City Council - Regular Meeting

I don't know if you're allowed to say that.

Good evening. Thank you for joining us here tonight as I call to order the Pflugerville City Council regular meeting at 7 o'clock on this Tuesday, August 25th. I appreciate you all showing up. I'm sure there's some exciting things that we'll hear about on the agenda, but as we begin, I ask that you take a moment and rise with me as we recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag, followed by the Texas flag, and then please remain standing for a moment of silence. 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. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to thee. Thank you. Please take your seats. This brings us to our first public comment item for the evening. This is general public comment for items that are not on the agenda. I do have a couple of people signed up for this. I do need to read our legal statement here. In accordance with the Texas Attorney General opinion, any public comment that is made on an item that is not on the published final agenda will only be heard by the council. No formal action, discussion, deliberation, or comment will be made by the city council. Each person providing public comment will be limited to three minutes. I have Tanya Canco. If you would come forward to the podium, you'll have three minutes.

for allowing us to speak. I am a small business owner in Cloverville. I own a beauty salon and beauty supply. And I was approached by U-Haul to be a dealer network where I will park two trucks on the side of my business and they installed a pick up and drop off box where individuals would pick up and drop off 24 seven. They wouldn't even have to enter my facility. Once we notified the city that I would have two trucks parked there, they shut it down. We was prohibited from having the trucks parked there. It was cited under code 4.6.1 that the accessory doesn't match the primary business. And I think that it was classified improperly because it's not an accessory it's like a secondary to my primary business but not necessarily a necessity i mean accessory so for that reason we wanted to bring it to council here because we've tried with the city without any success so we just want it to be reclassified properly so that we can continue to offer u-haul the community loves it it's been An enormous like business like people has been in and out like nonstop. The trucks never even sit on the property because it's constantly rotated out. It's the first one in downtown Pflugerville. There is no U-Haul there. And we're actually on in the transition area of downtown because part of the code says states that downtown doesn't allow. rental and trailer facility, but U-Haul is classified as that, but that's not, I'm not opening up a U-Haul. I'm just allowing U-Haul to park two trucks there and have it as a 24 seven pickup and drop off location. There isn't any storage, any U-Haul supplies, anything of that nature. It's just simply a drop off and pickup location of two trucks. It doesn't interfere with my primary business. It's actually parked in the rear of my business. All of the people who's entering the salon and beauty supply enter in the front area of the facility. And so we just feel like due to the fact that we were not properly classified, that we were prohibited and shut down. And it's a service that the residents and everyone in the area is enjoying and love. We started collecting signatures to that effect. We're right across in front of the Chamber of Commerce, directly in front of it. They haven't had any issues. No one has reported anything. There hasn't been any citations, any noise ordinance or anything that we have broken. Hasn't been a nuisance in any way. So and then this is JD from U-Haul. He wants to explain the difference between me opening up. I think we're classified as trying to open up a U-Haul. He's going to explain what it means to be a dealer, a U-Haul dealer, opposed to me opening up a actual U-Haul facility.

All right. If you'd like to speak, do I have a form filled out by you? No, he's just my personal. You'll need to fill out a form if you wish to speak. Are you wishing to speak now?

Yeah, I can fill out a form if you need me to.

You'll have three minutes.

Okay, fantastic. So basically U-Haul, we all know U-Haul, love U-Haul, use U-Haul. We're a truck share business, basically meaning that 50% of our residents with inside large cities are more using alternate means of transportation. So we also like to reduce the green footprint, right? So having a dealer downtown so people can actually use the trucks to move into the apartments and homes and whatnot, and not having to transport across your town with roads, the congestion, minimizing our footprint. Having that there allows people to show up downtown, pick up a truck, and then make their moves. And that's going to reduce, obviously, emissions, number one, into congestion. and three it serves the community and that's very important to us we regulate how much equipment the location actually gets by our lot limits so all of our vehicles are shunted instead of just being parked they're staged and ready to go even if flugerville police department needs something in the middle of the night if there's any type of let's say a domestic issue that truck is parked there and ready to be at use to the city Anybody who's, you know, having an issue at home, they can access a truck. They can move. So it serves a lot of purposes. Primarily having a small footprint at this location means that we're only allotting for two to three max trucks, one or two trailers. We don't want to inundate downtown with a bunch of trucks. That's not what we're trying to do. We just want a small footprint assisting in her business and helping the town.

