, no, didn't ISD didn't, um, didn't necessarily indicate there being an issue with that. They just noted the capacity limitation at this time. Um, but, but they didn't indicate any opposition to the project due to that. Um, so I'm not sure how they would, would possibly shift or reaccommodate. Um, I know in some instances with other projects, they've indicated that they could shift the, um, the attendance boundary slightly to accommodate for that as development occurs. Okay. And how many lanes is brush? Is the brush Creek road that's being proposed through there? Can you remind me? It's four with the potential ultimate build out at six if necessary down the road. Okay. So is the, is the amount of room that they're accommodating for saving the barn for the maximum build out? Yes. Okay. And so then that would, um, bring me to my next question. Is there a, I know I remember having this conversation during the annexation portion, but is there a, a crosswalk or something where we attach the neighborhood can cross from the path over to the parks? Is there some kind of safe crossing we're looking at? Or have we thought about that over brush Creek since it's such a, going to be a large fast moving road. I don't believe they specifically looked at the design for that yet. Um, but that is something that would be looked at during the civil engineering phase. Um, and I believe the future trail extension south of brush Creek would be, would be done by the parks department in the future. So they would work with them to, to figure out what the safest means of crossing that would be. Okay. And just one comment. I'm glad you said it was with 3.4 acres, uh, homes per acre. Is that what you said it equates to? Correct. That's the approximate density. Cause the picture, it looked like it was a lot more. So, um, I was surprised to hear that. Okay. Thank you. Oh, and I, and I, I think one thing that Haley, you know, she did touch on that we, I wanted to point out to council is the reason this took so long to get back to you is I had asked the, the petition to go back and work with the neighbor to the west, uh, to see if there wasn't a way to work out, um, moving the potential alignment of brush Creek. And it is as safe of a fashion as our traffic engineers believed could be done, uh, in still preserving the enjoyment of their property. So they actually, that land swap took a few weeks to work out, but I appreciate the fact that they were able to work that with them and, and probably saves us some major headaches down the road as well. And it's just the right thing to do. Yep. Okay. Any other questions for staff? All right. Then I will open the public hearing for agenda item six C, which is PD 20 dash zero, zero, zero one F. Um, do we have any callers besides the applicant wishing to speak on this item? All right. And I believe the, the applicant or representative, the applicant is on the line. Is that correct? Yep. That is correct. Where they're available for questions. Well, yeah, I'm just trying to get them to acknowledge that so I can establish a communication with them. That's correct. Oh, yes. Jason, you're there. I'm here. Thank you. Okay. Um, yes. Do you all have a presentation or would you like to obviously as the applicant, um, certainly entitled to make some comments during this open public hearing. So wanted to give you the opportunity. If you did, if not, that's okay. Just need to know if you do so we can start the timer. I believe Rivera has a presentation. I'll stand by for any questions. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. Um, I don't necessarily have a PowerPoint, um, that, uh, that I would want to go through. Haley did such an amazing job going through the details of the changes and what we worked through over the last three months with the P and Z and the neighbor. Um, and so I just wanted to kind of commend staff and the leadership there to, to encourage us to work through that issue. Um, they've been very helpful. Uh, we, again, we've been working on this project since December of 2018. Um, and so we're, we're just very excited to get that before you, uh, finally, after all this time and all the extensions with the land owner have kind of worn off. Um, and so we are at a point where, um, you know, a vote on this, uh, would, is what we need at this point. Um, and so Rob, Jason and I have done, uh, worked with staff for this, this, this amount of time and, um, looking forward to get going on the preliminary plot as soon as we can. And we're here for, uh, any questions that we can answer for you guys. Okay. Great. All right. Any questions for the applicant? All right. Saying none. Thank you. And I, we do not have any additional public comments or callers for, for a public hearing. So we will, um, yes, Council Member Meltzer, is this a question for the applicant? Uh, no, actually I do have a question for staff. Um, I, I know that Council Member Meltzer, could I, could I go ahead and if we need to go ahead and close the public hearing and then we can ask if that's okay. So no more callers for the public hearing. All right. Then we will go ahead and close the public hearing. Okay. I'm sorry. Council Member Meltzer, you can proceed. Not at all. Um, I know that there was a budget item for redoing the comprehensive plan. And, uh, my question for staff is just what is the status of that since, you know, part of the case for this, uh, project has to do with, you know, to what degree it fits or doesn't fit with the future land use map and the, in the existing comprehensive plan. I think that is, that has been put on hold right now through, um, due to some of the budget cuts that we made. Um, I'm not sure that it would have necessarily had an impact on this particular area, uh, versus more focusing on the infill, but, um, it has been put on hold. Okay. I understand. Um, you know, I'll just, I'll just make my comments now. I know there's a lot of engagement, uh, you know, a lot of work has gone into this. I, you know, I can't help the fact that this is my opportunity to weigh in. I have a process issue with the fact that, you know, it just doesn't pass the red face test to me that, you know, our comprehensive plan designates this area as rural, you know, the vast majority of it just in no way fits the future land use map. I understand there's a feeling that facts on the ground have changed. That's a good reason to reconsider the future, you know, reconsider the comprehensive plan. And, you know, I, I think, I guess we'll get to that, but I just, I just don't see how this fits our plan. And if we want to have one, then we have to let it guide us. So I'm going to be a no. All right. Hi. Anyone else? Council member Armitter. Yeah, I, I, I agree with, with council member Meltzer. You know, I appreciate, uh, staff's work, work on this and the improvements that, that have been made. Um, it, I'm, I'm kind of not convinced by, uh, arguments, the argument that we, that there's a, uh, quote transition that, that is needed between a rural area and a denser area. I'm not saying that that automatically means that I'm, I'm always against it. Um, but, uh, to me, you know, I, I would just, I would need, uh, uh, a lot, a lot more convincing and to, to, uh, do something so, so, so radically different with that, with that, that gorgeous rural space in a way that changes the character of it. And I too look forward to, and I understand with budget cuts, uh, you know, something like that, uh, has, has been postponed, uh, the new plan. Um, but when that comes back to us, I really do look forward to it, to that. And I really do like the spirit of the, the current plan. So I'm open to changes. Uh, but anyway, I'm going to be a no vote too, but I just wanted to hear why. Okay. Council member Davis. One of the things, one, this is the initial zoning of this parcel. This was annexed, uh, into the city in a multi-phase process. If you remember, we had to do it kind of out of order because of some of the considerations for the project, but this was rural residential because it was not part of the city of Denton until just the other day, uh, the last, when we, when he annexed it, um, just a few months ago. So this is the first time we're zoning this. My issue with the land use map in this area of the world is that we have big, a big donut hole between, uh, our parts of the city that are down on Crawford road that are on 377 across 377. You know, the folks who think they live in Argyle, but they live in Denton, um, the people to the North. I was driving down there just today and, uh, this is not an area that is really going to stay rural in character. Um, it looks that way right now because there's a sign on it that still says the word ranch, but that is not anywhere close to, um, the character of the properties around this, this parcel that we're talking about. Um, this is basically an infill that we annexed for the purpose of turning it into residential. So, uh, this is, these are really good points are being raised. I don't want to discount the points being raised about the land use map and the comprehensive plan, but the same thing goes for something we talked about earlier in the meeting