All right.

Welcome to the city council special meeting for Tuesday, July 21st, 2026.

We have three items on the agenda.

First one is consideration of approval, acceptance, rejection, amendment, and or postponement of awarding bid 2627-04 and contract K-2627.

Buy between the Norman Utilities Authority and TMI Coatings LLC in the amount of 532,200.

Performance bond, uh, statutory bond and maintenance bond for the Lindsay Tower Resurfacing two logos and budget transfer as outlined in the staff report located in Ward 7.

And Chris is here from utilities to leave us on the discussion.

Okay.

Thank you, Mayor.

Council.

So the last time I left you was Tuesday, and I had received zero bids that day, I thought.

And so we were gonna go post the um bids again because you have to start a 21-day state bidding cycle the next day.

But that next morning, uh our purchasing person came into my office and said, I am very sorry.

Um I got bad news for you, but I found one of the bids in our office that was sitting there in my Mbox on my mailbox, and I didn't I overlooked it, but she said we have it.

I was like, Well, that's great news.

That's not terrible.

So let's open it.

And so it was TMI coatings.

Um we've they've painted they painted the Robinson Tire back in the early 2000s with me way back.

Um, our good notable company out of uh Minnesota.

Um, and the bid came in.

Um we'll show you the slides, but it came in under the engineer's estimate, and so we're here to say this, you know, a little light here, chance of maybe still pulling this off without having to wait 21 more days.

So I wanted to show you kind of the what we see on the bids, some of our you know, calculations if if we do get this um third party to come in and want to um put something on the tank and give us some of that money back.

It looks like a good way to put this tank on hold and still keep it in good shape.

And so I think we could pull it off.

It'll it would be going fast, but Ken and I were out there just about an hour ago looking power lines and figuring out how we're gonna pull it off.

Anyway, we'll stop start with the presentation.

We kind of prepared just a couple of slides.

Oh, you got a vision up, yeah.

Just exit out of that and it's on the desktop.

Don't have water tower there.

All that's all we did is we populated the uh kind of our time value of money and of our options we had in front of us.

So let's go to the next slide.

So how we bid it was um what what if you painted white and put two Norman logos on there?

That's the $512,000 that they proposed.

What if you put the fancy logos on there?

Uh this other group, the third party, and they said 5322, and then to demo, they don't demo tanks, so we did not get a demo bid.

So I don't have that.

This is still the engineer's estimate for a demo.

Um, but then over here on the left, we went on and calculated what if we don't put the city of Norman logo on there, what would be the cheapest we could get out of this?

Just making it white, like we had talked about when we left last time.

That's 477,700.

But again, if um I I think our proposal or what we recommend as staff is to go on and move forward with awarding the bid and um have them on deck to start painting, and then we can adjust if this other contract comes in.

We can see how that fits into this play, or we can not do it, not even put city of Norman logos, and we would be in for 477.

The lowest cost.

But if they did pay us back some of the money, that would make the net only 10298.

Uh that we would be in the hole after time.

But we took out the the lighting package because uh I don't know if Jason, we what is we figured we'd bid that at a later date, right?

Yeah, I think we we have that out on the street now, so I think we don't need about three weeks to find out what the cost of lighting is take any questions or any comments.

I mean it's kind of a wild, it's not usually how we do it.

We usually take our time and bid them to professional acquisition guy, yeah.

So I noticed your estimate, your independent government estimate was done by your contractor was pretty dang high.

Consultant, yes, pretty dang high compared to what was bid.

Yes.

So in my mind, you know, just from my experience.

The question has to be asked does your contractor understand the requirement, or do we not understand the requirement?

You're a consultant.

I would say the consultant was being safe, and he was worrying if you look at what he bid high, he thought the legs were gonna be very high priced.

Um, and the contractor went low on that.

He thought uh overcoating the bowl was gonna be really high, and they went pretty low on that or affordable.

The contractor's the one this guy, these guys know it really well.

