City Council - Regular Meeting

And I say that sharing and living that experience, especially with children, is very rewarding.

We're back with Arlington Eats. I'm Jeremy Thomas with My Arlington TV. On this episode, we are headed inside Couple Vibes where they are serving up more than coffee. They're looking to serve you right here in the community.

We take pride in providing southern hospitality. Our mantra is brewing community, serving culture, so we're really intentional about creating a welcoming atmosphere that feels like home.

A home completed just this past October where owner and Arlington native, Charletra Sharp, calls her customers her neighbors.

The menu, it changes regularly and it's really in response to what our neighbors communicate. We do have some signatures that have become very popular.

Like the best seller, the Odom 97, named after Arlington's first minority mayor, Elsie Odom, elected in 1997.

It has mocha, hazelnut, and Irish cream. We added that on the menu after he tasted, and so it wasn't until he approved that we added it to the menu.

There's the popular pistachio latte, the spiced mango latte inspired by Mangolassi, and the expresso.

We knew that there's not one drink that could really reflect the palette, the diversity of Arlington residents. And so the expresso is an espresso-based drink where you get to choose your own spice and sweet.

Customization is key with quick bites of food, their house refreshers, and a variety of chai teas.

And so peach cobbler chai is very popular, as well as your traditional chai, and then we have one called the perfect burst as well.

Even with these items, Sharp says that they are more than just another coffee shop. They're here for your needs as she gives back to her hometown right here in the American Dream City.

We're a place where we build community. We're also used for meetings, private meetings. birthday gatherings, there's been worship events here, book signings, and just various events. I live not far from here. I grew up in this area and we just have never had a place in the community that felt like a community staple that was welcome to all, where your family would come.

Back on 45 years in this business, for me it's all about the relationships. And those are the things that I'll carry forever. I grew up in Massachusetts. I was a big Red Sox fan and that's where I developed my original love for baseball. Got into Georgetown University and the School of Foreign Service there which is one of the best in the country and I wanted to be a diplomat and going to the Foreign Service. One thing kind of led to another very quickly. I got in with contacts at the athletic department at Georgetown. They hired me as the interim SID at the age of 22, and I had the great fortune of my first real coach that I worked with was John Thompson, who made an incredible impact on my life. I'd been at Georgetown, you know, I'd been there six years total, and I always loved professional baseball, so I applied for the assistant public relations job in Baltimore. Working for that PR department taught me how to be a good baseball public relations director, and I got great training there. I started here in November of 1984. In those days, the Rangers were not very good. I mean, it was the mid-'80s. Our relationship with the media was not great. Our media services were poor. And so it was a real challenge to kind of build it up from the ground up. You know, the first big event, obviously, for the Rangers was the Nolan Ryan years. That put us on the map from a PR perspective. Nolan's accomplishments, it was a PR director's dream. Next year, in 2024, the Rangers and Arlington will host the 2024 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, and more importantly, and it's just as important, All-Star Week. And to me, that is a real matter of pride. It was a thrill to be inducted into the Texas Rangers Baseball Hall of Fame, and as I was preparing my speech, I thought about so many of the people that have had an impact on my career.

The love of baseball and the relationships it has afforded is what keeps me going after all these years.

I'm John Blake, and I'm alive with the American dream.

I'm

You're using your own creativity, your own art, because every single cake or anything that you do, you use it.

It's art. I really enjoy coming to her classes. It's such a fantastic moment that I always feel I love.

I love her energy. I love her spirit. I love how she brings us all in together in this magnificent project that she's making us do. Like today, we're doing cupcakes. We're decorating cupcakes for Mother's Day.

I'm grateful my mom took me to this class because it was my mom who told me to, hey, let's go to this class. I was like, I don't know about this. I'm nervous.

What if I'm not going to get it? What if I'm just going to go to that class and just not even do it? But I did. I'm actually so proud of myself that I did push myself to do it. I totally recommend this class for basically for everybody, older women, young women, children.

Sharing and living that experience, especially with children, is very rewarding.

The classes that we have here in the East Library Recreation Center, we have in the water, which is like water yoga. We also have yoga classes. We have what we call senior fit, which is for them, we have chairs for them that they can move in the chairs, since there is not much movement. It's just so they can start moving.

all right everybody we're going to go ahead and call the afternoon session of the city council meeting to order and hope everybody had a good weekend. Wasn't as good as mine, I got to spend it in Puerto Rico, so it was fun. Pursuant to VTCA government code chapter 551.071, 072, and 087, we will now go into a executive closed session.

I don't know.

Man, I did that loud enough, we got everybody's attention there. We're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the City Council back to order. We're gonna move on down to discuss our work session items, starting with 3.1, Mr. John Chapman. Welcome back, sir.

All right, great to see y'all. Mayor, Council, John Chapman, Long Range Planning Manager. Gonna dive right into it, agenda today, what we've been doing since our June work session with y'all, process and engagement update, and the next steps. Since our June's work session, the biggest takeaway we heard, help the community understand what Innovate Arlington is. We did three big things so far, and that certainly doesn't say that we're finished doing that objective. Created resource videos for all of the chapters, helping all the elected and appointed officials through the summer understand what each of those chapters really represent and mean for Innovate Arlington, and those are now publicly available so that residents also have the chance to review those videos. Streamlined information simplified that preferred growth scenario graphic that we looked at at the June work session and how it's kind of divvied up into the plan itself and then creating council district scenario pages that have been created and published for each of the town halls that I'll get more into here in a little bit. clearer engagement materials, making sure that our town hall presentation was prepared for residents as the focus. And then right now, as I'll dive into in a minute, we've been getting great feedback from districts one, two, four, and now five. One of the questions, how aligned is the existing zoning with the innovate Arlington vision? We looked at our three context zones, and this was presented to the steering committee in July, traditional connected and central context zones. What we found was generally overall, all of our existing zoning was in pretty good alignment with the vision for innovate Arlington. Supporting neighborhood preservation was a big one for traditional contact zones and connected. The biggest one that had the most opportunity was our central contact zone, UTA, downtown, the entertainment district. That opportunity really helps us elevate and work toward the future that Innovate Arlington is looking for. Most of that was within the innovation creative district is the most transformational potential, looking at some of our older industrial areas and how we can revitalize those. So process and engagement, we've began our phase three engagement. We're in Q3 of 2026, looking ahead into the remainder of this year with major, or not major updates, but updates to the plan, and then looking ahead into 2027. Wanted to, as part of the engagement updates, wanted to announce and let Council be aware that the American Planning Association for the Texas Chapter is awarding the City of Arlington first place, or GOLD, in the Planning Achievement Award for Public Outreach. This was in response to the great innovative work that we did with the Growing a Better Arlington board game and all of the residents that we reached through that process. So a great achievement. for this plan ahead of adoption. Steering committee, as we found out through some surveys that we sent out, generally supports the direction and wants a more focused, actionable plan. We heard three big things coming from the survey. What's working is the comprehensive and inclusiveness of the plan itself. A clear implementation framework, though we're certainly continuing to work with the steering committee on that, and we'll continue to work with y'all on that. Reflects Arlington's strengths, and then it has a strong vision in those big moves that we've been talking about. What refinement is still needed, and a lot of these items we're undertaking right now with the steering committee in both the meeting that we had last week, as well as looking into the months ahead. Reducing the length and repetition, in some ways, we can certainly reduce, in some ways, the plan will need to be, have some of that repetition, especially when talking about elements related to our place types. But what we'll be able to do, going back to how we can simplify this information is, as the plan continues to evolve and get to a final point, we can provide more guidance on websites and handouts as to particular items that residents and developers need answers to. Use more Arlington-specific language, clarify growth and neighborhood protection, strengthen transportation priorities, and also strengthen those measurable goals. We've had four engagements to date. Districts two, one, and four are currently on the slide, and I have some notes about District five. Right now, we've had 165 residents come out to the district town halls, and I sincerely appreciate all of the council members and staff that have participated in this and helped us provide answers to our residents that have attended these. Positive feedback from districts one, two, and four. We've received mixed feedback, I'm sorry, one, two, and five mixed feedback from district four. Mostly likes the vision, but there are concerns about the market demand and how vacant land is potentially only used for apartments by the market itself and developers. Sales tax leakage was something that was also brought up and as the plan, the plan also highlights that and then concerns about tree canopy loss. Generally, overall, especially in districts to one and four, we heard that residents are really looking forward to how development and rezoning aligns with this vision over the next twenty years implement implementation tracking and that annual report. Just wanted to make the room aware that the plan is available on conveyor. We've been putting out a lot of information on that. 27 social media posts, five newsletters reaching over 19,000 on those newsletters and over 95,000 through social media. All to make sure residents are aware of how they can review the plan as well as what the town halls are looking like. So we have two remaining options for an in-person and virtual town hall. The last two are on August 31st, next Monday, at the Bob Duncan Center with Councilmember Hunter, and then we have a virtual town hall on September 1st. And OOC, the Office of Communications, will continue to broadcast those dates to the public over the next few weeks. Next steps, we're gonna continue our public review of the draft plan now through about Labor Day. Then MIG and city staff will begin refining the plan with all of the feedback that we've received over a period of about a month to six weeks. And then we'll start through the initial adoption phase and meeting with y'all again November through early 2027. And with that, I'll stand for any questions.

Any questions for Mr. Chapman from council? No, sir. All right, thank y'all. Appreciate you. Okay, 3.2, Gary Pakken.

Good afternoon again. Gary Packin, Director of Parks and Recreation, here to talk to you about ACTIV, some operations and performance update, some great news and some challenges that we're working on. Just some highlights, we're gonna go through history, visitation, a little bit about membership, some program overview, some financial strategies that we're working on, and then some hot topics on how we're gonna continue to evolve and improve. So some concept to reality, total square feet, 73,000, extremely large building for us. It was funded in the 2017 bond program. Total project cost, $65 million. Anticipated facility memberships, a little over 10,000. As of the third quarter bar, our expenses are 2.5 million, and our revenues from the performance loan are at 1.2. From a visitation standpoint, so you see the Beacon, Active, East, and LZ on here. I'm going to show you a few slides about visitation. We added the Summit, which is the Grand Prairie 50-plus facility that we really patterned ourselves off of 10 years or so ago when Summit was built, maybe more than that, probably 15, 20 years. It's been that long. was really outside the box for this demographic. And they were a leader in the country in regards to what they did. And we really used that as a pattern. And we called them and said, hey, we want your visitation from February to July. And they gave us their numbers so we could see where we stand. And we're 50,000 people above them. So here's just a graph, a visual from comparing active to east across the fiscal year through July. Active, obviously a lot more people going through the building. And then just a specific spreadsheet that we're working on. So we're pulling data from a number of different entities. We're using Placer, we're working with a new company called City Data that we can track visitation and utilization of our facilities. This one is specifically door counters, so the amount of people coming in the building. Now this includes staffing, but we felt this is a really good number that we can track. The items in yellow are the highest attended line. So 25, you can see October was our highest attended month. That is, we have a Walktober program that was extremely popular last year. We expect it to be extremely popular this year. You can see in June, or in July, we were at 34,000. In June, we were at 31,000, which was the highest number for 2026, and we surpassed that. for this month, this past month. Now August, we're expecting August to be even higher. So you can see a trend that we are continuing to grow. We haven't plateaued yet. And then the average month, average day, and the average day in 2026, we're at 1,100 people through the door each day. That's a lot of people. And as of right now, October through July, we're at 282,000 people inactive. So originally when we projected our use of the facility, we had the active side and the social side. We figured it was about 50-50. And the attendance and the participation level was there. We just have that many more people added to the active side. So you could see a discrepancy with the current use. We have 5,000 more people, or membership I should say, a year at this point in time than we projected. And we're seeing a lot of that on the active side. So total memberships, we're at a little over 15,000 memberships. Those are news and renewals, so it's a little bit awkward. Unique memberships, we're a little less than 15,000, so that's unique people. Total cancellations, we're at 2%. We're still trying to refine that number to see if that's, how that cancellation's occurring, but that's an extremely low cancellation rate. Total scans, 336,000. Our oldest member is 103. Our youngest member is 40, and how's a 40-year-old getting into active? Well, they're married to someone that's 50, so they can get in there. So that's the qualifier. Total residents, we're at 13,600, so we're at 86% residents, 14% non-residents. We'll come back and talk a little bit about that. And then we're also about 50-50 between paid and insurance members, and we'll come back and talk about that as well. So from a membership standpoint, we have three memberships, and these are across the entire organization, blue, green, and gold. Gold is pretty much the buffet of everything that you can participate in. You can see the breakdown. We got 4,100 that are paid and 8,200 that are insurance on the gold membership. This category breaks it down in regards to ages. So we got 50 to 59, 60 to 79, and our super seniors, 80 plus. a 10,500, 10,600, or that 60 to 79 range, and then the subsequent rates that they're paying, whether resident or non-resident. And these memberships are per month. So going back to the insurance, again, we're 52-48, so roughly 50% the different type of companies and the insurance policies they have. And every time they scan, they pay a certain rate based on their policy. So whether it's $2.50 or $3 or $4, every time they scan in, we get that money eventually provided to us. Now, there's a cap to those. which is great. So what we're looking at now is from a revenue standpoint, how many people are using up to the cap and using past the cap. Once you get past the cap or you get past your membership rate, let's say it's $26, you can come as much as you want for free in essence. Because they can keep scanning, it doesn't matter because they're already capped out. So the key there is how many people are coming to the cap. So if they're only coming two or three times a month, how do we get them to come more often?

from a health standpoint, but also as a revenue standpoint for our budget.

