City Council Strategic Planning Session 3-29-18

[0:00:00] the 29th we will call this workshop to order at this point all right the workshop agenda is first of all a introduction and overview of the planning workshop which I mean yes ma'am okay with that mayor thank you first of all I want to thank all of y'all for joining us today for this really important planning workshop we'll be doing two workshops throughout the year the first one will be late March or April and this is really the ideal time to start discussing to kind of kick off our budget process for this coming fiscal year but in order to do that we want to make sure that we have the City Council input on our CIP on our top five priorities that have already been established and really we've gone through the process of introducing the CIP to the city council members as far as what the community had submitted on the survey as a priority for them this gives us an opportunity to actually go through those discuss those and maybe even look at those as a possible consideration in our top five priorities so again this is that opportunity to do that at this point is to discuss and look at what we may be budgeting for this coming year this is what the agenda looks like for today of course I'm doing the overview the Theresa will be doing a presentation on statutory requirements for City Council members kind of a training session to address the Penal Code what you can and cannot do really she's doing this to make sure she keeps us or everybody out of trouble so this is really important that we get this done next up will be a Tina she'll be talking about the update on

[0:02:03] the current financial condition and expected expenditures I want to make sure that one of the the first things that happens when we start talking about sales tax revenues we now we're over the but over $800,000 from what we had budgeted people tend to get excited about that everybody starts making plans for how that money's going to be spent so I want to make sure that we address that and also talk about yes we may have that but we also have certain expenditures and need to be addressed this coming fiscal year as well so it's kind of temper our excitement and make sure that we know what what to expect next up we'll be talking about our capital improvement priorities as I mentioned a while ago we have a list I talked to you to Anthony he told me that we had at least but over 900 entries as far as a survey from our citizens when they talked about which priorities or capital improvement items they want us to take a look at that's a huge improvement from last year when we only had 160 a little over 160 submissions on those priorities so again we've introduced introduced those to you and that we would like to have that opportunity to discuss and possibly plan for if anything these are capital improvement items that quite frankly we do not have funding for so we do have discussions on that we'll also have to decide how we're going to fund those projects and of course number 5 we have an update on the top 5 strategic priorities we've had these four now for several years the top five will have an update on each one of those will we be looking at changes in the future I think so I think today will have some really good discussions these are our top five strategic priorities others that we may want to consider as we move forward are listed here as well we've had discussions on the Downtown Development ears the edgewater property we know that moving forward with our sales tax revenues first of all we have three top revenues that feed into our general fund and that is our property tax revenues or

[0:04:06] sales tax revenues and our franchise fees these right here the Downtown Development Lake Ness worthy development Airport Business Park development as part of our economic development is part of what would it affect our sales tax revenues in the future it's it's really difficult when we start forecasting revenues for the coming fiscal year we make sure that we're planning for all this so that we know as we continue to grow those tax revenues will grow and it will help alleviate some of the pressures that we have on our property tax revenues we do have relatively high property tax rate in the past over the past decade we've actually reduced our property tax rate or we maintained it so we want to make sure that we do what we can looking at the future to address our sales tax revenues and other monies that could be coming in I mentioned I mentioned franchise fees that's one of the top three really there's not much that we can do with franchise fees or numbers those numbers are set and they're pretty static from year to year they don't change that much so again it's really important that we do address the future specifically how we can affect those sales tax revenues and then finally what we'll be discussing is our service expense reductions we have a lot of needs and as we move forward as Tina talks about our current financial condition and the needs that we have we have a lot of infrastructure and he's they still need to be addressed we looked at our CIP with some of the funded projects and non funded projects we have over seven hundred sixty-two million dollars in needs how do we how do we pay for that and how do we address that so we saw looking at the the one area that we can really affect immediately is our expenses if we look at reduction of services or elimination of certain services that aren't a priority for the city it frees up some of those monies that can be actually allocated toward the more important infrastructure improvements that we would we would have to make so again it's really important that we have that discussion with council members that we address that I'll talk to you about what we're doing as a staff at this point to

[0:06:08] address that but again it's a topic that we'd like to discuss and hopefully get City Council support moving forward you know when you talk about infrastructure we also want to make sure that is inclusive of maintenance issues so infrastructure is just not infrastructure it's maintenance issues Marin that's a really good point I think that when we look at maintenance well we've done a lot of in the past is deferred maintenance in the problem with deferred means of course in the future it ends up costing us a lot more money when we look at streets for example had we just done the seal code overlays and protected our streets over the past several years we wouldn't be having to be doing reconstruction over those streets which a lot of times that the figures are way up there as far as how much more money that cost us and you worked on five to ten times more than to probably an actual maintenance part of it so yes mayor that's really important that we address the maintenance there as well with all of that that's kind of a quick overview of what to expect today with that said I'm gonna hand this over to to Teresa and allow her to get started on her training portion of it she such as bribery and gifts to public officials now this is a presentation that I've been giving around the city to various I did it first at the staff meeting in a number of directors asked me to do it specifically for their staffs and when I started doing it for our staff I had a couple people ask me why are we doing this is there something going on and the answer is the only thing going on is that I've been doing this presentation since last fall and this is the presentation we've been doing purchasing corruption and 18 USC 666 now I have gone to a number of conferences to do this presentation with Nick Hannah who's a Texas Ranger and Jeff and Jason who's a special agent with the FBI and the reason that I convinced those two guys to go with me and teach people what these rules are is because both of these agencies have specialized units that deal with public

[0:08:10] corruption public corruption is a hot topic in both the Rangers as well as the FBI right now for example the Texas Rangers have two different units that deal with public corruption the first is the public corruption unit that's the unit that was created in 2009 and then in 2015 they added the Public Integrity Unit nick is a investigator for the Public Integrity Unit in Texas I'm the FBI similarly has a program it's called the public corruption program and they investigate violations of federal law for public officials including local officials now I've been a city attorney for 15 years and was only a couple years ago when talking to Jeff that I realized how easy it is for public officials at a local level to jump into those federal law violations and so I think it's important everybody understands what that connection is going to show the seriousness of these investigations it gave me these numbers I think it was like the end of January early February so they're not up to date completely but they are very accurate numbers this is just the Public Integrity Unit numbers so since December 2015 when they were created which really means starting investigations in January of 2016 the Texas Rangers have done 164 complaints from this complaints in 132 preliminary investigations which resulted in 32 full investigations and 43 referrals for prosecution now when you look at these numbers you have to look at them in relationship to the FBI numbers because the two agencies work together on these issues now this is just in the state of Texas in 2015 there was a report to Congress from the Public Integrity section of the Department of Justice and that's where these numbers come from so in the state of Texas from 2006 to 2015 there were 934 public corruption convictions of public officials in Texas now that is a conviction the prior numbers included investigations these are not investigative numbers these are people who actually pled guilty or were found guilty in a court proceeding I'm in 2015 alone which was the last year this report covered there were 259 local Texas officials charged with public corruption that year there were 200

[0:10:13] convictions of officials with a hundred and thirty-five awaiting trial now I was surprised by some of those numbers when I first started doing this investigation that was much higher numbers than what I had anticipated but once you go onto the internet and start doing some research you figure out this is relatively common in Texas so what statutes are we interested in when they're talking about these corruption issues the first one is bribery now bribery to me is one of those gut-check statutes that we all should know this is something I shouldn't be doing when this is happening but the actual offense in Texas is a person intentionally or knowingly offers confers or agrees to confer on another or you solicit accept or agree to accept from another any benefit is consideration for a decision opinion recommendation vote or exercise of discretion so this doesn't necessarily just have to be a vote on something it could be any exercise of discretion you have as a public servant that would apply now I highlighted that term any benefit because typically we tend to think of bribes and we see bribes on TV as cash now Jeff will tell you that it's rare that they find a bag of cash is the actual bribe in one of these cases and in Texas statutes it doesn't have to be cached so benefit under the statute means anything reasonably regarded as having financial gain or financial advantage including a benefit to any other person and whose welfare you have a directed substantial interest so in Texas a person is also considered and for the statue a corporation so for instance if you are not receiving a benefit but somebody in your family is receiving a benefit it could be a violation of the bribery statute if it's not you receiving the benefit but it's an organization a corporation in the state of Texas that the benefits going to that can also be considered a bribe and violations of the bribery statute under Texas statute is a second-degree felony now this one acceptance of honorarium is a very fancy way of saying getting paid perform a duty in your office so a lot of us are asked to speak at different events as council members I'm asked to speak as a city attorney we cannot

[0:12:16] accept payment for that you can't accept payment for any duty you provide in your capacity as a council person after we started speaking at the conferences we got a lot of requests to come and speak at more conferences and Jeff and Nick and I joke that too bad we have this statute because we could have made a lot of money but we can't we cannot take payment for that but what we can do is we can't accept transportation lodging expenses meals waiver waiving of conference fees and those sorts of things for speaking so anything that your out of pocket to go to a conference you can accept that I actually use the speaking to pay for a lot of my continuing legal education because I get the conference covered when I speak at a conference violations of the statutes a class a misdemeanor and then this is the one that comes up most often whenever I did this presentation for city staff this is the area that we had the most questions about this happens very frequently and so this is gift to a public servant now this applies to a public servant who exercises discretion now that can be a whole range of discretion that can be the kinds of decisions you or that can be who goes first when we turn on water in the morning so discretion is very broadly interpreted under this provision so it's an offence for you to ask accept or agree to accept any benefit from a person if you know they're interested in or they're likely to become interested in in a transaction with the city so that definition is a fraud as far as who this could apply to it doesn't have to be somebody who's actively seeking in contract who's currently under contract but somebody who provides a service that you know is likely to come to the city at some point wanting to interact with us violations here a Class A misdemeanor of Class A misdemeanor in Texas is jail of less than a year and a four thousand dollar fine so what happens here a lot is that people don't actually come up to our employees and give them gifts what they do is they leave them at the front desk or we receive something in the mail so what do we do for those gifts that are unsolicited if you do receive an unsolicited benefit what you can do with

[0:14:20] that is you can donate it to a governmental entity that has the authority to accept it or you can give it to a recognized tax-exempt charitable organization the city actually has a policy that tells us where we're supposed to give those gifts and it is to the tax-exempt charitable organizations sticking okay now this this particular provision irritates me a little bit it's offering a gift to a public servant so not only is it an offence for you to accept a gift but it also is an offence to offer a gift but there's a little catch in this and that's it's only an offence if the person offering the gift knows the public servant is prohibited by law from accepting it now in one hand that protects people who are innocently just giving you a gift and they really don't know better but the other person it protects is the person who knows exactly what they're doing and Jeff and Nick will tell you that they have never looked at this statute and had somebody say oh yeah I knew they weren't supposed to be getting that gift they always deny it and showing that somebody knew or didn't know something is pretty difficult I'm actually considering making changes to our contract RFP documents to actually put the specific provisions under the Penal Code into those documents so that when they're certifying those documents they're acknowledging they understand these rules again this is a Class A misdemeanor now there are some things that give to a public servant and offering a gift to a pope servant do not apply to I want to compare the gift in the bribe a bribe is something where you're given something and you're taking action in exchange for that a gift there's no requirement that you take action it's just they are giving you something as Europe is in your position or to somebody you know but there are some exceptions under the law the first is a fee received in some other capacity so if you work for somebody who does business with the city you can accept payment from them for that work a gift given out a kinship or personal professional or business relationship

[0:16:22] independent of your role as a city official this is a pretty small town most if not all of you grown up here we've lived here a very long time and so you know a lot of people and you had relationships with people prior to becoming a city council member gifts from those people are not covered under this they are exempted however if it's somebody that was not a friend of yours until you became a council member then you should probably consider whether or not that's a proper gift any benefit in the source of any benefiting excess of $50 used to defray non-reimbursable costs or expenses in the performance of your duties so what this says is if you out-of-pocket pay for something the city won't reimburse you for it somebody else can reimburse you for that on all of these you probably should keep pretty detailed records on what that was and what it was for and who you got the reimbursement from just in case it comes up for you a political contribution is exempt that is not considered a gift under the statute an item with the value of less than $50 excluding cash cash is never okay it doesn't matter if it's $10 $50 it's never okay and it's not just actual bills it can include things that are the equivalent of cash such as gift cards those little gift credit cards anything like that you cannot accept those even if it's less than $50 and then again the transportation lodging and meals provided is exempt now the catch is that those things are exemptions provided that you follow Texas local government code reporting requirements or any other statutory requirement so political contributions for example those are exempted from this provision if you report them properly we also have reporting requirements under Texas local government code chapter 176 that chapter says this it requires your disclosure of certain relationships with vendors contracting with are considering a contract with the city now the first one of those is a business relationship with you or a family member that you earn $2,500 or more for instance my daughter Anna she works for somebody who

[0:18:26] does business with the city she's so busy she doesn't work very much so she hasn't heard anywhere close to $2,500 but this summer she might and at the point she makes $25 hundred dollars or more I'll have an obligation to report that relationship gifts to you or a family member in the aggregate value of a hundred dollars now if you have somebody who gives your child the $25 Easter egg every Easter that won't be reportable because it's on a calendar on a 12 month cycle that we have to report this but if they're giving your children multiple gifts when the value of those gifts exceeds $100 at that point she needs to report it anybody who has a family relationship to you now this is 2° marriage or blood if you know they're no you know their family you probably should report that relationship if you have any questions about whether somebody's within two degrees come see us we have a chart we'll look it up and let you know but it is family relationships do have to be reported and again you must report this every 12 months one of the questions that came to us is why don't you just give us these forms on January 1st and the answer to that is that wouldn't necessarily meet the requirement because like my daughter Anna if she doesn't make that $2,500 until July that's when my 12 month period starts we're gonna start prompting people on January 1st to remind them of this requirement but it's at the time that you meet this requirement that you have to start reporting and it's a twelve month period from that date so you know all of those were state statutes so how does the FBI get involved in city business and these issues with cities and it's actually very easy this is the statute 18 US Code 666 which that six six six to tell you something this is a beast of a of a provision it is not friendly it applies to an agent of an organization or of a state local or Indian tribe or government we all clearly fall into that agent of a local government and it is a violation under the federal law to