They know it better than the consultant.

Consultants out there compiling information from different contractors making a guess.

Well, I understand, but a 50% overestimated on clothes.

No, I know my world's like wood.

Right, formal world.

And let me say another thing.

He was worried because we remember uh we smorgasboarded it in his opinion.

He didn't like that.

He thought that we were really messing that up, the consultant, and he thought by not doing a lump sum, he thought we were not gonna get nice bids.

And he was right to the point we didn't get many bids because some of the people backed out, but this group jumped on it.

The other question I have is you know it's 100-year-old, 100 plus, I guess, water.

So last time we were in here, you meant something about the legs and what they're going to do on the legs, and so has there been any analysis related to the life of the water tower associated with those lakes?

Does that make sense?

Yeah, strength and integrity.

Yeah, he the same company did a uh assessment of the tank, and we were worried is the ladder safe to climb on it.

Is there anything too rusty or about the you know need repair, structural repair?

And he gave us a report saying no, it's all in good shape, he would climb it, feels very safe with it.

I have that we have that at our office.

I'm not I'm not in your guys' world.

The last question I have is the if a tank from my understand my past if you don't have that protection related to annual cathode with the some type of metal hooked up to it so it rusts in a certain place, then your tanks can rust versus that makes sense cathodic protection.

Yeah, this one doesn't have it, and you see it does rust more.

Uh you always weigh the expense of that.

Adding cathodic protection is more expensive, so we haven't used it in some of our tanks.

Um we thought about on a large pipeline we laid.

We were thinking about using it.

Actually, didn't use it on that either, but it's always on the cusp of do you spend that extra money to try to save it, or do you just roll with it?

Oh, one more last question.

So we're talking about this for potential use in the future.

Given the age, and then condition those legs will have less capacity as far as weight.

Ten years from now.

Well, it was originally designed.

Does that make sense?

I assuming it would, but just that they have deteriorated over time.

Yeah, your engineer should be saying, Okay, it was original, it was manufacturing handled this, sign up for this, right?

However, given the condition of the tank, what we're gonna do to it.

This is the future limit of that tank.

Right.

Not on top of the water or whatever we can put in.

Right.

Okay, that was I mean, yeah, good points, but we I mean, right now it's still deemed safe to use functional.

Um we kind of came to you guys first.

We wanted to demo it.

So I mean, we've we kind of won eighty'd, and you know, people are we're saying we'll save it, let's keep it for a little longer.

So this is uh this is an option to keep it longer and and still salvage some of our money.

So I see your 400,000 dollars for demo work and my confidence in that because it's basically from your engineer, your guy you hired to do this, and yeah, well, this other estimate was 50% off.

So it was 320.

We bid it actually.

We did buy it two years ago, so I got bids.

So we just figured the price going up.

Yeah, that's a pretty good number.

And actually, he did cost estimate uh around the four or five hundred thousand range before when he did the uh just bidding it private and not going through the city.

So that was he was around these numbers before he went to this bid, like we parted it all up, and he didn't like that and thought it was gonna get high numbers.

Sounds good.

I have a little comment standing on that's great.

Thank you.

Yes, um I'm cool with this bid.

I like the idea of just going ahead and doing our logos with it.

I was reading the staff report and recommendations makes sense to do the lighting as another bit.

I was reading the staff report and the recommendations make sense to do the lighting as another bit that I'm saying since we're doing the line share of all this, why not put the logos on there?

And if they're gonna do it for that price, great.

And and you're talking the logos, so we did a third party of City Norman.

Okay, yeah, we can go forward with that.

That's base, but we we will be bringing another contract next Tuesday.

That will be that other option of the more expensive for you to consider it.

Yeah, I mean, I guess we could see what they have the I just think is it gonna be what we're putting into this, like well, it's right there the 75,000, it's based off of that.

They were they were gonna put in 75,000 the first year.

They didn't change the numbers, did they?

Yeah.

So 75,000 the first year and then 50,000 a year to the last year, and they give you 25,000.

Okay.

So basically don't pay all but 100 and two bucks.

Okay.

Well, we'll see what they bring up.

We'll bring it forward, but that's good to know.

So base, you don't want to go back to just white.

The worst you want to do is just put City of Norman on there.

White tank with City of Norman as our lowest effort.

Yeah, welcome someone.

Yeah, welcome to Norman.

Where yeah.

Okay, counselor steel.

Uh yeah, so the regardless of what paint job uh you go with, if the bid is approved, how long is the paint expected to last, and will it need like touch-ups down the line that'll cost money, any things like that?

That's a good question.

Really, the latest way to do it is that to get a 20-year life, 15 to 20, you you sandblast it down to white metal and start with the prime or primer and then come back with the paint.

That one I know is the state of the art, and then what we do in all of our other tanks.

This one, they they're doing it with the power washing, and but they have some tenemic paint that they guarantee they said 10 to 15.

We wrote in the memo 10.

We're just gonna be conservative and say we think we can get 10 years to cover this contract out of just so if if something were to happen and you know the paint job starts to go after us, let's just say five years.

Would this bid cover them coming back and essentially touching up or no?

No, no, okay.

It would be additional money if you have to do something else.

But this paint was uh last painted in 1993, 91.

I can't remember the date.

So this is what it looked like if it's 30 years old.

I mean, you know, with rust and it's looks pretty bad.

That's 30 years with not paying it.

There's a one-year one, so usually typically at around around one year you go and check and look.

And if you see little problems, you can fix them now.

And ideally, that kind of saves you from having bigger problems down the road.

So Robinson Tower that TMI painted was on it's right there at the railroad tracks and Robinson.

Um that paint lasted, we did it in 2002 to 2004, somewhere in there.

It lasted well into the teens 20 years, yeah.

And they came by, it looked good to me, but the tank professionals came by and said, Well, it's starting to chalk, it's not as shiny as a fresh coat.

I'm like, well, it looks way better than Lindsay.

So I mean, it's it's kind of a opinion too if when it's worn out on the paint and stuff.

Um I I guess all that being said, I'm okay with at least starting with the light, and then you know, we could wait to see the contract before we decide to go with logo versus whatever the contract says.

Um, I I don't know if this is possible or you know, might drop the money, but is there a way you could kind of have like the best of both worlds where maybe they they get half of it and you could still do like the city of Norman on the other half, or no?

That's what originally wanted to proposed with OU was have Norman on one side and OU on the other side.

Didn't work out.

But yeah, that's I think if it has this logo on it, I think they want it to look like the whole thing.

It says two of their logos.

On Google Street View, if you look at the water tower and you go back a couple years, it looks like around 2015 is when you can start seeing the rust.

Okay, and then it starts accelerating after that.

So 1991, I mean that's 25 years almost.

Hopefully, the paint paint has improved a little bit since 91.

A lot of things.

Uh councilmer Bruce and then Gansbury.

I would assume you do options on them the logo, right?

Whether you put Norman on it or you put something else on you have two options on your basic contract, and you decide what you're gonna do later for the just give them starter with the basic and exercise options later.

Yeah, that's what's contemplated here, and then if you all approve the agreement next week, we'll move forward with that design.

Uh we've got the design and it'll be attached to that contract so you can see what it looks like.

And everybody will know some work on this period.

Well, I just like just because it's an open meeting and everything, people listening.

Um, where does any of this money, whatever's decided, come from?

Utilities authority.

So it comes from the water, and that's the only place that any of the money comes from, correct?

Yes, it's from there.

And then secondly went and did a thing at Chickasha, and you know, the dumbest thing that I think they have in their town is that damn big foot thing illegally.

But they can show statistically by data that 1.3 million people a year come and take a picture with that daggum thing.

Unique visitors to Jigshay that may or may not have stopped by there.

