San Angelo City Council 12-13-22

[0:00:00] a.m on the 13th of December 2022 and this meeting is officially called to order we will start with our chaplain prayer and pledges so please stand and Gary and Mike we'll come forward and and lead us in prayer and pledges good morning everyone and happy holidays Merry Christmas Merry Christmas amen amen when you bow your head as I pray dear God in the scriptures you have said that citizens ought to obey the governing authorities since you have established those very authorities to promote peace in order and justice therefore if I pray for our mayor Brenner Gunner for the various levels of City officials and in particular for this assemble a council I'm asking that you would gracefully grant them wisdom to govern among the conflict and interests and issues of our times I pray father that as the agenda is discussed and policies are put in place for our city that the council will always seek what is in the best interest of the people I also pray father that we will uphold what is moral and rational remind us father that they are in a position not to be served but to serve the public just as Christ who is King came not to be served but to serve and ultimately died on the cross to save us I pray that as we journey through this Christmas season that you will grant us peace love joy and happiness this I pray in Jesus name amen repeat after me please to the flag of the United States of America

[0:02:04] for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty contestants for all honorable one State under God one and indivisible thank you foreign we will now move into the public comment section of the agenda come forward to make public comment state your name and address or SMD area each citizen can speak just once per item unless asked to counsel ask to comment by Council public comment is for three minutes unless extended by Council or translation services the proponent opponent is five minutes and less extended by Council or translation services Council has no obligation to respond to comments or questions from the public and any response from a member of the city council to non-agenda comments is limited to a statement of specific factual information recitation of existing policy and directing staff to place a subject on a future agenda are there individuals in the audience who would like to make public comment yep good morning I wanted to be here as soon as you finished mayor thank you I'm Shirley Spears I'm a member of single member district five and I'm here today just to bring gratitude again to the city council and to the mayor the San Angelo NAACP Buffalo Soldier Memorial will be hosting a groundbreaking this morning at the Paseo and we have invited Council of course and the public to come

[0:04:10] and join us now we don't have a time because we were trying to be sensitive to the fact that this is holiday season people are wanting to be with their families and we didn't want the council to have to come out on a different day so about 15 minutes after the council meeting this morning will be going over around the corner so to speak to the Paseo to do our groundbreaking and we hope that the general public will come and celebrate with us and it will be an exciting time this is just proof again of the help that the council has provided to us to be able to put our Memorial at the passage and we want to start it off with this groundbreaking and you'll hear more information at that service or Ceremony this morning so I wanted to make sure that everyone was aware thank you mayor thank you much anyone else here for public comment Zane white District Six at the November 15 2022 council meeting here councilman Tom Thompson made a pathetic feisty little speech that I'm sure he was very proud of that speech included multiple intentional misrepresentations of facts and several outright lies regarding my actions related to the city of San Angelo municipal government its elected officials and its employees Thompson boldly informed me that all of my future allegations of corruption regarding City officials should be specifically directed to the City attorney Teresa James and then Thompson defiantly claim that such allegations for me would no longer be welcome in this city council Forum Tom Thompson and All City officials need to understand that as long as city government corruption exists I'll be publicly exposing it in whatever form I choose Tom Thompson shameful little speech was followed by a brief statement from

[0:06:13] Teresa James during which she once again promoted the outrageous scam that certain Supreme Court decisions currently prohibit the issue on subsiding code violation citations to Lee fluger regarding his giant rooftop sign at the cactus Hotel in Downtown San Angelo Theresa's unquestionably false legal pronouncements were followed by equally false comments from you mayor Gunner you somberly stated that the city's actions regarding the cactus sign controversy have not been personal in nature and then you dramatically leaned into the microphone and claimed that the city's actions have been mandated by law mayor Gunner there's no question that the city of San Angelo code of ordinances is the prevailing law in this sign code enforcement matter chapter 12 of the code section 12.04.001 clarifies the aesthetic legal requirements false signs in San Angelo section 12.04.014 of the code clearly indicates the following all signs shall be maintained in a safe presentable and structurally sound condition at all times it's a fact that no matter how desperately you people try to spin it the hotel Cactus rooftop sign has not been presentable by any reasonable standard since 2005. in recent months City officials have disgracefully attempted to silence me with laughable claims at certain Supreme Court decisions currently prevent them from issuing any sign code violations whatsoever to leave Pfluger the two Supreme Court cases are Reed versus town of Gilbert in the city of Austin versus Reagan National advertising of Austin LLC both of these decisions are absolutely illegally irrelevant to the rooftop sign issue at Lee pfluger's Cactus hotel if that's a false statement then in the interest of governmental transparency City officials should immediately provide a clear on the record

[0:08:16] legal explanation repeating that statement further public comment come forward this I used to talk easy I'm in District Five would you state your name again we couldn't hear it Jatan geezy there's a saying that I'm not I'm sure most of us have heard it's out of sight out of mind I missed the meeting last I missed the last meeting my son and I were driving 30 dogs to Ohio but I'm here today to keep our City's pet of our population problem in all of your sites closing the city shelter the intake has done nothing to fix the problem nothing what is what it has actually done has made the problem worse and even created more problems well everyone is at home celebrating the holidays there are cats and dogs out in the streets with without food or shelter more animals are getting run over and killed more animals are being left to run the street get pregnant making more animals and even attacking people because the spay neuter ordinance is not being enforced it's making I'm sorry I had to run to get it it's making all these problems worse I see post after post on social media of people trying to help they try to feed their Community loose animals they try to shelter these animals from the cold without the city enforcing spay neuter and without providing more low-cost or even free spay neuter it's a slap in the face to these individuals and rescues many have told me that they are in fact they have in fact reached out to their District city council rep to no avail no answers and many times

[0:10:19] not even a response please find the money just for spay neuter and the manpower to enforce the spay neuter please offer feedback to the public your silence is deafening it's not a secret that all of the rescues are Beyond full in 2017 I provided data showing the contributions of just 10 volunteers that I know back then it came up to a contribution of 250 000 per year that's 250 000 that the city count the city benefited from for free what will happen if all the volunteers just quit today the only thing that the city has accomplished by refusing to take animals in it take animals in is clearing their name a future animal neglect and abuse charges or hoarding it's not right and you'll know it further public comment good morning Kim Henry and I my business and student services number District number three I just wanted to say thank you for the city Teresa James John James a lot of the city members and staff Patrick who have helped with accessibility concerns so far so far since I've we have presented in October we have have the update to the website including Grievous procedures so I want to make it publicly known that you can file griefer's procedures for the Ada and accessibility concerns on the city's website and also they added an accessibility accommodation request form which helps identify if there's an issue in the city that you recognize how you can get help with that and why it is an issue and even what is your idea to fix that so thank you for taking our recommendations and our concerns seriously also excited to hear that by in our last meeting we talked about the progress on the Ada coordinator position as well as the city committee on people living with disabilities that we should see substantive progress by January of 2023 and no later than implemented by March of 2023 however currently as I'm

[0:12:24] speaking there's no closed captions on the city's YouTube channel so I know this was something that was said to be added but it's either not working today or this is this is again something that needs to be consistent there is closed captions if you use YouTube closed captions but those are historically very inaccurate so I would recommend to the city to readdress that to make sure those closed captions are there I also notice there's an item on the consents agenda regarding the ramp The Pedestrian ramp downtown and I would like to ask if this is the normal process to pull that just for discussion I have a lot of people that have called me about that ramp and I want to make sure that the disability community's voice is heard because when it's not then there's a lot of concerns that can be brought up I was recently part of leadership San Angelo at the Tom Green County Jail which I know is not the city's responsibility but I was told that I cannot participate in the tour because of Daisy which we can get into the legal yes or no if I can legally I should be able to unless there's a high security concern but apparently that was not the reason why I was told I can't participate in the tour that I'm scheduled to be a part of and the reason I bring that up is because I was told that without any background information or any really legal information and no one to call from the county so that would be a situation where somebody can call the Department of Justice and make a very valid complaint and things like that are happening in the city every day so it's very very important that the disability community's voice is heard because there's things like that happening in the city and I don't want someone to just call the Department of Justice so I would request that if there's anything that deals with accessibility like the ramp or The Pedestrian sidewalks or walkway that it's important that the disability community's voice is heard thank you further public comment yes go ahead Tom so for all the residents that live on Edmond and Glenna Boulevard the and just give a little background notice here the United States Postal Service has moved from a delivery system to a uh a

[0:14:29] personal delivery system to a I guess a community mailbox down the street so for the 10 to 15 people that have called the past week we have heard you we have talked to people about what that is that's kind of a federal issue where they Place their mailbox we can discuss Public Safety and the fact that some of y'all do have to walk about three quarters of a mile with uh in distance to get your mail now I just want you know I talked briefly about Shane Kelton we're just starting the topic discussions today but I just want you know you've been heard thank you for their public comment [Music] seeing none we will close the public comment section of the agenda and we will move into the consent agenda I'll start with Larry to see if there's any items that he would like to have pulled M item M Lucy none okay Harry L and O Tom that's got me covered Tommy hi ma'am all right we will I will ask for a motion to approve the consent agenda with the exception of M L and O So Gunter yes we also received a request to remove item c um I think it's marked off on your copy of the agenda packet that's not ready to move forward yet so if we could have a revised motion to remove item clmno all right so item C has been removed from the agenda for consideration um as there's the correct information is not available to approve that item and so again I will say the following we will move item C with lack of information and then item m l and O for further consideration and so may I have a motion for that so move by Lucy seconded by Harry any public comment concerning the consent agenda with the exception of c m l and O seeing none will take a vote all in

[0:16:31] favor say aye motion has been approved we will now start with item m item m is the following consider approving change order number nine and number 10 to es-03-20 Chapman Street improvements phase a project contract with trisac tizac Concrete Incorporated reducing the current 7588 971 and 75 cents project cost by 83 685.07 and bringing the revised project cost to seven million five hundred five thousand two hundred eighty six and sixty eight cents Shane euron yes ma'am um councilman Miller or I guess Karen has he Smith what questions or do you want me to go over the project or request of Miss Henry we we pulled this item so that you could elaborate a little bit more on how the actual project is affected by the change the project this is just basically we're moving quantities around we're reducing quantities and changing quantities within the project itself and so this is basically due to the quantities of materials whether that's paint concrete those type things that are a part of the the deal we're actually reducing the actual scope of the project itself and saving the city money by doing so always good to save money I bet the ramp will be lighted is that correct the ramp will be delighted it will have light because it refers to the removal of street lights and insulation of new too many street lights in the plants not about lighting the ramp no it's not about lighting the ramp itself the the when we remove the lights out of the the project there was actually the street lots that were the actual signal light intersections there was actually a lot that was already created within that design itself and so when they ordered the poles they ordered they ordered an extra lap pole for the signal signalized intersection which we didn't need so we

[0:18:35] ordered basically they ordered too many poles and so we removed that from the contract handrails the handrails are currently being constructed right now and there should be put up um the the very bottom ones on the stair portion of the of the of The Pedestrian ramp are have been installed I mean like 30 or 40 feet have been installed but they're currently under construction right now and are going to be installed moving forward so thank you yes sir Harry my final question is when are we going to be done I am I am hoping we they had originally talked by the end of this month um with Christmas holidays coming up and the way the weather's been because they've had to actually uh the powder coat paint they've had so much humidity and and with the rain that we've had they they've been slowed down on getting getting the rails powder coated but I'm hoping by mid-January at this point we're in that we're we're basically that we're waiting on handrails at this point everybody's waiting yes sir yes I promise you I've been waiting a long time for this too so thank you Shane all right item L consider amending any motion you don't want to do them all together but we can do them all together okay sorry item L consider amending wu-05-2-1 professional Engineering Services of the Upper Colorado Regional flood training technical consultant with HDR engineering Incorporated increasing the contract amount by 104 000 funded by Texas water development board Grant bringing the new contract total of 1 million 575 000 and 200 in authorizing the city manager to negotiate and execute all related documents and a euron we're in mayor council Andy vaselio assistant

