Oct 20, 2020 City Council on 2020-10-20 2:00 PM

October 20, 2020 City Council
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             Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Denton City Council on Tuesday, October 20, 2020.
 The time is 2.02 p.m. We're going to go ahead and get started with our agenda.
 We do have a quorum, so I'll call this meeting to order.
 Our first item on the agenda is citizen comments on consent agenda items.
 And we do have several from our online form.
 So what I'll do is I will just read those in the order in which they, not the order
 in which they came in, but in the order in which they appear in the agenda.
 And so we'll start with agenda item.
 This is 4A, it's ID 20-1985.
 We had one online form submission in support of the item and zero against.
 For agenda item 4D, which is ID 20-2002.
 We had zero in support of the item and one against.
 For agenda item 4G, ID 20-1792, we had one in support of the item and zero against.
 For agenda item 4H, ID 20-2010, we had one in support of the item and zero against.
 For agenda item 4I, ID 20-2051, had one in support of the item and zero against.
 For agenda item 4S, ID 20-2070, we had one in support of the item and zero against.
 For agenda item 4U, ID 20-1873, we had zero in support of the item and one against.
 For agenda item 4U, we had ID 20-1873.
 We did have one in support of the item and zero against.
 That was the same agenda item.
 For agenda item 4V, we had ID 20-2125, had one in support of the item and zero against.
 So those are the comments that we had from the public on the consent agenda, and we have
 no callers.
 So then we will move forward to a request of clarification on the agenda items listed
 on today's agenda.
 Any clarifications?
 Councilmember Meltzer?
 - Yeah, just a request to pull out G for a brief presentation.
 - Okay, all right.
 Okay, Councilmember Briggs, I believe I saw your hand.
 - Yeah, and on item G, if they can just speak to how the artist was chosen during the selection
 as well, that would be helpful.
 On item K, I have a question about the Hinkle and Windsor, and just trying to understand,
 will the new road be torn up or will this be in a different section that hasn't been
 newly constructed, or was this already work done that we're just paying for?
 - Yes, that is work complete that we're paying for.
 So this was already completed with the Magnolia project.
 - Okay, good.
 And then in the background, it says that there were sidewalks that were done with this contract.
 It may or may not be, for this item, be able to speak about, but I'd like to know what
 section of sidewalk was included in this contract for Hinkle at some point.
 - Just had a...
 Sorry.
 - Okay, if you're okay to answer, I don't know if that's okay for the city attorney
 if that's on topic, but...
 - What agenda item is that, Councilmember Briggs?
 - Well, it's the Magnolia, Hinkle and Magnolia.
 It says in the contract that it mentioned sidewalks, and I know we had some questions
 about sidewalks on Hinkle with this, and I didn't know what section was included.
 - Yes, so Mr. City Attorney, I believe that is that an appropriate question for that particular
 agenda item as far as it's within the scope of the posting?
 - Exactly.
 - It is within the scope of the posting to find out the sidewalk construction that may
 be in that as part of that contract.
 - Okay.
 Thank you.
 - Okay.
 Yes, go ahead.
 - Included in that was a segment of sidewalk along the east side of Hinkle between University
 and the Good Samaritan retirement home there.
 The segment that was not included was along the west side that was pulled out as a separate
 project along the west side, along the new fireside development.
 - Okay.
 Okay.
 I'll have some follow-up questions later on about that, but thank you.
 Mayor, I have just one more.
 - Sure.
 Real quick question though, Councilmember Briggs.
 When you say follow-up questions for that agenda item or for that agenda item or something
 else.
 - The section of a sidewalk that was pulled out of this contract that wasn't in this contract.
 - Okay.
 So you'll address that in some other time, not necessarily in this meeting.
 Okay.
 All right.
 I'm sorry.
 Yes, go ahead.
 - Item P, we had our development code meeting and learned that this is the law firm that's
 going to be assisting us.
 Is this for that or will that come to a different, will that be a different contract for this
 legal team?
 - Madison's on her way.
 - Hi.
 This is the contract of the Borquez law firm is for the ethics board, legal support to
 the ethics board.
 So this is not about the development code review or anything like that.
 I believe that we have a separate agreement with them for that.
 - Okay.
 - That is correct.
 Okay.
 Yes.
 Councilmember Briggs, I guess those were your, no more questions.
 Okay.
 Thank you.
 Councilmember Armitage.
 - Yes.
 So number one, I want to have a J hold, I'm going to vote no on it.
 It's about the firing range.
 And then I just had a quick question about item U.
 It sounded like, I couldn't tell by what you said if it sounded like at first you mentioned
 that there was a comment against it and none in support and then it sounded like maybe
 it was the other way around.
 - No, no, no.
 There was one in support and one against.
 - One in support and one against.
 Okay.
 Got it.
 Okay.
 Thank you.
 - Yes.
 - Yeah.
 So I will just, I'll ask, I'm guessing the answer is no.
 I'm just curious to know what the reason for opposition is to that.
 So they sent, that comment form went out to all the council members.
 So I would just refer you to that.
 - Okay.
 So that must've come out at some point earlier today or late, late last night.
 So I will make sure to look at it, either way, I'm strongly in support of this item.
 It's about the changing of the name of the committee on citizens engagement to the committee
 on community engagement anyway, but I'm strongly in support of that.
 I look forward to reading what the opposition is, I'm curious.
 - Okay.
 All right.
 Any other clarifications of agenda items on the agenda?
 Okay.
 Seeing none, then we will begin to move through our work session reports, beginning with work
 session 3A, receive report, hold a discussion and give staff direction on municipal broadband
 service models and their potential application to the city of Denton.
 - Good afternoon, mayor and council.
 Stuart Birds, I assistant to the city manager.
 I'm going to share my screen.
 All right.
 I'm here to talk to you today about municipal broadband.
 Just by way of reminder, you've seen this before, the FCC defines high-speed internet
 as a minimum of 25 megabits per second download and three megabits per second upload.
 The city of Denton, for the most part, is serviced by frontier communications and charter
 communications to provide high-speed internet.
 Grande communications provides internet to ropes and ranch, and then staff is only aware
 of one section of the city being that area in the Preservative Concrete that doesn't
 have internet, as far as we're aware, all of the other areas of the city do have high-speed
 internet, and in that small section of the Preservative Concrete, CenturyLink is working
 with their HOA to potentially provide service there.
 This topic was presented during the January 28th, 2020 pending council work session by
 council member Briggs, and staff did receive a Consentance of Council Direction to Schedule
 a Presentation.
 Previously, we have provided three informal staff reports, number 19 discussed the current
 internet services.
 - Intervention?
 - Hold on, just a second.
 I'm getting some feedback from somewhere.
 Somebody could mute their mic.
 Okay.
 All right, go ahead.
 - Perfect.
 So, number 19, which was issued in February of 2019, discussed the current internet service
 in Denton, other municipal broadband services in Texas, and that included Greenville, Texas,
 Bellevue, Texas, New Braunfels, Texas, and some federal considerations.
 2019-08-5, which was issued in April of that year, expanded on the current internet service
 in Denton, municipal broadband providers in the US, including Chattanooga, Tennessee,
 Fort Collins, Colorado, and Alameda, California, and other implementation considerations.
 This past Friday, we gave you another staff report, 2020-09-0, and it reviewed the McAllen,
 Texas city Wi-Fi program.
 I will point out with that program and McAllen, they offer 15 megabits per second service
 to select areas of their city.
 That does not qualify, but we did want to make sure that you are aware of that service
 that they are offering.
 - Okay.
 Just a second.
 I'm still getting, I'm hearing you in an echo that, so if you're in the work session room,
 if we could mute the mics, or I'm just getting feedback from you from somewhere, so let's
 go ahead and move forward, and I'll try to figure out what's going on.
 - Sorry about that.
 - Oh, it's not your fault.
 - So those informal staff reports, they describe four different service models.
 The first one being private providers, and that's what we currently have in Denton, where
 private industry provides internet services to residents, a public-private partnership,
 which was outlined in describing what New Braunfels did, where a municipality lays fiber
 in an area and then leases that infrastructure to private providers.
 New Braunfels laid it in a business corridor and then leased that out to providers, and
 then a municipal broadband retail service.
 That's Fort Collins, Colorado, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mount Bellevue, Greenville, and
 then Alameda, California, kind of served as an example of where it did not work, where
 the subscribership was not what they anticipated, and so they were left with some assets stranded
 that they had to sell off at a loss.
 We also describe the public Wi-Fi in McKellen, and that's where the city installs infrastructure
 and nodes to provide Wi-Fi internet access to Denton, and the city does do that in downtown,
 other municipal buildings.
 That service for the downtown area is about 20 megabits per second, for reference.
 Each service model kind of has its own pros and cons or considerations.
 The private providers, the city does not take on any capital expenses, and we can work with
 private providers to request a level of service.
 However, the city cannot ensure that all residents or businesses are provided high-speed internet,
 and then Texas law does not allow a municipality to require service through a franchise agreement.
 In New Braunfels, with that public-private partnership, it allows the city to improve
 the infrastructure and lease the fiber lines to ensure that all residents and businesses
 have access to high-speed internet, but it doesn't ensure the quality or reliability
 of the service if a private entity is the retail provider.
 It also cannot control the cost unless that rate approval is a condition of the public-private
 partnership.
 The municipal broadband model, it allows the city to ensure that high-speed internet is
 available to residents and businesses, allows the city to control the rates and the delivery
 of speeds, and then it also gives them the opportunity to provide that customer service
 in-house.
 However, the city does take on a large capital investment, the ongoing operating and maintenance
 costs and customer service obligations.
 Those call centers are open 24/7 with technical support, and then the rest of it kind of runs
 similar to our utility customer service that we have now.
 There's also increased financial risk associated with offering the retail service.
 And then the public Wi-Fi, as the example in McAllen shows, there's the ability to provide
 service to underserved sections of the community.
 There's potential partnerships with other stakeholders.
 McAllen partnered with their independent school district there to provide those services.
 They also funded a large portion of those capital costs through some COVID funding that
 they were able to get.
 And then it utilizes the existing fiber infrastructure for those services.
 Additional fiber can be added at a cost.
 And the consideration's there that there's limited coverage range.
 If you're using only existing fiber infrastructure, the cost of wholesale bandwidth and equipment
 in the installation will have to be subsidized elsewhere, whether that's through rate payers
 or the general fund.
 And then their slow speeds are not competitive with the potential 5G or even hardwired internet
 services.
 Yeah, Stuart, and if you could, these next three slides on Fort Collins, I mean, those
 are informational really.
 They're in our backup.
 And if council has any questions on those, that's fine, but it's very different than
 what we're discussing, at least for the city.
 And we're still at this high elevation.
 So if we could just move to the slide nine, which is risk of retail broadband model, because
 I just don't want to get bogged down in the details of the Fort Collins proposal when
 it's Fort Collins.
 So if we could maybe go to nine and then we can start having a discussion on the direction
 from council.
 And so if the city were to look toward a broadband retail model, staff kind of analyze it.
 And these are considerations that we would have.
 There's a potential for legal preemption for municipalities to provide service.
 The service that's currently offered in Greenville and Montbellevue, those are kind of outlying
 communities where internet providers didn't really have any interest in providing those
 services.
 So there was no legal challenge to their services that they're offering.
 Montbellevue had a court ruling that allowed them to do it, but that doesn't necessarily
 apply to any other municipality.
 And the consideration there is that because Denton is so close to the Metroplex, it may
 encounter a little bit more pushback from the industry.
 There's also a long system infrastructure build out.
 There's potentially a long timeline to achieve the cost neutral operations.
 A lower subscribership than anticipated could result in stranded assets as it did in California.
 And then emerging technologies such as 5G may make the investment outdated where they'll
 have nodes that wirelessly kind of beam that internet service to a receiver in your house.
 If the council would like to move forward with exploring either a public-private partnership,
 retail municipal broadband, or even public Wi-Fi solution, staff recommends engaging
 in the RFQ process to identify a consultant to provide an assessment of demand, legal
 conditions, competitive assessment, capital costs, design considerations, and the existing
 infrastructure to be able to map that out.
 In talking briefly with the consultant, that estimated cost is about $100,000, and funding
 has not been identified for this fiscal year for that.
 So two options.
 Option one would be to continue down the path that we are right now working with incumbent
 providers to provide those services to Denton.
 Or option two would be to issue the RFQ to engage with the consultant.
 For that assessment, again, about $100,000.
 We could work with finance to identify funding for this year, or we could include as a council
 requested supplemental funding request for the '21-'22 budget cycle.
 So with that, I'm happy to take any questions.
 Great.
 All right.
 Council Member Armitage.
 Yes.
 So I am very strongly for option number two, having a consultant to explore all the options.
 I'm open to just about any possibility for funding within our current budget.
 I know at that cost, we can do it without raising taxes at all.
 I have some ideas on how we could do that, but I would rather just hear from staff what
 their ideas for funding are.
 I want to say, I did not always used to be in favor of municipal broadband, and I wanted
 to just say real quickly what changed my mind.
 Before, I used to think that we could address this problem by cleaning up these or bridging
 the gaps that we have throughout the city in municipal broadband.
 I thought that we could just work with retail providers and fill those gaps.
 I believe then and continue to believe that municipal broadband is a need, not a want.
 We need everybody citywide to have internet, but I've come to find out that retailers who
 are in it for a profit, there are some places where they're just not going to go where they
 can't make a profit, and that's where we can come in as a city.
 The thing that really changed my mind, because of the high cost, and I'm wrapping up, this
 is really about all I have to say about it, is the thing that changed my mind was when
 COVID hit and we saw people working from home and kids trying to do connected learning,
 and we really saw more than ever how that affected people, that is what really pushed
 me over the edge.
 I'm really motivated on this.
 I hope we can get consensus on this, and we need a consultant to come in from outside
 and give us some guidance.
 Thanks.
 Okay.
 Thank you.
 Council Member Briggs.
 Thank you, and thank you for the presentation, Stuart.
 I appreciate it.
 It was something that I asked to come forward, and I even am in more favor now than I was
 before.
 I think as we look forward to the future, we need to do all we can to set our businesses
 up for success and our individual homeowners also for success as we continue to end up
 working more from home, and our businesses downtown and across the city are having issues
 with credit card machines going in and out, and I've heard several different complaints
 from our businesses as far as their service that they have with freezing and lag times,
 and even issues with the safety cameras.
 The Wi-Fi that they have isn't good enough to have those cameras work very good, and
 so there's some issues there that we need to address, and I'd like to learn more about
 how we can help our community be better here, especially as we move into the future, and
 I did have a question as far as downtown, because we have the Wi-Fi downtown, like you
 said, is there a way to increase that?
 When you say Wi-Fi downtown, I'm not sure what you're referring to.
 Well, it was on the, we provide Wi-Fi downtown and the downtown location for.
 We provide, I believe, some hot spots where people are able to access the internet via
 Wi-Fi connection.
 Yes, I believe we do that, but I don't think that's meant to substitute for someone having
 a high-speed internet capability that's wired.
 Thank you.
 You answered my question.
 I was trying to get that out there, so although we have these Wi-Fi boosts, it doesn't substitute
 the need that we have for our businesses and homeowners who require that.
 Well, and I appreciate that, but I'm not sure I know enough about, I'm not sure that when
 you say Wi-Fi boost in order to help the businesses, if I recall when that was occurring and we
 decided to do that, it was more so for individuals who were downtown shopping or eating or something
 like that to be able to have connectivity more so than it was for the businesses.
 So I don't think it was ever intended to try to provide a different level of service to
 the businesses.
 I think it was for the people who are visiting there.
 Thank you for reaffirming and confirming that.
 I appreciate it.
 Yeah, you're welcome.
 Thank you.
 But that, I don't, I don't really know how that applies to the discussion we're having
 because anyway, I will, I will share my comments because having a Wi-Fi boost for people to
 sit on a bench and eat is different than authorizing tens of millions of dollars to try to do something
 that we have two commercial entities that are doing it right now in our city.
 Councilmember Davis.
 Thank you, Mayor.
 So I was among the folks who wanted to know more information about this to see what some
 other cities had done, some of their motivations behind doing it and then what the cost might
 look like in Denton.
 This idea that it's going to cost $100,000 for us to get to some, some new place where
 suddenly we're going to, we're going to have prospects ahead of us that are going to be
 break even or even be able to provide the level of service.
 You know, I'm not always happy with my frontier service.
 I know people aren't always happy with their charter service, but the idea that the city
 of Denton is somehow in short order going to be able to provide the same level of service
 that two national companies do for a profit.
 You know, we already have folks upset that we own and operate our own electric utility
 and they can't shop around for their electric rates.
 So the idea that we'd get into major competition with two national companies that have been
 in this space for a long time, there's no way we get out of that with anything less
 than hundreds of millions of dollars in capital outlay.
 The other thing too, I don't know that's immediately clear to everybody when you talk to them about
 their broadband service is you have to pay for access to the internet, just like you
 have to pay for the electricity that we generate.
 You can't just run the lines and then you turn them on and they have access to the internet.
 So we'd be buying service from another internet service provider and then sending that down
 the line to our customers.
 That's another enormous expense that I'm not sure the city is prepared to bear.
 The idea came up a moment ago that we could quote unquote address the problem.
 It's not been made clear to me what the problem exactly is.
 If the problem is that we have 20 or so homes in one part of town that don't have access
 to high speed internet, I can't justify hundreds of millions of dollars in capital outlay for
 20 or fewer homes in one part of the city.
 It's the only part of town that doesn't have access to some kind of high speed internet.
 I've spoken with constituents that aren't happy with only having one or the other, only
 having fiber or only having cable, but they do have access to high speed internet.
 If the problem that we're trying to address is low download speeds or low access speeds,
 again, that can't justify to me hundreds of millions of dollars in capital outlay to create
 an entirely new municipal utility.
 The cities that have done this successfully had no reliable high speed internet.
 Chattanooga, no fiber anywhere, no cable anywhere in their downtown business district.
 They could not get any kind of high speed internet.
 Berlin was notorious for years for having terrible, a place where you'd expect tons of tech companies
 to headquarters.
 They had no kind of reliable internet.
 They invested heavily in high speed internet.
 We don't have the same kind of market problems.
 We don't have the same kind of pressures.
 We don't have the same kind of issues.
 I just can't justify that kind of money to address a problem that there are already two
 large companies working on.
 Anybody else?
 Council Mayor Meltzer.
 Okay, it's definitely true and I don't think disputed that if we foresee a lot of growth
 in the high tech sector, just about everything is high tech now, even if it didn't used to
 be, so that high quality internet is critical to debt, the question is, how do you deliver
 it?
 Now, I have a little bit of a unique perspective having worked for 16 years in that industry,
 specifically on high speed internet, and I worked for four top 10 cable companies, all
 of which have been subsumed by larger companies since then, and you might wonder why that
 would be so.
 It's an incredibly capital intensive industry, even if you can get into it at the current
 level of technology, it's constantly evolving.
 So you're constantly adding to your server farm, you're constantly adding capacity and
 by multiples, it's incredibly customer service intensive.
 We may say, "Gee, we already have a customer service capability, what a good fit."
 They're fully engaged now.
 They're working all the time and the relationship that the consumer has with internet is a lot
 more arms and legs than whether the power's on or not.
 So anything that can look like slowness, which could be security software, a hundred things,
 when you've got bright people who are willing to answer the phone and talk to you, it becomes
 very expensive proposition.
 So it's massively capital intensive, operationally complex.
 So the business has consolidated to companies that can handle the scale.
 Secondly, you may wonder why, if municipalities could generally do a better job than these
 very large, sometimes international operators, why there aren't more and there aren't because
 you really can't keep up.
 You will have in five years, whatever you had is kind of obsolete.
 So it's a very tough thing for something that moves at the pace of government to do effectively.
 That having been said, we want to ensure that we're a very competitive community.
 I think there are a couple of things I'm at least interested in.
 I don't know, I didn't quite get from this nor did I ask frankly, whether we have a big
 dark fiber footprint, that can be leased.
 That is at least maybe a revenue opportunity to the city.
 The other area that I think is interesting doesn't seem to be part of what was explored
 was new technology like, and I don't know all that much about it yet, but like 5G, which
 ought to be less of a heavy lift to install because you're putting stuff on poles rather
 than digging trenches.
 And also, at least from my superficial reading, promises to have future increases in speed.
 That's really the key.
 With that business, you can't invest for today.
 You have to invest for five, 10 years down the road.
 So if you have something that has that growth capacity, even then I would say I would be
 far more interested in doing what we could to enable a competitor to enter.
 So maybe that's a public-private sponsorship, maybe it's a franchise, but adding another
 service that maybe is faster, maybe has more growth potential, maybe is more reliable,
 those are all questions, but if we could enable a third entrant, I'd be very interested in
 learning about that.
 If I could just say one last little bit, Mayor, as far as the spot coverage, we've heard about
 the one issue that came before us, I guess it was a year ago now, and I thought that
 they were on the brink of having a sort of alternative kind of wireless provider last
 time we talked about it.
 So I am curious why that hasn't happened yet, although Stuart mentioned CenturyLink is kind
 of maybe going to do something.
 So if there is a spot problem and we can kind of point people to a solution, but obviously
 I'd want to be helpful.
 And I appreciate the discussion.
 I think, first of all, as far as 5G, that is coming.
 I mean, there are companies who have applied for permits, it's my understanding.
 But the city to begin to install that, I don't really see this, what I'm hearing is sort
 of, I think there's a conflation here of providing high speed internet and all the things that
 go along with that, or how do we make sure that people have access and can afford the
 internet access and service that may be in front of their house?
 That to me is the more critical issue, because I think most of the city is wired for high
 speed internet.
 The times that we've discussed this, it was more along the lines of, but can people afford
 to take advantage of that, and if not, how do we address that, i.e. when it's talked
 about here today about remote learners?
 And I believe we partnered with DISD just recently with some additional funding to provide
 it's either Wi-Fi hotspots or some kind of technology to those who may need it in order
 to access the internet.
 Is that correct, Mr. Hyman, I think we approved it a couple weeks ago or something like that?
 We did, so they've got a grant application in to try to enhance the technology for the
 students right now.
 So I'm certainly in favor of exploring what options, if any, are available, just like
 we help people, now it's with our own utilities, but how do we provide or how do we encourage
 either our for-profit companies that are already present here to provide some type of program
 on some basis that will allow people who so far have been able to afford that, because
 sometimes they sell them in the bundles.
 They sell them in your phone, your TV, your internet.
 Maybe somebody doesn't need all that, and then of course the price gets jacked.
 So that's a marketing issue on there.
 But I'm all for exploring how can we ensure that we're doing all we can to have people
 who can have access to that that may not be able to afford it.
 But I don't think the route for that is trying to create our own internet company, because
 then we're going to have the same discussions.
 Do we shut people off if they don't pay?
 What do we do?
 I think we've got two companies in town.
 I guess I do have a question, Stuart, and if you don't have the answer, then that's
 fine if somebody could find it.
 When we are building new subdivisions, when someone comes in and applies for new subdivision
 plat and they begin construction, is one of our requirements that high-speed internet
 be installed in those subdivisions prior to issuing a building permit – not a building
 permit, but – well, are we requiring that to be installed?
 And if not, to me, that's something we need to really look at closely, because we require
 water, sewer, electricity.
 But if we can – if we don't – so is that within posting, Aaron, to ask that question?
 I think to ask the question, the – I don't think anybody in the room knows the answer
 to your question, but we can certainly follow up in the ISR and answer that question.
 Sure.
 I think that would be wonderful.
 One of the questions that came to my mind is, are we requiring the infrastructure to
 be installed to where all someone's got to do is then run a service line from the – and
 how is that going to also be with 5G?
