Good morning, everyone, council members, staff, members of the public.

I'm Fred Flickinger, Chair of the City of Houston's government operations committee.

Call this meeting to order and would like to welcome all council members in attendance.

Councilwoman Amy Peck, and then we have staff from uh councilwoman Tiffany Thomas, Councilman Mario Castillo, Mayor Pro Tam, Martha Castix Tatum, and Councilman Julian Junior Mares.

Council members and staff, please hold your questions until the end of the presentations.

If there are any members of the public that would like to participate in public comment, there's a sign in sheet at the front of the table.

For the first presentation, uh assistant director of the solid waste department, Shiva Singh will provide a review of illegally dumped tires ordinance.

Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, Chair.

Good morning, uh committee members.

So I'm going to give an overview of the tire permitting program within the solid waste management department.

Next slide.

So this ordinance was initially effective in 2016.

It was to help establish regulations and procedures for the environmentally safe transportation, storage, accurate record keeping, and proper disposal of new, used or scrap tires.

Tire shops can no longer use any transporter to discard their tires, they must be registered with the state and the city of Houston.

Tires must be disposed of appropriately.

The key difference is the TCQ regulation only applied to tire generators over 500 tires per year.

City of Houston ordinance applies to all businesses to be all businesses within the city limits are to be inspected and permitted.

Next slide, please.

I'm reasonable.

There you go.

Thank you.

Well, um, is the presentation it's okay.

Um, real quickly to go over some definitions.

A tire generator is defined as a fleet operator, an automotive dismantler, or a retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer, recapper, or retreader of new or used tires.

Tire transporter is a person who is responsible for causing tires to move along a public street from one location to another within the city.

Next slide, please.

We are following chapter 39, Article 8, uh, entire permanent process.

Uh so every tire generator is to be permitted annually and inspected.

This would include reviewing their manifest records, storage, and disposal practices.

Tire transporters are permitted and inspected, and they are issued a decal that should be visible on their truck as they perform their services.

We are increasing the audit frequency and the depth of the manifest records kept by both generators and transporters through this program because of the TCAQ limit of 500 tires per year.

Uh the goal of it is to cut down on illegal dumping of tires.

Next slide, please.

Tire inspector duties are to conduct inspections, particularly looking for the proper storage and disposal documentation, and that tire generators are following good environmental uh practices.

They issue citations, legal warnings, they communicate and educate.

They attend court when subpoenaed, process applications and payments for each business, mail out and issue permits and decals, and they respond to any inquiries for a business.

Next slide, please.

Registration and permit fees.

For a tire generator, the permit fee is approximately 114.

For a tire transport, the permit fee is approximately 295 dollars for one vehicle.

A tire generator, uh sorry, a tire transporter can have multiple vehicles and will pay an additional 5250 per view.

Annual registration and inspections are a requirement of the ordinance.

Next slide, please.

Looking at our permanent metrics, um, for the current fiscal year to date, there's about eight eighteen hundred plus permits in the system.

Only 1100 are active.

Almost 800 are expired.

So it's a combination of smaller businesses going out of business, things that need to be renewed or removed.

There's about 2800 inspections performed annually.

Two thirds of locations require a reinspection for compliance.

Year to date, five citations have been issued.

There's 612 closed, unpermitted or specifically ordinance violations found by the inspectors is just over 600.

Next slide, please.

So the 311 SR for illegal dumping does not specifically separate illegal dumping of tires.

So we had to go through the records and the comment section of 311, and many of these are self-reported.

What we could pull out, we generated a heat map to see if there is some kind of clear indication that legal dumping of tires differed from illegal dumping in general.

Doesn't look like there's a clear indication of that, but that's just going through the limitations of how we collect data through three long run right now.

Next slide, please.

So for illegal dumping, solid waste in FY25 did a little over 9,500 inspections.

80% of those were responsive to 311.

20% of those were proactive inspections as the inspectors drove around and saw something.

The breakdown of FY25 numbers, there was about 2600 illegal dumping that involved tires, and based on the estimated weight that was hauled out.

Calendar year through April, there's about 1570 illegal dumping, and we're estimating about 14,722 tires have been disposed of by solid waste.

Next slide.

So real quickly, um talking to communities that there's some confusion about where they can take some things.

Tires can be taken to all of our facilities.

So the six neighborhood depositories, which are being rebranded residential drop-off centers, will take tires.