[0:20:37] director of water utilities I'm here to answer any questions you may have I just want to make sure that the public understands that there's no tax Dollar City tax dollars involved in this when they see 104 000 increase then we get phone calls and it doesn't come from sales tax or property tax for the city of San Angelo is that correct that's 100 correct yes this whole project is funded by Texas water development board and so the city of San Angelo is basically just to flow through entity for the funds coming from Texas water development board to the subcontractor HDR thank you move to approve it oh we're going to do all of them together I'm sorry we can go backwards but we would prefer to go forwards item o consider ratifying an agreement with Encore Electric delivery LLC in the amount of 324 545.44 for the installation of electrical delivery facilities at the Hickory well field expansion site Shane you're on again question really is when are we going to be done with the wells and ready to pump we've um we've been working along this process um moving along fairly well they're actually on they're still on schedule so the wells should be completed um by March of March April of uh this next year and so we're we're on schedule so we're we're moving along uh we've already uh pump tested two of the well so um everything's going good there so again the Project's moving along quite well and then from there we will start from there once the wells are drilled then they will have to tie me and we have another contract that will come in and start tying all the wells together to bring them into the pump station question I get is since we had a dry year and surface water is at a premium people want to know that their water is secure so we back to the spot where we're able to pump 10 million gallons a day then I think we can answer that question so yes sir we're we're well on our way of course we have capacity up to

[0:22:38] 8 million right now and uh again with these new wells coming on we'll be able to pump up to 12 million gallons a day any further questions for Shane thank you Shane now Barry you're on what would you like to do well so we moved to approve l m n o yes thank you very much and may I have a second I see Tommy ready to do a second on that one so any public comment on the three items m-l-n-o Andreas souffle I'm in District One um okay so today I'm representing myself not any group that I'm affiliated with um the fact that you all spent seven million dollars on what me and my friends uh lovingly call the death ramp because it looks very unsafe we all don't well I don't understand the reasoning for the functionality of the ramp um I understand I I get that you'd want people from downtown to go to the river because our river is really great but I think that the funds would have been better used if we had developed the other side of the river for some businesses some Lakeside restaurants something of that nature that ramp is very scary especially if you even for mobily okay people it's scary even when the rails will be up I think the only attraction to the ramp would be skateboarders and roller skaters to be honest it's not aesthetically pleasing it's not a great like beautiful addition to our cute little downtown at all and it seems quite self-serving to the folks that have businesses downtown even though I don't

[0:24:41] really see many people using it seven million dollars in this town could go very very far as you know have have some of you even driven around your districts there are homes that have cardboard on their windows or pieces of um uh it almost looks like Juarez like pieces of metal for walls like there are people in our town who really need assistance or how about our homeless population that I know that you guys don't want to admit that we have it's there we don't even have a place that they can go to to get a hand up um Abilene got rid of their homeless population issue we could have used seven million dollars for so much more than a ramp that's ugly not functional and most of the people in the town didn't even want it or asked for it when was the last time you guys did a market survey of what the citizens in this town really really want or need one I mean when was that so I'm really not asking a rhetorical question I really want to know I think um even if you had a town hall about this it seemed like it happened under the rug because all the people I've talked to about it have no idea why it was built um and they had no idea how much money had been spent and it's a gross misuse of funds any further public comment he's standing out there and he first of all I mean the seven million five is not for the ramp so the total project cost was 7.5 million dollars it was not 7.5 million dollars for the ramp and that ramp was required by the grant that we received from TxDOT so that was a key portion of what um that Grant required Shane you want to

[0:26:45] add any further comment yes sir Grant covered that portions of those costs so it wasn't necessarily City funds that were spent on that as the grant covered those and was required as a component of that Grant application the connectivity correct there you go so we would call a public survey of that a CIP people could contribute to the CIP suggestions which they do every year correct sir we also add mayor that we had several public Forums on that design for the chadburn project which included the entire design and so we had several of those held encouraging people to come unfortunately a lot of people don't come but we advertised that we put it out constantly and we had those forums all right with that any further public comment on items LMNO three and I understand that one it was used some of that money was grant money but I both Andrea and I actually write grants including federal grants and so we understand the concept behind that and that you have to submit a design and the reasoning behind it so if you just consider the money that we used for the grant for the ramp and that's it yes I understand the whole project seven million dollars but I believe it was a million dollars for the ramp that million dollars could have solved so many accessibility concerns throughout the city and not just in one spot um but again I I would I have asked others if they want to go down the ramp or up the ramp and nobody wants to I cannot ask somebody to use their wheelchair to go up or down that ramp I would like to ask one of you to do that that's how scary it is is that we're not even comfortable asking people to use the ramp and as far as it being communicated and people not showing up I agree I know people don't show up however when you don't believe that there's nobody in the city that uses wheelchairs or there's nobody here that has a disability people aren't comfortable showing up and not only that but you have to go to them at times so how accessible is this meeting how

[0:28:47] accessible were some of those meetings people aren't comfortable just coming and showing up so it's not that people don't care and that's not why they didn't show up it's just that people don't feel concerned about if you're living with disabilities in this community which is why we have brought on this project and concerns so next time again speaking to the disability Community we could have helped provided priorities or ways to spend that million dollars of federal money differently regardless of the rest of the Chadbourne Street project but how could we have spent that money federal government money for accessibility for real accessible reasons not for one single ramp but nobody's going to be comfortable using it wasn't federal government it was textile okay I'm sorry not an option so that when we worked with the project with TxDOT one of the components was connectivity and one of those was connecting to the river which connected chadburn so we didn't have a lot of flexibility to just it wasn't money that was allocated for Ada generically and we could put it wherever so it was specifically Associated to this project and those dollars then keyed on getting the full component of the dollars those were reviewed by TxDOT those are all approved by TxDOT as far as accessibility standards and so forth the ramp's not complete we also held those meetings here in accessible location we've encouraged those meetings even with our sidewalk meetings that we had so I think there are a lot of Staff who care about that and want to get us to that level and this is an effort so I think you know give it a chance to to see where the ramp goes once it's complete and how that can be aesthetically pleasing in the area as well as helping our first choice was to put in an elevator but we could not afford that so maybe the next one will be great and thank you for sharing that I think that you know the I've heard from probably about 40 or 45 people that who use wheelchairs or other accessibility devices they all said the exact same thing why couldn't they have spread it out more and it be a bigger like longer ramp so the incline isn't as high so that would have been the design that would have been different and better and still

[0:30:48] reach the same purpose which is that connectivity issue having less of an incline as well as having a flat surface so it's not just a consistent incline but you have a flat surface to land on that's comfortable yelling there's one and envisioned as we look to the Future coming off of maybe along the Oak Side from chadburn from chadburn from Concho as well which is envisioned as a long more sloped one that actually incorporates that into a landscape that in my opinion feels more natural so as we get into that design which may be in the near future we'll see we'll we'll make sure y'all are included in that discussion any further public comment seeing none will take a vote all those in favor of approving items l m and O say yes any opposed seeing none opposed consent agendas m l and O have been approved with 7-0 vote we will now move into the regular agenda an update and discussion regarding the charter review committee's progress on evaluating section 60.64 chief of police of the city Charter and items comments regarding items on the regular agenda may be made by the public when each item is discussed as outlined above applicants proponents and a balance are exempt from the time limit above and instead must limit their remarks to less than five minutes so because this is a discussion and an update I'm not sure it will be done in um so he doesn't I know just making sure he understands we don't have to live but those numbers on this item thank you mayor City Council on Alan Gilbert here today representing the charter committee that you appointed for us to look at the elected versus the appointed chief of police we have with us today some of our members I'd like to ask them to stand because they work so hard on this we have Billy DeWitt with us candy pool and Jeff Curry some of our

[0:32:51] members of our committee that's worked so hard and and have come up with a recommendation for you today and so we would like to to give you this information we've already told you about the time that was spent the things that we did to investigate to look into we had our town meetings we did a lot of talking in the public we got feedback from the city's website and we looked at a lot of things uh some of the things that needed to be changed that we felt that we would recommend to you as the qualifications and so for the committee recommendation that we have for you today is that right now the chief of police has to be a resident for the city of San Angelo for a period of at least two years immediately prior to his election and shall possess qualifications of elector that's the only qualifications we worked a lot of areas looking a lot of things to say if we stay with an elected chief of police what would we want to see or are we going to recommend the appointed so by bringing this screen up I think it pretty much tells you that the committee after all the thought and all the work is recommending to you that we keep the chief of police as an elected position at this time but make changes to qualifications in order to see that we get the chief that we believe the city of San Angelo wants there is a lot of discussion and a lot of back and forth with the appointed versus the elected uh as a person that's total was totally in favor of appointed for many many years I have to and I'll publicly admit that at this time I think we need to seriously seriously consider looking at the other and going to appoint it at the appropriate time we feel that at this time the citizens of San Angelo from the

[0:34:53] comments and the things that we've talked to them about we feel that if we recommended to go to a point at this time that the citizens are not in a position at this time that they feel that's what they want to do and we don't believe that recommending to you something that we don't believe would pass is good common sense and so we are recommending that we change the charter to require and these are our recommendations to y'all uh that the chief of police have been a continuous resident of the city of San Angelo for a period of at least six months and a resident of the State of Texas for a period of at least one year immediately prior to the filing deadline for the election and shall possess the qualifications of electors in said City Additionally the chief of police shall meet or exceed the following qualifications to be sworn and accepted unless challenged challenges will be reviewed by the Civil Service Commission one they have 10 years as a sworn officer with a minimum of five years demonstrated performance in supervisory capacity lieutenant or above in the San Angelo police department and and are in a similar sized agency one the next is to have a master's peace officer certificate from the Texas commission on law enforcement our bachelors in criminal justice are four years of military service now what we did is we took these because we know that different departments different places and people that are with our department some of them may have four-year degree maybe some may have a master's degree from Tico and that they equal out and so we did not want to stop someone from being able to run for election just because they didn't have a Tico Masters they have a bachelor's and so we tried to make this the best we could and including the four years of military service and we also we looked at other cities we looked at some of their requirements that they have for appointments and we're right on the same area as what appointments are for most cities in the state of Texas with these

[0:36:55] qualifications so that is that was our recommendation for the qualifications for the chief of police on that issue basically because it does say that you have to have lived here minimum of six months right it would mean that qualified candidates would not be allowed to run for office even if they met all those other conditions because they haven't lived here which the issue would be if you had an appointed police chief you would have the ability for people outside our city to in fact put their name in a hat and run yes and we had to be clear we had those discussions and but we did lower it down to six months instead of and some of that is because if let's say we had a deputy sheriff that lived outside Tom Green County and but they've met all these qualifications but if they knew they wanted to run and they moved into the city for six months then they could present themselves as eligible to run you know that that's about as close as we can get it to having options and of course we have a lot these qualifications that we gave you right here and correct me if I'm wrong to be on the committee I believe uh Chief Howard's here that we have 63 police officers in our department that meet these qualifications somewhere in that area so it's not that anybody's being cut out but yes the term I mean the the time of being in the city we did cut recommend that you cut that to six months okay any other questions on that any other questions from Council I like the quality go ahead Larry you've you put in here uh one thing that folks have been concerned about is the fact you could have an 18 year old being the chief of police but what you've got in uh in your list there indicates a person at minimum would be 28 to 30 years old I

[0:39:01] think folks have been concerned about the having a qualification at least describes a person who has lived in the world and has education that merits him being chief of police so I like that but the bottom line in this whole thing is is the city is going to get to vote on this yes and whether they go one way or the other the city is in the best Democratic aspects they are going to have their say so I know there's people out there that they've even accused some people of being communists okay that's fine that's their opinion ultimately the majority of this town is going to decide whether it's going to be appointed or whether it's elected is that the bottom line no no uh we're absolutely not and Theresa May here's what it's got to be because you're not allowed to do either or either or so that's why we're recommending to you that we stay with the elected Chief with these changes and qualifications it's a yes or no vote on what is presented and what they're producing so if we had a choice yes if we present this with this on the ballot it's yes or no yeah but the no effectively says that they don't want the no just keeps it as elected as it is so it would be 18 years until 18 years out yes and you are correct we didn't put an age in there because you cannot accomplish this and be 18 years old so you're right you're going to be probably 20 28 years old minimum very minimum if something like that so any other questions on that part questions comments okay thank you sir okay uh our other change that we're proposing is it says term of office the term of office Chief signs though shall be for four years we would like to make a recommendation to