So that's something we're kind of diving into the numbers now. This might be a little hard to see from your seat, but you can see with the heat map, majority of our members are on the western side, which is closest to the rec center, or to the active center, but there are red dots across the entire city. And then you have Sprinkles in Fort Worth and in Grand Prairie as well. So those obviously are non-residents. But it's definitely reaching the entire city. So from a programming standpoint, so we started off, and these are programs per week. And we started off with 35 social programs a week. We're at now over 125. That includes day trips, games, art, music, et cetera. Aquatics, we're about eight programs a week. And then fitness programs is our biggest challenge. We started with 31. We're at 65. We have 70 classes between all the other rec centers in the entire park system. The challenge we're having there is enough instructors. So we're actively recruiting members from active if they want to you know, have a side hustle and be an instructor, we're open to it. So we're working with HR also looking at our pay range and how competitive we are with other entities in DFW to make sure that we're in that market as well, to make sure that we can expand our programs at ACTIV space providing, and also we're educating our customers in regards to what we have across the entire organization. So if they can't get into a program at Active, they might be able to get in at Clef Nelson, East, LZ, Dottie Lynn. And then from a visitation standpoint per day, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday are our biggest days. I was over there yesterday at one o'clock, and parking was at a premium. It was extremely busy, which is fantastic to see. So from some financial sustainability opportunities, membership is our largest revenue source with almost 16,000 members, 98% retention rate, 14% non-residents. So that's an opportunity we can look at. Are we charging enough for non-residents? We're gonna be working on our Parks, Recreation, and Culture master plan later this fall. We're gonna be going out for an RFQ, or we've been out for an RFQ and we're going through the evaluation process right now. And part of that component is our cost recovery for the entire organization. So how are we allocating all of our expenses? Are we charging the appropriate fees? Are we meeting the goals of the organization in regards to generating enough revenue to offset our operations to reduce our burden to the general fund? So that's something that we definitely need to look at is making sure that our fees are appropriate. We don't want to get it to a point where it's detrimental to use. but it's still subsidizing our operations, so we need to find that sweet spot operationally. And then from an insurance member, how do we maximize our members that are insurance users while balancing our demand for programs, treadmills, walking trail, that type of thing, all at the same time? From a rental standpoint, the social side is open on the weekends for rentals. We've generated about $150,000 in rentals, 134 specifically, in the various rooms. So that's a good revenue source for us as well to get people that technically aren't 50 in the building to see what opportunities they have in the future for future memberships. From a non-traditional revenue source, we brought to you a facility sponsorship with Texas Health Resources, our partner for co-branding on the facility. We are working on a coffee vendor that we hope to bring to you in the near future that will provide us product as well as some rent. to, again, offset our budget. And then we're also looking for a pool and a track sponsor as well, and even pickleball courts. And then we talked to you about the Pierce-Birch opportunity for future development. One of the key takeaways is we haven't been open. We were open last March. The pool opened up a few months later. We're still kind of growing into our skin. We're still kind of figuring out how the building's working, how logistically we're keeping everything moving, making sure all our spaces are full. You go out there on a Friday morning, there are people everywhere in the building. It's a beautiful sight to see that many people. in a facility that's active and hopefully changing lives. So that's definitely a huge takeaway for us. We're still learning in regards to how the facility operates and staffing perspective. We're making some changes through the budget process to relieve the general fund a little bit. in regards to positions and how they're being allocated. But ultimately, the goal is to get it below $1 million in subsidy is our fiscal goal. And through that non-traditional revenue source, we feel like that's the greatest opportunity for us to do that. Some hot topics. So we started a program called Let's Talk Active, where we sit down with our members. We've had three or four meetings with them so far. And just things we're hearing from them in general. Membership obviously has far exceeded our expectations, which is a good problem to have. I mentioned earlier working to expand class opportunities, both at Active and throughout our entire park system. We're recruiting and trying to hire and train fitness instructors, and we'll pay for that training. And we're encouraging members to be instructors. Registration, there was some feedback from our customers in regards to registration not working properly. We made some adjustments. We expanded the funnel. A good way to explain it is Black Friday, everyone's trying to buy that 80-inch TV set. And there's only 100 TV sets, but yet there's 1,000 people going to the store to buy it. That's kind of what we're experiencing when we have registration time frames. Everyone's trying to buy concert tickets at the same time. So we've made some adjustments with our platform, and we continue to expand or promote the use of the app. And the people using our app has increased significantly over the past, since December. Citywide services, again, educating our members on what's available throughout the entire city, not just at Active. We know, as you've seen with the heat map, people are driving across the entire city to go to Active. That's great. It's the cool place. Everyone wants to be there, right? It's where the cool kids are. We want people to come there, but yet, if you're driving by a facility, this may be more convenient for you to participate in your programs. Pickleball is a challenge. It's a very hot sport right now. If they could play in every room at the same time, they probably would. So we're looking at ways that we can maximize our pickleball space, again, not just at active, but throughout the entire rec center facilities. And then also, we're updating our fitness equipment at Dottie Lynn, Cliff Nelson, and LZ Odom. Some of that equipment's fairly old. LZ Odom's getting renovated as part of that renovation. But you'll be seeing a proposal to purchase new equipment for Dottie Lynn and Cliff Nelson in their future. Because if we're encouraging people to say, go to your rec center near you that may be more convenient, we want to make sure we have equipment that's like for like. and that's fair. We continue to ask for feedback from our customers. We started a Net Promoter Score this April, which is a big change for our survey process internally. We started with Active and Beacon. We've had almost 1,000 people, I think, from Active give us feedback. One quick question, if you have any comments, if you want us to call you, we'll call you. And Venera's been doing a lot of those calls, so thank you, Venera, for doing that. But it gives us an opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with people and really make sure that they know that we're listening to them. We sit down meetings, basically mini town halls. This picture here shows some of the ideas that we got from them. Again, to convey some of the challenges, some of the things we're working on to improve their experience at our facility and how we can continue to educate them on what's going on through a newsletter. We're gonna be adding some monitors throughout the building that we can communicate with them and continue to make sure that they understand that we're listening.

So with that, I'll pause for any questions. Any questions for Gary from Council? Council Member Pham.

Where's Gary? Great job on this briefing. I get a lot of complaint, the Pickleball Court, which you mentioned in here. Sometimes they have two court open and they block half of it because for basketball, but nobody's shut for basketball. There's a plan that your staff got in place. If nobody's shut for basketball, most old people like me don't want to play basketball. So you can just expand it out so we'd have more people get opportunity to play Pickleball.

Yep, so we've had a couple conversations, and I think we have another meeting next week with our pickleball enthusiasts about that. So we're trying to make sure that we have a diverse platform of programs, and it's not just 100% pickleball. So they have a lot of people show up at one time and try to play on two courts. And that's not fun and enjoyable and not maximizing their time. And we don't want to discourage that. So we're looking at changing the schedule where sometime there's going to be four courts, sometime there will be two. We still want to try to provide that amenity for different activities, whether it's volleyball or basketball. And again, make sure that the pickleball players know there's other places you can go and play as well throughout the system that are part of your package for your membership. So we're working through those details, making sure that we're meeting with the PICOL players to make sure we're accommodating that.

Thank you, Gary. Any other questions? Council Member Hogg.

Thank you, Gary. Good problem to have, right? As a parks director, you enjoy too many people wanting to use it, correct? Yeah. These are good things to talk about. Gary, when did you say, as someone who's not 50 yet, so I can't officially use active, When are y'all talking about, you mentioned about like the non-residence fees, when are y'all going through that? And will that also include like, I was even thinking like variable-based fees, like maybe reduction on some of our places where we want more people to go to Summit, to Beacon, to East or some of those. When will y'all do that and have that plan?

So as part of our parks recreation and culture master plan, we're going to have a component there. It's for cost recovery. So we're going to spend some time digging into every one of our expenses and all of our programs and allocating those appropriately. The challenge with the non-resident or the resident is those memberships are across the entire organization. So at some point in time, we made a decision to make sure it was one membership everywhere. You just didn't have to have a membership at Dottie Lynn. You could go anywhere. with that membership. So you can walk any one of our buildings. So that's the challenge. What we need to make sure is our non-resident fees are appropriate, because the residents helped build that facility, but the non-residents didn't. So there's that challenge from a capital standpoint, and then make sure that we're operating and make sure that our residents get first opportunities to participate in programs. So we're hearing, you know, hey, why are non-residents getting opportunity to take in my space is some of the feedback we're getting for program. And we want to make sure that our residents are getting first dibs. So that may be a prioritization for registration process that we look at based on what other departments are using. Okay.

Thanks, Gary. Any other questions from council? Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Thank you. We're gonna move on down to 3.3 fiscal year 2027 annual audit plan with Susan Edwards.

See if I can get it short enough for me. Good afternoon, I'm Susan Edwards, city auditor, and I'm here today to discuss with you the proposed fiscal year 2027 annual audit plan. Prior to the beginning of each fiscal year, our office is required to bring to you for your review and approval our annual audit plan. It is on your agenda for tonight. So we just wanted to take a minute to discuss with you how our plan is derived. The plan is based on a risk assessment of all city activities. We also take into consideration any requests from council, the mayor, city manager's office, and department heads. And we look at results of prior audits that we've done. And so with that, I will go over the projects that we've included on the plan this year. The first is external audit assistance. We do this every year. We assist the city's external auditors with the completion of the financial audit, and primarily we assist with single audit looking at federal grant compliance. We've included an artificial intelligence audit in which we plan to evaluate the extent to which artificial intelligence systems are used across the city as well as compliance with applicable policies. We've included a workers' compensation audit. We plan to review the processes used by the city to administer the workers' compensation program and evaluate compliance with laws, rules, and regulations. Access control audit, we're going to evaluate the processes the city uses to ensure the access to city facilities is limited to only those individuals authorized and those access rights are granted in compliance with established policies. We have a flock safety utilization audit. In this, we're going to look at the police department's use of the flock safety automated license plate reader system to determine if it's used in a manner that is aligned with established policies, procedures, best practices, laws, and regulations. And finally, an information technology department audit. This is continued from our FY26 audit plan. And in this, we're looking at the effectiveness of the processes used in evaluating, selecting, and managing information technology projects. In addition to the seven projects we have in our plan, we have two different co-source activities. These co-source activities, we plan to partner with external consultants who have specific technical expertise. The first is related to information technology audits. In this, we'll be procuring audit services, managing those audits, coordinating, and reporting back. I anticipate the first audit would be an IT risk assessment that identifies and prioritizes future IT audits. And secondly, we will be continuing the construction audits that we've partnered with a consultant with. I think one is completed, one is in process, and we're about to begin another. So we will be continuing those activities. We also have three follow-up projects on our plan, and these were just following up on actions taken to address recommendations that were made in audits we've completed this year related to fire overtime, police overtime, and risk management. And finally, we have two other audit activities. One is fraud hotline monitoring. We manage the city's fraud hotline and receive the reports as they come in. And finally, special assignments. That's really just a placeholder that we hold in case something comes up in the year, a request from mayor, council, city management, so we have some time to allocate to that. And with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions.

Glad to hear you don't have much going on.

And it's ambitious because right now there's only two of us right now. I've had some resignations, retirements and resignations. So you're going to be filling positions.

Council Member Hogg. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Susan. We appreciate what you do in audit. Y'all help us mitigate risk a lot. You're also a revenue generation on creating a lot of those things. So on those construction audits we do, we find a lot of good results from those. Are we auditing 100% of our construction audits or what's the parameter for what causes a construction audit?

We have not established those yet. We completed the first one. It was the active. We're in the process. And right now, this audit is underway as the project is ongoing. So as opposed to a project that's complete, this audit is happening as the project is underway. And so they're reviewing pay apps and making recommendations related to pay apps. And what we plan to do is look at different types of construction. The next one is a road construction project. So we're gonna evaluate after we kind of get some more under our belt to determine which projects we're gonna take a look at. We're looking at higher dollar value projects.

That's what I would think.

Okay, I'll let that.

And then on the flock safety utilization audit, listen, this keeps escalating in the community, so I appreciate y'all doing this. The audit goes so far as how APD's using it, but also is it what's happening with the data on the other side? Because I think that's the biggest concern people are poking.

I think we need to take a look at what our contract says, and we need to make sure that we'll audit to make sure that that's happening in compliance with our agreement. To the extent that we can get that information.

Okay. And is that going to be, do you know when that, is that early on you're hoping or later on in the year? I know you're a little short-staffed right now.

Mid-year, we have to, single audit is first. It will start first. And so once we wrap that, we can progress to the flock safety.

Okay. Thanks, Susan. Any other questions from council? No. Thank you Susan, appreciate you. 3.4, Alex Buskin, single family shared rental property.

Good afternoon, Alex Buskin, Director of Code Compliance Services. So we're gonna talk a little bit about single family shared rental property. So shared renting of single-family homes, what our team has seen recently is homes being purchased by investors or a company or LLC, and then in turn, the home is rented to multiple tenants on long-term rentals, and in some instances, more than five occupants in the home. We've also seen some instances where the property owner has then gone through a permitting process to add additional bedrooms to these homes, to rent to more individuals. The higher than normal occupancy levels in some instances have led to increased traffic and congestion on our residential streets, and in some of those instances, also additional code violations. I want to talk about why this is important for the city to address. It's important that we're preserving our neighborhood integrity and also ensuring that construction work that's being completed is permitted and completed in accordance with our code of ordinances. So to talk a little bit about zoning, our single family residential zoning districts are the most restrictive use districts in the Unified Development Code. Our UDC also includes a definition of family, which is listed as individuals living together as a single housekeeping unit in which not more than four individuals are unrelated to the head of the household by blood, marriage, or adoption. In the UDC, this term expressly excludes residents of assisted living facilities, boarding houses, fraternity and sorority houses, private dorms, halfway houses, or nursing homes as defined by the UDC. Multifamily uses are not permitted in our single-family residential use districts. And our current ordinances do not restrict the number of bedrooms that may be added to an existing home during a remodel, as long as those projects comply with all of our applicable building codes and our UDC requirements. We do have some current enforcement challenges with regards to these types of properties. Use violations for single family residential properties can be challenging to prove. Relationships of the tenants at the property have to be determined and adequate evidence has to be presented for us to be able to prove a violation. We often hear from complainants about information like advertising of the property, information about the number of vehicles that they observe at the property, or the number of individuals that they see coming and going from the property. That information can be helpful to us, but it's rarely definitive enough to prove that there is a violation occurring. So this is an example of one of the properties that we're talking about. And this one went through our permitting process. And so I've got a before and after on these slides. This is the before plan for the home. It was an existing four bedroom home with three bathrooms. It went through our permitting process and complied with our building codes and then was able to be converted to a seven-bedroom home with three bathrooms. One of the bathrooms was reduced in size. The property owner also identified a game room, a media room, some additional storage space, an office, and a formal dining room on their plans. So, we wanted to provide some options for Council to consider in how to address these properties, and they focus primarily on permitting, maintenance of the home, and the operation of the home, and we'll touch on each of those. For the permitting side, one of the recommendations that we've suggested is a reasonable regulation of bedroom sizes, as well as the number of bedrooms that can be added to single-family residence during a remodeling project we've also suggested including language related to bedrooms egress and ingress so that you cannot access one bedroom through another you've got access through a hallway or a more open space Relating to the maintenance of the property, what we have recommended is potential adoption of the International Property Maintenance Code, or the IPMC. The IPMC is a model code that's developed by the International Code Council, and it establishes minimum enforceable standards for maintenance, safety, and sanitation of existing residential and non-residential buildings. Staff has already discussed the IPMC with the Community and Neighborhood Development Committee back in May as part of the multifamily inspection process discussions. We've also conducted outreach to external stakeholders, including the Fort Worth Apartment Association and the Arlington Board of Realtors, to discuss that code and potential adoption of it. We've also begun reviewing the code for potential local amendments that may need to be made to it. The code compliance department, planning and development services, and fire prevention teams have all been reviewing it. If council wishes to proceed with potential adoption of that code, it would need to go to the building code board of appeals prior to it coming back to council for formal adoption. The third option relates to the operation of the home. And we've provided a couple of options here for the operation of the home. The first option relates to limitation on the number of leases in a single family residence to one lease per property instead of being able to lease out individual bedrooms. We've also offered an option of implementation of a single family rental registration program. A rental registration program would require owners of single family rental properties to register their property and then also potentially have the property inspected in accordance with our program guidelines. The program, we can tailor a program to meet the needs of our community. I've got a couple of examples on our next slide from other cities to show what those look like. And we can tailor it with varying levels of regulations or inspections. We can also look at annual fees to help cover the costs of operating the program, similar to our other inspection programs like our multifamily inspection program. Um, each month our team, uh, identifies the number of single family rental properties in Arlington. As of August 10th, we had identified over 12,000 single family rental properties here in town. As I mentioned, these are some examples of rental registration programs from some of our surrounding communities here in the DFW area. This is just a sampling. There are plenty of other options out there from other cities here in the Metroplex, but you can see they have varying fees. varying requirements for inspections and registration frequency I would point out Fort Worth is is somewhat unique compared to the other cities that we've included they have two rental registration programs one of them focuses on rental properties that have a history of fire safety and public health or sanitation code violations The other registration program relates specifically to an area around the TCU campus and for property owners in that area that rent their properties out. And as you can see, some of the registration frequency is on an annual basis. Some of it is more specific to the change of tenant at the property. With that, I'd be happy to take any questions from council.