and the callers were absolutely right about, you know, we have to consider the long-term costs of annexing land like this into the city and what we do with it and putting, uh, kind of higher density, uh, residential uses there. But I want to clarify a couple of things from what they said. The first thing, one caller said these developments are going to use our resources. The developers are not using our resources. The future residents who will live there will use our resources and we have to figure out how to pay for their police and fire and water and all those things. The other thing is, like I said, these are basically filling in the city of Denton map. If this question was about annexation or a new PD on the far north of the city, like we have to consider and some other items on the far west of the city, like we've looked at before, it'd be a completely different question. This is already a part of the city of Denton and this development to me is very logical given what's across 377 from it, what's about to be just to the west of it and the purposes we have in mind for the park just to the north of it. I think it makes all the sense in the world and I want to give a shout out to staff and PNZ for sticking with this and the developer kind of had to come in line with some concerns of the neighbors and they did. They came up with a very creative solution that really brought everybody to the table and now we've got a neighbor who's saying they're in favor of the project instead of before they're adamantly against it if you talk to them. Everything about this project was done the right way and I think it's a valuable addition to the city. All right, thank you. Councilmember Briggs. So on the on the green space because some of it was was taken up, how much is going to be saved or do we know the what the neighbors are going to do with the section or the acres that they were given in the in the trade-off? I don't think they have any plans at this point. They were happy to work with the developer and accommodate the roadway configuration in order to get the additional buffering but at this point there was no indication they had any any plans to sell it or anything like that. They just wanted to be sure that they were protecting their acreage. Because I think what I'm looking at now are images and there's lots of lots of trees on that area. Is that a lot of that property? Are you talking about the property of the west? A lot of that property's in the floodplain. It's in so if that's the one you're talking about. Okay. Any other questions? Oh go ahead Councilmember Briggs. I just wanted to confirm that I mean they didn't there weren't plans for that. Okay all right. Any other questions? The public hearing has been closed. Looks like questions have been completed for staff Chair would entertain a motion on this item. Mayor Pro Tem? Move approval. Councilmember Ryan? I second. So we have a motion and a second for agenda item 6C which is PD 20-0001F. Mayor Pro Tem, how say you? Aye. Councilmember Ryan? Aye. Councilmember Amater? No. Councilmember Meltzer? No. Councilmember Briggs? I was still reading through the comments but I will say yes. Councilmember Davis? Yes. All right. Mayor Watzas and I the motion carries five to two. We'll move on to agenda item 6D Z20-002D. Hold a public hearing. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Dent Texas regarding a change in the zoning district and use classification from light industrial to general office. Now we've been through this whole presentation before so I anticipate that we're going to have an abbreviated presentation because I don't think unless the developer's bringing something that's vastly different I don't think we need to go through the whole presentation or the detail level of detail because we did that I guess is about a month or so ago and then we had a motion for reconsideration so I just wanted to share those comments. All right so we'll go ahead and get started. Oh you're muted. Good evening. I do have a few slides just as an update from from the last last meeting so let me pull that up. So I'm Julie Wyatt senior planner with the city of Denton and I am presenting Z20-002D canopy trails. This is a rezoning request for 98 acres located at the intersection of Shady Oaks and loop 288. The request is to rezone the property from general office and light industrial to mixed use regional. As you stated before there there have been a couple of requests associated or a couple of items times this has gone before the city council. On June 16th of this year the request came before you. It was approved at that meeting however after that meeting a reconsideration was requested so the proposal came back to city council on June 23rd. At that meeting council discussed several items including nearby environmentally sensitive areas as well as place making design. That reconsideration was approved at that meeting so that brings us to tonight. So based upon that discussion at at the last city council meeting we just wanted to bring forward a little more information regarding those two items the environmentally sensitive areas and that place making place making design. So first we have the the ESAs. There are two ESAs on the site. There is a riparian buffer along the west side of the property. You can see it's that area in purple. This is a 100 foot wide linear buffer. It's 50 feet on either side of the centerline of the stream. Riparian buffers are protected within the city of Denton so that any impacts to that to that buffer would require city council approval through the alternative ESA process. Additionally there's an upland habitat on the property. It's the area and that kind of that bright green in the center of the of the site. This is that the remnants of the cross timbers forest. In order to be considered an upland habitat it does have to be a minimum of 10 acres. This area has been confirmed as 10.7 acres so it is a confirmed upland habitat. It is also protected within the city of Denton and that residential developments can remove 50 percent. So they have to retain 50 percent of that habitat and then commercial or non-residential development can remove 70 percent. Of course any of that those trees that would be removed or that habitat would be removed would be subject to our mitigation requirements. And then we also wanted to talk about the placemaking. So we listened to the council's discussion on the 23rd. We also looked at the applicant's proposed concept plan that we looked at at that meeting and kind of referred to the Denton plan 2030 and those and those site design and urban design elements in in the Denton plan. And so we took all of that and we devised some overlay conditions that the applicant may want to consider. We did we did provide those overlay conditions to the applicant to sort of start a discussion about what those would be. I won't read all of these to you but I will talk about just the general thought that staff had. So we really looked at three elements associated with placemaking design. We looked at land use, connectivity and then design. So in land use you want to make sure that you've got a variety of uses to make sure that it's a dynamic area that's sustainable. So we proposed that no more than 75% of that gross land area would be dedicated to multi-family as a single use to make sure that commercial was was folded into that development. We also looked at connectivity you know make sure you know connectivity and our street system is kind of the kind of the structure of a development. It allows developments to be organized in a certain way and it also can impact mobility you know pedestrian mobility, bike mobility, as well as vehicular. So we wanted to make sure that there was good connectivity with it. So we suggested first of all we just kind of put in what what that an extension of Carina which is a collector on the east side of Loop 288 to to to have a condition that it would be extended toward the west. Brinker Road is a is a secondary arterial that sort of cuts through that 98 acres so that would be constructed as well as to put in those street trees in those areas to sort of define those those streets. We also talked about neighborhood streets with them and to sort of create that framework for those neighborhood streets with them with a block link that really fostered pedestrian connections and pedestrian walkability. So and also to add those those street trees on there. We also put it suggested an overlay condition for parking to to allow the parking along those neighborhood streets for that minimum parking to to make sure that there is adequate parking but that we that we really activated those streets and then to limit those private driveway connections to Loop 288 and Shady Oaks to really make sure that the development took took advantage of the hierarchy of streets within the site. We also looked at design and what we really wanted to do is make sure that the that that the any conditions in place would create really interesting buildings not only for cars that would be driving past it but also pedestrians as they look at buildings as they walk past them. So I want to make