[0:29] There. I try again. I try again. Try again. Try, try, try.
[0:34] okay. Okay.
[0:56] and you're standing. There is seating available
[1:00] in the lobby with the tv. You'll be seeing it live
[1:04] if that's your choice. Or you can stand. I'm okay with
[1:09] either one. How
[1:13] are we? We good? Yeah. All right. We're good.
[1:17] all right. With that, I will call the planning and zoning commission for tuesday, april 7th, 2026.
[1:23] two. Order. First
[1:27] is roll call. Commissioner sherrod.
[1:32] here. Vice chair wortz. Chair.
[1:36] chair hudson is here. Commissioner
[1:41] hall here. Commissioner de delay here. Commissioner
[1:45] deleon here. And commissioner kenard? Yes sir. We have
[1:49] a quorum. All next item is public
[1:54] comment. Uh, I should
[1:58] have a stack of public comment cards.
[2:02] alright, here they come.
[2:07] and there's in the thing
[2:13] in the . All right.
[2:17] so in a very minor departure, I am
[2:21] going to call your name and ask if you want to speak in general
[2:26] as public comment or if you want to speak on a specific agenda item.
[2:31] if you want to speak on a specific agenda item, I'll put you in a stack.
[2:36] okay. So first up I have david garza
[2:41] in general, or, uh, agenda item. Agenda item. Alright. Uh,
[2:45] 6 5, 6, 4. Uh, which
[2:49] item? It's, I'll put it. Six four data center.
[2:53] uh, nick ock. Uh, in
[2:57] general. In general. All right. Thank you. Brett
[3:01] sutton, the data center agenda item.
[3:06] all right. Uh, nick choi.
[3:11] uh, dana. Thinner. Okay. Xavier
[3:15] garza. Item on 6.1.
[3:21] six one? Yeah. All right. Uh, sandra roth
[3:28] center agenda item. All right. Catherine.
[3:33] mike. Meek. Meek? Yes. Hi.
[3:37] yes. Agenda item. All right. Six four.
[3:44] uh, andrew walsh. Item.
[3:48] alright, uh, hannah miller.
[3:54] agenda item alexander sellers
[4:00] 6.4. David cabrillo.
[4:04] caballero. Caballero. Sorry. David center.
[4:09] nick clark. Adam, six four.
[4:17] uh, charmaine hadley.
[4:26] okay. Uh, dennis kaufman.
[4:30] data center. Helen kaufman. Data center.
[4:35] agenda items? Cameron harvey, the center.
[4:39] alright. Oh. Can barely read
[4:43] this one. Uh, s jenkins. S jenkins
[4:47] data center. Alright. Riley pruitt.
[4:52] in. Senator lisa
[4:56] zacharias.
[5:02] tiffany wilson.
[5:07] shauna wills agenda item 6.1. Six one.
[5:11] alright, mark leons 6.4.
[5:18] sally leons, 6.4.
[5:23] kristen markowitz. Hold on. Six
[5:27] four . Christine benson.
[5:32] six four. Christy yal data center.
[5:38] sarah near six four and six five.
[5:42] shannon bradley, 6.4.
[5:46] joseph cortez, 6.4.
[5:51] cassie ks 6.4.
[5:56] colby taylor data center.
[6:02] fernanda taylor center.
[6:07] robert roseberg data center.
[6:11] sorry. Uh,
[6:16] gary oldham. 6 4 6 5.
[6:20] richard booth data center.
[6:25] um, monika kia. Um, adam, 6.1. Wr
[6:29] farms. Matthew martin data center.
[6:35] katie martin data center. Brent,
[6:40] uh, mcir. Item six four.
[6:45] jeremy carter?
[6:52] yes, sir. Uh, brandon
[6:56] data center. Okay. Brandon n .
[7:01] lindsay run rumba data center. And
[7:06] greg rumba data center. Okay. So we have
[7:10] one for public comment. Easy.
[7:16] all right, so these are six one. So these
[7:21] you wanna put out with it. This is what this, this is,
[7:25] oh, he said public comment, that's why I separated it out. Oh, okay.
[7:30] he, he was just general. Okay. So just to confirm, uh, nick ock,
[7:34] you wanted to speak in general not on the data center agenda,
[7:38] right? Uh, it's my apologies. It's about the data center data. Okay.
[7:43] all right. , well, you were, you were the first one asked, so
[7:47] I understand the confusion. It's okay. Alright,
[7:51] so seeing that no one has signed up for public comment in general,
[7:55] we'll move on to agenda item number four, 4.1,
[8:00] consideration possible action of the meeting minutes for the regular scheduled planning and zoning meeting
[8:05] held on february 3rd, 2026.
[8:10] I'll make a motion that we accept the minutes. I'll second.
[8:15] alright,
[8:21] so I have a motion by vice chair watz and
[8:25] a second by commissioner
[8:29] delay. All right, is there any discussion
[8:33] or comment on the motion?
[8:39] alright, hearing none then I will call for vote. All in favor say a.
[8:43] aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? Same sign.
[8:47] motion passes. Seven zero.
[8:51] next is item 5.1, consent agenda,
[8:55] consideration impossible action on the amending plat of the maldonado
[8:59] subdivision. 8.01 acres, more or less of land four
[9:03] lots located on limmer loop.
[9:08] hello commissioners, this is manny hernandez. Uh, for the record, um,
[9:13] the applicant is here to answer any questions if, uh, need be.
[9:18] but the, uh, proposed, the proposed amending
[9:22] plat is, uh, for the maldonado subdivision, it's approximately
[9:26] eight acres. It consists of four total lots, um, each of them
[9:30] being two acres. Um, the applicant is seeking to,
[9:34] uh, move the lot lines between lots three and four to
[9:39] dedicate, uh, 0.503 acres to lot four. Uh, this lot
[9:43] is located, uh, on the north side of limmer loop, uh, between
[9:48] innovation boulevard and ed schmidt.
[9:53] so currently this property is owned, uh, general commercial b two
[9:57] and the surrounding uses are as follows. To the north, we have, uh, vacant
[10:02] land, um, which is part of the etj, uh, the extra territorial
[10:06] jurisdiction. It has a da on it where if the use changes, it'll
[10:10] be, uh, annexed into city limits to the east. Uh, we have, um,
[10:14] it's vacant on all sides right now, but to the east and the west we have, uh, b two zoning as
[10:19] well. And to the south we have a vacant light industrial. Um, the image
[10:23] here is of the, um, lot layout, how
[10:27] it will look in the future if approved tonight. Um, and in your packet you should have,
[10:31] uh, the original plat of how that looked before.
[10:43] alright, and so staff has reviewed this, um, with the udc
[10:47] in mind. Um, the applicant did, uh, waive the shock clock bill
[10:52] and, uh, staff recommends approval of this plat with the condition that,
[10:56] um, the signature sheet is updated, um, uh,
[11:00] to, uh, howard as it, uh, still reads, uh, john, but
[11:04] that's something staff can, uh, handle on our end. Mm-hmm .
[11:11] alright, so with that, I will entertain a motion on
[11:16] 5.1. I will make a motion to prove, uh,
[11:20] 5.1 as read.
[11:26] I will second it.
[11:30] all right. And I would like to just clarify, are you
[11:34] okay with the staff recommendation? Absolutely. Yes. Alright. Uh,
[11:39] vice chair wortz, you, you're okay with the staff recommendation for
[11:44] the signature sheet? Yes. Alright. Alright. So
[11:48] I have a motion by commissioner sherrod and a second by vice chair tz.
[11:52] uh, any discussion on the motion? None,
[11:57] then I will call for vote. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. All
[12:01] opposed? Same sign. Motion passes seven zero.
[12:07] next is item 6.1, old business consideration,
[12:11] possible action on the durango farms phase one lot two, a block, a
[12:16] repl, 1.226 acres, more or less of land
[12:20] located at the southwest corner of me lane and 1660.
[12:26] hi. So commissioners, uh, manny once again. Uh, let me just add
[12:31] in, uh, how we proceed with this. Uh, typically we will
[12:35] have presentation by staff that may answer some
[12:39] questions and then we will have the public comment come up. You will have,
[12:44] I'll, I'll address that during the public comment. Alright, thank you. So, um,
[12:49] you guys may remember this from a few months ago when it came before, but, um,
[12:53] so for those of you who might not remember, and for the general public, this is, uh, durango
[12:57] farms phase one lot two a, uh, repl.
[13:02] so it's located within city limits as stated earlier. It's on that corner of me, lane
[13:06] and north fm 1660. And the purpose of this repl
[13:10] is just to create a, a new lot for the monument sign and the
[13:14] landscaping around it. Um, currently that responsibility falls
[13:19] on the commercial lot, the daycare that's on there. So this'll, um, take
[13:23] that responsibility off of that and, uh, put that maintenance onto
[13:27] the hoa. Um, so the surrounding
[13:32] uses are, um, mostly part of the same durango farms, pud,
[13:36] but to the north you have a apartment complex, so you have some base zoning of multifamily
[13:40] within that pud to the west. You have, um, single family.
[13:45] um, so it's pud with that base owning as of sf
[13:49] one to the, um, east you have, uh, residential,
[13:53] some, uh, older, larger lot style, um, residential. And
[13:57] to the south you have, uh, the historic district. You have ot three there on the south side. And
[14:02] this is, um, this particular lot is done pud with a base
[14:06] zoning of, uh, general commercial. So here we have
[14:10] the plat for you guys. On the left hand side, I have the entire plat, and
[14:14] then I zoomed in for you guys on the right hand side, um, to view, um, in more
[14:18] detail. And, uh, the applicant is here as well for
[14:22] this project. If you have any questions for them. Um,
[14:27] I know there was some questions on that pue last time around and, um,
[14:32] staff has reviewed this similarly as the other one with udc in mind.
[14:37] they did waive the shock clock bill, and so staff recommends approval of this
[14:41] pla as presented. So we did, excuse me. So we did find
[14:45] out that, uh, the p are correct,
[14:50] uh, not pe the, the easements. Yeah, no, pues.
[14:54] yes. So they are, uh, part of the, uh, they were,
[14:58] uh, added in as, uh, requested by staff, uh,
[15:02] by the plate note requirements. Um,
[15:07] but as if you'd like more specifics, if there's anything in
[15:11] that pue or anything like that, the applicant is here to talk about that.
[15:15] no, I just know the last, at the last meeting we had questions and we're concerned about,
[15:19] about the way it went and everything. And I mean, staff was going to double check and make sure
[15:23] that that was correct. So yes, that's fine. Thank you.
[15:28] alright, so before, uh, we open it up to questions,
[15:32] comments from the dais, we've got some public comment mm-hmm .
[15:36] and first up will be,
[15:41] uh, monika kia.
[15:45] and when you come up, you will have three minutes
[15:50] to, uh, to speak.
[15:54] uh, unfortunately we do not have the, the fancy
[15:58] red, yellow, green that we, uh, typically have at city council.
[16:03] okay. So rick is going to use the good old fashioned three minute
[16:07] timer . Okay. Uh, please, uh, state
[16:12] your name and your address. Sure. Okay. My name's monique. Ready
[16:16] now. My name's monika key. I live at 1 34 greens fire lane
[16:20] in durango farm subdivision.
[16:25] okay. Um, good evening everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight.
[16:29] my name is monika key and I'm speaking on behalf of the homeowners of durango farms.
[16:34] I come before you today with serious concerns regarding the developer's ongoing actions
[16:38] and the direct impact that they're having on my community. The
[16:43] developer ma partners is attempting to transfer the additional
[16:47] maintenance responsibilities to our hoa, specifically, the easement that
[16:51] we're talking about. This easement is already damaged
[16:55] and needs serious repair that they are aware of. This is especially concerning
[16:59] because there was a prior agreement with the developers, which they have
[17:03] acknowledged that these issues, um, and are, are committing to make
[17:08] the necessary repairs before turning over the maintenance to us that has
[17:12] not been done. Instead, homeowners are now being asked to take on the cost of
[17:16] maintaining damaged infrastructure for a community of approximately only
[17:20] 250 homes. This c creates a significant and unfair
[17:25] financial burden. This is not an isolated issue during
[17:29] development, critical responsibilities were not properly maintained. Our detention
[17:33] ponds were not adequately cleaned or managed, and were now facing ongoing
[17:37] drainage issues, issues that have already failed multiple times
[17:41] that the city's aware of and impacting not only our neighborhood,
[17:45] but the surrounding neighborhoods. In addition, we are
[17:49] now being expected to maintain ponds that serve nearby commercial properties,
[17:54] as the gentleman had discussed, which further increases the strain on all of
[17:58] us as homeowners. The developers just gave this to us.
[18:02] we didn't even know that we owned it. What is most concerning is
[18:07] the lack of transparency and governance. The board that was elected
[18:11] myself by the homeowners has been completely removed.
[18:16] the developers have now inserted themselves back into control over our community
[18:20] to do this very same thing. This undermines
[18:25] the voice of our community and raises serious concerns about decision making that
[18:29] directly affects us all. We're not here to be confrontational. We're
[18:33] here to be heard. Our community deserves accountability, transparency,
[18:38] and fair treatment. We are asking that no additional maintenance
[18:43] responsibilities be placed on us as an hoa. We just cannot
[18:47] afford any more damaged or unknown
[18:52] property that we didn't know about. We deserve to have a seat at the table
[18:56] with these developers to know what is going on. We didn't even know about
[19:01] this tonight. We just did research and I found out,
[19:05] wow, they're about to just give us over, uh, a monument
[19:09] that they know is damaged. There's all kind of issues like you guys were where
[19:13] with the pue and all this other stuff that us as you know, homeowners, we don't know all
[19:17] of this. But, um, again,
[19:21] our homeowners should not be left to carry a financial burden. We're all
[19:25] in experiencing it right now with the economy, but as homeowners,
[19:30] we do deserve. And we're simply asking what is fair, what is responsible,
[19:34] and what we all agreed upon when we purchased our homes. This is our city.
[19:38] we love our city, we love our neighbors. And I'm gonna
[19:42] continue to see what can we do to hold these developers accountable for what
[19:46] they are trying to do. I thank you guys for your consideration. Thank you.
[19:58] one, one more addition I forgot to add, um, with
[20:02] public comment, you can address us. We are not allowed
[20:07] to respond back. So if you ask a question of us, you
[20:11] will not get an answer on public comment. That's how it goes. Sorry,
[20:16] I didn't make that rule. All right, next up is shauna wills.
[20:33] hello and thank you for your consideration. I am shauna wills. I live at 3 3 2
[20:37] durango downs drive in durango farms. I think monia kept
[20:41] it pretty succinct what I'm concerned about or what I wanna voice his
[20:46] support for having full transparency for what we are re financially responsible
[20:50] for as a community and as the community of huddle. Also, what
[20:54] would be the impact of these changes on our city? So that, I think she
[20:59] captured the majority of it in specificity and I just wanna make sure that I'm on record for
[21:03] standing with the, with the understanding that we want to be more, we wanna be aware
[21:07] of what we are actually maintaining, how we do it, and that we improve
[21:11] the city. Thank you for considering. Thank you.
[21:19] and next up I have xavier garza.
[21:34] hello, my name is xavier garza and I'm the engineer of record for this rela application.
[21:39] the purpose of this application, like manny mentioned, is to subdivide lot two
[21:43] a from one to two lots to create a standalone lot for the existing
[21:47] monument sign and associated landscaping. The new lot will be conveyed
[21:51] to the hoa since the monument sign and associated landscaping or community
[21:55] benefits. The resulting two lots comply with all setback and easement
[21:59] requirements is defined in the city of hu udc in the durango
[22:03] farm, durango farms. Pud. Furthermore, it's my understanding that
[22:07] the hoa already maintains this monument sign and landscaping. So there is no
[22:11] change in the maintenance obligations with this repl. Thank you for your
[22:15] time. Thank you.
[22:23] okay, so that concludes the public comment on six one
[22:27] and I will now open it up to discussion and questions from
[22:31] the diets. Are there
[22:35] there a, a deed showing that the hoa
[22:40] is responsible for maintaining this?
[22:46] um, I can check on that, but I'm not
[22:51] aware of it at this moment. So I'd have to look at the deed. And
[22:56] in the previous plats, does it note that the hoa is responsible
[23:00] for maintaining the lot though the monument signs all
[23:04] the easements,
[23:10] the previous plat, yes. When this plat was originally recorded.
[23:14] I can pull that up. Okay, please. I can pull that up.
[23:28] so I am curious, what's your line of thinking on this?
[23:32] if it's in the original plat that the hoa is responsible
[23:37] for maintaining the easement, the landscaping lot, then they're responsible
[23:41] for maintaining it. If not, it's not their responsibility and
[23:45] the cost should not be on them. Great.
[23:51] typically, when a final plot is plotted and recorded, there is
[23:55] a note stating that the hoa is responsible for the easements
[23:59] and for the monument signs.
[24:06] and we do not have that answer tonight. Is that correct?
[24:11] I'm pulling up the original pla I'm just sending it over to this other computer. Excellent,
[24:15] excellent. And we can, um, ms. De
[24:20] garza, are you able to answer any of these questions?
[24:35] I, I do not know the answer to whether the maintenance was on the original repl.
[24:39] I do know that the maintenance is currently performed by the hoa
[24:43] on the monument sign. Well, they may be maintaining it for
[24:47] aesthetic purposes, but if you don't have record or we don't
[24:51] have record that they're supposed to maintain it, why are we trying to force them to maintain it?
[24:56] we're not. Okay.
[25:03] we're not forcing them. They're already doing it.
[25:08] but you want, I'm sorry. If they take over this
[25:12] lot for maintenance purposes, that means the hoa is gonna
[25:16] have to raise their fees in order to maintain this
[25:20] lot. That's an extra fee for them. You got,
[25:25] am I correct? But didn't he just say that they're already doing that? They
[25:29] are doing it now. I'm sorry.
[25:33] I have the original plat pulled up. Okay.
[25:37] um, I'm not sure how to get it on that screen
[25:42] for you. Um, but so the plat notes, uh,
[25:48] 13 and 14 read as follows. 13 is all easements on private
[25:52] property shall be maintained by the property owner or his or her
[25:56] assigns. And 14 reads all amenity open space and drainage.
[26:01] lots shall be owned and maintained by the homeowners association. So,
[26:06] um, I'm not sure if that answers your question. I mean, this wasn't
[26:10] previously a open space lot, but that's the purpose of this
[26:14] repl to, uh, dedicate it as open space. Could you read that one more
[26:18] time please? So, 14 reads all amenity open space and drainage.
[26:22] lots shall be owned and maintained by the homeowners association.
[26:27] okay. It was in the original, so it was originally recorded. When was that plaque
[26:31] recorded? This original one,
[26:36] let me read through it.
[26:40] uh, 2021, uh, 29th of june.
[26:46] okay. Uh, 2021. What is that document number?
[26:51] the plaque number? Yeah, I'm looking on this page for it.
[27:00] yeah, these are, so the
[27:04] docket, if you wanna write it down, it is 20 21 11.
[27:12] that's not open. Just a order. Go ahead. 2021.
[27:17] 1121. Mm-hmm . 11 27 61.
[27:22] thank you. Okay.
[27:26] lot two a. That's,
[27:31] does it state on the plaid that this lot is an open space or landscape
[27:35] lot on? So are you asking me or are you asking? I'm asking
[27:40] you. So currently as it stands, it is not open
[27:44] space, but the repl that is the, the purpose to,
[27:48] to dedicate it as such. Okay. So, mr. Garza,
[27:52] my question to you is, so this was
[27:56] not originally an open space or landscape lot,
[28:01] but right now you want to repl it so the hoa
[28:06] can have, uh, access and maintain it and be
[28:10] responsible for it. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay.
[28:16] thank you. That's not fair.
[28:22] alright, any further discussion
[28:26] from the diocese? I have a question for manny. All right, go for it.
[28:31] manny. When, uh, like when you're building a house, we have to go through inspections.
[28:36] we have to pull permits, uh, before we say that house is safe.
[28:40] sorry, before that, before we say that house is safe. So
[28:45] with, with land acquisition, uh, permits moving
[28:49] ground before we turn over, uh, land to hoa
[28:54] association, does the city do due diligence to make sure the developer's
[28:58] done everything they're supposed to do before we give that access? So this
[29:03] repl is just moving over that lot line. If you wanted to add any conditions onto
[29:07] an approval of this, um, item, that would be
[29:11] totally up to you guys. Okay.
[29:17] seems like we need to do some due diligence here to make sure the developer's done everything they're supposed to do
[29:22] dot their I's and cross their t's. Mm-hmm . I have
[29:26] a question. Is there any way that we can get legal to look at this
[29:30] and to determine, since there is some question, uh,
[29:35] and possibly, uh, table this item until our
[29:39] next meeting, until we can get an answer from, uh,
[29:43] legal on it? So I know that they are on the line, so if they have anything they'd like to
[29:47] share, they can now, but if you prefer to table this to a later meeting
[29:51] to have them look or postpone this to a later meeting to have them.
[29:56] I, I'm just saying that because we don't know there's, there's,
[30:01] you know, it's either, it's either owned gonna be owned by the hoa or it's gonna be
[30:05] owned by the city. I mean, basically that's what it is. And I don't think the city's going
[30:09] to own it. I would prefer that we get a legal
[30:13] opinion on it. Also, I would like to see and
[30:17] find out what is wrong with the monument. She said it
[30:21] was deteriorating or something like that damaged. And
[30:25] if that's the case, then possibly work into an agreement
[30:29] or something that the developer goes in and fixes it at their
[30:33] cost. Not the homeowner's cost. I mean, agreed.
[30:38] that's, that's to me a, a more fair way to go.
[30:43] so, so with that, with that said, uh, can legal
[30:47] weigh in on this or, uh, would you need time
[30:51] to, uh, research? Thank you. We,
[30:55] we wouldn't need time to look at it. Okay. Not prepare days.
[31:02] well, if it's okay, if it's okay, I'd like to make a motion that we table it. Uh,
[31:06] I I would like to hear any further discussion. She, before we, uh, entertain
[31:10] motions, she said she, she hear it or she has, she's not.
[31:14] yeah, she is ready. Right? Yeah. No, no. She said, she said she would need time to
[31:18] research it. Research it. Uh, I would like the city to
[31:23] investigate before we transfer land over to an hoa make sure the developer's done everything they're supposed to
[31:27] do before the hoa inherits costs should have been done by the developer.
[31:31] right. I agree.
[31:36] there's probably also property tax associated with it. If it's gonna be a new lot. I,
[31:40] I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. Would there be property tax associated with it? If it's a new lot, use
[31:44] the mic please. Yes. . Would there also be property tax associated with it if it's moved
[31:48] to a new lot? That would be on the hoa to pay? Yes,
[31:53] it should. If you're gonna replant it,
[31:57] it'll have a new, uh, id number. Mm-hmm . You should have a new id number. A lot
[32:01] number, the county lot number. There is someone here that works with the county that could tell us that, but I won't
[32:05] embarrass him or anything. So, yes.
[32:09] uh, I would say that pending
[32:14] legal's opinion,
[32:18] we probably should not make a decision on this tonight. Right.
[32:22] I agree. I agree. So with that said, uh,
[32:26] vice chair works. You wanted to make a motion to table? Yes. And
[32:30] when would you like to revisit this? At our next
[32:34] meeting? Which is what? Uh, the regular meeting? Uh,
[32:38] yes. Okay. I don't, I don't, uh, howard
[32:43] could we, could we look at it for the 20th meeting?
[32:47] would is that too soon?
[32:54] shouldn't this be a regular meeting? Yeah, let's do regular meeting, I think. No,
[32:59] I think it would be better if it were at the regular may meeting. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. What I
[33:03] mean, what's ever easiest for the staff and everything and next regular meeting
[33:07] is the fifth may
[33:12] god, I don't know. The fifth. All right. So
[33:16] you're making motion to table until until may 5th. May 5th second. Did we need
[33:20] a motion for that language? I spoke about? Uh, not necessarily.
[33:24] we need to wait on legal's decision. Okay.
[33:29] I'll second that. Motion to table item six
[33:33] one until may 5th, 2026. Regular meeting.
[33:38] corey actually seconded it.
[33:43] all right. I have a motion by vice chair wetz and commissioner
[33:47] sherrod to table until may 5th. Item 6.1,
[33:52] pending legal's opinion on this matter.
[33:56] is there any discussion on the motion? Are we gonna look at our processes
[34:00] on when we have these certain things or certain requests that developer,
[34:05] we require the developer to do their due diligence? I,
[34:09] depending on legal's opinion, I think that may be something that we need to
[34:13] look at incorporating into our udc. Okay. And
[34:17] then can we also include some type of notification to
[34:22] residents when we have certain things like this? Hmm.
[34:27] I don't think we need, yes.
[34:33] I'm, I'm going to say yes on something like this. It makes sense.
[34:38] but if you are repl repl, for example, the
[34:42] previous item mm-hmm . Where they're changing it from two and two to
[34:46] 1.5 and 2.5 and they own, own both of the lots and
[34:51] they're not developed right. Then it really doesn't make sense to have
[34:55] staff spend time and money to send out notice
[34:59] to those property owners who are the people asking for the replay.
[35:03] so I think it's conditional. Okay. And I don't want to make a hard and fast
[35:07] rule that applies to everyone and we're just wasting money and time.
[35:12] okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. So yes, I think we need to
[35:16] consider it. Yeah. But I think it needs more refinement than,
[35:20] you know, 30 seconds of discussion here. That makes sense. Okay.
[35:25] alright. Any other discussion on the motion? Uh, I just want to say thank you
[35:29] for the people that came out, uh, for public comment. Appreciate it.
[35:37] add one more thing. Can I add something else? Yes. I would like to
[35:41] recommend that in the process of waiting for legal to come back to us on
[35:45] the, uh, may meeting, that the, um, developer
[35:50] takes the time to take care of these, some of these issues with that lot that
[35:54] they, they have that opportunity and I would
[35:58] encourage them to do so, but that's their choice.
[36:03] that's a recommendation. .
[36:07] thank you judge. Alright. Is there any further comment
[36:12] on this motion? Then I'll call for vote.
[36:16] all in favor of tabling until five, may, 2026 say
[36:20] aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? Same sign. Motion to
[36:24] table pass. Seven zero. Thank
[36:28] you for coming out and speaking. Next
[36:33] up, item 6.2, conduct a public hearing and
[36:37] consider possible action on the penske huro. Preliminary plat 35.800
[36:42] acres, more or less of land for total. Lots to light industrial and to open
[36:47] space drainage located on innovation boulevard lard.
[36:55] welcome minister commissioners, manny once again. Uh, so
[36:59] penske preliminary plat is a
[37:03] proposed, uh, at tract land consisting of four total lots,
[37:07] uh, two light industrial and two open space drainage
[37:11] lots. It is located along innovation boulevard just
[37:16] south of the, uh, texas state technical college. Uh,
[37:20] so the penske, pud and annexation took place in august, 2024.
[37:25] it'll be a two phase project with phase one resulting
[37:29] in a car dealership. And phase two is still conceptual.
[37:35] so as I mentioned earlier to the north, we have texas state technical
[37:40] college, um, to the east across,
[37:44] um, innovation or county road 1 0 8. We have some light industrial
[37:48] land that's already been developed to the south. Uh, we have, uh, future
[37:53] development. Uh, it'll be b two, general commercial and to the west
[37:57] is, uh, highway one 30. Uh, the par, uh, as part of the
[38:01] annexation and pud, it came in with a base zoning of
[38:05] b two. So here is
[38:09] the preliminary plat for you guys, and it is also in your packet. You'll
[38:14] notice that, uh, north is to the right,
[38:24] let yep. .
[38:32] and so staff has reviewed this, uh, to the standards outlined
[38:36] in the udc, uh, as well as those outlined in the, uh, pud
[38:40] or planned unit development that was established along with the annexation. Um,
[38:44] they did waive the shot clock bill and staff recommends approval. Okay.
[38:51] all right. And, uh, is the applicant present?
[38:57] yes. Excellent. Okay. So if we have any questions there we
[39:01] go. With that, I will open it up to discussion from
[39:05] the dais. Hey, manny, what's the phase two conceptual?
[39:10] what's the, any probability of what's going in there? Possibility?
[39:14] I just know that it's conceptual, but if they'd like to come up and speak or
[39:18] I'm not sure if they are aware. They don't know.
[39:23] okay. That's fine. Okay. . All right. We're
[39:27] still thinking about it. Looks good.
[39:33] no data center, right? ? I
[39:37] said I know what she said.
[39:41] okay. , any other comments, discussion from the diet
[39:45] after that? No. Nope. I think I covered it.
[39:51] I think they read my mind. Right.
[39:55] all right. With that then I will entertain a motion for
[39:59] 6.2. I'll move. We accept 6.2.
[40:04] alright, as written, uh, do
[40:08] you, before we get onto a second, are you okay with the
[40:12] condition that the license agreement is finalized prior to recordation? Yes. As,
[40:16] as in the staff notes? Yes, absolutely. Okay. Those right aways have been established 'cause we
[40:20] were talking about that during the sip. So we have all the right aways where
[40:24] we were talking about putting our lines and everything in. I think legal might have a comment.
[40:29] ah, legal. Yes. Yes. Uh, uh,
[40:33] chairman, um, please open your public hearing and ask if anyone is wanting
[40:37] to speak on the matter. You are correct. Thank you for catching that. Yes.
[40:41] this is a public hearing,
[40:46] so I'm going to withdraw your motion. Yes, please do. Uh, this is
[40:50] a public hearing, so I will open the public hearing on this item
[40:54] at 7:41 pm is
[40:58] there anyone who wishes to speak to the
[41:03] penske preliminary plat item?
[41:07] please come up and, uh, state your name and address.
[41:12] uh, my name is catherine meek. My address is 1 0 8 david drive.
[41:18] and I realize that my questions cannot go
[41:22] answered, but on the agenda, I noticed this item is a consideration of
[41:26] a 35,000 acre piece of continuous
[41:30] land. And that what's that, uh, act, actually this
[41:34] is, uh, this is public hearing, so there is a little back and forth
[41:38] allowed, and I'll correct you. It is 35.800
[41:43] acres. Okay. Not 35, not okay. 35. Got
[41:47] you. Uh, alright. Thank you so much. Um, and
[41:51] as I understand it, the consideration is for light industrial and seeing
[41:56] what the applicable uses are. Correct? Uh, actually this is
[42:00] a, this is zoned a, uh, commercial. B two is
[42:04] the commercial zoning. So sales, uh, retail, that sort
[42:08] of, that sort of thing could also include some services,
[42:13] uh, across the street is light industrial. Okay.
[42:17] got you. Alright. That is what I wanted to know and I'm, I'm
[42:21] glad that I was able to actually get those questions answered. Thank you so much. Not a problem. Thank
[42:25] you. Mm-hmm . Alright. Is there anyone else to speak
[42:30] on the public hearing for item 6.2?
[42:36] all right. Seeing none, I will close the public hearing at
[42:40] 7:43 pm and gavel.
[42:45] there we go. Now
[42:49] I will take, take my motion now. Take your motion. Okay.
[42:53] I move to accept it with the, with the stipulations that steady staff has placed on it.
[42:57] alright. Uh, do I have a second? A second.
[43:01] okay. So we have of,
[43:07] sorry, making notes here. We have a motion by a commissioner de delay and
[43:11] a second by commissioner kana kenard to
[43:15] accept with the staff note.
[43:20] any discussion on the motion?
[43:24] hearing none, I'll call for vote. All in favor say aye.
[43:28] aye. Aye. All opposed? Same sign. Motion passes.
[43:32] seven zero. Next is item 6.3
[43:37] consideration impossible action on the pensky huro final plat, 35.800
[43:43] acres, more or less of land four total lots, two light industrial and
[43:48] two open space drainage located on innovation boulevard.
[43:57] and if this seems familiar, it should. Yeah.
[44:03] uh, so before I begin
[44:07] this, and to address your question about the zoning, and
[44:11] I do apologize as that was a typo on my end. I have pulled
[44:15] that, uh, ppud document back and
[44:20] the base base zoning is uhi light. It
[44:24] is, it is li so I do apologize about that. Um,
[44:30] okay. Light industry. So with that said,
[44:35] um, I would like to
[44:40] reconsider 6.2. Yes. I agree.
[44:44] I don't have to, since we were provided that it
[44:49] was a commercial zoning, it is not, it is
[44:53] actually light industrial. I would like to reconsider 6.2.
[44:58] yeah, do that. Move, move. Second vote for the reconsideration. Yep.
[45:02] if it's in favor, then you can open it and go ahead. Okay. So then I, I'll move that. We
[45:06] reconsider 6.2 based on the okay. Well I, I was moving. You want to second?
[45:10] I'll second it all. We're gonna fight. We'll, we'll fight. We'll
[45:15] fight. No fighting. Oh, come on. . Just remember I
[45:19] have a gavel. That's true. You do carry the hammer
[45:23] nos on her head. Alright.
[45:27] all right. Reconsideration. Making notes.
[45:31] all right. So, uh, any discussion on the motion to reconsider?
[45:36] no. All right. Hearing none, I will call for vote.
[45:40] all in favor of reconsidering 6.2. Say aye. Aye. Aye.
[45:44] all opposed? Same sign. Motion to reconsider passes.
[45:48] seven zero. All right. Back to 6.2.
[45:55] all right. So to correct the record,
[46:00] the zoning on this particular item is light industrial,
[46:04] which changes some of the uses available to it. Sales
[46:09] can still be conducted there as part of the light industrial zoning.
[46:13] uh, it's a more well unsurprisingly industrial
[46:20] use than selling
[46:24] anything else. So hopefully that answers the
[46:28] questions. And with that, I
[46:32] will open it up to discussion from the dais.
[46:38] I have no comments. Alright. Hearing none.
[46:43] I will, we don't have to reopen the public hearing,
[46:48] correct? No. Okay. Yep. Could you
[46:52] sit inky? Yeah, you do. Do do we have to,
[46:56] we have to re reopen the public hearing? No. Is that a yes?
[47:01] 6.3 says consideration and possible action not public hearing. No.
[47:06] six two. Six two. We're six two. We're back on six two because yeah.
[47:10] business legal says yes. Legal says yes. Okay. Then
[47:14] we will reopen the public hearing on item 6.2
[47:19] at 7:47 pm
[47:25] is there anyone who wishes to speak on this item?
[47:29] yeah, that one in the back. Oh, one in the back. All
[47:33] right.
[47:40] yeah. Yeah. My name's jeremy carter. I live at 1 0 2
[47:45] comb road. Um, I didn't come here to speak on this topic,
[47:49] but I urge you to consider what they are going
[47:53] to produce there as opposed to what kind of
[47:57] sustainability impacts, right? Like, grow responsibly and sustainably
[48:02] and what it's gonna do for, not necessarily
[48:06] tax incentives to the city, but what it's also gonna do to the environment.
[48:11] um, and that's all I have to say about that. Alright. Thank you.
[48:22] alright. Is there anyone else who wishes to speak on this item?
[48:28] all right. Seeing no one, I will close the public hearing at
[48:32] 7 48 gavel
[48:37] and open it up for motion from
[48:41] po.
[48:46] I will, I'll make the motion again. Alright. As, as stated with the city's
[48:50] staff comments. Okay. So
[48:54] we have a motion by commissioner de delay and I'll second.
[48:59] alright. Consider industrial and
[49:03] a second by commissioner hall. I don't think it was either, but that's
[49:08] all right. Is there any discussion on the motion?
[49:12] are we sure that just the light industrial covers a car lot? Figured that'd
[49:16] be commercial. Uh, the pud covers the automotive
[49:21] dealership use the planned unit development. Okay. So somebody can't
[49:25] come in sideways and say, oh, it's light industrial, so I wanna put, try
[49:29] to pull heavy industry in there. Nope. Yeah, that'll,
[49:34] the pud states that it, it'll be
[49:38] the base ho uh, base zoning of light industrial. So what's allowed in
[49:42] light industrial, but it would have to be an amendment to the pud in order to
[49:46] try to pull in some sort of heavy industrial. Anything that's not covered in the pud
[49:51] as stated currently, it would be an amendment. Just wanna make sure
[49:55] future has a good citizen that comes in there that's gonna play ball.
[50:01] um, if I'm correct, and I don't have the udc memorized,
[50:05] that's kind of a large document. Mm-hmm . , uh, light, light industrial
[50:09] does allow for things like automotive service,
[50:13] large vehicle service. Yeah. Uh, repair.
[50:17] and if I'm not mistaken, it does include
[50:22] some sales.
[50:28] I am looking at the chart right now. Um,
[50:32] it sales associated with industrial whatever, it's,
[50:37] it does permit some, some sales.
[50:41] okay. That's what I thought, but I just wanted to
[50:45] confirm. Okay. So yes, it is a
[50:53] permitted use then. Yeah. All right.
[50:58] so, uh, any further discussion on the motion,
[51:03] then I will call for vote. All in favor of 6.2
[51:08] with staff notes say aye. Aye. Aye.
[51:12] aye. All opposed? Same sign. Motion passes.
[51:17] seven zero. Okay.
[51:28] all right. And I was just handed a note. Uh, this meeting
[51:33] is currently being simulcast in the executive conference room
[51:37] upstairs. If the standing room only
[51:41] folks would like to have a seat, they can watch it on the screen up there.
[51:46] so we have the lobby and the executive conference room upstairs.
[51:50] thank you. All right. Next is 6.3
[51:55] consideration and possible action on the penske huddle. Final plat
[51:59] 35.800 acres, more or less of land
[52:03] four total lots, two light industrial, and two open space drainage located
[52:08] on innovation boulevard.
[52:15] so this is the same spiel as
[52:19] last time, uh, for total. Lots to light industrial
[52:24] to, uh, drainage. Uh, this is just procedural
[52:28] to move the project along. We need the preliminary and the final plat approved. So that's
[52:32] why they're both here in front of you guys tonight. As stated, uh, this is
[52:36] a pud and annexation that, um, came in in august, 2024.
[52:42] and it'll be a two phase project. Phase one being that car dealership phase
[52:46] two conceptual. Um,
[52:52] the plant is also dedicating, uh, 1.5 acres for the future
[52:56] expansion of, uh, schneider boulevard in accordance with the master
[53:00] mobility plan. And here is that final plat for
[53:05] you guys.
[53:12] who's gonna pay for that road developer?
[53:17] we will. Uh, okay. They're dedicating the right way, but we'll
[53:21] pay for it. Okay. Just wanna know. At least
[53:25] I believe so. It might, there might be a condition in the pod or the development agreement that
[53:29] says otherwise. Yeah. So the right of way's all clear then right of way is
[53:33] going to be ours. Okay. And it looks like
[53:37] their proposed road aligns with schneider boulevard. That's
[53:42] a good thing. . Yes. Yes.