[0:41:05] the council that we look at this and that along with serving for four years or until this assessor is elected and qualified unless sooner removed from office by death resignation or recall to align terms of the chief of police with single member districts one three and five the term of the election to be held in May of 2024 will be a term for three years with all following elections be a term of four years now to answer the question why is right now we have the chief of police set off separately and it's a separate cost to do that election we spent roughly 68 thousand dollars in special elections so this would now time the chief of police race up with the council races so you don't have to spend that extra money in order to do that so we're recommending that you do that along with the rest of our recommendation if the chief of police ceases to be a resident of the city or is found to have violated state or federal law they have to be they shall be deemed to have automatically resigned from office we do not have any provisions in our current Charter that allows for if certain things happen with our chief that any type of disciplinary actions can take place this would provide some safety to the city that if things were not to be good and they violate laws things of this nature that it could be a resignation from their position well you say resignation so the question mark is they choose to resign or we choose to have them resign I mean I think you kind of got to get specific about that I'm going to let Theresa talk on that point it says it's deemed to have automatically resigned so as soon as that finding happens they're no longer

[0:43:08] the chief of police because they're going to be determined to resigned their position through that action and one of the reasons for doing this is because let's say currently if one there was violations the only way to remove somebody from the police chief position would be by getting signatures on a recall is that correct so there's no other options there's a recall or you can go to district court and you can file to have them removed from office depending upon what has occurred okay Mary did you want to make a comment just a question here it says found to have violated state or federal law doesn't say anything about city ordinances is there a reason that that's not in there well because city ordinances include things like traffic violations and we're all classy misdemeanors and we don't believe that a Class C misdemeanor is High Enough of a criminal charge to remove a chief of police from Office the state and federal laws that we're referring to are of course criminal statutes Penal Code statutes as well as things like sexual harassment age discrimination and those sorts of things that can occur that right now if they were occurring we'd have no ability to remove the person from office and I think that's that's the goodness good decision to keep it at that point so and if someone has been um so you're saying that until they have found guilty they would still remain in office so they would have to go through the process of going to court them being found guilty before the resignation would occur well yes ma'am we you know we we live on a standard of you're innocent until proven guilt making sure everybody understands we're not trying to we've got to make sure that everyone is innocent until proven guilty now there can possibly be some contact with Tico that could perhaps suspend someone's license if certain

[0:45:13] things occur but we could go into all these different scenarios which we have looked at a lot of these different scenarios that Tico could actually pull their license as a certified peace officer but then we come up with the question of what do they even really have to have a license to be our chief for police because it's under home rule and under City Charter and those questions all start coming out and that's where we get into this problem of being a elected and the only one in the state that there's no state law that authorizes elected chief of police in the state of Texas just not one so the city of San Angelo is the only city in the state of Texas that elects their police chief yes ma'am as far as we can find and we've tried to turn over everything we can turn over and as far as we can find that's correct there used to be I can remember in the 70s there was probably close to 20 but it did this and then very quickly they they just all went away whenever a lot of the Civil aspects started coming out Lucy good question judge um what is the reason that they've kind of just dwindled down to just us being left on the board what was the reason that they chose to go appointed well we talked to we talked to several different places and a lot of it was to get the politics out of the police department in fact everybody I talked to said that's the major reason is because the Department's every two years or every four years became total turmoil whenever it came election time and especially in the small cities when you've got 30 police officers and you've got two people running they said it was very destructive was Tom judge we get to a question this is maybe to Teresa too there's a question of legal and not legal which is pretty defined by state law or federal law whatever it is but now there's my question is you know there's question of Ethics here and ethics is a gray area you know we have questions about if somebody did

[0:47:18] something and took something and other people have some influence over them and maybe gave them gifts or things or presented opportunities to them that they can take while those is not legal or illegal to me those things were unethical right and so this totally removes any judgment against unethical Behavior I mean that's strictly subjective so correct me if I'm wrong but if somebody was to get tickets to a concert or to find Opportunities For Those that's still not breaking law I mean it's still not grounds for dismissal correct well it could be breaking a law depending on the conditions that they receive those things but until it's determined that it is breaking the law that it would not that kind of what we consider an ethical violation and things we just don't do because we shouldn't do it would not remove them from Office no that would go back to the the the state or the the the federal system would have to bring charges against them to Tom's question if it's unethical and they brought State charges or federal charges and they were found to be guilty then that would be grounds for automatic resignation that would be correct and also some administrative procedures where somebody's found to have um committed violations of sexual harassment or sexual discrimination or any kind of discrimination age discrimination those could also be findings I think that if I were City attorney and this were to happen which you know hope it would never happen that I would actually want the Civil Service Commission to take a look at what was done to make sure that they're on board with the removal of the chief as well so that it's not this body who's doing it but rather the Civil Service Commission who has more control over me and confer even though that's not or over Civil Service even though that's not you know something statutorily they do it is kind of their role well I mean we're making a decision that affects people many years past we're all gone and so my question is you know what do you put future councils and cities um in fear of or just you know kind of worrying about how how it happens but to

[0:49:20] me there's a question of you know as far as ethical and conflicts of interest that you know somebody could have two or three different other jobs side hustles whatever it is and when it comes down to a point of this in future generations and elected there's it's a lot to manage going forward but I just want to make sure the question of Ethics here does not fall within what we're looking it's legal it's black and white finding by some administrative or judicial body so there's no definition of What conflict of interest is there is a definition of conflict of interest and we all are subject to that and there are certain things that you can do to violate conflict of interest laws like taking gifts and not reporting them for instance that can constitute a violation under state law those things would be included here but there are always those gray areas where you know I got invited to a concert and you know there are other people there and the vendor stayed with me well technically under the bribery laws that's still allowed um but it's something that is discouraged and we probably shouldn't do so those gray areas would not be covered the only way to address those issues is through an appointed Chief this is infinitely better than what we have now where the sexual harassment age discrimination those things there's nothing this body can do except maybe counsel the person but it those kinds of conditions would be allowed to remain in a police department under a chief who was engaging in those kinds of behaviors under the rules we have now this at least gives some standard by which there has if there's a decision made or a finding made that that constitutes the removal the other issue that Tom just brought up is a secondary jobs so in other words is it perceived or is it stated that the chief of police shall be the only job that one holds so you as chief of police you could have a secondary business you could have two or three other businesses in addition to being the chief of police yes that would be allowed under these rules as they are now and as the rules as they're proposed yeah and under our city HR policies are

[0:51:24] also allowed you know with permission to have secondary employment as well and we've got that difference because of elected official versus an appointed so what you can actually do you're going to be still limited but this is at least we have something in here now to work with for this purpose because ethically with law enforcement they have their law enforcement ethical uh that they have to go by but whether or not they can how they can act upon an elected official it falls under the same statutories which will be the sheriff's but sheriffs have a state statutory we don't have a state statutory that provides any of this for us because there's no state statute for them unlike the chief because no one has one just us yeah one other recommendation right quick so we can move on with this under the authority we are clarifying that and changing it from on the left where the Chiefs have exclusive control Los Angeles Police Department shall have the right to select employee discharge at will prescribe the salaries within the monetary limits of the budget the employees and such Department we've we've changed that recommend that you change that to the chief of police shall manage and operate the Departments and according with local state and federal laws in addition to City policies so this becomes part of our Charter they have to work under City policies give an example of why that's an issue and why the change is recommended it just clarifies that because over here we didn't say anything about working under the laws or doing anything it's just the exclusive control we all know that we have Civil Service they have to work on we adopted I think yes you need to repeat that because we do have civil service we have civil service so that controls a large amount of things that happen in the police department we have state laws that control we have federal laws that control we have certain things that control different things that the

[0:53:28] chief can or cannot do within that department and what we're doing is just clarifying here the chief run your department the way it needs to be run for the benefit of the city of San Angelo but you must maintain everything that you do within the state the federal and within our city policies that we have within the city of San Angelo there's no reason to add to the that the Civil Service issue civil services automatically correct there so making sure we're clear on that I think I think we're good with that yes ma'am I think so but the here again Larry these will all have to be put over here this is what we're is recommended and of course you as the council can change this however you want to and whatever you come up with this is our recommendation yes or no that's that's how simple it's going to be yes or no yes or no I think the committee's done an incredible job of really interacting with the public getting comments from the public and studying um other cities how they manage of course they don't manage because they don't elect but trying to get as much information as you can to re-look at this and put it out to the public for votes I think you guys have done a great job well thank you they worked I've told you all that before they work really really hard and and they looked at it and and they they actually took their personal opinions and threw them out the window they really did and they they were very professional how they did it and I was very proud to be able to work with them right so any further questions or comments or judge Gilbert thank you thank you do we need to open this up for any comment from the public at this point so if there's anyone in the audience who would like to add comment to this please come forward District Five um just food for thought president of the United States has to be 35 and 14

[0:55:33] years in the United States that's it and putting more stipulations on the qualified Personnel I think just leaves room for down the down the road not y'all maybe other city council they put a new restriction another new restriction and y'all talk about not wanting to give I guess the authority the exclusive authority to for his uh over his Department y'all are elected and y'all have authority to do things they'll vote but I just think putting more restrictions the the public is smart enough to vet those people out and when they run I think putting them with the rest of the elections is a good idea so people are more in the mode and they'll look at it more but more government involved in narrowing the path and also allowing other people to come in I don't know how that would work I mean we had the school district people come in from outside and that didn't work out very well for thought I'd like to please clarify that any of the qualifications that are adopted by the election in the election those could not be changed by future councils without going to another election so you could not have a charter issue this isn't a council and then the second thing is that you know removing the exclusive control of the police department the citizens actually did that when they elected or voted on civil service and made us a civil service City Civil Service covers employment selection discharge promotion I mean vast areas of Authority Under the police department so we're just cleaning up language basically there to say that um there's not exclusive control because we've already had an election that said they didn't have it and that's what the local state and federal laws in addition to City of policies is intended to do okay thank you you need to come forward if you're going to speak their Authority I was agreeing with the

[0:57:39] recommendation I didn't know if y'all thought I was disagreeing with that I was agreeing with that well it's one of the reasons we keep bringing up the question about civil service so people understand that civil service has a tremendous impact on what happens okay further public comment one last opportunity okay seeing none we will then um we don't have to take an action on this right so we'll move on to Item B so there is action we need to take Direction at this point in time I mean if we could get some direction on whether or not this appears to be how you want us to present it to the um voters or if there's a whole other option you want us to bring to you and we bring it to call an election that would be helpful for us because we need to start drafting I think that's the reason we ask for comment and from city council was if there was anything we wanted to add or subtract or do this was the opportunity for everyone to do that and from what I understand from city council there hasn't been any suggestion to change the language is that correct all right that's what I heard we have Direction you have Direction I'm quite sure okay moving on to Item B consider approving a policy to address repeat open records requests requesters to provide a reasonable limit on the amount of time spent on Public Information requests submitted by vexus requests vexatious that's a good word how long did it take you to find that word in the dictionary well it's from the state so we're just adopting their language all right okay all right you're on Julia okay so I've presented uh prepared some slides for you guys today um as you can see from this slide in 2018 we really thought we were buried with pirs and at that point um we had received just 418 in that

[0:59:43] fiscal year we've now seen a 40 increase in pirs that are routed through the city clerk's office um so these numbers were gathered on the 6th of this month so they're a week out of date now right now we're actually at 573 pirs year to date and are projected year-end um count will be 604 so that's actually around a 44 increase is that our calendar year or the fiscal year this one is actually this count is going to be calendar year um in 2018 we were counting by calendar year and then the state law actually requires us to count by fiscal year so all the numbers presented in this slideshow will be actually fiscal year which is just the last two months okay so um just to note the police department they keep their PIR separately we use the same system but there's two different sides and I don't have access to that so what I'm reporting on are the city Side numbers only so just for some context so this here since October 1st we've had 83 unique requesters seeking information from the city side and we're using the term requester because anyone can request information from us doesn't have to be a citizen doesn't have to be a taxpayer doesn't have to be an individual it can be a business from out of state or anyone really um so out of those requests are 73 people requested just one um requests for information and that left the remaining 10 requesters submitting on average 3.9 pirs a piece um 3.9 or 39. well the 39 total so 3.9 per on average per person okay so the those remaining 10 people um are representing that a small number of people are using a disproportionate number of the pirs and therefore disproportionate number of Staff time hours