 Councilmember Briggs.
 Yeah.
 Thank you, Mayor.
 That was also my question, too.
 Do we consider a utility and then, therefore, be a requirement to go in?
 So my other question is – so we have frontier and charter, and I appreciate your discussion
 earlier, Mayor, because that is one aspect of it, the affordability aspect of it.
 But as I talk to the community and members of the business community, there are several
 issues with the current providers that we have, and it may even be just enhancing that
 relationship, trying to get better quality for whatever they're paying, but they either
 have Wi-Fi is cutting off, it's slow, service is out, bad customer service.
 And with this study, we don't necessarily have to invest millions and millions of dollars.
 I'm just interested in figuring out what ways we can be better and do better for our
 community, especially if we're looking for larger businesses to come in, and they're
 very dependent upon this type of technology.
 So –
 Okay.
 All right, so we need direction on where we go from here.
 From what I can tell, Councilmember Armitage and Councilmember Briggs are – would give
 direction to move forward with the consultant study – the amount – $100,000, and we
 find a way in the budget.
 So I know that we have two, I believe, for that direction.
 Is there anyone else in favor of that direction?
 Councilmember Melser?
 Well, you know, I think there are – there's at least one step that I'd want to pursue
 first, which I'd love an update on – you know, you just alluded to it, that's the
 first I've heard, on what the 5G sort of horizon looks like for them, who's coming
 in, what are the purported capabilities, what's the – you know, what's the future.
 And I think it's also important that we've really discussed three separate issues, so
 I kind of want to know which we're addressing, and maybe it's all three.
 There's coverage, there's affordability, and then there's kind of quality or competitiveness,
 you know, overall product quality.
 So I'm not 100 percent sure what – which of the three we're addressing now.
 Well, I don't know if we're addressing necessarily any of the – I mean, the actual
 posting is to discuss municipal broadband service models and their potential application
 to the city of Denton.
 So I think it might be contained in there, but it's been – this discussion has been
 more along the lines, typically, of the city entering into the municipal broadband business.
 Now, the three issues that you mentioned, affordability, you know, issues, quality issues,
 and coverage, I think that, you know, we can get some information on that from, I think,
 the two companies that we already have.
 And those are sort of – at least, in my opinion, up to this point, not necessarily
 related to do we go ahead and enter into the business of broadband.
 It's how can we work together to, first of all, get information on those three issues
 you mentioned, and if there's a deficiency, how can we address that?
 So then I would say, you know, I would advocate really getting – really looking carefully
 at broadband broadly in terms – you know, through the lens of those three issues – maybe
 there's more, but those three predominant – and if we end up settling out – I don't
 think we will – but if we end up settling out, like, by golly, we can solve all those
 – if we only have municipal broadband, then I would go to this step.
 I don't think that's going to be the answer.
 But that would be my ask is, let's look at the issues with broadband in Danwood.
 Okay.
 So to go back to my original question, so at least settle this, and then we'll have
 to address what you just described.
 So not yet.
 So not yet.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 So anyone else in favor of moving forward with the consultant study, Councilmember
 Armitage?
 I know you're in favor of that.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So I've already given my direction.
 I just have a question for staff that I just genuinely – genuinely don't know the answer
 to.
 You know, the concerns that Councilmember Meltzer is describing – are these the kind
 of issues that a consultant would be able to answer or take up?
 Because – I mean, if they're going to be handling – you know, dealing with these
 questions of municipal broadband and looking into it, I'd be surprised if they wouldn't
 look into these issues.
 So anyway, I guess I'll end my question there.
 Can you speak to that?
 I think we could write the RFQ any way we want for the scope of service to answer those
 various questions.
 The one thing that hurts us in Texas is the inability to enforce franchise agreements.
 In most states, you adopt those, you require drops to each new subdivision, you require
 drops regardless of how many folks are on those lines.
 In Texas, you don't have that hammer.
 So you've got – you don't have two.
 You've got three or four providers in Dent right now.
 They carved up Denton into their own little territories.
 They all have variable speeds.
 None of them have a particularly solid customer service track record.
 Our staff spends an enormous amount of time advocating with the – particularly with
 Frontier in trying to get customer service issues resolved.
 And that's just how it is right now.
 As long as we don't have the ability and they restrict us from enforcing those franchise
 agreements, we are really at their mercy.
 So I think anything that you would do short of this overall assessment, which would probably
 be to come up with some ideas.
 However, my concern with that is once you start getting into this business as these
 companies are merging and you start setting variable speeds, that sort of thing, it's
 going to mean they're going to want you to come to the table with money, which is exactly
 what we saw with the Pecan Creek area.
 They wanted us to come in and subsidize that neighborhood and pay for the buildout costs.
 So we can certainly bring a consultant on, help us answer those types of questions, help
 us give their best guess as far as where the technology is going.
 But you're juggling four different companies with four different philosophies and four
 different layers there.
 So it's just something to keep in mind right now without having that legal backing.
 And thank you, Todd, and I'll just say following up real quickly that what you're describing
 right now, I've seen it.
 I wanted a private public solution with Pecan Creek.
 I was really hopeful for that.
 And I came across and learned a lot about all these barriers that we face uniquely in
 Texas that people who have worked for cable companies in other states, you know, might
 not have encountered.
 So anyway, I'll just leave it at that.
 And that is why I'm for I'm not saying that you're advocating for against municipal broadband.
 You're just speaking to the barriers.
 But that's why I am for municipal broadband.
 Oh, okay.
 Councilmember Briggs.
 I have a question about the service providers and then Mr. Hellman, you mentioned four.
 I know in Denton we are, you know, charter frontier and people go back and forth to those.
 And I know Robeson has one provider and they're not happy with it out there.
 How does that is that the only provider that can provide out at Robeson?
 And what about 100 coal comes in?
 Like is that just the only one or will the providers from I'm just thinking about the
 future and forward thinking about, you know, how do we avoid what's happening now in the
 future?
 Well, my understanding is that they they sort of divide up these territories, similar to
 what we do with our electric areas where you've got to basically pick and choose, you know,
 do you have that territory or do you not have the territory, I think it gets into a question
 we need to let Aaron and his staff have a little bit of time to help us research, you
 know, what can be done in terms of requiring certain speeds, redundancy, that sort of thing
 in new subdivisions that are coming in is that fact, a utility that we can require that
 like a water main sewer main to have that kind of capacity.
 But we just need to give him some time to work with us and figure that out.
 But there's, it's just interesting, you're not seeing them going head to head with each
 other, you're seeing them carve the city up, and just sort of taking pieces of it here
 and there.
 And so you're missing that competitive aspect, which we cannot require at this point.
 Okay, thank you, Mayor. And I know that we've had issues with the polls and the equipment
 in the right away as well. So I just appreciate that you guys staying on them for all that.
 Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem.
 Yeah, I agree with the both the assessments of Councilmember Davis and Councilmember Meltzer.
 And I'll point out when I've engaged in problem solving, there's a business on Dallas Drive
 that had a similar scenario where the high speed internet was less than, you know, a
 few feet away from their business. What I did was exactly what I think we should do
 is engage I engage with a third party. And so what I'll point out is this. If you were
 to look up Pecan Square, I did the math. It's 13.2 miles outside of Denton to the west
 of I-35W by about two miles. That entire development has one gigabit internet. It's in the middle
 of nowhere in Northlake. And you know how they achieve that by working with Hillwood
 and larger entities and get gain that access. And so I tapped into that and said, Hey, who's
 your contact at Verizon? I have someone that has an issue in the center of Denton with
 a similar issue and connected those two. And so we're leveraging partnerships. It cost
 us no money. They're in that business. They deal with it. And now you have two large entities
 that are buying for that. And so as we're looking to grow commercially, those larger
 institutions can carry that type of sway. And so it's not for the city to step into
 that space. It's for the city to partner and bring people together to solve those problems.
 That's what I did on Dallas Drive for that business. And so it costs the taxpayers nothing.
 But at the same time, they benefit from it. So there's no reason for a neighborhood in
 the middle of Northlake to have gigabit internet and we not. But it's just a matter of putting
 the right parties together. So not for spending the $100,000 to find out what we all are leaning
 towards understanding it would cost millions to go down that road. I think I'm more for
 let's leverage partnerships, existing relationships and that that would serve our community better.
 So help me understand. Aaron, when we talk about franchise agreements, Todd, you mentioned
 that we can't enforce quote unquote franchise agreements. Does that mean? Surely. So, so
 let's say we don't have our own water, our own electricity and our own sewer. Then what
 you're what I'm hearing you say is Texas somewhere is the statutes, utility code or whatever
 have defined certain types of services as utilities that have to be present and that
 you can require those to be present. Like if we didn't have any our own water company,
 we could require some water company, somebody to come in if it's their CNN or something
 based on that. So are you saying that Texas does not define broadband internet as a utility
 that you could require to be installed, the infrastructure installed in new subdivision
 development? Mayor, I thought you were heading in a different direction as far as the statutory
 history and why we can't require franchises. But to answer your question, I'm calling on
 Larry to answer that. I can answer the other one if you're interested in that. Yeah. And
 we'll and I'll we'll maybe get that in a white paper or some type of informal staff
 report on the questions that have been raised here today. Go ahead, Larry. So broadband
 is regulated by the Public Utility Commission, but it is not considered the equivalent of
 water, wastewater, or electric. And so you've got it's more market driven, but it is regulated
 by the PC. Okay. All right. And so Aaron, then you you said you could answer the question
 of whether we can require that type of infrastructure to be installed in new subdivisions. Well,
 that is something that as Todd say, we can definitely look at and I know newer subdivisions
 are actually putting that as part of a feature. And if I remember correctly, I think Hill
 would and Stratford land, we're also proposing to do that in their developments. As far as
 us the franchise question, you know, that power got taken away by the legislature in
 2009 or 2011, where now all they need to do is just go to the legislature and get their
 permit to operate in any community in the city in in Texas. Well, and I think it's I
 think it's a fairly reasonable statement to say that anybody that's doing any type of
 quality development now knows that high speed broadband is is is not necessarily a luxury.
 It's a need, and they're not going to sell any homes in any of their subdivisions if
 they don't have that capability or availability at the property line. So I'm not worried about
 that moving forward. It's in these it's in older cities like ours that didn't have that
 that has a large amount of but there I mean, as far as who's indent and carved up, I mean,
 spectrum slash charter and frontier. I mean, they I mean, most of my places have the availability
 of either one. So but that's sort of probably in the core of debt. I don't hear we'll go
 ahead and wrap this up. I don't hear direction for the moving forward with the consultant,
 but we have raised some issues that Mr. City Manager and city attorney, if you could sort
 of figure out who's best to answer those questions and give us sort of a an informal staff report
 on that, that'd be great if it doesn't take more than two hours or so, then we might need
 to come back with a council request. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. We'll move on
 then to agenda item three B, receive a report and hold a discussion regarding plugged gas
 wells issues, including risks and public protections from plugged wells, current inspection practices,
 etc. Before we get started on this one, I think this would probably be a protracted discussion
 as well. Let's just take a really quick five minute break. So we don't have to interrupt
 the discussion with with a break. Thank you. Welcome everybody back to this meeting of
 the Denton City Council on March the 20th, 2020. The time is 303. We're moving to our
 agenda items for our work session reports. We're on work session report three B ID 20
 dash 1186. Let's receive report hold a discussion regarding plugged gas well issues, including
 risks and public protections from plugged wells, current inspection practices, setback
 distances, setback distances, excuse me, and Denton and other areas, cities. Good afternoon
 mayor members of the city council. He lives the Gersky senior planner. Let me get this
 pulled up and we will get started. All right. Good afternoon. So as you just mentioned,
 this work session is regarding plugged gas wells. There were two previous council requests
 that generated this work session. The first of those was from back in December and was
 a request regarding risk and appropriate public protections for plugged gas wells. And then
 the second came in February and was an addition to the previously approved work session regarding
 density bonuses or other zoning or land use incentives that could be utilized to encourage
 the plugging of wells. So just a little background before we jump into that with where we're
 at today in the city with regard to plugged wells, we currently have 38 plugged wells
 within the city of Denton and 22 in our E T J. Currently, the D D C has very limited
 provisions regarding this topic. It does require some notification from the operator regarding
 when they intend to begin plugging a well information regarding the location of the
 well head and requirements that they follow all railroad commission guidelines and provide
 copies of the plugging reports that they submit to the railroad commission to document that
 the well was plugged in accordance with those requirements. So looking at the topics we'll
 cover again. First, we will talk about risk and then public protections and then finally
 get into the incentives topic. So with regards to risk, I've broken this down into two, three
 topics that staff came across as kind of the high level issues that are often discussed
 regarding plugged wells, that being orphaned wells and then groundwater contamination and
 air emissions. And we'll look at each of these briefly in turn. So with regards to orphaned
 wells, this is a topic that is largely covered by the railroad commission. They maintain
 a database of all the well locations across the state. They manage also a statewide plugging
 and abandonment program. So when a well is orphaned, meaning the operator has essentially
 walked away and left it in place without plugging it as is required. The state has a program
 to take over and ensure that those are are eventually plugged. The city of Denton also
 maintains a G I s database of this. It is information that's available on our interactive
 map, which is what you see here on the screen. So when you have this gas well layer turned
 on, you'll see that plugged wells are shown with the darker red diamond symbol and active
 wells are shown with the red circle. So this information is available for anyone online
 to go and see where plugged wells are located within the city. It's also important to note
 that based on the railroad commissions database, there are no orphaned wells within the city.
 So all of these wells were plugged and abandoned appropriately in place. Next, with regard
 to groundwater contamination. This is also something that the Railroad Commission regulates.
 They have issued all of the requirements for how wells are plugged. What you see here on
 the screen is kind of their plugging primer that you can download online that summarizes
 that process. Essentially, it's a series of cement plugs that are pumped into the ground
 intended to protect the groundwater by preventing intrusion from oil and gas strata into groundwater
 strata. So around a layer of groundwater, there's typically a 100 foot plug that would
 go 50 feet above the base of that and 50 feet below to prevent any gas from seeping up into
 it. These are standards that have been in place for several decades and utilized across
 the state. And it's important to note with regard to this that the city's preempted by
 those state laws and cannot regulate the plugging process itself since it all occurs below ground.
 So with regard to the risk and how often groundwater contamination occurs, staff looked extensively
 for studies related to this to provide some information. We were able to locate one study
 from 2011 that actually looked at groundwater contamination cases in Texas. This case or
 the study looked at this issue over a 16 year period from 1993 to 2008. They found 211 groundwater
 contamination cases. That's out of the 250,000 wells that were actively producing during
 this timeframe and the 140,000 that were plugged during this period. And they found that only
 one of those 211 incidents related to plugging and site reclamation activities. The largest
 sources were from waste management incidents or from during the production. So thought
 that was important to note that plugging seemed to be a relatively low source of groundwater
 contamination with respect to the entire operation of a well. And then the last of the risk topics
 that we'll cover relates to air emissions. Again, we searched far and wide to locate
 information related to this topic. We found no studies done within the state of Texas.
 Most of the studies we did find examined methane as the primary air emission of concern. And
 the most informative of these with regards to how often this might actually be a risk
 was a 2016 study from Townsend et al. You can see the reference there on the screen
 was also provided in your backup. They looked at four different oil and gas basins across
 the United States. They found 119 plugged wells and 19 abandoned wells or wells that
 had been orphaned, so abandoned in place and not plugged. Of the wells that were plugged,
 only one of the 119 was positive for any sort of methane emissions. And it was a very low
 amount. I believe it was less than like less than 0.05 grams per hour, according to the
 study. And then eight of the 19 wells that had been orphaned or abandoned without plugging
 were positive sources for methane emissions. And then the next of the three topics for
 this work session is with regard to protections, so things that we can do to protect and inform
 the public about plugged gas wells. There's really three ways that cities could do this.
 The first is through inspections and then through setback requirements and marking the
 well locations themselves so that people are aware of where they're at. With regard to
 inspections, the city does have a gas well inspection program. When an operator notifies
 the city that they intend to plug a well, our inspector would go out and keep track
 of that process. Again, it's regulated by the Railroad Commission, but they monitor
 it through daily spot checks, as well as monitoring the restoration of the site to ensure that
 all the equipment is removed. And then they do a final survey to ensure that all equipment
 or materials containing naturally occurring radioactive materials are removed from the
 site and that it's left in a relatively clean state compared to how it was when it was operational
 with all equipment removed. And then with regard to setbacks, this is something the
 city currently does not have a requirement for. We don't require a setback for a plugged
 well. All of our setbacks and reverse setbacks go away once all of the wells on the site
 are plugged and all the equipment is removed. And then finally, regard to marking well locations,
 we do have our mapping system where we maintain those. But in terms of physical markers, whereas
 other cities have requirements for that, the city of Denton does not. So we'll look at
 a couple of things and how we compare to other cities around the Metroplex. First, I wanted
 to note that as of, or I'm sorry, all of our previous gas well ordinances before the 2015
 update did contain a requirement that specifically said no structure can be built over an abandoned
 well. This statement was left out of the 2015 ordinance. I'm not sure if that was intentional
 or not, but regardless, it's not in place today. So when you look at how we compare
 to other cities in the Metroplex, I did a sweep of 42 cities around DFW that have gas
 well ordinances. Many of them do have a statement similar to what we used to have in our old
 ordinance. 34 of those have that exact language in their ordinance. Seven other cities in
 this area do have a setback requirement. The most common is a five-foot radius around the
 wellhead. I believe Fort Worth as well as Keller and Capelle and one other city, I believe
 it was White Settlement, all had that requirement for a five-foot radius around the well. Others,
 common ones were 10 feet or 20 feet, but the majority of cities don't have a setback requirement.
 And then several of the cities, 10 out of those 42, did require that physical marker
 that I mentioned. And that, in all of those cases, was a requirement for a four-inch diameter
 pipe that was labeled with the well ID and the GPS location of that well to be set in
 the ground and stick up four feet above the ground, so that when you're on a property,
 you can physically see where that well is abandoned. And this bottom table just shows
 you some of our closer comparative cities that we often use and how their regulations
 compare. So again, all but one of them do have that building prohibition saying you
 at least can't put a structure over a plugged well. And then three of them do have that
 five-foot setback requirement. And they do that in the form of a no-build easement. So
 when a well is abandoned, an easement would be filed with the county, so that when someone
 plats or searches the property records, they would find that encumbrance as part of their
 title search. And then our final topic is with regard to incentives. So I wanted to
 start with where we're at today. Kind of the biggest incentive for plugging the well would
 be the -- >> Hailey, could we -- this seems like a good
 place if there's any questions for just the portion of your presentation that you just
 presented. Are there any questions as far as for what we've heard so far? Councilmember
 Briggs. >> Yeah, I would just like to see if our city
 attorney would comment on why that statement or sentence may have been left out of the
 2015, if that was just an accident or if that was because of a lawsuit threat or if you
 know, I don't even remember when we were doing that, that being brought up to us in a discussion.
 >> When I read this AIS over the weekend, I noticed the same statement. I went back
 to look through my files and e-mails and I couldn't find anything addressing that point,
 so I believe it was probably inadvertently left out during that massive rewrite in 2015
 as a result of HP40. >> Okay. Thank you.
 >> Any others? Okay. All right. We'll move forward with the second part of the presentation
 and any questions that come up from the first part, we'll just catch them all at the end.
 >> All right. So with regard to incentives, again, we'll start with where we're at today.
 The primary incentive, as our code is written now, would be that the reverse setback from
 the well site goes away once all the wells are plugged and equipment is removed. So this
 is just an example that we had looked at a few months ago, a site off of Windsor that
 was largely encumbered by a setback. So you can see in the area that's shaded in blue,
 that's the portion of the property, so it's about 9.3 acres out of the total 10 that is
 encumbered by that 500 foot. So if this property were to be developed with a protected use,
 that setback would come into play. The red area shows where if they sought a variance
 of some sort, they could potentially take that reverse setback down to the minimum reverse
 setback of 250 feet. And then if you can see the tiny kind of tan or orange circles around
 the well heads, that is what a 20 foot no build easement would look like. So 20 feet
 is a number that was agreed to recently with a couple of the muds that came before the
 city, legends and OLEX, I believe. They established that 20 foot setback as part of that or offering
 to establish that. So we thought that was a fair number. But that just shows how the
 developability of this site would be affected and they would regain the use of majority
 of their site for protected uses if those wells were plugged.
 And then again, looking at some of the existing tools that we have in the code with regard
 to flexibility and the ability to kind of tweak modifications to fit a site, these are
 things that would be applicable whether you're plugging a well or not, but just some tools
 that we have in the code that could possibly be expanded or amended if we wanted to pursue
 something related to plugged wells. So the minor modification is a broad sweeping tool
 for all of your dimensional standards like lot area and setbacks. Staff is able to approve
 up to a 10% deviation from those. So that's a very minor thing, but it is something that's
 available that we could look at building off of for plugged wells if we wanted to expand
 those ability to be flexible there. And the cluster subdivisions is a larger tool. So
 for this would be specific to residential developments of at least five acres. It does
 require that they rezone to a PD, but it substantially decreases the minimum lot size and setback
 requirements. So through this, if you're providing the minimum of 30% open space, you could reduce
 your lot sizes to as small as 2,500 square feet and setbacks could go down to as low
 as five. As it's written today, this is intended to be a tool to promote the preservation of
 open space, specifically environmentally sensitive areas. But this is something where it's an
 area of the code that we already have a tool for flexibility and we could look at specifying
 in the applicability standards here that this could also apply when a gas well is plugged
 as a tool to promote the plugging of the well and still allow and maximizing the ability
 to use the land for residential. Some other provisions that we already have in the code
 that would allow pretty significant flexibility. If you're looking at a multifamily or a non-residential
 protected use such as a hospital or church, these would come into play with regard to
 sub chapter seven. We do have very flexible landscaping standards with the ability to
 do an alternative plan and kind of deviate from the code and create something more specific
 to your site. We also offer many alternatives for site design and parking requirements for
 these uses. And then finally, a tool that we could look at it if council's interested
 in pursuing this is something similar to what we recently adopted for the reverse setback
 administrative waiver. So if you remember back in those discussions, we talked about
 instead of going to ZBA, if more than 50% of your site is encumbered by the reverse
 setback staff could provide a smaller reduction in that setback down to 375 feet. And through
 that process, we also built in some flexibility for smaller residential lots as well as increases
 in building height and coverage as well as parking reductions for those multifamily or
 non-residential uses. So this is a toolkit that wouldn't apply in this situation, but
 we could build something after this and use it as a model if we wanted to create incentives
 for plugged well situations. And then finally, we wanted to look at some new options as well.
