I could have turned this over to Mr. Cowell to go through our work agenda.
Thank you. Mayor council, first, if there are any regular agenda items that you would all like us
to provide additional information as we're going through the work session, I'd be happy to hear what those may be.
I just would have just a question on the consent agenda. During the purchasing, I just want to look through the list of
purchasing trucks. Let's see that we don't have a lot of people bidding. Things are maybe one.
I'm just curious how the bidding process really works and how people understand it and know when it goes out.
Sure, and if you want to pull it out, and we're going to have Trent Davis, our purchasing agent, come up and talk about that.
And certainly Glenn this year as well. They can talk specifically about the trucks, so we can do it in one of those.
Just as an infant. It's a good informational topic. So we'll do that one.
Sure. Okay, thank you.
If there are no other items, make sure I don't skip anything.
The next item deals with your CIP, and I'm going to actually have to move down there for this item, so a couple of seconds.
And I apologize, because I have a cold, someone's trying not to sneeze too many times as we go through this, so.
Just stay down there. Would you stay down there for the rest of the day?
That's why I moved down here, so I wouldn't spread the cold, so.
Yeah, which hat do I have on right now? That's right.
I'm going to walk you through this presentation and then hopefully save some time for you to be able to ask questions.
At your place, you have a couple of different documents, and it's a fairly thick packet of capital information, which I think on top of it is a spreadsheet that's going to green and yellow.
That's that's part of what we're talking about.
And what we're doing is, of course, a couple of meetings ago, we had a discussion with you all about the first year of the five year CIP,
specifically the proposition projects, the bond funded projects.
And today, what we're going to do is go through actually the full five year plan.
So what you have in front of you is the draft spreadsheet for the full five years for the CIP.
And you'll see, and I'll cover this in a minute, but you'll see it represents about $418 million worth of investments over the next five years.
And we'll go through those in detail as we progress through this.
The other items that you have, the big thick packet, those are actually the individual project sheets.
So all of the projects that are on that spreadsheet have a similar information sheet that provides a little bit more information about each of those projects.
And certainly Floyd Hartman as well as other members of the staff can delve in deeper on anyone of those that you might want to talk about as we go through.
And just as a reminder, the process that we've been using throughout the development of the CIP is one that starts with really citizen engagement.
And we went through that all through the last year as well as you were, you're identified priorities.
Those are most represented through the blueprint frame of real, but certainly there are other means that we've used to try to actually gain it those priorities as well.
Additionally, many of those priorities will make their way into a full blown strategic plan, taking the blueprint and kind of making it a little more robust.
Many of those priorities should then make it into either master plans for like water and wastewater.
We currently have a wastewater master plan and we're getting ready to start a water master plan.
We're a neighborhood district corridor plans and of course, you all just recently adopted the North Heights neighborhood plan or assessments and evaluations.
And we've done a few of those. So for example, last year we completed an evaluation of a component of the solid waste operations for efficiency.
And you all know one of the ones we'll be doing this year, one of the assessments is of our pavement quality.
So all of those kind of take your priorities and what we've heard from you and from the citizens, work them through those plans and documents.
And that ultimately, the end comes out in either your operating budget or your capital budget for four expenditures. So that's the model, if you will, that we've been using and kind of attached to that is work that Floyd has been doing, which will enhance our ability to deliver on those projects.
And we touched on that lightly last time about some of the steps we're taking to shorten the time it takes for us to secure designers and surveyors and engineers, those types of things.
As we go through the project, and I'll talk on that again as we move through. But that essentially is the model that we've been using to get us to this point.
And of course, it's a continually evolving model and we'll never actually end. We'll continue to add to those different products as we proceed through.
I want to sort of highlight what the, you know, you heard me throughout that number sort of nonchalantly the $418 million.
And we're going to talk about that in a few minutes. But I want to show you actually what the city has spent over the last five years on capital or community investment or capital improvements.
Counting this year, this budget year 2016, 2017, the city has spent just a little over 300 million over the past five years or the four years plus what we anticipate spending this year.
And the graphic that you have in front of you sort of lays out where that funding comes from or came from.
And you'll see an adjustment. And this is the adjustment we've been talking about as we've worked through the last year in terms of budget and those types of things.
And in particular, you want to pay attention to the dark blue and the light blue. And what you'll see is a gradual shift as we move forward.
As a matter of fact, you can see it in the 2016, 2017, if you recall, as we continually have trimmed away at our operating budget.
That dark blue is really our left over revenue from year to year that we relied on for a lot of pays you go type projects.
And then, of course, the light blue are our debt proceeds. And so this, of course, this first year shows the debt proceeds that were approved by the voters and corporate into this.
And I'll talk more about that as well. You'll see that again even more dramatically when we move into the next five years.
Because again, we're not relying. We're unable to rely on that surplus cash to pay for most of the improvements that we're going to talk about.
And we're relying predominantly on other vehicles that to get us through that.
Those funding sources are generally include voter authorized general obligation debt.
They also will include that that light blue bar that you just also includes revenue bonds. And those are associated with our utility rates.
So when we actually increase utility rates for water and wastewater, we may at times borrow money from TWDB.
We may actually issue bonds associated with that.
And others, and we likely will be doing that. We'll be proposing to do more of that with drainage. And again, I'll talk about that in just a few moments.
Certificates of obligation, tax notes, tax notes. We've used occasionally. And those are for where we try to match the debt up with the life expectancy of the asset that we're purchasing.
So if you're purchasing a vehicle that has a seven year asset, you're not going to obviously enter into 20 year debt on the tax notes.
Allow us to do that in a different way. And then, of course, we still do pay as you go.
There's cash from tax revenues. That's really that surplus cash that we may have left over. There are rate revenues.
So there's a certain amount of our rate that we currently collect for utilities and drainage that we use to pay for ongoing operating expenses.
But there's also a certain amount of that that we continue to apply to capital projects.
There are also fee revenues. You'll recall we passed, you all passed recently. A technology fee that will be added to the permits, which help us offset some of the ongoing operating expenses with software that we're actually putting in place for a development review process.
There are internal service charges. So these are things like fleet. So when we purchase those heavy trucks, the departments that they go to pay an annual lease payment for that.
That lease payment allows those vehicles to be maintained. And we build up a surplus. And on a surplus, we build up an account if you will with those that allows us to replace them.
So that we don't take those hits every couple of few years. We actually budget for that throughout the year.
And then grants. And most of our grants only come in the form of grants that are coming through our community development program, our airport program, or our transit program.
There are very, very few capital kinds of grants that come for anything other than that any longer. You all know we've competed a couple times for like the tiger grants.
Those are few and far between. There just aren't that many of those any longer. You really can't rely on those to fund that much in the way a capital investments.
It will be nice if we're able to do that and we'll continue to pursue those. But historically those have really fallen off.
On the five years and now this is taking, whereas I showed you before kind of historical the graph that was the funding source. This is now taking you from the approved budget year this year and moving you forward through the five years of the proposed capital.
So obviously you see the debt portion changed dramatically from what was in the past five years and you see that general fund portion that cash on hand go down to almost almost nothing.
We are, but for, and I'll talk again about this as we go through but we're anticipating very little surplus dollars to be available as we go through this five years CIP.
If obviously we actually get more surplus will be able to use that and rely less on some of these other tools but we're not, we're not budging or we're not planning for that for that purpose.
Inside that debt line what's inside there again is the voter approved or voter authorized general obligation bonds.
So the hundred and ten million dollars across the the four five years is included in that in those and then as we discussed in budget.
The other thing that is included in that is the is debt issued to tied to our project rate increases on water and wastewater and drainage.
If you recall you implemented the first of what is anticipated to be five utility rate increases for water and wastewater and then next year of course we're scheduled to begin the same four year roll out of drainage fee increases and those rates will use the proceeds from those rates to actually issue debt to be able to do the projects that are identified in the in the capital plan.
And again I'm going to come back and talk about that in just a few moments but this kind of shows you how that's to roll out over those five years.
We have attempted to ensure we have attempted to try to keep both the rate increases and the tax increases associated with the debt issue and its level.
That's one of your policies is that we try to do that rather than an effect try to implement it all at one time.
And so that's why you'll see and we saw this at the last update you'll see a piece of debt issued for year one and then you'll see another piece of debt issued for year two and the rate will adjust and so on.
And frankly there's a pragmatic component to that as well which is our ability to actually complete those projects we need really that full five to seven years to be able to complete these projects it would be completely and practical to try to do them all in one year.
On the expenditure side so that that slide was where's the money coming from to actually be able to do the investments that are proposed this actually lays out where is the money going.
So when you look at this graphic on the right hand side and you can follow down if you can't quite make out all the colors.
The bars are arranged in the way in which the text is arranged so you just follow your way down the text so the first the first line is IT which is almost hidden in some of those and there's a reason for that because there's not a lot of money dedicated to that because again.
That was one of the ballot propositions that did not pass so there's not a great deal of funding that's being able to be allocated to that.
All the way down to to the very bottom ones which actually get into some of the other categories that are listed in there.
The five or total again as I mentioned is a $418 million expenditure and again this includes funds that will come from all of those sources that I spoke to as we went through and it includes all the projects that we've we've talked about previously.
I will say I do want to say that the the CIP that we prepared is physically constrained but it's constrained with certain assumptions in place so what you will not see in the past what you might have seen in our capital program is.
We would have said okay this budget year we can afford twelve million dollars and so we put twelve million dollars in the budget next year we put a hundred eighty million dollars.
Well of course we're not going to have a hundred eighty million dollars we just put it in there as kind of a placeholder.
You will not see that in this case the dollars the projects and the dollars that are here either can be covered by funds that we already have in place.
Again the general obligation bonds are an example that we know we're going to have that hundred and ten million dollars available.
So they're covered by that or they're covered by grants that we anticipate in receiving transit grants airport grants those types of things which roughly will remain the same as what we currently have.
Or and this is the these are where those assumptions come in or they're funded by continuation of those rating creases that we had talked about at budget.
And and again obviously if those rates are not increased then the amount of projects we can do declined dramatically as we move as we move forward with the project.
And then the last assumption that's tied to that is we assume no more than about one point nine million dollars of new one time dollars being made available every year.
But one point two million of that is already dedicated by your policy to go to street overlays so there's really only about five to seven hundred thousand dollars anticipated and program in here of new one time money again.
We may have a great year in sales tax and that number goes up but we're not planning on that because based on the trends we've seen that's not likely to occur.
The same would be true on the utility side we may have a year in which we sell a lot of water and so the money that becomes available from those sales or dollars on cash on hand that we can use to fund some of these utility projects that would reduce the amount of debt that we actually need to issue through those.
That's one of the advantages.
If I can just jump clarify one thing so yeah before you said if we get more surplus and that and the assumption that is greater sales tax increase.
And then you just said if for example we sell more water so if we have greater sales tax increase that goes to the bottom line general fund.
But if we sell more water that goes directly to utilities.
Correct it goes into our enterprise funds so that would be used for that and and that's how we've used that surplus in the past if we had a surplus year we would use it to make advances on our capital program.
Just because you can't rely on on it being there in the future so you don't want to put it into your operating budget on utility side.
Same is true really on the general fund side until you start seeing a trend of that.
So we try to spend those on one time, one time.
And the reason I just asked that is because I talked to a lot of people who don't understand that we really have restrictions on the money that we spend in different areas.
Same thing goes with, even down to the red light cameras, for example.
So I just, you know, so I thank you for kind of clarifying that. So we can understand if we have a buffer or something, it is dedicated.
You'll see, you'll see other things kind of, you won't see them, but they're embedded in those numbers as well.
The red light cameras are good example. There are, there's revenue that come off the red light cameras that can be used for a very specific function in terms of like traffic improvements for example.
So those dollars are included in these projections of dollars that we have available. It's not all just general fund cash that we have available.
Bob on that, of course, I was looking at the graph for 1819 and 2021. Big spike both years in drainage utility.
Again, are you just trying to wait till that money is collected and you can spend it because you've got big projects both here.
Well, we anticipate what this program lays out is in those years.
Remember that what we talked about in the budget is next year with the approval of the budget will be seeking an increase in the drainage rate for the first of four years.
We'll collect it that probably that first year, then you'll see actually us coming forward to issue debt based off of that increase.
So those spikes in those two years anticipate actually issuing debt covered by that new rate increase.
You have a large list of projects to be covered by those.
And if you remember that's partly because when we talked about what that drainage fee is so small, if you will.
That when you raise it by a percent or two, it doesn't generate a tremendous amount of of cash when you're talking about projects that are one to two million dollars.
And so we're going to have to use that to service debt as we go forward, which we've done in the past week.
Remember the the drainage utility by actually issuing some debt so we could do projects like Martin Road Lake and a couple of the other ones.
We just can't do those based on cash on hand, but that's why you see that spike.
Okay. Now again, if the rate increase doesn't happen, those spikes don't happen.
Then you end up having that.
That's right, you end up having 1.9 million dollars each year to do projects that again, you know, we've used this example that basically a mile of new arterial.
Takes about a million two in drainage improvements.
So I mean that gives you a sense of what what the magnitude is of those projects as we as we move forward.
Okay, you've got 11 million one, you're in 10 million and another year or so.
Yeah, and those are so we can we anticipate we try to program this to align with either.
Projects that we know have already gone through the approval process, private development projects that we are by ordinance responsible for providing those and trying to sync that up.
Timing wise or that we know there's some major improvement that we're going to need to put in place either for development and or to replace something that needs replacement.
Okay.
The other advantage, this is also one of the advantages of this document ultimately is a, I mean it's a living document.
Only really the first year is an effect set in stone because that's what you've approved in your budget and you'll do that each year.
So each year you'll come back, look at the five year plan, refine the first year, adopt it and add another a new five year, a new fifth year.
And you'll keep you keep that rolling now what you'll see in this upcoming budget year is you will see dramatically a different number in your new fifth year because of course in your new fifth year.
You don't have we don't anticipate new deductions is tied with any voter authorization or rate increases, so you'll actually see that.
Drop considerably as you move into that new fifth year going out as you move forward.
I want to touch just briefly on impact on the operating budget when we went through the wise investments discussion prior to the election.
You'll remember that we we highlighted kind of what we anticipated that there might be there will be an impact on the operating budget as these investments are made.
In some cases the investments actually lower our operating costs, which is a good thing.
So for example, if you take a pipe that is leaking constantly and requiring us to constantly go in and work on it.
And you replace it with a new pipe, we actually lower the O&M costs associated with that pipe, same as true with a street or parking lot or whatever it may be.
And those instances what we'll do is we'll reprogram any savings we have with that to go into those areas that we still have have needs.
You'll have some of you have been around when we talked about the two inch cast iron line pipes that we're trying to replace for water and we said we went from the 100 year plan to the 60 year plan at some point.
So obviously if we actually save manpower and equipment by making some of these investments will move them to those kinds of areas.
However, some of the most of these investments are new, so it's an extension of a street, it's an extension of a storm sewer, it's the construction of a new parking lot or a new building.
Those obviously will have new expenses, some of them are hard costs, you build a new building, it has new electric charges.
Some of them are soft costs in that over time that building will need to be repaired or replaced or what have you are that parking lot or any of those.
Many of the cases these are incremental and cumulative, so by that what I mean is you build a mile of our material and that may be 30,000 dollars of new labor costs to maintain that out into the future.
30,000 dollars worth of equipment and 30,000 dollars worth of material for example.
Well it would make any sense you just built that you're not going to budget 90,000 dollars for that new extension.
You get five years into it and you've got enough of those you probably do need to start looking at doing need to start adding forces doing need to start buying more equipment.
Those kinds of things as you progress forward.
So most of them fall into that category.
There are a few exceptions that that's not the case and the most notable is when we build fire station number five that project includes the addition of a new ladder company.
So that is a that is basically a non optional if you will in the sense that you have to obviously increase the operating budget if you're going to make that investment in personnel is predominately what it is.
As we go forward now working with the chief you'll see in the five year CIP we've pushed that investment out to really to year four and your five and that gives the council the opportunity to start working their way up to up to that expenditure.
The one thing I'll say is if those cumulative and kind of incremental purchases aren't made are the expansions of the operating budget are not made.
Typically what will happen is you'll see a reduction in level of service across the whole system.
So for example we had nine or ten miles of streets but we don't put any more manpower into the system we don't buy any more materials.
That just means that what we have gets spread out across even more areas and you start to see that level of service to grade.
If you remember looking back at the previous five years and you look at that three hundred million dollar investment we made.
And then go look at what our operating budget and you know last year our operating budget went down seven or eight million dollars.
I mean it should be going obviously if you're going to try to keep up it should be going the other direction in order to keep pace with it.
So in a lot of areas you'll lose the level of service but it's not as.
Again mandatory as when you're talking about people like the fire the fire department as you move in and again this is one of the advantages of doing the multi year CIP.
The multi year CIP is each year means right now are kind of our projections but when we come in to actually propose for the next year's budget.
These items in the CIP we should have much better refined and cost and you can decide at that point council can decide at that point.
Do they go ahead and increase the operating budget to match whatever those are or do they just kind of note that you have we understand that's the first year and maybe three years in we have to make that adjustment as you go in.
In horror story that I encountered going through this in another community where we we constructed a new fire station full knowledge that was going to be an entire new company.
That was necessary I think was 12 to 15 people plus equipment that we're in that was in there.
Council of the time went in fully understanding that it was going to take I think for us it was going to take a three cent tax increase to pay for for that.
And again they programmed it out so there was three four years away when we got to that point the council at that moment said we're not going to raise taxes three cents to cover that expense.
The firemen it actually they were ready to be to be hired actually started that case and we ended up laying off over 20 employees to cover that that cost.
You don't want to get yourself in that situation unless that's ultimately what you want to do I mean there is obviously the option to come in and reduce services somewhere else to pay for it rather than trying to increase the tax revenue but that was.
That was not a pleasant experience to have gone through and it was kind of a foreseeable train wreck that wasn't avoided it as we went in we tried to structure.
Those kinds of major expenditures in O and M so that you've got some time to adjust for them you're not going to see anything sprung in year one that suddenly says we got to raise the operating budget by a million dollars you're just not going to see that.
Let me turn to the I guess let me ask first if there are any questions about any of that information and then I'd like to turn to just some of the project details.
Any any questions about any of that.
Yes Bob for those of us that are visually challenged who like to look at the.
At your charts.
The second slide the second bar chart.
I noticed that first of all hopefully you will have one that kind of expands on the would you go back to the second.
You're going to have a blurry on me.
I've been put on my glasses and got this close to the screen and it stills.
Let's see was that was at the first one.
I was looking at well.
First I would like to see a slide that would show yeah maybe that's it.
I want to look at wastewater for the years FY 1670.
This is the one.
It wasn't there another slide.
It looked like this one.
It looked like that.
Well, let me just look like a solid waste goes away in FY 1920.
But 1670 if I just kind of looked at that.
It looked like it was 5 million and then 1718 it went down to less than a million and then.
1819 it went back up to 3 million.
So Tim about the revenue side of the house.
Sure.
How does that?
For solid waste the solid waste actually for these these projects and these are projects at your landfill.
And so you have a fund where you actually make transfers from the general fund into that improvement fund.
And that's true with streets as well as the landfill and a couple of other categories.
The revenue actually ultimately comes from the folks that actually purchase sanitation services and landfill services.
Unlike your utilities though we don't operate our sanitation operation as an enterprise.
So what happens is you collect all the revenue from the landfill and you collect all the revenue from your collection system.
And it actually goes into your general fund and then money is transferred.
Well, one it covers the operating expenses of the operation in your budget and money is transferred into that improvement fund.
So that for example that first year which is inclusive of that 5 million dollar project.
And if you look on the spreadsheet it's actually the landfill gas collection and control system if you recall that we talked about.
That was that money was already in that improvement fund and so we just withdrew from that improvement fund to pay for that improvement.
That's also one of the reasons why you see a couple of years as you point it out that have no investment being made in the landfill.
And it's because the improvement fund will have no money in it because we'll have drawn from that as we go forward.
That's not the case necessarily with streets because you always have right now you've sending the budget say solid.
You've always got that 1.5 or so million that you transfer into that improvement fund every year.
So you'll never get to a zero and that street improvement fund and I shouldn't say zero.
You don't get to zero in the landfill improvement fund either because you have some reserves built into it, but you may not have enough money in there to actually make one of the capital purchases.
Is that is that answer that question.
Revenue comes from the users of the system goes in the general fund and then you all reallocate a portion of that into that improvement fund that we use for projects like this.
And I guess that.
To follow up on that because a good question is the same thing.
Work with when you mentioned when we have trucks and they're least back.
Is that a transfer from a departmental fund into the general fund?
So what you'll do is that the general fund basically so I'll take streets department.
So the streets department has their general operating budget that you all approve.
And inside that you'll see that there is a line that deals with with rental charges.
And so it's coming out of the general fund it's going to pay for their years cost of all of their vehicles that they have.
