All right.

Welcome as I call to order the July 21st City of Murphy, regular city council meeting.

Time is 6 p.m.

Rise with me as off the invocation.

Lead the Budget of Allegiance.

Our Heavenly Father, bless us as we consider the agenda in front of us tonight.

Give us the wisdom to act with compassion and shouldn't for what is best for the community.

Bless and watch over our public safety officers and the community they serve.

In your name we pray.

Amen.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Mayor Scott Bradley.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tim Scott Smith.

Deputy Mayor Pro Tim Ken Oldman.

Here.

Councilmember Place 1, Elizabeth Abraham.

Here.

Councilmember Place 3, Debbie Ison.

Here.

Councilmember place 5, Kevin Kelly.

Councilmember place 6, Janae Butler.

Here.

Mayor certified the presence of a quorum.

Thank you.

All right.

We're going to move on to public comments.

Is the time on the agenda we set aside to allow residents to address council on an item not on the agenda this evening?

Would anyone like to address council on an item not on the agenda this evening?

Seeing none.

I wanted to just take a moment to thank staff.

We had our we had the grand opening today of HEB.

And this has been the culmination of about four years of work between staff and HEB to make this come to fruition.

A lot of times we don't always see all the things that are happening behind the scenes.

This has been quite a lift for you guys over the let over the years.

Thank you for everything you did in order to bring this to uh uh the product.

Does anyone else have anything they'd like to add from the mayor's report?

All right, seeing none, we'll move on to presentations.

Item 6A presentation employee of the quarter, Chelsea Montgomery.

You're always the employee of the quarter.

I know.

Well, good evening, Mayor and Council.

Jump the gun there.

Um tonight I have the pleasure of introducing our next employee of the quarter.

Um so for those of you who don't know, this program is designed to publicly recognize a Murphy team member who consistently embodies our core values of being Murphy cool.

Um so the way that it works is each quarter of the fiscal year, employees have the opportunity to nominate anyone who they believe is um deserving of this award, and then the final selection is made by the city manager's office.

So without further ado, I am pleased to announce that our next employee of the quarter is Miss Ashley Hudson.

Yay.

And I'm gonna hand it over to our recreation superintendent to present Ashley's award.

Hello, good evening, Mayor and Council.

I am very excited to present.

Sorry, uh this award to Ashley Hudson.

Here you go.

Just want to say a couple quick words about her.

Um honestly, the city is super, you know.

I mean, it's just she's such an asset to the city, to our team.

Um, the amount of work that she puts in with vendors, sponsors, the event itself.

Um, we're really lucky to have her.

Um, you know, she's working at like you know, top level high big city events and pulling them in here to Murphy.

So you know, she definitely deserves this award.

The last quarter that she got this for, we nominated her for the Hop and Hunt event that she did, the barbecue event that she puts on every year.

So super proud of her, and definitely she deserves this recognition.

So congratulations.

Thank you.

Very good.

All right.

Congratulations.

Moving on to item six B presentation, water loss report.

Donald.

Right.

Good evening, Mayor, members of council.

Um jump right into the water loss report.

Uh historical water loss that you've seen before.

You can see down here that uh 2223, we kind of peaked at our highest highest water loss in millions of gallons.

Uh since then, 24-25, things have started to uh get a little bit better.

2025.

I'm sorry.

Just I wanted to look at the percentage.

Sorry.

So what's the total percentage for 2025?

2025 is on this slide.

It was 13 percent.

That's in norm.

Yes, absolutely.

Everything's everything's looking good as we roll through this.

Uh you'll see that we're you know, we're kind of up and down a little bit, but we're we're staying within the norm.

So again, total water loss is a little over 16 uh 8 million, which equal to 13 percent.

Again, that's using Texas Water Development Board's uh water loss survey methodology.

And uh you've seen this slide in the past, but I we added to it a little bit.

So uh you have the total water pumped in the system, so that's basically leaving the Hawthorne pump station into the city's uh distribution system, total water accounted for, and then the difference.

What we did was add the percentage here, and then we wanted to give you the same time period for the previous year.

So for example, in June uh 26 it's 14 percent water loss versus the same time period in 25 is 13 percent.