 So one of the things specifically in the request was bringing density back into the code. Since
 we don't have that as a standard when we work with lot sizes primarily, the way we can accomplish
 that would be through allowing a certain percentage of the area of development to have lots of
 a smaller size. We could also look at some other site-specific things or use-specific
 things such as parking reductions for single-family and duplex and townhome. That would maybe
 a good incentive since we do require four spaces, which is higher than what most residential
 developers expect to provide for a single-family home. And then we could also look at things
 such as open space reductions for multifamily or townhome developments where we have a minimum
 open space requirement as well as modifying unit sizes or building heights. So all of those
 would be options that we could consider. I just wanted to show a quick example of how
 that lot size reduction would look. So just basing this off of a hypothetical 10 acre subdivision,
 if we said 30% of the area could have lots that were 30% smaller, this is how those numbers
 would look. So at an R6 zoning, the minimum lot size would go from 6,000 to 4,200, and
 that would get them an increase of nine lots from 72 to 81. And then here you can see an
 R4 example where they would only gain seven lots. So after looking at these and running
 some numbers, staff wanted to, before coming to you all, just get a feel for how the development
 community felt about this and see if these would actually be incentives for them to go
 through the plugging process with an operator. So we presented some of these to the Dallas
 Builders Association in September. And then over the last couple of weeks, they provided
 us feedback. And ultimately, what they summarized for us was that the increased lot yields that
 we were looking at with some of those scenarios just would not be a significant enough incentive
 for them to pay the cost of plugging a well and would also not necessarily be feasible
 based on the current market demands for kind of standard size lots with standard building
 pads that need to fit on them. So instead, they suggested if we want to pursue this option,
 that we instead look at ways to offset the financial cost of plugging in gas well. Some
 of their suggestions were waivers or reductions related to park dedication or open space, waivers
 for tree mitigation fees or discounts on development review and impact fees. So staff has not spent
 any time looking into these. We wanted to bring these to council and see how you all
 felt about them first. And with that, I just kind of wanted to end by summarizing and presenting,
 you know, the kind of three overriding policy questions that we would be looking for feedback
 on with regard to this. The first being whether council's interested in establishing or reintroducing
 that prohibition for building overplugged wells. Staff would recommend that we add this
 language back to the code. Again, I think it was probably inadvertent oversight with
 that 2015 ordinance that it was left out because it had been in there for so many years prior
 to that. The second being whether we want to establish a no-build easement and what
 the radius for that would be. Again, we're recommending 20 feet. That is an -- there's
 another city here in DFW with that radius. And it is something that would be consistent
 with the recent MUT agreements that we've looked at. And then finally, with regards
 to incentive, is there any interest in the density bonuses or lot size reductions, any
 of those other flexibility provisions or any of the suggestions from the Dallas Builders
 Association? And if there is, we're happy to come back with you all -- to you all with
 more information. >> All right. If we'll -- so what we're going
 to do is we're going to take each one of those one at a time. And Councilmember Davis, I
 just got one question real quick for the city attorney to sort of help me understand at
 least some basic -- it looks like some of you all are frozen. Councilmember Davis, can
 you -- can you hear me? Aaron, can you -- Aaron, can you hear me?
 >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. Okay. You're unfrozen now. Councilmember
 Davis, can you hear me okay? >> Yes, sir, I can.
 >> You're back. Okay. All right. I thought I was losing my mind. You had your hand up.
 Real quick, Mr. City Attorney, if a well is plugged -- and if you need to go into closed
 session for this, that's okay. It's sort of a legal question. If a well is plugged, does
 that extinguish any vested rights that it had prior to our current code? In other words,
 if it was drilled under old codes and they were vested, when that well is quote unquote
 abandoned and plugged, meaning it's no longer there, does that mean that if anybody ever
 wanted to reenter that and redo it, therefore it would be subject to the codes at the time?
 And if you can't answer that right now, that's fine. But I think that's a very important
 question. >> That answer is going to really depend on
 what was originally permitted under the plat or site plan, depending on the year that was
 filed. If there are multiple wells on 200 acres and they're only plugging one and the
 others are remaining, arguably you still have that vested rights concept. This is the only
 well, the only one pad site, and it's totally gone, then the answer to that would be yes,
 because the actual use that has the vested rights has ceased. And so in that case, it
 would extinguish. >> Okay. So then just to add just a little
 caveat to that, because you brought up a good point and I appreciate it. So if you've got
 a tract that was under the old code, you know, that had a vested right, and they could plat
 for, I'm just going to say 10 wells for the sake of discussion, but they only drilled
 one so far. They only drilled one and they plugged that one, but they still had, you
 know, the opportunity or according to the plat, they could do 10. They drilled one,
 they could do nine more, they plugged that one. You're saying they still would have the
 opportunity to drill the other 10? >> It is possible. It would really depend
 on whatever the surface owner of the land negotiates with the gas well operator.
 >> But if it's the only one, if it's the only one on the whole plat, then it does revert
 to as if it would go to the new code if they wanted to come in and do something different.
 And that would be our position, yes. >> Yeah, given, I mean, there's a lot of
 hypothetical facts in there, but okay, that's helpful. Councilmember Davis, I think you
 had your hand up before you froze up on me. >> Yes, sir, can you hear me okay?
 >> Yes, got you. >> Okay. You asked us to go through these
 kind of individually. So my direction on number one, I think this one's kind of a no-brainer.
 We might even just be able to do a thumbs up on the screen for this one. It used to
 be in the code. There's no good reason to build something on top of a well. People ought
 to have good notice that there's a well in their area. So I feel like some kind of language
 for a prohibition against building over wells is a good idea.
 >> Okay. Any objections to that? All right. So there we go. Okay. Number two, no-build
 easement around plugged wells. If so, how large? This sort of would also take care of
 that issue. Councilmember Davis? >> So I think we ought to have some kind
 of no-build easement. I don't know, though, that I have a good number in mind. If 20 seems
 to be kind of common in other cities, well, that's good direction. At the same time, I'm
 not sure that we have the same safety concerns. I'd hate for somebody to not be able to get
 good use out of the land surrounding this well just because that 20-foot circle happens.
 If they want to design their plat to where the well's a little bit closer to this side
 of the empty lot or a little bit closer to the other side, I'm not sure what the safety
 concerns really are and where we get that number of 20.
 >> Okay. Councilmember Briggs? >> On that, it kind of goes back to the question
 and the conversation you were having with the city attorney about plats. Like, I'm curious
 if there is one plugged well, and we say, okay, no-build 20-foot radius, but there's
 a large plat, and they can come back and drill a well. If we're not sure -- I mean, if they
 can come back in, how does that work? I mean, that was one of my major, larger questions
 to just see how that process would work. And then that -- I mean, if we say 20 feet or
 5 feet, and then, you know, they come and drill a well, and then there's a house that's
 less than, you know, 200 feet, or would that be prevented at some point in the development
 process? >> Okay. I think the answer to that is going
 to really depend on the service developer and what they're platting on top of an existing
 plat. What we're seeing is that a new developer will come in, a service use developer, and
 they'll file a new plat that more or less extinguishes a large portion or all of the
 gas well plat, including plugging the well. In that case, basically, it goes away. In
 some cases, some of those plats are two, three, 400 acres where the development isn't extending
 over the entire area. So that's going to be a different result, depending on the facts.
 >> And what I'm hearing you say in that example, Aaron, is that what developers are doing is
 they're working with gas well operators or lease lessees or mineral owners to say, we've
 got this 200-acre plat or 400-acre plat, gas well plat. We want to develop 100 acres of
 the surface. You have no wells there. Can we somehow work out a deal where you will
 release that portion of your gas well to something? In other words, they work it out to where
 the scenario that Councilmember Briggs sort of described may not occur because they've
 come to some type of private agreement to where you don't have that. Of course, then
 if you don't have a private agreement, then the question really becomes sort of what we
 deal with now, and that is if you don't have a private agreement and someone's drilling
 a well coming towards the development, then it depends on is it under our new gas well
 ordinance, which has these different setbacks, or is it under the law or the code at the
 time they plotted, which may be they have some vested interest, and then you have to
 look to that code to determine what that setback is and so forth.
 And that is correct. Okay. All right. Councilmember Armitage.
 And then Councilmember Meltzer. Yes. So I support having some sort of required
 minimum radius around the plugged well. By the time the backup for this agenda came out
 on Friday, there wasn't time to get kind of additional information to get into the agenda
 and to have staff work on over the weekend, but I would like to know what input that our
 fire department would have on whether they think that 20 is sufficient or not. I would
 like to know what they would think. Okay. Now, okay, Councilmember Meltzer, yes.
 Yeah, on the 20 foot, it wasn't clear to me what we're protecting against. Is it the small
 probability of methane coming out of it, or is it not wanting to disturb the structure
 of the plug so that it might create a bigger problem, or is it just that we don't know?
 So the idea behind that setback typically is, again, ensuring that nothing is physically
 built over the well. My understanding from speaking with our operational side of things
 is that there's a very small risk that anyone would ever need to reaccess that well in the
 event that casing cracks or something like that, but you would want to leave some clearance
 zone in case that ever needs to occur. So again, other cities in the area range, five
 foot was a fairly common setback. Staff was recommending 20 because, again, for consistency,
 because we have two muds that have come before staff recently, and they've both established
 that 20 foot as what they're willing to offer since there are plug wells on both of those
 properties. So for consistency, that's why we went with 20 foot. I believe it's midlothian
 that has that requirement, but anywhere from five to 20 was fairly common from what I've
 seen in other ordinances. If it's, you know, giving direction on just
 this point, if it's just because, you know, we did it before twice, that isn't that compelling
 to me. If it's just to allow access, I mean, I'd be inclined to be as tight as we feel
 comfortable, given the whatever the actual risks are associated. It's just access and
 five foot is common. I'm okay with that, mostly because if that's safe, that I want to give
 the greatest incentive to go in this direction. Okay. Who else?
 I think I'm okay with the 20 feet. And the reason is, is if you're giving access, if
 you're needing to give access, if you've got a five foot perimeter easement, you got 10
 feet across, basically, in essence, I mean, it's not a square. And so if you've got something
 that happened and they needed to rework that or drill it out and re cement it, you don't
 have enough room to get the equipment and necessary in order to do that. So I think
 what we've I think what we've seen is so let me let's take them one at a time is 20 feet
 okay on the course you can't build on it. But if you have a 20 foot easement, then you're
 not going to be building on it anyway. Councilmember Davis, if this is an easement, it's different
 from a setback. So if we if we had an easement, would we then have the right to allow encroachment
 into that easement if we needed to rework a plat or somebody needed to we we got 40 feet
 on this side, we only really need five feet on this side, versus a setback, which would
 need to be a little more consistent with I guess so what I'm hearing from you is Ken,
 if you've got a and I think we need to determine if it's a 20 foot circle, or if it's a somehow
 we square it off so that we have a little bit better geographical area to work with
 because in your case, if you're able to move it over a little bit, and still provide the
 same level of access just from a different direction. I'm okay with that because I don't
 think that from a safety perspective. Obviously, none of us would probably agree that if it
 were a safety issue, that was really the concern 20 feet is not going to do you anything. It's
 just not. But when you look at the plugging procedures and what they have to do to ensure
 that that well, there's no equipment, I mean, they have to remove all the equipment, they
 have to do everything. I think you also have to have to cut the gas, the casing down so
 many feet, or I guess we can decide that below the ground, and then you put your marker in
 there. So I'm okay with having some flexibility in that. But I guess the no build part to
 me would be because in some easements, parking structures and driveways and things like that
 are allowed. Now, no build to me means you're not going to have a structure, whether it's
 a shed or something that's habitable, that's, it's going vertical, not just horizontal.
 So that might be something we have to think about. Haley, do you know what, what does
 that typically mean in these other jurisdictions? Yeah, so typically the language is referred
 to no structures, which would be what you're you're indicating, or it's no vertical construction
 of any sort of buildings, fences, typically, anything of that nature, whereas flat works
 such as paving would typically not be considered a structure. Yeah. Okay. Because even if it
 was a square, it's a 20 by 20 square, that's 400 square feet. So I mean, if you're talking
 about 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 acres, I think we can find a way to plait around that to where
 I mean, if they already know it's there, and if they're in the process of plugging it in
 order to develop, they're going to, I think they're going to be able to work around that.
 I just, I'm not sure how that would work. Councilmember Briggs and then Councilmember
 Meltzer. Since 2015, do we have any structures built on top of plugged wells?
 None come to mind. We have had several flats recently proposed for residential subdivisions
 where there have been wells plugged or are plugged wells in all but one of those instances
 that I can think of they have been amenable to staff's recommendation to make that a common
 area lot to prevent anything being built over it. One that I can think of does have the
 plugged well within a residential lot, but it would be within a side yard setback. So
 nothing comes to mind where there is a structure physically over the well.
 Okay. All right. Thank you. Councilmember Meltzer.
 If somebody paved over a plugged well, first of all, we just don't know it was there. And
 what's the sort of, not worst possible thing, but what's the sort of plausible, if there
 is one bad thing that could happen? What could happen? If it's paved over, you don't know
 it's there, people parking over it or what could happen?
 Aaron, did you want to take a crack at that? Casing failure. That's the risk. The casing
 isn't 100% foolproof. I mean, there is a certain percentage, although small, where the casing
 will fail and it'll have to be redone again, either by the state or the previous operator,
 they're still operating. That is the purpose of having this no-build easement is to, in
 such a future event, if it was ever to happen, you have the ability, either the state or
 the former operator to go in and to remediate that.
 I appreciate that. But between the casing failing and redoing it, what does that look
 like? What happens? It can be one of two ways. I mean, we do, the state does have their basically
 orphan well fund that they will use for these types of events. And they only resort to that
 if the operator that previously plugged it is not in operation anymore.
 So that's not what, I don't think that's what he's asking.
 I mean, physically what happens?
 I think you have methane leak.
 Well, physically, they'll tear up. I mean, they'll tear up whatever concrete or whatever
 structure may be there.
 Stuff pokes through.
 Yes.
 Well, I think what you're asking Council Member Meltzer is on a plugged well, what can go
 wrong with a plugged well? Outside of being concreted over. What can go wrong is the case
 casing fail, which then could either contaminate the groundwater depending on where the failure
 is and or also release methane into the air. Because now you don't have a you don't have
 a plug. So methane gas if it's in the if it's in the casing can can be allowed to escape.
 If you have if you concrete over it, my hunch, which I don't I would not recommend I mean,
 to me, a no-build easement, I think I would take away the opportunity to pave over it
 because if we're going to have a marker there, because then if you have a methane leak, number
 one, you don't know it and then it might leak out into certain cavities in the ground and
 then that's when you really come into some really potentially bad situations.
 So that's I think that's what you're asking. Well, what happens between the time it's failing
 and by that time, you know it and you got to fix it. I think it would be a methane leak
 would be the biggest risk.
 Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you on the paving over based on what you just said.
 Okay, so I would I would propose I don't know how we want to structure it, but a 20-foot
 type of if we're going to do well, let's test people's math prowess. What is the square
 feet of a circle that's 40 feet in diameter? Anyway, it's less than 400 square feet square
 feet. Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, yeah, you can measure the square of it. You can
 measure the footage of it, but you're right. Yeah, there you go. So I think we need to
 figure out a way that would be most beneficial to platting and things such as that. If a
 circle is great, fine. If not, but I personally would would not want to see anything within
 that radius just because if somebody needs to get in there and unless they're just unless
 you have another kind of easement around the actual because we got a marker. I think we're
 requiring a marker. Some require a marker. Correct. I mean, it's some require four foot
 above the ground with the well number on it and the date it was plugged and those identifying
 information. Is that right? Correct. Yes. Several. I think it was 10 of the cities I
 looked at did require that four foot pipe. That wasn't part of our recommendation, but
 it certainly could be if you all wanted to to follow suit with those other cities and
 have that physical above ground marker for the I would I would certainly think that that
 would be helpful because if we've got an easement around it, I don't know if it has to be four
 feet, but just it's important that if people are buying in the area that they can physically
 see that. So I would propose that as well as a 20 foot no built Council member Davis.
 The circles 1200 feet a square is 1600 square feet. Oh, that's right. Because I just did
 20 by 20. Yeah, you're right. Okay. So my my question still kind of remains though,
 if it's an easement, is there wiggle room? If the question is not necessarily catastrophic
 failure, but access to repair casing failure, is it still this hard and fast 20 foot circle?
 Or if there's a good tree to save over here, so we want to slide a lot over here and we
 want to have the you know that capped well a little bit closer to this lot line a little
 bit further this lot line. And you're still you still have good access for casing repair.
 Is that possible? I'd hate to have these. Like Paul said a moment ago, we want to give
 the greatest possible incentive to cap these wells. And if these wells just turn into 20
 foot donut holes that you can't really plan around very well, because you got to have
 these 20 foot clearances. I hate for I hate for that to become a big a big stumbling block
 if there's no wiggle room at all. If there's an easement, it seems like there's well either
 way easement or setback that seems like there's there's a possibility for wiggle room. It's
 just a question of procedure and how how we understand that. Okay, Council Member Briggs
 and then Council Member Meltzer. I like the flexibility part of it and also like referring
 to it as an easement. If a setback for me is regards to safety and easement is so that
 individuals can get in and work and do what's needed. And whenever we have our regular easements,
 we don't allow fences and things like that up to the easement. So I think we should kind
 of treat it similarly. And I like the idea of, you know, being able to move it over a
 little bit more if, if we just want to make sure that trucks and stuff can get to it.
 Okay, as Mary Meltzer, maybe we could define a sort of minimum distance from plugged well
 to the perimeter. So that, you know, that would tell you how far you could move it like
 maybe you wouldn't want it on the very edge of that space. You know, at least throw that
 for consideration. So maybe it's, you know, 20 feet around with no less than 10 on one
 side, just, you know, for argument's sake. Okay. Yeah, I'm okay with the flexibility.
 It's how do we codify that? You know, how do we draft it? That's really because I certainly
 understand the intention in that regard. So I'm okay with that if we can do it in a way.
 I think we just need to make sure that, number one, people can know where that plugged well
 is. I mean, to me, that's very important from the standpoint of whoever's developing it
 and whoever's buying whatever they're developing. And that that's there. And that those plugged
 wells are notated on a plat, obviously, so that people, you know, if they're doing research
 and things, so I'm okay with that. Is everybody sort of, in a sense, generally okay with the
 flexibility, the 20 foot, if the some marker that tells it either two to three or four
 feet with information on it, regarding the plugged well, are we generally okay with that?
 And that staff just sort of come back with some hard language recommendations. I'm seeing
 no one jumping up and down. So if everybody could just give me sort of a thumbs up just
 so we'll, as I said before, silence isn't isn't a scent. So all right. So we've got,
 I think we've got that on the second one. And then on the third one, open it up for
 discussion. Yes, Councilmember Meltzer.
 Oh, you know, I understand that the DBA expressed a preference for items that were sort of more
 hard cash, of course. But I don't know that it's necessarily true that there's that there's
 no or in store or insufficient incentive with some of the other ways it might be it might
 be the case. I mean, but it's unclear to me. And I wonder if Mary, you might be the best
 one to answer it. If you have some sense, given the you know, what would the increase
 in value be? Let's say with the clustering one, you know, we would enable you to have
 more more lots. You know, how much does that add to the value? And let's put that up against
 what the you know, what the owners got to go through. And I best I could tell from going
 through the staff responses. It's something might be something in the neighborhood of
 like $85,000 of, or actually, I don't know if that's true at all. The production, there's
 the production value of the well, and then the cost to plug it. Right? That's sort of
 give up. And the get is whatever the increased value is to the cluster. And there's a figure
 of about 50,000 production value. But is that like a year? Or is that really, you know,
 that's an annuity? Like, is that really like, like, like a sales value? What are they really
 giving up in order to get this clustering? And then what's the real value of the clustering?
 I'd like to see if we can get from that up. Sure. Well, I can only respond when I first
 read this. And after the presentation, my initial thought was, I'm not so sure we need
 to give any incentives only so much more space only only because we've already had developments
 who've come into the city and plugged wells and they've worked it out privately with the
 with the developers because it's a pretty easy. It's a pretty easy gig. You know, you
 look at the development, the developer looks at the development, they look how many loss
 they can get with the well being there and all the the maybe not negative but the concerns
 with it being there. And they look at okay, if it's plugged, we can get x many lots, we
 can maybe add some additional value to those lots because it's a clean development. Now
 we don't have this other these other kind of industrial uses, you know, what is it going
 to cost? Who's going to pay for it? I feel more comfortable just leaving that at least
 right now to the market because we do have clustering that's that's available, just in
 our regular DDC. And if we run into an issue like that, that's becoming more prevalent,
 you can revisit it. But right now I don't really see that I think you'll see that more
 often that the developers will be more inclined to agree to find a way from a market perspective
 to work with the guess while operators because look, a lot of these wells are drying. And
 you know, going in reworking them is not helping. It's just because of just the formation and
 things such as that. So that's why I asked the question about the plugging is what happens
 in that regard. So I'm more inclined to just say let the market figure it out right now
 until we really see that there's a because I don't really know how to evaluate that I
 certainly don't want to give up, you know, park dedication fees and tree mitigation fees
 and things such as that. I mean, yeah, yeah. Councilmember Briggs. Do we know? Did we speak
 to the Denton Community Development Alliance? I know that you mentioned the Dallas Homebuilders
 Association, but we work we work more closely on a lot of other updates with the development.
 And so I'm wondering if you reached out or spoke to anyone in that community? No, we
 didn't prior to this work session. We kind of wanted to get feedback from Council. We
 reached out to the Homebuilders primarily because when we see this issue come up, it
 is for single family homes. So we were looking specifically for some feedback related to
 those lot sizes and dimensions. But we can certainly go that route if that's something
 that you all would like us to do. So do we have any idea going back to the numbers
 there's the 276 in the City of Denton and 202 in the ETJ which could be likely annexed
 at some point in into the city. Do we know how many of those are older or not producing?
 Is that any? Do we have any idea or is that not something that the city could know it's
 more the owner of the well? With regards to the active wells, yeah the active wells. Okay,
 so the majority of the wells that I've seen at least here in Denton were primarily drilled
 in the early 2000s to kind of the right around 2010 or so. We haven't had any wells drilled
 since 2014 that I'm aware of in the city. So I would say there many of them are probably
 on that older side. A lot of the ones that we've seen here lately with subdivisions,
 it's worked out where it's the wells not producing enough and they're able to just pay to have
 it plugged. So I would say that's probably closer to the majority. But we could definitely
 look into that more if that's information that you were interested in. Mayor, may I?
 Sure, of course. Two more things. One, I have a comment. There's the EPA's brown fields
 and land revitalization program where they're offering grants for this type of thing. And
 I don't know if that would qualify some of these plugging of gas wells if we can find
 out. I think that would be very helpful for developers if they were aware of that program.
 And I think I lost my thought. That's pretty much what I was wondering about. If that grant
 program would be something that they would be interested in. And also when a development
 comes in, is it something that our planning department does when there's a gas well? Do
 we recommend plugging or is that just something they come in with and say, hey, if we plug
 this well, what happens? So we try to just provide the facts. When the developers come
 in for a pre-application conference, we'll inform them of where the well locations are,
 show them that online tool where they can go find that. We have where they can estimate
 what those setbacks look like on our online map. So we just advise them of what they'd
 be able to do with that setback in place. And then if the question comes up, then certainly
 we speak to -- the city currently doesn't have any setback requirements for unplugged
 well, but we try to always encourage them to place that in an area where it's least
 likely to have anything built on top of it. But that's generally how a pre-application
 would go is just providing them the information and how the different scenarios would play
 out based on the code.
 >> As far as my direction goes on the incentives, I'd be willing to look at the things we already
 have in place and the things that we do as far as clustering and things like that. But
 the recommendations for the Dallas home builders, I'm not really ready to entertain yet. And
 I would like to speak to our local development community, too, to see what feedback they
 have.
 >> Okay. All right. Any other comments? Councilmember Armitter?
 >> Yeah. So my direction on this is, you know, I, too, don't like the recommendations from
 the Dallas Builders Association. Especially, you know, I was really disappointed to see,
 you know, that they're asking -- one of the things that they're asking for was to ease
 up on our tree regulations, which we have not to make things easier or harder for them
 but to protect trees. I feel similarly about this. I don't actually -- I'm not really interested
 quite frankly in what the Dallas Builders Association or the development community has
 to say about this because I'm concerned about the public health and safety aspect. And so
 just as far as my direction goes, you know, I'm looking at what we need to do and how
 we need to legislate, where we can legislate for better public health and safety and requiring
 that they cap these wells, where there are obstacles, you know, where we're preempted
 in doing this. I'm open to any kind of incentives. But when I'm looking at incentives, I'm going
 to look at what do environmental experts have to suggest about what works. So that's just
 my direction.