sure there's a lot of variety and interest in those buildings and that includes you know interest in those facades so a facade rhythm as well as folding in some of those design standards that we have for our our mixed use downtown district and as well as our mixed use neighborhood district. A lot of those design standards have to do with buildings that have a base and a middle and a top and that makes sure that they are pulled up toward the street to really activate that street. We also suggested an overlay to add plaza areas for any of the larger developments so any building that would be over 40,000 square feet would provide that plaza area to kind of bridge that gap between the private and public realm. And then and then finally the loading areas to make sure that those were screened adequately and there's a there's a picture on the slide that shows shows a an arterial roadway here a parking area and then a store with the the loading area in the back and just that screening and how those those those that loading area can still be integrated within a mixed use development. There's there's town homes behind that so you can if you screen it appropriately that that can really ensure that there's that there's those uses work together. So we provided those overlay conditions to the applicant. They do have concerns that too many conditions could impede the development of the site particularly during changing circumstances with commercial type development. So at first blush they they said well we we can only agree to the no more than 75 percent of the gross land area to be dedicated to multifamilies a single use. So we talked through that with them and they said well okay we'll go back and we'll kind of look and see what else we can add in. So they they worked with their team and they did then add in those conditions two for two through four I'm so sorry two through six and that includes those some some elements of the connectivity along with street trees and then the screening of the loading areas. I do want to mention one thing under condition three. Brinker is actually on our mobility plan designated as a secondary arterial. They're they're requesting an overlay that could be constructed as a 50 foot wide road. That per our mobility plan would would need to be a 110 foot right of way. Typically our secondary arterials have have two lanes in each direction within a center median. So that wouldn't that would be inconsistent with our mobility plan. So while while we we understand their concerns for for flexibility and to maintain that that that nimbleness with the development of the site. If we are looking at adding on overlay conditions that really kind of speak to that placemaking. Staff felt like their proposed conditions weren't quite sufficient to really create that framework to to encourage that vibrant and distinctive development. So those are the new slides I have. We can go over the slides that we went through on the 16th. I have them available but the applicant is also here for questions and I could go through the slides or answer any questions. If we could pull the state if we could pull the presentation now. Real quickly just real quick question from me. The last time and I can't remember was did staff recommend a Nile on on this project? Staff does recommend approval on the project. It does meet the criteria for approval for a rezoning within the debt and development code. Okay then then what I just read at the bottom of your last slide you just don't think it meets the criteria for something that you heard the council talk about last time is that correct? Correct in terms of those overlay conditions for placemaking we don't feel that their proposed conditions really meet that standard for that creating that placemaking development but in terms of just the strict overlay or I'm sorry the strict zoning case it does meet the criteria for approval for a zoning case. Okay but they did add some additional criteria that they did not have in the original proposal is that correct? That is correct. Okay good all right thank you appreciate that. Councilmember Briggs? Do we know how many acres or what we have left of the cross timbers in our in our city? What percentage? I don't have that information. Okay because when you said this is verified remnants of the cross timbers and then right after that so they could cut in 50% or just 70% it just kind of punched me in the gut knowing that we don't have this is a historic forest so okay thank you sure. Okay anybody else? I guess I want to respond to that I mean I understand and certainly you know I appreciate the value of trees and the like but I also have to balance that with individual private property rights so if we're going to have a policy that when as things begin to dwindle that people who had some of that in the past got to do what they wanted but then as it becomes quote unquote more scarce that we have to ratchet it down on property owners then I think we need to have that discussion outside of this particular development. I think we need to create a policy so that people can decide if that's a potential inverse condemnation or just whatever we're doing so I just that's that's how I would frame that. Yes councilmember Briggs. That was a comment that I made because of the the request for it to be a PD which would mean that if we were working with them and the place making and as a development which they have said they aren't comfortable with it would be I would be more comfortable with that than than what the the presentation asking to vote for because of that situation. All right I appreciate that thank you. Councilmember Davis. Yeah I'm looking at staff's recommendations specifically on the width of Brinker Road and I'm kind of thinking of it in two frames of mind one from strictly a mobility perspective it does make sense to have roads of similar width you know if it starts out at a certain width now Spencer makes its way north and eventually connect to Shady Oaks it ought to kind of maintain the same width the whole way. From the other perspective though I could see where if it's through the middle of the development and we want the development to be walkable you know mixed use walkable between you know multifamily on one side of Brinker and retail on the other side of Brinker I don't kind of have a hard time squaring big wide Brinker with walking back and forth between you know in this mixed use development. So I wonder if staff can kind of tell us the thinking there and how we how we balance those two things. Brinker is is on our mobility plan for that 110 feet. I do understand the concern about the walkability when you do have such a large right of way. Luckily those street we do have several options for for designing those streets within the the transportation criteria manual and and we would just have to look at that design as it got forward but I do understand the concerns about wide streets and that pedestrian connectivity. Okay any other questions or county mayor Pro Tem? To pick up on that yeah no one it's going to be a while because before with respect to Brinker it's going to be a while because the American Legion post would have to there there I know there's probably an easement there but there's still I don't see that happening anytime soon and then I do adopt I understand staff's position but I do adopt council member Davis's point and I don't I would love I wouldn't want to construct anything that doesn't encourage through traffic towards loop 28 or back up Spencer. I don't want to encourage cut through traffic to avoid loop 288 in this development so I think a good flow to feed the development but also be purposeful about how we want traffic to go through that area and not motivate people to circumvent loop 288 or some of the roads that are already established is what jumps out at me. I appreciate staff my other comment is thanks for staff for going back and and working on the other steps but I'm going to move but we still have to have the public here yeah we have yeah so yeah we still we got that plus we have some callers yes so I well all that being said I'll listen but again I I just I just want to say when we're talking about partnering with us part of that is us doing worse what we say we're going to do right so I think we need to look at ourselves as well and say well have we been good partners because this is the second time at this and and and we committed then we decommitted and now we're back here in this again so I think it part of the onus is on us to be good partners if we expect people to work with us and and not be inconsiderate of of time energy etc so thanks. Councilmember Davis. Sorry Mayor this occurred to me after I spoke last time. The question for staff is right now we're looking at overlay conditions on the zoning case at what future date would we have another opportunity for some of these obviously opportunity to designate the width of the right of way that's that's fleeting you know once that happens it happens but some of these other like design standard kind of things like building facade tempos and that kind of thing do we have any future opportunities as this project actually builds out for city involvement in those those aspects of placemaking or is this kind of the last bite of the apple with overlay conditions? In terms of count this going before council this would be potentially the last because this would be the zoning and next would be site planning and then and then platting for the site. Well and also I mean the the legislature has severely restricted us on what we can ask I mean we we can I guess we don't really get into architectural type of approvals unless they bring those kinds of things to us during a rezoning and typically we've we've asked that they be incorporated or or so forth and so on but as far as facades and the type of material at least the type of material we we've been sort of cut out from that decision making process. Okay any more questions for staff because we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back with the public comment so any questions for staff? All right let's take a break it's 10 45. Let's go about five or seven minutes thank you. Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council we are reconvening and we are on public hearing item seven six D Z20-002D. We've concluded the staff presentation and concluded council questions for staff prior to the public hearing we are now to the public hearing portion and so I will open the public hearing and we will be bringing our callers on so we're waiting for our first caller. Thank you. All right do we have a caller? Hello? Yes caller you're on with the Denton City Council for a public hearing on agenda item six D. Once you state your name and address we will start your time and you have four minutes. Are you an applicant or a representative of the applicant? I am not. Okay yeah I just want to let you know you have four minutes. Thank you Mayor. Mayor Pro Tem Rob Rainer Denton Texas 76209. I wanted to cover a couple of points that were discussed and give my viewpoints on them concerning this zoning. One of them is on the design you know if you look at the aerial this looks like a nice triangle track and you think well there could be a lot of things done to it but in my opinion there's some major issues. One of them is there's a 50-foot utility easement water and sewer that runs parallel with loop 288 and it's about 200 over 200 feet into the property from the loop. Well besides that being there you also have about a 30-foot pressured fuel line easement that runs at a 45 degree angle from the southeast to the northwest in the middle of this rectangle and you can see it on the aerial it kind of looks like a part of the old Chisholm Trail or or a dirt road that's what that easement is. So with these easement configurations this rectangle starts to resemble a pie in my opinion. The building design standards I don't think or can't address the utility configurations that are being asked excuse me by the owner but the owner has designed buildings that would work under the utility driven conditions that we have. An example would be parking. I've been in real estate for quite a while here in Denton. I understand that on retail parking should be allowed in front of the buildings including these buildings but outside of real estate 101 and marketing the main reason I see here is these utility easements can't be built on but they can be parked as they are in place. The owner has designed the buildings so that they can work around the the easements themselves. I also like your conversations concerning connectivity. I think Brinker would be a great road for kind of a slow down deceleration portion once you pass Spencer so that you can enjoy I think a relaxed somewhat relaxed area because everything south is just busy busy busy. So I would like for you all to look at that and so I can only finish with I ask that the council vote for the mixed-use region regional zoning as requested by the owner and Mayor thank you again for time to be able to present this. Thank you very much. All right we have another caller and we will bring that caller on. Are you there are you with this caller? Are you with this caller? Yes sir. Yes welcome to this meeting of the Dent City Council and public hearing portion of agenda item 6d. I'm Mayor Chris Watts. Once you start once you state your name and address we'll start your time and you have four minutes. This is John Holman 76207. I know y'all got Pruitt's awesome email concerning a lot of stuff and I just want to reiterate that for y'all and for anybody who might be following along especially his ideas of distributing shops around the area instead of lumping all the apartments on the west side and all the commercial on the east side would help tremendously. This defining walkability I know apparently there was discussion last time about what exactly is walkable what what is walkable what makes for walkability and I hope that everybody on council gets real familiar with that. I think it's I don't think we can move anywhere forward without it personally. He gives an example for instance people sit on the courthouse lawn or take a walk around the courthouse after they eat dinner downtown because it's walkable. They may go get some ice cream at Beth Marie's or grab a game from a game store. This is what makes these areas more desirable more productive and pay more taxes than it takes to serve them. The whole idea of value per acre I'm just finding extremely interesting and extremely helpful for city planning. I just don't think you can plan without these kinds of considerations that y'all are seeing from Pruitt. I know you've gotten them and I just want to reiterate the importance of the stuff that of these aspects. Thank you very much for y'all work on it. Okay yes sir. All right thank you. Are there any more callers? Okay all right is is the uh is the applicant on or uh is the applicant available to answer any questions or to make any comments? I don't know if we he is here yes yes okay all right uh okay yes let me go ahead and get your time. Mr. City Attorney how many minutes does the applicant get? Is it 10 or 20 but only 10 per representative? You're muted Aaron. It's 10 unless there's more than uh I think it's four app for representatives and they get up to 20 minutes okay total okay all right uh all right so uh applicant state your state your name we'll put you down for 10 minutes so um you you may proceed once you state your name and your address we will go ahead and uh start the clock. Great Julie could you pull up my presentation as I introduce myself uh Danny McCormick 720 North Post Oak Road Houston Texas thank you uh Mayor Mayor Pro Tem Council um I'm gonna let Julie let me know when you have our presentation up. Yes it's up we're looking at your cut your first slide where it says McCormack commercial dentin rezone. Great uh go to the next page please um this is a uh aerial showing all of the property holdings that we own here uh in in East Denton uh it's it's bordered by McKinney to the north Woodrow to the west uh just north of the Denton Crossing Shopping Center to the south and to the East Loop 288. Next slide please the this is the development concept plans that you all have have seen before um this is understanding that you know this is a concept plan the ESAs have been worked started worked out with city staff and will continue to be worked out uh as well as some of the drainage and um other development uh design plans as well um the pipeline the oh the utility easements that Rob Brainer was discussing was in between where it says 288 right next to those red buildings those retail buildings right behind those there's a tree line that runs north south those are the tree lines that run and then there's also a high pressure gas line as well that runs diagonally through the track that that cuts through the track that you can't see here but um is there and so um we really wanted to show um you all the the plans of this this this truly is is intended uh the vision is to have this as a mixed use development with office multifamily retail and hopefully some sort of entertainment use if we can recover from this world crazy world we're in today um and really the concept of this is to bring in all the 18-hour environment where people can come in live work play eat get entertained live music what have you and so the concept of this is working with with staff and understanding what it is in the city of Denton to have a mixed use development and i'll get into the comparisons later but i want you to realize that we have pushed the environment that that we believe that that city of Denton will be proud of and we will be proud of as well so the next slide we had a drawing made up for for council to to show the type of environment that we are looking to build here it is an open air green space development that centralizes a long entertainment with some office and you can't see the multifamily but some multifamily in the back and some retail and really create a place for people to come hang out bring the bring their pets or you know have a glass of wine on the patio and have their kids in a play area that's fenced off so um this this really shows the sense of environment and a place to go and enjoy