[1:01:46] um so on to the next slide and there were 112 pirs submitted that resulted in 103 hours of chargeable staff time so out of those folks and 71 people submitted pirs that took a combined 33 hours to complete so again small number of people using a disproportionate amount of staff time 68 percent of time this fiscal year already has been spent responding to pirs from 14 percent of the requesters so um those 112 hours that I mentioned on the previous slide and the 103 hours those represent only chargeable staff time so um by law we cannot include any time that Heather or I spend reviewing documentation seeking clarification from requesters preparing cost estimates or redacting nor can we account for legal staff's time preparing certified letters to the Attorney General's office or providing their legal guidance so in the past two months six percent of the pirs have or will require an AG opinion so those letters all go to Legal they're prepared that staff times not included and I will note also not included whenever we send off those letters you have to send a minimum of two they're certified and they cost over seven dollars a piece so that's an additional cost to the city but back back to the actual hours and you can tell that this 103 hours it's grossly under reported because there's so many hours spent by our two offices that we cannot charge an individual for on the PD side in addition to the legal services that city attorney's office provides for us they're also reviewing some body camera footage and that takes additional time so in 2017 the state finally realized there was an issue with

[1:03:49] requesters that were abusing City staff times and and they allowed us to declare certain requesters vexatious now we're required to adhere to all sections of the public information act except this one little section it's not that we are required to follow it but it's that our governing body can adopt it so today we're asking you to adopt this one section so that we can start using this in addition to the remaining parts of the chapter that we're required to follow and so um like I said this has been on our radar since 2017 but until recently we were unable to track each individual request and so we were unable to declare anyone vexatious and but now that we can track that we wanted to bring this policy forward and to you so um the policy that we're presenting today Mayors Texas government code 552.275 and it states that once a requester uses their allocated 36 hours of Staff time in a fiscal year they must pay for all future requests at a labor rate of 15 an hour now I know you're going to say that our staff time is worth way more than fifteen dollars an hour this is also set by the state so that's not up for discussion at this point and and I just want to say I know there's been some discussion in the media about this policy our office remains extremely committed as does the rest of the city to providing publicly available information and this policy in no way impacts our average requester typically a person is only going to request public information for a situational event in their life so for instance we see a lot of the one-timers they want to know about their house plans because they're doing renovations they want to report on all of the equipment maintenance for a vehicle they bought in a city auction

[1:05:52] and they want to report on the fire that happened at their home these are one-time incidences and most of our requesters that's what they're asking for and so for them they might use five hours of time but we may not hear from them for another four years so this is not going to be keeping the general public away from getting information or for paying for information the policy is solely recommended so that we can rein in those people that are vexatious and if implemented back in fiscal year 2022 this would have impacted only five requesters and there were two requesters that were on the cusp of those only one was an individual everybody else was a business that is using this system to further their financial interest and there are currently no users that have exceeded the 36 hour limit in the last two months that we've been tracking for this fiscal year and but there are several that are trending to exceed the 36 hours and by the end of this fiscal year September 30th and just to clarify if we did approve this policy or if you guys approved the policy it would go into effect today but it would be retroactive back to October 1st and again that's because this state requires us to count this on a fiscal year um so I know I can speak to the work that Heather and I do Teresa can speak to her staff but I did ask Charlie Kemp to be here today in case you have any questions from the Department side and her staff receives about 16 percent of the pirs on average about 14 and a half per month so she can definitely speak to the disruption that it causes to her staff's duties if you'd like to hear from that perspective or if you have any questions for her I think those are so totally separate what's happening in planning and permits is so totally different from what we're talking about here no her staff is

[1:07:57] receiving 16 percent of our pirs on an annual basis and what are they asking for specifically what are the most frequent requests in terms of a lot of the uh requests she's here but a lot of the requests are actually for building plans or copies of old permits certificates of occupancy official I love the pr pars we get are like they want building plans whether it's residential or commercial they want any kind of information we have on inspections we get a lot of requests for if there's a sale of the property they want any kind of violations building permits anything that we have on record and that's going to you know we're going to archives we're pulling plans if those plans are stamped we're reaching out to the design professional asking if they'll release those plans so we can turn those in or turn those over to the requester if not then that's when we do reach out to city clerk to contact the AG's office and those are some of the requests we receive in regards to the pirs and I mean there's sometimes a PR could take two hours and then sometimes they can take six to seven hours it just depends on what exactly they're requesting so let me ask a question so are these over private property and there's things that they're asking you to find that they could find themselves well let me give you uh an example um like a certificate of occupancy and we'd let the individual know the property owner and those on residential that's maybe kind of understanding because it goes to the contractor or maybe goes to the bank but on a business it doesn't um it says that you need to keep that for your records we'll get a request asking for a copy of that certificate of occupancy because somebody just didn't keep up with it how much of your time is spent on

[1:10:00] requests that the requester could do themselves and that's where I have an issue with I mean if you could go and find it yourself you're an employee of the city we all pay taxes so you work on things for the betterment of the city it's not for somebody's own advantage to take to have a financial advantage to have you do their work for them that's what I kind of don't like I guess it's really hard to to say it just really depends on the the request or um but a lot of the what we're doing is just paperwork for that individual because somebody didn't keep up with the paperwork I guess you would say they have no place else to get that information or that paperwork well we would incur if I received a call just for example if I had received a call I would encourage them to reach out to like whoever was the design professional to see if they have kept copies or the contractor that built the pro project to see if they've kept copies and things like that only because I know that it would be expensive if we're having to start charging them per hour or or whatever we always write down how long it takes us so if it takes seven eight hours for us to do that for them where they may be able to call somebody and get that information we do try to help them with that without a PIR in place we'll we'll look up the information who was your design professional who was your contractor you know things like that that they may be able to reach out to those businesses and get that information from is there anything on our website that says if you have the following problem here's what you should do I mean house do they know where to go we get a lot of calls I know so that's my question so there's no place else for them to get the information in terms of who to turn to and what to do we could add something to the website means if if you're getting lots of calls for that it says that there's an issue with people knowing what to do to get the information where to go what are the re because they're making a phone call for that reason so we got to make sure they understand where else do they look to find the

[1:12:03] information other than calling you well I don't know that they would know who to reach out to who was the design professional on the project and who was the contractor without contacting us well that's I think the issue yeah agreed yes Tommy did did I hear you say that so far since October 1st you'd spent a hundred hours is did I hear hear that in part of the presentation the Departments have spent 103 hours and we have not calculated our time because we're not allowed to um on a very slow Friday I spent an hour and 45 minutes reviewing pirs so how many humans how many employees would be touching in that hundred hours that you're talking about how many how many different employees would be I think they're worse I believe there were 23 that touched these pirs but there's 18 staff members that routinely repetitively receive pirs the majority of our staff will never the majority of city employees will never see a PIR in their career it's it's very focused on fire reports permits Animal Services there's there's specific things that receive a lot of pirs and those people are consistently receiving pirs where other people and departments do not see very many and then of course police they're receiving a lot it's not in the hundred hours they are not counted in any of these numbers because I I cannot see their numbers so anything that we chose to adopt would not impact the police department anyway so it could possibly impact the police department Julia just doesn't have access to their side of the system there are requesters on that side of the

[1:14:05] system also who would probably rise to the level of this and just for an example when I came to the city of San Angelo seven and a half years ago I had one of my paralegals who part of her job responsibilities was doing public information and then one of the attorneys would write the letters and it didn't take very much time at all now one of my paralegals is exclusively dedicated to doing um these pirs that has a lot to do with body cams in that process we have to go through and then one of the attorneys and sometimes two work on getting the Letters Out and those sorts of things there's been a number of times where my whole office on a Friday afternoon will be going through some of the information that we've received from the Departments that we're trying to respond and redacting and looking for things that can't that we shouldn't be be releasing so the burden of this process on my office has been greatly enhanced we've tried and we have made some progress on putting more things online that people routinely request but like the reports for the fire department some of that contains medical information so we can't do that um and so that's not a total solution we've also done things like change our contract process so it frees up attorney time and reviewing contracts because it's more standardized so that more time can be devoted to this process but it is um taking over parts of my office as well as Julia's office yes Karen I have excuse me I have three questions um could you just repeat I think I I heard you say that the there was a small group of offenders that are either exceeding or close to exceeding the 15 hours per month 36 hours in a fiscal year and that those that body was not necessarily private citizens they were businesses is that correct because I think we want to reassure the public that that their desire to have information provided to them and that the government remain transparent really

[1:16:08] critical especially these days we live in a time unfortunately where people are very suspicious of government and government overreach so thank you for confirming that are your records paper only do you have to physically go and pull the paper and so our department serves more typically we serve more as a reviewer for what is submitted and each department has varying degrees um a lot of the fire reports are online permits are in our system and some of our computer systems are older so you may get a report but it may not be exactly what you would pull if you had your rathers and but a lot of our files are scanned and so we're seeing that a lot of people are just able to attach a file and but it doesn't cut down on the time for records that are older when we get searches that are I want to see all certificates of occupancy since 2011 or things of that nature you may not have documents that far back that have been scanned in but as a general rule the city departments are scanning more and more of their documents and more of our work processes are just done online now with it being the age of the internet you know most things are electronic these days um final question have you noticed any particular pattern in the types of requests that you're getting in this period of time between 2017 and today um is there a topical thread that I I kind of pulled the folks that would have been vexatious for 2022 had we had this policy in place um zoning due diligence solar panel research permits for in so that you can give somebody an insurance discount if you've recently repaired your roof so it's insurance companies reaching out to

[1:18:10] individuals saying you've done a repair on your roof you might be eligible for a discount and investment properties and real estate due diligence and property surveys interesting thank you a question go ahead Larry about the limits it seems to me what you're describing is a certain number of these will be accepted during a period of time and then after that what do people do I guess you still have the ability to receive the documentation you just have to pay for it so this policy just says that once you reach that 36 hour a year threshold then you're responsible for paying fifteen dollars an hour and some of these larger companies are probably going to do it this is just the one thing that we have as a possible lever to help control our workload and so we're just asking that we can adopt it see if it works it may not um how many of the requests the pirs that you have gotten do you think would would not have existed if you said well we're going to charge you the 15 an hour for what could be up to another 10 hours worth of work I mean at what point does establishing this change the request it's hard to say and sometimes we'll get a request that's voluminous and we will give a cost estimate for anything over three hours we like to give a cost estimate for and so that we can try to recoup some of the city's cost of Labor and and so sometimes we never hear from that person again and it's considered withdrawn and many times people will say what if I was able to reconfigure my request so that it was just for this information this is what I'm really seeking so we do see that at times that does help but then sometimes you may have a larger company and

[1:20:13] they're just going to send you a check for seven hundred dollars and ask you to do the work anyways so it's really a mixed bag so you you don't believe that this policy change will change the number of requests you get what this policy does do is increase the expense of the request but not changing I think it will cut down on some request but we there's no way to know for sure I guess my concern is a private citizen uh you know I have no problems with this in terms of Corporations and but the private citizen if he gets in there last in line he's getting charged for it which I'm not sure that that's uh oh no each individual has 36 hours no they'll be fine and and just to touch on that we would love to say if you're making a profit off of our information we're going to definitely charge you every time the state does not allow us to do that we cannot differentiate between an individual or a corporation so this is just a policy that would impact everybody because it has to and that's why we weren't able to adopt this in 2017 we did not have a way for our software to count this and this state specifically says You must be able to record the amount of time used for each PIR for each individual before you can deem anyone vexatious so that's why it's taken us this long to get to this Point otherwise we would have brought it forth in 2017 because we did have issues then but pirs have been growing exponentially since [Music] the questions yes I just want to make sure that I'm clear on something or making sure everybody's clear on something if these numbers continue going up we don't do anything about it at some point we'll need more Staffing to to assist with this which is unfair to the citizens that are vexatious they're just requesting their normal items it's not for citizens to be

