Yeah.

Oh All Alright, folks.

Let's go ahead and call the afternoon session of the city council meeting in the order.

L'hôtel, non, non, non, non.

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Oh, so Hold on, okay, okay, okay, okay.

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Oh, oh, L'autre l'autre.

L'humour.

Humanseo, o'clock.

L'autre l'homme L'humour.

Human.

Hold on, so L'humanity With the presence of the best university president that North America has to offer.

Dr.

Jennifer Cowley, and we're gonna ask you to come on up and give us a UTA update.

Okay, so I just need to know where the clicker is.

Oh, here we go.

Okay, I see it.

I solved technology problem number one.

Okay, well, I think we are all super excited about the World Cup launching very, very soon.

We have been an integral part of it.

So Megna Terre is our sustainability chief sustainability officer for UTA.

She also serves in the same role for uh FIFA in North Texas.

And so she has been leading all of the sustainability work.

So, for example, all the waste diversion efforts that are going to be happening at the fan festivals, helping to train sustainability advocates in the community that can work on litter pickup.

We want to make sure our whole region showcases really well and so have been training volunteers across our region to help make sure that we're creating a lasting positive impact for the region.

We've also been participating with our libraries, which has an extensive global map collection.

And so we have an exhibit both at the Museum of Art in Arlington as well as in our special collections at UTA.

It includes maps from every country that's competing in the World Cup, including a map from Spain from 1513.

So I just encourage you guys to stop by campus, see our more extensive collection as well as the one at the Museum of Art.

We are busy making all kinds of great things happen for our students.

For another year in a row, we have been rated as the top university in North Texas and one of the top in the nation by Wall Street Journal.

We welcomed 42,700 students here in Texas, and we have more than 46,000 around the globe that are participating in classes with us.

We saw our biggest freshman class in our history.

We have also had the largest number of freshman applications this year.

39,000 high school seniors have applied to come to UTA this fall.

We won't have that many come.

We have to admit them and you know make sure they want to be here and are a great fit.

But we have undertaken a huge number of student success initiatives because, of course, every student that we invite to join us at UTA.

We want to make sure that they're having a successful experience, that they're graduating, moving into careers that are going to create impact in our community.

Now we are intertwined very closely with the city, and this year is a very special year with our 150th anniversary of the city, and so we're helping as part of that commemoration.

So our students are busy designing a spirit horse just for the 150th birthday.

And so that is not what it's gonna look like.

That is last year's debut horse.

So stay tuned.

We're gonna be excited to have a new spirit horse to celebrate the city.

We're also looking forward to our glass exhibition art installation piece that's gonna be coming.

It is a cylindrical piece of glass surrounded by a large sundial that will be placed in the heart of downtown by the end of the year.

And then we've been participating, for example, one of our former uh history professors who's engaged in the city's podcast talking about our shared history.

But one of the most exciting new initiatives is our Mavs in the Metro, which I'm particularly proud of.

Trey and I had lunch one day and said we've got lots of students that are working part-time for the city.

What could we do to organize something that would be even more impactful?

And so we connected our honors college, which is organized Mavs in the Metro.

It's an internship program where students get to intern in city departments, whether it be the water department, our police department all over the city, fleet management, you name it, and they're also spending 10 hours a week volunteering with volunteer organizations in the community.

And so we really want to develop the civic infrastructure of our students to make sure they want to create impact in the community.

And so we had 11 students that are participating this summer.

We had more than 150 students apply.

So we're off to a great launch this year, and we hope to grow that program over time and are applying for additional funding to help support it.

The students are also getting to tour city departments, they've met with Tray's department, they've met with Parks Department, compliance.

You know, they're meeting with everybody because we want to show them what careers in a municipality can look like.

Last week they got together at Taste Community Restaurant to talk about what meaningful civic engagement looks like, and so we're really helping to develop their civic skill set, and we feel like they are creating a meaningful impact in the city.

Now, on the academic front, we're launching new academic programs.

We just got approval from the state for a doctorate and social work program.

We are applying for a doctorate in data science given the huge need for analytics support, a master's in science and systems safety engineering and management, and a new bachelor's of science in cybersecurity.

So, those are all new academic programs that you can be looking forward to soon.

Now, a number of you were able to make it out for our new Power and Energy innovative research lab.

This is located in South Arlington in one of our industrial areas.

It's a large lab that is a test bed for the Navy.

So we just got awarded an $86 million dollar contract from the U.S.

Navy.

They wanted a land-based test site for all of their power systems.

So we're helping the Navy figure out how to be more energy efficient and use alternative power mechanisms to help support their work.

And so we are the U.S.-based land test site.

So that's really exciting that we're able to support the Navy in this way.

And the Navy has been so pleased with the partnership.

They've brought other teams to explore other areas in which we can grow our partnership.

So this is a win-win both for the city and for the university.

Now we're also working on some really cool other areas of research I wanted to highlight.

We recently opened our new architectural robotic construction lab.

This is super fun.

So you design a building and they just print it in concrete.

Okay.

Like so the little robot armor goes, it builds things, and so currently two of our students are finalists in a competition to build an outdoor amphitheater for the Colorado Museum of Outdoor Arts.

If they win, they will actually get to build that amphitheater.

And so the designs that they're able to come up with will actually be able to deploy on campus and we can deploy them in our community.

So stay tuned.

Our students are developing some really advanced skill sets that will be able to create positive community impact.

Last month we were awarded a $4 million grant from the governor's office to support real-time flood alerts.

We all know what happened in the Hill Country, the very dramatic flooding incident, and this provides much more accurate information to emergency responders and community members so that we can provide those alerts so people can get to safety in real time.

Closer to home are social work professors or working with national institutes of health on supporting community-based engagement initiatives that support families who have family members with dementia or Alzheimer's disease to help create plans for how they can support the community and family in effective ways.

And we've been working on construction of a new research facility that's on Pecan Street.

You may have seen a warehouse-looking building that's been going up.

That is a really exciting partnership that we'll be able to announce in the next couple of months with a series of companies to make UTA a national center of excellence.

I can't tell you a national center of excellence in what, but you will hear in the coming months what we are the National Center of Excellence of, but it's a really fantastic partnership.

We're submitting a grant for the state to provide matching funds that will help support that construction.

But it's going to be a really high-profile activity in the research and development front for the university and our community.

So I wanted to give you an update on our campus construction.

So one of the exciting things is you see cranes in the air, all right.

That's our life sciences building that's under construction that's going to open in about a year.

That is our largest construction project in our history.

So we are renovating more than 200,000 square feet of space, plus, we have about a hundred thousand square foot addition.

It's providing modern laboratory spaces, and it fits directly with our life sciences expansion.

I've talked to council before about our efforts to really grow the life sciences industry here in North Texas and in Arlington, and so this is a major investment for us.

The funding for a project like this is a mix of state funding funding from the UT system as well as local dollars from the university.

And so a project of the scale just doesn't happen without the support of the UT system in the state.

Now, UT System also gave us 126 million dollars, so that's the equivalent of a whole big academic building project to support maintenance of our existing facilities.

So we do a detailed inventory on a regular basis of saying what do we need to fix up, what do we need to maintain, and we're prioritizing our key used academic spaces to modernize classrooms, restrooms, new roofs, new elevators, all the stuff that's really important.

We build our academic buildings for a hundred-year lifespan, but many of those buildings are reaching that midpoint that they need major renewal in their electrical systems, HVAC systems, and so this investment from the system is really transformative to help us continue to maintain the quality of our campus.

Now we're also focusing on greening the campus, which is part of our master plan.

And so, in partnership with the city, we were able to put in a disc golf course at Doug Russell Park, and so I really encourage you all to go out and try it.

I have tried it myself.

I need some lessons, I'll tell you, but it's fun, it's a great nine-hole course, it's gotten rave reviews.

We've got community members that are going out and taking field trips to test out the course.

We've added new green space, including Pashall Park, which is just north of Texas Hall.

It was the site of our old Smart Hospital, which we demolished and have turned into recreational green space.

We've added new recreational fields behind the Maverick Athletics Center.

And so we have plans as we complete life sciences and other projects to remove some of the streets and turn those into pedestrian plazas and to continue to pedestrianize the campus and green the campus so that we have a urban feel that provides plenty of places for informal learning and relaxation spaces.

So the life science building, I talked about that, I'll go into just a little bit more depth.

It's a hundred and eighty three million dollar investment.

It's a huge investment on the part of the university, the state, and the system.

One of the cool things I was just asked about is okay, what about fermentation science?

Do you guys still have that beer thing?

And the answer is yes, we still have the beer certification program that is available, and we will have a fermentation lab on the first floor that will be highly visible.

We've got some innovative classroom spaces that are going to support our students as well as expanding lab space to support all the great research that's happening on our campus.

The next project, which is getting started as we speak, is the University Center Expansion and Renovation.

So this project is demolishing the western half of the building, and we'll replace it with new, better space that better meets the needs of our students.

So some of you who are familiar with UTA from decades past, remember we used to have a bar in the basement of the university center.

Today that is the offices of the Short Horn newspaper.

Tomorrow it will be gone, literally.

So we're going to demolish all of that and then build something brand new.

And so I'm just going to show you a few images of what it's going to look like.

It's about a hundred thousand square foot addition, plus the renovation of the existing 99,000 square feet of space.

It's going to be an engagement hub.

We'll have more meeting spaces, both for our students as well as community members, and we'll have more dining locations, more informal learning locations.

We really want this to be a community hub for our students.

So this is the west entrance of the building.

So lots of light coming into the space.

And you can see this is a really great open space that can serve for eating lunch.

It can be World Cup watching parties, it can be, you know, whatever we need that space to be.

And then I want to close with talking about the future of our campus.

So our campus master plan calls for the expansion of space over time, shows us where we're going to make critical investments.

One of those critical investments is at the corner of UTA Boulevard and Cooper Street.

So we have two corners there, the old social work site, as well as the green space that is caddy corner to that.

So in the master plan, it calls for a performing arts center that would be located on the south side.

That project is one that we've asked for funding from the state the last two legislative cycles.

We will continue to ask the state, and the state is a critical enabler.

Performing arts space is the most expensive space you can build on a campus.

And so it will be absolutely critical that we receive state funding to support that project.

We would also anticipate support from UT system as well as fundraising in the community to make this facility happen, but the state is going to be the key enabler.

So we'll continue asking until they say yes.

And then on the other corner is the future potential hotel hospitality site.

And that is one that we have been doing detailed planning work with our consultants to understand the market conditions, interview developers, understand who would potentially locate there, the right market segmentation.

And so we've got some really good feedback on how to make the project successful.

It's a matter of timing relative to debt markets and capital for funding a project like that, as well as timing of when we can create the right creative partnership.

So we've been having ongoing conversations with the UT System Real Estate Office about how to make this project possible.

And so stay tuned as soon as we have a firm plan, we'll we'll bring that forward to you.

And the last project I want to talk about is the library green.

So one of the things the university has is lots of great green spaces on campus, but we do not have a signature park.

That space where everybody goes for their engagement pictures, to have uh community celebrations, and so part of what has been envisioned as part of the master plan is going over Cooper Street.

So right now, where we have bridges that run between uh the southernmost bridge and the central bridge, in between that we would put a cap, and that would become a park over time.

And so uh we had looked at potential for lowering of Cooper Street.

There's just a lot of complexities that go along with that expense is a state highway, and the odds of that happening in my lifetime are just extremely low.

So, as part of the master planning process, we said, okay, what if we go up?

Can we look at a cap solution?

So our current planning, we have hired some UTA alums uh to be part of the design team.

We're gonna take phase one, which is up to Cooper Street.

We'll save phase two and the cap for a future point in time, but we wanna start with phase one of creating this signature park space.

And so this is just a conceptual um idea of what it could be, but the architects and landscape architects are currently coming on board.

They're working with us.

Uh Carolyn from the Arlington Tomorrow Foundation is part of the planning committee to design what can be a major community asset, not just for UTA, but for the whole community, so that we can host all kinds of events, festivals, engage the community and our students in really meaningful ways.

And so stay tuned.

We'll be happy to share as that vision comes to life of exactly uh what this new park space is anticipated to look like.

So, with that, I uh will just say, you know, that we're really excited about what's to come at UTA.

We have a number of really exciting conversations going on with companies that want to co-locate at UTA, utilize the assets that our faculty and staff have, and that we're continuing to have a bright future ahead.

So, with that, I will answer any questions you may have.

Any questions from counsel for Dr.

Kelly?

Councilmember Gonzalez.

Thank you, President Cowley.

I'm excited, as you know, I'm on campus almost every day.

So I have a question.

International students.

How is this everything?

What's it looking like for UTA?

Because I know the cost of these students coming over here is costing a lot more.

So are we already seeing the difference?

Uh yeah.

Uh the international student population is effectively evaporating at every university in the country.

And so the changes in immigration language, uh, changes in immigration policy are having a direct impact on the U.S.

being a destination of choice for international students.

So we're seeing more students choosing to go to Australia and Europe versus looking at UTA or other universities.

So we saw a decline in our international enrollment last year.

It will be an even bigger decline in international enrollment this year.

And one of the things that's important to understand is that the international students are largely paying uh the full cost of their attendance, and so they typically are paying two and a half times the tuition that a domestic student would pay.

And so that has very substantive revenue impacts on the university, and so we have just forecast what that cycle is gonna look like as it comes to uh a close over the next couple of years and are making the budgetary adjustments that are necessary to respond to the shift in the marketplace.

And I'm sorry you guys are having to deal with that because I you know I've known that's a big international uh university, and I've noticed in decrease already.

So with with with regards to the budget, you talk about buyouts.

How did that affect me because I see a lot of people are gone, which really concerns me as alum, especially college of business.

We lost the dean and everybody else, and I know the dean was gonna retire anyway.

But I mean, are you excited about bringing you people or or how did the buyout go out work?

Did it were you surprised or on the numbers?

Yeah, so you know, you think about the choices you have.

If you've got to reduce your budget, you can either lay people off or you can buy people out.

And so we opted because we want to celebrate the success and contributions of our faculty and staff over these many years to opt for the let's put an incentive program in place, allow people who are eligible for retirement to choose to retire now, and that uh gets them retirement earlier than they would have planned otherwise.

Um, and it was very successful.

So we modeled what we thought it was gonna look like.

Um, we had about 200 people, except that.

We have more than 5,000 employees at UTA, so it's a small fraction of our overall um employment, and it meant that we had to lay off very, very few people as a result that we were able to get the results that we needed in terms of the changes in our overall compensation costs uh in a way that really honored the contributions of those faculty.

We're super excited about the new dean, uh Dean Kloss, who's gonna be joining us in uh July 1.

He is uh nine, had a nine-year deanship at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

He brings just tremendous expertise, and I know the faculty and staff and community are very excited about the experience he's bringing to UTA.

And thank you for being a leader during this time.

It's not easy, I know.

I mean, I I saw when I asked that first question, I saw a look on your face go down.

It's like I feel bad that I even asked the question.

That's okay.

A lot of students asked me the question on the Swift Center, it's so far away from campus.

Is there any talk about moving the facilities or in there closer to the campus?

Because a lot of students have to walk all the way over there if they go to those facilities.

I know when I when I was there, that's where they had dance class, and we'd have to drive to go all the way over there for country western dance, so don't think I was dancing.

Don't say anything.

Myself up, I know, I know.

I don't know if I exactly heard you correct.

You had dance class over there.

Yes.

That's why I do what I got.

Dr.

Kelly, can we get him his money back?

Um, you know what?

We can enroll him in some additional dance classes.

You know, maybe he just didn't come often enough, study hard enough, I don't know.

Yeah, aerodance facility is still there.

Oh wow.

As are a number of other other users.

Um, as we have reorganized the university center, we are moving some of our student-based uh users into the university center, but I don't have the final details of exactly what's moving with.

But you're looking at that.

Um, and uh what I will say is it's no more than 20 minutes anywhere on campus.

If you start at one point, you can get to another point in 20 minutes, and not everybody can be in the middle of campus.

It's just not possible.

And so we do uh try to focus on what student services are where and where we can make moves, we move them.

But for example, dance requires specialized uh floors and facility, and so sometimes you just have to put a use where it makes the most sense.

Well, I love the cleanup of uh all the buildings that you've done and the lighting and everything else, the light on the bridges and everything else, so keep up the good work.

So, appreciate y'all.

Any other questions from council?

Yes, Councilmember Garcia Dumas.

Hi, Dr.

Kelly.

Uh, first of all, thank you so much for your incredible master plan for UTA.

Marrying that with the downtown master plan is so exciting to see all of that sense of place coming together.

Um, like you mentioned with the international student population.

Can you tell us a little bit about um like the Center for African American Studies and CMOS and the fact that UTA is an HSI?

Can you kind of just give us some touch points of how that's going given everything?

So uh UTA is a highly multicultural campus.

We look just like our high schools that are all around us.

So uh we graduate more black students than any other university in the state.

We're designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution, we're designated as an Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander institution, and those uh designations are really a representation of who our student body is.

And so as we engage in our work, we want to make sure that we're providing programming that uh speaks to the cultures on our campus.

And so our Center for Mexican American Studies is a state-funded center that provides programming that supports our academic minor in Mexican American Studies.

Similarly, we have a minor in African American studies through our Center for African American Studies, and then provide a variety of scholarly programming that's available to the community, brings in all kinds of great speakers so that we can learn about our history and culture, and so uh we have continued to maintain uh those activities, maintaining our academic focus and supporting uh the diversity of our campus.

Councilmember Odin Wesley.

Let me add my appreciation, Dr.

Cowley, for not only your leadership, but for the partnership that you have with the city.

At the state of higher education, you announced that UTA was gonna be adding flag football for women.

Can you give us an update on that?

Yeah, absolutely.

So our first season will be next spring.

It's a spring sport.

They'll be paying playing at Maverick Stadium.

Uh, we have already recruited our first class of athletes that are gonna be joining us in the fall.

Our coach is super excited about the talent that we've been able to attract uh from across the state, across the country, across the world.

Uh there is a ton of energy around women's flag football.

You know, the Dallas Cowboys has been very supportive of helping this emerge at the high school level.

I know there's discussions of it becoming a UL UAL sport.

And so we're just seeing a boom in interest at the high school level.

With that boom, then there is a desire to continue playing once you get to college.

We have a Powder Puff football club at UTA that is, you know, already playing.

So we already had as a club sport, and so now we're moving it to a varsity sport on campus.

Coach is doing a great job, and I think we'll all look forward to cheering on our Lady Mavs next spring.

Any other questions from council?

Thank you so much, Dr.

Cali.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.

All right, 3.2 uh Trey and Spencer.

You all gonna tag team this one.

Um, we want to give you a little bit of an update regarding uh our financial um status as it relates to fiscal 26 that we're currently in, as well as kind of the foreshadowing on 27.

So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the future for 27, and then Spencer will give you a little bit of the year-to-date update as it relates to 26.

But uh that said, uh, I really want to just uh appreciate Dr.

Cali for uh and the UT system and the board of regents for the investments they're making in campus.

I mean, if you didn't catch it, I mean that was $350 million worth of investment in downtown Arlington, right?

As an anchor institution here that's significant, and we need to continue to work to find and win those investments as well as the others that we're trying to do throughout the throughout the community, right?

So anyway, part of doing that is is uh having a good healthy budget and making the investments, hopefully in the right places at the right times.

And so that's what I want to talk a little bit about for you today.

So I've shown you this slide a number of times, but uh especially giving the various financial challenges that are that we went through last year, but really kind of that all cities uh are going through in the future.

This has got kind of more and more relevance uh as it relates to financial planning uh for city government.

Um it's a year-round element.

It's not just a summertime budget budget kind of scenario.

It's uh it's uh every month.

Spencer and his team are working on things that are impactful and important to the decisions about uh how we're uh providing services and investing in our community.

So if you just follow kind of the the wheel of the financial cycle we're here in the summertime where we're reviewing our budget, we're kind of right in the middle of that, which is part of the reasons why I want to talk to you about it, because it's one of these things where you all are able to give us some feedback and some thoughts.

Uh taking a step back, you saw at the end of May the multi-year financial report that's out there and the significant um uh fund requests that are out there from across the departments, uh, every department from police to convention center to the water department.

