City Council - workshop

Let me call to order the April 7 of your Park City Council workshop. Anyone sign up to speak?

No, sir.

Moving on to agenda item number one, the presentation for Troy Cawthorn on an update from Seth and the Deer Park Hathaway House Market.

You. You

should correct yourself. Oh,

IT. I should have checked before.

Put on good paper.

This information is fresh on

the press. Really? Feel that. Alright.

Actually, it's been about almost fifty years, so I've been around a long time. Victory Properties. I'm representing you on the Southeast Texas Housing Authority Board, and have been for about fifteen years. I'm past president three years. I'm now a director, and I'm on several executive committees with them.

And most of you all know that Southeast Texas Housing Authority is a nonprofit housing finance. And I'd like for you to turn to page one of the pamphlet that you should have. And Southeast Texas handles different kinds of housing finance for folks. The first one is something that Deer Park is not involved in. It's some affordable housing in other communities that we do service.

And basically, the jurisdiction for Southeast Texas housing finance is basically 100 miles without the outer ring of Houston. It doesn't include Houston, but it covers all the up to Huntsville and Baytown, Mount Bellevue, Crosby, Matagorda, Seeley. And we have areas that we have these senior complexes and multifamily. These are not low in cost housing that's different. This is affordable housing.

This is where your teachers and police officers get have opportunity to live in a very nice place. And these are the projects that we help them with. If you turn to the second page. The second page actually talks about some of the things that we've helped out in Deer Park with our down payment and MCC tax credit programs. Total households assisted over the last few years is 146.

The total down payment provided by Seth is at 1,050,000.00 for people to have towards their down payment and closing cost for homes they're buying right here in Deer Park. So it's coming right back here. The loans that we provided for those that have used these programs is right at 22,000,000. And the average assistance per family is just over 7,000. So the MCC Tax Credit Program, that's one of my favorite programs.

It's a program that the interest that they pay on their home, they get up to 20% of that back. And that's typically running most families right now anywhere from $2,500 to $3,500 back a year on their income tax. That's a lot of money that they put back in their pocket so they can do home updates, have a little breathing room, they can use it for whatever they want to use it for. It's really helpful to those. And you have to be a first time home buyer to qualify and there's income limits. So, it's for those that are typically making under about 115,000. So, that's very helpful. If you turn to the next page, it talks about the kind of programs that we have right now that are most common. The Five Star, which is a down payment assistance program. There's a My Home Plus.

So it can be used for some of the new home builders as well. And that's a down payment. But if they don't need down payment, it will help them with a lower interest rate. So they have their choices of which way they can get help. So that's very beneficial. And the home credit, that's the MCC tax credit I just told you about. It gave you an example of a $240,000 home. Rates are right now running close to six or actually a little bit higher than that over the last couple weeks. The person would actually save $2,880 on their income taxes by having this program. That's money, real money, right back in their pocket.

So that's very helpful. On the Southeast Texas housing program, we do different things at different times. One of the things I feel like it's pretty neat is we have a lot of really great relations with financial institutions across the country that want to work with us coming up with programs for first time homebuyers, down payment assistance. And they bring us things that we can work with in our jurisdictions. The state has programs like ours.

But you'll find a lot of times we'll come up with the programs, they'll lock it and use what we bring to come up with their own program that's similar to that to compete with Southeast Texas. So, feel like, you know, what does they say it's a form of flattering when a person likes what they say and they want to do what you're doing because it's successful. So, the state has several programs that are mirrored directly after what we have put together and put out there for those that qualify for the program. Any questions about Southeast Texas housing? Okay.

So the next thing I'd like to tell you about is what's going on right here in Deer Park. Our market, to be frank with you, would be it's an interesting time. Over the last couple years, I remember coming into city council meeting in 2001 excuse me, 2021 and telling you that the market was so strong that people had asked me to print them out a list of homes. And they wanted a certain price range. And I told them I couldn't do that.

