City Council - Regular Meeting

Yeah. Yeah.

Welcome, everybody. Sorry about that little technical difficulty there. But thank you all for coming out to the City Farmers Branch City Council meeting for Tuesday, July 7th. Our first order of business this evening will be our invocation and then our pledges. And our invocation this evening is going to be led by Pastor Rick Dorman from the Royal Haven Baptist Church.

We should be remembering. You can't ask a pastor to stand behind the podium and not preach, okay? All I'm going to say is this. Ten years ago, we lost five police officers in Dallas, and there were close ties to Farmer's Branch with that. And so we remember these who gave their lives in the line of duty. We remember our first responders all the time. My son is a firefighter and every time I hear a siren, I pray. And you should do the same thing because they put their lives on the line every day. And so we honor their memory. We pray for their families. We remain grateful for their the courage in Christ of that day. Join me in prayer. Father in heaven, we come before you and we thank you, Lord, that we can call on you, our God. Lord, we realize and recognize that many of us look to you from different positions and different places. But I look to you, Lord, today as the supreme God that all those that lead this city. I thank you for the service that they give. I thank you for those that put their lives on the line every day in this city. And we pray, Father, that you would bless Farmers Branch and you'd bless us as we continue to look forward to you for all that you give us and all that we respect you for. Thank you. In the name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.

Now if you would join me for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Now the Texas Pledge.

Honor the Texas flag.

I pledge allegiance to you, Texas, one state, under God,

Okay, now at this time we go to item H on the agenda, ceremonial items. We're going to conduct the oath of office and receive remarks from Terry Lin.

County Commissioner, Andy Summerman.

Thank you all very much. It is my honor to give the open office. Terry, I'm going to say the words. Hi, Terry Lynn. I'm not referring to myself. I just want you to know that I am Andy Summerman. do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the duties of mayor of the city of Harbor Springs, for the state of Texas, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and the laws of the United States and of this state, So help me God.

So now at this time, I'd like to present the mayor with the city pin, which I'm sure there are like eight or nine rolling around now.

As well as the certificate of election, which makes it official.

So now I'd like to invite Marilyn to say a few words.

Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Wholeheartedly thank you for being here. It's truly humbling to see so many faces, so many supporters. And I'm really blessed. And so if you will indulge me, I first want to introduce and recognize the folks that are here that I spotted. this evening. Former Mayor Rick Stouffer from Irving. Our superintendent, Dr. Eldridge, I saw. Where's Wendy? Somewhere. She may be out in the lobby. Kim Brady, one of our school board trustees. Daisy Palomo. Carrollton City Council. Of course, we have some former council members, Richard Jackson. I see David Koch in the back. I apologize if I've left anybody out, but your presence here means a whole lot to me. to work with. I've learned an awful lot from you, and I appreciate that. To my family, yes, I want to thank them for their support and for sitting at the library. For sitting at the library to greet voters, not just the general election, but also for in Farmer Strange. I'd also like to thank them on a more serious note for all that they had to endure. and it seems that every year negativity eats up more than the previous year. I know they don't like seeing me attack and they themselves don't deserve attacks. I want to say special thanks to my wife, who I think had nine days off and sat out at the library for nine days on her part of her vacation. I've never seen somebody so glad to get back to work. So thank you, I love you all. I also want to thank all those who not only donated to my campaign, but also publicly supported me, took time to walk and knock doors, make phone calls, send letters and notes, and help out at the polls. Together, we did this. I'm especially proud of the fact that my supporters and I stuck to a consistent message. We never engaged or responded to negative attacks, and we never deviated from being positive about Farmer's Branch. Now it's time to focus on moving Farmer's Branch forward together. That means all of us. Let's come together and heal our city. I believe that the future of our city is very bright and very exciting. You know, not too long ago, I told you all about some of the great business wins that our city has received. Together, we're going to build on that and know that more is coming. I'm going to use the word we tonight a lot. I'm focusing on we because none of us can do this alone. We have five council representatives and they cannot achieve anything by themselves. is a group effort. The mayor is just one member of the team on the sixth man. My hope is that moving forward, we can focus on bigger picture. It's not just about your district, it's about our city 10, 15, 20 years from now. Moving forward, we'll take all of us will get a little easier. Serving is not about taking credit for yourself. It's about sharing ideas and developing thoughts that will benefit the whole city, not an individual. In order to help us get to a point of better understanding our goals, you will see a focus on bringing training to our council and some of our boards. back on a more regular basis to share information about real estate trends in Farmers Branch and the Metroplex with all of us. Multifamily is a growing concern for the future and the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas will be invited to present information to our council and PNC regarding And the same goes for the hotel industry. We had a terrific presentation several years ago from Jeff Binford, and it was great to have him back to talk about our hotels. We won't know until we hear from experts. And speaking of events, can we do a better job of promoting events taking place in our city? All too often, the public is not aware so that we don't lose our small-town feel and personal contact with our residents. Now, as you know, we do have some residents who are not shy about providing their opinion about how things should be. We, as a council, should welcome that. I want everyone here to know I will do my best to represent all the farmers' branch, not just those who voted for me. The same goes for our council. We are one city. We serve many different people. Since I was first elected to council, I have given my cell number out to thousands of people. It's in my newsletter every month because we're supposed to be accessible and at your service. Only a couple times has that ever been abused. But I haven't asked of all of you, and that is have some grace and patience when dealing with me and our council. get your way. Remember, we serve 43,000 people. We have to look at the effects of decisions on the whole city, not just on one person or a singular interest. So again, I say the future of Farmer's Manage is exciting. We have so much to celebrate. New businesses coming to our city, thriving residential redevelopment, a table workforce housing that will add new housing stock to Our station area will see lots of changes and new development. Mercer crossing with new development, more people, and a new park. The improvements and updates to some of our older parks in the city, in the central core of our city. Continued investment in modernized People want to live here and very few ever want to leave. In fact, many times I've heard people say they moved away but couldn't wait to get back to Farmer's Ranch. People appreciate the sense of community here. You, all of you, are the reason for that. This past weekend, we celebrated our nation's 250th birthday and it's also the 80th anniversary of our city's incorporation. The display of flags, both the U.S. and Farmer's Ranch flag, throughout the city has been great. Let's keep that spirit of community shining. So tonight, let's celebrate. We have something very special here. We can make it even better for the future and invite your help, your partnership, to continue what was started so many years ago. Amen. So at this time, we're going to take like a 15 minute break because I know all y'all don't want to stay for all the boring city council stuff. Not that it's ever boring, but we'll take a break, back out to the lobby, and then we'll resume our council meeting.

I think there's still more cake, isn't there?

There is more cake. Please eat the cake.

If not, Terry's going to have to bring it home.

Thank you.

We are back, thank you all very much. Thank you so much for the kind words this evening from everybody, thank you. Next up are items of community interest.

Good evening everyone. My name is Ariel Wallace, Communications Manager, and here are your items of community interest for the week. Farmers Branch launches a new water use portal. The City of Farmers Branch has officially upgraded all residential water meters to advanced metering infrastructure technology and launched a powerful new online water use portal for residents. This new resource provides A personalized dashboard with daily usage data by giving residents real-time visibility into their consumption, the portal makes it easy to spot costly plumbing leaks early, track conservation efforts, and make informed adjustments to irrigation or daily habits to lower your utility bills. Learn more at farmersbranchtx.gov or slash waterdashboard. Join Councilwoman Tina Bennett-Burton for a District 2 Town Hall meeting on Saturday, July 11th from 8 to 10 a.m. at Farmers Branch City Hall. All residents are welcome to attend this meeting to get updates on recent city projects, including the launch of the new Code Care program. Come engage with local leadership, ask questions, and learn more about how these new initiatives benefit our communities. Celebrate National Parks and Recreation Month this month with a series of free community events designed to encourage connection, active living, and family fun. The first festivity will kick off on July 10th from 11 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. with a parks picnic at the Farmer's Ranch Park Pavilion. Stop by to enjoy a free outdoor lunch featuring hot dogs, chips, and bottled water available while supplies last. Visit farmersbranchevents.com for more details. Last month, the Farmers Branch Police Department celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Citizens on Patrol program, honoring the dedicated volunteers who serve the community. The event highlighted the lasting impact of these vital service members and recognized Linda Longstreet Hall as the 2025 Volunteer of the Year. Join Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Neal at Brookhaven Country Club on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month from 4 to 6 p.m. This will be residents' opportunity to talk directly with your District 5 representative and ask any questions you may have. And as always, you can sign up for City E-News at FarmersBranchTX.gov or by scanning the QR code on the screen. Have a good evening.

Thank you very much. Next up are public comments. Each speaker will have three minutes to speak when they're called. When you are called, please come up and state your name and address. And when the light turns red, that is your cue to stop. So I have several folks that have signed up to speak this evening. The first one is Ja Dye.

Bill, would you please join me?

As any former elected official, would you please come forward?

I've got a presentation I'm going to make. My name is John Dodd, 12920 Mitchwin Road, Farbers Branch, Texas. Mr. Mayor, City Council, staff, and citizens, The Military Order of the World Wars invited me to take part in a special presentation for an estimated 120 special guests in a chapel on July 4th for recognizing World War veterans with the Freedom Bell Ceremony. George Washington, His excerpt from the Newborough Address was read by Mr. Washington, a distant cousin of George Washington. Mr. Washington led the ceremonial toward the division Excuse me. The Bill of Rights. Mr. Mayor, I would like to present to you with a ceremonial bell that was rung on behalf of this centennial year of a great city council, a great mayor, outstanding staff, but the star of all are the citizens. of Farmers Branch. Mr. Mayor, I would like to present you with this ceremonial bell, which was rung by Mr. Washington, symbolizing ringing in the bicentennial here. As mayor, also to recognize that the mayor and council are authorized and guided by the principles of liberty And the citizens are guided by the principles of freedom. God bless you all, and that was my line in the skit. So I would like to present to you and the city council and the staff, but more important, citizens, give yourself the hand, because you're the hand to freedom and liberty.

Mayor, thank you very much. Here's the 13 columns. Okay. Thank you. Next up is Theresa Mayne.

I'm Theresa Savoy Mayne. Go. Thank you for having me. I love Farmer's Branch. I've been a citizen here for 43 years, and I live at 3120 La Quinta Circle in Farmer's Branch, Texas. Thank you all for letting me speak tonight. I just learned of this the other day, I guess last year about this time you all approved a list of to be published on social media for different dates and honoring different groups. One that really struck me and that's what I want to speak about tonight and I would like to understand this so I'll get with Roger Neal later about this. But there's a religious group that's on that list. In January, I think it's the Muslim American, American Muslim group. You know, I celebrate everybody's freedom of religious choice and, you know, feel like we all need to protect that. The one thing that this strikes me, though, is that people could understand that as being anti-Christian, anti-Semitic. It doesn't seem to jive. with what our government says that we're supposed to separate, you know, the powers of state and government and religious freedom. So anyway, I just wanted to bring that to your attention. It's a very concerning thing to me. And thank you for your attention to this.

Thank you. Next up is Arlie Barrett.

My name is Arlie Barrett. I live at 14239 Dennis Lane in Farmer Branch. I'd like to address the council and honorable mayor that on the calendar for the city we'd like to propose to have December designated as National Christian Month. You know, we had Adam and Eve and Of course, the scientists don't trust Adam because Adams make up everything. But regardless, it would be a wonderful honor to have December designated. So I'd like you all to take that into consideration. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Next up is Dirk Priebus. I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor and City Council. This is my first time speaking here. I came... Name and address. Dirk Preble, 13217 Chalabarton Drive, Farmers Branch, Texas. Okay. I want to address the calendar as sort of a... what you were saying, with an eye toward growth for the community. I would suggest that we have things on there that would help our community grow. One might be a culinary month where you get local restaurants out and we have a variety of different kinds of food and opportunity to how would you say, the diversity of foods that are available in the community. We can have a health month where doctors could be invited or their staffs or businesses to promote a healthy body and healthy individuals. Maybe have a family month where we support families and do things that would be advantageous to the families of farmers branch. We could have a dentistry month. We could have basically a variety of different things that rather than promote a particular group, would promote all the citizens as well as the businesses of Farmer Branch. Help us grow as a community and help our businesses grow. That's all I have. Well, thank you very much.

All right. That is all the speakers that we have this evening for public comment, so we will move on to our consent agenda. There is one change. Item K4 is moving from consent agenda to regular agenda, and K4 will become M5. So just for those of you that are following at home, K4 becomes M5.

Okay, Mr. Mayor, I propose a motion that we approve the consent agenda with the amendment of The removal of K-4. I second.

Thank you. We have a motion and a second. If you would, please indicate your vote accordingly. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Next up is our public hearing, item L1. Conduct a public hearing and consider adopting ordinance number 4006, prohibiting the use of and contact with designated groundwater beneath land located in Farmers Branch, Texas at 1349 to 1399 Valley View Lane and associated city rights of way. to facilitate certification of a municipal setting designation by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, establishing a municipal setting designation, and take appropriate action.

Good evening, Mayor and members of the council. John Porter, your solid waste manager. So this item is for a municipal setting designation. And I'm going to call it MSD from now, for brevity's sake. is a legal designation that limits groundwater use in urban areas. It's designated by the TCEQ and it's enforced through a local ordinance. The property to be designated as an MSD needs to be serviced by the public water supply, which all properties in Farmer's Branch are serviced by our public water supply. And Just to move forward, so on the application process which is spelled out in Chapter 34 of the Code of Ordinances, you can see that this is a multi-step process and we've gone through this entire process and the public hearing item is in red and that's where we are tonight. After this, then we can move the application forward and it will go to TCEQ and if approved, then we'll be able to record it on the deed. Some background of the property. Here's an over an aerial view and you can see some of the groundwater monitoring sites. This is the old triple C property and the reason why we're doing this is the property has some chemicals of concern which are mainly semi semi volatile volatile organic compounds and we have a metal in there which is arsenic And so what we're asking of this governing body tonight is for a public hearing, and these are the council actions that we're asking for. And with that, I'm open for questions.