Uh very significant uh ideas that are out there as it relates to improving uh services and taking care of facilities, et cetera.

Um we'll see the full-on budget process in August uh into September, and then we start the reporting and the closeout and the annual financial report and so on and so forth.

It's just a cycle of capital improvement, operating budget, report, audit, cycle back forth again.

It's a very important process.

We take every step of it really very seriously.

Um, and uh this hopefully helps particularly our newer council members kind of see kind of the horizon and kind of how the wheel kind of flows and what's a little bit down the line.

We started this year's process uh back at the end of uh of April in our uh kind of planning session with the council.

Um, not gonna go through all this detail again, but I'm really proud of the detail that's here, so I would encourage you all and the public uh to take a look at those requests that were out there as far as the uh items that are uh of importance to the community and to the departments, but also uh the benchmarking, the benchmarking data to other cities, the homestead comparisons, the general fund uh per capita cost comparisons, the debt service comparisons, all the things that we do, invariably across the board.

Uh, we perform uh very, very, very well in the region, uh, and that data clearly demonstrates that.

And we just refresh it for you every year, but I want to start the process with you all knowing kind of where we are and how we benchmarked the others, and that we've really learned uh I think a high value, low cost uh reputation uh out there and doesn't mean that we're done, that we don't want to deliver better value and lower cost, right?

Those are the constant challenges for us to work on.

We also provided the economic forecast, and as well as the sales tracks trends and such, and that's that's real indicative of just kind of the environment that everybody's in, and uh we want you to have that data, and it's all part of what sets the foundation for what we're gonna talk to you a little bit about today.

As we look at uh the quarter for second quarter, just me at a couple at a high level, I want to take um just a uh a minute to say thank you to council that was here and the staff that uh worked with us on the fiscal 25 budget.

That was a difficult budget process because we had to work in a major market dislocation in the middle of the budget process, a 25 million dollar um uh uh budget gap that was created by some uh items that were uh outside our influence, some of which were in in uh things that we could plan on, but many that we couldn't, and that's part of what continues to be a challenge for us as cities look at changes at the federal level, the state level, and the county level, as system thinking, systems change, and then we're left to kind of deal with the outfall of whatever that is.

Um, and so there's a lot of us uh of things that we're trying to anticipate, trying to get ahead of, trying to work through.

But 2025 uh was a resounding success and in one key way, uh, our team, our collective team across the enterprise, every department uh delivered uh savings and continued service at a very high level during that challenging time.

And we ended the year in the black with a clean audit, no findings, no drawdown on reserves.

Very proud of that as it relates to our team's work.

Equally as proud of the team's work that's what we did as it relates to fiscal 26 that we're currently in.

We showed you all the first quarter of uh 26 and it was very good.

I think you'll see in a moment here that 20 uh the second quarter of 26 remains very solid, very stable, very predictable because we worked hard to kind of lower down our basis so that we could get to that uh situation, which was very smooth and uh constant and a good level service for uh for the community.

And then as we sit here and start talking about fiscal 27, a little bit of a very you know, kind of taking out the lead.

I think you'll find fiscal 27 to be a similar year to 26.

We're in a very stable situation.

Um starting to see things around us, I was just alluded to with the university, uh, universities got various challenges, uh ISDs uh running with some challenges.

Our neighbors to the east and west in particular have kind of found um uh more significant challenges this year than what we're uh dealing with.

We kind of were the uh canary in the coal mine on that, kind of leading it out and working through a lot of heavy things and found ourselves to a solid footing, and I think that's what the data that Spencer's gonna share with you will show, and then we will work on how we continue to solidify that footing and achieve some of the things that you all have on your mind for fiscal 27.

Spencer, mayor and council, Spencer Slider, I'm your chief financial officer.

Uh, real quickly, we just kind of want to go over the second quarter budget report.

Uh, this is probably one of the more important uh budget analysis reports you get throughout the year.

Your first quarter, one is a good preview of the way things are going, but it's with very limited data.

This is midway through the year and really kind of sets the tone for how we're gonna finish out the year.

Uh so you can see looking at a high level from our operating position that for all intents and purposes, uh, our revenues are coming in at budget.

Our planned transfers are coming in essentially where we uh budgeted them.

We are a little bit under budget on expenditures, which we will dive into a little deeper here in a few seconds.

But for all intents and purposes, that $5 million represents less than two percent of your budgeted expenditures.

So the train is rolling down on the track in a very smooth process, as Trey said.

Taking a look at our revenues, our two largest sources of revenue in the general fund are property and sales taxes.

And again, for all intents and purposes, we are hitting our mark for what we budgeted.

Both are slightly overperforming, but they are both less than one percent variance from what we budgeted this year.

Some quick highlights.

On the positive note, our license and permits is significantly over.

That is largely driven by new permitting activity in the planning department.

It's also partially done by some recent revenue fee changes to the permit.

Touching a little deeper on our sales tax, we are experiencing a much better sales tax environment this year than we did last year.

Part of that is due to what I would suspect a slightly rebounding economy in the consumer environment, but also just reminding you that we reset our sales tax expectations after we saw many years of sustained post-COVID growth, as that sales tax and consumer environment tends to normalize.

We took a new look at what our numbers should be, and we tend to be pretty accurate this year, and that's a trend we're gonna try to continue forth for y'all.

Overall, touching on expenditures.

Uh, we are, as I mentioned earlier, about projecting to be about five million dollars under on expenditures this year.

That is largely driven by vacancies.

Uh the two largest departments driving those vacancies are police and fire.

Um, police has an academy of 50 currently in process, and the fire department has an academy of 35 in process.

Part of that is unwinding both the long-term plans for man staffing, four-person staffing that we're implementing within the fire department, as well as just continually cycling new recruits in to kind of help keep our police department staffed and providing the safety that the residents require.

I noticed uh you might pay special attention to, I believe there was uh HR was projecting to be under budget or over budget in the first quarter, but as I mentioned, uh our departments are projecting with very limited resources during their first quarter numbers.

Second quarter tends to be a little bit more accurate.

So uh Yvonne and her team have done a great job, and you can see that their team is now projecting to be right where they need to be spending essentially the exact amount of funding they're authorized throughout the year, as well as every department is doing their part.

The vast majority of any variances you see on their estimates here are again due to vacancy savings, which just fluctuate throughout the year with staffing and the job hiring market.

Now, with this five million dollars, we have some opportunity to reinvest these one-time funds into various uh ideas and programs that can benefit the city.

Uh points two through five are really just kind of potentially refilling different funds and buckets of money that uh need to kind of stay afloat throughout the year.

Uh historically, we sometimes use ending balance to shore up our risk and self risk management self-insurance fund.

Uh but two of the biggest points that we are calling out for you here is our parks outdoor lighting.

Uh, many of you are aware that we are signing a new, we have already signed a new contract and we'll begin our new contract with TXU Electric.

We benefited from a very long-term good electric rates for the last 10 years.

We've locked in a very good electric rate for the future, but that is going to come with an increase that we have not experienced due to us staying on a rate from 2016.

So it's paramount more than ever that parks starts working towards planned upgrades on their outdoor lighting to LED to not only ensure better park facilities but reduce electric use and so that they can continue to offer the most cost-efficient service to the residents.

And then we'll touch a little bit more on police vehicles in the end, but uh once again, just ensuring that we are using the funding we have to ensure our police department, which is our largest general fund department, has the resources and staff they need to serve the residents.

Quickly glancing over some of our other funds.

Our enterprise funds, which are our most business-like activities, are all doing very well.

The aviation fund is a little under on revenues and expenditures for their fuel, but the aviation is the newest enterprise fund that we've activated.

And so the last year or so has really been about gaining true data on what their business is going to look like.

So these numbers continue to normalize, and you will see in future projections that they will be tighter and tighter and they continue to run an excellent operation out there.

Stormwater Utilities Fund is operating for all intents and purposes close to their budget.

There's a little bit less on expenditures, again, like our general fund departments that's mostly driven by vacancies.

That is due large in part to the work on the meter change out program that Alex and his team have been running through, which has also generated additional revenue and some additional cost on overtime to change out those meters, but that ensures a healthy water utility system for the residents, which continues to provide benefits to the city on financials as well as to the residents for their water quality.

Touching on some of our special event revenue funds, you can see the convention and event services fund is performing very well.

That is largely due to the Orange Barrel Media contract that we've entered into recently.

It is outperforming the initial expectations, and that'll provide us opportunities to really help reduce the burden on the general fund, kind of moving forward as that continues to ramp up and become a very lucrative and viable partnership with the convention and event services fund.

Gary and his team in Parks Performance continues to do great work.

They're exceeding the revenues, they're coming in a little under their expenditures this year.

And then our street maintenance fund is a little bit less than budget on the revenues, but for all intents and purposes, they are largely doing what they plan to do this year.

You'll notice a slightly increased balance from what was initially budgeted on their ending balance.

That is largely due to releasing encumbrances on some of their street maintenance contracts from prior years.

When we bring the FY27 budget to you all here in a few months, the plan will be to reinject that $3.2 million directly back into contracts to go directly into the streets immediately beginning in October.

And then quickly touching on our internal service funds, everything is operating as designed.

There's a little bit of increased ending balance from what was initially planned in our fleet services fund.

Right now, with the uncertainty around events in the Middle East, that is largely kind of at this moment planned to be used as to kind of hedge our fuel expectations to ensure we have funding without having to do any kind of additional looking for funds to ensure we have money set aside to plan for any increased fuel variancies throughout next year as the situation in the Middle East continues to develop.

And quickly going back to what I touched about on police cars and going back to my last presentation on the council priority financial resiliency.

Councilmember Gonzalez had asked if we had some additional metrics on our police fleet and availability of vehicles for the police department.

So what our fleet department has been doing in partnership with the police department is looking at the daily down rates at a very microscopic level for why police vehicles are down throughout the year.

And so what you have before you is 60 days of data across all the major categories for why a police vehicle is down.

So when you look at our total fleet size of 244 marked vehicles, it really varies between 10 to upwards on some very bad days, about 35.

Many of those factors are kind of outside of daily control that we can do as an internal staff.

Our police has a very dangerous job.

They spend a lot of miles on the road, so it's really unpredictable on a lot of accidents.

It's hard to predict when a vehicle is going to fail at a large fleet, so sometimes those cars are dealerships for a decent amount of time.

But what we have really dove into the data to find out is that at any given time there tends to be about 10 vehicles down for what we would call preventive maintenance or scheduled target maintenance.

And so what we are looking to do to grow and ensure we have a viable fleet for the police department is to identify funding to provide an additional police fleet.

Right now we're estimating about an additional 10 vehicles added to the fleet, which would help essentially overstaff the police fleet so that on any given day when a vehicle is down for maintenance, there is a vehicle still waiting, so officers aren't having to double up or change their routes throughout the city.

So that's our first bite at continuing to ensure we are staffing a good, not only police officers, but having a fleet that they can use to keep the city safe.

And so that kind of really draws to conclusion my part of this presentation.

But uh before Trey comes back up and gives you a preview for the future budget, I'm happy to take any questions council has.

Yes.

Wonderful.

Does that include the Ike kiosks?

Yes.

So it's the I kiosk and then all of the signage that's in the entertainment district.

Correct.

And you said it it I think it said 1.3 million over.

Over our initial expectations.

Yes.

Incredible.

Yes.

Thank you.

Councilmember Hog.

Yeah, thanks, Spencer.

Um, on items that we delayed last year or pulled off.

Can we?

I don't think we have to get like a separate report, but as we come into budget season, I think that needs to be a part we review of things we delayed last year and potentially ones.

I know y'all are reviewing what needs to then be placed on there, but I do think we need to look at items we pulled off last year to help make make some of our numbers and start that look of future going forward, is one thing I'd request.

Yeah, absolutely.

Any other questions?

Councilmember Gonzalez.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Hogg.

I I totally agree.

I mean, you know, we're looking at um, you know, under budget, which is great, uh, but you know, we do need to look at those things, and so I think for also for the new council members, um, every penny on our tax rate is how many million?

Is that three million?

Uh with this next year's budget, it's probably about four million.

About four million, okay.

So just you give you a concept what each one is.

Um, and then with regards to the these um the auto, so are you are you going to be proposing or is this how is how does this going to work?

I mean, with regards to the the police spot cars.

So, in coordination with the police department and fleet department, we've got an idea on what we think we would like to invest in.

We will obviously run those proposals through the city manager's office and in conjunction with our normal process to add those things, but we have an opportunity to take the initial bite out of that opportunity to grow the fleet in a strategic way with some of this funding that we have identified as kind of potential one-time reinvestments this year.

So that is our strategy that we're kind of putting forth.

Well, like I said, I just want to ask the question.

I don't I didn't want to say yeah, I mean, I don't want the police to think I don't want them, but I mean, street maintenance is still number one for me this year because I mean we've I know that's something that we get behind, and it's getting harder and harder for us.

I you know, for it'll be tough budget, so I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

Councilmember Odin was thank you, Spencer.

I noted there's a significant variance in uh co-compliance.

Do we know why that is which slide that was?

I think that's it, yeah.

Uh without looking deeply into their budget, I don't have those resources with me, but at 168,000, my guess is that is largely vacancies.

Uh, just that occur naturally throughout the year.

Uh we focused kind of heavily on um police and fire vacancies because they are driving the largest uh savings this year.

Uh but you can see civilian vacancies are hovering around 75, or our historical norms are 60.

Uh, but at the height of our hiring freeze, while we were working through some of the budgetary issues last year, it was 130.

Um, the process to hire an employee um in any business, whether it's private sector, public sector, is a very intensive and uh time consuming process.

So it takes a little bit of time to kind of unwind some of those stop gaps that we'd put in place, get employees trained, get them back out on the streets.

Um but my best guess based on my knowledge of the information as well as that number is that that is largely driven by vacancies for them.

Mm-hmm.

As we go forward, um, I'm sure you'll do a deeper analysis on on what's going on because we do hear a lot from citizens in the area of code compliance.

That's the area we get a lot of emails.

Any other questions from council?

Councilman, Garcia do.

Uh, so and this is there's probably somebody who deals with the orange barrel.

Thanks.

My question is just is there a plan to continue?

I mean, it seems like the program is running really, really well, and if we're looking at an over 1.3 million dollar over what we projected, I mean, let's continue to do that.

Is there a plan to put them in more places or other places in the city?

Can we continue to do well what we're already surprised by?

We are planning to continue the current relationship with them, yes, and we are looking at every opportunity where it makes sense uh to invest in that partnership at a deeper level.

Sure.

Is it who would I talk to more about that?

Lindsay, thank you.

Any other questions from council?

Trey, you want to take a look ahead.

Um, and just to follow that up, because I'm I'm thrilled by that program as well.

But it's very much market-driven.

We can't just put a kiosk on any corner or a spectacular in any location and have it generate the revenue.

This is successful because of where it is and the eyeballs that are on it and why it generates that kind of income.

But it wouldn't do it right out here.

So we're gonna strategically work on that to grow it.

But I think we started in our best spot, and we'll see if we can't find some other ways to grow it, because as we've talked with the council before, if there's corridors or other high traffic eyeballs that have those, and we have land that we can contribute to a ground lease, and it is a long-term program.

It's a 20-year program with I think another 10 or 20 year renewal.

So it's a it's a it's a sustainable revenue, as long as there's demand for that product, right?

So we'll just have to make sure that we can find them or somebody else who's willing to help us.

Because it's uh it's a great program because number one, it's beautiful and attractive and artistic and snazzy in that particular area, but it also um doesn't cost us anything.

There's no city expense to the build, there's no city expense to the grounds maintenance to the electric, it's mailbox money.

So it's uh it's one of the best things we've done in a while, actually.

So we're proud of it.

So let's uh let's talk a little bit about 27.

And I want to uh first though kind of take a step back on last year again, because we need to remember where we came from, right?

All right, come on.

So y'all remember a slide, and I probably should have put it in here, but I but I don't have it in here, so I'm looking at it on one of my old files.

Um things when we talked about last year's budget challenges and had seven points that we went down that were the challenges for last year that we solved for that are no longer a challenge, crystal clear, no longer a challenge.

The ARPA grants wrap up this year.

They're done.

We will wrap them up at the end of this year.

There is no recurring investment required to um to build up to the sustainable level of the ARPA grants.

They've been fully absorbed with this this year's budget.

Senior tax freeze will continue to grow.

It's something that you all have seen in the demography reports and all that, and it's an exponential growth, right?

But it's something that we can I think see and look at, particularly on demography and start to uh better plan for, um, but it's uh something that's um just we can't do anything about it other than plan for it and budget it.

So we will.

So it's uh it's something that we will continue to work with.

The appraisal districts as it relates to the conservative valuations, property protest, and the reappraisal plan, no reappraisal plan.

I think we're coming to the um, you know, the where some of that's starting to be rethought about what's the next reappraisal plan, whether it's the county's plan or what the governor's tax plan will be, we'll have to see what that actually comes out as.

But we're um that that's you know, been I think fully uh absorbed into the projections that we're gonna have.

Traveling housing finance corporations all are still a thing.

We're fortunate we're in a good situation thanks to you all's leadership and Molly and her legal team that got out and got us protected in that way, and then we statutorily got additional protection, but we're gonna see I think statutorily efforts in that way to undo that.

And hey, affordable housing is an important thing.

We need to have it.

But when you have affordable housing not paying any property taxes, and where people are in a dense way, they consume services.

So you can't have an expenditure of services with no revenue, is really what it boils down to.

And that's where we have to work on understanding the the cost of doing business with the city and the cost of services that our residents expect.

It's something that we've got to work through, and it can't just be zero, right?

It's got to, it's got to bring resources that is able to answer 911 calls and fill potholes, et cetera.

And then the business personal property tax that is going from 5,000 to 125,000 dollars based on our budget that we adopted last year and is in our plan this year, done off the list, plan for and accommodated, right?

So very um stable situation that we're currently in and that we foresee going forward.

That doesn't mean that there's a lot of resources, not saying that we have a ton of extra capital because we don't.

It's very stable.

It's just it's not up, it's not down, it's very stable, right?

Very predictable and controlled.

We have to work within those dollars.

So as we look forward as the preview, our kind of the key thing that I want to make, two kind of two or three key points I want to make.

And I'm gonna show you some data here in a second, which is I find interesting.

Um, but we are all in the city of Arlington is all in on public safety and infrastructure.

And I'll show you how in just a second.

100% all in on public safety and infrastructure.

Our challenge going forward is a simple one.

Um expenditure growth through inflation, wages, cost of services for employees, the expenditure growth is higher than revenue growth.

It's really pretty simple.

It's basic math.

Expenditures are growing faster on a current level of service through inflation, wage inflation, medical inflation, pothole inflation, whatever you want to call it, it is faster than revenue growth, and that is not sustainable.

So that's why having a stable and predictable environment is something to celebrate so that we can sustain the quality of life and the services that our people expect.

The world around us with federal, state, county reductions, inconsistency, the predictability of the system is very the consistency, the impredictability of it, right?

We're trying to get to a stable situation so that we can move forward there.

So that's really the biggest warning sign, is that revenues need to be growing at a speed or expenditures need to slow at a speed of which the revenues match up.

It's really very basic.

From a from a fundamental math problem, the challenge that we've got this year, and you're gonna see, and you've seen already from the April meeting 44 million dollars worth of new general fund requests, right?

We're gonna do very little of that.

We just are because that's not sustainable.

It's inconsistent with expenditures increasing while revenues are flat.

We'll pick and choose the priorities based on your feedback and what you're interested in, and we will go from there.

But the one that we're gonna have to spend a little more time on and solve for is the health plan, and we foreshadowed that at the retreat back in April, where we're starting to see uh several really good years of health plan performance start to creep up on us, and we've got to start working on uh continuing to plan and improve in that particular area.

You will remember this chart as we kind of look at things we look at as part of that financial wheel, it's a five-year financial forecast.

We don't look at things just one year at a time, we look at it on the horizon, and we look out at a very conservative growth change, right?

The revenue growth is half percent to three percent max.

The three percent max next year is because the county is due for a reappraisal plan update at that time, assuming there's not a change.

If there's not a change, we're looking at half, one and a half, two, one and a half, one point two, very low revenue growth.

By definition, a three percent raise to your employees to keep all the level services now is two percent.