That goes into the fleet account basically the money that's being set aside both to cover the fleet's operating costs to take care of the vehicles.
As well as to if you will kind of put away savings that ultimately will go to pay for the replacement of those vehicles.
And as that budget this is what we see we see transfer funds that we see different things like that.
And that is a and you all know this I think but that's a system that actually was pioneered here in Amrillo back 40 years ago.
No one else did it that way and Amrillo actually.
In Texas created that that system and now pretty much everyone does and again the reason you do it is because it avoided somebody standing up here and trying to make an argument this year.
I need a million dollars so I can buy.
You know some type of equipment out of the landfill now occasionally you'll still get that if we need to add to the fleet.
When we have to expand the fleet but we no longer have to do that for our 1200 plus pieces of equipment that we already have we've got that built in so we're going to address that.
Because we absolutely know those are going to wear out on a predictable time period.
If we get any more life we just use it but we know they're going to be gone.
Yeah and that's why glindas is glind manages that fleet it's not a you know we have by policy of replacement schedule we anticipate replacing certain things at five years and seven years.
But if the vehicle is actually low on mileage and actually is running perfectly fine glind's not going to replace that vehicle yet he'll extended for another year or two.
And we just continue to collect those dollars so that we're ready to actually and most of the time that absorbs kind of inflation costs that go with those new models as you move forward.
And that's how we manage that we do the same thing although not nearly as well with information technology.
So IT's built the same way basically there's a charge back to the departments that IT then uses.
To replace all of the IT equipment that we have, that has largely not been as well funded.
And you see that when you go through this community investment, we just don't have that much money to actually apply toward IT, and that's going to be an issue going forward.
It really has lengthened our replacement schedules, and as licensees get more expensive.
It's been a struggle with us, but that's how we fund that piece as well.
Thanks.
If it's okay, if you all would turn to the spreadsheet, I just want to explain what that spreadsheet is.
So what we've done very similar to what you had at the last presentation, where last time it was just one year, what we've identified by a category.
So you'll see things, facilities, streets and transportation, police, animal management, so on.
You'll see by year what we propose to spend for what project year by year, as you go forward, and of course, ultimately that's how you arrive at $418 million.
The lines that are green are the ones that are the voter authorized projects.
So, and then off to the very right, it has what proposition that was associated with, proposition one or proposition two.
So you can actually see, as you get further into the spreadsheet, the vast majority of projects are having to be funded, predominantly by utility rates.
The ones we talked about, or some sort of grant like again with airport or transit.
You know, out of that $418 million worth of investment over five years, only about 110 million is actually coming off of the increase tied to the voter authorized approvals as you go forward.
The idea of this spreadsheet is really to kind of help you be able to look and say, well, in relative terms, how much are we spending on streets and transportation.
So out of that $418 million, I'll use this one example.
Out of that $418 million, 91 million is going to streets and transportation.
Likewise, if you turn the biggest item, obviously, always will be your utilities.
Out of that $418 million, there's $189 million over those five years going to utilities.
And then you can likewise go into the body of the spreadsheet and identify some of those projects.
If you go, for example, in the utility section, and you see there's a project that is identified that is a single $11 million project.
That's the Northwest Interceptor line.
That line is necessary so that the medical district can continue to expand.
And so development can occur out in Northwest part of the city.
Without it, we can't accommodate that expansion.
And that includes there's some additional costs for lift stations and those kinds of things.
So that's how you would use the spreadsheet just to get an idea of how you actually can kind of dig into it.
We've tried again to program it when it comes to development-related things.
We've tried to link that up with the approved preliminary plans that the developers have submitted.
But if you already call when we went to kind of the one-stop shop and we revised our development procedure,
this was sort of the deal we made effectively with the developers, which was if you show us officially what you proposed to do on your property,
which may be a full square mile, over the next 15 to 20 years, we can then program our improvements ahead of time.
Rather than you show up kind of out of the blue and say, well, I need a street and I need drainage.
Well, that's nice, but we don't have it budgeted.
That we're now able to do that with those approved preliminary plans.
So that's why you see development projects linked to the pinnacle because it has a approved preliminary.
You see it linked to redstone because it has an approved preliminary.
You see it linked to the vineyards because they have an approved preliminary.
So that's how we're using those documents, those approved plans as we move forward.
Now again, because you refine this each year for some reason those projects don't happen.
Maybe they decide we're going to put them off.
Well, then you won't make those expenditures. You'll adjust that investment to another, another line item as you move forward.
Tides to this spreadsheet. Again, as I mentioned, is the big thick document that you have.
So every one of these projects is identified on one of the information sheets like you see on the screen.
And it gives some very basic information about the project.
Just to help you and ultimately the public understand what this is.
So for example, if I look at the martin road, the gene how park and martin road lake.
What's included in it is some information that we need to be able to track the project.
It tells you it's in the northeast portion of the city in case you know where it was and then it has a scope of what the project is.
So just a brief explanation of what this project is and what the estimated expenditure on the capital side is to accomplish that project.
The idea is we've used these information sheets for a couple of years now to build to get to this point.
The idea is that ultimately we'll use those information sheets out on the web to update folks on the progress of each of these projects.
So we'll say hey on this year we've planned it on starting this project and we're in design and here's the timeline for design and we're going to start construction.
That's the other thing you'll note in this spreadsheet is a number of these projects are spread out over two or three years.
That's typically because we've got some design element that needs to go on the first year.
Occasionally land acquisition like for our fire stations and then construction.
So we've also tried to be a little more realistic instead of saying you know we can get a $13 million project done in one year.
Well no we can't you know it's going to take us two to three years to design and construct a $13 million northwest interceptor line.
And so that's tried to reflect in here and again that allows us to equalize those expenditures.
So I'm not going to go through obviously that nice thick pile of projects but I do want to come back to that in just a second if that's okay.
The last slide I have is really kind of the next next steps in this process just so you know and so the public knows what to anticipate.
So what we'll do now is we're actually starting.
This is this is the CIP I mean this is the draft CIP so what we will by the end of this week we will have a completed document which is the five year CIP the proposed five year CIP.
That will be made available to the public and it certainly will be made available to you all with the idea being that it's your next meeting next Tuesday.
You'll conduct a public hearing on the proposed five year CIP and the first reading of the ordinance to adopt it.
And then on the February 14 meeting you'll have the second reading which time then hopefully the CIP will be adopted.
The adoption basically lets everybody know this is what we plan on doing for the next year for the next five years.
The only piece again that ultimately is fixed in stone is what's already been approved for year one.
Now I would hope that you could look at if it's not fixed in stone it's at least fixed in wood.
That means pretty fixed I mean we don't want to what you don't want to do is go in and radically alter because again then you lose the advantage of any type of planning that you've put into injured but things change and we understand that it'll have to be adjustable as we move forward.
I mentioned at the last meeting that we've already taken steps.
Floyd has already taken steps to begin to pre qualify designers and consultants.
Thirty firms who submitted their qualifications to provide a variety of different services for the city.
The advantage that does for us is we can immediately start negotiating scope and price with them rather than spending the next 90 days seeking qualifications because we pre qualified them or we're in the process of qualifying them.
So every one of our projects will realize a time savings of at least 90 days as we start to roll out with that.
None of our projects though are locked in so we find that we can't get to a good price or we just don't have someone totally qualified to do the project we can go through that process it doesn't lock us in but it certainly sets the stage to be able to let us do that.
Within the next two weeks that work will be done so we're ready to actually start negotiating with the consultants for those those services.
We anticipate within 90 days we will be ready to actually issue debt just as you did in the last meeting you completed the issuance of the debt tied to the emergency radio program.
What we will be coming forward within 90 days is the proposal to issue the voter authorized debt for year one of those projects that are identified in the capital as well as any revenue debt that we need to issue tied to the already approved rate increase of the first year for water and wastewater.
So again that will be within the next 90 days it will be able to do that and of course that allows us to begin work on those projects.
Now we'll start design on those projects as soon as we can because we have money to be able to actually manage that but we can't actually start construction on many of those projects until the debts actually issued.
So that gives you a sense of how we'll go through that you all know I've been tried to be careful as I present at these projects to say the year they're identified as the year will start them in.
We will continue doing projects probably two years maybe three years after the five year life of this because we will start some projects in year five and it will take us two or three years to finish some of those projects.
And you just need to build in that kind of flex especially because we really don't know you don't know how the market's going to react in terms of push out for bids for construction.
And what those dollars will look like or even what the responsiveness will be like as we push out some of these projects moving forward so we need to be adaptable with those as much as we can.
Bob, what we put in a new street what kind of warranty do we get from the.
Paving company there's a fairly short term warranty associated with it and I want to say it's a year one year and it's really it's pretty limited even in what that one year is and we keep we do regular inspections on those and we keep kind of a punch list.
What we've hidden miss and success with is we worked with the contractors where the past practice used to be an effect monitor for a year and then the end of the year sort of spring on them here all the things you got to fix.
And instead we switched more to where we're kind of monitoring along the way and if we see something significant come up will approach the contractor with trying to do that warranty work to get it fixed at that time rather than waiting until the end which makes it a lot more challenging to do.
This may help miss Scott would you explain acceptance of a street because that doesn't always take place.
Yeah, there's there is obviously they're constructing the street and usually this is tied to our private development streets so more so than our capital projects but.
So they're constructing the streets over some period of time and using those streets in many instances especially in private development to get to the home sites that are under construction.
We will not accept those streets as ours and therefore begin the warranty until they've gone basically the street has to meet all of our requirements and standards at that moment in time and then we accept it and then the warranty period starts.
So there's always leading up to that point already a punch list of some given take kinds of things so we can get the street up to the level that's required as we go through and that again that is probably a bigger issue with our private streets.
The streets they get constructed in the development and our private streets are our streets in the development they get constructed privately more so than our capital streets as we build our materials.
My concern is are we no longer doing our own core samples on these streets as we go along or we put it all up on the contract.
I'm going to defer to Floyd on that because we're Kyle the city in.
Kyle's there too.
Don't necessarily know the answer to that.
Good question. This is all kind of changed over the last few years.
So.
Yes sir. Thank you.
Kyle's leader John.
Basically on our new technical specifications for the for paving.
The contractor is doing the testing and the city of America.
They do quality control testing and the city does quality assurance testing.
So for example the initial core samples that they take on hot mix.
Specifically hot mix. They do their own quality control.
And then the obligation for acceptance is quality assurance where and that technically just reduces the number of samples that the city has to take for acceptance purposes.
But when that comes down to is the is the road being constructed as they go in a quality manner.
That does fall on the contractor in their response.
My concern is not I've had it more than one.
A asphalt company tell me that if they're responsible for doing the sampling.
They pull 10 samples in their bad.
They're going to throw those in a dumpster and keep pull until they have 10 good ones and they bring them to you and they pass.
If we were doing our own testing we would be assured that we're going to have a 15 20 year road because we only got a one year warranty with some exceptions.
So that's concerning.
So how we cover that and how you're exactly correct.
And so what we do require is that that is that that testing is performed by a third party certified laboratory.
And not only the laboratory certified meeting either state standards, ASTM standards.
But then likewise is represented by a further licensed engineer a civil engineer who carries a professional license and professional liability.
That does certifies a third party the the validity and the accuracy of those tests as they go along.
Well are we getting reports on every one they pull.
I mean if they pull seven bad ones and they get it tested their bad and they throw them away and then they get some good ones.
I mean there's a ring way to stop that.
Well the contractor requires that that all samples are submitted.
The contract does require that if they take a sample then that is is a public record quality control sample.
Their choice to comply with that is tied to their own professional license and their own ethics but those those ethics being regulated through.
Again professional Los Angeles and and certifications not only of their labs but of their personnel.
Sir is that similar to what I know textile requires they install a lab on site and do those so they can get immediate response.
How close to that are we.
Well so there are a few firms that we contract with that do utilize a lab on site.
But for the most part the scale and size that we're dealing with our contractors are hiring.
So there's a third party laboratories to do those testing not on site.
Dyspeederson laboratories apex laboratory.
Emerald testing.
Those local those local engineers and local testing firm.
The city of Lubbock has their own testing facility up in toll.
Yes sir.
And we just go I mean is it cost prohibitive or.
We had a testing lab in the past.
And over the long term and and since I've in a part we we did not.
I don't really know what the what the background was to that demise but in general.
This is the this is the method that again follows very closely to text out another consulting methods.
Around the state that you secure third party.
On the contrary, that's kind of the outside source that are bound by their own licenses and professional conduct to utilize as an outside source.
And some of those even can be employed regularly by that contractor, don't get me wrong, there is absolutely a relationship there.
But those last engineers and certifications are what we're really relying on.
But what we're relying on the contractor to bring in a bad sample, we're expecting him to bring in a bad sample if it's bad.
Every sample.
They don't typically, again, hiring that third party to take the samples with the contractor doesn't do the sampling.
But in effect, you're correct.
I just want to make sure the streets, we get good streets when we don't have another hillside or you know.
Okay, thank you. I think they're great questions, but Kyle, I'd just to be sure, so the contractor in his bid has to cover the cost of that.
But we're allowed to inspect that and enter.
Yeah, absolutely, and absolutely, the quality assurance is at our, we can do as much quality assurance as we, as we choose.
And in the situation where we have suspect or we feel like we need to do additional, that is absolutely at our power and we have that ability to do.
And we do so.
We have generally a set standard that they are that they bid as far as how many tests are going to be required over whatever portion we're doing.
And that's outlined for both the quality control to be performed by and paid for under the contractor's contract.
And then what the typical would be for quality assurance.
But quality assurance is not tied to a minimum.
We can do as much testing as we absolutely want.
Lloyd.
Mayor Council, if I could add to that, that's a good question.
In the multi discipline RFQ that we have out, we are selecting testing firms as part of that professional procurement, which allows us to review the contracts to make flexible.
How much we test and what we do to address that specific issue.
If we see issues like that, we can add that testing because we already have them procured under that pre qualified list.
We're also going to conduct review of our contracts through the legal review to determine if improvements need to be made in those processes.
And testing specifically targeted timely for the bond issue.
Okay.
So I, but the labs not required to tell us every test that's been taken.
The labs is going to test and give it back to the contractor to provide to you.
So the bad test could still go on the dumps.
We can change that model to where they are our own test.
We own those and we hire that lab ourselves and there's no contact with the contractor if that's how we choose to do it.
So as we move forward in the review, I'm not saying we're doing that but we'll have the option if we look at those contracts and issue those contracts to do exactly that.
The city own higher the tester and own those and they will be required to deliver all of those to us.
If that's what we choose to do.
And that's why we've moved to that avenue to give us that option easily and timely.
Does that help?
Okay.
But I want to make a statement with the whole council Floyd Kyle.
We have not in the past always given you I think the support to do this sort of thing.
All of us.
I was part of that.
We didn't really know the technique.
But I don't think a one of us wants to see us spend 80 million dollars on streets that have any concerns throughout this or at the end or in the middle.
So I think you're seeing from this council support that those things are done in a very professional way.
With reports and I think that's what really saying is we support you being very fiduciary responsible about those works and that they're done correctly the first time.
And you will see some of those costs you are talking about will be incorporated into each of these projects.
Everything from bringing in other project managers to assist us because again we're just not our staff is not large enough to actually accommodate some of these two inspectors to some of these testing methods and I know we've been talking about.
But remember we're testing all of our all of our investments whether it's a building or whether it's a utility they're all going through some form of testing for that quality assurance and then ultimately a contractor for that quality control element.
Great question.
I just I just want to follow up on that.
Has anything in our recent experience about some roads some issues we've had changed the process that you guys and this is really deployed.
And if so just in general what is that change so we can make sure that there's some kind of.
I think the first change frankly had a lot to do with what the mayor alluded to which is budget those tests cost money and we were not allowed to pass those costs on to the developers that was why we shifted the model now the model that we shifted to is as Kyle said it's very common that's the more typical model where.
It's the responsibility of a third party engineer to actually collect those however and an effort to try to increase the assurance.
That we're getting what it is that we need to get that's why Floyd actually took the steps he did to include those engineering are those testing firms in that prequalification so that we can indeed move into that if need be.
Because you know in the past we've had some issues now we haven't I don't think we've had necessarily the issues that are being talked about here meaning somebody hasn't necessarily an engineer is not honored there their license your requirements.
But I think the potentials there and so we want to try to close that gap where it makes sense and again there's a cost with it.
I mean I you'd much rather put money into asphalt but at the same time you want to make sure the asphalt you're building or the pipe you're putting in place is going to last.
That's right I mean just as simplified as a whole lot of money and I don't we don't need any bumpy roads.
That's right.
So I just want to make sure that the process has reflected that inside of what we've learned in the past.
And that you know that last in that model that I had that last line in the arrow that said changing practices and contracts goes exactly to this point.
And Floyd talked about the contract piece too is looking at our contracts to see if we have the in some instances our contracts are too weak for us to be able to actually enforce some of the provisions.
And we're going to change those so that we can actually move to where we can correct problems easier than perhaps.
And I understand as you do the RFPs or RFQs that you're going to inform those people and it's going to be a much more stringent process and to consider that is our bidding it.
And if we get an eighth of a mile less for a dollar we aren't back repeating the work in three years rather than.
Obviously the challenge with all of it is trying to strike a balance between assuring the quality of what we're getting and not pricing ourselves unnecessarily out of what we can afford to do.
So it's that that balance because it all comes in the same pot of money.
So are these questions satisfied in the interest of time we have about five minutes.
And I think the only other thing I wanted to say was again what our plan in your packet that you'll get for your meeting coming next week will basically be essentially the same version of maybe some minor tweaks from what you have at your at your desk.
But if you take the time to look at the spreadsheet also look at any of the projects any questions that you have certainly will be ready to answer those because I'd like us to move the next two meetings to a point where we're saying this this is what we're going to do in order to start moving forward with these projects.
So you'd job lots of work well well presented.
And the last thing I want to say to you is that I would not have gone to this point without Floyd's help obviously in Ronda Ferguson and Stephanie Coggins because.
I get to stand up here and present this stuff they actually get to put these lists together and the spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff.
You would not want me doing that so I appreciate their help as we go through this so.
And we'll talk a lot more of the next couple meetings on this.
Like Bob we echo your support of their efforts.
Thank you.
Okay Bob is that it for the work session.
Okay we're going to adjourn the work session and we'll come back at 5 p.m. for the meeting.
Thank you all.
There's Bob Schroeder with Hillside Christian Church.
Faster would you give her any of the case.
Father and heaven we pause right now just to remember who you are.
Your love your grace.
Your blessings on us as people end upon this community.
And we thank you that we can meet like this to take care of affairs of.
What this community is about and what it needs and we pray you're blessing upon each one each word spoken.
Pray for wisdom and discernment that you bring to us.
In Christ's name we pray.
Amen.
Thank you pastor would you join me for the pledge of allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
And to the Republic for which it stands.
One nation under God.
Indivisible.
We've delivered to you.
And justice for all.
Thank you please be seated.
We have a special introduction.
We'll have right after we call the meeting to order.
Good evening.
Welcome to the regularly scheduled meeting of the Ameral of City Council held on the third floor of City Hall this Tuesday at 3 p.m.
We would like to not go over the agenda in the minutes at this moment but first have an introduction.
So I'm going to call in Brian Brector head of the Ameral Economic Development board to give us an introduction.
And Brian before you begin.
If you're here for a moment for recognition, we don't mind if you stand but normally we'd ask everyone to please find a seat as long as there's empty seats and a room.
Please find a seat.
Thank you so much.
Brian.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you.
My pleasure to be here today to do the introduction of our new President and CEO.
I'm Brian Brector the current board chair for the Ameral Economic Development Corporation.
And when our previous President and CEO retired earlier last year, we began a diligent search.
We were tamed Jordan Synosoships, a national firm.
And their principal top, Jordan Syn, to search across the country for a replacement.
We felt very good about the process that we went through and looked at candidates from across the country.
And feel like that we've selected the gentleman as the right fit at the right time for the Ameral Attacks.
So I am.
I'm pleased to introduce Barry Albreck, our new President and CEO of the Ameral Economic Development Corporation.
Thank you.
Mayor of City Council members, it's a true honor and a privilege to serve an organization like this and serve you.
It's important that I tell you that I will be serving you.
I visualize the city as a customer.
But the organization we're going to serve the entire community.
Business leaders as well as citizens.
I have already reached out and started meeting with individual council members.
Mayor.
But I haven't reached everyone yet.
This is my sixth day on the job.
But I will be calling on you.
I will be interviewing you, sharing my philosophies.
But in the future, I will let me reassure you.
I will be reaching out engaging you as city council members.
There's nothing more rewarding as an elected official than seeing the results of economic development come into your community.
So I'm going to be engaging that for you because it's become very clear meeting with the citizens, elected officials, business leaders,
the Board of Directors, the Chamber, the Arts Groups that the community of Emerllo insist on better paying jobs that feeds our quality of life.
So if you have any questions, feel free.
I will be calling you if I have it met with you yet.