 Okay. So I'm not quite sure on your direction. You're saying just let the market take care
 of it. We don't need to put any additional incentives.
 No, that's not at all what I said. No. I said I am open to incentives. I would like to know
 what environmental experts, what environmental groups, what scientists think about public
 health and safety experts recommend about what works for incentives. I don't want to
 ask, you know, the so-called development community, is this okay with you if we do this? Is it
 okay if you do this? I'm thinking in terms of public health and safety, I've gotten the
 public health and safety.
 I understand that, Councilmember Archer, but I think you're confusing incentives with just
 what environmentalists say should be the actual policy. Because an incentive is saying what
 can we offer developers to develop this and maybe cap this well?
 I think you're going to know. That's fine. I appreciate that.
 I want to know from them what their policy recommendations are.
 We got you. Okay. All right. Thank you very much.
 Very similar to what he has to say.
 Okay. All right. No, I don't. Okay. Councilmember Davis.
 So I agree with your initial assessment, Mayor, that the market is starting to take care of
 this. We've already seen wealth capped in two different zoning cases that I can think
 of just off the top of my head that have come before us in the last six months or so, maybe
 a little bit longer than that. We've got the one over on the, well, never mind, y'all can
 find them. You know where they are. But Teasley Trails is one of them, that kind of strange
 parcel that we rezoned. They capped that well specifically so they could get more homes
 into the parcel. And I think, though, that it's okay to continue exploring things because
 already I like some of the things that Haley mentioned. She mentioned parking minimums.
 There's some places where parking minimums are prohibitive. There's some places where
 our minimum lot sizes are prohibitive. And I understand what the builders are saying
 about the products that they see getting the most traction in the market. But at the same
 time, we're looking at needing more affordable homes across all parts of the spectrum. So
 if people are willing to buy homes with smaller lots and at the same time that gives a little
 bit extra incentive for a well to get capped in the city limits, I'm okay with that. So
 my direction would be to explore some of the incentives that staff has mentioned. I'm not
 really interested in those cash incentives that the builders mentioned, you know, waiving
 fees or reducing fees. I don't see any need for the city to get into that business at
 all. I don't think we have a need for that. But I would like to explore some of the things
 that Haley mentioned specifically on the topic that we brought up for this work session,
 which is density. So, Mr. City Attorney, I guess my only concern
 or my reservation for that from a that's memorialize it and put it in a codified sort of standard
 form, you know, create some standards is that these all these things are very different.
 All these developments are very different. So we'd have to build in enough flexibility
 instead of so I guess my question is to the city attorney, could something like this be
 incorporated in an SUP? In other words, or or a plan development or something where we're
 not saying to the developer, here are the here are the only sets of incentives or sets
 of code criteria that you can you can use, how can we provide some flexibility in those
 code issues? So I don't have an issue necessarily with how can we continue to explore. It's
 how can we continue to explore and create it to where it gives the council the greatest
 flexibility, and it gives the developer the greatest flexibility and I don't know if we
 if we hard code that with here's the only ones and the only way you can do it. And so
 there's got to be a way to Is that okay Councilmember Davis with somehow creating some flexibility
 in there? Is that what sort of you had in mind or? Yeah, no, I think that's the key.
 I think that's what happens when you when you cap a well is the get yourself some flexibility,
 some that's already there because you don't have the setbacks to deal with. But then anything
 else we can do I think to incentivize the capping of the wells. Flexibility is I think
 what a lot of these developers are looking for. When they look at these projects and
 as as we have less and less developable land available and we're looking at these infill
 sites that might have some legacy wells on them that aren't producing flexibility is exactly
 what they need to get those sites developed. Okay, Councilmember Meltzer. I'm wondering
 if if we might be able to do something like a point system. I know there's some things
 that are already in the code. You may think of them what they are before I will where
 you know there's a range of options and and that it's sort of like capping a well buys
 you a certain number of points and you can use it for some densities some parking relief
 but you know where you can kind of you know pick off a menu of it a bit but then we've
 got to look at the values and make sure it's not not overly rich but you know I think part
 of what we seem to agree on is none of them are cash. Right. Yeah, so Haley do you think
 you have enough direction to begin to craft something that could come back to council
 with you know some as you've presented some alternatives and some options and then also
 hearing the flexibility discussion and things such as that because I think people it seems
 that the consensus is move forward with giving us some additional options and maybe really
 getting it more structured to how it would look actually in our code. Certainly we can
 do that. Do you feel you have a sufficient direction in order to do that? Yes, sir. Yeah,
 we can take a stab at okay kind of that menu of options and and see where council wants
 to go from there. Okay. All right. Well let's do that then and so given that we will then
 conclude this particular agenda item. Thank you Haley for that discussion and thank you
 colleagues as good discussion. We'll go to agenda item 3C which is receive report and
 hold the discussion and give staff direction regarding pending 2020 non-accented annexation
 agreements and non-ag exempt properties. Council member Meltzer. I'm sorry I know you just
 closed the item. I would all I would personally in addition to excluding cash items I don't
 think you heard any interest in giving up on open space requirements or tree preservation
 requirements. Sure we appreciate that and and staff can can take that direction and
 thank you Paul appreciate that. No no you're good no that's fine appreciate you clarifying
 that. Okay. Mayor give me a couple of seconds here to upload my presentation. Sure.
 [Silence]
 Okay. I'm ready to start my presentation.
 Sure.
 [Silence]
 Let me get it all full of you real quick.
 [Silence]
 Okay. Good afternoon. I'm Rami Guido, Development Services Principle Planner.
 Today, just to brief you on the non-annexation agreements, the 2020 non-annexation agreements.
 As you all know, as of August 1st, 2020, we had a number of non-annexation agreements that have expired.
 And what we're trying to do is reinitiate those agreements.
 And we have a number of them on the agenda for this afternoon or this evening for you guys to consider.
 As just to point out, on October 13th, last week, there was direction from the City Council to offer an agreement called the 212-172 agreement.
 Again, on October 13th, to those properties that currently do not have a non-ag exemption.
 That is just so that we can cover them.
 They were not offered a non-annexation agreement because they did not have an ag exemption.
 So again, staff was able to develop or have an agreement that will be very similar to the non-annexation agreement.
 And we will be presenting that to them in the short, during this time period.
 I also wanted to share that there were 148 non-annexation agreements that were mailed and/or emailed.
 As of Friday, we have received 125 signed non-annexation agreements,
 which leaves us with 23 non-annexation agreements that are still outstanding.
 This is a breakdown of those non-annexation agreements.
 And again, these non-annexation agreements that we have received and is in your backup as far as agenda items under items for individual considerations will be considered as you see here by area.
 So I won't go down the list, but DH1, we've received all of the non-annexation agreements for that area.
 And as you can see throughout the list, now there are a few that are still outstanding.
 DH4, DH12, PA1 through 4, there are still some that have not submitted their NAAs.
 We're working on making sure that we receive them, and hopefully we can get that back to you in a timely manner.
 This slide here just illustrates that, again, when we spoke on October 13th or when city attorney spoke with you all, the 212-172 agreement will be offered to those 19 property owners that have no ag exemption, that are not offered DNA, but will be offered a 212-172 agreement.
 As well as there are four property owners that are public, one in the county, one as owned by TxDOT, and then two are city-owned properties.
 We will proceed with annexation for the two city-owned properties, but the two county and TxDOT roadways will still be pending or are still pending.
 We will be working with them to get their consent.
 And that concludes my presentation. I'll be happy to stand for any questions.
 Ron, real quick question, and Mr. City Attorney, maybe a process question for the action items this evening. So the action items are per donut hole area. You're approving or disapproving on each one of those action items the agreements within that donut hole that have been returned to us signed. Is that correct?
 So, the action items are for those property owners who have lost their exemption or they don't have an ag exemption, that we're going under a different process. So those are different. That's a different set of agreements.
 That those would be separate and they will have a separate agreement sent to them.
 Okay. Any questions?
 Okay. Fantastic. Thank you, Ron. We'll look forward to the action items tonight.
 All right.
 We are moving then to our work session 3D, which is receive ID 20-1492, receive a report, hold a discussion, give staff direction on pending City Council requests for Discuss Collins Road expansion.
 Good afternoon, Mayor and Council, Stuart Birdseye again, Assistant to the City Manager.
 Let me share my screen.
 I can't see that down there.
 All right. So I'm here for our pending request for information work session. In case this is anybody's first time watching and just to give you a reminder, up to seven requests will be reviewed per meeting, one council member.
 I will introduce each request and then the elected official that made the request will have one minute to describe and justify their requests. The remaining elected officials will then have up to one minute to provide feedback and indicate their support
 and then we will move on to the next item.
 This is the second item, which is to discuss the use of staff time. We will respond to all requests for a consensus of council is established.
 Today we have one item. It's to discuss Collins Road expansion. This was requested by Councilmember Briggs.
 This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time. It's to discuss the use of staff time. This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time. This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time.
 This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time. It's to discuss the use of staff time. This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time. This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time. This is one item. It's to discuss the use of staff time.
 got a timer here so yeah just whenever councilmember Briggs starts I'll start
 the timer in one minute. All right thank you there's a lot of public interest in
 this and I just wanted to ask council for a work session this is simply not a
 mobility plan issue it is much broader and it deserves a larger discussion
 including overall how our future development fits into the Denton 2030
 comprehensive plan comprehensive plan and how it the impacts of this expansion
 would affect Clear Creek and our sustainability plan we need to discuss
 this in an open in an open arena and make a plan as items come to us so we
 are not trying to engineer from the dais as each of these individual items come
 to us we need to discuss the policy that go hand-in-hand with this expansion and
 some of the things are to consider our infrastructure build-out costs impact to
 remaining rural areas bike and pedestrian road safety decrease in
 revenue of our tourism and recreation flood mitigation costs timber and carbon
 suspension costs downstream water quality okay that was a minute okay all
 right councilmember Davis so the thing I don't want to do is derail our mobility
 plan process but one of the things we did I think that was very useful in that
 process was the conversation we had the work sessions we had based on sectors of
 the city and when we looked at that northeastern sector of the city we
 didn't focus on this area perhaps as much as we should maybe that's our fault
 here on the council for not asking the right questions we talked a lot about
 Sherman and some other things along Sherman 428 we did not talk a lot about
 Hartley Field and Collins Road so I think what I'd like to see is not
 something that derails the process we're already in but a conversation that
 centers on the development we expect in this area and Hartley Field and Collins
 Road so that we can give them full attention we have a lot of folks very
 interested in that area of the world and we have some significant policy
 decisions to make you know you build a road people are going to drive on it
 people are going to build houses on either side of it so if we wanted to
 look a certain way or be a certain way out there then the mobility plan yep all
 right councilmember Meltzer I think we'll take a yes and approach I
 particularly like the encouragement of councilmember Briggs to look at it
 holistically not just in terms of mobility and you know I think this really
 comes up because we've stopped respecting the 2030 plan and we haven't
 yet replaced it with the new comprehensive plan so I think you know
 that that should add some pressure on us to to make sure we get that done but the
 yes and means focus on that but I also really like staff's suggestion okay
 anybody else councilmember Briggs I mean armature it's the other girl yeah I
 really strongly support this proposal I support those comments that have been
 said including the comment about the 2030 plan we have gotten a lot of mail
 I've gotten a lot of feedback on this this issue it is really bad for the
 local environment is bad for clear Creek it's bad for neighboring communities so
 I'll just be honest in saying that I'm against it Collins is this Collins Road
 expansion I'm very much for extending this conversation okay all right I guess
 I'm a little I'm a little confused because councilmember Davis you you're I
 mean I hear three people strictly for this conversation as it's been presented
 discuss Collins Road expansion but so help me and so are you a yes on that I'm
 a yes only if it's in the context of those other other roads I mean you can't
 talk about Collins Road without talking about Hartley Field Road without talking
 about the outer loop without talking about all the things there's a reason
 why our engineers want to build Collins Road the way that they want to build it
 and unless you talk about those things holistically you're just shooting in the
 dark okay and I guess I shouldn't have asked you that question I'm trying to
 figure out with the we can't I mean councilmember I just needed a question
 clarification to understand the the consensus so I'm gonna say we have a
 consensus but it's a lot bigger than I mean I'm gonna go ahead and take my one
 minute let me get the timer going
 yeah I'm not and I'm not against taking another look at things that we need to
 take a look at but I think this is also part of the mobility plan that's what we
 do the mobility plan has also been developed in conjunction with the 2030
 plan the 2030 plan was developed ten years ago the city has changed a
 tremendous amount in ten years I don't think that you you can have a 2030 plan
 that you have to go totally by what that says based upon how the city's
 developed and based upon how it's growing it that plan is there to give us
 some direction it's not there is something that just says this is what
 this is what you got to do because if that's the case we don't need to do ten
 years out because the city's growing much faster than that so I don't mind
 having a look at it but I don't know if I want to do it outside of the normal
 process because there's a lot of people have the same concerns with other
 aspects of the mobility plan that we might not have addressed and so that's
 going to really open us up to having these discussions in general so while
 we've got a consensus of four I'm against as far as how it's going to be
 discussed not that it will be discussed all right that's my minute anybody else
 because we've already got a consensus to move forward this is just sort of
 stating your position Mayor Pro Tem yeah thank you for the clarification I am
 confused just because the process is a process it's it's a one-minute pitch for
 a specific item and either you line up with that or you don't and it and so
 that's where I'm a little confused is we it's it's become I line up with it kind
 of but here are some variations so I'll just say look forward to seeing what
 comes back and I think the holistic approach is important because if we're
 gonna have X amount of traffic it has to flow some way in who do how do we want
 to direct that traffic and what do we want to protect and to be purposeful
 about it thank you okay anybody else all right okay thank you and that concludes
 our work session reports so therefore I will now convene the closed session at
 414 a p.m. on October 20th 2020 we will consider the following items
 deliberations regarding personnel matters under Texas government code
 section five five one point oh seven four mr. city manager city attorney
 either one of you have a preference on who's going first all right okay well
 then I got to choose council city manager will just take you first and city
 attorney will take you second okay well let's take a five-minute break and we'll
 come back
 welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council on October the 20th 2020 it
 is 651 p.m. we do have a quorum I will now call this meeting to order I want to
 apologize for our tardiness we just had some issues that not issues but some
 business we needed to attend to that ran a little bit over our first item on the
 agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance to the US and to the Texas flag if you will
 stand with me if you're able and we'll do the US flag first 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 the
 Texas pledge honor the Texas flag I pledge allegiance to the Texas one state
 under God one and indivisible all right our next agenda item are
 proclamations and presentations and I believe the first one is resolution of
 appreciation for dr. Kenneth E banks and I believe that's out in the other room so
 I'm going to come out there to make that presentation so just give me just a
 moment
 almost right here I want to sit yeah that's all right let's see I'm just
 gonna get in the chair and then can the mic pick us up
 all right can y'all hear me okay council members can you hear me yes
 fantastic all right well we're here for a resolution of appreciation for dr.
 banks you know I've dr. banks I guess you were here when I started on council in
 2007 I was and you know I just remember it's about the only thing I remember
 because my brain is getting foggy on me these days is the talk you had about
 the West Nile virus and about mosquitoes and the science of that and I've never
 forgotten that just knowing that there's so many things number one I don't know
 and I'm so glad there are people around who do know they can really give us the
 guidance and the expertise that we need here at the city and you have done that
 over your years of service and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that and
 have relied upon just your steady hand your immense knowledge base and just
 your commitment to objectivity to science data and evidence and it has
 served our city extremely well so there's the words on this resolution will
 pale in comparison I think to the appreciation I feel and I think my
 colleagues feel in your service to our community I certainly know that the
 community itself has appreciated that as well so I'm gonna read the resolution
 and then I want to give my colleagues an opportunity if they would like to share
 some words to do so or even if there's city staff here that want to comment as
 well I just I really want it to be a day to honor you and your your public
 service to our community this is a resolution and appreciation of dr.
 Kenneth E Banks whereas dr. Banks has served as the general manager of
 utilities overseeing the water and wastewater utilities as well as
 environmental services and sustainability for the city of Denton
 since 2017 and whereas dr. Banks was hired as watershed protection specialist
 in the city of Denton water department in November of 2020 and held various
 managerial positions in the water and wastewater departments and environmental
 services from 2002 through 2017 and whereas dr. Banks holds a bachelor of
 science in biology a master of science in environmental science and a doctor
 of philosophy in environmental science all from the University of North Texas
 and is both a certified professional in storm water quality and in erosion and
 sediment control and whereas dr. Banks has served on the steering committee for
 the Trinity Basins clean rivers program project subcommittee for several water
 environment research Federation projects and board member of the EPA forum a
 watershed approach to utility management and whereas dr. Banks has
 participated in three book reviews and I didn't know this about you authored or
 co-authored over 70 publications slash reports conducted over 175 professional
 research presentations and continues to serve as an adjunct professor at the
 University of North Texas whereas the city of Denton has benefited greatly from
 dr. Banks dedication knowledge and efforts to make Denton a better city and
 you have definitely done that and whereas dr. Banks has performed the
 efficient discharge of his duties and has earned the respect of his fellow
 colleagues and the citizens of Denton now therefore this council of the city
 of Denton hereby resolves that the sincere warm appreciation for dr. Banks
 felt by the citizens and employees of the city of Denton be formally conveyed
 to him in a permanent manner by recording this resolution into the
 official minutes of the city of Denton and to forward to him a true copy
 thereof and be it resolved be it further resolved that the city of Denton on this
 20th day of October 2020 does hereby officially and sincerely extend its
 appreciation to dr. Banks for his successful career with the city of
 Denton so I wherever you are I just want to give dr. Banks a big hand
 oh well we've got hand sanitizer all this place so I'm gonna shake your hand
 dr. Banks thank you so much for your service and I wanted to give you an
 opportunity to say a few words and then I also wanted to give anybody the staff
 or city council my colleagues to share their thoughts as well so you got the
 floor thank you well it's an interesting spot to be in I've been with the city
 of Denton 20 years and I just want to extend my thanks first to staff members
 have made so many friends and worked with some amazing people throughout my
 time here I would not be where I am right now if not for that that group of
 people we have a very dedicated and loyal staff that are focused every day
 on making sure that the citizens of this community receive the services that they
 need and I'm really glad to be a part of that and we'll miss that and miss those
 people greatly I also want to thank the council members I get paid to do this
 y'all do not and I'm very appreciative of your time and all the council members
 that I've worked with through the years that have dedicated to all of their
 personal time to making this city a better place and I just I can't the
 commitment to do that is just astounding to me and I really appreciate that and
 have enjoyed working with all of the council members through the years and
 then last I just I'd like to reach out to the citizens and just say thank you
 you gave me a career for 20 years here I hope that I've served you well I did
 everything that I could to do so and I just really I love this city and I love
 the people and I enjoyed every day knowing that in some small way I helped
 to to serve the citizens of this community so thank you all it's a
 bittersweet moment for me to be in this position but I just really want to
 express my appreciation to all and wish you all the best of luck thank you all
 right councilmember Briggs thank you dr. Banks we had a chance to visit just the
 other day and I was really glad to be able to do that but I do want to thank
 you for your service to our city and to the environment and to to our Denton
 environment you have made a big difference in our air and our water and
 I appreciate that very much I'm doubt doubtful we're gonna find anyone with
 your intelligence and knowledge in all areas and aspects of science and I just
 I wish you I wish you well on your journey and we'll miss you councilmember
 Armitage so when I want to say again so Kenny when I think of you I think that
 three words gas well inspections I will always think of them this thing that we
 hasn't been all that long but we almost take for granted now it was pretty
 radical at the time very new I will always think of them as the Kenny banks
 gas well inspections it's really because of you I'm of course it had with it took
 you know consensus from council wanting it to happen but I honestly don't even
 know how much legwork you put behind that but I know you put a lot of work
 into that and anyway I will always associate you with that I think a lot of
 people don't know that but just like councilmember Briggs said we really owe
 you for cleaner cleaner air or you know things would be a lot worse if it
 weren't for your work on that so I'm really grateful I will never forget for
 that thank you so much thank you councilmember Meltzer I think I said
 this in a meeting when I you first dropped it on us that you're heading out
 I said what what ten people are we getting to replace here Dr. Banks you're
 you're you're it's not just your knowledge in so many areas it's also
 your commitment and your intellectual integrity is has just made you a really
 outstanding public servant you'll be so missed and I encourage you to do a
 podcast I'll think about that anybody else councilmember Davis so I want to
 pipe up it's still kind of the new guy on council environmental issues are so
 important to this city and the amount of expertise that you bring to bear put you
 in contact with a lot of different people in town and you know as a new
 council member coming on and paying special attention to some of those
 issues I would always be surprised when a topic would be announced and then
 here's dr. Kenny banks to give the presentation because like Paul said it
 seemed like they were all different things here we are learning about
 wastewater management Kenny banks is gonna tell us how to do it here we are
 learning about air quality Kenny banks is gonna tell us how to do it here we
 are learning about gas wells Kenny banks is gonna tell us how to do it so I don't
 know what we're gonna do without you I don't know what know what some of our
 community members are gonna do without your expertise and your calm cool
 demeanor with some of these hot button issues but we wish you all the best and
 great things are ahead I'm sure thank you mayor Pro Tem but yeah just echoing
 what everyone already already said you know absolutely will will be missed for
 a variety of reasons but I think primarily from a I'm more of a legal
 kind of linear thought and so you were able to be bilingual and speak science
 and then translate it and I enjoyed the tours of the the water treatment
 facility and kind of all the insight that goes into that so just appreciate
 your your teaching spirit your demeanor I've read books about how to be that
 calm haven't haven't managed it yet but I appreciate you in that capacity and
 in tough situations again always sensitive to the community and you you
 always performed well so wish you the best and and you will be missed and and
 look forward to you doing great things there and but yeah just want to thank
 you for all the the kind of teaching and insight you gave and patience with with
 disseminating that information thank you councilmember Ryan thank you man yeah
 Katie I just you are going to be irreplaceable your knowledge base is
 pretty much unheard of I've known many smart people in my life and you are at
 the top your ability to always present the facts and never kind of well I
 think this it was you knew what was going on and you knew and what the true
 facts were in in all the situations that you presented to us and that's going to
 be something that we're greatly going to miss from you thank you for your time so
 I have one last thing to say I always get the last word as mayor especially
 since I'm not gonna be here that long you know and I echo the sentiments of
 everybody there but I think really what I have really appreciated about you over
 the years we all know you're smart I never learned so much about mosquitoes in
 my life but what it is it's also your heart because you care you care about
 this city you care about the issues you care about what happens and to me that's
 what really sets you above and beyond because a lot of people can be smart but
 that doesn't mean everybody always cares but to me that's where a lot of that
 flow from so I really do appreciate that I'm just want to acknowledge your spirit
 in that regard thank you well thank you sir all right and here's your
 presentation and we're gonna you can hold it up yeah thank you Ryan we're
 gonna stand up right here all right we're not gonna short-change it just
 because we're not meeting in the council chambers right there over to over the
 shoulder they got massive they can't see where they were smiling or not thank you
 sir thank you god bless you and godspeed in your new adventures thank you thank
 you and yeah we're gonna I just I just wanted to give him a give him a yeah I
 just want to give him a chance to change his mind real quick before he walks off
 with I appreciate the chance okay I'm gonna actually thank you thank you Dr.