Any questions from council for Alex? Yes, Dr. Jason Schell.

Alex, thanks for the presentation, Alex. Clearly, this is an important issue of figuring out there's about 10 or 12 of those houses here so far that we know of that have all those bedrooms. I'm in favor of a little bit of all of those different options. But what I really want to get at is how do we, the 10 or 12 houses that we know of and the more that are probably out there that don't have the permits, how do we especially the 10 or 12 we have that have the permits. How do we go back and sort of dismantle those? How do we figure that out? Do we have to establish some new policy, some new ordinance in there that allows us to go back to make sure that someone doesn't have five or six people living in the house and it's legal and permitted in our city?

I think if the council wished to implement the single family rental registration program, you could identify properties like that from the ones that have already added on. If they've gone through the permitting process, I would defer to Gen C and Molly, but I don't know that we can really address that if they have gone through the permitting process and they've gotten permits to do that work, I don't know that we could retroactively address those particular properties.

So, Dr. Shelton, just to add, as Alex mentioned, would not be able to retroactively cause them to change, right, the structure of the home and take down walls where they might have partitioned bedrooms. But depending upon what you all choose to look to enact, whether from a maintenance or operation perspective, a new set of maintenance and operation standards at the home that would apply, right, regardless of how they might have chopped up the house previously.

Right. And that sounds like it's under that third option.

Yeah, both the second and the third, the maintenance and then the operation.

Yes, ma'am. Thank you.

I'm a fan of being able to do what I want to with my property, but I'm also governed by not doing things that impede. the enjoyable landscape of my neighbors. I think we are creating a horrible situation when we have people that are coming in and turning a three or four bedroom into a 10 or 12 bedroom and leasing out individual bedrooms in a neighborhood that wasn't anticipating having those type of houses there. I'm a proponent of doing whatever we can to keep those type of things from happening. I love the idea of the registration and making sure that there's one lease per household on something like this. We already have a definition of what we consider to be a family environment, so I don't see any need to change that, but the other changes, I'm with Dr. Shelton on that, supportive of doing as much as we can to keep those type of things from stepping into our communities and causing ongoing problems. Council Member Garcia-Dumont.

Thanks, Alex. I love the idea of a rental registration program, especially considering the rentals that we have now and kind of where the market is going. And in consideration of we want less apartments in certain areas, so let's make our rent houses really amenable to people. It also is great protection for renters rights as well I think that people sometimes think that renters come in and they devalue a house But there's only certain things that they have control over with the home and so this rental registration program It helps the neighbors it helps make sure that we have some more eyes on the rental properties and it also helps the renters as well. I specifically am thinking about we have smaller homes in our downtown core and then as we get into Hannah and the canal streets, they get larger and larger and we want to protect those areas. We want to continue to make them really nice and keep them nice. I get a little nervous about the size of a room regulating that. I compare five to four often because, again, our downtown kind of historical homes are much smaller than a larger lot. And so we want to be sure that we're not forgetting about those style homes that we have. But I like the IPMC. I think we talked about that before. But if we're not going to adopt that, I do believe that a mixture of, I think it was like option three, for the rental registration program. That seems like something that is largely overdue, that we're a little bit behind on, and I know of rental homes in the TCU overlay, and it has just really risen so many of those, not quite historical homes, but close to, which again is what we have on what we call the tree streets, the downtown historical area. So I think this is a great solution to several of the holes that we're facing in all of these different areas. We don't have a ton of those types of houses in our smaller homes. There's just not enough to fit. But this also trickles down to being very helpful to a lot of the ecosystems that we have. So I love this idea.

Thank you, and I would mention that the options that we've presented, council could choose to implement all of those, or they could choose to implement one or two. It's really up to the council on which direction they would want to go. It's not a situation where you have to pick one or the other. They can be complementary of each other. Council Member Gonzales.

Thank you, Mayor. Alex, thank you for working on this. This has been ongoing for all my six years on city council in several districts, not just mine. And the key is, you know, citizens think, like the mayor said, they have rights and they don't want neighbors doing that. But those owners that have that property have rights to do things. So it's working together. I think the key is, and I keep telling the citizens, they think we can just knock on that door and say, who lives here? You can't. If you see any construction being done on your street, you know, check with the city, see if they've gotten a permit. You can just send an email saying this is going on, and time after time, and, you know, most of these that are being built, they're quiet. They don't want to tell everybody what they're doing, you know, the ones, so I think that's key. I like the registration. I like all that part. You know, I know we can't have a definition, like Molly said, you know, it's discriminatory, but I really believe that doing what we can as a city is important. We are behind the ball, like, Whitney Dumas Garcia said. But I think it's important that we do something. I think what's really helped me, and not only I think, what's really helped me is the police department. There are homes in my neighborhood that have 12 cars. And it's a four-bedroom house, and there's just too many cars. So luckily the police have come out to see where there's illegal parking in the cul-de-sac area. They're parking in front of the fire hydrant. They're not having inspections. So that's how I started pursuing it. It's like, okay, well, let's start. They're not going to do that. Let's start looking at these cars that are here. What are they here for? And most of these, it's amazing how many of these do not comply with the law that we can ticket them. Like I said, that house, I think of all the cars that were there, I think eight of them were Target it and they kept putting those little stickers on the cars, and they finally disappeared so thank kudos to the police and Ms.. Montgomery with the police department because she's really made a big difference, so thank you any other questions from Council Council member where um Most of the reason we're here the bad actors that are doing this right now I

How do you handle that kind of a situation? I understand the enforcement's the hard part of this. If a neighbor knows that there's eight or ten different people going into a home back and forth every night, How far can we go in coercing that owner to admit that they have actually not registered and they need to? And what is the best way, I guess, for the neighbors to work with your department on how to report and take care of that kind of a situation?

Yeah, we would always encourage our residents to report code violations. They can report them through the app, or they can call the action center to report them. Like we mentioned, enforcement on these types of use violations is a challenge. as it currently stands. We don't get a lot of cooperation from the tenants at the properties, and they're not required to provide us a copy of their lease if we ask what the living situation is there. So we are limited in what we can currently do. We do feel like the options that we've provided can help us in addressing these moving forward.

Okay, and the other thing, you mentioned Fort Worth having two different programs. Yes, sir. Is that something we should look at for the UTA area versus the rest of the city, or is that going to be, is that confusing?

Fort Worth's program, like I mentioned, they have the one for surrounding TCU. And then their other rental registration program is more specific to properties that have a history of code violations. It's voluntary for properties that don't have that history. So if council wanted to look at something for the area around UTA, you could do that. The other cities that I highlighted on there, theirs is just citywide. It's not tailored to a specific area. Fort Worth is unique in that respect.

More unique than us?

We don't currently have a single-family registration program.

Well, I mean, if we were doing the same thing they were doing, I mean, they've got TCU in the middle of their city. We've got UTA in the middle of ours. Yes, sir. Councilperson Garcia-Demar, I want you if she feels like they need another type of permitting or something, I just want to listen to what she might have to suggest on that. Sure, sure.

So I think just to chime in with that, the rental registration program would be citywide. So they don't have a citywide one in Fort Worth. It's like specialty for TCU and then bad actors. Those are the only two. The rest of it's voluntary. So I think what we're discussing here is a citywide rental registration program. But I will note to Council Member Ware's point that it really ensures that that historical area is It maintains just such a level of beauty over there. And I think what we're saying here is let's do that citywide. That's what makes us special.

We're going to go to Council Member Hogg before I do that. I just want Council to understand we don't have to make a decision today on what direction we're doing. don't feel like we have to walk out of here and say, here's exactly where we're going yet.

Council Member Pryor. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Bushkin, thank you so much. My answer to your questions is yes, yes, yes. You know, all of them of what we do. Mayor, one of the things I would recommend, should we, I think the faster we go, the better, but also to get it vetted and put in, should we take it to the MPC or the Community Neighborhood Development Committee and let them and Two weeks, worked with Alex. put all the things together and then bring it back to this group?

And you can decide which committee. It really irritates me that you would suggest that because I was gonna actually suggest that and now it sounds like it's all been your idea with everything. So thanks for stealing my thunder, but yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think we should let the committee and let's let our neighborhood community look at it.

We've been doing the code for multifamily on that. Yeah. Perfect, thank you. Alex, let me ask another question. Yes, on restricting your rooms, I think the IPMC is a good parameter to use as miss garcia dumas said um to make sure we're not just going nilly willy on what we're doing um from that side alex one of the things we face is and the mayor said it um when this happens you know we're all a fan of you can do what you want your property but when you do some things it can affect street parking it affects all that um A lot of these are done by garage conversions. That adds rooms, that adds those things. Are there special permits, or can we get into, and maybe this is going a little into the weeds, of providing more parking spaces, some of those things, can that be reviewed when we take it to committee?

Sure, we can go over that, and Jynsie, I don't know if you have anything you want to add on that particular?

Thank you. Jynsie Thorpe, Director for Planning and Development Services. So... That was your timer, Jens.

I know, that's what I felt like. Good answer, Jensi, good answer. Thank you so much for your input.

Currently in the Unified Development Code, there is a provision that says no garage conversions are allowed for buildings built... after 1984, but many of these buildings, structures that's coming are built prior to 1984 and they are converting garages. If they do convert garages, currently the standard is that they have to have two parking spaces within the site, which could be just their driveway spaces. But when they bring in a lot more tenants, it does not work.

I don't want to get into the weeds. We'll get into that as we get into the committee on that. Thanks, Jencie. Alex, let me ask one other question. As what we've done with short-term rentals, we put a policy in place. It's actually worked pretty well. No policy's ever perfect, but it's actually minimized it. We've talked about... right after World Cup, going out to RFP to do a new bid to really make sure we have a program evaluating all those short-term rentals. As we get into rental registration and things, I just did a quick search on Spareroom.com, there was 143 rooms listed. On Roomies.com, page after page, I couldn't tell how many. Padsplit.com, there was 84 listings. Could we include that? And I don't know if any of those vendors do both of those You know, one bedroom rentals and they're monitoring these sites or I know we were focused on short term rentals. But can we look at that also? Because I do think something monitoring those would be critical for us as a city.

Sure. We can we can certainly look into that, see if there's a software component that would be able to address both.

Okay, perfect, we got work to do. I think we all learn new things and sometimes uncover things we weren't doing as a city, so I appreciate it.

And Mr. Hoggs is exactly right. We're gonna put it in a community and neighborhood development committee and let's work on coming up with some solid recommendations for council through the committee. Okay, let's move on down to 3.5. We have Mr. Weider talking to us about council priority, grow our economy.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I'm Marty Weider. I'm Executive Director of the Arlington Economic Development Corporation. Certainly, you can never plan things like what happened today out of Charlotte, North Carolina, but it's a great day to be talking about growing our economy. Let me run through a couple of things with you today. We're going to discuss our business plan and talk a little bit about some of the things we're doing in particular to achieve this council priority. And this kind of gives you an idea of what exactly we're focused on. When we get into our plan, and there's a lot of data up here. I'll give you a chance to look at this if you haven't already. But we really are focused on those key areas, recognizing that, through our strategic plan, that global competitiveness Business retention, expansion, business attraction are really our primary objectives. You can see a lot of activity there. I think the biggest thing that I like here, of course, is what we had with all the stuff with the Japan-Texas Economic Summit. We expect to know soon. Y'all are very well aware that we put in for the Opportunity Zone designation review. We've got a lot of great things here that we're waiting on that we expect to see happen soon. But there's some other things in particular that we're involved in doing as well. You get into those objectives on small business innovation. We're already doing some of that. We've got a program that you'll hear about that was briefed in the Economic Development Committee open today about a new business innovation research and development matching grant program. You'll read about some other things that we're introducing. I think the thing I'm very pleased at, too, this hasn't been shown as much, but all of the awards that the International Economic Development Council just graced us with, became public in the last week. They'll be picked up in October, and we'll share more about that. But they're recognizing that some of these programs we've been doing are good ones. And some of the things that they like seeing is, of course, the e-space program. In terms of business plan and project summary, we're in good shape. We've got good status as we go into the end of the year on a couple of things. You'll see some things on key measures that are still wanting, but the good thing is the news of today, there'll be some jobs that will plug in. There are a couple of other things that are coming, both to our board for the Economic Development Corporation, this next month that'll be before you at your last meeting in September that I think will change some of these other numbers. Some of these numbers were a little high in the previous year. Of course, this one in particular was e-space related. I think we still have, we like seeing the investment go well. Projects, we kind of overshot maybe some of these and have adjusted them a little bit. But we have had some staff changes, both in terms of the Economic Development Corporation staff, as well as, as you know, the Office of Economic Development that has lost some personnel, and that that's all been tucked into the Office of Strategic Initiatives. So I like, for the most part, what we're seeing with these. And you'll see some of these other numbers change for year end. But I do think we're going to have good overall numbers to share once we get to the end of the year. And there's a lot of things we're involved in. Let me clear that. I apologize. I think it's important with that change from the Office of Economic Development. We recognize we're the corporations the more public facing. And we embrace that role. And recognize, too, we've already worked in tandem very closely with Lindsay Mitchell and her staff. That's just going to continue. I don't see any problem with that. I think it's actually an advantage because we're quite seamless. But recognize that we are, I want to give you an illustration of something we know we've got to be able to respond. And so when Mike Salam and his tenants faced what they did week before last, my staff has risen to the occasion and met with him personally, followed up with some information, tried to help him with his building, his fire, and his tenants, and are doing our best to respond, even though that's maybe not directly what's involved with the corporation. We want to be there and be out front because we know how important it is. So you'll see some other things that are lining up. It was reported, and I'll let the chairman of the Economic Development Committee share with you a little bit more later on the film commission and an incentive that's going to be before you. We're seeing good things come about, and we've got some big events coming up, too. Thrilled that IC3 and that BioDFW decided to come back. to Arlington after seven away for a year. I think we're gonna get them committed. There's a couple of other things on the horizon that are lined up as well with some of our partner entities. So while I'm shown as the contact information, let me tell you, all this information is also done in tandem with Lindsay Mitchell and the Office of Strategic Initiatives, and I want to thank her for all her inclusion and review of these items, and I realize you may have questions, so I'll be glad to respond to those.