Two percent growth to do a three percent salary adjustment, doing nothing else.

It just kind of shows the point that I was trying to make a second ago, that's the fundamental challenge is expenditures and revenues need to align whether through revenues are increasing or whether expenditures are decreasing, either way, and as a service business, our investment is in the people largely.

It's in head count, it's in wages and benefits, and it's also why Dr.

Odam Wesley, when you say, well, why is code down 168,000?

Well, you don't fill a position, you save money, and it's a kind of a long, long standing tradition to slow down or speed up various hiring practices based on how the economy goes.

It's also a long-standing budget practice, just so you all know that we assume a two percent vacancy turnover rate.

We assume across the enterprise we're gonna have a two percent turnover, we pull that out because we don't want to start at 100% full because we know people are gonna leave, and we're gonna have a month or 60 days or however long, and so we pull that out, and it's part of our conservative practices of working through.

So, how we work through 44 million dollars in general fund requests with revenue growth like this is a challenge, but it's a way different challenge than we had this time last year because we've made such good progress on what we've done.

So the valuations uh talk to you a little bit about the process the county's gonna go through.

We typically we've gotten a preliminary value in April, it's really not very good.

Um, we get a better indication in May, which is uh okay, but we really don't get quote unquote the certified role till July, and even then the certified jolt roll doesn't mean that it doesn't change because it does, particularly in the last couple of years as all these changes have gone on.

The July certified role has varied much more greatly than it ever has historically.

But all that said, based on what we've looked at historically, we think now instead of a half percent, going back to where I was a second ago, this number, instead of a half percent, we're hopeful that we might see three percent this year, so a little bit of positive momentum that we're seeing in the data that might uh might help us, and that's on the commercial side, right?

Because residential is frozen on the commercial side, we're seeing better growth.

So I'm hopeful that that's gonna mean that there's a little more money to work with to solve some of the challenges that we've talked about.

Now, here's some of the data that I've that I find interesting.

Several charts that I'm gonna roll through.

It's a little just weird for a city manager.

I might find it way more interesting than you or the public do, but nonetheless, it's interesting.

So where we're at currently in 2026, we talked a little bit about what we're doing to solve our situation, and so we we like to do a lot of comparison, and we show everybody the data that we collect, and so this is pretty much every city in Terrant County, with a couple of other uh uh cities in the county surround us, like Plano, Dallas, Fort Worth, you know, and we looked at tax rate changes for the 26 fiscal year, and you kind of see what you would think.

You see a distribution, right?

From a bunch of cities that kind of did nothing to some who took their rate down to some who took the rate up, right?

And we sit right here in this red, this red cycle.

This is us.

So, on a distribution perspective in Terrant County, you can see a lot of other cities, Newark, Edgecliff Village, Collaville, Lakeside, Pantiago, uh Westlake, Burleson, Saginaw, Ulyss, Bedford, all raising their rate more aggressively than we did last year.

A lot of others doing so leaving it alone or doing so less aggressively.

Reno, Hazlitt, Haltham City, South Lake, Forest Hill.

Well, that's kind of how it distributed within the county of what people's actions were, right?

So, just kind of the data.

Then another one that I find really, really interesting that you've got to think of, and I'm gonna go uh, I'm gonna draw a line right here, just below Arlington.

There's a lot going on in this chart.

But you all know when we set a tax rate, there's things called the no new revenue revenue rate, and there's things called the voter approved tax rate.

Voter approved tax rate is that rate which they have to go to the voters to get approval on.

Everybody on the lower half of this chart has very little to know voter approval rate, meaning their tax rate sits right at the limit by which, if it goes just a notch above, we're putting the budget out for a vote.

Compared Arlington and above, these are areas where you have some flexibility on your rate before you have to go out to the voters for a vote.

Doesn't mean you have to use it, just means it's there.

So as Arlington sits here today, and we'll do an updated calculation for 27 because it will all change based on the data, but based on all of our conservative practices that we've done before, even with a rate adjustment last year, we still have more rate than most of the other cities that didn't change at all.

All right, and you can see a lot of our friends, South Lake, Fort Worth, Mansfield, they've got a little more room, meaning that it'll be a few years before they ever face that question.

But these guys all at the lower part are gonna face that question much sooner than the people on the upper part of this chart.

Just kind of an interesting piece of data.

Some other pieces of data.

I've said to the council a long time, because it's confusing to the public that not every tax dollar is the same dollar.

Orange barrel media revenue is different than a sales tax dollar, is different than an avalorum tax dollar, is different than a planning and development fee dollar, because it all is about the source of the revenue and then what you're lawfully allowed to use it for.

So we always are matching up sources and uses of money for everything that we do.

So I thought, well, let's take that to the highest level.

Let's take that to the highest level at the budget, and let's match up sources and uses.

So I said earlier that Arlington is all in on public safety and infrastructure.

So let me demonstrate that what I mean by that.

So in the very far left-hand column here, we have kind of what we call the business type funds.

This is largely the water utility, it's a business type fund because it sells water and they collect revenue to sell water.

It's different, it's not a general fund tax revenue dollar, it's a water dollar, water taking care of water.

So that's cost recovery in that utility.

Then you move over to the next area, public safety.

A little bit of cost recovery because there's some fees we collect.

For example, burglar alarm fees in the police department, help offset police calls, right?

Those who have alarms that they want monitored can pay a $50 a year annual fee, and there's a couple other things, for example, that are some amount of revenue.

But the blue section there is property tax, and it's 100% of the property tax, no holdback.

Every tax property tax dollar collected is right there in public safety.

What do I mean by public safety?

Police fire 911.

Then I got to go to my next revenue source, which is the yellow one, sales tax.

So we top off the public safety uh cup with sales tax, business like fee for recovery, 100% of property tax into public safety with a little bit of sales tax, and then we roll the rest of the sales tax over into infrastructure.

What do I mean?

Streets.

And we use a little bit of feed recovery, street cut revenue, some inspection type revenue, and then the rest of the sales tax, 100% of it.

So when the sales tax is consumed by public safety and infrastructure, that's it.

That's all the sales tax.

100% sales tax, property tax into public safety and infrastructure.

100%.

Okay.

Then we move down into quality of life areas.

Culture, parks and recreation, culture, um, library, where we have some cost recovery, some fees, like you pay to go to the rec center, you play to pay tennis, you pay to play golf, and then there's some general fund pieces, which are uh funded out of other general fund revenues that we've collected.

You know, could be franchise fees, liquor taxes, bingo taxes, other things that are malleable to be moved.

But you can see culture and recreation.

Uh, the green part is cost recovery, um, and then the uh orange is kind of other funding that's uh available, and then you've got kind of the general administration, financial economic development, city administration again, a little bit 50-50.

So you see the scale on kind of the non-tax supported stuff is much lower and blended, and um how the sales tax and property tax flows.

Now, priority services for priority funding.

Let me kind of take that kind of a different way and show it to you similarly, but by department level, priority services for priority funding, water utilities paying its own freight, 100% cost recovery.

Police got some some fee recovery, mostly property tax, fire, property tax, very little, but you can see it down there, a little bit of cost recovery, then with sales tax, then we're into street maintenance.

Stormwater utility is a utility, so it's cost recovery, just like the water utility is.

So the fee on your water bill pays for storm drainage and flooding, so it's a cost recovery.

And then we get into asset management, public works and transportation, where it's a little bit of fee and a little bit of sales tax, but certainly by scale, you can see the difference, right?

Of kind of what's there is being us all in on public safety and infrastructure versus very small investments in all the other areas.

Parks and recreation has got a little bit more revenue because it's got that fee recovery.

Uh, they're generating their own fees, golf tennis, etc., with a little bit of uh general fund support, city administration split, convention center is green, totally cost recovery.

Airport, totally cost recovery, thankful to what we did a few years ago with the FBO planning, cost recovery, court, fully cost recovery.

Libraries and code compliance, not fully cost recovery.

It's coming out of other funds.

The uh the franchise fees, liquor taxes, bingo tax, other managed management, managed kind of funds.

So I'm just trying to show that our biggest things that we spend the most time about go to the biggest things that people want to be invested in.

Infrastructure and public safety.

We are all in on that.

Everything else necessary to keep a community together and to have connected tissue, but being funded by blended fees and other types of services that are general fund revenues, but not your property tax or sales tax, right?

So some things that we need to pay attention to this year strategically, I think, as far as budgetary themes.

We talk we've got a council priority about financial resiliency, and one of the things I'd like to introduce for you all to give some consideration to this year is a is a specific cost recovery policy.

We've got we've kind of got um uh areas that we do more and less well in at various times, but if we can actually put something in front of you that would show kind of the overall fee structure and kind of where we target a zero to 10% or uh 20 to 50 percent or 50 to 75, where we would target based on the impact that that service has.

Is it global?

We talk sometimes about this in code compliance, like multifamily fees that you all have been talking about.

Well, that's a high impact, broad general fund thing, and I think what we would say in our cost recovery policy is that's 100%.

You want to pass that through, right?

On the other hand, um, does going to a rec center and paying for a summertime class, is that maybe more of a 10 or 20% cost recovery goal because there's a broader community interest to serve that, and there should be some general revenue support supported by some fees.

So I think some kind of adopted policy in that area, I think would be a good thing to add to our bailiwick here of things to pay attention to and to ensure that we have some financial resilience there.

We've talked about managed competition in the past.

We're in the process very soon uh for golf.

We'll be coming forward for the Meadowbrook Center in particular, looking at a uh what I call managed competition because it's not a direct outsource.

It's uh our people are going to compete with the market, and we're gonna have a neutral third party evaluate all that and decide you all will decide which is the best deal.

All right, and then we will decide where we need to go.

And there's other ways that we can use the management compet managed competition process to see that we can compete in many ways, as good as the private sector.

Um, that said, we still have tons of outsourced things, and we will continue to have those outsourced.

Not looking to bring anything in uh right now.

Uh, interlocal government partnerships, Pantigo, Dow Worthington, UTA, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, whatever we can do to find the things to work together to have shared services.

School districts also actually, this year the school districts helped us a lot on our land for public trust score.

With you all had seen in the last month or two, how we've uh we've kind of continued to shoot up the park scores.

That's because we got a letter agreement with the schools that gets to count their playground areas as parks.

And so it goes into the publicly controlled land space and then numbers go up.

So that kind of thinking is part of what we're continuing to try to do.

We don't have to do it all.

Others are doing it with us, and if we do it together, we can get more out of it together, right?

And then innovation, we're going to continue to try to find whatever we can to do to be more cost efficient and reduce our costs, and that may lead to things like AI implementation.

We've done some uh implement some reports with you guys back at the quarterly or the uh the retreat.

We're gonna continue to dig deeper.

That's a hot and heavy moving place right now.

Lots of things going on there, and we have to evaluate them and decide what's what's gonna work, what's not gonna work.

But uh something that's certainly a robust area for certainly controlling future cost.

It may not lead to less costs, but hopefully it leads to more sideways cost so that we can minimize some some software cost and maybe new personnel expenses in the future.

So, what I know that we're gonna need to do this year is uh try to focus what we can on certain select priorities that the council pays attention to.

We have to stay constant with our employee compensation.

Those are uh our folks that are out there on the front lines, and as we sit here right now, literally out on the front lines with uh a lot of the events that are going on uh in town the spring and this summer, pulling things over so we've got to make sure we're staying competitive in that area and consistent with the multi-year financial right now.

Our numbers have a 3% compensation adjustment plugged in.

I need to talk about health insurance adjustments.

Um I will get into more detail on that in just a second, and I would expect that we will look at certain selected public safety expenditures.

This is not extended to be an existing exhaustive list, but some things that are higher that need notice is we need to replace the computer aided dispatch system, which is the lifeline to the public safety folks in the field.

If the CAD's not working right and efficiently, that's a real problem.

So it's time to replace uh that that's fixing to go out of out of life here in the next year or two.

It's a significant investment, several million dollars, but it needs to be done.

Uh we will wrap up our last COPS grant.

We'll complete the funding here.

We need to do some things with the real-time crime center as well as complete the police radio replacement program.

We've made a lot of good progress there, but it's not quite done.

We'll finish that out as part of this process, and then to Dr.

Odom Leslie's point, we're gonna maintain code compliance because I hear you, there's a lot of code compliance thoughts and interests that are out there.

Want to make sure that we are sustaining the investments in that particular area.

These so these are things that I see as kind of immediate priorities.

Again, not an exact exhausted list, but something that we have to pay attention to.

So a little more detail on health plan.

These are some slides that came from our benefits consultant working with our staff, and Yvonne's here to help me with any more details that might come up if you've got any specific questions.

But you've seen this kind of financial wellness wheel before.

We show it usually most of our presentations.

We talk about the various ways that we support our employees.

It's a lot of things that we do.

We are an excellent employer, not perfect, but we're excellent.

We're really, really good at what we do.

Um, and so uh wages, special pays, stability pay, sick pay, funding step plan increases for public safety, and the retirement area, TMRS, which is 97% funded, continues.

We just got our rate letter this past week, continues to be 97%, almost 98% funded, a 401k match program, access to retiree insurance for retirees, and the income to families, life insurance, uh, long-term disability as well as workers' comp benefits in the physical and mental wellness area, insurance, employer assistance programs, sick vacation, et cetera, and in the growth opportunities we continue to invest in our folks, training and development plans, tuition reimbursement, and promotional opportunities, right?

So a lot of different things that people have to value and consider when they come to work for Arlington.

It's not just what the wage is, but it's all these other things that we try to bring to the table.

So health insurance is one of those areas.

And what we've been informed about and what we're seeing in our data, and what I think you're seeing neighbors to the east and west of us talk about is now a kind of a growing trend as it relates to medical cost, and there's various reasons for that.

But 8% trend rise in medical, about 11% that we're seeing in the pharmaceutical.

And when you look at it from an overall impact perspective, there's a lot of things that are carrying the cost drivers.

So it's just out, it's inflation, it's demand for services, chronic conditions, regulatory changes, all that.

Bowie knows way more about all this than I do, but a lot of these things are going on in the RX world, it's the GLP ones and kind of how that works, biosimilars, formulary management changes, etc.

And so how do we truly balance all this out, right?

How do we make it uh work?

And so those are part of the things that we're going to need to talk about.

Like everything else, we looked at data, right?

This is benchmarking of the Arlington programs.

We have two, a high deductible plan and a copay plan, and we compare that to what you see in the public sector for the high deductible and traditional plans, and you can see we we compete, I think, very uh very favorably, particularly in the spouse and family coverages, right?

A little bit higher for the individual employee, but when you realize that that individual employee has worries about children and spouses, and they're covered under our plans too, and you can see the benchmarking here.

We're very favorable in that in that way.

Um we also are working towards our 8515 target that we started last year.

We made a decision to go to 8515 over a two-year window.

You all did year one last year, year two would take us from that 87, 88 percent, and the 12% to make it 85-15.

So finishing out year two uh would be helpful, and then again, down in the lower areas as it relates to co-pays and such, you see that particularly on the family side is where we we compete above market uh in that in that way.

So, some things that we're thinking about trying to do.

A lot of stuff going on here, but I'm gonna dumb it down for you and kind of focus on one thing.

These are kind of like all the competitive benchmarking, but really what this is going to show you, I think, is that we want to we want to work on aligning both plans that we have to a 20% copay instead of one being 20 and one being 10.

So, we would uh look at uh moving and getting pricing in that area, for example, and when you start to kind of summarize some of these things, we expect that 8% increase.

We're gonna move to the 8515 to do year two.

We might need to take a look at aligning to an 8020 coinsurance share on them on the pharmacy.

Uh we're actually in 11%, uh, could be a whole lot worse.

Um, we've taken some actions on some of the GLP ones and all that.

We were a couple of years ahead of others that limited their use for certain particular uh functions.

So we don't have the same challenge there.

Not to say there's not still of our leading pharmaceutical cost, but they're just not as significant as they would otherwise be.

But we're gonna take a look at a couple of biosimilar drugs, which are some of the recommendations, particularly with uh limited use for uh Humera and Stellara, which are a couple of drugs which are extremely expensive that have comparables that are much more affordable.

We want to take a look at that.

Split fill is real simple, it's pretty logical.

Some of us have probably been in this situation.

Instead of going and getting a 90-day prescription and going two weeks into it and say, This doesn't really work for me, uh it's making me feel ill, I'm allergic or whatever.

Doing an initial kind of split fill and then going into the 90 day, right?

So we make sure we've got the right drug and there's less waste, right?

So something like that.

Also looking at a maintenance drug copay, for example, there are drugs out there, certain uh diabetic medications, cholesterol medications, blood pressure medications, which we provide free.

They're free in our program.

Um and it's they're free because we want people to not have a barrier to use them.

Because if they're not using them, they could lead to an increased cost down the road.

That said, it doesn't, it doesn't mean that in today's world, dealing with all the things that we're dealing with now that there shouldn't be some small copay, couple of bucks, five bucks, something like that.

Go get your Lipitor.

It was free, now it's five dollars, something along those lines.

We want to explore and look at that as far as a maintenance drug copay to add money into the fund.

We also want to enhance our wellness tools and deal with uh various chronic conditions in a hopefully a less invasive way.

Fewer surgeries, more PT, those kinds of things, and and aligning with some partners that Blue Cross Blue Shield can bring to the table that will help us with some of that.

So that is really kind of the main issue that we've got to we've got to work through.

There's a bunch of budget issues, but as far as what we're really focused on this year, finding the health plan uh solutions are the things that we really want to work on.

Um so uh I'm gonna stop there and just kind of let you know some key dates.

We'll be back again.

If y'all want to talk more about this next meeting, we're happy to bring back whatever uh y'all would like, but we will get the full budget presentation uh August 4th, and then we'll go through our our town halls and public hearings and all that through August and September, hopefully in a position to adopt an updated budget for uh September 15th.

But thought it was important to get to you all, let you have time to think about things over the summer, collect your intel and wisdom on uh what uh kinds of things you have in mind and go from there.

So that's uh that's the update financially today.

All in all, I think much better than when we were sitting here this time last year, right?

So, any questions, comments for Trey?

Councilmember Hogg.

Yeah, thank you, Trey.

And first off, thank you for your transparency.

I truly believe every time we have this, and I don't this is not the time, I don't want to go deep into the budget.

We'll have multiple meetings to get into that.

I do think on that one slide you had on interlocal agreements and going into some of those.

I I think I fully agree with that.

I think we also, and I say only reason I'm bringing this up now is it does take some time to get there.

I think we have to do a pretty thorough review of all of our current contracts and anything we can push to price decreases.

Um listen, we face some tough public procurement rules, um, but there's also public procurement rules where if a vendor's willing to decrease anything, and if we have an option to give them a year extension, we do that for those decreases.

I think some of those things we really have to start pushing, and that takes some time, and it's departments reviewing what can be or critical items that we think need to go out to bid um for that strict factor.

So I think that's something we should start looking at.

That's it's a month-long, multiple month process.

Um, so as we get into the budget, I think that's just that's the one recommendation I would make right there.

Thank you for that.

Any other questions, comments?

And from the healthcare side, I hate to say it, our cost is not as much as some others.

Um, it's still a lot of cost.

I do have some concerns that we're just putting the bear the burden on the employee.

There's a couple of things we're doing to fix pharmacy, but it's like how the hardest part is educating employees, like everything you spend in healthcare, we want you to spend and use that health care, but also understand this is not some insurance company that's getting the money, this is the city of Arlington who self-funds this and gets this, so that excessive spending on anything is a burden to us.

Um surgeries that aren't fully required, things of that nature.

Um we have to have to have fine more conservative care options, and it's really hard to do.

That's it's not this is not an us problem.

This is an all problem as a whole.

So the more we can do to push that side of care, I think is the better path.

I um I'm fond of asking.

I have a monthly meeting with different employees based on their anniversary, and I'm fond of asking folks who our insurance company is.

And you know, in the old days it used to be, well, it's you're not in health care, you know.

You know, no, no, no, no.

They're the administrator.

We're the insurance company.

The city is the insurance company in this case.

And I think more and more of our employees are getting that, and I think taking smarter decisions because of it.

Councilmember Garcia, Duba.

Thanks, Trey.

I loved all of those graphs.

You said, you know, you nerd out on them, and I do too.

So please keep them coming.

