I just happen to look up. You probably have the same thing I have. You have a lot of vacant space. water. Yeah. Uhuh. >> You're a good public speaker. You're okay with that? Are you fine? Okay, council. I'm going to call our work session to order. Today is August 19th all day and I'll turn it over to Jay Chop, city manager. >> Good afternoon. I'm going to go ahead and just get started since we're running a little late um on upcoming and recent events. I don't have anything specific to announce on the organizational updates and employee recognitions. I do want to update the council. It's public now that we have a new economic development director, Jessica Rogers. She'll be joining us next month and we'll have a formal uh introduction to the city council here at a upcoming uh council meeting. On the employee recognition side, I need to I'd like to we do have a few. I'd like to call up Sally Troder and Marilyn Marvin to start. >> Thank you. they can recognize an award that our folks did around this building and a lot of the folks standing here part of those teams. >> Go ahead. You can start. >> I'm not Sally. I'm Kevin Gunn. I'm the IT solutions director and we are uh recognizing Sally and Marilyn Marvin's uh leadership in the retrofit of this beautiful facility that we find ourselves in today. This is a gym of the community. It took a lot of hard work uh to get us to where we are today to change a single tenant office building into this uh community gathering place that we have. Uh and so uh we were submitted uh Sally submitted this effort to the best of Texas awards and lo and behold we won for best workplace workforce initiative is joint ef uh submission for IT and property management. So, we have a few of our employees here today. We we hope that you would join us in recognizing their efforts. [Applause] >> It truly did take uh tens of thousands of hours of work uh from these employees that you see here today. And so it's right that we recognize them for that effort and for this great award that we received uh uh from government technology. So thank you council and thank you to all the employees you see here today. [Applause] >> All right. >> Thank you Kevin. Thank you all. We have the I think the best city hall in America now and it's because of all y'all's hard work. So, appreciate it. Next, I'd like to call Midori Clark up to um make an announcement. Good afternoon, mayor and council. My name is Madori Clark. I'm the director of the Fort Worth Public Library, and I am thrilled to introduce our new library assistant director of operations, Sheri Knight, who started on June 30th. Sherry holds a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Texas at Arlington and a master's degree in library science from the University of North Texas. Her extensive library career includes positions at the University of Texas at Arlington Library, Northward University, Fort Worth Public Library as a cataloger in the mid 90s. Um, and just an interesting fact there, she rode the Tandy Center subway to the downtown library every day. Um, and most recently she joins us from Ulis Public Library. Um she joined that city in 1996 as a cataloger and progressed through various leadership roles. Um and she eventually became the library director and led the Ulis Public Library through a transformative reimagining of services overseeing a major remodel staff reorganization and a shift toward a more collaborative and innovative workplace culture. Um, she's involved with a lot of different library associations across the state and just a couple of little tidbits in her personal life. She married, she has she's married and has 19-year-old twins who are currently in college. She's an avid traveler. She really likes uh solo adventures and has been known to hop on a plane and take a spontaneous day trip to explore a new city. She also finds a lot of rejuvenation in hiking and forest bathing. and she had to give us all a a little lesson on exactly what forest bathing was and we were uh really excited to learn about it. I hope you will join me in welcoming Sherry to our incredible team at the city of Fort Worth. >> Thank you. Thank you, Madori. I'm very thrilled to be here. And just another fun fact about me, um, my great-grandmother actually worked for Fort Worth Public Library in the 1910s when it was a Carnegie Library building and that is where she met my great-grandfather. So, um, I have told the staff here, it's definitely in my DNA to be back here um, with the best public library system in America along with the best city hall in America. So, well, thank you. All right, next I'd like Casey Best come up and introduce the new assistant director as well. >> Hello everyone. I'm excited to announce to you Kesha Light. She is our new assistant director over administration for the neighborhood services department. This is a brand new position for us and part of the reason for it is that we really wanted to highlight the importance of our grants management functions, workforce development and then also our planning and reporting functions. Um she did not give us a forest bathing lesson when she came but she does have a varied experience. She is a um planner by trade. She most recently was an assistant director of planning for the city of um city of Denton. She also worked in Plano. Um she has experience with CDBG neighborhood development and so we're really excited about her wide variety of experiences. She completed her undergraduate education from the University of Louisville in business. She also has a master's degree in city and regional planning from the University of Ohio. And if that's not enough, she's currently pursuing her master's degree in HR management from Western Govern Western Governor's University. just kind of an example of some of the things that she will be working on. The neighborhood services department, we have nearly 40% of our employees are eligible to retire in the next five years. And so Kesha will be tasked with workforce development, leadership development, and succession planning. Um, and so she started in July. She's already off and running and she's making some changes and so we're happy to have her here. >> Welcome. >> Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I'm excited to be here. I'm thankful for the opportunity and looking forward to serving the Fort Worth community. Thank you. >> Thank you, Kesha. [Applause] >> Next, I'd like to call up Marilyn Marvin to introduce a new member of her team. >> Good afternoon, council. I am honored to introduce Stuart Young as our assistant director in property management over real estate. He comes to us from the city of Arlington where he had an 18-year career and most recently as the real estate manager and he has a wide range of experience um right away in easement acquisitions, property leases, cell tower leases, oil and gas programs, economic development negotiations, and many more. He has a business um excuse me he has a bachelor of public administration and a masters in public administration. He's been here for two weeks and he hit the ground running. He has met already started meeting with um people across the city to understand what their their pain points are and how he can improve the process. And I am thrilled that he is now a part of our team. Mayor and council, it's a and council, it's a pleasure. I uh look forward to uh becoming uh uh work in the city of Fort Worth and reach out to all our businesses and residents and appreciate the opportunity very much. I'm very proud. Thank you. [Applause] >> Next, I'd asking Santa to come up and make a couple of announcements around our communications public education folks. All right, I have a lot. Sorry, I need to fill it up. Okay. Well, Mayor Parker, Council, City Manager Choa, happy to join you today for some special recognitions. I'm pleased to announce to you all that Sharon Gamble has been promoted to assistant director of the communications and public engagement department leading our customer care division which includes the My Fort Worth app and 311. Sharon, would you like to join me up here? Sharon manages about half of the department uh for those who don't know about 23 employees. She has provided transformational leadership to this division since 2012, growing and expanding the work each year as new technologies and opportunities become available. She established 311 and my Fort Worth as an awardwinning industry leader that other cities seek out to learn from when they're building or improving their customer care tools. Additionally, her datadriven approach to customer care workflows have positioned her to support multiple other city departments in improving their processes and resident satisfaction with services. She does all of this with a lean budget, which I know makes Jay very happy. And a commitment to never leaving a problem unsolved. As Fort Worth continues to grow, efficient and effective customer service tools will be vital to keep Fort Worth a highquality city. And Sharon is a person who wakes up every day thinking about how she will do that. Please join me in congratulating Sharon who would like to say a few words. [Applause] >> Thank you Sana very much for this opportunity. Uh thank you mayor council and city manager for always supporting us. I'd like to recognize and invite the team that makes magic happen to stand. Uh, my Fort Worth and 311. My Fort Worth and 311. We work diligently to provide streamlined services to our residents internal customers. We support 39 departments and divisions across the city with the My Fort Worth system and 311. We have built 811 service types. That's crazy. Just FYI. A and have reached uh over received over 2.5 million requests since implementation. The 311 contact center has grown over the past few years to enter a little over two million requests, averaging 315,000 requested a year uh through multiple channels. We chat, we text, we email, and we answer calls to serve the city of Fort Worth. We invite all of you to visit our center. I'll give you directions uh to learn about the system, see our processes in action, and listen to our residents. We have much in store for upcoming implementations, including but not limited to AI to provide a quicker response to answers to questions and routine questions and to direct the call to the right source without pushing a button. We look forward to seeing you at 311. [Applause] Congrats to Sharon and her team. And as you mentioned, please go see the call center. It's amazing how hard they work and it really is a great perspective on how busy every department is, but how integral you are as kind of the nerve center to make all that happen. So Sharon, I can't think of a better ad. Congratulations. >> All right, we also have some exciting awards to share with you all. This year, the TAMO conference was held in Fort Worth and TAMO stands for the Texas Association of Mun Municipal Information Officers. During the Tammy Awards ceremony, our communications and public engagement team brought home five awards. This is a big deal because we're judged against peers across the entire state of Texas. The Tammy Awards honor leaders in government communications in Texas, and this year's competition included about 658 entries in 29 categories from across the state. The team's wins include three first place awards and two third place awards of honor. Please raise your hands as I call out your name. Uh, first place, special publication for the fourth animal care and control coloring book, Allison Rich, who is a