Thank you very much. Councilwoman Gonzalez.

Nothing for me, Mayor. Thank you.

Councilwoman Bennett.

I have no questions. Thank you.

Councilman Reed. No questions, Mr. Mayor. Councilwoman Villafranca.

No questions, thank you.

Councilman Neal?

Yes, sir, one or two quick questions. One of which is, with this groundwater that has the higher levels of acceptable metallics, I'm not sure, minerals, is there any concern for this groundwater impacting any nearby residents? Or any of their water systems in any way?

No. Again, we all get our water from Dallas County. It's processed. It goes through our piping. And so this is, there's no potable water.

Okay. I'm just trying to alleviate any fears that the residents might have that this toxic water may somehow impact their utilization. If you could go back to slide three real quick for me. Okay. Can you give me an estimated timeline of the remaining steps there, application to CEQ, TC? How much time are we talking here to get through the remainder of this process?

So this is a very critical step, and this will determine how long this process is going to be. But I can't give you an estimate because the process is essentially out of the city's hands after we complete this.

Is it weeks, months, years, anything at all?

I would not want to give the council inaccurate information. Okay.

That's good. That's all I have. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Thank you.

So, council, yes, sir. Go ahead. This is a public hearing. I do not have anybody signed up to speak to this so I would entertain a motion to close the public hearing.

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion to close the public hearing.

I'll second.

We motion a second to close public hearing. If you would indicate your vote. Public hearing is closed. Any further comments from council on this? Seeing none.

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion that we approve ordinance number 4006. I second.

Thank you. We have a motion and a second. If you would, please indicate your vote accordingly. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Okay. Next up are regular agenda items. Item M1, receive an annual update from the Metrocrest Area Chamber.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Ben, David, how are y'all tonight? I'm a little disappointed. I thought all those people were here to see the chamber presentation.

Sorry. Well, in the meantime, tell us who you are.

Well, I'm Michael Gallups, President and CEO of the MetroCrest Area Chamber. And still a little out of sorts. I was out of the country last week, so my brain is a little fried. But excited to be here tonight and talk about the chamber. Just going to give you all a quick update on the rebrand that we did last year, kind of the process we went through, and then some of the initiatives and things that we're working on this year. There we go.

All right.

All right, so a little bit about the Chamber. The Metrocust Area Chamber serves the cities of Farmers Branch, Carrollton, and Addison. Like what I did there, changed the order around, because I'm here in Farmers Branch. We have a little over 500 members across all industries, everything from home-based businesses to large corporations. And the majority of our members are small businesses that about 80 to 85% are are what most people recognize as small businesses. Those businesses with 10 or 50 employees are fewer. Of course, the SBA thinks if you're 500 employees, you're a small business, but. For most of us, that's kind of a large business, but most of ours are small 10 or less employers. our 10 or less employees but regional major major regional employers and our our purpose is really to connect to advocate partner with our cities businesses and other organizations and you can see our mission statement there we drive business growth convene leaders and champion a stronger community and we work across all of those areas our vision is to be the gold standard the gold standard for economic growth in the Metro Press region, and our values include integrity, innovation, excellence, and advocacy. So I want to talk about the rebrand a little bit. And most of you probably recognize, I think I have a slide in here that has our old logo on it, has our new logo on it. And most of you probably remember what that logo looked like. And the rebrand process with my board of directors started out as an effort or initially was to redesign the logo because there was a lot of confusion. When you looked at the name badge and looked at the logo, you saw MetroCrest. And we got confused with the other MetroCrests. I got confused with the other MetroCrest earlier tonight by someone. It still happens even with the rebrand, but not as often. Our old logo, you couldn't see the words Chamber of Commerce on it. It just didn't sit very well, wasn't very modern looking. So through that process, we started looking at, well, maybe we want to change our name. At some point, word got out that we were considering changing our name, and I started getting emails and video messages and Facebook messages about how dare you get rid of MetroCrest. And we learned a lot about the history of the name MetroCrest and where it came from. And the committee did consider, the task force did consider changing from MetroCrest to something else. It was difficult to come up with something that really... Addressed who we were, I don't know if you know, but originally the chamber was the Northwest Dallas County Chamber of Commerce, and that's just way too many words. And it wasn't even accurate then, because part of Carrollton is in Denton County. So it left them out. So, back in 83, they came up with Metro Crest and the task force included a lot of different people. Community leaders, some folks that have been around for quite a while some marketing folks. We had a good team of people on there. Wasn't just Michael wasn't just chamber board members. It was across the spectrum of members. Very diverse group of people on the task force. We learned about the history. We had folks come in who told us about the history of the chamber, where the name came from, why it was called Metrocrest, what that meant. And so we started through that process of what we could come up with. And we had some marketing people who helped with the redesign, came up with a new logo. Ultimately, we decided to go with Metrocrest Area Chamber. And truly, that fits us. If you look at the breakdown of our membership, about 30% are from Carrollton, about 27% are from Farmers Branch, about 20% from Addison, and the rest are from outside those three cities. So we're greater than just those three cities. We truly are the area. We considered regional, and we thought the DRC, the Dallas Regional Chamber, might get upset with that, so we went with area. And that's where we landed up on it. So what changed the name from Metrocrest Chamber of Commerce to Metrocrest Area Chamber? We're still legally the Metrocrest Chamber of Commerce, but our DBA is Metrocrest Area Chamber. We simplified the logo. Some people, I want to ask this question. What do you see when you see that logo, the icon? What do you see? Because we get different answers from different people. What do you all see?

Three neckties.

Okay. That's one answer. What else? A big M. An umbrella. A big M. So it's all of those things. And we actually talked about that. And the marketing folks who designed this logo thought about those things. So it's business related. It's ties. It's an umbrella because it's all encompassing. Still has three because our biggest players are our three cities. And, you know, the umbrella, the big M, so it's still M for MetroCrest. It's a little bit easier to read. If you look at the name badge, you see MetroCrest and Area Chamber a little bit better than you did before. So those things changed. It simplified who we were, simplified what we represent. The things that stayed the same, our mission, our purpose, our commitment to our members, focus on our success and on our business community success, and, of course, economic vitality. So what the new brand solves, help to reduce confusion, enhance credibility, made us a little bit more modern looking, better alignment with the work that we're doing, and a stronger foundation. And that helps us enable stronger branding or clearer advocacy, partnerships that we're working on, enhancing workforce development, helps us tell a better regional story, a better MetroCrest area story, and gives us, frankly, greater confidence in the work that we're doing. So on to some of the things that we're working on right now. We are still the voice of business. We still advocate for our businesses at every opportunity, whether that's a new business trying to come in, as you've seen yourselves, whether that's an existing business trying to expand their property or trying to find a new location. We advocate for good business policy at the state level and the federal level. We don't look at who wrote it. We don't care if it's good business policy. We support it. If it's bad business policy, we oppose it.

Period.

We're working on workforce out and talent development programs. We're working with our school districts, with our local community college to create programs to help our students get ready to enter the workforce. Many of them are coming out of school very smart with a lot of certificates, but not quite ready to adult. So we're building programs that we can help them with that. We're also looking at programs where we can help with upskilling and reskilling current employees. And we're working with the Greater Dallas Workforce Solutions Greater Dallas and other workforce solutions organizations as well. Obviously, small business support. I've already talked about that. Doing a lot of things. We have so many different programs going on for our members. Free training for members. We're doing a series of AI classes that are completely free for members. Our networking. Some of you were at our networking last week. We had 80 people at our networking event last week. That helps our small business owners a lot. It helps gives them opportunities and people to meet and people to line up with regional visibility. Storytelling, that's increased and gotten better. We're still working on those things. Aligning our programs, our events and services, we've narrowed. We've gotten rid of some events and things that we were doing that weren't really appropriate for us. And we're aligning those things and making those things better. Our upcoming economic development summit is bigger and better than it's ever been before. And I'm sure I'll see all of you there. It's going to be an exciting time. We've got some great speakers coming. And then we're also working with our school districts and our community college on creating a state of education event where we're going to have them give us a state of education. Each of the school districts that we work with, we actually partner with three different districts, CFB ISD, of course, Louisville and Coppell ISD. And then, of course, Dallas College. We're trying to bring somebody in from Texas 2036 to give us a policy update on education from a state level as well. Also wanted to go back and mention real quick, you probably saw the email, we're working under the advocacy section, we're working on our legislative trip for next year. That will be combined with our leadership Metro Press class trip to Austin, and we'll be meeting with... with all of our legislators at some point during that trip. We'll be recognized from the floor, we'll be up in the gallery, we're gonna have a tour of the Capitol. It's gonna be a great trip where we get to go and share our legislative agenda from a business perspective, and we wanna partner with the city so you can also share your legislative agendas as well. Upcoming events, I already talked about the Economic Development Summit, the Mayor's Forum coming up in October. The end of October, we're working on the location for that right now. We'll hear from all three of our mayors and get updates from them, and I promise I won't put them all three on a small couch where they don't fit.

I like them.

If you were there two years ago, you'd know what I was talking about. The state of education I've already talked about, and our first responders breakfast in October as well. And that has become a tradition now. We've done it for two years. It's an event we're going to continue. We partner with a couple of local restaurants, and we feed all of our first responders, police, fire, EMS, public works, and our call center folks. So that's always a good event as well. So working together, we want to work together with our cities, with our partners, supporting local businesses, serving our farmers branch businesses and employers with targeted resources, coordinating on city initiatives wherever we can, sharing business insights, providing feedback from the business community. If I hear something from the business community, if I hear an issue going on, I'm going to reach out to the council member that that business is located in. If it's something that's more economic development or city strategy related, I'm going to reach out to Ben or to Darren and let them know what's going on. And then acting as a connector. We're just trying to bring people together. And that's the strongest point about the chamber is that we can bring people together across the spectrum. And that is my presentation. I have any questions.

Thank you very much, Michael. Councilman Gonzalez.

Thank you, Michael. For the state of the education, do you think this will be something that you bring into the schools or would you have like a kind of an event and encourage students to come to it?

It's planned to be an event, probably a luncheon event is what we're working on.

Okay. I was just wondering because I know I still have kids in schools and it seems to be like a big thing of now homeschooling. I've seen so many different options. So if we do have homeschooling residents, then I think that'd be great so that they're also included.

One of the things that we're actually considering in the planning is having a discussion on not only the public schools, the community college, and the state of higher education, but including a segment on homeschooling and on pre-K as well.

Okay, that'd be great. Thank you.

Councilman Bennett?

We do have a huge homeschooling network here. Actually, the president of the area is Actually, now they moved it to the Baptist Church right up here. So she's right over there. Casey, I think you know her. Casey Kachers said she was over in Councilman Jackson's area. When you're talking about the adulting classes.

Mm hmm.

How are you going to communicate that? How are you going to get it out?

So what we're putting together is a boot camp type of structure. We're going to work with the school districts and bring seniors in. We're looking at two different methods. One would be a six-week program that would be two or three hours a week for those six weeks. We would bring them in. We would do classes on, do a personality type assessment. We would do classes on how to dress for success, how to interview students. How to not look at your cell phone when you're in an interview. I actually had somebody do that, look at their cell phone every 30 seconds during an interview. How to get through the day without all those things that those students do. So we're looking at that model or a model probably during the summer, the model would be a couple of Saturdays and a little bit longer timeframe. So it would happen a little bit quicker. The plan is for those students when they graduate from that bootcamp, give them a certificate that says they're employable from the chamber. So they'll have that when they go out to employers and then to roll that into a career fair where they get to meet employers and learn about what the opportunities are. And then we want to roll that into internships for like a hundred hour Internships where we're going to partner with them and with grant money be able to help supplement those incomes for those interns Catherine read I Was first introduced to the chamber went back when it was still farmers branch Chamber of Commerce when I moved here from Massachusetts That's where I met the mayor

Mr. Jackson, and a lot of the other local business leaders. It's incredible to see the growth that has occurred since the merger of the chambers, and especially under your leadership. So I want to thank you for what you've done for the chamber, for our businesses, and that trickles down to our residents. I have no questions, but I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Councilman Villafranca.

It's an honor and a privilege to be your liaison. I am amazed at all of the wonderful work that you do. I don't know if there's still space available, but if you have not done MetroQuest leadership and you are interested in doing it, I highly recommend it. I just completed it. It is a huge time commitment. It's an all day, once a month for about nine months, but it's worth every minute of your day. You learn so much about how we're all connected in some way. So if you have not... participated in it if you're a business owner or even if you're not a business owner um i highly recommend it um so many other great things that i know there's so many things that you can't mention like the connect lunch that i attend regularly there'll probably be about 70 business people there um each time and you're able to connect i was able to connect um KD, the new KD that moved into the conservatory, with David Moore from the Firehouse, and just so many connections that you're able to make. It's just wonderful. And so many programs also for women, like the Women's Summit and all of these great speakers that you have. I'm curious, have you had an opportunity to work with Dr. Madeline from Dallas College Brookhaven?

Absolutely.

Wonderful.

She is the chair of my Workforce Development Committee.

Can you share anything about that?

Well, she chairs the Workforce Development Committee. Her leadership was what started the AI series of classes that we're doing right now. It was a series of six classes. Anybody that attends, I think if they attend four of the six, they get a certificate from Dallas College with, I believe, one CEU. So that can be helpful to a lot of people. And then she is helping us with both the state of education and with the boot camp and the internship program that we're going to be building.

Fantastic, and for business owners, I highly, highly recommend a membership in the chamber. It is a good use of your time and a good use of your money. I highly, highly recommend it. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Neal. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Michael. For all you do, please extend my appreciation to you and your staff for all that you do. One of the things that's very near and dear to my heart is our public safety servants, police, fire, EMS. Could you tell us a little bit about the first responder breakfast, a little bit? for those that maybe don't know or want to hear a little more about it?