The next person I have signed up to speak is Amin Aboudaoud.

Good evening, Florida Revolting Council members. My name is Amin Aboudaoud. I appreciate this opportunity to speak today on the upcoming ACC tax vote to annex Pflugerville into the in-district fee region. I want to begin by talking about the money first, as that's the root issue for those voting no on this tax. I've heard and feel the financial struggles in today's economy and that Pflugervillians have voiced in these council meetings and around town, but I beg you all to not punish those seeking higher education, from your kids to the adults in this room, that want to pursue a change in their lives. We should not hold them back because of the pain our pockets feel at large. Right now, an out-of-district Pflugerville student pays $286 per credit hour. If this measure passes, that cost plummets to $85, bringing the total two-year district fee from $17,000 to $5,000. For a neighbor working towards a 60-credit-hour associate degree, that is direct savings of $12,000. Furthermore, for those pursuing their 120 credit hour bachelors at ACC like nurses, software developers, and engineers who are highly coveted in our world and in this job economy, they would end up paying $34,000 as opposed to $10,000 if this proposition does not pass. The opposition has argued that only a relatively small number of Pflugerville residents attend ACC and an investment would not bring equal return. I'd like to offer that the large out-of-district sum and lack of local access acts as a financial and physical barrier for our neighbors. 53% of Flickrville grads don't go to college immediately, and surveys show it's due to the steep financial wall and lack of local access and transit. The majority of our grads that do go to college go to ACC as a full commitment or as a gateway for transferring to other four-year universities. I'd like to add that the last time this proposition was voted on was in 2018, pre-COVID, pre-inflation, and even then the investment seemed too steep. I ask that you all consider the benefits our students gain access to for just $25 and out of taxes on average, and it goes beyond local and financial access. ACC offers students amenities catered to helping demographics like the students I just mentioned. They offer free school supplies, groceries, mental health counseling, tutoring, job advising, and so much more. I am lucky. I've had the high privilege of having parents who are willing and able to help finance my education, and that support is the only reason I'm currently able to attend ACC. I strongly believe the keys to success shouldn't be gated behind a $12,000 to $24,000 wall. And to everyone here today, please vote yes to the ACC annexation proposition this November. Thank you for this opportunity, and thank you to Councilmember Mateo for your support of our future workforce.

Thank you. I have Craig Reinecke. Where's Craig? I've got you signed up twice for public comment since 4C is on the consent agenda. All right. I get 15 minutes, right?

I think I did spot four forms up here. Awesome spot already.

Okay. Good evening, Mayor Weiss and members of council and all the really important city people also. So glad y'all are here. It's so great to see such a great turnout. My name is Craig Reinecke. I am the secretary of a nonprofit organization. We're about a year old. Strongtowns Pflugerville. Strongtownspf.org. So... So anyway, I wanted to extend a sincere thank you to Mayor Weiss. He actually attended one of our last meetings where we had invited . We have a summer speaker series that we've been working on, and I'm very grateful for him to be able to attend that. I do invite everyone else to try and come to some of our others as well. that's in their house at the public library. We've been having them at about two o'clock at the public library. It's not every Saturday. We're still working on some things and there's still some flux for how we have people coming in. And I'm really excited that there is someone else that, can I say maybe? Yeah, so that Councilman Kaufman has actually agreed to be able to speak at one of our speaker summer series as well coming up. So yeah. Okay, we were, like I said, we were thrilled to have city council members, Mike Enders and Darren Jarojda, I can never say his name. They had come and spoken a lot about what it is like how to go through like elections and stuff like that. They've also talked about what it means to have a strong towns. what it is to have a strong town. Having a local leadership show up and listen to and engage in these community-led discussions means a great deal to our members. It shows a shared dedication to find productive collaboration pathways for Pflugerville future. I do invite everyone to be able to come to keep this momentum going. And we do, as far as what Strong Towns is, Strong Towns is a bottom-up approach to be able to making the city a stronger place. We work to try and help citizens, to try and help work with our local city government to be able to make our city better. We want... one of the one of our focus things is like trails with our trails it's that's something that serves everyone we are there's some things that we're talking about as far as road development well these road developments are great for cars and if you have a car and if you're an adult and have a license but if you don't have a license you know i'm sorry your teenage kid still has to rely on you if we have an infrastructure of trails then we keep building on those trails, not for recreation only, but really driving that those trails are for transportation, then that serves everyone. That serves not only just the youth to be able to keep on going, but that also serves elderly. And there are times whenever you might have, you might not be able to travel and those trails might be a pathway for you. So anyway, strong terms. Yeah.