writer, Jason McGregor, who is a graphic designer. Um, our team had special assistance from several members of the code team who dreamed up the idea, Jeff Jones, Chris Lorett, Brenda Matudi, Chris Mallister, and Brian Doy. Um, I think we have some samples for you all. You all have them already. Great. >> Oh, yeah. On the table. Uh, first place for marketing PSA 2050 comprehensive plan moving a million. It's go time featuring Mayor Maddie Parker, Cameron Gorman, producer and editor. First place regular or recurring program Fort Worth Forward episodes that featured the worthy co and printed threads. Cameron Gorman producer videographer editor. Grant Chaparo, videographer, editor. And Paul Triona, videographer. Third place, best logo award of honor, Tarant County Heartwalk t-shirt, Jason McGregor, graphic designer. Third place, educational PSA award of honor, why our fire trucks are white. Cameron Gorman, producer, editor, Grant Chaparo, video videographer, footage and had provided footage of our fire trucks. Um, we actually brought some of our awards with us in case you'd like to see them because they are um, you know, really a testament to the work that the team does and uh, the fact that we really stood up against our peers all across the entire state of Texas. Um, so please join me in congratulating our talented CPE team for representing the city of Fort Worth at the highest level in bringing home these well-deserved honors. We look forward to continuing to create content that reflects the larger Fort Worth community and helps bridge the gap between communication and education for all of our residents. We'd love to have you come join us for a photo. [Applause] Don't stand in the [Applause] While everybody's making their way back, I want to introduce Holly Moyer, our interim assistant director of I mean director of HR to introduce a few people, including an assistant director. >> Good afternoon. Holly Moyer, assistant assistant director, but I'm interim right now. Anyway, I'm excited to share this opportunity with you to um give an internal promotion to Joanne Hinton. She may seem familiar to you. She was our benefits manager since 2017 and she's been with the city since 2012. So, we're excited to have her as part of our assistant director over the risk, wellness, and benefits area. And just a little bit about Joanne. Joanne has a bachelor's degree from the University of Alaska. Pretty cool. Uh, but she also has a master's degree from the University of North Texas in Library of Science. So, Madori, please don't take it. Just saying. And she's a certified employee benefits specialist. And so she has over 20 years of human resource experience, some of it in public and private sector, one of them being the Seattle University and some private areas as well. But her focus has been in the benefits and wellness area and risk. So we're excited to have her as a promotion here. Just a couple of things about her. She is a great crafter. I'm just going to say she just amazing what she can do with that. She also um as a benefits manager, just one thing I want to note is that she brought a lot of innovative programs to the city and I just want to recognize her for that as well. And so she's been with us as an assistant director since June and I would like to let Joanne go ahead and speak for a little bit. >> I don't really have a whole lot to say. Um so but thank you. I'm pretty excited to now be higher, I guess, in the in the system. And during the United Way, I will probably have a couple different craft items up for auction if you would like to uh um contribute to the to the city's United Way program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> As we move along, I can promise you no one has ever articulated the words is a very talented crafter about me. So, I will be watching to see what she can do. That's very impressive. Um, I must also say that um, the job that your team does, you know, I remember last year when Miss Tanisha was terminally ill, your team was amazing in making sure her family had all those resources and I just wanted Joanne to know that how meaningful it was to our staff and you do that every single day for countless city employees when it really is difficult for their families. So, can't think of a better person that's more deserving. Congratulations. [Applause] Holly, do you have one more introduction or is that postponed? >> The uh yeah, the lead the experience. Go ahead. >> So, yes. Um I'm excited about this recognition of lead the experience program. A few weeks ago in June, we had talked about emerging leaders. This is leading the experience. So, these are our managers and executives that are going through this lead the experience program. This program itself was created by Shannon and um loose through the um Franklin Kovi uh program. And so the program itself has four different objectives and this was the eight month ethmon program. See Shannon's bringing up our graduates here. So they took a deep dive into what's called inspiring trust, which is basically leaders owning character and competencies, credibilities that allow leaders to intentionally build a culture of trust. Creating vision, which is effective leaders create a shared vision and strategy, communicate to others and join them on the journey. Executive strategy, think big and execute at their vision and strategy through completion through with and through others. And then also coaching potential, developing their leadership potential in others and improve performance through constant feedback and coaching. So they strengthen their connections through a lasting relationship. and of these co-hosts here. I would like to bring up David Lewis who was really a sponsor of this program and give a little bit more details about the program. >> Thank you, Olly. Um, I had the pleasure of co-f facilitating this course with Shannon. The timing is great as we spoke this morning about the budget impacts and do we have reductions to training. This is just one example of the great job that our human resources department does in capitalizing on some of our internal resources to be able to do some of these. Rather than sending these outstanding people to a conference and spending all the money, we were able to facilitate this leadership uh internally. All of these people were selected by their directors and nominated for this course. So, these are some of the city's future stars that we look forward to becoming assistant directors and directors down the road. And this course was particularly important for me as I go through my journey becoming a new director and being reminded of some of the principles and and some of the processes that we can take to do that. So it was it was very important. One of the byproducts of a course like this is is the networking that they get to do. A lot of these people are meeting new people and and I've seen firsthand how we've been able to reach two people that have been in this course. It's a lot easier whenever you know the people rather than reaching out, hey, I have an issue I need to talk to you about. So, when you know them, that's um a big part of this. And one of the things we did on the last day of class, I asked, I said, "Raise your hand if you don't want anybody following up with you after this course and talking to you about things." And nobody raised their hand. So, we're all holding them accountable for all of that. So, uh we thank you for the continued support of of classes like this and want to recognize this outstanding first cohort of of this class. [Applause] I I just want to say congratulations and one of the things again going back to this building. Most of these folks if not all of them I know Keith's not but are in this building and having being able to do these classes are much more efficient, much more effective and then they do meet each other that they might have not ever had the opportunity to have that kind of relationship. And so when they need something from a different department, they know exactly who to go to. Somebody's going to pick the phone at the first time. All that provides efficiencies and effectiveness in the city that otherwise wouldn't be there. So, congratulations to all y'all. >> Appreciate you. >> Shannon would like a picture here real quick. [Applause] That completes our organizational updates and employee recognitions. I'll move uh forward to internal and informal reports. The first informal reports is on city facilities and the ADA compliance. Marilyn Marvin's here to answer any questions. >> Any questions? >> Yes, I council >> I do. I want to uh I know I met had an opportunity to meet with Val and um the other day. Do you have that that slide? Well, we're working on this slide for the different uh communities that are in the two different codes for um the ADA compliance. >> Yes, sir. So, they are part of the um IR. There's a table for community centers and a table for libraries that shows you which ones are ADA compliant and which ones are grandfathered. >> Okay. and briefly the ones that are grandfathered such as the issue I had at Holland Hills for uh the ramp on the back door, how are we able to uh fix that issue? >> So, as we get information um like the one you brought to us last week, uh we have the team working on those to take care of those items that had been grandfathered in. Um, and we'll handle those as requests come in. But we're also putting together a plan for the community centers and the libraries that will be done October 31st with a priority list and a timeline of how we will take care of all of those grandfathered items to bring them up to current ADA standards. And then for the rest of the general fund buildings that are grandfathered, we'll have a plan by February 27th of 2016. uh 2027. I'll get it out in a minute. 2026. >> And so I and I was so one of my concerns council I was looking at in Holland Hills um our senior part that a lot of our senior meet is in the community room and they brought to my attention if there's a fire. They couldn't go out the front door where it is ADA compliance. They can go out the back door which is not ADA compliance. And so that was a big concern. So, uh, they was able to put together a table that showed us the grandfather building in some of the other districts. And I think it may be important that you guys go through and see if it's, uh, affects, uh, your neighborhoods as well. But thank you so much for the thorough information. >> You're welcome. >> Marilyn, when you go through and do that, um, prioritization, will you look at which, um, of these facilities are voting locations because um, I know that was an issue with one of my community centers this past time. People are just so used to voting at the same places. I don't want to see that happen. >> Absolutely. So, when um we receive information from Tarant County, they go out and they look at our facilities based on today's requirements um as they should. Then we try to not try, we fix those items unless it's something really major so that we can continue to vote in those locations. But yes, ma'am. Marilyn, it would be possible to you don't have to do another IR presentation, but just to update this um chart with a year that each of these buildings were dedicated. I'm just curious. >> Yes, >> absolutely. And I can send it to you. >> Okay. And be curious about I'm just kind of curious what the ages are. >> Thank you for >> Thanks, Marilyn. Next up is regarding our community partnership program and the recommendation to provide funds to the Mr. Fred