[0:20:29] solicit or demand for the benefit of any person or accept or agree to accept anything of value from any person intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with any business transaction now this is a little bit of an easier standard to me because if you remember under state statute you we have to prove or they have to prove that there is a relationship there that you have a significant interest in the person that the money is being given to you there is no such requirement under the federal statute the other thing that has to be shown and bribery at the state level is that you actually performed some sort of duty in response to the money or the gift that you were given in this statute it's just that there was an intent to be influenced if you don't actually vote the way you're supposed to vote if it was intended when you received the thing that you received that she would vote that way it could be a violation of the statute it's also an offense to corruptly give offer agree to give anything of value so same provisions to accept it or to give it it's a violation of same statute now there is a threshold as far as money is concerned it is $5,000 but that's cumulative so if somebody were taking bribes and they were just taking a thousand dollars at a time when they take five thousand dollars at that point is when they can be put underneath this federal statute the penalty for a violation is fines and imprisoned if not more than ten years for each offense so it's pretty much the same penalty about the state and the federal level you would serve this time in the federal penitentiary versus the state prison so when does this apply to us I mean if we meet the $5,000 threshold window winders have actually apply to us it applies to any organization government or agency that receives any one year period $10,000 or more of federal funding now we have an airport we have a Health Department we have neighborhood services we have a police department all of those folks apply for either every year or very often federal funds it's a cumulative value so we are almost always going to meet this particular threshold so it is

[0:22:33] almost every year if not every year that we are subject to this special panel this federal statute and then when you consider that one year period they look at the date of the offense and look back twelve months and they look forward twelve months so if they figure out you're doing something look back there wasn't any $10,000 they're gonna wait for that year to see if the city receives $10,000 in that next year and either forward or backwards so it's really a 24 month period that they're looking at the other one you helped me there okay so whenever I presented with Nick and Jeff there were a lot more questions on this slide we had a lot of questions for them and this was really a very interesting part of that presentation but there's three questions that I want to go over with you guys and to kind of talk about what their answers were the first is how did the Rangers and the FBI get involved you know I told you at the beginning both of these organizations are actively pursuing corruption cases for public officials it's very easy to go on either one of their website click a link and find a phone number for somebody to report to I believe the FBI even has some anonymous reporting requirements on there the FBI is very very proud of their statistics when it comes to corruption if you go on FBI gov they're gonna have a corruption link very prominently displayed on their web page when you click that there is an updated rolling schedule of all the news stories where the FBI was involved in some sort of corruption event in the United States so who goes to them our citizens go to them other public officials go to them occasionally there might be a mandatory reporting requirement that whoever that applies to you has to go to them somebody that you ran against in an election that lost might go to them so it's pretty much anybody in our community that would be able to report these these crimes is there a preference for state versus federal statutes I would say generally in law enforcement actions there is always a preference for federal statutes now why is that first of all the penalty structure is often

[0:24:36] stricter and the verdicts often come out of federal juries at a much stricter level second as we show I showed you the elements for proving bribery in the federal statute is an easier burden for us to prove we don't have to prove substantial relationship to the person receiving the bribe for instance there's also a belief that the evidentiary standards in federal court are a little bit easier than in Texas State Courts and I think the most important thing is the conviction rate for FBI in federal court system is 99 percent in 2015 the stat was ninety-nine point nine percent of the time so those investigations on the federal level take a very long time and the reason they take a long time they tie up their loose ends to keep that 99 percent conviction rate no advice for individuals this was my favorite answer that Jeff gave people you know I say what what are the advice for the individuals in the room who were faced with these issues and his response was you need to talk to your City Attorney if you have any question about this because if you're talking to me it's too late so I want to keep encouraging you guys if you have any of these situations that arise come talk to us and we'll help you work through it I'm gonna offer you a written opinion if I don't offer that ask me for a written opinion because that way you have some evidence that you sought legal counsel and you're acting in accordance with that legal counsel and then the final provision I want to talk about is this misuse of official information now this is not something the FBI would investigate out there's not a similar FBI statute we would fall under but this is something the Texas Rangers would investigate for us and so it makes it a second-degree felony which is 2 to 10 years and a $10,000 fine in the state of Texas if you use confidential information that you've received as a public official for your own personal benefit if you give it to another for their benefit if you intend to use it for your benefit so we interrupted some sort of process but you had taken steps to utilize that information for your benefit or to accept confidential information from another to use confidential information under this is anything that the general public does

[0:26:38] not have access to so executive session materials is covered underneath this certain drafts of contracts information that we have related to some building permits that are not finalized and are still in the confidential stage conversations we have with people that we're not going to disclose all of that can be considered confidential information it does and I'm doing the same presentation with a number of our boards and commissions as well it applies to anybody who receives confidential information much comes out of an executive board meeting when it shouldn't be coming out of an executive board meeting right and if it's used for a personal benefit financial benefit then that is a violation of this provision all right so I think that's the last slide and I know that was really fast then when the presentation I did with Jeff and Nick we usually took an hour and a half to two hours and the one with staff was probably 30 to 45 minutes we went through that really quickly but if you have any questions about any of that that come up please come see me send me an email you have my cell number give us a call because we want to make sure everybody understands these requirements okay thank you Thank You Teresa and she is pretty good about that just in case you have you need any question even even if you you have an inkling that something may be wrong just go talk to her and she's really good about explaining the process so if you have relationships you need to disclose that haven't been disclosed you can see him in his office and they'll help you fill out okay thank you ma'am let's move that forward up next Tina hey now for our financial update we're going to start out with where we are with sales tax revenue which we we inform you of this every month but just a refresher on where we are we have been training upward for the last ten months in a row which is a good thing we're

[0:28:40] over budget currently for a revenue at about eight hundred twenty three thousand dollars year-to-date and if we projected flat you know the last six months of the year being exactly what they were last year then we would still be up about seven hundred seventy six thousand dollars for the year so we wanted to make you aware of some additional known requests or needs that we've already heard from departments this is before we've even requested from departments any additional needs that they're aware of that they will need you know next year so first we have the police with an additional five police officers at a cost of about three hundred thirty five thousand dollars we have a request for plate pay plan adjustments pardon me and at a cost of about four hundred and eighty five thousand dollars and then we have the second year of the ambulance the that sixth front line ambulance that Council authorized last year the second year will be an increase of about two hundred fifty five thousand dollars for the next fiscal year Texas Paint Sports Complex when we first created the funding for the Sports Complex we're allowed to use type B sales tax money to help with startup costs and things like that for capital needs at the Sports Complex but once it's up and running we're no longer allowed to use that money for maintenance so this will be the last year that we're able to fund the portion that has been previously funded by type B sales tax and so we'll have to find that somewhere else and most likely that's going to be the general fund health insurance we're not sure of the cost increase with that yet but I have been told by Lisa Marley to plan for about fifteen percent conservatively just to be safe so anyway with us going out for bid this year so we'll know more about that later on in the year all right that's what Lisa told us to project just to be safe okay hopefully that's a higher but just to be conservative with that so is looking into an option which may exist which would allow us to extend

[0:30:44] that contract that could be that could eliminate most of that increase the increase then would be based on claims experience not necessarily so much driven by cost for services length as the original contract she's looking at the possibility that there would be two one-year OTT one one-year option left for extension and she's talking I think talking to legal about that now and that could help capture those savings for the next year but I don't think that's I don't think we're ready to confirm that yet it's also a level of service decision for what we want remember we went with one provider and that's okay and finally we have of course always have capital and equipment replacement needs we've met with operations and vehicle may fleet services fleet services and they always have needs that that are beyond the funding that's available and so that's another thing that we want might want to consider funding in the next fiscal year at a more appropriate level and it's issues that have been put off for many years now what keep the money everybody maintenance at the beginning this is all before we've even requested target increases from the departments and so we already know that there will be additional needs in addition to what we've showed you today one thing I want to point out is that in 2015 we cut out about 1.5 million dollars in capital money that we used to transfer to fund 502 to address issues like this with pay as you go capital when we came upon some hard times we we robbed that fund of that 1.5 million dollars and that's something that is still in the back of my mind that we still need to really try to build back up so that we have some money when times are tough to to address needs that come

[0:32:47] up as they come up so we prided that we transferred 1.75 million dollars into that fund from the general fund to address capital pay-as-you-go and we left 250 thousand dollars is all we now budget per year and that is only to build up money to buy fire trucks as they come as the fire department department needs them so I think that's all we have as far as the financial update although again as I mentioned a while ago we look at the sales tax numbers and we we start celebrating that the numbers are up eight hundred twenty thousand dollars from what was budget at this point but you start looking at the needs that are there we have a needs already surpassed that dollar amount so we we have to take a look at that very very cautiously and we still don't know what the remainder of the year will do we suspect it will continue moving forward perhaps with a 5% a month a month increase but we don't know that so in our end we want to make sure that we're conservative in our approach and we look at it and say it's nice to have that but we've already pretty much already accounted for that for our knees for this company's coming fiscal year so we have to be really careful with that well in addition to that remember we've had double-digit increases starting with the beginning of this year and to have increases on top of those for the balance of the six months which would be the 2018 2019 budget session probably won't happen because if you look at last month if you had a 14% increase the previous month over 20% you probably aren't going to have another 14% and another 20% on top of those large percentages so the only flex we would have is the October through January where we were still somewhat flat but the other months have been double-digit increases and so the idea that we would be able to plan for an ongoing trend like that is not there we've learned

[0:34:51] merit I'm glad you mention that because we learned our lesson about that we had to be really cautious that one year a couple years back we thought were being conservative with our numbers that we budgeted boy we weren't we were off and we we were and that really threw us back and we ended up having to account for I think 1.2 million dollars at in a year just cutting cutting cutting expenditures just to make sure that we weren't in the red at the end of the year so again it's really important that as we forecast and we do budget for the future that we have a pretty pretty good idea of what to expect so we're not at the very end having a cut different programs especially not anything to do with maintenance or our infrastructure improvements as well so again we want to keep that in mind add to that to connect that dot with the dot Tina mentioned earlier that when you have that pay as you go capital built into your budget when sales tax tapes takes a dip you can suspend that capital and absorb that without affecting without dramatically affecting the services you provide to citizens without having to lay people off without having freeze jobs and so building that capital back in and combined with the conservative budgeting builds some stability into your services as you as you ride out the waves the financial waves Tina I think that's it you're onto the next one right yes just gone over with us are those all the additional requests that we anticipate at this point every year as we go through the budget cycle when we request expenditure budgets from the department's we ask them to submit target increase requests and there's a form that they fill out and so if they have any additional needs that they know that they will need to fund in the next fiscal year that's the time when they would submit those we collect all of those and we meet with the city manager's office and go over those with the departments and determine whether

[0:36:55] they're you know necessary in the next fiscal fiscal year and that's how we present the needs finally to the City Council when after we've met with city manager we compile the needs and and you'll be seeing those later on so no they're probably not all of the needs that will happen and when do you start that process we start the budget process in April with revenue budgets expense budgets in May we try to meet with city manager's office to go over everything in June Thank You Billy what information yet right they're just trying to stay in touch with them with the needs and they're seeing these big things so they're informing you now that they see some big things on the horizon that they anticipate they haven't even asked apartments yet to submit so there there's usually two to three million dollars in submissions Billy why this is why this process is really important is to get the City Council's input right before we kick off that budget process to know that we have new priorities we want to make sure that we're planning for that aside from what this staff is submitting and by the way and by the way any of those increases that they're submitting has to be justified and boy they really have to explain why that's a necessity we take a very close look at that to determine if in fact it is or not because again we do want to take it and consider it I always take a very conservative look at our budget when people look forward as well you are up now for now we want to discuss a capital improvement priorities again I mentioned earlier that a lot of these were by submission online as far as the surveys I heard that we had close to 900 submissions compared to last year's 164 so that was an overwhelming as far as the response compared to last year so we do want to show these numbers council members we have shown you these numbers but we'd like to kind of get your input on it as far as any action necessary moving forward and discussion on priorities to see how we would fund anything that you would consider us funding well the problem with this slide is the fine it's this year's C CIP it

[0:39:02] doesn't reflect the one last year and the year before and the year before in the year before so this is simply at three months ago request and so that's a 2018 request but where's the 1718 request because that's really the big issue some of these have been ongoing request year after year after year these are just this years so we need to make sure when we look at this and talk about it that this is just a real current one but we've got what is the number and the CIP everything combined with what funding is well Vomero we have a seven hundred sixty two million dollars quite frankly the projects that could be worked on so that's a lot that's a lot of money there that quite frankly we can't we can't cover right now when some of these are again maintenance issues that if we don't address them will become bigger expense items down the road so we need to understand the conditions you know is Fort Concho roof roof replacement if I could speak I would say roof replacement is it has it been a need for three years five years is it just something that came up this year I think it's been an ongoing issue but we need to understand how long has this been an issue the same thing with the Coliseum improvements how long have they been ongoing issues the river stage improvements how long have these been problems a splash pads a whole brand new quality of life thing that is not a maintenance issue some of these are significant maintenance cost issues that have been hanging out there for a long time marin these are contributors as well when you look at the Fort Concho roof replacement Fort Concho smile to our community and even those that come and visit our community tourists or other others that come and spend money here we want to take care of the assets that we currently have and we start looking at Coliseum improvements River stage improvements but for Concha roof replacement a lot of times we kind of overlook that and start looking at the like the splash pad something new something interesting something exciting

[0:41:05] but I really do believe that we want to make sure that we take care of what we currently have because that is a great benefit to the community as well yes we can't keep adding if we can't afford to take care of what we already have so we need to make sure we have a game plan for taking care of what we own today that's not maintained before we add more maintenance create new projects and new maintenance issues down the road rewind to when you when you were talking about the total amount on the CIP did you say 760 million yes sir so there's that because this goes to the mayor's point she just made does that include every single street in this community it includes everything every single piece of pipe underneath those streets that we already have that some are in dire need of I'm not talking about College Hills I'm not talking about Southwest Boulevard those are on a plan I'm talking about every one of us has streets in our district that are in horrible chase that we already have that we can't don't maintain so that's in that 760 million it's everything that's submitted at this point seven it'ld yes sir that's everything submitted by submitted but to the mayor's point I'm gonna guess it's another five to six hundred million in addition to that 700 million of every single Street that need now not every Street needs attention but I'm talking about every Street that needs attention I think you're right I'm on the on the money they're taught me this is what's been submitted at this point but other needs that may be out there that we haven't done the submission of the studies on that yet absolutely they never can actually climb it wouldn't surprise me if that number were double it wouldn't surprise me

