The Arlington City Council met on August 26, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. in the City Hall Council Chamber. The meeting included special presentations, public hearings on zoning and development items, adoption of a $2.5 million Chapter 380 agreement for Shady Valley Country Club, and approval of multiple resolutions advancing the E-Space North American headquarters project. Several items were removed or tabled, including the Fielder Square Redevelopment package.
Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Arlington City Council. We're gonna go ahead and call the council session to order. I'm gonna ask Reverend Joseph Francis from Saint Albans Angelican Church to come forward and lead us in the Anglican. Did I uh thank you. Help y'all help me with the big words sometimes. Um forward and and lead us in the invocation, please stand. Good evening, and thank you for the invitation to be here. Let us pray. Oh heavenly Father who sent thy son among us to proclaim the kingdom of God in cities, towns, villages, and lonely places. Behold and visit, we beseech thee this community of Arlington, renew the bonds of charity that uphold our civic life, send us honest and able leaders, deliver us from poverty, prejudice, and oppression, that peace may prevail with righteousness and justice with mercy, and at the last bring us to thy holy city, the new Jerusalem, where we shall know perfect unity and peace. This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Get 'em up here now. G y'all get up here. I have presentations to give to each one of these people. It should only take fifteen minutes per person. Come on in. Y'all keep on company. Get on up over here. That's pretty cool. Folks, I think the folks behind me are responsible for something that we often take for granted. And that's when we we turn our water on at our house at our businesses. We expect it to be safe and drinkable and clean. And we don't put much thought into it. It's like breathing, I guess. This character standing next to me is Alex Whiteway, who's the director of our water department here in Arlington. And the reason why we've brought everybody up here is because Arlington water has been recognized with something pretty incredibly special here in the state of Texas. And I want to read something here. Arlington Water Utilities received two prestigious awards at the Texas Commission on Environmental Qualities Public Drinking Water Conference in July. Those were first the outstanding public drinking water system award. And then the second one was the outstanding cross connection control program award. Arlington was one of just two public water systems out of 7,000 public water systems in Texas to earn the outstanding public drinking water system award this year. Did y'all get that? One of two out of seven thousand public water systems. It was the sole recipient of the cross connection control program award this year. A testament to the department's commitment to public health and water safety. According to TCEQ, the outstanding public drinking water system award recognizes overall excellence in all aspects of operating a public water system. To be recognized, a PWS must go above and beyond the minimum standards in protecting public health and ensuring reliable operation. The extensive application for the outstanding public drinking water system honor requires the utility to show that it exceeds the capacity requirements for water production, storage, and system pressure maintenance. And it has had no primary drinking water regulatory violations. For those of you who aren't aware of how big Arlington is, we're over 400,000 people. So real quick, uh, before we take the picture, um, you know, I want to say thank you to our mayor and council. Without y'all's support and believing, you know, in the department, we wouldn't be able to do what we do. Um, same thing with our executive leadership, Trey Yelverton, Lemuel Randolph, and Jennifer Whitman. We want to thank y'all, you know, for y'all's support. Oh, there you go. Makes it easy. I thought I'd talk loud enough. But um, you know, also uh, you know, I just want to say my staff is the best staff anyone could ever have.