The environmental service centers and also our consumer recycling centers will also accept tires.

Next slide, please.

Currently, solid waste management is under contract with Liberty Tire Recycling.

We collect them at our facilities and bi-weekly, they pick them up from containers and take them to the recycling facility.

This contract is also shared with HPW, FMD, and HAS.

Next slide, please.

In terms of where do tire transporters go per TCEQ regulations, they're supposed to dispose of uh their tires at a TCEQ regulated site.

This is the list of account of all the sites in the state of Texas.

So a tire cannot just be dumped in a landfill, it has to be processed, meaning cut up into pieces before it can be placed into a landfill.

So that's what the process processing center is.

There are two recycling centers in the Houston area, one in Houston and one in Baytown, where we have our contract.

And there's various other projects approved by the TCEQ for use of scrap tires.

Next slide, please.

So I wanted to point out to I guess the residents or anyone that has anything that they want to know how to dispose of it.

Please always check the Houston Solid Waste.org website.

Press releases and the status of your current 311 service request.

You can call the customer service hotline and get an update on it there.

We also have the HDX Collects app for Android and Apple or on the same website.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page and go to the magnifying glass, you can actually just type in what you're trying to dispose of and find out the uh solid waste management recommendation for how to dispose of it.

Next slide, please.

So with that, um, any questions?

Councilwoman Peck.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you so much for the presentation.

Um, did these numbers include um our hot team collection pickups of tires, or is this just the solid waste department?

This is just the solid waste department, but the hot teams would dispose of their tires at our facilities.

So the estimated tires would include the hot teams.

Okay, thank you.

Councilman Remers' office.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Um, so just to check my understanding, you're just letting us know about the existing ordinance, you're not proposing changes or something new, is that right?

Or currently, no.

Um, no, no proposed changes currently.

Okay, all right.

So, how do we know how many of these tire generator businesses exist and where they are?

So the tire generator list, it's um there's two things to it.

There's your big companies like NTB or Firestone, they're relatively easy to find.

Um, the reason why there's so many, no, we we listed as out of business in our records.

Um, lots of companies, smaller shops come in and out of business uh throughout the year.

Oftentimes when they do an inspection, the inspectors will find other locations that aren't in our records.

Um, they are good actors, they just didn't realize they were required to have a permit.

Yeah.

Uh so they do come into compliance when the inspectors contact them.

So it's sort of like if we see them, we'll let them know, but we may not know sort of the exhaustive list of those businesses.

That's great.

So do you have a guess sort of what percentage of those businesses um know about or have a permit versus what percentage are just out there?

I do not have a guess.

Um, I just kind of have the numbers of what we find on a regular basis.

Um, some of the improved processes in the in the past few years.

We we do keep better track of the data.

Um, so going forward, uh, in terms of pulling out these metrics, um, we think we can get better data.

Okay.

Um, so the illegal dumping of tires, do we have any guess?

Are they mostly permitted uh businesses or but we don't know who they are?

They're sort of dumping.

I do not know for sure.

Um I would suspect the tire generators and transportation of tires, the permanent process we do what we can, but uh realistically speaking, the vast majority of legal dumping, I would just say probably is unpermitted.

Okay, and how many feel free to cut me off if you need to?

Um council member, but um how many uh permit uh workers do we have sort of doing the inspections and all that stuff?

So including a supervisor who does do inspections.

We have five team members who do inspections.

Okay.

Um do you need to cut me off?

Okay.

Um, so this is not my area of expertise, so feel free to tell me.

I don't know what I'm talking about, but the fee for the for the permit, then there's plus also a fee for if they uh bring the tires to the depository or no.

So so the depositories um they're for residential customers.

Okay.

Um I kind of just put that in there because sometimes people just don't know what to do with this um with their tires if they have them.

So it is an option, but that is for residential uh service only.

I guess I'm trying to think what's the is there sort of a disincentive for folks disposing of the tires in the right way with the fee with the permit fee.

I'm trying to think is there some you know way for it to us to make it easier for them to do it in the right way?

I don't know.

That's a good question.

Um, I think it just does boil down to there is a cost to doing things the right way.

Yeah, okay.

All right, thank you.

Uh also we have been joined with uh representative from councilwoman Carter's office, uh Councilwoman Abby Cayman's office and councilwoman Marionette Huffman's office.

Um questions I I've got.

Can you walk me through what in what incurs at an inspection?