Sure. So, like I said, we partnered with two local restaurants. They were both McDonald's. We understand that first responders If we had a sit-down luncheon or breakfast, it would be hard for first responders to attend. Some of them could, some of them couldn't. Usually ones that are not on duty could, but they don't live here, some of them. And so it's not fair to them. It's not fair that they don't all have an opportunity. So we partnered with a McDonald's here, right there at the junction, right there at Marsh and Beltline. at the junction of Addison, Carrollton, and Farmers Branch, that McDonald's right there, and then one that's a little bit further north in Carrollton, and we get there at seven in the morning, and first responders show up, and we buy their breakfast, whatever they want. It's pretty simple. We have some great sponsors that help us cover that, and it's been a good time. I try to bounce back and forth between the two. The first year, we did it at one, and then this last year, we added the second one. Try to bounce back and forth, but myself and my staff are there. Some of our board members show up. Our ambassadors show up. Several of y'all have shown up at those, And we get to see a lot of them. And like I said, it's for police, fire, public works, EMS, and all of the call center folks as well.

That's really good. Thank you so very much, Michael. And again, thanks for all that you do.

And that's all I have, Mayor. Thanks.

Michael, what is the date of that again, just for everybody?

The first responders breakfast, I think, is October 28th. It's National First Responders Day.

Okay.

I'm going to make sure that that's on our calendar.

So I really don't have any questions. As you know, I was a big supporter of Farmer's Branch Chamber. It was a little eerie when we were going to merge the chambers because when it comes to business, I'm greedy. I want all the business for myself, which means let's bring it all to Farmer's Branch. But now, being part of the MetroCrest Chamber, we've had to learn to share. But I think we have a really good relationship with our sister cities. I'll call them Addison and Carrollton. and even Coppell to some extent. And so we do a lot of stuff together. The relationship seems to have worked out really well. I commend the Chamber on putting together as many successful events as you have. I, too, attend the Connect Lunch. When you have 65 to 80 people on a regular basis, and these are all business people that are coming, that's a pretty good thing. And it's enabled me to be able to make connections with folks not just in Farmer's Branch, but in some of the neighboring cities. So I really appreciate that. So kudos to your staff. I know they're doing all the work. You're just sitting back taking the glory. That's it. But we appreciate all that you do for our city. All right. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? No? All right. Thank you. Thanks. Y'all have a good evening. You too. Next up is item M2, consider approving resolution 2026-082, approving a contract between the City of Farmers Branch and Dallas Underground LLC for the construction of the Webb Chapel Road Water and Wastewater Improvement Phase 2 project in the amount of $2,695,813 and take appropriate action.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Council. My name is Corey Lawson, Deputy Director of Public Works. I want to present to you tonight the Webb Chapel water and sewer line replacement phase two. In October of 2024, we started engineering design. That design was complete. This is actually phase two of phase one. And in September of Council approved 418 for construction of phase one. We got phase one completed. Now we're going into phase two. Phase two is 4,200 linear feet. A water main and 3,700 linear feet of sanitary sewer with nine manholes that'll get replaced along the corridor. The limits are from 635 to Veronica and then from Selma Lane to Valley View. So it'll be two different phases that will get done within this phase two. Phase two is part of a fourth phase set up of doing Webb Chapel. The total bond was 10-6. And so we are kind of working through it. We finished phase one, going into phase two. And then we'll still have phase three and four left after this. We actually went out for bids. We got seven bids in. Dallas Underground was the most responsive best bidder after the consultant looked at their previous work, went back and researched them. Then they were the best responsible bid. And by that, they were also the lowest bid too, but they were the best responsible bid. With that, I'll take any questions that council may have for me.

Thank you very much, Corey. Councilman Gonzalez?

I have no questions. Thank you.

Councilman Bennett?

Can you define responsible?

responsible we just went through and we didn't want to run into some of the items we had ran into before so we checked previous cities that they had did work for we made sure that they were capable and able to do the job made sure that they finished previous projects that they had did on time didn't get into any legal issues perfect thank you

Councillor Stroud. Councilman Reid. Councillor Stroud Hi, great presentation, thank you. How long will Phase 2 take to complete? And then with that, when do you expect Phase 3 to start?

Well, phase three we still have in design, so we're still working on it. We want to get through phase two first. Phase two, we're expecting it to be right at, you know, 360 days, so right at a year to get it done. It's a lot of work, and it's two different phases. And then, you know, we'll bring phase three back as soon as, you know, we get a little further in design. We'll look further into phasing it out and seeing what we need to do in getting it to design. Thank you.

Council Member Villafranca?

appreciate you so much and i just want to point out the importance of infrastructure it's not sexy it's not pretty but it's really important two million seven hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money and i just want to really point out to our community all of the work that our cmo's office or city manager's office the mayor the council do to make sure that we are in the black and to make sure that we're able to take care of these things there are other cities that are close by that are furloughing employees because there is no money to cover these expenses. So I appreciate all of your work. I appreciate Jay, finance director, and all of the people that worked to put all of this together. Thank you.

Councilman Neal.

Thank you, Corey. Great presentation, good job. I wanted to ask you about, As I understand it, just for clarification, both phases would take about a year? Yeah, together. So both phases, 365 days?

Well, no, sir. This is actually phase two, and phase two just has two sections that we're doing within phase two.

Okay, so the phase two is about a year. And do you know when that's going to commence, provided this is all approved?

Once we can get it approved, go back and get it awarded, give them time to get their bonds and things together and get mobilized. I wouldn't want to give a time frame, but I would say here fairly quickly.

And of that $2.7 million bid, is there any overhead there? Are we expecting any cost overruns or any extra?

things that we might run into on top of this obviously there may be unforeseen circumstances but yes sir as of right now today no sir until you start digging in the ground and find out what you got and found old pipe or anything that you have but as of today's date no we should be able to make that budget work alright thank you thank you mayor that's all you bet thank you cory thank you i just hope that everybody realizes not only those that are here this evening but those that are watching at home how important

It is for us to have safe and secure water and sewer systems. It's also very expensive.

Yes.

And we live in a not just a growing city, but an aging city. And so our infrastructure is aging. It's requiring a lot of maintenance and upkeep and renovation and modification. And that comes with a price. So know that your city council is doing everything it can to be prudent with our tax dollars when we approve these projects.

So with that, Mr. Mayor, I make a motion that we approve resolution number 2026-082. I'll second. Thank you.

We have a motion and a second. If you would, please indicate your vote. Motion passes. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Next up is item M3, consider approving resolution 2026-092, funding facilities upgrades for the Firehouse Theater and authorizing the city manager to approve funding for improvements to the premises located at 2535 Valley View Lane and execute appropriate agreements and take appropriate action.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Robert Diaz, Parks and Rec Director. I'm here to discuss the Firehouse Theater facility upgrades, kind of a carryover from the last council meeting when Firehouse Theater was able to make their annual presentation to you. Just a little background. Staff has met with Firehouse Theater representatives back in May to look at a couple of projects. One of them involved the kitchen area. That was discussed at the annual update, and then also to the lobby. Staff determined these projects were beyond more of just a maintenance item. And so what we needed to do was kind of go back to the agreement that we currently have. And then that was part of the discussion that was at the last meeting. So we discussed these facility improvements then. And then it was discussed to go and bring those back to you all as part of a resolution. And so this first resolution, the 26-092, is really focusing on the kitchen area. We have those quotes back. When we put the packet together, we had one quote at the time that was almost $7,000. We've got a quote now that's under $3,000, which we feel pretty confident in. It's a vendor we've used previously. We are currently working through the quotes for the lobby area updates. We hope to have those back in a couple of weeks and we'll bring back another resolution for you at that point. So like I said, this is just kind of the first. the first resolution to get both projects completed. I do know the kitchen project can move fairly quickly once we get, if this gets approved this evening, then we can move pretty fast on that one. We will have to coordinate, there'll be a little more effort for the lobby one once we bring that one back to you, and we can let you guys know kinda how that's gonna go. Probably what we'll do when we get that quote, we'll do a little more coordination with the theater to kinda get a little timeframe of when we can get the job completed, It's more extensive we with that when we know there'd be some in addition to the walls and flooring and things that we got to deal with so But that's all the question. That's all that I have for you all this evening. I'll answer any questions.

Thank you very much Thank you very much Councilwoman Gonzalez I Believe it's councilman Neal's. Oh, it is. I'm sorry. I had that written down here and I still looked at you habit councilman Neal Thank You mayor

Real quick, I just want to state for the record that and let the record show that the firehouse theater did not request additional funds, they only asked for some modifications to the property and that it was the city that determined the costs involved there. But it's good to hear the kitchen we went from around $10,000 estimate down to 3000 that's a. That's a nice little savings there. Every bit helps. But my real question here is, do you know when the quotes, when do we expect the bids or the quotes for the lobby renovations to be awarded or chosen?

Well, we still have to work with the vendors to actually, we've had a few that have come out and looked at the property, but we were still waiting on it. We have to typically get three. Like I said, when we did the kitchen, we just had the one. We had to wait to get a couple more in, which was good because we were able to get some better pricing.

That's great. That's great. Great news. Great job. Thank you. That's all I have, Mayor. Thank you. Councilman Gonzalez.

You just answered my question about hoping to coordinate with the firehouse theater so that we know when's a good time to start construction so we're not really interfering with their projects.

Correct. The kitchen shouldn't take, we feel, a couple days, two to three days. It's a small project. The lobby will take a little more work. We want to have the least impact to their projects. performances and services that they they have so we'll coordinate that with them once we get a little more down the road we have quotes we know a little bit more all the work we'll probably reach directly out to staff at firehouse to get a little bit our idea of how what's the best timing on it perfect thank you councilman bennett you said you do have a quote for the lobby already no we're working on those working on it yes ma'am councilman reed okay

That's great that we were able to get it in a lot cheaper. And for timing, we don't want the kitchen work to interfere with grease.

Right. We'll make sure we... Good one, good one.

How long did you work on that? Seconds.

This stuff just...

It's constantly churning. But thank you for the information, Rob. No problem. Thank you, sir. Councilman Villafranca.

I appreciate you so much. Is there any possibility, I don't even know if this is appropriate to ask, but we have some local developers here that live and work and are actually vested in the firehouse. Have we been able to talk to them about possibly donating any of their time, talent, treasure to get the project done and save the city some money?

We have not, ma'am. We've just contacted the vendors we typically use for a lot of these renovation projects. That's something we need. I mean, we maybe could look at them. I don't know. I'm not sure how we... We typically have a group of vendors that we use for most of ours, but that is something I guess we can look at that maybe for future projects.

Thank you. Or maybe this project. Who knows? Thank you.

Anything else?

Mayor, I'd just like to, if there's no more questions. Sure. I move to approve Resolution 2026-092. I'll second.

We have a motion and a second. If you would, please indicate your vote. Motion passes. Thank you very much. Next up is item M4, consider adopting ordinance 4001, approving an addition of Article 5 special events to Chapter 14, amusements and entertainments of the city's code of ordinances and take appropriate action.

Good evening, council members, mayor. My name is Tara Bradley and I'm with the planning department. division, excuse me, and tonight I'm presenting an overview of the proposed special event ordinance. It's designed to strengthen and streamline the city's managed special events requests. Just to provide a little background over the past year, special event activities have continued to increase, kind of revealing a gap for having us not having a non-centralized permitting process and also being not so supportive to our customers that are seeking to do the special events applications, which it also does create a challenge for staff as well, too. Council members, including Council Member Tina Bennett-Burton, originally elevated this issue, encouraging a more efficient, customer-focused, one-stop approach in charging staff with developing a centralized system. Earlier, staff began to work on this, and here we are today to see the ordinance through. So also during F1 2025-26, Council also did formalize the direction with improvements such as the $50 special event fee. And also, however, there still is a inconsistency with how information was gathered and routed. So the proposed ordinance that we're looking at today does address this issue and it does improve application experience and fulfills Council's intended framework. So what is in the ordinance and what does it establish? It defines special events. It gives a clear application and documentation requirements and operational standards, support safety and compliance, and cross departmental coordination, as well as administration fee processing as well. So with this, our next steps would be to adopt and codify the ordinance. then create an online application centralizing special events requests, and then advertising to businesses and putting up a web page and FAQ to help customers have a supported experience, and also advertise to social media as well, too. And so with these elements together, this will help create a predictable, streamlined system for event organizers and staff as well. So this completes my presentation and I'm available for any questions that you all may have.

Thank you very much. Councilman Gonzalez.

Nothing for me, Tara. Thank you.

Councilman Bent.

So the 50, the greater than 50, that doesn't necessarily apply to a neighborhood group getting together, correct? It would apply if they're closing off streets or have, but if they're not closing off streets and they're just having a picnic style gathering with children and walking around a park, basically, it does not apply?

Not for the special events, but it may apply for park fees in that instance, but not for special events.

So the 4th of July parade, the children's parade that has been going on for multi-years, is there a fee for that?

With that, it would be that special event permit for the $50. With that, because it will allow for safety and compliance with the code to make sure that They're all, it's streamlined.

Ben? That's just not what we spoke about. So that's the reason I'm asking.

Let me follow up.

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Councilman Reid? Nothing for me. Councilman Villafranca?

So this includes, like, fall festivals, like at Mary Immaculate? Is that part of that process?

Especially if city services are going to be utilized as well.

So everything would be sort of one-stop shopping, online, one application? Correct. Because in the past, when I was the fall festival lady, it was come to the city and then go down to the fire station and do another application over there. So it would all be all just one application, and then you would figure out what we need for that $50? Correct. Okay, thank you.

Councilman Neill.

So I have a question or two. This is for both public and private. As I understand the definition. So how would this function and operate if there's an HOA community that wants to have, say, a garage sale? whereby they're not using any city services, they're not blocking off streets. Does that apply to them, or how does that work?

Usually, like for garage sales, that would usually...

It's a garage sale or some sort of community HOA event that they want to have for whatever reason.

On this court.

Would they be required to...

Within the definition, it doesn't have garage sale provided in the special event, so I would be... It does, I'm sorry, it does have one.

So if they just wanted to have a community event.

They would apply if it's over 50 people.

They would still be required to have this permit?

Correct.

Okay. And what about for the national night out that we have every year? Would they also be required a permit for that?