[0:43:10] shelter I will say that in the back of the capital improvement plan there is a section that's called future projects and there are a long long list of streets included in that and that would be projects that we expect to have to repair at some point after the five year horizon which is the CIP that portion of the plan is I think three hundred and sixty-four million is the whole point of my diatribe there is we got we got more than we can said grace over today closer we have more than we can say in and we are not really we got a list the CIP is a nice list but we're not addressing those things on the list with a plan of how we're going to take care of on top of the street underneath the street so you know we could spend the rest of our time my personal opinion talking about nothing but that and really not make a very big dent in that because of the needs that we have to the mayor's point of things we already own that are not maintained you can talk about the Fort Concho you know we there's the state office complex funds so we have put into place a plan of how that's you know we're gonna fund that so some of them do have potential plans that are working plans but there's dollars that have to be attached they have dollars coming with them those like the state office complex so I agree but just so you know some of these do have some solutions that are working along with them they're not just open-ended general fund has to do it just water treatment and this goes to the mayor's point early as far as the maintenance and deferred maintenance gets us where we are you know that's that's the issue is we're trying to tackle as much as we possibly can and we've been doing it for several years now but again any time you defer maintenance on any facility that the

[0:45:11] city owns we end up having to pay a lot more in the future and that's kind of a situation that we're in at this point is we want to make sure that we we do it responsibly which serves we sure can't address everything at once and be a very long-term plan to address funding for all of this but at the very least we want to make sure that we're pointing out where we are City Council members are very well aware and that we do continue with an aggressive infrastructure improvement program as I mentioned when I first got here we had six hundred and forty thousand dollars to do streets on a yearly basis that's a drop in the bucket that is not gonna do anything for us so I was thinking that same thing that's one of the first things we talked about when Daniel came to work was this wide range of needs we had and and we talked about folks was necessary and that's somewhat what I hear you to saying is that we're gonna need to focus if you go back to and talk about what municipalities priorities are and certainly infrastructure is one of the number one things that a municipality is supposed to take care of infrastructure and so with that we've got to make sure that we prioritize what municipalities are supposed to do take care of infrastructure as a first priority and the other issues are those things that drive our economy and bring tax dollars into the city coffers so when you take a look at that the decisions that we make need to be decisions that when we invest the money they return on that money is greater than the cost of the investment so that we get back more than we put out and because we have to continue to press the button on economic development whether it's through tourism whether it is through new businesses whether it is through and more industrial complexes which bring higher property taxes we must build the tax base it's got to be a top priority absolutely Tina now that you've gone through the quality of life projects and then there's more to come I'm tell you right now I'll let her

[0:47:15] continue then so we'll go on to the next PI transportation projects this would include your streets projects let's see some of these are already in progress the reconstruction of college hills from loop 306 to Avenue n was the highest ranking amongst citizens that one I believe already has plans to implement Russell correct me if I'm wrong I think it's starting in year five of our rolling debt plan okay they're working on the plans for that one right now second up was the reconstruction of north Chadbourne from loop 306 to Washington I know that they're working on some plans for that one as well and then third on the list was the drainage at foster Road and these truly we can call them transportation projects but their quality of live projects too because for these people who fear flooding when we need rain and they fear getting rain because of the flood issues so in their minds these issues are quality of life issues and we do have an item on the agenda of course Harry's pretty relieved I'm sure because she's been working pretty hard on this and that's the Avenue P I'm Tuesday's City Council meeting together yeah designs done but again I agree Mara I know that area probably you know when it was raining the other day I just kind of shudder to think of those individuals there in that area too so inch plus that we got impacted those those citizens on that particular Street in that area so of course we're working on the number one drainage issue in the city also is on Bell Street which is right right there with Lucy in my own district and so both of those along with foster Road and over in College Hills there are drainage issues as Tommy said in everybody's district and we've really got to figure out a way that we can address those and keep them from happening in the future when we approve plans for development of

[0:49:20] neighborhoods and businesses and then we've got to make sure that they're taking care of those draining situations then so it doesn't impact us in the future basically the city does end up having to pay for those lack of planning especially if the drainage wasn't in place guess who pays for the citizens to do that any longer I do want to mention as well as far as investment in our community when we start looking at our streets and we start recruiting industry or companies to come to San Angelo it's really difficult to get them to invest in our community and we can't even invest in our own community when our streets look terrible either they're shot and those businesses come through they're gonna drive through and they see that in fact the city doesn't care enough to plan for their streets why should they come in invest here locally it becomes an issue for us as well okay next up is public safety projects first among citizens on that one was the animal shelter improvements followed closely by the police departments admin building then traffic signal battery backup system and traffic signal replacement and finally land for future fire stations our final category was water and wastewater projects with the first being water treatment plant improvements followed by water mana placements and wastewater treatment plant improvements again council members we wanted to show you what the the responses were as we move forward we start talking about the top five priorities keep these in mind in case you saw something and they're quite frankly did you felt that we may want to include but we have others that we'll discuss as well that we want to make sure that we take into consideration we keep these in mind as well you're done Tina yes sir thank you I appreciate that with that said next up what we want to do is give you an update on those five priorities that we currently had and we'll start off I believe we have water up first [Music]

[0:51:36] they said it's up to you that's funny good so I just want to provide y'all with an update on water supply and infrastructure a lot of things we talked about at the last council meeting that are some big-ticket items one of the projects that we are currently working on is a water supply engineering feasibility study this was a contract y'all approved back in August of last year it's an 18-month study so we're seven months into the project we anticipate bringing an update to the water advisory board in May regarding this project and depending on their guidance or recommendations we'll probably be bringing something to y'all shortly after that but we are working through that project another one that y'all approved last council meeting was the start of the next phase of the chicory groundwater supply project just an update this brings the ability to pump and treat from 8 million gallons up to 12 million gallons so we've started that design process and so we are getting off the ground with that project and then lastly we continue our efforts with the West Texas water partnership and this is for long-term water supply source the council meeting when we approved the hick'ry ground water supply project feasibility study I'm shocked that that feasibility study wasn't done at the time when the original 15 wells were done because we had to have known at that point what the issues were in terms of how much we could pump how much we could treat so is this a duplication of what should have been done at the very beginning of this project you're saying the contract that we approved is in a duplication because I can't imagine that when we started the hick'ry aquifer project and we originally started out with X amendment X amount of Wales and then we added another nine wells or six

[0:53:39] wells to it I can't imagine that we went out there and started drilling wells without knowing that we only had the capacity to do X amount Galan's eight versus the 12 that we have a need for and that we didn't know what those issues were back then because how did we go about doing it without knowing the big picture part of it so we had a general concept of where these additional wells would be laid out what this new contract that you approved it would go into details of those I mean that it takes it from that fifty thousand level view down to how are we going to supply power to this site how deep is the aquifer at this location it goes into real specifics on each of these nuwell locations and that work was not done previously with the 15 wells so it it's taking the concept view to the more of the details so it is work that is not being duplicated and I can tell you that the other side that we have is the water and wastewater infrastructure I think you'll you'll kind of briefed been starting the discussions on this so we are following the street program right now so we are doing the utilities underneath those streets for example Belle Street y'all just recently approved 7.2 million dollars worth of water replacement with that Street in a little over five million dollars worth of sewer infrastructure replacement College Hills as we said is in the design process but there will be major water and wastewater utility infrastructure improvements with that project as well I cover those numbers on Belle Street because the question I keep getting from everybody is how could a the Belle street cost 22 million dollars because they think of it only as a street reconstruction project you need to re-emphasize the fact that there's 12 million dollars worth of sewer and water line replacement so if

[0:55:42] you take the 12 million which I think is what you just said seven plus seven point two so you take 22 minus 12 you're really at a ten million dollar Street reconstruction which makes more financial sense to people when they hear that yes so when they hear twenty two million they're like how could you approve a twenty two million dollars Street project it's ten million dollar water and sewer line replacement project in a ten million dollar street project yes and we also at the last council meeting y'all received an update to the water master plan and this I plan on getting y'all a map of the I think Billy asked for it previously but a map that showed those lines I think they were in the purple pink and blue hues of the needs that are outside the street program and so we are developing a plan that will address those needs outside of the street program needs and may drive some of those street designs in that year five your eight categories the other one is in regards to sewer infrastructure Lake Nazareth II sewer study that y'all just recently approved we hit the ground hard with getting that study approved and we know that I think it was a ten to twelve month project a lot of that requires flow monitoring so they will put those out for a period of time I think it was two to three months and then that evaluation of that flows that they see with the lift stations and grinders and all of that they can use that data for the evaluation and then the other big sewer project that we have is the sulfur draw sewer project and I have that it is twenty percent complete regarding that project so those are some of our bigger water and sewer infrastructure projects going on November 1st 1920 1828

[0:57:59] your study up there and that's one of the other considerations that I've listed up there as well because that's something that we're not going to continue to we won't be able to grow out there any longer we've had a situation where we had a restaurant that wanted to build out there over a year ago they couldn't because the capacity just wasn't there so again in order for us to start talking about a length as were the master plan and what we can do out there we need to make sure that we address that and that does affect our future economic development our sales tax revenues the course if we start looking at the airport also for the possible business part that has to be addressed as well well you have two major assets you have the airport is an incredible asset and you have Lake Nasser worthy which is an incredible asset and both of those things are going to be negatively impacted if we don't deal with the lake nads worthy issues and so that's a real high priority in terms of getting that done because we don't want to negatively impact and there's already businesses that have been negatively impacted by the sewer system as well as growth yes optimistic are you about the facility I guess there is a treatment facility already out near the airport that we say maybe could be refurbished optimistic are we that that could come to fruition I think are we would like to keep all all of the sewer flowing to our existing plant because if we have to rebuild or bring that plant up to speed that is also requires that takes staffing to now man that facility and so it's it's one that we would like to see either a gravity trunk main brought out to the lake depending upon cost or it might just be a matter of some lift station improvements that can still continue the flow in its same direction and without having to bring up another facility because like I'll talked about

[1:00:00] maintenance and those type of things that adds a whole nother set of cost aside from a capital cost upfront to rebuild that facility and so it there are several factors but it might be the most economical in the end so but that study will evaluate all of those things will this study take the numbers for both of those so that we can see what what those will be I mean will a study say it'll take this kind of this kind of capital improvement to bring this that facility up to speed at the airport to improve this as opposed to making sure that we improve lift stations to get it to flow off to the to the other if I recall the scope of services correctly there's a task order for each of those that kind of specializes that specific topic of treatment plant upgrades if you did that it be this cost and it would provide these benefits or if you did lift station more if you invested more in capital and lift stations you would see these benefits so I think it does provide the benefit and cost analysis of each one of those options with $300,000 to get a master plan for the lightness or the area which we have and so but we don't have the infrastructure to support the master plan that we've already done out there so we need to make sure we support what we've already said needed to get done that's all South concho behind the Goodfellow is has that been factored into our max capacity out there for sir or is that kind of on hold and that project is not on hold those recently I guess right off south contra drive that was actually plaited many years ago dr. dente yes account for and with that development they also provided new pumps for the lift station that feeds that

[1:02:03] facility and so the that facilitating development has been factored into the current sewer system any other questions for Ellison thanks appreciate counsel with the streets update we'll start off let's start off with the complicated map here for the maintenance side of things for the for the 2018 sealcoat this is a little it's a little different this year as to how we're looking at it and approaching it going into the bidding in the and how we're going to tackle it simply because one we do have our our eight-year rotational plan that's a part of this but we also have the additional funding that we've received when we received the 2013 the reimbursement from from the issues from that so or their settlement from that so and when we're bidding it out in multiple sections with all alternates in there so that we can make sure that we can do as much as we can with as much funding as we can but if we need to cut a piece out and cut a piece out to make sure that we can match the most most amount of work with our funding existing funding we have so you can look up there and you can see the section in the blue which is up there in Nepal an area that's a 20-18 section we have a 28 another large 2018 section down there kind of primarily it kind of I guess buffer is part of Councilwoman Gonzales is and councilman Thomas is both of those districts in those areas and then we also have another section kind of down towards see if does the laser works on this or no laser on this

[1:04:11] one then yep section one section three and then we'll go down to where we see 2018 section 2 and that's pointing up into the pink section up in that area so and then we have then we go into some alternates where we have some smaller areas for the 2018 part where we again that's where we start kind of if we can if we can push our dollars we want to go ahead and get those into as much as we can if we don't really have those dollars and then we'll try to back off of those also when we start looking at the 2013 alternate section 5 which is down there in the tan and down there and Southwest should work ok down there in the in the trying to fund the laser pointer maybe I'm not talented enough to use it that's it but but in that yes the blue section the 2018 section one is number one priority it's not it's not necessarily based on priority everything we believe it we believe we have enough funding to take care of we just how how I did it in different sections with different colors so it's easier to easier to follow where it is and still it's not really easy to follow there as well to 2017-18 budget is a 2018-19 budget seven it's our current seventeen eighteen yes seventeen those would be done by october 1 or started like tober one if funding stays consistent actually this is scheduled this is planned for this honor i actually go in this summer with this budget year within the current budget year that we're working in

[1:06:12] currently so and again the the alternate and those were these were actually scheduled the green and the blue were actually though in the in the pink color down here we're actually the ones that were actually in this year's funding cycle our our annual funding cycle what you see in the tan are the areas from the 2013 sealcoat to where we're gonna start going back and reworking those areas as alternate bids to see what we did within those bids but this is such a large large area for us that we're looking at this year that we believe that we're gonna we are going to see hopefully our bids will come in very competitive because we are doing such a large project that the bids will come in very competitive and we can get more more done with our with the dollars that we have so we say alternate where we'll have like section 1 section 2 3 that's a 2018 that's our that's gonna be our base bid this is gonna be our base each one of those alternates will be a it'll be a separate line item on the bid so we can either accept it or not depending on how much how far the funding goes how goods come in and how far the thing will go and if our money runs out before we get to say alternate the 2018 alternate of the Sports Complex parking lot if we don't have the funding for that will pull that or if we have one of the alternates Worth Avenue in or a.m. or I guess is it or Dina whichever one that is right in that area if we don't you know that's an alternative if we don't have the funding for those segments then we can pull those out of the bed and go ahead and award the bid okay so that's what that's how we look at alternates but again this is it's kind of spread out all over town trying to get as much as we can done this this time around so it's gonna be a very very