Um, where you had uh property tax, sales tax, other funding.

Can you tell me what is some of that other funding?

And I that seems like that's an area for innovation that you had mentioned on there.

What are some of those ways that we're currently pulling that in?

Yeah, so a resource that might be helpful to all of you all is something called the Texas Municipal League Revenue Manual.

And it's uh it's really a book that shows every lawful allowed fee or thing that you can charge.

Believe me, we've been through it a few times, right?

It's like what you can charge it for, what the parameters are, like a court technology fee, for example.

If you have a ticket, there's a I don't know, a three or five dollar fee that goes on top of it, and it specifically goes to fund certain technology things in the court, for example.

The bigger ones though are things like franchise fees, uh, and those are the rental of our rights away.

So we have ATT and Encore and Atmos, they're in, they're using our public rights away to sell their commodity, and so they pay a rental charge to be in our right-of-way.

But those are all regulated by state law, pretty much.

They're capped and determined as far as what they can be, but they are some of the larger items that are there, and there's a ton of others.

I mean, literally the revenue pages in the budget book are four or five pages, but there's a miscellaneous revenues I alluded earlier about the police department having a $50 uh fee for burglar alarm permits.

It's been $50 since it was ever created about 20 years ago.

It's never been adjusted.

That said, the revenue on that is half of what it used to be because as technology has innovated, you know, ring cameras are much more prolific than before, and fewer people pay to have their alarms monitored than what they used to.

But I don't disagree that as we talk about that that slide and we talk about cost recovery goals, all those revenues.

You can have, I've got a little matrix that we're gonna borrow from Plano because we participated in a financial sustainability program with them.

And it's it's got a grid that really you can take virtually all those and determine what should be your target and and then how far do we want to push it versus how lenient do we want to be?

And that's based on the value of the public service and how much of it should be funded by taxpayers versus individual, right?

You go to take a yoga class at a rec center, that's on you, right?

It's not on taxpayers, but again, a youth at a at a after school or uh or summertime deal, that's probably a little more balanced as far as there's public interest being served as well as the individual interest.

So, how do we come up with the right ratio?

But there are lots in there, and if you uh can flag for you just in the budget book, there's pages and pages of what those other revenues are.

We should look at every single one of them and make sure that we're doing the most with it.

We'll be able to see that matrix in August.

Yeah, if not before.

Um, and we would also say, uh, another kind of thing I'm fond of telling the staff is general fund last.

You know, all those various things that we talk about.

You have a water fund, you have a stormwater fund, you have a park fund, you have an aviation fund, you have various funds, and then you have quote the general fund, right?

What that really means is you cannot source your expense lawfully under that revenue source.

I talked about matching up sources and revenues and versus the expenditures.

You can't source it.

There's no way to lawfully pay for it under a grant or under a certain uh statute, so therefore it falls to the general fund.

Therefore, it's last.

It shouldn't be general fund letters first, it's general fund last.

Let's allocate cost into funds that are lawful and allowed, see what's left, and then determine what we want to do with what's left.

So we should think about that from a tack, we're all in, but as you saw, those numbers are big, and there's lots of things in police and fire and infrastructure that we cannot allocate to those other places.

So they do fall to the general fund last.

The smaller ones, you have smaller grants and smaller revenues that help sustain and support those programs.

Any other questions?

Councilmember Gonzalez.

Thank you, Mayor.

A quick question on the retirement health insurance.

Is that also done by the city now, or is that still?

How are they covered?

I mean, I saw the employee retirement insurance, so how does that work?

Um if you retire from the city of Arlington, you can buy into the city's retirement program or the insurance program uh at your cost.

If you're a younger retiree, you're on like the Blue Cross Blue Shield program, which is more expensive, but if you're an older 65 over 65 retiree, it's Medicare through United Healthcare.

So we provide access to all of the retirees to be able to buy into the program.

We don't provide what used to be in the old days a reset a subsidy for retirees.

That was something that was eliminated 20 years or so ago.

And you'll find plenty of employers out there if I were to benchmark that don't provide any benefit to retirees, not even access to the program.

It's like when you're done, you're done.

So we've got I like the balance we've got of making sure people have access to our program.

And if they've done right by us by us together with them in investing the 401k, then there's a lot of resources there on the back end for them as well as the TMRS payments that are available to them to buy into that.

That's great.

Thank you, Trey.

Anything else from Council?

Okay.

Thank y'all.

Appreciate you.

Yes, sir.

Let's move on down to 3.3 five-year street maintenance plan.

Keith.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Uh Keith Brooks, Director of Polar Works.

Today I'll be giving a presentation on the five-year street maintenance plan.

We'll walk you through our current strategies, street conditions, and then uh funding challenges we face in sustaining our street infrastructure and the importance of the recent reauthorization of the street main to sales tax in May of 2026 and pavement management strategy.

Also have uh Sydney Kelly, our direct assistant director of uh public works operations, and also Daniel Burnham, our city engineer, to help answer any questions you might have.

So just to go over just the overview of our street maintenance uh plan.

We'll talk about purpose, uh, overall condition index, uh which we refer to as our OCIs, our current street conditions, uh maintenance treatments, uh location selection and coordination funding challenges and key locations.

So the five-year uh plan identifies streets anticipated for maintenance and establishes a framework for coordinating, prioritizing, and updating the plan over time.

Uh it guides uh project planning by helping the city evaluate pavement condition, maintenance history, uh field operations, available funding, and coordination needs before work is scheduled.

By identifying plan locations in advance, the city can better evaluate the appropriate maintenance approach, prepare project scopes, cost estimates, and coordinate schedules.

Coordinating this plan uh plan street maintenance work early helps reduce conflicts, avoids unnecessary disruption, and identify risks before scheduling construction.

Uh planning tool can be a planning tool to use to facilitate with uh with right-of-way and other external entities to minimize impacts on newly constructed streets.

So here we have uh a map showing our uh a public street network.

Uh we currently we we maintain uh 3,006 lane miles.

Uh the majority uh 1,850 lane miles are residential streets with 1,156 lane miles category categorized as uh collector and arterial streets.

Additionally, there's 165 lane miles yet to be built to complete the therapy development plan.

So as we were talking about the OCI or over the overall condition index, uh this score is based upon two uh major components: the payment uh condition Index, which is the PCI, and the International Roughness Index.

The PCI evaluates visible dispayment distress, including type, extent, and severity of pavement defects, and accounts for 60 percent of the OCI score.

The IRI measures a pavement roughness and reflects the amount of vertical movement a standard passenger vehicle would experience while traveling the street.

The IRI accounts for 40% of the OCI score.

The OCI values are calculated in the city's asset management system and provide a consistent way to complete to compare pavement conditions across the public street network.

The pavement survey of approximately we do a pavement survey of approximately one-third of the city each year, ensuring that all publicly maintained streets are accessed assessed every three years.

This reoccurrence reoccurring assessment cycle helps public works monitor changes and pavement conditions, identify trends, and plant and plan maintenance before streets decline into more costly repair categories.

Higher scores indicate better pavement conditions, while lower scores indicate more significant pavement needs.

Pavement scanning and condition assessments help identify visible pavement distresses, including cracking, rutting, potholes, surface wear, pavement uh deformation, and other indicators of deterioration.

The resulting OCI score provides a consistent way to compare pavement conditions across the street network.

And as we look at our pavement uh conditions, uh current street conditions, you'll hear us talking about red, yellow, and green streets.

Uh this table shows a breakdown of our yellow uh red, yellow, and green streets with greens having streets having an OCI above 70, uh, yellow streets and OCI between 50 and 70, and red streets with an OCI below 50.

As you can see from the data, our residential streets have an average OCI score considerably lower than our thoroughfare development uh plan streets, which are arterial and collector roads.

We're able to improve 45 miles of streets in 2025.

So, this map is uh showing our condition uh current street condition map.

It just illustrates street conditions of city maintained streets, it excludes textile and private streets, and it helps us prioritize maintenance and capital projects based on a real time based on real time data.

Overall, uh over 20% of our street uh infrastructure are red streets and have an OCI below 50.

The graphic shows how our street infrastructure has aged since 2018, and we've been working to try and flatten the curve.

Uh, significant increases in uh red streets over eight years.

This is a major reason why the recent reauthorization of a street maintenance sales tax was needed and needs to continue.

This is a map just basically showing a hot spot of our red streets with the overall condition index below 50.

This area, this area shows the heaviest concentrated failing streets within the city.

Uh Eastern Arlington has the highest number of red streets.

Uh, through red though red streets are apparent throughout the city, significant street maintenance in the dense areas areas are crucial.

Looking ahead all uh of our current uh green streets are projected to degrade below to yellow streets by 2036.

And unless we increase funding, around 56 lane miles will drop from yellow to red each year, exceeding the 22 lane miles we currently treat with asphalt millen overlay.

Here, uh you'll see a graphic of the typical maintenance techniques used.

The red line shows the projected lifespan of a street with no street maintenance being done.

The blue line shows the various maintenance techniques used to extend the life of a street.

Crack ceiling prevents uh moisture from penetrating the pavement and reduces potholes.

Asph asphalt reclamation rebuilds the full pavement structure.

Concrete panel replacement addresses isolated pavement failures, and asphalt mill and overlay restores uh surface condition.

These allow us to extend this the extended street life and prioritize based on condition and funding.

In our toolbox, we utilize several street maintenance treatments depending on the type of roadway and its condition, which includes crack ceiling, asphalt mill and overlay, full depth asphalt reclamation, concrete panel replacements, and complete street reconstruction.

So as we talk about location selection process, the project identified identification process begins with the review of pavement condition data.

Streets with OCI scores that indicate preservation, rehabilitation, or major street maintenance needs are evaluated evaluated as potential candidates for future work.

Note that the OCI is not the only criteria that must be for project selection.

It is the initial step in assisting with the selection process.

The appropriate treatment depends on the pavement condition, pavement type, observed distress, and extent of deterioration.

After initial candidates are identified, public works reviews additional information to confirm whether the street is appropriate for maintenance and whether other infrastructure needs must be addressed before street work occurs.

This review helps determine whether a location should move forward, be modified, be grouped with nearby streets, or be delayed for coordination with another project.

And also to minimize damage to new streets.

Streets must be cleared by our CIP committee prior to proceeding on our project.

So addressing uh address streets with significant pavement deterioration, red streets and streets with reoccurring pavement failures may require full depth asphalt reclamation, concrete panel replacement, or complete reconstruction.

As we talk about preservation, preserve streets before they fail, yellow streets may be prioritized when a cost effective treatment can extend pavement life and reduce the likelihood of more expensive repairs in the future.

And then, of course, coordinating street work with our other infrastructure needs.

Street maintenance locations are reviewed for water, sewer, stonewater, franchise utilities, and other capital project conflicts before work is scheduled.

And then we talk about location coordination.

Many streets contain underground or adjacent water, sewer, stormwater, and franchise utility infrastructure.

Coordination helps avoid performing maintenance on the street shortly before it's disturbed by underground infrastructure work.

Public works coordinates street maintenance projects with related infrastructure improvements so that work can be completed in the correct sequence.

May delay some street maintenance locations, but it protects the city's investment and reduces repeated disruption to residents and motorists.

In the roadway, projects are constructed in this order.

Subsurface work, subgrade improvements, and then pavement structure.

So this image is an example of how the CIP committee coordinates.

This is our internal committees.

Coordinates projects to ensure that all needs are met.

OCI is less than 25.

After planning coordinating, it was determined that all the streets in this neighborhood needed to be a future reclamation project.

The CIP committee planned and coordinated a project for phase two for one to improve drainage to also improve sanitary and water utilities, and then the street reclamation.

The projects have now been merged.

This cost effective approach will also be will also use the voter approved 2025 bond election, street reclamation funding by using the bund funded street reclamation funds that allow street make the sales tax to focus more on yellow streets and concrete panel replacements.

This is why this is a crucial part of what we're doing.

An important part of this is that all CIP needs and street improvements were completed, will be completed with one contract mobilization and most importantly our citizens are only inconvenienced one time.

So our payment manage it strategy so we're just been taking a look at this and we want to we want to have a concerted effort where we're focusing on some of a lot of our residential streets for reconstruction with some of our future bond elections focus on those red streets.

As you can see our red streets are approaching 21% of red streets for our entire network we want to continue funding for full depth asphalt reclamation locations and future bond elections to address red streets and then in the 2025 bond election was the first bond election to include full depth asphalt reclamation.

And as I mentioned before it allows our street maintenance to focus a lot on the yellow streets to prevent them from turning red and then pavement preservation focus more on preventative measures like crack sealing on green streets and then we want to identify future scenarios where lame miles could potentially be reduced or converted to private streets.

In addition to the street maintenance sales tax we're going to continue to research and explore options to assist in in closing the gap.

So this slide here is a slide where we show the street maintenance sales tax the quarter set sales tax of course we just recently had the sales tax approved in 2026 it'll renew in 2034 and this is like I said it's a crucial funding preserving our street network so very important uh part of what we do with our street maintenance this is a chart of how our street maintenance sales tax funding is programmed our field field operations crews uh prepare sites and handle smaller uh maintenance items for some of the larger street maintenance projects uh the asphalt mill and overlay asphalt reclamation and concrete panel replacement work those uh those projects are are contracted out so our internal crews they'll continue uh to focus on handling daily operations such as potholes repairs uh concrete repairs uh conducting field inspections needed for project planning to identify uh contracted street maintenance projects and locations as you can see here from the statistics we have there uh since 2018 we've had over 60 thousand uh in-house potholes that were filled over 30 thousand in-house concrete repair repairs including uh concrete uh curb and gutter sidewalk pavement median noses etc and over two uh 24 million used uh to complete in-house street maintenance including asphalt level ups uh significant base uh layer failures and asphalt uh overlays as we talk about maintenance and reconstruction costs our main funding source are divided between the quarter six sales tax and general obligation bonds below is a table showing our various maintenance techniques and the cost per lane mile uh to construct them uh the sales tax and general fund together provide anywhere from 25 to 30 million dollars uh annually while our uh general obligation bonds can contribute to 27 to 38 million annually for street maintenance and reconstruction this is a funding strategy that we worked uh with together with the finance office and our uh city manager's office uh so this is our current funding strategy through 2028 FY2028, which includes a combination of sales tax, general fund, general obligation funds, and impact fees uh without any sustained increase um investment in street maintenance will continue to fall behind.

So this strategy is to help us get to where we need to be uh FY 2027 and 28 show the projected uh street maintenance investment uh now that the street maintenance sales tax uh is reauthorized.

This is uh our 10-year OCI forecast, and so we run these forecasts to see how we're doing and how can we get back to where we need to go.

So this this graph shows the blue line.

Uh in the blue line, it shows the budget.

It would take a budget of 135 million per year to flatten the curve and to kind of slow down the red streets and get us closer to our baseline.

The gray line shows it would take 165 million, not only to flatten the curve, but to start to take a downward uh trajectory to get us below 10% red streets.

So some of the challenges that we face currently uh an additional 30 million is needed annually to preserve for to uh for preservation uh maintenance for yellow streets that are projected to turn red.

Um complete reconstruction costs have doubled since 2015 and continued on an upward trend.

There's rising construction costs.

Uh they reduce the number of lane miles uh that we can rehabilitate uh and reconstruct every year.

Um coordinating street maintenance uh priority projects with water, sewer, and stormwater infrastructure maintenance and rehab rehabilitation needs.

So we got to make sure that that we're making those uh coordinated efforts to make sure that there's funding in all these sources as we're working on these projects uh together, and then to avoid extensive street failure, significant funding are needed to support street maintenance.

So this next slide is uh the investments.

You'll see the investments kind of start uh popping up over the last decade.

Well, well, there's there was a let's see if we can get that working, but it shows the investments that we've made over the last decade.

Maybe the graphic is not working.

Yeah, our report that will work.

Oh, okay.

All right.

So, but but anyway, I don't want to hear the rest of it now.

Yeah, I know it just it just it just ruined it.

I was all excited about this, Keith.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

All right, but it but anyway, it just it just shows that we've made a significant investment in our street investments over the last decade and all over the city.

And uh it's also uh was gonna show you know what we got going on this year going into 2030.

So moving forward, uh, some of the key locations that we have the main focus of today was to take a like a closer look at our current street maintenance projects and projects scheduled for 2027, and then the forecast for project tentatively scheduled for for FY 2028 through FY 2030.

So each year, what we'll do, we'll come back to you and we'll present this uh the five-year street maintenance plan, and then if there's any uh revisions or anything like that that needs to be included, uh we'll come back to you and uh seek uh council approvement for seek council approved approval for each uh fiscal year that we do this.

So that um moving forward right now, we're showing you the key uh 2026 uh locations.

As you can see right now, we got a Bernie Road from uh Greenoaks to the city limits.

That's a street reclamation as construction has started.

It's in progress.

Of course, Daniel Drive is a big one we're working on from Carla Avenue to uh Cloud Croft Drive, uh Street Reconstruction.

It is scheduled to begin very soon this month.

And then, of course, Brown Boulevard, Collins to Hidden Hidden Ridge Drive.

This is a mill and overlay, but also some sidewalk improvements.

Uh, construction is in progress right now, and it's about 35 lane miles.

Uh, that would be improved with our street maintenance program.

Same thing, uh, just showing you some key projects, and we have a list of all of the projects in the uh five-year maintenance plan, but just pointing out a couple of key projects here uh for 2027.

Uh, of course, Colonial States, down there off of Matlock in South South Arlington, that's phase one.

We got going, and then of course, Oak Street and College Street, down there off of Park Row.

That'll be a major rebuild there, a residential rebuild there.

Lamar Boulevard from Mossy Oak Street to Fielder, this will be a mill and overlay.

And then Matlock Road from Sublit to Lynn Creek will be doing some concrete panel replacements.

So approximately 40 lane miles of improvements right there.

As we look ahead, with the mill and overlay program, as we mentioned, we primarily use mill and overlay to help us with our yellow streets to prevent them from going red.

As you can see here in some of the neighborhoods here, we have a list of streets, and I won't go through all of these streets, but just kind of give you the general areas.

So this part up top, we have some projects that's uh west of Sinn Street near Pioneer area.

We'll be doing a bunch of uh residential streets in that area.

Also down here, uh we'll in it will be in the Millbrook edition.

That's kind of in the Green Oaks, Northwest Green Oaks, uh Randall Mill area.

Um, and then we'll uh be doing Brown Boulevard down there in District 1.

That's uh Collins to Hidden Hidden Ridge Drive, as we talked about.

2027 uh mill and overlay program.

Uh we have several streets we have lined up there.

Um some of these streets are kind of uh towards the top in district five.

We're at uh Davis and Park Row area, uh, then down there in District 2, we got a uh a bunch of streets down there that we're doing, kind of like uh Andalusia uh in the Southwest Green Oaks uh Kelly Elliott area, and then uh down there in District 3, we'll be doing some uh uh some several streets uh south of Mayfield uh east of Collins.

And then you hear us talk about the full depth asphalt reclamation.

Of course, this is a more in-depth uh more robust uh repair than just a mill and overlay.

We'll actually get into the subgrade with these, but what we have planned here, we're just showing some of the projects we have planned here for 2026 and 2027.

Uh, some key projects, of course.

Um, one of them be of course colonial stretch uh estates that I mentioned, phase one.

Uh so this is in the sublit Matlock area.

Uh so this is the section that's uh west of uh Weston Pilgrim between Pilgrim and Matlock.

This will be phase one that we're doing in 2027.

Um and then down there, we'll also be doing some uh work down there, Garden Beverly, Arbrook, and the Arbrook Malir area.

Uh, we have some uh asphalt reclamations planned down there also.

Concrete panel replacements.

These are kind of, you know, they're kind of sporadic a little bit, uh just based on where there are broken or we see a bunch of broken concrete panels.

Uh this also helps us, it saves us time instead of trying to rebuild the entire road.

We really just focus on where there's concrete panels that we can just replace and uh make our OCIs and the road uh a lot better, a lot smoother.

So here are just some some key projects, of course.

We'll be working on uh Wimbledon, uh Southeast Green Oaks from New York to Collins, Pleasant Ridge, Sublit, Matlock to Collins, Pleasant Ridge Road, uh Bowen and Cooper.