Rouse Memorial. Christian Simmons is here to answer any questions. And I'm told uh Mr. Fred Rouse III isn't >> I didn't see Fred yet, but I thought he was here. >> I don't spread here. >> He's hiding the back. >> Mr. Rouse, thank you very much for joining us today. We appreciate you. >> I don't have any questions, Jay. I just want to thank you. This part the community partnership funds comes out of the city management. And so this we started years ago. It was one of the first things I did on council. So it's exciting to see it kind of come to fruition. And thank you for having that fund that allows us to do unique projects like this. >> Sure. Thank you all. >> Any other questions? No. Thank you. >> Next. Next IR is facilities renaming policy and this is concerning the police department south patrol division uh recommendation to be um renamed and uh interim chief Aldridge is here to answer any questions. >> Any questions from councel? All right, next up is the 2025 report on the release of area from the ETJ and DJ Herrell is here from development services. Okay, next one is with Texas Health Southwest for indigent care. Um Danna Gordano is here to answer any questions if there are any. No. Okay. Next is a citywide master thorough plan amendment. Kelly Porter from TPW is here to answer any questions. >> I have one. >> Council Flores. >> Kelly. I'm going to take the opportunity to um I guess pick up where we last spoke, you know, from uh RTC. I know that you uh were working on getting uh 10 mile bridge road, you know, added to the MTP. We've been having those discussions. A lot of that has been based on feedback that we've received uh from uh community members as well. Um I know that you said that the and please correct me if I'm if I'm wrong, the east segment was added and I think you were trying to find a way to include the other segment which is categorized differently. >> Right. So the the segment that you're most concerned about to the east of is it Huffines? >> Yes. >> Uh that segment uh doesn't generate quite enough traffic just because it is so short uh for the thoroughfare plan and it's also not on the functional classification system, the federal functional classification system. So any improvements on that are something I would work with uh Mary Hannah's team on on the minor railway side and our city traffic engineer to improve. >> Okay. So probably again because of the categorization, right? Not not suitable for the MTP, but I think that you could probably work it in in another category of uh road infrastructure. >> Correct. >> Okay. All right. Uh well, that's all I have and thanks for the inclusion of uh those segments on 99 as well. >> Absolutely. >> Council member Crane. >> Yeah. Uh Kelly, thanks again for this. I don't see on here and maybe I'm just not reading the parts uh correctly, but Altameesa where it turns into Dirks Road right there. I haven't count discussed with councilwoman Hall, but it also would affect right there her district, my district. It's tech stock controlled. It runs by um Pon Valley, runs into Benbrook, etc. with all the growth in the area. Just start to look at that street. Southwest Christian is right there. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. >> Our last IR is an update on the fiscal year 2026 proposed tourism and public improvement district budgets. And Brady Kirks from the lab is here to answer any questions. >> Brady? No. Okay, >> that's all I have, man. >> Okay, we'll keep rolling. any changes or updates regarding membership on boards or commissions or questions regarding city council M andC log for the upcoming August 26th meeting. Okay, first up, Chris Poinset. Welcome. We're so glad to see you. Uh our chief financial officer for DFW International Airport, a presentation on the DFW International Airport proposed fiscal year 2026 budget. >> Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here once again. Uh before I get started, I just wanted to kind of set the the premise for this year's budget. Um you might recall back about five or six months ago now, American Airlines and DFW uh to uh came into a new agreement to expand Terminal F from $1.6 billion to 4 billion, from 15 gates to 31 gates. Uh that increased our capital program by about $3 billion and we are starting to borrow money for that program. It's very exciting, but it is impacting our budget quite a bit. So, real quickly, I will go through this fast. Um, we have rec this budget reflects record passengers, record revenues, record uh net revenues or profits. Um, it has an expenditure budget of $1.4 billion, which is an 11% increase mostly due to debt service. Um, the airlines will pay us about $756 million primarily for landing fees and terminal rents. And that averages out to about $17 per inplane passenger. This is kind of a trend. You can see we had really substantial growth in 22 to 24, leveled out a little bit this year in 25 and we're expecting a 1.6% increase in passengers next year. Then as we look at our revenues from the DFW cost center, these are non-airine revenues. You can see substantial growth, 5.3% this year. And when you compare that to the growth of passengers at 1.6%, uh that's very positive. Uh here are the major categories in the non-airine revenues. Um parking and concessions are driving most of the change. Uh parking is up because of the option for prepaid parking and a uh change in our fees for uh TNC's and uh concessions is up primarily due to three new lounges that'll be starting next year. As we look at the net revenues from uh our DFW cost center, you can see in the dark blue what we get to put into our capital account. Um and the light blue is what we share with the airlines to reduce what they pay us. As we look at our budget, uh you can see uh operating expenses are up 5.8%. Uh that is primarily employee related. I'll go through that on the next slide. And gross debt is up 106 million or 18% as I mentioned earlier. So as we look uh at our operating expense walk forward, we're going from 715 million to 756 million. Uh we've got $12 million of budget reductions which are mostly one-time costs that we incurred last year. Uh employee related increases relate to a 4% merit increase. Um some new positions. Uh health care cost increases and defined benefit plan cost increases. Our fixed contract increases are mostly associated with utilities and with facilities maintenance. We are taking over maintenance from American Airlines in terminals A and C starting this year. Uh dig we have some digital and technology investments. Um we uh have our CEO gets a contingency in the budget of 8 million and we used that during the year for a variety of projects. So that's reinstalling that and and then some other increases. Then as we look at the airline rates, uh both landing fees and terminal rents are going up because of all of our capital programs and the debt service. And this is the budget we're asking for you to approve, $1.45 billion. Um the our board approved the 1.44 number. We always ask for a $10 million contingency outside the rate base that the board of directors at DFW uh would need to approve for us to use. And uh we always share with you uh the tax sharing uh that the owner cities uh receive from the host cities of Irving uh Capel, Grapevine and Ulis. Uh the revenues are split between the host city gets 1/3 and 2/3 go to the owner cities and then the owner city split is based on the ownership percentage except for the rental car center which is shared equally. Uh you can see that it was almost $30 million in total revenue sharing um which was an 8.2% increase and the shares for Dallas and Fort Worth there. That's a very quick highle overview of our budget. I would be happy to answer any questions that you might have. >> Thank you Chris. Questions from councils. >> There you go. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much for being here. Council will move next to our vision zero safety action plan. Chelsea St. Louis, transportation public works, senior capital projects officer. Hello. >> Good afternoon, mayor and council. Presentation Good afternoon again. Um, I'm Chelsea St. Louis. I work in the transportation and public works department. And today I'm presenting on the vision zero safety action plan that we've been working on for the past year and that we will be recommending for council adoption at the end of September. I'm joined here um with our consultant uh tool design group uh Nan Jiang. She's in the audience and can assist with any questions that may arise um throughout and after the presentation. So I'll start with just a background on the safe streets and roads for all grant program which funded development of the action plan and then I'll move into uh a definition of vision zero and why it's important for the city and then provide a highle overview of the vision zero action plan development activities and highlights from the plan. So again the safe streets and roads for all grant uh was used to fund development of the action plan that grant program is administered by the US department of trans transportation federal highway administration and the point of that grant program is really to support um the national roadway safety strategy. They don't call it vision zero but it's essentially the same concept. um they're focused on eliminating traffic uh fatalities and serious injuries nationwide. Um so with that grant, we're awarded over um $524,000. Um we are uh as I mentioned looking forward to recommending um plan adoption at the end of September, which is a requirement of the plan. And so this plan is really important because it makes the city eligible for um federal implementation dollars. Um and so we look forward to um moving forward with this plan and all the great stuff that's in it. So what is vision zero? Again, vision zero is really a strategy to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries using a safe systems approach. And I like this graphic on the right because to me this reads as this is shared responsibility. We only get to safety if we're all working on safety. So we have to design the roadways in a way that accounts for the fact that people will make mistakes on our roadways, but it shouldn't cause them their to lose their lives when they make a mistake or seriously uh be seriously injured. And so that's really what safe systems is really all about. This is a traffic safety is a national problem. It doesn't always get promoted as such, but these numbers are very stark. Um, I thought they were a mistake initially. Um, so in 2023 alone, almost 41,000 people died in the US on our roadways. In Texas, um, lives lost represented 10% of that. Um, over four 4,000 people died in Texas in 2023. And in the city of Fort Worth, 123 people died. And on average, um, every year in Fort Worth, we have a little over 100 people dying on our roadways. And so this plan is about what our strategy is going to be over the next 25 years to get these numbers down to zero. Um, so that's our goal. The safety action plan aligns with the master transportation plan, which is also currently in development. Um these goals you see on the screen represent the six goals of the master transportation plan. Um please note that number six, the equity goal is changing to community. Um but the action plan supports the first goal safety first. So as part of our grant, we were required to look at a city-wide analysis of crash data um regardless of roadway ownership. So, we looked at 2019 through 2023 data um which is summarized in the table below. I thought these numbers were a mistake again because they're very high. So, there were 68,936 crashes in Fort Worth over a 5-year period. 