Any questions for Marty from Council? Council Member Garcia-Dumas.

Hi, Marty. Hi. I have a question. Asia Town Square, is that what's the new development in Benton? Or what is Asia Town Square?

Well, we continue to talk with Asia Town Square, too, because they have land in Arlington. Asia Times Square. Asia Times Square. There we go. Coming downtown, it should have been Times. My apologies.

Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, Asia Times Square.

I know what Asia Times Square is. I know what it is.

My staff member who put it together might have not known. That covers the question. I'm glad you caught that. But no, they have land. I've been talking to Matthew Lowe and actually Bob Kimball.

who is involved with him a little bit on some of that.

That's great. That answers that question. Yes, ma'am. And along with Bintan Plaza and Asia Times Square, always looking for what's the next thing in the international corridor as well. Do you have any kind of update or anything on the horizon or any great ideas for the international corridor? Sure.

There's one specific group we met with at the International Council of Shopping Centers back in May that is specifically looking there, and we met with them a few weeks ago on another site. I feel confident we're going to be able to see them come in there before too long. I mentioned the Opportunity Zones. You'll recall, if you've seen the map, several that we recommended and that you all reviewed. I think have a chance at being selected, certainly optimistic. We'll see what the governor's office releases here soon. That will play very big in that. Plus, through the neighborhood retail center revitalization program, there are a couple of centers out there that have been seen, that I've shown to a couple of groups, and we know developers are seeking close to Arkansas Lane and 360. So I'm encouraged, at least by the market interest as well.

Do we know about when we'll know when we get those or which opportunity zones we get?

We expected those to be released or at least made public on the 17th. Still hasn't happened. I understand they've been communicated to the federal government. They've just not been all signed, sealed, delivered, and checked off for release. So I'd expect that's any time. Yes, ma'am. Any other questions for Marty from council?

Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. I appreciate you. Thanks to all of you. We're gonna move on down to discuss the informal staff report. There is only one today dealing with trash and recycling cart storage 4.1. Any questions for Nora Coronado from council on that report? Everybody's had an opportunity to look at it. We gonna let Nora get off without having any confrontations, questions, anything like that. Outstanding, thank you Nora, appreciate you. Oh, Trey.

because you'll just save us a minute when we're going to do the budget update, but one of the things that we heard at one of the town hall meetings was potentially the discussion of exploring a second day of service. I don't sense that there's interest in that, but if there is, we need to know. It's probably a $6 to $7 more a month for a second day of service and a lot of communication, education, all that, but I did want to make sure that everyone knew that that got suggested, and I want to make sure I got the direction that you kind of like it how it is, and we'll keep rolling. Okay.

I haven't heard any major complaints from the citizens on our trash pickup on the way we have it laid out right now, so. The person in the town hall, they were renovating a garage,

there's an appetite for it regularly.

Cool.

Thank you.

Thank you, Nora. Okay, we're gonna move on down to 4.2, economic development, Mauricio Galante. Anything in addition to what was discussed in the executive session today?

No, we, WE HAVE ON THE STAFF REPORT THE PRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE FILM AND MEDIA INCENTIVE PROGRAM AND ALSO ABOUT THE BOARD MATCHING FUND PROGRAM. and the small business program update. Those are on the informal staff reports. Anybody can access to it. And we had also a discussion of business incentive, which was dealt in executive session. That was the Economic Development Committee. Thank you, Mayor. Sorry for my voice.

That's okay. Any questions for Councilmember Galante? All right, 4.3, Arlington Housing Finance Corporation update. Council Member Hunter.

Thank you, Mayor. Today we started off the election with officer elections. I will remain on as the president. Treasurer will be Brittany Garcia-Dumas. Secretary will be Dr. Shelton. The staff was provided a template for reoccurring monthly reports related to the properties that we partner with. That report's going to include statistic information such as location, property manager, and office hours. The board also recommended approval of a variance to a regulatory agreement for center place apartments. And it looks like that is it. Any questions or comments?

Anything from council? Thank you, Ms. Hunter. All right. Ms. Garcia, do we have any appointments, boards, or commissions?

Yes, Mayor. We have four appointments to boards and commissions on the evening agenda.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor? Yes. I'm pulling my two CBA appointments for approval in a future meeting. Thank you.

4.5, evening agenda items. Council have any questions, issues you'd like to discuss on any of today's evening agenda items? Yes, Council Member Gonzales.

Item 35, I think we all received an email regarding that, so I don't know if we want to, I think there was a lot of questions regarding that, so I don't know if Lindsay just wants to give a brief Summary, I think there was a lot of confusion about how much money was being used. I think people were getting confused with the amounts and everything else. So I don't know if you want to address that or not.

Sure, I can. Matt, if you'll pull up the Blackbird presentation. I have a chart that kind of explains, I think, very quickly how it's structured. OK. So in terms of the funding structure and sources for this project, so this is the development that is proposed at the corner of Mesquite and Abram on both private and city property. That's basically a large surface parking lot in the Pinnacle office building right now. We do have a proposed cash grant for the Athalon property. That is the private component of the property at $9.6 million, and that source is from water utilities funding. The reimbursement for public improvements throughout the project, which is sidewalks, landscaping, public water and sewer, that type of thing, up to $16.4 million, and that is coming from TERS 1, a combination of cash and bond proceeds to be determined. We also have a reimbursement for project costs excluding public improvements, and some of this is going to go to the Water Utilities Administration office building that will be on the property, up to $9.9 million, and so that funding is coming from water utilities. We do have an annual grant that's post-completion for five years, $500,000 annually, coming from a lawfully available source. And then we do have some maintenance responsibilities that we're going to have related to the water portion of the office building, as well as the parking garage elevator, just the elevator, not the garage writ large, but just the elevator. And then the water department will need to contribute funding to finish out their office space that is built there. So that is an additional cost. But that's kind of how this adds up to that 38.4 million investment in the property. But I do want to point out, and actually I have some updated data. This is a little bit of an outdated slide, but it's actually over 80% of the funding that's going to go toward public infrastructure and assets. So only 20% is kind of the more pure incentive toward the project to close a financial gap. But the rest is allocated toward public infrastructure and assets, land that the city would own. Um, and like the parking garage, for example, you know, helping to correct parking issues downtown and provide more supply, which we do need down here. Um, I can answer any other questions about this. I know that was really kind of brief.

I think the public infrastructure is important. I think, you know, that includes sidewalk sewer. Uh, whatever else it was, I think there was a public water. Those are all drainage, landscaping, those are all things that we'd be doing, so this is all part of that project. And I think there was some confusion about how much was being put in. I think there was two numbers that were being added together, but really it's only one number. So it's what? 19 million, right?

Yeah, I think there was some conflation of the two buckets from water utilities. So they're going to different things. One is a grant for land acquisition, and the other is contributing to some of the project costs. So they're separate things.

And one of the questions that I know we've gotten is, and I I don't think anything of it, but the question has been, why was this on the consent agenda rather than an item that we would discuss openly?

Yeah, that's a good question. It can go, obviously, either place. We elected to put it on consent mostly because the majority of the funding here is coming from the TERS board, and the TERS had a public approval of this agreement back on August 11th. And so, generally, it's kind of a ratification that the council would do of that agreement. The city is party to this agreement, but it is a lower amount of funding than the TERS contribution.

Thank you, Lindsay. Appreciate you taking the time.

Any other questions from council? Anything else on tonight's evening agenda items? Perfect. We're going to move on down to 4.6. Fiscal year 2027 budget, Trey Overton.