Uh we'll be down there and ballparkway from Brookhalla Plaza to Avenue J, Arbrook, Matlock to Cooper.

Uh so several as you can see, just several projects that we got going on in 2026 and 2027 as far as our concrete panel replacements.

And then we'll do some some complete uh street construction.

So we're not showing everything like all the major CIP projects we're doing, like the you know, the Randall Mill roads and stuff like that necessarily, but we are showing uh a lot of with what we're doing uh as far as uh some of our smaller and residential streets that that we'll be planning full reconstructions on.

For example, like Daniel Drive.

Uh we're also be doing some work um down there at Collins border area.

Uh you got Dugan Spruce, Spruance, uh Williams, and then some other streets like I mentioned before, uh Oak Street off of Park Row, uh Woodcrest College in that same area.

Annual mill and overlays, so these are future candidates.

Like I said, we'll bring these back every year.

So this could this is what we're planning, but it could change depending on what's what's going on.

Uh, but this is what we're planning for 2028 uh for annual mill and overlay, uh, a couple of key projects there.

We got Shorewood Drive from Beachview Drive to West uh West Poly Web.

Um, and then we got a bunch of work in South near South uh Southwest Green Oaks.

Uh we also have some work down there, uh Lovers Lane, Tucker, so west of center, north of Pioneer Parkway, and then we got a big job uh in 2028 uh down there in district out there in District 4, kind of south of Mayfield west of Bowen.

There's a bunch of streets we'll be doing in that area.

Okay.

As we progress to 2029, like I said, these are just future projects that we have lined up.

Some key key projects.

Of course, you see Lincoln Drive at the top from Washington Drive to Northeast Green Oaks, and then we got some more projects near uh Arbrook Boulevard.

Uh and then uh we got a big neighborhood uh down there by uh northeast Green Oaks, just west of 360.

So as you can see, there's several streets we're gonna be doing there that we have planned for 2029.

Um as we continue, uh 2030, um, sort of the same thing.

Uh up top, we got some some projects that's in District 4, west of Cooper, south of uh Arbrook, uh that we'll be working on.

And then, of course, also in 2030, we got a big project down there in South Southwest Green Oaks, uh, near the uh Park Springs Kelly Elliott area.

We got several streets we'll be doing down there.

Full asphalt, uh, full depth asphalt reclamation.

Um as you can see, we have uh this is all the things uh the reclamation projects we have planned for 2028.

And uh as you can see, we got about 14.2 to lane 22 lane miles.

Uh we'll be doing some work in uh district five uh near Park Row and Fielder area, and then we'll have some some big projects uh like the Harvest Hill uh project that I showed you uh the slide of before near New York, Arkansas area, and then down there uh below you'll see in district three.

This is the second phase of Colonial States is a big job, so we broke it up into two phases.

So this is east of Pilgrim.

The first phase was west of Pilgrim.

This will be east of Pilgrim.

Um so as you can see, we got Betsy Ross Declaration, Revolution, all those projects will be scheduled as part of part of this full depth reclamation.

As we continue, we're looking at 2029 uh and and then also 2030 uh projects that we got lined up, about 12 lane miles of roads here.

As you can see, we got major roadways like uh Allen Avenue uh from Timberview to uh Mayfield Road, and then we got uh several other projects like Timberview from Collins to Sherry Street, and uh, and then even uh in District 2 down at the bottom, we got uh Wimbledon Drive from Bowen to Cooper Street.

So we got some some pretty good projects lined up there, and then concrete panel replacements.

Again, these are in various locations depending on you know kind of they're kind of like spot repairs.

Uh as you can see, we'll be doing uh some significant repairs on Park Row, and then um we're also be doing some significant work in the Nathan Lowe uh Cooper area uh down south.

So we got several spots that we'll be working on in 2028 and 2029.

And then um we'll also, as we continue, we'll have some major uh roadway projects, concrete panel replacements that we'll doing in District 2 and 3.

As you can see, we got various streets that we'll be working on New York, Matt Lock, and uh Shoshone in District 2.

Uh we're still in 2028, actually through uh 2030, just showing you some some complete street reconstructions uh that we'll be doing here.

Uh we'll be in district three and five.

Um, so we'll be uh like north of Pioneer.

We'll have some areas where we're uh in Ravenwood Drive, Brierdale, so field or park row area, and then we'll be down there in the Mount Lodge Green Oaks area doing various projects down there, and then down at the bottom, we got uh up here near uh Division Street.

We'll have Harrison and Bob Duncan that we'll be working on.

So you should have a link to the uh the actual plan itself uh in addition to this presentation where it shows all our proposed projects and the corresponding project maps if you want to look and look at it more in depth.

Uh but that this time that's uh that's pretty much my presentation, and I'll be happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Keith, for that very comprehensive look at our street maintenance plan.

Any council members have questions or comments?

Councilman Maha.

Yeah, thank you, Dr.

Owen Wesley.

Keith, thank you.

Um I think you and your department, you do a great job.

I think you you've added some innovation, you've added new things.

I I would just always say push to how we can make street repairs less expensive faster, and uh on there.

I think this is more to my colleagues.

We all know, and and Keith, I'll ask you a question after it, and I think it'll answer a lot of what we're all thinking is um, how do we get out of being behind?

Right?

Because that's the question we have to answer, and we've said it a multiple times as a group.

We're behind, we're not too far behind, right?

And and I think that's uh a better place than some other organizations and cities have been in.

But uh we also are hitting that age time of a city where a lot of our roads are hitting those huge growth areas that Arlington had, and so we're getting all these coming on track to be repaired almost at the same time, right?

And that that's what's causing us this issue.

Um, so I think we've gotta look at Trey, I look at everyone.

I think we'll start seeing how do we allocate more in the budget.

We have to find some pieces in the budget and make that a priority to put some of these pieces in there.

Um, and and I think it's not an impact for us immediately, it's an impact for 15 down years down the road when none of us are on this council and other people are doing it.

They can hopefully say thank you for trying to do that.

Um Keith, let me just ask you the question because I think you guys are doing everything right.

How do we get out of this hole of being behind?

That's uh just a very small question.

I'm asking you right there.

Yeah.

I think we're I think we're working towards uh, you know, our previous um philosophy was uh take care of all the dwarfs first.

And we did that for years, and it was just attack the red streets, but we weren't doing a whole lot with the yellow streets, and so they were just cascading into red as we're just focusing on the yellow streets.

So we're trying to take an approach now that you know as we get you know funding for let's say uh bundle elections and things of that nature where we're focusing on, let's say we're like residential rebuilds where we're focusing on red streets.

We want a lot of our street maintenance to focus on sort of the lower hanging fruit, like the things I mentioned like the concrete panel replacements, the mill and overlays, things that are not, they're still expensive, but not as expensive as a full uh uh rebuild.

We've we've started we've been working on that for a while, and obviously it's a big ship, it takes a while for things to start turning.

Uh but as you mentioned, everything is everything is starting to get older at the same time, and so it's really just a matter of uh we've been working, we've been working on, you know, of course, a strategy to increment, you know, uh over time, increase the street maintenance.

Uh obviously, it would be nice to have 30 million right now to do something, but at the same time, we we do realize there's other priorities, and so what we try to do is we try to be as innovative as we can.

We try to stretch our street maintenance dollars as far as we can.

Um and things like the shifting of some of the reclamations to our bundle, our bun uh elections, that has helped uh because those are expensive.

Um so we're doing things like that as as best we can, but at the end of the day, it's it's it's still gonna be, you know, we we just need we're just gonna have to have more funding.

But but the strategy that we have, our street maintenance funding strategy is a good strategy, but it's just the the site sustaining of it and and keeping that going.

Mayor, one last question on this, and thank you, Keith.

Um, like I said, I have trust in y'all.

Is there any we talked a lot earlier with Trey on cost recovery?

Is there anything extra we could increase to increase some fees that you guys are doing to help with cost recovery from our streets?

And it may, I may not need an answer right now, but maybe creativity of are there certain things out there that we could sit there and say, listen, we all talk sometimes.

These large delivery trucks put a some extra burden on our roads, right?

Of what they're covering.

You know, I'm not saying that's the answer, but is there anything that could go towards that that gets into cost recovery to help us start bridging that gap?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're we're taking a look at a different thing.

So we at one point took a take we took a look at a street fee, but we didn't really find any cities that were doing a street fee and also doing a street maintenance sales tax.

So that's that's a little uh tricky there.

Um yeah, I mean, I I guess there's always some some things like that that you can do now, whether or not how much of an impact that will have, I don't I don't know.

Um but one thing that we also do is we're always looking for different grants.

Now I know they're they're kind of hit and miss, but we always are applying for grants.

Um and we also we work very closely with Terry County, they've been very helpful as far as giving us different funding uh on various projects.

So we every every chance we get to request funding from other sources, we do.

Um, but it's just the sustained uh deal is is is where the uh probably the challenge is gonna be.

True, you want to add to a couple other thoughts um to that line of thinking.

Um, we probably ought to look in the sense of that that cost recovery model that I was talking about earlier, like street cuts, for example.

I got utilities out there cutting our streets left and right, ATT, at most, whatever.

Is our street cut fee the right right amount, right?

So that the damage they're actually creating somehow is the actual cost plus some you know maintenance relative to that.

That's the kind of thing that I think you're talking about.

Um, some signage, you know, and to a degree talking earlier, the orange barrel thing is is really about putting uh uh signage in our in our some of our rights away.

And are there ways to do that in other parts of town that are uh unobtrusive that could work?

Another revenue idea.

Um we need less streets.

And thinner width streets.

I mean, uh a year or two ago we had a little bit of a debate about Randall Mill, for example, did it need to be four lanes or six lanes?

You know, in the spot that we were talking about, it probably needs to be four lanes.

So how do you save money?

You don't build six lanes.

So we need to make sure the thoroughfare plan is right sized and that we're building the capacity we need, and then of that, are we building the width?

I mean, can we get away with an extra linear foot of width that's that's less candidly, and even on streets and Ms.

Boxall would say the you know the smart growth stuff too, right?

Smaller, tighter streets uh that you see in the um the river the uh Viridian area.

So all those things layering together over three thousand lane miles of streets are incremental things that can help um extend uh our capabilities, and we just need to keep that line of thinking going.

I heard ads on our streets is what you're looking for, Trey.

Like selling this street sponsored by.

Whatever we can do.

And I I commend you guys for finding that.

We we know we have to bridge that gap, so I appreciate it.

If we can do medians and everything else, we can do streets.

We'll sell it all.

Yes, council member.

Who are you again?

Tom Ware.

You didn't call me anything, just call me.

I'm gonna I'm gonna quiz Trey on something here.

Uh back in 2005, when this started, uh we did the quarter centes tax, because uh at that time we uh were told that we just can't quite keep up with things.

We want that quarter cent sales tax um to add to what we're doing out of the general budget, bonds and so forth.

And uh in this uh this last election where we we continued that uh there it was put out that the quarter percent sales taxes like 90 percent of the basic street work, non-bond work.

And I'm curious if we didn't back in the day, um, shift uh everything that, not everything, but quite a bit of what we were doing to that sales tax in order to build the general fund to go somewhere else, or has it just exponentially grown uh over the years.

I know when I moved here in 78.

I know how much we built since then and how much was already bad.

So I'm I'm curious about if in the past we just didn't handle that very well, or there are the reasons.

Um I'll say something and then maybe Keith or Daniel can add.

Um I think we've handled it actually well.

Um we've had, I think, over my time one or two uh internal audits that have been looked at relative to that to make sure we're handling it well.

And when I say well, consistent with the law, using best practices as it relates to crack seal, microsurface, those kinds of things.

Um, but what we've got is a huge asset.

I mean, uh almost two billion, almost two billion dollars worth of things to take care of, and we're trying to take care of it with 27 million dollars of sales tax and and some bond money.

So what we've been able to do through Keith's change is really separate, because I do think there were probably some areas in the years before where there was some of the worst first where we used more of the money on um the reclamation type streets or even maybe some bond streets here or there, but it's gotta be built out of one way or the other, right?

So what we really try to do is try to be pure to the bond streets go to new builds and rebuilds, and maintenance goes to crack seal overlay and those kinds of things.

Really doing the yellow street treatment and the red stuff is what's going to bond.

Now, thankfully for us, sales tax has grown.

Ad valorum has grown where we've been able to exponentially increase um our bond programs without increasing the uh the allocation to the taxpayer.

So I mean it wasn't too long ago we were doing total bond programs that were under 20 million dollars.

This year we'll probably push 100 million dollars.

That's more money in streets.

So you get to the way you treat take care of streets is number one, you have fewer of them, right?

And and less of it.

You maintain them, you build them and re you bond them, and then you use supplement with some general fund, which is what I think Mr.

Hogg was talking about a second ago is we've got to look at how you incrementally add more money to close the gap.

But we're dealing with a bubble that was created of roads built in the 70s and 80s that are coming of age, all at not say the same time, but within a compressed period of time.

So that bubble is coming through, and we'll get to the other side of it, but when we get to the other side of it, inflation and other things will continue to hedge.

This is probably the biggest kind of sustainability thing we've just got to pay pay attention to.

But I have no doubt that number one, when 100% of that money went into the streets because the law requires it.

No, no overhead, no general administrative support or anything like that.

It's guys working on the streets and asphalt and concrete in the streets.

So I feel really good about the history on this.

We were the we were the trailblazer.

We were the the reason this the law exists um back in the day.

It got created to help Arlington with a street fee uh to replace a street fee with this instead.

So I wish we could squeeze out more and get more, um, but I would I would challenge and welcome any and all ideas and/or questions regarding it.

But I'm I feel really good about how we've handled it.

And Keith, feel free to say whatever you want to say about it, but I've I go go for it.

We're actually working on our our fourth uh reaccreditation with the American Public Works Association.

So we're real proud of that accreditation.

And it's basically, it just means that our department, we're doing best practices across the, you know, compared to across the nation.

So we're we're an accredited uh public works associate department.

But I would say that, and there's always a little bit of, you know, let's let's, you know, let's try this for a while and see if it's if it's moving the needle.

We do a lot of testing on our roads, as I was talking about.

We we survey a third of our roads every year, uh, every year, so every three years we have a full assessment of what's going on.

Um, and so we're always studying our streets, and and and the reason why we want to stay consistent with that and even with our vendor, is because we want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples.

We don't want a new vendor come in and just start messing with the numbers or the methodology at all, and then we don't know where we really are.

So we want to know where where we really are, you know, because you can always mess with numbers.

I don't I don't want to have no parts of that.

We want to know where we are so that when we start putting this investment in, we can start seeing the needle.

And when we started changing to doing a lot more um milling overlays, uh we really started to see, oh, okay, that's really starting to, yeah, it's it is it slowed things down.

Now we're still trending up, which we don't like that, but it definitely slowed things down, and so we think we have uh we think we have a good game plan.

I think part of it's just we just got to put a little more investment in it, Dr.

Wisconsin.

Thank you, Keith.

Um I have a question because of a discussion we had in the transportation committee, and so my question is are we fixing anybody else's streets outside Arlington City limits?

Anybody else's streets, that's what we're asking, Bowen.

No, another city.

Are we fixing anybody else's streets?

No, um we have uh, no, uh, I think the the only agreements we have is maybe with uh was it Pantiago?

The water water project on Bowen Road.

Water line project.

Okay.

But for the most part, no.

Okay.

So so but let's clarify.

So the answer was there was a water line project on Bowen Road.

Right.

That section of Bowen is in Pantiago.

We're doing the work.

Why?

Because when the road and the right-of-way was granted through Pantiago and Dow Worthington, both those cities required in order to have that right away, the city is responsible for maintenance and improvement of those streets.

So technically speaking, I think there's a section of Boeing and maybe a section of Arkansas that fits that definition.

That's correct.

But in order for those streets to connect and to not go around, that was the deal that was done back in the eighties, I think, maybe 90s.

So there are technically that, but it was part of an interlocation in order to get the inner the city support to allow the road to connect.

Are those cities paying us for that service?

That was the transaction.

It's also required as part of those agreements as I recall, and I can remember Mayor Green sitting right there just expressing dismay about it.

But those cities also retain the right to police those corridors because they didn't want us messing with it.

So it's our maintenance, their policing in order to connect the grid at Bowen and Arkansas.

History was done back in the 80s or 90s, yeah.

Yep.

I guess I have dismay over that as well.

Thank God you didn't say Mayor odom.

Any other questions?

Yes, Councilmember Gonzalez.

Ms.

Brooks, I mean thank you for your whole department.

Everybody, all you do is get complaints, whether it's storm drainage, whether I mean you're the department in my six years that I've been on council that I've had to deal with almost weekly on, so thank you for what you do.

Thank you, Councilman Hogg for bringing up that, you know, that we're we want to make it a priority.

So I guess you know, when when we when Trey always says, tell us what you want and I'll figure it out, so I know that's what Trey's gonna do this year, figure out how we can, you know, make a difference because it's really important.

And I hope the police and fire understand that because you know we've done really well with the fire and I'm not saying anything that we're not gonna do anything for, but to understand we've got other needs and we've gotta have good roads for the police to fire and everybody else.

So I'm hoping everybody works well together and you know doesn't demand too much and uh we we make things happen for the entire city.

So thank you, Keith.

Thank you.

Hey, uh Trey.

So when Pentigo or Now police give our citation on the Arlington side, do they share that revenue, the ticket with uh with our city?

I think if they wrote the citation that goes to their court.

But but they but they on the Arlington side when they because they have the rights to police it pursuant to the interlocal agreement that allowed the road to be get be there in the first place.

Okay, even they they were staging on one of the church property that belonged in Ireland.

You'll copy the agreements, you'll come with them.

That horse is dead and y'all keep beating it.

Councilmember Galante.

Keith, thank you so much, and uh, I wanna make him public so you know how much you uh the the residents and the citizens uh appreciate uh the the swift responses you give to everything.

One of these last week you uh uh resident just put on us Carlington, 8 30 in the morning that someone hit a traffic light and uh put it down on Brown and 9 30, one hour later, your crew was there and fix it.

And I sent an email internally here just to congratulate you uh the the standard leadership you have on the department.

Uh and uh and you've been presenting to us those numbers, and I we have it all.

We have the data, uh we know exactly what we need.

Uh it boils down to what Trey says.

What is the level of service that the residents require from us because ten years ago, actually eight years ago, we have ten percent of the roads below fifty OCI.

That's the presentation right there.

That's eight years ago.

Today we have 20% of those roads on the red.

If we continue the same level of funding, we're gonna have 30% of the roads in ten years.

We will be acceptable for the residents.

That's a that uh a question that we should ask for the residents.

So because lots of complaints of when you do my road, when you're gonna fix this, when are you gonna fix that?

Uh you know, it's a decision, of course, we discuss about budget here, but it's a thirty million dollars extra just to keep it 20% the way it is right now, right?

You flat the curve, talk about flattening the curve, right?

And if we wanna bring it back to what it was before, we need sixty million dollars.

I mean, for figures here, people say ten million, fifteen, thirty million, give it and take.

Don't don't uh uh correct me if I'm wrong, but for every five million dollars, it's a one percent extra on property taxes, give it and take, right?

It's it's one uh one point extra.

We're paying already zero sixty two.

So just to fund the roads, if we take the money from property taxes, which is not we're taking from the sales taxes, right?

We're looking at eighteen, seventeen, eighteen points, so we'll go to almost zero eighty.

That's not doable.

So what is this strategy here?

I'm asking Trey also.

Uh uh since we get rolled down the bones from five years to three years.

Uh are you embedding uh thirty million dollars extra for every bone on the cycle every three years, but in sinces every three years, you need 90 million every three years.

That way you continue the same level of service we have now.

If you wanna not only flat the curve but bring it back to 10%, if the residents require that level of service, now we're talking about 180 million dollars every three three years extra on the bonds.

That way we don't need to massive what is working, which is a sales taxes.

Thank goodness was approved by the voters, right?

Thank you, every voter that is watching this.

So what is the what is the strategy here?

Are we gonna just flat the curve?

Or we're gonna go back to 10%.

Uh Keith and Trey can peach any on that.

Thank you for listening.

Yeah, uh, I think it's uh it's a it's a that's a policy question that you all can help us decide, right?

Because we will spend every dollar you allocate to streets, and we can describe to you the speed at which it you know goes up or down.