and so um the slide page the next slide please so this slide is a the current zoning of this property which is li and go and as you can see there's office buildings that front loop 288 and then there's going to be warehouses behind them on the remainder of the track this will not be a master plan development as it will be built and sold in different phases therefore you can see all of the blue boxes and rectangles and triangles those those are detention ponds because the this will not be a master planned cohesive development it will it will be more of a hodgepodge one-off type development that the current zoning is and it it really will be a visually unappealing less tax base less tree preservation a little less landscaping more metal buildings type of development um and that's the current zoning so i wanted to go to the next slide and this is a slide that shows what our neighboring properties look like both on the office side on the top picture and on the industrial side on the bottom picture uh the following slide this shows your general office zoning versus your mixed use regional and i will not read all this to you word for word but i would like to highlight you know the importance of the mixed use regional which is best on the point i want to bring up here is it's established in areas with the greatest regional access with i-35 to the south major major road and loop 288 connecting to 380 really a major corridor for east end uh the following slide is also go versus li i'm sorry go versus mr as you can see on this slide the minimum landscape area will increase by 25 from 20 to 25 and if you notice the general office zoning location is deemed primarily west of i-35 near the dent municipal airport the following slide is the light industrial comparison to the mr comparison is that slide just yeah which one okay i'm looking at slide um i think it was there we go yeah here we go dent zoning li to mr yes so this slide is light industrial versus the mixed use and it's established in areas with the greatest regional access which is given the property is is on loop 288 then the with with with the following the mixed use regional enhancing and creating we're having national retailers employment restaurants entertainment venues and housing at the highest level scale and that's important as you can see we took that into our preliminary designs uh intensely and we would like to create create that environment on the 288 where we think it's best fit to do that so the the last slide page nine um is an important slide because as you can see the landscape area actually increases by 66 from 15 to 25 your tree canopies will increase by 50 from 20 to 30 you can also note that the light industrial is primarily located west of i-35 next to dent municipal airport also the architecturally finished metal will decrease by 80 from 50 to 10 and in dash in addition if kept light industrial the noise threshold will be a hundred times louder 100 percent louder than mixed use regional so if you'd like i can run through uh staff uh well you've got about two minutes left okay um so so in short the staff proposed a items for um for the zoning um that we were not able to we wanted to compromise with staff so we went back and we worked with staff and we came up with the items that we can commit to today our vision is connectability walkability and really a sense of place and that's what we're striving for today but to put this into a to put the additional requirements from staff into this zoning case we did not feel was fiscally responsible today or able to put into a zoning case so with that i will open up for questions okay yeah if we could pull the um presentation out questions any questions for the applicant mayor pro tem yeah i just wanted to make sure uh danis truard i was just i wanted to make sure i understood where he said he could or could not line up with staff are we are we saying we we did agree on some of those things that julie laid out and some we couldn't in that the road etc or is he saying what julie julie laid out is no longer feasible i just need to make sure i understand that all right correct we were able to compromise with staff and we came up and julie has that list if you'd like to pull it up on what we agreed to and and there's a little confusion on the on the brinker road extension said spencer but it's brinker road uh it was my understanding that staff and misinterpreted staff wanted us i thought staff wanted a 65 foot collector to be built there if the staff wants to do the still the 110 foot we would be willing to um to to agree to that as well if that helps got it no i mean okay that's good to know um i i hope that i'm biased but i i would i would hope we keep it smaller um but i understand uh the the thoroughfare plan etc so okay that answers my question thank you all right any other questions yeah oh well we got a question councilmember davis councilmember davis thank you mayor i have a couple of questions um so i'm kind of flipping back and forth here between the slides that show uh slide five in our presentation which is staff's design conditions for placemaking and then uh slide six which is the applicant proposed conditions there's some overlap there but there's some key differences in the applicant proposed overlay conditions we have street trees at a rate of 40 linear feet on average would you be amenable to to 30 feet as staff has has requested yes what we looked at was the was the ddc 7.7.5 table 78 and it was a 40 foot per linear foot but if that gets us across then yes i would be amenable and my other question um you might better be able to answer it but staff may have a clear answer for me i'm getting kind of turned around myself on what width the staff is proposing for brinker road and what width i know you've got it as 50 and well your accepted conditions but um it's 65 in one place and i just want to make sure i know what we're talking about with brinker road correct so it's it's a um 50 foot actual road with parallel parking on each side so it's it's we're saying the same thing it's a 65 foot right away correct got it okay and my last question what i'm looking at is staff slide five conditions a through d are primarily that's before we even get to any of the parking stuff a through d are primarily about building design certain heights the facade tempo you know what set back at different distances from each other are there any of those conditions a through d that y'all are are amenable to or you think kind of jive with the concept that you've shown us the design that you want for this project so you're asking a through d the design um so let me make that you want me through d i'm sorry b b through d 3b through b yes yeah so so 3b to jump in um you know office multi-family retail are 10 to 12 foot high ceilings uh if we raise them to 15 that would add 15 percent of the cost of the building we'd love to do this but this condition adds costs that we can't currently commit to in this environment um c is is building shall maintain a facade of 20 to 30 foot multiples i won't read the rest of it um these standards really make for a very busy streetscape we understand the spirit of it uh but we would rather make sure the building facades face more of the streets and and have the pair face more of the parallel parking to be more welcoming uh on the streets for the pedestrians and d is the building's long carina spencer and neighborhood street shall maintain alignment this is a design yet to be determined due to the high pressure gas lines that run diagonally through the property so that's another thing that we just cannot commit to today because of the site restrictions so those are all my questions right now mayor okay so i want to make sure i understand uh these so staff are on 3b the first floor height for structures located adjacent to spencer and carina must be a minimum 15 feet are you saying that even if it's multi-family or residential you want first floor ceiling heights of 15 feet so the intent is to allow those buildings to be um retrofitted to to be vertically mixed use if if if those streets became more commercial so yes even in a multi-family it would be um it would allow that sort of um flexibility within that first floor okay so help me understand the the origin or the genesis of that is that a is that a ddc requirement or is that just so yeah the ddc actually requires 12 feet um we i you know we talked about adding a little bit more to make sure that there was adequate space to provide for a um a commercial building or some sort of retail on that or restaurant on the bottom floor so the ddc and md and um mn do require that um for multi-family do require the um the first floor to have a 12 foot um to be 12 feet if it's adjacent to a street but but that's that's if they have i mean typically they're putting retail or some type of commercial use in that first floor uh and then multi-family on top of that um is that yes the intent is to um to provide a building that would be flexible um for a future redevelopment to allow for a commercial use to go on the first floor if that if that building um transition to a vertically mixed use building but