And they'd say, why can't you do that? And I said, well, I can give you the address of the one home that's between 150 And 250 or 300,000. They said, one home. Cause there was a time that we only had seven active listings in Deer Park. That same time, we had 60 others that had contracts on them.

That's how incredible the market was. Over the last two or three years, we've seen a change in the market and it's calmed down. Right now, today, we have 80 active listings in Deer Park. That's a lot compared to what we had, but that's not a bad thing. One of the problems that people have had is there's so little for them to pick from, they would get frustrated and they'd have to bid over the price to get it.

Now, it's more of a balanced market where sometimes they have to go high, most but of the time they can get it for the list price or slightly less. So, the buyers and sellers are doing a little negotiating, okay? Our market was just starting to pick up from the winter slowdown when things happened with the war over the last four, five, six weeks. Our rates had just dropped down to six and maybe a little bit below. Over the last couple of weeks, it went up to almost seven. We're hoovering right now. It's kind of calmed down to six point five and six point seven five. So that's okay. But that has slowed us down a little bit on our market. Like I said, we have 80 homes that are actively for sale in Deer Park.

It just happens that I had one reduced today down to 139.9. It needs a lot of work, a lot of work. And the most expensive one I have also, I put up two or three days ago. You may have seen on Pasadena Boulevard. If you haven't, you know which one I'm talking about. It's 13 and a half acres almost for 3,250,000.00, okay? So, can help you from the lowest or the highest, but that's kind of the range of homes. Most of the homes in Deer Park really run from about 200 to about 650,000. That's where most of them are. There's a new subdivision over in East Meadows you might be familiar with that's building right now.

They've got eight or nine and it's on that list. But they have pending from about $5.39 to I think it was like $6.77. 677,000. That's some folks with some money wanting to live right here in Deer Park. That's good for us. That's good for a community. That's good for the housing market. So they're building some very nice homes over there and that's going well. Right now, even though there's 80 houses actively for sale, there's actually 43 more of them that are for sale that have contracts pending. That's a lot.

So that tells me the market is balanced here. We're actually doing better than some of the other markets. Some other markets are getting a little soft and they're not having the turnover time as quickly as what we're having in Deer Park. One thing I do want to bring to your attention, if you look at the list of all the houses that are for sale, it's got the address, lot size and stuff. Of the 80 houses, we have just over 50%. We've got I think 42 of them that actually had price reductions, okay? So, that kind of tells you that there is a balance. Some people are priced too high and they've had to come down or their expectations were unrealistic. And they're having to come down to still get them sold even though the market is pretty good. In the last thirty days, as of today, there was 22 closings, which is a little low.

And I contribute some of that to what's going on with our world right now. But 43 pendings tells me good times are going to be seeing some houses close over the next thirty days. So that's kind of where we're at. On a couple other things that I'd just like to bring to your attention that's going to help us not just here in Deer Park but other communities across the state, is the state actually passed some legislation back recently to change the laws on squatters and evictions to make it easier for landlords to get people out of their home that move into them that shouldn't be there. Much easier.

And same thing for, you know, evictions. If people don't pay, they shouldn't stay. Whether you're buying a house or leasing house, you need to pay your bills. So it's making it easier for landlords to go through that process. We do have I'll make this as a little side note and we can chat more about it later. There are some things that are coming down the pipe that we're not quite sure are going to how things are happening. The President was supposed to sign a bill last week, I have not heard if it got signed. But they were going to change the amount of time that how many times you could actually do a modification on your loan to once every two years. This may be hard to believe, but this is true. But there's people that have been using that modification programs across The United States, including in our area, where they haven't made a payment for six, seven, eight months.

They go to the lender. They bought their house back in 2015. They have a lot of equity. Lender says, no, we don't want to take your house back. That's not what they want to do. So what they do is they add those six payments of late fees onto the back, and that thirty year mortgage now is a thirty five or forty year mortgage. And then they don't make another payment for another six, eight months. The lender says, what are we going do? Like, man, we just can't do it. So they do another modification and they add it on. Now, it's a forty year. A lot of people have done this three times and now they have fifty year mortgages on their loans right now today. Okay? That's going on. That's going to be changing.