Some way or fashion, we have met.
And I just want to thank you that in reassure you that it is an honor and a privilege to have this position.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mayor.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here and we wish you the best success.
It means success for our city and I'm sure you'll be a great leader for that group.
As with your board, we're conclosive with your board.
So thank you all for your efforts.
Thank you.
Okay.
That next item then is the minutes.
We'll consider approval of the minutes.
I'm sorry.
Excuse me.
We have a recognition of Excel energy.
Mayor, we wanted to take the opportunity to recognize the work that Excel energy did over the most recent storm,
I storm throughout the Panhandle as well.
It's also an opportunity to acknowledge the many businesses and individuals who actually donated food,
donated time, all kinds of other things for those guys that we're working.
And so that's what the purpose of this.
Thank you very much.
Welcome.
Thank you, Mayor, City Council.
I'm running Walker with Excel energy.
I'm the regional manager of Community Service for the Texas Panhandle region.
I've also have a couple of guests with me today.
I've got Brad Maldridge.
Brad is the Senior Director of Distribution Operations for Excel organization.
And Drew Chettister, Drew's the Community Service Manager for Canadian Texas.
And he also covers Perry to the Panhandle and the surrounding smaller cities in the northeastern Texas Panhandle.
So thanks for having us.
We do have a short little presentation.
Powerful presentation about the restoration efforts and a lot about the Panhandle spirit that came shining through in response to this winter storm.
Jupiter that came through.
Let's give one.
There it is.
Winter storm, Jupiter, in our area, in our service territory.
Excel energy on the evening of Friday the 13th.
That's always a bad day for us.
And largely produce significant weather, winter weather all the way through Sunday evening of the,
January the 15th.
Weather conditions during the storm,
including significant rainfall.
We had anywhere from 3 to 3.5 to 5 inches of rain.
In the panel here in Emmerillo, thunderstorms, all day Saturday, Sunday, we had that throughout the northeastern Texas
fan panel. Also, we had significant freezing rain that hit further, further northeastern as the
temperatures got colder. The further we went north, the bigger they asked gotten and the more
the ice accumulated on the trees, power lines and anything that was standing, actually any structure
that was standing. The most heavily impacted area in our territory was, some mentioned the northeast Texas
fan panel where the temperatures were a little colder. We were still let you know and we've got a lot
of good pictures here, but just to let you know, we were about two degrees off here from having a major
major catastrophe in Emmerillo, Texas. It was that bad and you'll see from some of the pictures,
I know you've seen them some of them, but the significant damage that we received in the northeastern
Texas fan panel. We knew this storm was coming. It started getting worse and worse. We've
got the emergency management sends us weather reports and so does the National Weather Service. So we began
pre-staging a few days before this thing hit, because we knew it was coming. And so we had crews,
we had crews on standby, and Brad's going to get into a little bit of that when he comes up and talks
about the restoration efforts, but those efforts started that weekend and actually went through
the 20th of January, which is at Friday and actually at Saturday also, next week. We had over 58,000
excellent energy customers that were affected by the storm. This picture right here, this was the picture
that we received from the National Weather Service. This was just a few days before kind of outlining
the storm and the path of the storm, which was going to go and I mean, you know, the weather guys usually
are a little bit off. They pretty much nailed this one exactly. You can see where it says,
damaging and crippling. Actually, it was a little bit further into the panhandle. It was the crippling
but we received it in the storm coming in and followed this path just about precisely there.
Brad's going to come up now, Brad Baldridge, who's a senior director of operations. He's going to
talk about the restoration efforts, the crews, and what it took to get our facilities back,
back in work in order. Brad. Now, thank you, Ronnie. I appreciate that. As Ronnie was saying,
we began to get this kind of information earlier in the week. We staged crews up in the northeast
panhandle, all down into Emerllo as well. Had them on standby, Saturday morning, as the storm became
to come in. We also reached out to our contract resources, letting them know that we may be calling upon
them Sunday or Monday to come in and assist. And then we reached out to our sister company, PSCO,
there in Colorado out of Denver, and they ready a group of 59 employees to come down in case we
would call upon them in that aspect of it. So, total restoration efforts that took place. As Ronnie mentioned
is 58,000 employees. This was the largest storm that has impacted our territory since the 99
last storm that occurred over Super Bowl weekend. If you recall that, it took out to the largest
damage was done up there in the Lipscom area. It's a 73 mile line, radio line that goes out of Booker
serves all the way down into Higgins, Texas. That entire line at some portion of every mile of that line
was down. So, it goes and serves Higgins, Fallet, Lipscom, and Derisette, and just totally destroyed
that line. Also, we impacted several of our communities, Panther, Borgher, mentioned Derisette already,
Spearman, Perryton, and even in the northeast part of Emerllo. So, it reached deep into our territory
from the northeast point. It damaged over 7,500 structures, 1300 power poles, 26, 2300 cross-arms,
so it touched a great deal of our territory up there. As you notice here, this is a map that indicates
the territory that we have up in the northeast panhandle. The red hash marks shows where the ice came in,
and it was significant. We were at reports of ice on our lines up to a coffee can size. So,
significant damage, significant portion of our territory, and in doing so, we had to reach out and
get some support from our contractors as well as our sister companies. We had over 977 full-time
resources that includes employees, contractors, assisting with that again with 59 of them coming from
our PSCO company. We had resources internally from SPS, over 300 full-time employees from SPS alone working
on this storm that came as far as Carl's bad into Mexico, and our contractors came as far away
as Chad knew to Tennessee. So, we had to reach out quite a ways to bring in, but we had some of the best
working on the storm. So, we'll talk a little bit real quick about why ice is really damaging for
a electric utility. As you can see, I'll ask it's up on the lines, and it's just the sheer amount of
weight that it puts on the lines. It adds thousands of pounds to our structures, and doing that.
Again, we had reports of coffee cancels, coffee cancels, ice on the line. The other thing that you get,
we got Sunday morning, Sunday evening, into Monday morning, we had a little bit of breeze,
and even the slot breeze that we had to into 15 mile an hour presented a situation what we call
galloping. It starts to flow across that ice, and the lines will begin to buck and move up and down.
That puts a lot of weight, a lot of tension on our structures, on our cross storms, and you start seeing
damage as this. The other thing that you might not realize is the damage that comes when the ice starts to
release. So, as that weight starts to release, it again causes the line to buck. Sometimes,
it'll cause the phases to go into each other, and we'll actually burn phases down, and in doing so,
you create a cascading effect. Once you lose one, it will start cascading in each direction.
It causes a hazardous situation for our employees, an employee may go up on the line. You may have that
ice built up on the line, and when you start breaking away that ice, it causes the structures on each
side up to collapse. We had that. We had employees reporting as they went up, but the lines busted
us off the lines, you would have a mile and two in each direction start to cascading fall over.
So, the very hazardous conditions for our employees, the other thing you get when you have an
icing event of this kind is the damage that it causes to trees. The trees, as we know, gets the
weight on them, and they start to collapse. That starts to bring down primary lines, but probably more importantly,
in this particular situation, in this storm, it starts to bring down service lines. So,
not only do you have the wide-scale damage on the large feeder, so that you have the individual
service lines going to the houses, pulls those lines down, it will pull the customers mass off the house,
so you have lots of damage to the customer's equipment that has to be repaired by electrician.
So, a very tough situation for our customers. You can just see the amount of ice that was built
up on the trees in those areas. Again, here's a picture of a gate, it shows some pictures of
the ice buildup that we saw out there. And then this is a picture of the Perikton service center.
You can see the lines coming in and out of the substation of this outside of the service center there
in the lights, the amount of ice that was on the Sunday night. So, lots of opportunity for us to have
damage, wide-scale damage, when the wind picked up Sunday evening into Monday morning.
And then the next thing you start, as our crew started to work on the lines, that ice starts to melt,
and it now prevents a muddy situation force. And with this terrain up there, especially at some
of the most rough terrain that we have in the SPS territory, it's up and down, it's very rugged,
it's very rural, and in doing so, you have lots of mud. And what that requires us is you just
can't drive a truck in there at that point. We had to have dozers, farmers came in, volunteered their
time, gave us their tractor to drag our equipment through from pole to pole, and it's truly just
pole to pole, and there's a lot of effort. Here's some pictures that indicate the amount of trucks that
we had in the air. At some points of the restoration, we had trucks in the air for two miles of
the time. So a truck at Everpole for two miles straight, it's just a great restoration effort by our
crews, and the efforts they put out there. An additional poles there, the other thing that we had, it's
specifically up there on Highway 15 is the traffic control. A lot of folks wanted to get out and look,
see the damage, and we had that. And so presented an additional hazard for us, but all in all, the
customers up there did a good job about staying out and staying out of the damage areas.
We'll quick before I turn over to Drew, just talk a little bit about our employees. We did have,
we believe we've got extraordinary employees, and they did an outstanding effort in this. Not only did they
they worked 16 hour days for just over a week, they did it safely, and we were able to provide
restoration services to our customers without any kind of serious injury to our employees.
And then just to comment about the 58,000 customers that were impacted at that. They're the most
gracious that I've ever seen. One thing about being in this job, we have the opportunity to assist
other utilities across the company. We've been to Florida, we've been to the Gulf of Mexico,
we've been even Hurricane Sandy up in New York several years back. I've never seen the people like
we have in this area, and Drew Machaudester is going to talk to us about the people that we have in
this room. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Drew. Before you go, could I ask the folks in back that came in
late, we asked you to please take a seat. We know the first responders are here. We ask everyone to
else to please take a seat. Thank you very much. Go ahead, Drew. Thank you all for having me. Well,
like I said, I work in communications and you can imagine how nervous I was going to be when
a storm like this hits. They kind of phone calls. I'm going to receive, but I just want to say that
I did receive a lot of phone calls, but I never received one negative phone call. All the phone calls were
for support. They wanted me to point out how appreciate the lime and were and that they thank them for coming,
you know, far and wide to come and serve their community. So I never received one negative feedback and that
was great. It made me much of a busy one of the tasks that I was tasked with was I had to provide
a place where we could feed 700 lime and also a storage facility where we can
cover material, store trucks, we had hundreds and hundreds of trucks. So I called them the county and the
county came out and allowed us to use their expo building. And their expo buildings are pretty
good sized buildings. We were able to get the lime and in the evenings pretty much out of the weather,
tables and chairs and sit down and relax and a place they can just sort of hang out to finish the
evening off. And then the county also allowed us to use the parking lot as a material storey area
where the trucks could pull up and get the material and then also a place overnight to house all the
equipment and everything. So it really worked out really good and it was a great partnership with the
county to be able to do them. But trying to get a catering company to be able to serve 700 lime and
some of the expressions I got when I called them was pretty overwhelming. The local catering companies
are really couldn't use for the first two days because they have to order all the supplies. They
really just cannot do anything to that magnitude. I think I hit that. I'm sorry.
A little bag. I guess I was sitting and clicking. I didn't even know what I'm sorry. That's the one
I want to do. Okay. First of all, I want to say thank you. We use a couple local catering companies.
We use our young bloods cafe in the Plaza. When I first tried to go local, it was just too overwhelming.
They couldn't do it. So I contacted the Plaza. Plaza put emerala, border and pampered together,
and they were able to come out and cater to the nights. And young bloods later on was able to take
over the breakfast in the lunches, which made a lot easier for me to sit and run around trying to
get all the local ones. But the ones I really want to say thank you to is United supermarket.
I don't know what I would do without them. I called on United and it was overwhelming for United,
but their employees came in about four or four o'clock in the morning and it made about 900
breakfast burritos each morning on the first two mornings and served it to the linemen as they took off.
They also provided the lunches. The first day they came out and made cheeseburger sack lunches
over about 900 of them and delivered it to the employees. The second day we're running out of supplies.
And I mean with that many people in town with a lot of people being out of power,
supermarket was pretty getting drained with their materials and their supplies and everything.
So we were really running the issues there. They said they could make pulled pork sandwiches,
but they just didn't have buns to put the pulled pork on. So so I had to run all the way to border
and pick up 600 buns that come back to make pull pork sandwiches to deliver to the crews.
And so, but United would never tell me no. And money can arts the general manager up there.
And he's really involved in the community so I just really want to give him some recognition
because he really deserves it. Okay, the thing that there's a lot of great stories that came out of this
and I'm on the PR side. You know, the red cross went up there and delivered
MRE's and waters. They went to Higgins. They went to Darzett and hand them out to the other community.
But the thing that really caught my attention was the community of Perikton. I had several ladies
call asking what they can do. How can they help? Can we make dinner? Can we sandwich his coax? What can we do for
the law? Can we make desserts? And I told him that we're pretty much providing dinners that dessert might be a
great idea. And so the first night.
That the ladies just communicated through Facebook, and it took off. I have people all day long,
bringing desserts, pies, cakes, pumpkin rolls out here. And you can see, this is where the linemen, I'll get to a dessert.
Well, there's a dessert, there's a middle one, the bottom one. That's pretty much the dessert table.
That first night, it goes about six tables and it's plump full. We had that amount, double that in the kitchen.
The next night, the radio station started broadcasting in, come out, show your support for the linemen.
They're there at 630, bring desserts, come out. And so the rest of the four nights we had eight tables of desserts,
and what to see is a full table. We had four times that in the kitchen, each night.
Lime and were taken pies and pumpkin rolls and everything back to the room.
But they were really thankful. And what was great about this is that about 40 or 50 people in the community came out and delivered this dessert to the linemen.
Personally, they wanted to serve them. They wanted to mingle with them. They went through the crowd, talked with them.
Some local pastors actually came out, got them in a group and prayed for their safety.
They just really wanted to be involved and show them how to push it and they really were.
Some other things that took place is that they had high school kids coming out.
High school kids came out and worked shifts. They would serve the linemen and work the serving lines.
They'd also go around and serve them. And then you can see the bottom left picture that is one little girl scout that came out and gave girl scout cookies to the guys.
And I'm trying to find that little girl because I'm going to give some kind of recognition to her.
But she gave them out. She gave them out a whole box at a time.
I don't know who funded that, but we're going to try to take care of that little girl.
But here's just a serving line. So you can see we had two lines going both ways.
And this is the dessert line. These are some of the volunteer workers in the community. Those two ladies right there were there all four nights.
And they stayed there, helped me clean up, even helped me put up the thousand plus chairs and tables.
I finally had to stop and make them go home. And I told my come back the next morning.
But they just, if we're just real appreciative and they just really wanted to show.
They really, but here's the great thing about this. Most of the people there were there were out of power still.
So they weren't upset. They didn't have any power at home. So they had nothing better to do.
But they come up and serve the guys preparing their facilities.
This is, the elementary schools in Peritin was really great because what they did,
all the classes made little posters and signs like this.
And then they came up, the teachers did. They posted them all around the expo building.
They actually put them on all the tables.
To where, as alumni meet, and they could sit there and be reading them. So we thought that was really neat.
And then this right here is a thank you sign on the back of a pizza box.
We found this in Spiriman near some of our down power lines and we just take two offends.
We don't know who put it up there.
But you saw little things like this all over the place and thank you.
And we really appreciate you guys coming out.
And then they'd be on the side of the road.
I remember when we finally closed it on Higgins and got power restored.
As the crews were leaving town, porch lights are on now.
Because they went out at night.
And so they're all in the front porch, waving it all the lime.
It was a great moment. It really was.
And finally, the great thing about this was we had lime and come from all over.
We had lime and come from Tennessee.
They travel all over the states.
And we had one lime and it came up.
And he said he's been doing this 30 plus years.
He's traveled all over the United States doing storm breaks.
And he said, I've never received the recognition.
And thank you like this, like I received from Perry Den.
And we thought that was pretty good. He said he's been doing it for a while.
And so I just want to say the community Perry didn't really win above and beyond.
And represent the Texas State and I know really well.
And that is it.
Got any questions?
Well, I want to say it.
And I hope other council members are joining me.
Thank you. The partnership, even though you are a utility and your monopoly,
I couldn't ask.
We want to recognize that.
They know that and we know that.
But they could not be a better partner for our whole community for our citizens.
If we took the volunteer F hours out of United Way and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and everything else that those employees provide,
we wouldn't get anything done around this town.
So I want to say more than just the power you supply.
It's the people that make the difference in this town and in their community.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Well done. Thank you.
So we don't West Rees. How come you don't get introduced?
Everybody knows you.
Everybody knows West Rees.
So wait a second.
Everybody that was involved in this process.
Would you please stand?
Employees of Excel.
Retired employees of Excel.
Come on.
I'm seeing them.
So you're going to be back.
Thank you.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you.
Well, we will then go to the meeting business and the first item of business is the approval
of the City Council minutes from the regularly held meeting on January 24th, 2017.
Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes is presented?
Not an entertainer motion.
We approve the minutes is written.
Second.
We have a motion.
The second for the minutes is written.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstention.
That passes with a 50 vote.
The next item is presentation and consideration of ordinance number 7650.
This is the first reading of an ordinance.
Resoning of a lot.
The third of that.
This is a.
Seven.
Block.
One forty one, garden and sandborn addition.
Section 169.
Block.
2.
ABINEM Survey Powder County.
Texas.
Plus 1.5 of our Founding streets all these in public ways to change from Light.
would we get a presentation?
Good evening.
Thanks, AJ.
So as required by State Law, we notified everyone within 200 feet of the subject request
according to the appraisal district records.
That was a total 13 notices.
We did not receive any responses either in favor or in opposition to this request.
Here's a photo of the property as it exists within our current zoning map.
Again, the current zoning is industrial one zoning.
This is located in Central San Angelo.
I'm sorry.
Amarillo.
I knew that was going to happen at some point.
Forgive me.
This is within the North Heights neighborhood.
So we'll talk about how this relates to the North Heights neighborhood plan in just a moment.
A few photographs of the property that were included in your background packet.
This is looking north on Madison Street.
As you can tell by the photograph, it has developed as a residential area,
although the underlying zoning is industrial in nature.
The industrial zoning actually dates back to when the subdivision was originally platted
and predates most of the development within this area.
Same as true if you're looking west from that intersection of Madison with third avenue.
Again, this is all industrial zoning.
Although again, it has developed with some residential uses.
There's a park there as well.
This is looking from Madison in fourth.
This is where the manufactured, I'm sorry, the multi-family zoning district actually begins.
And continues to move into the background of this photograph as well as looking the other direction,
looking west.
If you look down the photo, the street in this photo to the left.
That's the same industrial zoning into the right side of the street.
Again, is the border of that multi-family district.
So this is an excerpt from the city's comprehensive plan.
This is the future land use and character map component that we talk about at every meeting.
And this is a consistent request with the future land use plan,
which calls for this entire area to be zoned in a general residential type of character,
which is consistent again with the development that's occurred there.
So I'm looking at this, we looked at the compliance with the existing zoning ordinance,
which you all have adopted in early 2000s.
It does talk about transitions in this zoning district document.
As we have seen through the historic development of this area,
the transitions are somewhat at odds with what the future land use plan calls for.
Again, it's calling for a very industrial type of character,
but has developed as anything bad and is a very residential and major.
So because there are no reasonable transitions that we would like to see in place,
this doesn't exacerbate the issue, it's really addressing an issue that has existed for quite some time.
It is consistent, of course, with that idea of having residential development near a park.
And it is, of course, consistent with the plating configuration of this area,
which, as I mentioned, has been in place for quite some time,
and is plated in a way that is, especially conducive to residential development.
I mentioned the North Heights plan, just a moment ago,
and again, that was adopted by you all as a group just last month.
And you might recall that there was a page in that document that talked about future guiding principles for land use.
And so as this is, the first is on change we've had come into us in this area.
The first thing we did is a staff was to sit down and evaluate it as it pertain to those guiding principles,
which you now have adopted and we will carry out and looking at each and every application.
So not all are applicable, but there are a few key principles in there that are applicable and do support this application.
One is making sure that we plan for an adequate and adverse supply of housing.
This, of course, opens that up and allows for some additional housing in the area.
The discouraging of intense uses adjacent to residential areas.
Again, although the area is developed, residential is not zone to such.
And so the starts is down the road of really making sure that the zoning in the area.
And the development of the area are in sync.
So again, supports the application.
And then lastly, it talks about the importance of trying to encourage and fill development in this neighborhood.
And this zoning application would again take us down that road.
As I mentioned, just a moment ago, it is in keeping with the general residential land use that the future land use.
Plain calls for and it is also something that is in keeping with the residential area character of this area.
And as I mentioned, also creating in fill possibilities.
So if that, the city staff recommends approval of the request of the plain and zoning commission unanimously recommended approval as well at their most recent hearing.
And if you have any questions, we can address those now.
Absolutely have any questions.
I just have one about just a little bit about process on this one.
So I know that we've asked in the past for the minutes of the planning and zoning commission.
And we have the minutes, but there are minutes from earlier meeting in January, not the minutes to talk about this.
Is it because the time is too compressed to get the minutes.
Yes.