I believe that would fall into it as well.

Okay. Okay. That's all I have for the moment, Mayor. I don't know if there's any other comments.

Does anybody else have any questions, comments?

Mayor, I'd like to... I'd like to move that we table this one. It seems as though there's some additional information that the city manager is gonna review and get back to us on, so I'd like to move that we table this until the next.

I would agree with that. Thank you, Roger. Okay. I would second that.

All right, yep. Okay. We do have a motion to table, which is fine. If you would, please indicate your vote accordingly. To table. Thank you. Motion is tabled.

So we will deal with that later.

Next up is item M5, which comes from the consent agenda item K4. Consider approving Resolution 2026-093, approving a revised policy pertaining to city responses to repetitive Public Information Act requests and take appropriate action.

Thank you, Mayor. I'd ask that we pull this from consent to regular agenda item for some additional discussion. And I do have some additional questions regarding the documentation that's in there. It's in our booklet here regarding the document and administrative policies, rules, and procedures, where there's some numbers in there that indicate documents totaling 300 or more or requiring five hours or more staff time. I'm just trying to get understanding of how we derived those numbers, if anybody has an idea on that. Why not more? Why not less at all? Do we have anything in that?

You want to address that?

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what numbers you're looking at, Roger.

Well, I'm looking at the document that was in our packet. It says City of Farmers Branch Administrative Policies. I'm working at the second paragraph on that page.

All right. The policies really came before the council at the last meeting only because in order to adopt the very last section of that policy that limits the number of hours that staff is required to spend requires under state law council approval, approval by the governing body. The balance of the policy, this whole policy is purely operational in nature. It's not really, it's something that staff develops on its own to handle and comply with Texas law in handling Public Information Act requests, not really within Council's purview under a Council-managed form of government. Again, the only reason why this came before council at all was because of the very last section that allows us to, I guess, not avoid but somewhat limit repetitive and redundant requests from people who are harassing us with public information act requests. And again, the only reason why we had it at all for discussion purposes is because the act requires council approval for that section. The balance of its operational nature is up to staff.

I understand it's operational in nature, but we are being asked to approve this policy. Uh, so therefore, I think it's appropriate for us to be asking questions surrounding that. That policy, and I'm just wondering if I guess if it's the staff's belief that 300 documents in 5 hours is appropriate, then I just would like someone to say, yeah, that's. That's what they think is right. I just haven't heard that so far.

You understand that under the Public Information Act, the policy itself complies with the law as it's written right now. The act itself is not structured in a way that allows us to break even in terms of the costs that we expend in responding to requests. We're allowed to charge really what is effectively nominal fees. We're going to lose money, like it or not. But that's the way that all cities are forced to operate under the legislation. And so I don't know if the numbers, in terms of volumes, they're not necessarily random. I mean, the numbers that are in the first half of the policy, the general guidelines, really come from state law. I mean, 10 cents a page is what we're allowed to charge. 100 bucks or more, we can ask for a cost deposit up front. Other than that, we're kind of stuck with the law.

Okay, let's move on to a different area then. There's a theme throughout the document where an estimate is given when appropriate to the requester, and then they must approve that estimate. Are we asking for any deposit or any money as part of that in order to move forward if we give them the estimate, whatever that amount is? I understand from reading through here that they will need to approve or accept that. Are we also asking for a deposit?

If the response to a request exceeds certain minimum thresholds, we are authorized by law to provide a cost estimate to the requester, letting them know in advance how much it's going to cost them, and giving them the opportunity to narrow the scope of their request if they don't want to have to pay that. In some circumstances, if it exceeds other thresholds, we can ask for a cost deposit up front. Lately, we have been doing that when the estimate exceeds certain thresholds.

I just didn't see the cost deposit requirement identified here. It's the policy.

These are general guidelines. I got to tell you, there are other cities that have policies that are pages and pages long. This is pretty much as bare bones as it gets. It's real simple and very easy for staff to apply. Very straightforward for requesters to understand.

I just hate for us to give an estimate and the requester say, yes, I approve. You do all the work, and then they don't pay. Of course, they will not get the information because they didn't pay, but our staff has then spent all this time and labor to do that, and we haven't received any kind of a deposit.

The amendment that we discussed last time would allow us to withhold responding to further requests if there are unpaid amounts, but in connection with the concern, what happens if I hate to say this, but the question really is most appropriately directed to the Texas legislature. That happens all the time. We submit a cost estimate. If we ask for a deposit up front, then we'll at least have the money that we can use to pay for the labor and the overhead charges associated with responding. But in other circumstances, if they narrow the scope of their request or if we give them a statement of expense and they authorize the work to go forward, There are going to be circumstances in which we're not going to recover. That's just the way that it works under the law. I mean, ideally, we'd get a fair compensation as opposed to lopsided for the work that the tax dollars that are expended by staff in responding to the requests.

OK, unfortunately, this. Texas legislature is not here for me to ask, so you're my next best.

They wouldn't give you a good answer anyway.

Understood, understood. The only other thing is I generally agree, and I'm hoping council will agree with me, I agree with the resident who spoke regarding Section 1, given that Council has been asked to rather ratify this particular operational aspect. I think that it makes sense that we withdraw that last statement in section one where revisions of the policy are simply handled by city staff, I think. Given our involvement as council, I think that should be reserved for council to administer just with city guideline or recommendations.

Are you sure that you want to assume the responsibility for approving every change to this policy? This is purely operational in nature.

I understand. But given that we've had multiple council conversations regarding this, multiple types of questions, I think it's only reasonable that the council be involved in that. And I'll let the rest of the council speak. Maybe I can...

I was the requester on this agenda item, and I really would like to... encourage us to pass this. It really puts a huge strain on city staff, on our city attorney, and even in some cases on our council people, with people asking for thousands of pages of just stuff. I really want to encourage us to go ahead and pass this, and this is definitely operational. Well, I can respect what with the resident's concern was this is strictly operational and I don't think that we should be, there's a really fine line and I think that it's important for us to get this through and at least to be able to receive some compensation and also people that abuse the system, that have abused all of the privileges will think twice if they know that they're gonna have to pay.

So, Council, if you'll allow me. It seems as though, and Barbara to your point, most recently, requesters have tried to weaponize open records requests against either individuals or cities themselves. I recently turned in 1,430 pages of notes that were requested. We have a duty to keep our notes for at least a two-year period. If you have longer than that, then you have to provide that. I did have longer than that. I provided that information. But one, nobody compensated me for my time to go and search through my garage to make sure that I have all the information so I wasn't incorrectly answering a question. i don't get paid for that number two i brought all of this information to city hall city staff had to copy it their time and expats The city attorney and I sat and redacted all 1,430 pages because in some of that I might have had personal notes, I might have had notes about my business or other things that didn't pertain to the city. So that stuff had to be reviewed. You're not paying me for my time. This is expensive. then it has to be recopied again in order to provide that information to the requester. A subtotal was provided to the requester and this was just on one. Note that we had, I believe it was either 10 or 12 from one person during about a two week period. And for what purpose? This was, you know, some say it's harassing cities to do this. The information, yes, it's public information. But when you go back and want somebody's information from the very first day they were ever elected, in my case, 2015, or 16 rather, 2016, I didn't have all of that. that presents a pretty major challenge and it's pretty time consuming and very costly to do. We do not come close to recovering what it costs us to provide this information because I believe we're paying more than $15 an hour for our city attorney. So just when you think of what an attorney costs, not to mention city staff for all their time to put forward, to do these things, we are losing money. We are losing productivity. We are losing time not spent on doing actual work that will move our city forward, but instead trying to address what seemed to be more like punitive issues information requests than things that are truly beneficial that the public really needs to know about. So I just put that out there just for conversation.

I'd like to share just really quickly the legislative legislation text in our in our folder and the background policy addressing repetitive Public Information Act requests provides a consistent and transparent framework for administering such requests, which requires significant staff time and resources. Establishing a policy ensures that requests are handled uniformly and in accordance with procedure authorized by the Texas government code. We are happy to provide all of the information that anybody would need, but when, We're trying to set limits on abusing the privileges. The brunt of it goes to our city staff. They're being pulled away from doing the work of the city to make copies of really busy work. I can't understand why anybody would have wanted all of the mayor's notes since 2016. It just makes no sense. That was the reasoning for all of this, and I hope that we can all agree that we really need to make sure that we're taking care of our staff and that we're taking care of our city and we're doing the work of the city.

Just a quick, to our city attorney, is this estimated cost what they would pay, what our resident would pay? In our document? The example of it, is that kind of how it would work?

The example in the policy, yes. Ouch. But that's for a massive and hypothetically large request. The example is 4,000 pages, and the total would be $1,188 a resident would have to pay.

Councilman.

So can you give us an example of what might need to be amended that would be operational?

I can't imagine that we would need to do many more amendments at all. I mean, the policy that we have right now is pretty bare bones. operationally staff complies with Texas law doesn't actually have to be stated in terms of a written policy. I mean, there are some cities, some jurisdictions that have massive policies, but the law is relatively complicated. The statute itself has a whole bunch of different provisions that interact with each other, but there's also provisions in the Texas Administrative Code and then manuals that the Attorney General's Office promulgates, and all of those things have to be followed. So having a policy, is just another set of rules or regulations that staff has to follow. Now, there may be some occasion to adopt or amend or revise a policy, but you understand that this isn't a policy that we're promoting to the public. This is a policy that we adopt and apply internally just so that our own staff will have a guideline to go by. It's not something that we're telling our citizens is out there for them to avail themselves of because the law already does that for them. This is purely internal. Now, staff may one day have the need to make a change to this for internal instruction purposes, and having to go back to council with a simple operational revision like that would be cumbersome. It takes up your time, and it takes, how long have we worked on just this one amendment? Months? A month, give or take? So not likely that there would be more changes, but I can't predict the future and say that there never would be. But I will say this, the change that we made was required to be approved by the governing body only because of that one specific provision in that one statute. The only reason why we had to come to council at all was because of that. So not likely that there would be a lot of future changes that you would need to address as council.

Mayor, I'd like to make a motion to approve resolution number 2026-093 as presented.

I'll second.

We have a motion and a second. Any final discussion?

Yeah, I'd just like to say that as I've sit here and heard my colleagues up here and multiple instances use the word we and I think we all are generally in agreement with this but we as a collective body here are trying to address this and I'm sorry mayor you had to go through that but I think all of us are generally in agreement here but I go back to the term we and then also the city attorney mentioned that the governing body needs to approve I just feel at this point that if there's the collective we are trying to manage this, the governing body has to approve this. I think the governing body needs to manage this in the future if there were changes to be made. Okay.

We do have a motion and a second. So I will ask at this time if you will please indicate your vote. the motion Does not pass so could I suggest?

If the concern is that one sentence in the resolution rather than having because I'm not quite sure What the next step would be given that the policy amendment that staff has proposed has not been approved If the concern is the one sentence in section one of the draft resolution the one that says future Revisions to said policy may be adopted and implemented by city staff without the need for further Formal counsel action unless required by law if the concern is that one sentence then perhaps I would suggest a motion to approve The resolution as written with the deletion of that one sentence that way we get the amendment on file before somebody else files a dozen more requests next week And we have at least the backstop And I think that the direction by approving by that motion with that being approved is kind of giving direction to staff to bring future amendments to council anyway.

So moved. Mayor, I move to approve Resolution 2026-093 with the amendment removing the last sentence of Section 1 from the resolution.

I'll second.

emotion and second if you would please indicate your vote motion passes thank you okay next step is item anna and as a result of uh... are executive session we had this uh... discussion regarding the spot at my report and the council will be working and staff will be working to hold a town hall uh... to engage with residents we want the developer there uh... to be able to address uh... any resident concern answer questions directly so more information on that will be forthcoming We did not get a chance to finish our study session this afternoon, so we are going to resume at C2, but we're going to take a five-minute break real quick, and then we will come back and resume again with item C2. So five-minute break.

C3.

All righty, we are back, and we are resuming our study session. Item C2, there was a question regarding code cares that the city manager was going to provide input on.

We're going to have staff come up and provide some insight onto that question.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of council, Derek Hall, community services director. Was there a specific question related to code care?

It was just a brief mention in a page somewhere. So, you know, whatever information you're able to share with us.

Absolutely. Staff is assisting me. We're going to pull up. This has been a project that we've had. And actually, through the leadership of Mayor and Council, we've been able to kind of, we've been able to advance the efforts. Initially, when the program started, it was a part, it was born out of the... the vision back in 2023 really kicked off in 2024. At the same time, we began also looking at the minor home repair program. And as a result, that became the priority for mayor and council and staff began to implement those activities. I'll walk you through what is basically kind of a timeline As I know, the cold care program is, again, started in late 2023, early 2024. minor home repair program became the primary focus, limiting our resources on the staff level, and then looking through some legal services, primarily making sure that the city was gonna be covered as it related to relying on volunteers to do some of the work. We began in late 2025 to build partnerships. This was born out of the vision of some of the efforts from our elected officials, in particular, Mayor Lynn, I think, assisted us in building relationships with the faith-based community. And then as well as Councilwoman Bennett-Burden helped us to expand our partnerships with local businesses and the volunteer groups. And we've tried to facilitate and build on that and kind of round that out. And now we're ready for implementation. As a result of this, our business community is going to be critical because these are going to be individuals that will not necessarily qualify for a minor home repair program. Maybe their properties are higher than the value that we assess from Dallas County, or maybe there are some other issues. that are not covered under the minor home repair program that can be addressed by our volunteer groups. And so our focus now is to continue to build that volunteer group, continue to do outreach, and to make sure that we can identify those projects. Once we take the individuals, the specific homeowners through the process, again, through the leadership of mayor and council, we'll be able to start facilitating these projects.

So this is the first that I've heard of it. I just saw something, a town hall continue to build. Have you already been building? I mean, I'm a business owner and a councilwoman, and I've not heard of anything until just a few days ago.