So if you've got an inspector going out and it's going to in TB tire, what happens?

So the inspection process is essentially more of a paperwork process.

They will walk through the facility to make sure tires are being stored, look like they're being stored appropriately, but it isn't documentation.

So a tire generator would need a manifest to show okay.

They received the shipment of tires.

Um it was a certain number of tires uh received, and if a um a shipment of tires go out, who transported it and then how many tires went out.

Um, they look for is a manifest um depending on the size of the shop, should make sense.

Um an NTB probably gets weekly deliveries versus some of the smaller places.

Uh, if their manifest doesn't show a delivery, say from over a month, um that manifest actually isn't accepted because it's probably not documented correctly.

But but the bulk of the inspection process uh for tire generator is paperwork review.

Um for transporters, it's very similar.

It is mostly a paperwork review.

Uh are they are they keeping proper documentation according to the inspector's judgment for the size of the business?

Okay.

So uh essentially you match up the tires that came into the shop versus the tires that exited the shop with the transporter, making sure they've got paperwork for what came in and also paperwork for what left.

Is that is that correct?

That is correct.

Okay, and those numbers should jive for the most part.

It should make sense to the inspector when they look at it.

Okay.

Um what about the unpermitted locations?

How do we go about finding those?

That's one of the issues I guess in the past year.

We we've we've looked at our new data collection techniques.

Um they now do have a map with them when they go out in the field.

And if there's a tire shop that doesn't show up in our records, they will literally just go after they complete their inspection, uh, go to that location and and find out.

Are they even aware of the permit requirements?

Is that something that each council district could do as well to look to see, you know, if they see a tire shop, match it up to see if it is on the list, and if it's not, contact you and say, I just drove by this address, there's a tire shop there.

I don't see it on the record that's being permitted.

Potentially that is something we can set up.

Um any locations that are questionable, uh, we can pass along to the inspectors and they will check our records, and if it doesn't match up, we will add it to the list of areas to investigate.

Okay.

And if the you become aware of one that is not permitted, what do you do?

It normally starts with when um an inspector goes out and contacts the owner of the business.

Um, like I said, the vast majority of cases they're good actors, they just weren't aware they were required to have a permit because the TCQ um the limit is at the 500 tire mark.

Okay, so they're not aware that they've got to be permitted with the city even though they're under the 500 limit.

That is correct.

Okay.

Uh councilman Remair's office.

Thank you.

Um, so the map that you have of the the kind of heat map of where the dumping is and where the cases are, does that at all correspond to sort of where the permitting folks permitted folks are?

Like they have the highest number of tire generator businesses there or totally unrelated.

Didn't look for that correlation specifically.

Um we'd have to go back and take a look at that.

Okay.

Um get back to you.

Um last question.

You had on slide four, you mentioned about you want to try to increase the frequency uh of the and audits.

Is that something you think your existing budget is gonna hold or well?

That's what's in the ordinance, um, one of the intents basically without the city of Houston ordinance, um, some of these locations would never be inspected, but the the annual reinspection from the city, uh, we don't coordinate with the TCAQ, but we would assume we're not re-inspecting in the same one.

Okay, thank you.

The fees that we charge for permitting, does that cover the inspectors cost of their salaries?

Yes, sir.

That's intended to cover the cost.

Okay.

So essentially the more the better compliance we have with the registration that allows more time and more money for the inspectors.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Um when I purchase a tire, isn't there an environmental fee charged with that transaction?

There there is.

Um, as far as I'm aware of, the city of Houston does not um, okay, but that should pay for the retailers's proper disposal of the tires, shouldn't it?

That is correct.

Okay, so obviously, with the number of tires that we end up dumped in the city, they're pocketing that money, not having to pay anything out to actually dispose it.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Well, with no more questions, I think we're good with that.

And is there any member of the public?

We'll just be present.

Okay.

So moving on to the second presentation.

And thank you very much, guys.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Um Deputy Director of Administration and Regulatory Affairs, Maria Urshad.

We'll provide updates on the Smart Loading Zone Program and Chapter 26.

Good morning.

I'm just waiting for the presentation to get up, but thank you all for giving time to us today to give you an update.

I've actually got four parking programs that I'll be giving you updates about.

So I see the presentation is up.

Thank you again for allowing us time to provide you with updates on these programs.

Let's go ahead and go to the next slide.

So I've got four uh programs that I'll be giving you updates on.