And we're actually trying to change our internal processes in a way that we'll better accommodate that.
Also, exert those minutes for you that are relevant to the case and you're not having to shift through all of them to finally you're looking for.
Oh, that would be correct.
So it's a known issue that we're currently working on that.
So my apologies.
I can tell you at the planning and zoning commission level because you may have been looking for what the conversation essentially was.
There was some conversation about it being and keeping with the North Heights plan.
That seemed to be from our observations the biggest focus for the commissioners and we didn't have any public comment.
We didn't really have any discussion amongst the folks on the dias.
It was really is this in keeping with what we just went through what we just approved.
Okay.
And those would be draft minutes not approved by that group yet.
That is true.
Yeah, because they hadn't haven't met to approve those minutes.
They could be presenting draft minutes but not approved yet.
AJ, it's zone blight industrial and it looks like it's mainly housing.
It's somebody still come in there and operate under a light industrial zoning and build a shop or things that are qualified.
Absolutely true and and so a large part of that North Heights plan focuses on us being more proactive.
And trying to make sure that we give the protections to that area.
That means because it developed in a way that was out of context.
Mr. Mr. Mayan.
Yes.
The council I would like to speak to this just before.
Giving a wholesale endorsement of this.
Could you go back a couple of pictures because I want to show the council something.
It's an opportunity for us to go back to the picture.
Yes, there.
This is really important because it gives us an opportunity to to thank the building safety.
And and and the tremendous job that Bob Cowell has has introduced.
If you wanted to see that house where the.
Put on my glasses.
Where the.
What colors that car.
Where the burgundy car is.
That is a that is a resident where last summer.
Uh.
Bill and safety was here and there was an initial discussion about tearing that house down.
The young man I believe that's the house came and ask to work with building safety building safety.
Worked with him and that is the results today.
So that is a great partnership where the city worked with a.
An individual in a low income area.
And was able to salvage that house.
Secondly, I want to say that I think that this is a tremendous job.
Thank you.
AJ because property values over here lots are about 300 dollars per lot.
And so pro councils have useful just right.
Council member Berke because pro councils have been less.
Vigilant.
Where this.
But's up against what at one time was a a.
The building neighborhood industrial.
Businesses have now come in and infiltrated.
That area because it's cheap land. And so it's not uncommon if you were to go to this area of our community to see industrial buildings, including paint, paint shops, right next to a residential structure. So this begins that process.
And I want to thank the both the staff and this council in taking a long range plan to approach and trying to increase now the viability of nature.
And Mr. Mayor, if you would, I would like to offer a motion if that's in order at this time.
That we would approve this ordinance number 7650.
We have a second. Second.
Postion of a second, any discussion from the council? Other than what we've heard, any discussion from the audience?
All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions that passes with a 50 vote.
The next item is presentation, consideration, ordinance number 7651. This is the first reading of an ordinance,
which is rezoning of a lot five block eight fair view town site unit number one, section 123 block two.
A being in serve a Potter County Texas plus one half of all bounding streets, alleys and public ways to change from residential district three to residential district three with a specific use permit for the placement of a type B manufactured home.
A city of South East, sixth Avenue and South Dallas Street.
AJ, would you present this please.
Thank you.
As this typical, you've seen many of these, this year, these specific use permits for manufactured homes.
Just a reminder that we do have various classifications of the types.
And in this particular case, there was some, I think, confusion if you just skimmed through the reports.
I just want to clarify our type B manufactured homes are no older than 1976.
They're required to be manufactured at least six years prior to the year of installation.
In this zoning district, a type C manufactured home, which is a brand new manufactured home is allowed by right.
However, there is a minimum width to which that applies.
And this particular home is not a double wide width.
So the specific use permit is required even though it is brand air.
Okay, thank you.
I'd like to question your ass off.
Thank you.
Okay.
So in accordance with this, we sent out 20 different notices.
We did not receive any responses in favor or in opposition.
And again, this was recommended unanimously for approval by the planning and zoning commission at their meeting.
This is a subject property.
This is just east of central Amirlo.
It is located in a quite large residential three district.
As you can see, the brown area there.
It's pretty close to the center.
And there are a number of these specific use permits which have been approved in this area.
And we'll go through those in just a moment after we look at some photographs.
So this is actually the subject property that we're looking at here facing the property from South Dallas Street.
And these are some pictures of the surrounding area.
So this is looking turning and looking north up Dallas.
You can see again some residences in that area as well as some manufactured in mobile homes in the area.
As we turn and look west down South Dallas, this is actually looking just across the street from the subject property.
And again, you do see some continuation of that residential character and looking south more of the same.
So it is quite a large established neighborhood.
There are a few specific use permits that you've approved in the past.
This is number 161.
And this is just north of that subject property on the same street.
This is looking just south, that's a specific use permit 171.
And then one street over on spring street, a specific use permit 179.
So there is quite precedent for this type of development in the area.
This again is the excerpt from the future land use in character map, which calls for this area to be general residential, which is quite consistent with how it originally developed and how it exists today.
And this would not compromise that in any way.
I mentioned the differences between the types of manufactured homes at the beginning of the presentation.
There are some specific standards, which are required for these types.
And that is verified through the submission of a site plan as part of this application, which we reviewed and it does mean all of the acquired standards.
It is consistent with other approvals that you and previous councils have made in the vicinity of the area.
And it is also consistent with that neighborhood unit concept that we talk about often as well as with this concept of having a variety in various types of housing within the neighborhood.
So based on all of these factors, this is staff does recommend approval as well as the planning and zoning commission.
And if you have any questions, we can address those.
Questions from council. Well presented.
Thank you.
I entertain a motion.
May I move the approval ordinance numbers 7651.
Second.
The motion and the second discussion from the council.
From the audience.
All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstentions.
That passes with a 50 vote.
Thank you, AJ.
The next item is a resolution support of canyons.
T.C.L.L.C. application for housing tax credit.
Oh, I missed one.
Excuse me.
Presentation.
Don't go away.
AJ.
I know you're trying to get rid of it.
I'm sorry.
I apologize for using.
Presentation and consideration of ordinance number 7652.
This is the first reading of an ordinance rezoning of lots.
Five.
Dash.
Eight.
Block.
Four.
Nine.
Four.
Mirror.
Addition.
Unit number.
One.
Section.
Five.
Block.
Two.
A.B.N.M. survey.
Potter County.
Texas.
Plus.
One.
Half of all.
Bounding.
So, in this request, we were required to send out 10 notices.
We did receive one call once we went through the process and answer the questions that
Individual that called in had no opposition to the request.
At the planning zoning hearing, there were three folks that came in spoke one in favor.
And then we had two speakers that stated that they were not opposed to it, but had some questions and concerns.
And so those were answered throughout the course of the meeting as well.
So, this is the subject property.
Again, this is very close proximity to the other areas.
We've looked at already today in central Amirillo.
And this is actually located just north of the interstate.
So, as you can see, it's on the border between a very large heavy commercial zoning district, which we've researched.
And that has actually existed as far back as the 1940s.
And the next to it is a residential three zoning districts.
Again, probably not an ideal situation, but nonetheless, the situation that we face today as the current zoning has been in place for quite some time.
So, a few photographs, this is looking at the subject property.
This is looking from the right of way for Houston street and so you can see the interstate there to the left.
And just behind the subject property, you can see a metal building in a sign.
Those are on properties that are already zoned the heavy commercial for which the applicant is seeking today on his property.
If you turn in look east from Houston street, this is nearby church, and there again is the access road for the interstate.
Looking north, again from Houston street in the intersection with the interstate.
This is the section of the area that is zoned for our three residential zoning.
And you can see that there is a park there on the right hand side of this street, and there are some houses there to the left.
And then this is looking southwest and again you're seeing the interstate there in place.
So the future land use and character map for this area does call for these lots that we're seeking consideration of today to be zoned in a way that is consistent with the general commercial character.
And so that does support the application as it was filed.
Of course, we also again looked at this in compliance with the zoning ordinance.
It is a logical continuation of the pattern that is there in place. Again, there is a very large heavy commercial zoning district there, and this would be a small extension of that zoning district.
Does not provide an ideal transition. However, this lack of transition is very similar with the first case that we heard today really isn't present even at this time.
The city's comprehensive plan talks about this general commercial character and it advises that that type of heavier intensity.
Can't be broken up by using things such as landscaping and landscaping requirements would in fact apply to these lots so that will be addressed.
There are some changing conditions in the area, although they don't seem quite recent in the history of the area.
They are fairly recent and that is the incorporation of the interstate all of the zoning which is in place in this area predates that.
And many of the lots as well as the development of those lots also predates this.
The traffic in this area again with the proximity of the access road is already very commercial in nature.
I mentioned the compliance with the comprehensive plan. We also, again, mentioned future menus component in your report.
We elaborate a little bit more about the general commercial land use, but it does support the application.
And so based on all of these factors, both the staff as well as the unanimous vote of the planning and zoning commission are to recommend approval as presented.
Yes, please.
The single family residences that are located just north of there are lots one two three and four.
They didn't have a problem with it.
We did not receive anything in writing and we just had those three comments that we had one that was very much in favor and two that we would just classify as neutral because it was more fact findings.
So we didn't have anyone indicate that they were in opposition.
Okay, thank you.
Any other questions?
Very good.
Thank you.
I'd entertain a motion.
May I move we approve ordinance number 7652.
Second, the motion in a second, you just touched him from the council.
You just touched him from the audience.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions.
That passes with a five o vote.
Now we move on to the resolution.
Resolution supporting of canyons TCLLC application for housing tax credit.
This resolution is support for an application for affordable housing from the Texas Department of Housing Community Affairs Housing tax credit program by canyons TCLLC.
Canyons at 40 at canyons at 45th West, a development of affordable rental property located at 4101 Southwest 45th Avenue.
Mayor and council just to kind of refresh everyone's memory about this time last year.
You recall we had several presentations from folks that were seeking the same resolution or resolution like this to pursue these tax credits at the state level at that time.
We ultimately were asking them to come in and make the presentation to you all and our recommendation was that you need forward unless you had opposition to it.
The support for all of those projects we are intending the same here.
There are there are there are three projects here two different applicants and I'd like if it's all right I'd like to have James Allen explain kind of the difference between the two different types because in this case actually they're not competing with the same.
And then we'll hand it off to the applicants.
Mayor council.
We have you have before you three different projects but the first one is something that we have not had an emerald before.
It's utilizing 4% tax credits from the Texas Department of Housing Community Affairs.
In this is for rehabilitation not new constructs or rehabilitation of an existing property here in emerald an apartment complex that consists of 328 units currently to make that entire complex affordable housing.
This project not only meets the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs standards it also aligns very well with the emerald blueprint for strategies.
As well as HUD's requirements through our five year consolidated plan for the city of emerald to advance affordable housing.
So based upon those strategies we would recommend funding and I can certainly answer any questions but Scott Pickett from post investment group is here to make a presentation for you considering this particular project then I'll come back and talk to you about the other two.
Please.
Welcome sir.
Thank you James. Mayor and council I greatly appreciate you guys taking the time to entertain this project we are putting forth.
I've worked with James and he and his team have been phenomenal and extremely helpful.
We are seeking a resolution of no objection to convert a market rate property to affordable housing.
Canons at 40 fifths west is currently does not have any restrictions in place.
The properties 80% occupied is owned by a group of investors who we previously sold a property to and have been unable to maintain the capital need to the property and keep it up to date.
So what we are proposing and have negotiated with him is to purchase the property and renovate the property with federal tax credits and as a result we will need to put rental restrictions.
So the benefits to emerald is one it increases the affordable housing stock.
Two utilizes and I think maximizes the existing use of a property so we're not coming in and developing a whole new property we're taking an existing property.
Putting about 35 thousand dollars a unit in it to renovate it and in the hopes create a safe quality affordable housing property.
In addition, the total projects, I apologize for the small font.
So a summary of the project is, it's currently 328 units, and we'll stay that way. It was built
in 1974 and 1980, and has not received major capital upgrades since then. By obtaining federal tax credits,
we'll be able to fully renovate this property. We anticipate the conversion to take approximately 18 months
for the construction to be completed, and subsequent lease up.
One of the phenomenal assets with this project is, we have done a preliminary review
and approximately 75% of the existing tenants will qualify for affordable housing.
So 75% of these tenants will be able to get a relatively brand new unit that now has new roofs, new windows, new doors,
new interiors, flooring cabinets at a reduced rent.
The total cost of this project, hard cost for construction will be approximately $13 million.
And while you can't read my font, you can see, hopefully, those two photos.
On the bottom left, you have an existing photo of Canis at 45th West.
And on the right, you have property that posts investment groups owns in Austin, Texas,
that is a loan-com housing tax credit for what property.
And it is our goal to make that picture on the left.
Look like that picture on the right.
Quick summary of the renovation we will, as I said, we will be doing a full renovation.
Replacing the parking lot, new landscaping, new fencing, new roofs, new windows, new doors, new sighting, aesthetic upgrades.
So it kind of stone facade to upgrade the property and make it a bit more contemporary.
Full interior upgrades, new appliances.
And again, on the bottom, you can see, on the left, a photo of the existing kitchen at Canis at 45th.
And on the right, a representative photo of what we plan on converting it to.
More importantly, too, there will be a lot of efficiency upgrades to the property.
So with the new appliances, these are all going to be energy star rated appliances.
All of the roofing and paint materials will be environmentally friendly materials.
You'll have low flow toilets installed, new water heaters and boilers that are infinitely more efficient,
as well as upgraded lighting systems that will be more energy efficient as well.
Post investment group has done a number of projects like this.
We've done four ground up developments across the country, one in Little Rock, Arkansas, two in Colorado and one in Los Angeles.
We are based out of Los Angeles, but we also have a asset management and construction management team is headquartered in Dallas.
And I know how much Texans enjoy listening to Californians.
So I assure you that the majority of this was written by our Dallas employees.
We own about 10,000 units across the country.
A significant portion of those are affordable deals.
We have owned and operated 14 affordable housing projects and continue to look at ways to expand that.
Personally, I think there is a huge wage gap in this country.
And it's a common topic in the news and I think affordable housing creating safe affordable options is a phenomenal way to bridge that, you know, at any improvement is a good improvement.
On the last page, I have just a few more photos of some of the projects we have done.
On the top left, there's a photo of the HUD Finance project we did in Little Rock, Arkansas that we built from the ground up.
On the top right is a photo of our section 42 loan-gam housing tax credit property in Austin, Texas, which will have very similar has very similar restrictions as to what Kenyan's has.
Bottom left, a ground up development that we did in Denver, Colorado and then on the bottom right another section 42 loan-gam housing tax credit deal in Austin, Texas.
Again, I truly think that renovating and existing asset is going to be a substantial boom to the surrounding area.
It should encourage additional apartment landlords to improve their property is a healthy competition.
I think we'll benefit all and we plan to keep disruption in the surrounding area minimized by renovating and existing asset.
So it shouldn't be too much of a change except for the tenants there.
It will be a dramatic change and as you drive by, I think you'll notice a significant improvement.
That's my presentation.
So just not to disaffect my support of this one-hour order.
So you have 325 units.
28.
328.
Yes, sir.
My math was better at 325.
So 80% of the 80% occupied.
So 260 residents, that's currently there.
So you've done this before, will they all be required to move out?
No, no.
What we will plan on doing is with the units that are currently unoccupied, currently vacant.
We will renovate those first and move tenants.
The existing tenants that qualify from their unit to that property.
As we go through the construction or excuse me to those buildings.
Another alternative and we'll, as we're going through this, will be able to better gauge what we can do.
As you all the exterior renovations, and then a majority of the interior renovations,
and we'll need to have the tenants leave for a day and try to complete those units in one day.
But I think the more feasible is to move tenants.
Finish three buildings that are vacant.
Move tenants from existing three buildings that are occupied into those.
Then start.
So there's, there will be some shuffling.
There's no doubt about that.
Shuffling, I don't mind.
But displace and focus.
No, yeah.
We will not be sorry.
Okay.
How, you obviously rotate units every month anyway with people moving in and out.
Tracts.
Yeah.
Okay.
Any other questions from the council?
I appreciate that question.
I was trying to figure out the map on that and see how many days it would take and you shuffle people.
And then what you do and how that affects your timeline.
But I got the just of it.
Okay.
And minimal disruption is really important.
I think that applied both to the tenants and the surrounding area, which you clarified at the end.
Because it's a busy road.
Yeah.
I'm out there.
So, great.
It looks beautiful.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
And also, yes, James and the team are quite great.
They are.
They've been a pleasure to work with.
So the people would, that might have to move out.
But they just didn't qualify for them.
Correct.
Okay.
So we've looked at income qualifications in about 75%.
Based on their reported income.
And most of the time, people do not lie that their income is lower.
So there's a possibility that there may be more.
No, I like everything except the font.
Yeah.
I apologize.
It's even with our handouts a little difficult.
So we're right in here, Western and 45.
But a little bit east of that.
And we're on the south side of the street.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you.
So just so you hear it from me.
Because these amorello values are, we value people.
And so at the end of the day, you know, my hope and my expectation is that you will keep your promise
that folk are not going to be displaced.
And inhumane, inhumane manner.
But that there will be this effort.
You know, I know it's about the dollars.
But for me, it's about the people.
Okay.
Absolutely.
100%.
Couldn't, couldn't agree more.
Well, and I think you also honoring those things that you've promised.
Really improved the lives of a lot of those folks.
If this has been updated since 74 to 80, it's obviously a need.
It needs a little love.
There is doubt about that.
So good.
Good.
Thank you for the presentation.
Any other comments from council?
Any questions from the audience?
Is there any of the part of this presentation?
Very well.
One question.
I mean, my name is Melody Malay.
I live in emeralone.
Post office box five out of two.
Sir, if you, or ma'am, if you'd give us a straight address, please.
79 11 thinly drop.
Thank you very much.
I don't know if I misunderstood you, but you said 75% are qualified.
What about the other 25% that aren't qualified?
Or they could be allowed to stay?
Or will they be asked to leave?
No.
They will be asked to leave, but we will have to compensate them.
And help them assist them with finding new units.
And help them with the rest.
Time in.
So any tenants that do not qualify?
We have a budget in place to assist them with any moving needs.
Moving them to new units, and we will obviously have to help them find new housing options.
Well, we kind of begs a question if we're already low on low rental housing.
How they're going to be able to place their current unit with a equitable rent that's at that same price,
or well, or it seems like temporarily that might be funded.
But it still puts them out in a higher, in my opinion.
It pits them out to look for it to try to match the current rent they're paying.
We have to clarify.
These are not affordable housing units today.
That may help you with your question.
Understand.
But I'm still concerned about the people that are currently paying low rent that are going to be put out on the market to try to match that 25%.
Yeah.
It's quite a few people.
And that concerns me.
So in response to that's a good question.
If you don't mind taking a seat while he's speaking.
We do have a large number in our budget.
And the TTHCA, the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs,
who oversees tax credit developments,
enforces that you assist any tenants you're displacing in a situation like this financially.
So we are forced and must assist them in finding new apartments.
There are, you know, I think the vacancy rate in Amarillo is approximately 90%.
So I do think there are options that we will be able to assist them with.
But yeah, that is, that too is a concern of ours.
And something we will absolutely monitor and assist the tenants with.
Thank you.
Any other questions?
So James Gank, 62, 16 games, rural.
If you serve, you get that Scott, take your seat or take a seat.
Then we'll talk.
Okay.
Because my question is for him, the support.
What are we doing?
What does the city do?
This is a resolution for support of this.
It's helps with their application for the money.
Yeah, they get things that get points for several different things to be accomplished.
And one of those, and that makes them competitive.
And one of those points is a support and resolution support from the city.
That's why I literally know,
No, no, no, no.
There are a couple years of money.
But no longer.
In tell two years ago, there was a requirement for monetary support.
No, you're still in the next two that there is a mononomenal,
nominal I mean I think we talked about like $50 kind of financial support as to meet check one of the other boxes
I don't know if that applies in this case with this that is not applying in this case with that program
So no, it's really just a resolution of support
The air conditioner is working in here. It's good
Now that we're going through some changes because you know I mean I think even bin Carson is fixing to be in charge of this HUD
We realize there's some pullback on some of these in and these affordable housing which we've been bit by before
In some I'm not saying this is but there's situations there that get out of hand real quick
I think you want to be responsible about the accusations or statement you make sir
I am responsible
Because I've experienced it and we still experienced it here in town with some of the houses that have not been taken care of
And that's the reason those sorts of questions happen
Thank you. Thanks, Jeremy. Anyone else would like to comment
Jim Louter 6723 Emerald Court. My question is do we have any
There are a few good dress us please do not address the audience. Thank you.
We have testimonials from this vendor from the 25
From other people who've been ejected from previous projects that they were treated fairly and that they
If you take your seat we'll ask for an answer
So to clarify, tenants will not be ejected from our property
All tenants have a contractual lease that they have signed
Many of the tenants are on month to month leases many of the tenants are on one year leases
And all of those tenants are paying market rate rents
The property is not in affordable property. So we will not be kicking out people that do not qualify. We will not be removing them from an affordable housing project. They will not be allowed to live in what in the future will be in affordable housing. They don't qualify.