2589 of those crashes resulted in a fatality or serious injury. Um, as you can tell in the third column, bicycle, pedestrian, and motorcycles represented only 4% of crashes, but they represented about 34% of killed in serious injury crashes. So, we really want to focus on those vulnerable roadway users um in our strategy as we move forward with the plan. Some other key findings in terms of text dot facilities, those facilities represent 84% of vehicle miles traveled and a little over half of the killed in serious injury crashes. Non-ext roadways only account for 16% of vehicle miles traveled, but 47% of KSI crashes. Fort Worth has the high the highest proportion of commercial vehicle and large truck crashes compared to the six largest six cities in Texas. Um, but we also have the most freight traffic. Um, so we did normalize that information. And then also young adults aged 15 to 34 represent a large proportion of people involved in in crashes overall. 46% and 49% of people killed. Speeding and distracted driving. We know that this is an issue anecdotally uh and intuitively. We know this is an issue and it bears out in the data as well. Um driving under the influence and lack of safety restraints. seat belts. They're also they aren't top contributing factors, but when people aren't wearing their seat belts or they're driving under the influence, it's a high likelihood that there will be severe outcomes from that. Um, and lastly, uh, we you we utilize the Centers for Disease Control Social Vulnerability Index, um, to look at how, uh, these crashes are impacting um, vulnerable communities. And we saw that 60% of these total crashes and killed in severe injury crashes are occurring in these uh census tracks with vulnerable populations. So taking into account the five years worth of crash data that we evaluated, we identified roadways with a higher frequency of fatal and serious injury crashes to develop the high injury network. Um so there is one overall high injury network that identifies something like 380 roadway segments in the city. Um to the right that just show that's just a snapshot of the pedestrian high injury network. So that's not the the complete high injury network shown there. Um but we did break out each of the modes for the high injury network. And then going from those maybe 380 roadway segments, we did a deeper dive and we looked at how we were going to prioritize all of those segments to figure out which ones um were the highest priority. And so we looked at crash history, the characteristics of the roadway, the functional class, land use contact uh context, where are the um traffic demand generators and also overlaid that with the Centers for Disease Control Social Vulnerability Index and we also gave additional points um if a segment was located on more than one high modal high injury network. So if it was on the pedestrian and commercial vehicle highendry network, it got higher points. And so these are a list, this is a list of highendry network corridors that we decided to do roadway safety assessments on. Um, you can tell or maybe not from the list, but there are a few locations on the list that overlap with neighborhood improvement program area. Um, neighborhood improvement program areas, specifically Sharondelle Street, um, Northwest 14th Street, as well as West Seminary Drive. And I thought that there was another one, but I may have mistaken. And so pretty much what happens with these roadway safety assessments is a multidisciplinary team goes out into the field, evaluates existing conditions, and then provides recommendations on what traffic safety counter measures we can implement to reduce the crash incidents along those corridors. And this is a snapshot of what you can find in the plan. So we developed these uh profiles for each of those corridors. Um, so you'll see uh traffic volumes, um, the speed limit, sidewalk connectivity, um, signals and number of lanes, and then proximity of crashes on the corridor. And then you can see the breakdown of what the key contributing factors were, crash types, um, and also breakdown in the of the fatal and severe injury crashes. And then there is another um piece of the profile that gets into the actual recommendations that you can find um on these profiles. And then there's also uh a benefit cost ratio that's provided. And that's based on Tex DOT's highway safety improvement program formula which pretty much shows what the benefit of preventing crashes is over the total cost of the project. And so if you have a higher ratio that means you get a greater return on the investment. And just a little bit about our public outreach. So we had a great opportunity to leverage the master transportation plan um outreach efforts over this period because we were developing the plans concurrently. Um so we did two three rounds of open houses. assist to uh three rounds of open houses in summer and fall of 2024 and one this past spring. We had over 300 attendees. We had 13 popup events and we deployed a survey that uh received over 10,000 responses. We also convened a community and technical advisory committee and we also had a vision zero safety action strategies workshop. Um, and within that workshop, the community and technical advisory committee actually helped us prioritize the 34 action strategies that you find in the plan. These were some of the key areas that the public is concerned about uh from the outreach that we did. aggressive driving, speeding, red light running, large trucks on city streets, um transit facilities, missing sidewalks. These are all common and recurring themes throughout a lot of the outreach. And so quite a few of the recommendations in the plan um reflect those concerns. And so in a nutshell um taking together the crash data analysis from the five years in addition to public feedback we developed really about 50 action strategies. We ran that through the filter of um having the technical and community advisory committees review those action strategies to get it down to 34. And so um this is a breakdown of what those areas um how many action strategies are within each of those areas. So the four areas that our action strategies focus on are a paradigm shift from to the safe systems approach which essentially means moving from a roadway user having to perform perfectly in our transportation system uh to remain safe versus the safe systems approach where we have this uh multi-pronged uh approach and system that regardless of whether you make a mistake or not, you're not going to die or be seriously injured. injured. So that's what the paradigm shift is about. We have safe speeds uh which in many cases is lowering speeds or creating speeds that are more appropriate for the land use context. Um and then we have have reducing conflicts and adopting policies and programs. And in terms of our action strategies, this just shows uh an example of one of those strategies, safe speeds. So, in the action plan, there are five um safe speed actions. This is just one of them. And this focuses on uh deemphasizing the 85th percentile approach to setting speed limits. Um I know every community meeting I go to, no one wants to hear that 85 the 85th percent uh percentile speed. People are driving that, which they don't think is reasonable. Um, so we're trying to move away from that approach uh to a more holistic approach to setting speed limits. And so for all of the action strategies, you'll see the focus area, the time frame um, and the agencies that are involved in making uh, that action possible. And then lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about traffic safety education. um because this isn't quite emphasized enough in a lot of vision zero safety action plans. Um going back to us taking 25 years to get to zero. We didn't get here overnight. It's going to take time. And so focusing on education will really um help us to create that safety culture um to make sure that over time we're building we're implementing sustainable solutions and we're getting community buy in on um everyone really engaging in more safe behaviors on the roadways. Um so none of this matters if our behaviors don't change. And so, um, we want to make sure that we're educating and making the public aware throughout the year, not just on, you know, the walk to school days or the bike to school days. Um, so, for example, our school crossing guard program manager this summer, he went out to um, summer camps at our recreation centers to teach kids about um, crossing the roadway safe, roadway safety, and the importance of crossing guards. Um, so we want to create year-round programming that gets at this traffic safety education piece. And with that, I believe that's the last slide. Um, so our proposed plan adoption is uh September 30th and uh we're required to submit the final plan to FHWA by November 17th. And with that, I'll take any questions. >> Any questions? Council Council Flores and Councor Peoples. Uh >> Chelsea, thanks for the presentation. Just to be clear, um you've been looking at this in a five-year window. Is that correct? >> Yes. >> Vision zero. Okay. And so you've been taking data, you've been um making assessments, and then now you're proposing to us that you're going to implement these to uh hopefully reduce some of the uh issues that you're seeing right? >> Yes. >> Okay. Um just so that I'm clear, uh there was a I think there was a graphic here. Yeah. circular graphic that identified uh postc crash care. >> Okay. And then is that the same as postc collision action plan? I mean is they went on the same >> potentially? Yes. Um so it's really looking at our response to crashes. >> Right. Okay. And then a final question that I have uh one stat um stood out for me. Uh I think you had said highest proportion of commercial uh vehicle and large truck you know accidents compared to other cities of comparable size to Fort Worth. >> Um what can you share generally? I mean is there are there any particular routes locations where you see this repeating? >> I have a data dump in my brain right now. Well, the good call it I mean you can share >> I can't recall off the top of my head but the great thing is that so there was a lot of technical data that went into the plan and so we uh posted all of the appendices which includes that information on the website um so I can pull that report and provide to you specific information on that. So we have a truck traffic evaluation report that I can share >> that really stood out to me and so I'd like to see what it looks like. That's it. Thank you, >> Councilman. >> Thank you, Mayor. Um, with this vision zero, and I see chief in the background, um, what collaboration is there with our PD? Um, because I know whenever we talk about, um, education, I think enforcement's a lot of it. know recently on public safety. We're going to be getting a a presentation at some point on enforcement plans on on traffic because I know for district 4 and I'm sure it's the case with with all my colleagues, they want to see more not just patrol, but more traffic enforcement. That's a huge complaint. Um I know growing up in Garland, there's one stretch in Rolette, you did not it didn't matter if you're going two over or 20 over, you're getting a ticket every single time. >> Um and it was just that reputation. Um so no one sped. So, with that being a major concern here, what collaboration is