[1:22:18] paying for this extra staff now if we Implement something like this this extra money is coming in and we still have a high number at least the money that's coming in will help pay for that extra staff so those vexations individuals actually end up paying for it I just want to make sure I make that clear so if you take a look at 2022 and this policy would have been in effect how much additional Revenue would would have been received from my calculations from the city Side it would have been around five thousand dollars so it's not going to pay for an entire individual but it does make steps in the right direction and PD will be if this policy is approved PD will be doing it as well their letters also indicate the time spent per request and overall for the fiscal year so if we adopt it PD will adopt it as well so that there'll be revenue from their side as well and they do have a belief a much larger issue than we do I just wonder if changing a policy that would in fact simply raise five thousand dollars if it was a policy that would impact financially a thirty thousand dollar issue it would seem to make more sense to in fact change policy I'm just not sure changing policy for five thousand dollars makes sense if it's additional a lot more money than that and it's really costing the city a whole lot more then I'm a little more interested in it but if it's a five thousand dollar issue I don't know somebody else I think you're looking as the the amount of Revenue that would be raised but the amount that it would save in staff time would far exceed the five thousand dollars but do you think that that re this will reduce the requests

[1:24:23] because that's what you're saying is if we do this this number of requests will diminish and if that diminishes then it requires less time I think here's my point on this we hope that it works if it doesn't work I think you need to be prepared in the next budget cycle to be adding somebody to permits Department to be adding somebody to my office possibly to Legal possibly to fire to PD it's a big issue I may not have stated it clearly enough but pirs are a big issue if we can do anything to possibly limit them I think we should give it a shot I don't know if it will work but not doing anything is not going to work yes sir Tom I think what we're going here it's the repeat people that do it constantly I can take the request that I've gotten and I can know if somebody says hey there's a PR uh PR coming I know it's one of two people and it's never changed anything in the amount of time we've all spent on but I'm kind of like Brenda everybody deserves a chance for a PR I mean there's if your kid gets thrown in jail or something happens that's not the people we're targeting with this it's the person that knows that it doesn't cost him anything or her can go in and throw five of them up within a counter of a quarter and it takes a lot of time and to this point has not caused any problems so mayor I'm in favor of going with it but I really see your point of you know it doesn't generate funds but it's a I think it's a preventative and we all get the same ones from the same people over and over and over and it's never I agree Larry would you like to speak yes ma'am thank you thank you as we've stated already it's not to generate Revenue but it's applying a penalty for those people who choose to do do this so it could have some impact on the vexatious requesters yes but you I'm and the point is the fine okay if

[1:26:27] we're being told okay if we don't do this we're going to have to hire five more people to curb the problem and yet we're looking at five thousand dollars so how does five thousand dollars equate to five more people now if we think it will impact it and we think it will slow down those two or three people that um are the ones who request the most pirs then that would seem to make sense in an effort to do it but if two out two or three people out of the what was the total number of people Jillian what was the total number of people this year um 83 requesters but two how many were the repeat uh so far three for this fiscal year so the question mark would be does this policy only impact the three out of the 83 that's correct so very small percentage very small percentage yes sir good morning my name is Billy Clemens the fire marshal um kind of a little too close all right um pirs come to my office pretty much every day and um it does affect my staff a lot we had a recent PIR come through um a lot of folks that do construction work uh send pirs through my office and it takes a lot of time to walk through these pirs the one in uh in general that I'm talking about right now the gentleman wanted to ask us to go back for the last six to eight months on every fire that we went to wanted addresses of all these properties it would have taken my staff 80 hours of information to come through for every fire that we went through that's the kind of PR pirs that we're

[1:28:29] trying to reduce because that kind of time takes away from my staff and I'm already short staffed as it is so if we're getting those kind of requests all the time it can impact my staff and what we're trying to do the team we'll see and I again I'm not saying it doesn't I'm just saying what the statistics you're providing today say three out of 83 people so you're still going to have 80 people still requesting pirs that might or might not qualify underneath this and so I'm trying to determine how big of an issue is it and I'm perfectly willing to approve a change in it to help everyone out I just want to make sure that we think what we're asked to approve is really going to make a difference that's all I'm I'm just trying to make sure we're clear that so three people might be impacted by this is that really a policy we want in place to impact three people I understand your concern but if you look at this um 71 of the requesters combined used 33 hours so they're using less than half an hour of Staff time that's what you expect out of a PIR it should be providing a simple document and you move on to your daily work 12 of the people resulted in 69 hours of work it's disproportionate so yes it's three people but it's three people that have already used around 40 hours of Staff time combined in two months see because that's the issue the issue is the following is that I'm not sure this additional expense is going to change those people's requests will they if they have to spend an extra 25 is it really going to change their request because I my guess is they can afford the 25 and again I get it I understand the need to cut

[1:30:32] down on ridiculous pirs but I do not want the public to think that what we're trying to do is shut down their ability or their to create Hang-Ups in terms of requesting a PIR and statistically the numbers I don't know they're they don't read well I do want to remind everyone too that they talked about there's certain hours we can't even charge and again that's coming from Teresa's office and Julia's office as well so all those numbers actually when you start talking about revenues and what have you uh the whole the gold part of it is of course to reduce those numbers I know that I know for a fact uh one individual that at times uh not maybe not this year but in previous years you'll have between seven to seven to fifteen percent of the requests that come through is from that one individual again mayor we know what we're saying right now is that really the great majority of people that need help and need information will get it that's not an issue now if you're that individual and you know who you are who's requesting numerous requests per year and has taken up a lot of Staff time and it's affecting ESU it's affecting you but the average citizen that wants information is going to be as Julius Julius at a while ago it's half an hour maybe at the most uh that's not a problem for us I think that this policy alone uh even given it a try give us an understanding you could even say hey let's bring it back in in about three months and take a look at it but if anything I think it helps more than anything than what we have in place right now right now what we have in place is not working mayor yes Tommy Charlie I was going to say something I wanted to add one more thing we do have um a couple of contractors every month we do receive a PIR from them asking them for copies of their permits copies of their inspections because they don't have that person in place in their business so they kind of rely on us to do that for them and they do that

[1:32:34] through pirs and you know we're kind of in hopes that maybe this would help them understand the time that it is taking us because you know they are they make a copy they just white out the date and then resubmit so every month we're we're generating them almost um helping them run their business and unfortunately the and that does take away from somebody else that may be coming in and we're trying to speak into the mic please oh I apologize um so that does take away from some of the other job duties trying to help other people with their projects and everything because we're trying to help run this business for a contractor go ahead Tommy mayor I'm to move us along I'll make a motion that we adopt the policy as presented by Julia public comment I think what we need to do and I would say this is that what we need to do is determine a timeline on this to for re-review and see if it has had any impacts I'd like to see this brought back in six months for rediscussion in terms of if it has had any impact in terms of the workload yes Joe I just want to remind you I'm not that I'm in the news media and I'm not that concerned about this from a news media perspective except to say that the policy you're making today is going to outlast you is going to outlast me you got to look at how this can be used in the future future councils future news media people to suppress information from the city so I mean you got to look at that you got to think about that um I will say that from a news media perspective paying for information can become very expensive the margins are really really tight if uh I'll speak for my competitors if I'm klst or ksan or Fox I don't have a lot of money from corporate to do stuff like this to do

[1:34:37] investigative reporting that's why they don't do a lot of it from my perspective trying to make money off of uh off investigative report when I can go right down the street on Sherwood Way and and right on about three crashes and I get enough traffic for the day to make my quota you know investigative reporting is expensive it takes a lot of time so look at what you're talking about as far as what the news media exceptions are in this in this deal because the news media is they're the Watchdogs or the guys going to shine a flashlight into this one of the concerns I do have is minor but you don't really Define what sanjo live would be I mean I don't have an SEC license for example so that's my biggest concern on this is looking way into the future when you're not here and how could this be used for us information out of the city thank you all right so there's been a motion in a second but I would like to ask that that motion be I don't know if I can do this right now maybe it has to be voted down but I think part of the motion has to be that this needs to be re-reviewed within a certain amount of time to see if it's effective or not I'm just again the numbers don't work for me and so I I need to make sure that it accomplishes what you think it will accomplish or whether it just makes us look like we're trying to shut people up that's my concern and that's all yeah you and then you Julia how much time do you think you need to kind of get a pretty good reading before coming back to city council I know the mayor suggested six months would that suffice we can try six months I think the problem is is that it's a full 12 months is the way that the state designed it to be calculated so I don't know if we want to say bring it back in October I don't know

[1:36:40] um what you want to say but the the state did design it to be a 12-month program I want to know in six months how many repeat offenders qualified underneath this policy Larry I was just curious on whether we can table this for further discussion well what further discussion would you like to discuss on it sweater that name a couple questions well I think we've been surprised at the impact that this could have in the media long term it also could have uh and as I understand it the the vexatious people it's not a question of the numbers uh except when it gets into the depth of what their requests are and I'm not sure we have an answer for that because if that person is asking for the moon then that's more time spent but it still counts as just one understand what I mean man well one times how many hours because again if you're down to what we talked about three or four people it's probably pretty easy to figure out if statistically what kind of time frame each should I mean we're trying to you know we keep talking about how much it costs us so if it's x amount of cost we have a way to determine that because that's what we're talking about is it cost us x amount of money to do all of this and if x amount of money is going to be required to do all this we're going to need extra staff but yet the dollars we're talking about don't don't add up to what you're saying in terms of needing more staff so the whole thing doesn't seem to mesh well with me that's and if we need more time to talk about it we need more information we need more statistics we will have to vote to um we would take a vote on that motion and deny the motion to be approved right before we bring up a new emotion a new motion just a minute but I'd like to address Joe's comment

[1:38:44] for just a second I mean this is something that's allowed by State Statute so a future Council even if you don't do this if they want to control the Rogue Media or whatever they can then pass the similar policy and because it's a policy it's one reading of council so one reading of council removes the policy it's not like a charter Amendment which is there until the citizens get rid of it policies by their nature are very easily to amend and adopt and change and again since it is allowed by State Statute unless that statute changes any future Council would have the same ability to do what we're asking you to do Lucy you had yeah I just had a quick question for Julia Julia is this kind of like well you call and ask us to do to go and look at all this stuff from a year ago and that's correct that's a lot of time in our own daily that's correct and just to also address the media on fiscal year 2022 and to date none of the media Outlets have come anywhere near reaching any sort of threshold um I don't actually believe I've received any pirs this year from the media to date but most of the media calls and calls a department head and says hey can you provide more information on this policy or they're not typically doing a public information request they typically know who to contact in each department and they reach out directly or reach out to Brian Groves and kind of ask him for some guidance all right so we have a motion and a second and we've had comment from Council certainly so is there any further comment from the public easy District Five I was just going to ask if when y'all go to evaluate how that's working to try to maybe do what he was talking about making it where people could do their own research easier access you know some kind of menu from the cities page because like per I mean when I file lien notice for at least 10 years I file a filing fee they

[1:40:48] scan it in it has to be in that I mean that should be available let somebody let those people do their own research so just making a menu so that they go do their own well that's what I was asking if we had posted on our website Direction and I know some people don't like to read they just want to make a phone call or send an email they don't really want to do do the work I get that any further public comment all right seeing none we will yes Larry could we have the resolution repeated no it's not a resolution it's emotion the motion is what Tommy approve as presented by Julia and the second was that as well would that include a possible six-month trial period on this I think we could get that in our Friday packet um well no we need it part of the motion or not if it stands as it is we would vote on no time limit no anything just as a new policy we would choose to do this because that's the motion on the floor and unless Tommy amends his motion on the floor that is the motion we would be voting on and we could reject that motion by a vote and then create a new motion inclusive of that is that correct so with that the motion on the floor is as presented so all of those in favor of the motion as presented say aye aye those opposed say I I to wait we don't we these numbers do not okay let's start four people don't make okay all those in favor of approving the motion as presented I'm going to go one by one Tommy hi here Tom Harry yep mayor Gunter no Lucy aye for and Lou all right so the motion passes