When those people don't have that, I think we're going to see foreclosures tick up. We're actually at a twelve year high on foreclosures. That sounds really high. But for the last ten years, we've almost had nothing. So when you go from nothing to having a few, you're going to say it's a twelve year high. But it's not in a dire situation. But these modifications will be changing and that could change our market fairly soon. So that's our housing market. Any questions? Thank you very much.

Thank you. You. You.

Attendant item number two, discussion of issues related to proposed FEMA maps and comments. Hello, sir.

Good evening. Thanks for having me out. My name is Karl Arndt. I'm with Codd Finley. We are working with the city to go through the new FEMA maps that have been issued by Harris County Flood Control District and FEMA to go through and review those and make sure they are up to date and match what has actually been constructed in your city. I'm going to jump to a map real quick. I was initially going to start with the FEMA maps, but they have the functionality turned off right now. It couldn't have something to do with the fact that they are shut down currently. They are part of the DHS program, they're not currently having any funding. So I was gonna start with that map, but instead I'll go ahead and go straight to the Harris County Flow Control District's map, which presents the same information just in an easier format to view.

If you go to www.mapnext.org, interactive map, you can see this. You can see this anywhere in the world. You can go to your house and watch it from there too. But if you zoom into any area, I have basically the whole city pulled up, there's a slider where you can move back and forth and see the old maps in comparison to what the new maps would show. When I do this, you'll notice that there is significantly more green than there was blue.

The green represents the new one hundred or five hundred year floodplain, whereas the blue represents the old one hundred or five hundred year floodplain. So what our purpose in this is is to go through and review these maps and the associated models that go with them for the city so we can make comments to get all the improvements that you've already constructed incorporated into these maps and models such that they're more realistic for what your current condition is. That will help reduce rates for the constituents that live in the city once the maps are corrected such that we're able to bring some of those floodplain elevations back down to have less flooding. Are there any questions?

If I can add a little bit to that. I mean, we've known this was coming for a long time. And then they released initially the maps just a couple of months ago. And we had some staff level discussions with Carl and his team. And again, they're not accounting for the millions and millions of dollars that we've spent in Deer Park just over the last ten years or so.

And a lot of people county wide there's a big story in the Chronicle of the Day, if you all didn't see it. I think it was 280,000 homes in Harris County are going to go into the floodplain under the new map that aren't currently in the floodplain. And if you have a federally subsidized mortgage, you have to have flood insurance. So while Deer Park isn't one of the harder hit areas countywide, if one home here is hit that doesn't need to be, that's a home that Troy's going to have

a harder time

selling because they've got to have flood insurance. So we just want to make sure that our story is told about the projects we did on 8th Street, the school property that we bought down by Dabs, the big Bayou Bend project, the big one that we did over on Pasadena, etcetera, etcetera. And have the flood plain maps as they're created be as accurate as possible. And I'm sure it's likely that there will be some homes that are going to to get flood insurance that previously didn't have to. But we want that to be as little as possible.

So, just to give a current update of where we are right now, we've already contacted FEMA and Harris County Flood Control District. We've notified them that there will be comments coming from the city. We've notified them that we did not receive copies of the models which are supposed to be given with the maps. So, once FEMA receives their funding and begins work again, they will send that information to us and then we can begin that review process for you.

And one more thing if I may counsel. This connects with, you know, in the big picture we still have more stuff to do. But until we have a little bit better understanding of this, it's hard to know how to proceed. For example, what we call the long streets over there. What are some of those? Behind Papa John's. Hillshire, Wakeshore. We know that those don't have those houses flood. A lot of cases, the roadway is higher or higher than the elevation of the house. We get graps about sidewalks, for example.