We have the mobile payment program.

We'll be talking a little bit about smart loading zones.

I'll be talking about ride share zones and then some updates to chapter 26 and chapter 16.

Next slide, please.

So let's start with the mobile payment program.

You may be aware that we've had mobile um apps for paid parking in the city of Houston since 2011.

What the app does is it allows customers to pay for metered parking without having to go and uh you know actually touch a meter.

Um, since implementation in 2011, we have seen mobile payment uh adoption soar.

So about 50 percent of our three million meter transactions are done through mobile payment uh through mobile apps.

Um in the industry, as in any industry, we see things change, we see technology um make uh improvements to our operations, and what we've seen in the industry as more people have adopted mobile payments to pay for parking.

Agencies have started looking at these mobile payment apps in a different way.

Now we're looking at them like a method of payment, like a visa or a MasterCard.

Um, so why should the city dictate what mobile payment provider the customer wants to use?

We don't care which mobile payment provider you use, we just want you to pay the meter.

Um so agencies are now looking at how can we include more mobile payment um platforms for our customers so they have the option, it's not the city dictating what you use.

So, next slide, please.

So last year in uh 2025, we issued an RFP um to go to a multi-vendor solution.

So that would instead of having only one mobile payment provider, the RFP allows us to select up to three.

Plus, we want to have a data aggregator on the back end because every month we've got to reconcile the revenue that's coming in, and instead of going to three back-end um platforms, we want to have one data aggregator so that we can reconcile all the revenue easily easily.

We had 10 respondents, uh, the top three vendors were selected.

The benefits of a multi-vendor environment, a the customer gets to pick, so when the customer gets to pick the the companies have to kind of market to to the to the customer so that they could get market share.

Up until now, we've had one platform, and most of the marketing has been on the city.

We've gotten to 50% adoption because of the work that we've done.

Um the vendor has been helpful, but you know, when they have complete control of the market, it's a little bit um challenging to get them to do more marketing than what then what they would normally do.

Um the other benefit is it accommodates out-of-town visitors.

So folks who would come in from out of town may have a different provider in their city.

When they come to our city, they've got to download this new platform.

Well, now perhaps they can just continue to use the same platform because you know, these are pretty common across um multiple cities that throughout the US.

Um, and then finally, um, the customers have options.

We want to give as many options to our customers as possible.

Cause at the end of the day, we just want them to pay the meter.

So I don't care if it's coin, built, visa, master card, which uh mobile payment uh application you want to use, that's up to you.

That's the customer's decision.

So next slide, please.

So these contracts will be coming to city council this June for uh approval.

Uh the custom these are no cost to the city, the customer pays a transaction fee just like they have been paying a transaction fee since 2011.

The city will collect the parking meter revenues from the vendors.

The vendors will install new signs and meter decalts at no cost to the city.

We anticipate a go live of May of, sorry, winter of 2026.

And so we do recommend and ask that when these contracts come to City Council in June that you do approve them.

Alright, next slide, please.

So staying with the curbside, we wanted to talk to you about a pilot that we've been working on for about two years now.

Cities have been using smart loading zones to manage growing pressure from delivery vehicles and curbside congestion for the past few years.

A smart loading zone is usually a curb space monitored or managed with sensors, cameras, apps, dynamic pricing, and sometimes reservations, so delivery vehicles can load and unload more efficiently.

Benefits of efficient loading and unloading include a reduction in double parking.

When double parking is reduced, you have more open lanes of vehicle traffic to get through.

I'm guessing I know I've sat behind a delivery vehicle that's in a moving lane of traffic because they couldn't get to the curb space, and that creates congestion on the rest of the road.

It supports e-commerce growth.

We all know, you know, our commercial loading zones were developed in 2005.

That was well before we had such advances in e-commerce.

We need delivery zones that accommodate the current practice.

Commercial loading zones are kind of a little bit archaic.

So we want to pilot these 19 zones.

It will provide increased safety.

Can pose a safety hazard to uh bicyclists, pedestrians, uh emergency access.

And when you make sure that curb space is available for delivery vehicles, you can mitigate those conflicts.

Another advantage of smart loading zones is efficient use of the curb space.

It is a limited asset that the city has.

We have limited amount of curb space.

There's not an unlimited amount.

So we want to be able to control that and use it efficiently.

These smart loading zones will also generate data.

So the data will help us know how long our cars staying there, how quickly are they coming and going, how many are being used, what is the demand at this particular location.