[1:42:53] two four five to two all right we're moving on we will go into item C consider authorizing tax increment reinvestment Zone funds in the amount of a hundred and five thousand three hundred eighty two for the purpose of Maintenance activities within the zones including maintenance of landscaping weeds trash pickup and similar tasks to ensure aesthetic streetscapes along streets within the North and South tiers areas you're on John so that that pretty much summarized it but I'll just go into a little more detail uh the proposal is to use both North and South tiers funds for maintenance including maintaining Landscaping lots of the Landscaping the new Landscaping on Chadbourne but also the older Landscaping on North Chadbourne uh weeding picking up trash that's one of the things after one of our town hall meetings one of the comments was could we use this money to pick up trash make the the roadways look better for the businesses um and so this proposal came from the parks department it would include upfront equipment costs of about forty three thousand dollars what's that equipment uh it's detailed in your packet but I know but safe for the public is the public yeah it would include a vehicle and then just some tools you know that would be used for trimming trees and and that sort of thing the parks folks are here if you have more detailed questions about the specifics included in their proposal it would also include annual operating costs of about 62 000 largely for Lay labor for the folks that would be assigned to doing this and then so the total first year cost would be about 105 000 but then the recurring would be about 62. although that could increase a little bit each year based on labor costs you know with increases it's anticipated most of the work would be in the Chadbourne Corridor although it could be done throughout the tiers if there were special uh you know let's let's do something on MLK or or Harris or you know it could be used throughout we looked at this a few different ways

[1:44:57] as we talked about it with the tears board about 37 percent of the Chadbourne Street Corridor is within the South tiers and 63 percent is in the north so that was the first we looked at splitting it that way so 37 percent of the money from the the South and 63 from the north but then we sort of went back and forth with that discussion and ended up deciding just to hey this is going to be done in both sides there's proposals for more Landscaping on the North Chadron Corridor so let's just make it an even 50 50 split to make it easy um as we move forward so again that that's a very brief overview I will mention as noted in your packet this did go for before the tears board they recommended denial of this funding so they did not recommend uh using the funding their concern was largely that the limited amount of funding particularly in the South would be better spent going towards incentive projects in the South and they didn't want to pull even this fairly limited amount of money I mean a 60 000 a year that'd be about 30 000 a year from the south out of an annual allocation between 250 and 300 000 so a substantial percentage but a small percentage they just didn't feel that that was the proper use of terrorist funds that is part of what can the tears can pay for yeah it's absolutely an eligible expense with tears uh the board just felt like they did not want the tiers money to be going towards this they thought that this was something that um the city should just be doing if we're going to clean up streets pick up weeds you know pick up trash that that should just be done by the city but I'll add that one of the reasons we propose this is what we're what this is proposing is a greater level of service for this area than what we do city-wide so if we just go with Citywide policy we don't routinely have people going picking up

[1:46:59] trash on city streets we don't typically trim trees bushes those sorts of things throughout town and so this is this would be using tears money to give an expanded level of service for that area I know on Mondays that the trash cans are overflowing and probably looks like there have been three trash cans not one trash can so who's responsible for picking up the trash in those trash cans that are part of the streetscape program I guess I would defer to somebody else to answer that but with this program that would become the responsibility of these tiers funds would help pay extra staff to do that more regularly process on chadburn we said I thought that we would need to allocate funding to maintain that once complete during the construction process of course the contractor and Shane may be here to speak to it if I misspeak Shane but contractor maintained the site as that has finished off the contractors no longer doing that they are maintaining like the tree the plant materials I believe for a year the mic Rick no one can hear you I'm sorry do you have a mic did you hear the whole first part well we might have but I'm the public isn't here is that any better it's on I can't I can't do any better that's why maybe that mic's working um throughout the construction process the con actually the contractor was responsible for maintenance at the of the side of the entire side as as we have uh started turning that over uh to the city as as they've completed uh we have um we first started off with Street and Bridge and uh in conjunction with the parks kind of working hand in hand sometimes Street and Bridge guys would be you know on Mondays and Wednesdays Street and Bridge guys will be there and on you know Fridays and whatever we Parks guys would be there and kind of tag teamed it Parks has really taken a lot stronger role in that here lately and so they've started working and

[1:49:00] picking that up more often so the guys are going down there what Mario go three times a week or yes sir yeah they're they're down there three times a week to actually collect the trash out of those trash cans and replace the liners is what they're doing right now um the um the contractor is still doing bed maintenance and will be responsible for uh plant replacing any plant materials for the next 12 months um is there a time it's a guarantee guarantee basically they're guaranteeing their plantings is what they're doing and so it's a guaranteed to replace those however um once once we've actually signed off on the project and it's completed then it will become the city's responsibility to maintain those beds whether that's pulling weeds we have seen quite a bit of Bermuda growth and a few of them and so to to get that pulled out and get that out of there to keep the beds clean that will become the city's responsibility at that point so again moving forward there's not necessarily any extra staff anywhere to really put somebody down there every day to take care of this kind of like what we would believe the enhanced expectation would be for this project but again that's a council decision how y'all want to move forward so well I know that when downtown was so was selling the trash receptacles they had an agreement with Republic to pick up the trash out of those trash receptacles that the downtown area was so how does that work with this I believe that those receptacles are still down there I'd have to actually visit with Dell to see exactly how many of those receptacles are still down there I believe there's five or six still in the downtown area that Republic does have a car or has an agreement with downtown San Angelo to to collect those currently there is no no contract or anything Associated between the city and Republic to actually run a big truck to go through and replace those of course that's also instead of just dumping a can we do actually have liners within those cans so it makes it a lot easier

[1:51:03] and they're a lot smaller these cans that we've placed along Chadron there's a lot more of them but they're they're smaller in nature than those larger cans that downtown San Angelo place there are there further questions for Shane since he's at the microphone okay thanks all right so with that is there a motion for approval I have a couple of questions um I'm curious to know what what if any burden is on the individual Property Owners to particularly deal with trash weeds minor pruning and general maintenance I'm very happy to see the tree pruning and the irrigation on there as designated targets for this particular project we want to take care of that for sure but the very fact that the tiers board voted against this I think we we have a couple more questions and that's my first one yeah I I don't know that I can speak to what obligation the property owners have that did come up both at Town Hall and the tiers board meeting I think some of the tiers board members felt that that should be the owner the property owner their obligation even if it's not a legal obligation they should pick up in front of their place I think in some cases the question mark would be is it minor is it yours because it's kind of between our two businesses so it's meant for a public use not the businesses use so there becomes a conflict and that conversation is is this for the Public's use or is it an individual businesses use and that's always become the issue and that was the concern raised by the other side of the argument at some of the board members or that well even if Property Owners should be doing it many of them aren't and so something like this would ensure the whole Corridor looks nice and my business on North chadburn isn't

[1:53:07] dependent on my neighbors picking up even if I do it and so this would give kind of a consistent theme throughout but as you mentioned that the ultimately the board came down on the side of not recommending it in this case to add to that just a little bit and I'm sorry if this didn't work but the really the intent I think the owners do a pretty good job of picking up you know in front if it's on the on the ground or something but this crew really focuses a lot on picking up the larger septicles making sure that trash is hauled off in the big receptacle areas and of course if there's something on the ground but I think in general the property owners downtown do a good job of keeping the streetscape picked up and you know put into the receptacles but but I mean when we're talking about weeds growing out grass growing out in certain areas you can have certain areas of downtown that look really nice other areas will not look as nice until code enforcement can get in there and enforce it and even with enforcement you typically have over 10 day period before anybody can actually do anything about it so you can have certain parts of the downtown that look nice and others look terrible and there's not going to be that consistency that we're looking for quote ordinances is not going to work because this is public streetscape it's not individual business streetscape it's public streetscape and I think we're not going to have city code ordinances against a business because that tree is out front and in that tree out front are weeds growing so I think like many things if it's public and this is public investment back into a district we want to make sure we maintain it at the highest level possible Marin I do want to add when you definitely don't want a property owner go out there and trim a tree and kill it no just because you think it's your responsibility so we have to be really careful or a plant looks like uh a weed and it's not a weed it's a plant so I think that some professional management of this is very key and very

[1:55:10] important we've invested in it now let's make sure we get it taken care of and make sure that the investment we make reflects what we've chosen to do here move to approve thank you let me I've got a motion in a second no you open up for public comments and you can make a public comment in anticipation of the next item on the agenda the north tier zone is going to have nearly a budget or nearly have a fund balance of three million dollars we're talking about half of one percent I I don't I don't see why you just don't charge 80 and the the tiers board their concern is the burden on the south tier Zone the north tier Zone has a nearly 3 million dollar fund balance out here not far away so my point would have been to make the motion with 80 percent of it being paid from the north tier Zone she has to amend that motion on the floor would you like to do that how does that idea sound everybody make a motion already got two are you willing to have that motion amended I um I'm willing to have that motion amended I think that the overarching concern when I had a question or two for John was the fact that the tears board pointed to reinvestment not maintenance so while I personally want to see the city look beautiful be cared for be consistent um we have to we have to treat people fairly so yes I'm open to your amendment I mean I look at it when you buy a home and it looks one way the very day you bought it you know six weeks down the road if it needs the lawn needs mode you're probably going to mow it I mean it's all about how we present ourselves and I think if there's funds available let's do the best job possible and if it's an issue whether it's charged to the north versus the South we all benefit the district benefits so I think that you just made an amendment to the motion and that Amendment to the motion is that the northern tiers pick up the entire expense of this is that what your motion amendment is no I'm just make let him

[1:57:14] answer he's the one who made the motion then we'll go to the next one my motion was to have the northern Zone pick up a minimum of 80 percent of it because they have abandoned motion she made the motion he asked Amanda do you are you willing to have amended she is willing to have it amended okay and then we have a second for the amended motion no no and she says it's like how did we get to 80. from from these numbers so listen 80 percent isn't going to change there's almost three million dollars sitting in the north a hundred thousand dollars a year is not eighty eighty thousand dollars a year is not going to break the northern tiers I mean just isn't save the trees save the landscape save the investment how about that let's start all over yes well we have to vote on that what's the process right now we're waiting for a second on the amended motion somebody wants to Second it I second it there's an amended motion to accept as presented with the exception of charging 80 percent of the expense to the northern tiers with the remaining 20 percent charge to the southern tiers that is the motion on the floor and that is the second and it is open for public comment seeing none will take a vote all of those in favor say aye aye any opposed to motion passes five two all right the next item is item d discussion Direction on the tax increment reinvestment Zone regarding moving boundary lines between the North and South areas and the issue of North tiers funding for non-profit organizations John Europe

[1:59:19] yes this um this item came up with discussions you know you may recall recently we talked about North and South funds and how to distribute them as part of that discussion one of the questions and comments that came up was um is the north-south division line in the right place and so we're bringing this to you as a discussion item this is not for Action today it needs to go to the tiers board first before action is taken for their recommendation this has not gone to them yet I believe it's scheduled for their next regular meeting in January so they will be discussing it but this is for you all to either provide Direction tell them don't worry you know don't bother we don't we don't like the idea or yes we think it's a good idea the board should take it up and consider it so we're just seeking Direction on that here are the maps this is the existing North tiers and a South tiers and I think I have a this is the zoom in of that boundary line so right now this yellow line is the line between North and South so here is the Houston heart coming right through there and this the boundary jogs around but it's roughly third and fourth street and so what this proposal that that was brought up was to move it to Harris which is the north south boundary line for addressing in the city everything south of Harris is you know south chadburn or South Oaks everything North is the north side and so that's the whole premise behind this is because uh and several of the meetings people don't understand if North chadburn starts at Harris Street and they're but their property is considered North Chadron but the funding is from the southern tiers even though it's called North chadburn and that's the confusion is that Harris line as a division line creating a north and a South chadburn and yet we have a north and a South tier Zone that don't