there between Vision Zero and the PD on the enforcement, especially in some of these uh high threat areas, like I noticed in some areas on the highway, they have those uh high threat corridors where the fines are double if you're caught speeding there. Is there anything we can do within the city for more enforcement in those particular areas where it's like guaranteed like do not pass code and not collect $200 like it's huge fines for those specific areas? Um I think that's something that we can pursue in terms of some so there is one action strategy that's related to creating um slow zones. Um so that's one um perspective. I think the one you're talking about is like safe safety corridors. I've seen uh those a lot where the fines increase. those would fall under kind of the policy area um that obviously it would take you know city council um to help us implement those types of strategies. Other than that, we have a pretty close relationship with PD. Um we I think within the last two weeks, two or three weeks, uh we met with all the neighborhood police officers, uh to just just share information about the department, um each of our divisions. And so, uh usually when there is a request that comes in, we're usually in touch with the neighborhood police officer. They're giving us information about what they've seen in the field. Um, we can work with PD as well on increased enforcement because they also get their I believe it's the STEP grants. Um, and that's for a spec usually for specific times of the year. Um, and so we can work with um, Chief Aldridge and the neighborhood police officers and the traffic division specifically um, to target areas for enforcement. We'll probably start with like you mentioned those high injury network. the priority areas first um and then kind of um fan out to other areas as needed. >> Okay. I know those grants are great because I know the residents notice when they see the police officers out there, it's it's definitely noticed and it helps and then then you no longer see them and then they go back to speeding again. So more prolonged uh persistent presence I think is what's really sorely needed. And I can't speak for my colleagues, but whenever it comes to the policies that you were just speaking of, um, I would love to see some of those presented for us to because I don't see anyone here arguing against any of those, especially in the high injury network areas where there's serious injury or deaths. I don't think you're going to find anyone who's going to argue against that. >> Yeah. And I think as part of the plan as well, our hope is to um help PD in terms of managing the community's expectations. Um because sometimes we'll come with the data. The data isn't enough, you know, and they want police officers out 24 hours a day to do enforcement. You may find one vehicle, two vehicles speeding. Um but that's really not a threshold for us to implement, you know, capital infrastructure. um and you know as they're prioritizing different calls, you know, speeding may not be the highest priority for them at that time. And so our goal is through education, through capital investments, um through really just working more with the community, uh making sure people are aware of where the the really are the areas of highest safety need are um so that even when we are engaging PD, it's really in those areas where they're really really needed. um and not necessarily in areas where the data doesn't show that there's an issue, you know, most of the day. >> And I'm all for the education piece. I think that's incredibly important. You know, I think at these meetings that we had the community come to and that we're talking to, they're usually not the problem. >> You know, it's those who would never even engage in any sort of dialogue. They're the issues. U you know, me trying to educate my now three teen drivers in the house important it is. Um, and they I I got my first ticket in the school zone whenever I was 16 and I will never forget that and I will never be in a school zone ever again. Uh, sometimes I just got to hit them in the pocketbook, not necessarily just the the brain housing group. Thank you. >> Thank you, Council Peoples. >> D, make sure your mic's on. I apologize. Thank you. I think there you go. There's a lot on. There we go. >> Okay. First, I wanted to thank you for taking what could be a sobering and what is a sobering and depressing subject and presenting us with a very wellthoughtout plan that shows light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not sure that I could do this because it is sobering. And so, I wanted to thank you. But the other thing I just wanted to do, this is the petty patty in me. Go to page six. You don't have to change the word equity to community. I think equity in this case is a good use of the word. >> Thank you, Council Peoples. Anyone else for Chelsea? No. Thank you very much. >> Very good presentation. >> We'll move to the next presentation. Updates to the zoning ordinance and transportation impact fee program. Landre Stringfellow, I think, is leading us in this one and Jennifer Roberts. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. >> Yeah. >> All right. Think we waiting. There it goes. Did I throw things off by going to the wrong podium? Okay. Well, let me introduce myself. My name is Jennifer Roberts. I am one of the assistant directors in development services. Um, I'm up here today. I only have just a few slides. In my capacity as assistant director, I'm the uh administrator of the transportation impact fee program and some of the legislation that was passed in the 89th legislature this year impacts that program. The bulk of the presentation will be given by my colleague Landre. um and still come up here and introduce herself. So, in her capacity, she is over all of our zoning and uh planning work. >> There it goes. Okay. So, the bills that we'll be looking at this afternoon are uh the bills listed on the screen. So, there's six of well, seven of them. Um, and of course, they impact the different areas covered by the development uh services department in different ways. Can I just Oh, now I'm drawing on things. Can you erase my big red line, please? I don't know how I did that. We'll just keep going. We're going to wing it. All right. So, Senate Bill 1883 uh substantially impacted the impact fee program. Um there two departments have impact fee programs, development services and the water department. Uh the water department has graciously entrusted me with um talking about how it impacts them, but we'll focus mainly on the transportation side of the house because that's where I'm most familiar. The impact fee program um was impacted by I'm going to say impact like 57 times uh by Senate Bill 1883 in a couple of ways. In particular, it adds a financial audit to Excellent. Thank you. Um now to the impact fee program. So then whenever we uh make any changes to the collection rate, there will be a financial audit included in uh that process of updating the study and all of the service units. It also adds an additional 120 days to our overall public comment period in two 60-day increments. This is a really great improvement because it allows us to get more feedback from our community. So, not only our residents but also our uh interested parties, so all of our different boards and commissions. Now, there are some advisory committee changes. This predominantly impacts the transportation impact fee side of the house. The city plan commission can no longer serve as the advisory committee for the transportation impact fee program. So um we will be coming to you with some ordinance changes to address that. The new commission will need to be at least 50% represent the real estate development or building industries. Previously that was 40% that increased. So then there'll be ordinance updates to establish these advisory committee criteria. So we'll be putting these in the ordinance themselves. Previously the water department had some resolutions that covered this and so we're going to put pack it into the ordinance so that um you know it's easily accessible and viewable by um anybody who's interested. The intention is to have the members be nominated at large but appointed by council. The transportation impact fee capital improvements advisory committee will be seven regular members with two alternates. The water impact fee committee which is called the capital improvements plan advisory committee. We had to make them different just for fun. Um, that will be made up of eight members including one representative from the ETJ. Slide, please. Oh, no, I can do it. Hold on. There we go. Now, Senate Bill 840, which will be discussed in further detail um by Landre. It impacts the impact fee program by um expressly stating that a city cannot apply an impact fee on land where a building has been converted to mixeduse or multif family uh residential use. So a change of use this aligns already with the existing program and so from the impact fee the transportation impact fee side of the house we will be making some very minor ordinance updates just to make sure that it is crystal clear that we are in compliance with Senate Bill 840. So this slide represents u the ordinance changes contemplated uh which will be brought to council on the 26th. So there's a couple of areas. One in the definitions. We will be removing our definition for from the CIA from there and moving it into a later section so that we can add all of the details about how that commission is functioned and appointed etc. Then uh we'll be updating our change of use definition and our shell building definition again to better align with 840. Then um later on in the ordinance we will uh put in all the details establishing the committee. So we'll be kind of expanding that definition with more detail. And then last but not least, we will be updating uh section 173 to again clarify that um you know we are in alignment with 840 for the water impact fee program. They will be making um a minor change again to establish the functions of the CIPAC where previously that was all done by resolution. So that will be now packaged again in the ordinance. All right. Now I'm going to hand it over to Landre. Right. Good e good evening, good afternoon, city council. Um, so I'm going to talk a little bit more about the impacts of Senate Bills 840 um and also SB 20 2477 with regards to multifamily and mixeduse residential um developments. And so these two definitions that you're seeing here are specifically terms that are in that new state law. So, one of the things that um we've been working with the city attorneys on is determining how much do we want to let the state law impact some of the definitions that we already have in our code. So, that's one of the things that um we're still working with the city attorneys on. But, so, you know, whenever we talk about these changes, these are definitions um that the state has already defined for us. So, the these are the impacts that are going to be on our code. So, first we're just going to talk about our standard zoning districts. So, multifamily and mixeduse residential then must be allowed by right in these districts. Um, so that's going to be ER, which is our neighborhood commercial restricted. Um, E neighborhood commercial FRF intensive commercial, and light industrial. So, you'll notice the the two non-residential districts that we don't have up there are JNK, which is our more heavy industrial districts. And that's because that's an exemption that