Thank you, Greg. That is all I had for this section of public comment for items that are not on the agenda. Is there anyone else from the public wishing to speak during this time on items that are not on the agenda? Seeing none, Council, I will call our consent agenda. Are there any items that you wish to have pulled from the consent agenda?

4E.

4C. I heard 4C and 4E. That's Charlie and Echo. Any others? Trista, would you do me the favor of reading the consent agenda?

Yes, I have items 4C and 4E pulled from consent. For A, ordinance on second reading with a caption reading, an ordinance of the City of Pflugerville approving the 2026 Annual Service and Assessment Plan update. In 2026, assessment role for public improvements for the Martin Tract Public Improvement District in accordance with Chapter 372, Texas local government code making various findings and provisions related to the subject and providing for an effective date. For B, ordinance on second reading with a caption reading, In Ordinance of the City of Pflugerville, approving the 2026 Annual Service and Assessment Plan Update and 2026 Assessment Roll for Public Improvements for the Meadowlark Preserve Public Improvement District in accordance with Chapter 372, Texas Local Government Code, making various findings and provisions related to the subject and providing current effective date. Again, 4C and 4E have been pulled from the Consent Agenda. All remaining items may be acted upon in a single motion.

Move to approve the Consent Agenda. Second. I have a motion and a second to approve the Consent Agenda. Motion passes unanimously. That brings us to item 5A, that is conduct public hearing on the fiscal year 2027 proposed budget for the city of Pflugerville, Texas. We have Tracy Waldron, our finance director, to present.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. As it was stated, this is a public hearing. This is required by the budget process. And so I have a presentation that you've seen. We've added a few extra items to it. So I'm going to go through it fairly quickly because it's not new information. So we'll talk about the appraised taxable values certified. As you know, we did gain new property value of $321 million. We also had about $20 million captured by our tax increment reinvestment zone, but we did lose some property value to personal exemption. I went back and looked at our 20-year history chart that's in our budget, and this is the first time in 20 years that we've seen our total taxable assessed value go down in totality. So just want to point that out. This is new territory for us. talk about the no new revenue rate and the voter approval rate. The no new revenue rate is the rate that produces the same amount of revenue with the same properties year over year, where the voter approval rate is the maximum rate allowed by law without going to a mandatory election, and it's 3.5% over the no new revenue M&O rate. Property taxes that have been calculated are The property tax that was proposed as the maximum rate on August 11th by the council was the $54.36. This is the voter approval tax rate as it has been calculated. The voter approval MNO rate is $26.10. The debt rate is $28.26. And the total no new revenue tax rate as it was calculated was $54.07. And the no new revenue MNO tax rate is $25.23. Thank you. The property tax revenue that is being generated for the general fund, which is where the MNO is budgeted, is $30.1 million. That's $1.3 million over the fiscal 26 projected budget. As you can see, the projected budget is coming in a little less than what was originally budgeted, and this is just the difference between those properties that were under review and have come in at different values over the year. The average homestead value, as you can see, the average and the median taxable have gone down over the year. And the difference in the calculated rate is about $54. We did look into the properties that are below the median taxable, as you had asked Mayor Weiss, and about 50% of our residential properties are underneath that median. On the appraised taxable value as we separate it between residential and commercial, we are noting that commercial values went up by 5%, whereas residential went down by 2%. This is just a chart showing where Pflugerville's rates fall compared to some of our cities in the region. And we did point out and add to this chart which of those cities are using some of their sales tax to specifically reduce their property tax.

So let's stick on that one for one second and what's great is that we've got people in the room so we can have this conversation. I mean, I'm just being real because we say these things and I don't think people really understand the consequences of that. So why would that be such a demonstrative difference for folks to use sales tax to reduce their rates? Why would that matter?