[2:01:24] tie in to the North and South chadburn language that's right and my understanding is when this was created the the idea was basically the downtown is the South tears and everything else was the North and so this was sort of a rough approximation at the time of of where people felt the boundary was between downtown and non-downtown uh and so that's I think that's the history of why the boundary ended up uh where it was and obviously that's kind of debatable you know what's what is downtown and where is that line but uh again this is the the proposal to move it down to Harris just looking for your direction the other piece of this is uh the non-profit um discussion you may recall I think it was back in August revision to the tiers policies came to you all and the policy on nonprofits was changed prior to that nonprofits could not get funding uh through the tiers it was changed in the north tiers still no nonprofits in the South but in the north tiers the policy was changed to say that I was done in 2017. yes sir okay I was thinking it was in the recent change um and the uh in the north so right now in the north a non-profit can get incentive funding for improvements to their property in the north but it does require a finding that it has an economic benefit to the community and it does require a super majority vote by both the board and the city council to authorize funding for a non-profit the whole idea behind tears is to create additional property tax dollars so the idea that we would have an area that we would be willing to give money to a business an organization who brings no property tax dollars to the tier Zone does not make sense the whole idea is that increased property values bring

[2:03:28] increased dollars into the tiers bucket of money that's the whole premise behind tax increment reinvestment Zone and that's the reason the request is to make sure that both in the Northern and the southern that only if you're a tax paying business owner are you allowed to submit requests from the tiers bucket of money yes sir so it was 2017 as one of the first councils I was on I remember Brandon made the motion to include on the south Zone and exclude non-profits the reason I spoke against that and I remember it very clearly was there's discussion about there are some development companies that come in as a non-profit and buy property reconvert it then kick it out as Pro you know as properties that then can be developed but we have never seen that as the case ever and you know so I will take the blame for that that was my reason was to protect that opportunity but in the five years that I've been here I've never seen that even anybody talk about it and I think it does make sense to go ahead and remove non-profits from eligibility it's really simple and again just as with the first piece of this on the boundary this is just for discussion and Direction it will the policy change will have to go back to the board and then come to you all right I think if there's any yes Karen sorry I couldn't see your hand I would just like to point out since we're discussing um the relative merits of profit versus non-profit that Shannon is now a designated non-profit and that's been that we factor that into the anything that we prescribe well let me refresh your memory on that because here's the deal when the tier Zone was created the idea was that the north would receive lots of

[2:05:30] additional funds because the new Walmart was being purchased and was going to be done and at that point in time Shannon had not taken the real estate into a non-profit status and so there was a consideration for those two zones because you had increased dollars coming from a new Walmart and you were going to have Shannon expansion and Shannon real estate dollars then somewhere maybe 2018 Shannon pulled all of their real estate into a non-profit real estate fund and so the equalization of those two things became very lopsided and so that's what the South had counted on in terms of fueling the tiers bucket of money and so that's what happened yes it changed this this boundary line uh hair on hairs is Shannon going to be on this no it doesn't matter Shanna doesn't pay a penny I know but would the line show where they would be eligible as a non-profit to get some monies yeah if you don't vote to right they don't vote to do that okay that's what I needed to know Lucy go Lucy that's it go girl I just woke up welcome thank you I like Harris because it's it's the dividing one it is it's north yeah so whether it should be or not I was going to say dude just to me it makes it easier to say yeah North is here south is here because every the addressing is is that way so it doesn't matter from a you know anybody their address isn't going to change it doesn't impact anything like that it's just policy okay with that any other questions comments concerns if not we're going to take a break [Laughter] thank you mayor yeah let's call it a 12-minute break 12 minutes 53 a.m and we will call this meeting if

[2:07:34] you will back to order and we will start with item E I believe um yes item e is first reading and public hearing of an ordinance extending the temporary changes to chapter 12 planning a development article 12.04 signs in the city code of ordinances to allow additional time for preparation of permanent amendments to the San Angelo signed ordinance and John euron thank you you may recall a couple of years ago we we made some uh changes to the sign ordinance based on a court case that was at the fifth circuit that that basically made parts of our sign ordinance unconstitutional so we made some quick fixes to that uh describe what that was basically the main point was uh that you could no longer treat on-premise signs uh so like a business sign differently than a billboard an off-premise sign and so we modified our ordinance to basically say those signs are interchangeable we still have rules for Billboards but a billboard now can advertise something that's on that same site or off that site but similarly on a business property the smaller signs that are allowed on a business those could also advertise for a McDonald's or whatever's on the site or it could advertise something off-site so we got rid of that on-site off-site distinction that we did because State ordinance there was a court case that said um basically you can't make that distinction any longer so we made that change to our ordinance but you all made it temporary and said this will be uh temporary until the end of the year at which point The Hope was we would bring back permanent changes that looked a little more comprehensively at what changes needed to be made well subsequent to that the Supreme Court took up that case and so we had that extent we asked you all to extend that another year well the Supreme Court decided that case and they partly

[2:09:39] reversed the decision but partly remanded it back to the lower court to look at it again with some new Direction and so because of that it's still sort of up in the air we're waiting on it to go back to that lower court so we're asking for another extension we don't want to bring you a bunch of signed ordinance changes that in six months will change again because of this court case that's still in process and so we're asking for another extension our hope is to complete those changes to the sign ordinance over the next year but in this we've asked for a two-year extension so that we don't have to keep coming back every year if the court keeps dragging their feet are we looking at it based off of that discussion I know that there are other issues with our signing ordinance that people would like to have discussed or reviewed or reconsidered so I would like to make sure that what we're doing as we're waiting for the courts to make a decision that we spend the time and effort to re-look at our signed ordinance and make sure that we still like what the sign ordinance says look at recommendations from citizens in terms of things that they think need to be changed in the signed ordinance and let's use it as an opportunity to re-review the signed ordinance if you will absolutely we can do that yes Karen um full agreement in fact one step further I'd like to inquire um whether there would be any interest in having a citizen committee that would help with the review process I know that there are people in my district that are very interested in serving in that capacity um just a thought yes wouldn't have a problem with that we we often do that with ordinances like this looking at revisions having a group a stakeholder group that we could put together to help provide input so we'll go ahead and create a citizen stakeholder group if there's anyone from

[2:11:43] any of your districts that you would like to recommend or inform them of this re-review please let John James know and we will start to try to put together a citizen stakeholder group on sign ordinance review do we have to make a motion on this election on this yes and all this is doing today is extending the temporary changes to the ordinance for another two years yeah so move so moved by Harry seconded by Tommy any public comment citizen Mertz single District Five and I would like to thank the council for agreeing to have a Citizens Review Committee made of a diverse interest throughout our city to review our signed organs thank you so very much for their public comment it's to the heart of Zane White District Six this gets to the heart my comments earlier in my comments for the last several months regarding this Supreme Court decision excuse that's been used actually two separate Supreme Court decisions that I've been given by the city that have absolutely nothing to do anybody with any reading comprehension at all that has Integrity can simply read those decisions again the Supreme Court decisions are read versus the town of Gilbert that was in 2015. the other is a 2022 decision City of Austin versus Reagan National

[2:13:47] advertising of Austin LLC these are content primarily content related issues okay they don't have anything to do with the cactus Hotel sign if if they do I've been asking for months and months and only you know it just tell me different so show the city of San Angelo that I'm wrong this business of yeah all of this vague stuff about yeah you know there's there's a supreme court this there's a yeah we got to get back you know there's things that's not going to work if you're going to just dispute what I'm saying you need to lay out some facts and if this attorney can't get it done you need to bring in somebody else bring in the AG bring in a D.A they can actually interpret those laws correctly because this is just another deal using these Supreme Court decisions to kick this down the road and I believe there's an agenda that there are people being protected by this smoke screen and it's going to come to a stop you people need to put your money where your mouth is have someone do a five minute presentation to prove me wrong until then I'm going to keep coming back till you get it straight or the public comment seen none we will take a vote on the motion all in favor say aye aye any opposed none opposed motion passes seven zero we'll move into item F first reading and public hearing of an ordinance for pd22-03 to rezone from the zero lot line twin home and town home single family residential and low-rise multi-family

[2:15:49] residential zoning districts to a planned development zoning District to allow an underlying base zoning of zero lot line twin home and townhome single-family residential with the additional use of single-family homes subject to development standards outlined in the ordinance being 37.5 Acres located southeast of Valley View Boulevard and Stone Canyon Trail John thank you as you mentioned this is a rezoning this is the property here um this is Valley View and college Hills so that gives you a kind of an idea of where it is you've seen this a couple of times over the last few years as development Trends change as properties change hands um this property they've looked at a couple of different models and so this is another change in this area this is in the future land use plan as neighborhood that's that's not changing you can see the current zoning on the property the front part is RS3 it does allow those town homes and that type of development the back part is rm1 which allows apartment development and so one of the key pieces of this change is that it would change it to allow multiple different kinds of single-family development but would no longer allow the apartment development we did send out our notices 40 notices in total foreign support to an opposition I will say that we received a number of phone calls about this from property owners in the area and largely when we explained what this was doing uh basically allowing single-family homes on slightly smaller Lots than is normally allowed but getting rid of the apartment zoning most of the people who called into us were satisfied with that answer largely their concern over the years has been with the apartment zoning that was originally allowed on this property this is the preliminary plot that has already been approved for this area and so that that is not changing um some of these Lots were originally uh

[2:17:53] envisioned as zero outline Lots where one one side of the house would be right on the property line and those are slightly narrower Lots because of that basically what they're looking at is the opportunity to do single-family homes that aren't on the property line so moving them over on the lot but still having them on these narrower Lots which are 45 feet wide instead of the 50 feet you can see here the in the the colored areas those are plats that have already been approved final plats they have not all been filed yet but those are I mean basically they could follow those plots and begin development as soon as they wanted to uh and so uh they're looking at the rest of this that hasn't been finally plotted but as you saw in the previous has already been preliminarily planted so at this point they're not looking at changes to any of this in terms of layout of the area so these are this is kind of the summary and and the reason you see the red this is what was proposed to the Planning Commission and they made some changes uh staff is supportive of those changes that the Planning Commission made but I wanted to leave those on here just so you could see what their discussion was um again one of the main things is is allowing 45 foot wide Lots instead of the 50 that's normally required for a single family home it also reduces the front sat back to 15 feet allowing them a little closer it still requires a 25 foot setback for a garage the problem we see if if homes are built up to closer than 25 feet you start to get cars that Park and block you know there's not enough room to park cars in front of the house so garages will still have to be back 25 feet but the rest of the house can come up 15 feet that gives them a little bit more Development Area on these smaller Lots single family home lot size overall would stay the same so the Lots will have to be a little deeper to make up for them them being narrower our normal ordinance requires a floor

[2:19:57] area ratio of 0.6 which means basically you can't cover more than 60 percent of the lot with buildings they've asked it for they've asked for 70 percent coverage and so that's what was approved by the Planning Commission so again similar to zero outline homes a little bit more of the lot would be covered by the home so slightly smaller yards around that this area was as I mentioned originally zoned for multi-family and as you may recall under our new sidewalk ordinance multi-family areas require sidewalks so we had recommended including sidewalks given that the density is higher and you're putting more homes in a smaller area that that seemed to make sense the Planning Commission said no if we're rezoning to RS type zoning which doesn't require sidewalks we should stick with that what's in the sidewalk ordinance and so that's been removed one of the staff's concerns that are reflected by eight and nine here what we originally recommended one of the concerns we have is that they're developing these areas and so it's creating traffic up Stone Canyon and by not connecting Valley View over and by not extending College Hills you're funneling all of that traffic up Stone Canyon and that's one of the complaints we heard from some of the neighbors we had recommended a provision that subsequent plats let me go back to this map if they start to plant any of this area or any of this area they would have to extend College Hills and Valley View as part of the next phases of Platz in other words they couldn't plot out an area like this and then this and avoid creating the college Hills or Valley View after discussion at the meeting with the developer I think the Planning Commission was comfortable that their intent is fully to to move forward with that and we probably have other we have other ways to prevent that from happening through the subdivision