[1:08:16] busy and very active season so it's it's a whole we've we've never had a project a sylco project that's even come close to comparing to this before so I need to talk about the eight year cycle what we're trying to do is make sure that we do see a sealcoat these streets and get them all complete over the eight year cycle and continue that again we're the ones that we've done the first year we start all over again and then again that goes toward the maintenance so that we're not deferring it and later or not later on having to reconstruct streets so this is really good a good program sometimes you're good complain some citizens it'll call in and say hey we don't want that tar on our Road so tell them not to do it here well we we have to to make sure that we seal up those cracks make sure that water doesn't seep through the base and and create potholes and destroy the streets so this there is a method there's a reason why we do this and sometimes citizens don't understand they just don't want that tar on the vehicles in the residential areas but this is really maintenance to protect those streets and seal them up my question was in Shane thank you this was a really good memo on the status of where we are with the Benedetti machine but will it be operational to do some of this work or we don't use it for the sealcoat mill and overlay for the for the cilco work which which is preventative maintenance the this machine is gonna be the benedetti or the hot in place asphalt recycling machine it's it's gonna be used primarily more from the where we have the mill and overlay projects that we see in the larger areas we're hoping that this machine will that's that's the gap that it'll take it's not necessarily preventive maintenance it's more of a rehabilitation effort from that standpoint to wear this sill coat is just preventative maintenance is what this is this it goes along with the crack sealing in you know pothole and trench repair and those type maintenance activities this is it's just another maintenance activity as to where the the benedetti machine is gonna be more of a rehab to hopefully take the place of the

[1:10:21] the mill and overload do we have a map of where the benedetti machine was planned to be at work we don't necessarily have a map of those areas we've been as we got started and of course I'll give you the update here in just a second we start kind of talking about the other side of it well get into it right now we uh the vineyard dating machine we got started with it and of course we had an we had a mainsail on one of the engines go out and then of course with the oil field the way it is we weren't necessarily real hound on caterpillars come fix the as a warranty issue but we weren't real high on their priority list to get here and get it done really quickly so that kind of as we started moving in and transitioning into the fall with that machine down it took quite a while to get it repaired once we got it repaired again we started having seen the staffing issues with street and bridge and losing them and well over 50% of our staff in street and bridge and so again we've at that point going into the going into the fall in the winter months we reprioritize weary ship to reprioritize and started tackling a lot of the pothole repair issues catching back up on our utility trench repair those type issues and and we're just now starting to get back to the point where we have staffing levels where we believe that we can actually start running this demenna dating machine again so we really haven't had a good test with it at this point to really get out there and and do a whole lot with it so as we're as we're moving forward into this month we're actually we've created a new crew we have a new we've actually incentivized to try to keep and maintain trained employees before this machine incentivize the positions that will for the people that will be running the machine and hopefully keep those employees there we are bringing back the people DeBenedetti people they're gonna be in here the week of April not to retrain a new staff to run the machine and so we're gonna get started again

[1:12:25] there we're hoping that with that get started April not start running the machine we're hoping we can really take off with that where we're going to use the Machine first is going to be on our collectors our collector streets here in town the you start talking about one of the main ones that we like to say of course we're gonna probably start on the Bell Street on the very south section that was repaved reconstructed and repaved about 15 years ago we're gonna we're going to start with that small section it's just goes from Lac bel-air Avenue ale it's a really small section start there and then we're you know looking at other collectors such as the 29th Edmund Glenna that from that section that which is on our milling of one of our mill and overlay projects one of our big ones so hopefully we can use that machine in that capacity there so we can use those funds instead of paying a contractor to come in and do a milling overlay we'll use this machine in-house and then those dollars will be able to be pushed further down the list on the streets that actually need need to be reconstructed a full reconstruction so but those are the areas in stark and start using the machine on our mill and overlay projects that we've identified in our in our ten-year plan and hopefully those dollars will be able to be pushed further down the road as we use them in a dating machine moving forward but again that the one of the best perfect examples is the 29th Glenna segment right there from from a corridor on that one yes ma'am wanted out in your report that the Benedetti would not work on all the streets in San Angelo correct did we know that when we purchase that it wouldn't work on all the streets so we factor that in yes ma'am and that's why when we start talking about we had a situation as far as even streets that are in our atj that

[1:14:29] are being proposed with a to course treatment like we had just recently it becomes an issue for us because that Benedetti does need at least what is it two inches and a half and we prefer two inches so when you're talking about two course treatment out there and we accept that then later on we won't be able to maintain those treats that we had to go in there and and and do that mill and overlay top worth we won't be able to maintain it because we have a two course treatment that's maybe not even a half an inch thick you know and then everything underneath that's gonna be based so be really difficulties that machine in the future so you want to make sure that as we look at that we do make sure that they're being beamed bill to city standards and and then of course as we're moving moving forward with with those functions also we do have the 10 our 10 year capital improvement plan Martin Luther King was the first Street to actually go out to bid and start working see that nearing completion there the street the markings all that all that's completed at this point sign is completed we're just the contractors are finishing up the sidewalks and cleaning up some of the a DA issues in working through the final stages of that we're estimating that to be 90 to 95 percent complete but it's it's basically all this left is side walking and some curb curb repair on that on that project so completing that the next one yes ma'am you've been erupting you but I have to tell you give you the feedback from a lot of people that I talk to that live and travel in that area they are so excited about Martin Luther King and what was done with it they never expected that to come to fruition so they're just really excited the Blackshear homecoming will be this year so they can't wait the restoration of the Dunbar library and the reconstruction of MLK that community is so excited about that so thank you thank you thank you to city manager and

[1:16:32] everybody that funded that and and supported and voted for that to happen so citizens really appreciate it or the Bell Street for that same reaction [Laughter] another one of the another project that that is actually completed now that we've completed is the southland project which was a part of this as well to in in conjunction with the the text out work that was done along Sherwood way and so that's completed now and and it's opened up that intersection and I was I spent some time out there this last week looking at everything now that we've actually taken taking responsibility of all the traffic signals along Shorewood way now from text dot and we've got them in our in our timing core in looking at how all of that's flowing and functioning it'll it'll be everything out there looks to be working well at the intersections and and how we're flowing traffic into into that commercial area right there with the SAMS in the walmart and in all of the development that's going on right there now so looking good there a great improvement from that as we as we start moving forward of course we do have the South College Hills from Luke Thoreau six to vallivue that is out it's been bid out they've started construction they've had the they've got the underground drains placed in of course it's kind of taking a little slow hiccup right now because of Reese Albert the asphalt plant went down and then when they got it back up there out there at the airport Lu's got him Lu's got him working out at the airport right now and got him tied up so College Hills is kind of taking a small backseat to that but it's mostly a Midland overlay project with a little bit of

[1:18:34] reconstruction in it up there right around around the church and I hop in that area right there so moving moving along well with that project so we're hoping to get that get that completed in hopefully in a few months yes yes we did put the the french drains in across the street so hopefully that will help significantly with the drainage in that area and of course we have Southwest Boulevard which is in final stages of design hoping to go out to bid real soon that's going to be from Rock Brook all the way out to to twin Mountain which is gonna be another mill and overlay project I hope to get that out on the bid get it out on the streets real soon get that working other things that we have working right now that our engineering department is currently working on he is we mentioned that well you saw that up there well ago the college hills from Avenue in down to the loop that area right there of course that's going to be another major project that's gonna be a significant one like the bus trick project is and so it's gonna take quite a while design a lot of different components in that the drainage components are actually going to be more difficult than what we were from a design standpoint than what we saw on Bell Street so we but we have that in the works we're getting started on that right now so and then moving forward some of the other projects of course Chadbourne that was up there of course we can't do anything from Avenue Avenue al out to out to the loop on that signature because that still belongs to the to the state that still wants to take start but from Avenue L all the way back up to 43rd Street is on our priority list it within our funding list we have through the downtown area worked with it received a text out grant working with Rick and some of the other groups community groups tears downtown sanae's locos in DC those groups funding for

[1:20:39] that downtown area to really make that a showcase coming into downtown sanae's Lo and then of course from the loop back up north we're looking at there's gonna be some extensive water line in underground infrastructure that's gonna be needed on from loop up to about 14th or 19th and then from there it's gonna really kind of lighten up and be more of a mill and overlay project from that area but again working through those issues now or working through the design issues now and hopefully follow up and have that ready to go some some of those sections ready to go for before too long the downtown section of course I believe Regan and Sandra and some of the others are working on looking at other grant opportunities to help get the get the funding necessary to do that downtown area so that that area might take a little longer but the rest of what we're gonna go ahead and and start pushing forward and get the designs out and get them bid out so going going on from there and of course other things that are in design right now we've started the sunset Sunset Drive we started yet rehabilitation never designed for it looking at we have look at some of the other ones here that we've got we've got a lot of them out there going on right now in the design Johnson Street Avenue into Sherwood way for rehab on that one as well to looking at that and then of course Jackson Street right there from Knickerbocker from Knickerbocker back to the railroad tracks that area right there where the new chick-fil-a went in and the and the Taco Bell in that area right there where we've seen such a heavy increase in traffic right there and we've actually got some significant road failure coming into that intersection right there so got the design work going on that as well too so that kind of takes us into through our year 3 funding and into our year five planning for funding and then of course you know we still

[1:22:41] have the ten year plan looking further out than that but that kind of gets us where we are right now today and what we're doing and and how we're moving forward with eighty million dollars ten year plan and so the question mark is at the end of the ten years is the 80 million dollar debt paid off at the end of the ten years is that how it's been budgeted or is 80 million dollar payoff longer than the ten years and then what happens at year 10 because obviously the concept or the conversation about road construction never ends it's always an ongoing so we should never believe that the end of the ten year we Road works done we can move on because it's not and so there's a plan from year ten to year 22 be done but how's the debt planned relative to budgeting we typically issue debt on a 20-year issue so we'll take 20 years from the date of the issuance to pay off the debt issue that said as that debt is paid off year after year it does free up capacity in our debt service so that if the council in ten years did still find straits up to be a priority we could say we can implement another ten-year cycle given what capacity we have at that time because I don't think the streets will ever not be a priority it's part of what a municipality must do but we need to understand the debt and how long it's planned out 20 years so even though this is a ten-year plan the debts of 20-year financial obligation ideally we would work into our annual budget and amount for reconstruction but right now we talked about focus we need to focus and catch up on the streets issues and hopefully in 20 or 30 years this organization would have a larger annual commitment to reconstruction and then also when we start looking at the future 10 years down the road I'm very hopeful that we've done enough

[1:24:42] especially with the comp the bell band our sales tax revenue used to really start growing their revenue that we can actually pour into those projects in the future as well so that's thank you Tommy I don't want to scare you but to answer your question while ago with within the the Fugro study that we had completed in 2015 it they in 2015 when they came back with her study to get us to get the city of San Angelo up to a pavement index score of 80 would was gonna take over five hundred million if we spent five hundred million that day that day that's been three years gross so it just keeps growing because after at that point that point yes so as the streets get older guess what you know some of them start crumbling and it's no longer a maintenance issue now it's a reconstruction it's a reconstruction I think it's time to take a break what do you think item number three on those five priorities that we had and that's the police station I'd like to invite the chief up here just to kind of have a general discussion about that I will tell you that prior chief and our discussions had mentioned a police station where there was new refurbished to the tune of about forty million dollars and that's not what we're talking about today but we do want to have a general discussion to kind of have an idea of where we may be going in the future good morning mayor good morning council since 26 we need to move along that's kind of a sore subject mayor with all due respect like the city manager mentioned since 2016 I've had the opportunity to speak with each one of you as far as my concerns or why I did not want to proceed with a bank building one of those that back in that

[1:26:45] time was our economy and the cost of 38 million to remodel and 40 million to build new also it been my desire to increase our manpower and strength according to the FBI standards for about 20 to 25 officers below where we need to be and have a competitive salary with that being said within the next couple weeks we will occupy the second story of the bank building which will allow our main police facility a little little breathing room and also parking it will be a cost savings measure as well some of our auxilary buildings will be able to vacate one being the building at 5:05 south contour chatter excuse me also with that being said I've had the opportunity you've had the opportunity to tour our facility to PD which was built basically in 1960 I think we all agree at some point in time that we do need a new police facility it is outdated and we're basically putting band-aids on it at this point Michael Dane has formed the committee with several council members in the mayor and several other directors in the department we're beginning discussions now on a police building I believe the top priority at this point would be actual finding a location as my goal personally four to seven years for a new facility so any any questions with that being said thank you we appreciate your honesty and your game plan well that's it as far as the chief as he mentioned four to seven years would be the the plan we do have we still have a listed up there is a top five priority at this point we may want to consider taking a look at that maybe removing that for now and considering it in the future maybe a couple years down the road that we could take a look at that but we may want to look at it and say we can replace that with something else that we may consider as a higher priority that we want to

[1:28:48] address immediately so with that said I'd like to go ahead and vitaly's some marli up here to discuss the fourth priority that we had with your salaries Lisa good morning mayor council city manager we've got some handouts coming around so that everybody can kind of go along with me my the goal that I'm to talk about is salaries and during the last budget discussions last year the council expressed the interest in this year having our salary increases connected to performance evaluations and as I mentioned at the time obviously performance evaluations we do every year anyway so that would not be an issue for us but I wanted to spend today to kind of go over that process with you so that you could understand how we do our performance evaluations this year is not a year that we will be doing a salary survey so as part of our strategic planning I just thought the performance evaluation process would be more critical for the discussion new employees must be on the payroll each year by March 31st in order to be eligible to receive an evaluation the policy requires that employees have at least 6 months on the job to be evaluated the evaluation period starts on October 1st and it runs through September 30th and the evaluations are typically done in the month of September so there are 310 different job categories that we have in the city and those are spread across all of the departments that we have now when the evaluations were originally created you can imagine that it was difficult to