Thanks, Mayor. I just want to continue our conversation around the 2027 budget and do a couple of follow-ups on things that you all have talked to me about, as well as some feedback I've gotten from town hall and neighborhood meetings that we've got. They correlate to kind of these six areas. We're going to talk about homelessness, transportation, water rates, debt service, tax rate, and kind of just our process, as always. All the things that we've talked about are daisy-chained together and hyperlinked in this area, so everything that we've done kind of into the springtime until now is all here, and there's tons of information on the city's website for anybody who'd like to do a little deeper digging. Just kind of jumping right into the homelessness question that I think the council asked about at the last meeting, and where's the budget line for homelessness, right? Well, there's not a line, there's actually multiple lines, and let me kind of show you where they're at. So a lot of what we do in the area of supporting of homelessness is grant funded through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. On an annualized basis, about $916,000. And it goes into those areas along the right-hand side. Tenant-based rental assistance. is a very typical kind of like Section 8 housing assistance. You're provided a voucher and you go and you have your place. This amount of funding served around 35 to 40 households during this last year. But on top of that, there's funds that come from the Community Development Block Grant for case management and homeless diversion and from the Emergency Shelter Grant for homeless prevention, street outreach, rapid rehousing and shelter services. So almost almost a million dollars coming from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Separately from that, the city and our budget has a number of things that are kind of hand in glove to that. In the code compliance area, we have a homeless encampment coordinator, as well as funding to abate encampments. I mean, just the cost to clean up the illegal dumping and the trash and debris. and hazards that are created at a site. We also have some dollars in for cold weather shelter overflow for when we need to work with volunteer groups like we did last year's Winter Snap. We worked with First United Methodist and then I think Church Down on Park Row where they needed some assistance to stand up hours beyond what their volunteers could do. So there's some money in the organization's budget for that. We also support indirectly, but downtown Arlington supports directly homelessness outreach to the tune of $70,000 in the downtown corridor where they go out and they essentially create relationships and case stories and manage the individuals that they see in the community. In the parks area, we also have some additional parks facility cleanup because as you can imagine, people find the path of least resistance and a lot of times that's passive green areas, which end up being our parks and we do that. And then the police department has two and a half FTEs in both patrol as well as crisis intervention for homeless intervention to the tune of $314,000. So in the general fund budget, there's about $554,000 worth of support to augment the grant support. And then also, coming through the support that the city has for Arlington Tomorrow Foundation, we've provided, since the last two decades, around $4 million worth of grants that went to various organizations that serve sheltering, like the Life Shelter and Safe Haven, to things that also do various kinds of operational things like Urban Ministries and Mission Arlington, Mission Metroplex. So the Arlington Tomorrow Foundation has put together some significant resources. So it's kind of... you know, it's not just quote the city as like the general budget, but it's the city with what I'd say the capital A, the Tomorrow Foundation, its grant sources, and its general revenues, stitching it together to provide the resources. And when you do that and you look at it kind of all in one spot, not one budget line, but one spot, It's around almost a million and a half dollars a year that we are funding to support activities that are dealing directly and indirectly with folks that are in the state of homelessness, as well as the one-time funding that we've provided to organizations that serve that community. So around $4 million there. And I know if we went back further, I can remember earlier in my career where Like the life shelter, we provided significant capital grants to that building. We provided significant capital grants to the women's shelter building. So I know we've done more than even this. This is really kind of in the last 20 years, what we've done historically, but also annually that's there. So that kind of answers, I think, mostly what we do in the homeless area. Maybe we want to pause there for a second. I've got six or seven other areas I need to hit. So we can either do it all at once, Do it one at a time, whatever y'all would like. I'll keep rolling. Transportation has also been a question that's come up in a couple of spots about Arlington On Demand and what would it look like to add hours. Specifically been asked about Sunday hours, but also some just extended hours. And if you look at extending hours on Monday through Sunday until 10 instead of, I think, 9, and then Saturday until 10 instead of, I think, 6. but then also going until midnight on Friday and Saturday, you can see kind of various options that exist, anywhere from just the Sunday service is somewhere in the $550,000 to $900,000 range, to these others, and any of this can be done collectively or together, and you see on there the number of trips that are projected to be impacted if we were to add those times. So that was a question that we were asked about. Wanted to make sure you all had the data there. In the water area, we received some feedback and some questions regarding kind of how the rates work. And so just a little deeper dive into some of that. A few things here I want to point out. What I'm showing you here is the water rate and the sewer rates. And you might remember we have a fixed rate and a volumetric rate. There's like a connection fee and then there's how much you use. And then in the how much you use is based on the volume and our average user. is 8,000, so that is kind of where it's at. So when we look at these rates, and you look at the percentage of customers about 82% of all of our customers are below 10,000. That's where the impact is on the rates. That's where the heaviest impact is. And the feedback we were getting was about kind of how the averaging on this kind of skews to the lower end versus kind of the distribution across all fees. And while it's true all fees are going up at a higher level, than what is reported as the 6.37%, it's definitely skewed to lower levels because that's where the most impact is, right, when we're looking at the average users. So I wanted to make sure you all knew that. Why are the rates going up? Generally, it's pass-through expenses from TRA, TRWD. It's our own increased renewal and rehab, both debt service and pay-as-you-go. It's PFAS preparations, kind of that federal standard of how we've got to add better water quality. And then it's just constantly the supply pressures within the region. We're Arlington, but we're part of TRWD. TRWD is part of a broader Regency in the state of Texas. and more and more demands on creating repositories of water. more water treatment facilities and more significant pipelines to get there is what drives this. I'd also just respond a little bit, because I get questions like, well, why is the water up 10 but sewer up 1.7? And there's just much more variables that we have to deal with on a water system, whereas the, candidly, the sewer system, because we don't treat it, it's really just the pipeline to the treatment plant is all we've got to worry about. So our costs are much more certain in that particular area. In the overall scheme of things, the average users are really our minimum and below 10,000 to 8,000 is actually the average user. So in that 4.7 to 6.37 objective is where it rolls. And then to add a little more context, this is a particular account. If you're not using it, I would encourage everyone to use our online tools. There's tons of information. You can set alerts and totally control how much you're gonna monitor or spend for your particular water utilization. But this is the last two years is what you can see online. As you can see, a monthly bill is not the same. It depends on what time of the year. You might have a pool, you might not. You might have irrigation, you might not. And so that variety is what creates various kinds of things that impact how people's situations are. It's also important to note that you control a significant portion of your bill on the wastewater and how we average the wastewater. Not everybody understands this, so I wanted to take a quick second to talk about that, because it's dealt with differently. We meter water, so we know how much water goes in, but we don't necessarily know how much comes out. There are not sewer meters. Water's just, it's just cleared out and off it goes. So we've come up with a different methodology. This is industry standard across the state. But we take what's called an average winter consumption, and we look between the months of November and March, And depending on where the billing cycle is, we look at the four months that you hit in that period of time. We throw out the highest one, and then we average the other three. And so most people are going to find that their sewer, they're averaged for 4,000 or 5,000. That's typically where most people are. But that's how it's calculated. And then that's locked in for the rest of the year. So water wants us determined or sewer wants us determined. during that winter consumption, it stays the same all year long. You control it during that low, that's the other reason we do it in the winters, that's the lowest usage. So it's the lowest possible time to get the lowest three months of sewer utilization. So that's how that works and how it pulls people's total bill to the lower level. So going back, to how these get calculated. I just wanna show you. Again, our average user's gonna be in this under 10,000 bucket. 11.80 is the monthly fee, the connection fee. Then your first 2,000 gallons cost you 263. Your next 10,000 goes to 381. And you see in the next, if you go to the next area, it's all the same, but then you go next one, it's 607. The more you use, the more you pay, based on volume and also rate structure intending to create conservation. People who are using 30, 40, 50,000 gallons Candidly, we want them using less. We want them smarter with their water, and we want to create the incentive process for that to occur. Or they're a heavy user, like the General Motors plant, and we're happy to sell as much water as they want to use, right? But that's how the rate structures work. It is not a flat rate for everybody. It's very much pay what you use. The more you use, the more you pay. And you control it with all your tools and the metering systems that we have in place. And even with the rate adjustments that we're making, and believe me, we're serious when we evaluate all these things about trying to keep things low, we do. This is us, both where we've been and where we are headed. We believe we'll either be the lowest or the second lowest in the region, depending on what Dallas does. And we've constantly been in this zone. Every year we show this chart, it's the same. So we work hard to keep things low, but I also know that as things rise, it's an impact, right? But I'm gonna tell you that water, represents one of the biggest financial risks to our community because of its limited scarcity in the region in a growing metropolitan area with the constraint on water systems. There's going to be more and more capital costs to build out those systems and where we get our water from and how we pipe it here and how we treat it. And if we've got to meet PFAS standards and all those kinds of things, the pressure on our budget, I would tell you, is probably not higher than any other location than in the water department. The water and sewer issues are gonna be more and more incrementally up over time, and we'll have to continue to work hard to be efficient. So that's that. Also got some questions around debt service that we received some feedback on. And basically the principle is do less, less debt service. And we don't disagree with that. But as you can imagine, there's kind of more to the story in there. Why is it that the city has debt? Why do we issue debt? Why can't we just pay cash for everything, right? A couple of things. One is what I would call intergenerational equity. Long-lived projects deserve residents who are here during that long time to pay for it. I'll use Abram Street here as an example. It was opened about five years ago. Should we all here in this room today pay $27 million for this street in one fell swoop, or should the people who drive it 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, pay kind of their fair share of the utilization of that street? Alternatively said, as the South gets more streets, Debbie Lane's getting ready to open up. next week. If we were paying cash, what we'd be talking about is, hey, Trey, which streets are we going to pay cash on this year? And we say, Debbie Lane. Well, all the folks in the South say, that's great. All the folks in other parts of town say, why are we spending our cash on Debbie Lane? We need to spend it on Randall Mill. Or we need to spend it on New York. It creates geographic discussions that are not really long-term productive. So that intergenerational and regional equity within the city is important for how we do it. Also accelerates our project delivery, candidly. Instead of saving cash and just saying, hey, I think I've got $20 million to go build Debbie Lane now. Okay, but there's a lot of foregone opportunity cost in that particular situation, and I've constrained my budget in significant ways and made it much less predictable based on inflationary risks and things like that. The alternative or the accelerated project delivery is one that's systemized, it's routine, it's constant, it's steady, it's predictable, and that's what we're after. Our low cost of borrowing is unlike really any other thing that you'd find private sector wise. We are the beneficiaries of tax exempt debt, which means last week when we issued bonds, we sold bonds at 3.8% interest. When people are doing a home loan today for six or seven, or they're doing car loans for four or five, or they've got credit card debt at 18, We're doing our debt at 3.8% because we have a AAA bond rating and because we have the benefit of being tax exempt. And when you do that and you have a 3.5% inflation going on out there, that's essentially the same as cash over time, right? So it's important to... make sure that our costs stay low and having a low cost of borrowing with the AAA deal. We also, what I didn't say in there, is we have a very conservative pay down. So when we built a 50 year street out here, we paid it off in 20. So we accelerate with level principle and a 20 year amortization on a 50 year asset. So it's very aggressive, and so we believe, yes, we need to maintain and watch our debt and our cost of debt service, but all the things that we do collectively constrain that and make sure that it is very critically conservative. And then the other thing I alluded to was managing inflationary delay. So, you know, if I had to tell you I don't have enough money, Ms. Hunter, to build Debbie Lane for three more years, well, what's going to happen in three more years? Costs will go up, and I'm going to be chasing that money to try to build Debbie Lane in three more years, as opposed to doing it earlier, faster, cheaper. and averaging in, like we would our investments, dollar cost averaging, what we do over time. So that's why we do it. In the city, the question was, well, you have a lot of debt, and we do. As I was telling the neighborhood group this weekend, this isn't Mayberry. Arlington, Texas is a $3 billion corporate entity, and there's a lot of things to do. There's 3,000 lane miles of streets, there's 190 municipal buildings to take care of, and when we do that, we issue debt. And we do it in several ways, which I think are important. And we need to make sure that we're paying attention to what one concern was expressed as overlapping debt, that this debt is coming all from the same people. And I think that's partially accurate, but not completely. But I want to talk about a couple things. So our total debt, and if you were to go to our Transparency Star page on the city line right now, you would find this, $1.4 billion. That sounds like a lot. Let's break it down. The biggest piece of that debt is voter authorized debt of about $386 million for our stadium venues. That is specifically not intended to be cash funded. It's specifically funded to create cash to issue debt to build an asset and then pay the debt off, right? So 386 of that is voter approved and it is backed by sales taxes, which we know based on all of our analysis that half of the sales taxes that we collect in Arlington come from non-Arlington people. So Arlington addresses are only paying half of this number. The rest is coming elsewhere. Then we have the general obligation debt. This is what's backed in our budget that we're talking about right now. Tax backed. Property tax backed obligations for debt. What do we do with that? We build streets. We build parks like the active. We build public safety facilities and things like that. And we do it under very specific conservative constraints that you all have put upon us, which have led to AAA bond rating, which leads to the best cost of money, which leads to this virtuous cycle of very healthy systematic investment of what we do. And I'll talk more about that here in a second. And then we have revenue bonds. These are not voter-backed, but they're utility-backed. These are water utilities and storm drainage. You all get a lot of complaints about storm drain and erosion, and it's backed by the revenues created in that utility. And we pay for public infrastructure in those areas. That's what makes up that $1.4 million. So you can see from the property tax pledge, it's only about 40% of that number. $628 million is a lot of money. and a $3 billion enterprise, relatively speaking, very, very manageable. How is it manageable? A couple of ways. You all set ratio targets for us. When someone goes to buy a house, one of the first things they say is, how much money do you make? Well, how much can I afford? Well, we have a limit that says you can only spend 30% of your income on this mortgage. That's what the standard is. Well, okay, apply that to a city. Our standard is 20% of our income. That's our limit. We won't do 30. We'll limit it 20. And where are we at? 16.4. So we're below our caps. Tax-supported debt per capita, $1,600 per capita, we're at $1,339. And we also have a cap on debt to assessed valuation. Don't get too heavy in that way, right? So 2% of our total base, we're at 1.27. So you all have set conservative best practice limits that are recommended by Moody's and S&P and all those folks, and we're below those areas. So when you look at it, and you can also go to our transparency star, we put this stuff out all the time. This is our five year history on general obligation debt and total revenue debt, which is the utility and water stuff. And you can see, What I was saying before, very stable, very predictable, very consistent. That systematic investment in your neighborhoods, that systematic renewal in assets that need to be invested in, and it's affordable in an intergenerational way. It's spread out across the city, and it's spread out across generations. We all pay our fair share while we're here, all right? And then another way to look at it is on an inflation-adjusted way, on geo debt per capita and inflation-adjusted per capita, you can see both very stable to declining. So while it feels often like we're asking for the next $50 million or the next $100 million, in the big scheme of things, it's all very predictably managed, very affordably managed for what we're trying to do to cover 99 square miles and $3 billion worth of assets, right? So, which leads to a tax rate question that came up. I always get this question, how are we doing on the rate split of residential versus commercial? And we've been very good about saying we need more commercial tax base because what's going to keep taxes low here is commercial tax base, not residential tax base. Residential tax base candidly creates more cost pressures on a city. Where people are, things happen. Where people are, people need things. Where people need things, it costs money. So the more you have resources for is by having commercial tax base, which is why economic development is a critical strategy to what we're trying to do, because you want that commercial tax base to increase. Now, how are we doing? The red line is the commercial tax base. Last two years, man, that looks great. Residential values dropping in a way. To get to my ratio, that also looks great. I'll be honest with you, like I have been around everything we've talked about with the appraisal district, if I felt like this was a true reflection of the market, I'd be thrilled. but it's not a true reflection of the market. This is a manipulated approach to what's going on about how we're just simply trying to keep taxes low. It's not indicative of what's happening in the real estate market as far as the proportional share of commercial tax base to residential. But nonetheless, that's the answer to the question, right? And if we had a healthy real estate market that was moving right along, this is what we would want to see, and we'd want to see it accelerate. But this is not real data if you take my perspective on it. So some other things data-wise. We keep updating this based on everybody's information. We continue to ride right here. right in the middle. I think what I've started to call this is the Tarrant County Tilt. This is the 20 largest cities in the region, not all Tarrant County. But if you look to the west there, to the left, most of those cities are Tarrant County. And some places that you're not used to seeing there, right? So Colleyville, number one, four cents up. North Richland Hills, 5.7. Hirsch, 5.7, Bedford, three or four cents, Fort Worth, three or four cents. I think after, since Fort Worth presented, they've actually increased the consideration of what they were gonna do there. And then you've got some off to the right hand there, which are a little different. But there is a theme here, and it's a Tarrant County Tilt is what the theme is in this data. And then the other thing that I like to show here again kind of a couple of break lines in here Keller and up And then let's see here. We'll go Irving and below so This is as it relates to the voter approve rate so all these cities Irving and below are right at the limit of the voter approval tax rate Click above, they're going to the electorate for a vote. This middle pack has kind of a little room, one to three cents, and then this top pack of which we are has a lot of room, six cents plus to provide services, right? And our neighbors there to the south actually doing pretty good there with 10 cents of roll forward for what they're considering. So then, where it all kind of leads then is to some of the questions that I need to get guidance on you all about. You all know last time we spent a lot of time about what might we do on the tax rate, and we circled this area right in here, right, between what we proposed and then what the no new revenue was. And all the stuff to the red is just context now. We can't do any of that. That's all off the table. Everything in red is history, but it's data. It's just context. And it's just to stay consistent with what we've talked about. I did add a little bit more detail to the $2.2 million number to kind of break it down and make it feel kind of more manageable to individuals. And so from the current tax rate, it's $1.29 a month or $15 for the year, $15.50, $15.48. And even then, even with that, because our rate sits out here, people are still going to see about a $5 less rate. tax bill this year, the average homeowner would see $5 less, even if we take that little click. So it's still a reduction, even though this feels like it's all the same, it's not the same, it's still less, based on how the rates work. And then again, to put it out in total context, if we were to, and we're not talking about it more, but I just think it's important to put all this from where we are to 2 million, 14 million, or 24 million. That's the scope of resources that this year we have decision-making domain about. Next year to be different. This doesn't always stay the same. The parameters stay the same. The no new revenue voter approved, that stays the same, but each year based on tax base and exemptions and all that, the calculations independently change every year. That's why this year it was such a shock, for example, that our actual rate was below the no new revenue rate. It's never been that before. So you've got to put all the variables in, and then you get the details out. So I'm not sure what it'll look like next year. This is what it looks like this year, and we're only talking about anything kind of here to the left. That's all we can visit on. Okay, so I think it's come up in the meetings, I think you all asked too, well, okay, Trey, if we're going to do this, and that's an if, because it's very clear that a lot of people were very hesitant about that, what would we do? And so I've kind of brought to you a couple of options for you to consider about what we would do. Most of these tie exactly to what we talked about in the initial presentation. So if we were to move back to the no new revenue rate, These six items are the areas that I think we should give some consideration to making investments in. Real-time crime center, facility gear for police officers and firefighters, expanded homelessness services, and then increased investment in our asset management of our facilities, which are chronically underdone as our streets, as our fleet. Those are all insatiable. So that's kind of one option. Another option would be to do, and I've actually come up with another one since we did this, I'd call it 2 and 2A, or maybe 2A and 2B. So, as I sit here and I think about, we're not just always solving budgets for right now, we have to be looking multi-year, right? And we have a five-year for our newer council members, we have a five-year financial forecast, we take a look at these things so we can see the trains coming. One of the trains coming is Fire Station 18. It's a brand new fire station. Not a new build with existing people, but a new build that's going to require new people. So when Station 18 opens, that's great. Where are the firefighters? Where's the fire truck? So we have to be able to populate all that. We're two or three years out on that. And one legit option is that we wait until we solve that until two or three years from now, right? Because that will be just in time at that kind of deal. But it is a bogey that's kind of out there for us to see what's coming. But we could, for example, use $2.2 million this year and allocate it to street maintenance in a one-time way, which would be $4.4 million extra into streets. Everybody loves investing in streets. And then when it comes time to do the firefighters, we roll that money into the operational cost of the firefighters, and we're funded, we're there. 2B of this scenario would be, let's just do the streets. Let's just hang onto the streets and we'll deal with the firefighters when the time comes, closer to the time comes. Knowing that we're gonna have to figure that out and we're gonna have a budget challenge when that comes because that's not a 10,000 or a $50,000 item. That's a whole new fire station, two, two and a half million dollars, easy to populate that with firefighters. So that's another option. 2A is kind of the fire street hybrid. 2B is let's just do streets. And then really option three, which is where I sensed most of y'all were when we actually had this conversation about where we're going to set the rate, is let's just leave it how you pitched it, Trey. That's what you said you needed. Let's just go do that. And that's clearly still an option. But at this point, it kind of starts becoming your budget and what you want to achieve with it. And we've got a lot of it there. And we've got a few options for you to consider. But I want to kind of reality check that. And of course, as you know, the next steps, we've still got another town hall next week. and then we still got till the 15th, really, a first reading on the 8th and a 15th second reading, so we don't have to have all this finalized till then. But in order to get the paperwork in order, we do need to start kind of marshalling towards certain conclusions about what you'd like to do with any of the information that I presented. So that's what I got, Mayor. Questions for Trey on budget stuff?