[53:48] alright. Uh, any other discussion from the dais?
[53:53] this does not have a public hearing. Yes. I see there is a lot.
[53:57] one open space. Who's going to maintain that?
[54:02] yeah. So let me pull up
[54:06] those, uh, plat notes. But typically it'll fall under the
[54:11] property owner. But we can confirm that for you.
[54:21] yes. All right. We have an answer.
[54:26] the text is too small. I can't see it. It's too small. Um, it will,
[54:31] the, um, open space will stay with, I'm sorry, please. Oh, amy chavez
[54:35] with p dawson engineers, uh, engineer of record. The open space
[54:39] will stay with the developer. Uh, they will own the property and they will maintain the property
[54:44] as well as the detention pond lot, which is off the screen. But number
[54:48] 17, thank you. The intent. Thank you. Okay. 17.
[54:55] uh, did I hear that was t note 17? Mm-hmm . 17.
[55:02] there we go. Yep. That's what it says.
[55:10] okay. Alright. Any other discussion?
[55:17] then? I will entertain a motion on 6.3. I'll make a motion that
[55:21] we accept, uh, approve 6.3 as written second.
[55:26] alright. I have a motion by vice chair wetz and a
[55:30] second by commissioner da. On any discussion on the motion.
[55:38] hearing none, I will call for vote. All in favor say aye.
[55:42] aye. All opposed? Same sign. Motion passes.
[55:47] seven zero. Next
[55:51] is 6.40 what we've
[55:55] been all waiting for, public hearing consideration and possible action on the
[55:59] zydeco data center, formerly known as upper
[56:04] schmitz creek, pud, future land use map amendment.
[56:12] so the way this typically goes, uh, is we will have a presentation
[56:16] by staff and or the, uh, applicant.
[56:21] and then we will follow that up immediately with public hearing
[56:26] comments. Uh, given that there are so many people here who
[56:30] probably want to speak, I do have a stack of papers. Uh,
[56:35] given that there are so many people, I would ask that if someone
[56:39] has covered your points, that we
[56:43] don't, uh, belabor the minutia .
[56:48] if, if that, if you guys are understanding what I'm saying, I want
[56:52] everybody in here who wants to speak to have an opportunity to speak
[56:57] tonight. Not tomorrow morning, .
[57:01] okay. So if we can just kind of agree on that,
[57:06] I think we'll, we'll move along just fine. And we'll get through all of this. You
[57:10] can burn your selection bag. , no sleeping bags required? Yes.
[57:14] yes. All right. So with that, let's begin on 6.4.
[57:19] okay. Thank you, mr. Chair. My name is howard konz. I am the director of development
[57:23] services. For the record, uh, before I get started, I do wanna take care of a couple
[57:27] of, uh, housekeeping notes. Um, it's been said before, but I'm
[57:31] gonna hit it again. I don't want anybody to be lost on this. Tonight is april the seventh, and we are opening a public hearing
[57:36] related to this item. This item is 6.4.
[57:40] the next item on the agenda is 6.5, and they are related to one another. I
[57:44] will try and stay on task as best I can. Sometimes I slip between the two
[57:48] 'cause they are related, but I'll try and try and stay on point. Uh, tonight the
[57:52] public hearing will open. It will not be closed. We will, um,
[57:56] keep the public hearing open until april the 20th.
[58:01] on april the 20th, we will reconvene and pick up this item
[58:05] again for the purpose of making the recommendation that pursuant
[58:10] to state law needs to go forward to the mayor and council. The
[58:14] city council will make the ultimate decision at their regular may meeting,
[58:18] may the seventh, um, that where there will be a second public
[58:22] hearing. So first public hearing will open this evening,
[58:26] april 7th. That will remain open until april the 20th, where
[58:31] you will make your motion and your decision between the seventh and the
[58:35] 20th, you are free to deliberate amongst yourselves on your own. Um,
[58:39] we'll come back on the 20th. You'll make your motion, you'll make your recommendation. The public hearing will close,
[58:43] and then we'll go to the seventh of where the mayor and council will make the final decision. So
[58:47] if anybody's lost on that, feel free to email me or call me or ask me about it.
[58:51] um, but without further ado, we're gonna talk a little bit about this. Um,
[58:55] this first request is a request to amend
[59:00] the city's future land use map. The amendment to the future land
[59:04] use map is not the assignment of zoning. That's the next item.
[59:08] this is an important step though,
[59:13] because the guiding document that should form the foundation
[59:17] of decision making for staff and for our boards and commissions and for
[59:21] our city council is our comprehensive plan. Comprehensive plan
[59:25] entitled soar 2040, uh, fi, uh, formerly adopted in
[59:30] the end of 22, I believe, but we, it's been in place for a couple
[59:34] of years now. Um, within that comprehensive plan is a map, the future
[59:38] land use map. The future land use map calls out, um, designations
[59:43] for certain classes and categories of land uses.
[59:47] it does not assign zoning either. So being
[59:51] that this guiding document is so integral to the decision making
[59:55] process, if a request is incongruent
[1:00:00] with the tenants of the comprehensive plan and specifically the future land use map,
[1:00:04] then that request should not be considered favorably. So
[1:00:08] tonight the applicant has come forward realizing that the future land use map needs
[1:00:12] to be amended before that their intended final use could be
[1:00:17] considered favorably for that same site. That's why there's two
[1:00:21] separate applications that look the same, but function differently.
[1:00:25] so first we're talking about the future land use map amendment.
[1:00:29] the site itself is located on the southeast corner of edge schmidt boulevard
[1:00:34] and lier loop. It is roughly 40 acres, somewhere in the neighborhood
[1:00:38] of about 800 feet, east to west, and a little over 2000
[1:00:42] feet north to south. I've included a couple of maps on the screen
[1:00:46] there. There's a larger vicinity map on the left, and I've tried to call
[1:00:51] out some landmarks that we might know. So we've got some, um, residential subdivisions
[1:00:55] that are in the immediate vicinity. Cottonwood estates is north and west
[1:00:59] hu of squares to the east and northeast. Uh, emory estates is to the west and southwest.
[1:01:06] oh, correction. Oh, you're right. It is my bad. Sorry about that. Um,
[1:01:12] um, I'm, some of these are from the actual subdivision plats, not the dba on the sign out
[1:01:16] front. My, my apologies I pulled from the records I didn't pull from the street. But anyway,
[1:01:20] we know where we're at for that point. Um, next is a, is
[1:01:24] an insert of the current future land use map.
[1:01:29] and, um, you'll notice that the site itself is in the center outlined in green,
[1:01:33] um, and colored somewhat the lighter brown, the
[1:01:37] lavender or purple that's on the far west side of this map is the employment
[1:01:42] center designation within the comprehensive plan. Um, next down
[1:01:46] on the left side is suburban subdivision, and that's in the bright yellow. And
[1:01:50] those are typically the lower density single family detached type residential
[1:01:54] uses, whether it's fee simple and owner occupied or rental. The ownership arrangement's
[1:01:59] not important here. The land use is what we're talking about right, with this item.
[1:02:03] and then, uh, lower left, I pointed out corridor commercial, that's the, the garnet
[1:02:07] or the barn red and whatever it looks like on your screen. Um, corridor commercial
[1:02:12] is a, um, I mean, really it's used for all sorts
[1:02:16] of goods and services and, uh, point of service sales that are on site. Um, typically
[1:02:21] those that are on, uh, arterial arterials and thoroughfare,
[1:02:25] other auto oriented type businesses or the type of businesses that you need to reach by automobile.
[1:02:30] if we move to the right side of this, map com, uh, community activity center is the bright
[1:02:34] red sections. Um, if you go through the text of the future land use
[1:02:38] map, you'll see that there's a host of uses, but it's really encourages
[1:02:43] onsite live work play mix of uses, um, at
[1:02:47] somewhat of a higher density than you would expect from an exurban community. Civic
[1:02:51] uses are on here, that's the blue, and we all know that's the elementary and the middle school that are, that
[1:02:56] are up there off of exchange. And then this site, um, is
[1:03:00] currently designated in the future land use map as multifamily.
[1:03:06] move to the next slide. Here's a aerial photo of today. You can see, uh,
[1:03:10] the tighter squares are, uh, the existing
[1:03:15] land use pattern, a stable single family detached residential that's been
[1:03:19] established west, east, northeast, northwest. On
[1:03:23] the southwest side of the development site, across edge schmidt boulevard
[1:03:27] is the, uh, encore substation for electricity, uh, distribution
[1:03:31] to, uh, this specific area. The parcel itself in question
[1:03:35] is actually vacant and undeveloped. It's largely flat grassland. Um,
[1:03:40] you can see from one side to the other, despite the fact that it's 800 feet wide and about 2000
[1:03:44] feet long. Um, additionally, there's development sites to the south, that same
[1:03:48] land use pattern. There's a photograph taken
[1:03:52] from, uh, edgemont northbound the, the right side of the road as you're going north.
[1:03:57] um, and this is looking back towards the southeast at the apartments that are at
[1:04:01] the, what's currently the far western end of west live oak street.
[1:04:06] um, from that same spot rotating, uh, to the left about,
[1:04:10] uh, 90 degrees. This is looking northeast from that, uh, same vantage.
[1:04:14] and you can see some of the residential rooftops that are, um,
[1:04:19] adjacent to this site. Uh, so it gives you an idea of the scale because those,
[1:04:23] those homes exist right at the property border of the subject site and the
[1:04:27] existing, um, residential. So, uh, the current classification
[1:04:31] in the future land use map is multifamily. And, uh, put some information on
[1:04:35] this slide. This is lifted directly from soar 2040. The comprehensive
[1:04:40] plan, it reads multifamily primarily supports a mix of housing options that
[1:04:44] may consist of one or more of housing types. Should be, should be noted
[1:04:48] that, uh, one of the things that's listed as multifamily areas noted
[1:04:52] in the future land use map are intended to be used for existing apartment complexes and multifamily
[1:04:56] areas only in the future. They would prefer those go to activity centers so
[1:05:00] that you have a mix of uses where folks can live and have outside activities
[1:05:05] on the same lots. But this particular parcel is already, um,
[1:05:10] entitled with a pud. And the pud is, uh, largely residential
[1:05:14] in nature with some associated community, uh, retail on the
[1:05:19] west side of this existing parcel. Um, that's why the designation I think,
[1:05:23] was assigned to it because it's, it's already, uh, it's already
[1:05:27] entitled for that. So they made the future land use ma match up with that. The request, however,
[1:05:31] from the applicant is for heavy industrial, heavy industrial is because that's
[1:05:35] the land use category that best encompasses that type of, um,
[1:05:41] non-residential, uh, use. That really goes beyond
[1:05:45] commercial. It's, uh, heavy industrial allows for things that are
[1:05:49] more than simply point of service sales or high turnover sales. It's,
[1:05:54] uh, light assembly. It can be all sorts of warehousing
[1:05:58] uses and all the things that you would expect to find in what we would term an industrial park. We
[1:06:02] don't really need tutoring on what that is. Um, heavy industrial allows
[1:06:06] for major manufacturing, major employers and some, and some supportive retail and office. But
[1:06:10] by and large it's, uh, it's self-titled.
[1:06:15] so as we reviewed this, um, like I said, the, the chief guide that we
[1:06:19] had was that comprehensive plan. I cannot recommend enough that you leaf
[1:06:23] through that. It's a very compelling document that was ultimately put together with
[1:06:27] the input from the community. That's how those documents are built. There's a series
[1:06:31] of public meetings where consultants or staff or both
[1:06:36] solicit the input of the persons who want to contribute to the places where they live
[1:06:40] and make their home. And so they're asked questions, what do you wanna see? What do you not
[1:06:44] wanna see? And using those specific answers, they create things like future land use maps
[1:06:48] and the expectations of what all those designations are. So as we
[1:06:53] went through, we looked at it in the number one question, uh, that, that we, we have
[1:06:57] put forward. And I would hope that you would consider these questions as well as you make your decision,
[1:07:01] which is why I've put them here. But is the proposed use superior to the current entitlement
[1:07:06] in short staff beliefs? That that is not true? Uh, the proposed use
[1:07:10] is not superior to what's currently entitled. There are some, uh,
[1:07:15] some pages in there, some language in the future land use, uh, or I'm sorry, in the comprehensive
[1:07:20] plan that states, um, deficiencies that the community has things
[1:07:24] that we need to do. Some of the things were a greater variety of housing types.
[1:07:29] we're, we're pretty much, uh, you know, a single family detached community right now.
[1:07:33] and the opportunities for what's entitled on the lot, uh, right now,
[1:07:38] um, go towards remedying some of those deficiencies. However, the application
[1:07:42] itself's not. So, um, the second one, is there sufficient
[1:07:46] community benefit considering the perceived threats to the local development pattern?
[1:07:51] would this be better placed elsewhere in the city? Um, we staff
[1:07:55] believes that it would be, uh, better suited if it were elsewhere in the city
[1:08:00] using the euclidean pattern of zoning that we know about. We put some things where
[1:08:04] they belong and other things where they belong elsewhere. And it's the nexus
[1:08:08] between the uses that creates whether or not they're dissimilar or similar.
[1:08:12] we haven't found, uh, that the category of use is allowable in this future land
[1:08:16] use designation are congruent with the, um, emergent and the existing
[1:08:20] pattern of development along it schmidt and limmer. The third one
[1:08:25] is the bulk standards allowable in employment categories, um,
[1:08:29] as well as the effluent from those. So bulk standards would refer to
[1:08:33] the basic, uh, dimensions of what can be built on the site. You're
[1:08:37] talking about your setbacks, building height, impervious surface ratios, the
[1:08:41] amount of parking. Um, we haven't found necessarily
[1:08:46] that they're able to fit in congruently with the existing pattern.
[1:08:50] and we can speak more about this on the next item because we have conceptual site
[1:08:54] plans of what they would like to do within the pud that they seek on
[1:08:58] the lot. Um, but, but by and large, the irrespective
[1:09:03] of whatever use is placed here in the future, the parent category
[1:09:07] of industrial on this lot would lend itself and
[1:09:11] open itself up to uses that create noise, light,
[1:09:16] smoke, smells, vibration, uh, traffic, uh,
[1:09:20] especially deliveries, truck traffic deliveries, uh, at hours that are outside
[1:09:24] of what you would consider to be daylight hours, 7:00 am to 6:00 pm
[1:09:29] or something along those lines. Um, the, the idea of the, the, those
[1:09:33] employment categories have a higher degree of, um,
[1:09:37] uh, use, I'll call it, or just activity throughout the course of the day, which
[1:09:41] would be incongruent with residential uses that, you know, really wind down in the evening. And then
[1:09:46] lastly, um, future adaptation after the
[1:09:50] proposed use is no longer in operation, meaning resiliency, what is the most
[1:09:54] likely adaptive use for the next operator to come
[1:09:58] in on a site that is heavy or even light industry
[1:10:03] on a 40 acre lot in the middle of a number of subdivisions and
[1:10:07] community commercial, uh, can't be said, but, um,
[1:10:11] again, we'll talk a little bit about mitigation and the expectation of mitigating,
[1:10:16] uh, the, the differences between those dissimilar uses. So,
[1:10:20] um, for that, for that purpose, and I didn't touch on everything that's in the
[1:10:24] staff report, I encourage you to read the staff report, but even if you ignore the staff report, you can
[1:10:28] come up with your own decisions by reading intently that that comprehensive plan
[1:10:32] section on multifamily and the comprehensive plan section on, uh, heavy
[1:10:37] industry and decide if what's there today is, uh, superior to what's
[1:10:41] proposed. But staff has found, um, no indication that you should,
[1:10:45] uh, support this, uh, this application as presented.
[1:10:49] I make myself available for any questions you may have or, you know, at
[1:10:53] your discretion if you wanna call up the applicant.
[1:11:06] all right. So this does call for a public hearing. Before we begin the public hearing, I
[1:11:10] would like to read off that we did receive
[1:11:16] responses to the notices that were mailed out. Uh,
[1:11:20] and we received on this item, I believe it was
[1:11:25] 33 responses
[1:11:30] as of perhaps last wednesday. Okay. Because we've, we've more
[1:11:34] than doubled that. And I figured there were a few more. We'll, we'll have
[1:11:39] some more for you on the 20th. Okay. Ev everything that's come in since the packet's been posted, we'll bring
[1:11:43] you the new ones for the 20th. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Uh, yes. So they,
[1:11:47] the, the, uh, responses that were sent in were
[1:11:52] received. They have been read as part of this packet and, uh,
[1:11:56] acknowledged. Can I, can
[1:12:00] I ask one question that's kind of unrelated? Okay. Uh,
[1:12:05] si signage. Uh, I know that was, uh, that's
[1:12:09] most of the reason why we're delaying or furthering this
[1:12:14] hearing, public hearing, is that correct? Yeah, I mean, if you wanna get into
[1:12:18] it. So, um, there been pretty snakebit with
[1:12:22] this meeting in general, let alone this item specifically. But, um,
[1:12:26] there we had a, there's a state law for how long signage needs
[1:12:31] to be posted on the site. Mm-hmm . That is one of four notifications that
[1:12:35] we are required by law or code. One of 'em is letters to the
[1:12:39] adjoining property owners. One of 'em is advertisement in the newspaper of general circulation
[1:12:43] within the community. Another one is, um, the advertisements
[1:12:47] are posted on the website and the fourth one is that a sign is posted on the site.
[1:12:52] okay. I was going through a series of checklists to make sure that we had dotted all of our I's
[1:12:56] and crossed all of our t's about two weeks ago or so. Maybe three.
[1:13:01] yeah. And realized on thursday of that week that we had not
[1:13:05] posted signs on the site, which were due to be posted by the
[1:13:09] previous monday. So we were four days late. The reason for that is because our code
[1:13:13] per the letter of the code reads that the applicant is to place
[1:13:17] signs on the site and then take photos of those signs and send them back to us
[1:13:22] as an affidavit that they've been established. And then further they're required to
[1:13:26] maintain those sites throughout the course of the notification period. We did not convey
[1:13:30] that to the applicant. Okay. This is my first meeting, my first go around here. I've only worked here since
[1:13:34] january, so I'm learning as I go. And most of the time I learn is because I screw something
[1:13:38] up. So, um, we worked with legal, worked with the city manager's,
[1:13:42] office and development services, and we decided a new plan that we would
[1:13:46] be able to get new signs up. And that's when we decided to push
[1:13:51] the deliberations of this to the 20th. The decision could
[1:13:55] be made on april the 20th, as long as we had the signs posted,
[1:13:59] you know, on site properly by april the fifth. Sounds great.
[1:14:04] so that friday we had put up the signs after learning thursday night, they weren't up, they were up
[1:14:08] the next friday. So we were ready to be a week in a, you know,
[1:14:12] in advance of what we needed. Mm-hmm . Then come to find out that the state legislature
[1:14:17] had arbitrarily changed the standard for what public
[1:14:21] hearing signs need to look like. And they changed the dimension to four feet wide
[1:14:25] and two feet tall. Our signs were
[1:14:30] not that, uh, close 30 something
[1:14:34] inches instead of 40 something inches, but at the end of the day, it wasn't what was prescribed
[1:14:38] and there's no slack in their rope. So we learned this
[1:14:43] on perhaps tuesday in the morning, I guess of the, after that weekend,
[1:14:47] called up a sign company had signs made on an emergency basis,
[1:14:51] and this guy right here went on good friday up to georgetown,
[1:14:56] picked up the signs and posted them on the site, um,
[1:15:00] on, you know, last friday. So we're still on board
[1:15:04] with the schedule we had put forward for the 20th and the seventh. Mm-hmm
[1:15:08] . Um, but we had to do it again to make sure that we were
[1:15:12] compliant with public notification laws, both domestic, I'll
[1:15:16] say, which is the city of hu requirements and the texas local government
[1:15:20] code, which is forward by the, the legislature. So we, we
[1:15:25] are on board, we are working out a plan in the future for what that's gonna
[1:15:29] look like. The signs are gonna change, they're gonna get bigger. Uh, they're gonna get more yellower,
[1:15:33] uh, so that you can see 'em, and we're gonna put bigger print on them so they're not so small when you're
[1:15:38] driving by trying to figure out what it reads. So, okay. I'm, I'm
[1:15:42] learning. I'm, I'm gonna get there. Yeah. I, I just wanted to ask, 'cause that was one
[1:15:46] comment that I saw in public that we were hiding something, so I just wanted to make sure.
[1:15:50] no, we're, we're not hiding. It's just drinking from the fire hose for the last three months has really
[1:15:55] got me, really got me twisted. So sorry about that. And then we're still
[1:15:59] gonna require the developer, the applicant to be able to
[1:16:03] still put the signs out, right? Or is that gonna fall in this city? No,
[1:16:07] I'm, I'm gonna work that out. We'll, we'll talk about it, you know, probably,
[1:16:11] actually, there's an item tonight to talk about our udc and I'm gonna slide a couple of things to
[1:16:15] you right there too. So, um, it's gonna, it's gonna be better and more
[1:16:19] automatic. Good. I wanna ask a question. Awesome. Thank
[1:16:23] you, howard. Sir, can you tell us how many, uh, letters
[1:16:28] that you've received are for this project? To
[1:16:32] my knowledge? Two. I'm sorry. Two. Thank you.
[1:16:37] so follow on question then, out of how
[1:16:41] many responses you've mailed out how many? I,
[1:16:45] but the number I think was 2, 2 35, and I think it was 235 letters went
[1:16:49] out to a, to a radius of 600 feet from the, the site. That's the buffer. And
[1:16:53] how many were received? We believe it's like 54 or 56 right now.
[1:16:57] okay. As, as of this evening. And, and two of them were four? That's
[1:17:01] correct. The others were against. Against, yes, sir. Okay. That answer,
[1:17:05] that, that put it in context? Nope, that's fine. Okay. I'm
[1:17:09] gonna stop any further discussion because we have a public hearing to get to.
[1:17:14] so with that, are you gonna have the applicant come up or the public hearing? Which, which order
[1:17:18] do you wanna do it in? Um, does the applicant have a presentation? Yes.
[1:17:22] yes. Let's do it then. Let's hear the applicant's presentation.
[1:17:30] thank. Give us
[1:17:34] one second. We'll get it up on the screen for you.
[1:17:47] uh, before we begin, I would like to ask the gallery to
[1:17:52] refrain from comments noises, exclamations,
[1:17:58] clapping, booze, anything like that while the presentations are
[1:18:02] being conducted. Thank you.
[1:18:07] is a mic, is that a microphone? I have one
[1:18:11] over here. Um, let me see which one.
[1:18:15] it's that works.
[1:18:24] our internet is so slow today.
[1:18:33] uh, good evening, commissioners. My name is wes gilmer and I'm a principal with zico development.
[1:18:38] I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you this evening. Um, I have two key points that I
[1:18:42] would like you all to walk away with. The first being that this is an opportunity for the
[1:18:46] city of hu to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable value by taking the
[1:18:50] existing infrastructure on an otherwise very constrained and restricted site.
[1:18:54] the second point is that not all data centers are created equal. And what we're proposing tonight is
[1:18:59] designed to be a low impact, thoughtful neighbor with minimal burden on city utilities.
[1:19:05] uh, so a little bit about zydeco. We've been around for 30 years. We're based here in austin.
[1:19:10] uh, we're known for best in class engineering, best in class architecture and design.
[1:19:14] I would encourage anyone who wants to see our projects to go drive met center, which is the project we're most well
[1:19:18] known for in southeast austin. We've built five data centers
[1:19:22] in the past. Um, all these are at met center, the most recent one being the 40 megawatt
[1:19:27] a md facility. We've also notably built the, uh, ercot headquarters as well.
[1:19:32] again, a little more on met center. It's a 550 acre project, three and a half million square feet
[1:19:36] began in 96. Some of the tenants in the park include a-m-d-p-p-d,
[1:19:42] the statesman headquarters. And then, um, the data centers that I mentioned being cyrus one
[1:19:46] digital realty. So our goal is to
[1:19:50] bring a significant tax value project to the city of hu while still being
[1:19:54] a thoughtful neighbor on a very constrained site. Um,
[1:19:58] I'm gonna walk through how we routed our concept plan today, but we've met with the adjacent neighborhood, hoa
[1:20:02] two times their first time being in october, which has guided us towards the
[1:20:06] plan plan that we're presenting to you today. Um, it will be an environmentally, environmentally
[1:20:11] responsible project in that we're using modern cooling system technology that
[1:20:15] minimize water use. Um, and then comparing this to the previously approved pud,
[1:20:19] uh, the 173 multifamily units, this is significantly less than pervious cover. It's
[1:20:23] separated by five acres of green space between the adjacent homes and the project.
[1:20:28] um, and the building will be set back 300 feet opposed to 30 feet previously
[1:20:32] approved. So the site, uh, I know the city staff just presented,
[1:20:37] uh, an aerial, but we really view this as a transmission corridor. It's across the
[1:20:41] street from the giant hud substation. It's one of the only sites in hudu,
[1:20:45] actually one of the only sites in northeast austin with the existing transmission
[1:20:49] and substation adjacency required for a project like this,
[1:20:54] there are five large kv lines that run down the site. Obviously, when you drive
[1:20:58] down edgemont boulevard, you really can't miss them. And when you map this out,
[1:21:02] everything showing here in red is sitting in the encore transmission easement.
[1:21:06] you cannot build any structure in that red area. So it creates a really
[1:21:10] fragmented side geometry. There's essentially zero retail frontage. Um,
[1:21:14] I can't really imagine another use working well here. It certainly doesn't seem like, um, it'd be friendly
[1:21:18] for some multifamily development entrance either.
[1:21:23] so, up top here is showing the, the concept plan of the previously approved p
[1:21:27] below is showing our proposed concept plan. Um, so we're
[1:21:31] proposing a 225,000 square foot building, whereas the previous project had 550,000
[1:21:36] square feet. Um, just in general, data centers are
[1:21:40] known for substantially lower traffic, uh, and daily activity. What I've,
[1:21:44] what I've heard from residents is that this intersection here at et limber loop is
[1:21:48] a high traffic intersection. It already gets super backed up. So adding all these units,
[1:21:52] I think would be a, a problematic, um, issue. And then we're
[1:21:57] adding significant buffer and setbacks. So the previous plan could build multifamily
[1:22:01] units 30 feet away from the adjacent residential, whereas again, we're
[1:22:05] setting our project back via a five acre, um,
[1:22:09] greenscape buffer with two rows of trees, and then two eight foot masonry
[1:22:13] walls separating the screen service yard from the adjacent residential.
[1:22:20] from an infrastructure perspective, um, our project's gonna get in was going to use a
[1:22:24] closed loop cooling system, which I'll get into, uh, how exactly that works. My
[1:22:28] understanding is the previous plan required new water, sewer, storm water road extensions.
[1:22:33] um, I'm not even sure that the water was in place to serve, is in place to serve
[1:22:37] a project of that size, whereas we're not, um, really asking for any upgrades
[1:22:42] from municipal, municipal utility standpoint. And our project, uh, creates essentially
[1:22:46] no city service demand on schools, police parks, et cetera.
[1:22:50] and then just to visualize the difference in estimated tax value, um,
[1:22:55] you can see here we ran a conservative analysis. The previous project, um,
[1:22:59] you can call it around $39 million of taxable value. Ours is around eight times that
[1:23:03] amount, and that's assuming that this project would ever even get built. The, the developer
[1:23:08] who took this through rezone was a group called aspen heights. They were not able to capitalize this project
[1:23:12] because no one wants to live the, the, the kv line. The kv lines are super
[1:23:16] problematic from a development perspective. So just
[1:23:20] blowing up the concept plan a little bit more, I've already noticed that. I've already noted the three
[1:23:24] 16 foot building setback, the five acres of green space. Um, I'd like to
[1:23:28] also note that the building will be single story. Um, so at max we expect that
[1:23:32] to be around 42 feet is our best estimate. Um, and then again,
[1:23:37] there's gonna be an eight foot cmu screening wall. We're willing for that to be 10 to 15 feet.
[1:23:41] um, and then there's another eight foot screen wall for the screen service yard as
[1:23:45] well. So what can the
[1:23:49] nearby residents expect? Uh, a quiet low traffic facility. There's no regular
[1:23:53] delivery traffic, no evening or weekend crowds. Sound levels designed to remain within
[1:23:57] the city ordinance limits at all times, including nighttime, uh,
[1:24:02] shielded, downward directed lighting to prevent any sort of spillover on homes. And
[1:24:06] I've already noted on the setbacks, the landscaping and screening. And we're trying to just minimize the total impact
[1:24:10] in general from the adjacent properties. We wanna include
[1:24:14] a slide to talk about who needs a data center. So, uh, to be clear, we do not have a
[1:24:19] customer yet for this project. Uh, we are in the preliminary design phase with encore.
[1:24:23] we've asked for ing megawatts. Um, we have not heard an answer from them if that's even achievable
[1:24:27] yet. They could come back and say it's 40 megawatts. Either way. The maximum amount that this pro, this project
[1:24:31] would be is 70 megawatts. Um, that's a midscale data center. So it's
[1:24:35] too small for a ai training facility. It certainly won't be a bitcoin mining
[1:24:40] facility. Those are bad. Those are loud. You know, every time that you call 9 1 1 that you use
[1:24:44] your email or use social media, it's being processed through a data center. So this, our
[1:24:48] customers could be someone like adele, like instagram, visa payments processing. We're not really
[1:24:52] sure, but it's just a good example of who a fa a facility of this size could potentially
[1:24:57] work for. I wanted to speak a little on the closed loop
[1:25:01] cooling system that will be, uh, written into the pod and certainly used for this project.
[1:25:05] so, uh, this, it's sort of operates somewhere to a car radiator where there's an
[1:25:09] initial charge, and from there there's only a 2% loss factor annually. So
[1:25:13] when you look at in terms of, um, houses, uh,
[1:25:17] the operations of the data center alone use around two homes worth of
[1:25:21] water on an annual basis. If you include, uh, irrigation
[1:25:26] for the whole site, that number could be closer to 15. But either way, that
[1:25:30] is significantly less than what we expect the 173 multifamily unit
[1:25:34] project to, to use. And on that front, we
[1:25:38] wanted to point to two existing projects with real data that we got
[1:25:42] from the city of round rock, the switch and sbe data centers that have been operational for one
[1:25:47] year and two years respectively. Uh, looking at sb for an example, they only used
[1:25:51] 137,000 gallons for the actual operations of the data center
[1:25:55] last year. And again, if you include the irrigation on the rest of the site, it's around 15
[1:25:59] homes, but it's still de minimus compared to the alternative. And at the same time,
[1:26:03] that project is providing the tax revenue equivalent to that of 600 single family homes.
[1:26:08] from a noise standpoint, there's been no recorded noise complaints received by the city.
[1:26:12] um, and that's for dba and dbc, low frequency vibration. They've been a friendly
[1:26:16] neighbor to the adjacent residential areas, and there's been no harmful wastewater contaminants
[1:26:21] identified. So, uh, we wanted to
[1:26:25] address some common concerns versus facts. Um, so this is a mid-skill
[1:26:29] data center. Um, and in order for this project to be approved, uh,
[1:26:33] encore and ercot, who oversees the power grid, has to run an interconnection
[1:26:37] analysis and ensure that this is not going to impact the existing residential customers. If there's
[1:26:41] any sort of, uh, cost associated with grid enhancements to serve this project, they'll
[1:26:46] be fully born by the developer and our eventual user. Um,
[1:26:50] and from a, you can think about it like this as well. We're adding capacity to the grid in
[1:26:54] that if the, uh, in the event that there is a grid shutdown, all of the power
[1:26:58] from the grid serving this facility will be rerouted to the adjacent residential.
[1:27:02] and that's the only case in which the backup generators would be running continuously. Um,
[1:27:06] from a low frequency vibration standpoint, uh, there are specialized inertia pads and spring isolators
[1:27:11] for this equipment to prevent vibration from entering the ground. And again, I think with the setbacks
[1:27:15] that we're including here and the, uh, a hundred foot landscape buffer with trees
[1:27:19] and the two eight foot masonry walls, I just think that that should not be a, an issue here. However,
[1:27:24] we have initiated a, a sound in vibration study with kimley horn
[1:27:28] that we're gonna bring to council and share what the results of that study as well.
[1:27:33] um, sound similar story. We are, um, designing with best screening
[1:27:38] practices, and we do believe that at the distance it's a setback that's going to be a, a non-issue.
[1:27:42] um, there are some concerns that we've read online about the backup generators. The backup generators
[1:27:46] will only be on for monthly testing for about 30 minutes at a time, all
[1:27:51] during daytime hours from the hours of 10:00 am to 5:00 pm um,
[1:27:55] the only time that they'd be on for an extended period of time is if there is a grid shutdown.
[1:27:59] uh, air quality, our generators are used infrequently, as I mentioned, and they must comply with
[1:28:04] tceq and federal air quality standards radiation. There's no
[1:28:08] ionizing radiation that is produced by this project. Um, health impacts,
[1:28:12] there's no harmful chemicals that are emit, uh, from this project.
[1:28:16] emf fields, uh, data centers are fully enclosed, reinforce concrete structures
[1:28:20] with building walls, concrete building walls that are over a foot thick, so that naturally
[1:28:24] attenuates the emf fields. Um, and light pollution, as I mentioned, we're shielding the
[1:28:28] lighting. We're directing it downward. It's not gonna be some beaming feature. Um, there's
[1:28:33] really just gonna be security yard security lighting in the screening yard, um, at night.
[1:28:37] and we're adhering to dark sky best practices. And we also wanted to address why is
[1:28:41] a pud being used? The zoning code does not, uh, specifically address data centers. This
[1:28:45] is our only route to do so. Um, however, uh, that's why we had to go with the heavy
[1:28:49] industrial path. That's our only path via the city of hu code to entitle
[1:28:53] a data center. That being said, you can, it's an opportunity for the city to maintain a
[1:28:58] greater control over the design elements, such as, such as setbacks, building height,
[1:29:02] sound, and site layout in addition to use. So if there's
[1:29:06] concerns about the heavy industrial use, you can write in the code that one day. If this data center doesn't exist
[1:29:10] here, you could write in all the things you'd be concerned about are also not allowed in
[1:29:15] this project. From a timeline standpoint, um, we started meeting
[1:29:19] with the neighborhood back in the fall of last year. We submitted our putt in february. We're obviously here
[1:29:23] at pz tonight on april 7th. Council will be on may 7th. The earliest
[1:29:27] possible date we think we'd start construction is 2028. But with what we're hearing with how
[1:29:32] backed up the grid is at the moment, we think it's much more likely maybe 20, 29 and 2030 is
[1:29:36] the actual energization date for this project.
[1:29:40] and with that, really appreciate the time to present to you all tonight. We view this as the highest and best use for
[1:29:44] this particular site. Um, and I'm here to answer any questions. Thank you.
[1:29:48] thank you. Okay, so
[1:29:52] we've got the presentations concluded. I believe now would be a good time
[1:29:57] to open the public hearing.
[1:30:01] so I am going to open the public hearing at 8:30 pm
[1:30:10] and we have several people who have signed up to speak
[1:30:15] the president. I'm gonna go straight down the line here. Uh, first
[1:30:19] we have, uh, come on down. Nick kock.
[1:30:26] is nick still here? He's there. Oh, there he is.
[1:30:36] good evening. I'm nick crane. I'm at, uh, 10 13 vanderau road
[1:30:40] here in hu. Um, obviously speaking, um, against
[1:30:45] changing the zoning for the data center, um,
[1:30:50] I just think that there's threats to long-term
[1:30:54] sustainability and quality of life in the community. I know that the
[1:30:58] presentation was just kind of addressing some of those issues, but with
[1:31:02] the data centers in round rock, I think that one to two years of
[1:31:06] data he was showing that's not enough. It's a short period of time. I know data centers are
[1:31:11] new. They're trying to come all here at central texas, but I just don't think one to two years
[1:31:15] of data, um, is enough to justify changing the zoning to
[1:31:19] place the data center here. My biggest concerns are, uh, water
[1:31:23] and then the, uh, electric grid, because there could be issues with,
[1:31:28] uh, the facility consuming, um, a lot of water.
[1:31:32] and then obviously the texas power grid, the grid here
[1:31:36] isn't the best. Uh, we just moved over here from georgetown. Our neighborhood is, you know,
[1:31:41] six was six years old over in georgetown. And, uh, you can pretty much put it on the
[1:31:45] calendar power outages like once or twice a month, if not
[1:31:49] more, which is a major issue. We have young kids, uh, we had family members staying
[1:31:53] with us that needed, um, power for, you know, oxygen tanks and stuff. So,
[1:31:58] um, having more draw on the electric grid is not good.
[1:32:02] um, especially with central texas growing,
[1:32:06] uh, as it is. So I would urge, uh,
[1:32:10] to consider the water, the power, and then also, uh, the noise pollution because
[1:32:15] you can, you can say that that data centers or this data center isn't gonna
[1:32:19] have a ton of noise, um, data centers do, and that's gonna cause issues
[1:32:24] for those neighborhoods around the proposed site. And
[1:32:28] I mean, you could say that this data center is gonna be quiet, I'd say quiet compared
[1:32:32] to what, like a 7 47 engine or, you know, I don't know.
[1:32:37] uh, but so I would, I would consider the, the, the water impact that
[1:32:41] could impact the local community, the power grid strain, that's the biggest problem.
[1:32:45] and then how much it's going to, you know, drive up cost for the people to actually live
[1:32:49] here and live around the proposed site. So I would,
[1:32:54] uh, strongly advise against changing the zoning.
[1:32:58] and, um, were you, I don't remember, sorry.
[1:33:03] were you allowed to answer questions? We, we can do a little bit of back and forth.
[1:33:07] okay. That is, that is permissible on a public hearing. Um, yeah,
[1:33:12] so the biggest thing for me is,
[1:33:17] um, where's the, the power coming from water
[1:33:21] supply? And then also is there an alternative site
[1:33:25] for the proposed, uh, data center. So
[1:33:29] as far as alternative sites, I don't think that would be considered on this item.
[1:33:34] this item is talking about changing this specific site
[1:33:38] from residential multifamily to heavy industrial
[1:33:43] for the data center. Okay. So it's specific to this particular site.
[1:33:47] are there other places that might go, that's
[1:33:51] open to discussion and speculation. Okay. But it's not part
[1:33:55] of this item. Okay. With, with the five,
[1:34:00] right. With the issues, uh, you know, with the water and the power, I would suggest
[1:34:04] hopefully that no data centers come in to the city of hu so that
[1:34:09] the people can have a high quality of life here. Thank you for your time. Alright. Thank you.