[1:30:52] come up with a single form that would apply across all departments and so our focus was to create employee core values there are ten of them and that is on handout one that went around the room these ten values we decided were critical and important to the city function no matter what department you're in and no matter what job you performed so those core values are consistently reviewed as supervisors go through their evaluation and there are three different categories of evaluations for different groups of employees the first one is for our general employees the second one is for our supervisors and professionals and in the third evaluation is for managerial and executives those are your handouts two three and four you'll probably recognize the form it's very similar to the one that you do on the city manager each year but the categories of review and the types of things that they're looking for in those jobs is completely different jobs are then appropriately matched to the applicable performance evaluation depending on their title and the requirements for their jobs and I've listed those in handouts five six and seven it gives you the list of which jobs are considered general employees which ones are supervisors and professionals and which ones are managerial and executive now supervisors will score each supervisor using a score of below expectations meets expectations or exceeds expectations then at the end of each evaluation there's an overall score that the supervisor would grant to that employee typically a meets expectation receives one percentage you know some percentage and then the exceeds receives a different percentage and then obviously if an employee gets a below expectations they do not receive a

[1:32:57] pay raise this I also want to mention is only for our non civil service employees this does not apply to fire and police those civil service employees although they do get an evaluation their pay increase is not subject to their performance now should an employee get an overall score of below expectations they are placed on what we call employment or probation for performance and they are placed on probation for three months so for October November and they are given new goals to achieve in order to bring their performance up and then in January of each year anybody that got a below gets another evaluation if it continues to be below expectations then they're terminated at that point if they have raised their performance level then they would receive whatever pay increase was entitled to them based on their score but starting in January not retroactively the other thing that I passed around in handout number eight is a distribution of scores that goes back ten years and shows you how the evaluations have fared how many people have gotten meets how many have gotten exceeds how many have gotten below for each year generally speaking about two-thirds of employees historically received meets and only one-third receives exceeds so that is everything that I wanted to tell you about the evaluation process and certainly if you have any questions on that I could answer them but your last handout is on the federal minimum wage since we're just talking about our strategic planning it's something that's on my radar you know there is still a bill floating around and the federal government and the Senate side that they're talking about raising the minimum wage and you know we just need to make I wanted you to understand how many folks we have at the different

[1:35:00] lower levels so that you could know that if something changes with that we will need to make some adjustments right now the federal minimum wage is 725 an hour that is also the minimum wage for our part times temporary seasonal people and those the ranges for our temporary seasonals go from 725 to $9 an hour for our regular full-time employees the minimum range is 1061 an hour so you know if they raise it to $10 an hour it's not going to have a huge effect but if they go much over that we would certainly have to address that but even that they would probably do that over a series of years typically when they raise the federal even if they raise it to 10 that's over 2 or 3-year so it's it escalates per year not dramatically in one year yes up next I want to invite John James up here to give us a an update on the development process so John thank you I just wanted to go through real quickly kind of an update on where we are I just wanted to first mention we do now have some building permits that are online you could go on today on the city's website and apply for and not only apply for but pay for and get your permit you don't have to even come into the office for any reason for these I know that's a fairly short list but those are live now and have been for for about a month now because of that software package we bought that we've been working on installing so this is part of that that's correct software so these finally are online yes that list and and I think the next slide after this one I'll talk about some more that are rolling out some as early as

[1:37:01] next week as I mentioned we are now able to take electronic payments right now that's just four that's just by credit card over on the right the future the accounts receivable that is something that the software will do but we're working with the software company that's kind of a change that has to apply citywide not just to our building permits software but then we we do have a lot of builders that are on an account basically they charge it to their account and then pay at the end of the month right now the software is not able to do that but if they want to pay with a credit card they can go ahead and do that now we're also sending out now email notifications of an approved permit so once your permits approved if you have an email registered with us you get a notification the same with a completed inspection they no longer have to wait and call in and say hey did you is my inspection done they can get an email that that has been completed by plumbing yes that's any individual inspection is created in fact something I mentioned to you at the last update all of our building inspectors now have iPhones in the field and when they complete an inspection it automatically sends it back the way it used to work is they would note it all down on paper when they came back into the office either right before lunch or at the end of the day all that be entered now it's just done straight that it gets reported immediately we are working on scheduling inspections right now you do have to call in to say hey you know my Plumbing's ready I need an inspection we're working on being able to do that online as well I'm frame if I call in today in need of a plumbing inspection do I anticipate two days or three days out now if you call in and morning you will 90 plus percent of the time you'll get inspection that afternoon if you call in the afternoon it will be the following morning the only times that's not true is if an inspectors log is already full of inspections which doesn't happen that frequently that we can't squeeze in one or two more it's

[1:39:04] kind of a regular regular thing but that's the only case where you'd be pushed if you called this morning that if you're not this afternoon you would definitely be first on the line tomorrow morning we do have some applications that are rolling out those three subdivision Platts utility plans and site plans is actually a big one that's the that's the first step in the building permit for commercial plans those three should all be rolling out on Monday of next week and then we're looking at June for communication tower zoning and River corridor and historic applications being available online as well I should add that right now we already have all of our applications online you can download them most of them you can fill out online and email in but you still have to come in to pay and and do the other things with what this is doing is allowing all to be done electronically of course we'll still be doing it you know believe it or not there are some old-fashioned folks that we work with that they're not going to do this and don't have any intent to you can still walk in paper application and plans you'll be able to do that as well pterence in their plane and it's incorrect to you writer wasting it right back and then they have to correct it and send it back to you yes I think that's on this next slide some of the things that we've some of the improvements we've made over the last year or so that second bullet there's streamlined completeness checks and then better communication of what's missing and so we the very first thing we do is a completeness check and if we don't have all the information on the application we need then that is sent back to the applicant along with communication of okay here's here are the things that are missing that's one of the things we've identified and we've made improvements on better identification not just turning it back and saying hey you don't have everything we need but giving them a point-by-point list here are the things that are

[1:41:05] missing and what we would need and those turnarounds are really quick on the completed something I've mentioned in the past one of the reasons we've implemented this completeness check is in the past people who had submitted applications that weren't complete we're holding up people whose applications were so now if you want your applications complete you go straight to review if it's incomplete you're basically put on hold so you're not holding up other people while we're waiting on your additional information one of the things this designated staff stays with the project from application to occupancy in the past one of the things we've done once plans were reviewed and complete it was kind of passed on to building permits and inspections and our development services staff sort of was hands-off at that point what we've started doing is identifying a staff person that would follow that project all the way through one of the things we found with the certificate of occupancy is builder developer will be going along and we won't hear much from them they'll get there regular inspections from a plumbing mechanical electrical but then all of a sudden like on a Wednesday they'll call and say hey our Grand Opening is scheduled for Friday and you know we never we never knew that so we're trying to keep on top of these better and better communicate with them so that we're not surprised by something like that because you know if they have a issue with the fire marshal or a plumbing issue that they have to resolve you know you really can't do that between Wednesday and Friday and so we want to try to avoid those circumstances where they're saying the city's holding us up from our grand opening and a lot of times I would argue that that's not our doing it's it's their doing and waiting so late to contact us but in any case we're trying to head that off so that we have fewer issues like that come up this is something I've presented to you all the last two or three years the highlight there is the average review time this is for commercial plan reviews

[1:43:08] in 2015 we brought that down to nineteen days I think before that it was 25 to 35 days on average for plan reviews 2016 we dropped that average plan review to 13 days and then last year in 2017 that average plan review is nine days so we've continued to make progress on ensuring that those plan reviews occur on a timely basis I will say that I'll be surprised if next year's report is this good I think nine days we're getting to the point where that's about as quicker turnaround as as we can we can do and so I think we've at least in terms of these commercial plan reviews I think we've gotten to the point we wanted to get to go back on it says revisions required you know 2015 was 25% now it's up to 35% can you talk through that yeah I think some of that is we've it's kind of a double-edged sword we've started doing a better job of a full completeness check and so in the past when we would review it it looked like everything was there we would pass it on to the reviewer but then the reviewer would maybe find some addition things that they still needed to make their review and so by doing those more thorough completeness checks the end result is more of them are getting rejected at the beginning rather than a little bit later in the process is that 35% still within the nine days because that becomes the issue so the first review was nine days then there's X amount of revisions required so 35% of the things are rejected because they need more things and what does that add to the time frame well two things with that one is the the nine days for the completeness review that's usually a day or two and so we know real quickly if we've got everything we need and that gets turned back to them so that's not it's not taking an on days and then

[1:45:09] another nine days the the other thing is the way we count those days is when it's in our hands so once we tell them hey we're missing X Y or Z we stop the clock and basically that's not counting against us if we're waiting on them because sometimes they'll provide what we're missing the next day we had one case where they were waiting on a fema determination on a floodplain issue it took them five months that's that's not their fault it's not our fault but again we don't think it's a fair comparison if we included that five-month wait on in our review time so we only count the days that we have it actively under review and so once when you save revisions require 35% that means that we they can't start working on it because of the revisions required but a lot of that's because their paperwork wasn't correct to begin with that's why they were surprised at what they had to do I think it's some of both I mean it could be you know that it could be they didn't submit us a complete set of plans it could be as simple as we had a zoning application yesterday for example that they didn't ride in what the zoning district they wanted to go to was so planner called them up and said hey wouldn't what do you want the zoning district to be added that to the application and you know in a matter of literally hours it was complete in other cases you know they're not providing an engineering report that's required by state law to to be with a building plan and that might mean they go back engineer and it takes some weeks before they can resubmit are we having a lot of issues with people starting the project etc and then something comes up oh we forgot to tell you you need to do this as well does that happen a lot because I still hear that a lot I don't believe it's happening a lot I will say one of the things I'm gonna get to in a future slide but I guess I'll go and talk about it now is we're trying to encourage more

[1:47:13] consultations and DRC's we call them development review committee where we encourage people to come in as early as possible and say hey here's what I want to do what are the steps I'm gonna have to go through and we find that people who go through those processes have many fewer problems of being surprised by something because we had everybody in the room from building planning fire marshal engineering you know everybody who's involved with the project and identify all the different things they need to be thinking of when we find that that happens with projects it's typically when they haven't come to us beforehand but they just walk in drop off an application and and that's it so we have seen a pretty big increase in the number of projects that are coming through those consultations which is basically a pre development meeting and we've had good success with that so I think it's helping quite a bit but we do still have cases where unfortunately sometimes we're trying to do better at answering questions people should ask sometimes unfortunately we're just answering the question they asked and if they don't ask the right questions we may not even know that they're doing something and it's only when they tell us oh by the way we're you know we're gonna be doing X Y or Z at this property that's when we say oh well that adds some additional things that that we didn't tell you before I mean I mean I'm not our staff we're not perfect so location they will miss those things but I see that a lot they actually there's something that they're they're building and then our inspector goes out and they're like okay well this isn't on the plan and so then we tell them okay well no you have to do this because you've constructed differently or it's those kind of things that usually result in a a change we always require a fence to be put around a construction project I actually don't know the answer of that I don't I don't think we always do but I think in certain circumstances fencing is required a lot of times they'll just

[1:49:17] do it for their own either safety or security they you know there are some if it's for instance you may see in the downtown area where there's a public right-of-way next to it and it's a multi-story building and things could fall on to where people so there are requirements depending on the scenario but like a building a single-family home they don't have to it doesn't sound like it's really in a bad sight one would require it not typically like just a new restaurant going in they wouldn't be required to fence the perimeter unless there's some unique circumstance of the pad is so close to it I don't know we'd have to look at but most likely no roughen expect inspection or one inspector comes out and says you need to do a B and C and then I do a B and C and I call in for another check a different inspector comes out because the other first one might be tied up a B and C are good but D and E need to be completed now what is the occurrence that we're running to with the thing we identified probably a couple years ago and I think the incidence of that is down one of the things we did was we have a staff person and building inspections that one of her primary jobs is to coordinate the consistency of inspections and so she'll ride around with the different inspectors and see how they do different types of inspections to try to get that level of consistency where if it's Spectre a is inspecting your inspector B you're getting told the same thing so I think we've made significant improvement honestly I don't know how often something like that happens my sense is that that's down significantly from what it maybe was yeah and as I've experienced just very recent and I think we have we have different responses in some cases you know if if you were told you have to do X Y Z we'll say okay that's that's good you did it and you're

[1:51:21] done in some cases our inspectors will just miss something and if it's if we consider a critical health safety issue we're not going to just let it slide I mean it's if it's an ordinance requirement it's unfortunate if we missed it but it's it's still something that has to be done now I will say in some circumstances I've dealt with it's because of what they changed well if you changed X Y & Z that created well that moved this to close to something else and so this outlet had to be moved too and it was never identified but only because originally it was okay but when they changed this thing it necessitated a change to that other thing so that sometimes happens too and some of the complaints I've heard of well they told me something they didn't tell me the first time it was that circumstance where it it was kind of a cascade effect some of the things we're looking at right now a development newsletter I think Aaron handed you a copy of this is kind of our first annual report this is for 2017 we want to do those quarterly that quarterly report will end up being a little more detailed slide I didn't have time to read it all yeah okay so I think we're gonna replace what now you sometimes get is our monthly report with this that has a little more information and the the quarterly reports will be a little more numbers heavy than than this one but a lot of the same information you're getting but in a more readable format they've done that the other report you got was basically a dump out of the HTE system so it wasn't as easy to put it in a readable friendly format so what they're doing now I think you'll like better if you have suggestions too that we can tweak it some more say plants I'm angela develops it's pretty straightforward you know how to get there and what to look for so and one of the things we're working on is some

[1:53:26] better training materials and including our development handbook that's going to have checklists and flowcharts we find that the developers that you know say lows or Walmart's coming in well they know what they're doing they and and our processes are very similar to every other cities and so we don't have as much of an issue with them but it's the first time someone a homeowner just wants to build an addition or mom-and-pop business is opening a business for the first time and they you know they need a little more help stepping through the process we think this development handbook will help with that with clear checklists and flowcharts that show people what steps need to be taken to get through the process you know one of the things that I would hope that we do on a regular basis is to make sure everyone in the planning area understands that developers and our clients if you will aren't the enemy in fact they're our future and what we want to do is to make sure that everybody understands that the people who come to the planning area have to do this and it's not something we allow that not to do they have to do it so we're already forcing them to do something that they kind of walk in with sometimes with them can't believe I'm having to do this I know what I'm doing on the other hand we need to make sure we understand that if we're forcing it and we are because it's the rules and regulations that we make sure they don't feel like we've made them the enemy right that's why our future planning economic development growth property tax base is so important and we want to make sure people continue to do it without the frustrations of saying I'd never do it again based off of the process and what I had through I want that conversation to end sure and I think a lot of the things we've done have moved us in that direction and I think I mean that's that's definitely our goal is to make sure that people walk away I mean I don't know that we're gonna make him happy but at least we don't want to make him mad