So any tenants getting displaced currently pay market rent and will just have to go to another unit or property that charges market rents.
So we will not be kicking people out, but when their contractual lease ends, it may not be renewed. In regards to oversight of the property and maintaining it,
we have 30 years of restrictions that we need to comply with with the IRS and also the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.
If, at any time, we do not abide by those. We could be liable to pay penalties and recaptures, which I assure you are CEO who personally guarantees those will make sure that does not occur.
But, but yes, I just, I do want to clarify that this is not currently in affordable property. So we will not be kicking out or removing any tenants who are currently in an affordable property.
They will once their, once their lease is up, it will just not be renewed and they will, we will assist them in finding housing elsewhere.
I want to clarification there, James, we are short of affordable housing, are we not?
Yes, we are extremely short. We've, through our department, we've grown about a third issue. We've had almost 400 assisted units this year.
And in fact, HUD is, they're strongly encouraging communities like ourselves to increase our affordable housing inventory and also meet the needs.
So at this point, not knowing what the future is, we still see the need tremendously for new affordable housing. So this would be possibly 300 units that our clients would be eligible to rent.
So that meets that need through the Texas Department of Housing Community Affairs. One of their goals is to increase opportunities for low-income persons to live throughout the entire community.
They would, they classify this as a high opportunity zone because it's near retail, it's near things that aren't traditionally in the low-to-moderate income neighborhood.
So it has benefits for the Texas Department of Housing Community Affairs as well as for our clients.
And there's no one else that's tried to revamp or redo this without any incentives.
Not on this major level. We've done much smaller rehabs, but nothing else.
Let me just say that I'm pleased with the presentation. I'm glad someone wants to invest in our community to help raise the standard of living for people that are in these houses.
I think it is incredibly good for the community. I know there's been good questions asked.
But my conclusion is this is very good for the community.
Is there any other questions?
Good afternoon. My name is Deb Bunsen, 3409 South-Rusk.
Thank you.
Just to get some clarification.
If you could please address us.
I know it's hard. You aren't here everyday. You need to learn.
This is a second time.
You need to take action. Thank you.
I have a question or some clarification.
One is my question about relocation of the residents that do not qualify for the slow income housing.
Are we going to monitor?
And I know this, but are we going to find out that this company is actually helping those that are being displaced?
And this company is going to pay for the relocation services.
Because at this point, it doesn't seem that these people are wanting to move.
We're going to pay for their utilities, any fees.
And then as a veteran, is this company or the council going to help out with the veterans that have no housing?
Thank you.
Well, I will answer the last part. This council.
This city has helped tremendously with the help of the VA.
And we have less.
We have about a hundred veterans that were homeless now in housing.
Because of efforts in combination with VA groups.
The VA itself and the work of our city staff to put these veterans in home.
So I'm very proud of what's happened.
There has been more help for this.
More recognition of it.
And it certainly raises a standard of a lot of veterans lives.
Some of it has come through another chance house.
Some have come through other agencies.
But we are well aware of that.
And would be well aware of this.
Mr. Allen, would you just remark quickly.
We need to move on.
Would you remark quickly about how will monitor this to be sure that they do as they promised?
This is not actually an obligation of the city ram roll to monitor.
It would be for the Texas Department of Housing and the Community of the House.
Okay.
So they will be monitoring those requirements.
Because that's a very requirement for that assistance.
Right.
In the order.
Man, that answered your question.
Right.
Thank you.
Is there anyone else that would like to comment?
I call the question.
May I move that we approve the resolution and the support of King and TCLLC.
The application for the housing tax credits.
Second.
We have a motion.
And a second.
We've had discussion.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Any opposed?
Abstentions.
That passes with the five of them.
Thank you for your work on behalf of our city and our citizens.
Good presentation.
If it would be possible if we could introduce the next two items together.
They're actually kind of right next to one another.
Absolutely.
We'll still need two separate actions on them.
But that way one presentation can kind of cover both.
I'll read them both.
We'll get them and we'll act on them separately.
So resolution number six on the agenda support of S.H.
Amerala Boulevard LP application for housing tax credit.
This resolution is support for an application for affordable housing
to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.
Housing tax credit programs by S.H.
Amerala Boulevard LP, a private entity,
Marabella, a development for affordable rental property,
located at plus or minus 2.96 acres near the southeast corner of
Emerald Boulevard in Jim Lake Road.
Second item is a resolution support of S.H.
Amerala Jim Lake LP application for housing tax credits.
This resolution is support of an application for affordable housing
to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.
Housing tax credit program by S.H.
Amerala Jim Lake LP, a private entity.
The attendance of Jim Lake, a development for affordable rental property,
located at plus or minus 2.00 acres near the southeast corner
of Emerald Boulevard in Jim Lake Road.
And could we hear this?
I think if Mr. Allen wouldn't mind just again,
this is though it's going in a similar application
is actually competing for a different program.
If he could just explain that and then we'll turn over the presentation.
The resolution that you see before you are from the same developer,
but this is through the 9% tax credit project.
So these are competitive.
The last one that you saw is not a competitive grant.
Emerald's district consists of Emerald's love and friendships.
So we're considering an urban district.
So we would be competing.
This project will compete potentially against projects
in those other two cities.
Emerald's not had a 9% project approved in the past few years.
So one of the criteria is how many you've had proximity.
So this project probably has a good chance of being accepted by TTHCA.
The developer, the stellar family properties,
is actually submitting too.
Only one would be approved for our region.
They're both adjacent to each other.
One is almost a three acre track.
There's a two acre track.
Just off of Emerald, a boulevard west.
Any questions?
Just one, Mayor May.
Is there a way that we can get an update regardless of what happens,
whether if we approve the resolution site,
if we can get an update later about what has happened,
if this has gone through a process and approved.
Certainly, hopefully if they're approved,
you'll get some updates on construction,
but unfortunately I'll give you the update if they're not approved.
This is a good question because last year,
some of those things didn't get further through the legislative process
that happens after we give these resolution.
So we're in support of the letters.
We're asking our representatives to give letters of support.
People doing these projects have covered those bases.
We're simply adding our voice to this is an absolute need in our community.
And the fact is they're investing in other communities because we haven't had the ability.
Now that they've reduced the monetary obligation,
I believe we should take action to support these kinds of things
that help develop our community for people that absolutely need this help
in developing the community.
So we're having this as a senior project.
Where's the last one was a multifamily unit.
So we have needs for affordable housing for seniors as well.
So the need is there.
We just need more affordable housing than that.
We are way, we've seen thousands of units go in in sister cities
as sister cities like Pampa and Peritain and Dumas and the Lubbock.
And we have not gotten any, but now the stars are aligned that we might do this.
It's still all we're giving is a resolution.
They still have to perform.
They have to do a lot of the things to get this done.
But the fact is there's a dire need for this in our community.
So you know, a lot of these seniors could be senior veterans that could be in there too.
Okay?
About well, seniors, we have 95 vouchers for the City of Emerald and they're all fully utilized.
In fact, we need more vast vouchers to help the veterans.
There are any other part of the presentation.
The applicant is here.
Please, we'd like to hear from them.
Good evening Mayor.
Members of the council.
Welcome City staff.
My name is Paul Stel.
Thank you for allowing me to come before you talk to you tonight.
And tell you a little bit about what we want to do.
I'm here tonight to ask is they've said for a resolution of support.
And in addition to that for a commitment for a 100 or you can make a $50.
It could even be $10. I think.
The waiver that will also allow us to check one of the boxes and get an extra point,
which is very, very important to me and I'll walk you through why and what we're doing.
The stellar family companies is a love-up-based company where a faith-based mission-driven organization
that focuses on trying to enrich the lives of people that live in our residences and people who work into
company and our associates and our owners.
We have four subsidiaries.
We have Stellar Capital Partners, which is an investment firm, which we recently acquired
a proper here in Emerllo.
We've owned several before and passed.
And we're in a process of remodeling that community.
We have a development arm that does market rate and affordable, which I'm talking about tonight
about and we have a construction arm in a management arm as well.
The company collectively has about 102 years of experience across 95 projects,
located in 41 markets in five states.
So we have a pretty rich experience and practice in this area.
The tax credit program, I like to talk about a couple, some of the major components about it in an effort
to at the risk of maybe being repetitive.
If you would indulge me and give me a couple minutes to educate you about a couple components about it.
First of all, it's federal tax credits issued by the Treasury Department through the IRS.
And they're administered through the state level.
So you hear the TDA or the Texas Department housing community affairs.
Each state is charged with taking the credits.
They get at the federal level and awarding those developers.
They set up an apartment.
They create rules in a competitive environment for developers to pursue.
And so it's an annual cycle.
They issue these tax credits once a year.
And it's a competitive process.
In Texas they have a point system set up.
And they have all kinds of funny little rules.
Some of them I think are very valid.
Some of them I think are obviously a bit silly.
But you get points for them.
And I can tell you that oftentimes the projects go down to final application they are tied.
And they have tie breakers.
And in based on tie breakers, there is a winner.
But one single point is a difference between winning and losing.
And so for example, if a city will give financial support and what they
think that deemed as a diminimous amount, which can be $10 or in this case,
100, I said 50, whatever you want to make it, they deemed that as financial support.
I think that's a little silly.
But you get a point.
And with that point, emerala will lose.
No doubt about it.
And so it's very important to win every point you can.
So the developers across the state are trying to find sites that are able to meet the
criteria set forth by the state to earn points to be competitive and win and award.
The market rate quality of these projects is important to note.
The state requires that these projects have the same level of materials used.
The same level of interior features in the units.
And the same level of common area amenities that you would find in any market rate community.
There are 100% masonry products there.
A brick stone, stucco, or if it's siding, it's a cementous type product called fiberboard or
hearty plank.
And so the projects are built.
Most of the times you'll drive by and there are some here in M.
Rillo from the past.
I bet you drive by and I mean, don't even realize your tax credits.
Because there are very high quality in this mandate by the state.
The difference between tax credits in federal or market rate communities is that
they're very low leverage.
As opposed to typically having a 75% loan to cost on a market rate project,
you only have about a 25% of the cost in debt.
And so they're very financially stable.
But because the debt is less the state forces you to lower your rents so that they're at a more affordable rate.
Knowing that you can make profit still because the note payments is less, and so they're forcing us to lower the rents to be appealing to a affordable resident.
These rents are set to serve what would be called 60% of the area median income of the market, which are really working families.
The resident profiles are workers, and the residents pay 100% of the rent. This is not hud housing, and that's perhaps the most important point I want to make.
You have across the income spectrum, you have the task code that helps the middle class and up to the wealthy. You have hud that helps the poor.
And oftentimes what is lost is people in the middle. And let me explain, people who are truly very poor, oftentimes may not have but a hundred dollars they can apply towards rent.
Hud comes along, and if the rent is $700 or $800, hud will pay the difference, the other $700.
And so the resident moves in, they're only paying $100, and that's a hud type of project. A tax credit project, however, is intended for a working person who is making about 60% of the area median income.
Those type of people make up to $36,000 a year, oftentimes they're single mothers with children, it may be a teacher who has two children at home, it may be a public servant, a policeman, fireman, some administrative assistance in your back office.
These people oftentimes, they can't apply for hud, and the task code in helping them much and are struggling to make ends meet. Sometimes we hear them referred to as a working poor.
And so this project, the tax credit system, takes your rent that may be $800 and it makes or $1,000 for a two-better, let's say, for example, and the rent gets pushed down about $800.
And $200 a month may not make a lot of difference to some people in a room, but to others it's a lot of difference.
And so that person, though, pays 100% of that $800 rent. So they're paying a substantial amount of money still for the rent, but at a price they can afford.
Whether it's $800 for a two-better, or six-hundred for a one-better, and so on and so forth.
But I want to pay in a picture of the type of people that live in a tax credit community.
Moving on, we have a long-term investor. When you get the tax credit, you monetize them by selling them in a market.
And so you'll sell them to people like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Google buys, tax credits.
A recent one we did, we sold to the Royal Bank of Canada. They buy $13 million worth of credits, or whatever the amount is.
They put a substantial amount of money into it, and they receive the benefits of the tax credits.
What happens, though, is over the next 30 years, if you don't take care of the project and you don't continue to meet the requirements of the state, there is something called tax recapture.
And they would have to pay all the back taxes they should have paid, plus all these penalties.
So because of that, we don't have just the government watching over the property.
We have a bank, and we have a huge investor that puts their thumb on us every day, every month, every year, to make sure that property is maintained.
That's why you never see a tax credit project in disrepair as opposed to kind of what people come to know as HUD housing.
The tax credit projects, if you, as the gentleman referred to earlier, if you have a tax credit recapture, you are bankrupt.
It is a big deal, then you got city bank, or you got Wells Fargo, or you got Google on you to make sure it doesn't happen.
So the properties are very well maintained over the long term.
And so it creates a long term viability.
So the property amenities, I mentioned earlier, are significant.
The common area amenities, oftentimes you have clubhouses, fitness centers, business centers, media rooms, you'll have garages.
You'll have a number of amenities that you can kind of scan through and see there.
In terms of the interior of the unit, this is a picture of a interior unit.
You have everything you would see in any market rate community that may be built out on a son's seat that you might drive in and look at.
The quality of cabinets, the appliances had to be energy efficient, so on and so forth, very nice.
They are the exact same unit.
The two sites that we have are located in reflected on this area.
Let me explain why we have two.
Oftentimes there are some unknowns.
The state requires us to make a pre-application in January, and then the final application is due in March,
and then they award or make their decision in July.
But oftentimes the rules are not finished until around November.
So it gives us a very short window to find our site and a short window to do all of our due diligence.
Sometimes we have a site that there are still some questions unknown.
And so we may have more than one site that we make the initial application on while we're still looking at our numbers to see which site works better.
It may have to do with access, the heck of a access, it may have to do with access to utilities, how much drainage or grading is needed, cost to associate things such as that.
And so in this case we have two sites.
We will only move forward, ultimately only one will get done.
We may still even present both while we're still trying to figure out all the final details of our due diligence, but only one of these will be built.
It will be a senior project.
And this is an example of one that we are constructing right now.
This would be the type of prototype that we would build on this site.
It would be a multi-story product.
It's senior in orientations, so it's one in two bedrooms.
And the hallways are located interior to the corridor of the building.
There are no exterior breezeways, stairs or anything like that.
You have interior hallways, and you have elevators, so that the elderly do not have to go out in the elements.
It's much safer and secure that way.
Here's another picture.
Oftentimes I have a port of code that comes out front.
You've seen them a lot of assisted living facilities, so you can drop grant them off or you can get into a car and out of the weather.
The building is typically in a U-shaped configuration, so it creates a courtyard in the center,
and this is a rendering of the project and how the courtyard is created.
So at the end of the day, our focus is about quality.
It's about working to collaborative approach with the city and all the constituents involved.
This is our backyard.
West Texas has so proud to hear the story about Excel and how the people of our community behaved.
It's representative of who West Texas is, as a West Texas company.
This is our backyard and we're very committed to it.
So we're excited for this opportunity, and we appreciate your consideration on this matter.
I'm happy answering questions you might have.
Sorry.
This is another question.
It's learned about the content more about what we have to do tonight.
So you talked about a day minimum of some out, and making sure we check off that box.
Is that something I don't see in the resolution?
It can be a letter that's signed and sent to us by the city manager.
And that's what we did, I think, last year in the certifications.
Okay.
We made it a part of the motion, so you'd authorize that letter to be written.
Okay.
But it does not have to be done as part of this resolution tonight.
But it will be done if we further the application.
Got it.
Okay.
I just want to make sure that we didn't mess up and you lose that one valuable point that you need.
So it's nice when it's pocket change.
Not what they required before.
You get the same point.
You get the same one point for 10 bucks or a hundred bucks.
Yes.
That's when he was referring to the silly things that go on with the requirement.
Okay.
It's a great presentation.
It was.
Very good.
Any questions for council?
Any questions from the audience?
I'd entertain a motion.
And we'll do the item six first resolutions.
Supporting the SH Emerald Boulevard LP application for housing tax credit.
Do I hear a motion?
Mayor, I move.
We approve the resolution support of SH Emerald Boulevard LP application for housing tax credit.
Second.
We have a motion in a second.
All those in favor.
Please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstentions.
That passes with a five o vote.
The next item is the resolution supporting SH.
Emerald Jim Lake LP application for housing tax credits.
I entertain a motion.
Mayor, if I could just clarify the reason to that included the the authorization to.
I guess this question to send the letter.
Yes.
Okay.
Pardon me.
Thank you.
Mr. Mayor.
I would so move approval with the noted authorization for the letter.
Yes.
For the second.
Second.
We've got a motion in a second.
All those in favor.
Please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstentions.
Thank you.
Thank you for your work in our city.
Thank you all.
We should good luck.
I know you got a lot of work left to do.
Thank you.
The next item is resolution calling for municipal election.
This resolution calls a regular municipal election to be held on May 6, 2017.
The election will be for the offices of Mayor, Councilmember Place 1, Councilmember Place 2, Councilmember Place 3 and Councilmember Place 4.
We're fulfilling a requirement.
The secretary state, the AG get together.
Send us a list of when these dates have to be accomplished.
We are, of course, required by our charter to hold these elections.
And so we act on this today and then set the ballot next week.
Correct?
Yes.
Is there any question about this item from the council?
The audience?
I'd entertain a motion.
Mayor, I'm moving to approve the resolution calling for the municipal election.
Second.
The motion of the second calling for resolution calling for municipal election.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Extensions.
That passes with a 50 vote.
Okay.
The next item is consideration of appointments of boards and commissions.
This item is for discussion and consideration of appointments to vacant.
Expiring positions and boards and commissions.
And there's a whole list.
But I'll go through those with the council's understanding.
There's been Councilmember Demerson.
I finished this task and happily passed it to councilmember.
They haven't worked it.
They have done a lot of effort to try and get this.
But staff has done a tremendous effort to make sure we have the corresponding applications and other things.
I have done a summary.
And if you'll bear with me.
I think it's very important.
We get some of these appointed.
There's some that I think you'll all agree.
They need a little work for instance.
A little work being that we have suggested by our group.
And I support that.
That we that we interview the candidates.
And we'll name for hopefully tonight candidates for the ADC.
But let's go back to that.
I'd like to take some of the low hanging fruit that I think we'll get pretty quick resolution of and move on.
If you'll bear with me.
We have on this list.
The MPO policy committee.
And Mr. City Attorney, I'm an ask clarification.
We of course we're going to point Bob to that.
It's a legal deal.
Be suggested that we need to really change that.
I'm not sure what it takes place to say the city manager would be the person serving there.
Whoever it is.
But I think that would take some more effort.
I don't know if it's premature to just a point.
Jared Miller to that.
And obviously if he's not available.
His subordinate would be there.
Is it appropriate tonight?
This is just Jared Miller.
That's your city attorney.
Okay.
You can do that.
And in fact, the way it actually works on this particular committee is if the city manager is unavailable.
He does have his design E attend.
So that's him.
There it has been in the past.
That's okay.
The other advantage they only meet quarterly.
So there's there's some time for him to get it.
Or him to be here.
So I would let's knock that one off if we can.
I'd entertain a motion for that item.
Mr. Mayor, movie appoint Jared Miller to replace Terry Childers on the MPO policy committee.
Second.
We have a motion to second.
Any discussion from the council?
Any discussion from the audience?
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstentions.
Okay.
We finally got one off this list.
Councilmember Demoson.
I think we were part of this.
Now we're carrying it on.
That's an easier.
There we go.
So the next one that I hope we can do something similar with.
There's just some really good people that are vying for these positions.
And I certainly would tell you that one of those that was suggested by our group was for animal animal management and welfare.
We had a past chairman.
Vice chairman.
Retire from that.
And it is suggested by many of the people in that board that Melanie.
Davidson would be an excellent substitute.
New person.
And we've received an application.
And it is stellar.
And I would suggest we take action on this.
I would like to ask a question.
Please act on this.
I had also offered a name prior to.
Melodies.
Davidson's name being submitted.
Was that considered by the subcommittee?
Let me look at that list.
Do you remember the name sir?
Please.
It was.
Melodies.
Yes.
So what we.
What we did was we just took.
To the list.
Just a recommendation.
That we had from.
Outgoing and current people on the board.
That's.
That came up.
One of the things to note on this is we had applications.
That they looked at and passed on to us for three people.
We have had inquiries from another 10 that haven't put an applicant.
10.
Maybe seven that haven't put an application.
We did have applications from Melanie Maloof from Melanie Davidson and from Matthew.
Actually.
So we may need to have further discussion about this.
But Councilmember Demerson.
And to the committee.
Melody.
She's.
Good candidate.
No question.
It's.
What are we all.