Comments?

I got one. Well, go ahead. Council Member Garcia-Dumont. Go ahead. Mine can wait.

Trey, thank you so much for this. Can you pull up that tax rate continuum? This is something that I had asked Trey to pull together. I think lots of us kind of contributed to needing this. Because I think when the residents see this, $2.2 million is a large number. But when you break it down, what is it actually going to cost the resident? And not even just the resident, but the entire... home as we break it down um i thought that this was just such a more clear look at that rub that's been discussed between raising the taxes and getting services from the city and so i know that i probably hear the same things you guys hear um that we want roads fixed and we want things for the residents and you know i do hear from our residents that the entertainment district gets all these things From what I have seen in these budget conversations, there is a desire to keep our taxes very, very low. And we also still have to have a functioning city. And so what we do is we go out and we look for other ways to get money pumped into the city. And sometimes that comes through the entertainment district. And sometimes that money has to stay there because of the way that we get it. But the benefit of... of some of those monies being there. We also get community partners out of these large national brands. I do hear from residents, they look at things in Colleyville, and I think, Trey, that was one of the slides that we got to see. Colleyville is up 13%. And they're right at that base of what they can charge. So I guess my sentiment is some of our residents say they want a collie bill, but we don't want to pay to be a collie bill. And that's where we are right now. We're trying to mitigate how do we make sure our city is so beautiful and well-funded without dumping a bunch of tax burden on people. And so I love that tax rate continuum where we are able to see What would it really cost you to get you the things that you want, right? Colleyville is all the way up to their voter approval tax rate. So that would infuse $14.2 million. I mean, we're not talking, like that's not an option for us, but just to give you a line of sight. That's what it would take. And so I love that we're able to see this $1.29 per month for your entire house. Then when you get down to these options that we have, we say, okay, this increase in your taxes, it's not just a dead increase, but here's some of the things that you can have. I believe that $150,000 for expanded homelessness services, that's the... homelessness diversion service that Mindy talked about. And then also that $50,000 Arlington Life Shelter, that's to increase their capacity. And so, you know, What we're really looking at is do we want to be a city that continues to beautify and do great things for the residents? And if we want that, this is how we're gonna go about it. We're going to have to have a small tax increase after having a lot of years of not increasing our taxes. And something that I just wanted to make a note of is in one of our budget town halls, we heard from someone who's very fiscally conservative, who kind of got it that if we delay street maintenance for an extended period of time, we are only pushing that cost down the road. And they actually raised their hand and said, I think we should do this. I think that we should add on a little bit, go to that no new revenue rate. And I was not at all expecting this specific person to say that. And so I know that nobody wants to raise taxes. I know that's something that we don't love. We are at a point, I wouldn't even say approaching a point, we are at a point where we are beginning to delay things that we should not delay. In my opinion, from what I hear from my constituents, there are things we cannot delay. Homelessness services in downtown is a big deal, and if we continue to delay that by not accounting for it within our taxes here, it's going to be an even bigger problem in the future, and it's gonna get more and more costly. So I am in favor of going to the no new revenue rate, especially considering we have option one, option two of what we can do with that money. It's not just a tax rate increase for increase purposes. It is to do things for our residents. And we hear all the time that our residents want things that are for them. And this is what we're trying to do with that. Trey, I just had a question about option two. Where will Station 18 be?

It'll be down near the Martin's Pocket and Gear. We've got land, I think, right adjacent to it, which I think is at Mayfield, west of Cooper. And so if you're west of Cooper, I think on Mayfield, Millier, Mayfield, somewhere in that area, that's where Station 18 would go. And it is intended to take... kind of the Parks Mall Highlands congestion that Station 9 south of the mall hits. This puts a kind of a compatible north side of the mall activity because that's where a ton of our calls get run.

And so that, I'm assuming it was, that's a strategically placed fire station, right?

And voter approved, by the way. Station 18 has already gone to bond election, and we have resources. That'll be our next station, Station 18.

Awesome. I also love that we have this option of, or we have so many options, but one of them presented is to be, as you said, to just do the streets, right? And I think we all hear all the time, fix the streets, fix roads. We have an opportunity to do that. And I say we take it. Because again, if we don't take it now, it will be more costly in the future. And this isn't 30 years down the road future. This is like two years from now future when things are even more expensive. And so I think we've done, and Trey, really, you have done such a great job in laying out what we get for what. And this is not a fiscally ridiculous way increase or way to use money. This is money for the residents, money for our city to make it a continuously beautified city and a place where people want to live. And I say that we take it. My option, my favorite option is option one. I know we're not discussing the options, but I love that we have a strategy moving forward for what we could do with that no new revenue rate.

Any other questions or comments for Trey? Yes, Dr. Jason Shelp.

Trey, thanks a lot. Appreciate the presentation, sir. Forgive me, I've been here since 9 o'clock, and my brain is starting to get a little tired. But I think I heard you say something that I wanted to go back on. Did you say, sir, per that same slide that Brittany, excuse me, Council Member Dumas asked you to bring up, did you say that... that the average resident of our city might see taxes declined by $5? Did I hear you say that? Yes. You did? I heard that?

Yeah, it's right here.

OK. So let me also translate this, because again, I'm getting tired. Layman's terms, I remember in the last meeting we had, and Spencer was here, And I asked, what does all of this translate to overall? And at the time, you all were kind of theorizing and saying that it might cost us on a monthly base, the average household, about $15 a year. Right. And then now you've done the math, and you estimated it might have been $1.30 something, and now we're at $1.29. So, per Councilmember Garcia-Dumas' point, if this is true, Trey, I would love to encourage our colleagues here to consider this slight, very slight increase, $1.29 a month for all of the great things that particularly option one would give us. There's a lot that has been removed over the years. And here's an opportunity to get a whole lot back at $1.29. Come on, y'all, that's McDonald's money. We all blow that real easy on a couple of beers at the golf course, Mauricio. We blow that. And here's a chance to us to enhance the quality of our lives significantly. So I'd like to encourage my colleagues to do that. I'm with that. I do have one other question, sir, and then I will shut up. And it's really about transportation, because I see Alicia over there. And so she knows, and if I haven't spoken to you about this, it's a big thing to me. I've always lived in cities that had public transportation seven days a week. And it is really, really important to me that one day, and this may not be the year, I get it, that one day that Arlington On Demand moves seven days a week, I was at church the other week here in Arlington at Cornerstone Baptist Church, and a friend of mine, his son was giving a speech, and he realized that some people in their family couldn't make it to church for the speech because he's in a national speech contest. He couldn't make it because his family couldn't catch Arlington on demand. They didn't have a way to get to church is my point. So we live in a big city where people need to get around on Sunday. So, Alicia, my question is really sort of a – related to Sunday, because you sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, and I asked you, how much is the fall off from potentially Saturday usage that we know versus the Sunday metric that Trey put up earlier? My question to you is just, you don't have to go back hard into the data, but how much of a fall off would there be in terms of usage For a city, so what we know about Saturday, how much is the fall off for Sunday for people to get around our town using Arlington On Demand, ma'am?

Alicia Winkelbeck, Director of Transportation. I think the data we're talking, I think a good way to look at this is current trips per week and then additional trips that are estimated if we were to add Sunday service. So right now, the on-demand service is doing about 9,600 trips per week, Monday through Saturday. If we were to add Sunday service, for the amount that Trey mentioned is somewhere between around 500,000 to a million, depending on federal funding availability. We would add an additional 800 trips estimated on Sunday.

But compared to Saturday, that's not a significant fall. In other words, if we were to bring it back, if we were able to have this program run on Sunday, in other words, people will be using the program significantly on Sunday as well, correct, ma'am?

We estimate that. I mean, we don't know until we do it. But based on Saturday service and just other trends we've seen, we used around 800 trips per day on Sunday to get our cost estimate. So that's kind of what we think would probably be the ridership we would see.

Yes, ma'am. I'm off my horse, but I just want my colleagues to think about the importance of this in a city this size where people can't get to church on Sunday. And I know that's really important to a lot of us. Thank you very much.

Trey. If we don't increase anything at all, do you see any numbers changing between now and this fall that may give you an opportunity to help do some of those other things in that $2 million gap?

A couple things that have come up that seem optimistic would be one of the things we talked about was the $80,000 from the Tarrant County Tax Assessor Collector. What we found in having conversations with them is the money that they hold for rebates or for refunds, that those aren't being invested. the way we would invest our money. They're just held in an account so that they can be dispersed. So there was some discussion about, well, you either need to invest them or you need to give it back to us so we can. And I think we've made good progress on that. Ethan talked to the tax accessory collector, and I think there'll be one of those pathways that will occur, and that'll be, I think, $80,000 that we'll be able to come forward. So another thing that I don't have enough detail on, but I'll put it out there. NTTA has been notified by Texas DPS that they're no longer gonna be their primary responder to NTTA roads. And so they need somebody to do that. And of course we have the South 360 area they pay a service fee for that. So we need to figure out what that is, but that may be a little bit of an offset of money that can come in to the budget that NTTA would pay because APD would be the primary responder for that section of road compared to DPS doing it. And then the other thing that we've got coming, which we'll talk more, I think, next month about, but have kind of in my mind a bit of what I will call the FIFA dividend that we're putting some information together around and what we've been able to quantify relative to sales tax boost, hotel tax boost, liquor tax boost. But all those are one-time investments, right? we can buy more equipment or we can put it in the streets as a one-time investment. We just can't really put in any kind of recurring stuff as it relates to wages. So I think in the next meeting or two, we'll have a little bit of some one-time money that will come into the budget that might be able to help us with Bunker gear, gas masks, for example, if that's what we want to do. Or that's money that would go into the streets would be how we do. So we'll know more as we get more info on that. We'll have kind of a recommended FIFA dividend package for you all to consider so that the community can feel directly it was X because these teams were here and here are some leave-behinds that we're going to be able to do something with.

Council Member Gonzales.

Thank you, Mayor. Trey, can you go back to option one? So are those reoccurring, or is that a one-time deal, all those?

I would say real-time crime center is ongoing. The homelessness services is ongoing. The other, I think, in a way, I think they're all ongoing, but if we could buy this year's gas mask or this year's bunker gear or this year's facility maintenance number, those are all offsets against things that we need to do, but they all need more after that. It's insatiable, right? Equipment replacement, street replacement, building renewal and rehab, it never ends, which goes back to the discussion about kind of how we do things. back on kind of the debt question, not everything do we do is that way as well. We have a hybrid situation of capital maintenance cash that we pay as we go, and then when we're doing new or expanding is when we do debt instruments. So I meant to say that earlier too. Two of these, the homelessness and the real-time crime center, are very clearly staff kind of operating kinds of things. The others, we could buy a package this year and not buy a package next year, and we would have made progress, but it wouldn't have solved the situation.

Thank you.

Yes, Council Member Locke. Yeah, real fast, and thank you, Trey. Just you and your team's professionalism on a budget is truly impressive. Someone who's done a lot of these for over the years. I just can't thank you enough for, y'all take some steps, and you take some bold steps on some recommendations. Can you get, one thing I do think we need to look at, I saw Tarrant County College is considering like a 13 cent increase, and I don't know what they finally decided on. They're a very small portion of the tax. I think Tarrant County, as a county actually maybe did a small reduction. 0.02. 0.02 reduction. Can we see it whole just when you get a chance for the next meeting or send it out to us?

You mean just for like an Arlington?

What they proposed, yeah. What they proposed. Because it is... Listen, we can talk about ours all we want. Homeowners, see it as a whole, right? So we've gotta see it as a whole of what the school district's done, because now they passed a bond, so they've got a little increase in their bond rating. So I'd like to be able to see what that is as a whole from that perspective. I, of course, lean towards the proposed tax rate that we came in. The one piece I can start looking forward and start really having some concern about And we spent a lot of time as council talking about street maintenance and where we build that out and what happens on that. And so I would even say, and I talked to Trey about this, instead of just allocating 2.23 million, you allocate the... point the point seven cents of where it is and you earmark it towards streets so that is then getting into future budgets you've got a dedicated funding source to start going towards streets because we all know these are things are and when you do budgets it's not you know everything's important it matters so you're talking to on the importance of where they are but I can tell you we all spent a lot of time talking about We're 30 million annually in the hole on streets. So this doesn't fix it, but needing a little start bandaid and start going towards the future is something I could be willing to consider.

So for the last couple of years, we've raised taxes. And for me, it's not about $1.29 a month per household. It's about what we can do with the money and is there other places the money can come from. And it's also about creating an atmosphere where the community feels like we hear them on this. They're not gonna hear this is increasing just a buck 29 a month, they're going to hear you've increased my taxes for three years in a row. And I struggle with that, with what's going on here. We're talking a couple of million dollars in the grand scheme of things, and I think between some of these other things with NTTA and the county money that they're not investing, and God knows what the FIFA dividend or whatever we wanna call it is gonna give, but I suspect that that's gonna give us an opportunity to have some of those one-time payment things, and if you look at your list of expenditures there that we could do stuff on. Those are a lot of one-time cost items. And so for me, I have a hard time bumping up any taxes this year. I think we've asked a lot, and y'all know I was supportive last year and the year before. Last year we really had to cut stuff and we really had to do a lot of things between our cuts and our tax increase. And I'm all about increasing the taxes when we absolutely have to do it. I just don't see us absolutely having to do it this year. So, for one, me for one, I'm gonna be more inclined to stick with the original proposed tax rate below the no new revenue, more from a standpoint of being able to demonstrate that we hear everybody, we know exactly what's going on, we can survive without it, and I think it makes everything in the future more palatable. There's still a whole lot of unknown variables where I think we're gonna get some substantial monies coming in to help address some of those issues that we had up there, so that's my inclination. and we're gonna have to give them some guidance, give Trey some guidance on this, so I'd encourage y'all to weigh in. Yes, Council Member Hunter.

Thanks, Mayor. I'm gonna agree with you as well. That's kind of where I stand.

Thank you.

Same. I agree with you, Mayor. Adopt the tax rate as proposed and take option one as we have extra incomes coming in. Focus on option one priorities out there.

Will you go back to that slide there, Trey? As we get some of these other monies coming in, whether it's the NTTA or the Tarrant County or the FIFA dividends and all that, those are these types of things that we can address with those things in there. I would speculate that we'll be able to address a number of these things with that additional money in there. And we can do it without doing any increase to the citizens. So that's where I'm at. Anybody else? Council Member Gonzales.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Trey. Just like Boobie said, you guys are so professional, especially you, the way you present it and everything else. And you make it, it's up to us.

Okay, that's a bit much.