[1:55:27] yeah that's with that if she gets complaints she brings those to us and we can answer those questions if it's something that we have done wrong and we need to change we work to do that if not we try to explain it to the person where they understand so if you get any of those don't hesitate to let us know Aaron also helps us with that so please send them our way because we want to accomplish the last thing I'll mention is a few things that we've been talking with our development task force which is a every other month meeting we have with the development community we're looking I'm been meeting with the county on looking at the ETJ one of the things the county would like to see and I think we're supportive of is defining some areas of the ETJ where they can control development versus where we do right now we apply our subdivision regulations throughout the entire three-mile ETJ so three miles out from the city limits we think there are some areas where we concede that authority back to the county but that that has an impact on our annexation plan and valerie's of our ETJ and so you'll be seeing that sometime in the next few months do we have on a priority list or do we wait to things happen to change like this is we believe this ETJ area is probably gonna be the next one that we would consider bringing in versus another one versus another you know I mean because some of these things like the one that came up not long ago you know it might be 30 years before it's even considered to bring in and that particular one that we had the four issues that were being addressed probably won't ever be brought in because most people will fight that because they want to be in the wall school district Britt from who I had to do this once before and so school districts remain so we have currently areas in in the city limits over by grand canal over in that area that are in the wall school district that are in city limits so that they do run independently that doesn't mean they

[1:57:29] won't fight it because they just don't want to be in city limits for no I'm just saying but school district and those don't change no I know my point is is the fine that is that particular development most of the people who buy the homes there when a bond there because they want it to be in the walls School District of which it is currently and so the idea that would be pulled back in to your point into the city limits which would make them pay city taxes right and that's one of the factors we're looking at the Red Creek area north of town for example that's almost developed it's so far out there that we likely won't annex it if ever not in the near term and so that's an example of a place that we've already identified as pulling out of the ETJ and if development if moderate redevelopment happens out there the county can deal with that and and we don't have to worry about it so again that's something you'll be seeing street standards and sidewalks is something that the development community is asked talk to us about I'm going over the detail I can talk for two hours on just that but that's something that you know our sidewalk for example our sidewalk requirement right now is like two sentences in the subdivision ordinance so it's we could use more clarity both for our perspective and from the developer's perspective so they've asked us to take a look at that now will probably be recommending a more robust sidewalk requirement than some of the developers but that's where you all will come in and help us decide what's the right answer for San Angelo and finally we'll continue to work with Allen adopting the 2015 building codes you've seen some of those and adopted them already he's working with his committees and builders and contractors and the rest of those will be coming throughout this year our bike lanes considered quote sidewalks they're not typically bike lanes are designated for bicycles

[1:59:31] and pedestrian generally are not supposed to be using this because where we have neighborhoods where there are no sidewalks but there are now designated bike routes I think they're going to become the sidewalk substitutions and I think that's probably true one of the issues with street standards is we have water street standards than most of our peer cities as we research that the logic behind that was our streets used to be narrower there was a sidewalk proposal for a sidewalk ordinance and what the council at that time decided was rather than requiring sidewalks and new development will just make the roads water and people can walk at the edge of the road that's not a solution that most cities have chosen in fact I don't know a single other city that's done it that way so part of our proposal would be to go back to narrower street standards that saves the developer money it also saves us long term maintenance when we go into sealcoat it's cheaper to sealcoat a 36 foot wide street than a 40 foot wide stream but in exchange for that we're gonna be looking at on those narrower streets starting to require sidewalks more in new development well you don't have an easy job and I think that you've worked awfully hard to help improve this process and I don't think you'll ever make a hundred percent of the people happy but I certainly think you've done a great job of making it a much more friendly open process and I thank you for the hard work answer to your fencing questions that Charlie sent me an email and says that the code requires safeguards during construction it states barrier along walkways for safety of pedestrians and then also stormwater typically requires a fencing barrier for the the debris runoff and the fencing ordinance requires screening

[2:01:35] for a commercial use of district from a residential so it kind of depends on the scenario any other questions for John before we move on so those were that's an update on the five priorities that were established previously again its water streets police station salaries and development process we've had these for quite a while now actually for about four years as our top five priorities so we may want to take a look at we've made tremendous progress really in the development processes this may be another one that we kind of pull from the top five and to make room for another two that we could possibly consider in there as well but with that what I like to do is start talking about possible new strategic priorities that could be included on these instead of a couple of these include them the top five so I want to move on to is to talk about others that I mentioned just briefly AWOL ago while I was doing my introduction and three that I have listed on there the first one starts off with a downtown development and as we talked about sales tax revenues economic develop and in growing that in the future I wanted to make sure that we were addressing the that aspect of it and there's three port parts of it that really addresses the Downtown Development and one of those we're already working on and John James and working with vacant buildings ordinance he along with downtown San Angelo dela others Fire Marshall I've been working on that and you'll probably be seeing that in next month's City Council meeting will they'll be bringing that forward for discussion and for your direction as well but another one has popped up we just go back to that in just one minute because it says vacant buildings but one of the big issues we're working on is dangerous buildings because there's a difference between a vacant building and a dangerous building and so that policy

[2:03:39] will address those separately because that becomes a big issue is the dangerous aspect and what we need to do for that so again that is something that's being looked at very closely that you'll be seen coming before you the next item as well was a Tears consideration at one point a couple years back City Council was looking at combining different boards and and kind of limiting the number of boards that we had out there available so one of the things that we did is we kind of eye two different boards which was the tears and the Downtown Development Group as well so it was combined together and it was supposed to work to address not just the tears issues but also development at downtown actually what's happened is that the tears group kind of took this other group in we did come up with it with different boards Harry you were you were here along with Lucy the issue that's developed from that though is they're addressing all the tears issues but what's been left out in the cold there's been the development part of it so we wanted to take a look at the possibility of Santa Kate do we need a do we need a different board or a different group that can address a development and allow tears strictly to address tears issues or are we okay with the way it is I think at this point is something that we definitely want to make sure we discuss to make sure that we are leveraging our downtown as much as we possibly can as far as development so I wanted to kind of open that open that up for discussion well first of all tears was created very specifically to address the the tax increment refinanced funds and the projects that would be funded by that that is singularly the reason it was created the Downtown Development Board was really a board that was created that created several other issues and one of the big issues is is that you already have a downtown San Angelo Inc group that is responsible for the Downtown Development so what I think needs to be

[2:05:45] done is we clean the slate and make sure the tears people do what the tears board was created to do downtown San Angelo Inc which was created and does Downtown Development stay pure to those focuses we don't need one overlapping the other I mean it's real clean it's a clean break and I think it needs to stay clean and you know having a third group with which has already been done away with and so the tears needs to be the tears group it deals with tax increment refinance zone and the projects that will be selected to be funded by that board and that in itself is its own Downtown Development improvements I don't disagree with you one thing I that I want to make sure that we do is to make sure that that link is between the downtown inc group and this particular group sitting here is solid I know as long as Europe you're in the mayor's position that's going to be solid but we need to make sure that that happens beyond your time and beyond Del's time so that we can make that relationship stronger than it is today so I think that was the original intent of trying to combine those two groups but I think you're right we really should take a look at the responsibility of the Tears group on one side and making sure that we allow the development for downtown to be done by those individuals that that's their that's their life is it but we also want to make sure that somehow or other we keep those liaisons whether it's the person that's in my position whether it's somebody that comes after you whatever that needs to be we need to make sure that that relationship is

[2:07:47] there because at some point in time you and Dell are both going to be not not in the position just like people sitting at this table won't always be here so it's one of the reasons why we have these key strategic planning sessions so that we as a council can agree on the focus and then we ensure that through the reports quarterly or if we want more frequently than quarterly to report to the council so that we as a council whether any of us are sitting here or not that there's follow-up and consistency with we believe as a city and a council and I think these are the programs we support and and like I think there was some some concern from people that were previous to me previous to most of the council maybe even previous to Lucy that were concerned that that wasn't happening and that's why they tried to two groups together well that there were different reasons for that but let's just say the fine we need tears to do tears work downtown to do their work and for both of them to report and get the support of council and make sure that those groups are supporting the issues that we the council believe take us to the strategic level that we want to achieve thank you Marian I don't believe that the tears group as far as in their meetings that they haven't addressed since the the groups have been combined they really haven't address any development issues whatsoever it's all been tears related funding type of projects so again when you're started to start taking a look at that are we really doing the downtown justice by having those combined and really not addressing development whatsoever no I think again it needs to be pure tears does the original tears work downtown San Angelo Inc if you look at what a Main Street City does it is Downtown Development and most of the people who come to look at developing projects in downtown come to the Downtown Development Office for that resource and for the information of which Harry

[2:09:51] because this is his district is very involved in that process and he through the downtown organization bring the subject matters as they need to be to counsel well I have to agree that where were we that relationship is better today then it evidently was previous to my time on the council because I'm hearing from both the city and from Dell that we we are making progress we are and that's because you've you've made a decision to be very involved and understand the need and and the impact it has so thank you for that mara well there could be other zones around the city could there not for for funding potential using the tax increment well we would have to expand you talked about expanding the boundaries of the tiers well not necessarily this but what if what if we see a part of town that is beginning to grow does the Planning Department suggest well maybe this would be a good spot for an additional tiers zone for that particular man is that something that this group would be looking at or is this only within there and remember when you created two tiers own that money comes out your general fund so there you know you it's a catch-22 is because you can create one let's say in southwest San Angelo but when you do that whatever those increased tax appraisals are it's going to be wiped out of our general fund and so that's a consideration and tiers boards are created for specific regions with specific rules and regulations relative to who can be on that board because of the involvement in making decisions about that to your zone so I'm wondering is this is this a tool that we have

[2:11:55] because it seems to me it may be until we have at our disposal for economic development future economic development which then to me creates another conversation with respect to is it this tiers group or do we need a and I'm not suggesting we do I'm merely asking questions no I understand that well and tell me the other issue you have to realize on tears is there's very specific rules and regulations in terms of what can become tears for example of if it's a strong residential development you cannot create a two-year zone it's got to have a large percentage of commercial development otherwise you can't create a Tears own and then hence you know I would think the Planning Department then if they're gonna you know and it might be one of those things that's ten years out but they start saying wow we've got this is looking like do we need to then talk about having it might not be this group at all of it sits here but create but is that something we need to be concerned with today well I mean typically when you look at a tear zone you're gonna do an evaluation to determine the actual benefit to the city so if you look at a tear zone of course will capture the base amount but it's mentioned in there mentioned a while ago the incremental amount as far as the values or be going up in the future the city won't see that other the tears the tears group will so well we would have to take a look at is we evaluate to determine the future benefit to the community we're gonna be for going on a general fund at certain amount an incremental amount but if we do that are we leveraging more in sales tax and economic development in the future so that would be it would have to be taken a look at as well tell me but at this point as a mayor mentioned a while ago anytime of tears is is established I think a lot of times businesses that are located in the tears don't realize that those incremental amounts go directly to the businesses in that area and it benefits them directly and it benefits the city but again those are amounts aren't going into the general fund we want to do everything we possibly can to leverage those monies

[2:13:56] and in the future get a bigger return than we would have off of those incremental amounts that they went up and that's the type of evaluation we would have to take a look at and see if there's actually a benefit to the city and also it can't be 80 percent residential that's right its commercial and so it's the other reason when we looked at trying to extend the southern tier zone down to the new Walmart part of the issue is the zigzag you would have to create in that in order to eliminate the residential to get your right relationship between commercial and residential it's not a clean line this tear zone was a pretty clean line because of where the Walmart was created in the Chadbourne street and you could look at the large number of commercial businesses and that's allowed that tear zone to be created well that said no in theirs as far as our ordinance and bylaws were changed in the past you know to create this combination of these two different boards really it would be a matter of just looking at the ordinances and the bylaws and changing the wording again to make sure that we are addressing tiers separately and development separately to get that focus back in there as well so we really want to just go back to the original tiers documents we will what we would do is go back in there go back to it and kind of take a look at when we actually combine them it'd be probably as easy and Brian could probably talk to you a little bit more as easy as to separating it and going back to how we added and designating who would be handling that development portion of as well but City Council members if you're okay with us taking a look at that well unless you have some type of I'm not asking for a vote that's for sure but if you have a concern just let me know but at this point I think that a focus on development would be really important for us with that and I don't want to go into more too much detail I know the Edgewater property is up there and it had some discussions on that I will tell you that when we did the Downtown Development master plan study with Paris Rutherford when he came in and did the

[2:15:57] study we did determine that we were about six hundred units short in the downtown area for creating the foot traffic necessary to give a boost to the downtown what that said mr.brother fer to talk to us about possibly doing something there in that area to create living space he has sense a you know kind of abandoned that that project but we are looking at a way to continue moving forward with a maybe a similar project a project that would bring more living units to the downtown area or other projects but I just wanted to make sure that on our end that we maintain a focus on developing that Edgewater property which has been sitting there for quite a while we have addressed it in the as a council to see what we would want like to do or see happen in that area and it just has never come to fruition but we are at a point right now what we do have some interest on in that property that would create additional units or a living space that would create that foot space in the downtown area I just want to have kind of a general discussion on that see if y'all are still open to that or if you're you're looking at a different direction so we can kind of talk about that and make sure that we're not getting conflicting as far as support for different projects I just want to make sure we maintain a good focus moving forward I want I want to develop it and I want I want to make sure that we have something that blends with the rest of the neighborhood and reflects the historic nature across the river so I'm willing to go start going forward with this this project and I'd like to get it done in my lifetime I think we need to be more defined than that okay I figured okay I've got that long left I'm moving it up for years one of the key issues and for all of you who were not involved