It will also provide data that can be used for future development of street design so that you'll see what's going on with the loading and unloading.

And then finally, smart loading zones encourage turnover.

You want delivery vehicles to get in and out as quick as possible, and that is the goal of the smart loading zone project.

So if we go to the next slide, I'll tell you a little bit about how it works.

So we've partnered with the company to pilot 19 smart loading zones.

These are primarily in downtown, but we have a handful in midtown.

The zones will have cameras to read the license plates, and it will track the time by the minute that the plate is in that zone.

Customers will be directed to sign up for uh registration.

The signs at each zone will have QR codes that they can go and sign up for the parking.

They will be charged by the minute in these zones.

And it is like our commercial zones where it is a higher price because we do want cars to come and go quickly.

The zones will operate Monday through Saturday, 7 a.m.

to 6 p.m., and we'll have dynamic rates in place to encourage the efficient loading.

So the system is really similar to tolling.

Once you create account and register, when your plate goes into that zone, it starts charging you by the minute.

When you leave, all charges stop.

Now we do expect that some folks will not register their vehicle.

So for those folks, we will be mailing parking invoices.

So they will be they will be timed.

So if my car is parked there for seven minutes, I will get a parking invoice saying I park for seven minutes.

Here is the fee that Maria needs to pay now, and there will be an admin fee attached to that because now we've got to look up who the vehicle owner is.

We have to send a letter and get them to hopefully register so that they don't make the same um, don't repeat the same thing again.

Um, so as I mentioned before, our commercial loading zones have been in place since 2005.

We have four different permits that we sell for commercial loading zones, and these allow the vehicles to park for a specific amount of time, and it ranges from two hours to 30 minutes, depending on what kind of permit they purchase.

So for our permittees that have these permits, what we're going to do in the smart loading zones is give them that time.

So if MARIA has a commercial A permit, I'll have two hours in the smart loading zone.

I'm not going to be charged by the minute.

We want to make sure our customers who are already in compliance with our loading and unloading zones that they are not having to deal with two separate programs when we do the smart loading and unloading zones.

So they will so Mario would get two hours in that zone, and then if I overstay that, then I would start getting charged by the minute and need to register with a program.

We are communicating with all of our permittees so that they are aware of the program and to let them know where the locations are.

Next slide, please.

So this is a map of the downtown locations.

We will have a website that will be ready just pretty soon where we'll have this map loaded, we'll have FAQs, it'll direct customers to the registration page for registering for the smart loading zones.

But I also wanted to address privacy while we're talking about this because I do know that will be something that will be a concern for people.

So the system is going to store license plate information solely to automate the parking payment and compliance process.

So any other data that is that is available, like people walking by or whatnot, that is going to be de-identified.

It's going to be kind of similar to what we already do in parking, where we are using the license plate recognition systems to drive down streets, we're collecting vehicle data.

It gets purged after a certain amount of time, unless there is some kind of activity associated with it, a payment, a ticket, a boot.

This is the proprietary to the city, and the vendor is clear on all that.

And what this data is going to show us at the end of the day, what why we want the city to be able to have access to this data is again to look at that curbside and track the turnovers, how the vehicle turnover, how long are people staying, how quickly are they going, how many cars are parking in that space.

Do we see a reduction in double parking?

Are we mitigating any of the challenges in that loading zone area?

Our plan is to go live on June 2nd, 2026 with the smart loading zones.

We're in the process of deploying the technology and communicating with stakeholders.

If our pilot proves successful, if we see that we are able to encourage turnover and we see reductions in the safety issues, we will uh look at a longer term agreement with the vendor and come back to city council for that after 18 months.

Next slide, please.

So the third program I want to talk to you about is ride share.

And uh this is again another form of transportation that's uh that's creating some challenges at our curbside.

Um we already know that there are challenges with ride share around the main street corridor, um particularly in the nighttime hours.

It's not so much a daytime issue.

The smart loading zones is addressing our daytime issues.

Uh, the ride share is nighttime.

So what happens is the ride shares come and they pick up and drop off from wherever the customer drops the pin.

And that could be very problematic, particularly as we gear up for main street to become a pedestrian-only corridor.

Uh right now, we well, right now a lot of it is already shut down, but what we saw in the past was that ride shares would turn on to main street, block the street, leading to some of the intersecting streets being blocked, sometimes even preventing the light rail from moving.