 Banks appreciate it I'm gonna go get the other proclamation and read it here
 because I sort of like this process so just give me just a second come on in
 I sort of like being in here I'm in that office and you sort of hey oh yeah come
 on we can get out and get you in on the camera okay all right so our next item
 on the agenda is a proclamation for the 2020 census complete count committee and
 if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself and just tell us a little bit
 about what you all have been doing here for the last many months on the complete
 count committee well thank you mr. mayor my name is Tahisha Scott and I'm the
 executive director of giving helping and I have been on the complete count
 committee since the fall of 2018 it felt like Gilligan's Island for a minute
 there we were told it was going to be a three-hour tour here we are two years
 later right but honestly that time was helpful because what it allowed us to do
 is give more time towards focusing on the citizens and getting more individual
 that reside in the city of Denton to complete their census because over the
 time we know how critical it is for that to happen and we know that that number
 is gonna follow us for the next 10 years so although it was a little longer than
 what we expected probably longer than what Ryan wanted working with us but we
 are truly grateful to each and every one of the individuals that reside in the
 city of Denton that completed the census and we appreciate all of the work of
 city staff and the support of the leadership of the city for getting that
 done thank you well and and as we know that this this is a vitally critical
 count that determines federal funding for our city and our region over the
 next decade so it's so important that everybody was able to be counted now
 help me understand because I know that I thought the deadline was the end of
 September today extend that or did it end in September do we yes so what had
 happened was initially with the census the date was supposed to be the end of
 September and then they actually extended it at the beginning of the
 coven as we know it they extended it until the 31st of October but then they
 came back and they moved it back to the end of September but then they went to
 court and they moved it back to the middle of October so actually last I
 believe it was last Thursday at 6 p.m. was the final day great great thank you
 so much what it gives me great honor and pleasure to read this proclamation this
 is a proclamation by the mayor of the city of Denton Texas whereas the United
 States Census Bureau is compelled by the Constitution of the United States of
 America to conduct a decennial census in the year 2020 and this count will
 determine the number of Texas representatives to the United States
 House of Representatives redistricting of state legislators county and city
 councils and voting districts and whereas an accurate census determines
 the annual allocation and distribution of over now get this 600 billion dollars
 of federal and state funding to communities to include those for
 education health care employment housing transportation and additional services
 that are vitally important at the local level whereas the city of didn't
 recognize the importance of each and every resident in the 2020 census count
 and became one of 39,000 government entities to partner with the United
 States Census Bureau in supporting a complete and accurate count and whereas
 in support of that partnership the city of Denton form the 2020 census complete
 count committee in November of 2018 and it was further back than what I had even
 remembered where does time go whereas the complete count committee
 incorporated all segments of the community and its information and
 outreach activities including but not limited to education and community based
 organization religious institution workforce development business government
 and media to ensure the important 2020 census message reached encouraged all
 residents in Denton to participate and whereas despite in a historic pandemic
 creating unforeseen challenges committee members exercise great ingenuity and
 instituting new ways to safely reach the community such as outreach with church
 groups caravans and undercounted areas and radio advertisements in grocery
 stores that serve historically under counted population and we thank the
 members of this committee I mean we thank the members of the committee so so
 much for your hard work and dedication as you persevered tirelessly to ensure
 that everyone in the community was aware of the critical impact of a complete
 census count now therefore I Chris Watts mayor the city of Denton Texas to
 hereby recognize the 2020 census complete count committee say that very
 fast ten times and applaud their commitment to maximizing 2020 census
 participation to ensure that members of Denton's community count and they count
 so that we receive our fair share of that 600 billion dollars in federal and
 state aid so thank you so much for your commitment to this in our city for this
 is greatly appreciated and greatly thank let's give them okay I think the way
 we're going to do this is whoever's here we'll get their own pocket so we're just
 going to sort of file through and we take pictures as we present each one
 with it if that's okay where do we want to I'm gonna just do it right here
 wait I didn't smile that's good that's good one okay we're just learning all
 ways of ingenuity here as you all do one two three one two three oh my goodness thank you.
 Great job y'all if you could just add 10% to every number I think we'll be all right let me give you
 these for those that weren't able to attend thank you all right I'm gonna
 return.
 Okay wonderful it's so good to recognize those in our community who contribute so
 much to the well-being of our city all right we're gonna go now to presentations
 from the members of the public we're gonna switch the order a little bit we're
 trying to get a hold of the individual who's registered for the pre-registration
 for the public comment we're gonna go to the open mics first and then if we're
 able to reach that individual then we will pull them in after after the open
 mic so just give us a moment as we sort of make those adjustments.
 you
 we have our first open mic caller and we'll wait for the open mic caller to
 get on the line and I will prepare my a caller are you on the line I am yes
 thank you so much for joining us on this open mic portion of our agenda item
 presentation for members of the public once you state your name and address
 your time will begin you'll have four minutes and because this is the open mic
 portion of the program the council members will be unable to answer any
 questions or deliberate only except they may be able to make comments of policy
 or factual basis but due to restriction from the Texas Open Meetings Act so just
 state your name and address and I will start your time all right there my name
 is Michael notes and it's 2700 Colorado Boulevard okay yes go ahead okay so I
 want to touch on two things really quick the first thing I want to do and I'm not
 you know I'm not on a witch hunt so I don't want to point anything or I'm not
 gonna address an individual by name but I do want to clarify something so my
 understanding is that the City Council is nonpartisan and with elections coming
 up I did want to mention that I had received over seven phone calls from the
 area young Democrats and from a couple other organizations and I've left they
 left me voicemails they texted me so much that I had to file a police report
 because they were advocating for a City Council member for reelection so I did
 want to put that out there that if I may not be the only one but you know I had
 to file I had to file a police report with the police department because they
 were literally harassing me texting me calling me you know before 6 a.m. at some
 point then it was just kind of ridiculous and then the second thing I
 want to touch on really quick is earlier this week the 911 dispatch center went
 down for the city and it seems like there was it was down at one point and
 then it was rolling over to Denton County and then at one point there was
 you know they were trying to post the non-emergency number and so I guess once
 they got it fixed you know they they posted that and I think that's great
 we're in a time where a lot of us are participating in the open meetings for
 the use of force committee and some of the other things that are going on and I
 think that it's important for the city not only to acknowledge the issues that
 took place but I think that telling us what happened why the phone lines went
 down 9-1-1 is I mean extremely important the fact that it was down for you know
 45 minutes an hour it's pretty significant when you're talking about you
 know medical and life-threatening issues you know there have been a couple of you
 know from my understanding some shooting at one point not too long ago some guns
 being pulled and so just the city addressing that is extremely important
 telling us what happened I think is extremely important for accountability so
 those are the two things I wanted to touch on just wanted to share like I
 said recap real quick 9-1-1 down kind of letting us know what happened and then
 the other thing is you know if you're running for re-election my understanding
 is this is a nonpartisan council you know circling back to not only having you
 know political organizations work on your behalf but potentially you know
 where that gets to become harassment and you know that being investigated so
 thank you guys thank you Michael I appreciate it you have a good one you
 too thank you and we have our waiting on our next caller for open mic a caller
 you're on with the Denton City Council in the public portion comment of our
 agenda for this council meeting this evening once you state your name and
 address your time will begin and you are in the open mic portion so you'll have
 four minutes and because of restrictions under the Texas Open Meetings Act the
 council will be unable to respond except for I'm going to read this because I
 always get it don't say it right except for a statement of factual information
 or resuscitation of existing policy so at any time you go ahead and state your
 name and address and I will start your time thank you this is Eric 2111 Westwood
 Drive I must apologize I think I kind of committed a procedural faux pas I thought
 I would not be available to speak this evening and so I submitted some written
 comment on one of the items but I'm glad that you have this open mic portion so
 that I could add some context to that this is concerning the next to last
 public hearing on the rezoning from r2 to r4 when you get to that item I just
 asked that you would remember that the fiscal side of this one is a really easy
 math problem even if it were developed as r2 the total taxable value would be
 lower because the houses would not be worth twice the price of r4 houses and
 if they were it certainly wouldn't old help affordability you may recall that
 I'm often not a fan of large r4 style suburban housing developments that
 require new roads and infrastructure that the additional tax revenue they
 bring may not cover this is not one of those in this proposal the road is even
 private and maintained by the HOA it doesn't require any new fire or police
 stations to service it it'll bring additional tax revenue without
 increasing the liabilities of the city do I wish it were more connected to
 adjacent neighborhoods absolutely could this land be developed in a way that
 helps even more fiscally probably but it is an improvement of what to approve
 this zoning change is a vote that takes tax burden off of the rooftop rooftops of
 the rest of the city it will lower our taxes a vote to deny this zoning change
 is a decision to keep taxes for the rest of the city higher by admittedly a small
 amount maybe a fraction of a dollar each year but that only benefits the six
 bordering properties so I just encourage you to keep the the fiscal side of it in
 mind as you're deliberating later this evening thank you thank you I appreciate
 you calling in all right just give me just a moment please
 all right we we were still unable to answer or to get a hold of the
 registered caller so we'll move forward with our agenda to the consent agenda
 which is agenda item four so chair would entertain action on the consent agenda
 councilmember Ryan yes mayor I move approval of the consent agenda except
 for items G and J to be taken up individually after the vote okay all
 right thank you councilmember Davis I'll second okay we will we've got a motion
 and a second to approve the consent agenda which is agenda item four for all
 the consent agenda items except for consent agenda item G which is ID 20
 - 1792 or agenda item J which is JD 20 - 20 58 and so councilman Ryan how say
 you on that motion aye councilmember Davis aye councilmember Meltzer aye
 councilmember Armitter yes councilmember Briggs yes mayor Pro Tem all right mayor
 Watts is an aye those carries seven zero we will now move to those consent
 agenda items that were pulled and we will now consider them under items for
 individual consideration we will take up item G first which is ID 20 - 1792 I
 believe there was a request for a brief presentation on this so it is consider
 adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton authorizing the city manager to
 execute a contract for public artwork with Daniel black and who who pulled
 this one yeah I did mayor I thought the public could find this yes interesting
 to see and I think somebody asked a question on the selection process was
 that you councilmember Briggs or was it someone else that that was that was me I
 was I had a question before about how the artist was selected and just if you
 could just brief over that okay great thank you
 there we go all right good evening Gary Pack and
 director of Parks and Recreation wanted to share with you this evening an update
 on the foundations our history mural project just some background information
 this mural was painted in May of 2019 that was on Bonnie Bray and in February
 of 2020 the Public Art Committee voted to use funds to salvage that at the time
 that facility was going to be set to be demolished and that fence was going to
 be removed in which the mural was painted so we had been working on trying
 to salvage it to put it in storage for future erection of the monument
 erection of the monument at a later date after some deliberation in regards to
 its condition there was some concern that if it was removed that it wouldn't
 be salvageable so at that time we we took an idea that KDB Inc was originally
 going to paint a second mural on the Robertson Robertson underpass and we
 thought maybe we could have that reproduced so that's how the the concept
 originally started was trying to save the mural on Bonnie Bray and repainting
 it on the Robertson underpass so in September of 2020 we had a few community
 meetings to gather feedback on the mural location and we started to move forward
 and proceed at that so here's the original mural that was painted on Bonnie
 Bray and the mural included five women that have lifelong detonates that were
 involved in education business and local community activists the total budget is
 a little over twelve thousand dollars that includes artist fees of eight
 thousand dollars a Union Pacific administrative fee a little over a
 thousand some site prep graffiti coating to make sure that if it does get any
 type of graffiti that we can go in there and just power wash it right off so
 that's like a clear coat and then a plaque and some future signage the
 funding source is a public art committee which is hot funds for twelve thousand
 dollars and keep that in beautiful is providing twenty three hundred dollars
 towards that effort the location again it's on Robertson on both sides of the
 railroad tracks you could see the condition of it right now where there's
 been a lot of vandalism or spray painting underneath the underpass the
 mural that was put just south of this has not had any vandalism since that was
 put in so we we hope that that tracks that vandalism from occurring so panel a
 and B and I'll show you some pictures here in a second and then D and C and
 those match up with these panels here so Minter and Cole will be on this side and
 Alexander will be on this side so this is the side that you will see facing
 Bell Avenue and then from the neighborhood side it'll be Clark and
 Kimball and then a general sign for the foundations of our history so there'll
 be a title of the monument and the mural on both sides of the railroad tracks from
 both directions one way that we're looking to continue to preserve our
 history is either through an art trail where we could highlight all the art
 within the city and people could go out and explore the city educational signage
 this is an example of a tree sign that we have in some of our parks this one is
 at Sequoia Park and then also using technology whether we put a sign there or
 we could create a website with QR codes and have technology available for people
 or both where people could scan the the QR code and then learn a little bit
 about that person and that allows us to update things on a regular basis a
 timeline we're gonna start pretty soon so November 1st if council chooses to
 move forward with this project we'll get started in November it'll take a couple
 weeks to get completed pending weather and then we'll have a ribbon cutting and
 dedication when it's appropriate time for for health and safety reasons and
 then this is a kind of a plan for keep them beautiful in the parks and
 recreation to beautify the Belle Avenue area of the city phase one was obviously
 the Eagle and Dallas Drive memorial that was done a few years ago the second
 mural would be done in phase two and then we're gonna be doing some
 wildfire plantings in that area as well as improvement of the existing shade
 garden as the entrance to to Southeast Denton mayor that's that's the brief
 presentation welcome to take any questions yeah I think the question was
 how was the artist selected and is that the same artist that painted it
 originally yes sir Daniel Black is the one that painted the original mural on
 Bonnie Bray and we're trying to save and salvage that so it could be reinstalled
 at another location and since he was the original artist we wanted to replicate
 that and KDB was looking at creating a mural at the same time so we thought
 that was the best way to preserve that existing mural for these that night that
 nights and reproduce that at the Robertson underpass okay all right
 councilmember Briggs does that answer your question yes sir okay thank you any
 other questions for staff on this project yes councilmember Meltzer not a
 question I don't mean to hold any other questions off I just want to say I think
 it's a wonderful project a lot of impact for for the dollars these are inspiring
 debt nights and it's it's a really terrific rendering you know there it's
 just a great great work so I'm moving approval okay all right
 councilmember Briggs yeah I will second and just to just to confirm that this
 has been through all the the public processes and the the community meetings
 and the feedback has been incorporated and so this is just the last step yes
 we've had two meetings in September we've had it on our social media to
 gather and feedback and we are going to be changing one of the the ladies asked
 for her picture to be changed so we're working with her to get that new picture
 as part of the final step and she's provided that to us okay right thank you
 I will second all right we have a motion to second any other discussion
 mayor pro tem yeah I just want to thank Gary for his insight here and and so for
 those that don't know so his original original idea of my dad and and he
 executed it by you know with Dan black and and and so to have it carry over
 into a more permanent format is spot-on so really excited about this really
 excited about the individuals that it recognizes and makes a great gateway into
 the to our neighborhood so I just want to thank all involved and I just want to
 encourage people if you've not gotten to know Dan black the artist he has a true
 heart for our community and is an outstanding guy and and really it's it's
 great to have that kind of energy behind the the the the painting that'll go and
 I look forward to seeing it done and and I appreciate all the input that that
 Gary's taken into this so thanks and then again credit to my dad for for
 getting it started okay any other questions I only have a motion to second
 for agenda item G which is ID 20 - 1792 councilmember Meltzer how say you I
 councilmember Briggs yes councilmember Ryan I mayor pro tem all right who am I
 missing councilmember Davis I'm an I councilmember Armitter yes mayor Watts
 is an I motion carries 7-0 all right we'll move on to agenda item J for
 individual consideration JD 20 - 20 58 I don't believe this required a
 presentation just a separate vote consider adoption of an ordinance of the
 city of Denton authorizing the city manager is he's designee to execute a
 facility use agreement with other law enforcement agencies for the use of the
 Denton Police Department training center and firearms range mayor pro tem
 approval councilmember Davis a second and just for clarification this is the
 existing facility correct not the not the new one is that is that correct if
 we good evening council this is Michael bear and some lieutenant at the police
 department and yes that is correct okay there there was some intimation in our
 earlier meeting this was for the new facility but this is for our existing
 facility I'll second okay all right any other questions or comments all right we
 will take a boat councilmember Meltzer I thought you know yeah well I just saw
 you reach for your microphone so yes mayor pro tem how say you all right
 councilmember Davis I almost said councilmember Jesse councilmember
 Meltzer I councilmember Ryan I councilmember armature no councilmember
 Briggs yes mayor Watts is an I I think I got everybody motion carries six to one
 we will now move forward on our items for individual consideration which is
 agenda item a which is ID 20 - 20 85 consider adoption of an ordinance of the
 city of Denton amending chapter 23 of the city code police to add article 6
 section 23 - 177 creating the Denton Police Department chief of police
 advisory board and providing an effective date we've had one person to
 call in on our or make a comment on our online form and they were in support
 we've had zero in opposition
 mayor and council deputy city attorney Michael Kronig after our meeting last
 week you gave me directions on five key areas so what I want to do is just go
 through this very quickly just to point out for you and the public the changes
 that were made after last week's meeting so the first one is on page 2 under the
 definition of city official I changed that to reflect that it only means a
 current a former member of the Denton City Council it was a lot broader so in
 accordance with your instructions I went ahead and changed that the next one and
 the word quorum is misspelled that's been changed but there was a question
 about since the chief has the ability if you pass this to a point five non voting
 members there was a question about is a quorum of just the voting people or the
 entire composition of the board so this just clarifies that a quorum is a
 majority of the voting members of the board and I did put in there either in
 person or virtually in light of that we're holding all these meetings
 virtually right now so that just defines a quorum the next change is I did add an
 additional member from the Denton Municipal Police Association so there
 are 11 members seven pointed by council for by the city manager the next
 provision deals with the confidentiality so that provision is included including
 that violating that would be a cost removal from the board so that's there
 there was a question raised that could a member of a sitting board commission or
 committee be a member of this board as well and it was clear to me that
 council's direction was that you would wanted that so this provides that unless
 it's expressly provided by the Charter or Code sitting member on a board
 committee or commission can serve on this board I did put in that if a member
 serves on more than one board and there's a conflict of interest between
 serving on the two boards that the member that may have a conflict it's up
 to that person to decide whether they should recuse themselves mayor this was
 your change here you the original version said the entire City Council I
 took out the word entire on then this highlighted language just makes it clear
 that quorum is with the voting members the next provision under D and E deals
 with the Texas Open Meetings Act he specifically I thought it was important
 that there should be a specific provision expressly stating the tome it
 does not apply and then D one even though it doesn't apply we will post the
 agenda at least 72 hours beforehand and the reason I put D and E in is someone
 reading D one could think that Tomer apply since we're putting in the posting
 provisions so I wanted to make it clear that it does not and that's subsection
 E and then the last part was on the chief's briefing semi-annually twice a
 year that was a change it originally just said annually and those are the
 changes that I made after our last meeting happy to answer any questions or
 take any further direction from council Michael if you could go well on on E if
 you could maybe pull it back up I just want to I'm looking at it in my backup
 but the draft word is sort of covering over some of the it was the one you just
 read about the Open Meetings Act yes sir okay so all right so when I first read
 it I mean I saw the comma but it's saying that it's exempt from that
 provision of the Code and Ordinances and so that's really therefore it is not
 subject okay okay so that's saying and is not subject to the Texas Open
 Meetings Mac referring to I guess the board I know it's referred yeah this
 board okay I got it all right I just wanted to make sure I followed it okay
 thank you okay all right any questions comments on this agenda item we've sort
 of gone over this two or three times councilmember Davis I just want to thank
 everybody who's weighed in on this topic it was it's quite an undertaking you can
 go back and watch the hours and hours of work that the mayor's ad hoc committee
 did and then it looks a little bit easy from the outside because Mike Kronig is
 an expert but he he didn't start this ordinance from scratch he'd written one
 like it before for a bigger city down in Austin so I want to give him a lot of
 thanks too because he helped shepherd us through this process and without his
 leadership on the legal side and Chief Dixon's leadership on the the policy and
 procedure side we wouldn't be here doing such good work so I appreciate everybody
 who put so much into it councilmember breaks yeah I do have a
 question about removal I know that and some of our other boards and commissions
 attendance is one of one of the reasons for removal but I didn't see that here
 listed is it just because it follows our other boards and commissions or if if a
 member doesn't show up because I know that there's pretty strict reasons for
 removal for cause and would absences be one of those causes if nobody if they
 decided not to ever show up to a meeting he was there's a provision and I'll find
 it that specific specifically says that you have to show up and see I don't know
 if remember under the qualification provision but okay I just that would be
 that would be a cause for removal for not not showing up but would it need to
 be listed and under there since we have such a vigorous process for for doing
 that I would say if I can find it cuz I remember there's something in here
 mayor would it be helpful to table to give the attorney opportunity to sure
 yeah I was reading it as well it says and it says must attend require training
 and meetings of the board either in person or through electronic medium
 that's under composition section 23 - 1 7 7 - I think it's spot well actually is
 23 - 1 7 7 - 6 qualifications to serve paragraph 10 must attend required
 training and meetings of the board either in person or through electronic
 median so that's right may that that's the part that I was referring to I
 believe that would be cause for removal failure to attend the meetings I okay
 that's fine I just know that we have like three apps there's an absentee
 policy and other boards and I was just wondering if that needed to be listed as
 one so it wouldn't be an issue if it came up but if you think that that would
 be suffice and that would work if there was an absentee issue if you nominated
 someone and they didn't show up for you know three meetings then you could that
 would be cause for removal or well I think it's it's worthy to note that that
 particular provision is under qualifications to serve and so I think
 if they didn't show up then they their their qualifications to serve would no
 longer be valid I mean they they would be disqualified to serve whereas I
 think whether you're qualified to serve and being removed are really two
 different types of actions now I mean we could put it in there but I think that
 and I'd like to hear the chief weigh in on this because I think if it if the if
 he's here I would want to give him pretty you know wide discretion that
 you're right councilmember Briggs we have very specific standards in some of
 our other boards and commissions like if you're absent for three times out of a
 year or some time period you're you are available to be removed you're not
 automatically removed but you could be removed and I guess because this board
 really hasn't been or this advisory committee hasn't been crafted with the
 same formalities that the other ones have especially since we're not
 necessarily making it subject to the Texas open meetings act and some other
 type of provisions that are applied to our other boards and commissions I'm
 okay with that unless the attorney or the chief thinks that you know it needs
 to be a little bit more defined so I understand what you're saying mayor on
 20 section 23 - 1 7 7 - 7 under a 1 it says if a board member resigns is
 removed or is disqualified and I agree with you that if a member doesn't
 attend the training or the meetings they would be disqualified and I think that
 that covers the issue okay I'm satisfied that it does okay all right thank you
 thank you and I just want to thank the use of force committee for their time
 and work as well thank you any other questions or comments before someone
 makes a motion I too want to express my my gratitude and appreciation to those
 who were willing to serve I reached out fairly quickly and they they all the
 ones that committed were they didn't have a whole lot of time so I really
 appreciate their willingness to serve on such a short notice and for an issue and
 a that is very important to our city and for their input no matter what it was I
 mean you know robust discussions are the way you craft a good policy so I
 appreciate the leadership city leadership our police appreciate the
 police chief thank you Cheryl English for chairing the meetings and and
 shepherding us shepherding them through though that process so again you know
 our citizens are great you know when when we need them to step up and and
 really help us out there they're more than willing to serve and I really do
 appreciate that all right share would entertain action councilmember Davis I
 move approval do I have a second councilmember armature I second all right
 we have a motion and a second councilmember Davis how say you for
 agenda item 5 a ID 20 - 20 85 Councilmember armature yes Councilmember
 Meltzer aye mayor pro tem all right councilmember Briggs yes councilmember
 Ryan aye mayor Watts is an eye the motion carries 7-0 thank you all agenda
 item 5b is consider approval of a resolution of the city of Denton
 adopting an urban forest master plan as policy for the city of Denton and
 declaring an effective date you know what let's take a quick five-minute
 break because we've been going for about an hour and then council was in meetings
 prior to that so let's take a quick five-minute break we'll come back right
 back thank you sorry about that hey all right we're back the Dent City Council
 on October the 20th 2020 at 759 Wow it's already 8 o'clock okay we're at our
 agenda item 5b which is consider approval of a resolution of the city of
 Denton adopting an urban forest master plan as policy for the city of Denton
 good evening honorable mayor council Haywood Morgan city of Denton urban
 forester this evening well we'll be giving a brief review of the urban
 forest master plan specifically how we got here the process an overview of the
 plan and edits made since our last presentation and plus our next steps as
 you may recall we hired we hired sorry about that I got a little ahead of myself as you may be as you may recall we hired David
 resource group to develop the urban forest master plan which was presented to
 you in June of this year tonight we're requesting adoption of the urban forest
 master plan with a few edits that I will go over shortly once adopted staff will
 finalize a five-year operation budget for implementation of the plan as a part
 of the process we reviewed our current level of operations and budgeting
 guiding documents such as the den 2030 plan the dental development code best
 management practices and industry standards as well as the state of
 didn't urban forest report we also engaged a community through internal and
 external interviews and meetings including local residents the urban
 forest master plan created for Denton is unique and based on the information that
 was garnered during background research analysis of the 2016 state of then urban
 forest report and community stakeholder interactions three focus areas were
 developed each focus area has goals and objectives attached to it each
 objectives has an action plan to fill the goals and objectives focus area one
 supports the implementation of proactive and quality tree maintenance in general
 trees pose minimal risk to the public but tree care can help make the
 community safer and the urban forest more resilient focus area two supports
 the earth the action to preserve and enhance the existing tree canopy to
 maintain the benefits provided by the urban forest this can be done by
 planning so our trees are maintained through their lifetime the urban forest
 in a sustainable manner focus area three supports connecting the community to the
 urban to the urban forest by creating an environment for all in the commute in
 the community to advocate for the urban forest it is recognized that the urban
 forest is more likely to be preserved and maintained by community that
 understands the benefits it provides okay so getting to the edits that were
 made the first edits is on page 45 of the plan and it basically changes tree
 committee to tree focus group which was previously clarified in a Friday report
 to council back in April 24th of this year and the second set of edits were
 made to page 48 of the plan and these adjustments were recommended by City
 Council back in June when we met during work session and it changes the
 percentage recommendations for use of the tree fund for planting from 60% to
 40% and for purchase of property to preserve trees from 35% to 55% our next
 steps will be to review and restart our tree planting programs inventory our
 public trees and expand our education and outreach efforts this concludes my
 presentation I'm available for any questions you may have okay Council
 member Briggs thank you Haywood thank you for the edits in the presentation
 can you for those who didn't read the report are the public can you talk about
 the tree focus group really quickly briefly go over over that yes so that
 the idea of the focus group is to assist us whenever there's a change in
 policy or an update to to artnesses that affect trees so it is something that's
 designed to be very focused and finite in nature when we need help and we need
 input from the public and would that be just individuals that your your office
 reaches out to you yes okay and would there be like a list of individuals for
 that focus group that people could see when it when it is created absolutely
 yeah part of the plan is to create a website for the urban forestry program
 here and then and we can definitely include that in that website perfect
 thank you so much you welcome anybody else Council member Higgs I move
 approval okay Council member Amater oh yeah I had a question actually sure go
 ahead yeah so hey what if you can speak to how the this plan works tree
 preservation ordinance and can you speak to you know if there are additional
 changes in the tree preservation ordinance how that how that plan fits to
 how this plan will fit together you know and will change as or if a tree tree
 ordinance plan to a tree preservation plan changes okay so our tree
 preservation ordinance primarily deals with trees during the development
 process on private property the the urban forest master plan while we look
 at the the entirety of the trees in the city public and private the the focus is
 for trees that we actually have control over to build a maintenance program so
 that we're properly maintaining and growing our urban forests okay so you'd
 say that they're pretty they're separate issues except to the extent that you
 know the tree the tree preservation ordinance can put money into
 theoretically you know getting more you know adding to our our park lands or
 adding you know adding to the tree fund but other than that there's no there
 they're pretty separate you're saying yeah for the most part the only overlap
 is where we do we are allowed to give away trees for planting on private
 property but the development code is trees on undeveloped land where they have
 to preserve a specified amount of trees okay thanks and can you can you also be
 able to just speak to just speak briefly to the idea of trees as
 infrastructure you know we all know that you know trees help clean the air but
 what's the you know is there what's the you know philosophy behind this this
 plan regarding you know why why trees are important if you wanted to just
 speak for them I know you do that so often day in and day out but just if you
 were to just put that in a nutshell how are trees important as infrastructure
 aside from just of course being beautiful okay part of that is actually
 covered in the plan under the goals and objectives to recognize trees as green
 infrastructure and so so trees provide many benefits beyond aesthetics in our
 state of didn't urban forest report that was done in 2016 we were able to
 actually put dollar values on carbon sequestration stormwater runoff energy
 savings and so when you look at trees beyond the statics and the actual money
 monetary values that they provide that's when you start to really look at them
 more as infrastructure versus just a landscape aesthetic yeah and thank you
 so much and I know I know that the plan covers that but I wanted to give you an
 opportunity to tout that because that's one of the things that I really like
 about about the plan so thank you okay anybody else
 councilmember Meltzer yeah just a second thing okay see who who made the motion
 councilmember Briggs okay all right so we have a motion and a second for
 agenda item 5 be ID 20 - 1851 councilmember Briggs I say you yes
 councilmember Meltzer aye councilmember Davis aye councilmember Ryan aye mayor
 Pro Tem aye councilmember Armitter yes mayor Watts is an I motion carries 7-0
 moving to agenda item 5c consider adoption of an ordinance approving the
 economic development agreement under chapter 380 of the local government
 code to promote economic development and to stimulate business activity and
 economic growth we had to I'm getting I'm getting feedback from someone if we
 could make sure our mics are muted probably all right thank you for this
 item we had two people make comments on our online form there were two in
 support none against
 good evening mayor and council members Jessica Rogers director of economic
 development
 right so the first presentation that I have in front of you tonight is for the
 incentive application for from the future on the line with us this evening
 we do have Mike Christian who is the CEO and Marks Hawkington who is the who are
 who is the CEO of from the future and they'll be available for questions I
 will go through the presentation fairly quickly most of this is information that
 we covered in the work session previously but just as a reminder from
 the future is a software company that specializes in virtual reality training
 they're based in downtown Denton they were founded here in 2009 but they're
 currently experiencing rapid growth and value revenues customers employees and
 they expect to outgrow their space in 2020 they see themselves as as
 competitors and really the high-tech centers around the country and they are
 competitors and they are attracting talents to Denton and utilizing our
 current talent pipeline such as NCTC and UNT for their staffing needs from the
 future submitted an incentive application for consideration as we do
 with any incentive application we review it for compliance with the city's
 adopted tax abatement incentive policy I'm not gonna go through all of these as
 we went through these in the work session but just as a reminder and that
 the policy has general provisions and also outlines targeted industry sectors
 and for this applicant met two of those targeted sectors as both a research and
 development and an information technology company the policy also
 identifies priority considerations and from the future met seven of the ten
 priority considerations because their application qualified them for a chapter
 380 grant or loan we also reviewed the policy as it relates to policy
 considerations excuse me specific to the chapter 380 program and they actually
 met four of the five goals that you see on your screen there there are also
 other or additional considerations for chapter 380 grants or loans that the
 City Council can take into consideration they met three of those additional
 considerations I'd like to point those out because those are important those
 include net new jobs with wages above Denton County's median wage and this is
 the for an expansion of existing business which this grant is and the
 city will take into consideration their creation of new or additional higher
 wage or knowledge-based jobs which we'll go over in detail in a few slides and
 that this is a job-based grant that's going to be considered for businesses
 creating higher wage or knowledge-based jobs this particular application is
 being funded or it's proposed to be funded through the economic development
 investment fund to be funded a company must meet two or three criteria from the
 future meets the quality of consideration of having higher wage or
 knowledge-based jobs and as a recruitment of an industry sector
 targets I'll switch now to talk about the application itself and from the
 future has submitted an application that included information regarding growth in
 jobs and wages they're looking to add 138 new employees over the next five
 years for a total of 150 jobs of those new jobs 82 will pay $65,000 or higher
 an annual salary and 67 will pay $75,000 or more at the conclusion of the five
 years they estimate that their total payroll will be in excess of 10 million
 with an aided out weighted average annual wage of 67,000 so the incentive
 proposal for your consideration tonight is made up of three separate piece
 components of a grant the first is a performance performance based business
 expansion incentive the second piece is a job-based grant that is stratified
 based on the wages earned by position and the last component is a residency
 bonus for jobs that are set or for employees that establish residency
 within the city of Zetton so this breaks out as follows the one-time expansion
 grant to offset FF&E cost expansion costs and that are based on demonstration
 of actual costs of up to fifty thousand dollars a job-based grant not to exceed
 a hundred and twenty four thousand five hundred dollars that'll be paid out
 according to the schedule that you see on the screen and then a residency bonus
 not to exceed sixty nine thousand dollars that's it paid out at a five
 hundred dollar per employee that establishes residency the total not to
 exceed value of this grant is two hundred and forty three thousand five
 hundred dollars if you'll remember we went over the qualitative and
 quantitative benefits of these incentive applications at the work session but
 just a quick reminder that these types of grants have a little bit of a
 different benefit when we're looking at them certainly in terms of fostering
 entrepreneurship and keeping a debt and startup in Denton the retention and
 expansion of a local company and clearly a huge investment in human capital as
 opposed to infrastructure or some of the more physical capital that we're used to
 seeing in incentives and in terms of quantitative benefits we do look at the
 economic impact analysis modeling that we have and this particular grant had a
 return on investment of over ten years of seven point three percent to the city
 so in summary staff recommends approval of the incentive agreement as presented
 and I will stand for questions any questions councilmember Amater see I
 don't have any questions I just want to thank you so much Jessica and to say how
 excited I am to vote yes to this I'd be happy to be the one to motion but I
 don't mean to cut short discussion but I think this is just the kind of economic
 development agreement that our city needs for all the reasons that you said
 I'm just just really excited about it councilmember Briggs yes so I will I
 will second and I just want to clarify we have seven of ten qualifications four
 of the five goals plus three additional considerations including including
 higher wage and knowledge-based jobs a bonus for getting employees to live
 within Denton and fostering entrepreneurship I think that's
 fantastic so thank you yeah I just have a comment yeah first of all support it
 fully I guess when I look at this economic development incentive based
 upon the ones that we've given in the past ie one that was created a hundred
 jobs provided two point four million dollars to the city in actual hard cash
 revenue with the same incentive amount help me understand we've got a seven
 point three rate of return on this one over ten years I guess this is more of a
 rhetorical question I just find it fascinating that people voted against
 that incentive which didn't provide two point four million dollars and also
 provided a hundred jobs at a wage level that many of our people in our community
 need and it was a I don't even know what two hundred forty seven thousand and a
 two point four million what is that ten tenfold rate of return over ten years so
 I appreciate that we can offer all kinds of incentives to different groups and
 organizations they come to this community that provide different needs
 and I appreciate them expanding here in Denton that is a very robust expansion
 plan to go from 12 employees to 150 in five years or less so really really
 support them in that and in their endeavor so I just needed to say that
 based upon some of our earlier discussions and I guess I've heard also
 that thank thank them for being here and expanding I've heard that some people
 think people should come here without any economic development incentive
 because we're such a good city these this company is here already so I just
 want to point that out as we go into this discussion and I'm not going to
 repeat that in the next discussion but so appreciate Jessica your work in this
 matter councilmember Briggs yeah it's my understanding too that there was an
 option to leave the city and so by doing this and facilitating this we were able
 to keep this company in the city as well oh I don't I don't dispute that I don't
 dispute that at all what I what I say is what I'm saying is when you compare and
 contrast that to comments that have been made that people should come here and
 want to come to Denton just because of who the city is and therefore don't need
 economic development incentives I'm just saying there seems to be an
 inconsistency in that and no way am I saying that we shouldn't provide them
 with an incentive to try to keep them here I'm also saying that when companies
 want to come here that's also a reasonable opportunity to try to get
 companies here who are going to help others in our community councilmember
 Armitter oh I was just going to respond to say that I would explain to you
 again why I voted no to Tyson but since that is not the incentive package that
 is before I can talk about that with you at some other point we're free no no no
 reason to do that I understand your I don't want to be off-posting so I don't
 want to talk about that but this one is very different and we both agree that
 this is a very different kind of agreement well okay and I like sure I'm
 sure I understand that councilmember Armitter yeah I understand that very
 much okay anybody else okay we have a motion in a second for agenda item 5c
 I believe that's what it is ID 20 - 2068 councilmember Armitter how say you yes
 big yes councilmember Briggs yes councilmember Meltzer I think this is a
 great direction for Denton I councilmember Davis I councilmember Ryan I
 mayor Pro Tem all right mayor Watts is an I motion carries seven zero moving on
 to agenda item 5d ID 20 - 2069 consider adoption of an ordinance approving an
 economic development agreement under chapter 380 of the local government
 code to promote economic development and to stimulate business activity and
 economic growth of the city of Denton between the city of Denton and team of
 defenders LLC mayor and council members still Jessica Rogers director of
 economic development and I will try very much to not repeat myself as much of the
 information is the same in terms of background so the item and before you on
 this one is an agreement with team of defenders team of defenders is an IT
 platform technology and service delivery company founded in 2018 focused on
 innovation research and development and deployment they currently have an office
 inside of stoke but they are rapidly outgrowing the space and they are
 arranged as a hub and spoke company where team of defenders serves as the
 central hub company and they have offshoot spoke companies such as storage
 defender and information related to that is in your backup similar to from the
 future team of defenders utilizes existing talent pipeline such as in CTC
 UNT and even high school students for their staffing needs and they are also
 projecting rapid growth in their value revenues customers and employees and and
 they expect that one of their spoke company of storage defender and is
 projected to be in more than 2,500 facilities by 2023 so moving forward
 again team of defenders submitted an economic development incentive
 application and staff reviewed for compliance with policy they met the
 general provisions is diversifying the tax base and creating quality jobs as
 well as two targeted sectors research and development and information technology
 I'm sorry I clicked too far in terms of policy considerations team of defenders
 met seven of the ten priority considerations established in the
 city's tax abatement and incentive policy in addition they met four of the
 five goals listed in the chapter 380 grant and incentive or grant and loan
 section of the policy and they met three additional considerations this identical
 considerations we discussed in the last item they also met two of the three
 criteria for use of the economic development investment fund having
 higher wage or knowledge-based job creation and recruitment of an industry
 sector target I think I clicked too far again so in terms of the team of
 defender application we're looking at they are looking at adding 54 additional
 employees over the next five to ten years which would total their increase
 their staffing to 56 employees they estimate that 30 new employees will have
 wages of over 65,000 13 without wages higher than 75,000 a total estimated
 annual payroll of close to 4 million and a weighted average annual wage of over
 70,000 so this proposal is almost identical in terms of its base terms and
 there's a performance-based business expansion incentive there's a job-based
 stratified incentive and an additional consideration for employees establishing
 residency in the city of Denton here's a summary of the team of defenders grant
 and again a $50,000 one-time expansion grant and the job-based stratified
 incentive as you see outlined here when an amount not to exceed 29,500 and a
 $500 residency bonus and an amount not to exceed $27,000 for a total grant of
 $106,500 and very similar to the last incentive application that you saw
 there are qualitative and quantitative benefits and again we're keeping a
 startup that started here in Denton in Denton as they grow and expand we're
 also fostering entrepreneurship and continuing that pipeline and reduction of
 brain drain and as we're keeping university and technical students here
 locally in terms of quantitative benefits and because this item has a this
 proposal had a little bit of a higher wage you do see a higher average wage
 direct and indirect and impact there on your screen and a little bit of a higher
 return on investment but very similar in terms of its attraction and venture
 capital and low cost of government services and so with that staff
 recommends approval of the incentive agreement as presented and I failed to
 mention at the beginning we do have Mark Sierra and Nathan Wright and from team
 of defenders on the phone if there are any questions for the company okay any
 questions councilmembrometer yeah so I'm just curious to know obviously I'm a big
 fan of this incentive I'm curious to know where you got the name team of
 defenders it makes me think of comic books I'm wondering I'm just curious
 see you know Nathan yeah they'll be on here shortly could you can you guys hear
 me yes mm-hmm okay I'm sorry though the there was a voice over talking the
 question I believe the question might have been what the genesis of our name
 was is that is that was that the question yes yeah so when we started this
 is Mark Siri thank you for the question when we started the company and founded
 ourselves in Stoke back in 2018 we had to come up with a name of a company
 anticipating future employees that would join and Nathan and myself are both big
 fans of superheroes and we wanted to build a company with superheroes
 creating super spin-off superhero spin-offs as corny as that sounds that's
 our mission right to create something special to create a you know sort of our
 own Marvel our own Avengers and so we've done that with team of defenders and
 then every every company we spin off for example storage defender itself has a
 superpower and for the folks the tenants that we protect in the self storage
 space we see ourselves as the defenders of the tenants peace of mind in the
 self storage space so it's it's it's something to create a bit of culture but
 also we don't lose sight of our mission either we're trying to create special
 user experiences with superpowers hopefully that helps and it's not too
 funny I don't get to see everyone's expressions I'm sorry no I love it I'm a
 big you know comic comic book geek and so I that was my what I suspected but
 I'm pleased to know that it makes sense to me with what I understand about the
 company thank you for answering that I really appreciate the question as well
 in your thank you now some member breaks yeah so I just I just wanted to say
 thank you I know this has taken a while and I just want to thank you for working
 with the city and our economic development department to come up with
 this and thank you for staying in Denton we appreciate it I'm glad that you're
 here I appreciate you very much and Jessica met us over a year ago and we
 sat down and you heard out our our desires and our and our also our
 concerns and we Nathan and I are very excited about this we are so thankful to
 all of your support this is where our heart is this is where we have employees
 that live there and we're just you know very appreciative Jessica Eric had done
 a lot of hard work and again thank you so much thank you all right any other
 questions chair would entertain action councilmember armature I move approval
 councilmember Meltzer they'd lead to a trend I second all right we've got we
 we've got two people who made comments using our online form they were in
 support with zero in opposition all right we've got a motion for approval
 for agenda item 5d ID 20 - 2069 councilmember armature how say you yes
 councilmember Meltzer aye councilmember Briggs yes councilmember Davis aye
 councilmember Ryan aye mayor pro tem all right and the mayor is an eye the motion
 carries seven zero we'll move on to agenda item 5e consider adoption of an
 ordinance these are the NAAs Aaron is there a particular way we want to do
 this you want me to call them all and I know we've got a vote on them separately
 there's probably not a long staff presentation with these are there if if
 any I think there's a carbon presentation I think the what was going
 to be presented to you is one presentation but if you wanted to call
 the items first the presentation would cover all of them and then we would do
 single individual motions for each item okay all right all right so I'm gonna go
 ahead and call all these do we have any comments we have no comments or callers
 on the line so I'm going to call agenda item 5e ID ID 20 - 2071 consider
 adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing for acceptance of
 eligible non annexation agreements for agriculture wildlife management or
 timberland use properties within an area of land adjacent to and abutting the
 existing limits of the city of Denton Texas agenda item 5s f excuse me ID 20 -
 2072 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing
 for acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements for etc generally
 identified as DH to the language is identically similar except for the
 different DH designation as the previous item agenda item 5g ID 20 - 27 for
 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing
 acceptance for eligible non annexation agreements within an within an area of
 land adjacent to an abutting the existing city limits generally identified
 as DH 3 agenda item 5h consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton
 Texas providing for acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements for
 agriculture etc within an area of land adjacent to an abutting the existing
 city limits of the city of Denton Texas generally identified as DH 4 agenda item
 5i consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing for
 acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements for agriculture within an
 area of land adjacent to an abutting the existing city limits of the city of
 Denton Texas generally identified as DH 5 agenda item 5j consider adoption of an
 ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing for acceptance of eligible
 non annexation agreements for land within an area of land adjacent to an
 abutting the existing city of Denton limits of the city of Denton Texas
 generally identified as DH 9 agenda item 5k ID 20 - 2079 consider adoption of an
 ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing for acceptance of eligible
 non annexation agreements for agriculture or timberland uses properties
 within an area of land adjacent to an abutting the existing city limits of
 the city of Denton generally identified as DH 12 agenda item 5l ID 20 - 20 80
 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing for
 acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements for agriculture within for
 properties within an area of land adjacent to an abutting the existing
 city limits of the city of Denton Texas generally identified as PAA 1 agenda
 item 5m ID 20 - 20 81 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton
 Texas providing for acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements
 within an area of land adjacent to an abutting the existing city limits of the
 city of Denton Texas generally identified as PAA 2 agenda item 5n ID 20 -
 20 82 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing
 for acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements within an area of
 land adjacent to an abutting the existing city limits of the city of
 Denton Texas generally identified as PAA 3 and finally agenda item 5o
 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas providing for
 acceptance of eligible non annexation agreements for properties within an area
 of land adjacent to an abutting the existing city limits of the city of
 Denton Texas generally identified as PAA 4 okay so we will have a general
 presentation on that and then we will take each one individually as a vote
 Ron's playing up real quick just a minute
 [silence]
 presentation is ready there
 [silence]
 sorry mayor give me one second here
 [silence]
 thank you mayor members of council Ron Mingier principal plier with development
 services or for the delay hopefully you can all hear me and see the
 presentation this is going to be a quick presentation similar to what we saw
 during the work session as you all know this non annexation agreements that we
 just heard the mayor read out cover most of the areas that shown here that were
 once part of a non annexation agreement that had expired in August of this year
 what we have done in the the last almost six months or so starting in April
 working on getting these non annexation agreements re-signed with the property
 owners that have a ag exemption now there are 148 property owners that are
 qualified for the non annexation agreements as of this evening we have
 received and a signed non annexation agreement from 125 leaving 23 non
 annexation agreements still outstanding which staff is working with each property
 owner to make sure that those get in as soon as possible the non annexation
 agreements for your consideration again that was read earlier are as follows as
 you can see in the middle column are the agreements that were received and signed
 and again these are what is included in the backup and packet that you all had