You say a couple words so in the process.
So I don't understand.
We we made this subcommittee.
So we can optimize our time so we can get some names.
And then the point was that then we would offer names that we kind of cooked up.
And then we have a couple weeks that all of us could take a look at the names.
And then we come back tonight.
We can kind of evaluate it.
And so in the spirit of that.
I mean, I have a name that I would like to add.
For what we did with the recommendation before.
If I have some.
Phone calls.
And so I think.
So I think.
All of this is this really great, great, cooperative way of coming up with the best board members.
The other thing of man or app, because one of the things that we weren't always able to do is get enough.
We've gotten a lot more applications to, I don't even encourage anybody that wants to serve on a board.
There's over 200 people that serve on these boards to get your name in, go online, fill in the application for a specific board or general.
But Mark, you are considering somebody else and this is board, just another seat for another board.
Okay, so I'm taking a little time to explain the process and what we did, but not anything was said in stone, right?
But we also said we hoped we'd have more than one name for this board to consider and we haven't achieved that. Now we're achieving that, so let's carry on the discussion.
What's your all's preference on this item?
Is there a preference from this committee on the choices that are presented?
So I think what we've gotten now is consideration of Melanie Maloof, and we also have consideration of.
So in the discussion of the committee, we did a couple of things.
We looked at our policy that we created up here of somebody staying on a board for two terms.
So we said if you're on two terms, the policy we've created is okay, let somebody else take that spot with certain exceptions.
Sure, and those exceptions will talk about here in a little bit, I think.
Then the next was we have recommendations from people that are currently in there, or people who are leaving the board.
And then we looked at time on the queue.
So if people have been waiting, we take people who've been waiting longer than people who just applied, just out of equity and fairness.
Again, a really important one is that somebody have an application.
So we really tried in this past two weeks to make sure that it has the application, because it's not a valid name if we don't.
So those are the kind of rules that we established ahead of time.
Now inside of those rules is where we have the discussions, and here's the best fit.
We'll try to really hard to follow the policy of what we had gotten, and start with the council.
But we all recognize, as councilmember Demoson, I experienced that policy has to be varied for practicality,
and he's keeping these boards moving.
Right, so that's my whole point, is we tried to fit into this, but now we have to figure out who is right.
Councilmember Demoson, do you have a comment?
I know, I have no comment.
Okay.
All right.
So do you want to consider this over a period of time or do you want to have a nomination for one of these people tonight?
And we see if it passes.
We're not trying to hurt anybody's feelings.
We've got some great candidates that have popped up for a lot of different boards.
But we simply need to make a choice, and it's timely that we make a choice.
This said in one of the boards, we can talk about an executive session.
It is not.
It's the ones that count.
Mr. City Attorney, would you explain which ones those are?
So everybody knows.
Under the Texas Open Meeting Act, there's a limitation on the type of officers and employees you can discuss.
An executive session.
That is their duties and responsibilities and qualifications.
In general, the act requires that in order for you to discuss them in executive session that their duties include final decision making.
That's the general test.
And you have several boards like that, such as the AEDC, the Hospital District Board, and some others.
It's a particular board animal management and welfare is an advisory board only.
So that discussion has to happen in Open Meeting.
They did substantial work in the last three years.
We don't want to dismiss that at all, but it's not illegally.
It doesn't have legal dick.
I would like to just offer.
And if you tell me, I don't, I don't, I didn't have any.
We didn't have any information at the time that we would.
We could meet correct regarding.
Melody Davidson.
And we did have an application from Melody Malloo.
At the time, the reason that her name was brought forth is because.
Andrea Gully.
Isn't attorney going off.
And there were.
Issues that that I thought that animal.
Management welfare had had been.
Looking at that were more.
I had to have some specific expertise.
If you tell me though that.
Andrea Gully.
Going off.
Person also recommended.
Her, you know, I think either one would be a great.
As said to this board.
I don't know.
I just need to.
Because I just got.
Well, let's, I would recommend we delay this on this board.
So we can have another week.
That's fine.
We have Melanie Davidson who.
Just we do have her application now and we did not have it when you and I were discussing exactly.
And she shows as a member of the community cat committee established by the current.
Emerald.
Management and welfare board.
And she's been working for animal rescues for the last year and a half.
Specifically with our shelters.
I believe she was here and presented the team.
She was and she did a good job and was very interested.
The other one has obvious credentials and has a lot of agree and with something in our considerations.
We have an attorney going off that board.
This, this board has some really technical things that they give their expertise on.
So let's put this off till next week.
But let's try and get a decision next week.
Okay.
All right.
Next item is.
The.
Okay.
There was a suggestion for the library board for Thomas Warren the third.
There's no better or other.
And I would suggest we take action on that.
Mayor, I move.
We.
Nominate are we.
Put Thomas Warren the third in place of.
Mori Rom and Jordan.
Second.
We have a motion a second in discussion by the council.
Any discussion by the audience.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye aye opposed.
Abstentions.
That passes with the 50 vote.
And I think in the history of the city this may be the first person because now the voting age is now 18.
He voted.
I know in the last election.
And I think he's the first high school student appointed to a committee.
Congratulations Mr. Warren.
So learn a lot more hard.
Okay.
The next item.
The next item is the landmarks.
And this one may not get through with landmarks and historic districts.
The suggestion was made that Jason Boyet be recommended by the committee.
You know the name I saw in here that I would like us to discuss is Greg Bynam.
Greg was involved in the.
The same board.
With the chamber.
Convention of visitors.
He operates he's the president of the education credit.
He and his family has a long history here in and border.
He's very interested in those old buildings and downtown and other parts of town too.
But.
And I would somebody speak for Jason Boyet.
I don't know him.
He has a good application.
But I simply don't know him.
But obviously when you're doing these, you're trying to get a number of names out in your
Picking from a list.
So did you guys have anything else specific?
And he's a professional writer.
More than a dozen books with religious history.
He did the columns in the Emerllo magazine.
And he's interested in local history.
And his father was an architect.
Father's an architect and designed many of the church's built in the
Emerllo in the 1980s.
Good pick to.
Does anybody want to make a motion?
Mayor Will.
Yeah.
I'll make a motion that we approve Jason Boyet in replaceable independent for the board of review.
Len Marx and historic district.
Second.
We have a motion to second.
Any discussion from the council?
I just want to say I know I thought I saw Lyndon here.
So.
So thank you for serving on the board.
Lynd is now in with the mothership at the city.
So she can't be on the board anymore.
But I appreciate your time on it.
We've put her to more work.
Is there any any discussion from the audience?
We have a motion to second.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Negquent.
Opposed .
Oppbest things that passes.
Okay.
The other one that I saw in-
Wait a second?
Construction it.
Yes.
It is.
Let me Yeah.
Okay.
Construction Advisory.
Let me sitama.
The city.
The committee suggests a real point.
Je brain.
I strongly recommend we do that.
I'm not sure if y'all saw this, but Richard Constancio was appointed to fill in air.
He's only been on the boards since 15.
Yes, that's an error.
I thought it might be.
Yes.
So I hope you'll consider him for re-appointment.
He's done a great job.
He's just getting settled in.
Right.
That was just some of you guys.
Yeah.
Francis helped me clarify that.
Okay.
Then the other one that was suggested is Ron Johnson.
I think that would replace Frank who's served admirably and done a huge amount of work
on that board.
Ron Johnson also fits right in that those foot prints he's a plumber has extensive history
here and has offered his services.
The board with the subcommittee suggested Jeff Bryant, Ron Johnson.
I'm just asking you, consider Richard Constancio also an executive motion.
I'd also like to ask that we make these motions individually for people.
Okay.
Mayor, I think that though, with Ron, I think there's an issue on with the City Secretary
and I think he might not be, I would draw right now.
Okay.
So can we take action on the two and we'll consider that last appointment later.
Do you all mind if we do?
What about Eddie?
What about Eddie Barron now?
Eddie Barron is a very qualified person.
Has a huge amount of experience subcommittee.
What?
Was he the engineer?
Yes.
42 years experience as an engineer has had a lot of projects obviously well qualified.
Yeah, that's why we popped them in there.
Yeah, that's why we had.
Okay, with that.
I'm good with it.
I just want to make sure we still have a plumber.
As a consensus, well, we really don't then have a plumber.
I don't believe.
Do we?
Well, that's been what we've tried to do is get one from each trade area, but he doesn't.
He doesn't.
Eddie Barron's solid.
I mean, I'm good with him.
Okay.
Do we, we can also consider, yes, we want to do these individually.
So could I hear a motion, the suggestions have been Jeff Bryant reappointment, Richard Constancio reappointment.
He's been in a short term and possibly Ron Johnson, but could I hear a motion for them individually?
Mary, I'm going to read a point, Jeff Bryant.
Exactly.
We have a second.
Any discussion from the council?
Any discussion from the audience?
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed?
That passes with a five-o vote.
The next one, any other nominations.
Mary, I'm going to move it.
We reappoint Richard Constancio.
We have a motion.
We have a second.
We have a motion in the second.
Any discussion from the council?
Any discussion from the audience?
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed?
That passes with a five-o vote.
The other name that was mentioned, do we have any motion for Ron Johnson?
Well, I'm sorry.
Eddie Barron.
Yes.
Eric Barron.
Mr. Miami, I just asked for a point of clarification.
Please.
Is there any prohibition in the ballaus or rules that would preclude this Eric, Eddie Barron from serving in the third?
Is there, would that hurt you talk about Frank Wilbur and I guess was a farmer?
I do not believe so.
I think we are just trying to get a cross section of expertise.
No.
It's unlike the community development committee where we have to have people in different sections of the town.
We've had great experiences with some of these people.
There is no one, and I can ask staff to comment, but I heard unbelievably good comments about our current plumber that's on there.
He's done extraordinary work to help us stay up with things and I think he's learned as he's gone through this process more about what the requirements are in the state requirements.
And federal requirements and all that.
So, it's done a youngman's effort to keep that thing moving and to talk to other people in his peer group that are out doing this work every day in the field.
But I'm the council member, I'm not really sure you're question about it.
I'm very.
Frank's plumbing.
He's been at more meetings with.
I think the other reason we suggested replacing him, he's been on air since 2000.
I don't disagree.
I just want to ask one clarification.
This may know this does this board.
Some of our boards have trade specific spots.
Is this one of them?
I'm sorry.
Okay.
Well, I think if you.
It does have.
Can we can we get clarification out while we go to the next one or Scott?
Do you know off top of your head?
The requirements.
This is Scott McDonald building safety and various other things.
Animal men go off air.
Go ahead Scott.
Yes, Mayor.
The board is aligned with each of the trades so that the plumber.
The board specifically states if you're taking a plumber off or putting a plumber on.
So you need a plumber.
An electrician heating cooling and an engineer.
An electrical contractor architect.
And then you have an individual at large.
Okay.
I'd be interested.
Will Warren's going to come off and you need to replace him with a plumber.
Or he'll be in at least in the position until it's replaced.
We've taken action on Jeff Bryant and Richard Constantio agreed.
Yeah, we suggest we wait and do a little more homework.
I agree.
You guys go back to work.
Okay, Scott.
Thank you.
You got it.
Okay.
Next item is.
Well, so.
Go ahead.
Do you want to do a coil creek pad?
Please, absolutely.
I take a nomination for a coil creek grid.
Obviously, we all know that they are suggested by the pad.
They fit their qualifications.
We're pretty much giving a approval of that.
Well, Mr. I think we need to delay this one for.
Similar reason that he may not be eligible.
All right.
It's very good.
Okay.
Okay. Now we.
We have one that I hope we can get through tonight, but we may not be able to, but let me give you some rundown on this and I'll give you some history and then you see.
So, and I may actually ask, because we have a person, a staff person that serves with these people to make sure they're spending the money right, and she does a really good job, but Potter County event center.
The chairman, Glenn McManamy, has asked, we have day au Williams, who would be a reappointment. He was asked to serve in 16 to fill out a job. So, he under our policy.
Mayor Harpole and Dell Williams is actually appointed by Potter County. You're two that are up for reappointment.
We only have two. Well, I had three yellowed on my sheet. That's fine.
Would be Mr. Bivance and Mr. Ruffer.
Okay, now we understand these people have long served on these committees. Mr. McManamy has two.
This, we are not the only group that serves on this committee. There are people from other venues that do.
And in those cases like on the Canadian water authority, we don't want to lose our stature and our tenure when there's a group of people meeting.
So, the only argument that I have about let's consider possible reappointments. You may not wish to do that, but.
Well, again, you know, the only reason that we have this is to follow the term limit kind of policy, but that said when there are exceptional cases, especially when people are in the middle of something or have you unique.
The point of, you need to point of unique information to help these boards function. I think that's completely us to wave that and determine who the right person is.
It is and it's wise and actually the chairman is that they both be reappointed. That's Mr. Glenn McManamy who served a long time too, but knows what to do.
And let me tell you that this isn't just a fluff board. These guys get out and do a lot of work in the community, but they do physical work at the events and other things.
So it's a hard working board. I don't have that in my packet as far as I'm sorry. Let me look and see the venue district, right? Yes, sir.
I got it in mind, but you may not have it.
Mr. Mayer, if it, if it, if the council would, and it holds me, I would like for us to pass on this to see you.
I agree. Okay, let's pass.
I was just going to give it to that, but if we're going to pass, let me get my sheet.
Let's pass and we'll have more discussion about that. So subcommittee, would you go back to work on this one?
Do you have some homework? Yes, that's good.
Okay, let's see if there's any others and then what we want to do with these last ones.
Okay, so, let's try to show you what it was.
Michelle, our assistant city manager that also monitors this.
I would like you to tell us what you've heard because the Emerald Hospital District Board of Managers was recommended by the subcommittee.
And we did today get Dr. Biggs application.
I personally think he's an excellent candidate for this. We also got a few days ago or a while ago.
Medea, lace and more parameter. And her application is also stellar. And my view, I don't know either of those.
I had a lengthy conversation with her. She's very, she's well qualified and she's very excited about being on the board.
I would personally like to re-appoint Smith Ellis and then do Mindy Lou and play some Mark Lawxton and then do Richard Biggs in place because we had three seats.
Is that correct?
I think that's a wise choice from my standpoint.
Is there any discussion from the council about those items?
Mr. Mayor, if council member, Berkett would make that in a form of emotion, I'd be glad to second day.
So let's do an individual if we could.
I don't have that.
Okay, so, yeah.
I know, but who are they replacing here?
Well, Biggs is coming down here.
Well, let's do the reappointment first.
We could.
Mayor, I wouldn't believe the list we have up here.
A small force, the paper.
The reappointment of someone that was just elected as chairman.
I'll, I'll make the motion.
Mr. Mayor, I move that we appoint Smith Ellis to the hospital district board of managers.
And would you like to second that, Mr. Berkett?
Yes, second.
He'd like to second that.
So any discussion from the council?
You guys get to watch us make sausage today.
Any discussion from the council?
Any discussion from the audience?
Calling the vote all those in favor.
Please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions that passes with a five-o vote.
With that?
Mayor, I would also like to suggest,
Mindy-Lose, see more parameter and replace a marklockstone.
Thank you.
Do we have a second?
Second.
We have a discussion from the council.
Or from the audience.
I'd entertain a motion.
Or we have a motion.
Excuse me.
We have a second.
All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions that passes with a five-o vote.
We have one last spot open.
Anybody want to make an nomination?
Would you please.
Mayor, I move that we appoint Richard Diggs to replace.
No, I'm just speaking.
It's just being.
Abstual.
I'm just speaking.
Abstual.
We appoint Richard Diggs to replace Chuck's feet.
And we have a second.
Second.
Any discussion from the council?
Any discussion from the audience?
Does anybody out there know what we're doing?
Okay.
Believe it or not.
We spent hours on it.
And there's a poll packet on the stuff.
And I know you don't believe us, but that's okay.
Okay.
So we have a motion in a second.
And I believe it's for Dr. Richard Biggs.
Now I want to clarify for council that it happens that his son is an attorney.
And he has another son that serves on another board.
This is a well qualified person that would give great support to that group.
So all those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions.
That passes with a five o'clock.
All right.
Let me take account of where we are.
All right.
So here's another one that we have.
Let me go back and recap this.
And I'm asking somebody to picture that I'm saying this correctly.
You know the council has quietly been working with a group of citizens around the town for a period of over two years to develop a senior center.
We hired somebody to run that.
We're now placing that board in place.
And we've had suggestions.
And I would like to read some of those and tell you that I hope we get act on some of these.
Some of these appointments are not ours.
They're product counties.
Others.
But we have the ability to point four positions on this board.
I think out of ten open positions.
Is that?
Linda, do you know if that's correct?
Okay.
So we have 11 of them that are prescribed by how we set this up.
But we aren't trying.
And we're trying to do the four at large.
Do I don't even have the list of the others here?
Are we going to?
Are we dealing with those tonight?
I thought just the at large.
I think our group was catching on to all this.
Malarkey we passed on to them.
So they probably just looked at those four.
We just did the four at large.
And so if you.
You have the other list.
If you would and those are really prescribed and they fit that prescriptions.
So I hope you'll consider those.
Do you have any mayor?
How many positions are we for?
And there's four large out of those 15 and the four at large.
You're given a suggestion on is what I think we need to talk about.
Oh, if we're going to see 10 more.
11 new applications.
Can we just do the at largest tonight and look at the other if we certainly could.
I think.
I mean, Francis, do we know if we've received that question?
I'll go ahead.
Please.
I can tell you who the.
The organizations are the Emerald Senior Citizens Association.
And that board would like for you to appoint Charlene Cole.
They held top senior center.
And that group would like for you to appoint 10 Williams.
The Wesley Community Center and that group would like for you to appoint.
Liz.
Um, alongside.
A panel area agency on aging is Melissa Carter.
The Mary E. Biven Foundation is Judy day.
I should be reading you that the the their positions as well.
Judy days the president of the Biven Foundation.
The Emerald area foundation.
Um, Clay Sterling, who's president of the area foundation.
Baptist Community Services, which is Steve Dowrempel, who is president of BCS.
United Way of Emerald King and would like for you to.
Uh, to appoint Mary Coin, who's a board member for United Way.
This is your ambassador's coalition.
Would prefer that you appoint Jilline workman, who is president of the Senior Ambassador's coalition.
Emerald College has asked that you appoint Tony Gray.
Who's the dean of continuing the education and is in charge of the downtown Emerald campus.
Uh, and then, um, the city of Emerald representative.
The, um, the ass there is that you appoint Terry Price.
Who is a member of the Parks and Recreation Board.
And I think I was trying to get Terry Price to stand up as an employee of exile.
I think she left with them.
Oh, there she is. Okay.
All right.
So folks, let me kind of go back and explain how this explain how this happened.
We very much wanted the individual senior groups to suggest somebody.
And I think that's where we got those first three.
Panel area and agency, of course, a part of PRPC.
They have somebody who works in this every day and that's Melissa Carter.
The other foundations are funding this.
They deserve a seat at the table.
I hope they have, I'm sure they've made good at poems.
I hope, uh, will honor what they've asked for.
Obviously, United Way, Senior Ambassadors Coalition, Emerald College.
Everybody, hopefully, knows Tony Graham where she's done at that college.
Uh, for people that are in need.
And, um, so, I'm going to ask that we,
Well, I'm going to break the rule and ask if we can consider these first.
Uh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
11.
They're suggested.
And then we go back and deal with their at large, which the committee discussed.
So I'd entertain a motion for those 11.
Suggested us by the agencies.
They're going to operate this.
Yes.
I mean, if that we approve.
Those.
Those 11 that we're just regular.
Okay.
And we have the sheet on them.
We do have.
Yeah.
We got a motion.
We have a motion.
She knows them all.
They have a motion.
And they're all great appointees.
There.
We have it.
Yeah.
We've all found it now with all our other stuff.
So we have a motion.
And we have a second.
And it was there any discussion further than what we've already done from the council.
Or from the floor.
I'd enter.
We will vote.
Vote.
And all those in favor.
Please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Extensions.
That passes the 50 vote.
Now let's go to those four suggested ones.
Mr. Mayor, if you would.
I would like to offer a name for the consideration.
Because here you have Mr. Lane workman who you just approved.
Up here as a representative from the senior and.
Ambassador's coalition.
So she made it under our list for opt for.
At large also.
Yeah.
Okay.
What do you have a lot of.
Mr. Shirley heard.
Have you been able to talk to her?
Yes.
Do we have to talk to her?
Yes.
We don't.
She's there is a.
Her name is previously.
It's just mentioned.
It's on the.
If you look on the bottom.
Yes.
I got it.
And we've talked about her.
Yes.
For other things too.
So you know that we're.
Council.
I certainly entertained that as a substitute for.
Jelene workman who we.
The subcommittee simply duplicated that not knowing the other names.
She's.
Jelene workman's excellent.
But so would.
I would also like to even though we made.
The series of names are recommendation.
I had a really great conversation with Steve Hoyl today.
