City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, everybody. It is roughly 17 till 4 o'clock on August the 11th, and I call to order the Community Development Committee meeting to order. So, first item of business, the approval of the June 9th, 2026 meeting minutes. I'll move. Motion?

I'll move. Second. And a second from Deborah. Is that you, Deborah?

That's me. Okay. Any discussion? Corrections? Seeing and hearing none, all in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. All right. Aye. No nays. No nays. Passes. Gets us to our briefings. Who's the lucky individual, Chris, to give us something along the lines of eager at mitigation?

Can you hear me? Thank you. Okay. So maybe we'll bring the tone down after that lengthy budget presentation.

Maybe not because they're all over my neighborhood.

We will definitely get to that in the areas they are. So Mayor Portillo and council members, thank you for having us today. My name is Chris McAllister, Assistant Code Compliance Director, specifically for animal control. Behind me we have Teresa Thomason. She's the Deputy Director for Parks and Recreation. Her and I are going to be pitching this together.

So, move right in.

So here's a purpose overview. Today we're going to talk about seasonal e-grid impacts, how they affect the neighborhoods. We're going to summarize briefly the coordinated mitigation efforts, review some legal framework, what guides our response, and then highlight some activities that we've done for this 26th season. So a little history. Each year the egrets fly in. Typically we'll see the night herons come in. They come in as scout birds. What they're doing is they're looking for the thick canopy trees, some water sources, and they will start nesting. And then the other egrets will come in and kind of follow suit. We typically see them come in around February, March. They will leave September, August time frame. And then those that overstay their welcome leave around October. And so this year we are hoping to get them out sooner than later. What they're attracted to, again, is the mature trees. Once they do nest, our efforts, our mitigation opportunities go down. But the impact of the neighborhoods that you see on the slide is the odors, the noise, the damage to private property, and what we see with those is increased complaints from the citizens and the residents. Moving on to legal framework. So our response, the city's response is guided by state and federal framework, specifically the Federal Migratory Treaty Act, as well as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Code. Once they nest, which is eggs or hatchlings, Again, our opportunities become limited. At that point, it is simply maintenance, if you will, much like we did in some properties for the 26th and the 25th season, which is why deterrence is always key. We do hold a federal permit. I have one person in the city. It's Christopher Lorette in Animal Control. He is the only permit holder. Every year, we apply for that permit, and we receive it. Sometimes a little longer than we'd like to see, but we do receive the permit, and that establishes how many nests and eggs we can disrupt that year. Our goal is always deterrence. Our goal is never to allow the permit. What we'll find is what happened in a few years where we run out of the permit. You and I, sir, we had that conversation a year and a half ago. So again, even the federal government, when they're issuing these permits out, it's very clear in the application that deterrence is key. We can't get the permit unless we have a deterrence plan in place. And so that's one of the things leading into this season, and you and I talked extensively, Councilman, at the end of last season, at the 25 season, we determined that we didn't wanna rinse and repeat, which we feel like we've been doing for years. and that rinse and repeat is we've been reactive. So this year we took a more proactive approach and we created a mitigation strategy. That strategy is a coordination between code, parks, environmental and communications as well, as well as the residents. The residents play a big part of this. So we went into it with a mindset of deterrence. And so again, we partnered with the residents, specifically in D4 as a major help, because D4 is right on city property, which we're gonna get to some maps in a second. I'm gonna go ahead and get those now.

So Chris, before we move on, not being an expert like Charlie over here on Egrets, What number typically does the permit prescribe for us to disrupt their? Yes, I mean.

So every year it changes. And I actually brought the numbers because it's a pretty lengthy permit. What I'll tell you is some of them didn't change and some of them did change. And again, we can get in the specifics and I can give you the exact numbers. But again, historically, when we've relied on those permit numbers, regardless of what it is, the permit gets exhausted. And once that permit's exhausted, We have no more options. We can't scare them. We can't make the noises. We can't chase them away. We are just in maintenance mode, which we see cleaning streets, picking up limbs, dead birds. That becomes maintenance. We never want to get there. So a part of our education to the residents is we need to be preemptive on this. Keep your yard clean. Not getting nests out from the season that just ended. Keep your trees trimmed. You know, it's things like this that we educate on. And this year, part of our strategy is we created some deterrence kits. We put together 250 kits as a pilot program, and it's been a success with those kits as well. So does that answer your question, sir?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we can – I'm just curious about the numbers. You can share those offline. I know it's involved. And I can send it to you.

I have it all in an email. And, again, if you'd like, we can discuss those here. It doesn't change that our primary goal is deterrence, always. So this is a map of the 26 rookeries, the nesting sites that were active. We had a number of calls from other locations in the city. We would get the calls that the birds are nesting, they're landing, and we respond to all of those. What we found in all of the cases is it might have been a bird or two in the tree, but they proactively called us, which is good, because if we saw any need for a deterrence, we would do it then, or education. But what you see here are the three active rookeries for this season. Six and 10 on Marco and Boaz. They are still active, but they are stabilized, meaning there's no new nests coming in. Birds are leaving as the hatchlings leave the nest.

We'll see the birds leaving.