So we are looking at how can we mitigate those challenges because it poses safety risk again too, it creates congestion and it creates conflicts for pedestrians.

Sometimes, you know, I can't get to my ride share, my ride share can't get to me because there's traffic, so maybe I'll run to the third lane of traffic to jump into that ride share, or maybe I will jaywalk across it creates a whole host of challenges that we're trying to mitigate.

So by uh implementing the dedicated ride share zones, we can direct the ride share vehicles on where to go and to stay away from the areas where we know there is congestion going on.

So, next slide, please.

So today we have four zones designated to address.

We are right now focused on looking at the main street corridor that is going to be that is pedestrian only from commerce to about Texas.

So we want to make sure any ride share that is going to those businesses in that area.

And the businesses we're more focused on are the nighttime economy businesses, bars, nightclubs, restaurants.

These are the ones, especially at 2 30 a.m.

I don't know if you've talked to HPD, but they could create a whole host of issues.

So it's going to be very similar to like an airport.

When you you're in baggage claim, you might call for your ride share, and the app will direct you to go to the parking garage, maybe go to the third floor or go to section A or to which door, it will guide you.

Same way, but now we're just talking about the curb side.

So we've got these four zones, and our goal is to be live by the end of May so that if we need to make any tweaks or adjustments to these zones, we can do that before the FIFA activities go into full force.

These zones will be active Monday through Sunday from 6 p.m.

until 3 a.m.

Next slide, please.

So here is a map of the four zones.

They're primarily on Travis with one on commerce.

We are coordinating with the ride share companies to geofence the businesses, the establishments that are creating the congestion.

So we are geofencing bars, restaurants, and nightclubs.

We do not want to include residential or hotel.

Those are not the ride share issues that are creating conflicts here.

It is the other businesses that drive a lot of different traffic at different hours, and then the mass exodus at 3 a.m.

on a Friday night, anywhere from two to 3 a.m.

creates a lot of issues.

So what we're trying to do is balance the needs of the curbside along with, you know, make sure we're we're looking at safety for our pedestrians and mitigating congestion.

Okay, so next slide, please.

So uh the three projects that I just talked about have a pretty big impact on the public, and I wanted to make sure that you are aware that we are engaging stakeholders in these conversations, and we have been in communication with our stakeholders for the mobile payment program.

This won't launch until later this year, but the vendors will have street teams out there to help to the new system.

They will also have new signs, new decals, we'll have marketing programs to educate our customers.

Of course, we'll always have a web page for each of our programs that customers can go to.

For the smart loading zones and the ride share zones, we are visiting all the adjacent businesses in the area.

So if there is a smart loading zone on Travis, we are gonna talk to all the businesses around there that are familiar with that loading zone that probably get deliveries from that loading zone because we want them to be aware of it.

We are also making uh we are engaging um, we have contacts with UPS, FedEx, we have our commercial zone permittees.

So we're gonna communicate with all of them to let them know about the smart loading zones where they're at.

Um, and we are also uh we have been updating the downtown district for all of our plans regarding the smart loading zones and the ride share zones.

The ride share zones also will we will communicate with the uh surrounding businesses, and like I mentioned, we are already in touch with and working with the rideshare companies to get the geofencing in place.

All right, so next slide, please.

So lastly, we're working on some updates to chapter 26 and chapter 16.

The primary purpose was to address uh findings that stemmed from a controller's audit of the Washington Parking Benefit District.

Um, so we we made those updates, and then we also took the opportunity to take the time to get the ordinance uh updated regarding some items for technology, some uh job titles, and just other housekeeping measures to make sure that we were uh keeping our code.

It is a living document, we want to keep it up to date, and uh we took this uh issue with the controller's office to make sure that we were updating our code at the same time.

Uh the ordinance amendments are being finalized right now.

These will be shared online uh for public feedback.

We anticipate that these may come to city council in June for uh approval, and we are recommending that city council do approve these ordinance amendments.

And with that, next slide.

I think we're at the end, so if you have any questions, I'm happy to take those now.

Um real quick, we've also been joined uh in the chambers here from Sally Alcorn's office, and also online from Councilwoman Alejandra Salinas' office.

Uh does anybody have any questions?

Councilman Ramirez.

Hello, thanks.

Um, the three bullet points about the Washington parking benefit district.

So the audit clarifying disposition of revenue and the hurdle.