[1:34:13] yep.
[1:34:21] okay. I, I think that's acceptable. Alright, so
[1:34:25] I've been asked, um, if you
[1:34:29] come up to speak, if you could tell us what subdivision, what neighborhood
[1:34:33] you're from, that would be helpful.
[1:34:37] all right. Next up is, uh, david garza.
[1:34:51] good evening. Uh, david garza. I live, uh,
[1:34:55] just across the street from this proposed location at, uh, in emory farms. 4 22
[1:35:00] emory farm creek road, farm creek drive, excuse me. Um,
[1:35:05] so long, make it very quick and simple. I'm, I'm
[1:35:09] against this, uh, proposed, uh, change. I think that there could
[1:35:13] potentially be better uses, um,
[1:35:17] for that land. Obviously I've lived there for, uh,
[1:35:21] since 2017. It's the, the newer part of the subdivision. Um,
[1:35:26] I grew up in hudu. Uh, I, I went
[1:35:30] to the middle school when it was the middle school and the high school. Like, I remember there was
[1:35:34] one light in this, in this town at one point. And that, that's, you know,
[1:35:39] that was it. It was very simple, right? A lot of that hu do I miss? You
[1:35:43] know, it was very, very easy to navigate through, um, not as much congestion,
[1:35:47] but understanding that these are the times that we live in, you know, austin
[1:35:52] grew, and with that, the surrounding areas grew. So
[1:35:56] I'm all for that. And I'm not necessarily against data centers. Again, the,
[1:36:01] these are changing times and it seems like data centers are here to stay with, uh,
[1:36:05] the advancements in technology and, and just the direction and everything's going. Um,
[1:36:10] but why there, you know, uh, ,
[1:36:15] I mean, we're looking at images on the screen and you see neighborhood, neighborhood, neighborhood
[1:36:20] data center, like schools, schools, you
[1:36:24] know, there, there's, I'm not trying
[1:36:28] to make this so complex and I'm not, I don't wanna get into the engineering side of things. I understand
[1:36:32] it's closed loop system, you know, 200,000 gallons, and then that's essentially
[1:36:37] a wall that they're gonna use. We're not really worried about that. They're gonna provide their own energy. Great.
[1:36:42] my neighborhood's adjacent to it. I find it
[1:36:47] difficult for someone, let's say I intend on selling my
[1:36:51] home. A lot of young families in that neighborhood. If I sell my home
[1:36:56] and I'm putting a listing on zillow, what I don't want is under amenities
[1:37:00] to put a data center a
[1:37:04] thousand feet away.
[1:37:12] again, I, I understand in your, in your positions, it's difficult, right?
[1:37:16] you're, you're trying to do what's best for the community, generate tax revenue. And believe me, I'm
[1:37:20] all for reducing taxes and bringing in as much revenue as possible.
[1:37:25] I'm to the other gentleman's point, we're not, it doesn't seem like
[1:37:29] there's a shortage of land here in texas. We have land for
[1:37:33] days. Um, you know, it, it could be a convenience putting it there
[1:37:37] because of the infrastructure surrounding it. And yes, it is a landlocked spot.
[1:37:41] it's, it, you know, the city made some decisions years back in place and
[1:37:46] started sprinkling neighborhoods left and right. And, and so we just have this odd plot of
[1:37:50] land with a bunch of utility of going across it
[1:37:54] yourselves. You have an opportunity to really sit
[1:37:58] down and think, what would be really cool to put there? You
[1:38:02] know, aside from from, from family homes, what else could we do to bring
[1:38:06] the, the community together? It's central to hu you know, um, we
[1:38:11] have a lot of development in and around the, the surrounding areas. And I again, put a
[1:38:15] data center outside the, uh, you know, outside
[1:38:19] of, not in the middle of all of our residential mm-hmm . Um, again,
[1:38:23] I don't, I, I, I, this is not to be combative. This is just me expressing, you know,
[1:38:29] my thoughts and concerns as a homeowner. Uh,
[1:38:33] I don't know if I'm in the minority, but . But again,
[1:38:37] uh, I, I hope you all consider these things. Uh, again, it's not,
[1:38:41] you know, it was a great presentation and there could be some, some benefits. But from
[1:38:46] a simplicity standpoint, do I want to just be driving down the street and see
[1:38:50] a data center across the street from my neighborhood? Nope. No, no. That's all I
[1:38:54] have to say. Thank you for your time. Thank you.
[1:39:02] all right. Next up we have brett sutton.
[1:39:14] uh, hi, my name is brett sutton and I live at 1 0 2 golden
[1:39:18] lane in carmel creek. Um, I've been thinking
[1:39:22] about this issue for a while and researching it, uh, because I
[1:39:27] saw the , uh, data center, and there's about five
[1:39:31] different things on my mind. I mean, I'm an engineer.
[1:39:35] um, I spent almost a decade engineering racks for
[1:39:39] dell, uh, in data centers, you know, enough to fill up like,
[1:39:43] I don't know, a million square feet, tons of tons of, uh, space,
[1:39:48] you know, is what I've engineered. And I see, um,
[1:39:52] different engineering concerns. I'm not concerned about the water. Um,
[1:39:57] but four things really. It's, it's the electricity, it's
[1:40:01] the heat, it's the noise, and then the attractiveness to the city.
[1:40:06] um, so as far as electricity goes,
[1:40:10] I think that they mentioned at the beginning of the presentation that,
[1:40:15] well, this meets our adjacency needs. So there's a little bit
[1:40:19] of a financial incentive to put it there, because if they don't
[1:40:24] put the data center there, they have to go through what's called a large load interconnect,
[1:40:29] uh, process, if I'm not mistaken, to actually, you
[1:40:33] know, work through running the power lines out to, uh,
[1:40:37] further out in the city, right? Which is where I would advocate for this to happen. I'm
[1:40:41] against the data center in that particular location, but,
[1:40:45] okay, so let's say that, you know,
[1:40:49] they don't want to put it out there outside
[1:40:54] the city and they're like, oh, we want this because it's cheaper.
[1:40:58] okay, well, um, what about noise? And
[1:41:03] what about heat? And if you're not gonna pay
[1:41:07] for the large load interconnect process, then why don't
[1:41:11] you pay for somebody in the city to choose
[1:41:16] some consultants who can do a professional
[1:41:20] engineering study, like a heat island simulation one
[1:41:25] and a noise, uh, noise engineering study. Um,
[1:41:29] I know they mentioned a noise study by kinley and horn, but it's like, well,
[1:41:33] hey, they paid for this study. Like, is
[1:41:37] it, isn't it gonna be biased towards them? Um, so
[1:41:42] why not, you know, just find some engineers who are kind of third party
[1:41:46] a could be university students who aren't really in it for
[1:41:50] the politics or the finances, or b um, have some
[1:41:54] people in the city find those consultants somewhere in the country. Um,
[1:41:59] I'll volunteer to help with that. . Um, I live in carmel
[1:42:04] creek, so I'm not really fully motivated
[1:42:08] to get this outta my backyard, but I do think it should be in the outer regions
[1:42:12] for, and I'll try to make this short. Okay, so attractiveness is kind of like a
[1:42:16] no brainer to put it in the middle of a city. And then I, I googled
[1:42:21] population projections for hudu and it was like 400,000. And I
[1:42:25] was like, wow, that's a really weird number. I don't see it getting up there, but let's
[1:42:29] just say that the city is a hundred or 200,000 people. Do you really want
[1:42:33] the downtown to be like a data center? Like
[1:42:37] I, I wouldn't. Um, so like round rock's
[1:42:41] a hundred thousand. So what happens when hu's a hundred thousand? Like, are we gonna have a
[1:42:46] downtown that looks like round rock, that's like actually cool, or like, you know,
[1:42:50] like a data center . Um, so yeah, I guess
[1:42:55] I addressed attractiveness, um, I addressed electricity
[1:42:59] a little bit. I, yeah, I addressed noise and light,
[1:43:03] but I do wanna just come back to one point, um, before I
[1:43:08] end. And, and that is really that I think that
[1:43:13] the electricity numbers should be public. The electricity consumption
[1:43:18] should not be secretive, should not be under, uh, non-disclosure agreement
[1:43:22] because we're afraid that we're gonna lose a competitive advantage. I racked
[1:43:26] my brain trying to think of ways in which like having
[1:43:30] that number private would give a business a competitive advantage. And
[1:43:35] I'm not, I'm just not seeing it. Whether it's from a hardware producer, software
[1:43:39] producer, hardware user, like purchaser of the
[1:43:43] services or software user, I'm not seeing how
[1:43:47] publishing a power consumption number would fail
[1:43:52] to, to give a competitive advantage. And I, I'm saying this because
[1:43:56] I think that power consumption numbers should be public. It, it
[1:44:00] should be like a budget, you know, like we can see the city budget. Okay, so why can't
[1:44:04] we see the power budget, right? So I would just really advocate that,
[1:44:09] um, those numbers be made public, but I think that the equipment
[1:44:13] that is being used inside of the data center should not necessarily be,
[1:44:17] well, shouldn't really be public, but that, um,
[1:44:22] you know, to verify that these power and these water numbers are
[1:44:26] actually legitimate. That there, there be an engineer somewhere
[1:44:31] in the city who is under nda, who can see an itemized list
[1:44:35] of the equipment used, um, for, for
[1:44:39] water and power consumption. Alright, thank you.
[1:44:50] okay, next up I have nick choi.
[1:45:04] good evening. Uh, my name is nick choi. I own a property on
[1:45:09] hilton street, which is, uh, directly adjacent to the
[1:45:13] proposed plan. I'm here to express concerns about the proposed zoning change
[1:45:18] for the data center. Uh, first, this is a 70 megawatt
[1:45:22] facility roughly equivalent to powering 20,000
[1:45:26] homes. While I, I appreciate the focus on the power, reliability
[1:45:31] and availability, the high power consumptions
[1:45:36] from the dana center can pressure and
[1:45:40] increase the ongoing, uh, electric bill for
[1:45:44] the surrounding area. This will not be just one time
[1:45:48] cost, but added reoccurring cost for the neighborhoods
[1:45:53] and surroundings areas for the huddle. Second,
[1:45:57] the proposed proposal describes low noise.
[1:46:01] this is around 40 decibel as the document shows. However,
[1:46:06] the constant 40 decibel is not silent. It
[1:46:10] may not be noticeable in the daytime, however, at night it can be
[1:46:14] noticeable comparison
[1:46:18] to, to the existing data center. I don't think it's
[1:46:23] directly applicable because those existing facilities are a lot smaller
[1:46:27] and located further away from existing residential areas.
[1:46:32] and I visited those sites today. They are right next to highways,
[1:46:37] meaning there are a lot of background note already existing, which
[1:46:41] makes it people who, um, around the area may not notice
[1:46:45] that this project is different.
[1:46:49] third, mainly data center rely on backup power generators during
[1:46:54] the power outages. Potentially not one,
[1:46:59] but potentially couple dozens. And these are not
[1:47:03] small power generator you may see when you go on a campsite. These
[1:47:07] are large industrial generator, not just one, but many
[1:47:13] during the extended power scenarios such as winter storm
[1:47:18] uri operating multiple generators, steam seriously
[1:47:23] raises concerns about sustained noise and air quality concerns
[1:47:27] for the community. So if, if
[1:47:31] someone states that there's no noise or no air quality concerns,
[1:47:36] that may be normal state, but during the emergency
[1:47:40] situation, it may be difficult for the surrounding areas.
[1:47:44] fourth, I'm concerned about property values at best, these types of development
[1:47:49] is neutral for the area at best, but it introduce
[1:47:54] risk for nearby homeowners and does not enhance neighborhood
[1:47:58] value. Finally, there is more appropriate locations
[1:48:02] for these types of facility, such as existing industrial
[1:48:06] zones or sites nearby highway where already there
[1:48:11] are background noises exist away from residential communities.
[1:48:16] for these reasons, I do not support the proposed zoning change.
[1:48:20] I give some thoughts about why developer selected this particular site.
[1:48:25] I can relate that the developer see, sees the location attractive because
[1:48:30] the substation is right there. So during the winter storm, they don't have
[1:48:34] to worry about distribution line falling down by the trees.
[1:48:40] I can also see the, uh, perspective from the city. This will, uh, allow
[1:48:44] the, um, land utilizations also generate a lot of tax
[1:48:48] revenues. I like to encourage
[1:48:52] the huddle city leaders to do the right thing for the people and the
[1:48:56] families in the huddle and not be misled by tax revenues. Thank
[1:49:01] you.
[1:49:10] next up is sandra roth.
[1:49:25] my name is sandra roth and I live at 6 0 1 open range
[1:49:30] drive in emory farm subdivision. I'm not gonna belabor the point.
[1:49:34] each one of the gentlemen that proceeded me, I agree with
[1:49:38] everything they said. Those are my concerns. My house faces
[1:49:42] ed schmidt boulevard. The last thing I want to do is look out of my living room
[1:49:46] window and see a data center. So I object
[1:49:51] to the proposal and the erection of the data center. Thank you.
[1:49:55] thank you.
[1:50:03] uh, next is, I'm gonna butcher the name again, sorry. Catherine,
[1:50:07] mike, meek, meek,
[1:50:12] it gets people. Uh, yes. Catherine meek. I'm at
[1:50:16] 1 0 8 david drive in country estates. And
[1:50:21] I am not tied to this project and probably represent
[1:50:25] the unpopular opinion in the room. But as an energy
[1:50:29] consultant with 20 years in the development space, I wanted to bring some context
[1:50:33] as to what a project like this means in practice. Uh, the
[1:50:38] developer showed two previous projects, one with a year in marketplace and the
[1:50:42] other with two years in marketplace. And just for a little bit of perspective,
[1:50:46] those projects probably started in concept about
[1:50:50] five years ago when technology did not offer a lot of the things
[1:50:54] that are available now. In fact, in the developer's project, they've cited that they
[1:50:58] wanna use a closed loop cooling system and that the tenant has
[1:51:02] not quite yet been defined yet. So if we put this in practice at the rate of technology
[1:51:07] movement, their end use tenant in the building may not
[1:51:11] need water at all. It may be air cooled, it may be a proprietary cooling system they
[1:51:15] use for their chip. And as far as deciding what
[1:51:19] the actual load will be at 70 megawatts, that
[1:51:23] is a sizable amount of power. But I also wanna give some context as
[1:51:28] to how that works. Data center projects have a ramp schedule.
[1:51:32] so at best case scenario, they may start with maybe
[1:51:36] 25 megawatts of power. And every year for six
[1:51:40] to 10 years, depending on the size of the project, they increase a little bit
[1:51:44] more, a little bit, a little bit more. That's according to encore and ercot
[1:51:49] study to maintain grid harmony. So it does not all come on
[1:51:53] at the exact same time. And as the developer pointed out,
[1:51:57] any infrastructure needs that are required are gonna be bore by
[1:52:01] by them to get the project up. So here's another little perspective that
[1:52:05] I wanna leave the city and the residents with for the state of texas. Best
[1:52:09] case scenario, our energy infrastructure is 60 years old.
[1:52:14] it's weak and crumbling and it isn't sufficient. Take away a large load
[1:52:18] interconnection and data center demand. We need stable power, which
[1:52:22] means we need new and higher volume transmission lines.
[1:52:27] and the only way to get that is to pass that cost onto
[1:52:31] somebody who has a project that they're willing to pay the increased cost of
[1:52:35] infrastructure for when
[1:52:40] the developer pays for it, it does not show up in rate base
[1:52:45] when the developer does not pay for it. And the utility has to extend
[1:52:49] because of natural growth. It does show up in distribution
[1:52:53] and, and in rate base. And with encore, you have the two metrics, right?
[1:52:58] you have the cost of supply, and then you have the cost of delivery. So
[1:53:02] the residents immediately in the area, their relationship to that
[1:53:06] substation is going to change once the volume of power increases.
[1:53:10] and the way delivery works is the more you need, the less you pay for it
[1:53:15] because the channels to get it there become more efficient. Now, what I wanna
[1:53:19] pose to the city and to the residents today is not necessarily
[1:53:24] how you feel about data centers. That is important. And
[1:53:28] you have the advantage of having really the purse in
[1:53:32] the room to let them know what you want to see in order to accept this
[1:53:36] growth. It's not really do we want
[1:53:41] them, it's if they come, what do we want them to do for us?
[1:53:45] what do we want them to bring for us? Looking at the
[1:53:49] site map, uh, when mr. Konz was laying out the
[1:53:53] plot, I can tell you that if I were citing this project, I probably would not
[1:53:57] have chosen something right in the middle of a residential community. And
[1:54:01] it wasn't until, and I'll I'll also say this, I was not aware of this project
[1:54:06] until tonight. I didn't prepare a speech. I'm giving you 20
[1:54:10] years of my insights and my knowledge about how these
[1:54:14] projects grow and what their constraints are.
[1:54:19] now I can see why this site has been
[1:54:23] slated for this project. And to put it into context, 40 acres is a very small
[1:54:27] data center. We're normally seeing megawatts,
[1:54:32] not rather not megawatts, but gigawatts, which go on hundreds
[1:54:36] of acres, not tens of acres. So even in the developer's plan,
[1:54:41] buffering a five acre, uh, really
[1:54:45] window between the facility itself and the community around it means
[1:54:49] the community has space to ask for what they do. Look at in that five acres,
[1:54:54] does it look like a park? Does it look like a hedge wall? To not have
[1:54:58] to look at that building, that is a very serious, I think, concern. We
[1:55:02] all worry about, oh, this big huge open piece of land,
[1:55:06] what's it gonna look like now when somebody builds something on it? So the residents have
[1:55:11] an opportunity then to say, all right, if there's an upside, then this
[1:55:15] is what we want. And that's why I came out tonight. No
[1:55:19] data center
[1:55:25] is my time over. Well, thank you so much. I I generally don't
[1:55:29] hold people to the three minutes, but we do have a lot of other people who need. That's
[1:55:34] what I had to say. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. She didn't get any claps.
[1:55:39] all right, next up is andrew walsh.
[1:55:51] good evening counsel. Uh, as the previous speaker,
[1:55:55] and unlike everyone else here, you know, everyone else here
[1:56:00] I stand with the, the proposed rezoning of the
[1:56:04] itchy grass and trees into a data center. You guys,
[1:56:08] elon musk is about to be a trillionaire. Isn't that cool? ,
[1:56:12] who are we to stand between a man and his dreams? More locally.
[1:56:16] our mayor is a gambler. We've seen him at the shady game rooms around town.
[1:56:21] why not let 'em gamble with our future?
[1:56:26] uh, I don't know about y'all. I'm tired of hearing my friends and neighbors
[1:56:30] complain about their rising electric bill. Uh, instead of paying to heat
[1:56:34] your home, we can just stick a giant heater right downtown.
[1:56:41] uh, the proposed data center will add over three permanent jobs to
[1:56:45] our city , that
[1:56:49] enable us to create videos of sonic the hedgehog kissing donkey
[1:56:54] kong. Um, in all honesty, it is pretty sickening how
[1:56:58] our future's being sold to big tech billionaires. Um,
[1:57:02] aaron king, you ran on no new revenue, so you should probably stick
[1:57:06] to that. Peter gordon, your facebook posts are tone deaf.
[1:57:10] we all saw him last night. It was, it's disgusting quote. Not as bad
[1:57:14] as the other data center. I'm sorry. Rough quote. Not as bad as other data centers.
[1:57:19] that's not good enough for us. It's not the flex you think it is. Uh,
[1:57:23] every summer since I moved here, we've been put on water restrictions
[1:57:28] to told us we can't do this. We can't do that. Why? We want to add to
[1:57:32] that strain. And I know they call this closed loop, but still
[1:57:37] they, the energy that they consume, the power plants consume tons of water.
[1:57:41] so whether it's directly on site or indirect, it's going to put a strain on our grid.
[1:57:46] I have a daughter, she turns six months old today. I can see
[1:57:50] the average age up here is a lot higher than that. So she's gonna have to deal with this
[1:57:55] decision much longer than you guys are. I implore
[1:57:59] this council to stop the madness, put in a green space, a park, anything
[1:58:03] but this data center. Thank
[1:58:07] you.
[1:58:17] real quick, uh, point of clarification. This is not city
[1:58:21] council. This is p and t. I just wanna make sure you guys know .
[1:58:26] thanks for the compliment. Thank you brandon. It's a rehearsing there. It's
[1:58:30] public hearing. They can say what they want. I know. I just wanna make sure this is,
[1:58:36] I I was looking around. Uh, yeah, they're not up here. Alright,
[1:58:40] uh, next up is hannah miller.
[1:58:48] hello, my name is hannah miller and I live at three 19 black bear drive in cottonwood
[1:58:52] farms. Um, a lot of the people up here have already said a lot of the things I
[1:58:56] was, uh, had in mind, but I will just mention a few things.
[1:59:00] um, as previously stated, we do not have a lot of data on data centers
[1:59:05] and we have no idea of their long-term impacts on the environment or the
[1:59:09] health of the residents who live nearby. And even if
[1:59:13] zydeco is able to make good on their word and not use a lot of water or electricity,
[1:59:17] it will still affect property values. People are going to look at home listings,
[1:59:21] see it's close to a data center, and just scroll on by without giving it a second thought.
[1:59:25] um, there are plenty of options for what to do with that land other than
[1:59:29] a data center, as you said, a trail, a nature park, a bike path, a dog park.
[1:59:34] I don't think the residents of huro should have to put up with poten so many potential
[1:59:39] negative factors because iica wants to save some money. Thank you.
[1:59:50] next up is alexander sellers.
[2:00:03] hi, I am alex sellers. I live off of 2 0 8 brookside street in hu town square north.
[2:00:07] um, I am opposed to it obviously. Unlike the very, very few people
[2:00:11] that are here at the fort. Um, there are some concerns with data centers.
[2:00:16] I come from a background in cybersecurity engineering. I've worked at data centers myself.
[2:00:20] um, they do come with busy construction. Now, as we all know, limmer loop and ed
[2:00:24] schmidt are both two lane roads. They, um, the two
[2:00:28] comparables they gave both sbe and switch are adjacent to toll
[2:00:32] road 45 feeder roads. And if you look at the map, it's close to I 35
[2:00:36] as well. So you have easy access. Now with this, it does
[2:00:40] not bring many jobs. Once it's completed, it's gonna bring 20 to 40 maxs. That
[2:00:44] includes a standard number of five to seven people of the size of the data center for
[2:00:49] security onsite technicians and then it specialists. So
[2:00:53] these are gonna be very specialized roles, um, which probably won't be coming from this,
[2:00:57] uh, this community. Um, this also removes the pillar
[2:01:01] for highest quality of life here for hu um, the bi. Now, during conversation
[2:01:06] they had with rhoa, they brought up a, uh, a motion saying that
[2:01:10] the buyers and use, uh, and users of the data center can help the
[2:01:14] community. Do you want amazon meta? Who's facebook at instagram,
[2:01:18] or even google to come in here and have a say on your community meetings?
[2:01:22] no. Um, this land cannot be reclaimed once the zone has
[2:01:26] been used for data center for up to eight to 10. Uh, after, you know, it becomes
[2:01:31] redundant. Eight to 10 years. It takes a long time to have this all this ripped out, have
[2:01:35] it destroyed, taken down. There's gonna be batteries. It has to be an environmental impact
[2:01:39] analysis done. Um, the, uh,
[2:01:43] there's not, they have not specified what kind of data center is gonna be built. Obviously it's
[2:01:47] roughly after the ramp up period, probably about 70, uh, megawatts.
[2:01:52] um, besides it not being used for ai farming or,
[2:01:56] um, bitcoin mining, um, zydeco does not have a user for the data center yet.
[2:02:00] but if it is a compute data center, the refresh is every five to 10 years. Now
[2:02:04] that's overtime and it's not some dude driving up in a truck, you know, his little, uh, f-150
[2:02:09] or, um, silverado and dropping off a couple of units, like
[2:02:13] a couple of computers. It's semis coming in there, unloading, loading, leaving.
[2:02:17] if it's data storage data center, the refresh is every three to six years.
[2:02:22] um, that number is actually, I can't remember the website's name, but they, um, do
[2:02:26] impact for hard drives. Um, so that number is a hundred percent accurate.
[2:02:30] the risk, um, sies second building just had a fire at
[2:02:35] their, um, battery storage facility. I'm sure someone else is gonna bring this up soon.
[2:02:39] um, the negative impacts of just that, um, alone,
[2:02:44] it, you know, requires cleanup environmental repairs for quite some time. This is
[2:02:48] obviously a one off, but what happens if it happens here? Um, next to this
[2:02:52] neighborhood now mentioned in their request and part of the
[2:02:56] documentation they have under item six criteria, the proposed future land does,
[2:03:00] uh, use, does not create a public nuisance or have adverse impact on surrounding properties
[2:03:05] or, uh, the natural environment. Justification of the nearby residents are aware of the intended to use
[2:03:09] the property and largely support the change, which, uh, recognizes the facts that
[2:03:13] intended land use is not a nuisance nor will have an adverse impact.
[2:03:17] I don't know who they talked to besides peter gordon. Um, as attached on the,
[2:03:22] uh, the agenda packet, there are many individuals living within the direct impact,
[2:03:26] um, impacted area that it provided feedback objecting to
[2:03:30] the rezoning. Now I live 2,300 feet away. I've seen
[2:03:34] quite a few of my neighbors that are on the exact same street as me. I'm sure they're all here to oppose it
[2:03:38] as well. Um, now going back to the hu pillar for create the
[2:03:42] highest quality of life next to the switch data center, which again, off of the,
[2:03:46] um, toll road 45 next to I 35, it is
[2:03:51] directly north to of the dell, um, campus.
[2:03:56] looking at one of the houses there, 2302 stratford drive
[2:04:00] in round rock. The house directly north. Um, or no, this
[2:04:04] one was directly east of that data center. So this would directly impact
[2:04:09] the houses along in hu town square south. That house was
[2:04:13] built in 1985. Those houses along that strip were built in 2012.
[2:04:18] by that logic, I'm no real estate agent, but I have worked in real estate appraisal
[2:04:22] in the past. Um, that is not a comparable, I don't know what they're looking at,
[2:04:26] but that is not a comparable. Um, now looking at the next
[2:04:30] one, there was the, um, se the houses there
[2:04:34] were built in 2002, 2004, 2005. Um,
[2:04:39] all north of the se building two, which is still being developed.
[2:04:43] um, along all of those, if we're gonna remove everything else, taking
[2:04:47] the exact impact on the housing values since the se
[2:04:51] campus one was built and launched in october of 2024, um,
[2:04:56] we have a negative home valuation of eight and a half percent.
[2:05:01] wow. Now, um, with all of that,
[2:05:06] with hu town square being where it is, limmer and at schmidt, all those homes
[2:05:10] were built well after 2020, uh, 20 14, 20 15.
[2:05:14] they're not near busy road, uh, busy roads. And again, they're all newer. So
[2:05:18] I'm gonna leave that there. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
[2:05:28] alright, next up we have david, uh, caballero,
[2:05:39] how are you? My name is, uh, david caballero. I'm on 7 1 7 gray fox
[2:05:43] loop. Um, I'm a registered architect as well for the state of texas. Um, so I, I
[2:05:47] do wanna compliment the developer, ms. Meeks as well. I've been in a lot of these forums and it's very
[2:05:51] difficult sometimes, especially with community members, but I, I appreciate you come out and presenting.
[2:05:56] um, even though I am ag against the, the data center as well, um, as well
[2:06:00] as everybody else. So, you know, I, I did make the signs too and kind of passed 'em out. So sorry for that.
[2:06:04] . Um, what can I say that hasn't been said?
[2:06:08] um, I think a lot of my concerns is obviously the, the rising utility costs.
[2:06:12] um, but mainly is just location. I mean, I, I think when you look at the
[2:06:17] site and you're in between the, the two large community investments, right? Even with
[2:06:21] cottonwood farms at, at the, at the top corner, um, you're asking
[2:06:25] to bring this facility into our neighborhood, into our community, and then
[2:06:29] repeatedly the developer repeats, hey, we're, we're here to be a good neighbor, right? But, but you're
[2:06:33] asking us to accept this prison in our neighborhood, right? Something we
[2:06:37] can't access that shielded has no community input. No community
[2:06:42] resources that gives back to the community. It just benefits the taxes, right?
[2:06:47] but it doesn't benefit us, right? So how do, how can we,
[2:06:51] you know, justify it? Justify it? There we go. Thanks, thanks for
[2:06:55] that. And so that, that's my main concern. 'cause the only thing that I'm seeing is like, now you're
[2:06:59] reducing our home prices, right? I get, hey, you're, you're, you're trying to keep, no, we're
[2:07:03] not raising tax rates. That's our, that's our big goal for, for this year, right? And you're trying to find any way
[2:07:08] to do it, right? But what you're not seeing is that you're doing it by lowering
[2:07:12] our home prices, increasing our utility rates, and you're not making it sustainable as for us to
[2:07:16] be here, right? Or to even make it a livable place where we want to be here,
[2:07:21] right? And so, I, I get, it's not a desirable area. Um,
[2:07:25] you're looking at the small piece of land that, that has all those utilities and easements run through it,
[2:07:30] but it's such a crown piece and it's such a crown jewel. Um,
[2:07:34] that's nestled in between, in between neighborhoods that can be better than a david center, right?
[2:07:38] and I think it's our responsibility to find a better piece, a better jewel
[2:07:42] that you want to place in the community, right? And that's our responsibility
[2:07:47] and that's what we're here for, right? And so that, that's my piece. That's all, that's
[2:07:51] all I say. It's,
[2:08:01] uh, next up is nick clark.
[2:08:10] good evening everybody. Good evening.
[2:08:14] so we're doing my best not to belabor all the wonderful points that have been made tonight. Uh, I'm
[2:08:18] obviously in the camp of no data center, so shout out to all my friends here for that.
[2:08:23] um, hey, whoop, um, sorry, a and m brad. Um,
[2:08:28] hey, but so I just wanna add a little color to a couple of things that have been
[2:08:32] discussed here and put 'em into some context that maybe more people can quantify
[2:08:36] and understand. So when we're talking about power, what was proposed is about 70 megawatts,
[2:08:40] right? So if we wanna talk about megawatts, 20 megawatts can power upwards of 15,000
[2:08:45] residential homes, right? So in hu, and this is based
[2:08:49] on quick google, this 15,000 homes represents most of the
[2:08:53] residential homes in hudu. So we're talking 20 megawatts
[2:08:57] versus 70. So we're talking almost triple, actually more than triple
[2:09:01] what the actual residential energy cost of the entire neighborhoods
[2:09:05] of hudu. Put that in context. That's more than every one of our homes
[2:09:10] for one building. And then when you talk about the electrical
[2:09:14] infrastructure was mentioned earlier, there's benefits to where they have moved this location. They're
[2:09:19] trying to save themselves money and not have to pay for infrastructure. That is the ultimate
[2:09:23] goal of the developer. I work in construction, so I understand the angle and I
[2:09:27] actually appreciate it. But the problem is, as I was mentioned before,
[2:09:32] the trends show across the entire country. When these data centers are built, the
[2:09:36] end users subsidize the cost. And I'm not talking about direct infrastructure
[2:09:40] that the developer may pay on site to handle the power that they're bringing
[2:09:44] to their facility. But we're talking about what encore at their plants,
[2:09:49] at the overall distribution, any cost that they have to increase to
[2:09:53] generate power for this plant, that ends up going to every end user within this
[2:09:58] area via their electrical providers. So you will see those incremental
[2:10:02] up upticks and they won't tell you why. You'll just, most of the people here,
[2:10:06] they're, they're here, they active, they probably look at their bills, but most of the other residents
[2:10:10] in this town, they won't look, they won't understand. They'll just question why they're at bills or
[2:10:15] harder to meet. So that's power. Then I
[2:10:19] wanna get into water. Obviously they have a closed cooled system, which is very,
[2:10:23] very, very efficient. I've worked on a couple of these buildings that have it, it is great. But
[2:10:27] when we already have data centers in town, taking ca taking up our resources,
[2:10:31] we want to add another thing that's gonna take up our resources. That's
[2:10:36] just a simple question. I'm gonna leave, I'm not gonna get into the numbers when we already have these things taking
[2:10:40] our, taking our resources. Do we want to exacerbate the problem? Something
[2:10:44] else I was mentioned earlier is the, uh, the health, the, the
[2:10:48] issues that this, the health impacts of this development could have. In a study done
[2:10:52] by richard klein of the community and environmental defense services, they found that data
[2:10:56] centers pose negative health risks to those living within even just a half mile radius
[2:11:01] due to the emission of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter. These
[2:11:05] aren't just technical stats. Even the national institute of health links that these particles to
[2:11:09] the thousand or lead two thousands of premature deaths annually. If
[2:11:13] you guys are accused for a real life example in south memphis, the time magazine reported
[2:11:17] on a large scale data center by, uh, xai,
[2:11:21] that had reported that residents were experiencing severe respiratory
[2:11:26] illnesses such as copd, as a direct result of nearby data
[2:11:30] center pollution. And when what was mentioned earlier is whenever the power goes out,
[2:11:34] it's great that the power grid will not take power from the homes and give
[2:11:38] it to the data center and they will be forced to use generators. But as it was mentioned,
[2:11:42] these generators are giant. These guys have a 70 megawatt facility. Some
[2:11:47] of the largest generators I've worked with are three to four, um, megawatts,
[2:11:51] and they're as big as a shipping container. So you gotta imagine they're gonna
[2:11:55] have dozens of these things. And when, if the power goes out for multiple days, like
[2:11:59] we had in the great freeze of 2021, all those powers or all
[2:12:03] those generators are gonna run 24 7. And gus, who's gonna be breathing
[2:12:07] all that smog, all the pollution, the kids at the schools,
[2:12:11] the neighborhoods, and anyone going nearby that facility. So
[2:12:15] think about that. So one more thing to add is,
[2:12:19] furthermore that the cambridge university study of 6,000 projects across
[2:12:24] the united states who did in fact create heat islands where the surface temperatures
[2:12:28] were raised by an average of 3.6 degrees and in some cases raise the
[2:12:32] temperature upwards of 15 degrees. So for anyone that is, has a green thumb in
[2:12:37] plants, plants, I hope we don't plan on planting anything new. This data center just saying.
[2:12:42] and finally, I gotta ask, what does hu really get in exchange for this
[2:12:46] giant risk to our resources, our health, even our local temperatures
[2:12:50] we're asking for uh, meager 10, 15 jobs. Not even
[2:12:54] accounting, if any of them are remote.
[2:12:59] the temporary construction surge will not be staffed by our
[2:13:03] neighbors. It's not gonna be many people from huda. It's gonna be people from out of town.
[2:13:08] it's gonna be people from the area, and you're even out of state. Those are gonna be the people that build those jobs.
[2:13:13] and when the cranes are gone and the dust settles, all we're gonna be left
[2:13:17] is with a giant eyesore. We're gonna have something that sucks
[2:13:21] our resources and potentially puts the health of our children at risk.
[2:13:26] guys, just so everyone know, understands, again, I'm a construction manager. I work on these projects
[2:13:30] all the time. I'm very pro-development. I really am. Um, I'm
[2:13:34] arguing against this project and for the fact that I am pro-development, should really speak
[2:13:38] volumes about these types of projects and data centers in general. Excuse
[2:13:42] me, in general. Um, and my parents live here.
[2:13:47] I live here with my wife, my two kids who are under five years old. I plan to
[2:13:51] be here a really long time, and I really care about the prosperity of this town and this community.
[2:13:55] and I'm obviously, everyone here feels the same way. So I hope that you
[2:13:59] guys make your voices heard, make some considerations on that this is really the
[2:14:03] right thing for the city. As I've been sitting here listening to everyone speak, I keep looking at these tenants
[2:14:08] and these pillars of our community that we claim to uphold, grow responsibly
[2:14:12] and sustainably, and create the highest quality of life. Do we really believe that we're offering the
[2:14:16] highest quality of life to these neighborhoods and these schools and these children by putting a data center
[2:14:20] right next to 'em? I don't think so, guys. So
[2:14:25] thank you. Thank you.
[2:14:34] uh, next up is charmaine hadley.
[2:14:43] and it's shannon bradley. Um, no, pretty
[2:14:47] sure. It's pretty sure it's hadley .
[2:14:52] hello, I'm, um, charmaine hadley. 10 10, hey, needle loop in, uh, caramel
[2:14:56] creek. Um, a lot of people have said everything I wanted to
[2:15:00] say as well. Um, but I do wanna throw some things out there for everyone who
[2:15:05] does not know. Um,
[2:15:11] as early as 2026, texas has over
[2:15:15] 79 to 200 plus operating data
[2:15:20] facilities, okay? As of march, 2026,
[2:15:26] we lead the us with 140 data centers under
[2:15:31] construction. They're not even up yet. A lot of the times.
[2:15:35] um, this gentleman right over here, I forgot your name, but
[2:15:39] do you live here? Do you live in the community in which that data center
[2:15:43] is gonna be built at, behind, around, or near it?
[2:15:48] or are you just here temporarily to do what it is that you need to do? Because
[2:15:52] if you don't live here and you're not living in those, uh, communities
[2:15:56] behind and or around where that data center is going to be, I highly
[2:16:01] doubt you should be here trying to tell us as residents
[2:16:05] that we should allow you in. That is not right.
[2:16:14] I, when I do not mean to interrupt mm-hmm . But if you
[2:16:18] could address okay. Us no problem. Opposed audience. I, you know, I was
[2:16:22] just, just saying, um,
[2:16:27] water. Everyone has talked here about water for homes, businesses.
[2:16:31] what about ag? What about our farms?
[2:16:36] okay. One of the biggest things that we are concerned about as
[2:16:40] residents, as anyone living here in the united states of america, is the fact that
[2:16:44] the cost of our food three years ago is not what the cost of our food is
[2:16:48] today. We need our local farmers to help keep this
[2:16:52] city going the way that it's going. Okay? So think
[2:16:57] about the water that they need to help those farms keep
[2:17:01] going. And the water that quote unquote right now may not
[2:17:05] be allocated towards those data centers right now. Well, this
[2:17:09] particular data center right now, but it will,
[2:17:14] it definitely will. Water adds up. It,
[2:17:18] it's gonna evaporate faster at the data center than it is in the ground
[2:17:23] where it needs to be on our fruits, our vegetables for our animals,
[2:17:27] for our kids, for these schools. I don't have, I don't wanna have
[2:17:31] to worry about our kids getting sick at school
[2:17:35] because of the drinking water. I don't, I already hear people
[2:17:40] or see people talking about on the ring app and everywhere else.