Well, they're able to apply a certain amount of sales tax to basically calculate down their tax rate. So if they assign 0.5 of their sales tax towards property tax, then that is part. It's factored into the calculation. And it would be different for each city depending on how much. sales tax.

It's been a while since the last time I checked and I know it was a while ago but I think for Round Rock at one point Dell was half of their entire city budget just from that one sales tax source. So definitely different composition of sources of revenue for some of these cities.

And I'm glad the mayor brought that up. I mean, because Doug, and I see Jim right behind you nodding along, because he's right. We used to have this conversation about what's the importance of having a commercial to offset what happens with residential, and why it's key to bring those in because of not only Ed Vorn, but also the sales tax revenue that can be utilized for that. Additionally speaking, as you look at these properties as well, you see the significance of the ones that are built out, like Round Rock and Cedar Park. And so when you're talking about infrastructure, and we have that conversation about Pflugerville that we've had the readers that you still have literally half the population, half the growth is still happening on the other side. Everything that for some people may not know, east of 130 and between 973 and even Pflugerville crosses 973. You have to build that infrastructure for that. And so part of the reason why you have the rationale regarding what you have regarding your taxes and that is because of what you're looking at regarding the infrastructure for that. And so you need to bring in these commercial businesses to help offset so the burden isn't just on residents when it comes to building these things.

Tracy, do you know if these other cities still have 1% sales tax to go to regular operations and the sales tax that they designate isn't in addition to that because they have more sales tax than we might have?

I would have to dig into each one of them and look at their composition.

This is my understanding that Round Rock, I think, has 1.5% and half of the percent goes to sales tax, so they still have the 1% going. Wow.

Well, much like I think I would imagine every city on that list has 1% of sales tax going to the general fund, and then it's the additional other one cent here that goes to support the ESD operations. uh our economic and community development corporation which is tasked with bringing more of these businesses to grow more sales tax many of them may not have those other entities that consume that that sales tax so i think cap metro is a another consumer of that sales tax uh allocation.

Yeah, and if you're looking at Taylor, there's that small thing called Samsung that is going to come through right there and make a demonstrative difference in that, as well as the University of Texas at Taylor, which will be coming online in the next couple years as well.

It is amazing how much construction activity generates sales tax as well. All the wood and steel and all the nails and tools add up. Absolutely. Tracy, I'm sorry.

You're fine. So this is an all-funds discussion as far as revenue expenditures and debt service. Voter approval tax rate was used to build the budget. Conservative self-tax projections have been used, and I will touch on that a little bit later. Utility revenue is based on the study recommendations. Recreational increase based on estimated memberships and proposed rates. On the expenditure side, general funds reduced By 17 positions, the utility fund by 10 positions. Monarch fund gained 123 new positions. Obviously, that's a new fund. 3% cost of living and also a market increase to the police step plan. Health insurance cost increased by 8%. And we had to include all of the new occupancy costs for the new facilities that will be coming online in fiscal 27. On the debt service side, the general fund debt service obligation for that year is 43.6, and the estimated amount on the utility side is 43.6. This budget does not include any new debt proposed.

And, James, to the point regarding the expenditures and the 17 positions reduced, let's just be blunt, swept, those aren't necessarily positions that we don't need, but given the fact of where we are with our citizens right now and trying to go ahead and be as conservative and working with them regarding this time period, regarding our economy, those are positions you just said right now we aren't going to fill, correct?

That's right. It's a level of service discussion now.

And with the Monarch, we have agreed to make sure that that is running at 100% cost recovery. Is that correct? Work toward that?

Per council's direction, that is the plan to try to work toward a full cost recovery facility. That will take a number of years to do that. That is the goal.

Well, on some of those positions, though, they have been vacant. So if you have a vacant position for a long time, then those are the ones that are on the top of the list to be unfunded.

That's why I asked him last week or two weeks ago when I said, okay, these are vacant. Do we need those or are those just going to be swept up? And he said, no, those are actually ones you would fill, but given how things are.

And they vary in length in terms of how long they've been vacant. Yes.