Yes, so just to reiterate, this program initially kicked off back in 2023 and really began to grow in 2024. Shifted some priorities, but we've continued to do some of the work internally. But again, because of mayor and council, they've provided us with some guidance relating to some of the resources that are out in the community.

Will there be a study session or any kind of program that we can follow and see what businesses are already participating? What are the expectations? What happens if a volunteer is mowing somebody's lawn and a rock goes in their eye? Will there be any presentation about this?

I'll leave it to the city manager to figure out the appropriate venue in terms of how we can schedule this. But certainly... This is a program we're currently rolling out and we'll want to make sure that we have the participation of our community that can get behind and make sure that we can do as much good for the community as we can.

Are there parameters already out there? I just haven't seen anything about it.

Well, so I too have a follow-up question. Let me ask my question before you answer because it may help clarify. And that is, you're saying that we incorporated this in 2023 as part of the minor home repair program.

So my understanding is that the cold care program was born first, was created first, and then as a result of that, there was also a specific need to address some of the maintenance issues of some of the residents within the community.

Okay. Well, obviously I've slept since then, so I don't remember everything, but is the purpose... or the focus of what you're trying to do now to recruit volunteers, whether they're individuals or through the faith community or some other neighborhood group, to help assist in doing these projects, if you will, for people who qualify. Yes. Okay. Because I know Councilwoman Bennett is having a town hall on Saturday, and I don't know if you're looking for more volunteers to promote that aspect of it, or looking for people to participate, people who are in need, or both. Okay, both. But we need to know that this is available to the whole city? Correct.

Okay.

Ben, do you have anything you'd like to add?

Yes, so we're splitting it between the policy and operations. The policy of the council was, and this has been a multi-year journey, is to leverage resources beyond what we have with just the city budget and just city staff. Multiple cities in the region do some form or flavor of this type of project where you coordinate. The city is more of a help spread the word and bring the community together, and you're seeing that from the flag program and other elements to start saying how can we work together as a city and be beyond just what the city has, but how can we have residents help residents and the city be part of that, but not necessarily be every piece of that. From risk and all those other elements, that's handled on the operational side of the equation. From a transfer of the journey to the council, there's been a memo that's being shown here from April. If we search agendas, it's shown up on multiple agendas for the last three years in different elements. And most recently, a big part of the strategic planning retreat where we talked about strategic alignments and the council's goals. So similar to other elements that are on there, GOALS SUCH AS THE SIGNS THAT WERE INTRODUCED BY A COUNCIL MEMBER, CODE CARES, THESE ARE ALREADY STARTING TO MOVE FORWARD IN DIFFERENT CAPACITIES. THEY WILL MOVE TO THE WHOLE CITY IN BROADER DISCUSSIONS. RIGHT NOW STAFF IS BUILDING THE FRAMEWORK THAT WILL BE REQUIRED FOR THE PROGRAMS TO LAUNCH AS THE CITY ADOPTS A BUDGET AND MOVES FORWARD WITH NEXT YEAR. SO THESE ARE STEPS AND PROGRAMS MOVING FORWARD. THEY'VE BEEN TALKED ABOUT IN DIFFERENT CAPACITIES. AND, YES, THE COUNCIL WILL BE Staff will handle the operational piece to manage the program, but it will move forward and grow. And council will be encouraged to be part of it, participate. Right now, we're just talking to the community about here's what's coming and gauging interest and seeing who wants to be part of maybe something bigger and helping neighbors helping neighbors, businesses helping neighbors. And uniting those forces with only the thing that the city can do is help bring those things together with the relationships we have with the community. And so you've done it with the faith-based organizations already and sent some of those groups together. Different council members have different business relationships. Then, of course, we have the expertise of the staff that also happen to know there's certain homes, residents, maybe there's a widow, a super senior, somebody that just needs a helping hand that... Maybe some of the faith-based organizations maybe can't reach all, but maybe if we bring this group and that group, resources of the business community together, we can help folks come and do compliance also with code enforcement instead of just enforce and get it, bring folks in. How can we offer that helping hand up and use the city staff expertise to help guide a program and bring it together so we can handle our piece as the city, but the solution isn't just put a bucket of money together and say, city, go in and fix it, saying, how can we make it resilient?

Okay, so help me understand if we see a House. in our council district or in the city that maybe it's severely overgrown. We know that there's an elderly person that lives there. They can't physically get out and do the work, or maybe they don't have the means to hire a crew to come and clean up their property. And of course, if it is an elderly person, the last thing we want to do is just be hitting them with code violation after violation after violation. Explain to me what is the process? How do we as? Council representatives. Help somebody to get the ball rolling. To do something like a an outdoor cleanup or.

landscaping care very good question here so part of what we do on the staff side and again to the point that the city manager mentioned this is more operational but we do an assessment as well many of the cases that we are looking at as it relates to code care are code enforcement cases where we have worked hand in hand with the property owner but it could be an individual that is elderly and may not be able to maintain his or her property. And so we identify potential houses where we can do some remedial work through our volunteer program. And we call out what those specific activities are and then we approach that with the volunteer groups to see who can provide those services. And we work together to really facilitate the activity from beginning to end. And again, these are typically individuals that may not qualify for the minor home repair program for whatever reason. It may not even be activities that are covered specifically under the minor home repair program. But it helps us to stabilize the neighborhood. It helps us to address some of the code deficiency issues. There are a myriad of, you know, we have the common issues. code cases that we have to address some of them are not specific to the house per se it could be related to landscaping and so in this instance these are some of the activities that we think the volunteers can get involved with okay um i'm going to stop you there because i was just advised we're getting a little off topic uh to c2 although it does have budget um

It's related to the budget, so. We're having a tangential discussion here. Does anybody else have any questions at this time? I didn't hear. Okay, again, we're not taking action, we're just hearing. about this. So do you have?

I will say one thing. Nothing that we that this volunteer group will do will be needing a permit. It will not rise to the level of needing a permit.

Okay. Do you have any objection to any council members coming to your town hall and just listening? Okay. That's Saturday. Okay.

Yes, sir. I was just going to ask, will there be a future discussion about this program outside of what we're doing right now so we stay in alignment?

Yes, because we want to roll it out to the entire city, so we have to give updates on how it's functioning and working through it.

Okay, that's fine.

It sounds like a great program, but I feel like we got ahead of ourselves. I feel like there should have been a study session. There should have been discussion. The impression is that only one person is aware of really fully what's going on. So there's a lot of questions about all of this, but I'll be requesting a study session item.

Okay. Certainly fine to do that, but I would also suggest if any of us can attend without obviously breaking any quorum rules,

We are posted for a notice of quorum.

Okay. Thank you. Anybody who wants to attend, feel free to do so on Saturday morning. And that'll be here. Thank you. Okay. Moving on. Item C3. Received presentation regarding the 2026-27 medical plan RFP updates and considerations.

All right. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Jeffrey Ross, Director of Human Resources. Excited to talk with you tonight about some changes we want to propose for consideration to the medical and pharmacy plan. I first want to start by drawing a difference between two different concepts here. So tonight's discussion is not about how we're going to redesign the health plan, how we're going to innovate the health plan. They could do all these different things. that maybe people wanted to. That's not tonight's discussion. That's something really called plan design. Tonight's discussion is about our agreements with our current administrators for both our medical and our pharmacy provider are expiring at the end of the year. And this discussion is to go over the RFP that we received new vendors for. and select who those vendors will be that will administer these plans for us. And then the discussions begin with staff on how do we design the plan, what do we want to look at, what covered services, things like that. So tonight's presentation is mostly focused on uh the rfp process and the vendors so before we do get into that though i think that it's important to to maybe give a little bit of context to our plan because public sector self-funded plans are a little bit different than than some other plans so we are a fully funded self-funded health plan this means that we only pay for the claims that we incur We set a specific budget for our health plan budget, and we only pay for the claims that are actually incurred. Anything that's not spent, the city just rolls into the next year. So this does give us a lot more control over plan design, different cost control measures, different programs that we can consider as part of it. And there's many different parts to it, but the main parts of the self-funded health plan, there's three primary pieces. That's gonna be medical and pharmacy kind of together. So essentially, when an employee goes to the doctor, they seek care, they need something done, The way that the plan is designed to work is we offer one plan currently. It's called a high deductible health plan. And it has a $2,000 deductible for the employee only plan and $4,000 for employee plus one or more. What a deductible is essentially is the amount of money that an employee has to pay before the city starts to pay anything at all. So out of pocket employees have to pay anywhere from two to four thousand dollars before the city ever even kicks in to start paying anything. Once an employee does meet their deductible, something called coinsurance kicks in. And that's where the employee continues to pay for part of their medical care at a 20 percent rate. And the city starts to pay at an 80 percent rate. Now, once those two things combine. we have what's called an out-of-pocket max. And so once an employee meets both their deductible and they reach their out-of-pocket max of $3,000 or $6,000 if they're on the family plan, that's when the employee essentially stops paying for things and when the city plan really starts kicking in and paying for those bills. The way that the plan is funded is biweekly through contributions from both the employer and the employee, and employees And each paycheck, I'm sorry, for each month, they pay anywhere from seventy four dollars a month to four hundred and four dollars a month for the health insurance plan. Pharmacy is integrated with that. So when you go to the doctor, you know, they give you an exam. They say, oh, you also need this. All those things, all those costs combined go towards that deductible that's on the medical plan. And to just kind of highlight that, to give you an idea of what that looks like, a very simple. A couple of examples. So let's just say John takes his son to the doctor. He's met $2,500 of his $4,000 deductible. The office visit costs him $175, and they prescribe $75 worth of medication. So $250 total since John has not met his deductible for the year yet. Even though he's already paid $2,500 into it, he hadn't met that deductible, so he's paying the full cost. He's paying the full $250 for that visit that day. And the city is paying nothing on that. And again, the city wouldn't start paying anything until John met his deductible there at $4,000. Another example would be, let's just say Jill's spouse has a surgery. She's met $3,500 of her $4,000 deductible. The surgery is going to cost around $5,000. So Jill is going to pay the remaining amount of her deductible, which is $500. And then she's going to pay an additional $900 for the remaining amount of her coinsurance. And then once all that's done, she's met both her deductible and her out-of-pocket max for the year. So the city from that point on is going to pick up the claims at that point. Now, about the deductible and the coinsurance and the out-of-pocket max, those things reset every plan year. So every January 1, those things all reset back to zero, and employees got to meet all those same amounts again before the city starts to We also provide something known as stop-loss insurance, and we typically bring that to y'all every year, somewhere around towards the end of the year, after we get quotes for it. Stop-loss insurance is a type of insurance that protects us against high-cost claims. So essentially, the way that it works in its most basic form is any high-cost claim that's over $200,000, the city gets reimbursed for anything in excess of that $200,000 through that insurance carrier. So those are the three primary components that make up the self-funded health plan and really where most of the funding goes to. Now I wanted to give an idea of utilization and enrollment in our plan. And so we do have pretty high enrollment in our plan. So 82% of general employees are enrolled in one of the plans, 90% of police, and 92% of fire employees are enrolled in the plan. So we do have pretty high enrollment for the plan. Moving on to the RFP. So we worked with our insurance broker known as McGriff and we administered an RFP along with our purchasing department and our finance team and we received six proposals for pharmacy and five for medical. We actually brought together some employees from some of the biggest departments in the city to help us evaluate the different RFP offerings so that we had more than kind of just our eyes on it, making sure that we're looking for the best value things here. And so we've kind of ranked these things here in order of whether they're going to save us money based on projections for the upcoming plan year, which is January 1 of 2027. We run some predictive models. We look at trends and spins for the health plan. We get a lot of data from our broker. They put all those things together, and the vendors, they give us essentially quotes on what the costs are going to be for everything, basically all included. And so they come in two separate buckets. So we have one for pharmacy and one for medical. And so right now, we are currently with PROACT. That is our current pharmacy provider. And UMR, which is part of UnitedHealthcare, is our medical provider.

Thank you.

And so what we're proposing is consideration to actually switch to ServeU Rx for pharmacy and to retain UMR for medical for a three-year agreement. Now, ServeU Rx is a UMR preferred pharmacy manager, and they presented the best opportunity to reduce some costs on pharmacy. Because overall, pharmacy costs us about 15% of the total spend in the plan, either by employers, by us, or by employees. So it's a pretty high cost, and Serv-U is going to help manage some of those costs and bring some of them down. They offered one of the best clinical program offerings that some of those things are listed here. I'm not going to go through every single one of them, but if you're interested, I can tell you a little bit more about what they mean. Disruption is a concept of what's going to happen if we were to switch that vendor. People will have, if they currently have medications with their local pharmacy, they'll need to give the new pharmacy provider information of ServeURX because we'd be switching from Proact. So people who have current prescriptions would experience a little bit of disruption. It's basically just give them the new information and then they just continue filling from then on. How about for medical? we would be looking to retain UMR. They gave some of the best fixed cost savings, along with increasing what's known as administrative credits. So these are a really great resource for us. They increase them from $30,000 each year of the plan to $50,000 each year. And these admin credits can go to pay for different expenses on the plan, different sorts of fees. We can also use them for things like wellness incentives. We typically pay for things for our annual employee health fair. Out of some of those admin credits, it keeps us from having to kind of draw that money from other specific line items. So it's really great. And for some of those fixed rate fees, some of those costs, they do offer the three year rate guarantee for those. And since they're a current provider for medical, disruption would essentially be none because the network's not changing, people's doctors aren't changing, the scope of it's not changing. There would essentially virtually be no disruption for medical. And so some of the next steps. So we are looking at an estimated health fund increase of around $600,000, and that's anticipation of increased medical claims, pharmacy, and some upcoming stop loss insurance premium increases. This amount, the $600,000, this is something that we've been working with the finance team with, that we've built into the current budget planning, and everything that we've been talking about with budget has included this as part of the budget process. So we got into it really, really early this year, so that we could make sure that we were planning properly. So a next step could be to bring a resolution for city council consideration sometime after this with consideration of UMR for medical and Serv-U RX for pharmacy. And I'm happy to answer any questions that anybody may have.

Thank you very much. Councilman Gonzalez?