Uh you know, we are having a little bit more uh than we did last year this time period, and the only thing I can say is we probably we we've had some more leaks, uh and I think there's a lot of leaks out there that aren't surfacing.

So uh we're just not finding them as as quickly as we'd like to.

And then for the year to date, uh the same time period we're at 10 percent versus uh 14 percent for the year to date this in 2025.

So we're ahead of the curve, what we were last year.

So let me ask this question.

Is this is the percentage going down because we're losing less water, or is the percentage going down because we're uh our our ability to determine where the water is going uh is improving.

I think you have multiple factors here.

First is I think it's it's coming down from previous years because we're being more consistent in how we calculate it.

We're calculating it correctly.

Um and also I think we've we've found a lot of leaks.

Uh you know, last year we found I think it was fifty something leaks.

I have a slide on that.

Uh so we're addressing these leaks quickly as soon as we find them.

Uh unfortunately, this time of year there's not a lot of those leaks surfacing.

We're having to get the calls from the customer saying, hey, we've got a little bit low water pressure, will you come check and we go go look at their meter?

We can obviously we can hear it.

We can hear that there's a leak.

So is there a uh slide?

Maybe it's on here, but maybe it's one you can add.

Uh that shows the number of leaks fixed per year.

Um yes, yes.

I actually it is on here, so I can I can show you that.

Right.

Well then I'll be patient.

Um we also added this this slide uh which gives you uh our metered of water usage per category.

So you can see commercial church city.

Uh obviously the biggest usage is uh is residential.

Uh I just added this this quarters on here.

I didn't try to go and add the previous quarter to it.

Um this does not include the unmetered usage, which is gonna be uh estimates like fire hydrant flushing, uh water that we use for uh sampling, things like that.

This is just strictly the the metered usage.

So all of these are billed with the exception of the city meters, uh which is not billed.

Let me ask this question.

You you show the sprinkler line.

I want to make sure people don't think that that's the residential sprinkler.

Right.

Right.

That's covered under residential.

Correct.

Uh sprinkler in this case re references exactly what.

Sprinkler in this case is gonna is going to reference your uh I want to you know I'm gonna have to look that up.

I uh now that you've said that I'm not 100% sure.

I think I think it's municipal sprinklers.

I believe it's I believe it is too, but I need to verify that.

Okay.

So again, uh, you know, our proactive leak detection methods, we're we're act actively looking, uh, we're always out on the road looking to see if we're finding any pooling, looking our outfalls to see if there's any water flowing that you know during times of dry weather.

We have not been we have not been locating those.

We haven't found any of those uh recently.

Everything's dried up and it's really uh it's just not really surfacing the way we'd like it to.

So we're having to, you know, lean back on our on a reactive leak detection, which is basically just you know, when the citizens call in and tell us, hey, our our water pressure is low, then we go out there and uh investigate, and then if it's leaking, you know, we try to fix it right away.

2026 water leaks.

So here on the top is in 2024, we had we've repaired 51 water leaks, 25 was 40, and so far this year we've repaired 19.

Uh so we're kind of on track during the summer months, so some of those will pick up and we'll we'll we'll have more.

Uh here's some of the leaks that happened this quarter.

Uh you know, we tried to address those as fast as we can.

Unfortunately, on like on Taylor Trail, that one went for 13 days, which is longer than we actually like it to, but we just couldn't get there in time to get it done.

Just had too many other projects going.

13 days after it's no after we find it.

Yeah, it's been identified.

Right.

And it was and it was also, you know, on the private side, it was showing 65 PSI, which is which is you know, plenty of plenty of pressure on residential side, so we we didn't prioritize it at the time.

If it had been much less like 30 or 35, we would have jumped on it right away.

So what's next?

Um, you know, council approved the construction uh for the uh copper service line change out project on July 7th.

I'm hoping to have those contracts signed by the uh the uh construction company uh I'm hopefully having tomorrow, and then Ms.

Adams can sign them right after that and uh we can get moving on this.

Uh if everything goes well, we'll begin construction in August uh or September, and there's an 18-month timeline to finish that project.

And I'll happy to answer any questions you may have.

I've got a question.

I'm sorry to do this.

Could you go all the way back to the very first slide?

Right.