Could you explain a little bit more what those are?

Sure, yeah.

So in the ordinance, now the Washington Parking Benefit District ordinance was uh approved by city council in I think 2012 or 13, somewhere thereabouts, and it was the first parking benefit district that the city had um move forward on.

So at the time, because it was the now a parking benefit district.

What that does is it takes the net meter revenue and it shares it with that district for public improvement projects.

It was the first time ever that the city was looking at sharing meter revenue with a district to fund those kinds of projects.

So one of the um items in the ordinance at the time was to put in a project hurdle.

So the project hurdle was set at 100,000, and what that meant was this is the first time the city's doing a parking benefit district.

We don't want the advisory committee to just start initiating projects when we don't know if there's gonna be enough money to share back with the advisory committee for those projects.

So the ordinance had a 100,000 project hurdle, so the the advisory committee had to have a hundred thousand in meter revenue in the bank, that was their share, before it could be spent or approve even any public improvement projects.

So that was a one-time hurdle.

When the audit was done, the way the language was written, there was an interpretation that it could be for each project, that there had to be a hundred thousand dollars for each project, which was never the intent.

The intent was we want to make sure there's some money in the bank before anyone approves any public improvement projects here because the city doesn't want to be beholden to spending money on projects that we don't have.

So uh we updated that.

The second thing was the um uh citation revenue.

So in the audit, the citation revenue is addressed.

Parking citation revenue is addressed in the ordinance, but it is not shared with the parking benefit district.

They only get a net share of the meter revenues.

Citation revenue stays with the city.

That is not something, it is not good policy to share citation revenue because that's where you get into encouraging issuance of citations and and quotas and things like that.

We that is something we definitely never intended that parking citation revenue would be shared with the parking benefit district.

The way the ordinance was read, it was interpreted that we needed to consider citation revenue in reaching that max threshold of $100,000.

And again, that was never the intent, and we understand that you know ordinance can be interpreted in certain ways, and so at the end of this audit, we you know our response to these findings was and the the controller's office agreed on it was that we would address um the actual ordinance to reflect the intent so there is no ambiguity about these particular items.

Does that make sense?

It's a long answer for a short question.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Okay, it looks like that's all the questions.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

And next we will have Houston Public Works, and I believe it's Chris Butler, Chief Operations Officer.

Yes, good morning.

Good morning, thank you, sir.

My name is Chris Butler.

I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Houston Public Works, and I'm joined today by Deputy Director Ms.

Gina Gillary with Utility building.

I would like to apologize on behalf of Director Randy Mackeye.

He's been pulled away.

So Gene and I are going to stand in his gap and present this presentation.

Next slide.

So today we're going to update on the mayor's water bill improvement plan.

What prompted the plan, the implementation progress, the ongoing challenges, and the next steps.

Next slide.

So in 2024, Mayor Webby instituted the water bill improvement plan.

It was developed to follow following a rule of review of issues affecting billing consistency and customer confidence.

As some of you guys remember, we had issues with water bills with meters not registering properly.

So we implemented a plan of how to address all the concerns that we had.

So one of the first things we saw was we had aging infrastructure.

So most of the meters that were installed were 20 plus years old, so they were not reading accurately.

And so since they were not reading accurately, they failed the remote read devices failed to actually tell the system what the actual consumer was actually using.

So we had limited manual read capacity, the bills that followed the estimated bills followed by actual use of corrections and the customer confusion around higher than expected bills.

So individuals had bills that sometimes doubled or triple what they were normally used to, partially due because of aging infrastructure.

So there was a lot of customer confusion about what actually their bills were.

So this water bill improvement plan was to correct some of those issues.

So as I mentioned, we had the uh aging infrastructure.

So if you look on the left side of this graph, you have the remediatre device installation.

So the blue line is what the actual plan was, and the orange is actual.

So you see in FY24, the plan was to replace 51,000, and we actually did 30,000 826.

So the average monthly demand for your manual meeting reads, if you see on the right side, as of FY24 is over 128,000.

So because we have this aging infrastructure, we're required to go out there and manually read more devices.

So the plan is to get that new infrastructure installed as soon as possible so we can decrease the amount of manual reads that we actually have to do.

Next slide.

Let's go with FY25 first.

You had a plan of 80,000 devices that needed to be installed, and we exceeded that by 101,000.

And then if you look at FY26, the plan was 60,000, and currently, right now we're at about 40,00