[2:22:00] ordinance and so the Planning Commission felt that those numbers eight and nine requiring those Road Connections immediately were not necessary and staff is comfortable with that recommendation as well this is in your packet I won't go through all of this but this just kind of compares the different requirements in our ordinance if you're in single-family homes duplex RS3 rm1 and then this is the proposed PD and you can see in red or where the the significant changes in the proposed plan development from what's allowed the primary one being that lot size of 45 foot wide and then the the setback as well uh with that I'd be happy to answer any questions are there any questions for John James Tommy John have we had any input from public safeties folks specifically fire I I'm assuming we're going to be increasing number of homes just because the that would appear to be the the ultimate goal here did we have input from fire department of any concerns that they had just from Public Safety standpoint no but I will point out again that um let me go back to this their proposal for the total number of lots hasn't changed from the preliminary plot that's already approved and if they did want to redo this in a way that tried to squeeze a few more in it wouldn't add that many more lots and compared to the apartment zoning that's already on the site that would add a lot more people and a lot more traffic so this reflects actually a reduction in the total density that could be allowed there any other questions or comments for John on this issue then mayor I'd move approval wait here we go you still don't have green zones here we do not we've we've been meeting as staff with discussions about uh requirements for that but uh under our current ordinances we have no capability of requiring any uh any sort of Parkland

[2:24:03] as part of new developments and again as I mentioned that preliminary plot has already been approved years ago and so even if we had new rules in place today they would be exempt from that having already gotten their approval my main point is we need to move faster on getting something established that provides for the green spaces and areas such as this any other comments or questions all right seeing none there is a motion for approval a second no they have I will second at them in public comment please Andre used to play uh district one um Green Space is really great um I live in that area I drive down Valley View and I take that curve and go up College Hills all the time almost every day um we have a lot of people in that area that are runners so I'm just saying if to consider once Valley View and college Hills I mean once Valley View has been developed if you could put in sidewalks because right now the runners I mean they're risking their lives um when they're making that turn and going up the hill towards that little Walmart also the Green Space would be great if we could incorporate it somehow into that area because there's a lot of deer and wild turkeys that live in that area and if you live in um salad you you know because they visit your neighborhood all the time but it we're pushing them out and um they can cause a lot of wrecks right but if we had some green space at least they

[2:26:05] could hang out I mean just consider it that's all I'm asking thank you any other public comment good morning I'm James Duncan I'm here on behalf of the the applicant and I just wanted to make myself available if there are any questions I think most of the issues were already addressed I'll make a couple of account already been said um we did last year asked to rezone the northern part to RS3 quite frankly that that was a mistake on our part we've had some wrong assumptions I guess everyone at the time was focused on the sidewalk coordinates and we were focused more on drainage and we also thought that we didn't care about apartments up there but what we thought was included was single family usage and turns out it wasn't um we asked to redo this to try to have the single family allowed also we thought we were reducing the larger Lots because the builders that we've talked to are not crazy about trying to design zero lot line homes that are harder to design I personally am a fan of zero lot line but it is more difficult to do it well and so rather than having them try to design a zero outline and possibly on a 40-foot lot we just said they they they would prefer if they could have a standard design splitting the setbacks on either side um regarding our plats that have been done up to now I thought it was worth a little bit of an explanation we bought the property of course

[2:28:08] interest meters starting to tick we were working having discussions and intermittent conversations with the nearby landowners about trying to come to a corrupt Cooperative agreement perhaps splitting costs putting in at the same time a joint development of either Valley View or college Hills um those were promising but have not redu not produced and uh an agreement to go forward jointly uh concurrent with that we were looking at drainage issues and where not only our detention goes but the drainage on Valley View was a big consideration not for the the Improvement of Valley View that's in front of our property but Downstream on the existing Pro Part to the east when we opened it up and there's a lot of drainage that comes through there it's going to increase the amount of storm water that runs off onto that section which if that were to be built today the amount that would flow onto there would exceed the amount that would be allowed within the gutter and creating a deeper and a wider section of water in an area that already has a has a storm water some issues and so we've various City departments have talked to us and that there is a proposal that on some of the city property we might take a look at Regional drainage and or detention and that would help alleviate the concerns so in the meantime College Hills had the same factors of trying to work with the other landowner across the street the drainage and detention and then the combining that with the fact that where and how that detention and where that and how that runoff to Valley View

[2:30:11] is handled Russell Gully was here and he left but uh the design of college Hills the design of our streets to connect them to college Hills would be impacted by how much water you divert which direction and how much you allow to pass through so try to get the project going we stopped short of college Hills to allow some intervening distance that the engineers could have the latitude to make appropriate design adjustments in how those intersections would correct connect and function it was not because we desired to delay quite frankly we wanted to start with Valley View that would have been the most logical point of view I mean point to start and then we also want connectivity for the good of our future residents and everyone else so I'm available if there are any other questions thank you James any other public comment with that we'll take a vote all in favor say aye any opposed not opposed motion passes 7-0 moving on to item G first reading and introduction of an ordinance amending the budget for the fiscal year beginning October 1 2022 and ending September 30th 2023 for ongoing projects and capital items Tina urine thank you mayor Tina dersky Director of Finance I have a couple of budget amendments for you this morning to consider the first one is for police body cameras requesting seventy thousand dollars to cover the Gear 3 cost of that um the second is for overtime expenses for the fire department we kind of discussed this in the budget hearings that they would be using some of the charity care money to help out with the peak hours ambulance and overtime expenses 42 930 dollars

[2:32:15] and then now we're going into our annual carryovers that are requested by departments for projects that were ongoing but incomplete by the end of fiscal year 2022 so we bring those to you for consideration and approval the first is for city clerk I'm trying to carry over about twenty eight thousand dollars for election expenses the second is for facilities maintenance for Tom Green County jail inmate work Crews and lighting replacement twenty seven thousand three hundred ninety seven dollars that's a Tom Green County expense why is it on the city here it is a an agreement I believe with Tom Green County but I think that's a Ron Lewis question Ron Lewis facility maintenance it is an agreement with the county to share the costs for the TDCJ prisoners and the inmate crew Camp that's out near the animal shelter so that it yeah it's not their work crew it's just the crew that comes from the TDCJ and we shared yeah we share those expenses through agreement years ago and we've amended some years back and it's still in effect okay next step is for traffic operations for their flashing yellow arrow project 42 396 dollars how was that I don't think we remember what that is is the flashing yellow lights that you see in traffic signals but I think Patrick can probably speak I mean I know what it is I'm asking what the dollars are and I don't remember having this discussion about them so so we have we do have a project that's moving forward to convert all of our signalized intersections over to the flashing yellow arrow on the left turns this is just asking Council to to carry over monies from last year so that we can continue that program and continue those advancements that that particular department is that it runs it runs

[2:34:19] pretty tight on its funding so anytime we can bring over some additional funding to continue those projects we'd like to request those Patrick has the next two if you have any questions on those so just keep them close the next one is for the right-of-way property related services and Street repairs and maintenance 555 thousand dollars and this is a carryover from the previous year yes it is um they had funds that they had not expended at your end so they're asking to carry them over is it tied to a specific project or just general for General Street repairs mayor it's not tied to a particular project this is the kind of carryover that we that we do annually Rio Concho Drive was happened because of these type of carryovers we can carried over a number of years finally accumulated enough funds to go and do Rio console drive that had no prior funding available for it and the next one for Street lighting the streetlight LED replacement project I think that's kind of similar to the flashing yellow light project with did we approve a street light LED replacement project to begin with so this is just in the budget so we didn't know it this is a strategy so we're Street lighting budget every year has some additional funds that are left over that we just don't expense these are the street lights that shine at night light the roadways around town and we Pay AEP for the electrical use of of those street lights um what we're proposing here is to carry over this money that we usually don't carry over because we have just recently started a program with AEP to convert all of our our metal halide street lights over to LED so what we would propose to use this particular money for is to expedite that program there's a certain so any lights that go out or need repair AEP is fronting the cost to change those over to LEDs but we would use this for is to expedite that and Pay AEP to come in and replace

[2:36:23] street lights that are convert street lights over to LED in those areas that street lights are already working so what we're not doing is we're not having a hodgepodge of LED lights and metal halide lights and then another LED light we can do areas at a time so that there's some some consistency across those streets both from a safety perspective and just an aesthetic appeal but we want to start utilizing some of these residual funds at the end of the year just to move that project ahead a little bit and start seeing the savings from the LED from the current Street lighting savings it's it varies depending on the type of street light there is um we have a whole worksheet that will that um spells out what that return will be on those Investments so we're making sure that within five to six seven months that we would actually see that investment come back as from that transfer this is just an easy way of using already budgeted money in order to to start making those transitions okay next up we have for the parks division Kirby Park concrete slab repair sidewalk renovation projects and Equipment purchases they're requesting to carry over fifty nine thousand dollars for those projects and animal services requesting to carry over 13 549 for maintenance projects for damages and for their computer replacement program the fire department requesting to carry over six thousand four hundred sixty five dollars for their MDT project for the rugged notebooks we describe what that is I'm not sure yes I believe it's their tablet but I'm here you know what MDM notebook s morning Council if you call a couple months back I came to you requesting money for the purchase of MDT Moda motor dot mobile data terminal see I can't

[2:38:26] even say it right but it's basically the computer inside of our units for ambulances and our fire trucks uh we had a little bit of extra money left over that I wanted to bring forward for contingency money whenever we go to move to install the project there's always something that you miss and I wanted a little bit of contingency to complete it okay next up is 361 thousand dollars for the State Office Building for HVAC improvements at the chase State Building and eight thousand eighty three dollars come from uh rent or is that in the maintenance budget I'll ask Bob Bluth heart to come up and speak to that morning mayor council this would be Capital Improvements which would be in the capital budget not the operation we have a fairly decent maintenance budget in the 201 fund to take care of the day-to-day stuff but this would be to replace the 11 units we talked about that you approved at the November 15 and probably we're going to start on the next years because we like to do eight to ten a year for the next four to five years thank you Texas Bank Sports Complex requesting a carry over eight thousand eighty three dollars for Gates fencing and lights out there at the complex the airport requested we carry over seventy five thousand dollars for weed killer cover Vehicles power washer and bathroom remodel the airport Solid Waste I'm requesting to carry over eighty five thousand two hundred three dollars to our landfill permitting and Design and storm water for existing landfill I believe it's for the upcoming permit but I'll ask Patrick to speak to that that is correct it's it's monies that we

[2:40:32] anticipate using in the permanent process moving forward with the new landfill uh proposal that we're looking at and and vetting right now and finally stormwater design and infrastructure Improvement projects in the amount of almost 239 thousand dollars this is similar to the street and Bridge money that we asked to carry over every year we roll over funds within our capital projects so that eventually we'll have enough money in order to do a a substantial storm water Improvement project this type of money is what we're looking at with sunset Lake and the Parkview lakes and and some of those storm water Improvement projects that's how we get this money accumulated what's the What's the total sum of that amount money that you've accumulated so every year we budget about 700 000 in that account and then we roll over so we just had a large expenditure with the Avenue P pond that's how we paid for a large portion of that project so now we're starting over essentially so 238 is is basically the beginning of of that savings that we have for future projects and I believe that's the last carryover Amendment and so if you have any other questions any questions any additional questions on these budget amendments moved approval for Tommy seconded by Tom any public comment saying none we'll take a vote all those in favor of approving the budget amendments say yes I said say yes okay we will go on to um uh no closed session so we'll move up into the follow-up and administrative issues consideration of approving various board nominations Civic events

[2:42:35] Advisory Board Dale Velasquez mayor to third term ending December 2024 the park commission Heidi Brooks at large to first term bitsy stone at large to Fourth term and Allison Watkins at large to a second term all ending January 2027 and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board Debbie Wilson as is smd4 to the third term ending December 2024. is there a motion for approval of all of those board nominations so moved by Harry second by Lucy any public comment on those board nominations seeing none will take a vote all of those in favor say aye aye hey you did it right I didn't know we're gonna do yes or right yes all right a motion approved 7-0 any announcements or consideration for future agenda items if not a motion for a German second by Tom uh public comment on adjournment seeing none all of those in favor say yes yes okay we kind of got it it passes so 7-0 Buffalo Soldier 11 45s 50 minutes after this meeting if you want to be there okay

Captured 2026-07-26 · source: youtube.com/watch?v=I3JfZUWuftY