No, seriously, people need to understand that. It's important that the way our city is run, I mean, you know, when you hear all this negative stuff and everything else from other cities, I mean, we're lucky what we have. But I'm going to agree with the Mayor. I've been doing this for 17 years. and the prior two years was just the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make. And I'm just, you know, I think the citizens, you know, I know it's not a lot, but it's just we don't know what's going to be next year. You know, if we do something this year and then again next year, that will be four. So if we don't have to do it, I don't, I'm not for it at all. Thank you.

Anybody else? Council Member Pham.

Well, I do concur with you, Mr. Mayor. If we go to the no new tax rate, I mean, three years in a row, we increased taxes. And I know it's not a whole lot of money, but there's a lot of people, they live on fixed income and it doesn't matter $1 or $200, it's too hard on them. And that kind of sent the wrong message. If $2.2 million gonna hurt our budget and we have to cut this, cut that, I understand I'll go to the new race, but last year we increased three pennies to bail us out because it's not our fault. But, you know, most people in here should know. That's why you be careful who you nominate on the tadpole, okay? I don't want to share with everybody, so...

Stay focused.

And then, so I, the current rate, I mean, I support that to keep, leave it the same, you know, so. But you gotta remember, what you can do, you can hurt your city. That's all I'm saying. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Councilmember Shelton. I just want to ask a final question, and I'm a player for Angel's Advocate, and that is, I swear I heard Trey say that the average local resident is going to experience a $5 decrease. So I hear y'all, but I mean, I kind of, I need to hear where, and I know that I'm outnumbered in the room, but I mean, can somebody tell me where the, if average person's gonna get the decrease?

Here's just the way, first of all, I love the fact that you said angels advocate instead of devil's advocate. I may steal that for the future and claim it as my own. For me personally, I can tell you where I'm at for me personally. I agree with the stuff that Councilmember Garcia-Dumas said earlier. It's $1.29 a month. This is palatable for everybody on this stuff, but it's not. It's not about the money. It's about the perception that people have when the council is increasing the tax revenue year after year after year when it comes to that. So, yeah, there's a reduction, the change from the prior year of 489 on that, but when you go out and you start saying, well, but there's a reduction so we can increase your tax, see how far that flies. And there's another saying, pigs don't fly. And that pig ain't flying. Not in the community. That perception means a lot. I don't disagree with the great things that we can do. Lord, we could do a phenomenal thing. Imagine if we could turn Trey loose if we just went up to voter approval. Trey would do all kinds of stuff with over $14 million. But that perception, that perception that we'll get a lot more services, that perception is gonna be really tough for our community to swallow, as is any increase, because the storyline won't be Arlington gives one of the lowest tax increases. The storyline will be Arlington has increased it year after year after year. That's the storyline, and that's what people will hear. They won't hear about everything that that little bitty boost is going to give you.

All of us experience and hear from our constituents about their perceptions of crime in the city and not feeling safe, regardless of how safe I feel in this city. And here we have an opportunity to bring back a program that's gonna help the APD and do a number of things that's gonna help the APD. So I think that a vast, a strong majority, of course you ain't gonna satisfy everybody, but a strong majority of people in this city are gonna be like, yo, you brought back the real time crime center? Yo, you got gas masks? You got these things to help people, help our APD? I just think that what people are getting for the $1.29 is going to outweigh what people feel. Now I'm gonna shut up again.

You said that over and over again, you haven't done it. Arlington ranks by the hill as the second safest city in the state of Texas. So the argument can't be made that we don't live in a safe environment. But I'll tell you what, you hear more then safe environment is tax. Taxes. You'll hear more complaining about increase in property tax than you'll ever hear about us being in an unsafe environment.

Council Member Garcia- Yes, I hear you that in the perfect world, we would not raise taxes and we would be able to have all of these things. I also know that only 13% of our UTA students remain here after they graduate. I also know that we are having difficulty getting people moving to this city and remaining here. I also know that we have a large population of people who are about to experience a property tax freeze. And one of my main missions while here on council is getting younger families to move here and live here and leave their legacy here and stay here for forever. So I hear you that, no, in a perfect world, nobody wants to raise taxes. But we have got to live in the reality in that we don't have people moving here like they're moving to Colleyville or like they're moving to Frisco or McKinney. And they consistently are raising their taxes year after year. So I'm not saying raise taxes to raise taxes for that sake, but we've got to look at what other cities are doing to get people to move there and stay there. There's an element to which we cannot get a lot of people to move here. Working professionals, mid-30s, 20s, 40s to move here. And we also can't get our younger generation to stay here. So we have to live in that reality as well when we're considering the money that we're going to have in our city.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Yep, I understand. The big thing about where people live, including my kids, is where's the jobs and how much are they paying? So it's not tax rate. It's not crime. That's the big deal. So when you talk about 13% from UTA, they go to other jobs that have high-paying jobs. They don't stick around here and start working at Walmart or whatever or even eSpace. We're lucky we're hiring, but that's the key we've got to focus on is economic development. And I get it. One cent is nothing, but when you see groceries going up, you see gas going up, you see health care going up, daycare going up, it's all going up, and that's, like the mayor said, that's all they're going to see, and everybody's tired of it. I mean, everybody's tired of it, and I get it, you know, but like I said, the last three years have been really difficult, and I know that's what you are seeing for the first time, and you're like, oh, that makes no sense, but I think you just have to look at the whole situation. I heard you, I mean, I was shocked at some of the positive that we had at the town hall. I've never seen that before, that, hey, increase it. I mean, that was really great, so people are getting to, getting it now. But it's important that they know that it's, you know, I think TCC is making a point to show it's not us, it's TAD. You know, and Fort Worth is doing the same thing. Fort Worth is saying, look, um, Your tax rate is going to be higher, but you're going to pay lower because of TAD. So I think that's, you know, those are all things we have to look at. And I fully feel, you know, I agree with you and I agree with everybody. But like I said, it's not just this year. It's been for many, many years. And like I said, like the mayor says, it's just perception and, you know, that's it.

Council Member Hunter.

Thank you, Troy. I want to just kind of confirm. You did mention that there were buckets of money that could still allow us to do this that we don't know about yet, as in the World Cup, things like that, correct?

Let me be clear about this. The budget that we presented is what we think, with all best estimates, is what we have the resources to do. But it is a plan, right? And plans, they change monthly, quarterly, based on information that comes in. I don't have a magic bullet on any of these things. We've presented to you what we think we need and what some options are. And as some opportunities show up, if they show up, On the upside, we'll talk about, hey, we've got some upside potential to do things, and if they're on the downside, then we're gonna show up and say, we're cutting this, we're stopping that, like we've always done. We will manage with the resources that you all provide us and we'll do the best. That said, I also wanted to be really clear, is that chronically in the organization, We are underfunded and understaffed. We do the best with what you give us, and we are gonna do the same. I hear it, we know where we're headed, and all that, but it shouldn't come without being noted that we're short on fleet, we're short on buildings, we're short on streets, so as we talk about those things, These opportunities to fix those present themselves really every time this year, right? This time of year is where we have that conversation. And I don't disagree with any of the comments, both for and kind of against. We've kind of got a history, and history is always an indicator of kind of future action, what you should or shouldn't do based on what you need to do. So we'll adapt, no problem. We'll manage it, and when we have good news show up, we'll tell you, and we have bad news show up and tell you, but I can't tell you that I can fix any of this based on what I know today. We'll just work with it, and we get our first quarter budget report, our second quarter budget report, the FIFA dividend report, whatever it might be, we'll have good news, but we are a chronically under-resourced organization that makes the most with what we do, and it goes back to that point I want to make that's got to resonate for everyone. I know people want low taxes, but I also know they want things, and that's the tension. I need this, but I also need low taxes. I need this, but I don't want to pay for it. The tension is what is our government going to be for our community and what are we willing to pay for it? And every time this year we negotiate that to a status quo of what we're going to do or to a detente, and then next year we have the chance to decide do we need to open Fire Station 18 or not. or do we need to do this because AI has influenced something, right? So I just wanted to be clear that This is, I think I said before, the remarkable thing about this budget is unremarkable. It's very standard, it's very basic, it's very routine kinds of things. But I would not be doing my job if I wasn't doing two things. One, we're gonna do what y'all want us to do, the majority of what you want us to do. But two, you need to know what we're not doing based on that. And that's what I wanna be real clear about.

Any other comments or questions?

Well, population. Have we been going up every year?

Yeah, a little bit. It's pretty flat, usually a thousand or two. It's been since the, honestly, after 9-11, it's probably, we're in the 390s, 385. It's been 1,000 or two a year. On our way to about 440, 450. That'll be build out for us, right? So that'll be the maximum population that I would expect when the South is done and when Viridian is done. And so then that's a whole other generational question is when you're at 450, and you're seeing it now because the revenue growth, As Mr. Peel used to say, what's the existential threat to Arlington? Well, he had one way to characterize it, but another way to characterize it is, in a budgetary sense, if you have growing inflationary costs in materials and people, and you have revenue that's not growing at that same pace, there's a problem, right? So how do you align those things? How do you slow down the expenditures or accelerate the growth revenue and it's not all on taxpayers to your point about economic development it's on new accounts showing up new bigger accounts showing up that's why economic development is important because we're trying to dollar cost average in new money so yeah still growing but our existential threat is expenditure growth that's faster than revenue growth and they have to align to be sustainable let me just throw something out there that I

Whether or not there's a almost 1% increase and all that doesn't reflect our non-desire to be like any other community. What really is interesting is you have to look at apples to apples in a situation like this. The average home in Plano is over half a million dollars. The average home in Dallas is 305,000. In Arlington, it's 307. Fort Worth, 295. In Frisco, like you mentioned, it's 775. There's a substantial difference in your property tax bill for a home of 775,000 to a home of $300,000. McKinney is 590. Salina Prosper is 810. So it goes on and on and on and on about where our revenues are coming from. And the majority of our revenues historically come from residential property values. About two thirds of our revenues come from residential property values. That means our homeowners with their smaller priced homes that TAD, Council Member Pham, is continuously causing to decrease year after year with how they're handling appeals on their stagnant appraisals is decreasing the value of our Arlington homes year after year after year. So you can't close that gap if you just look at the property taxes that we're collecting on this. And that's why I say you have to look at how the perception is of what we're doing with what we're getting. You want to increase that level. You want to bring those things. What you have to do, in my opinion, is make sure you have good schools, make sure you have good jobs, and make sure your community is safe. And we're bringing some of the best jobs that we can bring with some of the companies that we're talking about coming in here and doing all of that. So our economic development is strong. We have the most robust entertainment district anywhere in the Southwest United States. We have good momentum going. The key is making sure that our residents appreciate and understand that momentum. So, I take exception with saying we don't, we're not doing those things necessary to stay current with some of the stuff they're doing. We're not gonna get more jobs by increasing our property tax one percent, one cent rather, so. Any other comments? All right. Oh, Tom? You got to yell at me or something, Tom, so I can. Council Member Ware.

Not loud enough, I guess. I wanted to kind of hear what everybody said since I was the guy that brought up the 6363. It's $2.2 million. In the grand scheme of things, is that more important than keeping the taxes where they are, doing what we can? We're suffering from the fact that we've done a good job, and I'd say we, even though I wasn't part of setting the, everything that's going on, but I think our city has done a fine job of keeping taxes low, and it's coming back to haunt us right now. And at some point, we're gonna have to bite off a big bone to be able to make up some of the things that we're not funding right now. I'm afraid of next year when we don't have a baseball season, and it's very likely. So we're going to have some stuff coming up, as well as maybe some prize money coming in, but I know we've got some going down. I'm leaning toward staying where we are, 629A, with a serious consideration for next year that we are going to have to suck it up and put a pretty decent a tax increase in effect. I don't see any way around it personally, but some of you have much better experience than I do in here. So that's kind of where I'm sitting right now. I think we need to show our folks that, all right, we can tighten our belt, but let them know that it can't stay that tight, and we'll have to do something in the future. So that's.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm worried about baseball. I'm also worried about people keeping campaign promises and making some adjustments that are gonna drastically impact our communities as well. All right, we're gonna move on down to 4.7. Thank you, Trey. Tarrant County November election polling sites. Jay? Say what? You're not gonna do it? You're on my agenda.

I think Mayor's just here for you all to have a discussion. I'm not sure we've got anything to present.

I thought Jay was going to actually present something. So here's, Lord. Jay, when they put you on my agenda, I fully expect you to be totally prepared for this, okay? I've asked this to be put on the agenda so we could have a discussion about this. Fort Worth unanimously voted on a resolution to oppose any reduction of voting polling locations in their city. We had voted previously on the redistricting efforts in our city and did a resolution on that previously, and I wanted to have council to have the opportunity to discuss what y'all would want to do, if anything, on a resolution to oppose Tarrant County reducing polling locations in Arlington. I'm happy to throw it out there. I am leery of the reasoning that is being given to save money on this with the population increases that are being done, and I'm leery on how some of the polling locations were selected, or what appears to be how they were selected when it was eliminating polling locations from communities of color and those who are underprivileged. So... I'm inclined to weigh in on it. I know that not everybody would agree with me on this, but I am certainly opposed to the reduction of polling locations and anything else Arlington can do. Previously, I'll throw this out there, Arlington ran our own local elections. You don't have to use Tarrant County to do your local elections. Doing it on a national level is totally different, but on your local elections, you don't have to use them. You could do your own, or you could get somebody else to do it. But I'm not saying we go that far. I'm just saying it's something that we may be able to at least say, listen, if you start doing this, if you start diminishing our residents' ability to get out and vote, that we're gonna look at all of the options available to us on how we can get control over this stuff. Here's the reality, I don't care if you're conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Independent, none of that stuff matters to me. What I care about is that everybody in this city has an equal opportunity to vote. and drastically, like they originally proposed, I understand they're peeling back the number of polling places they're talking about now, I think is pretty bad. But I wanted to open it up and give you all an opportunity to weigh in. Anybody?

Council Member Hogg. Like any resolution in Myers-Hodgson, right? Like the devils and the angels and the details. Sorry, there we go.

On that.

Did you come up with that all by yourself? Yeah. Grandma Shelton is proud.

Grandma Shelton's working over here. You know, with that, I also look at I don't think we should reduce, but I'm worried about just a blanket statement of saying no reduction because. Voting locations have changed as of a couple of years ago, you had to go to a specific location. I think we all remember I've waited in hour and a half, 2 hour lines and I remember these last year. So I'm going up there in the last couple of years and you're going. not voting but it's because you can go to any location now even on election day um it is one and i haven't followed what all tarrant county's doing on this we got enough stuff we're dealing with down here um on that so i i think there's some i think i think they're let me just let me throw this out because i don't want i don't think we need to just say yeah let's do a resolution

I think what I'm looking for is do we tell Molly and crew, go ahead and do a resolution for us to review and make a decision after reviewing it? Because I wanted to get that out there because that goes directly to what you said at the beginning. I think that's a reasonable thing to do.