[2:18:10] in the earlier discussions with the Paris Rutherford development was that one of the reasons that it was not considered the right project at the right time was not because of the downtown living opportunities the number one phone call the number one issue that everybody talks about is downtown living and we truly believe that when the Roosevelt Hotel is completed it will be a catalyst for much other development downtown and I know many of you got to see the details to which the Roosevelt Hotel is going to be developed and I think it's really exciting but the big issue is to make sure that the Edgewater in becomes low density housing it must be low density no high-density and the reason for that is the following if you create high density which means apartment complexes on that property what you end up doing is negatively impacting the high-rise buildings in the downtown area for development so the idea vision for this is that you would have low density meaning townhouses duplexes on the Edgewater end property and that you would convert high-rise buildings into apartment living and that they would be the apartment living strategy the others would be townhouse and duplex type of living which would match the neighborhoods to the south strategically that is the downtown San Angeles vision and if you talk to developers they will tell you that that is in synched with what should happen isn't has happened in other like cities yes ma'am when we had the developers here presenting opportunities for housing affordable housing I didn't sense that there was a lot of support for creating affordable housing in the Trimble Baker area so if we need more footprint for you know downtown living why do you think there

[2:20:16] wasn't more support for a particular process I'll tell you why specifically was because of the focus of that specific project it wasn't affordable housing in the big picture there will be projects that come before council that will be strictly affordable housing projects this one was a project that was specific towards elderly senior living mm-hmm affordable housing on the other hand and the big picture can be people who are 25 years of age who are 30 years of age was 35 years of age they just happened to make X amount of income this project was for elderly and seniors it wasn't affordable housing at all ages okay and that was the reason and the resistance behind it and what we're looking for are affordable housing opportunities for a broad range of people so we just didn't think elderly citizens 55 and older would be contributors to the downtown area as well I mean yes ma'am and one of the issues if you talk to them about it was that you know in their original concept they weren't even really talking about parking so you're already talking about people who probably and their focus and in other projects perhaps didn't have cars or were not that mobile so those were the reasons and when you took a look at the profile of that that was the issue but affordable housing is still a very important strategy for downtown development and you know there would be some receptivity to affordable housing because it wasn't restricted to elderly and you probably will see in the next two years some affordable housing projects come to council but the focus will be again for the very broadest

[2:22:18] range of citizens and that's what we're looking for is the broad range that got some resistance in your district Billie I think I think if you have that type of project where you could look at those 25 26 year-old kids in that area that are entering in into professional life whether they're firefighters police officers bank tellers any of those other things that you're looking for but they're just starting out in their lives where they're they need that that extra help to get into someplace good to live and we you know we true personally I mean it's not about elderlies and seniors cuz heck I'm getting there so it's not about that but it's really about looking at the broad range and making sure that you know really what you want living downtown are people who work and live town and if you look at the age group and the work and lift concept walk to work eat that's what we're looking for for Downtown Development and I think that initially when we looked at the six hundred some-odd units that would be built there in the in the Edgewater property and other campus area as well that what I was gonna be a dance you know as far as the unit's living space so the question there in the mirror raised a really valuable point is that we do have all these high higher high rise buildings where there's loft space available there as well the I think it's the perfect scenario would be to have living there and the Edgewater property but also distributed in the downtown area and as building spaces that we have so having those six hundred units not just located on the river but throughout the downtown area in the downtown area in those loft spaces as well so it doesn't take away from that that that possibility how do we determine the highest and best use for that we just been a study to do that property along so what did do it do do we have along

[2:24:22] the river there that we have that identified that the highest and best use for this particular parcel and that parcel and as we move up and down the river in that area we have requested proposals to see what would go in that area and we've been as far as we've been limited as far as what's come back and of course anyone that's willing to invest in our community it's gonna be looking at their benefit as well you know they're gonna be looking for a way to not just and help the city but also benefit from that and at this point when you look at the highest and best use you may want to consider other projects but who's gonna be the investor that's gonna come in and do that we haven't had those opportunities with anyone else come in and say hey we want to develop something other than the living space we just haven't seen that yes so how long do we hold that property event how long do we leave it there and I think at this point when we look at it as possibly a catalyst and we say that a lot but I think that definitely in that area we still have the Health Foundation that have property along the river as well I think that once that develops you start seeing that also take off as well but again as far as the highest and best use to determine that a lot of times what we do is we test proposals we look at the Downtowner we look at the master the the the downtown master development plan to determine what is the highest and best use and really what came through that is that we need more living space in the downtown area when you look at it and you say how many hotels were built in the year 2014-2015 any single one of them look at the Edgewater in property for development not one as much as we ask as much as we begged as much as we said we need you know and that was before of course the pearl and the Concha was done but you know hotels have a different structure and what we know today to develop downtown and to support the businesses are down there it's down town living first and foremost request over and over again okay so that is the the first one and again we when

[2:26:25] we look at the Downtown Development Lake NASA where the development error Airport Business Park development we're looking at the future we're looking at what we can do to grow you know as far as the new business new property values that'll be in the tax rose we start looking at sales tax revenue increases I mean all that really could be a boon for everything that we're we're planning for the future moving on to the next item we had a little bit of a discussion on this when Alison was up here that's a lake nest worthy development as y'all are very well aware at this point of course sewer infrastructure is a main issue out there we cannot develop that area along with an airport Business Park actually these two could be combined together is that we just don't have the the infrastructure out there to address our needs and for that growth that we're hoping to see in the future so again that's why these two items were up there and we wanted to make sure that they were there for discussion as well and see if that's something that moving into this coming fiscal year and five years ten years down the road that we're already planning for that and maybe prioritizing that as well I think it's great you know we I I will say over and over again and Daniel you say it over and over again is taking a look at our assets and making sure that each of our assets have a plan for not only maintenance but growth helping us to create economic development for our city and we need that sustainable growth meaning that regardless of whether the oil industry is hot or not so hot or in a more neutral state that we have secured and invested in the other assets that we have that will continually bring more sales tax dollars and property tax dollars to our city and I believe strongly like Nazareth II is one of the greatest assets particularly when you're out here in West Texas having a lake is major asset and you know we often talk about the airport meaning everybody's so frustrated with the fact that we only have American Airlines we only have so many flights in and out but imagine not having an airport so what we want to do

[2:28:31] is to make sure that Airport looks important to us there are many businesses that particularly if you look at the government there are a lot of governmental agencies that want to be located on airport property which we have some of those people already talking to us and looking at those properties so we want to be able to support that growth opportunity and those are areas that will be strong for us forever the drone business is going to be good for forever border security is gonna be a business that's going to be good for forever but are we prepared to support that growth and what they need at that Airport and those are just a couple of the areas I'm think there's many other opportunities but those two are really key driving points I have these of course as I mentioned both these could be combined together but also I included also in question marks of others and of course we cover the CIP a while ago and some of the priorities that were listed by our citizens I want to open that up to discussion are there any other priorities that we should be considering aside from these that were given as an example yes and some issue some areas but we really need to make sure that we make drainage issues in the city a priority I mean two of these items on that at that five were we've pretty much done what we need to one of them with the planning department it's got a great thing anyway and we've already heard the chief say that he'd rather put off this this police station for at least a couple years so those priorities maybe we need to replace with something else but drainage issues to me is just something that we've got to do I mean it's just too many places every one of us has got an issue and I think we just need we we need a good brother a priority it's in and around the areas too that is going to impact already existing drainage issues so you know that's that you know I agree with Harry drainage drainage is something that

[2:30:34] needs told me I do want to add to that comment though any new development that's occurring of course we do have our drainage ordinance into place to address that so I shouldn't exasperate the problem any more shouldn't add to it we'll still have those issues there but any new development will take care of whatever development they're having to make sure that whatever drainage issues are there they address that so again it's not gonna make a situation worse but the problem that started will still be there so it'll just be addressed through the new development though okay so I also think we need to bleed it we need in the mayor's right on this in order for this this city to continue to be successful we need commercial development in this city if you take a look at our peer cities are our tax rate is higher than any of them and that's because their sales taxes are much greater than ours because they've got much more commercial property so we need to continue to do that so supporting what we can we can do at the airport and making sure that we've got the infrastructure ready for that I think our key we need to continue developing the other industrial park out here we've got plenty of land out there we own it we need to make sure that we get that done and I think we need to do it with a partnership with with the chamber as we go forward with this these ideas but economic development is gonna have to be a driver for us and if we don't do that then the citizens are going to suffer I mean they're the ones that were or taxing with the industrial park conversation let me just say the fine and as you've heard me say it again and planes trains and automobiles look at how much the train traffic has increased look how much Freight is being driven by trains we also own property out there on wherever the location is you know yes I talked about the airport need but there's a railroad neat as well for

[2:32:36] business development industrial park development if you take a look at the cattle industry and the meatpacking plants that exist you'll find that a large part of its coming out of this part of the world and we need cold storage we need cold storage to go on rail lines we need railroads we've got a huge need to improve to have a railroad spur if you will we need development at the railroad and we don't need to do it you know often I've North Bryant Boulevard but there is areas out there that is perfect for railroad development so yes we have an industrial park that's got a lot of land but it's a singular focus and we've missed huge opportunities in the rail business and in the airport business we're out here in West Texas we must address planes trains and automobiles all the ways that Freight gets moved or businesses require and they will say to you that if you're going to have economic development you have to be within five miles of an interstate within a certain space area between railroad and and railroad rail support we need to look at those and are those things that all of that can be afforded in today's dollars no but if we're not looking at it and we're not the council that looks forward and says we might not be able to accomplish it in the next two or three years but we better be looking at and having a game plan for where we're going down the road and this council can set that tone and we need to do it we agricultural is a huge important part of this city an agriculture probably isn't going to be based out that existing industrial park our cultural needs Rael huge amount of rail and those are economic drivers here so we want to be a council that I think is futuristic in terms of sand let's not just think about the next five years the next two years let's think about where this city needs to go down the road and

[2:34:38] make decisions today to help support the growth opportunities the economic development opportunities that those areas provide us and we will then leave a city in better hands than when we all came into office and I think that's what we want to do okay well again and thank you Mary that's I think of it definitely on point and we've had our parties the past and headed up down the screen it's longer there though we had our priorities again water streets police station employee pay and of course the development services as made some tremendous strides my proposal is that we look at police station I did talk to the chief a little while ago I went to the back and asked him chief are you ok I know that you have other priorities at this point are you ok we would remove the police station off of our priorities at this point and look at it a year two or three years down the road as we continue our planning process and then we can include it in later he said that he'd be ok with that because he has other priorities that he wants to make sure that her address so insane so with that said I want to make sure also that as we move them into the first financial bank that we have budgeted whatever monies need to be spent to make that facility appropriate for them if new carpet needs to go down we need to we need to make sure first financial is budgeted to make those offices correct ok ok I know Harry brought it up in the in the chief has prioritized the the the pay and the officers how many officers were as we talked about more development that's going to bring in more more industry more jobs more people we're already behind the 25 officers so instead of kind of taking the police station off we need to reword that and just put police there along with fire because as we bring in more development with us being behind the tax base that's gonna be created by the development it's just

[2:36:40] gonna you know get us up to where we're still twenty five behind so we need to focus on that to where we're protecting our citizens and keeping everybody safe as we go along we can't neglect that okay so that is a priority along with development because if we're gonna influx with people from outside the city and our if right now we're growing at 1% population if that jumps to five to ten within a couple years then we might be in a heck of a situation we probably will never grow at ten percent at best we might grow at 2% that being said we still need the correct number of police we do support the city so okay well I think that what we can do and on our end of course laying thanks for that as well I think that the City Council last year especially showed the the importance that the police department the police station staff I mean a police staffing is for us because we did budget for those additional of five and we want to make a commitment every year to make sure that we continue budget of that budgeting to that point we got to the offers officers that they needed out there of course the pay was an issue as well as far as addressing that but looking at again the five priorities we are I think development services or the what John James is done they'll continue working on that the reason we have five priorities up there is because it allows us to maintain a very sharp focus on those items that we'll be addressing in this coming year and years down the road so I do propose that we remove the development services off that list and move up right perhaps at this point development services that could include a course in our discussions and that's worthy the airport business the downtown the spur I mean anything has to do with developing you know the airplanes planes trains and automobiles we can include that in there y'all are okay with that and start focusing on our future to make

[2:38:43] sure that we are that base that we need to the sales tax revenues and the the new new values that we be coming in so if you're okay if y'all because this is kind of kind of what I'm hearing we all are okay whether we can include that now at number five or higher well these aren't necessary and priorities they're they're all important but but they weren't listed number one number two however I think we all agree water is probably number one regardless of whether wherever we put it it's huge in streets can you know I think the way to instead of saying streets we say infrastructure because the drain ease issue etc is all under infrastructure so we have a game plan already about redoing the streets over the next ten years so it would be a continuation of the existing street plan it would also be continue to look to correct drainage existing drainage new drainage shouldn't be an issue because new development will take care of that well in that with that South American I know that we have water we do have streets and we could call it infrastructure to include we could call this treat slash drainage and that's something that as we're working on certain streets we're looking at especially on reconstructed projects what we can do differently - maybe alleviate some of the flooding in certain areas so we could do that Street slash to cover that part of it Lane you mentioned the police instead of calling the police station calling it police police services or making sure that we safety it could be it could be that one number because safety of course we have not just the police station but also the fire department that falls under that as well so we could have Water Street / drainage a safety safety support the port would have yeah very good okay and we then we include also and remove the development services

[2:40:46] include the development I think we should have economic development as a strategic priority and underneath that will become things like developing yes so I think economic development should be a key issue here and then it always can have subcategories of existing issues but economic development one lake now is worthy to Industrial Park sewer issues etc or is that gonna fall under the the water there because you know I to me the issue with the lightness or the sewer that has impacted the airport as well does that fall under the water so we don't need a separate category we don't need a separate category Tommy the way I look at economic development as with a bullet point Lake Ness where the development we already have water up top you know and those two actually tying together because any work that we do any anything that goes before the City Council in the future that addresses those needs that we have out there we know how we actually have it as one of our top five priorities as a matter of fact in two different categories of our top five priorities so I think that'll suffice I mean telling everybody door-to-door water streets fired a police sneaky economic development was what I'm running for live just prioritized every single one on the tamerica and again and the reason we do the top five again is to keep us laser focused on those issues and make sure that anything that's going before the City Council in the future that that involves discussion about this or we should be focusing on moving items for that address these five priorities