that's not required in the mr zoning is that correct or it is let me let me verify um it's in two places so i kind of want to look in both places so yes um in mr um the ground floor fronting a public street shall have a minimum wall height of 12 feet for multi-family in the ddc okay all right okay mr mccormick can you hear me yes i can is uh is 12 feet i mean is 12 feet more acceptable or you're is that still something that you're you're unable to do in the ground for multi-family yeah i mean mayor thank you for this and uh you know when you put when we talk start talking about putting retail inside of multi-family you're talking about floor plates you're talking about column spacing you're talking about a ton of additional cost and i i cannot agree to that today okay well so let me let me make sure that that is that is that staff is what he just mentioned i mean are there other requirements than other than the 12 foot because he's right i mean if you're building a multi-family space it's going to be a different layout and a different basically physical structure and an engineered structure than if you're putting office down there so is are there those requirements that he mentioned other than the 12 feet the placement of all these kinds of things is is that part of the ddc or is it just you have to have 12 feet tall okay yeah just the 12 feet okay so mr mccormack what what i'm hearing and and somebody correct me if i'm wrong is that if you build a building that is uh if you're going to keep it multi-family that the only requirement that i'm hearing right now is that the first floor adjacent to those streets has you know needs to be 12 feet tall i'm not hearing that you have to construct the first floor as if it has to accommodate a certain level of commercial type of construction and engineering does that make sense i mean does that change because i thought what you mentioned is there were a lot of other things that you'd have to do to make it potentially a commercial space where what i'm hearing again somebody correct me if i'm wrong is that on the first floor of these adjacent by these streets whatever i just lost mine that the first floor ceiling heights just have to be 12 feet now is that just to be clear is that just for multifamily that you're saying no no what what i'm hearing is that in the mr it says the first floor height for structures located adjacent to spencer particular to this and carina must be a minimum of 15 feet that was staff the ddc only says 12 feet so if you're building a multifamily they want the 12 foot height in case if for some reason you go back eventually and change those first floors to commercial that it meets the ddc requirements of 12 feet is that is that a correct summary of staffs uh what i what i heard staff say yes for multifamily developments in mr it's just a ddc requirement that that the first floor have that 12 foot ceiling height um if it's adjacent to a right of way okay yes all right so yes yes sir that's that's it okay yes if it's just for multifamily then we can agree to the first floor 12 feet 12 foot ceiling height okay well that's what's required by the ddc they were adding they were adding the three feet additional to 15 feet um okay all right i'm just i'm just looking through these and just wanted to make sure that um uh we we had some clarification on that council member briggs you're showing a little angst there well well yeah because i the confusion between what the ddc says and what the placemaking suggestion was um i was just um they're they're two different things so well and i agree but i really i mean i've done some multifamily development uh and i've put them on all i mean i put them on some pretty major roads and a 15 foot height in a multifamily building i don't know how three feet makes the difference between a placemaking of 12 of 12 feet or 15 feet when you've got the same room with now you've just got an additional three feet council member davis okay oh council member briggs go ahead i'm just gonna try to clarify what your question was a second ago mayor yeah go ahead council member briggs yeah my my question is so when we do build or someone does build um a structure with commercial in the bottom and um multifamily on top is that 15 what is normally required for that type of structure i think that's for staff yeah that's my question don't know what the actual requirements would be for um uh for for building inspections but i'll try to get an answer for that for you well but also want to clarify that that's not what we're talking about here i mean what she said is the ddc code requirement for building multifamily on a collector i believe it was or something that's adjacent to the street the height of the ceiling is 12 feet whereas there may be a different regulation if you're building a multifamily building with actual commercial space on the first floor and then apartments above that so they're really two different scenarios council member davis sure mayor if i'm understanding count staff's recommendation here on 15 foot versus 12 foot for this particular project the idea is incremental change at a future time if someone were to build a building today that was in a that was a commercial space it would have to be that 15 feet in this in this scenario is what i'm understanding i think what julie said at the beginning of this was if at some future time somebody wanted to come back in and make this bottom floor a commercial space they couldn't they'd be conforming to the code if it were a 15 foot ceiling they'd already be good to go with the existing code but if it's 12 feet for a multifamily just apartments you can't necessarily it's harder to do or wouldn't be code compliant to do a future refit of a bottom floor turning it into retail the idea being that you could you could incrementally change the building later on and make it more mixed use and not just multifamily top to bottom well and i understand things on the square and i understand that i guess if that's what we're starting to say in our development process that we are going to zone or make approvals contingent upon somewhere down the line 20 or 30 years someone being able to retrofit a building um i think we're gonna we're gonna have some difficulty because if you're building multifamily you're building multifamily and if if you're built multifamily with the 12 foot ceiling height they're not going to be able to come in and do it or they can do it they can come in and i mean people can re-retrofit buildings uh to do a lot of different things that may mean you've got some major changes on some of the design so i just i mean i hear what everybody's saying but i i think this is getting pretty micromanaging and of course we're going to take a vote and this council is going to decide what they want to do i'm just trying to figure out what some of the parameters are for the for the developer that uh you know to try to get him a little closer to see if we can't can't get this but if if if three feet make or break this deal in a ceiling height i would be very very disappointed i sure hope there's a lot more than that uh if that's the way that it goes uh or yeah three feet so anyway um any other questions uh for the applicant okay all right uh fantastic so i i guess um just to summarize um i heard that the applicant said that he would be willing to do street trees at intervals of 30 feet i think is what i heard and i think i heard the applicant i think i heard the applicant say that uh you know the 15 foot minimum is a little bit onerous or that it doesn't work for his project but the 12 foot minimum for an apartment building in mr zoning which at least from what i heard staff said that's the requirement uh that that would work uh and then i don't know if you address the building shall maintain a facade rhythm of 20 to 30 foot or multiples therefore i'm not quite sure what that even means could somebody explain to me just help me sort of visually does that mean a 20 foot or 30 foot with the change of materials change of either an offset or in other words it's not straight across okay uh and mr mcparmack is that something that that you think you could build into your design is is to be able to just sort of put those kind of architectural elements in of course we we really can't um we really can't regulate materials so i really have a have a problem with you know i mean we we cannot regulate materials pursuant to state law i guess we can regulate color but but i mean you also want to build a quality project i know and you also want to build something that is going to have value and will be pleasing and that will make it the most marketable as possible so is that something that that you you you intend to do that you can agree to do sort of have those kinds of offsets and change of materials in your design you know mayor i talked to my landscape architect and an architect deeply about this conversation uh this this in particular and i understand you having it downtown makes a lot of sense because it's tighter areas not as much land but this would become a very busy streetscape and i no no i'm not i'm not i'm not talking about the i must either i'm