the state has made that wherever there's 1,00 within 1,000 ft of heavy industrial uses, um we do not have to allow multifamily and mixeduse residential. So we will also be um making those delineations in our land use chart as well as throughout um our zoning code. Also our historic districts um have also been and not just a historic district but um you may be aware that in our downtown we also have some um parcels with structures that have um historic landmarks and historic designations. So even though you're not in historic district, those parcels um you know will also be protected from this particular state law. And so this is a this is really a conceptual map here. One of the things that uh we just did not have time to do is, you know, go through every plan development district, you know, which may include um some commercial, but this gives you a general idea of, you know, across the board where you could possibly see more multifamily and mixeduse residential where it would not have been allowed today. So, basically, this is all those commercial districts that I just um named to you. So, um it's it's it's pretty expansive. And so, now I want to talk a little bit more about um how this is going to impact some of our mixeduse districts and our formbbased codes. And so we already have our standard MU1 and MU2 districts, but um also where we have now we have a proximity test and we have location requirements for our Camp Buouie formbbased code near Southside Stockyards and Trinity Lakes. So if someone wants to do um a multifamily component, now we could not require them to do non-residential. Now they can do mixed use. However, that mixeduse, you have to have a minimum of 65% residential in order to do um a mixeduse development. So, that does change again those codes as well. So, we're also going to have to amend those codes um with reference to these um specific uses. And so, these are other things that um the bill requires. And this was talked about um a little bit earlier, but in terms of density, the highest density, highest residential density in the city um would have to be allowed. And currently that is Hz zoning, which is there is um it's un I shouldn't say it's unrestricted. There is a strict a restriction, but the restriction is that it's unlimited. However, there is a there is a big however here that's really going to be end up being capped based on the height because we still can enforce the applicable height of the district. So, what that means is whatever someone decides that they want to do multifamily in an E district, they're going to be limited um to I believe that's a 45 foot height. Now, another really huge change um that is unfortunate about this is in terms of setbacks and where this really is going to come into play is when you have these commercial districts that are next to residential. In these particular instances, if beforehand, we'd be able to um require a greater setback based upon the height. Um in this instance, we can no longer do this because the maximum setback now is going to be 25 ft. Um also with regards to parking maximum um requirement now is one space per dwelling unit where beforehand um it would have been one space per per bedroom typically you know in our standard multif family districts. So um another, you know, pretty big change for us is it's going to be administrative re administrative approval now. Um, and the bill is requiring administrative approval for anything that has that typically goes to UDC um, as well as downtown design review board. We had instances especially with DDRB where any type of new development or major conversion had to go before that board. for example, um the city could no longer require that. Also, you all are used to seeing PD site plans, and again, I just want to say this is PD site plans for multifamily and mixeduse residential. Now, those um PD site plans, um not only will they not be going to zoning commission, but they won't be coming to to you, the city council. Um, and another thing that we're still working with the with the city attorney on is it possibly may also eliminate um consideration of waiver requests. Our urban design commission is the group that mostly sees those um waiver requests and so there's a possibility that we may not even be able to take um those particular items to the UDC and the DDRB as well. So there is also a distinction um between what's required for new construction and conversions. And so um while SBA40 also talks a little bit by conversions, SB 2477 went a little bit more in depth. And so what I did think it was important to note like you know not everything is lost for new construction. We can continue to regulate facade design, administration and building entries. we can continue to regulate open space and urban forestry. Um, and then we also have other items related to pedestrianoriented form like sidewalks, lighting, street trees, benches, and bicycle parking. Um, and then as well as signage. And so, you know, one of the things that we that we may want to look at um is looking at some areas in the city where maybe beforehand certain districts didn't have these requirements, but maybe now we want to look at um enforcing some of these and some of our standard commercial when you're going to be doing multif family. But that's something we'll we'll talk about a little bit um in the months and weeks to come. So, building conversions. So if there is um a building that is um being used for office, retail or warehouse, it can be converted to um one of those multifamily or mixeduse residential uses um if it was constructed at least 5 years before the conversion. And these are the this is a list of things that we we could not regulate. Um also the design standards um in these urban district urban design districts um also are going to be impacted in our formbbased districts. We look at our downtown urban design district um those items typically again would go to our design um or our downtown design urban review board. Now we would not take those camp Buouie near Southside Stockyards and again Berry University. And so this is a map um I want to put a little disclaimer on this map as well. This is a map of everything that basically we're we're trying to bring out everything that was residential and that could potentially be impacted by um this SB15 which we're calling the small lot bill. But the disclaimer is that some of the items on here are currently parks. However, they have a residential zoning designation. So, you know, if the city were to sell that that property for whatever reason, then it could possibly um you know, be converted to one of these small lot subdivisions. But this gives you a general idea of what we're looking at. And um we were kind of shocked to see as many um as as we did um somewhat centrally located, but again, you know, some of those are parks. So, mainly what you're looking at are, you know, everything along the periphery of the city. And again, um the bill is requiring um the city to not be able to regulate um parking in terms of requiring a garage or covered parking. Again, you know, we see the one space per dwelling unit requirement. No regulation on bulk and wall articulation. Um that is that would be pretty major if we were talking about some of our um foreignbased districts, in particular Barry University. um we can still regulate that in Barry because none of those would come under this requirement but we could not have that regulation again for um anything that that meets the requirement. And then also in this particular bill um in terms of lot coverage, we are going to be limited to requiring no more than 30% lot coverage or permeable surface whereas in some of these we have a higher standard. So, um, now we're going to talk about zoning notice and protest. And so the one big thing, well two things actually that I would um like to point out here that I feel like is the biggest change for us is that if there is a zoning protest of a of a zoning case that is residential in nature, now that threshold for that opposition goes from 20% of property owners within 200 feet to to 60%. And then also the other change is with our zoning signs. And so um currently the size of our zoning signs are in terms of width are a little bit smaller. And so we're also going to have to change the type of signs um that that we're posting. And so we're talking internally about how we want to do that because not only is the size of the sign changing, but beforehand, you know, if a sign happened to be knocked down or, you know, someone willingly remove the sign, we could still proceed with the public hearing. Now with um with the with the way the state law has been written is if the sign is taken down, we cannot hold that public hearing. So the sign has to stay up. And so that's an additional requirement, you know, now on staff to make sure that that sign is up. So we're again talking internally about how to make sure that that um gets done properly. Um next home >> can I can I interrupt you for just a quick second? Um you say the sign cannot be taken down. >> Yeah. Uh I mean for how long does it have to be down before it's deemed you know that you trip that uh threshold requirement? >> That is a good question. Um and it's probably a better question for the city attorneys. It's one that we're going to be working with them on because that's also going to have to be another um change in our zoning code because now we actually have it written in that if a sign is down we can proceed. And so that's something that we're going to have to figure out like what is that threshold? >> And it's still the TPW department that's charged with um putting the signs up and taking them down. >> Yes. Okay. >> Okay. So um homebased businesses. So this wasn't a uh in in my opinion this wasn't a huge change for us. We have, I feel, in my opinion, a pretty good extensive um regulations in terms of homebased businesses and what can and can't be done. I think for us, the rule to remember here is if we change anything, you know, make sure that we're not going to um be in contradiction to the state law. But for the most part, we're we're pretty much um operating consistent with the law. Um we'll make sure that there's nothing we don't need to tweak, but um we're in pretty good shape. we fill there. Okay. Now, out outdoor storage containers. So, this allows outdoor storage containers um at commercial facilities. Currently, how outdoor storage works, um it depends upon which district you're in, whether or not it's allowed, the amount it that you're allowed to have, they also have to be stored. And so this is though referring to these um bulk containers that whenever there is it first of all it defines what um a bulk container recycling facility is and then it allows cities to adopt an ordinance um regulating those. And so I want to talk now about plan community engagement. Actually, this was the first thing that staff thought about is we said, "How are we going to, you know, not only inform, you know, when you talk to our boards and commissions, you know, of course, first of all, but we have so many um engaged neighborhood groups and stakeholders, some of those have actually already reached out to us. So, we're going to be meeting um with those groups within the next couple of weeks. But then also we feel like um it's important to get the word out to um neighborhood groups and then making sure those neighborhood groups get the word out, you know, to the folks in those neighborhoods. So, um, we've, um, talked about maybe