So that's a that's a that's a question.

If the goal is to say the service level should be what it was, then that's a that's a whole different formula.

But it's just like every other budget.

You have to cut costs, which is do fewer streets and less width, or you have to increase revenues, which is a lot of what our economic development stuff is about, build more abalurum, bring more sales tax, which then allows you to allocate new incremental revenue into the street maintenance fund.

And if you were to take a look, you would see Keith's budget has grown over time.

It's just grown, like I said earlier, it's grown faster than the revenue has grown with it.

That's fundamentally the sustainability question that you're asking, right?

So, how do we how do we get um more aggressive there?

I think it's gonna require continued growth of both revenues and a third, the general fund to Bowie's point earlier, and we have to we have to get there over time.

It won't get there overnight.

Um, but that's the strategy.

And more bonds to the degree that the streets uh dictate it and the voters are willing to support it, and I see very consistent support for do more streets, do better streets.

If it's a red street and there's plenty of them on that map, as long as the bond capacity can help it, balanced with parks, public safety, and other things.

Sure, we're gonna generally do 70 to 75% of every bond election will be streets, just to keep up.

Thank you for uh and I'll I'll follow up on what you say.

We I already asked that question before, if uh less than 10% is the ideal, what other cities uh do across the region or the states, and you said 10 12% is okay.

We don't need to be less than 10% uh uh on red roads, right?

Below OCI.

That means that said we need to allocate 180 million dollars.

Uh and I I support that 180 million dollars every three years.

But when we roll back the bonds, I remember that discussion.

Uh the idea was not to have bonds of 900 million dollars, a billion dollars bonds, right?

Every three years will be a less bond, like like the last one 328, 340 something, right?

If we already earmarked for every bond, 180 million dollars, we're gonna find ourselves in a position in a couple years because we have all the parks and this and capital improvements.

We're gonna be rolling bonds back to close to billion dollars again, and that can affect the the ratings, the triple ratings that we have on the the on the on the debt, right?

The service debt that we need to cover.

But that's a discussion that we that I think is important, and uh more communication, maybe a town hall just for that with this the citizens, the residents say you got to tell us what the level of service you want.

And if they tell us what level of service they want, and then we make it happen because we always make it happen here with the staff that we have uh in the leadership we have in uh in the mayor leadership also.

Uh, but that's my question.

So I am in favor to roll back to 10%, and I 10% is fine.

We don't need to be 5%, 3%.

Let us work on getting you uh a good target, uh, because I think you would uh well everybody would say that 20%, uh we should aspire to do better.

Uh I think you would find comparing, I think we did some benchmarking on this.

If you compare us within the region, you'll find Arlington streets are amongst the best in the region.

But it doesn't, but but but what is that metric and what can we hit do the service level to?

Is it 15?

Is it 10?

Is it whatever?

We can we can tailor it to whatever.

I want to make sure, too, in this budget or this discussion that you you don't miss the other key point.

There's really two points in today's discussion is like okay, what's the funding level that we want to work toward, and then we got to incrementally work on the strategy.

We're not gonna solve it today, we're not gonna solve it after a town hall, but we can incrementally make progress.

But secondly, thankful to the voter support.

What we're trying to show you here is a multi-year strategy of the street maintenance plan because you all provide feedback periodically that says why are you doing this street and not that street?

Why are you doing this street and not that street?

Fundamentally, part of that is because of efficiency, because we don't want to do a street and then two years later have the water department come through and cut it.

So we cut the street, do the line, and then do the street on top.

So a lot of that list that Keith gave you is dictated by what's going on underneath the street, and then we kind of coordinate it on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis.

So I need y'all to pay attention to that because just like the CIP, if you can give us some perspective on what streets are important kind of in your areas or things that are high, then our goal to make certain streets that are maybe worse or certainly more a thorn in your side better.

Um, those lists that 27 is a kind of a pretty solid list, but 28, 9, 30, and 31 are tentative lists.

So take a look at those lists, coordinate with us and let us know what's on your mind so that we can dial those in, and next year we'll be back and we'll ask you for the 28 numbers, and then each year we'll get into this rhythm where we can narrow in and we can have sustainably a conversation every year at least, if not more, about this question that keeps coming back about how we're gonna do it and how are we doing and what streets are next and what's the incremental revenue to do more streets?

Anything else from council?

Thanks, Keith.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.

All right, we're gonna move on down to talk about the informal staff reports.

Y'all have already received the staff reports.

We'll address any questions that you may have without any further presentation with the individuals.

4.1 opportunity zone applications to the governor's office, questions from council.

I have one, Marty, if you want to come on up.

Richard Nevins.

So I Christie Goodman do.

Currently, we have one opportunity zone in Arlington, and it's bordered by Park Row on the north, Arkansas in the south, New York on the east, and Collins on the west.

Yes, sir.

But when I look at the proposed opportunity zones here, proposed zone number seven incorporates a part of what we currently have now, but it doesn't incorporate all of it.

Is that partial proposed zone replacing our current zone?

And are we losing part of the current zone with that, or is it adding to it?

If that made any sense, it does.

Yes, sir.

Uh number one, the the government the census tracks changed since this was done in 2017.

So some of them are gonna be split.

It will not mean that complete track that was broken up if I'm not mistaken.

So the original zone will change.

Yes, as I understand that.

That's a positive thing.

There's been no activity or interest in that zone is primarily single family residential.

Uh there was not a lot of input from the from the municipalities when that decision was made.

So this time we've got an opportunity to influence that decision and make it something that will be more useful and more attractive to investors in the community.

Perfect, Richard.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Councilmember Galante.

You'll Marty, you're submitting all those those eight areas, so all those eight areas will be uh considered and approved, or just a couple of them, you don't know which ones are going to be approved.

We don't know.

Uh the governor's office allows us this process.

They gave it a very short time frame.

Uh we just got uh the criteria just a few weeks ago, but had been reviewing that in preparation for months leading up to that.

You can submit uh to the governor the ones you prefer.

Uh you want to be careful not to submit too many because they might choose something you don't want.

We'd love to see them choose all of them.

We don't know which ones they'll choose.

But that's why we were we were very strategic in selecting those because we don't there's twenty-eight eligible zones in the city of Arlington.

And so we were very we went through a very strategic process to identify those zones.

So we won't we don't want to submit too many, we don't want to submit too few, but we we figure if we submit eight, if we get any of those eight or all those eight, it's gonna be a good thing for for Arlington.

Unlike before, where we didn't really have much opportunity to have that input.

But we feel like if if if we get any of these, it would be a positive thing.

Perfect.

Any other questions?

Well, so uh what you stated is we have eight of them, right?

But we're submitting eight we're recommending to the governor's office eight zones.

But then did the government gonna decide which one?

So we have no say so, right?

But so, but to me, if you look at it this map here, uh the the Pioneer Parkway at the international corridor, that's that's a most vital uh uh area.

We should focus and you know, puts a little uh meat into it and tell the governor to say, hey, we need to support for that six, seven, and eight in that area.

So we've been working real closely with uh John Chapman and the planning development services group, because the application that goes into the governor's office for nomination of these tracks is fairly detailed in what information they request.

They're looking at developability, availability of incentives, existing projects, basically they want the projects to be shovel ready so that it's it's ready to go when someone's interested in investing, and so that's why we chose that particular corridor.

So we were very strategic and in the the we were very detailed.

I want to thank and John's not here, but I want to thank John and his team and Jennifer for her support.

We've been very detailed about the information we're including in the application to highlight the reason those tracks should be selected.

Oh okay.

Well, thank you, sir.

Yes, sir.

Councilmember Garcia Duha.

Uh okay.

I have a couple of questions.

So you're submitting these now, and in theory, let's say they all get approved.

When do they go into effect?

January 1st, 2027, and they'll be in effect for 10 years.

The prior opportunity zones had a 10-year lifespan, and so as that as that was what it came to sunset, people lost interest because you're only gonna get if it's year seven of the opportunity zone, you're only gonna get three's worth of benefit under the new big beautiful bill act, those opportunity zones will be in place and they will not be changed until 2037.

And so they'll have the full 10-year capability to to uh take the benefit of the tax uh tax uh benefits.

Great.

And so let's say that they choose one through six and eight.

They don't choose seven.

Does the one we currently have stay?

No, it does not.

The one we currently have will go away, it'll be it'll be a clean slate.

When will it go away?

January first, 2027.

When the new zones go into effect.

Okay.

So regardless, this opportunity zone we have right now, that block goes away January 1st, 2027.

Correct.

Okay.

Um, how did you choose these?

We went through it.

We would we looked at all the criteria that the governor's office is looking at.

We looked at number one, are there existing projects in there today that make the track make the the census track attractive to potential investors?

Number two, we looked at the developability of the site, is there infrastructure in place?

Number three, we looked at what would the city consider incentivizing those particular tracks if the development was to come in.

And when you look at if you look at what's in there, you know, with the Collins and I-30 track, that includes Anthem, includes the city owned property, includes Center Street Gateway Project, Champions Park.

Look at the downtown tracks, it includes all the stuff near UTA, the form-based code is in place, the tramble co-development, the Wolverine Project, and then in the international corridor, you have the recently completed Benton Plaza, the New York Avenue Corridor Strategy, international corridor visioning effort.

So we're able to demonstrate to the governor that there is already activity in that place, and by turning that into an opportunity zone, that's gonna make that even more attractive to potential investors because it's it's ready for investment.

Yeah.

So uh going back really quick to the one opportunity zone that we have right now.

In theory, if there was somebody who wanted to develop on that in that opportunity zone now before January 2027, would they be allowed to have that?

Technically, they'd be allowed, but they would only get they wouldn't do it because they only get six six or seven months worth of benefit.

Right, okay.

Uh and lastly, just thank you.

So many of these are in district five, and it it really needs it.

And so I was very, very excited to open up the map and see all of those along that area, and I'm very excited for them.

Great.

Thank you.

Any other questions from council?

Okay.

Well, thank you.

I'all.

Appreciate you.

Move on down to 4.2.

Uh any questions or comments for Jay Warren on the external boards and committee appointments.

Yeah.

Councilmember Hog.

Yeah, Mayor, I I brought this up, and uh this this kind of came about because I've seen some other counties and actually county governments doing this, and I appreciate staff looking into this.

Is uh as you know, you know, it's about cleaning up some governance pieces on there, and uh I did not bring my example.

I saw Collin County list one where they list all external appointees, and I looked and I said we vote, we have representatives that represent council on this.

Um, the only I think we still should have it where the mayor's making nominations, continue our practice where we're doing that, but when someone is representing the council, I do believe we should have council vote um on those representatives to affirm that person to be able to do that.

We made that change in a charter amendment um for an item on the deputy mayor pro tem um in the last one, and I don't think any of us thought of this from where it's coming, and so I I would say on this, I think we continue the practice of how we have, where the nominations come from, what happens, um, and we get into alignment.

I see this as alignment with our internal boards of what we're doing because we have this internal board practice with terror zones with anything we're appointing within the city, um, to do that.

I would just say, and and that make the recommendation, and from what I've talked with Molly, it's we just have to kind of advise city staff that that's how we'd like to do it from that as a future.

Um, and I would say I think if someone's representing the city, the council should all vote and confirm those from where we're going.

I saw Molly under.

I'm just gonna chime in as far as if um the council desire to kind of change the current practice, could do it via a number of ways, could just be direction here from this body to staff that we're gonna kind of change the practice and would like these to go mayor makes a nomination, full council votes on the appointment.

You could look to formalize it through a resolution that maybe approves kind of your policy for it, or you could even formalize it even more further with an ordinance that might codify, say an administration chapter the process for these um appointments.

And I appreciate that, Molly.

I and Mayor, I know you got Scott, I don't think we have to fully make a decision today.

I don't think this is a rush into anything.

I think it's just uh the piece of getting to that to get us in alignment from what we're doing when people represent it and maybe not all of these.

Um, you know, if it we don't have to vote on mayor or major designee on homeless coalition, um, that's maybe one.

But I think also it helps.

I saw Callin County listed in a Terran County also when they listed all their TERS boards.

They listed them all together, so they they approve all those together, and every time they approve one, they can see all the listings of who's representing what.

Um, because I think we could all sit here and say, I don't know who all represents everyone and everything right now.

Um, and I think that's a common occurrence, and some of us we all we're doing a lot of work, and I think we should all see who's doing what.

So I'll leave that as uh other comments.

I think it's a good point to start on when you say we're all doing a lot of work.

My concern is we're implementing more work on doing these type of things because what we're doing then is we're bringing council in to what has historically been um positions where the mayor can appoint a chair of a committee, the mayor can do this, and essentially I think it's just it's convoluting the process unnecessarily, and it's been working for decades like that.

Um, so you know, I think it's a council decision to talk about it today or in the future, but um uh yeah, I I don't know that that's the most efficient use of our time is to bring all of those through here when this is what has been in the process forever.

Hold on one second, council member uh Garcia Duma.

And I'm the new person here, so maybe you all know all of this.

Booy is what you're suggesting, Councilmember Hogg is what you're suggesting that if the mayor is appointing anyone on any of these boards, that the council then has to approve that.

I just I'm trying to clarify because I'm new.

That's exactly it.

It's kind of taking the same policy and procedure that we do for internal board practices, like today we're voting on you being appointed to the TERS board.

So I would say why don't we have that practice on anyone when someone is representing the council?

Um, I believe they should be voted on from a governance perspective by the body that is putting that port putting that person on there is my belief.

And and specifically these ones that are in the staff report here.

I think that's all uh that we have.

I mean, you know, I don't know, something else may pop up, but uh these are the ones I think Molly and team found that we have that would qualify for external appointments, correct?

Councilmember Galante.

The a question for Molly, also uh position on this is uh we don't mess with what is working, but try to improve as much as we can without creating overwork, right?

Um tell me if I'm wrong.

When we, you know, the mayor that has discretionary power uh of appointing internally on the committees, right?

And when the person is serving the committee, uh he is delegating authority for that particular council member to run that area of uh of work of or study, correct?

Okay, outside the city.

So the mayor is the representative of the city, is that correct?

Or any council member is representing the city, is the mayor's representative the city, who's representing the city outside the city.

Figurehead perspective, correct, but you all have as a body, okay.

As a body, he's a present body.

So when he's appointing somebody to any external committee commit committee, is it wrong to say that the person that is appointed there is it has been delegated the authority of the mayor to represent on that board?

Definitely think that's a way the council could look at it.

I think again, there's from a legal perspective, either option, right?

What's the policy?

So and then I go forward.

So since we have uh the feedback here, everybody that serves in external committee at the end of the day, uh, which actually is the next uh agenda item, right?

They're gonna report what is happening in those committees outside committees, and then when the issues come up, uh I think would be uh healthy for those members that are representing outside committees to show up and say, we have this issue here.

Well uh it asked the opinion of the council.

Uh I'm I need to vote on this.

Well, what do you guys what is the vote here?

And then he goes out back there to that committee and exercise the majority, the decision that was given to him instead of uh we vote once, and then he's there doing his own thing without reporting back to us.

Otherwise, nobody needs to report to us here.

Either or we either they either come back here, they are working under the authority, the delegated authority by the mayor, and they report to us, and we direct them with the mayor what they need to do, or they do their own thing after they voted and they don't need to report to us.

That's what I feel that's how I see, right?

So tell me if I Well, and I I will note um you may have noticed a change on the external committee and reports.

We actually added the term discussion.

So there is an opportunity rather than just getting a report after the fact for you all to discuss um activity might be coming to one of these external boards committees um before it happens.

So you've got an opportunity to discuss and say what the will, what the direction of the body might be on those topics.

So I'll be mayor, I'll be inclined of keeping the way it is, and then every issues on the external boards, anti cog, transportation, whatever, the person that is representing there, bring the issues to us and discussing executive session, if that's the case, so they can come back there and vote the way the majority uh decided on executive session.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments?

Councilmember Gonzalez.

Um I appreciate everybody's input on this.

I just on the committees that I'm on, I know um we get the agenda and we're gonna have to vote almost you know uh two weeks later.

So sometimes there's not gonna be a chance to come to city council as everybody knows.

So I think uh what we've done now is a lot of it is what we discussed in here, and we formal I mean, I know I use and the ones I'm on is the Trinity River, uh RTC, uh you know those things so I I look at what the city does and so I feel like I I understand that and I understand Mr.

Hogg's um s suggestion so let me ask you is it that much you know the mayor doesn't want to create extra work and I I understand that but I think is it that hard when he put somebody that it just puts out a list and then we just look at them all and that's it I mean let me be and Booy I'm sorry correct me if I'm wrong I think the issue is not as much the appointment but the removal if if and I think that's what we're getting at here I would disagree I think it's yeah if if you have consensus from council on an appointment you would consequently therefore have to have consensus from council on the removal and I think that's probably what we're really looking at here is the discretionary aspect of somebody sitting in my seat and whether or not there should be um checks and balances on the removal of something like that.

And I get it I I think there should be to some extent but I think when we start doing that we really start to muddy the waters and what we're looking at for instance when I look at this kind of stuff here the Terrent Regional Water District Customer Advisory Committee is done by a mayor appointment.

So what you're telling me then is that I would make a nomination of somebody the council would vote on that somebody if that somebody doesn't do whatever they were appointed to do or nominated to do or selected by council to do we would go through that process again to remove them from that position.

And I think that's really what we're looking at in something like this and my position is you know part of what we have to do is provide direction for the city on the efficient operations of government and what I've read in this staff report Jay tell me if I'm wrong that cities are as different as night and day on how they handle these type of things there's no right or wrong on how to do it but I didn't see where any cities were doing it carte blanc council approval on everything on the ones we surveyed the ones you surveyed.

There may be some out there but at least not the the bigger cities throughout North Texas so yeah I'm I'm hesitant to say listen we have to do that.

I think the checks and balances come and an opportunity for council to say council member Gonzalez you did this the other day and I really have an issue with how you did that representing us or mayor Ross you did this the other day and I have an issue with that um and I think when we do that with our committee report outs on everything that gives us that opportunity so I'm inclined to say let's keep things the way they are for now but that being said if if council wants to explore other options I mean y'all have the ability to do that.

Yes sir go a yeah thanks mayor um I think we're mixing up some issues here I think this is just about we're a governing body we are not we have no true power and authority as individuals we are a governing board.

So if we are having someone and some I think on there is if someone's applying to be on the you know Miss Odon Wesley's done a great doctor and Wesley's done a great job on NLC board I think those are things we should say as a board we're fully supporting sometimes we have to do resolutions some of those organizations require you to have a resolution from there.

As a governing board, if someone, if any one of us is representing, I think the board should be the body that is making that vote to make that representation.

I still think the mayor should have the nominating power um to take that.

And mayor, I don't think your comments wrong about, yeah, from a removal process, it should probably be the same way because we must do things as a governing body on what we're doing.

And if I look at this and we talk about work, I think that's a I don't think it's a lot more work.

We're already doing this process for every single internal board and commission that we appoint for.

We do this every single week.

This is a standing agenda item, and it's just adding to that list, is all it's doing, and saying, as a body, we are saying yes, the mayor nominated you, and we want you to go represent us as a governing body of where it goes.

So I don't think it's much more work, but I do think it's helping the body say, here's the appointee that we're going to, and here's the person that's going out and representing the governing body.

And here's another example of how I see it being difficult.

With downtown Arlington Management Corporation Advisory Council, there is one seat that is currently designated for the mayor, there is one seat for a council member that has traditionally and logically so always been district five representative.

So because that's the downtown area, what your process would do is to say we would have a council vote on whether it should still be the mayor and the council member over downtown.

Now to me, that seems like a total waste of time, because the logical thing is you have the mayor and the council member for that district, and that's just one of those examples on there.

I just don't see the necessity of changing it at all.

Council member Garcia.

Council Member Hong is what you're looking for a vote from council today, whether to change it or not.

Would you is that what you're doing?

Yeah, we don't have to vote on it.

I think we just got to give staff some advisement.

And for that example, mayor, I think it's a really good example to say, you know, we're saying you represent us.

You represent our body as a whole, uh, and what we're voting on from a governance standpoint, it's saying, and and I would fully agree with a seat for the mayor, but what if there's that time where the mayor doesn't want to serve?

You know, and I we always think 20 years down the road, right?

What if there's a time when the mayor doesn't want to serve?

It could be it's as an eight.

Well, if we have that going to a vote, then that's a simple, easy process to go through.

And we're like I said, we're already doing this for all of our internals.

So I don't think it's a change for much of what we're doing.

Isn't it true though that when we sit on the board for anything, we're representing the city, not ourselves.

And it doesn't matter if it's appointed by the mayor or voted on by council, we're representing the city, and we should carry out the will of the city and those discussions, which means the will of council and how we direct ourselves.

Yeah, I fully agree when you're on there, and that is the number one reason why I'm saying we should vote for these people so that we can sit there and say as a governing body, I support Raul doing this, I resort Mauricio doing this.

I believe as a governing body, which is we're not individuals, there's nine of us having that support of where it's going.

That's why I believe from a governance perspective, this is the right path for something that we already do.

Fair enough.

Yeah, mayor council member go out.

I agree with you, Boe, that we have governing body, but at the same time, that governing body has one person that is the mayor.

And mayor has some prerogatives, and he should have some discretionary powers different than all the other city council members.

We make the decisions together, he has one vote, but at the same time, the mayor represents the city outside.

Um, the way he's working, don't fix or try to fix what is working.

In my opinion, it's working.

And uh I'm I am um concerned here of doing an election, and then you elect somebody to serve in an out uh external board, and then it's almost like writing a blank check for them to do whatever they want to because they've been voted once.

I rather have the mayor appoint the person, and then every meeting they do, they go all there, they report to the board here and have a discussion on issues, external issues that are happening in those boards, and they get direction every time they get a clear direction.

If that was the case, we can we improve on giving a clear direction.

Definitely.

We can improve anything, but we give a clear direction on subjects like speed train or high speed train or um interlocal government agreements, or NLC boards of water treatment or water conservation, anything.

So the person comes back here, asks for direction, and we give clear direction, he comes back there.

That way we don't need to change the process, but now everybody that is serving external committee has a clear direction, and he can consult the mayor directly.

If you there like uh Roe just said, he's sitting there on the transportation committee, and then something comes up, he needs to make a vote that day.

So the mayor is the guy that appointed him under the powers of the city council, the entire city council, and then he calls the mayor, say, Hey, I have this vote here.

How should I proceed?

So the mayor goes ahead, proceed that way.

I don't see it's a rocket science, just keep doing what we're doing and have a better communication internally and externally.

You keep bringing up uh I guess I'm a little, you break it up the communication, which I think we all fully agree with, but we also know there's always some items that can't be disclosed to the car council legal proceedings when you're serving on these external processes.

Um, those are things that can't be discussed with an entire council, especially not an open session when we do some of these reports.

So for you to just say that and push on those items, I think we're getting off the track because what we're talking about is appointments, and then the mayor brought up pulling someone off.

I think both of those things fall under there, and we're saying, and I'm not saying we change it from the mayor's nominations.

I still think that's fine, and that's working, but when you represent, you represent this body, not individuals.

Thank you for bringing that up.

You know, I tend to disagree with you, and I asked the senior attorney to chime in.

Okay, now we have a uh a member of the city council or the mayor himself serving an external board, he has an executive meeting inside the board, right?

That things that should not be said.

Okay, but the he has to bring it back if that's that's the case in the executive session here.

I think what you're trying to ask, does the privilege fall with the individual, or does the privilege fall with the city council as representative?

Perfect mayor.

So you just summarize what it needs to say.

Thank you.

I would say in typical lawyer fashion, it depends.

Um, because the privilege may belong to the lawyer.

You're such a lawyer.

The privilege may belong to the body or the entity, right?

That the individual is serving on.

Um, and it might present a disclosure of uh confidential information if they were to attempt to bring that back to this body, right?

So I get it creates a really interesting predicament that doesn't occur often, but um, but the specific facts would would dictate kind of whether or not that information would be disclosable or not.

Well, and I I also would think Mr.

Galante to be candid, uh Mr.

Ogg is right.

There are probably some things that would be inappropriate to discuss in an open forum.

And personnel in the first one.

I understand that type of privilege stuff, and there has to be that fiduciary responsibility of Mr.

Hog being able to say, I can't discuss this for certain reasons.

He may be able to discuss it with our attorney, but not in an open forum with counsel.

And there's that duty and level of trust that he's doing the right thing.

But I would also argue that that same fiduciary duty and level of trust applies to me and making the appointments or removals, and that fiduciary duty and responsibility applies to every other council member sitting on external or internal committees, as we make our decisions and we conduct business and those, and there has to be that level of of understanding and accountability when it comes people for time for people to do what they need to do on that.

So I think that was it.

And council member ware, I think you were waving at me earlier.

Yes.

I've been I've been on a number of boards and I've been accused before of feeling strongly both ways.

And that's kind of how I am now.

I've heard some pretty good debate today.

Um I would like to say I don't think we need to close this today.

We should maybe plan to bring it up at some point in the future after we have both sides presented for us to all look at to be able to make a decision on a on uh what we want to do with that.

I'm I'm perfectly happy like it is, but I see uh I see Councilman Hogg's side uh also on this, then that the external appointees are representing our city and all of us.

Uh so I'm I'm not so darn sure we shouldn't have some say in it.

I want I just I just don't want to see this close today.

I want to see something in the future.

Like I said, we don't have to finalize this thing.

That's all I want.

Like I said, we don't have Molly, can I ask you one question?

Um, besides just the city charter says we have to appoint and vote on internal appointees.

Why do we do that?

Yeah, so not necessarily your charter.

Actually, you find a lot of that um in your um board and commission policy statements.

Um sometimes you find it in state law.

So tourist boards, an example you all brought up.

State law requires that the body act on those appointments.

So there's times where you'll find it in state law.

These are ones where there's not an existing ordinance policy, you know, state law provision uh that dictates that process.

So let me make, oh, I'm sorry, Mr.

Gonzalez.

Go ahead, please.

Yeah, I mean I I agree with you know, with Mr.

Ware, and if you notice, look at Dallas' um, they use a hybrid, and maybe that's what we look at.

So I I like to have the discussion, but I mean, I think it's you know, to do all of them, I don't know, but I I I think I don't want to give council member ware much credit because he's just new.

He's too new here, all right.

But why don't we do this if everybody's comfortable with it?

Let's not put anything to bed one way or the other right now.

Let's do this.

We have a runoff election going on with a new council member.

We have one council member that's not able to be here to weigh in on things as well.

Um, let's ask Jay, listen, can you do a little bit more digging and maybe come up with what specifically other cities are doing along the lines?

Is there something that um we can all find a happy middle ground on, or something like that that could become palatable?

God knows we've had to find middle ground on other things before, and this may be one of those things as well.

So and I agree with you, Mayor, on that.

And I think Mr.

Gonzalez, your idea of maybe there's a little bit of a hybrid that works also, and I would also ask Jay, like also from our counties.

Um, one that I saw for a perfect example, um, because I saw a document listed as what kind of sparked a lot of it was Collin County.

They list them all so you see all those that are so much a good example at all.

You know that, right?

I don't I don't think it's a bad example at all.

It's the fastest growing county, uh, I think possibly in the U.S.

So there they've got some governance pieces over there, and I know a couple other counties do that.

Now I think they are required by law on some of those to be able to do some of those because they do operate as in essence a court, um, a commissioner's court is how they operate.

So uh there may be a little different legal proceedings of how we do that on from the strikes.

But I think a hybrid and finding a way to do it, I think on certain pieces may be valuable to us.

Let's let's give it a while so that we can I hate to exclude council member Odom Wesley from all any of this discussion, but she's on her way out, so let's give it a while so we can get a new council member in here and and get council member Hunter back, and we'll take a fresh look at it here in a month or so, and uh we won't put it to bed yet.

So, what he's saying is Mr.

Tom Ware's correct is correct.

Okay, no, I'm not saying Mr.

Ware is correct on anything.

I'm saying that that was my idea, and I think I had a really good idea.

And you know, I think the the mayor should have the authority to just come up with a plan like that and do it.

Okay.

Are y'all comfortable with with taking Tom's suggestion and well I uh I did win the election to get here my hand is big enough right now.

So okay.

Thank you, Jay, for doing that.

Although you didn't do anything, you didn't answer any questions, but you were looking good standing up there.

Okay, let's go on down to discuss committee meetings.

Uh council member Odom Wesley on 4.3, please.

Mayor, yes, sir.

Can I ask?

I've got to run and go to the council.

I was one cultural tourism already.

I know we had to discuss that, and if I was gone, it didn't really help the discussion.

So I had to hold off.

If Dr.

Odin Wesley wouldn't mind, I'd love to do C and D.

Please go ahead.

That's okay.

Let's thank you first.

Um, our C and D met this afternoon.

Um, as you as y'all know, we've been deep, deep deep in discussions regarding multifamily inspection standards.

Um we've gone through multiple areas, we're still on our right path to have this hopefully in place by the start of the year.

But a couple of the big items, uh uniform housing code.

Uh we went through a committee.

We're supporting modifications to the uniform housing code to include language that includes multi-family permit issuance.

So that's saying for them to get the permit, they have to achieve a multifamily inspection score uh of and making any necessary corrections identified during the annual inspection.

Um, this is an additional tool, so as you can imagine, people were not passing and they were still able to get their multifamily inspection score um permit, um, which is a big deal.

So making sure quality of housing of what they have is there is the goal on that.

And then the scoring standard is another big piece.

Um staff presided uh an overview.

As you know, we're looking at all of how the inspection works.

Um, the staff overview was our existing inspection standard, which is called um REAC, and then an alternative standard InSpire, um, and potential self-certification options for properties.

Uh we are fully supporting to utilize the continue the reach system uh for multifamily inspections and moving forward with modifications that you have for housing code.

We're also going to take a couple of the elements from the other one and bring it into there.

Um, we don't believe we talked a lot about self-certification, it's where multifamilies can kind of go through Plano does it and the city of Dallas both do self-certifications.

Um, our staff was very, very helpful and helping us understand this is helping us make sure we have eyes and ears on every single multifamily facility every single year.

Um so we don't believe self-certification is there.

There's already some kind of we talk a lot about carrot and sticks.

There's some carrot incentives in there.

Um, if they score right things, then the inspection's kind of scaled down a little bit.

So there's already some incentive enough that we don't think we need to go to a full multifamily um inspection self-certification.

So that's all we have for that.

Um we are continuing on this process.

It is this is a big change for the city, and it'll take a little time to get there, and we are vetting every little piece.

It wasn't that long ago.

I had a meeting with Mindy and some other um vendors that came in to speak to us, and I remember specifically them using Cincinnati, Ohio as an example of a software program where there was a uh rating system that was done and it was free of charge to cities.

Uh were you a part of that?

I I part of what's going on.

So I will say we are working to have that be deployed.

I think you're gonna get an informal staff report here in your next maybe the end of June, maybe in August, once it's all fully set up, but it is underway.

But I think this is it on I don't know anything about Cincinnati, Ohio and what they're doing.

This process is a scoring system that is ultimately paid for by all of the multifamily groups that are out there because they need to get on there, and it it's a two-part process.

It helps residents looking for places, but it ranks those places accordingly, and it gives good and bad comments about each of those places, but it also provides the city an opportunity to see where the issues are arising, and and it can map out some of the problem areas on stuff.

And I remember us having that meeting a while back, and as you were talking, it made me think about that.

Yeah, I think if we can incorporate something like that in, I mean, let's let's review that as a committee.

I think the other thing we talked a lot about, and staff is working through, and we'll get some future, it's when uh when someone does have a failing score.

Um, right now residents aren't notified.

Um they aren't notified, and so we're kind of working through exactly how that, because the goal is we want them to fix it.

We want them to repair and and fix the problem first.

And so we're working through with staff of uh, you know, do we give them 30 days to get that fixed, and then let the residents know?

Because that is a big feast, and and we didn't go into great detail, but the permitting issue.

If they don't have that multi-family permit, they cannot lease new multifamily facilities if they don't have that permit if they have a failing score.

And right now, if they have a failing score, they can still lease out to those facilities, and so I we kind of put it as that's a lot of big incentive for these folks to have passing scores from what we're doing.

And can we make sure that during the next committee meeting on that that we can share that yeah, I think program with I'm about to Google Cincinnati what it is, but uh yeah, I think we love the name of the thing, but uh, don't worry, send it to us.

Yeah, I I also looked at that, and one of the things that really stuck out to me is that the apartments then see how they're being rated, and they put a little more pressure on themselves.

And I think that's the goal of what we're trying to do.

That's what we are trying.

I mean, we even went through y'all may not notice if you go to the multifamily site of the website.

Um, the colors were very kind to all the apartments no matter what they scored, and now it's pretty tough.

If you score below a 70, you're red, to let you know this is not a high performing apartment complex.

If you're in the lower scores, you get yellow.

If you're in the high performings, you're getting a green.

So we are we are making it a little more like use the comment carrot and stick mentality, and and we are taking a little of that mentality.

City wise is the name of the application.

Well, y'all are promoting a vendor up here, okay.

Well, worth worth looking at always.

So just giving you so you can sure could look at what they're doing and and all of that.

Mr.

Hog, yes, sir.

You know, I've got three apartments that have just always that are always you always have to be on them to get stuff done.

And I've you know, when this it all started when two young um children were shot and killed in the apartments.

I've been really conscious about going to those apartments.

And it's funny, these people are living in bad conditions and they don't want to tell anybody because they're threatened by that management.

And so when the city got onto one of them, then they started enforcing different things like oh, you messed up your blinds, here's an extra charge.

So they started, you know.

So I think it's you know, we've got to do something because the people, I mean, some people have lived there 25 years, and to be treated like that is just not right.

So I would say, well, and I think this has all come about, and you know, I've got two of our new council members serving on this, or I'm sorry, one serving on there, um, new, and and we've had the discussion of we had too many apartments scoring too high on that.

So we've got to kind of sit there and say, What are we making sure we're really, you know, there's some apartments that we're scoring in the 90s that probably shouldn't have been scoring in the 90s.

So we're increasing some of these, and I think the perfect example of someone could have a failing score, but they still get a multifamily permit.

Well, I'm sorry, if you have a failing score, there should be punishments in place.

And and you want to talk about a big punishment, you can't lease until you have a per multifamily permit.

Um, that is a huge, huge factor to this.

Now, we will run all of this through apartment coal.

We're this is a process, right?

This is not, we've been working on this for months as it is, and we're gonna continue for months to make sure and and legal sits back there and constantly make sure we're hitting all the right pieces, but uh we know this is a need for the city to increase this on our multifamilies as we have 50 something thousand units um in this, and I think our city staff is doing a really commendable job about how we change and go to this, and so I think we're hitting all the right pieces and getting ideas like city wise as we hear from others.

I think those are factors that we can start building in.

Ms.

Drog, I'm gonna go out of order here and give you an opportunity if you have anything to add on the uh COG executive board since you have to pull out of here.

Without a doubt, real quick, I'll tell y'all um, I I sent it to Victoria, so you should be getting it um fairly soon, but we went through, and this is uh my hard copy, and sorry I don't have hard copies for everyone, but we'll print it.

But I think the biggest thing is we went through the 2026 population estimates.

Um the region, the council of governments added 1.12 million people since 2020, and 2010 to 19 is one million.

So we even had more than we had in the last decade.

It's growing faster than our.

Um in that time.

Uh Larry's Conseil is small, had 45.

And so as you look at the growth.

This is just I know Trey just sent us all AI C demographics.

We need to see from a regional area of where that's going.

This is affecting transportation, everything we're doing.

A couple other pieces, strategic planning consultant.

Um, they're coming in, they did an internal staff meeting as the COG works on long-term strategic plan.

Um, they're planning, I think, in July to meet with each board member about where they're going, and then uh General Assemblies Friday, uh discussion RTC solvency and discretionary items.

What else?

Going through some of my notes.

Um, and we did do a review on the executive administrator, and he got a salary increase the same as what all employees got from that perspective, and uh a 20-week contract is what he got, which is legally what you're allowed to give.

Um, that's all for a quick update on COG.

Any questions for Councilmember Hogg?

Thank you, sir.

Thanks for sticking around.

Thank you.

I'm running to the I'm not avoiding other people, and I'm sorry I'm about Miss Jaul's reports, but I'm running to help us on the Arlington Council, Arlington Cultural Tourism Council.

So I'll be back.

I'll be back by 6 30, Mayor.

Perfect.

Councilmember Odin Wesley, 4.3 municipal policy, please.

Thank you, Mayor.

Municipal Policy Committee met uh this morning with all members present, and we had two agenda items.

The first one was a continuing discussion about um never can put my hand on that house bill number, the one that allows one stairwell instead of 2835.

Thank you.

It now allows one stairwell in a um multifamily development as compared to it used to be two stairwells, so now they can have one, and the whole point is to reduce the cost of construction, and the hope is that would also end up reducing the cost of housing and provide some more affordable housing.

So we looked at um the recommendations from the fire chief, which was a question we had from the last meeting.

Chief Anthony addressed concerns regarding fire safety, ingress and regress with one stairwell, and stair pressurization, the fire suppression systems, fire alarm requirements.

And the recommendation we got from the fire department was that the one stairwell was safe.

Because what they recommended was to extend the width of the stairs.

They were previously 36 inches.

His recommendation is 48 inches, so that farmen going up with equipment could pass each other on that one stairwell, as well as if you had people who need to evacuate, they could do it on that one stairwell.

And the other requirements make it safe.

Um more than four units per floor where you have that one stairwell, and no one could be more than 20 feet away from the exit to that that stairwell.

So, following discussion on all of these areas, the committee did agree with the recommendation from the fire department, and that we would advance a um revision to our UDC.

So in the construction chapter that would modify the building code board of appeals, and it'll come back to us for consideration and comment.

Before I go to the next agenda item, are there any questions on that or um comments?

Don't see any.

Thank you.

Okay.

We're going forward with one.

And it's a may, it's not a shall.

That means you may do it or you don't have to do it.

The next item on our agenda was to look at the 27-28 federal and state legislative agendas.

I think council members have these at your places.

You have the state and the federal.

So we had some recommendations from the last time we looked at those just to make it more concise, clear, and make it flow better, easier to read.

And then we created the staff created a summary statement at the end of each category that would really hone in on what the recommendations from the city were.

Let's see, for example.

There was one that said we just wanted to make sure we maintain local control.

That was the summary statement.

So you have those little summary statements at the end of each category of legislation, and this will guide our advocacy efforts, and when we make our hill visits, we would have the, we'd all be on the same same page with that.

So under the federal, well, just mentioned those summary statements.

We added those for sustainable economy and housing, and we also added one related to autonomous vehicles under transportation.

On the state agenda, again, they reworked those principles for more clarity, conciseness, and for the flow, created those intersection summary statements for municipal finance, land use, and housing, and economic development from the content that was already there.

We added a new intersection statement for public safety and emergency management.

So next state uh next steps, the staff will bring the legislative agenda to the full council.

It'll be on our agenda on June 23rd for us to adopt these, and that would guide the efforts of our legislative team.

Questions, comments.

Councilmember Gonzalez.

Thank you, Miss Order Wesley.

Um, this is for Natalie.

Natalie, did you get with the school districts again and work with them with trying work with the agenda?

Yes, sir.

And who else did you reach out to the people?

The EDC, the chamber, um TML, NLC, conference mayors as well, and all the stakeholders that we're working on our network with.

And the reason I asked that question, I just want people to know it's not just us, we're all trying to work together because when we go up there, we want to be all on the same page.

So thank you, Natalie.

Thank you.

And that concludes my report, Mayor.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Gonzalez, 4.5 Transportation Municipal Infrastructure.

Thank you, Mayor.

The transportation municipal infrastructure committee met today.

All um members were present.

We received a presentation on potential options for recouping some of the costs associated with service outside of the city limits for handy tram.

Uh the staff proposed two options for the committee's consideration.

Uh if you if you don't know, currently the handy tram goes out a mile and a half outside the outskirts of the city as a service area to get they go into Delwinter Gardens and Pantiago, and they charge everybody three dollars to go anywhere.

Uh if you're outside the the city limits, you have to come into the city limits.

So you can't you can't get a handy tram from Grand Parade to Fort Worth, you have to go from Grand Prairie to Arlington or Fort Worth to Arlington or Arlington and Grand Prairie.

So they propose two options uh remove service to some or all locations outside the city limits or charge more trips or locations outside of the city limits and require contribution for other cities to maintain access.

The committee unanimously recommended the staff move forward with both parts of option B.

So under option B, all trips to and from addresses located in the 1.5 mile external boundary will cost $8 trip.

So anybody from outside coming in, it will cost eight dollars.

All other trips will remain three dollars.

So if you're in Arlington going on, that's $3.

The city will request that the other cities pay an annual access fee in order to maintain handy train access to locations that fall within the 1.5 mile buffer area.

So for instance Manfield Grand Prairie they will be asked to pay a fee depending on how much goes in and out of their city and if they do not pay it we will not have access services to that city.

Access fees will be based on the ridership from the previous year and will range from $2500 to $2400 depending on the ridership data and an analysis of existing mutual aid agreements could influence a city's access fee such as with Patigo and with a mutual aid fire service agreement we have with them.

Cities that choose not to participate will no longer have access to handy trans services.

Staff will begin meeting with impact cities and come back at a later date with related items which will include an update to the handy tram policies and procedure manual agreements with the cities for the access fees and a FTA required public hearing.

One of those items one once these items are approved extensive research outreach will be done to ensure riders are aware of the charges one thing Dell Warding Dell Worthington Gardens will be considered and outside and if the city does not participate we will not have access to the Wardon Gardens Pantigo we're not going to do anything because we have an agreement with it for mutual aid fire services and we don't want to influence that so does any member have any other comments or anything I missed.

Yes ma'am I have a question with what you just said there at the end so does that mean that somebody going from DWG into Arlington now has to pay eight dollars yes and the what we discussed was we're paying for it Arlington's paying for all them and it's amazing if you look at the fact if you go on the agendas and go to our handout you can see how much is costing the city so they're getting the full benefit of you know without paying anything so is it eight dollars there eight dollars back?

Yes.

Any other questions you said do you have something to add?

Yes Councilmember Gonzalez um we had a lot of back back and forth in the committee and I just wanted to clarify I think what the committee was um directing staff to move forward with was eight dollars for trips that are going into the external city limits so in that one and a half mile buffer around the city but trips to and from Pantiago and DWG would remain three dollars since it's kind of we went back and forth on that so um since they're uh encapsulated you know inside the city so those trips would remain three dollars but but we're asking DWG to pay the fee like we're asking the surrounding cities to pay the access and the other surrounding cities are doing both paying the fee and then having the eight dollar trip.

Right.

So you can think about I guess I would break it into two things one is an access fee that we're asking cities to pay the other is an impact directly on riders so it's both residents and non-residents that want to take trips into another city in the outside one and a half mile boundary would have an eight dollar trip and what is that timing of if a city we say okay now you have to pay to participate in this how long do they have to start paying into that and then also the timing of if they don't meet it by a certain time limit when when do those rides to them go away sure um I think we need to work through all those details so our next step will be to reach out to the cities talk to them about what council has directed us to do before we can do anything we need to put agreements into place with the cities.

So I think we can work through all those details and then the the ridership to the eight dollars how quickly does that come into that would happen around the same time we cannot make changes to the service boundary or the ridership or the um excuse me the fair until we have a public hearing per FTA guidelines.

That needs to happen at the same time that we do any agreements with cities and we update our policies and procedures.

So that's probably I my best guess is about six months away.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

Councilmember Odin Wesley.

I just wanted to um share from the committee discussion that the other option we had was to discontinue hand-to-trans service outside the city limits.

Because right now what we're doing is a one and a half mile boundary all the way around the city, which results in what 88 square miles additions.

Yeah.

So we're almost doubling the size of the city with the handy trans service.

And our city is subsidizing all of that.

Grand Prairie's not paying, Mansfield, DWG, all these other cities that we're servicing, we're subsidizing that.

And so that's why the committee went with option B, so that we uh would increase the fare for writers as well as ask for contribution from those cities.

Any other questions?

Council Member Ware.

Um the way I remembered it is DWG was would uh be paying more.

Pan Tigo wouldn't because we have a fire agreement with them, which they give back to us, we give to them.

Uh so I uh uh would think that DWG would be paying uh the higher higher price.

That's the way I understood it, and that's why I thought we were more than $80, so that's what you're saying, so yeah.

I think um we well, I what we staff heard in the committee meeting or thought we heard was that DWG would pay the access fee, just like Grand Prairie or Fort Worth, but trips to and from DWG and Pantiago would remain three dollars.

Now, if if we misunderstood that or the committee wants to think about that differently, we can do that.

Um if you think about trips going up to a mile and a half outside the city, many of those are much longer trips, which means they're a much more expensive trip.

So that is where we start to align the eight dollar fare structure.

Um recently, city council approved a fare change where on-demand trips went to eight dollars for our longest trips.

Kind of that same concept, the longer trips are more expensive.

So when you've got DWG and Pantiago in the middle of the city, those trips are not necessarily more expensive for us, which is why we were recommending that those stay at a three dollar fare.

Okay, so and ever just remember none of this goes into play until council votes on it, so it's still subject to debate once it comes back around to us for final thing.

The committee will make recommendations.

Councilmember Pam, did you have something?

Yes, yes, he's uh Alicia is uh each uh calling the seat of autumn $31.70, minus three dollars per trip fare, correct for each right?

That is an average per ride cost, and then you can cost us a lot of money, so we just want to know uh lovely neighbor to you know help with uh share the cost, that's all.

Thank you.

Anybody else?

I want to apologize if I I misspoke, but I just thought that sort of wasn't we voted so they know or so, but we'll we can talk about it when we vote on it, so sure.

Yeah, we're we are like I said, probably about six months away from actual asking for council consideration.

So we're happy to come back and um clean it up or provide a staff report in informal staff report um before that to make sure everybody's on the same page.

Thank you.

Mr.

Gonzalez, anything else on no this is Barbara Odom Wesley's last meeting, so we want to wrap it up.

So we the the staff did a great job.

Walls did a great job, and at least and Jennifer.

I mean, just Barbara didn't do a great job though.

Well, of course she did.

I mean, she has those questions.

We didn't want to start all over with some.

Some we already had a new member, Tom.

Um, 4.6.

Ms.

Garcia, do we have any appointments boards and commissions tonight?

Yes, we do.

We have four appointments to boards and commissions on tonight's agenda, Mayor.

Thank you, ma'am.

Evening agenda item, council members.

Y'all have any special issues on that.

I've I've heard rumored that one or two of y'all want to pull 7.16 for separate consideration.

Is that true?

I'm seeing a heads nodding.

Anybody want to talk about anything this afternoon while you're here with it?

I think the issue that uh, you know, last time we let me make sure I'm talking about the right one.

I can't remember the number that is.

I think that was a start talking, so I guess it's the wrong item.

Uh, when we approved it at the last city council meeting there was a lot of loose ends, and I think a lot of people still think there was a lot of loose ends.

So I just want uh planning zone or planning development to talk about those loose ends and see if they've been wrapped up, if there's any questions, because I think there was a lot of questions regarding the trees and every tree ordinance and everything else.

I see Mr.

Holman sitting in here, uh, and I know that he's representing the applicant on this, so if y'all have any questions you want to ask him this afternoon, you're welcome to do so before we take up everybody's time this evening on getting into it, or you can wait and do it this evening.

Are we gonna have him come up or is SAP gonna come up for our questions first?

I I don't care.

Can come on up.

Can can you can come up?

It was hiding there.

Y'all have any questions for Ken?

Yeah, there were several items that had loose ends.

And so were all those taken in consideration.

So the report shows everything that should have been that what that needs to be done is done.

I is are you all satisfied with everything?

We still have some uh considerations as far as the deviations go, but in terms of uh what they uh said that they would put in into the staff and excuse me into the development plan that is in there.

What deviations have you got to be addressed?

Ken.

Uh there's still deviations for uh besides for the um tree mitigation, there's also deviations for minimum lot area, minimum lot depth, and uh the width of the front load garages relative to the width of the building as a whole, okay.

Anybody else have questions for Ken?

Uh, Kim, just um clarify to be clear for everybody.

We have a tree mitigation minimum, 35%, right?

Correct.

Okay.

So is it a uh does the developer can choose not to do the 35% and pay a fee?

Or no, that's that's not in our ordinance to do that.

They're supposed to tell us what it is in the ordinance.

The ordinance is you have to do the tree mitigation.

Now you can offer um people can uh the council can grant to variance, um that is an option.

Um, what has happened in this case is the applicant has offered to uh and this isn't necessarily written into the ordinance, but the all applicant has uh offered to pay a fee for the remaining delta of the inches uh that were uh removed and so essentially a mitigation fee, although that's not really in the ordinance itself.

And when we talk about we talk about the the the protected species species, right?

Right.

Because there's some trees out there that you can cut it and pay a fee or replant another one, right?

Oh, you pay a fee, you know, the protected species must be protected.

Is that is that correct?

35 percent uh tree of the protected trees.

That's that's the the ratio.

Yeah, and right now we have only 13, right?

Uh, yes, that's true.

Okay, so the the the development could uh could be possible uh mitigating 30 percent.

Uh it would it would be possible for for them to do the 35%.

Uh if they would have to reconfigure potentially some of the site.

I have a uh slide for this evening.

I'm not sure if it's available right now.

Uh not sure who's in control of that.

Uh, but uh I do have a slide for this evening where I can show you where those trees are the protected trees where if they were to save those and kind of turn the buildings, that would be conceivably possible.

Why don't we why don't we do this?

Because I don't want to spend the next half hour dealing with this one issue in here because we still have stuff to do, and then we have to be downstairs at 6 30.

So I'd encourage everybody, we'll go ahead and pull 7.16 from the consent agenda.

Um those who have issues regarding deviations, uh, get with the applicant or can or somebody else between now and then, and then we'll see what we can address in the uh evening city council session as well and go from there.

Fair enough.

Okay.

Any other evening agenda items that people want to talk about?

Yes, Dr.

Owen Wesley.

Thank you, Mayor.

I had a question on 7.23.

That's the AISD interlocal agreement for school resource officers.

Is this is this brand new?

Or it's the same thing we've been doing.

So there's there's no changes.

Oh okay, okay.

That was my question.

Uh I also had the question on 7.24, the interlocal agreement with AISD for a hometown recruiting officer.

Is that new?

Not new.

Okay.

Okay.

And one additional question on 7.27.

That's the drinking water.

Uh um application for a grant removing the lid.

What if we don't get the grant?

Are we still gonna have lead in the pipes?

Oh, hello, Alex Whiteway, director of water utilities.

Um, so we already have a a program in place to um attack that.

We're looking at spending about a hundred thousand dollars a year to be able to replace those hundred and eighty-nine uh services, and then it would put us in compliance within the next 10 years.

But what happens is so if we don't get it, that's what's going to be in place.

But if we do get this grant funding, we're gonna go ahead and replace it all within one year.

So we'll be in compliance within one year.

Okay.

Otherwise, it's gonna be 10 years.

It'll be 10 years to do it, but this is doesn't it mean that there's lead in the line?

It's just what we call unknown.

Okay, um, so it's just uh it's another category in there that we have to get replaced as well.

And this is only and this is from behind the meter to the front of the house that we're replacing.

Okay, okay, thank you.

That was uh alarming.

That's all I have there.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anybody else on the evening agenda items?

Okay, how about uh city and tech stop projects?

Anything on that?

Let's go on to uh 4.9 council external committees, training reports, etc.

Councilmember Hogs already addressed A.

I'm gonna go ahead and address the ones I have.

I'll try to do them in uh chronological order according to date.

Um the first one I'm gonna talk about is uh item number E is in Edwards on May 28th.

Uh we had a uh master plan steering committee meeting for tech stot uh the Fort Worth division.

If you're not familiar with uh the various divisions of TechSot, there are 25 divisions in the state of Texas.

The top five divisions are Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston are the top five.

If you look at those top five, the Fort Worth division has historically received uh substantially less money than the other four for the development of roadways and things such as that.

So the steering committee was put in place by the new executive director of the Fort Worth Division to better address the funding um mechanism by which we're asking TechSDOT to give us money on things, and um so we have entered into the implementation phase, which essentially means we're done, and now it's time to implement this stuff to and present it to tech stop to see how we can maximize this.

I'm hoping that it's gonna uh enable us to get more funds throughout the Fort Worth division.

Uh yes, sir.

Does that is the funds?

Will they go to be able to clean up the highways also and all that, or is it just for growth?

Yeah, virtually all the discussions was for growth, not for the mowing and things such as that.

This is for the addition of roads, widening of roads, overpasses, mixed masters, things such as that.

Thank you.

Uh-huh.

Uh on June 1st, we had Tarrant County Mayor's Council uh meeting.

Uh to be honest, we didn't really cover a whole lot on that.

We got an update from uh Dr.

Byrd uh with Tarrant County's mayor council.

He's the Tarrant County's uh chief medical officer.

Uh he provided an update on the preparations that the county is going through for FIFA and the influx of people coming in from all parts of the world into Arlington and what to be on the lookout for and what not to be on the lookout for.

Um Ebola was one of the main things that they're gonna be checking for, looking for signs, and he discussed the mechanisms by which they would put out notifications if we get anybody uh experiencing symptoms of of contagious diseases.

On 6-3, we had the uh Terrent Regional Transportation System or Terrant Regional Transportation Coalition meeting.

Uh essentially there we talked about the text dot update on what we just covered in the implementation phase, and we talked about the conflict between the regional transportation council that Mr.

Gonzalez will talk about here in a little bit, and the North Texas Council of Governments, where the Regional Transportation Council has sued North Texas Council of Governments, and there is an issue as to whether or not all parties are going to be signing the text dot proposed master planning organization agreement.

So they're going through that, we've received that update.

Lastly, I just got back this past Sunday from the annual conference of the U.S.

Conference of Mayors uh in Long Beach, California.

Um very robust discussions about uh issues such as uh housing.

Housing continues to be the number one priority for municipalities across the country on how to uh uh get attainable housing, affordable housing, uh, and addressing homelessness, all of that fits into the housing uh uh issue.

Uh uh crime appears to be down across the country in all major cities, um, both Republican and Democratic led cities, uh, which I think is is great for everybody, of course.

We have a new president of the U.S.

conference of mayors, which is the San Diego mayor, uh Todd Gloria, great guy, uh good friend.

Arlington had made a uh submittal to host the 2028 U.S.

Conference of Mayors annual conference.

Uh there was some issues regarding Arlington's submittal and uh it being pulled from the submission list unnecessarily, but nonetheless, it was considered and after when everything was said and done uh there was uh an analysis done by a consulting firm called Globetrotters.

There were eight total cities that made submissions for 2028.

They included Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Des Moines, Arlington, uh, I forget which other one.

Oh, um uh San Antonio was one of them.

Uh, and there was a couple of other cities in there that I can't remember off the top of my head.

The analysis showed Arlington and Philadelphia neck and neck on uh where we should be on that.

So it was a it's a great credit to Arlington that we were considered up as one of the top two things.

However, the selection committee chose Philadelphia as it is an election year and it is a swing state, and they thought it would be beneficial to have um uh representatives from both of the two major parties in the United States at the U.S.

Conference of Mayors, Andrew Party and Philadelphia.

Uh uh so Philadelphia was chosen for 28, Alana was chosen for 29.

I have been asked to participate because of some of the problems associated with the failure to properly present Arlington in a fashion that it should have been presented.

Uh I will be uh participating in the committee establishing the new protocols for future selections in the future.

Uh so whoever my successor may be maybe have an opportunity to submit Arlington again and uh get us in there.

There was a commitment, however, by the U.S.

conference mayors that they will on an annual basis come to Arlington at the National Medal of Honor Museum for a leadership cohort.

Uh the first time we had it, it was about 18 mayors that came.

Uh there is a lot more of excitement now because the word has gotten back, and we had mayors like the former president of the conference, um, uh Andy Kenther out of Columbus, Ohio said it was the best in the 16 or 18 years that he's been mayor.

It was the best training he's ever received.

And um, so he spoke about it as well as uh the current the immediate past president, the Oklahoma City mayor David Holt, uh, who talked about how phenomenal it was.

So everybody was thrilled to be in Arlington and they will be coming back to Arlington in April of next year uh to do another leadership cohort.

Uh any questions.

Okay.

Uh we'll move on down to Mr.

Gonzalez.

Uh RTC.

RTC mayor, I have that the last meeting was May 14th, and I've already reported that on May 26th.

Do you have a transit vision subcommittee meeting?

Yes, I did have a transit.

Okay.

You have anything to add for that?

Yeah, the RT Transit Committee met virtually on May 29th.

Uh we received an update on RTC's existing mobility 2050 policies, and then uh the program manager Rebecca Angora shared an update on the next steps regarding legislature.

Uh Michael then put those two together saying uh he emphasized that implementing a long-term regional transportation strategies without disruption will require comprehensive funding, prioritizing projects and effective regional mobility planning.

This approach will demonstrate to the legislators that the DFW area is well prepared.

We concluded the meeting by gathering reactions from the subcommittee members on the updates we received and on um Michael Morris' comments.

So our next meeting was scheduled for the 11th, but it got canceled, and so I don't know when the next meeting is, and we're not meeting in July because of FIFA.

Okay.

Uh Councilmember Odom Wesley, National League of Cities.

Mayor, I attended my final board meeting with National League of Cities on yesterday, and it was a federal advocacy update where they again went over our legislative priorities, and uh we will have representation, of course, on the Hill, and all of their preparation to present those priorities.

Excuse me.

Then we had um presentations for each one of our uh constituency groups and what their activities for the summer.

Many are having leadership conferences, and just for information, especially our new council members, there are uh quite a few subgroups, about 10.

Uh military first, well, it was been called first tier suburbs.

They're changing their name to the suburban suburban cities, council.

Large cities, small cities, university cities.

We've got the uh Hispanic, the National Black Caucus of Locally Elected Officials, LGBTQ, Asian Pacific, women in in municipal government.

So all of these subgroups are represented at NLC and they meet during the summer usually for uh leadership so that was most of the conversation and then the summer board and leadership for NLC will be in Louisville Kentucky um this summer uh and uh well the legislative priorities they talked about water infrastructure the uh brownfield programs transportation the build America 250 where there's a potential for 580 billion dollars to be spent on transportation and again FIFA FEMA uh funding housing federal guidelines and much support for the Road to Housing Act and that was the gist of that meeting on yesterday and again I just want to encourage our council members to get involved with NLC choose one of those subgroups that you're interested in and um they if they've heard of Arlington and uh just look forward to making sure we're still visible there.

Thank you.

Thank you future agenda items I have a couple um I'd like to put on the agenda the continuation of council's appointee evaluations we have been unable to complete our evaluation of all of our appointees and I'd ask that in doing so that we've receive a proposal from the city manager on the completion of his evaluation at some point here in the not too distant future um I'd also like for us to start a process by which we evaluate um uh eligibility for those who are uh wanting to enter elections for city council and mayor uh I think it would be appropriate to look and see what other cities are doing and explore Arlington's options to both possibly increase the fee that's associated with filing and the requirement of getting a petition signed by a certain number of people so that you can't just pay a hundred dollars and anybody can run I'd also like to explore the possibility of providing uh an appropriate salary for council and mayor one that may help us broaden the pool of people eligible or interested in running for public office um I've been very involved with the U.S.

conference of mayors we appear to be the largest fully unpaid city in the country um and I would ask specifically that we not look at strong mayor cities because those are held in different light and that we look at strong city manager run cities so that we get a more apples to apples comparison on what other cities around the country are doing I think um uh we need to start exploring how we can best structure uh an appropriate salary for the future for our successors going forward and for those who are um interested in entertaining this wonderful thing that we're doing here serving the city um are you happy with that, Barbara.

Councilmember Gonzalez.

Yeah, I would like a staff report on adopt a medium an updated report on that okay yeah you like the Long Island medium?

Yeah.

Texas T better.

Or this.

What's the seatbelt seat belt medium or whatever his name is anyway.

Not all of y'all got that joke.

I think Jay got it.

He was the only one laughing in the background over there.

Okay, anybody have anything else on future agenda items?

With that, we will stand adjourned.

I'll see everybody downstairs at 6.30.