misunderstanding something this is talking about your actual building this isn't talking about streetscape this is talking about your actual where it says buildings shall maintain a facade rhythm of 20 to 30 or multiples thereof along all public streets by changing materials color or relief with columns cornices bases flues masonry in other words it's the facade of the building it's not anything having to do with the landscaping or the street right right but from the streetscape you're looking at the buildings and the buildings would be just too busy and so i don't believe that's something that we want to agree to now okay all right that's fine yeah i'm just i'm just double checking to go through that ones that council member davis had brought up just to sort of get a a deeper dive into that okay all right well uh if there's not any more questions for the applicant we will you can stay on the line but um we will continue our discussion and or uh we'll continue our deliberation and or vote so any other questions for staff uh mayor pro tem my question was do we have any no other callers i know but did we have cards so yes i was going to read that yes yes we've got for the item 6d we had 12 people making comments using our online form there were 11 in support of this item and one against uh and all these comments forms were emailed to the entire city council and our city secretary finally there were two who had requested to speak over the phone on this item and just as a clarification if i don't read this out that means all those lines were zero all right so if if in previous agenda items if we don't have any comments we just there's no comments we we read this when when there are comments so from this for this item 60 there were 12 and 11 in support one against two speakers and then of course uh that did not include the applicant but uh so we had a total of three including the applicant yes mayor pro tem okay with that then i'm gonna move approval okay all right uh we have a motion to approve agenda item 6d is that do we um i know that the applicant agreed to a couple of things do you want to include that in in your motion um mayor pro tem yes so by way of reference it's the place making slide that staff provided uh that be page six of 19 for for point of reference all right and that's the that the applicant agreed to a 30 foot interval for street trees and 12 feet for first floor heights on uh structures located adjacent to spencer and kareena that is correct those two adjustments were were yeah okay is okay any other uh were there any other comments on that did i get that right all right so that that was your motion including those two uh additions that is correct and i'm making a note okay council member ryan a second all right yes council member davis uh two things first a clarification i just want to make sure it's memorialized somewhere that when on page six when we see 50 foot we're talking about a 65 foot right of way total they describe it a little differently but that's a 65 foot right of way for brinker and then secondly i would move an amendment to the motion that we also require staff's conditions 3c and 3d that's the facade tempo and the horizontal elements okay so you're you're asking that as a friendly amendment or you're asking that as an amendment uh the same thing i'm offering it as an amendment whether it's accepted or seconded and voted on it makes no difference to me well it makes a difference on how we proceed so if it's a friendly amendment i have to ask council member mayor pro tem if he accepts it and if he doesn't accept it then we'll we'll have a uh a vote on it council member pro tem did you uh hear council council member davis's uh request for an amendment i did but am i tracking right that the applicant said that was a a bridge too far right that was the busy comment i believe so yeah um then no i i won't accept it as a friendly uh if we we can put it to a vote and see if there's a majority and uh and see how that goes all right uh so council member davis that's a amendment that you're making to include uh three c and d on what'd you say page it was placemaking i think those are on page five okay all right so we have a motion for an amendment to add uh on i believe it's page five of the staff presentation under placemaking uh elements three c and d to the current motion that's been made and mayor i think on on condition 3d it says carinas and spencer i think that's supposed to be carina and brinker so i just want to make sure that my motion is for it to be carina and brinker okay they're not building anything on spencer today okay all right so uh noted so thank you so much for that all right so we have the motion for the amendment do we have a second for that amendment council member briggs i'll second all right so we have a motion and a second to add as an amendment to the motion on the floor as we discussed uh placemaking 3 c and d with the correction that the road spencer is is should be made brinker all right uh mayor protem uh discussion uh sure is so i guess it's a it's a inquiry is it is they are we able to ask the applicant um again um to give thoughts or is that not uh parliamentary parliamentary accurate i don't think that's a word well i mean i think the uh i think the applicant has given i don't remember what the direct answer was to 3d um but i think the answer to 3c at least at that time was um they they weren't willing to do that got it okay yeah all right yes council member davis uh by way of discussion in support of the motion i understand what the applicant was saying about busyness and i i get that um it's just a little bit of a brush off answer that those elements are there to encourage interest visual interest uh one man's busyness is another person's visual interest as they walk down a street to and from their apartment to their job um i i know it seems like we're micromanaging here um this is a very important development the the use of this land is very important and i want to make sure we get it right the first time around and we don't regret it when we drive by it later on sure i promise you this is not micromanaging this is good design principles and i think that they can find a way i've spent time with this developer uh to close disclose all of that of course um i've looked at their concept i'm very happy with what they have planned for this area i think what we're offering here is an improvement and i think they'll find a way to work with it very well council member breaks yeah i i'm going to withdraw my uh my second because i'm i'm ultimately going to be voting no for the project and so i feel like it would not be um right for me to force the developer to do something he didn't want to do with my no vote okay all right um is there a second on the amendment i'm gonna i'm gonna second that amendment um because i i wanted to uh to come to a vote and and i will say that under 3c there are a lot of oars in that statement so this isn't something that you do all of these things these are these are options that you can do so um i think that um there's something there and it's worded in such a way that i believe that there there could be a way to to figure out how to do that uh and and if not i understand that's ultimately depending on how the vote goes with the amendment and how it goes with the motion that's ultimately going to be the developer's choice council member ryan yes i'm having problems uh figuring out if in c we're requiring uh a possibility of varying setbacks but in d we're requiring that shall maintain a horizontal uh the horizontal elements it's almost like they're conflicting with one another am i not reading that correctly that's a good question for staff it's a good question and and spencer is brinker so it's d it's buildings along kareena and and brinker so could help us someone help us reconcile uh a seemingly uh at least a potential inconsistency so those um so the the uh those the rhythm of the building so those those vertical elements that the potential setbacks or the fluted masonry or columns um you know those those would go along the street frontage but then you would pretend would have horizontal elements so parapets or water courses or some other uh string courses some other um visual design that would sort of lead the eye down the building down down a um a street so it allows for both the horizontal and the vertical elements to work together to provide consistency within the horizontal but provide that variation within the vertical council member ryan um i'm still i'm just trying to it's it's just getting late and i'm trying to visualize what what this is describing and it just again it just seems like it's for both of them to be in there just seems off can i can try to help mayor yes go ahead council member davis in my mind your condition c is your 20 or 30 foot or multiples offsets of different masonry you might have a column you might have a change in color in masonry you might have a change in in the type of material the facing material and that moves you along vertically item d that's your all of your balconies are going to line up all of your parapets are going to line up your