There are things we'd like to do to go in and change that. But when you see these maps and they're not accounting for it and they're showing those houses still be in the floodplain, we don't want to go in and think we're solving a problem and spend a bunch of money and then find out it was unnecessary or the sidewalk that we put in now needs to be torn out or something like that. So it does all connect in terms of the information we have and the dollars that we spend and all the infrastructure over there. Not just flooding, but it connects to one another.

That's all I have

for today.

Thank you, sir. Appreciate y'all's work on this for us.

So I'll agree.

It's in the item number three, discussion of issues relating to selling of obsolete street signs.

With this item, mayor, took down the old blue street signs initially along Llewellyn. We put up the new signs. And the contractor disposed of those signs. Those signs were gone. And then we decided to redo the new signs on Lulea and the adjacent streets, adjoining streets.

And so we have several 100 of the signs that were the newer style that were not up for very long. In addition to that, as we went down San Augustine and we replaced the blue signs, the old blue signs with the new signs, we kept those blue signs. The neighborhood that we did the ribbon cutting on earlier today, those signs got changed out. But same thing, was not properly communicated with the contractor to keep them and they're just gone. They just disposed of them.

But we do have the old blue signs up and down San Augustine and the cross streets. And the first round of the signs that went up and down the Wella. Billy Pennick tells me that he's had numerous people show up at the barn, the Wella Complex, saying, can I buy those signs? Can I have those signs? What are you doing with those signs? I know I've had several of you, as council members, tell me that you've had constituents ask, what is City doing with those signs? How quickly can I buy them? We've had people just call City Hall. Angela's office has dealt with them. Stephanie Register has dealt with them.

Cami's dealt with them. Just ask them, what's the plan for that? So we put together an inventory of and that's in your agenda packet of what exists. And we need to dispose of them in a manner that we get fair value. Now, you all get to pick what fair value is. We'll talk about that in a minute. But we can't just say $1 if they're worth more than $1 They're worth more than just scrap metal costs. And we're not trying to make money on this, so to speak. We're not trying to get any money back. We want to be very fair.

We want to be fair also in terms of the best way to dispose of them would probably be to just say, just pick a date on Wednesday, May 15 at 8AM. We're now for sale. And people can get in line. We're not going to hold any back for anybody. We're not going to do anything because some people will if they grew up on San Augustine, they may very well want a San Augustine sign. They may want to come in and buy all the San Augustine signs. I don't know. Particularly the ones that have a name like Alice or Amy or some of those. But we just want to do it in a way that meets the definition of legally what we're supposed to do. And I think you all setting the values is the way to do that and in a way that's fair to those that would want it.

And we just threw out those numbers. Staff just kind of spitballed, do we think people would pay? If you all think that's too high, that's fine. If you it's too low, that's fine. We want rid of the signs. We're not trying to set the numbers so high that we retain a bunch of signs. But we do want to put a number where we think they will be bought and it will be fair. And the process of acquiring them will be fair. Because I do think, at least with some of those, there's going be a lot of demand.

What do you think they'll do with these signs? What would be the purpose to put them in their backyard or something like that?

Have you

been to TJ's backyard?

Yes. Yeah, I've been to TJ's backyard. Something like that.

People love all stop signs and yield signs and deer crossing signs and things like that. So, I think we replaced street signs in other cities where I've worked and I kept those signs. I've got two of them at my house. So there's fun little So

you want counsel to say yay or nay in regards to what you're proposing?

Counsel First of all, do you all want to dispose of them in this manner? And then two, do you like the idea of just setting a date and time certain that people can show up and buy them? And then three, what price do you want

to My personal opinion is the fifty-seventy 5 is too high. I don't see somebody paying that for street sign. I don't think so. But I could be wrong. I think if you did I think 20 five-fifty, but that's myself.

Counsel, thoughts?

I'd say

$25.50

is good.

I'd say $25.50.

Are we going put a limit on it? You can only get so many signs. Somebody don't sit there and get

a 100? That's what we're here to discuss. So we're clear on the first part. Dollars 25 for an old blue sign, dollars 50 for the newer maroon signs.