Could you go back to that slide? I think it was like one of the first ones where it kind of had the breakdown with John and Jill. Yeah. I don't know if it's just my insurance or if everyone works the same. I've only had the same one forever. But for the coin insurance and they pay the 20%, is there a difference between their primary and if they get a specialist? Or will they always pay 20%?

So the co-insurance is always going to be 20%. And I'll point out also that co-insurance is also a little bit of a different thing than what's known as a co-pay. Some plans have what's called a co-pay, where you pay a set amount to go to the doctor. It might cost you $40 to go to your primary care. But then to go to a specialist, it might cost you $60. Right, yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, so our plan doesn't have co-pays. So we only have the co-insurance.

Okay. Yeah.

and then the range of the 74 to 404 104 a month does that depend on like how many dependents they have okay so the employee only is $74 a month our employee plus one which can either be a spouse or a child runs 270 a month and then for the employee plus family which is an employee plus one or more runs at that 404 a month okay and then it's is the deductible per dependent or per family? Yes, per the family.

No matter if they have one dependent or more? Correct, yes. Thank you.

Councilman Bennett?

Okay, so you've explained the co-pay versus the co-insurance. Let's talk about in and out of network.

Oh, sure.

So all of this is fine and well and good for in-network. But what happens if they have to find a specialist out of network?

Most of that stuff is not going to be covered.

Correct. And there's no stopgap anywhere that we have to help with that.

Not if it's going to be out of network. There may be some additional pieces and I'll get you. We can get some follow up on what the exact in and out of that out of network costs looks like. But essentially, most of the information that we look at and most of the benefits only apply for things that are in the network. Correct.

OK, so and I see this is medical and pharmacy. Are you going to bring us vision and dental later?

So vision and dental is separate. So those are under completely separate plans. And those are also 100 percent employee sponsored plans. Employees pay for the entire cost of those plans. It doesn't those plans don't cost the city anything.

OK, thank you.

Councilman bring a very good question regarding out of network. And I'm sorry, I want to inject this. It's my understanding at one time AFLAC. provided service to the city uh... i don't know what happened their rep called me said he did business with us for twenty five years and all sudden it stopped so this is where somebody like an aflac would come into play Correct?

No, AFLAC is going to offer services that are going to be what's called tertiary. So they're going to be services like critical illness insurance. They're going to be things like hospital insurance where you get reimbursed if you go to the hospital or something. They're going to be more so you get injured on the, you suffer some type of big illness or injury. It's going to pay you cash benefits for the time you have to be out of work. Things like that is what AFLAC is going to do.

So could you, in layman's terms, consider that supplemental to

Absolutely. OK, it is supplemental and it would work in tandem with this. So you would use your medical benefits as they're defined by the medical plan. And let's just say you're hospitalized. It's following whatever the medical plan is doing. And then if you have one of those plans, one of those supplemental plans, and let's just say you're hospitalized and it pays you five hundred dollars per week for being hospitalized. It works alongside these things.

OK, so and that would be entirely employee funded.

Oh, 100%. The only one that the city contributes to is the medical plan.

Okay. So if it's entirely employee funded, why would we not at least make that available to our employees if it's not costing the city anything?

We do. All of the benefit offerings that we have are available to all full-time employees. So, it doesn't matter the role, the level, whatever, tenure, it's all offerings are available to all full-time employees.

Okay. So, again, AFLAC rep calls me, telling me all this. I said, hey, I'd love to help you, but I can't. That's not my area of expertise. Sure. I said, you need to get a hold of you. And he says, well, there's the breakdown, because he hadn't been able to get a meeting. And, you know, I'm not facilitating a meeting. I can't do that. But it would seem to me if providers that are providing those supplemental benefits, and I guess AFLAC had a pretty good reputation with our city for many years. I don't know what changed, but...

If you get another phone call, just... That change happened back before I started getting involved in the administration of the plan. It was kind of retooled, and we did go out for RFP for those plans, and then new plans were selected, and new vendors were selected, and then we moved from there.

Okay. That's all I'm going to say. Thank you. Oh, you did mention UMR with the... I think I'm one of the slides that said a three-year, are they willing to guarantee, yeah, rate guarantees for three years they're going to hold rate?

Let me draw another difference between rates here. So mostly when we think about rates, most people think about what employees are paying and what the employer is paying for that. So these rates are going to be more so fixed costs. These are going to be administration fees and third party administration. It's everything that any provider is going to charge us to administer claims, do billing, customer service. They're the ones who issue the cards. that have the info on them. So they're going to, there's costs that they charge us for doing those things regardless. And that's what they're giving us the rate guarantees on. The other rates, what employees pay versus what an employer pays, that's not part of this. And that's part of the plan design concepts.

All right, thank you. Councilman Reid.

Thank you for clarifying that about the rates I was going to ask. In regards to the integration between pharmacy and medical, I saw that like the family plan max out-of-pocket is $6,000. So once that's reached, does that also include pharmacy? So if I have an ongoing prescription, it's no cost to me?

It's included. Fantastic.

All right. They've asked a lot of my questions already, but thank you. Sure. Councilman Piafranca?

Thank you, Jeffrey. Just a few questions for clarity. Are we competitive with other municipalities? I know that when people are looking for work, like insurance is really important.

It really is. And I can say that we are competitive with the plan that we offer. There's certainly things that we can always do to look at what can we do to make the plans more understandable, usable, things like that. And that was part of plan design. But for the cities that we look at around us that have the same type of plan, because other cities do have other things like copay plans and things like that, which do cost more, the draw of the high deductible health plan is that it's going to cost you less out of each paycheck.

Is it worth looking at other options? Besides self-funded, self-funded seems, I don't know.

So with self-funded, most cities are going to go self-funded. So with the fully funded plans, which you can purchase, those work really well for smaller employees, mostly in the private sector. One of the great things about self-funded plans is that whatever we don't spend, we keep. If we're on a fully funded plan, whatever we don't spend, they keep. And then we've gotta find that money again the next year, whereas with a self-funded plan, we build the budget for it, and it just continues to roll year to year to year to year, and we're only paying for the claims that come in. It also allows us to be more competitive with our selection processes for pharmacy providers, as well as stop-loss insurance, where most of those two things, if you go with a fully funded plan, you're locked into that. And if your plan has a really, really bad year, it's kind of like car insurance. If you get a wreck and a few tickets in a year, your insurance is the same thing with a fully funded health plan where a lot of high cost claims are going to raise the stop loss and just costs are going to go up at a rate that we can't necessarily have as much design and control over.

Is this an HMO plan?

No, this is known as an HDHP, high deductible health plan.

Okay. And do employees seem generally happy with this plan?

So I think that there's some more education that we can do so that employees can understand how to better use the plan. And my benefits specialist, Heather, who's here with us tonight, we've talked about a lot of different things. She's really the brains behind all of it. And she she has a lot of ideas for what we can already do, along with what we can look at as part of plan design. And a lot of that does center around education, trying to get people centered more towards a primary care physician model rather than the urgent care, emergency care type of thing, which is basically like paying retail for for everything. It's just going to be higher cost as it is rather than primary care. Also pointing people to that primary care so that they can understand you take care of things sooner, they're less likely to cause you big issues later.

Thank you. Yes, ma'am.

Councilman Neal.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Jeffrey. I have a question regarding the medical vendors and the RFPs that were provided. Can you sort of highlight some of the decision points that help you chose to choose or stay with the UMR versus, say, the Baylor Scott & White. I know the cost is different, but obviously when you cut costs, you may also cut some benefits to stay. So I just want to make sure that whatever benefits that we currently have, we're not losing. And if you could just help explain a little bit on the decision making beyond just the cost.

Absolutely. So beyond the cost, we looked at a number of different things, the clinical programs that they offer, the different types of virtual care options that they offer. Most everything with this does also come back to cost. So it's not just the expansiveness of whatever programs they may offer. It's also going to be what that's going to cost us and what we're going to have to be able to plan for versus what, to your point, employees may lose versus what they may gain. So we were looking through the vendors aside from cost. it really was a big focus on those programs and the rate guarantees. And it was also going to be a focus on whether they were going to allow us to carve in or carve out our stop loss and our pharmacy. With some of the vendors, we're going to require us to carve both of those things in. And when we have to carve those things in, that means that we have much less control over getting to be competitive in our selection of them, we're basically at the whim of what they want the stop loss and the pharmacy providers to be, whether or not it's necessarily the best fit for the city. So we looked at the total scope of offerings, the total benefits that we would receive, not just as the city, but that would be provided to employees kind of as secondary and tertiary benefits. So a lot of really good things coming from UMR, and a lot of it did come down to the cost. But they also offered the best programs.

OK, thanks. And that, according to I guess it's what slide three, it's a would be a current savings of fifty two thousand seven hundred annually about this roughly based on the projection. But then I'm a little confused because later on in your presentation, you estimated a. fund increase of $600,000. So help me understand, we're saving $50,000, but we're going to spend $600,000. Help me understand.

So the $600,000, and it's a great question. So the $600,000 is to account for, based on the modeling that we've done, based on the trend data that we have, we anticipate with the rising cost of medical care, that $600,000 is going to be what we expect in claims. So the $52,000 in savings that you see from the RFP response from UMR, that's for the administration of the plan, not necessarily...

Okay, that's the administration, not the health. Yes, sir. So we're expecting health costs to go up around $600,000 in the upcoming year, based on the projections you have.

Yes, sir.

Thanks for that clarification. And just... Just one final point here. We're not here, as far as I understand, tonight to talk about the contributions, correct? I just need to say that because residents are emailing me about the contributions. Okay, so that'll come at a later date, as I understand it. Thank you. That's all I have. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, it sounds like you need to promote safety and wellness. Yes, sir. In order to reduce that $600,000. Okay. Anything else, council? Okay. Jeffrey, thank you.

Thank you.

All right. Next up is item C4, discuss conceptual designs associated with the relocation of Liberty Plaza to the vacant lot near the Rose Garden area on Valley View Lane.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Robert Diaz, Parks and Rec Director. We're going to go over Liberty Plaza concepts with you this evening. So this was a project that the councilwoman, Tina Bennett-Burton, brought back up in November of last year, and then we reviewed some possible locations back in February 3rd of earlier this year, and at that point we were looking at trying to look at the Rose Garden in front of Cuban Cemetery area, and it was requested that we bring back some possible concepts, and then that's what we're gonna look at this evening. So just to get everybody back on track, this is the site that we're looking at. The area that we're looking at putting the concepts is the area in red. You see the adjacent current parking. We still have a large open space adjacent to that parking. And then there's proximity to the Rose Garden. And then you have Kenan Cemetery, which is in this area, where we have the size and dimensions of the lot. And as you can see, we've got Valley View Lane, and this fits in well with the rest of everything else that's in the park. I mean, we've got Rawhide Creek, in addition to the Rose Garden, and it feeds on into the other parts of Augusta Field Park. So concept A, what we're looking at, it's a very simple concept, the most cost-effective concept. We'll be bringing you two this evening. This one is basically just a shaped area. We've got flag poles. We've got connectivity from the current parking area. This is a valley view on the right side of the screen. And as you can see, these are the profiles of the current trees that are there. The intention is to leave the trees on this site that we have currently. And as you can see the designer was able to kind of work through the trees for the connectivity We've got some really nice standard trees and then the remaining areas open space the large prominent flagpole And we're recommending about a 35-foot flagpole The flagpoles out front of City Hall are about 40 feet so that just gives you a little bit of perspective the current flagpole and this because the site is smaller than the current Liberty Plaza and That pole I just found has about a 150 foot pole. This fits the size of the site a lot better than the current pole. So basically the flags we have out front would be about the size that we would be recommending for this site. And all this would be accessible. We create accessible pathways from the current parking lot. We create accessible spaces. And one of the things that we discussed early on in this process back in February was just the reason for moving this to this site was to have it be more prominent. be more of an amenity to the city. And as we showed in that previous slide, the proximity to the other park infrastructure that we have with Gussie Field Park, we've got pavilions already there with the Rose Garden and all those amenities. And it's also access to Valley View. It just kind of makes it a nice site. And then we'll move on to concept B. This one is a layout very similar to the current plaza. It is a little more expensive because you got a lot more paving involved, but it still meets the intent where we have a prominent walkway connectivity. We keep the trees intact. We do have more of a circular. movement to the design, flag poles on the north side, closer to Valley View, with one prominent pole in the middle of the area. And I also want to point out that both these designs have access for any future development. So if you wanted to add to either one of these designs, the other one probably more so than this one. This one you've got in concept A, you've got a lot more room to, if we wanted to add something at a later point, add more trail, something like that, we could always do that. Concept B kind of gives you more of a footprint currently, because you would have one large pathway around the entire site. So it's just a little bit different, a little bit different take on the design. So just to bring it all We kind of look at cost as well. Of course, because Concept A has less paving, there's less to it, we would look at a lower cost for that one. Basically, you're just featuring the paved plaza area. We've got the flags and then, of course, connectivity, ADA parking and things like that that we would get for the public. And Concept B is a little bit different. Similar, more in line with what the current Liberty Plaza, kind of that layout, but still prominently just larger, having the flags area representing all the veterans. We can even look at, in addition to veterans, I know we don't really feature public safety and first responders, but that could be something that could be added or could be added to an initial design. And then just some key factors that we would look at is just basically using a phased approach. What I mean by that is, Really, initially we'd be looking at the flat work, the concrete work, getting the items moved from the current plaza over to there, and then kind of going from there on what amenities we, you know, but basically would be to get an area prepped, get the flag poles and get the amenities moved from the current site. And then, you know, the goal would be to kind of do this project similar, how we did Dutch Village, how we've done even the, When we remove the fountains behind City Hall, we would be able to kind of piecemeal it out to a certain extent, do as budget allowed. In order to kind of move forward a little bit quickly, I would want to be able to get the flat work in and get the items moved so we can kind of get that done probably in the first initial phases of this project. And then, as I said earlier, both designs allow for future improvements, future amenities that could be added, depending on what the community dictated and what council would want to see as we move forward. So this is kind of just where we are, and I'm hoping any questions or comments you all might have.