And I cannot dispute his passion for.
This mission.
In the committee.
So.
I know we recommended a few names.
And here I go.
Recommending a new one.
The 11.
But there's a great conversation.
And that's the kind of passion we need.
The only other one that's come up in this as we reviewed these.
And you had a huge task to go through all these boards.
Council member.
And I acknowledge because we did it.
Try to do it before.
We've had Deborah Cummings readings be suggested.
And she is on the list.
She lives in North.
West.
And she's been a resident 59 years.
I just don't want.
And I know Steve Hoyl.
I know he.
He worked very hard.
But.
Okay.
So let me.
Let me do this.
Do we mind going back.
I know that we have some that.
Pretty generally agreed on by.
You know, your suggestions and nobody's raised any concern.
Chris Bell and Wayne Woodward.
Janet buyers was there too.
And.
And Deborah Cummings.
Bob Goodrich.
And.
Steve Hoyl.
But we have three more appointments left.
And I really think that.
I would like you to consider Chris Bell and Wayne Woodward.
Well, can I I would like to nominate Wayne Woodward Chris Bell and Bob Goodrich.
Well, I think we'd like to take these individually.
Okay.
Well, I'll start with Bob Goodrich.
Is there a second for Bob Goodrich?
Second.
Any discussion about Bob Goodrich?
I think he has a third.
Great education.
Third.
That's what he tries to convince us.
He tries to push off on.
That's what he's worth.
Mr. Goodrich is worth.
They're underrepresented in.
As a statement,
In fact, that's his own joke.
We're making sausage without you.
Would you respond?
We have a motion, now are we taking that individual first? Okay, we have a motion, a second, a discussion. I just simply would say that while Bob comes here often, I want these committee meetings to move along, and I would challenge if we approve that to make sure these don't get bogged down.
I'm not going to make any more comment than that other than we have a lot of people that want to serve on this board. We have a lot of people that would definitely move that board forward.
I might be one of those two. Any other comments? No.
With that, I'll just need any discussion further by the council or by the audience.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed aye. abstentions. That passes with a four one vote. The next person.
We could possibly appoint. We have.
I think I'm right. We got three other positions to deal with there.
I'd nominate Chris Bale. She's worked Texas Department of Aging and Disabilities, knowledge of senior programs.
Second, we have a motion and a separate Chris Bell. Any other discussion about Chris Bell?
Christine Chris Bell any discussion from the audience. All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Opposed. abstentions. That passes with a five-o vote. We have one more position and the names that still were served on the table.
We have two more. I believe you're right. We've taken action. I think we're right. You're wrong this time.
You get one mistake a year. That's it. Okay. So Wayne Woodward, Janet Buyers, Deborah Cummings,
Reddings, and Steve Hoyle. And we have two positions to fill. Did you see another one that I missed?
Mr. Deemers. Oh, she really heard. You know, she was willing to serve.
Let's just take her. You know, I met met her. She has a passion for, you know, the downtown senior citizen.
But you know, if we have several great people. I'd like to know more about Steve Hoyle.
If that's Mark, would you fill him in on Steve Hoyle? Would you have an application for me?
Yeah. I'll just be in your packet. Instead of what I know, I mean, you know, like I said, the conversation I have today was very positive and very passionate guy.
And I'll just read here from his application. He's been a financial planner for 28 years.
It's passionate about seniors and feel we have to have a paradigm shift to strengthen programming to make seniors an integral part of our society.
So he really wants to be involved in the whole community development with the senior population.
I'm going to Steve for years. And I would second that recommendation.
Did we have a motion on this? Well, I'll make the motion. I have a motion. We have a second discussion from the council.
discussion from the audience.
All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Aye.
Abstentions. That passes with a four one vote. So I believe we have one left.
I would like to nominate Wayne Woodward. He's a retired nurse practitioner.
Todd, she instructor, dammer. We'll see in your citizen center. So he can keep order.
Okay. You have a second. You know, a title is like a gavel.
We have a motion in a second. Any of these guys from the council? Yes, sir. Please.
You know, my concern is.
And perhaps I need to maybe I'll abstain on this because I'm a I'm a senior.
I mean, I know I don't look at, but I'm a bona fide senior citizen.
I understand when we have professionals being a part of planning.
But there's also a need for regular seniors.
They get there. They get their social security. They get there.
And they get their Medicare and they get they pay their 140 dollars a month.
I don't know how I know that for you know, for Medicare B. Who do we have here that represents that person?
Let me let me tell you something that I've learned about. Charlene Cole absolutely represents that. She was the head of the Senior Center for a few years.
She's the one that really presented the idea that they were not going to survive as they were.
And she worked with this group quietly for a couple years.
Helped in list to help of every one of those agencies that are now giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support this ever.
City obviously is in this too with her employee and with managing this.
But Charlene Cole certainly fits those qualifications you had.
Liz Raskon runs the Wesley deal and she is a hidden talent in my view.
And I think she absolutely represents the entire community.
I would like to say if the larger Mr. Demerson wants to nominate surely heard I will second it.
Well we have a motion on the floor so we need to take care of that motion.
We have a motion we have a second.
Do we do we not have we get a second.
I don't think we have a second.
It's loses for lack of a second and you'd like to make an additional.
You've made an motion now the floor is open.
Yes thank you council member. I would I would make a motion for Mr. Shirley heard second.
We have a motion for Shirley heard.
Any discussion from the council.
Any discussion from the audience.
All those in favor of signify by saying aye aye aye aye.
Opposed abstentions that passes with a five o vote.
I think we filled your board.
You better get to work now.
We keep saying that tonight.
We've got this community development advisory committee is the only one left that.
Yes and we have I would like staff to give us an update Mr.
James Allen.
We do have requirements and from the list you guys gave us.
There's a couple.
Miss steps maybe there because one of those.
There's people that are required to serve from different quadrants.
I might just start the discussion by saying that.
Wait a second.
Everybody get out your list for this.
Yes.
Mayor that that's exactly right and what we tried to do is look at zip code and see who is in what area.
And I think that we attributed a person to the wrong area.
I think so.
But we're not sure that.
Let's double check it because there was I think council member.
We can't have a big question about that.
Well I had a line.
I had nominated Mariah strong woods but tonight support that.
But we're told that she could still fit because she's either in.
She is in southwest.
Are you in southwest?
Okay.
Good.
So was Jerry Glover.
I thought one of them was in southeast.
Well I.
I let's take action on that.
She was kind of applying for board.
She's worked hard.
Yes.
Can we get a.
I would make a motion if that's.
If that's.
It is a trouble.
Second steps.
We got a motion in a second.
The discussion from the council.
In the discussion from the audience.
All of them favor.
Please signify by saying aye.
Opposed.
Extensions.
That passes with the five of.
Thank you for your work.
Okay.
Now we have other areas that we got to cover.
You just still have northeast of southeast.
I'm going to suggest.
I think you guys may miss this.
I'm not sure.
I'm not going to get any accusations.
But Gilbert Gusman was just appointed to tell the term.
He was appointed to five.
Fifteen.
He's had.
Poked.
Printing forever.
He lives in northwest.
He is a solid citizen involved in.
Quinas and other things.
He is.
I'm not.
Okay.
I don't want to make the nomination.
But it's a reappointment.
All.
Do you want to make the nomination?
That's a lot.
Thank you.
Excuse me.
I'm moving.
We reappoint Gilbert Gusman.
Second.
We have a motion in a second.
Gilbert Gusman.
Can you discuss from the council?
Can you discuss from the audience?
All those in favor.
Please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions.
That passes with the five of.
I do believe he was on our initial list.
I don't know.
I don't know where to drop.
Yes.
Something happened.
You guys didn't dig a secretary with you.
Next time.
Take a dig.
I know.
All we had is a burger.
Would you tell us what else we have?
Example.
Great.
So you got this too.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks.
Listen up here.
We're still with us yesterday.
We're still reviewing south east.
We really don't.
Okay.
We go to tonight.
Yeah.
Forget everybody.
For everybody out there listening.
at some of the most difficult decisions,
never as enough money to do everything they need
and want and should do,
they really discern, they go visit, they go look,
but we need a person from which quadrant?
North East to southeast.
And we need a southeast and a northeast,
and you can go online, press boards and commissions,
see that application fill it out,
or you certainly can come in,
we'll give you a handwritten one,
you can handwrite and give to us, okay?
Any one of the council members or the city secretary.
So we need people to sign up for that one.
I guarantee you're going to work,
and you're going to learn stuff about cities,
extraordinary, and not simple, tough stuff.
So it's a good board.
What else?
I think we got most of them.
I would like to just suggest that we start
the interview process on economic development,
or set a date to where everybody can be there.
I think that's great, so let's review,
we have actually 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 people
who have expressed interest.
We have applications on all 10 of them from what I can tell,
and you were able to pick four, and we have a great group,
and I certainly think we want to narrow down
and interview four.
Could you all tell us how you picked those four out of these?
It's a great number of people.
I picked Paul Christie, I was one of them.
Paul's just kind of a real success story,
and kind of started on his own, and he's built
a nice, real estate empire for lack of a better word,
apartment, and a complex, he's a real savvy businessman,
okay, highly respecting.
And then the other ones, I think we're suggest
that it was Joshua Rave, who has the franchise
for Chick-fil-A on Georgia, that's great.
And he has been, I think it took him two times
to get through Emerald at 101,
because he's busy devil with kids,
and he is expressed interest in it.
He's turned in an application.
One of the other ones, you suggested, was Laura Strutho.
I really think we should interview,
and the last one, you suggested was Bill Summaford,
who you're suggesting interviewing.
The only other ones I saw, and if I'm just going through this,
Rob Parker has a significant job,
development type things, and the only other person I saw
was David, her was Brian Hudson,
who's grew up here, went to school,
left, went to Denver, came back,
and worked for Excel, and is interested.
So, my only concern with Brian, he's a fine young man,
I just think this particular board is,
it's really, you know, I think when he's some season veterans
on it personally, I would argue that,
I just also want to give a chance to find young people.
He's a great guy.
And I know you do too, so.
I think a lot of him and his father.
All right, so let's set it, if you don't mind,
let's pull up our calendars, and I know one of these candidates
will be back in town on the eighth,
and I think that leaves us where we interview
sometime next week.
Council is that okay, if we try and set interviews on the eighth,
what is?
Well, the eighth or after, we're gonna have to get them and make sure.
How do you all, and then we take action,
hopefully the next week.
So we've got, we can do it from the eighth on,
and I think get a hold of every one of these from what I'm hearing,
just doing a little scouting.
Is that okay with you all?
Eight to nine through ten, we set up interviews.
And may I, I will be in my team leadership class.
So let's do at the ninth or tenth or the 13th or 14th.
But now, let's say the ninth to the 10th, I agree.
I don't want, I absolutely agree.
So ninth or 10th, everybody can, what's the day of the week of the ninth?
That's the Thursday and then Friday.
So let's try Thursday.
Let's do the ninth.
Okay.
The days away from the weekend, let's staff, would you get a hold of,
and I think we're, let's be sure we agree on this.
We're gonna ask Bill, some of her, Paul Christie, Laura Street,
and Joshua Rift, to come in and interview.
Is that the consensus of the council?
Yes.
Any, any, what do you want to challenge that consensus?
Council member Demerson, you look like you got a question.
You know, hour, when is our new city manager?
We think Monday is Monday the 13th or the 13th, but he'll be here by the year, by the next one of you.
Right now, he's enjoying moving.
The reason I ask is because I know that we have, you know, with all of the economic development
that we're talking about now and the partnership with AEDC and other entities,
do we want him on board?
May not hurt.
I don't want to delay this long, but here's the other thing to consider that you're wise
to bring up.
We're in the middle of a approximately $175,000 study, broadly encompassing all types of economic
development in our city, whether it be the job type or expansion of sales tax effort or
reviving older areas of town, which I know is an important thing to everybody on this council.
I do not want to delay this very long, but I'd say, well, no, the new city managers, he wants
to be involved over the AEDC and I think Barry and him are kind of on the same page, so I certainly
don't have a problem if we want to postpone it until he gets here.
If we are not far as that council is consensus, I think that's a good idea.
It's a consensus.
We'll move that to, well, we're going to move it to, if he gets here to the 13th, we'll try and
set it up.
So let's preliminarily talk to those people, see if they can do it late in the week of the 13th,
which would be the 16th, or if we want to go, or if we want to go to...
That's Thursday, so I'm emimicking that date. Or if we want to go to the following week, would you be the 23rd?
I think on the 5th week, may have LGC, I think you're trying to schedule it.
Yeah, the 6th, that's what I was going to say. You said 5th, does do 16th.
Well, let's try 16th or 23rd, let's work it out. Certainly don't want to go to the 23rd.
Okay, so we're going to do those then. All right, was there any others of these appointments that we missed the boat on?
We covered it.
Yeah.
Just for clarification, the ones that you're still looking to act on, do you want those posted at your next meeting for action?
Let's go back and see, we are, which ones are we still working on.
The venue district?
And the, you've got the instruction.
How quick are your 7th committee get that work done?
Well, we've got animal welfare, we need the point, and we need the venue construction of those.
And a construction advisory.
You know, I don't think the 7th committee on that animal welfare, could we each try and call those people and see what we think?
Yeah, that's fine.
Can we do that? We've only got two people really talking about, let's see what we think, and then we'll come back and deal with that one.
So let's post the animal control for next week. We're, it's our job to get those done before then.
What are the other ones?
Well, we could post the venue too, and just if we don't move on it, we don't move on it.
It's on there.
Let's.
We don't.
Quill Creek as well.
Let's put it up in Quill Creek as well.
Let's put those up.
And we're then.
You get the community development committee.
Construction advisory.
The community development.
James, if you can find anybody quickly and get them to us, we'll, this guy.
Okay.
At some point, I'd like to have another just quick conversation.
If this process is still working for us, if it's broken.
We do a lot of horses tonight.
We can't have a better description of pointing these boards on.
I think Councilmember Demosil would agree, then it's like making sausage.
So we get now that we've got these great applications.
It's not simple.
Right.
Well, I don't think we're going to say that.
Thank you.
For your work.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
We're glad you took it.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Okay.
We're getting done patting ourselves on the back.
Yeah.
I think we're to the consent agenda.
I think we're close.
Let me get back to my gang to agenda here.
Mayor, just to recall.
Councilmember Nair asked when you go through the consent agenda.
If you.
We'll pull the sign of a brief.
A brief report on the purchase for heavy trucks.
Yeah.
Kind of regretting that one.
Yeah.
Trent and Glen have been waiting here.
I'm going to hit the gavel if you guys don't settle down.
The consent agenda.
It's recommended that following on is be approved that the city manager be authorized.
Execute all documents necessary for each transaction.
I'll read them.
Then I'll ask if anybody wants to remove one for separate consideration.
A is the purchase of heavy truck.
B is the approval of water tower lease agreement.
C is the approval of authorized two year extension of ambulance service permit grant.
To emerala medical response.
Incorporated.
A M R.
And the number B is the approval of emerala medical response.
Extraordinary rate increase of 2.935 percent.
The any items that need to be removed for separate consideration.
Councilmember Nair.
Mr. Mayor, I appreciate if we can remove A just to have a little conversation.
A quick one.
Absolutely.
Any other.
Any other discussion needed about the other items.
Mayor, the only point of clarification to make on the AMR.
You all will recall that you asked for.
Since it includes the removal of the advisory board.
We have staff has talked with all the members of the advisory board.
And there are no objections to that being removed.
And the medical director of course will still remain a part of that board.
And there's a copy in your packet of the kind of report that would provide it to you all
Quarterly because that was one of the things you'd asked about as well.
Thank you.
Okay.
So let's take those items left.
We're moving item A for separate discussion.
We're going to have a motion for item B C and D.
Mr. Mayor, move that we approve consent agenda items B C and D.
Second.
Motion to second for B C and D in the consent agenda.
I'll any discussion from the council from the audience.
All those in favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstensions.
That passes with a five vote vote.
Now let's go back to item A.
Mr.
Interim city manager.
If Trent and Glen both wouldn't mind coming up, they can kind of give you a.
I believe the word was quick.
Yes.
Right.
References to the process.
It's your through.
Mayor council.
If I understand your question.
Drag me.
You wanted to know about policies or procedures for purchasing related to why we don't get more vendors.
Yes.
On this.
Sir, do you mind coming up closer to that, Mike?
That devil is.
Thank you.
On this particular truck.
I'll be purchasing.
Has 98 registered vendors that have told us.
They want to sell trucks to us.
So the buyers will create the list.
We mail that 98 letters to vendors.
An interest letter that said go to publicpurchase.com.
Download the bid.
Of the 98 letters we sent out.
34 vendors.
Downloaded the actual bid.
Of that.
We got five bids or 14 bids to five vendors.
A lot of our truck manufacturers will sell more than one product line.
So we request that each individual bid being its own envelope.
So we sent out 98.
34 downloaded it and we got five.
I think most of our truck dealers and Glenn and I know that weight black from premier truck is in the audience.
But you would have to go a considerable distance to not get premier or summit or rush or
Brutner's because they're surrounded the area.
I know like for summit I was working with transit earlier in the year on a bid.
And they would have had to gone to Denver to find the nearest truck beer that wasn't a summit truck.
Okay.
So we're consolidated within this area with these guys.
That's true.
Okay.
It's just that it had been meaning to ask us for a while every time I look at the bid results.
But then when I see that we have one bid and we have an awful lot.
You know, so that answers the question about.
Because I didn't know how the process worked from sending out from the city.
So it's a letter that goes out and they actively engage to download the bid.
I got it.
Okay.
That's it for me.
I'm good.
Any other discussion from the council?
Thank you very much.
I'd entertain a motion.
Mr. Mayor, I move will we approve consent agenda item A.
Second.
The motion of the second for consent agenda item A.
Any discussion from the council?
From the audience?
All those favor please signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Abstentions.
That passes with a 50 go.
Okay.
Well, that concludes the regularly scheduled agenda of the number of city council.
And I want to be sure that everybody.
I'm going to ask everybody please take their seat.
Sir, you in the back.
Would you please take a seat?
Thank you.
I'm going to ask that everybody.
Listen to this statement very clearly.
It's customary at this time to allow citizens of this community.
With matters not on the agenda pertaining to cities, policies, programs, and services, speak to the council.
The floor is not open for any other comment.
I don't like using this so gavel, but if I need to, I need to.
And our council, our council cannot respond to these.
I know many of you that I see faces out here today have never been here before.
Understand the rules.
We cannot respond to this.
We can't let you discuss an item that was on the agenda.
And we will accept no personal attacks at all.
And we will ask you to make comments that have to do a city policy program to the services.
If you are up here to do anything else, I'm going to ask you to explain at the beginning.
How it has to do with policy program and services.
It doesn't.
I'm only going to ask you to not comment in this arena.
This is not what this is for.
You had the luxury and pleasure of seeing.
The council at work.
I've seen councils at work for 12 years.
We are here to do the business of the city.
We're not here for other things.
Now, I will tell you, some people get up week after week after week.
And if you'll notice their comments always have to do with policy programs or services.
And they always have to do with items when they're on the agenda and we speak to agenda items.
The thing I'll caution you is, if you do come to that podium,
you're not here to speak to the audience.
We're here to do our job and learn.
We have a requirement to do this and we're trying to do it.
So, I'm going to ask that we maintain order in that way.
When we see a crowd, we're concerned.
Mr. City Attorney, I'd like you to add to the reasons that we're so restrictive and why yet we're so generous.
And in this city, not us, but this city has been generous about these public comments.
I'd be happy to hear.
As we've discussed before, and I think you'll see on the screen in a minute.
The Attorney General of the State of Texas and actually the express language of the Texas Open meetings act provides that
at a public forum or citizen comment section, such as the one that's provided by the Emerald City Council here,
is to allow you to speak about items such as related to in the policy the mayor mentioned earlier.
But the City Council cannot respond.
The elected officials cannot respond except to ask that an item be placed on the future agenda,
make a statement of fact, or a declaration of established existing city policy.
The reason for that is the item that you may raise at this public forum is not posted on the agenda for other citizens to comment about.
Are to hear.
So it is a very strict requirement and this council has adhered to that requirement as well.
I would also like to add mayor something I don't believe I've mentioned in this city council meeting before.
When you stand at the podium, you do not have the protections against libel and slander that a public official does.
You're just standing at a podium.
So keep that in mind that's one reason we do not allow public comment typically on board on particular individuals who are nominated for boards and commissions because.
Some you may not be aware of what you're saying about them in public.
But keep in mind that you do have those restrictions that apply and it's a very strict requirement of the Texas Open meetings act.
May you're about your your response and non response.
So I would ask anyone that has a public comment to come forward.
We ask you to begin with your name and your address keeping those in mind and to keep your comments under three minutes.
Thank you.
Good evening, Mayor.
Jim Lauder, 6723, Emerald Court, Emeril.