And what is the process? So we name a day and they go

They will go to Central Collections.

Central Collections.

They'll all be there. Presumably, you could wait in line, and you show up, and you say, I want to buy the well assigned. Whoever's

first

in line that wants the well, they can The pay for four sign limit?

First come, first serve. First

come, first serve. Yes, sir.

Limited to Yeah.

I'll say four sign limit and then after that day whatever's left is first come, first serve for all the rest.

So four sign limit.

I think it needs to be a limit. I definitely think it needs to be a limit.

I just

don't know. I've always said that before.

Yeah, I'm just trying to make it for.

I can't believe we're talking about this, honestly.

We're getting lot of phone calls.

Hey, want my sign. I drew up

Well, y'all hurry up and just tell them what y'all want so we can move on to something

more important than

25.5, four sign limit.

That's what I'd say.

Anybody object That to sounds good with me.

First come first.

I'd

to

discuss another thirty minutes and show.

Yeah. We don't we don't want we don't want to talk about signs anymore.

Do we really think fours?

Here's your sign.

Just real quickly before we move on from this, we have Michelle, our intern to thank for personally going out to the shop and inventorying all those signs. Wow. So thank you, Michelle. Awesome. Thank you,

Michelle. Thank

you. You. Anything else on obsolete signs that we need to get rid of? Thank you. Agenda item number four, discussion of issues related to the potential school resource officer agreement for the twenty six-twenty seven school year. I thought that's why you had Frank here. You were punishing him to come talk about resource officers.

In case I get locked up, he's to come up here and take my place. Kind of a big topic, but let me give you a little history, where we're at, what the ask is, and then potential things to think about where this might place us somewhere down the road. So we went back for at least twenty five years. We've had a working relationship with the school, starting with DARE and the great program. Not sure exactly when the school resource officer position came in, probably late '90s.

Best we could tell, we couldn't narrow it down to a single year. But a long, relationship with the school. For a number of years, we had four officers in the schools. And then we were approached in the, I think the '20 trying to see the year here. Well, we added four officers.

And now we did that in about a six month about a twelve month period. And then we, so we went from four officers to 10 officers and a sergeant. And that's where we are now. And that payment agreement is a seventythirty. There's a certain amount of equipment, uniforms, cars, all of that that's in that 30% training, a number of things like that.

So we were approached by the school district and this was several months ago and asked about providing school resource officers for the six campuses in Pasadena that are Deer Park ISD campuses. Up until this time, Pasadena PD has filled those positions with part time jobs and they've been doing that for several years. Of course, the Pasadena School District has their own police department, which is obviously separate from the Deer Park. So Deer Park, Pasadena officers actually covered the our schools in Pasadena. So once we upped our game to where we had 10 officers and a sergeant, the principals in Pasadena wanted something similar.

They wanted an officer that they knew was gonna be there every day, same officer dedicated to that school. So we were approached about supplying additional, at first, six officers and a sergeant. So we asked if they if they had talked to Pasadena Police Department because it's in their jurisdiction. They should have the first say at this. They went to Pasadena.

They had their conversations and did not want to do that. Mister Stokes made sure that they knew right off at the very beginning of these discussions that if we filled the positions in Pasadena that they would have to pay 100% of the cost over there as it was not in our jurisdiction. So they came back to us and said Pasadena did not want to do it. We sent them a ballpark figure. You've got those numbers about what it would cost for us to do it.

And they said they were still interested. The only thing that they wanted changed is that those six campuses within three to four years were gonna be five campuses. They were gonna consolidate two of them. And so they asked if we could supply five officers and a sergeant, with the sergeant helping cover one of the schools that's right next to another school. So if that sergeant had to go somewhere, the officer could look at both campuses for the short time that might involve.