I'm sorry.

Um keep going right there.

So the percent I'm what I'm looking at is to see the percentages of loss uh in relation to the amount of consumption or the amount of gallons.

So I'm just trying to see if there's any correlation too.

So when we have a high month like June when there's a lot of water, uh we're at a 14 percent.

Um but we're at a 13 percent when there's in February.

So is there anything that that uh the the amount of water that is flowing, the amount of water that that is going through the system, does that have any relation to the to the leak?

That's a that's a great question.

I really I just can't I can't answer that.

I I really think your water loss is gonna depend on how many leaks you have that are just just unknown.

Uh I don't know that there's a correlation to it.

Uh I do know that in the summer months, on times when you are just using more water anyway because of irrigation or filling swimming pools, whatever it may be.

Um that's also the same time that uh the ground is getting drier.

Uh things are starting to move, some of these lines are are gonna get leaks more often.

Uh so I there may be a correlation just because it's summertime, but not necessarily because it's more water usage.

Okay.

Well, I look forward to seeing what the future holds.

I think we still need continue to need more data, you know, as this goes along.

This is a I'm excited to see how this changes as we as we uh go through the construction project, and uh you know, part of this pro part of this would be maybe adding how many lines we actually replaced that have a leak, and so we can get an idea of how many leaks we really had.

That'll be fascinating.

Just so everybody kind of has some perspective on this.

When this became a crisis, we were averaging about a million a day.

At least from the way we were reporting.

Uh we were at uh averaging a loss of a million gallons a day.

Um 15 million in June is still a lot, right?

It's about a half million a day.

Yes.

Um, you know, I'd like to see uh more consistently like April.

Right?

Yes, sir.

Yes, I would too.

Absolutely.

So um but yes, uh hopefully the project will get us somewhere in that space.

I believe it will, yes, sir.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr.

East.

All right.

Going to move on to item seven, city manager staff reports.

All right.

Uh just a couple of updates tonight.

As you mentioned, HEB is in town now.

Um they will be officially opening to the public tomorrow at 6 a.m.

Uh we will be putting out traffic information for the public to consume on social media, um, making sure that they understand there will likely be delays, there will likely be an increase in traffic over the next few weeks, maybe a few months until things settle down.

Um, but we hope that the traffic is worth HEB coming to Murphy.

Um Emerald City is coming back.

Their concert was previously canceled due to weather um uh back in the beginning of June.

They will be coming back on Friday, July 31st from 7 to 10 p.m.

in Murphy Central Park.

And then our next council meeting will be a combined council and budget work session.

The first part of the meeting will take place in council chambers.

The second half of the meeting will be the work session that takes place in the community room downstairs.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Uh with that, we'll move on to consent agenda.

All consent agenda items to be considered routine by the city council, be enacted by one motion.

There will be no separate discussion on these items unless it's a council members have request, in which event the item will be removed from the consent agenda and voted on separately.

Would anyone like to remove an item from the consent agenda at this time?

Okay.

Seeing none, I'll take a motion on the consent agenda.

Mayor, I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented.

Second.

I have a motion, second.

All is in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Motion passes unanimously.

With that, uh, we'll go into item nine, executive session.

Uh accordance with Texas Government Code, Chapter 551, subchapter D, the City Council will now recess into executive session to discuss the following.

Item A, 551.071, consultation with attorney on pending or contemplated litigation on a matter in which the duty of the attorney to the governmental body under the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct of the State Bar of Texas clearly conflicts with this chapter.

Item I, code enforcement nuisances and litigation under the Texas Government Local Government Code, Chapter 54.

Time is 616.

City Council will reconvene and a regular session pursuant to the provisions.

Chapter 551, subchapter D, Text and Government Code.

Take any take any action necessary regarding item A 551.071 consultation with attorney on pending or contemplated litigation and on a matter in which the duty of the attorney to the governmental body under the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct of the State Bar of Texas clearly conflicts with this chapter.

Time is 7 p.m.

There was no action taken in exec.

There's no follow-on actions.

No member of the city council may discuss any of the requested subjects until a matter uh has been properly placed on the agenda.

Would anyone like to add an item to a future agenda at this time?

Seeing none.

701, we're agenda.