So we expect six and 10 to start drawing down later this month in September. District four, city property. That's the one where we had a lot of tree trimming and pruning. I'll let Teresa cover that in a bit. That was, I think, district four on Teal and Chaco was, was a good example of the coordination of the plan. Because we, being that it's city property, we had a lot more latitude and flexibility to do things. We can go on private property with our permit. It just gets challenging. We have to have the permission of the property owner. If there's contractors, we have to be on site. It just gets a little challenging. So being that Tillichaco was city property, we were able to just kind of dump the plan at that problem.

But again, District 4 has all been vacated last time we were on site.

Again, 6 and 10 are still active and they are in maintenance mode. What we see, and I should have covered this two slides ago, the nesting period is about three to five months, right? And what's important to note is that just because you chase a bird away for an egret from a nest that it's building, which you can still do as long as there's no eggs or hatchlings, you can disturb the nest. It's habitat mitigation. they will move to another site and they will start nesting again. Or if we take one through permit, like I take a nest with eggs, they're not just going to fly somewhere else in Texas. They're going to pick another tree. They're going to start nesting again. So that's why... Oh, sorry. That's why continued deterrence is key here. I think we're going to get into... That's what it is, Paul's fault. So now we're going to get into the park part of the presentation. I'm going to call up Teresa. If there's any questions that come up after, I can always come back.

Hi, Theresa Chalmerson, Deputy Director for Parks. So here you have just a map of the completed tree pruning, I can't talk today, and identified egret root areas. So the highlighted in yellow is what we did here in 26 and what's in 25 last year. You left me with a remote that doesn't work.

Okay, here we go.

So our forestry crew were the ones that were responsible for going out and doing a great job doing the tree pruning this year and last year. We did, you can see between the two, increase the amount of trees pruned, but we also went a little deeper in the trees. So that's why it cost a little bit more, because we took a little bit more of the tree out to help kind of mitigate that problem and expanded pruning into the targeted neighborhoods. So my sides are much easier than Chris's. So I guess we'll stand for any questions that you might have.

Well, here's one, and I'll relate it to the budget. I don't have my budget materials right in front of me, so I can't access them. But in your opinion, are there any suggested measures in our budget in terms of cuts that would affect tree pruning that could have an impact on our mitigation efforts?

I don't think that there's probably that much impact. We'll probably be okay to continue to do what we did. Joel's gonna come up and take my place.

Chair and council members, Joel McElhinney, Assistant Director of Park and Recreation. And no, we held on our recommended budget for hazard abatement. This falls under that umbrella of hazard abatement within our forestry section in the Park and Recreation Department. That does have an impact on going out and doing other higher priority hazard abatement of tree limbs or tree removal. So kind of keep that in mind. But we did not recommend reducing that line item.

Thank you, sir. Any questions, my board members? Charlie? You know I do on this one.

So not really any questions. I really just thank you for all the work done. I think this year in District 4, it was the power of the city and the communication and then the residents actually owning that they live there and that it takes constant action on their behalf. Just like I told them, anytime you depend wholly on the government for anything, you're probably going to be disappointed. And so they actually created a, dedicated Egret Busters Facebook group. They coordinated schedules. They used the kits provided by Parks as well as the kits that they bought on their own. They were out there all hours of the day, especially the night when they would typically start nesting. Enough so that Other residents were calling police to make noise complaints, not realizing what they were actually out there doing, which was protecting the neighborhood. And so this year was a vast, vast difference from what we saw last year when there was really very little action from the neighborhood, despite all the communication from parks and, hey, you've got to take this into your own hands. And really, thank you, Teresa, as well, with all the help with the trees. That was a huge help. made a huge difference as we know Parkland and other areas of Fort Worth that are well developed and have large tree canopies. That's not an area we're going to be able to cut. And a shout out to Michael Rodriguez from our office who drafted a letter that's going to be going to the USDA. Hopefully we'll have it signed by the city where we're actually petitioning for them to review this treaty that is really no longer needed. I mean, it's just way overdue, but it's easier to not do anything than it is for them to do something. but it lays out all the financial impacts it has on the city. From the city perspective, I believe it was actually closer to $100,000 in all that we'd spent on overall e-group mitigation, which we wouldn't have to do if we had more power to take care of these issues. But huge thank you to your team for everything y'all did this year and for providing overtime staff to come out and help out with some of the noise making as well. Our residents, they noticed it and they certainly appreciate it. I know I certainly did too. So again, thank you so much.

Anybody else ever you mentioned earlier that you had some issues in your neighborhood I know if you wanted to elaborate on that a little.

There we have seen some egress but I haven't had a lot of complaints about the nest and so this was good for me to see where they've established rookery but we have seen ingress. in District 5, including in my yard. So we just have to keep our eye on it because let's hope they're not, they don't decide to settle between four and six.

Yeah. And so far, knock on wood, no concerns that I'm aware of in District 2. And it goes without saying we have good resources online, right, on our city webpage as far as migratory birds and efforts that the city is taking to mitigate Eager at effects.

Okay. Good.

Anybody else? All right. Thank you, Chris. All right. Any need for an executive session? Really disappointed that we don't.

Future agenda items?

Anybody? One's going twice. Seeing none, we'll see you all next time. We are adjourned at one minute before four.