[2:17:44] hey, my water stinks. Why is the
[2:17:48] water shut off? Why is this happening? What, so why are we wanting to
[2:17:52] bring another data center in? Doesn't make any sense. The
[2:17:56] employment number for data centers, there are more people who are employed
[2:18:01] than there are people who are actually going to run it. It's really fast
[2:18:05] for someone to say, hey, we're gonna hire about 800 people to go ahead
[2:18:09] and put this all together. But out of those 800 people, nine times outta 10,
[2:18:14] 10% of them 10%, and based upon the size,
[2:18:18] it's going to be smaller. So there are no jobs
[2:18:22] that are coming after this data center is built.
[2:18:26] okay? Um, you
[2:18:30] talking about the, the backup generators, gas is through the roof,
[2:18:36] is gas is through the roof. I pay $4
[2:18:40] and change for gas. And you're
[2:18:44] telling me they're going to have backup generators available
[2:18:49] just for their buildings when no one else
[2:18:53] is going to be able to benefit from it. If the power goes out, no
[2:18:57] one, but we're gonna benefit from the pollution. We're gonna benefit from
[2:19:01] the sickness. We're gonna benefit from everything else in a, in a matter of, there's
[2:19:06] none of us gonna be here. We're all gonna be gone. You wanna know why? 'cause
[2:19:10] either people are going to move, because no one
[2:19:14] wants to live by a data center. No one. I
[2:19:18] guarantee you, if the data center was going up across the street from
[2:19:22] your homes, you would be sitting right in this crowd with us.
[2:19:27] so, I mean, that's,
[2:19:36] yeah, that's really all I got for right now.
[2:19:45] uh, next up we have dennis kaufman.
[2:19:59] hello. Um, I am opposed of the data center, uh, live
[2:20:03] in emory farms subdivision. Um, a lot of the points have been
[2:20:07] made. Um, but I will say, um, you, this lady here is talking about,
[2:20:11] you know, what kind of data center I'm gonna tell you right now, I sell high end servers and stuff
[2:20:15] for my job. If you're talking about closed loops for data center, you're talking about
[2:20:20] stuff that's not gonna be just running the mill server stuff. Um, so
[2:20:24] if they're trying to tell you, oh, you know, it might be easy for something small, it's not gonna take a whole lot of energy.
[2:20:29] they're, they're pulling the pool over your eyes. Um,
[2:20:34] and on top of that, um, you know, I, I like to, obviously I'm invested because I like
[2:20:38] to sell the stuff to 'em, right? But being in the middle of the city, that doesn't make any
[2:20:42] damn sense. Um, and property value, someone's
[2:20:46] actually mentioned, um, I actually talked to some of my customers that live in, up in ohio and pennsylvania that
[2:20:51] has data centers. You can bet the bottom line, they can't sell their houses
[2:20:55] next to the data center. So, um, heat, I
[2:20:59] mean, to the gentleman over, there's, you know, probably try and say something
[2:21:03] else. I I shouldn't have to tell him about laws of thermodynamics. Right? Energy
[2:21:07] can't be lost and created. The heat's going to rise somehow, right? And
[2:21:11] you gotta take care of it somehow, whether it's water, which, if it's a closed loop,
[2:21:15] probably not. But they're gonna be running filters and pumps and everything else. And then
[2:21:20] eventually you're gonna have to do maintenance on that closed loop.
[2:21:24] so, you know, whether it's the first time they, they take however many gallons they need,
[2:21:28] they're eventually gonna have to do something else with it, because they're gonna have to deal with leaks.
[2:21:32] they're gonna have to deal with maintenance, um, and outcomes and other things. So,
[2:21:36] um, that's it. Like I said, I think I wish the other guy was here. 'cause I would've tell 'em that three
[2:21:41] permanent jobs. Yeah, they're probably gonna be remote, but yeah. . Thank you.
[2:21:50] uh, next up is helen kaufman.
[2:22:02] hi, helen kaufman, spouse of that man. We've
[2:22:06] lived here in emory farms at 100 emory farms or emory fields
[2:22:10] drive corner of emory farms and emory fields.
[2:22:14] we were the original owners of that land when there was cows to the west of
[2:22:18] us, cows to the north of us, and nothing but maybe 10 other
[2:22:23] houses in that neighborhood. We have lived here that long.
[2:22:27] that is the first time that man has spoken publicly, even though he is felt
[2:22:31] passionately. And, and this is more of his field. I agree
[2:22:36] with most everything that's already been said as far as concerns about the environment,
[2:22:40] the electrical, um, the sound, et
[2:22:44] cetera. I think what I can add,
[2:22:50] uh, is in regards to aesthetics and history,
[2:22:54] where the community has consistently come out and spoken in regards to
[2:22:58] what do we want from the city, and why that was zoned
[2:23:02] that way. And then also something for you to consider,
[2:23:06] not just why that site, but why we as a city was attractive to them.
[2:23:10] um, I'm gonna borrow upon knowledge that I'm not an engineer.
[2:23:14] um, I've worked in many careers, uh, but I have friends
[2:23:19] that are very knowledgeable. One of them worked for the us department of energy.
[2:23:24] he has a doctorate in engineering, electrical engineering, a doctorate
[2:23:29] also for fun in astrophysics. Uh, he used to set
[2:23:33] the us agenda for, at the international energy summits in geneva. He
[2:23:37] gave me, uh, a couple websites I paste on fa, facebook. And I'd like to
[2:23:42] pass this around to each of you, uh, on the board that demonstrates,
[2:23:48] uh, the lighter of the lines is how the general increases,
[2:23:52] uh, with energy in communities have gone, and then those with
[2:23:57] data centers, how that's increased, about double that. If
[2:24:01] you could hand that to manny, he'll pass 'em around. Thank you.
[2:24:07] um, so that, that friend of mine I spoke of, uh,
[2:24:11] jonathan williams, uh, he provided me this website, um,
[2:24:15] and, and links, um, that, uh, is
[2:24:19] provided by the bureau of labor statistics
[2:24:23] that have historically provided us
[2:24:28] analysis and critiques of data that evaluates trends and,
[2:24:32] um, and, uh, critiques on
[2:24:36] things that affect inflation. Of course, electric use is part of that.
[2:24:40] so this is putting data in front of your faces. I'm, I'm not gonna speak
[2:24:45] for the data too much, except you can see that as our technology
[2:24:49] and knowledge of this early adopters still
[2:24:53] a proof in concept, uh, in many communities. As, as
[2:24:57] they were talking about, technology's evolving. Well, that may be the case, but developers
[2:25:02] are always going for the bottom line. And sometimes budgets cut and things change. They
[2:25:06] don't always make the best choices for communities.
[2:25:10] when we moved in, we liked hu to, it appealed to us because it was
[2:25:14] a city that liked the aesthetics. It knew its location was maybe not
[2:25:18] the big shaker mover. Maybe they won't, won't always have big, uh,
[2:25:22] employers, but it would be a quality life where family could go from very early
[2:25:27] all the way to retirement. The reason why, way back when holland
[2:25:31] was a mayor, that time and time again, we've showed up to say, hey,
[2:25:35] we want multi-family is because we want people to have options
[2:25:40] whether they can't afford, which is becoming harder and harder, single family
[2:25:44] homes, or they're at the point of downsizing into retirement to be near
[2:25:48] grandkids, et cetera. We want that quality of life. We also wanted to
[2:25:52] have neighborhoods that connect, sort of like a circuit, so that eventually
[2:25:56] would have that walkable space. When we bought,
[2:26:01] we thought neighborhoods would be built around us. I'm not gonna
[2:26:05] speak ill of anybody on, on, on this committee
[2:26:10] or on the board, but in the past time and time again,
[2:26:14] my neighborhood has been told things that have not come out. True,
[2:26:19] true developers have made promises and they failed. And then the city said,
[2:26:23] well, they promised us it. And they said they'd be open to, but we really, our hands are tied
[2:26:28] now. So forgive
[2:26:32] me, but I cannot extend trust again on something that hits so
[2:26:36] many ways to our community as a whole
[2:26:40] that makes emory farms an isolated
[2:26:45] island and abandoned as a neighborhood surrounded
[2:26:49] by industrial when it comes to development. Yes,
[2:26:53] that interchange is very busy and it's traffic. But here's the thing that
[2:26:57] we're told about emory fields and why it had to be connected and why
[2:27:01] that, um, uh, you know, road had
[2:27:06] to continue is because it was a thoroughfare in case there was traffic jams. We need alternative
[2:27:10] routes. When you have a neighborhood put in there, it could potentially connect to the
[2:27:14] other neighborhoods. And if limmer loop or ed schmidt gets blocked out,
[2:27:18] it gives some other alternatives for police, fire
[2:27:22] families to get through, to get home to their kids, to pick them up, to make dinner,
[2:27:27] to, to crow the crops, take their care. As far as the easement, my neighborhood
[2:27:31] has that easement. It's not too hard. It's not
[2:27:35] too much of a nuisance for that developer to use. And I'll tell you how it
[2:27:39] is used. It is used as a walking space for hiking, for walking
[2:27:43] dogs, for wildlife to transit, and still be a beautiful aspect
[2:27:47] of our city. I saw the
[2:27:51] plans of the buffer zone that was promised of the industrial space behind
[2:27:55] us. That buffer zone was fought over very
[2:27:59] tooth and nail. It's a big mound of dirt.
[2:28:04] the trees are not so big that they will fill that up. And, and a third of them, I walked it just
[2:28:08] yesterday with my dog, have been removed. For what reasons?
[2:28:13] I don't know. Last time I saw 'em, they were very healthy on his indicator.
[2:28:17] they're spaced so far apart. It's not gonna be a buffer.
[2:28:22] you did a wonderful study and presentation on, on, on maybe
[2:28:26] ways of, uh, you know, addressing
[2:28:31] some of the economical concerns about electric. You did nothing for the heat.
[2:28:36] uh, lot, you know, increase. 'cause my husband
[2:28:40] said on thermodynamics. Those are the things on the aesthetics.
[2:28:47] hudu is a proud city. We have a long history. There
[2:28:51] are multi-generational families here. And, and, and
[2:28:55] that's what I bought into. I grew up in the town of maytag. Maybe you've heard of them.
[2:29:01] uh, they're well renowned. I used to be able to go anywhere in the world and wa look inside a washer
[2:29:05] or dryer if I was homesick and, and see maiden newton, iowa,
[2:29:09] hudu has that feel. But
[2:29:13] let's face it, through several administrations,
[2:29:18] developers have come in and they've swindled us.
[2:29:22] they have learned that we don't have the oversight. If they say they'll
[2:29:26] be open to consideration, well, those are empty promises
[2:29:31] that have no guarantee of oversight or, or whatever. They can kind of run
[2:29:35] shot over us. They've seen lawsuits. We've
[2:29:39] gotten some attention. I think that the reason we as a
[2:29:43] city is attractive is because
[2:29:48] we're small enough that we can be manipulated. And I'm not saying you're
[2:29:52] dumb and you don't know your expertise and then engineering and whatnot. I'm
[2:29:56] saying it, we're disorganized. We don't have the power and the resources
[2:30:01] behind us that, that they can easily throw things in
[2:30:05] their favor, um, and then not fulfill promises
[2:30:09] or change them. And that's where my concern is.
[2:30:13] um, you know, best of intentions, just be
[2:30:17] wise about that be wise, that when you get national
[2:30:21] attention for lawsuits, sometimes,
[2:30:26] uh, not, not the best of characters, we go, oh,
[2:30:30] well, that might be a good small city to plant my seed and take advantage
[2:30:34] of. Um, and that's where I, I'm most concerned
[2:30:39] that hasn't been addressed. Um,
[2:30:44] I'm just gonna real quick look over my things here. I,
[2:30:48] um, well, that is
[2:30:52] about time. I don't mean to cut you off. Thank you. No, that, that's okay. I had it. Thank you. Pretty
[2:30:57] much everything.
[2:31:02] uh, next up we have cameron harvey.
[2:31:10] hi there. My name's cameron harvey. I, uh, live at 1 2 0 denton drive in
[2:31:14] the riverwalk, uh, subdivision. Um, just so in case y'all
[2:31:18] aren't aware, most of the houses in the riverwalk subdivision are,
[2:31:22] uh, fully electric. So there is no gas, there is nothing
[2:31:26] there any sort of power outage that happens. We cannot cook food. We cannot
[2:31:31] preserve food. We, we can't do heat. We get nothing.
[2:31:35] I had to live through that. My wife had to live through that, through the snowpocalypse
[2:31:39] of 2021. I am very concerned
[2:31:43] on a personal level that me and my family can be negatively
[2:31:47] impacted by this, this data center
[2:31:51] being put into the community. Um, I'm not gonna go through
[2:31:56] all of the other minutiae. You've already been hit through it a lot.
[2:32:00] um, water, electricity, noise, all
[2:32:04] of that. I, I will just skip that. Um, what
[2:32:08] I do want you to know is that
[2:32:13] last week bloomberg released an article stating that
[2:32:17] of all of the planned data center buildouts in the united states,
[2:32:22] nearly half of them have been canceled or delayed.
[2:32:27] how can we be sure that this developer is not going to be
[2:32:32] one of those halves? How can we be sure that if we go through with this
[2:32:36] proposal, that they are gonna be able to build that, that they have all
[2:32:40] of the components in their supply line to actually build
[2:32:45] that data center to even get it off the ground? He's already said that
[2:32:49] he doesn't have a tenant. Do you really want to give up this land
[2:32:53] for someone who says, I have no business. I cannot
[2:32:57] promise you that there is anyone who is gonna
[2:33:01] take up this. Yeah. So I
[2:33:05] just, I I really hope
[2:33:09] that you take a quick thought on this
[2:33:13] and I really hope that you reject this proposal. Thank you for your time. Thank you.
[2:33:23] all right. I'm not gonna try to butcher this one. S jenkins.
[2:33:31] hi radda jenkins. I live on 7 0 5 east
[2:33:35] street in old town. Hu I've called hu home for almost
[2:33:39] 10 years. I wanna say. I really appreciate the director for the work that you put in to
[2:33:43] show exactly where the data center is for proposed to go
[2:33:47] and all of the use cases that it will impact. So thank you for that.
[2:33:52] so the pod or the pudi don't know if you get to mush it together like that or not,
[2:33:57] doesn't address data centers like the presenter shared. And that is
[2:34:01] a great example of how unregulated this technology and
[2:34:05] this use case is, and what a significant gamble
[2:34:09] it is to bet on something where the lines are so gray and can
[2:34:13] be manipulated to the user's goals. Okay, everybody's
[2:34:18] already talked about water and about power. So I'm not gonna belabor the point, but
[2:34:22] I do wanna go back to the trust. When they talk about it being closed loop and
[2:34:26] they talk about it being sustainable, they're asking for a lot of trust. I know that
[2:34:30] the data center that's being built in abilene is much, much bigger. But
[2:34:34] just for an understanding of the use, it's gonna use about 20%
[2:34:39] of the electricity that new york city uses, and
[2:34:43] it's gonna use water comparable to what the entire city of hutto uses.
[2:34:48] so when you think about that and you put that into perspective, it's very, very hard to trust
[2:34:52] this is gonna be sustainable or not have a big impact.
[2:34:56] if you look up any of the cases and where communities have added these, and I
[2:35:00] urge you to please do so, you will see that their utility bills have gone up
[2:35:05] in some cases very, very significantly. We already have insanely expensive
[2:35:09] water here. Let's not make it worse. He talked about
[2:35:13] how little impact it would have on our traffic. That's because of how few jobs
[2:35:18] it will bring .
[2:35:22] so as much as I hate driving in auto traffic and as terrible
[2:35:26] as it is, um, I do recognize that we need jobs and we need homes.
[2:35:31] this doesn't solve either of those problems. We've heard about the health, we've heard about
[2:35:35] the property values. Overall, this is not good for our community.
[2:35:40] and while this location is especially terrible and is
[2:35:44] a very clear no with the backing of everything that the director said, I would go
[2:35:48] a step further and say, when you consider all of the negative implications,
[2:35:52] we should not put a data center in heto. Yes, just like all the construction
[2:35:57] people, I also have that construction background and I appreciate that there is
[2:36:01] a, a need for growth, but we need to be thoughtful about that. So whether
[2:36:05] we put it in a field somewhere, or whether we put it as an enormous
[2:36:09] eyesore right next to our schools and our homes, it will still use our water.
[2:36:13] it will still impact our environment. It will still use our power.
[2:36:18] so I ask all of you to please vote no, not just on this data center, but on data centers for
[2:36:22] hudu. Let's make it really clear that hudu cannot be bought.
[2:36:26] thank you.
[2:36:34] uh, next up is riley pruitt.
[2:36:42] hi, I'm riley pruitt. I live at 2 0 2 3. Matt locke circle
[2:36:46] in carmel creek. Uh, I just wanted to thank y'all for volunteering
[2:36:50] and serving as you do hu planning and building the city. Uh, thanks
[2:36:55] for taking the time tonight. Um, I agree with everything that
[2:36:59] everyone said. I'm against the data center. Um, I wanted to bring up
[2:37:03] three points that we didn't talk about. Um, one, there was
[2:37:07] inconsistency in zydeco presentation.
[2:37:12] they said that it's the data center's, a small
[2:37:16] data center. It's not gonna be used for ai, it's not gonna be used for bitcoin
[2:37:20] mining. But then they said they don't have a tenant.
[2:37:24] how does that make sense? Well, what if a bitcoin miner comes around and what
[2:37:29] if a, what if ai chips gets smaller and quieter and can be
[2:37:33] done in a, in a, you know, a smaller data center? You can't be a
[2:37:37] beggar and a chooser. So it doesn't make sense to be able to promise things that
[2:37:41] we don't know. I wanted to point that out. They're gonna say whatever they want to
[2:37:45] get, whatever they want. The second thing is, if we accept
[2:37:49] this, if we bring this online, and if we repl
[2:37:53] this rezone this, it sets a really horrible precedent in hudu.
[2:37:58] it says, hey, any, any developer in the united states
[2:38:02] come by in hudu. It doesn't matter what the zoning is.
[2:38:07] we'll just stamp it. We'll make it a data center.
[2:38:12] it makes us look like idiots. We don't wanna do that. This won't be the
[2:38:16] last thing. And then the final thing is, I I want to make
[2:38:20] an appeal to beauty, uh, beauty in the city. I live in carmel
[2:38:24] creek, but I also have lived in hu since I was 12. And I actually lived on
[2:38:28] hilton street in, uh, in hu town square. Uh,
[2:38:32] and I would look out my window west at this exact
[2:38:36] land, this exact zone. And there was nothing there.
[2:38:41] and it was kind of beautiful. And I, I pictured myself as a 12-year-old
[2:38:45] looking out and seeing this horrendous data center
[2:38:50] and what that would do to my psyche, what that would do to my life. I I have no idea how
[2:38:54] it would affect me. I have no idea how it would affect anybody in that neighborhood. And so
[2:38:58] I wanna make an appeal to beauty. Hudu is in risk of becoming
[2:39:02] a hideous industrial park. Yeah,
[2:39:08] we, we are on our way there. We're so
[2:39:12] enticed by money that we forgot about beauty. We forgot about the reason
[2:39:16] people live places. We wanna live in huro because it's beautiful. The people are
[2:39:20] beautiful, the buildings are beautiful. That's why we live here. So
[2:39:25] we have an opportunity to do the last thing on the hu pillars to create a high quality
[2:39:29] of life. We have the opportunity to uphold that. So I hope we make the right
[2:39:33] decision on it. Thank you. Thank you.
[2:39:40] next up is lisa zacharias.
[2:39:57] hello, I'm lisa zacharia, uh, 2012 blue drive.
[2:40:01] I live in the enclave of brushy creek and I am
[2:40:06] objecting to rezoning. Um, like I said, everybody else,
[2:40:10] um, had all my bullets, most of them, but I
[2:40:14] wanted to touch on when he was speaking of,
[2:40:18] um, the water and the direct use for cooling
[2:40:23] and how many gallons of potable water that's gonna use per day.
[2:40:27] and, you know, if, if it's affects the town of, what are
[2:40:31] we at? Almost 50,000 people now, you know?
[2:40:35] so 5 million gallons of potable water a day is equivalent to our
[2:40:40] town. And so it, it is just too much strain
[2:40:44] on what we already are doing. Because even summers
[2:40:48] with the droughts and we're, you know, we're restricted water
[2:40:53] use on our properties. We can't water. And, you know, odd number of
[2:40:57] days, yada, yada, yada. We can't water. And it, it just, uh, it's
[2:41:01] a severe strain on, on hu um, the
[2:41:05] indirect, uh, use power consumption, uh, used
[2:41:09] for generation. Uh, the, uh, power generation increased by 400%.
[2:41:14] like, what are we doing? I I, I really don't
[2:41:18] think this is necessary to be here and to be in, in a neighborhood,
[2:41:22] you know? Um, what about,
[2:41:26] um, innovation and mitigation? He, he just said it,
[2:41:31] but didn't even touch on that. Uh, what are the solutions for
[2:41:35] that? Um, there are supposed to be coming solutions.
[2:41:39] I've read, uh, zero water cooling or reclaim waste water.
[2:41:43] what are we gonna do about that when they have to test out the machines
[2:41:47] and change out the water that's cooling? Um, what, what's
[2:41:51] gonna happen to that, uh, blow down discharge discharge? Uh, is it
[2:41:55] gonna be dumped back into our aqui aquifer? Uh, what's gonna happen
[2:42:00] with that? So there's a lot of questions he didn't answer. He just
[2:42:04] grazed over it. Uh, he didn't give us any numbers on decibels
[2:42:08] of how much, how noisy it was gonna be. Of course, it's gonna start off
[2:42:13] low when it ramps up, it's going to get louder. The noise, uh,
[2:42:17] I'm reading that it carries over a mile away and it's
[2:42:22] constant 24 7. 'cause those machines are not gonna be turned off.
[2:42:26] so worried about that. What about, you know, close neighbors to that and then
[2:42:30] you talking one to two miles away depending what they were ramping up. He
[2:42:34] didn't talk about that. He wasn't specific on that. It is
[2:42:38] just, what about water pressure?
[2:42:43] we already have a problem with our water. Um, brown
[2:42:48] water, low water pressure. You know, we don't know what they're
[2:42:52] gonna bring to us. Uh, chemicals leaching into the ground that may cause cancer 10
[2:42:56] to 15 years from now. Uh, what are we doing with our, um,
[2:43:01] you know, the next generation that live here? I mean, I,
[2:43:05] I moved here in 2006. I was in huro square, I was close
[2:43:09] to it, but now I'm in, you know, enclave of brushy creek. So
[2:43:13] I'm across on 79. But it's, you know, we're only two
[2:43:17] miles away. But that, that sound is gonna affect us. The heat's gonna affect the
[2:43:21] population there, and I just don't think it would be
[2:43:26] productive for us. We, we can come up with something better, like a green,
[2:43:31] you know, landscaping, greenscape, a dog park, something
[2:43:35] that could be useful and beautify hu where we can use that, that
[2:43:39] property better. Um, I'm just so
[2:43:43] worried about that. And then of course, it's gonna decrease our property values.
[2:43:48] um, it definitely is not gonna increase it.
[2:43:53] uh, a
[2:43:57] lot of my bullets were already taken. Um, what were,
[2:44:01] were they, were they given any tax breaks to come here? What were the incentives,
[2:44:06] uh, or subsidies? Zach mentioned, you know, what are they looking
[2:44:10] at? Just to bring that here. You know, it, it's not worth it. It really
[2:44:14] isn't worth it. Not for us. So with that
[2:44:18] in mind, I hope that you vote no against the
[2:44:23] rezoning. Thank you.
[2:44:31] next up we have, uh, mark lyons.
[2:44:35] this is just the future age map, two evening.
[2:44:39] I'm mark lyons. I live at 3 0 4 westfield street in huddle town square.
[2:44:44] I have two points. One, I commend the chair on his choice of shirt.
[2:44:51] and this data center does not support any of the pillars.
[2:44:55] so I recommend that you do not support this land use as a data center. Thank you.
[2:45:00] thank you.
[2:45:06] okay. You want the good news or the bad news? I have both. We're halfway through
[2:45:11] . Next up we have sally
[2:45:16] leon.
[2:45:20] a long time. Those chairs are not great .
[2:45:26] uh, my name is sally lyons and that is my husband over there. And
[2:45:30] mine's not gonna be quite as short as his, but it will be short. And I'm gonna
[2:45:34] tug on your heartstrings and I'm sorry about that, but that's how I am.
[2:45:39] anyway, if I can get this, this is a picture of my son. I
[2:45:43] live at 3 0 4 westfield in old, um, hu town
[2:45:47] square. And, um, he has,
[2:45:51] he had autism and he passed away two years ago. And
[2:45:56] sorry, we had to move from the house that
[2:46:01] we lived in for 33 years in hu
[2:46:07] to another house in hu, which is right
[2:46:11] across the street from where the data center's gonna be.
[2:46:17] I'm 65 years old and that's probably gonna be
[2:46:21] the last house that I live in. I'm very sensitive to sound.
[2:46:26] I can't even, I have to put earplugs on because his cpap
[2:46:30] machine makes too much noise. And also he
[2:46:34] snores . So I can't,
[2:46:39] I can't handle any kind of hum
[2:46:43] or vibration that might be coming under the ground or
[2:46:48] through the air. And I also have, um,
[2:46:53] bad sinuses. So that's, that's
[2:46:57] another problem. So what I ask you, please don't
[2:47:01] let that be put right there. Put it on the landfill.
[2:47:06] nobody lives there. , great spot for
[2:47:10] it. And it's still in the huddle.
[2:47:14] thank you. Thank you.
[2:47:20] alright, next up is christian markowitz.
[2:47:29] thanks for hanging in there, . It's been a long evening, but we
[2:47:33] appreciate your time. My name is christian markowitz and I live at
[2:47:37] 700 north emory cove in emory
[2:47:41] farms. We've lived there since 2017,
[2:47:46] and I brought, I brought both my daughters home to the house we live in.
[2:47:52] I'd like to express my reasons for the opposition. Many of them have already
[2:47:56] been stated, but a big portion of that is that
[2:48:00] there is a effect on homeowners equity.
[2:48:04] if you look at reports, it is a negative equity loss of
[2:48:08] five to 15% for anyone within
[2:48:12] two miles of a data center. That
[2:48:16] would be a huge loss to residents. Um, we're looking at about
[2:48:21] 300 homes just within the one mile radius
[2:48:25] between the three neighborhoods. As far as environmental is
[2:48:29] concerned. As somebody else stated, the sab e center that the developer
[2:48:34] discussed did have a two alarm fire on march 22nd.
[2:48:39] the firefighters that attended to that fire did inhale
[2:48:43] toxins, um, and had to be treated and also took
[2:48:47] five hours to put out other concerns,
[2:48:51] of course, would be the location. It is not the location
[2:48:55] that residents want because we would live right next to it. There
[2:49:00] would be light pollution. There would be concerns about epa
[2:49:04] and tceq requirements being followed. A closed
[2:49:08] loop system does have toxin chemicals in it to keep the
[2:49:12] water clear. It is not something that would not be affecting the community,
[2:49:17] excuse me, where it to leak out. It does leak out at times during maintenance
[2:49:22] and it would go straight into our wastewater. So that is something to
[2:49:27] consider. Other items, of course, include
[2:49:31] what others have discussed, which would be air pollution. But for me
[2:49:36] it's the water pollution and all of those directly affected. It's not just the
[2:49:40] homes, it is the middle school and the elementary school that
[2:49:44] my kids attend.
[2:49:48] it would affect the neighborhood within a hundred feet. The most.
[2:49:54] their metal yard directs or is
[2:49:58] directly up against the fence. Yeah, a hundred feet sounds like a lot,
[2:50:02] but there would be floodlights out there, there would be activity in that metal yard.
[2:50:07] that's where they would most likely have their generators. That's within
[2:50:11] a hundred feet of some of these people's homes. That shouldn't be acceptable.
[2:50:17] tceq is already having a difficult time
[2:50:21] maintaining and measuring chemicals in the water because of all
[2:50:25] the data centers within texas that are coming up and starting up.
[2:50:29] it is something to consider who would be ensuring that our
[2:50:33] water isn't poisoned? Who would be ensuring that when those
[2:50:38] generators are up and running, whether it's during an emergency or just
[2:50:42] during testing, that it is only just 30 minutes. A proposal
[2:50:46] is just that. It's not a contract, it's an idea. And
[2:50:50] what they've brought is a great idea in respect to
[2:50:54] what income would bring to their company, but not
[2:50:59] a great idea for what it would bring to us taxpayers.
[2:51:03] so me being someone who is within 200 feet
[2:51:07] of this potential development, I would like to vote no on it.
[2:51:12] thank you. Thank you.
[2:51:19] next up is christine benson.
[2:51:26] hi, I am christine benson, and I live at 7 0 1 gray fox
[2:51:30] loop, which is in cottonwood farms. So you asked, um,
[2:51:34] I read both staff reports for items 6.4 and 6.5, and I have concerns.
[2:51:39] I'm gonna try not to belabor the points, as you said, , but I'll do my best
[2:51:43] to keep it short. Um, staff recommended denial of both items.
[2:51:47] I'm asking you to follow that recommendation, but I wanna give you three specific reasons from the application
[2:51:51] documents themselves. First, the numbers just don't add up.
[2:51:56] the applicant's pud document says that the rear setback from the residential
[2:52:00] properties is 400 feet in the presentation he just showed us, it said 316,
[2:52:04] which lines up with the hoa presentation, but the concept plan showed
[2:52:09] 100 feet. Um, their hoa yeah, sorry. There, there are three different
[2:52:13] documents here. Three different numbers. The single most important buffer between
[2:52:17] a 24 hour industrial operation in people's homes. How are we supposed to trust
[2:52:21] these people if there are already these types of discrepancies
[2:52:25] in the plans? Second, the applicant's own, uh, future land
[2:52:30] use man. Uh, what was them mandate? Future f-f-l-u-m. Yeah.
[2:52:34] flum claims that nearby residents largely support this application.
[2:52:38] it says largely support. Uh, there are at least 33
[2:52:43] written objections just in the record so far along with every single person
[2:52:47] who's come here tonight. Two comments in favor.
[2:52:51] I will let you decide if that is what largely support means.
[2:52:56] third, what's being replaced here is not just an empty field.
[2:53:00] the existing entitlement for this land as zydeco covered,
[2:53:04] did include 173 homes, retail, dining,
[2:53:09] and a street connection between, uh, ed schmidt and albany way,
[2:53:13] which would potentially alleviate traffic on limmer loop, I would hope.
[2:53:18] and your staff said that that entitlement, the one that was in place,
[2:53:22] the one that the developer wants to throw away, the one that's in
[2:53:26] place better aligns with soar 2040. It better aligns
[2:53:30] with what the city needs and what the community has said they want. We're not choosing between
[2:53:35] a data center and nothing. We are choosing between a data center and
[2:53:39] homes, restaurants and walkable retail for the families that already live here.
[2:53:44] the two people who spoke in favor of the rezoning claim tonight
[2:53:48] are talking down to us like we're bratty children who don't understand what's best for us.
[2:53:53] that we don't understand that this data center's not as bad, but
[2:53:57] we deserve better than that. We're not kids. We deserve to tell you what
[2:54:01] we want. And I hope that you'll listen. The staff said no. All of the community
[2:54:05] members here are saying no. I'm saying no. Please follow your staff recommendations
[2:54:10] and community and deny both items. Thank you.
[2:54:20] next up is christie yal.
[2:54:30] good evening. My name is kristi yal. I live at 5 28 emory crossing boulevard
[2:54:35] and emory crossing subdivision. I'm a newer resident here. My husband
[2:54:39] and I moved here last summer to retire here to be closer
[2:54:43] to our kids. And I, a few things I just wanna ask. When I look at those,
[2:54:47] that pillar up there, create the highest quality of life. For
[2:54:51] who? For us or for zydeco and
[2:54:55] the millions that they're gonna make off of this data center. We're not gonna make the
[2:54:59] millions off of it. They are. And I, I can tell you from
[2:55:03] where I came from when I moved here from louisiana, look it up, this
[2:55:08] place called cancer alley in louisiana long time
[2:55:12] ago. They welcomed the chemical plants. They promised
[2:55:16] lower taxes, better schools. We're gonna come in here and we're gonna
[2:55:20] make your lives great. Look it up. Cancer
[2:55:24] alley. And this has been over 50 years.
[2:55:29] all of the people who make a difference moved.
[2:55:34] got out. What's left are the people who can't move,
[2:55:39] who have to stay there. One data center, you're
[2:55:43] going down a very slippery slope. One turns
[2:55:47] into four, turns into eight, turns into this entire
[2:55:52] area, becoming a data center. And if you're more of a visual learner as
[2:55:56] I am, everybody behind me, raise your hands if you're
[2:56:00] against this data center so they can see.
[2:56:05] I rest my case.
[2:56:09] thank you.
[2:56:14] next up is sarah near
[2:56:25] good evening. Um, everything I'm about to say comes directly
[2:56:29] from the ida report for this agenda. 6.4 and 6.5.
[2:56:35] sorry, I'm gonna be reading from a speech I
[2:56:39] am speaking tonight to urge this commission to formally adopt the development
[2:56:43] services director's recommendation to deny item 6.4, the future land
[2:56:48] user map or use map amendment. And item 6.5,
[2:56:52] the ped revision for the zydeco data center.
[2:56:56] I'm not here to discuss noise trafficked or property values.
[2:57:01] I'm here to address the city's legal and procedural obligations.
[2:57:05] your own professional planning staff has explicitly outlined why this heavy
[2:57:10] and industrial designation is incongruent with the
[2:57:14] surrounding stable single family subdivisions, they have documented
[2:57:18] exactly how this proposal violates the performance metrics of the
[2:57:22] hu soar 2024 comprehensive plan. It removes future housing
[2:57:27] diversity, fails to create an efficient infrastructure system and isolates
[2:57:31] a 40 acre per parcel solely to accommodate a
[2:57:35] single developer's custom zoning request. Most critically
[2:57:40] city staff has formally warned in tonight's agenda packet that approving this action
[2:57:44] affords the opportunity for spot zoning in texas. It is an
[2:57:48] illegal practice that renders a zoning ordinance void. The
[2:57:52] legal test in texas courts for spot zoning is whether a municipality
[2:57:57] acts arbitrarily, unreasonably and without substantial
[2:58:01] relation to its comprehensive plan. Because your own planners have
[2:58:05] already established on the public record that this pud violates the soar 2040
[2:58:09] plan. The foundational evidence for arbitrary action is already
[2:58:13] written in tonight's packet as an advisory board, this commission
[2:58:18] serves as a city's procedural firewall. If the
[2:58:22] city council approves a zoning change that their own development services department
[2:58:26] has formally flagged as a spot zoning risk, the council is making
[2:58:31] a demonstr demonstrably arbitrary legislative
[2:58:35] decision. More telling the applicant
[2:58:39] has admitted that they have no customer for this facility. They're asking this
[2:58:43] commission to grant a custom industrial pod for a hypothetical user.
[2:58:48] do not trade the documented future of hu do's neighbors for a speculative gamble.
[2:58:53] we ask you to reject this epy shell protect
[2:58:57] your comprehensive plan and demand that this land be used to benefit the people
[2:59:01] of huro. And now, on a much more personal note,
[2:59:06] I am a high school english teacher every single day
[2:59:10] I see just the despair and the apathy in
[2:59:14] my kids. You could do something so awesome for them by
[2:59:18] using this land to benefit them. Give them some hope, give them
[2:59:22] some joy. This is not it. Thank you.
[2:59:34] next up we have joseph cortez.
[2:59:44] good evening commission. Thank you for coming out and thank you to everybody here. I know this is how y'all wanted to
[2:59:49] spend your evening. Um, I mean, we got families here. That's how important
[2:59:53] it is. You know, you see that this is important to everybody. So
[2:59:57] I do have ape. Oh, so I, my address is in hu highlands balsam
[3:00:01] street. Um, but I own and operate. Um, I'm one of the owners of
[3:00:05] the hu farmer's market, uh, which takes place two doors down from this
[3:00:10] property at the hu discovery united methodist church every wednesday.
[3:00:14] I did have a nice speech and I still read it, but mr. Uh, zydeco did a great job
[3:00:18] kind of doing it for me. When he said, there will be no traffic. That
[3:00:22] means no people coming from out of town to support our local businesses
[3:00:26] to bring tax dollars in that right revenue for decades,
[3:00:31] no impact. He said, there's no impact. Yeah, no impact to businesses on that front.
[3:00:35] so we can expect nothing. And I appreciate him bringing those
[3:00:39] points up. But, so anyways, every single week we see what community
[3:00:44] actually looks like. Families are showing up together just like they are today. Kids running
[3:00:48] around at the farmer's market, the farmers, the small businesses connecting with their
[3:00:52] neighbors. And that's not theoretical. That's real life happening right here in
[3:00:56] huro. And that's exactly why I'm here, here. 'cause this proposed data center,
[3:01:01] especially in this location, is fundamentally at odds with what makes this city worth
[3:01:05] living in. I wanna be very clear, this is not about being against technology.
[3:01:09] it's about placement. It's about priorities. You'll hear about tax
[3:01:14] revenue, you'll hear about economic development. But I want to challenge that
[3:01:18] because revenue alone is not the measure of a healthy community.
[3:01:22] this project does not bring people into huro to support our small businesses.
[3:01:27] it does not create a space where families gather. It does not support
[3:01:31] local vendors, restaurants, or shops. It brings infrastructure
[3:01:36] but not life. And once that land is used for this purpose, it'll be gone
[3:01:40] for decades. That means no park, no space for
[3:01:44] local businesses, no place for future families. No opportunity to build something
[3:01:48] that actually serves the people who live here. And that matters
[3:01:52] because all of you on this commission are not just decision makers. You are members of
[3:01:56] this community. Many of you have families here. Some of you have kids who play
[3:02:00] sports here. You volunteer, you show up, you invest your time into building this city.
[3:02:05] and that's what community looks like. So I would ask you to think about that, not just as
[3:02:09] commissioners, but as a neighbors. What kind of huddle are we building?
[3:02:14] one where land in the heart of our city is used to bring people together. Or
[3:02:18] one where it's locked away for decades serving something that has no connection to daily life.
[3:02:22] here, this decision's not just about a project, it's about whether we
[3:02:26] prioritize people or we prioritize profits, which is also debatable.