Yeah, and I don't... Listen, we've got to keep the county in our graces. They killed... The proposal that came back to him, I don't know if I fully believe they didn't know what was getting proposed. Listen, we usually know it's getting proposed. So I know how governance works on that side, but getting into something that we don't have the details about a blanket statement. I have a hard time getting into that and I do think. elections have changed. They did implement money where you can vote at any polling site, which has been super convenient. I know it's convenient for almost everyone I talk with because all of us who have run elections know you've had to talk to people and used to talk to people and say, here's where you have to go election day to actually go to your location. And that's not an easy thing to tell people to do. And that is the biggest hindrance on voting having people be able to go to any location I think is a good good set. But on the same note, I don't know what they're evaluating on dollar cost on those. So I would have a hard time with anything that says just a blanket statement. I'm on there without us really any of us know any of the details.

Council member Gonzalez.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Bowie. I was on the committee when they changed Tarrant County to where you could vote anywhere. And it was interesting to see all the polling sites. And we were, you know, all we did was just talk about and we made the decision to offer voting anywhere in Tarrant County. But when they showed us the map, it was really interesting. Like Bowie says, you don't know what they're talking about is there'd be some place where there was a polling site across from another across the street. and we couldn't decide to give it one. I mean, it wasn't gonna happen. I mean, nobody was gonna give in. So it is tough. I understand. I mean, I don't like what I'm hearing, but I think the resolution coming back and then we can talk about it. But like I said, keep in mind, I mean, like I said, I was on that committee and you would be shocked at how many were so close and they just didn't wanna change. But now you can vote anywhere, but there are some people that don't have the means to get to those places. So I get it.

Would y'all, just from head nodding, are you comfortable with looking at a proposed resolution and maybe looking at what Fort Worth or somebody else has done just to sort of make that discussion? I know you're not comfortable with it.

Sometimes, we have a lot going on on what we're dealing with, and so I want us to stay laser focused, but it's not saying this is unimportant, I think we should say laser focused.

Yeah, I hear you. But representing our residents and their ability to cast a vote is part of what we're here to do. And that's where my concern is. So, council. No, everybody else sort of holds their hand up a little bit. You've got to yell at me like that. Council Member Garcia-Dumas.

Yeah, I hear you that we do have a lot of stuff going on here locally. And it is our job to hear from our residents what matters to them. And what we have heard is that this matters to them. That what was originally proposed was a reduction of 45% of polling locations. That's wild. That is... We should never make it harder for someone to use their voice. It is difficult to do. It's an insult to democracy to make it more difficult to vote. And what the residents of District 5 that have weighed in on this have said is that this is very important to them, that this affects them. And they have asked that we make a resolution similar to our friends in Fort Worth. So, yes, this is a county deal, but it does affect our residents, and our residents are asking for us to do it. And so I am, at least I'm in the vein of I want to see what a resolution would look like, and then we can go from there because we owe it to our residents to act on the things that they are asking for us to do, the things that are within our power to do. And this resolution would be within our power to do for the residents that are asking for it.

Thank you, Mayor, for not sharing me now. Yeah. I will be cautious to say that we attending all the residents, because the reality is only 9% of people show up to vote. 9% of the residents of Arlington show up to vote. The ones that can vote. 91% of people don't even care. I mean, I came from a country that is mandatory to vote and have one day of voting. And when you go to vote, you stay eight hours in line. And if you don't vote, you quit, you get a fine. So I've been following elections here, and I work the polls. I actually work the polls for some of our friends here, and for the time I got elected here. And I see with my own eyes, we have 10 days of early voting, 10 days, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Some of those days, I stay there from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., including for some friends here in the council. And there's times of the day that nobody show up. Hours and hours, countless hours, nobody even show up. And I have a hard time to agree that it's hard to vote. We are doing a disservice to democracy. I mean, it's 10 days to vote, and then you have a hiatus of two or three days, and then you have a voting day. And to agree with Council Member Hogg, you can vote anywhere. I mean, pick a spot that is close to your church or your work or whatever. You don't need to cross the street, cross the city to go out and do your voting. And the second, this is the parting of voting. The second is, we are talking about budget here, trying to solve our problems with budget. THIS IS ANOTHER ENTITY. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN PROBLEMS WITH BUDGET. SO WHEN THEY COME OUT AND SAY IT'S NOT EFFICIENT, LET'S LOOK AT THE NUMBERS FIRST. LET'S LOOK AT THEIR EVIDENCE, THEIR NUMBERS. YOU KNOW, YOU ALL KNOW I'M A NUMBERS GUY. AND I LOVE TO SEE THEIR NUMBERS. AND I'M NOT BEING FOLLOWING. I APOLOGIZE. I'M NOT BEING FOLLOWING THIS PROCESS. AND I DON'T EVEN WANT TO FOLLOW BECAUSE BUT WHEN YOU COME OUT, LOOK AT THE NUMBERS. LOOK AT THE EVIDENCE. If they say that it's inefficient and they can serve the people in Tarrant County better with less polling locations and actually somehow dedicate some money for transportation, for public transportation, higher public transportation for people that sign up in a list that they cannot get to the places where they can vote, now we're gonna be attending the citizens that are saying, I cannot get there to vote. And we're being efficient at the same time because the last thing, our responsibility, not only their entity, in our entity, is to make the most of our dollars. The most of our dollars for the people that want to vote, which is only 9% of the people, I think is an absurd, right? We don't have a representative democracy at all because 91% of the people don't bring their voice. And we are being efficient with the money for the other 91% of the people that don't participate in local elections. So that's my three cents with a horrible voice again. I'm sorry, man.

How's all that voting mandate worked out in Brazil?

You work horribly. And you work horribly in Brazil. That's why we have a communist country there down south.

All right. So I appreciate you raising this issue. I'm on board with, of course I would love to see what the actual language would be, but definitely on board with a resolution that emphasizes that we wanna make it easy for people to vote in the great city of Arlington, Texas. And just for the sake of it, sir, I'm gonna fundamentally disagree with you about, I can tell you for certain at UT Arlington, my students, my staff members, faculty members, people I've known at the university for decades, talking about how hard it was to go figure out what to do now after they have relied on UTA as a polling place for the arc of their adult lives. So I do believe that it's become harder to vote for certain people in certain places, and I think we need to make sure that it's easy to vote. And so with that, We will disagree on that.

Why don't we just do this because we could debate this all day long. I'm gonna ask the city attorney to go ahead and do a sample resolution for us and we can look at it next council meeting or whenever she's able to get it done, and then we can decide what we want to do by looking at things without going back and forth on all of this. Council Member Pham.

Trey, you know how much it's going to cost the city for this general election in November?

How much is it going to cost the city?

Cost the city, yes.

Oh, for our share of paying for it?

In the past, that's around $88,000, $89,000.

No cost for the city in November because we don't have anything on the ballot. But when we have something on the ballot, it's around $80,000 or $90,000.

Okay. Now, has the commission, the court, voted in yet? They haven't decided yet how many polls will be closed, right? So we don't know. That's how can we do the resolution. What happened? They come back next week, they vote. They say, we're going to open all of them. And we do a resolution now. We've got to be careful. We've got to find out if they vote for that yet.

Do you think they're going to reduce what the city pays?

No. I don't know, but I know that.

Do you think Tarrant County's gonna say, well, we're gonna reduce the polling locations, so we're gonna go ahead and reduce what you owe, and are we talking about the same entity that drove the TAD board to do what they've done? This is the issue I'm having with this, is because we're trying to say we're not gonna get into all of this. You know, They're not... I'm not going to say that because I'm going to get on that. No, salamander. Salamander is my safe word. Salamander is my safe word. Trey's whispering it to me now, but you're... You're talking about an organization that has done some pretty crazy things. They're not gonna reduce. If they cut the things by 45%, like Councilwoman Garcia-Dumas said, they're not gonna reduce what they're charging us by 45%.

Well, if it doesn't cost us, I know all the main polls, six of them in Arlington, we open, and most people do early vote. They got 10-day early votes anyway. So they cut a couple of them during the election day only one day.

That's fine. Let's take a look at some language on a resolution. We can make a decision on it from there. If you all aren't comfortable with it, then say no. Okay. If you are comfortable with it, then let's say yes. Fair? Fair. All right. 4.8, salamander. So everybody knows that's watching this. That's my safe word is salamander. When I get going too far sometimes, you need to yell that at me. 4.8, issues relative to city or tech stop projects. Any questions? Comments? Nope. 4.9, council external committees, training reports and discussion, Arlington Convention and Visitors Bureau. Council Member Hogg, you got anything?

You want me to do it? Yeah, I'll do it.

Okay.

All right. CONVENTIONAL VISITORS BUREAU BOARD MEETING. WE WENT THROUGH THE FISCAL YEAR 2026 FINANCIALS. THEY REPORTED $340,000 BELOW BUDGET. THERE WAS SOME ADVERTISING COSTS, WHICH IS GOING TO BE OFFSET IN THE COMING MONTHS. APPROVED THE FISCAL YEAR 2027 BUDGET OF PROJECTED AT $9 MILLION, $9,013,500. ALSO DISCUSSED THE ARTICULTURAL TOURISM CONSUEL CRITERIA. THE BIGGEST THING WAS THE ALLOCATING 15% FOR OPERATIONAL COSTS OF THE TOTAL $725,000. ALSO DISCUSSED THE NEW BRANDING, THE NEW BRANDING FOR THE CITY THAT WILL BE UNVEILED ON THE CVB ANNUAL MEETING. I CANNOT TELL YOU NOW, BUT IT'S PRETTY COOL. ALSO WE DISCUSSED THE PERFORMANCE MEASURES, THE KPIs, KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS TO SEE IF WE'RE ON TRACK. New board slate of members. We have the new chair and a treasury and a vice president. In a strategic plan, they went over the strategic plan to clarify what is the city identity, what is the plan to grow the tourism from 16 million tourists to 20 million tourists. and also adding value for every visitor in the city, and also monitoring the performance indicators, the KPI, so we can achieve 20 million tourists in five years. And good news, Arlington set travel records in 2025, 16.5 million tourists, $3.3 billion other people money being spent in the city of Arlington. Each tourist averaged $203 per expenditure. And that was the meeting of Alito Convention of Petersburg, August the 12th.

Any questions or comments for Councilmember Galante? Let me just add one thing.

Really good job, Mr. Galante. We did also add rules for public comment to match what the city does, which is something I know as a city we're trying to do that across any entity, so they're following on that. And then the cultural tourism, we've talked about that as a council before a couple times. It takes it to 85-15, so that we're still funding brick-and-mortar facilities in there, mainly in the majority, but then cultural and tourism things that have multi-day events, then they can receive part of that 15% funding. That's about $900,000 a year that goes into that funding. So it got clarity, and there was some little controversy over the last year, so I think we've got a good plan going there, a good report. That is. Sure. Sure.

For the ACTC, there was discussion about creating a board specifically from members of the CVB. Did that get created?

Like from the CVB?

Yeah, there's a community, there's a group of volunteers that regulates the ACTC, and there was discussion from Brent Durab that members from the CVB board would now become a part of that decision-making process.

We had Brent there, myself representing the city there, and then Valerie, the chair, to help go through and kept it on the cultural tourism committee.

Okay.

Anything else? All right, thank you, sir. North Texas Council of Governments Executive Board. There's not gonna be any specific details I can share with y'all. We had an executive board meeting in which we discussed a personnel issue and an investigation into some personnel matters. There was a discussion had in the office I've filled in our city attorney's office about those discussions and we will address the outcome of the final investigation and what the board's actions will be as a result of that at the next executive board meeting. That was a very vague sort of around the block sort of representation of what had, but I can't really get into the details yet. Council Member Gonzales, RTC.

Yes, Mayor. I'm going to report on C, D, and E, so I'm going to put them out of order. E, the Regional Transportation Council.

What's that? D has my name on it. You're going to do D, too?

Which one?

D. I'm sorry.

I didn't know you were on it. Okay. Never mind. I've got C and D, E. The RTC Transit Subcommittee originally scheduled for the 13th was canceled due to an early RTC workshop. COG staff, then the RTC, we had that workshop to discuss elements related to the roles of the RTC and of the Executive Board, including the Metropolitan Planning Organization Agreement with TxDOT, a settlement agreement between RTC and the Executive Board, and two operating agreements describing the roles of each body. Then the afternoon session, began and i i guess i already mentioned that we voted so sorry you threw me off completely sorry additionally at the regular meeting the rtc approved several items including the funding for zero emissions vehicles funding for a thank you luncheon for all fifa transportation team members funding for the technology project identification program which which including close to $2 million for two roadway safety projects in Arlington, a grant application for a software platform to improve elderly and disabled transportation services in the region. RTC held a remembrance for former U.S. Representative Kay Granger and recognized the outgoing Captain Bo Hofstetter of the Fort Worth Naval Station Joint Base. The next RTC meeting and transit subcommittee is September the 10th. That's my reports, Mayor.

Thank you. Any questions for Raul? Raul and I also attended, along with Alicia Winklebeck, that we attended a meeting with... Fort Worth, Dallas, Trinity Metro, I think DART was supposed to be there, but they didn't show up. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the high speed rail issues that we've been doing with the environmental analysis. We're trying to wrap that up. I think there was some, what appeared to be some misunderstanding when some previous board members from Dallas had on what our position was, our being the Tarrant County side of things, our position was regarding Dallas's choice of where they should have a station and how it should be done. We helped clarify that, listen, we don't want anybody telling what Arlington has to telling us what we have to do in here. We have no desire to tell Dallas what they have to do either, but We're gonna have a follow-up meeting in Dallas. This meeting was in Arlington. We have a follow-up meeting that will be scheduled in Dallas where we can work on a memorandum of understanding about finalizing our environmental analysis of the high-speed rail system And hopefully get an opportunity to move things forward and see where we can go with this. There's still a whole lot of uphill stuff that has to be done for a high school between Dallas and Fort worth. That was acknowledged. There are no monies coming from. anywhere in particular, other than we're probably gonna need private monies to do that, but if we can get things done, there are private entities that have an interest in building a high-speed rail between Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth. We have done, in conjunction with Fort Worth, an economic feasibility study or an economic analysis of the likely impact that would be done should such a thing get complete, and the city has that. If council members would like to ever see that, you're welcome to ask for it and take a look at it. Any questions? You already did E, right, Mr. Gonzalez? Any future agenda items? Anything y'all just can't live without talking about? No, Mr. Pham, you don't get to ever have any future agenda items. All right, with that, we're gonna adjourn the meeting. It's 5.03 p.m., and we'll see everybody downstairs at 6.30.

on a third location.

Right here in Arlington, the American Dream City.

They also enjoy everything being fresh, different from what they're used to.