 received on Friday other than that I don't have any more information again
 available for any questions that I can answer if you all have any okay any
 questions councilmember breaks could you just briefly explain what happens to the
 outstanding ones after all of these items are are passed sure so how the
 plan is to continue to reach out to these property owners we hope to receive
 their sign signature or sign non annexation agreement and the plan is to
 come back at a later time and amend the ordinances that if you do proceed with
 approving these ordinances at a later time is essentially is the plan okay
 thank you any other questions all right so we're
 going to take these in individual order beginning with agenda item 5e all right
 so 5e ID 20 - 20 71 chair would entertain action on that item
 councilmember Davis on the approval is there a second councilmember Ryan no
 second all right we have a motion in a second councilmember Davis how say you
 I councilmember Ryan all right mayor pro tem is that I'm sorry mayor pretend I
 didn't hear you all right thank you councilmember Briggs yes
 councilmember amateur I'm voting yes on this because this is what the people
 signing the agreements want I am generally not opposed to annexations but
 because the people support this ID okay all right thank you
 councilmember Meltzer hi mayor Watts is an I believe that got everybody motion
 carries 7-0 on agenda item e agenda item 5f ID 20 - 72 chair would entertain action
 on this item councilmember Ryan move approval do you have a second mayor pro
 tem second any discussion councilmember Ryan how say you all right mayor pro tem
 all right councilmember Briggs yes councilmember amateur yes councilmember
 Meltzer hi councilmember Davis hi mayor watts is an I motion carries 7-0 agenda
 item 5g ID 20 - 20 74 chair would entertain action mayor pro tem move
 approval councilmember Ryan second all right and we're on G correct 20 - 20 74
 that correct okay mayor pro tem has say you all right
 councilmember Ryan I councilmember Davis I councilmember amateur yes
 councilmember Briggs yes councilmember Meltzer hi mayor watts is I so motion
 carries 7-0 agenda item 5h ID 20 - 20 75 chair would entertain motion councilmember
 Ryan move approval councilmember Davis second all right we have a motion a
 second for ID 20 - 20 75 councilmember Ryan has say you I councilmember Davis I
 councilmember amateur yes councilmember Meltzer hi councilmember councilmember
 Briggs yes and mayor pro tem I motion carries 7-0 agenda item 5i ID 20 - 20 76
 chair would entertain action on this item mayor pro tem move approval
 councilmember Ryan second we have a motion and a second for ID 20 - 20 76
 mayor pro tem how say you all right councilmember Ryan I councilmember
 amateur yes councilmember Briggs yes councilmember Davis I councilmember
 Meltzer hi mayor watts is an I motion carries 7-0 agenda item 5j we're about
 halfway through the list 5j ID 20 - 20 77 councilmember Briggs I motion to
 approve do we have a second councilmember Meltzer second we have a
 motion and a second for ID 20 - 20 77 councilmember Briggs how say you yes
 councilmember Meltzer mayor pro tem I councilmember Davis I councilmember
 amateur yes councilmember Ryan hi mayor watts is an I motion carries 7-0 moving
 to agenda item 5k ID 20 - 20 79
 chair and entertain councilmember Briggs I move to approve do we have a second
 councilmember Meltzer second all right we have a motion and second councilmember
 Briggs I say you yes councilmember Meltzer I councilmember amateur yeah all
 right councilmember Ryan I councilmember Davis I mayor pro tem mayors and I
 motion carries unanimously agenda item 5l ID 20 - 20 80 council mayor pro tem move
 approval councilmember Meltzer second we have a motion to second for ID 20 - 20
 80 mayor pro tem has say you all right councilmember Meltzer I councilmember
 Briggs yes councilmember Davis I councilmember Armitter yes councilmember
 Ryan I mayor watts is an I ID 20 - 20 80 passes 7-0 agenda item 5m ID 20 - 20 81
 councilmember Davis move approval councilmember Meltzer second we have a
 motion and a second councilmember Davis has say you I councilmember Meltzer I
 councilmember Armitter yes councilmember Briggs yes mayor pro tem I and
 councilmember Ryan I mayor watts is an I motion carries 7-0 agenda item 5n ID 20 -
 20 82 councilmember Meltzer move approval councilmember Davis second we
 have a motion a second for ID 20 - 20 82 councilmember Meltzer how say you I
 councilmember Davis I mayor pro tem I councilmember Briggs yes councilmember
 Armitter yes councilmember Ryan I mayor watts is an I motion carries 7-0 agenda
 item 5 o ID 20 - 20 83 mayor pro tem move approval councilmember Ryan second we
 have a motion a second for ID 20 - 20 83 mayor pro tem has say you I councilmember
 Ryan I councilmember Davis I councilmember Briggs yes councilmember
 Armitter yes councilmember Meltzer I mayor watts is an I motion carries
 unanimously that ends our items for individual consideration let's take a
 quick five-minute break we'll come in and start in on the public hearings okay
 welcome everybody back to this meeting of the Denton City Council on October 20th
 2020 the time is 8 52 we're moving into our public hearing portion of our agenda
 agenda item a is a ES okay it's ESA a ESA a 20 - 0 0 0 hold a public hearing
 consider adoption of an ordinance of the City of Denton Texas approving an
 alternative environmentally sensitive area plan for a renovation at Ryan High
 School I'm gonna go ahead and open the public hearing just so that I don't
 forget to open it yes councilmember Davis mayor I'll be recusing from this
 item okay thank you councilmember Davis okay you may begin
 good evening council members my name is Christy Upton and I will be presenting
 an alternative ESA plan tonight the request is at Ryan is regarding Ryan
 High School and is located northeast of East McKinney Street and May Hill Road
 and recent renovations generate the need for this alternative plan and ESA field
 assessment was conducted in the last year and confirmed the presence of a
 riparian buffer vegetative cover that supports the water quality of this
 stream segment along the east southeast corner of the property there are
 proposed impacts to this riparian buffer the engineers identified that a problem
 with the drainage of the parking lots in the front of the high school it needed
 to be resolved and in order to resolve the problem the applicant is proposing
 to extend a storm drain from the headwaters of the stream down to East
 McKinney Street the proposed mitigation for the removal of this riparian buffer
 would include an upgrade of a dry detention basin to to transfer the
 water quality treatments capability of that riparian buffer to the dry
 detention basin and in addition to the increased water quality treatment
 capability of the dry detention basin the applicant is proposing to increase
 runoff infiltration in other words resulting in less runoff leaving the dry
 detention basin as it infiltrates into the ground and then native grass
 vegetation to help support a habitat replacement in the dry detention area in
 order to support this these features a maintenance plan was included in the
 alternative ESA plan that includes a reduced mowing schedule and removing
 trash and debris and sediment as needed this is a the landscaping plan and shows
 the general location of the the the drain field mix that will be installed
 along the dry detention basin as part of this plan notifications were sent to
 the adjacent property owners and while staff did not receive responses formal
 responses to this notification there were a couple of citizen inquiries
 namely the residents that live along North Carpenter Road and the applicant is
 confirming that drainage improvements would alleviate future flooding issues
 that were experienced along that road the Planning and Zoning Commission
 recommends approval of the request with the following conditions that the land
 disturbances be limited to the 1.195 acres identified as the riparian buffer
 the detention basin would be designed with the additional 0.91 acre of water
 quality volume and that the property owner shall maintain the
 detention basin following the maintenance plan provided in the
 alternative ESA plan and these last two conditions are the standards by which
 environmental services has set to establish reports and to accept
 vegetation that is offered as part of an alternative ESA plan questions are there
 any questions for staff councilmember Briggs if we could go ahead and pull the
 president there thank you just to clarify you did say the neighborhood
 that's behind is it Carpenter Road I can't remember it's something the
 neighbors are to the generally to the south south southwest of the entrance to
 the high school and so they're experiencing some flooding and this would
 alleviate their current issues correct in addition to the the design that was
 incorporated into the alternative ESA plan the designs for to meet the the
 minimum drainage criteria set forth by the the engineering department so all of
 that combined design elements the applicant proposes that that will
 alleviate those flooding problems for them in the future oh that's great and
 just there's no impact to the cross timbers here right correct there's no
 impacts to that across timbers area thank you okay anybody else
 customer Melcer is there anything about this arrangement that would prevent the
 applicant from allowing outdoor education labs from in high school or
 UNT to have access that asked some of those questions and the applicant and
 that the school district has indicated that the the challenges are with with
 that sorry ADA sorry I couldn't think of of the requirements and those ADA
 requirements exceeded their capability of promoting this as an educational
 feature I'm just curious and maybe you don't know the answer to it but did
 they mention what were the ADA access issues were there specific access issues
 to the site correct that would have required some design elements that were
 beyond what they were proposing okay well I love if that's the case then I
 would love to know just kind of what they had in mind and what we can do to
 make this ADA accessible because I would love to see your parks our parks ADA
 accessible for everyone it's not a I don't for our our ESA you know to have
 this area whatever we can do I know it's off posting I'm just mentioning since
 you know you mentioned that as an issue it doesn't affect my vote on this I'm
 interested to know so I would just love to see I would love to see a report on
 that from somebody okay if you wouldn't mind asking for that and concluding
 items that'd be great councilmember Briggs I move approval do we have a
 second councilmember Briggs I mean armature yes I approve all right so well
 personal public hearing yeah it's public here and we have no callers so yeah we
 have no callers on this public hearing and so therefore since we have no
 callers I will close the public hearing councilmember Briggs would you mind
 repeating your motion please yes sorry I move approval councilmember armature
 and I second okay all right we have a motion and approval for six a which is
 a ESA 20 - 0 0 0 4 B excuse me I forgot the 4B in the cup when I called it
 councilmember Briggs how say you yes councilmember armature yes councilmember
 Meltzer hey councilmember Ryan I mayor pro tem all right mayor Watts is an eye
 the motion carries six zero we will now move on to a public hearing agenda item
 6B is a ESA a 20 - 0 0 0 2 C hold a public hearing and consider adoption of
 an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas approving a request for an alternative
 environmentally sensitive area plan for approximately 18.83 acre site generally
 located on the south side of Dutchess Drive
 oh and I will go ahead and open the public hearing good evening council
 de ravier with environmental services I will be presenting tonight a alternative
 ESA plan for Eagle Cove before your consideration tonight is an alternative
 ESA plan for 18.8 acres generally located south of Dutchess Drive and west
 of loop 28 this is a 56 single-family lot subdivision with three HOA lots a
 preliminary apply was approved at the beginning of the year in March and the
 reason for this alternative ESA plan is for the to allow the construction the
 impact to a riparian buffer and undeveloped floodplain ESA due to the
 construction of two roadways the installation of a storm drain and the
 grading of a one residential lot an ESA assessment was conducted that confirmed
 the presence of a riparian buffer of a good quality undeveloped floodplain and
 the process of timber cross timber upland habitat just as indication the
 proposed development exceeds the preservation requirements for cross
 timber upland habitat there will be some encroachments that are permitted by
 rights such as the point and acres of undeveloped floodplain that will be
 impacted due to the installation of culverts and bridges and of course the
 1.05 acres that will be removed of the cross timber upland habitat the 1.05
 acres represent 29% of the existing upland habitat present the buffers the
 impacts to the riparian buffer are mainly due to the construction of the
 roadways and the installation of the storm drain those areas are highlighted
 in green on the screen basically 0.68 acres of the riparian buffer will be
 impacted due to this construction however point 20 of that area will be
 restored back so the net what it will be lost will be 0.4 acres of riparian
 buffer the applicant has proposed a series of mitigation strategies in this
 plan one of the main strategy is all lots for which a riparian buffer
 transverses those lots are going to be designated as an HOA lots and those
 areas will be maintained and preserved in natural state the applicant is also
 proposing to install a growth zone signs through those HOA lots to indicate
 areas that would not be moored and live in natural conditions and also will be
 installing one educational signs to relate information about the presence of
 the cross timber upland habitat on site since the approval of the preliminary
 plan back at the beginning of the year the applicant is also a green to
 dedicate lot eight 18 highlighted in red as a part of the HOA network of open
 space the applicant is also proposing to restore any disturbance due to
 constructions re vegetate the riparian buffer and undeveloped flat plane as
 well as remove the Chinese privet there's currently present throughout the
 area there are few considerations that I would like to bring to your attention
 and for the full implementation of this plan as currently proposed there are two
 important documents that at this point staff have not received the final
 versions of it those will be the final drainage detail drainage analysis that
 information usually comes with the civil plants and those are not still are not
 being submitted the other important aspect of this would be the tree
 preservation plan that plan is usually submitted in conjunction with the final
 plot and final plan application have not been submitted to address those
 concerns as that has added some conditions and we will review those later
 in the presentation also important to note that lot 17a it will be a
 combination for preserving or mitigating for open for I'm sorry for Isis as well
 as for tree preservation 28 notices were sent out to properties within 200 feet
 350 notices were sent out to addresses within 500 feet at this point a staff
 have received no letters in opposition the planning and zoning Commission
 recommends approval with seven conditions and I'm going to pretty much
 summarize each one of them condition number one addresses or relates to the
 implementation or adoption of these restrictions for all lots designated as
 HOA that will that would deal with the maintenance and preservation of those
 lots in natural conditions condition number two puts a cap on the amount of
 disturbance that the alternative ESA plan will allow them to to do condition
 number three deals with the the revegetation of the riparian buffers and
 undeveloped flat plane condition number four deals with the removal of privet
 within the riparian buffer condition five and six relates to the typical
 language that we put about the three-year reporting and the 90% survival
 rate for all plant material planted on site and condition number seven deals
 with or put a notice that any changes that that is required to let me let me
 back out any changes that is necessary for implementing the any plans such as
 construction plans the tree preservation or the drainage detail study that would
 require the the the alternative ESA plan to be amended so this is the condition
 that we have crafted to address this stuff concerns about the primary
 condition of those analysis at this point this concludes my bit my
 presentation stuff is available to answer any questions
 all right we will wait for sorry about that I apologize Gerard I didn't know I
 was muted and off-screen we don't have any callers in this regard so I'm going
 to go ahead and close the public hearing council member Briggs I believe you have
 a question or comment yeah on page four in the presentation that shows the the
 layout but the red cross-stitched is that all the trees that are going to be cut
 down so like there's the one along the back along the back property line where
 there's is that is that cross timbers as well you're talking about this yes yes
 okay okay thank you okay any other questions let me see pull we could pull
 the presentation down oh that's okay any other questions all right we've closed
 the public hearing staff staff chair would entertain action on this item any
 action on this item councilmember Ryan move approval we have a motion for
 approval do we have a second mayor pro tem I'll second all right we have a
 motion and a second for agenda item believe it's 5b which is a esa 20 - 0 0 -
 2c councilmember Ryan house a you okay I'm getting some feedback from somebody
 I mean an old one anyway okay mayor pro tem all right councilmember Meltzer hey
 councilmember Armitage yes councilmember Briggs no councilmember Davis
 mayor watches an eye the motion carries I believe five to two if I'm not
 mistaken all right moving on to agenda item C which is z 19 - 0 0 1 2 C hold a
 public hearing consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton Texas
 regarding a change in the zoning district and use classifications from
 residential 2 to residential 4 we've had one person making a comment on our
 online form and that person was in support this is a public hearing so I
 will now open the public hearing and then we'll have staff presentation
 good evening council mayor let me just pull it my presentation
 there we go I think I've got the right one now good
 evening I'm Julie Wyatt senior planner with the city of Denton and I am
 presenting z 1912 C to you it's mockingbird single-family residential
 the request before you is to rezone approximately 2.61 acres from our two
 district to our four district the subject property outlined in yellow is
 south is located south of Audreau Lane just east of Mockingbird as you can see
 it's a flag-shaped lot the surrounding development includes some large lot
 residential just immediately adjacent to the site and then suburban style
 residential development surrounding that the majority of trees on site are
 fence line trees along the perimeter and per the applicant the purpose is to
 develop nine single-family residential dwellings so just a comparison of the
 current current zoning map to the proposed zoning map currently it does
 have a zoning designation of our two and you could see it out in yellow here they
 are proposing to rezone the property to our four extending that our four into
 the subject site the criteria for approval for zoning cases is in sub
 chapter 2 of the didn't development code we have general criteria for approval as
 well as specific criteria for approval I won't read all of these to you but we'll
 talk about them as we discuss the project so the first thing we always look
 at is consistency with the the Denton plan 2030 so this subject property is
 designated as low-density residential as you can see here as you know that is
 intended for single-family neighborhoods up to 12 up to four dwelling units per
 acre the proposed are for district the minimum lot size is 7,000 square feet so
 that doesn't quite conform to that maximum density that we typically see
 in low residential however it is consistent with the character of the
 area and it also meets those overall goals for infill development for that
 compact development pattern within the city and there are no small area plans
 that affect the site consistency with the purpose statement the are for
 district is intended to accommodate a variety of housing types on lots
 designed to encourage walking to neighborhood serving retail and other
 amenities such as parks and school facilities the zoning district will
 ensure that the existing neighborhood character is maintained while also
 serving as a transition area between established single-family neighborhoods
 and mixed-use neighborhoods staffs analysis indicates that the request is
 consistent with the purpose statement the the proposed single-family use and
 the permitted uses in our for are consistent with the surrounding
 development pattern in use and its location near loop 288 has it located
 near more of our commercial districts the next is significant changes in the
 area there haven't been any significant changes recently in the area but what we
 did look at was how this area has developed over the last few decades so
 we looked at the development in the area starting in the 1980s and then up until
 today and and these aerial maps kind of show that first we have here in black
 and white the single-family neighborhoods or single-family residential
 development emanating out from downtown toward the northeast side of Denton you
 could see there are some new neighborhoods starting to develop that
 pattern continued through the 90s where additional filling in of the residential
 continued and then on to today where where that residential has continued to
 fill out minimizes adverse impacts to surrounding on surrounding properties our
 for is consistent with the existing neighborhood to the south and the east
 in the West it is an extension of that of that are for district that that
 zoning pattern the lot sizes in our for that seven thousand square feet minimum
 is consistent with these lot sizes we did an analysis of those lots and the
 sizes range from about six thousand square feet to seventy five hundred
 square feet it would be an expansion of that existing are for district and it
 would allow a residential use consistent with the surrounding uses
 intensity of development not expected to significantly cause adverse impacts to
 surrounding properties or public facilities first we'll look at
 transportation I'm due to the limited number of homes it would create about
 90 trips per 24-hour period and then roadway impact fees would be assessed if
 approved at the time of development so we also discussed the project with our
 engineering group and there is adequate capacity on mockingbird to accommodate
 the request and there is water and wastewater available to the site it is
 in our infill area so so tap and impact fees would also be required if if it was
 developed Milan Park is about a mile south of the subject property down
 mockingbird and park dedication and development fees would also be paid if
 it was developed there was a question about access at the Planning and Zoning
 Commission meeting so we did have our engineering group just take a look at
 where they would take access on to mockingbird and it does meet the
 spacing requirements from those driveways along mockingbird public
 outreach Weston out newspaper notice mailings and then and then signs on the
 property we have received six letters in opposition which does total 34%
 opposition which does trigger that supermajority for City Council so in
 order to approve the request it would require six votes in favor of it to to
 approve the rezoning it was presented the Planning and Zoning Commission and
 they did recommend denial of the request so that also triggers the
 supermajority requirement for City Council staff analyzed the request and
 and determined it did comply with the criteria for approval in sub chapter 2
 the applicant did request an overlay condition while staff has no objections
 to limiting the permitted uses as they've requested we do have one change
 that that should be made on that overlay and that would be to remove that
 reference to variance to comply with the Denton Development Code and state law
 which don't allow a variance for use so the the overlay condition that was
 requested was that single-family detached homes only no downtown homes or
 duplexes will be permitted even with a variance or a specific use permit and
 staff is requesting that if this were approved that that language with a
 variance be struck from that that recommended or that overlay condition and
 with that I will be happy to answer any questions and the applicant also has a
 presentation as well okay let's see this is a public hearing that we have no
 callers let's go ahead before we take questions if the applicant could go
 ahead and make their presentation how many minutes is the applicant afforded
 somebody refresh my memories at 10 minutes 20 minutes it's 10 I think unless
 there's multiple people if I'm correct in that that is correct all right is the
 applicant on the line yes this is Amy visit with 97 land company I'm here on
 the line and also have two others with me we do have a presentation and my
 understanding is that we have 20 minutes combined although hopefully we won't
 take that amount of time okay all right all right let me go ahead and get the
 clock ready
 Amy I'm pulling up your presentation now okay great well while Julie pulls up the
 presentation I will go ahead and get started in the interest of time mayor
 and council appreciate being here tonight my name is Amy visit with 97
 Land Company my address is 100 West Oak Street I also have Jason Feisley with
 Allison engineering group on the line he's our project engineer and I have
 Pandari Pasini the property owner on the line and I appreciate your patience if
 you will just bear with us for a few minutes this case has some history
 associated with it and has a little bit of peculiarity in terms of how it's
 progressed through review to date and so we do want to take the opportunity to
 share with you a little bit of the history on the project and we've also in
 response to the most recent planning and zoning Commission meeting and done some
 project feasibility analysis work that was essentially implied that would be
 helpful at the planning and zoning Commission meeting so we would like an
 opportunity to present that information to you and to discuss some of the
 concerns that were expressed by the neighborhood and Julie will you go ahead
 and change the slide please and I'm gonna apologize to Julie in advance
 because she's gonna see something that was not in her staff presentation and we
 are requesting a re-voting from r2 to r4 and we do we are requesting that an
 overlay condition be put on that zoning to limit the allowable land uses to
 single-family detached only and then a response to some of the discussion that
 took place at the planning and zoning Commission meeting last month where we
 would also request that you consider limiting the density to nine single
 family detached homes only and this is new information to Julie and I know it
 was not in your backup it just arose out of our discussions and how we might
 accommodate the neighborhood concerns so our current zoning is r2 which with the
 current dimensional standards for r2 we could get five lots on this site with
 our proposed r4 zoning we are looking at nine lots Julie we advance the slide
 please and the intent is subdividing the nine lots ranging from seven thousand
 square feet to eighty hundred square feet and there's obviously not a lot of room
 on this site so streets and detention take up a significant portion of it so
 while Julie mentioned that by r4 zoning standards we could get a higher density
 than four units per acre and with the with the streets and detention we were
 limited to nine lots and we do we are proposing HOA maintained detention and
 private streets that have no connectivity to the adjacent neighbors
 and we held a neighborhood meeting back in October of 2019 which will provide
 you a little detail detail and where we've evolved over the last year in that
 neighborhood meeting we presented two concept plans to the neighbors and one
 specific one was selected because it had it was preferred because it had more
 protections to the neighborhood Julie will you advance the slide please this
 is the configuration that the neighborhood preferred and I want to
 walk through the reasons that they prefer this particular one and the
 private street rather than a public street with minimized traffic the
 detention pond and entrance along the north side would provide a buffer to the
 our two neighbors to the north and the deeper lots along the eastern side of
 the property and to the southern side of the property and though the the deeper
 lots there would increase privacy as well as give us an opportunity to
 preserve the trees along the fence line Julie mentioned that all the trees are
 on the fence line and we do want to preserve those trees and having more lot
 depth would give us the opportunity to do that next slide please I do want to
 kind of Julie covered this briefly but I do want to kind of try to orient you a
 little bit further to the current zoning pattern in this area you can see I kind
 of highlighted the the quadrant of this inner ring of the city if you will that's
 bordered on the north by Mingo the south by McKinney and the east by Luke 288 and
 the red star in the northeast corner is our property and the light pan Julia
 Phil advanced the slide and I great I kind of make that pop a little bit more
 everything that is that light tan is our for zoning today so we we do believe
 that this request is consistent with the pattern that is in the neighborhood
 currently it's consistent with the lot sizes that are surrounding it and it is
 consistent with adjacent zoning you will you go ahead and advance the slide
 please I do want to point out that this is as Julie mentioned the future land
 use plan here is low residential which is up to four units per acre as you can
 see all of the r4 zoning that can that is is there today is also in the low
 density future land use designation next slide please and I the one of the
 reasons that were to the reason that we are adding the request for a limitation
 of nine single-family detached homes is that that actually lowers our overall
 density to 3.45 units per acre which is consistent with the low residential
 future land use designation and when when this originally went to PNC so this
 has been the PNC twice the first time was a year ago this month I'm sorry a
 year ago in November and it was right after the new development code was
 adopted and at the time there was some discussion about whether or not overlay
 conditions could be considered and so at the time they weren't contemplated and a