This total budget is $495 million, the breakup of the different funds. ON THE GENERAL FUND SIDE IS BALANCED AT 65.8 REVENUE OVER RECURRING EXPENDITURES. THERE IS 2.5 MILLION CAPITAL OUTLAY BUILT IN. 1.6 OF THAT IS A TRANSFER INTO THE VEHICLE EQUIPMENT AND REPLACEMENT FUND TO FUND THE VEHICLES THAT HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED TO BE REPLACED IN FISCAL 27. That's leaving fund balance at $16.9 million, which is 26% of fund balance. Our policy is 25%. On the general fund side, the revenue, when we talked about taxable assessed value going down, that decrease was at $65 million. New property did see an increase in valuations, which just means that existing property in total did decrease. On the sales tax side, we had budgeted, I think, 3% for fiscal 26, but we're really running at about 1.2 year over year. So we decided to just do a flat 0% projection for fiscal 27. As far as that projection goes, if we do better, this will be good. It will provide those funds available for one time and capital purchases in the future.

Why is commercial business so key? Because we get that sales tax revenue up.

On the other category, it increased by $1.6 million. This does include the Travis County EMS funding of $600,000. There is a transfer of tree escrow funds of $521,000. Recreation fees were removed from general fund for a portion of the year and moved over to the Monarch fund. And we did see a slight increase in total franchise fees.

Tracy, can you explain franchise fees and how that works with our utility fund?

These franchise fees are franchise coming from, that's not the franchise fee that we're talking about. That is a transfer from the utility fund.

So sorry, explain franchise fees and then also how we deal with that with our utility fund.

So these franchise fees I'm talking about are right-of-way fees that utilities pay. And the transfer from the utility fund is treated. It's similar like a franchise fee because it's a 4% over their revenues, the way it's been calculated over many years.

But it's also to help with right-of-way costs just like with other...

it's to support the general so the the way i always phrase that especially for the people in the room here when we talk about rights of way we talk about the the areas along the roadway y'all own that that that's property that belongs to us as a community so when a utility says hey we want to put our our lines in there we want to put our pipes in there our wires whatever they're putting in there they they have to pay y'all rent on that so they them paying rent is a franchise fee that then offsets the uh the cost of the taxes that you have to pay that goes into the city's budget uh because that is money uh that is owed to the community for the property that the community owns it's the way i like to explain it that's good good explanation

And this is just a picture of how our sales tax has been looking. And so as you can see, the last several years have been a little more flattened. So as we're projecting 20 million to end fiscal 26, this is the same amount we're going to use in the budget for 27. On general fund expenditures, we've kind of covered some of this. I'll touch on some highlights. I did get the amount that was taken out of the general fund and moved over to the monarch fund. That's the $881,000. We did find some ways to reduce third-party contracts, and we did redo our cost allocation, which includes the Monarch this year, and so you would see an increase in that loan item.

Would you mind explaining the changes that you made to the cost allocation?

We just reassessed which departments were included in that cost allocation, but we also added the monarch as part of the allocation. So before that, it was just the utility fund that was participating in that cost allocation from general fund departments.

And that's to cover some of the administrative time that is with HR or IT and other things.

People and culture, it's finance, it's IT. GIS does a lot for the utility fund. That was one department that was not in the previous cost allocation, but we definitely recognize that they do a lot on the utility side. Thank you. Major events that are included in this budget. All of these have funding in the budget.

And Tracy, because the name is new, can you explain to the folks in the room what Red, White, and Boom is?

I believe that's what it's always been called, but that is the 4th of July event.

I just work here. That's our 4th of July fireworks event. Red white and boom.

Yes.

We're going to have that in 2027.

It's in the budget. So this is the property tax revenue that serves the debt service fund. And I just want to point out that the preliminary budget for 27 is a little less than the projected 26 ending. And that's because we're using $4.85 million of available fund balance in that fund to keep that rate. And it's actually less this year than it was last year. And so that is the reason for the slight reduction in total revenue in that fund. Which brings us to the summary. Total revenue is 39.6. Reoccurring expenditures is the 43.6 in debt funding, which you can see the net changes drawing down that fund balance. So we'll end fiscal 27 with a fund balance of 5.3.

Now, Tracy, when I was looking in the budget, I noticed there was an arbitrage expense. Can you explain what that is and why we incurred it?

Can you spell that, too?