[3:02:31] and I'll leave you with this. There are other places where a data center could go,
[3:02:36] but there's only one heart of hudu. Please protect it. Thank you.
[3:02:49] cassie cans.
[3:02:59] my name's cassie cans. I live at 2, 2 3 hilton street, directly behind where
[3:03:04] the status center wants to go. I'm married to a first responder. I have two little children.
[3:03:08] one of the points that I have not heard brought up is the strain that we're gonna put on our first responders.
[3:03:13] he made a good point and said, seie hasn't had any issues. Seie did.
[3:03:17] seie had a really big fire. They also had toxic waste leak into fresh
[3:03:21] water systems. And whether we wanna acknowledge it or not, that's a real strain.
[3:03:26] we don't have a whole lot of first responders in this town. We are growing, but
[3:03:30] we don't have a whole lot. And you want us to send, you want me
[3:03:35] to send my husband into things like this under-resourced,
[3:03:39] understaffed, under supplied. Why?
[3:03:44] why? So I can have no new customers. So I can
[3:03:48] have my children watching a data center and no bunnies in my backyard so my garden can
[3:03:52] die. So I can't resell my home when I wanna build my farmstead
[3:03:56] and, and actually live on site with my horses. Why?
[3:04:01] I'm urging you to listen because I'm not, I'm not sitting here saying,
[3:04:05] let's not do the data center. I I don't want a data center. This is zoning.
[3:04:09] I don't want heavy construction in my backyard. I don't want
[3:04:14] institutionalized places that make loud noises and make it impossible for my
[3:04:18] children who I'm worried about, who they're hiring and what they're doing around my family.
[3:04:24] I want safety. I want security. I don't want more taxes
[3:04:28] on my water system when I already have to call y'all every other week. 'cause the water's
[3:04:32] brown. But I'm paying a couple hundred dollars
[3:04:37] for a family of four with children that I have to fight to take a bath.
[3:04:41] . I mean, come on . You have kids. So like,
[3:04:45] I'm asking you to really think about this. Are do we have more spaces for first
[3:04:49] responders? Do we, do we have the finances for it? Because
[3:04:53] I don't see him picking up the bill. I see us picking up the bill. I see it coming
[3:04:57] out of our tax dollars when we're already taxed out the wazoo to pay for
[3:05:01] more first responders than I would love nothing more, honestly. Um, but I don't wanna
[3:05:06] have to pay for all the equipment that's gonna take to put the batteries out when the batteries catch fire.
[3:05:11] and then what about my home? Is my home in danger? So all
[3:05:15] of my crap is no longer worth anything because it caught on fire and
[3:05:19] it, it spread and we couldn't get it. We couldn't get a handle on it. Five hours
[3:05:23] for round rock. And round rock has a significantly larger first responder district,
[3:05:28] five hours. Not to mention the families
[3:05:33] that are impacted by the toxins that were, they were exposed to on the
[3:05:37] job. And they're already, they're already risking everything. It's already
[3:05:41] a debate about whether or not he's coming home. And now I wanna expose him to
[3:05:45] more. That doesn't seem fair and that's
[3:05:49] not being talked about enough. But I'm not really gonna shy away from that when it's my family,
[3:05:54] when it's my, my community that I'm so plugged into because
[3:05:58] I'm a first responder spouse. Please consider that
[3:06:02] you could put a park in, you could give us a space for our kids to grow and
[3:06:06] flourish. I'm, I'm also an lpca, almost a . Um,
[3:06:11] I sit with our youth. I sit with the mental health
[3:06:15] of our youth. And you're telling me that a data
[3:06:19] center is more important than the kids that wanna commit suicide
[3:06:24] on a weekly basis. That I'm having to talk down,
[3:06:28] that I'm having to hold the broken pieces of them because
[3:06:32] they don't have anywhere where they can let loose and be kids for a minute. That's safe.
[3:06:37] I have one park in my neighborhood and it's about as old as the
[3:06:42] neighborhood. And it, it's not really safe. And we don't let the kids go. I
[3:06:46] have to go to round rock, cedar park, leander. Why don't we have something like that?
[3:06:51] do we not care about our kids that much? We're a young town.
[3:06:56] we have families. A lot of our community is families.
[3:07:01] can we start paying attention to them because we're here, we're
[3:07:05] the future. And I'm already halfway out the door
[3:07:09] because what the heck? And I'm not really advocating
[3:07:13] come live in huddle. I'm not. I wanna
[3:07:18] be. I love y'all. I wanna be, but quite
[3:07:22] frankly, it's really hard when stuff like this gets pushed and a data center company comes in and says,
[3:07:26] we don't mean any harm and we're not gonna do any harm. But my other next point then I'm gonna end
[3:07:30] with this one. If he doesn't honor everything he says, we have two options
[3:07:34] as a community. We get into a really pricey lawsuit that we may or may not be able
[3:07:38] to afford. Or we turn a blind eye and they get to do whatever the hell they wanna do. Pardon
[3:07:42] my french.
[3:07:50] I urge you to think about that. It is unchecked, it
[3:07:54] is unregulated across the country. Don't let it into our waters,
[3:07:58] please. Thank you. Thank you.
[3:08:07] next up is colby taylor.
[3:08:16] colby taylor. I live at 1204 round cove in car meadows.
[3:08:20] I'm not a cross the street permit or anything. I'm about a mile away.
[3:08:25] the whole point here is, uh, the rezoning. I think it's pretty common sense. Uh,
[3:08:30] you're within the two three mile radius. What do you have residential?
[3:08:35] families. Families. Families. Families. Use the space for families, right?
[3:08:39] I mean, make it a garden, make it something else. The data center doesn't make any sense.
[3:08:43] I work in the industry. It would bring my company lots of money. It was actually kind of funny
[3:08:48] 'cause I worked with every company that he put up there. They don't, though, they
[3:08:52] don't have anyone to go into the data center yet. But
[3:08:56] again, do something for the families, not for another
[3:09:01] greedy company. You have plenty of them. That's it. Thank you.
[3:09:05] thank you.
[3:09:10] all right. Congratulations. Three quarters of the way. Done. .
[3:09:15] next up is robert roseberry.
[3:09:20] all right. Sorry. Couldn't tell if it was a wire. K yeah,
[3:09:24] I know. I'm sorry. My handwriting is not good. Are your doctor, my name is robert roseberry.
[3:09:29] I live at 2 2 7 dale street, huddle square. I've been there about 12
[3:09:33] years. Uh, we started to raise a family there. Um,
[3:09:38] I'm a united states air force veteran. Uh, worked for the state for 10 years. I've
[3:09:42] worked in construction. I'm a cancer patient. Um,
[3:09:49] the gentleman here, uh, had a nice presentation. Um,
[3:09:53] one lady pointed out there was some question about it, but,
[3:09:58] um, it was a nice presentation and I, if, if I was getting paid to be here to sell this to
[3:10:02] you, I probably would've said the same thing. Um, and he
[3:10:06] actually, uh, proved some of our points in his presentation. There are health concerns.
[3:10:11] um, uh, like I said, I'm a cancer patient. I have several other disabilities.
[3:10:15] um, I don't need more. I don't want my kids to have more. Uh, our
[3:10:19] house is about 2000 feet to the east of the proposed location, uh,
[3:10:24] um, the school and about a hundred houses are
[3:10:28] between, uh, me in there. Um, he, he
[3:10:32] proved some of our points in his presentation, uh, when he addressed the health concerns, uh, when
[3:10:37] he addressed the noise concerns, the water concerns, the power consumption, uh, concerns.
[3:10:42] um, and one person brought up apparently the, the temperature concerns
[3:10:46] that, uh, surround the data center as well. And, and he did mention that there are different
[3:10:50] types of data centers. They're not, uh, all, uh, created equal.
[3:10:55] um, but a quick google search on any of these, uh,
[3:11:00] topics that a lot of people have brought up, um, will show you like, yes,
[3:11:04] there are health concerns. Um, he cannot say
[3:11:08] that this is a hundred percent safe. Um,
[3:11:13] how many years after asbestos was used, uh, was in until they determined,
[3:11:17] hey, this is actually bad for you. Mm-hmm . Um, madam cury
[3:11:21] found out when it was too late, the radiation was bad for her. Um,
[3:11:26] there was a movie that came out in the late nineties, early two thousands, um,
[3:11:30] that was based on a true story, aaron brockovich, where, uh, the company is
[3:11:35] saying it's safe. It's safe, it's safe. Meanwhile, all the people in the area are getting
[3:11:39] poison from contaminated groundwater. Um,
[3:11:44] so, uh, I wanna I wanna pause and just ask
[3:11:48] a question real quick. Um, I I've been to a city council meeting or,
[3:11:52] or or two before. Um, I haven't been to a planning and zoning meeting before.
[3:11:56] is the turnout here today? Standing room, room only. Is that normal for
[3:12:00] your meetings? ? We've had standing, standing room only
[3:12:05] twice in the eight years that I've been on pnz. And
[3:12:09] you have a meeting once a month. That's true. Once a month. Once a month, a month.
[3:12:14] um, and there was the gentleman that represents,
[3:12:18] re represents the company and then one of lady that we're in favor.
[3:12:23] but everybody else I've heard so far has been a resounding, no, we don't want this.
[3:12:27] and as the one gentleman pointed out, we're not anti-development. Um,
[3:12:31] we're just, we don't want this possible health hazard and other concerns
[3:12:36] in our neighborhood. Um, and, and, and the gentleman
[3:12:40] representing the company did bring up, um, what else
[3:12:44] are you gonna do with that property? Uh, and, and a couple people have addressed that, but
[3:12:50] we don't have to do anything with it. Not doing anything with it to me
[3:12:54] would be a better choice than a potential health hazard. And
[3:12:58] he did.
[3:13:02] and, and of course there are brother options that other people brought up, but, uh,
[3:13:07] he brought up the, the, the water, the closed loop system. Um,
[3:13:11] like I said, I, I've worked for the government. I've, I've been in construction
[3:13:15] and, and they have all these plans and all these, uh, um, ways
[3:13:19] to mitigate the noise and the water consumption. And
[3:13:23] I didn't hear one to, they have the backup generators, which would create another problem as other people
[3:13:27] have pointed out. Um, but this closed loop water system,
[3:13:32] um, I've been around long enough to know, okay, the water they put in there
[3:13:36] on day one, it's not gonna be the water that's in there 10 years from now. There there's gonna be issues.
[3:13:40] they're gonna have to, I would assume, uh,
[3:13:44] replace that water every now and then. Uh, what happens with that water? How
[3:13:48] contaminated is it? What are they gonna do with it? Um,
[3:13:56] they're, they're gonna have to flush it. Just like the fire hydrants. They're gonna have to keep
[3:14:00] adding water to it. And, and in a city where for
[3:14:04] months on end, every single year, for as long as I've lived here, we've been in
[3:14:08] water restriction. Um, and yeah, he pointed out that an apartment complex
[3:14:13] is probably used more water. That's, I I, I'd be okay
[3:14:17] with that. Um, that's providing more places to live. Um,
[3:14:22] and, uh, power concerns. The
[3:14:26] one gentleman pointed out how much more power it would need. Our power system is strain.
[3:14:30] like he pointed, one guy pointed out in, in 2021 snowpocalypse.
[3:14:35] um, it proved to us that our grid couldn't handle what
[3:14:39] we have. So I don't know what our infrastructure is supposed to do to
[3:14:43] support this, but I don't think we want it anyway. Um,
[3:14:49] apparently I did a quick google search 'cause somebody brought up to me, one of my neighbors over here brought up to me that
[3:14:53] apparently, uh, in a data center area, it can raise the,
[3:14:57] the temperature of the area. Mm-hmm . And a quick google
[3:15:01] search. Uh, ironically ai told me
[3:15:06] that, uh, within a six mile range, uh, it can raise the temperature.
[3:15:11] um, and there's also radiation concerns. I looked that up too while I was sitting here waiting
[3:15:15] and he said, yeah, it's not ionizing radiation, but obviously there
[3:15:19] is radiation. Um, and some people may say,
[3:15:24] well that's not harmful. It is harmful. It's questionable. This whole thing is questionable
[3:15:28] at best. And you,
[3:15:32] uh, the, the only good thing I've heard here about
[3:15:36] having a data center would be revenue for the city. Um, I think
[3:15:40] it's not worth it. Um, related to
[3:15:44] the risks. And yeah, they, they,
[3:15:49] I was reminded of the wizard or I was paying no attention to the man behind the curtain. Um,
[3:15:54] when uh, they have all these concerns that he did bring up and he validated our
[3:15:58] concerns there and he's got an answer for everything, which is concerning in itself. , they
[3:16:02] got the right answer for everything. But one lady brought up, um,
[3:16:07] once it's done, it's done. And this is our time to
[3:16:12] stop it from happening. This is our time to,
[3:16:18] you have an overwhelming option here to
[3:16:22] listen to the community or to choose
[3:16:26] money. And, and basically all the people that have come up
[3:16:30] here and talked that that's the way I see it, that's your option.
[3:16:35] um, and he mentioned like acceptable levels of pollution and noise
[3:16:39] and radiation and everything. And there's been talk about selling
[3:16:44] your houses and moving. 'cause you don't wanna live next to a data center. I'd be willing
[3:16:48] to bet if you tried to put it on the market today,
[3:16:52] good luck selling it because right now the buyer's gonna find
[3:16:56] out, oh, they're thinking about putting a data center there and it's probably gonna go through because the
[3:17:00] little guy most of the time doesn't turn out well for him.
[3:17:06] good luck with that right now I'm talking about today.
[3:17:10] I could be wrong, but that'd be my guess.
[3:17:16] I think I got everything. I'm sorry if I went too long. Thank you. Thank you.
[3:17:26] all right, next up is gary oldham.
[3:17:35] so good evening. My name is gary oldham.
[3:17:39] I live at 29 28 clinton place in, uh, far northeast round rock, texas.
[3:17:43] I've lived there for 20 years and I frequently shop and dine in in hu.
[3:17:48] I'm one of the co-founders of protect round rock. We're a grassroots community organization
[3:17:52] formed last december to oppose what ultimately became the
[3:17:56] ninth data center to be approved in round rock. Uh,
[3:18:01] make no mistake, artificial intelligence and greed
[3:18:06] are the reasons data centers are exploding, particularly across
[3:18:10] texas. You've heard concerns, very, very valid concerns.
[3:18:14] we've heard, I heard from the applicant and I, I was
[3:18:19] somewhere between deja vu and ptsd hearing those claims because
[3:18:23] they are almost verbatim the same false claims
[3:18:27] made by the data center developers in round rock. They're saying from
[3:18:31] the same hymnal, but that hymnals a work of fiction. Along with the other compelling
[3:18:35] reasons there are to reject data centers like auditory
[3:18:39] noise pollution, the visual blight, the insidious
[3:18:44] low frequency sound, the infrasound that causes real health
[3:18:49] impacts on human beings, on animals, on
[3:18:53] wildlife and livestock. And the strain on the grid. Yes,
[3:18:57] data center developers have to pay to connect to the grid, but guess what? That
[3:19:01] grid, the electrical provider has to generate far more
[3:19:05] electricity and distribute that electricity to support these data centers. And we rate payers.
[3:19:09] everybody in this room and all of you pay for that. We are subsidizing involuntarily
[3:19:14] the data center industry through, through our electric bills. But I wanna
[3:19:18] talk about something else I was pleased to hear some people touch on already. I spent
[3:19:22] half my lengthy career in the fire service. I'm
[3:19:26] a member today of the international association of fire chiefs national fire protection association.
[3:19:31] I'm a survivor of occupational cancer that I acquired through exposure
[3:19:35] to carcinogens on the job in the fire service.
[3:19:40] a couple people already mentioned one of the fires that sabe data center round rock
[3:19:44] has had, they've been operational for about two years. In march, 2024,
[3:19:48] there was a second alarm fire there. It required 14 pieces of fire apparatus.
[3:19:52] it was a second alarm fire, including automatic aid from adjoining cities. It
[3:19:56] took five hours to bring under control. And with all the automatic aid
[3:20:01] and other resources provided to round rock, that drew down fire resources throughout
[3:20:05] the region, putting everybody at greater risk during that time, 14
[3:20:09] pieces of apparatus, 44 firefighters caused $2 million in damage.
[3:20:15] it also caused about $400,000 in damage city property, personal
[3:20:19] protective equipment of those firefighters that had to be destroyed and replaced.
[3:20:24] 40 plus firefighters were exposed to carcinogens and other toxins. They're
[3:20:28] gonna have to worry about having a ticking time bomb inside their bodies for the rest of their lives. And
[3:20:32] hopefully they'll live a full life, but they'll always have that worry.
[3:20:37] in addition, this, the, the, the second alarm fire on the 24
[3:20:41] or the 22nd of march in 2024 was in a roofless battery
[3:20:45] building. And throughout the entire time that fire was occurring in that building,
[3:20:50] toxic smoke was billing out of the area and
[3:20:54] directly into the neighborhoods adjacent to the sb data center.
[3:20:58] you have homes on either side of this proposed location. There's, uh, cottonwood creek
[3:21:02] elementary is a quarter mile away. Hu middle schools just a little further than that,
[3:21:07] directly in the path of any smoke, particularly with a, a dominant southwest wind that we have here.
[3:21:12] when, when using the techniques of sb folks instructed ground rock
[3:21:16] fire to use dry chemical extinguishers proved insufficient. They had to
[3:21:20] apply copious amounts of water to extinguish that fire. The water runoff
[3:21:24] containing carcinogens and other toxins went into the storm drain. It went into
[3:21:29] brushy creek. And when we talk about environmental hazards, it's not just a day-to-day
[3:21:33] operations, but it's things like this. They've had a second structure fire
[3:21:37] this year in another battery compartment. Uh, building wasn't quite as
[3:21:41] severe as the first one, but that's two major fires in just two years.
[3:21:46] and that's the kind of risk you're accepting willingly if you allowed another data center
[3:21:50] in your community. It is an absolute lie to say
[3:21:54] the data centers do not place a demand on emergency services, and they don't place
[3:21:58] a threat to the environment or the community or their wellbeing of the people. And that's in your
[3:22:02] city. I would urge you to represent and look out for the best
[3:22:07] interest of the human beings that make up the beautiful and vibrant community
[3:22:11] of hudu. It's not the soulless concrete buildings churning data, supporting
[3:22:16] ai, supporting mass surveillance that make your community a beautiful place to live. It's
[3:22:20] the people, the people behind me, the people at the deus look out
[3:22:24] for their best interest and deny this application.
[3:22:29] I have a copy of the fire report that'll leave.
[3:22:38] next up we have richard booth.
[3:22:45] um, hi, my name is richard booth. I work at, I live at, uh, and
[3:22:49] I work at, uh, 1 0 9 emory stable drive in, uh, emory farms.
[3:22:54] um, I've doodled all over my notes, so I don't
[3:22:58] wanna, uh, go over a bunch of things that have already been talked about.
[3:23:03] um, I'm a retired environmental engineer, but I still work.
[3:23:07] uh, in the last five years I've worked as the air quality consultant on 18
[3:23:11] data centers, 16 in california, one in texas, and one in chicago.
[3:23:17] um, I can honestly tell you that the site over on
[3:23:21] ed schmidt is the worst data center site process
[3:23:25] I've ever seen. Nothing even comes close to being as worse
[3:23:29] as that. I wanna make one statement here. Um,
[3:23:35] everybody's brought up some really good points, um,
[3:23:39] but I think the main issue has been overlooked and minimized. And I'll tell you what I think
[3:23:43] it is. I think what we should be asking is, is this appropriate
[3:23:48] and necessary to locate, locate a data center that will be
[3:23:52] sandwiched in between four large existing housing developments
[3:23:57] in close proximity to an elementary and a middle school, several
[3:24:01] churches, and a myriad of local businesses? I think the answer to that
[3:24:05] question is no. In my opinion, the site represents
[3:24:09] a poor choice as a location for a data center, and it certainly conveys
[3:24:14] a complete lack of concern with respect to the lives and wellbeing
[3:24:18] of the residents who live in the nearby subdivisions whose children will attend
[3:24:22] the nearby schools. And for the people who work at all the nearby businesses,
[3:24:27] based upon the concerns being addressed by the texas legislature
[3:24:31] via uh, sb six, it may be beneficial for the city of hu
[3:24:36] to step back and wait till all of these environmental inciting
[3:24:40] concerns are dealt with in a responsible manner. Hu
[3:24:44] already has a proposed 600 megawatt hyperscale data center
[3:24:48] being built out on the east side. I think we've done our part with
[3:24:53] respect to data centers. , uh, I've previously submitted
[3:24:57] a whole list of questions to the planning commissioner. I've revised those.
[3:25:01] I have a set here and I would like to request that I be allowed to put 'em into the public record.
[3:25:07] can do. Thank you.
[3:25:14] in closing, I I'd like to, uh, answer just a couple of concerns that I've heard and
[3:25:18] I'll make this very quick. Uh, the gentleman before me was talking about
[3:25:22] the best fires, bess battery energy storage
[3:25:27] systems. I've worked on those projects in california at the moss landing
[3:25:31] facility at the corbe best facility, and I'm currently working on another one.
[3:25:36] uh, those fires are extremely hard to put out.
[3:25:41] they emit huge amounts of toxic materials, hydrogen fluoride being
[3:25:45] the, the most pr uh, prevalent. Um,
[3:25:50] I was a little bit concerned when I got the notice in the mail that was only sent out to the residence
[3:25:55] within 200 feet. Uh,
[3:25:59] right now, when we do modeling for these facilities, we go out to a two and a
[3:26:03] half mile radius around the plant, not 200 feet.
[3:26:08] so you've got schools, churches, and hundreds and hundreds of families that could
[3:26:13] possibly be impacted by any type of accident at one of these facilities.
[3:26:18] not only the accident, but the, just the use of the emergency generators.
[3:26:23] um, one gentleman brought up
[3:26:27] the fact that, uh, uh, a small facility on, on
[3:26:31] he, he stated a false small facility on 15 acres.
[3:26:35] uh, well this is a small facility on 42 acres.
[3:26:40] we regularly routine, routinely permit
[3:26:44] much larger data centers above a hundred megawatts on acreage as low as 15
[3:26:48] acres. So this acre, this acreage up here could hold a lot more
[3:26:53] and we certainly don't want that. Um, I've
[3:26:57] given, uh, the copy to the gentleman and I really appreciate the
[3:27:02] opportunity to speak before the commission. Thank you.
[3:27:12] next is matthew martin.
[3:27:18] uh, good evening. I'm, uh, matthew martin. 2 2 8 hilton street, hu town square.
[3:27:23] uh, you may have seen me in h uh, the ho 18 meeting call was I idaho last week.
[3:27:27] and I'm speaking more to agenda item 6.5 here.
[3:27:32] my primary concern is in regards to sound levels, particularly as current huda ordinances
[3:27:36] do not speak to c weighted decibel limits, which cover the low drum vibrations
[3:27:41] of data centers decided to go, brought up a good point during the hoa
[3:27:45] meeting and that I did not have a proposal for what the limit should be. Thus,
[3:27:49] I conducted some research on how other city ordinances handled this issue. I found
[3:27:53] the language imbued as ordinance to be quite agreeable. As noted for any sound source
[3:27:57] regulated by this article. The c weighted sound level dbc
[3:28:02] shall not exceed the a weighted sound level dba when
[3:28:06] measured at the real property line of the property from which the sound is generated
[3:28:10] in terms of the quantitative limit. I did note that zydeco hoa
[3:28:14] presentation slide 19 on tonight's presentation, had the
[3:28:18] following language for reference, sound levels at the property boundary are
[3:28:22] expected to be below approximately 40 dba, which is comparable
[3:28:26] to a quiet residential environment. My suggestion would thus be that the
[3:28:30] sound limit at the property boundary be both under 40 dba and
[3:28:35] 40 dbc. Uh, you were talked about,
[3:28:39] uh, the predictive noise impact assessment. Someone, uh, uh, rightfully
[3:28:43] said, hey, we need a third party acoustic engineer, not so, uh, self-selected.
[3:28:48] I would also want to add that interns of the noise impact assessment, a couple stipulations.
[3:28:53] one, the baseline measurement should be in the dead of night, say 3:00 am
[3:28:58] and also an elevation of a second story home as sound would travel
[3:29:02] directly to folk story home. Uh, second story rooms not being blocked by fences, for
[3:29:06] example. Also, we should include a stipulation on how ongoing
[3:29:11] testing would be performed to ensure this data center remains compliant,
[3:29:15] along with what penalties and potential shutdown procedures would entail for continued
[3:29:19] violation. In addition to my sound concern above, I am seeking
[3:29:23] clarification on this, uh, on if this upcoming vote on the agenda,
[3:29:27] item six, uh, 6.5 triggers the vested
[3:29:32] in, uh, vested right statute of local government code chapter 2 45,
[3:29:36] specifically section 2 45 0.002 a two, which
[3:29:40] in summary provides grandfathering protections for a plan for develop
[3:29:45] development of real property or plat application is filed with a regulatory agency.
[3:29:50] my concern here is that the amendment request for the plan unit development fits
[3:29:54] a two language of a plan for development. As I'm understanding
[3:29:58] this, any stipulations that you wish to include in the pud would need
[3:30:02] to be addressed via altering the present amendment requests being voted on may 7th
[3:30:06] to emphasize, I have concerns that if we vote to approve on may 7th,
[3:30:11] we would no longer be able to add stipulations to the pud instead being beholden
[3:30:15] to our present insufficient ordinances. If this is the case, we should
[3:30:19] deny this specific amendment request, adjusting to a more agreeable amendment request before
[3:30:23] go forward. Thank you for your time and consideration. Thank you.
[3:30:32] next is katie martin.
[3:30:37] good evening. My name is katie martin. I live at 2 2 8 hilton street in hu town square.
[3:30:42] I'm about 200 feet from the pro proposed site and I'm here to formally voice
[3:30:46] my opposition to the zoning change. I wanna echo some of the concerns
[3:30:51] of the other speakers, um, especially when it comes to noise level, the temperature and the
[3:30:55] fires. Um, but in my comments, I wanna focus on the character of our neighborhood.
[3:30:59] my husband and I chose to buy our very first home in hu specifically because of the
[3:31:03] small town feel. If there had been a data center in that space when my husband and
[3:31:07] I were looking at houses, we likely wouldn't have moved to this neighborhood. If
[3:31:12] the building ends up producing industrial noise, even at a low volume, even if it's
[3:31:16] well below city ordinance levels, who will want to buy our home if we
[3:31:20] decide to move because we don't want to listen to it anymore. I personally
[3:31:24] would prefer if this land remained an open space like a park, as some have suggested.
[3:31:29] but if it must be developed, it should be in done in a way, um, in line with the
[3:31:33] soar 2040 comprehensive plan and in a way that serves the people
[3:31:37] living next to it. We need community fee facing retail.
[3:31:41] we need a grocery store. We need services that add value to our daily lives,
[3:31:46] not a data center. I urge this commission to ensure that development of this land serves
[3:31:50] the people of hu hu. First, thank you for your time and consideration. Thank you.
[3:32:00] is it brent mcgurk?
[3:32:07] okay. Hello, my name is brent mcgirk. I live at 3 0 1 brookside
[3:32:11] street, uh, north side of uh, hu town square. Um,
[3:32:16] I'm not gonna open my notepad. Everybody's touched on literally everything I wrote down. So,
[3:32:20] um, I have worked, um, at data centers for
[3:32:24] a data center as a data center technician, checking all the systems to make sure that there are no leaks,
[3:32:28] alarms, or anything like that. The low volume noise
[3:32:34] is the biggest pain. That's
[3:32:38] one concern that I had and it was finally touched on. Um,
[3:32:43] I actually work at one of zy co's or our equipment is
[3:32:47] at zydeco. One of zy co's uh, data center is cyrus one down
[3:32:51] in the met center. If you go park your car and you get out, you can hear
[3:32:55] it. It's constant and it's mind-numbing.
[3:33:00] um, I did, I will open my notepad 'cause there is
[3:33:04] a quote that I found in the intent section
[3:33:08] of the hu development code, a quote by justice
[3:33:12] george sutherland. It says, a nuisance may be, may be merely the right
[3:33:16] thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.
[3:33:21] this is certainly that wrong place.
[3:33:25] and I would say that there is no right place in huro. I would agree with others
[3:33:29] that we don't need a data center here. I hope you vote no.
[3:33:33] thank you for your time. Thank you.
[3:33:41] uh, looks like jeremy cortez, carter,
[3:33:47] jeremy, carter, lawrence, jeremy c
[3:33:54] okay. Probably left. You guys have been pretty
[3:33:58] thorough. You probably didn't have anything to add. Uh, brandon
[3:34:04] . Thank you. .
[3:34:09] thank you for letting me talk for just a moment. I'll be quick. 'cause
[3:34:13] almost everything I have to say has already been covered by other people than many of these fun
[3:34:17] people. Um, I I do want to make two
[3:34:22] points though. One is just like, how do we want hu to grow? You know, like,
[3:34:27] I like growth in terms of we get more amenities, more
[3:34:31] services, more population. My home property goes up, price
[3:34:35] goes up, great. I don't really care about growth that just feeds hundreds of millions of
[3:34:39] dollars to someone that doesn't live here, like at all. In fact, I find it very
[3:34:43] counterproductive. Um, it's gonna stop us from real
[3:34:47] growth. It, no one's gonna move here. So
[3:34:53] beyond that, you know, we talk about the primary benefit being revenue, like
[3:34:57] tax revenue, but the center is a tax on homeowners
[3:35:02] here. Like, that's what it is. It's just a unevenly distributed
[3:35:07] tax. Like it's gonna take tens of thousands of dollars off of all our property
[3:35:11] value. How is that better than like,
[3:35:15] rate a 1% increase in property taxes? I'm not sure I understand the
[3:35:19] map there. Um,
[3:35:24] and then, you know, everyone here understands quite well that
[3:35:29] we have supply and demand economy, and that there's no way you can create
[3:35:33] 70 megawatts of demand on our power and it not increase prices
[3:35:38] for everyone here. And that when they make those claims, it's just entirely ingenuous.
[3:35:43] so given those things, I just hope that you guys will do what
[3:35:47] the community very clearly wants and say no.
[3:35:52] and I wanna stand with two people. I've said before, like,
[3:35:56] a lot of people just don't want it here. I don't want it in huddle. Like please just say no
[3:36:00] to all of them going forward. That's all I have to say. Thank you.
[3:36:09] all right, next up is lindsey roach
[3:36:18] going once, going twice. Ler ready,
[3:36:23] guys? Ready? It's the last one. Greg roach. He
[3:36:27] left too. Oh, all right. Now with that
[3:36:31] said, um, is there anyone else who would like to speak
[3:36:35] on this item? Name,
[3:36:40] uh, address, and if you would, what community?
[3:36:44] uh, my name is brian schaffner. I live at 7 0 1 gray fox
[3:36:48] loop in cottonwood farms. Uh, my wife christina's already spoken.
[3:36:52] and, um, I don't have a lot to add.
[3:36:57] um, with everything everyone else has said,
[3:37:01] um, I am opposed to this data center. Um,
[3:37:06] and I, I, I have to say I'm, I'm really
[3:37:11] inspired by all of the people who have come out to speak tonight.
[3:37:15] um, it, it's just a wonderful expression of,
[3:37:19] of the community because the community is, is just
[3:37:24] the people who live here coming together for common purpose. And, um,
[3:37:30] I I just want it on the record that I stand with them
[3:37:34] and I want to ask you in the strongest possible
[3:37:38] terms, please listen to our neighbors and
[3:37:42] reject the data center. Thank you. Thank you.
[3:37:49] is there anyone else who would like to speak on this item?
[3:37:53] please come on up. How your please.
[3:38:00] hello? Hi, my name is pam lawrence. I live at
[3:38:04] 400 farm creek drive in hu in emory farms,
[3:38:08] which is directly across the street from this proposed location.
[3:38:13] I'm not gonna cover any of the points that I have been discussing, partly on
[3:38:17] facebook with people, um, because it's all been covered here tonight.
[3:38:22] um, I'm, oh, first I wanna say thank you to all of you for staying
[3:38:26] late and listening intently and paying attention to
[3:38:30] what everybody's saying because for my, in my mind, that's what's
[3:38:35] important to me is that our elected officials and our volunteers,
[3:38:39] um, listen to the community and what the community has to say.
[3:38:43] and, and they are overwhelmingly asking you all
[3:38:47] to really pay attention here and to decide
[3:38:52] that this property should be used for the benefit of the citizens who live around
[3:38:57] it. And not just for tax revenue and not just to make money
[3:39:01] for a data center. There's too many unknowns about
[3:39:05] data centers, and you've heard it all tonight. And the other thing I
[3:39:09] wanna say about the presentation from zydeco is, you know, that was a
[3:39:13] very nice presentation, but extremely self-serving. You know, it's, it,
[3:39:17] it doesn't ha it doesn't cover any of the, the negative impacts that
[3:39:21] the people are concerned about. So thank you for your time
[3:39:26] and I hope everybody has a great night, and I hope you make a very informed decision.
[3:39:31] thank you. Thank you.
[3:39:37] okay. So, uh, is there anyone else?
[3:39:41] all right. I am not going to close the public hearing as was
[3:39:46] discussed several hours ago. We're going to continue this public
[3:39:50] hearing on may 20th, if they're teenth. April, april, april,
[3:39:54] april, april 20. Thank you. It's getting late. I know. I've been up here for a few
[3:39:58] hours. , um, let's past my bedtime. Um,
[3:40:02] so yes, april 20th. There, the public hearing will
[3:40:07] continue. If there are people who want to speak, um, after
[3:40:11] viewing this or not viewing this or whatever want to speak, encourage
[3:40:15] them to come. I want, I personally would like to hear
[3:40:19] more voices. I, I like that. I
[3:40:23] like public engagement. Um, that being said, we
[3:40:28] as a body are not going to vote on this until april 20th.
[3:40:34] so we will consider on our own, we will not meet
[3:40:39] and debate this between ourselves. That would be a violation of texas
[3:40:43] law. But yes, uh,
[3:40:48] april 20th on this item,
[3:40:52] we will have a decision. So
[3:40:57] that's something you can look forward to. With that, we're not going to
[3:41:01] vote, we're just going to continue public
[3:41:05] hearing that start at eight 30. It will be continued. And
[3:41:09] we are adjourning. No, we're not adjourning. No,
[3:41:13] we we're not no adjourning the public hearing. Pause.
[3:41:18] we're gonna pause it. Just move to the next item. We're moving to the next item. There
[3:41:22] we go. No, late night. We need,
[3:41:26] uh, don't we wait a minute. Hold on. Pretty picture. Don't
[3:41:30] we need to table 6.4? No, we're
[3:41:35] not taking any action on it, so, right. But we are taking
[3:41:39] action.
[3:41:43] we need because of the public hearing. No, that's custody.
[3:41:48] okay. All right. I, I messed up. You may want to explain to them that, that
[3:41:53] this, once we make the decision, city council, they make the final.
[3:41:57] right. They may not know that. Okay. So the next
[3:42:01] item is 6.5, which is a public hearing. Just
[3:42:06] saying it's a public hearing consideration and possible action on the zydeco
[3:42:10] data center, formerly known as upper schmidt creek pod
[3:42:14] revision.
[3:42:19] . All set. Did should we, I'll ask, should we take
[3:42:23] a a, a break at all for any reason to come for break? About five minutes, right? No,
[3:42:27] just keep going. Okay. I'm into it either way. I'm just, do we want, do we want to it? Alright.
[3:42:31] you know what, let's do it. All right. I got stress. My we're gonna, I believe you. I
[3:42:35] believe we're gonna take a seven minute recess. We will reconvene, uh, on my
[3:42:39] clock at 10 50. Okay.
[3:42:43] all right. I got the same. So it is, uh, thank you. 10 51. We're gonna reconvene.
[3:42:48] yes, sir. And we're going to jump into 6.5
[3:42:54] public hearing con consideration and possible action on the zydeco
[3:42:58] data center, formerly known as upper schmitz creek hud
[3:43:02] revision. One second.
[3:43:08] I'm waiting for technology to catch up to us. Alright, .
[3:43:13] thank you, mr. Chair. Uh, my name for the record again is howard kuhns. I'm the
[3:43:17] director of development services. This item 6.5 is
[3:43:21] a public hearing and consideration and possible action related to
[3:43:25] the item that we just, uh, talked about. Um, the previous item was
[3:43:29] the future land use map revision. This is effectively a rezoning,
[3:43:34] it is a revision to the planned, uh, unit development,
[3:43:38] uh, formerly known as upper schmidt's creek. But this is the one that would facilitate
[3:43:42] the, uh, establishment of a data center. On the
[3:43:46] subject parcel, uh, put up a map there. We're at the same
[3:43:51] site, 40 acres southeast corner of limber loop and, um,
[3:43:55] edge schmidt boulevard. Um, put up some, uh,
[3:43:59] references there so you can orient yourself. Uh, the map that I put
[3:44:03] together of, uh, the existing zoning shows b two commercial
[3:44:08] in the vicinity. There is some single family directly adjacent
[3:44:12] to the east single family that is adjacent to the west
[3:44:16] across the edge schmidt boulevard. Um, there's additionally single family
[3:44:20] residential to the northwest and the northeast. And those are both across,
[3:44:24] uh, existing rights of way as well. We've got some, um, light
[3:44:29] industrial that's in the vicinity, uh, to the west, uh, about 12
[3:44:33] or 1500 feet to the west. Um, there is some existing b one,
[3:44:37] uh, local business, which is the, uh, more restrictive, less
[3:44:42] pervasive, uh, type of retail and local business zoning that
[3:44:46] we have. There is a piece of unincorporated, so
[3:44:50] nz no zoning, unincorporated williamson county directly to the north across
[3:44:55] leer loop and, um, multi-family on
[3:44:59] the southeast. Um, which is the currently
[3:45:03] the western terminus of live oak street. The site itself is
[3:45:07] zoned pud. And there are, uh, there's an, the existing entitlement
[3:45:11] is pud, um, for the multifamily development that we spoke about earlier. So
[3:45:16] an aerial photo, again, the, the site itself highlighted in red. You
[3:45:20] can see the existing and emergent, uh, development pattern of
[3:45:24] single family detached east and west civic uses of the elementary
[3:45:28] and the middle school a little bit further east. And, um, this site,
[3:45:33] uh, the adjoining site to the south and the site to the north across
[3:45:37] edge schmidt are, uh, vacant, currently undeveloped. So
[3:45:41] the current classification is pud, um, as stated in
[3:45:45] the staff report. And I, and I don't wanna read to you from that, but
[3:45:49] the important parts of the current classification is that seven parcels, 21
[3:45:54] acres for commercial two parcels, which are 18 acres for residential. And
[3:45:58] the rest of what's in there will be right of way. And that shouldn't be lost because
[3:46:02] there is currently a plan for the connection of albany
[3:46:06] way from the east will move to
[3:46:10] the west and will connect to edge schmidt. So essentially
[3:46:15] bifurcate this site that we're talking about today with an extension that will
[3:46:19] connect that neighborhood to the arterial edge schmidt, um,
[3:46:24] 173 units in different housing types. Um,
[3:46:28] the requested classification is pud with a base zoning of light
[3:46:32] industrial, um, that would, uh, facilitate the establishment
[3:46:37] of this data center project. Now, um, in a, in
[3:46:41] an attempt to mitigate, you know, perceived or real negative effects on the adjacent neighborhoods
[3:46:45] and the, and the rest of the adjacent pattern, they have proposed a host of,
[3:46:50] um, I kind of call it restrictions, I guess, on the development
[3:46:54] of the site setbacks, um, buffer yards, landscaping.