 year later they have contemplated overlay conditions in other zoning cases
 and we've felt like this particular overlay condition would help would help
 one reassure the neighborhood that no townhomes or no increasing density we're
 not gonna say we're gonna do nine lots and then come back and do more than that
 so and the gross density of what we're what we're proposing is 3.45 units per
 acre next slide please these are conceptual elevations these are not
 architectural and designed homes but these are the concepts of what the the
 property owner intends in terms of what the what the home style and size and
 product would look like and he's actually going to speak as well and go
 into a little more detail about that in just a few minutes next slide so just a
 little bit more on the project history we did go to planning and zoning
 commission in November of 2019 but this exact concept plan and no overlay
 conditions it was actually recommended for approval with a vote of 421 at that
 time the commissioners that opposed it were concerned about townhomes and
 duplexes of being allowed with an SUP which they are in our floor normally and
 that we could exceed the gross density of the low residential district at that
 time we withdrew our application because we did not would prefer not to come to
 you as City Council members in a situation where we had neighborhood
 opposition and where we had we were in a super majority position we came back to
 planning and zoning Commission in September of 2020 and with the same plan
 but with the overlay request to limit it to single-family homes only at the time
 we believed that the our neighbors our neighbors on this project that you've
 seen are in opposition and would be satisfied with that in fact we were we
 were told by them that they would remove their opposition if we can get that
 written into the zoning ordinance that no townhomes or multifamily or I'm sorry
 townhomes or duplexes would be allowed even with an SUP at the time the the
 planning and zoning Commission had a couple of new different conversations
 than the previous year which is understandable a year had passed they
 were concerned that we didn't really meet the criteria for infill development
 and that we could develop the project under R2 that that would be economically
 viable and we did do a little more research on infill development and and
 it's infill development is only called out nine times in the 500 pages of the
 Denton Development Code and they're all related to providing exceptions or
 exemptions to the landscape code and the parking codes in order to be able to
 develop length length infill they are not related to zoning and so we don't feel
 like we really meet the criteria for infill development to start with and that
 the the development code is written around providing exceptions for infill
 and then secondly that there were some statements made that R2 we could
 develop it with five lots instead of nine and that that would be economically
 viable our property owner and developer went back and did a considerable amount
 of feasibility analysis to to determine whether or not that was the case and I'm
 gonna hand this over to him now and Julie if you would advance to the next
 slide Pindari Pathini is on the line and he's going to present the feasibility
 information that he put together I just want to let you know you're at that
 you're at the 11 minute mark so I just want to give all right yeah that's not
 too bad thank you mayor I'll keep this short
 thank you Amy thanks everyone my name is Pindari Pathini of the owner of the
 property so I want to quickly run through several you know scenarios that
 we ran to study the market around within a mile radius Julie if you could
 advance or we picked the other one mile radius as from the market group property
 then we came up with the five scenarios right first one is any property that's
 built within the last five years and sold within the last five years right
 that kind of gives us somewhat of a late most recent data that would be
 consistent with the current economic conditions then then we went back any
 build a year but that are sold within the last five years right we're going
 back you know 20 20 years or so the third one is really how homes that are
 built in the last five years but sold within the past year so that gives us
 more accurate data when we look at what the current prices that people are paying
 for the for the properties in this area and then the fourth scenario would be
 same same conditions but we go back any build a year that are sold within the
 last past year then the last but not least is somewhat of the newer properties
 right built in 2020 and sold in 2020 this we feel like is probably the most
 relevant data that point that any buyer would look at when they purchase this
 property next one piece so as we did I did consult with a licensed realtor to
 do the search for these properties so these are source from the MLS system for
 the scenario one we found 116 homes the average size we came out of that was
 around three bedroom two bath and roughly around 1934 square foot average
 size sales price was around 257 the max sales price we found in the data was
 325,000 second scenario is the single-family home built any year but
 sold in the last five years we found 681 homes and then we the average size was
 a little bit smaller than the prior because some of the older homes have
 tend to be a little bit smaller so they're about there's about 1680 square
 foot the average sales price went down a little bit to 207,000 for the one we go
 back any year and then the max sales price was a little bit higher 379,000
 that this market could support next one please the third scenario we looked at
 the homes that are five years or newer and that are sold within the last five
 years there's about 106 homes and that that fit the same description but the
 average sales price is around 258,000 and then maximum sales price was 325,000 so
 the pattern seems to be around the max sales price woods around that 300,000
 range maybe next one please a fourth scenario is any build here but sold
 within the past year so the past year I think the real estate has been kind of
 in the peaks and everybody kind of seen the Dallas market or DFW market pretty
 much go in the upward trajectory so 597 homes average home size is a little bit
 smaller 17 hundred and three square foot and then average sales price was around
 two hundred and nine thousand the max sales price is still at that three
 hundred and seventy nine thousand range is what we can find there next one so
 this is the the last scenario these are the most newest properties that they're
 sold within that mile radius and average size actually went down a little bit to
 1703 but the sales and the average sales price is around 278 278,000 the max
 sales price we found based on the sold homes is three hundred and sixteen
 thousand dropped a little bit but there's some active listings out there
 that are going up to a size 341,000 next one please so overall conclusion what
 we've found is the the comparable price range is within the last five years the
 data is around 258 to 340,000 and that seems to be the healthy range for the
 market and based on the development cost and everything for five lots you know we
 we kind of have a broad recommendation of 2,000 to 3,000 square foot and the
 cost of development being high and being burdened by just five lots the
 estimated sales price is targeted to be at 450,000 and these are medium-bill
 grade not the entry-level they're slightly higher than entry-level homes
 because the nature of the larger lot sizes naturally warrant a better product
 so these so that's kind of where the price is ended is that it's 450,000 which
 kind of puts it at 225 dollars a square foot which is kind of very high for that
 market and if we take the same similar development costs and we distribute that
 against nine lots it the cost isn't exactly identical it's going to be
 somewhat similar but we could build more homes and the per lot fee drops
 significantly so we've kind of recommended the same model like 2,000 to
 3,000 square foot homes about three to four bedroom two and a half bath two car
 garage standard entry-level homes and the building grade we can afford to go a
 little bit lower on the build level if we need to the estimated sales price is
 you know around 318,000 which somewhat fits into what what the market can
 actually handle at a 159 dollar per square foot and it's really the
 feasibility kind of the data shows us like the folks can really just anybody
 who buys a home they'll look at the comps and the comps really are driving
 the finished product the sales price really so that's kind of the end of our
 presentation is really that's kind of the sales price we're shooting for and
 nine lots is the only one that would cater to that that sales price okay is
 there anything any more presentation no that's it okay all right if we could
 thank you very much appreciate that Julie okay then what we will do this is a
 public hearing we've had we've got no callers and so I'm going to go ahead and
 close the public hearing and so I guess I've I've got a couple questions if this
 is I think I'm let me go back and look at the presentation too since there's
 new information that's being submitted by the applicant that was not seen by
 the Planning and Zoning Commission I mean one of our options is to just
 remand it back to the Planning and Zoning Commission to see if that
 additional information has any impact on their decision of course it still may
 require a super majority based upon the land based upon the comments from the
 land adjacent landowners exceeding the 20% so I'm going to go to question I
 can't find my question that I had councilmember Briggs mayor to your
 point I was also wondering if the neighborhood had a chance to review
 those as well I know that miss beset said that they would remove their
 opposition but I didn't see a note in there so I was just curious if they
 were able to see the updated presentation is the applicants still on
 the line yes I'm here sorry you guys find all the unmute button sure go ahead
 we we had multiple conversations with the neighborhood leading up to Planning
 and Zoning Commission where they indicated a willingness to remove their
 opposition but in our attempts to reach out to them between Planning and Zoning
 and now we have not been successful in in having a conversation with them
 despite making efforts to do so yes go ahead Councilmember Briggs okay thank
 you and I had some other questions mayor do you want me to hold does why or may
 continue yeah just real quick question is the applicant's presentation I'm
 looking at our backup I see I see our present am I looking at the right one
 let's see yeah marking bird is the applicant's presentation in our backup
 is not okay okay all right we provided that to Julie yesterday okay all right
 Councilmember Briggs go ahead I'm sorry um yeah so my question is generally when
 you see neighborhoods and it may just because it's the size that you have to
 have two exits or entrances is that is that not necessarily a rule every time
 depending on how many homes are being developed you are correct it depends on
 the number of homes and so the the limited number of homes would not
 require that second point of access in this instance okay and on that on the
 street size do we know this the size of the street is it are they large enough
 for fire trucks to get in and turn around it would have to meet the
 standards to to for a fire truck and so the concept plan that you showed did
 show a hammerhead for that fire truck to turn around but it but their concept
 plan is is is a concept right now and has not been fully reviewed by
 engineering at this stage okay yeah I noticed that and one of the comments was
 privacy but the option that they showed pretty much took care of that with the
 trees and the way that the design was my other issue or not other issue I guess I
 should rephrase that one of my concerns is that on mockingbird we we have done
 a speed study and their significant speeding I think there were over 45
 people that were pulled over for speeding and that is kind of being
 addressed so just people pulling in and out of there and kids walking without
 sidewalks can can you address or does anyone know where we are in the in that
 study I don't know where we are in that study okay okay okay anyone else I get
 well I was good I had a question and I thought I wrote it down from the
 applicant's presentation but I guess I guess I did so it helped me understand
 again so I want to make sure I understood your answer to councilmember
 Briggs and that is you had a neighborhood meeting prior to planning
 and zoning where they said that if it was limited to single-family only no town
 homes do plastics etc the the I guess the additional information you're
 providing to us now that I believe staff has not seen is that the piece of
 information that's different that they're you're restricting it to just
 single-family am I right on that what what we what what what part are you
 saying that staff didn't see refresh my memory on that you started down the
 presentation that you're presenting something that staff had not seen yet
 they had not seen a request to limit the density to nine single-family detached
 homes they had seen the request to limit it to single-family detached only and in
 fact the wording of the overlay condition that we requested originally
 that Julie presented which is single-family detached no duplexes or
 townhomes even with a variance or SUP was the neighborhoods request that we'd
 be that specific that there was no way that we could come back and ask for a
 variance or an SUP to allow for townhomes or duplexes and increase that
 density and in that scenario they indicated that they would remove their
 opposition and I'm gonna I'm gonna let Pandari answer a little bit more because
 he spoke directly with those neighbors one-on-one I did speak with one of the
 neighbors I think I believe the gentleman is BG Edwards and his biggest
 concern that they would you you would support a nine homes but not nine homes
 only right in his opposition during the planning and zoning meeting wasn't so
 much about the single-family homes but the language in the overlay conditions
 didn't specify nine homes and he's clearly texted me right after the
 meeting he's still supportive of the project but as long as the overlay
 conditions had done those nine homes in there that's that's the conversation I
 had with him okay so what I'm hearing you say is that during the PNZ meeting
 and the opposition and the neighborhood meetings the specific language about
 limiting it to the numerical number of homes and that is nine was not really
 part of the discussion at the PNZ meeting correct even though our by
 definition are four can only fit on nine homes but they really somehow wanted to
 see the numeric condition in the overlay well I mean when you say it could only
 fit nine homes that's because of your I mean how many acres is there two point
 six one okay and so at four so that's where you're getting the two point so I
 guess given that because apparently that was significant enough for you all to
 come and make that modification here at council that wasn't made it planning and
 zoning even though yeah people could have done the calculation and all that
 but I would have yeah I mean if I would hope to have thought that if there was
 gonna be nine homes there anyway so I guess I'm more in favor of remanding it
 with that new language I understand that it would be implied that you couldn't
 fit more than nine homes on there based upon the to the density issue so I but
 yet if that's part of the opposition then I mean that's I mean I'm not saying
 I'm sold to that but right now we're looking at a super majority here for two
 reasons one is the number of landowners that protested was greater than 20% of
 the surrounding land value and PNZ recommended denial seven zero so I just
 as an aside I'm not sure why it wasn't brought forth before when you had an
 approval by planning zoning at four to two with the one recusal so but that's
 that's here nor there that's not necessarily in this discussion but
 that's why I would I would like to have this vetted back down the line
 Councilmember Briggs if stuff could just address why PNZ said it doesn't
 necessarily fit the infill for me just by looking at it you would think that
 that's the pure definition you're developing on a lot that's within the
 city and you're fitting into it and you're not developing outside the the
 city so could you just explain that or maybe is it something that we need to
 address in our code later um well I think I can explain it the Planning and
 Zoning Commission was really looking at especially those large lot on single
 family homes adjacent to it and not looking at that in terms of that
 development in term if it was a subdivided or a or a fully developed lot
 that those were kind of those those larger lot single-family properties
 just adjacent to the site I think there was also some discussion regarding our
 Denton Development Code does have a provision in in the definition of infill
 that does limit infill to lots that are two acres or less now our comp plan
 defines infill differently it does not have that two acre limit so it is kind
 of that that difference in those definitions between the Denton
 Development Code and the comprehensive plan so it does make it a little
 confusing when you refer to the comprehensive plan you talk about the
 2030 plan yes sir oh okay all right any other yeah Mayor Pro Tem yeah Julie so
 this we've dealt with this area before it's had a few different iterations of
 zoning changes etc so on the ground and forgive me if you already touched on
 this but on the ground what are we looking at I understand it's our two but
 in practical terms is it it doesn't does that whole form or is it closer to our
 three those houses I guess that to the north on Audra let's start there um in
 terms of the those the homes north of Audra no the homes that face Audra
 north of this development so the larger lots that we've talked about and so
 tradition I know it falls in the zoning it falls in but on the ground if you
 were to look at it is it is it truly two acres I mean two homes per acre it is
 about yes sir so I looked at I just looked at the lot sizes for a couple of
 them essentially the very large lot just to the east of the subject property and
 that lot is about two and a half acres and then I looked at the one of the
 smaller lots that faces Audra and it's about half an acre so they generally do
 comply with that R2 size okay and then I but then and in the other analysis just
 thinking out loud I looked at the CAD map and the home sizes are comparable to
 what's being proposed 1900 square feet there's one really small one 900 square
 feet there and so but everything else seems to be in that range and the price
 range matches I think that that's where so given direction I think that's where
 I get hung up is I was hoping the neighbors would call in to kind of get
 some feedback with the updated information that's really the trick for
 me I appreciate the the applicant's presentation and it speaks to their
 business case very well but I don't know that it speaks to the neighboring
 concerns as well as I'd like you know especially the super majority
 consideration and understanding the consequences if it does not pass at this
 level so that that really is just just thinking out loud that's what gives me
 concern I'm comfortable with the just over three that they've proposed and the
 layout that buffers the neighborhood reading the complaints and our concerns
 from the written statements I think those have all been addressed and
 mitigated that that's cut my only hang up is just hearing from the neighbors
 mayor protein quick question you said that you're comfortable with the three
 that they've proposed do you mean the zoning the r4 zoning I'm not I'm not
 sure you mean the r4 zoning yes sir so they call it r4 zoning but it's r3 on
 the ground and we we've seen that just to the west of this development as well
 something where it reads it was when the homes were built it's r4 but I mean
 pardon me r2 but on the ground the new development is the old development
 wares if you will more like our force just it was built at a time that the
 error was r2 so just in this area there's a lot of history and a lot of you
 know shifts of titles but based on the applicants presentation taking them at
 their word they're just over three on the ground in r4 zoning so so it wears
 and it'll be three houses per acre but round numbers obviously I know it's it's
 it's three point whatever they said in their presentation but that was
 noteworthy to me okay yes could you could Amy could you tell me because it's
 how big is the lot 2.6 acres or 2.271 the lot is 2.61 acres and the the overall
 density with nine lots would be 3.45 units per acre okay okay alright okay
 councilmember Ryan yeah mayor I'm in agreement with you that I think one of
 our best options is to send us back to P&Z into kind of add a little clarity if
 we were still under our old DDC the r3 zoning actually allowed 3.5 units per
 acre so this would go in under that but because we are now basing on the square
 footage of of a lot size under the new code as opposed to number of units per
 acre it's a ten thousand square foot minimum for the lot versus the seven
 thousand square foot minimum on the r4 again under the old code it would be an
 Arthur they could have gone for an r3 and built the product that they're
 looking to build so I think there's some some new facts on the ground that really
 just need to go back to P&Z and be looked at again yeah and the neighborhood
 as well yeah and I agree because if it is zone if it is zoned r4 then they're
 able to get which I'm not necessarily opposed to it but they're able to get
 another how you know four units per acre times the two point six one is ten point four four homes so I
 think that limitation of nine which was specifically expressed after the meeting
 is important and dispositive I think for the neighbors and potentially for P&Z so
 and I Joey go ahead somebody I think we got it I mean Amy are you guys okay with
 maybe remanding it back to P&Z with some of that specific language yes I believe
 we are and I I'll let Sundari answer that question but based on the
 conversations that we've had I believe that we would we would be fine with
 going back to P&Z and presenting this information and Ari yeah we can we can go
 back to P&Z and go back to vote again yeah and and the neighbors as well
 councilmember Briggs I'm sorry go ahead yeah that was my could do they get
 re-notified if you go back to P&Z is it Aaron did it if it goes back to P&Z if
 it we were mandated is it a new posting is a public hearing or item for
 individual consideration it would be an individual an item for individual
 consideration but nothing prevents council from directing staff to send out
 notices to the neighborhood advising them of this that this is going to be
 held okay yeah all right it's councilmember Meltzer
 curious to know what is that mechanism remanding back to P&Z is that it'll be a
 motion to remand to P&Z oh okay along with it sounds like there's only certain
 items that the council wants the P&Z to look at and if that could be if that is
 correct if you can express what those certain items for them to review viewed
 including the neighborhood have the opportunity to review the new plans as
 part of your motion that would be great okay that's an option all right okay
 councilman breaks yeah I'm just just thinking I know that sending something
 back isn't isn't the most favorable but I think with the opposition the way that
 it is in the super majority it might be better for the development to get a
 green light if it goes back to P&Z for now so I will make a motion to
 reprimand it back to P&Z so that they can look at the new presentation and
 items that the developer has put on and do you want to include in that a
 notification public notification similar to public hearing notifications in the
 paper and also sending out postcards to the surrounding property owners well for
 me it would just if the the surrounding property owners the ones that they have
 contact with would be priority but if you have to do if you do one I'm not
 sure legally what all you have to do to begin with if council wishes that they
 do that whole process on notifications then then okay okay well all right which
 it's your motion that's on the floor so if you don't want it that's fine it'll
 just if somebody does they'll just need to make a friendly amendment or an
 amendment that's only reason I'm asking well I would like to make sure that they
 notify the the surrounding homeowners okay all right of the change okay all
 right so that's part of the motion councilmember Armitter I said I second
 that motion all right Erin in the motion of just notifying the surrounding
 property owners do we need something more specific than that to get to get a
 little bit more clarity on the actual process or do we would we need to do it
 per our normal processes in this situation you can do and I'm looking at
 staff and the city manager at the 200 foot radius notification if that okay
 sufficient we'll do the 200 foot notification okay and is that is another
 opportunity is that okay councilmember Briggs that's what you intended on your
 motion okay all right okay so we have a motion to remand to P&Z and to notify
 the property owners within 200 feet of the subject property regarding the
 remand and etc we have a motion in a second any discussion councilmember
 Briggs how say you yes councilmember Armitter yes councilmember Ryan aye
 councilmember Davis aye mayor Pro Tem aye councilmember Meltzer aye mayor
 Watson's an eye the motion carries 7-0 we're on our last public hearing agenda
 item it's DCA to wrote it up 0004 I believe is that the correct ID okay
 thank you we've got one person making comment on our online form and that
 person is in support and so I'll read the caption hold a public hearing
 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of didn't Texas amending the dent
 development code sub chapter 5 use regulations related to the table of
 allowed uses and use specific standards for tattoo and piercing parlors in a
 mixed-use neighborhood district and I will open the public hearing thank you
 mayor members council run get up and plan with development services I'll be
 making this presentation pull up my PowerPoint presentation real quick
, no.
 Okay, thank you again as introduced in the introduction by the mayor this is a
 development code amendment to address tattoo and piercing parlor within the
 city of Denton so what we have today is a an issue related to nonconformities we
 have a total seven tattoo and piercing parlors that are identified in the city
 that are non-conforming because of the 2019 development code when it was
 adopted it did not allow these uses or this use within the zoning MN mixed-use
 neighborhood however they were approved prior under a 2002 development code
 under a NRMU 12 or NRMU they were permitted as professional service and
 office under that use and again I stated earlier there are seven existing
 businesses that fall under that situation currently under the tattoo and
 piercing parlor under the 2019 development code the MN does not allow
 that specific use or this specific use so the option that we have presented for
 council is the option is to note to do nothing and that is to leave the
 non-conforming uses as is or to amend the table of allowed uses with a P plus
 the plus being a use specific standard for MN to allow for tattoo and piercing
 parlors this next slide here just illustrates the number of tattoo and
 piercing parlors that we have in the city and as you can see there are a
 number of them seven in total that are currently zoned MN which under the
 current 2019 development code it is non-conforming the map to the right just
 illustrates their locations they're primarily within the core of the city
 what the staff is proposing is an amendment to the development code to add
 that P and that plus again under MN for tattoo and body piercing parlors the P
 the plus rather is a use specific standard 535 P and basically what that
 states is that tattoo and body piercing parlors shall comply with the licensing
 and certification requirements of the Texas Department of State Health and
 Services with that that concludes my presentation and I'll be happy to stand
 for any questions okay councilmember Davis let me open the public hearing so
 I'll open the public hearing councilmember Davis I think Paul had his
 hand up first oh councilmember Meltzer I apologize I just want to confirm I think
 we confirmed this in work session that this is essentially correcting an
 oversight where there was the stated purpose of the new DDC was or stated a
 stated objective was not to create nonconformities so this was kind of a
 mess would you agree with that characterization that's that's correct
 correcting a nonconformity that was created per the 2019 development code
 okay so just to you know kind of keep things moving along I'll go ahead and
 move approval of the recommendation to add the P plus allowing tattoo and
 piercing in MN in order to correct the inadvertent exclusion yet yes and if we
 could thank you Paul for that motion and I'll hold the second until I close the
 public hearing so I see no callers I have no one queued up so I'll close the
 public hearing so we have a motion on the table by councilmember Meltzer
 councilmember Davis a second all right councilmember Briggs I thought I saw
 your hand yeah I was wondering did we have any cards in favor or yeah okay yes
 yes there was one for this item we had one person making a comment on our
 online form there was one in support and zero in opposition thank you you're
 welcome councilmember Amater oh I was going to to second the second has
 already been made I'll just say I'm really pleased to be voting yes on this this is
 it's it's correcting a problem that needed to be corrected and there's thanks
 so much to staff for getting right on it and thanks to the you know small
 business owner who called this to our attention thanks to everyone yes thank
 you so we've got a motion in a second for agenda item 6d DCAA 20-0004
 councilmember Meltzer how say you hi councilmember Davis hi mayor Potem all
 right councilmember Briggs yes councilmember Armitter yes councilmember
 Ryan all right mayor was is an I motion carries 7-0 we are now on concluding
 items councilmember Briggs yeah from our call earlier I would just like to get a
 Friday report or something on how the 911 situation what happened and you know
 if that has happened before and if we learned anything from it basically thank
 you great all right anyone else concluding item mayor Potem just want to
 point out that there's the virtual serve Denton bank with this Saturday I do
 believe so have people call that out they do great work here in the city and
 want to support them all right anyone else well I'm glad we fixed it in
 because I just got a restart required on my computer so okay well then seeing no
 more concluding items we will adjourn the meeting of the Dent City Council on
 October 20th 2020 at 1008 thank you all very much

        
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