Arbitrage. Yeah. So every five years is when you actually owe the arbitrage. We may run calculations every year on what the arbitrage liability is. But it's basically if you earn more than the bond document allows you to earn on interest, you owe that to the IRS. So we did have 2021 Bonds that were calculated and due to the IRS and we that's what the arbitrage is So if the funds are available in debt service, which is where some of the interest ends up going Then we will pay for it out of there. If not, we will pay for it out of the capital improvement project fund where interest also is residing and

So what was the reason that we had earned more interest on the bond funds than was allowed?

The rate we were earning investments at was higher than the arbitrage rate in the bonds.

So is it specifically on the rate or also the amount of interest income? And so the longer the money would earn interest?

It's the calculation between the arbitrage rate allowed. So like in some of those older bonds, the arbitrage rate was like 2%. to something and um it wasn't that long ago that we were earning like five percent on our investments even in investment pools so just uh it's based on the interest rate not how much interest we earn like in total dollars no

And then I thought you had mentioned something before about if we have too much of a fund balance in the INS fund that we might owe arbitrage on that.

Can you explain that a little bit? Yes, there's a 1-12th bona fide calculation that basically if you have more than 1-12th of the debt service that you owe that year in the fund, then that can be subject to arbitrage.

So are we close to being at that?

We are over the 1.12 right now, which is why we're trying to draw the fund balance down to get underneath that bona fide calculation. the monarch fund still want to reiterate this fund is i wouldn't say it it's still being refined and so you know we are stepping out with a budget that has been vetted and there's a lot of research that has gone into these numbers, but until we start selling memberships and start programming the facility and until we start hiring these 121 part-time positions, all of this is, you know, up for We'll see how the actuals actually come through. So we will be monitoring this fund. But this is where we landed when the budget needed to be produced. And so just to say, these are very much estimates. This budget does include 2.1 million support from 4B funds from PCDC. And I did make the note on just how much was being transferred over to this fund from General Fund.

Now, on the additional employees that need to be hired, is that going to be staffing at full capacity, or are we going to be adding new positions over the next five years as we add memberships?

I believe that the recommendation for the staff level is to operate the facility at the hours that we are suggesting that it be open. So it's not really about how many memberships there are, but covering the facility.

So if we have the same hours this year as we do in the next few years, the staffing should remain consistent. But if we add, we might need more staff. And if we reduce, we might need less staff.

Yeah, I would defer to those who have been working on the financial sustainability plan.

I imagine largely that's a fixed cost, but there's probably a little bit of a step cost in there related to programming. So I wouldn't expect it to be exactly the same every year based on the hours, but probably pretty close. Right.

Yeah. On the utility funds, the projected revenue is 66.9 operating expenditures at 32. This does include new facility costs. I want to point out the debt service is a transfer of 32.5. It's not the total amount that's owed for debt service. um we have factored in some capital outlay and transfers into this budget but as i pointed out in the work session at our last meeting that we will monitor how our projections come in and we will keep this fund at the 25 percent policy um which means that we may not be able to transfer as much as we had hoped into the capital projects but we will continue to monitor that throughout the rest of the fiscal year. On this fund, there were ten positions that were reduced. Six of those positions were transferred to general fund to better align with how we've restructured our public works departments. Four of them were unfunded. This fund still has the same 8% increase in health and the 3% cost of living.

Tracy, could you tell people where we came on health costs this past year and why we used 8% as our trend?

We actually were able to stay within our 5% increase last year in the budget, but they always come out early on in the process saying that our insurance is going to go up by like 20%. The last number I think that was thrown out was 14%. So by the time, we actually are doing a request for proposal. So we are putting it out onto the market this year. So in October-ish time frame, we should be able to know where that's going to fall a little better. As you asked last time, we talked about health insurance. If we cannot get the provider to get close to the 8%, then we have to start looking at benefit packages, you know, like what we're offering from a benefit standpoint in order to get to the 8%.

And that's probably the most significant thing for y'all to hear about the public is that, I mean, we all know at home how much insurance cost is going up for each and every one of us. And the reality of the situation is that to get folks who are working in the public sector, they have to have a good insurance package. And if we have to reduce our package because of the issues regarding cost and issues that are going on in the market that are well beyond our purview, I'm trying to be generous here, then ultimately what we'll do is we'll lose folks to that because of what's going on with our package.