[3:46:58] um, there's also a, a wall, um, that would
[3:47:02] block both visual and, and the auditory intrusion from
[3:47:07] the site onto the neighboring sites. Um, and you can
[3:47:11] read through that. It's, it's in the applicant's material, it's in the a ir and, and it's also
[3:47:15] in this report here. So as we went through and did our evaluation,
[3:47:19] um, the, the staff concerns really were all of the,
[3:47:23] all the site plan concessions proposed being those buffer yards,
[3:47:27] the increase in the setbacks, things like that. Um, all of them are
[3:47:32] proposed as mitigation to reduce the interference between two
[3:47:36] dissimilar land use categories. If we were
[3:47:40] talking about, uh, a land use that was being established on this site that
[3:47:44] was more harmonious with the existing pattern, there,
[3:47:49] there wouldn't be a need for higher and more intensive
[3:47:53] buffering and uses such as what's proposed for this. So
[3:47:57] that, um, makes you take a little bit of a, of, of a harder look
[3:48:01] at the proposal for the, um, uh, the conceptual
[3:48:06] site plan that was included. Um, when you do, does a single
[3:48:10] use operation with this low development density
[3:48:15] provide more benefit to the community than the current entitlement? I think the text of
[3:48:19] the comprehensive plan indicates that no, it does not. The needs
[3:48:23] as identified in the comprehensive plan and from the community at large, and we'll talk a little bit
[3:48:27] about that in a second. Um, the, are are spelled out reasonably
[3:48:32] succinctly that we need a greater diversity of housing. We need, um,
[3:48:36] more opportunity for, uh, local, commercial and local employment.
[3:48:40] keep people from having to make trips to work where we lose that retail
[3:48:45] leakage, where we're going to round rock in pflugerville and austin to get goods and
[3:48:49] services that we would prefer be, uh, sold here within the community.
[3:48:53] um, so the, it goes back to the question of is what's proposed better than
[3:48:57] what's existing? And staff has not been able to necessarily make that statement
[3:49:02] establishing a project with no active nor passive benefit to the surrounding community.
[3:49:06] in that we're talking about, um, the, the,
[3:49:10] the expectation that this site will effectively wall off, um,
[3:49:15] the communities on either side from themselves.
[3:49:19] um, it would be, you know, a site that
[3:49:23] would not lend itself to pass through traffic, whether
[3:49:28] it be, uh, rights of way for automobiles or off
[3:49:32] highway trails, uh, or or other type of use that you could, uh, pedestrian
[3:49:36] bike bed facilities for that neighborhood that, especially to
[3:49:40] the east, trying to get back down to the edge schmidt corridor, which is
[3:49:44] emergent with corridor retail. So it would be nice if we could get some of those cars
[3:49:48] off the road by facilitating, uh, travel between
[3:49:53] the rooftops and the local retail. But,
[3:49:57] um, putting up this site, we, we lose the opportunity to connect the roadway network
[3:50:01] and lose the expectation that there would be, uh, pedestrian connectivity
[3:50:05] for the folks that are around. 'cause these will likely be secure sites, and they don't want
[3:50:09] intrusion from the folks from the outside that being able to pass through. So, um,
[3:50:14] one, one of the thing, it, it would basically just be a hole of inactivity
[3:50:18] in the, in a donut basically, of higher activity of all the, the rooftops.
[3:50:23] does this fulfill those certain needs identified by hudu and its residents? So since,
[3:50:27] since I've been here, I've, I've been educated to the idea that hudu is,
[3:50:31] um, quite introspective. Um, we, we look at our processes,
[3:50:35] we look at our procedures, we look at our forms, we look at everything and decide whether
[3:50:40] or not it's the best bang for the buck, be it, you know, whether it's, uh, the
[3:50:44] best idea for the number of persons assigned to it or how much money is budgeted to it.
[3:50:48] and one of the things that we do is put out a survey, quite often, put out a, a, a survey
[3:50:52] to the citizenry and say, what, what's going well? What's not going well? What are
[3:50:56] your highest priorities? And what would you rather see stopped? And some of the things that come out of that
[3:51:00] true are traffic traffic's probably the number one answer that I see when
[3:51:04] I went through the results from this calendar year. So when you talk about traffic and you
[3:51:08] say the number of trips onto and off of the site as currently entitled versus
[3:51:13] the number of trips onto and off of the site as proposed. True.
[3:51:17] I think the pro I think the proposal, uh, uh, would have fewer trips per day. I
[3:51:21] agree. I think there would be less cars coming into. Um, but at what cost
[3:51:26] is the expectation? The, the, the, the emergence of traffic
[3:51:30] is the expectation that you are, uh, moving forward in
[3:51:34] commerce and the, um, the idea that
[3:51:39] development is gonna bring more roads, it's going to create more
[3:51:44] connections in the transportation network. And that is the number one way
[3:51:48] to alleviate traffic pinch points. Because what we have is, you know, traditional
[3:51:53] development of cul-de-sacs generally forces traffic in the other direction, and
[3:51:57] then eventually they all end up at the same intersections. And then eventually we get two and three
[3:52:01] light cycles before you can get through. The only main intersections that are through
[3:52:06] the expectation would be to create more of those roadway networks,
[3:52:11] minor and local streets to take some of the, you know, initial
[3:52:15] push of rush hour traffic off of the major corridors and connectors.
[3:52:19] additionally, um, you know, some of the things in there that were identified were more
[3:52:24] options for shopping and entertainment, which is something that huda is pretty low
[3:52:28] on. Um, and more options for local employment. So people don't
[3:52:32] necessarily have to leave and travel so far to go to work. The current entitlement creates opportunities
[3:52:36] for all those things, you know, diversify the work, um, create more
[3:52:41] entry and exits off of the, the site itself. And then, um,
[3:52:45] shopping and entertainment and employment. So, um, if
[3:52:49] you read through the staff report, there's a, there's a number of other, uh, uh, points that
[3:52:53] were put in there. But at the end of the day, um, staff's analysis has
[3:52:57] shown that this would not be an appropriate assignment of, uh, zoning
[3:53:01] to this site in light of the existing and emergent, uh,
[3:53:05] uh, development pattern and the dissimilar district being placed in
[3:53:10] the, in the middle unto itself, staff can't support it.
[3:53:15] alright. And do we have a, uh, presentation from the
[3:53:19] applicant on this item?
[3:53:26] um, it's extremely late and I appreciate y'all, y'all appreciate y'all bearing with us. There's, there's just too much
[3:53:30] to address right now and I just wanna let y'all, um, get outta here on, I just do wanna
[3:53:35] note, uh, mr. Kunz on the, on the albany road connection issued
[3:53:39] to ed schmidt. Um, that's designed because we, specifically in our october
[3:53:43] meeting with the neighborhood, hoa, we showed them an iteration of our site plan actually connecting a
[3:53:47] ring road, uh, to ed schmidt boulevard. And not a single person on the call said they wanted that
[3:53:51] there was 20, 30 people on the call and they said, we think that would bring
[3:53:56] too much trafficking into the neighborhood. We prefer your plan. Um, not showing that road,
[3:54:00] if the neighborhood's position has changed on that, it's certainly something that we can look back into. 'cause we did
[3:54:04] have side plans that, that showed that. So thank you. Thank you.
[3:54:08] alright. And as this calls for a public hearing, I will
[3:54:12] open the public hearing at 11:02 pm
[3:54:17] oh my god. And very similar to what
[3:54:21] we just did on item 6.4, this will be continued
[3:54:26] onto april 20th meeting, is that correct?
[3:54:33] gosh, I'm sorry. Is is that going? Is this public hearing going to be continued
[3:54:38] as well? That is correct, yep. All right. Two items will be heard again. Uh, so is
[3:54:42] there anyone to speak on this item?
[3:54:46] all right. Seeing no one, and with us not taking action on this,
[3:54:50] I do have two questions. Okay. Um,
[3:54:55] number one question is, it was mentioned in,
[3:54:59] in the public comments, but it was something that I made
[3:55:03] note of as soon as I saw this. What sort
[3:55:07] of additional fire department resources are going
[3:55:11] to be required to combat any sort of battery
[3:55:16] fire at this facility? Uh, I understand that
[3:55:20] fire departments currently have issues even with evs
[3:55:24] in garages, and I want, I am
[3:55:28] curious to know if we can get any sort of information about
[3:55:33] what additional resources would be required.
[3:55:39] I can ask. I I don't know. That outstrips my yeah, yeah. Subject matter
[3:55:43] expertise. We probably ask the esd and they've got an answer for us,
[3:55:47] but I don't know the answer. Okay. I can ask them. Uh, second,
[3:55:51] second question is a kind of legal one.
[3:55:55] um, I've seen it mentioned in the staff report and,
[3:55:59] uh, seen mention of it elsewhere, spot zoning.
[3:56:04] are we in danger of falling into
[3:56:08] some sort of spot zoning with this? I don't know if I'd use the word danger per
[3:56:12] se. Okay. Um, I, I did recognize that there could be an opportunity
[3:56:17] just because of the, the nature of the block
[3:56:21] and the surrounding area, that to place this assignment unto itself,
[3:56:26] um, especially in light of the direction from the comp plan,
[3:56:30] um, that it, it did open us up to the potential for a liability,
[3:56:35] depending heavily, depending heavily on the argument that
[3:56:39] could be made by the, by a person who was aggrieved. So
[3:56:44] my answer is yes, and I felt strongly enough about it that I wanted to mitigate that risk to
[3:56:48] the city, um, by opening up the conversation. I, I want,
[3:56:52] I want to talk about it not in a legal way per se, we
[3:56:56] don't have to go to exec or anything, but just talk about what the concept is.
[3:57:01] I have been involved in cases in my professional history where,
[3:57:05] um, spot zoning was called for and was completely appropriate.
[3:57:10] um, the, the reason was there were certain
[3:57:15] districts that were residential. The residential districts did not allow
[3:57:19] for other certain uses that were usual and customary
[3:57:24] ancillary for residential. So they had to put in little dots
[3:57:28] of, for, it was for schools and for, uh, fire stations. Mm-hmm
[3:57:32] . You couldn't put civic uses in a residential district in this city where I worked. So every
[3:57:36] time you would do a subdivision, you had to put those little things in there to allow,
[3:57:40] because the only reason for the civic uses was the rooftops. That's who they served, right?
[3:57:45] so they started to put them closer to where the people lived rather than moving them to a different
[3:57:49] district. Um, so I don't always,
[3:57:53] I try and tell people that it's not always bad or wrong,
[3:57:57] but we know of the instances where it's done, where it is bad and
[3:58:02] it is wrong. And if you were to place this entitlement
[3:58:06] where it's located, I, I feel that there's not the nexus
[3:58:10] of the immediate adjacent neighborhood, that it's immediately adjacent
[3:58:14] neighborhood is not a requirement or a need or even a, a,
[3:58:19] a, um, a a patron or a client of this use.
[3:58:23] it is unto itself. And I thought that it was just a little too remote
[3:58:27] to make me comfortable to that I didn't wanna, didn't wanna mention it. So the
[3:58:31] following question then for me is,
[3:58:36] is there a way to include conditions,
[3:58:40] requirements in the p to mitigate that
[3:58:45] or eliminate it?
[3:58:49] I mean, mathematically, yes. Right now, off the top of my head, I'm
[3:58:53] not sure that I can think about how other than somehow incorporating
[3:58:58] this, like folks have mentioned where there,
[3:59:03] there is a use on there that would be useful to the rooftops
[3:59:07] adjacent. So people have talked about passive recreation, dog parks, open
[3:59:11] space trails, things like that per perhaps. Um,
[3:59:16] if you combine the uses and you mix those uses together,
[3:59:20] see the wild card here is that this is a pud zoning. It's not a straight
[3:59:24] euclidean district that calls for what you can and what you cannot.
[3:59:29] the language that's in our udc speaks to, you know, freedom of design
[3:59:34] and, you know, being able to work outside the bounds of
[3:59:38] specific metrics for the purpose of creating something that would necessarily
[3:59:42] be a, a approved or approvable, um, by
[3:59:46] the decision makers. So I can't possibly enumerate
[3:59:51] all the possibility or all the combinations of ways that that could work. That's
[3:59:55] why I say mathematically I think so. But as I sit here right now and the
[3:59:59] entire 45 seconds of consideration, I've given your question, um, I don't have an
[4:00:04] answer for you right now on that. Alright. All right. , sorry.
[4:00:09] okay, well, um,
[4:00:13] words that on
[4:00:18] since we're taping. It's fine. We go to next month, right?
[4:00:22] yeah. So this is going to be handled on the 20th. Okay. It'll be voted on that.
[4:00:26] we'll close the public hearing on the 20th and we'll vote okay on
[4:00:31] this item on the 20th. So we can just have discussion already next, next month about,
[4:00:35] yes, we can certainly have discussion on it next month. Okay. Yeah, if you have any
[4:00:40] questions that you want to, you know, talk, think about over the next month, you can ask 'em now,
[4:00:44] I guess. Mm-hmm . Well, just the, the 6.5 agenda item.
[4:00:49] I, I agree with the staff with your sentiments about this.
[4:00:54] it takes you back to the early 1930s of the red line districts and the
[4:00:58] fallout thereafter, and the social justice that came with that, and all the health effects
[4:01:02] and side effects of those neighborhoods. Especially in austin. There's three or four of 'em in austin
[4:01:07] who are still suffering generational poverty, health effects,
[4:01:11] and all the things that happen with the heavy industry that was pushed into those neighborhoods
[4:01:15] under the red lines. And this smells just like this and
[4:01:19] I, I have a lot to say about it. Okay. That's fair.
[4:01:24] anyone else before we move on?
[4:01:29] okay. Then we'll move on to item 6.6
[4:01:34] consideration and possible action on the 2026 planning and zoning commission's cip
[4:01:38] recommendation. You'll notice in the packet that the staff
[4:01:42] report was pretty thin. Um, staff really didn't value add to this at
[4:01:47] all. This is a procedural matter where
[4:01:51] the full recommendation being made at a regular meeting of all of you that goes
[4:01:55] forward to the city council staff did not touch
[4:01:59] the document or change any of the lines or any of the other information. So
[4:02:03] I'm gonna go ahead and let the chair speak to this as it's, um, been your project
[4:02:08] for a number of months now. Um, but really the only thing that we're
[4:02:12] looking for is staff, is just a formal vote where we can count who said yay,
[4:02:16] who said nay? That, uh, goes to the, uh, mayor and council.
[4:02:20] alright, so, uh, regarding the cip,
[4:02:25] uh, I know that everyone saw the worksheet that we were
[4:02:29] using mm-hmm . That staff had developed. It was
[4:02:33] loosely based off of the 2025 cip
[4:02:38] that council approved. Um, had a lot
[4:02:42] of bright colors, had a lot of numbers, had a lot of columns that
[4:02:46] didn't add up, et cetera, et cetera. I took it upon myself to
[4:02:50] clean that up and to make it a little more
[4:02:57] reader friendly, let's say. And that is
[4:03:01] what you have as the first asm gonna say
[4:03:05] slide sheet in your packet.
[4:03:10] it is far too small to read . Okay.
[4:03:15] it's just you're not reading that normal pages to tell me
[4:03:19] . Um, which is why I brought my computer,
[4:03:23] which has the spreadsheet that I manipulated .
[4:03:27] so I can tell you that
[4:03:32] all of our comments that we made
[4:03:36] as part of the cpac were captured
[4:03:41] what was presented to us. And our comments
[4:03:45] are unchanged. It's just clarified you,
[4:03:49] you don't have to scroll through a spreadsheet to find fiscal year 30.
[4:03:55] you don't have to say why are there all these, it, it's
[4:03:59] just cleaned up. That's all. That's all I've done with this is clean it up
[4:04:04] so that we don't have to get into what's the tax
[4:04:08] rate impact and what's the funding sources and
[4:04:12] how does the funding source shake out over the next 30 years. That doesn't
[4:04:17] matter a whole lot to the cpac.
[4:04:21] so what I have is
[4:04:25] the comments, uh, we can go through them if you'd like,
[4:04:31] but the, if there's been no changes to it, yeah.
[4:04:35] we, we, we do have one with a stick. They're just separat separated out. That's all. Can
[4:04:39] I ask some on park? Pp seven four,
[4:04:43] sorry, my voice is going. Uh, we have for 88
[4:04:47] compliance, it's not, there's no set, uh,
[4:04:52] I guess number there. It's just two zero xx and it's at the bottom of parks.
[4:04:56] yeah. Now, now one of the things that I would like to
[4:05:00] accomplish mm-hmm . Um,
[4:05:04] is we've been working on the, the cip process
[4:05:09] as a city and getting it to council and getting the recommendations
[4:05:13] and all of that stuff. There is room for improvement mm-hmm
[4:05:17] . And the process currently
[4:05:21] is, well that's why I took it upon myself
[4:05:25] because I had to meet with the,
[4:05:30] uh, cip engineer. I had to meet with the city manager, I had to meet with the finance
[4:05:35] director and just collecting this information
[4:05:39] so that it made sense mm-hmm . And I could compile it into something
[4:05:43] presentable and digestible
[4:05:48] shouldn't have to be done. But I understand we're going through
[4:05:53] the process, we're building this mm-hmm . And
[4:05:58] my intent is if this is approved,
[4:06:03] then after it goes to counsel and
[4:06:07] should counsel prove it, et cetera, I want to sit down with
[4:06:11] the stakeholders and refine this process.
[4:06:17] because if I'm not here, I don't want the
[4:06:21] next chair to have to go, how do I, how do I manage
[4:06:25] this? It should be a clear cut process. Sure. Do this, do this, do
[4:06:29] this, take it to council. Mm-hmm . Good idea.
[4:06:34] good idea. So that's what I've been working on. Okay. Independently,
[4:06:38] hopefully that process, because it is a staff process,
[4:06:43] will get tweaked by staff, but it shouldn't be anything we need to vote on.
[4:06:48] alright. But I just wanted to explain, this is why I kind of
[4:06:52] took it on because I looked at these processes and went, yeah, this needs
[4:06:56] help . Yeah. You right. So
[4:07:00] that's kind of where we're at. Um, that's the first page.
[4:07:07] uh, that's also the second page. It's also the third page.
[4:07:11] and it looks like that's the fourth page. So they're getting this or a cleaned
[4:07:15] up version. They're going to get,
[4:07:20] I would assume that they're going to get this if give
[4:07:24] 'em this so they can read this. Okay. Yeah. That, that sounds fair. No, do
[4:07:28] tell 'em like this. That sounds fair. I'll give, I'll give them a big magnifying glass and, and
[4:07:32] this, yeah. There we go. Sitting back there going, we're gonna kill you .
[4:07:36] but, but my intent is, and
[4:07:40] I've I've talked with howard about this, my intent is to be there and do
[4:07:45] the presentation to council. If they have questions about why
[4:07:49] did you guys do this? Here's the rationale. I can answer
[4:07:53] that. Rather than having staff members go, well,
[4:07:57] we thought this and I think cpac thought this. No, they're
[4:08:02] hearing it directly from the straight, straight from the horse's mouth. There we go.
[4:08:06] so my intent is to present that
[4:08:10] microscopic first four pages. Yes. Have no
[4:08:14] problem with you doing that. So, I mean,
[4:08:19] make a motion. So you're saying everything's cleaned up and there's been no changes
[4:08:23] to it or anything? No changes to, to what? We, why
[4:08:27] don't we just vote on it now? Well, unless anybody has anything,
[4:08:31] I don't, I don't know if, go ahead, tony, make a motion. I don't know if anybody
[4:08:35] here has complete trust that I didn't change something.
[4:08:40] I, well, so if you do have a question that rick would not
[4:08:44] have changed anything, if you do have a question or, hey, did this get changed?
[4:08:49] I can tell you I only, I only make a suggestion.
[4:08:53] uh, some of the columns are kind of repeatable. Oh, yes. If there's a way we
[4:08:57] can kind of clean that up before we hand it off. Right. The,
[4:09:02] uh, the, the columns or the rows. Some
[4:09:06] like, uh, sidewalk reconstruction, some of 'em,
[4:09:10] they're still on there and we've moved that to a different, you know, the top
[4:09:14] of the sidewalk construction. Um,
[4:09:18] some of 'em still have double values. I just wanna make sure that
[4:09:23] some of the finance numbers are confirmed and that we
[4:09:27] don't have numbers in the right, wrong place. Um,
[4:09:32] as far as the discrepancies and any of the conflicts go,
[4:09:37] we as a body as cpac did not identify those
[4:09:42] and we did not discuss those and we did not approve those.
[4:09:47] well, there's, therefore they remain. Well, I know there's some,
[4:09:52] I why I say that is there is some notes like include with
[4:09:57] t one refy. Right. And, and that is a
[4:10:01] cac note. It's not the presented title. Okay.
[4:10:05] so like, uh, what, what was one you just said the parks,
[4:10:10] uh, sidewalk p 74.
[4:10:14] was that, was that the parks 80 a? Yes.
[4:10:19] sorry. For some reason getting, we don't have p 74 here. Dumb.
[4:10:23] yeah. P 74 2 dash two xx.
[4:10:28] is that the bottom of parks? Yep. P okay. Got it. Uh, p 74,
[4:10:32] uh, two xx. That was a da
[4:10:36] compliance parks for the parks. Mm-hmm . As opposed to the
[4:10:41] trails and the, uh, facilities. Mm-hmm . And that
[4:10:45] was a ca recommendation to include in the cip.
[4:10:50] yeah. Okay. That's the comment. So in the presented
[4:10:54] as it's a da compliance parks. And then the comment
[4:10:58] is c, a recommendation to include in the c-I-p-c-I-p. Okay.
[4:11:03] you know, if we look at the very next one, t zero one
[4:11:07] refi, it's presented as t zero one
[4:11:11] refi sidewalk construction. We didn't make any comments on it. There
[4:11:16] are no, that column is blank. Yeah. Okay.
[4:11:23] okay. So I'd like to make a motion. Yeah. So that being said,
[4:11:27] if you guys are good with going forward with the
[4:11:32] comments notes that we made on cpac mm-hmm .
[4:11:36] I will entertain a motion. Okay. I'd like to make a motion
[4:11:40] to approve 6.6, the planning on zoning commission
[4:11:44] cip recommendation items as presented.
[4:11:49] I'll second. I'll second cory. All right.
[4:11:53] so I have a motion by commissioner schad and a second
[4:11:57] by commissioner hall. Any discussion on the motion?
[4:12:04] just a question for staff. Um, what are,
[4:12:08] what are the continued like improvements on this process
[4:12:12] that we're working on currently as a staff?
[4:12:18] can you restate that? What are the improvements, uh, for the cip process
[4:12:22] planning process? Like, what are we doing as staff on improving this process?
[4:12:28] are we doing anything now? Other than what rick just stated?
[4:12:33] I can't speak to that. I, I haven't been involved in, I just started in january, so
[4:12:37] I'm, I, I inherited this. Okay. In the beginning of february. I could,
[4:12:41] I could ask around and okay. And find out and get some answers back to you, but I'm, I'm
[4:12:45] not, I think this is usual and customary in local governments across
[4:12:50] the nation where p and z makes a recommendation on cips,
[4:12:55] specifically the, the x's and o's of the city of hu's process.
[4:12:59] I'm not aware if there's any talk about changing or altering it at all. This is the
[4:13:03] first I'm hearing about it. No changing or altering it. It is just more of improving,
[4:13:07] obviously. Right. And so I was just curious. So as an
[4:13:12] example, and I've, I've got, uh,
[4:13:17] five mm-hmm . Proposed tweaks to the process. As an example,
[4:13:23] only, uh, capital improvement projects approved
[4:13:27] by city council are assigned a four digit
[4:13:31] year after the project number. Okay. P zero two
[4:13:36] is xx, x, x until council approves it. Then
[4:13:41] whatever year they approve it in, that gets plugged into the xs.
[4:13:45] okay. That year. That way everybody can look
[4:13:49] and go, that's an x that's not approved yet. Right. That's a 2026
[4:13:55] that's funded for this year. Council said. So, okay.
[4:14:00] that's an improvement to the process. Yeah. Alteration
[4:14:04] to the process. Yeah. I only ask 'cause it's probably a
[4:14:08] good idea for a, a board that we
[4:14:12] do lessons learned like what can we do better next time? Exactly. Exactly. And that,
[4:14:16] that's kind of what I did, you know? Yeah. Call that the, the military
[4:14:21] experience or whatever. It's like, okay, here's how we can make it better
[4:14:25] next time. Yeah. Right. And once I kind of discuss
[4:14:29] these with howard, my hope is
[4:14:33] that I'm gonna bring it back as an agenda item
[4:14:37] that I request you guys take a look at it and go, yeah,
[4:14:41] that's something that, you know what? That sounds pretty good. Or, oh, you forgot this
[4:14:46] and we can tweak it again mm-hmm . And then
[4:14:50] help hopefully refine this process. Okay. Because right now, as
[4:14:54] it stands, if, you know, we all die in a meteor strike.
[4:14:59] yeah. The next people are gonna be starting from square one and not know what
[4:15:03] to do. Right. And that's not a good way to do things.
[4:15:09] and, and, sorry, one more question. I'm sorry. Okay. It, um,
[4:15:13] , uh, the storage of this spreadsheet or,
[4:15:18] uh, whatever the master spreadsheet for scip,
[4:15:22] is that somewhere that we don't have like
[4:15:27] floating works at cip worksheets everywhere or
[4:15:32] I I, when I need it, I go to finance alberta is can okay, can can
[4:15:36] give that to me. Okay. That's fine. Um, the, the document tonight I think is
[4:15:40] actually the one, uh, that we got from, from rick. Okay. So
[4:15:44] it, it hasn't actually been washed, quote unquote through the finance process yet.
[4:15:49] this is literally the raw recommendation that will go,
[4:15:53] uh, to the council. Okay. I was just making sure 'cause we worked on
[4:15:58] the cip list and it was the wrong one, so that's why I asked that. Yeah.
[4:16:03] okay. I'm good. And, and the intent is to
[4:16:07] avoid that in the future. Exactly. . Okay. All right.
[4:16:11] so we have, uh, I once again, we have a motion by commissioner
[4:16:16] rad and a second by commissioner hall to approve the
[4:16:20] cip list recommendation to city council.
[4:16:26] all right. Any further discussion on the item?
[4:16:31] okay. Then I will call for vote. All in favor say aye. Aye.
[4:16:35] aye. All opposed. Same sign. Motion passes seven
[4:16:39] zero. And now the moment some
[4:16:44] of 'em have, some people have been waiting for
[4:16:48] the presenta 6.7 presentation only by the huro city council's
[4:16:53] ad hoc committee for the city of hu's unified development code and
[4:16:57] engineering design manual amendment.
[4:17:01] thank you mr. Chair. Howard konz for the record. Um,
[4:17:05] put a couple of staff notes together real quick before the presentation. So this, this agenda item,
[4:17:10] I'm sure you went through your packets and you saw that the udc itself is
[4:17:14] many, many dozens of pages. Uh, the engineering design manual
[4:17:18] as well. This is not the expectation of staff that you went
[4:17:22] through it and you have a litany of questions and points and you wanna put it forward. Mm-hmm
[4:17:26] . This is an opportunity for the committee to broadly and generally present
[4:17:31] their changes to the document. Um, the reason is this process has been
[4:17:35] going on for quite a while. I believe it started maybe in late 24 or spring
[4:17:39] of 25 timeframe. We're already in april of 26. Um,
[4:17:43] in that time we have new commission members. And the document that
[4:17:47] this board, this commission saw the last time that went forward has been,
[4:17:51] I'd say radically changed. Mm-hmm . Um, by the committee. So I think it's fair that
[4:17:56] you get another bite at the apple to take a look at it, to see what it's turned into, um, before
[4:18:00] you make a recommendation on it. So to that end, um, we have another calendar
[4:18:04] for you. Another, another calendar of how this is gonna go. Tonight is april 7th,
[4:18:08] and that is the ad hoc presentation. Um, feel free to ask them
[4:18:12] any questions or get any clarification that you're looking for. Um,
[4:18:16] between, uh, now and the next time that you vote,
[4:18:21] legal has advised us that the city council will have to, um, propose
[4:18:25] and pass a resolution that will create the opportunity for you
[4:18:30] pnz commission. Have a joint meeting with the city council to
[4:18:34] ultimately approve the document, whether it is a wholesale
[4:18:39] revision to all the pages or repeal and replace. However it's done. That'll
[4:18:44] be done at a joint meeting. So at the may 7th, which is the first regular
[4:18:48] may meeting of the city council, there will be an agenda item on there to set the date for
[4:18:52] that meeting. Tentatively the date is, um, uh, may the
[4:18:56] 21st. So the next time that you'll have to talk about
[4:19:00] this as a group will be a special called meeting in may,
[4:19:05] um, may the 12th planning and zoning special called
[4:19:09] meeting for consideration. That will be the long meeting. That
[4:19:13] will be the exhaustive exercise where we go through this chapter by chapter and page by page
[4:19:17] and talk about what the changes are from the existing document, which you can find on
[4:19:21] the city's development services website. It's, it's the one that we're operating under today. Mm-hmm .
[4:19:26] versus the revised version that has been put in front of you,
[4:19:30] uh, in your packet. Side note, if anybody wants one
[4:19:34] printed out, let me know and I will. But I held
[4:19:38] off on staff, um, printing those, uh, you know,
[4:19:42] for you tonight. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 and change
[4:19:46] pages of paper. So if I get the opportunity to save that, I would take it. But
[4:19:50] if you want one, I am absolutely willing and able to create that for you. You can come by and
[4:19:54] pick it up if you want to be able to make changes, you know, with a pen and, and the paper.
[4:19:59] um, finally, may the 21st, which is the second regular meeting
[4:20:03] of, uh, the mayor and council. May the 21st would be that joint meeting
[4:20:07] for p and z and council. So may 12th special called meeting. You'll
[4:20:11] get to talk with them and staff and anybody else and hash it out for what your recommendation
[4:20:15] for approval will be. And that will move forward to, uh, the meeting later
[4:20:20] that month. So if there's, um, anything I can help you with, there
[4:20:24] are, uh, a couple of things that I, that I did wanna talk about and add. I
[4:20:28] can do it whenever it's appropriate. Um, one of 'em would be an ordinance for, um,
[4:20:32] the city's capital recovery ordinance. The idea that we would, uh, put
[4:20:36] things in the ground and then as users come and tie into it, they would pay us back a prorated
[4:20:40] portion of, you know, whatever went in the ground. But there's a lot more to it than that, but mm-hmm . There's
[4:20:45] something we want to add to the udc, which is the capital recovery ordinance. And the other one is,
[4:20:49] I talked about earlier this evening, was the public hearing signs. I think the process we have in place right
[4:20:53] now for public hearing signs could be refined. I've done it in a couple of other, uh,
[4:20:57] cities where I have gone out to bid, um, as the department,
[4:21:01] as the city, to all the sign manufacturers that I can find and tell them exactly what
[4:21:05] I want. Size, color, location. And these sign companies will often establish
[4:21:10] the signs. They'll go out and put 'em in the ground for you. All you have to do is go out and tell them.
[4:21:14] so I'll put that out as a bid, I'll get a series of quotes back.
[4:21:18] hopefully I will go with the lowest qualified bidder likely, or something like
[4:21:22] that, or make a recommendation. We will change the fee schedule so that
[4:21:26] any application that a client makes that requires a public hearing sign,
[4:21:31] they would give us what ends up being a pass through. They pay us, and I'm making
[4:21:35] this up a hundred dollars. Mm-hmm . So let's say there's a hundred dollars signed fee. We would
[4:21:39] eventually contract with a signed contractor who would invoice us for a hundred dollars for that
[4:21:43] sign going up. We just pass it through. The sign company goes out, establishes
[4:21:47] the sign, they take a picture of it and send it back to us. The thing about them is they'll
[4:21:51] use nicer poles. , they usually use a c channel post
[4:21:56] rather than, you know, we, we may do with some wooden stakes that we were able to pick up from
[4:22:00] lowe's, which worked this time. Prior to that we were using these
[4:22:04] steel h frame sort of thing. A wire h frame that
[4:22:09] blow over as soon as the sun shines on it. Like it's just the wire h frames that
[4:22:13] I gave to the city. Yeah, yeah. Well, we, we, we had them in, the signs we had were so
[4:22:17] big and the frames were so small that that wasn't really getting it done for us. So
[4:22:21] we can also make these two-sided and place them perpendicular to the right of way so they're
[4:22:25] visible in both travel directions without necessarily having to stop in front of it to
[4:22:29] see it. And because we're gonna make them a little bit bigger, four by four, we can put two inch lettering
[4:22:34] on it, two inch lettering, it, you know, 35 miles an hour, at least you can get some of the big words,
[4:22:39] . Um, so anyway, that's a, that's an expectation that I'm gonna put together and I'll probably have
[4:22:43] a, some, some verbiage to that, to that end, uh, by the time we,
[4:22:47] we sit down again and talk about this, so it's late, I've talked too much already. I'm gonna
[4:22:51] let the folks that did the hard work get up in front of you and, and give you the, the high points
[4:22:55] of what they've gone through. And you can go ahead and ask him any questions. Awesome.
[4:23:01] well, if howard thinks he talked too much, he hadn't seen us talk . Um,
[4:23:06] so we made up a subcommittee mm-hmm . After we, um, it, it came to council
[4:23:10] to vote. Um, we, some of us read through it and, um,
[4:23:15] I think the consensus was it might've been sized a little bit. Um,
[4:23:19] and while there are radical changes for central texas, I would argue
[4:23:23] that in other parts of the country, in the state of texas, the changes are maybe not
[4:23:27] as radical. Central texas, if you go to other metro areas,
[4:23:31] is kind of known for being, um, extremely complicated bureaucratic
[4:23:36] and bogs a lot of stuff down. And what that ultimately does is costs
[4:23:40] you more in tax money in, in terms of we need more employees to navigate the
[4:23:44] process. A lot of times, how many times have you guys had a meeting where we
[4:23:48] have two parts of code to conflict and we're trying to figure out what executives means, or how
[4:23:52] many times. I know on the council side we have people, we're debating what the code
[4:23:57] of we're reading actually means. Staff's got one interpretation, but it changed
[4:24:01] because we have a different staff member and then people on council read it and we can't
[4:24:05] even figure it out. And yet we're expecting developers to do this. So what we did is
[4:24:09] we read through every single page down to, and when
[4:24:13] I say ized, we had things like what was once an sf one neighborhood
[4:24:18] is now called a neighborhood hamlet. And we're like, why would you make a change to handle
[4:24:22] it? What was the point of that? We looked at it as it's just making a change. To make
[4:24:26] a change. We spent $400,000, uh, councilman
[4:24:30] morris went through, we found a lot of sections. Section two is now section
[4:24:34] three, section four is now section two. And when y'all put it back
[4:24:38] together, safe to say it was almost the same damn code, but for $400,000,
[4:24:43] we renumbered it and moved the paragraphs around. So
[4:24:47] we read through it all with a couple focuses. One, we wanted to take away as much staff
[4:24:51] discretion as possible because what we find a lot of times is,
[4:24:55] um, and here's an example that I'll start off. Um, there
[4:25:00] was one for a detention pond. Could be up to 25% in a building setback,
[4:25:04] um, depending on staff, uh, discretion. And you had to have the, and it
[4:25:08] wasn't staff at that time, it was city engineer or director of planning. So one of your
[4:25:12] two highest paid people are now in a room debating where
[4:25:17] the detention pond goes. What we did is we said, look, we don't want you to have the
[4:25:21] opportunity to put it in this building setback, either make it work or don't make it work. We don't really
[4:25:25] care. But the problem with putting that stuff in a building setback is
[4:25:29] a developer then comes up and says, hey, instead of 25, can I do 35?
[4:25:34] and the staff's like, well, I I could let you do 35 if you do this over here.
[4:25:38] and then we spend four months of debate on something that most of the public
[4:25:43] doesn't care because detention pond's a detention pond. And so we're
[4:25:47] spending all this staff time doing all these debates. And I can tell you my
[4:25:51] personal job, what my boss always says is, well, they can't make you do that. Yeah.
[4:25:55] but you want this over here to happen. So now we we're horse trading, so we took
[4:25:59] a lot of that stuff away. The things that were left, a lot of them are staff,
[4:26:04] any staff, anybody in planning can make the decision because we're trying to, again, make
[4:26:08] it a little bit more black and white. A couple other things, big changes we win is
[4:26:12] we want to really go through what really matters to what we hear about the
[4:26:16] people in huda. What do they hear? And a lot of times what we've heard is we
[4:26:20] like the small town feel. But if you look at a small town in texas, what
[4:26:24] do you see? You see, uh, multiple different types of uses, building types. We
[4:26:28] are talking like the prototypical, um, uh, whataburger
[4:26:33] with the tall steeple. And then what do you see in the big cities? They're all just block
[4:26:37] buildings. They're all the same color, they're all the same, everything. Because the code has gotten
[4:26:41] so complicated that developers just go, look, what does it take to
[4:26:45] get it done? And so we've thrown out what makes a lot of people say what we
[4:26:49] want is small town, and we thrown in big city. So to that extent,
[4:26:54] um, we really looked at things like we had parking,
[4:26:58] we had exhibits to where they tell you you can't have the building up on a street
[4:27:02] backed up to the street. But then the diagram for parking shows a building up on a street and
[4:27:06] tells you how to do the parking. And so the depictions are not matching with the,
[4:27:10] with the actual wording of the law. And then in some areas we have, we
[4:27:14] want you to have the buildings up on the street, but then other areas, we're telling you why we don't want the
[4:27:18] buildings up on the street. And we're sitting there going like, you've got the government telling everybody
[4:27:23] how to run the business. And then when it fails, we blame the business people. But the
[4:27:27] business people are going, hey, my business only works like a restaurant.