if you have an extra row of a different kind of facing or stone work or something that's going to line up along the street the idea behind all of this is a more urban feel think about brownstones and a new york or boston street that you have spacing of vertical elements and the spacing of horizontal elements and there's a continuity continuity but a variability to it also so i one is vertical one is horizontal and i don't see that they contradict personally okay all right uh all right i appreciate that there's something i was going to say too but i can't oh on c and d who determines who makes the decision whether this these conditions are met in other words when the design comes in and these kinds of things is this solely a staff decision and if there's disagreement what's is there any type of i mean help me understand that process because this isn't i mean these are pretty loose i mean some of these are pretty it's not as if it's nailed down very specifically there's a lot of oars and of course i understand about the the horizontal that that makes sense but on these others who makes the decision on whether these conditions have been met so with the um with the review of the site plan or potentially the building permit staff would review it and and we we would review it their their elevations would have to show the dimensions of how of where these elements the dimensions between them and then they would have to show an element within that menu every 20 or 30 or you know 40 feet whatever multiple of that so staff would review that to ensure that compliance yeah okay so you're saying that they could have facade rhythm of 20 30 or 40 feet in other words it's not it says or multiples thereof in other words they just okay all right um okay all right yes uh mr city attorney i also wanted to add when it comes to something like this where the staff what is having to make an interpretation or the director of of development services if the applicant disagrees with the interpretation because it's not clear they could appeal that as an administrative decision to zba for a final determination and then from zba if they if they don't if they don't like the decision is that then when it proceeds to the district court exactly okay all right okay yes mayor pro tem just real quick so julie if you can look at the aerial and help me reconcile this so assuming i can get past c my hang up with d is if you look at the trajectory of the road if i'm not if i'm missing something you tell me it runs directly into that high pressure uh pipeline so you're saying you can't put a building there it says the buildings have to go along that street but you can't do it let me make sure i understand um well i think they're just saying buildings along korena or or um brinker i mean you obviously can't put a building in a high pressure gas easement i mean right but but the wording doesn't give you that it doesn't account for that it says it has to be it doesn't say where along there it says am i reading it wrong well it says buildings along korena and i'm going to change it to brinker and neighborhood streets show me i don't think that's saying um that i mean i'm not understanding what you're saying is how you're reading it i'm reading it to say there's a segment of korena that the building cannot go right so the i don't see where it gives you that flexibility to say it doesn't say anywhere along katrina korena it doesn't say on the back half of korena it just says all the buildings have to go uh there and in that so then you get into a financial equation to say where do you how do you make that work and you know squeezing a bit i just i guess if if we're going in and i guess that's the problem with trying to plan the detail um i have is i'm just taking it at its word and it says just strict reading it says uh buildings along korena and brinker and neighborhood streets etc so where on korena does it meet the mandate well i i think if this if i could um it doesn't say that all the buildings that that there has to be a building all along korena i think that's the decision of the developer i think if the develop what it is saying if a developer puts a building on korena where it can go i mean our code is not going to allow uh or the law is not going to allow a building to go on korena if there's a portion of korena that is uh occupied by gas easement but if there is a building along korena or or or brinker uh it's talking about if there's a building there buildings along maintain the alignment of horizontal elements along the block or lot i don't think this is a this is a declaration of that there has to be uh that the whole street has to be buildings it just says if you're putting a building on korena or brinker this is how it has to be yeah okay all right so um so we have a uh an amendment that has been motion and a second made to go to the to the main motion the last question i had mr city attorney is i remember this from a long time during when i was on council that at some point the council made a decision to pass something that the developer and i could be remembering this differently that the developer didn't want and that they put a piece of paper down on the podium and said we protested this and it had to it required either a supermajority vote or something like that i'm not trying to convolute things i'm just saying we've heard the developer say that he was not assenting to one of these conditions and if we pass that um number one can we do that and number two what is the impact on the developer other than i just don't build it or i build it this way there's two provisions in the local government code on a zoning item that allows a supermajority vote via protest the one that we're usually or that we usually encounter is when 20 percent of the property owners surrounding the property object there's also one that doesn't come up very often and i will double check but i'm pretty certain it involves if the people within the area to be zoned the property owner object to it and then it would also trigger the supermajority vote typically that is with the actual zoning but i have not seen although i don't think it would exclude the possibility of somebody objecting to conditions in like overlay conditions to be able to trigger i got you it would be a case of first impression for us yeah okay so mine might have been an actual zoning or this isn't a we're not changing the zoning we're changing a condition or an overlay within the zoning okay all right okay uh so mayor pro tem and then we're going to take the boat yes just one question i i would ask uh council member davis's if i know this is if he would amend his his um motion i think we can get to 3c i can get behind that d is so ambiguous uh that i don't end with the pressure line i i'm that's my ask is if you i mean i think we can i can get the c d is just i don't know who's going to regulate that and and how do you hold someone accountable and if they take us to court we're going to lose you know that that's that's tough for me i don't want to be i guess the thing that's tough for me is i just don't read it the same way that i think you're reading it i i read it as being pretty simple to comply with and and i don't i don't fault the developer for taking issue with it you know it's a design specific thing that that constrains them in some ways but um i just don't read it as restrictively as you do so okay sorry thank you okay yep all right so we have a motion and a second uh on the amendment as we've stated and i trust that the city attorney has those conditions in the amendment so i don't have to repeat all that uh councilmember davis how say you on the amendment i mayor watts is an i uh councilmember ryan nay councilmember melzer nay councilmember briggs uh no councilmember hudspeth nay councilmember armater no all right okay so the amendment fails and uh councilmember hudspeth has a motion uh for approval i believe councilmember i mean mayor pro tem excuse me mayor pro tem husbeth uh councilmember ryan did you seconded that did you know yes i seconded that okay uh and that's with um i think the 12 feet in item 3b and then i think that was it um or the 30 feet interval on the trees okay mayor pro tem how say you all right councilmember ryan aye councilmember melzer day councilmember davis aye councilmember briggs i know uh councilmember armater no uh mayor watts is an i i believe if i count correctly the eyes have it uh four to three so agenda item 6d uh passes all right now we're on to concluding items any concluding items mayor pro tem just real quick uh saturday the 25th is tim crouch's birthday so i want to wish him a happy birthday uh great guy uh does a lot around the city uh so want to um wish him well all right councilmember briggs we we've heard a lot about um long-range financial plans and i think the city manager weighed in on something that he and richard were going over um or financial impact sorry um and so i'm gonna i guess ask for that in a friday report or that to come to council um eventually so i just wanted to put that out there since we discussed it earlier tonight okay all right anybody else okay we will stand adjourned at 1154