having just, um, one large open house, um, where we'd invite those neighborhood groups, you know, to come in and, you know, talk to us about some of their concerns because I believe that they'll even have some ideas on some things that, you know, we may want to do in the future to try to mitigate, you know, some of the concerns. >> Would you please include us in that? I would like to attend the neighborhood association meeting. >> Absolutely. >> Okay. Yes, ma'am. So, um these are some important dates to to tell you all about. So, you know, one thing that I probably should have put on here is um the the two bills that I feel or maybe three bills that I feel like um are the most impactful for us, those um were not signed by the governor until June 20th um or somewhere around that date. And so, you know, some folks may say, well, you know, why weren't we on this earlier? Well, June 20th is, you know, hasn't been a lot of time to do a lot of work. So, you know, we've been working, you know, as fast as possible to try to figure out what some of these impacts are. In addition to that, we've been working with the city attorney and city attorney has also been working with, you know, some of our area cities as well as us reaching out to those cities to kind of find out, you know, how they're going to be regulating. Um, keeping in mind, of course, that each city is different. And so, um, we've already, um, had a couple of briefings with the boards and commissions. However, um, we just let them know what the bills were. We hadn't, you know, really gone into a whole lot of detail about how, um, the code's going to be impacted because, you know, we wanted to have, um, this discussion with you all first today before we, um, proceeded with making those changes. Um our next I feel like our next big thing that we're going to be doing is bringing forward to you all a resolution on August 26th. Um again just indicating the state uh indicating that the city you know will be complying with state laws and we'll also be adopting um that impact fee ordinance amendment. The other big thing for us is even though we won't have codes adopted, we're still going to be, you know, expected to comply by September 1. And so, um, starting next week and the following week, we're going to be training staff because it is a huge, you know, change from what we've been doing. We also, um, we had initially scheduled community engagement for 91, um, through 95. we're going to do that, but we know we're going to have to extend that, right? So, that's probably going to um be happening the entire month of September. Then September 10th, you know, the the goal is to have something in front of the zoning commission. Um we're we're going to also be updating Dak a couple of times as our development advisory committee. Um and we our plan currently is to have something um to you all for adoption on September 30th. And um I'm gonna you know in advance ask for a little bit of grace and that you know just because of the extent of the changes um and once we hear from some of the neighborhoods we may not be able to get to 9:30 but for certain you'll have something in October. >> Okay. Questions. Council member Hall. >> Mr. Landra. What does I know that you kind of mentioned it a little bit but what with it being two weeks away what does community engagement like look like preliminarily to you? >> Right. So, a couple of things, you know, I talked about, you know, some of the um stakeholders like, you know, we'll go to some of their meetings as we're invited. Like, I've already been invited to come and um speak with DFWI um as well as the um the the Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber and I'm probably missing a couple of others, but um you know, several have have asked us to come and speak. So, we'll be going to them. But in terms of like the neighborhood groups, what we wanted to do, we have a a registry of neighborhood groups. Um we were going to send out, you know, a an invite to them inviting them to come and participate um you know, in a you know, basically like an open house type meeting to learn more about these changes and how you know they will be impacting you know those neighborhoods. And so, um, we'd have that meeting, we'd schedule it. So, we'd probably be sending something out within the next couple weeks. That's why we were thinking those actual meetings may not happen until that second or third week of September. Um, being that there's going to be a resolution on this coming up in August 26, it would be nice to just kind of have something on the books for them so that they we're making a decision was just basically going to send an alert um through our community. So, it would be nice to have something temporar, not temporarily, but something um on the calendar on when there will be an opportunity for them to hear more information about it as opposed to making individual calls to our offices about more information. >> Well, whether Excuse me. For what it's worth, we plan on also putting this information online on our website and sending it out to the interested parties that have registered for zoning notifications as well. We'll figure out the date and make sure it goes out prior to the meeting next week. >> Councilor Nettles. >> Yes. Uh you state that we going to you're going to put forth a resolution that the city is going to be in compliance with the state law. >> That's my understanding from um the city attorney's office. They can speak a little bit more on that one. But >> I just have a question. Do we commonly do that or do we just follow state law? >> We just follow state law. This is just a change, right? So, we wanted to make sure that when staff when somebody comes in to do something and we're not following what they're used to following that we can say we have a resolution for the city council directing us to follow state law along with state law. Right? Because we every all our ordinance until this happened all our ordinances are are uh follow state law. Our current ordinances after the first is not going to be following state law. We want to just be able to say legally the council directed us to follow the new state law and we're in the middle of actually amending all our ordinances so that we can comply with the ordinances comply with state law. We just wanted something on the books that >> so it's different just didn't do it on our own that the council gave us direction. >> So basically it's different because our ordinance is not going to be following state law. So we're going to put a resolution. >> Exactly. >> Okay. Makes sense. >> Any other questions from council? Thank you very much, Landre. We appreciate it. Okay, we're going to move to one-time use of interest income. Christian Simmons, our Fort Worth Lab chief transformation officer, is going to present. Okay. Ready? Good. >> Ready. >> All right. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Christian Simmons with the Fort Worth Lab. So, I'm here to close us out in the middle of your long day today with a discussion on interest earnings and recommended uses. So, as you probably know, uh the city generates investment income um by investing idle cash from operations, PIGO, bond funds, and compliance with state law and city policy. Uh and there are a number of policies regarding cash and investment management in our financial management policies. Um, but the primary thing you need to know is that we reserve interest income in particular almost exclusively for one-time needs based on those policies. And so we don't adopt budgets that are balanced based on interest income. Um, because of course that income can fluctuate widely based on what's going on with interest rates and the economy. So instead, typically the practice is around this time of year, we bring you an update on actual interest earnings along with some recommendations for how we can appropriate that funding. Uh some of the common uses at this time um are addressing fund balance issues. So either purposely trying to grow fund balance like we're doing in the general fund or if there are certain funds that have fund balance issues that are lagging behind, we usually um would recommend addressing that with onetime money like this. um closing gaps on capital projects and then other one-time contributions for capital uh projects, grants, purchases, etc. So, one-time money. And to give you a bit of context on that, when I mentioned volatility, this is a five-year history of interest earnings dating back to 2020. Um so, the line on this chart represents the federal funds rate set by the Federal Reserve. So, you can kind of see the correlation there between that rate and our interest earnings, right? It's a pretty clear, you know, it follows um the stacked bar or the bar chart there is our actual earnings year-over-year. Um so when the rates higher, we've earned more interest. That's an obvious correlation. Uh you'll see for example in 2021 and 2022 when the rate was sort of effectively near zero. Um we earned about four to five million and then last year in 2024 when the rate was like 5% we earned 30 million across that same group of funds. So that's what I mean when I say that it fluctuates really widely. Since the city doesn't have any control over the federal funds rate, we also again don't really rely on this source of income for balancing the budget since it can vary so much. And then just one more chart for context. Um the bars here, same period of history, represent how our property and sales tax performed relative to budget in each of those same years. So like in 2020, we underperformed on sales tax and property tax mid- pandemic. Uh but in the following three years we had a a recovery that was heavily correlated with the federal funds rate being so low. So rate low more spending you know that. Um so you can see now with the rate high those two revenue sources are once again underperforming property tax and sales tax. You've heard that in recent budget and forecast um projections. So another strong relationship here just to give again some context about interest. So with that in mind and knowing that the rate has been upward of 4% all year, we have another high year of interest earnings. Um so the fiscical year 25 forecast for interest income is $28.1 million. Now I mentioned I've been like hammering like we only use this foretime things there. There's one caveat to that which is that we do adopt a very small budget annually to partially cover the cost of a couple of employees who work primarily on debt or in part for debt. Um these are employees primarily in finance but also include um some legal staff and forth lab staff. Our policies allow us to allocate the appropriate portions of those salaries. So we do that. Um so we we remove that 500,000 from the available then 28.1 million. So available for one-time needs 27.6 6 million um that we'll talk about today. So this is a quick summary and I have a slide sort of for each of these recommendations. Uh but this is the proposed use of those um fiscal year 25 interest earnings the 27.6 million. So almost half about 44% of it um we're recommending to maintain the general fund fund balance at 22% followed by 6.5 million to the cowgirl hall of fame. You can see from there I don't won't have to read the whole table to you but I'll proceed to the detailed slides unless you have immediate reactions here. Okay. So fund balance um the bulk of the recommended appropriation of interest earnings has to do with maintaining the general fund fund balance