[4:27:31] typically they want their parking up on the street because you drive by and you see an empty lot.
[4:27:35] you think the restaurant's terrible. You see it's busy. You would think that
[4:27:40] would make people go away, but for some reason people are attracted to full parking lots.
[4:27:44] and so to that extent, we made changes there. We made changes to parking.
[4:27:49] we're dictating how much parking you have and should have. And then when you have
[4:27:53] too much and too little, and we said, it's really not up to us to determine that because
[4:27:57] every time we get in and doing that, you have parking lots that are too big and people
[4:28:01] are telling you, we don't need that much parking. And then other times you have people saying, we need more
[4:28:05] parking. And you got the city telling you, you don't need that much parking. So again,
[4:28:09] we're like, look, we keep us not being business owners
[4:28:14] keep telling the business people how to run their business when again, in
[4:28:18] our opinion, most of the people don't care about that. What we try to stick to
[4:28:22] is what do people care about? They care about landscaping, they care about trees.
[4:28:27] but the problem we have with our tree ordinance right now is that, um, for every
[4:28:31] 50 linear feet, you have to put two canopy trees in an ornamental tree.
[4:28:35] the problem is the canopy trees, the minimum one was like 90 feet,
[4:28:39] um, at maturity up to 130 feet. So we'd start telling developers.
[4:28:44] we had the, um, I hate to say the word data center, but we had the data center
[4:28:48] over by lowe's and you drive down 79,
[4:28:53] but rules are rules. And so we made those people put so many trees,
[4:28:57] they're not gonna make it. Most of 'em are gonna die because we're making them put in a
[4:29:01] hundred foot tall or a hundred foot wide canopy trees and we're making 'em plant
[4:29:05] 'em 25 feet apart. And then we're throwing ornamental trees in. On top of that, we have
[4:29:09] an irrigation in water issue. And so we're like, look, maybe we need
[4:29:13] to do one tree per every 50 feet and an ornamental tree and try
[4:29:17] to find a way to where it's something that's gonna be more long term. Because as we, some of us
[4:29:21] see it in 20 years, we should have a very nice tree canopy. Yeah. But
[4:29:25] we're gonna have to cut down most of the trees that we're making people plant. Mm-hmm . And so what's the
[4:29:30] healthiest way to do that? Another one the council voted on. And, and
[4:29:34] these next four, I think three or four items are items that the council physically
[4:29:38] voted on. So I think at this point, um, barring some major change on council,
[4:29:43] we we we're gonna expect to change, make it happen. Um, we don't want trees in
[4:29:47] between the sidewalk and the street. Um, we appreciate the
[4:29:51] idea for, um, shade, but we see a, an issue with long
[4:29:55] term maintenance of the sidewalk and the trucks hitting them. And the
[4:29:59] few times that we have seen that work, um, you have some pretty beat up
[4:30:03] trees out there. Um, but that is city way right away. So we
[4:30:08] made that vote. We took a vote on rear
[4:30:12] entry homes. We're not real happy with rear entry homes, think brookside and
[4:30:16] durango. And so the city manager is a big proponent of it. Don't understand
[4:30:20] why executives, what we did is we took that out of the code based on a legal opinion
[4:30:24] that by not being in a code, we would have the ability to then do a
[4:30:28] pud if a certain thing came up. And for some reason we saw that. Um, so
[4:30:32] we took a vote to where we would take it out and leave ourselves open to the
[4:30:36] ability to negotiate that for some reason that would come.
[4:30:41] there was one other thing we took a vote on. You remember what it was?
[4:30:47] signage. Uh, we did bring up the staff. I haven't seen the changes that signed ordinance
[4:30:51] is too complex and if they can't find a way to fix it,
[4:30:55] our, our suggested fix was every sign would come before city council as a consent
[4:30:59] agenda item. We can look at say a chick-fil-a pole sign and
[4:31:03] say, we'll approve that exact thing maintained just like that. And then we use
[4:31:08] an example of a discount tire. Usually those are pretty rowdy looking when they're new,
[4:31:12] we would just say no, because the way the code is written, it's so complex.
[4:31:16] I do this for a living, I don't even know what signs are allowed. And so that's
[4:31:20] another debate. So really try to look at the code line by line and find
[4:31:24] out, okay, where are we spending a lot of staff time? We're not gonna hire more staff
[4:31:28] members to sift through code and debate with things for six or nine months.
[4:31:33] then we look at things like academy was a major issue. Um, due
[4:31:37] to glazing requirements, they almost couldn't build because we required
[4:31:42] so much changes that we had to have emergency meetings. And a couple
[4:31:46] times academy deal almost died over glass on the outside. So
[4:31:50] they have fake glass. And 'cause our original code was, they just had to have
[4:31:54] almost glass walls. And they were like, we can't have four sides of the building with glass everywhere.
[4:31:58] wow. So little things like that. We went through and tried to really think, what, what
[4:32:02] is it we're really trying to do with our code? How can we simplify it? And then how can
[4:32:06] we go through and when we have developmental issues, is it a people person?
[4:32:11] is it a process person or is it a code, uh, type issue?
[4:32:15] and if it's a code, we can fix it. If it's a person, we can fix it. If it's a process,
[4:32:19] we can fix all that. So I think in all that, I don't know, we cut out what maybe
[4:32:24] we'd suggested like let's say a fourth or a fifth of a code. Um,
[4:32:28] the last thing I'll tell you, uh, here's another example. Um, things like,
[4:32:32] um, path of travel from your building to the parking lot. We have the complicated
[4:32:36] way of figuring it out. Well, we're not in the tas and a da
[4:32:41] business, but we're dictating to people how to put their pathway of travels, how to lay all
[4:32:45] this stuff out. And so we've kind of said, this is, that's not a responsibility that's a
[4:32:49] developer as long as they get it approved by the proper governmental authorities,
[4:32:53] why are we going in on top of them and suggesting? 'cause a lot of times what happens,
[4:32:57] a city will tell you to do one thing, but the fire department's telling you to do it different. And they're the ones
[4:33:02] that say in charge of a fire lane. And so then you start moving things to make the city happy
[4:33:06] and you negotiate with the fire department. And developers get very frustrated when they're like, look,
[4:33:10] we just wanna do what's right, but we can't mirror the two things. And so we
[4:33:14] try to get this negotiating done. And so we're trying to get outta that. Um,
[4:33:19] when it comes to, um, say you open up a restaurant, what we kinda
[4:33:23] looked at is, um, when you, when you go to permit right
[4:33:27] now, we spend a lot of time telling you how it's all gonna look inside and different things. And we
[4:33:31] kind of took the opinion of if you're building, say a restaurant and you're doing a building finish
[4:33:36] out, um, that if you have an architect that say this
[4:33:40] is oversimplifying it, but if you have an architect that say, signs the plans and says, these meet
[4:33:44] your 20, 24 building codes that we have adopted, um, then
[4:33:48] that's where we're done as a city. As long as we're suggesting changes.
[4:33:53] like they get the fire marshal to sign off on their plans, they get the health
[4:33:57] department to sign off 'cause that's gonna handle your plumbing, your grease trap, all those
[4:34:01] sort of things. And then your, um, your uh, state rep for
[4:34:05] the, uh, tas or a da, they're gonna sign off on that. If everything else meets
[4:34:09] the building codes, then we're done from a planning and from a permitting side
[4:34:14] where I think the city and where we thought the sea would then come in would be when it came to inspection
[4:34:18] time, the inspectors would be more making sure that it followed the 2024
[4:34:23] building code, which I think is what we have adopted now, but as may be adopted
[4:34:27] with further revisions that way, instead of spending months and months trying to permit
[4:34:31] something, it's like, look, if you wanna set up your check stand a certain way
[4:34:35] and you wanna set it up, we think it's silly, but that's your business model.
[4:34:39] go ahead and knock yourself out. If it works great. If it fails, then someone else
[4:34:43] will move in as long as you've got the other three people signed off. So a
[4:34:47] lot of times again, um, we have gotten into issues where the health departments
[4:34:51] requiring one thing when it comes to plumbing, the city's requiring another. And
[4:34:56] it's kinda like, why are we, why are we in the business of saying about plumbing? If it
[4:35:00] meets the code and they can get it permitted by the proper authorities,
[4:35:04] why are we involved in that? So as you guys go through, that's what we're really looking for.
[4:35:08] does that kind of sum it up? Yeah. Really looking for how do we make our staff
[4:35:13] to where they're not buried in the minutiae of things. And then how much of it is
[4:35:17] really important, uh, to the public. And then, um, a lot of
[4:35:21] us change state laws. We took some of that into account. You can't dictate
[4:35:25] building materials anymore. Um, some cities
[4:35:29] used to require a certain type of limestone, just couldn't even be limestone. We weren't
[4:35:33] that bad. But we've made changes to where we're looking ahead. Um, lot
[4:35:37] sizes. I think the original code had maybe 25 pages on lot sizes
[4:35:42] depend on what you were gonna build, how wide lot had to be.
[4:35:46] and we dictate all that stuff. And so we kind of said this is, we want, we
[4:35:50] think five feet on the side of homes is too narrow.
[4:35:54] you don't wanna be hearing, you don't wanna hear your neighbor yelling at the, at the husband.
[4:35:58] 'cause it's ever the husband yelling at the women. It's the the wife yelling at the husband for something.
[4:36:02] but you can hear that or or the old pass me the sugar neighbor. Okay.
[4:36:07] alright. Yeah. So the houses are so close. So we said, okay,
[4:36:11] it should be seven and a half feet or should it be 10 feet? And then we don't dictate
[4:36:15] right now. Um, I forget that I think it's a hundred thousand
[4:36:19] people. You can't dictate lot sizes anymore with the state of texas. Mm-hmm
[4:36:23] . Typically what we've seen in the past is they hit the big cities first. The
[4:36:27] next session they hit the smaller cities. So we're trying to think ahead a little bit to where
[4:36:31] instead of dictating lot size, we'll just dictate side setbacks. Now it's seven
[4:36:36] and a half feet. And so the builders originally when we talked to them, that's
[4:36:40] great. That's great. And then they said, wait a minute, seven and a half feet, that's
[4:36:44] 15. Yeah. I can't build a 40 foot house anymore. I said, well that's, that's
[4:36:48] your problem. Maybe you go vertical. Maybe it looks like san francisco. We don't know,
[4:36:52] but we're like, and you just need a wider lot. Right. Exactly. But
[4:36:56] see they want the 45 foot and we can't, we feel like we can't dictate in the future. So we were trying
[4:37:01] to think ahead of potential issues to where, um, we
[4:37:05] really don't want people, um, building a second home in our backyard. We actually,
[4:37:09] somewhere around here we have that. Mm-hmm. And I don't know if they torn it down yet, but we vote
[4:37:13] on a council to remove that house. Oh, it, it came to p and z mm-hmm . Did
[4:37:17] it. Yeah. So we have that. Um, now we went to, to
[4:37:21] build the, um, engineering manual a little bit. And some of the things we looked there is,
[4:37:25] um, you know, when we, when we permit
[4:37:29] a neighborhood, we have a pervious ratio and impervious ratio calculations.
[4:37:34] right. But if you drive through new neighborhoods, everybody's adding
[4:37:38] like a foot onto their driveways. Well one guy does that. It's really not gonna
[4:37:42] cause flooding downstream. When you have thousands of homes adding
[4:37:46] two feet along every driveway, that could be a problem. Well why are they doing it?
[4:37:50] well 'cause the driveways are too narrow. So we're suggesting we make the driveways
[4:37:55] one foot wider, two feet on a double. And then also the driveway length
[4:37:59] is, uh, a minimum to where an f-150 can park in the driveway without crossing over
[4:38:03] the sidewalk. And then the garage, we told the builders we only got a couple things
[4:38:08] and then the garage has to be able to fit an f-150 in it. Yeah. Because right now
[4:38:12] I've had a ford explorer not fit in a garage in texas. Mm-hmm . And so the idea
[4:38:16] there being, we don't care so much about the outside articulation. That's been
[4:38:20] a lot of, um, variances over the years for how your
[4:38:24] garage is set up. We're like, look, we don't wanna get into all that. We're just telling you the truck's
[4:38:29] gotta be able to park in it. It's gotta be a park in the driveway. 'cause ultimately we want less cars on the
[4:38:33] street. We also want the streets a minimum, a certain width so
[4:38:37] that we can have parking on both sides. 'cause it's a nightmare. We're painting one
[4:38:41] side that's an upkeep and we're trying to make it to where we don't have staff members
[4:38:45] going out to every two years painting red stripes and ticketing people. 'cause no one likes that.
[4:38:50] we'll just make the streets two feet wider. And if, because literally I think we're
[4:38:54] building them 28 feet wide and need to be 30 to park on both sides mm-hmm . And so
[4:38:58] by skipping two feet, what we've done is we've caused an issue now with
[4:39:02] the homeowners are upset because of the police department's going through. And all we have
[4:39:06] to do as a city is just tell the builder, when you build your neighborhood, look,
[4:39:10] we don't care what type of house you build. That's the market. We're just telling you, you gotta
[4:39:14] have seven and a half foot. You gotta park an f-150 inside, you gotta park it outside
[4:39:19] and the street's gotta be 30 feet. You as a market people, you figure out what you wanna
[4:39:23] build. And as long as the landscaping on the outside of the street
[4:39:27] looks great, we even suggested the city manager about passed out. You'll
[4:39:31] like this howard, we suggested kinda like, why do we require
[4:39:35] trees in front yards? And the reason we said it was not that we don't
[4:39:39] think a house can't sell, the problem we have is from my front door
[4:39:43] to the street, it's 25 feet, but I have a live oak planted in the middle of
[4:39:48] my yard. Yeah. So I've already, the house is nine years old. I've already had to trim the tree
[4:39:52] off the house. So we've gone through and told everybody we love trees,
[4:39:57] but you gotta put a hundred foot wide canopy tree in the yard. That just doesn't
[4:40:01] make sense. And then we have people when their trees die, then the coats
[4:40:05] people are going around and we're telling everybody what to do. And we're like, you know what? We don't know what
[4:40:09] the market wants. And we're assuming things and we're like, you know what? We're not in
[4:40:14] business selling homes. Let them do it. And so we gave in on that one and
[4:40:18] said, okay, we'll just follow the, um, what texas a and m, um,
[4:40:22] agricultural agriculture, something and said a name and trees, whatever
[4:40:26] a and m says to do in our area. They're the forestry, uh, experts. Yeah.
[4:40:30] leave it to them. Um, that's a lovely of things that we did
[4:40:35] that won't live come on up a year or two. We got till three. We had this book till
[4:40:40] three. So we got out to say jim morris city council. Actually,
[4:40:44] before we continue, I do have a couple of questions before we get into the,
[4:40:48] uh, uh, can we finish our presentation first? Okay,
[4:40:52] sure. , because we are doing the presentation. Sure.
[4:40:56] but, um, jim moore city council, um, yeah. Part of the things is about,
[4:41:00] in in the references we it does talk about landscaping or anything else is make
[4:41:04] sure there's appropriate re references there. And, and if there was something in
[4:41:09] the engineering manual, a lot of things I looked at as making sure that we didn't have duplication
[4:41:13] in the engineering manual and in the, uh, udc mm-hmm . So
[4:41:17] that we don't have to conflicting things and then, or if even if it's supposed to be identical,
[4:41:22] now you gotta maintain document, maintain maintenance is a, is an issue. So that's
[4:41:26] some things that we looked at quite a bit. I I looked at the engineering manual and made sure those
[4:41:30] references. I do wanna bring up some of the things that mayor brought up. There were probably 40 or 50 instances
[4:41:35] where a specific person had to speak on this waiver. Those
[4:41:39] have been eliminated. Uh, there were several of 'em. Wait, wait a minute. Wait, say that again.
[4:41:43] well, to it, a waiver as as mayor said that either the
[4:41:48] director of engineering or the planning director had to be the only
[4:41:52] person to do that waiver. So like code didn't say
[4:41:56] development staff, it said the director of engineering. Like there
[4:42:01] was one that had to have the director of engineering sign off and the development director. Well,
[4:42:05] not everybody's working here during the day. That's right. Some are working at home. Someone's over here.
[4:42:10] you gotta get two of them lined up. One of 'em has one opinion, one of 'em has another. And the developer's
[4:42:14] like, look, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. But if you guys don't
[4:42:18] know , then how are we supposed to know what to do? No, I,
[4:42:23] I understood that to be rick hudson needs to sign off on
[4:42:27] this. And I'm like, whoa. No, no. Just step, step, step. No. The thing is though, okay, it's
[4:42:31] no fault of the director or the, you know, the planning de planning director or the, in
[4:42:35] the, the engineering, uh, the or city engineer. No, no, no.
[4:42:40] uh, disparaging opinion about them. But when you, when you've got a
[4:42:44] planning process, it may take six or nine months. And now in the, in the plat,
[4:42:48] the preliminary plat review, we've gotta have all these waivers done by this individual.
[4:42:52] you're talking a minimum of 48 hours just to get requests and response and
[4:42:56] that there's no, there's no dwell time on that. Mm-hmm . So I think that that's one of the things is that we,
[4:43:00] we've tried to streamline the process and I mean streamline
[4:43:04] to to that we don't have as many checks and balances while maintaining still
[4:43:09] the fundamental meaning of fundamental, uh, design of the udc that
[4:43:13] we do have the checks and balance of putting a, a good product out on the, on the, on the neighborhoods
[4:43:17] and the streets. So that, that was a lot of instances. And I, I do wanna bring up, and, and
[4:43:21] mayor did this before, there were probably at least
[4:43:25] 30, maybe as much as 60 instances where
[4:43:29] this part of the document disagreed with this. Whether it was a picture
[4:43:34] and a text or a table and a text or a description. See
[4:43:38] this, could I ask for our $400,000 back from, I think it was 160,000
[4:43:43] because we did a lot of work on this. And so I'm like, I think it was a hundred, I think it was 160,000
[4:43:47] was the actual consulting for the redesign. But I mean,
[4:43:52] yeah, we spent three to four hours, probably eight, at least eight
[4:43:56] sundays, the three of us, um, to meeting, to, to review
[4:44:00] all this. But, um, so, and, and the la the the last thing we talked about the,
[4:44:04] you did the driveways, the, well, let me mention pla two oh was on the pla
[4:44:08] so plating right now, if you're a developer and, and I'm, I,
[4:44:12] most people know I try to stick as much as I can on a developer. Okay. But the more we
[4:44:17] cause them in cost, the less they're willing to do for us. Well, right now, if you're,
[4:44:21] if there's a, let's take the 40 acres we talked about today. Let's say somebody wanted to build
[4:44:26] a restaurant. We're all excited for the restaurant. He needs to buy three acres. He's looking
[4:44:30] at a 12. He or she's looking at a 12 to 15 month process to get that
[4:44:34] property plotted to where it's a legal lot. Okay. And in that
[4:44:38] you have to do a tree study. You have to do a flood study, you have to do a tia,
[4:44:43] um, there's over probably a hundred thousand dollars worth of costs
[4:44:48] to do everything. And you're just trying to get the three acres okay. Or the two
[4:44:52] acres. You push them through all that. And so what typically happens is people do
[4:44:56] an ilic a lot and it's not like they're gonna go to jail or anything, but they're closing on land on meets
[4:45:00] and bounds, which is very hard to index at the, uh, the, the,
[4:45:04] uh, county. And so the whole reason is why are they, why are
[4:45:08] they doing this? And they're doing it because our process is on, we don't wanna necessarily
[4:45:12] do away with those processes. What matt rector was working on was a different,
[4:45:17] a different way of doing it to where, and I forget what he called the, uh, lot, but you
[4:45:21] were gonna be able to get a lot in 30 days because our opinion is
[4:45:25] the state wants a lot platted in 30 days. And all cities
[4:45:30] have done is figured out all the ways to drag it out to where what
[4:45:34] we would say is, we get you an answer in 30 days. It just takes you
[4:45:38] 12 months to get everything ready in the application done to get it. Well, that's not the intent of the
[4:45:42] state. So how do we get the intent of the state? The developer
[4:45:46] doesn't mind doing all this work. They just don't wanna do it all when they just went
[4:45:50] to three acres. Can they even get the three acres and they run? And what happens in commercial real
[4:45:54] estate, they run out of time. They've maybe got six months to, for due diligence and
[4:45:58] then they have to close. Well, six months, you can't get through the process.
[4:46:03] there's not a city in central texas that can get it done. Other
[4:46:07] parts of the state we looked at, they can get it done. They've moved their processes
[4:46:11] to a different part of the development. So we still wanna protect everything. We just wanna
[4:46:15] make sure that we just go quicker. We don't want to have this, I don't know how these people are
[4:46:19] waving a shot clock other than they're probably being
[4:46:23] told that, hey, this is a easier way, just waive it. Well,
[4:46:27] the whole point is we need legal lots. And so we worked on that
[4:46:31] and I, again, I don't remember what matt rector called it, but that was a big thing to where
[4:46:35] staff was saying, you can't get it done sooner. And then we said, you're
[4:46:39] gonna have to figure it out. And so rector came up with a way, it's like a provisional
[4:46:43] plat or something effort. But anyway, you get the, you get the league lot and you stick out the process.
[4:46:49] but, um, yeah. And uh, I guess the last thing, understanding
[4:46:53] what, what mayor has said and what we've tried to accomplish is a, there, in the packet,
[4:46:57] there are three documents. There's the red line that starts on
[4:47:01] page two 17, which is the, basically the document that was given to
[4:47:06] us by the consultant that we got rid of all the accuracy things
[4:47:10] and the just typo type of stuff. So that that's your modified yes.
[4:47:14] it was our modified of accuracy, just typos. This table didn't
[4:47:18] agree. You know, we didn't, we didn't change the content of the, of,
[4:47:22] of what it just said that this table said it needed a a a an sup
[4:47:27] over here. It said you didn't. So find out what it's supposed to be and make it one. So after those
[4:47:31] accuracy checks, so just to clarify, that's not what the, what
[4:47:35] the consultant submitted? That's exactly what the
[4:47:40] the committee what the, what what the co what the consultant gave us was
[4:47:44] a lot a load of kaka. So I mean it really was our red line that
[4:47:49] okay, so the, yeah, I'll, I'll give you an example. Um, so we would have like,
[4:47:53] um, when, when you go through the code, this is another one. There's
[4:47:57] a lot of stuff doing here. When you go through the code, a lot of times you've got your definitions over here
[4:48:01] of what all the different uses are. I wanna open up a daycare, here's a definition. Mm-hmm
[4:48:05] . Then you go to your zoning table. Okay. And that's sometimes that said
[4:48:09] an su it would have an s for whatever zoning classification.
[4:48:14] but when you go back to the definition, it didn't say that it would say zone by. Right.
[4:48:19] and so we mirror, mirror those up. We also recommended
[4:48:23] that instead of having all this information, two places just have it in one. Mm-hmm
[4:48:27] . Because a lot of times you're flipping through, I don't know what the code was, five, six,
[4:48:32] maybe a thousand pages. And so you go through a thousand pages and you're going back and
[4:48:36] forth and we had definitions that didn't exist. We had definitions that
[4:48:40] were there that not in the zoning table. And so they didn't match up. Even tonight
[4:48:44] with the z code, there is no heavy industrial in the city of texas,
[4:48:48] idaho of texas, out where they got heavy industrial. It's not in
[4:48:52] the old code. It's not a new code. So yeah. Just so you guys know, they're
[4:48:57] asking for a zoning that doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah. Earlier and now it's coming. So
[4:49:01] it's industrial and light industrial. Right. That's it. You get it. That's
[4:49:05] how you get to the code to where again, somewhere in there it probably says something about heavy industrial.
[4:49:10] well, it says, you know, b is for business and, and light industrial and
[4:49:14] I is for industrial. Those are the, that's our two codes. B and I and the new udc oh.
[4:49:18] and in the old one didn't have a heaviness. So that's what I mean. Right. That's sometimes we see those and we
[4:49:22] go, there's some, there's a conflict somewhere and we would try to find it. Mm-hmm .
[4:49:26] no, all, all I was asking about is the,
[4:49:30] the consultant provided a, okay, here's a mess,
[4:49:34] here's what we're submitting and we're not going
[4:49:39] to get that. So we shouldn't look for that. What we should look for is
[4:49:43] what he submitted and you guys redlined with
[4:49:47] the graphical errors and stuff. Right. Okay.
[4:49:52] the first document is a red line, but the red line is the product
[4:49:57] of, of direction from the subcommittee to city staff
[4:50:01] to correct all the typo pointing to the wrong picture. Okay.
[4:50:06] the picture saying, having the wrong example. I think guys just saying the same thing. He's saying
[4:50:10] consultants, we're not getting the consultants final product. But the red
[4:50:14] line document is after we've gotten the cleaned up consultant
[4:50:18] is what, what is what the subcommittee has decided that this is what we want
[4:50:22] to change the changes that mayor outlined about the, the
[4:50:27] driveways and or the um, the planning process. Okay. Those have the red
[4:50:31] lines in there. So that's what I'm trying to get you guys to focus on is what the
[4:50:35] red line is, is what are the changes to the udc that the
[4:50:39] subcommittee has directed to staff for us to
[4:50:43] implement new. So that's what y'all should be, I feel like that's what y'all should be looking at. He saying, because
[4:50:47] those are contextual changes. He's saying the red line is a consultant's clean copy
[4:50:51] with our suggested changes. Okay. So everything from typographical
[4:50:56] to yes sir. Misalignment to substantial changes when
[4:51:00] it came to objection. Doesn't match that. Right. I I, I understand what's
[4:51:05] included, but I have a question regarding that
[4:51:09] because what of what you just said that
[4:51:14] these are directed to staff by council or the
[4:51:18] ad subcommittee committee as these are the changes.
[4:51:22] so we're certainly not going to look at the red lines and go, well,
[4:51:26] that's not right. We're not, I think you disagree. I disagree. I think
[4:51:30] you should. I mean, you guys looked at it once, y'all should look at it. Howard howard's right? You guys looked at it once
[4:51:34] as a different makeup, but you looked at it once senate to city council. We got a subcommittee,
[4:51:39] made a bunch of changes. And I think what we're asking is go back and look at it,
[4:51:43] read through it. See if you track with us. If you're like, hey, we, we see major
[4:51:47] issues. I haven't signed a plat, I don't know, must it been three years since
[4:51:52] the mayor signed a plat or four years? So I haven't looked he doesn't know he is january.
[4:51:56] no, but it's a, it's a texas state thing. It is been a while. Yeah. And so, um,
[4:52:00] so there's things like that to where we're looking at making changes to things that
[4:52:06] I haven't seen from a city side. And so I think your guys' input is invaluable
[4:52:10] to be able to go, hey, did you think about this? Or, I see where you're going. I
[4:52:14] think there's a better way to do this. And we wanted to cut another yeah. You're just asking for
[4:52:19] some more ice to look at. Yeah. And I'm sorry, I'm being unclear, but the, I I would like,
[4:52:23] I would suggest that p and z look at the red
[4:52:27] line copy mm-hmm. For actual contextual changes. You know, does this look
[4:52:32] good? Right. Hey, have you, you know, whatever. Yeah. Uh, and then the, the,
[4:52:36] the, the, um, the next thing is the engineering now, and that's
[4:52:40] engineering manual starts on page 5 5 5 that has no red lines in it. That
[4:52:44] is what we consider the subcommittee considers to being the final
[4:52:48] engineering manual draft, which has very little changes from what matt
[4:52:52] rector did that one. So we have very little if any, changes in that.
[4:52:56] and then the last on page h 8 69 is the udc
[4:53:01] in a final draft form with all the red lines incorporated.
[4:53:06] so, okay. Just trying to get, give you a little map. Yeah. Of these three. That's
[4:53:10] what I was trying to clarify is, wait, what are we getting? Okay, so
[4:53:14] we're getting, we're getting the well in this packet, those are those three
[4:53:19] documents. Okay. Okay. So we're getting the engineering manual, which has
[4:53:23] very few red line corrections. We're getting the initial
[4:53:27] red line pass and we're getting the final red
[4:53:31] line, the product of those red lines. Okay. If all are included. So the, that's
[4:53:35] what I was trying to clarify is, so the udc document and the engineering manual
[4:53:40] have no red lines in them. Those are final versions based on
[4:53:44] okay. What was in the red line. Okay. And on the engineering manual, there really were
[4:53:48] no errors. It was more of using the engineering manual
[4:53:52] as the, as the, the gospel mm-hmm . And then making sure the udc
[4:53:57] agreed to it and we had proper references to the proper thing. Okay.
[4:54:01] and that this reference may say, it didn't just say see engineering manual, it
[4:54:05] said see engineering manual section, this. Right. Okay. So that's good. So, uh,
[4:54:10] couple of couple of few questions. Um, you talked about
[4:54:15] businesses and you know how we shouldn't be in the business of
[4:54:19] dictating to businesses. I don't, some things I don't
[4:54:24] disagree with that. But when we look at like tonight's
[4:54:28] the 42 acres, originally we had
[4:54:32] to,
[4:54:37] or I, I believe that we should say, you've got
[4:54:41] x number of shops, you need to have x number of
[4:54:45] a da parking you need and mm-hmm .
[4:54:49] because what I don't want to happen is a development come in 40 acres,
[4:54:54] whatever, and they end up like the, the, uh,
[4:54:59] the fitness place that's sharing space with the church where they're parking
[4:55:03] all over the lawn. That that shouldn't be allowed. Well, that's
[4:55:07] good code. So it's against code. It should be allowed. Yes. And I would say, I would say
[4:55:11] yes, my opinion, yes. And no one, we, I don't know if they should be, they
[4:55:15] should be parking on paved areas. We're not getting into that. What I say no is when it
[4:55:19] comes to aada, a parking spots that's covered by the a da and the
[4:55:23] tas after hug gonna, I tell you how many spots you gonna have. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And so
[4:55:28] you can't get a site plan approved. Mm-hmm . Like, I think it's like after 48 spots you
[4:55:32] have to go to 3 88 parking spots or something mm-hmm . And so like
[4:55:36] we keep 'em at 47 spots at keep two, but that's not a city code.
[4:55:40] that's 80 d eight. And that's what we try to get rid of is a lot of times our code was
[4:55:44] one and the problem is, is right now they mirror up. Two years
[4:55:48] from now the government makes some change and now all of a sudden they don't mirror up.
[4:55:52] and so we're looking at just saying, look, that's an aada a issue. Now we don't want you parking on
[4:55:56] grass. And we actually have an issue in downtown where, you know, some people wanna
[4:56:01] park in gravel and we wanna do this, we wanna do that. Some of those we have problems with.
[4:56:05] 'cause we have uh, tceq and we have drainage. We have a drain, I think it's a drainage
[4:56:09] permit. Right. With them or ms four. Yeah. Ms four. And so that dictates
[4:56:14] things. And so we're like, look. Right, we can't, we're not gonna break that. And so things like
[4:56:18] that, I think that's what I think the code handles we're just taking out. We're
[4:56:22] just, we're providing a reference to that. We don't wanna tell heb it's that way if it changes. Yeah.
[4:56:26] and, and we do, we do that kind of thing all the time where it's in compliance with state
[4:56:30] law or in compliance with state. Yes. We, we don't wanna tell heb where to put their parking
[4:56:34] at. Right. How much to have and what's, what's gonna be a handicap spot because
[4:56:38] that's already, that's already, um, um, governed by other
[4:56:43] state and federal laws. And I guess, I guess what I'm looking at from
[4:56:47] a larger development, not an individual business standpoint, but a larger
[4:56:51] development standpoint, if we don't dictate to them that they
[4:56:55] must have parking, where else
[4:57:00] is that dictated to them? The state? Like in terms of if, if we
[4:57:04] don't, so heb for example, if we don't tell 'em, you
[4:57:09] must have paved parking. Mm-hmm . Who else does
[4:57:13] that? Does the state mandate that customer, if there's nowhere to park, they don't go,
[4:57:17] well, what if it's gravel? Well, now that no, see no. That's different issue.
[4:57:21] that that's, that's, we're not gonna tell you how much what we have, we're, we're, we're suggesting is
[4:57:25] we're not gonna tell you how much parking to have. Right. We did say it's gotta be like nine by
[4:57:29] 18, or I forget, nine and a half by 18 that. But our current code right now,
[4:57:34] every time the school district does a project that come to us for variances mm-hmm . Why
[4:57:38] we dictate how many motorcycle parking spots you have to have in a development.
[4:57:42] we don't wanna get into that. We cities dictate, I've seen cities not only dictate
[4:57:47] you have to have a bike rack, they dictate a certain type of bike rack. Yes. Right. And
[4:57:51] it's specific to that city. And we're like, look. Yes. We don't wanna get into, if you have
[4:57:55] a bike rack or not, the public and your customers will determine it. The
[4:57:59] problem is how many times you see a bike rack just stuck out over on the side somewhere?
[4:58:03] 'cause it checked a box. Yeah. When if you just let the people go, look, I got something else. The
[4:58:07] reason we don't wanna get into the parking is we don't know. You know, when I was a kid,
[4:58:12] the um, open air malls was a big thing. And then on they tore 'em all
[4:58:16] down. They built enclosed malls. And I don't know what the hell happened. They started
[4:58:20] tearing all 'em down, went back to enclo or, uh, outdoor malls. Mm-hmm . And
[4:58:24] so the business community is gonna dictate whatever the customers want. Right. We
[4:58:28] just wanna make sure we have what we find important protected
[4:58:32] drainage, uh, landscaping on the outside, you know, home depot,
[4:58:37] we said, look, do we care how much landscaping's in the center island?
[4:58:42] some people say, yes, I'm a guy that says no, because if you drive through, all the trees
[4:58:46] are broken down anyway. And so we're not out there patrolling it, antagonist it. Well
[4:58:50] we wanna make sure it's from the street. When you drive down the road and you're new passing through huro,
[4:58:55] does it look good or does it look like an eyesore? We want it to look good. If, if you're in a
[4:58:59] passenger car and you pull out a chick-fil-a, do you need to get out of the sunroof
[4:59:03] to see the traffic coming at you? Almost. Almost. So,
[4:59:07] yeah. But when it comes to your point on gravel parking and grass right.
[4:59:11] we're not making changes that that's, that's governed by. Okay. And, and that, that's
[4:59:15] kind of where I was going is, you know, I understand, okay, we wanna make it
[4:59:19] easier and so on, but if the state doesn't say
[4:59:24] you will have paved parking for this kind of facility,
[4:59:29] then isn't it our job to say that? Yeah. If that's what we want. I think that's
[4:59:33] in our, that's our ms four permit change. We're just not, we're just not gonna be dictate. It
[4:59:37] has to be pa or right. Mayor, mayor,
[4:59:41] while ago, while ago, excuse me, while ago, you were talking about the
[4:59:45] concrete foot on each side of the driveway mm-hmm . Is that something that, that
[4:59:50] we are going to, uh, highly encourage the
[4:59:54] builder to do, or well, that's a great thing about the engineering manual and
[4:59:58] the udc mm-hmm . It's very easy to highly encourage it. If you all say,
[5:00:02] you know, it's a good idea and we pass it, you're gonna have to build it that way. Yep.
[5:00:06] and so that's, that's our building code that we have. No, you just kind of confusing me a little bit. 'cause
[5:00:10] when you said if you have 50 or 60 homes, uh, and you have 'em all like that, it's
[5:00:15] gonna increase flooding. Well it does now because when, when, when they're doing
[5:00:19] their calculations on and approving things, they're doing it based on
[5:00:23] so much impervious pavement. Well, every time one homeowner and you have a
[5:00:27] thousand homeowners add on everywhere, now it's throwing off that detention
[5:00:31] pond was only built to handle so much. Yeah. Right. And so a thousand homes
[5:00:35] adding that on. So what we're saying is we'll just make it wider. They'll run
[5:00:40] different calcs and people are gonna start building wider and longer driveways, which
[5:00:44] is gonna affect, honestly, it's gonna affect lot sizes. 'cause you can't have a longer driveway. Right.
[5:00:48] okay. And that's gonna push your house back and oh,
[5:00:52] I understand. He lives in a neighborhood you couldn't even park at fort explorer in yeah.
[5:00:57] in uh, durango. Unless you wanna, you know, you gotta have your garage door open to get the bumper in in
[5:01:01] there. Good luck with getting well, it's public safety hazard. You go through some streets, two cars
[5:01:05] can't get by. If trash cans are out or people are parked on the street, that causes
[5:01:09] emm s problems as well. That's right. Right. And go, you know, we, we looked at, I told
[5:01:13] the city manager, go drive down to brookside. He said, it can be done better. I'm like, I don't think it
[5:01:17] can because I'm seeing issues down there because we, we gave like, every time
[5:01:22] you give a developer a foot, they're gonna take 10 feet. Mm-hmm . And so we're like, look
[5:01:26] on some of it, do we really care? And it was like, no, we probably don't.
[5:01:30] but on the stuff, we do care. We just stopped making it gray and said, look, either
[5:01:34] do it this way or go pick a different city. We don't really care, but this is what the new rule's
[5:01:38] gonna be. And then that way staff doesn't spend week after week
[5:01:43] arguing about things. 'cause then they call us and then we're like,
[5:01:47] I mean I don't understand what, you know, why, why are you upset about this? But we also
[5:01:52] added a lot more suvs into the process. Okay. Because a lot of
[5:01:56] things we had, what the recommendations were from the consultant was a
[5:02:00] lot more uses in, I think it was b one or b two, which
[5:02:04] is all around residential. And some of the uses, we were like, no, no, no,
[5:02:08] no, we, we don't want all that. We wanna have an sup process because sometimes we're okay
[5:02:13] with that use. And then it depends on the use we're okay with. So
[5:02:17] it's like, I'll just say not all drive throughs are built the same. Right.
[5:02:21] and so some of them you'd say, that'd be freaking awesome and we'll do it. Right. And other ones
[5:02:25] you're like, no, no, no. The traffic on that, you know, chick-fil-a would be great, but
[5:02:30] I mean, tell me a chick-fil-a that doesn't have a double drive through wrapped around the building out into the street
[5:02:34] mm-hmm . That's not gonna go well everywhere. So we wanna have a little bit more input. We
[5:02:38] want staff to be able to say, hey, um, yeah, it's zoned. Right.