[2:42:49] as well I'm you know I got started without taking all our notes but I was taking notes as well I think we're talking about how one thing that that was discussed this briefly as far as the update was the pay issue as well you know where do we go with that you know know that we've talked in the past by looking at a pay-for-performance and looking at how maybe we restructure that is that still something that we call a priority but we kind of reward it now and say we do want to address the pay but we want to do it in it in a different manner well you know I surveyed all the cities that we say we survey and compare ourselves to number one we have to live within our means number one and number two I say the following is that I think we have over the past few years done all the adjustments to market to get people within a range whether it was a correct range or not pay should just be something that every institution every corporation every company does just as a matter of business I don't think it should be a strategic priority it should just be what you do day in and day out you take care of your employees as their performance requires and I believe strongly that we should set aside X amount of dollars period and give it out to departments to do and they evaluate staff and based off of and exceed expectations they get a pay commensurate to what their exceed expectation would say so okay I don't know if that's clear or not clear I'm pretty muddy but we need to take care of all of our assets of which in fact employees are an asset and there's no question employees are an asset on the other hand we also need to make sure that we you know when you start taking a look at it and you start

[2:44:55] taking a look at the cities we compare ourselves to we are the lowest City the lowest City for combination of property taxes and sales taxes combined the lowest and yet we're taking everybody else's ranges of compensation and using that as our standard but where we're not at their standard we're way below them and if you take a look at Midland alone and you take a look at their sales tax revenue it's 2.5 times larger than ours odessa's is 2.16 Abilene's 1.65 I wish we had all that revenue I wish we had the sales tax dollars in the property tax dollars we do not we cannot continue to increase the percentage of our revenue to a larger number we already went up one percentage point this past year we went from 72% of our total revenues up to 73% we can't keep growing that and we've got a prioritize what we do and that should be to compensate the meats and X and exceeds expectation people at the level we can afford to do and it means that we need to make sure that we continue to support the safety aspects of our city there's a lot of needs mayor and I definitely understand where you're coming from as well I think that as we look at in I know I know that I can already see Lisa Marley's face right now she's probably got a this is the headache dealing with having too structure you know how we we look at pay in the future I do know I do understand that from from a revenue standpoint we we are one of the lowest cities when it comes to collecting revenues that other cities quite frankly don't worry about

[2:46:57] that's why when we look at recently we're looking at fees and we're comparing to other cities there are some cities that haven't changed their fees in twelve thirteen or fourteen years because they probably don't feel like they need to which for me I think it's the responsible thing to do though but regardless you see some of that because they have that additional revenue that's coming in I think that I know for a fact that our employees there are most most valuable human human resources asset that we do have and I want to do everything we possibly can to do right by them as well but that means looking at how we structure our pay in the future and that would be something that human resource Lisa and her staff would be looking at along with ourselves to bring back to the City Council but also know that we have a lot of needs that we address today and so how do we address those and how do we take care of that which is going to lead us to the next topic that we're gonna discuss but if we move on I want to make sure that we're very clear on our on or five right now you have sander did you move I'm sorry I'm a little bit blunt okay okay it's what we're discussing start on that sander but what Brian has right now is infrastructure which includes on bullets Water Street advantage and then we have a public safety number two which was watered streets is under one as waters nice way and one be if you will restructure IT what's it I guess if you can start over on that on that okay let's make sure we get it a ride so make sure that we're all in agreement on this so you ready again okay thank you ma'am infrastructure is number one with three

[2:49:00] bullets underneath that water streets and drainage development new correction of treatment of yeah so superb so number two is public safety which would include police and fire and we'll address police station in the future in the near future as we do these planning sessions will include bad next time around and see how well we are with that and and that doesn't preclude us or didn't stop us from looking at a location for that station but will so be looking for that number three was economic development which this one has several bullets there senators so you might want to have to flip the page there the bullets that we have include development services that's okay development services followed by development projects development projects commercial development and industrial okay you ready hilltop you good so those were the I mean those are the three right there actually we you so we have three that are there the main focus mayor as far as councilmembers as far as the pay part of it is that just a restructure then to focus on how we do that well I think that just you know for me it shouldn't be as strategic strategy just simply should be what we do day in and day out as part of what all

[2:51:03] corporations do you review pay you support those people who deserve pay raises it's not it's just normal business practice and that's how most cities address it and most corporations do most companies it's just what you do you want to protect your asset which are employees and do that on a year-to-year basis based off of the review of their performance they're important but it done need to be it should be date it should be a business practice not a strategic issue it yeah so what so what we're seeing then I mean if we don't necessarily have to have top five we could call it our top three with all these subcategories underneath that oh we can afford actually afford but we can just call it that and that'll actually give us a change from the top five to a really more focused top three then so if y'all are ok with that we can kind of move forward with it ok with it ok so let's do this then we'll move on to the next item is it lunchtime yet we'll go in the next subject and then break shortly ok or you guys want to take it is lunch here so you guys want to take a break now because lunch is here start anew yeah we can have a working lunch this is provided and specifically service expense reductions the possibility of looking at that I alluded to it earlier in my introduction when I talked about one of the quickest ways to kind of free up money to impact our budget is to start looking our expenditures to see if there are certain areas that we can kind of trim back I had tina tina actually put this together for us you did a study of different cities to kind of give us a

[2:53:05] comparison of the number of services that we provide compared to other communities and if you look at san angelo we are at 21 service levels that we do provide compared to odessa and others odessa's down at 8 if you notice if you notice the next closest one to San Angelo is Fort Worth it provides 19 and San Antonio 18 I will kind of make sure that I make this point clear I think that some of these cities may M not when they submitted their survey may have excluded a couple of services but regardless the services you see for the city of San Angelo it's pretty close to correct so we have 21 probably be the most difficult task we will do today yes because once you give people something and try to take it away I think you know it's going to create you know some real issues and I understand that why we need to do it but I think it's really going to be tough and the other point I want to make is because I studied this chart and the different services that went live online but the other thing is I think that's what makes San Angelo so great it's what we you know try to bend over backwards to give our citizens yes pal and if we start doing takeaways I think we're going to get quite a bit of loud feedback we will Billy but I think that one thing that I want to make sure that I make very clear is that we do have priorities we have you know we talked about that a little while ago infrastructure I think that we've got to the point maybe in certain areas where it's it's no longer just community this community wants and we do have limited funds available to us to address those you know so realistically when you look at you know the the amount of money that's come in revenue watch the city and the mayor talked about that a while ago when we compared our values compared to other cities we compared our sales tax revenues compared to other cities and the services that we're providing we do have to take a look at this very closely and say okay she'll be providing this many service compared to others

[2:55:07] communities or should we pull back and look at what we consider the city's priorities you know and again going back to infrastructure development of the future and if we do address development properly that means that our base will grow in the future those tax revenues will grow as well and maybe in the future we can look at these are the services that we may have to trim back at this point and say hey maybe maybe then we'll look at it but right now it's just really important to understand that this is what we're dealing with right now and we really felt that we need to take a close look at it their thing because I understand that we have finite revenue coming in but I'm just saying this is gonna be really difficult and as we go through and make some of those decisions I think we're also going to have to talk about a real thorough communication strategy absolutely you know because and we do a good job of communication so it's not that we won't but I just think the way we position it well you know go a long way to our helping or since can I also say Billy I think your comments are very well stated and the idea would be the following in a best-case scenario and that's what we would look for here is to find partners because there are some of these services that the private sector could very well become a part of the plan so where the city might be less of a partner in it you would pick up a private and so the service wouldn't go away it would just be financed and taken care of by a different area of money and so those would be the things that we're looking for would the private sector do a better job of doing this and could they grow that service and make it even a better bigger service if it was owned by a private managed by private is the city where we have limited funds and can never grow or develop it or maintain it at its greatest capacity and that's kind of the way I look at it is what part of this can we find partners to help us with the service and what the mayor saying that as well one of the top

[2:57:12] priorities we saw earlier you know when it came to the first pie that we saw up there you know we saw that splashpad was one of the top requests that we had should the city take on something a project such as that or should we be looking at a private entity that perhaps could come in and say hey we'll build it because there is a need you know obviously there's a need y'all did the survey and there's there were quite a few citizens in this community that listed that as number one so can we entice a private investor to come here and come in here and invest and and and do that instead of the city actually taking on that that project itself or even better if you say the following if that if those people who wants that do that would they've given the option of spending five dollars to get more fresh new resources for water would they still want this flash pad as a priority or do they want that $5 put towards it's nice to have a wish list but when it comes down to making decisions about where we spend our money and you put that out to the citizens and go do you want your street repaired or do you want splashpad do you want new water and and water treatment facilities or do you want to I'm having a hard time talking flash pad and so it's easy to say I want but when you have to make the hardcore decision about the money what is your and the only and the reason why we're bringing it up here and Billy we definitely aren't asking you to go through it today and pick out the ones that we want to take out this is what I'm proposed and all I was trying to do is kind of get y'all's take on this to make sure that we're on the same page that I'm not proposing something that quite frankly would never get any traction with the City Council so really what I'm looking at is and the mayor mentioned a while ago we want to look at services that provide that perhaps we can outsource or perhaps there's another group that can provide this service actually even better than the city could so what I am proposing is this and I've already talked to my directors is each department and are at the city was

[2:59:13] created for a specific purpose you know there's course services that are provided in that department you know now that's my directors why does your department exist you know what are the services that are that are a key or integral to to this community so what I'm asking my directors to do is to develop a list of all the services that they provide apartment currently provides from most important all the way all down to the least important and from that list what I want to do is take the ones at the lower part you know as far as the least important and attach numerical as far as dollar values to those and bring that back to the city council members and say okay we did this study this is what we did as far as the staff working together and this is what we're proposing these are the areas that we would like for y'all to consider taking a look at and get y'all's input on that but aside from that you know if you come to us and say hey I just thought about a certain service that I've always asked myself I've been scratching my head why does the city provide that service we'd love to hear that from you as well but at this point we're already working on this part of it and that's to create that party list from from top to bottom and then key in on those bottom services to determine okay are these absolutely absolutely positively necessary and they're not can we eliminate them can we outsource it can we work with a private entity maybe a public-private partnership what exactly can we do together and kind of trim back that budget and agree up some of those expenditures so this is really what I'm proposing I'm asking you know as to see if we can get that support Harry I know that you're I think this is a great approach I think it's something that really needs to be done probably should be done every four or five years or whatever the timeframe is to take a look at make sure those things but I do have to agree with with billion citizens have been getting certain services for a long period ten so before we actually bring this to the council is there a way that we can we can get Anthony and a public information group to put something out it says that we're looking to reduce expenses and here's

[3:01:17] one of the approaches that we're taking because if citizens hear this for the first time at a council meeting I will guarantee you that all seven phones will blow up they will absolutely not understand that we're going to have to do some education ourselves I understand but if we can get it a start with it with the with Anthony in putting something out that talks about reducing expenses and what the city is trained to do and lay that groundwork I think will be we'll have less less no there won't be quite as many citizens calling I agree and I think that citizens might not feel the overtaxed and overburdened when it comes to that as far as property taxes and we want to make sure that they understand while we're doing it it's not just because we do it is to make sure that we continue looking at our tax rate and look at different ways to maybe even bring that tax rate down in the future but they I'm sure that if anything and working with Anthony I think Anthony Brian do a wonderful job and getting information out is just to make sure that we do explain to the citizens why we're looking at doing it you know we do want to make sure that we address the absolute needs of our community but also minimize the impact to them as well and making sure that we're not increase in their property taxes every year just because we want to we want this and we can free up expenditures and put more money into the budget for infrastructure improvements and other needs that we have we just want them in your right hair we just want to make sure that we explain it the right way again we don't want to impact the quality of life for it but San Angelo it's not the intent the intent is to try to find those things that the private sector might be able to support and do a better job of that we just can't do and will continue to deteriorate because we can't take care of them and to really look at it and say is this really a service that the city ought to provide and we don't want to have the conversation we can't have the conversation about rape in the tax rate you know companies already today are looking at Midland and going well the tax rate there's thirty four hours of 76 gifts what I'm gonna put in a twenty million dollar plan or a ten

[3:03:22] million dollar plant look at the difference property taxes I would have to pay it's an easy decision to make so the approach about you know the forward communication rather than then playing catch-up and you know I made that comment because when I looked at this and and start thinking about which one would I vote to take away I thought you were gonna make me do though not today toward show that way today so yeah and also we want this to be a long term strategy but it's a mindset exactly it's a philosophy and it's something that we as the council I think need to constantly look at in terms of strategically where we need to go down the road and look at opportunities to get the private sector involved reduce our overhead so we can reinvest in the things we don't cannot we cannot have a tax rate increases we can and Billy we definitely that's why I just want to introduce the idea allow us to do all the legwork on that and research and look at the numbers and we will present that to you again if you ask y'all what do y'all think we should cut right now because you need more information than that you don't want to know who it's going to affect how it's going to affect those individuals what are the options we have available so we want to make sure that we bring that to you as a staff to City Council for y'all's review and direction as well so again this was just a presentation to show you what we had as far as a number of services that were providing what the needs are for our community and we've talked about a lot of those today and there's a lot of needs out there and we want to make sure we do this in a very responsible manner that we tackle all those needs so again on our end this is just a presentation for y'all for y'all's review and if y'all are okay with us moving forward and working on this then we can in the in the very near future bring that back to you and say this is what we came up with we'd like to get y'all's input on

[3:05:24] that it's not an all-day event pretty good but least y'all got y'all's luncheon as well so but we do want to express our appreciation for y'all's time and I think that that there was some great discussion today and I think we have some pretty good direction moving forward as well so we appreciate that you know also just to go back over some of these services provided you know there are things that we have here that no other city has like a Fort Concho so you know it's not apples to apples either because you know Midland doesn't have a fort Midland doesn't have a river that runs through it you know there are certain things that are very specific to us that require services that other cities don't have so we're definitely going to ask you to cut those services of the board neither County does but and Midland Odessa has a Coliseum that's been paid for by private money all private money so we are adjourned I'm gonna sit and continue to eat so

Captured 2026-07-26 · source: youtube.com/watch?v=EW6ZRJyDNiE