And if there's a way that you know next Tuesday, we do agree on a possible partnership with somebody else to go in on this, and it even gets one chance to be that what that leg is to them, it could easily make back this 103,000 dollars in revenue just off of tourism around it and everything for us, I believe.

And on that note, would the revenue from that agreement go to the Norman Utilities?

Okay, so and to Councilmember Gansbury's corner.

Uh one of the tools at uh our disposal is operated by Sarah Kaplan and her ability to draw a circle on a map.

Um, and and she can draw a circle today and say how many people were in the circle last year.

Um, so it's really a powerful tool, but it'll give us an idea about how many people showed up and actually spent 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half hour in a pretty small circle around that tower.

Uh, and of course, we recognize probably nobody spending any time there at all right now, but I think it it's a thing where we can actually gather that data and and provide council and the that concept of placemaking that chick say chick shape they figured it out and uh that lake lamp wasn't big with us for a long time.

It's still here, it's got a whole documentary on it.

Did you talk about the high school?

Was there a statue of me up?

Yeah, yeah.

I didn't know if they got it up yet, they just told me to come back and thank you, is all I said.

Yeah, got some more students.

Yeah, you can just kind of fall into things.

Oh no, but the uh the money question.

Uh so like the the bids are up there, but in the the packet it said you're requesting around 575,000.

Is that extra just like a buffer, like just in case or yeah, we just he requested 300 over the amount we already had in that account just to have extra.

And so whatever's on you just goes back into the utilities funds and the water fund.

Yeah, any other questions, comments.

Well, I also support moving forward with that and look forward to seeing uh for the other agreement come forward as well.

Okay, do we uh do approval or something for the contract?

Is it it is on your agenda to take action on uh the contract with the painting contractor tonight?

So we are agendized as a special meeting so you can actually approve it.

Okay, so you've got the change.

I'll just I'll read it out.

Consideration of approval, acceptance, rejection, amendment, and or postponement of awarding bid 2627-04 and contract K-2627-10, buy in between the Norman Utilities Authority and TMI codings LLC in the amount of 532,200 dollars, performance bond, statutory bond, and maintenance bond for the Lindsay Tower resurfacing, two logos and budget transfer is outlined in the staff report.

I'll entertain a motion to accept or reject the bid and approve or reject contract K-2627-10 and accompanying bonds.

Motion to approve second, and we recognize staff for discussion already.

We had council comments.

The motion on the floor is to accept the bid and approve the contract.

So those in favor say aye.

Aye, and those opposed the motion to accept or reject the bid and approve and passes here.

Okay, and then item two is a consideration of acceptance, approval, rejection amendment and postponement of temporary construction easements e 2627-1 through E 2627-4 for the summit hollow drainage improvement project as outlined in the staff report.

And I'll entertain a motion to accept or reject the easements for the summit hollow drainage improvement project.

And recognize staff.

Scott Sturts for discussion.

Scott starts director of public works.

It's four houses that there used to be a concrete channel that ran behind their house, and over time that channel became weakened and it collapsed.

The stormwater crews went in and put a pipe in and it had problems and it floated up out of the ground.

So we went out there and replaced it and it floated out of the ground again.

So this is wanting to go in there and actually fix the problem once and for all so these citizens' homes are taken care of, their backyards aren't disrupted.

We've actually gone out, we have professional engineering plans.

We want to go out to bid on this project.

And as part of that, uh we're putting in a concrete box.

It will not float.

We know that.

And then we'll be coming back in and restoring their yards to their their current condition, putting in some drains back there, doing some items at the north end to help some of the water get into this box instead of around a retaining wall from when Siena Springs uh section two was constructed.

That's kind of been a concern too.

Uh so as part of that, we need a little bit more room to work because we're also gonna do some grading to make sure that we can get the water out of their backyards because there's some low spots.

And uh we've been working on these, and I gotta say thank you to Councilman McGandis Berry who went out there and and and sealed the deal on the on the final one that we need to get this moving forward.