I'm going to... I'm going to have a comment, but I'm going to go last. I want to hear what council members have to say first. But Councilman Bennett.

Can you go back a slide?

Yes.

And then. To pictures? Two more. Okay. To the original or to that one. Okay. So what is that in the middle?

So basically it's just the designer kind of give it, we'd look at like colored concrete, paved stone for that center area. You've got landscape around it. And then the flagpoles are integrated into the landscape that's around the shaped kind of plaza area.

So the little dots are all flags.

Correct. Yes, exactly.

And then, but the other flag is at C. in the front on Valley View, the 35 foot?

Yes, letter C would be the primary American flag, similar to how we have the current one, correct.

Okay, and then go to the next one.

Yes.

And then this one. What's in the middle? What's at A?

So A would be your primary U.S. flag by the 30- to 40-foot pole. B would be all the prominent branches of the service, their flags.

And that's up by Valley View.

And that's correct. Those would be closer to Valley View. And then we'd have the walkway going all the way around it. What we would plan to do, that kind of that area to – kind of nestled between the two trees. It would kind of be like a seating area. What we currently have, let me go back, some of the statue that you see there, some of that, that's kind of what we're reserving for an area like that. We could still incorporate something like that into concept A. It just would be kind of more featured in concept B.

Okay, and then two more slides down. No, other way, other direction. Right there. So I don't have, I mean, really either one of them. I think it's going to improve that area. Are you going to, like, I know you're not going to break up. You're going to use that parking lot, but are you going to enhance that parking lot so it's more aesthetically pleasing? Because that's the goal. is to utilize that space because if we can't it was there's a restriction on the deed it has to be used as public space so there's nothing else we can do with it so we need to make it nicer enhance it for the city um so i'm okay with either i don't really care which i just do want it to be nice is that's one of our main drives connecting our city and you're not when you say you're moving things the one thing you're not moving taking down is the flag.

Correct.

I just want to make sure that everybody knows no trees are going away and the flag is not going away. Correct. Okay. All right. Thank you.

I'm good. I'd like to interject here. So I had submitted a plan early on on this for consideration uh... i don't see that on here i don't know if you can step forward and just take a quick look at that uh... because when i was doing my research on this This is one of the visuals that the city manager and I had seen. And so I would really like to see what something like this costs. I'm happy to resend it to you.

Okay.

And I will ask the city manager if he can share that with the rest of council. And then... Can you go back to me? Yes. Okay. And... as part of this also would be to incorporate perhaps a brick campaign since this does have bricks here and this is a great way for folks to memorialize those who have served and it could be a little fundraiser for the relocation of the plaza itself. Go ahead.

Could we do those if we did Plan B at the B, at the curve up there maybe?

Yeah, I guess I just need to see more detail of what this looks like.

If we could use the bricks as the walkway around so they could walk and find their person's name?

Yeah, I just think if there's a way to incorporate all that. So I just want to interject that, and Ben, if you would, share that photo. with everybody. Okay.

Thank you.

Councilman Reid.

Could you go back a couple of slides to the picture montage?

Okay, right there.

No, right there. Perfect.

Okay.

The lack of a better word, the pedestals that are there, how are they going to be incorporated?

So what we would plan on doing is either Either option, we would take the pedestal, because currently those pedestals go around the pathway. So we would take those pedestals and go around either the smaller plaza area in concept A, or we would do it similar to how we have currently. Concept B would be more in line. We'd probably almost just mirror what we have currently. It's going to be a smaller pathway, but they might be closer together. I know currently if you walk that path, they're pretty spread out. So this would be just a little more compact design. Definitely more compact if we had concept A. It would be definitely a lot closer together.

Okay. Yeah, that looks cool. I like that.

And I think when we talked about this in February, we had some examples from some other local. I know the city of Carrollton's got a Veterans Memorial, and it's a smaller footprint, closer to kind of probably this size than the current Liberty Plaza. And I think we had a few. Coppell had theirs as well. So, yes.

Yeah, I like the idea of incorporating the brick aspect of it, you know, to commemorate loved ones, and putting that into the pathway with, so basically B, with, if you could go back to B.

Okay. I can't do arrows.

Yeah, to me that seems a little bit more appealing where you could have the pedestals around the walkway. It's already incorporated. We don't have to worry about adding it later as you would with A. And then what the mayor was just showing in regards to the flags, have that in the B area of that picture. I think would be pretty impactful. So, those are my thoughts.

Okay, I'm sorry, I had skipped Councilman Gonzales.

Okay, so I like the idea of the flags up front, but I just hate spending all that money on concrete when plan A looks a little nicer. I'll go back to that one. Is there a way that we could just move these flags to kind of do that little curve that everyone was looking at?

So take the flags, so do concept A, just move the flags closer to Valley View? Right.

Okay. And then you're still incorporating that statue and all the plaques, right?

Right, everything would remain in the plaza, correct.

Okay. Okay. I know there's a lot of, like I know Mary Magdalene has it and stuff, where they do have the writing on the brick. Now I just, I'm just bringing it up because we brought it up at the elementary school, like as an idea, but they said it like fades and stuff. So, I mean, I love that idea, but can you possibly just do some research on that to make sure, or what's the best way to do that? Because I would like to see that.

I do know the bricks that we have at the current plaza are, A lot of them have worn. That would be something we would try to move the ones we could that are still intact. If we can, we can, you know, that's something we have to take in consideration. I mean, they do wear. I mean, that so. But that's something if we have kind of a brick campaign where we can go out and just rehab those on occasion as we need to. But, yeah, I can do more research on that.

OK, or. I guess maybe fine to see because I saw on option. On concept B, the U.S. flag is on a raised... Could we add, like, plaques to that, or...?

I mean, yeah. I mean, we can... tweak any of these however we, you know, the council feels would be best. I think we just, I think we wanted to call out the U.S. flag kind of like Liberty, the current one is. And so, but it can move within the plan wherever, you know, we feel is best. I think they kept this design a little bit kind of toward the middle because we have the flags. Yeah, I like that. But you also could move that entire thing kind of behind and make the poll maybe a little bit larger and have all the flags in one spot. I mean, that's an option as well. So it's kind of what Council would want to see.

Okay. Yeah. Like I said, I really like the brick idea, but it's just the wear that kind of... How long will it really last? Do you have kind of an idea of how long those have been up on Liberty Plaza versus what they look like now?

I think those have been up 10 plus years probably. I don't know if they were all installed at the same time. I'd have to check with staff on that one.

Okay. Thank you.

Councilwoman Villafranca.

Thank you. I have a few questions. Do you have an idea how many pieces would be relocated?

I believe there's... I did count them at one point. I think there's like about 10 or so. Including the pedestals? Well, and we would probably take, we'd reset them into new pedestals. They're just set in concrete. So, and we would just try to take them a piece at a time. Those are not real cost prohibitive. So for some reason we can't, get them moved. We can always replicate those. They're not designs that we couldn't update if we needed to, but the plan would be to try to get them out and get them back intact as they were. We'll also look at the condition of all those. Some of them might need to be updated and redone. We'll just have to see how they all... We wouldn't want to put brand new ones with some old ones. We just have to play that bear once we start to move them, try to move them

Would there be lighting for the flags at night?

Correct. We would have to have lighting. Currently, all the flags have lighting, or I know the prominent one does for sure. So yes, that would be included in this. And like all of our city facilities, like I hear, everything has to be lit. So that's going to be definitely a big part of this as well.

Is it appropriate to have a farmer's branch flag incorporated somehow? Sure.

I mean, we could do a separate poll. I'd like to see... We do have, I believe, some facilities that have the Farmers Branch flag under the American flag. But typically on this, we probably want to keep the American separate just because of what this is. But we could possibly do a separate poll for a Farmers Branch flag. We could even look at another poll for a Texas flag. So there could be, in addition to the branches of service, we could add a couple of flags if we needed to.

Do you have a timeline?

Well, if I can get some... It sounds like we've got a little bit of consensus, but if I can get some consensus this evening, we definitely would, because we're looking at a phased approach, I'd like to be able to then kind of go back and get some more concrete design on one of these or the other. I'd like to be able to move, try to start getting closer to where we get some actual real pricing. This is still all... estimated pricing for this concrete work and things like that. So once we get a little bit better base design, then I can get a little bit better pricing involved. I'd like to say if we can try to move sometime this year and then kind of finish it up. I think in the staff report I put over the next couple of years, we'd like to be able to at least get the base and get everything moved from the current one over to the new one. And then if we get the base, when I say base, the whatever paving needs to get done, flags and then the the monuments and then get everything kind of moved and where we have a basically a new plaza to be able to enjoy. So, you know, but we do it kind of in the house. I wouldn't want to do this with like a. We probably would do the flat work separate because we have one vendor coming and do that. And then we have really good relationships with a couple of flag vendors, and we would just have to get pricing. So there might be some multiple trips to council to get some things done that way once we get kind of an established budget and we kind of have some direction. But I would hope in the next couple years we'd have it all moved over and done, if not sooner.

I'm trying to find sort of more reasons for people to visit this area, which is kind of a good reason to have the concrete. So it's sort of a walking area. But I know this may sound crazy, but maybe like a labyrinth or something where people can sort of contemplate like the sacrifices that all of our service people have made and just kind of a labyrinth.

I think in this concept B, I think that's what the designer was going for in that kind of reflective area, that kind of eye that kind of is under those trees. And if you're, you know, that area's close to the Rose Garden as well, so you've got kind of the benefit of some of the landscape and the way the topography drops a little bit. You've got the, you're kind of on top of the hill. I mean, it's a It's a nice place. Reflective, definitely. This feeds more into that than the current location for sure. Thank you.

Yes, ma'am. Councilman Neal.

Thank you, Mayor. I have lots of ideas here, so I apologize if they're somewhat out of any order. First, I'd like to start by saying I think it's important that we have a Texas flag somewhere within this area with some level of prominence as well. I wanted to ask, have you pursued any grant opportunities or grant monies from any of the federal agencies or anything that might be able to help us?

We haven't pursued anything yet because we're still trying to establish what it is we're wanting to do and budget and things like that, but that would be some next steps. We definitely would want to look and see what other opportunities are out there.

I would encourage you to pursue that, too.

Yes, sir.

And when you say that getting the items moved over, that includes all the bricks, right?

Correct. Yes. And like I said, some of those... We'll have to check condition on a lot of those.

I think there may be some benches, some seating benches over there as well. Correct. We've got some. Are those two or not so much?

Yes. I don't say we may even have a picture of that.

Let me go back.

Yeah, I know we have benches. And those are nice benches at the current park. So we'd probably try to reuse those if we could.

Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. And I know there was an earlier comment about lighting. Will there be any lighting added to the parking area at all?

There probably needs to be lighting. And as I'm looking at this picture, we would try to maybe, if we can, use some of the lighting that's currently already there, if it's even usable. But yes, we would need some lighting. The benefit of the location is that it is close to Valley View, which I think it is. lit to a certain extent, but it's going to need some parking lot lighting for sure.

Okay. Is there any need for us to do a subsurface scan of that area? See if there's anything under that dirt that maybe somebody got buried there and never got marked or something?

Well, the area that we're discussing is primarily where the old school was. Right. I mean, it hasn't really been something that we discussed internally because the cemetery is a little bit removed. I'd have to check and see if that's something we need to do. I know there was a scan done years ago. Historical Park staff did that, but I'm not sure the areas that they covered. They probably didn't do this area, but I'll have to check and see if that's something we would need to do.

Okay. I just had an idea. With all the bricks that are being moved and maybe the future purchase of bricks with the names, do we have a catalog of those names? And will we be able to add something interactive here where somebody wanted to find somebody's name or somebody's brick, where it's located? Is that too costly?

As far as I know, there has not been any record. That is a question that I asked the staff internally. I'll double-check on that to see if we do. I need to check on that again.

Only because I know some of the families that have purchased the bricks now, they know where they are, and if they're moved, they would probably like to know where they're being moved to and be able to easily find it without too much effort. The only other comment I might want to add here is that Veterans Day, a Veterans Day parade, a Veterans Day celebration, some kind of community event there. I'd like this to be architected in some way that we could have some sort of a recognition of the veterans on Veterans Day there. I don't know that we need a whole amphitheater or anything like that, but just something creative to allow for a rather larger group gathering, at least for that short period of time, to honor, celebrate our veterans. But otherwise, I'm kind of leading towards that concept B. But I do like some of the ideas that Councilwoman Gonzalez put forth also. So that's all I have at the moment, Mayor. Thanks. Thank you very much.

All right. One more thing. Yes, ma'am. Just because I'll sit here Googling. A lot of the times, so when you go up to the memorial, you kind of go up to it. So I don't know what everyone else has thought of as having the flags in the back. So you're walking up towards the memorial and not like you. Oh, it's right there.

Is that in the concept?

Yeah, more concept be kind of like towards the. Yeah, like if you were just to rotate it.

Oh, OK. So put the flags more toward the cemetery.

Right.

OK.

Just my thoughts, so that you, and if you do walk towards it, you can walk towards looking for your bricks. I know no matter what, people are going to walk on the bricks, but maybe could we do like an outline and then have like more of like regular cement in the middle so that they're not constantly walking all over them, maybe preserve them a little longer.

Well, if we did things kind of like we did that, again, I referenced that one area to the kind of the, the jet out area at the bottom right you could add some areas around there where we have kind of some designated areas for the brick where it doesn't impact the pathway where um that could help with i've worked on another um memorial in another city and we had actually designated areas for the we didn't have bricks but we had basically markers um And they were basically kind of fenced or roped off, similar, and where people still did walk on them. It wasn't going to prevent people from going over. But it was a nice place, way to kind of respect those, the people that had purchased the markers. So instead of roping them off, we could, since people can walk on them, but it would be something that we kind of have these...

Judd outs where it's not impacting people just trying to walk around the path I think those are those would be something we could look at for sure Very good anything else Well, I think we're a general consensus was be looking at B and I'd still like you to incorporate this photo that's going around and Somehow but we'll a lot more to come.