42 years ago, I left the Panhandle area where I grew up in the T. Barty Ranch and Beaver County up in Oklahoma to go to college and serve our country.
And after 38 years of garnering skills, knowledge, abilities.
Mostly paid for by taxpayers and taxes elsewhere.
I've come home to Texas six years ago and I'm here tonight to announce that I want to give back some of that knowledge skills and abilities to the citizens of Emeril.
Because I've filed a candidate treasure report to run for the Office of Mayor.
This is a copy. I mailed the original, but I brought a copy for the city secretary if she would like it.
And I'd like to say that if I can measure up to Elijah Demerson's concern for listening to people.
And Lisa Blake's ability to be civil and Paul Harpole's deep knowledge of the city.
And Randy, like James Bond, even though he may be a crude instrument, if I can live up to his courage to speak truth to power.
And Mark Knayer's hard work, intellect, imagination.
If I can live up to half way, then we, in the next city council, can do a fantastic job.
Thank you.
Good luck.
My name is Edith Deach Moss of 1613, B. Bowie Street, Emeril.
Mayor, Mayor, City Council members and guests.
I'm a woman of very strong, Christian faith. I've come to ask you for protection for our immigrants, specifically our Muslim population population.
I'm extremely grieved by our current President's executive order that effectively bans all Muslims from the seven Middle Eastern countries.
Of those seven countries, we have people from Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan in Amarillo.
I'm reminded of the person that I serve, of a man that I serve very greatly, who was a refugee, and he was a refugee from Herod, because he was trying to kill him.
I'm also reminded in Leviticus 19 that God commanded the Israelites to be to take care of the residents, aliens in their communities, and to treat them as a citizen and to love them in themselves.
I'm also reminded in Micah that says, Oh, mortal, what is it that God requires of you, but to do justice to love kindness and to walk humbly before your God?
And I'm also reminded that Jesus told us in great care and image that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are to love one another as he loved us.
I'm afraid for our Muslim brothers and sisters, especially those of our refugees. I'm afraid for their safety.
For the right to worship as they believe, and I know that there are elements in this community that strongly oppose them.
From 2012 to 2016, Emma Rillo took in 569 refugees.
Of that, that is a small amount in a city of approximately 200,000.
We educate them in our schools. They work in our businesses. They own businesses. They fight for our country.
And they contribute to our community and make our lives much richer and more diverse.
I feel this very personally, because I am the proud first generation.
My grandparents came from Scotland. And so I feel very deeply.
I am asking that you search each of your hearts and ask yourself what Emma Rillo Texas can do to ensure the safety of our Muslim brothers and sisters.
What can we do to be a more welcoming community to our immigrants and refugees?
And I don't expect any answer today, but I would like you to search your hearts and your minds on that question.
I have a resolution.
I'm sorry, but your three minutes is okay.
If you would like to leave something with us, that would be great.
Can I give it to the officer?
Certainly give it to the officer and they'll present it. Thank you.
Good evening. My name is Gus Corey, and I live on 2004 South Bonham Street.
I want to say something along the lines that other lady had said.
Sir, I can't hear you.
Emma Rillo has one of the largest refugee populations in the country, which adds to its diversity.
Now I love the spirit of the city and the kindness and generosity of its people.
Earlier, the Honorable Councilman said that in Emma Rillo we value people.
Some things in the news right now, and I've been had me concerned.
I feel there's a great need for dialogue in this town for understanding.
Mr. Burkett.
Sir, if you are going to make a personal reference, I'd caution you.
Yes, sir.
Not to venue for any personal concerns.
I hope that we find ways to speak with our local Islamic leaders and working class Muslims and refugees in town.
People who represent.
Meet some of the Emerilins who are affected by this negative rhetoric.
Learn about them in their stories.
They're not afraid to you. They're not afraid to this country.
They're not. They are this country.
Many of them have run away from their hometown, shattered by war and hate to come here for safety and liberty.
I'm worried. I don't want to see this city become Victoria Texas or Quebec.
We need to talk. We need to understand one another.
I hope that you all would join me learn more about those difference from you who share the love for Emarello, the love for this country.
Thank you for your comments.
Thank you.
Welcome, sir.
Thank you.
Mark Gold 517 Southwest 770.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor, council.
For your time today, I appreciate everything you do.
That said, I am here to discuss Mr. Berkett's comments on social media.
I will be careful, sir.
In exchange with the name of the resident, the council member say the following.
You are a Muslim and it's no secret how you feel about all Jewish people.
Kyle Bell's is merely a product for environment being homeschooled and brainwashed.
Sir, I'm going to ask you what this has to do with our city's policies.
Yes, sir.
Excuse me. Let me finish.
I want to ask you if you can define how this applies to our city's policies, programs or services.
And also before you go, I'd like our city attorney to remind us how unusual it is to have this comment time at the end of meetings.
We'll give you your time, your help, your clock is held.
Well, Mayor, I guess you're asking me about my experience with other cities.
Yes, I am.
Yes, it is.
An usual for this type of a form at the end of meetings.
Typically, they're held at the start of meetings or not at all.
So, I think Emerilow is in the minority as far as end of meeting public forums.
Like this, often cities at point council member and rotation are a staff member to meet with members of the public.
After meetings and then there can be an interchange, but you don't have that here.
See, the problem I have and I have since I served on this council is we can't respond.
I can't tell you it's in my heart.
You can pour your heart out to us.
We cannot respond either way.
It's illegal for us too.
And so, it's illegal.
If I request a response?
Yes.
We cannot.
And so, I had somebody present.
Well, they thought it was in my heart earlier today.
It's a 180 degrees out from what's in my heart.
And so, I cannot respond to that.
So, I want everybody to understand that he has to hold our hands and say,
You cannot do that.
And I want to ask you if this is the best forum for a message that somebody has.
Our businesses do the city's business.
Fortunately, you were here to see.
This was a pretty complex meeting today.
And we are here to do that.
We're here to understand your issues and a lesson.
But at this point, it is very frustrating that we can't respond.
And so, I'm happy to talk to you afterwards.
The media is here too.
But I would just ask you and ask others that is this the best venue for those comments.
I don't know what's in your heart either.
But I won't get to it because we won't have an exchange today.
Thank you.
You believe it is an appropriate venue on account of the fact that Mr. Berkett is a representative.
And I do have a section here that I'd like to get to quickly all jump ahead to the end of it.
And I do think it is relevant.
Was it city business?
Potentially?
Was it city business?
You heard our business today.
You heard what we had to deal with.
Tell me how it's city business.
Well, sir.
The gentleman earlier referenced Victoria Texas in South Texas.
There was a mosque that was burned down just Saturday evening.
I believe it is city business if there is a aggressive dialogue coming from the city council towards a particular group.
That kind of dialogue can lead to things like what happened in South Texas or I just like to address that briefly.
Understanding that you won't know our answer.
We can't respond.
Please stop the clock for a minute.
We cannot respond.
You won't know what is any of our hearts unless you speak to us after we're allowed legally to visit about it.
But we simply can't respond.
And I do not personally like being judged because I don't respond.
And someone earlier tried to judge my viewpoint.
And they added 180 degrees out.
So I will tell you, I don't appreciate that.
And I don't want somebody trying to set the stage for judging anyone up here.
When you don't know our hearts.
Go ahead.
I was a minute and 13 second.
Yes, sir. I'm simply quoting what Mr. Berkett said.
I'm not making any judgments.
You're a minute.
10 seconds.
Yes, sir.
I would urge all of you who feel the USA is treating you poorly to simply move to the middle east where you can live under Sri Allah and quote.
This type of statement is disturbing because it suggests the council member might not be open to complaints of potentially marginalized community in this city.
Like I said, a mosque in South Texas was set on fire early Saturday morning.
This place of worship has been targeted with the aggressive and divisive language from every level of the government that represents it.
Municipal State and Federal.
Chapter two of the Texas Municipal League Handbook for Mayor Mayors and Council members says quote.
The real task of a city council member is providing leadership and direction for the city in deciding what needs to be done and helping plan what the city will be for future generations.
Since you can't respond, I wasn't aware of that.
I was going to ask what the council's opinion is.
But I'll jump ahead and just say.
Council member Kett, the newly 700-damerola women and children who marched on January 21st, sir.
They do not appreciate being referred to as Turkey's when they're marching to get their elected officials attention.
I would ask all of you.
I'm sure that you have to visit the local Islamic Community Center and talk to them instead of just making generalizations about over 5,000-year-old residents.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and Council people.
That's good.
My name is Kathleen Fairweather.
My address is five, three, zero, six, south, faint.
And I want to direct this towards the city policy of external communications of the elected officials and city employees.
Madam, do you mind staying close to that mic?
Because I missed part of what you just said.
Okay.
It's hard to do that.
I know, but please.
This is just to address the city policy on external communications with elected officials and with city employees.
So, elected officials answer to all of the people, not just some of the people.
Making hate, hateful comments and dismissing those who don't agree with you is not what our officials are elected to do.
As Americans, we have the right to have our own opinions and remain in our own homes.
Thank you.
Welcome.
That mic's.
Hi.
I'm Virginia Williams.
I'm tri-154 Bowie Street.
I was here today just like I've been on other occasions to talk to you guys about.
Individuals experiencing homelessness in our city.
It's been a year since the ad hoc committee subcommittee that you'll put me on.
Since the council, a listing of five gaps in services.
The top one was needing a low barrier shelter.
I guess it was presented to you guys actually formally on the second of February last year.
So it hasn't been exactly a year yet, but nothing has happened.
Under the y'all investigated the cost of one.
That was a request that I think one of the councilman had made a few meetings ago.
And I think at the working session last week, it was supposed to be put on to the agenda for this week.
But as far as I can tell, it didn't get discussed today.
I know y'all have been emailed by some concerned people in the community because we have a.
The person in our community who is so.
Dead set on they're being a low barrier shelter built that he's been hunger striking for over.
Because it's 31 days today is not consumed any food.
That is of great concern to me.
I know that plenty of people have criticized that action because people have died and still there has not been any action.
That's as far as the city goes as building the low barrier shelter.
But we have another person that's in the process of endangering them.
They're trying to get y'all's attention to at least.
Talk about it if you're not going to do it.
Say you're not going to do it so that the community can come together even more than it has.
We've been providing emergency low barrier shelters through two to organizations.
The past.
Cold season.
Yellow city can y'all reach.
And we're all housing first of both and providing those temporary shelters for when the temperature gets extremely extremely cold because we don't want anyone else to freeze it.
But we really need to have a year round low barrier shelter for the city.
The ad hoc committee came up with it as a solution.
We have a meeting with care.
If I talk to them they all agree.
No one seems to object to the idea to do it.
But it's not moving forward.
So anyway, I just wanted to bring that to y'all's attention again since it's we're at the year anniversary.
That.
Mysteries.
Statement of fact.
There was an absolute disagreement from that subcommittee that came back to us.
There were various views.
And so I would not on that one point.
Excuse me, ma'am.
I would ask you to get with us afterwards because there was widespread disagreement.
There were people that quit the committee because it couldn't be resolved.
They spoke to me.
I'd be happy to talk to you about it.
I personally would be happy to talk to you about it afterwards.
I went to all the continue of care meetings.
I've gone to all the ad hoc committee meetings.
Subcommittee meetings.
Not one person disagreed on the low barrier shelter point.
There were other points of disagreement.
Feed a proposed feeding ordinance which was.
I'll give you a list to disagree after the meeting.
Thank you.
Mr. City manager.
Could you just look into the approximate cost.
What do we cost to maintain one annually or in the cost build one?
And for clarification on the comment that was made regarding the requests for.
You know, and every one of our meetings, we ask is there a request for a written report or a presentation.
A council member.
Nare requested that that one of those be taking up with this particular issue.
I have spoken with council member.
Thank you.
You know, I'm really concerned how I really appreciate you controlling the situation that could possibly come up here.
And one of the things that concern me, though, is your discussion of the public form, which I believe is probably one of the most critical areas where citizens can come and do it in the proper way.
And I've tried to over the times, even though, well, I've got Gabbled and, you know, I've sort of spoken up and, you know, and, you know, my plan is to sit up there.
And, you know, with that reality, I would like to hear from citizens not only from here, but on other forms and things.
And as that citizen, I think I have the right to have my feelings about different things that, even now, I see, I've sort of curbed my passion for our country and for our lives.
Would you help defend and many did, you know? And so, I have a passion about speaking to the government and, you know, and that's what we're at.
So, please, I don't know what the other cities are doing, but if they're not letting people step up and speak.
Now, you can't get into all the other things, and I appreciate you all controlling that, though. Thanks.
Mr. City Manager, I would like, in reference to this, and agenda item next week, in the work session, to talk about alternatives, that I would suggest could be more productive, and I hope the citizens would agree.
As anyone else on the Council want to hear this discussion?
I would. Okay.
Okay. We have three people to want to hear that discussion. It's a discussion. It's not a decision.
Thank you. Anyone else, please?
No, someone left their pan here. I'm Melody Malif, and I live in, I live in Finland.
I wanted to say how grateful I am that some of our bonds passed, especially those for street improvements in for our animal welfare department.
We have desperately needed improvements at our city pound, and we've made great improvements in the last few years, but there's still a lot to be done.
Those bonds are now out and ready to buy because I've looked at them, and I'm getting ready to purchase them.
They're triple I write it insured, and so I would ask all my fellow citizens to look at those.
In that lot, some of those bonds are allocated for street improvements.
I live in a neighborhood that, in Pucket West, we are boxed in from the north. We don't have anybody to get out in the north because of the mall.
On the west side, we have the terror of Sonsi Drive, which the highway department cut off our right turn lane a few years ago.
We have one other way we can get out if we go back south, then we're boxed in on the south by 34th the east on culture.
We don't have a school, we don't have a park, and all those, there's no place if you want to have a picnic, play ball, watch your dog, there's really no place to do that.
So when you're considering all the growth in the community, please remember there are some of us that have been in neighborhoods over 30 years.
We don't have any place to enjoy a lot of these basic things, and would like us citizens for you to consider that.
On that note, we had some street improvements several years ago, and would like to see some of the funds that you're allocating for improvement to go back and sweep up all those rocks.
There's still there. I was walking my dogs last year on a sidewalk, cross an alley, and literally my left foot went forward.
Like I was on roller skates, my right foot went back behind me, and I broke my ankle.
So there's still dangers there. I know the rocks move around, but we really need to allocate some of that money to go back and clean up from the old project,
especially in those entrances to the alleys where those rocks pull. It's a hazard to the young and the old and to people who ride bicycles.
But again, we appreciate your hard work and getting those bonds passed and approved.
I think our city will do good with those improvements and asking the citizens to support those bonds and reap the benefits.
Please, Mr. Luf.
If Kyle, you raise your hand. If you would give Kyle the address, we'll do better because we don't need the extra money.
We already have street sweepers that are already sweep, so we just need to know the street address, and we'll see the entire bucket was.
And we'll relay that onto the streets department.
Mr. Interim City Manager, I would request that we have a roving patrol for a period of time, just like we go through every alley and pick up the with a grapple hook.
That we look at all the streets because we know that that has been a certain and a complaint for many years.
And we sometimes not been able to do that adequately because of weather or whatever.
So I wish we'd review the whole city.
And the focus will be on the streets that had done the seal coating because those are the loose rocks.
We actually, we actually, as a practice, don't sweep residential streets, but those that have gone through seal coating certainly.
And you do, I think, two times if we watch the video, there is a video online telling how that process works.
It's a crummy process, but it's the best one we know of to fix those streets.
I mean, I've literally, when I've walked my dogs pretty regularly, I literally, one day was walking.
There was a man that had a shovel and a trash can and was in the gutter shoveling the rocks out just so he could get him, so he could park there.
Don't question anything you're saying, man, thank you.
Anyone else?
Yeah, I don't know if you're going to go through a quick.
Get rid of 6850 growing down.
I'm going to have to talk real fast because I have a whole lot of things to say.
First off, I want to take off my YCCO hat and put on my Randy Birkett hat.
You're my friend.
I've got your back in any situation, anytime, anywhere.
I just want you to know that.
Thank you.
Now, back on to YCCO.
You're just talking about cleaning up the end of the alleys and stuff like this.
I have a few people that come to me in the past week.
They're so impressed with the generosity of our city and our community that they're wanting to give a little back.
So they're asking me, hey, can we go out and do something for the city?
I told them, I said, I'm sure we can, because everywhere you look, you see trash.
So I've got a crew that's willing to get up.
They're volunteering their time.
I'm going to volunteer my truck and my time and my fuel.
We just want to talk to, I've been talking with James and I've been talking with Kevin.
And we haven't got the details, worked out or anything yet.
But we're going to make this work.
I kind of want to try to get rid of the stigma that people say about the homeless.
They're lazy.
They just don't want to work or they wouldn't be there.
This isn't true.
It is for some of me.
But it's not true as a general rule.
So we're trying to put a little bit of a work program together with the homeless here.
And we're trying to clean our city up, make it look pretty.
These people are just trying to give back a little bit of what they've received from the generosity of all the people in this city.
Our low barrier shelter.
There's no way it would work without the help of the citizens of this city and the surrounding towns.
So, you know, it's, it's what's been making it work.
But these people just want to give a little back.
And so as soon as we can get the details worked out,
I'm asking for y'all support on this program.
I know y'all have a work program already established.
And to me, the success of that work program is so important.
And I will do anything I can to help ensure the success of that program.
But these people, we're just going to do this on our own.
They're just wanting to give back a little bit.
It's not so much that they need to hand out.
They just need to hand up and the hand out that y'all are giving them.
They want to give a little bit back.
So, I'm going to ask for it when we do get the details worked out and stuff.
I am going to ask for y'all support on this in any way we can.
The way I've got it worked out.
I don't think it's going to cost the city anything,
except possibly if we could get y'all to wave the dump fees.
You know, we picked up tires, we'll pick up trash.
We'll scoop up gravel at the end of the alleys.
You just let us know what needs to be done.
We've got it.
Thank you very much.
You can continue the conversation with our staff that have been talking to them.
Thank you.
Anyone else?
Mr. Firmler, 5723, South Malam, I did want to let you down.
I came to apologize to the city commission.
My comments have last week.
I was a little bit out of hand because I wasn't aware of what you were trying to do with the
ADC efforts.
I apologize for that.
I brought up some information from,
Mr. Kyle last week that I was not well informed to know that you guys were all
a polluted.
Thank you for being here.
I do have a comment about Excel, because Excel did a great job along Georgia and 58th
Street and put it up there, putting up there post, post.
They changed it on that.
They also took the uh, they made a location along Washington and 58th Street and
street and have fence that end. They also built a drive that this has large rock that they are
crossing the sidewalk with to get into that lot and they're leaving these large rocks on that
sidewalk as they drive across the sidewalk. There's not a proper entry for, and that's at 58th and
Washington they put up against the railroad tracks or for instance. It's on the west side of the
Washington and where that is. They've taken that facility for putting some of their supplies in there
and fence at all in but they have made a driveway but they're crossing the sidewalk and when they do
they pick up their large rocks that they put in for the driveway and they're leaving it on the sidewalk.
We'll get the message back to them. I appreciate that. I'm not complaining about Excel. They do a great job. Thank you.
We believe you're right. Any other comments? Thank you for being, excuse me. Please come up. Please come up.
Okay. My name is Alexis Roberts. I live at 1924 South Seminole Street. Thank you for letting me take time to speak in
front of the council and sitting in on this meeting. I've heard some really great comments. Things like
we value people and it's the people in the community that make the difference. These statements are so valid and
Amarillo's community is comprised of varying ethnicities, races, religions, socioeconomic,
statuses, sexual orientations, and political belief systems. I'm a second generation Mexican American.
I'm a founder and facilitator of an LGBT QA support group in Pampa starting a rainbow for the record.
I'm a member of PWPJS and currently a social work student at WT. I'm a proud voter of Potter County.
I'm preparing to be a policymaker. I'm preparing to change the world. So that's why I'm here.
I'm dedicated to building bridges. I'm dedicated to the ideas of social justice and equality. I'm also a firm believer
that our city boards and councils should be a representation of the best of what Amarillo has to offer.
It is imperative that the behaviors demonstrated by the leaders of Amarillo including those
executed on social media be held at the standard that perpetuates the overall professional and all inclusive
representation that Amarillo deserves. Even in the most diversified cultures,
we experience our own biases concerning individuals who are assuming to be outside of our personal comfort zones.
My response to these types of behaviors is that these people subject to our biases and prejudice
and even sometimes reverse discrimination are the bridges between our cultures. We cannot lessen the gaps
between any two differentiating cultures whether the people who walk between them.
And I find this to be consistent in every case where there is a culture gap, a lack of understanding,
and a fear that when we realize that we are in fact ignorant, making connections between cultures,
educating ourselves admitting and confronting our biases, these are the tools that we've been given
to defeat the monster known as prejudice. Thank you. May love find you an acceptance, you'll you.
We're adjourned. Thank you for being here.