Competition, yeah. On the operating side, obviously we have the new plant, the Will Barger Water Treatment Plant, coming online during fiscal 27, so all of those additional expenses have been included. Also, the expansion of the water treatment plant. We did find some reductions in third-party contracts in this fund. On the capital and transfer side, of the $828,000 that's being noted on the slide, $500,000 of that is being transferred to the Vehicle Equipment and Replacement Fund to fund replacements that have been identified for fiscal 27.

Tracy, I'm just going to comment real quick. So this is one area, some of these, when it comes time to add positions, this will be the first place that I'd recommend. This public works, I absolutely need those 10 people that were cut. It's just they were vacant and rather than laying people off, like that was the decision that we needed to make. So if things go well this year and there is an opportunity to add staff back in, get a public works director in place, get an ACM over public works in place, I would just expect me to come back and ask for some more positions if we can swing it sometime mid-year.

Just to clarify, there was just four positions unfunded and six were transferred, right?

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you. We did want to bring back a conversation about the capital projects in light of Council's decision on the 2026 proposed bond projects. We do We did hear that we did want to try to find some funds and move forward with some of these projects. And so this is the recommendation that we're bringing forward as it relates to limestone commercial project, which is 4 million in the budget. The amounts on these projects are what was budgeted for in fiscal 27. So a million for the new shelter. All of that is considered design costs. Reunion Park, $150,000. 1849 Phase III, $500,000. This is all starting designs on these projects. And just the fiscal 27 fund year for Indian Hole Trail improvements is $3.8 million.

So what I heard from the bond discussion, the proposed 2026 bond discussion, is that it's not that we don't want these things. It's that we don't want to issue a bond for construction yet. But if there's a way that we can keep these projects moving in a meaningful way, get them planned out a little better, get them designed, then y'all would be open to that. This is one way to do that. Limestone commercial is $4 million. That's a project that you could make a policy decision to say we're going to wait on that and let developers pay for that. if and when that becomes appropriate to do so. So this is kind of low-hanging fruit, so to speak, to meaningfully move some of these projects so we don't lose momentum.

So I like the idea, because the reality of the situation was this, is that we said that given the economic reality for folks, we didn't want to issue a bond. If we're going to ask for funds, it's got to be something big, dynamic, that's going to make a demonstrative difference to the community.

And things that are ready to go.

Yeah.

Things that can show value very quickly.

And I've got to say that, I mean, if no one else is going to say it, I'm going to say it. Thank you, Doug. Because I think this is a very smart way to go ahead and see about shifting our funds on this. Because the reality of the situation is that, as you all heard, we need all this. There is nothing that we don't need. But how do we balance that with what's going on with our own pocketbooks at home right now? And so this way, we have a project that we're looking at. We're saying, okay, instead of doing this in Limestone, and you all know we're the busiest place in Pflugerville is at noon on a Saturday over here, you know, in that area in Stonehill. We're going to go ahead and use those funds to go shift some of those projects to have them move forward so they're run ready, and then we'll see what the economic realities are next year. I think that's a smart idea.

So I have a question, though, because that's a road project. And when I look at the funding, those are dedicated for the debt that was borrowed that was going to be used is dedicated for transportation. So I'm just wondering how we can use those funds.

Very creatively. So I have some projects in the CIP reserve fund, which is not reserved funding, that are transportation projects that this money will come from a CO. and those transportation projects are eligible for that co funding which means that will free up that money in the reserves for these particular projects i did look and the geo funding that we had available was not available for park projects um and even though the co the co funding was not either because parks were not included in that co um but there are transportation projects in the reserve fund that we could shift back

So what I heard is you found a way to keep our budget balanced by moving it around and reprioritizing.

Just shifting it a little bit.

And I think, again, just it's a smart idea. We all know the new animal shelter, I mean, that has to be a priority of the way that Jonathan and Kim brought that up last time specifically talked about that. We've got to do something on that. And I'll be blunt. The historic colored edition has been one of the most dilapidated and underdeveloped and underappreciated areas in our community where the black community first started here in Pflugerville. So if we're going to do something, we're going to make sure that we're actually supporting that area and develop to where it is. And so I'm glad to see what's happening regarding Reunion Park is that and trying to move that project moving forward. They've been waiting not months, not years, not decades, over 100 years. to make sure that they get the same support that the rest of Flukeville does.