So that would cut it down by one officer. But this does take us up to 17 officers and two sergeants. Now, that's kind of the history of it. If anybody has any questions on that, I'll be happy to try and take that on. But my concern with the thing that we're getting into is if something changes radically, soon, whether when I say soon, quickly, not it could be ten years from now, twenty years from now All of a sudden, we have a new council.

Probably wouldn't happen on our end. It would probably have to be on the school end. And they decided that for funding reasons or for political any reason that they did not want us in their schools anymore. All of a sudden, we're sitting here with six officers, five officers and a sergeant that we would have to assume 100% payment for. And then the 10 officers and another sergeant, we're gonna have to pick up 70% of payment for.

That's about $3,500,000 in today's dollars. So one of the things that we brought up was could we have a staged drawdown if somebody wanted to back out, it could not happen overnight. It would have to happen. We preferred five years, I think, when we got this sample when it was they put it to three. But we've never lost 17 officers in five years. So the attrition would be really difficult for the city to get down to where we could actually absorb it. The alternative would be, all of a sudden, you have to let go however many officers it is and your reputation is shot. You're not hiring another officer around this part

for

ten years. Because they're all gonna go over there, they'll things change and they they'll just fire you and you're out and out of work. And on the other hand, the city can't just turn around and go, oh, we'll just absorb that 4,000,000. It's not a big deal until you all can get your numbers back down. So I would like to see a little bit I'd like to see that minimum three year I prefer five and have it cover all the officers if we're going to go into this new thing with them. So that if there was a drawdown, at least we would have a period of time where attrition could take place to where maybe we could get down to a number the city could absorb until they could get down to the rest of the numbers. But we couldn't eat 17 at one time.

Any aspect of exchanging information? Has anybody laid that out to the ISD?

We have. We have. And we're still in dialogue with them. The next step was kind of to bring it to you all and let them take it to the school board and see if everybody wants to keep moving forward. And then we work on those finer points, including what you've just talked about. But it's a good point that there's no reason to ever think about what if the existing officers had needed to be phased out. But this kind of brought it up that maybe we need look at it holistically, as Chief just said.

11 would be a lot, but it would be far more manageable than 17.

Mean, y'all have no issues doing this if it moves forward, correct? I'm sorry? Like y'all don't have any issues moving forward with doing this as long as those protections are put in place, correct?

No. Right now, they're wanting three officers to start in August. We have currently, we have five officers. They're working. They have an interest in the school resource officer position. So we can certainly fill it easily this August. By next August, we'd have two more officers to test our five and then another and another sergeant. Okay. So I think logistically, can fill it and and we can do that okay. We've had a great relationship with the school. We've had one for a long time. My only concern is I don't wanna leave this city fifteen, twenty, twenty five. However long it may be, all of a sudden there's a catastrophe and somebody's going, who got us into

Yeah. Yeah.

So if we can put some safeguards in there, I think it it would be better.

Makes sense.

Sounds good to me. Yeah. Especially since they're willing to pick up the whole tab.

Well, they're paying for the whole tab now,

what they're doing. So what's the difference?

No, don't pay the whole tab

now. Well, now it's seventythirty.

No, I'm talking about what they're doing in this Pasadena School. Oh, yeah.

Oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So from their perspective, it shouldn't be a whole It should be a much more predictable, measurable narrative if it stays within our department so they know what they're going to get. Yeah.

The difference in what they're going to be paying is the difference between what they're paying their part time officers and then our full time, which will be more, but it will not be Right. It will not be a sizable increase.

But they get the continuity of having the same officer at

the school Correct. All the

Same team. Yeah.

Makes sense. Okay.

So have we gone back to them after the three and said we really want the five? I mean, they balking at that? Or they haven't No.

We have not had that in the conversation yet. We will. But we wanted to get with y'all, make sure first that this was something everybody was good with and to proceed. And if it is, then we'll set up a meeting and do that.

Okay. Thank

you, sir.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank

you. That is all the items we have on this workshop agenda. This meeting is adjourned. Our regular city council meeting will start here shortly, 07:30.