These are temporary construction easements, meaning that they are not filed at the courthouse.

This is just an agreement between us and the property owners.

And once the project is done, these are terminated, they no longer are in effect.

So that's really all we're asking for tonight.

Is your your acceptance of these four easements so we can go out and help fix some people's problem that that we may be part of the problem?

Just asking for your help on this one, really.

And with with your uh consideration and approval, basically, you're authorizing the mayor to sign those temporary agreements.

They're signed by the property owners, they're notarized.

Uh, based on council's action at night, the mayor would sign and we would give those homeowners back their fully executed copy of that temporary easement.

I was just explaining to someone the other day how I don't have any executive four powers, and it takes the whole council.

They wanted me to like look at some agreement and sign it today.

And I was like, I don't have that.

Councilmember Stu.

So all the homeowners have already agreed to the easement.

Yes, they've already signed and they've been notarized, so we've got signed and notarized, so we know it's actually their signatures, and very confident they all understand the work that's gonna be done.

Okay, councilmember Grant.

Um I'm cool with this, and thank you, Councilmember Gibbonsbury, for um getting that guy to agree and going above and beyond.

Uh we appreciate it.

That's exactly what yeah, above and beyond, but that's what we have to do.

Find any unlikely you'll find Congress people uh about doing stuff like that.

Relationship driven.

Councilmember Bruce.

Uh so is this an HOA?

I it looked like I mean it was in the neighborhood.

It is in a neighborhood, and there is an HOA, but this was a public infrastructure and a public easement that we that was installed.

So the builder didn't do it.

We there was an existing structure on this one.

It was kind of a it's a really weird situation.

The building didn't put together, right?

Correct.

So I mean I've got places all over World 3 that uh these easements, I guess the consideration is a dollar.

You say no.

Don't fix my stuff for a buck.

Yeah, so uh the the day the pipe floated.

We got four inches of rain in about two hours.

Uh property owners sent in a picture of their backyard with this large black pipe along the fence, and I ran over to Scott's office and I said, please tell me this isn't ours.

Nope.

That one's ours.

Oh that was tough to hear.

Um recognizing that if a big old piece of city infrastructure just ripped up through your backyard, you would not be happy about it.

I wouldn't be happy about that.

We totally understand.

Uh obviously, we didn't have the budget.

We didn't, nobody anticipated that happening.

Um, but uh the whole team pulled together, came up with how are we gonna how are we gonna cover the cost?

It's not optional.

We absolutely had to restore those folks' backyards.

Um, and we we have a high degree of confidence the project going in will be a permanent solution, those homeowners will never have to think about it again.

So you look at Inhoff Creek and what's going on there, what's going on in the past, and how the city came partner with the community there.

I've got the same things going on on Boggy Creek, Femmo Creek, as far as the amount of water flows coming through there.

Original zone's been overcome by events.

So Ganthry.

I'd just like to say once again, because I know that there might be people listening right now and stuff to this meeting.

Is I just want to thank the two neighbors that know who they are that worked very hard and finding a way to work with me, trust the process and everything, and that is very much appreciated on their ends to make this happen for the neighborhood.

Very good.

Any other questions for staff?

Okay.

And the motion on the floor is to accept easements E-2627-1 through E-2627-4.

Those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Those opposed.

Passes nine to zero.

And we'll be going out to bed on this project now.

This item resolved, we'll be going out to bid on this this week and be starting as quickly as possible.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Item number three is consideration of adjourning into an executive session as authorized by Oklahoma statutes.

Title 25 to discuss possible litigation regarding the acquisition of right-away in connection with the Lindsay Street Special Corridor Project from Pickard Avenue to Elm Avenue.

Um I need a motion to adjourn out of special session and convene into an executive session in order to discuss possible litigation regarding the acquisition of ride away in connection with the Lindsey Street Special Corridor Project from Pickard to Elm Apple.

Submission.

Okay.

Do we don't need to vote?