at 22%. So the city's goal is really to increase that fund balance to 25% which would be three months of operating expenditures instead of the required two months of operating expenditures. We are not quite there. You can see the comparison there between what 22% versus 25% fund balance looks like. But we certainly don't want to go backwards either. And so staff recommends appropriating at least the 10.6 million to maintain that 22% plus anything else that remains un unassigned through this conversation. So right now we kind of went down the list and there was a little bit extra. So we're saying we'll push all 12 million over. Um but you can kind of see how it breaks down there. Can I ask why we're from a policy perspective why we're moving from a 22% to 25% fund balance? >> It's part of the long-term plan that this the city has had to try to get to a AAA bond rating and it the cost of funds ends up being lower and all AAA bond rated cities are at 25% minimum. >> Good question. All right. Uh, second largest recommendation for allocation of interest is for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. So, um, for those of you who here in April, the city council adopted a resolution supporting this expansion project. Uh, and in that resolution, we committed for consideration of the $6.5 million in funding for capital cost. Uh, and so the Cowgirl Museum has, you know, officially made that ask. So, we believe that this is a good use of that one-time available funding since council supported that project um back in April. Next, Panther Island. So, staff recommends using $3.1 million in funds for direct costs of bridge projects. Um so, these are the projects located at Commerce Calhoun, potentially North Main Street, just depending on how the costs really shake out. Um but these costs include uh local match so local participation for the contributions from COG and from text dot as well as items like professional services project management inspection. Um and so this will this is one one phase of ask for Panther Island. So, another fund balance item here. Um, this one regarding group health, the group health and life insurance fund. You know this, um, we talked about this a little bit in budget last week, but this is the fund that administers health insurance for employees and dependents and life insurance for employees. Um, the claims are currently outpacing the contributions. And so, you know, employee premiums, for instance, aren't keeping up with actual medical and pharmacy cost. Um, you can really see that noted in bullet one. and I don't want us to miss that. So, um, also the table at the bottom, at the beginning of this fiscal year, their fund balance was 35.9 million. Their forecast for the end of this year is 23.8 million. So, that's a $12 million use of fund balance. We So, you can see that they're kind of on a um the fast track to falling below their 25% reserve requirement um because that's their reserve requirement as an internal service fund. So, this is part one of likely a two-year restoration plan to get that fund balance back on track. And we also have to look at sort of the costs and how we're we're allocating those things. Um, but this is a recommendation to help them into fiscal year 26. >> Council, >> I'll you go ahead and give the and I have some questions about the next slide. >> This one? Okay. Yes. 2 million to city hall floor 18. Um, these funds would be used to complete construction and buildout of the 18th floor. So, we're coming up on the time where the tenant lease is ending and con contractors will vacate that floor in the next couple of months. Uh, and so the idea is that we do the buildout for that floor. Um, likely for the city manager's office to be relocated along with planning staff. You'll remember planning is moving over to the CMO and needs office space there, homelessness, some of the other city management um, divisions. Question. >> I have some real heartburn over this particular issue. Um, I can't remember how long ago it was. We'll call it a couple years ago. Staff came back to this body and asked us for $50 million for city hall. And because we were over budget, we were overbudget what previous council had been told they were going to spend on this building. $50 million is a lot to be over budget. And I understand that some of that was out of our control, but here nor there, huge price tag. Did we not contemplate the remodel of this floor when we built out this very expensive um redesign of this building? >> Can anyone answer that? >> I believe that that the it was not part of it because the the lease there was a lease a tenant in there and their their lease was going to go longer. They decided to terminate earlier. >> How how early are they terminating? >> Three years. So, I'm inferring here, does that mean you had anticipated yes, you would remodel this floor, but it wouldn't have been until 27 or 28 based on that lease? >> Okay. >> I don't I I wasn't here when all that happened, but I believe it wasn't part of the projections that they put forward at that point. >> I'd like to know why not because when that $50 million came to us, we were told that we're going to hold true to that $50 million and now there's two more million dollars coming into that. >> Yeah, that's correct, Council Member Beck. This 18th floor was not part of the scope that we gave to the Athenian group and to Bokeh Powell and everybody else. It was not anticipated that we would be doing anything with that floor during the the time period of this project. >> Is that because of communication from the the lei at the time? >> Correct. Correct. >> I I get that we had someone >> So it's really up to you know it's really up to us if we want to do something with the floor now or we want to do it later. >> Council peoples. >> So what were their termination fees? termination fees >> the leasey when they're ending >> terms of buying in terms of buying out >> okay >> buying out the lease yeah we can I can look that up check check into that >> okay would you because I think that's important to know >> yeah they chose to get it out of it and one of the reasons it was here is because actually council back in the spring made the request that the city manager's office move up to this floor the other alternative is I would recommend it just go to the health fund if we don't want to move down that road and shore up the health fund, but we put it on here because it's onetime money. It would only be used one time and so the floor can be used for as currently as, you know, storage or some other use like that. Uh, but that's what included it because it was a city council request back in the spring. >> So, let me >> I know that Christian is going to finish her presentation, but I think we should look at shoring up the health fund. That's concerning to me, but we'll uh if you'll finish the presentation. >> Councor, do you have another question at the moment? No, I just I want to be clear that I want staff to have the adequate office space that they need. So, if we need it, my my real concern is that this the cost of this building and my concern that it's out of out of control. it fell out of control at 50 and to find out that an entire floor was not included in that scope and I understand we had a lease but we knew an end date to that lease and so council was not given an accurate number of of full readout and I think you owe staff owes it to us and we owe it to our our residents our taxpayers to to be able to make those decisions. So it just feels like we just keep putting more money in that and and we don't have a handle on it. So maybe that's an IR. I'd like to know how much we spent total on um on this building. >> Any other questions at the time? Council member Chris Anne could go in. Thank you. >> Okay, thank you. Um this is my last slide. So our final recommendation is to allocate 871,000 in interest funding to the Child Care Associates Early Learning Center in Stop 6. So, you might remember this uh was originally planned as part of the stop six hub, that community center project, and it was originally allocated $5 million in ARPA um back in 2021 as a way of improving access to child care um in district 5. So, but due to space limitations and and competing demands at the hub, uh there was a pivot made and they're now pursuing a standalone facility. Um, and as a standalone facility, there are costs of land acquisition, site work, utilities that were not originally budgeted. Um, and so staff has identified ARPA savings from other completed project that can be reassigned to this project. So that'll be a bit of the $ 1.5 million gap, 629,000 of it. The other $871 is where the interest would come into play. So kind of a two-prong solution to fill that funding gap for childcare associates. And that is the end of my formal presentation. We can facilitate discussion, answer questions. What I'll say before that is the next steps of this would be typically um both of these uh M andC's are on your agenda for uh next week, August 26th, both the interest piece and then just related to that last item, the ARPA reallocation there for that last project. So, one option maybe is would it work to, and this is a question for Christina, for Jay and for Lean, does it work to separate all of the proposed interest income allocations that were proposed today except for that $2 million that was proposed to the 18th floor, allow us to have an additional discussion about that and walk through cost. It sounds like Maryland probably has some numbers to provide counsel about what the leie um you know buyout was that council can kind of look at those that we don't delay the 26th vote but we have that to talk about and then council people's point she there may be some interest in actually putting that towards the fund balance for healthcare. Charlie >> thank you mayor. Yeah, my questions would be for floor 18. Um, certainly understanding if we're going to do it eventually anyways. I'm sure there's a cost savings in doing it now versus what construction will be in three years. But my questions were just on some of the other things that were on there like I said homeless on there and it says other city priorities like I guess just more clarification on what does that actually mean there >> bringing other departments on that floor or >> which is a good reason maybe to kind of put all that together in one if that's okay to work for everybody to do it like that. >> Absolutely. It it was all the divisions that are now part of the city manager's office with the reorganization >> would be up in that floor. >> Different offices of this of the city manager's office, the the terror group, homelessness group, the planning group that's moving in, >> all those then would be on one floor together but >> we're currently on one floor. It's spread out in different divisions, >> right? It's just the actual staff related to those functions. And that might also allow you to walk through what the 14th floor would become at that point. So if we're good with that, council, maybe that allows us to have a bigger discussion about that particular two million, but move forward on these other items. >> Great. Okay, we'll keep going. Thank you, Christian. Great presentation. >> Thank you. >> Of course. Okay, council. Any requests for future agenda items or reports from council? Council Beck, go ahead. Did you have one? Okay. No, >> I did mine this morning. >> Okay, I'm going for it. Meeting adjourned. >> Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay.