The Fort Worth City Council held a work session on August 25, 2026, to receive presentations and discuss several key items including the DFW Airport FY27 budget, a proposed economic development agreement with Carrier Corporation, updates on the 2026 bond program, and the contractor accountability process. Council members also raised future agenda items for staff follow-up.
Good morning. I'll get us started. Welcome to your city council work session. I'll call a meeting to order and turn it over to Jay Choppa. Good morning, Mayor and Council, and everyone in the audience. Welcome to our work session today. Under upcoming and recent events, I'd like to let everybody know that we will not be having a CCPD board meeting after this meeting since the uh board adopted its budget on Friday. And under organizational updates, uh, I'd like to um confirm that James Horton, I will be appointing James Horton as the new interim fire chief. And uh on the council's work session or um agenda later today, a resolution to confirm his appointment as fire chief. Uh we'll be there for your um consideration. Next, I'm gonna call on Kristen Smith to introduce uh a couple of new assistant directors in her department. Very excited to announce uh two of our AD vacancies are currently filled. So um one face is very familiar to you, uh, Christy Lemon, who has been with the city over twenty years and has lived many lives and uh had many roles most recently as the assistant director of finance. Uh, she joins our HR team effective yesterday as our AD of shared services. So um HRS, um, talent, organizational development, uh, and many special projects are going to be coming Christie's way. Anything to add? All right. And then also Sandra Medley is our assistant director of employee relations and business partnerships. This is a new portfolio on our team, making sure that we are directly connected to our highest risk areas, including employee relations, labor relations, compliance, regulatory leave. She's also a veteran and will be helping us with compliance programs in that area. So super excited for both of you. All right. Congratulations. Okay. Moving on to informal reports. First report we have is development activity report for October. DJ Harrell, actually, he's not here today. Jellin. Oh, he is here. He chains it up on me. DJ Harell from Development Services here to answer any questions? Okay. Next report is proposed contractor accountability process. Again, DJ's here to answer any questions. Councilor Rebecca. I have a couple of questions, DJ. While you're um making your way to the podium, thank you so much for for putting this program together in response to some bad actors we had. So thank you for the work that you've done. I think it's pretty well fleshed out. I have one question. So we um the process we have now is that if they have or we will have as a result of this, if a contractor has three violations in a 12-month period, and so the only thing I'm concerned about, or a question I have is is that 12-month period long enough? Like realistically speaking, right, houses or building projects take a long time. So should that be 24 months, right? Like how realistically, how often are people committing that? Um good morning, mayor and counsel DJ Horel Development Services. Uh thank you for that question. I I think we looked at 12 months because we thought, you know, as a contractor, being not being able to do construction in the city of Fort Worth for a 12-month cycle, it's a pretty big deal to oh no, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with the punishment period. I'm talking about the look back period that we have. So right now it says that they commit three violations in a 12-month period.