Okay. Well, let me let me this is good direction We can come back and kind of we'll see what the photos and we can come back and do this session.

Very good All right.

Thank you.

Just one thing I want to add. I do think that the flags on Visible from Valley View are important like that'll be one of the highlights of driving up and down Valley View Thank you, thank you

Next up is item C5, receive a quarterly update regarding the Charter Review Committee.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Stacey Henderson, Administrative Services Director. I'm here this evening to give you a quarterly update on the Charter Review Meetings. So just as some background, the committee was established in November of 2025. They've been meeting each month since then. They meet on the third Wednesday of the month. And at each meeting, they are reviewing the charter by each article and each section. So, for this quarter, the committee reviewed articles three through article six. They did have some minor amendments in article four of the budget that was related to just clarifying Section 4.06, that we were in compliance with state law. And then the other two items here, Sections 08 and 09, were just grammatical corrections. And then Article 6 was also a spelling error that was found in that section. Items that are being considered currently is the establishment of a transit committee. They have recommended to move forward with that, but they're working on language that would be appropriate, so that will be coming back again. Fixing typographical and grammatical errors. We are keeping track of that as we move forward through the charter with each one, but they're also recommending that item be placed on the ballot that it allows those items to be fixed without going before an election and it would be brought forward by ordinance to the council for approval and then remote attendance related to executive session they're reviewing that item as well as council members who voluntarily resigned before their term expires and are they subject to a waiting period before they can run again so that item is also being reviewed Upcoming discussions. We have moving general elections to November, and that's in Section 7. That is coming up next week at their July meeting. They'll be reviewing Article 7. Changing council terms to two- or four-year terms. Requiring the CIP program to be updated every five years. Clarifying the language regarding reinstatement of the Charter Reef Committee and appointment of members, just making that clearer. and then potential penalties for council members who resign midterm, as well as discussing adding an at-large member for council. And that is all the updates I have for this quarterly update. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much. Councilman Gonzalez?

Nothing for me, Stacey. Thank you. Councilman Vette?

Nothing for me, Stacey. Councilman Reed? Councilwoman Villafranca?

Appreciate all of your work. I'm there every month and I am learning a lot. Thank you. You're welcome.

Councilman Neal.

Thank you, Stacey. I like the presentation very much. Do you have any information regarding attendance? Have we had any members of the committee drop off or not attend or anything? Are we maintaining a decent level?

No, we're maintaining a very good, we had two members that dropped off in the beginning, but since then we've had very good attendance and no other members drop off.

Okay, that's good to hear. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Have a question or a concern rather and that's The establishment of a transit committee. I'm not sure that I Understand what the purpose or function of that is number one number two. I would think that that should be a An area of responsibility of the City Council and as we move forward with dart and with some of the new changes that are going to be taking place the representative member for each city that city managers have been talking about excuse me at city mayors have been talking about would either be a mayor or a council appointee uh... to serve as that dart representative since each city will now have a dart uh... board seat so I'm very concerned that they're running off into an area that they really shouldn't be delving into as it relates to that.

Well, I believe the intent was for a committee to be formed, similar like the Charter Review Committee, and that would be just provide some transit-related review that they would report back to council.

Then I think then if that's the case, then The council can appoint either a committee or an ad hoc committee, whatever, to evaluate Services but our agreement with dart is not we are not in a position Where we can just do what we want and dictate to dart we are part of a group of 11 other cities as it relates to dart and so unless 11 other cities want to make fundamental changes to the dart system and then that's not gonna happen, and it's certainly not gonna happen at the whim of a committee of Farmers Branch people. And I'm not trying to disrespect anybody in Farmers Branch, I just want them to know that this is not something that's gonna get received well, especially by our fellow member cities.

It may not. The purpose, though, of the consideration of a transit committee would be to enable a council-appointed committee to get well ahead of the six-year deadline for calling for an election to opt out of DART. There were some concerns apparently by commission members regarding the last round, the issues that we had with the last DART thing where we had called an election and then had recalled that election. I think that the commission wants to consider establishing a committee that would enable that would be appointed once every four years or so, or six years, that would allow a group of citizens to provide the council with recommendations and get well ahead of that six-year process or deadline.

Okay, I'm not against that. I just don't think that that should be the council's purview to appoint that committee, not a charter mandate to have that committee. Typically, residents are not going to know Much they're not going to the dark board meetings. They are not attending. They're not invested as much as the city council representative or the or the mayor as relates to those things. And I say that having just been through this big to do so. I would respectfully ask that they stand down on that item, but that's just my opinion. So I'm curious to hear what the council say about it.

It was just a general discussion, and I think part of it was that some felt that DART just crept up on us, and before we knew it, we had to negotiate now. And so they wanted to get ahead of the curve, and maybe in the fourth year, maybe have the council select members of a team that could start looking at things that need to be either corrected or looked at or revised or Through dart okay, so again.

I'll just add To think that it just crept up is a misnomer. That's not true the day that I was elected that That week city manager said we've got a dartboard meeting you need to be here at this meeting so for three years I I attended these meetings, many meetings. And then periodically, I would give updates to the council. And look, I'm not looking for more to do. All of us have plenty to do. But it's who manages this discussion. And Farmer's Branch alone cannot dictate how dark functions now if we want to evaluate whether we stay in dark and that We're in for six years. Okay, so If three years from now, we want to form a ad hoc committee to evaluate What's the next step then? Maybe we put that on our radar, but I think having a charter mandated committee I just don't see that as being the right way to approach this. That's, again, just my opinion.

You know, they're only going to be recommending that the council consider these charter amendments. And so if hypothetically they go forward with making a recommendation to the council to consider a charter amendment that does this, the council is going to be the one that makes an ultimate decision. Fair enough.

But I was going to say, ultimately, it's the council's decision whether you approve or accept their recommendations.

Understood. I just hate to see them wasting time on something that may... All right. Never mind. All right. I'll stand down.

I was just going to add that, yes, the city attorney is correct. These are just recommendations. I know that at some point, the chairperson of the committee will present the options to us, and I would just like to make sure that they come with... as many answers as it could be to even this topic along with all the other topics. So sort of make sure that they're well versed and well prepared to handle the questions that we may ask. Yes. So yeah.

Okay. Anything else on that? Nope.

All right. Thank you, Stacy. Thank you.

All right. Next up is item C six discuss and provide direction regarding city council liaison appointments to external organizations.

I'm just staying up here. Stacey Henderson, Administrative Services Director. So council liaison appointments. These come back every year. This is to external organizations after our election cycle. So currently we have a vacancy for Woven Health. That is our charitable clinic that provides free and low-cost care services to residents in Carrollton and Farmer's Branch and surrounding cities. This is our current appointment list. And I do have to say, we do have to add, Firehouse Theater is not on here. It needs to be listed on here since that is part of our contract with them that we do have a liaison, which Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Neal is our liaison. And so you'll see the items noted with asterisks. Those are either staff or council-specific positions. And then obviously the ones that are not asterisked are what you have volunteered for. So certainly, I would love an appointment recommendation for Woven Health. And if you want to look at any other items, now would be the time to do so.

I'd be happy to do Woven. I would just need to know what time their meetings are to make certain that my schedule does not conflict.

They meet every two months. They meet every two months virtually on Thursday evenings at 6 p.m.

I can do that. Okay. I can do that. And then on the TML, it says Mayor Pro Tem, and I'd asked Ben for clarification on that, and that was because that was me. And I was the Mayor Pro Tem at the time. I'd like to continue with TML. I did just finish my certified municipal official with them.

Anybody else have any requests?

I'm pleased with the work that I'm doing with my groups. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

We're good with everything else? Perfect.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

All right. Thank you. Item C7, receive an update from the mayor and council members regarding board liaison information from outside organizations and other meetings attended. Councilwoman Gonzalez.

I attended a TML webinar on crisis communications. I attended the 4th of July Independence Day events and the walking parade that was hosted by our community.

I won't list all of the TML classes I took because I did just finish my CMO, but I am completed.

Okay. Councilman Reid.

I've taken a couple of the TML classes I can't recommend them highly enough. I also attended the 3rd of July Independence Semi-Quincentennial Celebration.

Councilwoman Villafranca.

Thank you. Attended the Friday Franks over at the Branch Connection. I'll continue to have my office hours, but I will not have office hours for... Oh, actually, I will have office hours this Friday after all. Never mind. I attended the open house for State Representative Cassandra Garcia-Hernandez. She has a new office here in Farmer's Branch, and she is open and available to help in any way she can. I attended the MetroCredits Connect lunch and also attended the 4th of July and 80th birthday of Farmer's Branch celebration, which was a huge, huge success. I just cannot tell you all of the work that our city staff did. It's just Incredible. Thank you so much.

I don't have anything, Mayor. Thanks.

Okay. I attended North Texas Crime Commission meeting last month. They had a chief's panel, very interesting, in addition to that. was also in attendance at the chamber, Metrocrest Area Chamber Expo that they had at the Hotel Dax. They did a really good job allowing businesses to showcase what they're all about. Of course, we had a mayor's breakfast two weeks ago to talk about things going on. in each of our cities and how we address that. I attended the swearing-in of Mayor Al Zapanta, the new mayor of Irving, and of course former Mayor Stouffer was here this evening, so it was his going away also. I didn't know I was going to be called to speak, but I was, and it was just a really nice ceremony. I toured the Princeton uh... office building and parking garage which is a property that is half on in farmers branch in half in addison parking garage structures in farmers branch the office building is in addison i was there with three addison council members and we went through the building uh... And we'll continue working on that because there is a redevelopment project that is trying to work through approval in Addison. I attended the Greater Dallas Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce dinner at the request of Dr. Koo. And there were a lot of other elected officials there and several congressmen and whatnot. Really, really nice time. I, too, went to Representative Cassandra Garcia Hernandez's office dedication and thank her for inviting us for all of that. I attended. the chamber luncheon on July 1st at BJ's restaurant, and they had a really good turnout there, met a lot of businesses. Farmers Branch was very well represented with businesses at that lunch. I attended a memorial service at our police department for former officer Chuck Purvis, who passed on. Of course, this week we had breakfast at the Branch Connection on Monday for the senior breakfast. Let's see. And that is about it so far. It's been busy. So know that your council, all of us are working hard for you. And of course, the Independence Day event on the 3rd, kudos to our staff for doing a very superb job in presenting that event. So that is all I have. Next up is item C8, review and discuss future agenda items. Councilwoman Gonzalez. Councilwoman Bennett.

Mayor, I would like to request a future discussion to evaluate opportunities to improve the city's public notification process for zoning and development cases, including additional notification methods, technology, enhanced onsite signage, and other public outreach efforts that increase resident awareness and participation while continuing to meet all statutory public notice requirements.

Okay. Councilman Reid.

I would like a discussion and possible action to review and establish City Council policy and procedures governing engagement with the City Attorney, including authorized methods for requesting legal advice, communication protocols, the respective roles of the City Council, and expectations to ensure legal services are provided in a consistent, equitable, and efficient manner. Secondly, I would request that the City Manager develop and present a proposed One Community, One City, One Future initiative for the City Council's consideration to strengthen civic pride, community identity, and neighborhood engagement through lasting community traditions. The proposal should include policy recommendations, implementation options, funding considerations, and opportunities to leverage the Farmers Branch flag, community partnerships, and other community engagement initiatives to foster a shared sense of belonging. Lastly, I'd request that the City Manager invite the Valwood Improvement Authority to provide the City Council with an update on its current operations, budget, and financial outlook, services, capital projects, strategic priorities, measurable outcomes, and future initiatives, including opportunities to strengthen coordination with the city and advance shared economic development and community goals.

That is all I have. Thank you. Councilman?

I have two requests, please. I'd like to request that staff provide a thorough presentation on the history, development, and implementation of the Code Cares program to include current volunteers, current organizations, and any information that we need to be able to assist in making that program successful. I would also like to request that the city manager develop and present recommendations for the city's evaluation of artificial intelligence data centers, including land use, infrastructure, utility capacity, fiscal impacts, and development standards to help guide future City Council decisions. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Neal.

I don't have any, Mayor. Thanks.

I have four items. First is regarding a mayor's recap. Beginning Thursday, I'll record a brief video, about four minutes or less, recapping the key actions and discussions from each city council meeting. The goal is simply to make it easier for residents to stay informed, especially those who can't attend our meetings or watch the full recording. This isn't intended to replace the official meeting record or speak for individual council members. It's about providing our community with a clear, consistent summary of the work of the city council or of the work that the City Council is doing. While we may have different perspectives during our discussions, we all serve the same community. My hope is that these updates will help keep our residents informed, connected, and focused on what brings us together as one farmer's branch. Next is in regards to permeable driveways. I would like staff to evaluate expanding the residential permeable driveway program to include properties on streets without curbs, including the potential conversion of eligible grass areas adjacent to the roadway into approved permeable parking surfaces to address neighborhood parking concerns while preserving drainage and stormwater benefits. THIRD, REGARDING CITY COUNCIL TOWN HALLS. I WOULD LIKE STAFF TO RESEARCH AND BRING FORWARD A DISCUSSION REGARDING CITY COUNCIL POLICY FOR CITY COUNCIL TOWN HALL MEETINGS TO ESTABLISH A CONSISTENT FRAMEWORK FOR PLANNING, SCHEDULING, STAFF INVOLVEMENT, USE OF CITY RESOURCES AND DECISION-MAKING RESPONSIBILITIES IN SUPPORT OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND RESPONSIBLE STEWARDSHIP OF PUBLIC PROCESSES. a policy for subcommittee formation. I would like city staff to review the city charter and current practices regarding the city's subcommittees and return with a proposed policy establishing a consistent framework for their creation, purpose, authority, duration, reporting, and dissolution while considering best practices, legal requirements, staff capacity, and the efficient use of city resources. That is all that I have. Any further business for this evening? Seeing none. With that, we will... Gosh, I think I'm going blind. 941. We will adjourn at 941. Thank you all for coming tonight.