[5:02:42] but the drive through's an sup and you have to get through council and council
[5:02:46] does not like traffic backing up into the streets or p and z doesn't
[5:02:50] like it back up in the streets. So you guys are gonna have to rework this. I'm
[5:02:54] telling you now, if you don't, you're liable to get a denial. And then we come up and we go, we don't
[5:02:58] want it backed in the street answer's. No. And that, that was
[5:03:02] another question that I had is, um, with
[5:03:07] the, I'm gonna say, uh, elimination of
[5:03:11] a quarter of the udc, did you guys
[5:03:15] go and take a look at the sup
[5:03:20] uh, I'm gonna say allowances so that there
[5:03:24] is some flexibility when they come up and they say, yeah, you know, we want to do this
[5:03:28] uh, 30 foot drive through for a chick-fil-a single lane.
[5:03:33] no, that ain't gonna work. . Have you ever been to a chick-fil-a it that
[5:03:37] ain't gonna work. Right. Well, my understanding is by law you, you're able to do that anytime an sup process
[5:03:42] comes up that you've got two important things you can do. And, and howard or the
[5:03:46] attorney, um, can jump in, tell I'm wrong. But typically, um,
[5:03:50] you know, I'm famous for making a comment to the isd one time when they came up and said,
[5:03:54] you can't tell us what to do and we're here, we're here just as a courtesy. And
[5:03:58] I was like, look, you're asking for an sup. If we ask you to paint your building pink,
[5:04:02] we can do that in sup because when you come up for an sup and you want a variance of code,
[5:04:07] we can require anything. And that's why I tell people all the time, listen
[5:04:11] to the presentation and then decide maybe
[5:04:15] there is no way to mitigate it. Maybe it's like, look, you're gonna have to do x, y, z. And they're like, well
[5:04:20] that kills the site. Well that's not my problem. The other flip side is, is once you do do
[5:04:24] that sup people say, you know, I heard tonight. Well how are you gonna enforce it? Well,
[5:04:28] if you violate certain things, if you say you can't have
[5:04:32] whatever, more than 20 people in a drive through, that's the legal limit we're gonna allow
[5:04:36] you to have. Mm-hmm . Then you regularly see 25, you can end up
[5:04:41] through a process, another public process you can take to sup back away
[5:04:45] rescind it and that effectively closes 'em down. Yep. And so suvs
[5:04:49] I find are very, very important in development process because you can
[5:04:54] massage each thing completely different. What I really dislike personally
[5:04:58] is when you just have code that's broad to where
[5:05:03] staff, a council's not paying attention, whatever, all of a sudden
[5:05:07] up zone by. Right. Well, you know, not every zoning thing for
[5:05:11] some of us works out. It always depends on each situation. And
[5:05:15] so what we've looked at is how do we do this to where you all can put input? You
[5:05:19] know, one of the things council, uh, tasks at p and z with is be tough
[5:05:23] on people. Don't be afraid to be tough. You're the first line of defense.
[5:05:28] arguably we will end up being the nice guys. But that's, you know,
[5:05:32] people that know me know I'm not trying to be the nice guy. But that's the point of it is,
[5:05:36] is that you guys help move the line forward. I think the sup process,
[5:05:40] as you guys go through it, you'll see opportunities to, to
[5:05:45] push the, push the line some to where people come, you know,
[5:05:49] squawking at council, man, these guys are tough. It's like, well as the city builds out, it
[5:05:53] gets tougher. Go try to permit in cedar park. It's not an easy, uh, it's
[5:05:57] not an easy trip going through cedar park. And and that's part of the reason why I asked the
[5:06:01] question about the s is because, um,
[5:06:06] that gives the city council p and z
[5:06:11] whatever gives the city the ability to negotiate.
[5:06:16] because in my opinion, 70%
[5:06:21] of the people who come in here to p and z wanting something,
[5:06:25] it's a custom. We've never seen this particular,
[5:06:29] it's not cookie cutter. We have to look at each
[5:06:34] individual one and decide, is this right? Is this wrong? Do we need
[5:06:38] to tweak this somewhere? And if the sup has been expanded but the
[5:06:42] code has been cut back, then we still have the ability
[5:06:46] to negotiate that power of the su. Right. That's right. You
[5:06:51] know, if, if I've never a yes on any project, but I can always get to a yes,
[5:06:55] you may not like it. And I can't tell you how many times we had a guy six months ago,
[5:06:59] he was up here banging, I'm gonna sue you if you guys don't vote this way. And I was like, don't,
[5:07:03] don't, uh, chat me with a good time. That's fine. There's a certain thing that I'm looking
[5:07:08] for and if you want me to vote you, you can get six other votes.
[5:07:12] if you want my vote and me to not be, you know, talking about it, then you're
[5:07:16] gonna have to go do certain things because I have concerns about things. And so a
[5:07:20] lot of times people end up not wanting, um, I've voted against more
[5:07:24] developments around here than I voted for. And it was simple things. I just
[5:07:29] wanna take what you said in verbal. I want to have it in writing as part of the
[5:07:33] sup. 'cause I know that by law, if you don't follow that, which you heard today, people
[5:07:37] don't follow rules 'cause we're not attach 'em to the sup. Right. You
[5:07:41] attach to that. You don't build the berm or we sit in your permit and I
[5:07:45] don't know what that happens to your deal, but you can't operate anymore. And that's, I build a burn myth.
[5:07:49] I was you. Yep. Or whatever the issue is. Exactly. And so that's what we're trying to task y'all with is a look,
[5:07:53] you'll look at that and you'll go, there's a whole lot of s's got put in where
[5:07:58] it was permitted by. Right. Because as we build all these neighborhoods up,
[5:08:02] I don't know that a daycare goes next to every neighborhood because daycares cause
[5:08:07] a little bit of traffic, especially some of the bigger ones. So let's make
[5:08:11] sure that when we build a daycare, we have proper parking. 'cause again, we're
[5:08:15] not dictating parking. But you want to have one that holds a hundred kids and you have
[5:08:19] a q line of six cars and you have four parking spots. Well that
[5:08:23] doesn't make sense. , so you guys are gonna go, doesn't work for me. I think you
[5:08:27] need a minimum like 50 parking spots and you need a queue line. And so I think what'll
[5:08:32] happen is the market always takes advantage and does the
[5:08:36] bare minimum. Yes. The problem is when you write all in code, they do the bare minimum
[5:08:40] and it's our fault. Everything is screwed up. Exactly. Because we codified it.
[5:08:44] yeah. But if we make the market go, look, there are a bunch of grumpy people up
[5:08:48] there. They vote no a lot. You're gonna have to present a really good item
[5:08:52] to the, you know, to the planning and zoning. And you get through that, you go to city council
[5:08:56] and they're just as bad. I think what you'll find is a lot
[5:09:01] more people will present things in a manner where you'll sit back and you'll go, you
[5:09:05] know, I'm okay with this. And then we'll start having a deal to where, hey, when you come to hu, don't
[5:09:09] cut the corners. Don't screw around. You go through the process like that,
[5:09:13] but you try to screw around. You try to skimp on something, people
[5:09:17] just say no 'cause mm-hmm . I mean, the easiest thing to say is no.
[5:09:21] and you don't really get hurt by saying no. Where you get hurt is by saying yes and going, well we
[5:09:25] screwed that up. We shouldn't have done that. That's right. Which is why like your neighborhood,
[5:09:30] we're just now going through, digging up all the ditches and redoing 'em. 'cause we said,
[5:09:34] and I don't wanna talk to you about that, we said 20 years ago to stuff and
[5:09:38] we were saying yes to all these neighborhoods, open ditches because, well, we wanted homes
[5:09:42] 20 years ago. And so we would do anything to get people moved to hu now
[5:09:46] we don't have to do all that. Now we can say, look, we want roads. If we want roads
[5:09:51] built in concrete, you put in the engineering manual. Oh, you wanna do asphalt? Well,
[5:09:55] I dunno what to tell you. Go to another city. We're now, we're upping things up. Well it costs
[5:09:59] us more. Well what costs you more? Costs us less. And so don't build it.
[5:10:03] so there's a lot of things like that to where, you know, um, we're
[5:10:08] trying to get to where, I guess yeah, more of a market based approach.
[5:10:12] approach where y's input city staff gets input and it's
[5:10:16] like, hey, you can do really good and, you know, do something great
[5:10:20] and you just sell right through the system. And then again, you try to cut
[5:10:24] corners or we think you're cutting corners or you're doing something that really is stupid, doesn't
[5:10:29] make sense. We just, you know, cut it down and say no real quick and save staff
[5:10:33] time and save everybody a whole lot of grief.
[5:10:37] hey, mike. That's right. Go ahead. At the meeting that we had here
[5:10:42] a couple of saturdays ago mm-hmm . We were kind of touched base on zero
[5:10:46] escaping. Uh, my question exactly what I was gonna call out. Huh? I was gonna call
[5:10:50] that. Go ahead. Is that what you were ask? Yeah, go ahead. You fine? No, I was just asking did y'all kind
[5:10:54] of touch base or change anything? Uh, as far address that there was some landscape
[5:10:59] changes? Go ahead. I was gonna say, I don't think we changed any of that. I
[5:11:03] think we actually put I know, don't be afraid. Do say don't,
[5:11:07] don't be afraid to step up for the record. Evan porterfield city council place. Fine. You're
[5:11:11] you're too far away to bite. You're fine. Um, yeah, I don't think any of that we changed the language
[5:11:15] on, I think, um, I think we actually added more language. Uh, I don't think it was much, but we
[5:11:19] added more language to allow more of that. Uh, 'cause our mindset was,
[5:11:23] hey, if you want to do that, I mean, that just saves on the irrigation costs. So mm-hmm . Um, you
[5:11:27] know, we wanted to be that more of an option. I don't think we dictated that necessarily. Texas a
[5:11:32] m I'd like to see that be a little more forceful for constraint of water
[5:11:36] and save saved the city money. Uh, we, we can, we can go in
[5:11:40] and and look at that and see if we need to uh, yeah. If
[5:11:44] you guys want to yeah. If you want to enhance that at all. But like I said, I think, I think the only thing we did was made
[5:11:48] it, uh, easier for people to do that. But it wasn't anything that we dictated that they had to
[5:11:52] have. Yeah. Like, uh, but we, we were in favor of it. I don't live in an hoa
[5:11:57] and if, if I did and an hoa came along and said,
[5:12:01] you have to have grass, I'd tell 'em go get bent . Well, right
[5:12:05] now, a lot of times the city's telling you you have to play. Exactly. Yeah. And that's one
[5:12:09] thing, again, we want landscaping, but we go through, I mean those,
[5:12:14] we, we know what it's, except for last year, it usually lasts.
[5:12:18] rain is sometime in may and then rain again till september. Yeah. So
[5:12:22] what I've seen around, around the metro area is when we actually had mighty
[5:12:26] find open up, they opened up on a tco because they couldn't plant landscape
[5:12:30] for four months because we were in the middle of a stage three mm-hmm . And it's like, okay,
[5:12:35] how does that make sense? And then they plant all that stuff and you're going, but every
[5:12:39] year we're putting ourselves in. Yeah. And you know, right now, this year it's gonna
[5:12:43] be a whole lot better 'cause you have more water. But you're in a market that you have
[5:12:47] to ask yourself. You know, I'm not advocating for the data center people.
[5:12:51] most of their water used is in irrigation. Right? Yeah. They're irrigating
[5:12:56] all this stuff because we're saying, hey, you gotta plant all these trees. Sometimes it makes sense.
[5:13:00] the one by lowe's, when you drive down 79, it's in a hole. They're
[5:13:05] walling off a whole thing of trees. You're gonna drive by and always see
[5:13:09] a big building there. Yeah. But the trees are supposed to block the building, but they're never gonna grow 60
[5:13:13] feet tall. No. So what would've maybe made more sense is to go, do we really
[5:13:17] need all that right there? Maybe we needed the money. I don't know, spend it some other park.
[5:13:21] so you, a lot of things like that. If you guys will look at it and kind of go, hey, you know what,
[5:13:26] um, we do want planting. There's a lot of trees in phoenix, but it's a
[5:13:30] desert. Mm-hmm . But they have different things. There's mexican sagebrush that goes really
[5:13:34] nice. Right. It doesn't die when it gets to be zero. Yep. It doesn't die when
[5:13:38] you don't water it for six months. Mm-hmm . But people aren't
[5:13:42] planting it. I mean, it's more of a climate thing. Um, I know some, there's
[5:13:47] a lady I know she hates, um, crate myrtles. I got crate myrtles in my backyard.
[5:13:51] the things bloom year round. And they never look like they need water. I don't know
[5:13:55] where they get their water from. I don't know how it works. Oh, they're plants. But I know you can, from your foundation,
[5:13:59] you keep 'em 30, 30 feet from your foundation. I fence. Fence. But you can chop 'em
[5:14:03] off. It seems like that. Like back, what, what can we do to where we get what
[5:14:07] we want? We want shade. That stuff does reduce overall, um,
[5:14:12] um, temperature in our city. Mm-hmm . Yeah. Um, but we wanna make sure it's also something
[5:14:16] to where in 10 years people aren't cutting all the trees down because they died.
[5:14:21] tree or house. You're gonna pick your house every time. But we want, we want
[5:14:25] greenery. My, as an example for the trees, my front yard,
[5:14:30] when I bought the house, they had two brand new trees planted.
[5:14:34] and I looked at it and I'm like, well, I ain't gonna move that tree, but they're
[5:14:38] eight feet apart. One of them's dead and the freeze killed one
[5:14:42] off. I chopped it down. I'm like, yep, okay, we're good. I got one
[5:14:46] big old tree and everyone loves it. Now, on the flip side, I think we did, uh,
[5:14:51] I don't know what we ever did with, we were advocating to more tree surveys. There is a
[5:14:55] little bit of a, if you have a property and you have a tree and you wanna cut it down,
[5:15:00] we're like, I like the trees there, but who am I? Or who
[5:15:04] are we as a government to say, rick can't cut a tree down. It's in the middle of his
[5:15:08] property on two acres. And now, now he has to work his development around it. Well, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm
[5:15:12] . That's not our responsibility. Well, we ought to try to find, like we did, um, have a certain
[5:15:16] development that may come. And right now their pud says they have to have,
[5:15:20] they had to keep the trees. It's at limmer. Um, no, it's at edge bit. And live oak
[5:15:25] to southeast corner have to keep the trees, historic trees, the,
[5:15:29] the pecan trees. They're really big. No, they're really big. Um, the han peon property. Yeah,
[5:15:33] the pecan trees. The hanson. Yeah. That's, those are live trees. The put says you gotta keep
[5:15:37] 'em. Well, another person came through and said, hey, we might have a certain use. You guys, they've really
[5:15:41] been wanting, we'd like to put there, but the trees are in the way. We said they can come
[5:15:45] 'em down. But we'd like the opportunity to move them. And so our ideas
[5:15:49] at our cost, we wanna be able to move them to one of our parks to where they're very nice, mature
[5:15:53] trees. Okay. But we are pro-development and they're gonna plant other trees.
[5:15:58] and I do wish we had these, you know, big 24 inch trees.
[5:16:02] but to say you have to work your whole development around a 24 inch tree mm-hmm . Or you have
[5:16:07] to move at your own cost kind of kills development. And it's really not a
[5:16:11] prop for some of us, it's a property rights issue. But again, we're trying to find ways
[5:16:15] instead of saying no, how do we incentivize you to say, yes, I'll
[5:16:19] move it. So whether it's tree credits or so. Right. Again,
[5:16:23] little things like that, we, I don't know that we could think of everything. Um, we, um,
[5:16:28] we did get rid of the, the on the, on the single family or the family units.
[5:16:32] remember there was sf and mf, but they had hamlets. And
[5:16:36] remember they were like five or six hamlets and hamlets had commercial in them. That's
[5:16:40] right. And we got rid of that. Neighborhoods could have zoning for neighborhoods,
[5:16:44] could have commercial in there within the hamlet, per the consultant. They split
[5:16:48] yeah. Potentially families to hamlets. They went from two or three zoning to like six
[5:16:52] or eight zonings in these different hamlets with different types of commercial.
[5:16:56] and for a little, his history on that, I believe that was because
[5:17:01] there was a push, a trend, whatever you want to call it,
[5:17:05] to the village concept where there is a, there
[5:17:10] is a corner store, which doesn't exist. It's a
[5:17:14] convenience store gas station. Yeah. You know, there was corner stores,
[5:17:18] there was walkability of this so that you don't have to get in your
[5:17:22] car and drive. I think that was the intent. Well, we saw as a little bit of laziness to where a guy
[5:17:26] come up and say, I'm gonna zone a hundred acres is residential, and I'm gonna put some
[5:17:30] commercial on the outside. And we're like, look, you can do the commercial on the outside,
[5:17:35] but we want to have a say in that. And so you're gonna have to zone it exactly one way.
[5:17:39] you can't just come in. Because what you could also do is, as we get older
[5:17:43] neighborhoods, you don't have an hoa next thing you know, I'm buying two lots, tearing
[5:17:47] them down, and I'm building a liquor store right in the middle of your neighborhood and you're going,
[5:17:51] I'm going, I'm zoned by. Right rick, you can't do nothing about it. Uh, this is a neighborhood,
[5:17:55] blah, blah, blah. And we're like, we're not doing that. Right. And, you know, uh,
[5:18:00] I'm gonna go way back to the old smart code, which they used in
[5:18:05] brooklyn's. And they did exactly what you were talking about. Here's all the houses,
[5:18:09] here's the commercial up front. We meet the requirements mm-hmm . And it's
[5:18:13] like, okay, so yes, I get it. The neighborhood or a
[5:18:17] hamlet thing. I think that was the but intent. But we mixed that and got back to,
[5:18:21] but it wasn't implemented well. Well essentially we cut out 54 pages.
[5:18:26] okay. Um, current document three, four. There's, you cut out 54 pages outta how many
[5:18:30] cop, 3 78. 3 78 to 3 24. 3 24. That wasn't enough.
[5:18:34] then you cut more. Well, hey, that's why I, hey, you guys can cut it more scissors. You're not
[5:18:38] gonna hurt our feelings. But no city manager did think he, he told me once that
[5:18:43] you guys kind of got a, uh, the council kind of has a little bit of a libertarian bent.
[5:18:47] and I wouldn't say it's more of a libertarian bent. I'd say it's more of a, um, we're
[5:18:51] trying to be efficient, efficient with, you know, our, some of our employees
[5:18:55] make well over six figures. And so they're not able,
[5:18:59] there's only 40 hours a week that they're able to work and get everything done. And so we're really trying to,
[5:19:04] again, before we started this conversation, really dial into what do we really
[5:19:08] need to be focusing on? What's really important? And then how do we take as much gray
[5:19:12] out and just tell people like mm-hmm . Answer's no. Now ultimately they could bring
[5:19:16] anything to council to get it overwritten. Right. But if staff can go back and say,
[5:19:20] like, for instance, the sign, if it was all suvs, um, and it was on consent,
[5:19:25] it's like, hey guys, counsel's very particular right now. And look,
[5:19:29] look around at the signs. Um, they're saying no to everything unless you put stone
[5:19:33] and you make it look pretty and you gotta put some lipstick on it. Otherwise they say no.
[5:19:37] right now we can't even, we got development on one 30 trying to build in our
[5:19:41] sign. I think the, the maximum's like six feet and so
[5:19:47] mm-hmm . It's a, it's a, it's a psychological issue
[5:19:51] with development in these big box people. They don't like six foot tall signs
[5:19:55] for 40 acre developments. And so we usually end up doing a variance or
[5:19:59] we do a pud mm-hmm . And I think one of the issues we have is everything's a pud now,
[5:20:03] right? Mm-hmm . And a pud. Everybody's writing their own code. Yep. Well, what's
[5:20:08] the point of having a code if you're gonna have every development's a p, so what's causing
[5:20:12] the pud and what can we do? And some of it we're, it's gonna have to
[5:20:16] be a put 'cause it's maybe some major mixed use and it's, you know, it's gonna be great. In other
[5:20:20] parts. It's like, like, I don't know, the last time we had a neighborhood built that was built by code,
[5:20:24] it seems like they're all built by some development agreement and some p
[5:20:28] and so we're just getting out of, uh, what like slope. We
[5:20:32] had one that was uh, I think called exchange. They got a variance for the
[5:20:36] slope of the roof. Yeah. I don't even know why we cared. And we always say yes.
[5:20:40] so it's like, why do we run through this system? Let's not use to have time for
[5:20:45] that, but let's make sure we're not, you know, we're limiting the amount of multifamily they're having
[5:20:49] to, uh, the amount of units they can have per acre. Things like that. Okay.
[5:20:53] so, uh, I wanna bring something up regarding what we're looking at on the screen right
[5:20:57] now. I'm a little concerned with 34
[5:21:02] days for us to have a special called meeting for
[5:21:06] consideration on this. I think that might be rushing this. I would not
[5:21:10] be here on may 12th. I'm gonna be on vacation. Okay. Okay.
[5:21:14] I won't be here. Well look, but that's,
[5:21:18] that's a concern of mine. I think that might be a little too
[5:21:23] much rush because I mean, I'm, I'm not casting,
[5:21:27] I'm not throwing shade. But you guys took nine months to look at this
[5:21:32] and we're doing it in 35 days. Well that's . We did a lot of work.
[5:21:36] I pushed back, I pushed back this little bit. You guys already approved it as a board
[5:21:40] and we didn't like it. And so then what we did is we didn't,
[5:21:45] I I hear you, but I'm just saying. So we took it and we said, hey, and we gave it back to staff
[5:21:49] in january and they were like, holy smokes, you guys are making
[5:21:53] major. I passed that. Then, um, ashley left.
[5:21:58] howard came in, wanted to give howard the opportunity to read this because he's getting ready.
[5:22:02] he takes a job and the first thing he comes to is, is finding out like, hey, they just,
[5:22:07] they just gutted a whole section of this. So, um, I don't think the, the
[5:22:11] date, to me, the dates and the times to me don't mean I don't care if we
[5:22:15] do it in june or july. Okay. We're using an old code. It's just some things
[5:22:19] like, um, oh, like, oh, I know what the other one was. We changed, we
[5:22:23] took a vote on right now as code is, if you wanna have a food truck and you wanna park
[5:22:27] it at lowe's, you have to go get an affidavit signed by someone with
[5:22:31] the public restroom saying that your people can use that
[5:22:36] bathroom. And so we ran into an issue where an ice cream truck wanted to
[5:22:40] park. Now, to be honest with you, most people just park the truck.
[5:22:44] they conduct their business and they don't even pay tax in. I don't think they pay
[5:22:48] tax in. How do they get in? They get out. And so we're like, okay, now you got a person who's
[5:22:53] like, look, I wanna be here permanently and come in and I wanna follow
[5:22:57] everything and pay taxes. But this public restroom thing, I'm selling ice
[5:23:01] cream. Does it make any sense for me to have, you know, someone order a sundae
[5:23:05] and then go, hey, I gotta go to the bathroom really bad. That's good. And we're like, okay.
[5:23:09] so we took a vote and said, look, my wife, that's up to the person who's frequenting
[5:23:14] the food truck yeah. To go figure out how to get the restroom. Exactly. And most people are
[5:23:18] gonna say, yeah, you can use my restroom. 'cause potentially lowe's or whoever's gonna sell more
[5:23:22] merchandise. Right? Yeah. So little things like that we were navigating through
[5:23:26] and I would call this a living document. As you guys go through, you
[5:23:30] can say you wanna move to june 12th, whatever howard and you guys come up with, I don't
[5:23:34] think we care. Okay. We're using an old one. I think where they're caught into
[5:23:38] is they see substantial changes coming in some areas potentially.
[5:23:43] and they're telling people, I'm guessing you guys are doing this.
[5:23:47] here's what it says today. If you wait like a month, this won't be an issue.
[5:23:52] . And what you're asking for a variance on, I think they're gonna do it, but we don't know quite
[5:23:56] yet. And so, yeah. I mean for example, tonight
[5:24:00] the data center stuff that was in the
[5:24:04] revisions that we looked at and approved over
[5:24:09] a year ago. Yeah. Almost two years ago. It's like okay. And what was approved, by the way, took out
[5:24:13] the sup for data centers. Right. What I
[5:24:17] spearheaded put it in there. And so when I read that, the first thing I did is said, no, no, no,
[5:24:21] no. Gotta be an sup for data centers. Gotta have input.
[5:24:25] so things like that that were right. But I'm, I'm saying that was an
[5:24:29] example of hey, you know, we voted on on these
[5:24:33] sup changes and approve them, you know, two years ago,
[5:24:37] whatever. And it's been a while. You know, tonight we have an
[5:24:42] sup or we have, we have a data center that
[5:24:46] should absolutely be going through an sup process
[5:24:50] and we're operating off of old code. Well, old code still has
[5:24:54] an sup process. Right. We, we 'cause we didn't adopt the change and then we put it back
[5:24:58] in. But yeah, to, to your point, we do have some issues like that to where we've
[5:25:03] made or we want some changes. I think everybody would agree to 'em. Mm-hmm . But old code.
[5:25:07] but um, I think old code's gonna be more restrictive on things that maybe I think you guys are
[5:25:11] gonna find doesn't matter as much. And then the stuff we are picking on,
[5:25:15] I think think you guys have finally like, that's pretty good now I don't think we haven't
[5:25:20] seen your changes. Right. Or your suggestions. Now howard brought in my opinion, brought
[5:25:24] up the cost recovery, the capital, whatever that was called. That was great catch.
[5:25:29] um, I'm a little concerned personally about the signage thing only
[5:25:33] because when, when this data center we, we use tennet as example
[5:25:38] when they came through and I found out, I uh, I think the city manager told me
[5:25:42] that, um, hey we had to go put the sign out 'cause they missed it. I was like, well that's their problem.
[5:25:46] right? Well you know, we're trying to be helpful and I'm like, that's not our job as a city
[5:25:51] to me. We set the rules and that's it. And anything we do
[5:25:55] to try to help somebody, yeah. I think we ought to spend the time helping
[5:26:00] the, the single family guy that's just trying to build a shed in his backyard.
[5:26:04] the big, big time developer. To me it's a rule. Send a picture. I didn't get your picture.
[5:26:09] so you got bumped off the agenda or hey, you can come, but first thing we're
[5:26:13] gonna say is you didn't have your sign, um, done and you didn't maintain it.
[5:26:17] 'cause one of them blew down. Yeah. And I've been in municipalities to where, where you get to drive by
[5:26:21] every day and check the sign because if you got reported that your sign was stolen
[5:26:26] or taken down, guess what? Greenville, south carolina, they pop you to
[5:26:30] the next month. It's your problem, your jobs to put it in your jobs to
[5:26:35] maintain it. To me, every time we put it on us, that's a thing where someone's
[5:26:39] gonna say, you guys screwed up. And I'm like mm-hmm . No offense to these guys, they make too much
[5:26:43] money to be worrying about signs. Again, in my opinion, the council may vote differently.
[5:26:47] the developer, that dude needs to stay out there and if he has to, I almost had to
[5:26:51] pitch a tent. I kid you not on this one site. 'cause the people kept pulling the sign down. So
[5:26:55] I got permission to tape it inside the window of the building. That way they had to
[5:26:59] bust out the glass to get to it. That was the city took the
[5:27:03] position. That is not our problem. That's a you problem not an us figure
[5:27:07] it out. Mm-hmm . But you don't want to see set a legal precedent that you're doing a favor. Then it turns around,
[5:27:12] oh it looks like you should do be viewing this and you're held accountable. Yeah. The neighboring
[5:27:16] communities, the developer has to go put the sign out there and take the photos. Yeah. Now
[5:27:21] I'd be all in favor of us buying signs from the sign guy. We pay 10 bucks and charge
[5:27:25] 15 and we have a certain way they have to go. I mean like, uh, like
[5:27:29] a detail in a construction document. Here's the certain poll. Yeah. That
[5:27:33] sign's a hundred dollars sign. You better keep an eye. 'cause people sometimes steal those polls.
[5:27:37] mm-hmm . It has to go up a certain way. Make sure you take a picture. 'cause if we don't have
[5:27:41] a picture, the p and z, the first thing they're gonna do, make a motion to kick it to the next
[5:27:45] month. I've seen it happen before. And then all of a sudden developers are now in our community
[5:27:50] a lot more. They're paying a lot more attention. They're like, hey, these people aren't screwing around.
[5:27:54] but again, I'm a little bit more hardcore because then they got everything signed. If they want it bad enough, they'll
[5:27:58] do it. That's what I said. If they want it bad enough, they'll do it. I also make a suggestion,
[5:28:03] uh, going back to the zeroscape that maybe we should go to texas a and m forestry
[5:28:07] and we check with them, what do you need a plants are that we can plant
[5:28:11] that will not die? And that go back to what our grandpas used to do.
[5:28:15] here it is on side. So now what our suggested change is
[5:28:20] not having all these trees and landscape and all that. It just refers back to the texas
[5:28:24] a and m. That way is they update 'cause of the professionals. Our code automatically
[5:28:28] updates that, that's what jim was alluding to. A lot of times we say,
[5:28:32] hey, you have to do it this way. Which is what's in the engineering manual. Yep. Well then when
[5:28:36] we adopt a new engineering, um, there's like, I don't know, six different
[5:28:41] code books. They're all adopted as 20, 24 I believe. Mm-hmm . Um,
[5:28:45] or you know, atlas 14. We just now reference
[5:28:49] whatever the, whatever the terminology is that way, um, staff can
[5:28:53] just go, nope, sorry, 2024 it says this or 2025.
[5:28:57] 'cause the fire chief gets on us for having old code. And so we bump that up real quick
[5:29:02] and then people like the, like I'm not took on the isd but they're wanting to use like a
[5:29:06] different, um, electrical code that's like six years old. And we're like,
[5:29:10] no, it's 2024 and I don't have to tell you it is what it is. Um, so
[5:29:15] yeah, that's what we kind of took into account. It's how do we do that to where um,
[5:29:19] you know, people aren't out planting bradford pears, um, in our climate. Right. But
[5:29:23] they're also not out trying to plant a tree. They're like, it's an exotic tree. It not gonna
[5:29:28] live. Or it's invasive. I personally think we are banned.
[5:29:32] banned, yes. But, uh, bradford pear trees, they're, they're an invasive
[5:29:36] species. They need to be bamboo. No more bamboo. We got a, we got a city park that bamboo
[5:29:40] all over it. So I don't know who planted that years ago they probably thought it was a good idea
[5:29:45] and my god, but cost a million bucks. Bucks. They probably, they bloom in
[5:29:49] the spring. They're pretty, that's all. They're good. But the texas a and m, the texas a and m
[5:29:53] manual, like the a da regulations
[5:29:57] like the atlas 14, all of these things we can
[5:30:01] refer back to and yeah. Just say, hey, when,
[5:30:05] when the fire code changes, we're going with the new fire
[5:30:09] code. Mm-hmm . We don't have to spell it out. It saves us
[5:30:13] money. Have updated it every time it changes. Yeah.
[5:30:17] yeah. Less meetings. My hope is that, and what we're gonna see unintended consequences.
[5:30:23] staff's gonna come up and say, hey, you guys thought this was a good idea? Here's why you don't wanna
[5:30:27] do it that way. Mm-hmm . And I think two things I'd ask of everybody is one, don't
[5:30:31] do a knee jerk reaction and wanna pass a bunch of code 'cause someone
[5:30:35] skirted the deal. Because that's why code gets the way it is. Right. And then the second
[5:30:40] one is when, when you do determine like, hey, this is actually a really big issue, we just need
[5:30:44] to act quicker. Um, like our uh, parking issue. We've
[5:30:48] been given, well we've been given tree variances and parking issues for eight years since I've
[5:30:52] been on council. And I'm like, can we just fix the, you know, the dane code and
[5:30:56] it's always yeah, we're gonna get on that. We don't always have to spend $400,000 to have a guy
[5:31:00] go, here's how you fix your, um, your content variance issue when it comes to
[5:31:04] parking. So yeah, as, as far as
[5:31:09] the presentation and kind of q and a, that, that was my last one. I'm
[5:31:13] good. Is kind of on the calendar and the, the pacing of this, it's,
[5:31:18] that's kind of rough for four people who haven't looked at this
[5:31:22] udc revision. I do it sooner than that, but I'd say we do a
[5:31:27] quicker, that's my wife's due date, so I can't be here that day. Okay. Why then I say, you guys, you just
[5:31:31] post an emergency meeting. Uh, do it. You got 72 hour notice, spend
[5:31:35] a night, bring a cooler some sandwiches and just bang it out on a saturday and call
[5:31:39] a day. I mean, what do you think? Let's do it. Which is good. Good
[5:31:43] to me. I'm retired. I live here. I'm retired too. So I live
[5:31:47] here. I mean, someone stole my cotton. There's gonna be problems. Not
[5:31:51] forget about age. 'cause I did think someone said, said, hey, like, you guys are older than me.
[5:31:56] I didn't think, I didn't think you guys, he was just as oldest. Probably the oldest oldest up here
[5:32:00] in here. Okay. I'm probably the oldest one. I'm the youngest one about a lot.
[5:32:05] so, but I do appreciate your guys' time going through this. I do appreciate
[5:32:09] staff going through and um, doing all. And I think ultimately what we're gonna have
[5:32:13] is, um, I think what we talked on council is we can have one o'clock
[5:32:18] more developer friendly in some instances, but we won't be giving incentives. We'll be
[5:32:22] hopefully charging more to do business in hu we'll be moving faster and we'll
[5:32:26] get higher quality. Um, we're just going about it a little bit different than maybe
[5:32:30] some other people do. Tony, it's bedtime, . Yeah, we
[5:32:34] gotta go. I told you we can go until two or three. You guys done? Or you want some
[5:32:38] more? We ain't done yet. . We, we still got off. We still
[5:32:43] got stuff to do. Alright. Please don't, please don't run. But hopefully
[5:32:47] it's fast. I'll get out here now. It won't run off. All right, tony. We're trained to go
[5:32:51] to two or three o'clock in the morning. We're good. We're good. I know
[5:32:55] you are, but I'm not. I'm old. All right. We're not military retired.
[5:33:00] I'm 20 years older than you mike. Guys, calm down. So thank you for
[5:33:04] the presentation. We're gonna move on to item seven. Development
[5:33:08] services director report. You know what we should have done? Make a sign.
[5:33:14] 4.0. Keep it real, tony.
[5:33:18] um, it's late. I'm not gonna drag this out. Um,
[5:33:22] just the dates that we've mentioned today. Uh, everybody send me
[5:33:27] an individual email and let me know what you think about. I know,
[5:33:31] you know, if you want more time to look at the code, my directive since I
[5:33:35] got here was move it and move it faster. It's been dragging on
[5:33:39] like a nosebleed right. For months and months and months and months. And we need to get it done and done. And
[5:33:43] I, you know, I worked with legal. We put a schedule together that would work. But if we're gonna
[5:33:47] change it, let me know soon. 'cause that joint meeting resolution's may the seventh
[5:33:51] and we're, they're gonna have to put a date on that, so we'll push it back. But
[5:33:56] just let us know what you think. Um, otherwise the next time I see you in person
[5:34:00] will be april the 20th. Drive fast and take chance. Let's
[5:34:04] do it over it. All right. Um,
[5:34:08] yeah. Uh, so I guess, yeah, we're done. It's fine. This, this calendar.
[5:34:12] yeah, let's do it. You know, go ahead and email. Back it out the way. All right. Done. Uh,
[5:34:17] let's see. Request for future agenda items. I don't think we have. I have a,
[5:34:21] I have one. Oh, we do. All right. Yes. So I've spoken
[5:34:25] to some of the city directors and had good conversations with about some information
[5:34:30] I found out about it's, uh, part of the board that both howard
[5:34:34] and I are part of the american planning association. And they sent me some information
[5:34:38] about inclusion, about our neurodivergent, our
[5:34:42] autistic community. Mm-hmm . Those all
[5:34:47] we're not very inclusive of them in our community as far as some
[5:34:51] things that we could do better. Okay. And
[5:34:55] it doesn't cost a lot of money with what I have been given and done a
[5:34:59] little research on. It's just some friendly reminders of things that we could do
[5:35:04] and make it more safe for them. Make them feel safer in
[5:35:08] the community. Okay. So you would like to have an
[5:35:12] agenda item proposing, uh,
[5:35:17] these inclusion mm-hmm . Where are we talking
[5:35:21] about the udc or what are we talking about? Just, just a discussion and see what, you
[5:35:25] know, p and c can talk about it. Okay. And then we can forward it up to council.
[5:35:29] okay. Uh, would amenable
[5:35:33] to inviting deib
[5:35:38] chair and or members? Yes. I had a, had a long conversation with her. Okay,
[5:35:42] good. About this. Good. And the lab, uh, library
[5:35:46] director and talked to jeff. Okay. Uh, at parks.
[5:35:50] so, uh, can we
[5:35:54] add that for,
[5:35:59] geez, that would be the may 7th, wouldn't it?
[5:36:03] no, may 5th. May 5th. May 5th. Yeah. The, the next regularly scheduled meeting
[5:36:07] would be may the fifth, but we could
[5:36:12] still got some pretty heavy items, you know, on our immediate future.
[5:36:17] so it don't have to be may 5th, we can push it back. It's just something I wanted to get on
[5:36:21] the agenda that we could look at. Do you think june would be better?
[5:36:25] yes. Right. Right now I say that not knowing how much
[5:36:30] of what we have, we're gonna kick down the road and, and lengthen out. So,
[5:36:34] but right, right now, plan for it. And it's the type of thing that it can roll
[5:36:38] month to month if something comes up in june, but okay. And then gives us time to
[5:36:42] reach out to some of those directors who have read over it and thought you saying, sir,
[5:36:49] I just think it's very, very helpful. Yep. Uh, and you know, but
[5:36:53] I don't know if you guys remember from that, uh, the, I call it the come
[5:36:57] to jesus meeting we had on a saturday where all the boards are here. Oh yeah.
[5:37:01] I'm very, very, very big on let's get input from
[5:37:05] the other boards. Sure. Okay. So, uh, some of it
[5:37:10] I support that it rings true with me. Uh, when I was healing from
[5:37:14] my brain injury, I was, didn't feel safe going, leaving my house until
[5:37:18] I got back home. So I couldn't find my way around. Wow. And
[5:37:22] I, I know there's people out there, I see 'em and how they look and how they talk
[5:37:26] and the way they walk. And let's do something about it.
[5:37:31] city council thing. All right.
[5:37:35] any other agenda items? Nope.
[5:37:42] well then we'll move on to item nine, which is adjournment.
[5:37:46] and we will adjourn this meeting on the 8th of april
[5:37:51] at 12:46 am
[5:37:56] thank y'all. Good night y'all. Stay tight night.