So I do want to say I appreciate the creativity here. I still have reservations about removing the work for Limestone Commercial with Flukeville Farm based on the implication of a particular developer that stands to benefit if we don't do that construction. And like councilmember Mateo mentioned the traffic in that area is terrible. It's an area that is ripe for additional development and so obviously this is a discussion that we'll have to have Separate from tonight, but I still have reservations about that particular part of the plan And my reservation are the last two I'm okay with the first two but the last two I think those are wants not needs I

But that's just my opinion. I think there were other stuff on there that we could have added other than those.

I am a little curious about the trail improv. That sounds like a yes and project. You sound what? No one?

No one? This is improv. Oh, OK. Oh, wow. If you have to explain the joke, I gave it a shot. But, again, we can talk about that.

Yeah, I think we need to have a further conversation about the priorities of those.

I think the things that are on this list, I think some will cost more than others. I think that's a good list to start from, but we're probably going to want to reallocate within that list.

Yeah, and I think, you know, based on how far we think any one of these can do, if we really need to prioritize two of them to make meaningful progress versus splitting the money across all of these.

That sounds like a great idea. I think we should subscribe to that newsletter.

Like and subscribe.

The animal shelter and the reunion park definitely seem like high priorities. And I think we need to make a substantial investment in in both of those.

Now, is this for design and engineering? What are these costs?

This is for design.

This is for design.

For design?

Well, except for the trail. Or is the trail for design, or is the trail for actual projects?

No, the trail's for actual projects. Because I think we asked specifically. I'm thinking of the animal shelter. That's the thing that I'm most concerned about.

Yeah. And I think that the reality is animal shelters that, just like we said, the different machinations that were brought up have a further help move back forward on that as well. Shane, we're not forgetting about you at Parks. You know how I feel about Parks over there as well. It's just, what do we do right now?

There's a lot of things going on with Parks still with Lake Pflugerville Phase 2 and the first phase of Destination Play Space. So I think... I think we have a lot of things that we're working on.

Make sure you give them a hug after this.

I've been waiting patiently from 2020.

So I am trying to finalize your budget for next meeting. So we can go two ways. We can either say, yes, go this way or tweak it and go that way or don't change anything. And I come back to you in like October with some sort of a budget amendment to do whatever y'all want to do. But I need some direction tonight. I'd pick the first two. Same here.

I would like to see some immediate investment in remediation at the animal shelter in addition to the planning.

We're doing that now, yeah.

Well, as Rudy says, Reunion Park has been waiting for the better part of a century, and it's also the smallest cost on that list. I think we can afford to prioritize that.

So if you don't want to touch the limestone at this point for various reasons and you want to focus on the top two, I can probably swing that with interest in the reserve account if we're just talking about those two for fiscal 27. I will say the CIP department is looking for a little direction so that they can finalize because we already know we need to make changes with the changes on the 26 bond projects, because if we're not going out for debt, we're not paying for those projects in 2027. So if that is the case, we can make those modifications and make that work.

That's a big maybe, though, with the interest. I want to emphasize that. That's like you're rolling the dice on that. We don't know how that's going to shake out.

Yes, I have set aside money for arbitrage.

So there's some risk associated with that approach.

So are you asking for us to make a decision on the limestone commercial tonight?

I'm asking for... I felt like there was... It wasn't formal direction, but it was very much like, can we try to get the yes on designing some of these projects so that it's shovel-ready if and when a construction bond came? Is that fair? So that's what I'm doing. I'm bringing you a potential solution to do that. I mean, I'm good either way. The only one that gives me heartburn are the top two. I do agree those should be priorities.

But in order to do those... maybe we can do it without taking limestone, but off the table for this year. But if we did take it off the table for this year, we could, this would be my recommendation. Okay.

This would be my recommendation. This is the cleanest way. This is the, I am, I am risk averse to some extent. Um, so I do think this is an easy, clean way to fund those projects. It would, if you want to focus on the top two, you could allocate more of that money to doing additional things of the, We do have some money kind of built in. I'm scaling back some other renovation projects to provide some amount of money to do stuff. Like right now we're kind of gutting the ceiling in the animal shelter. That's just disgusting with rat infestations. That's being remediated right now. We do need to address some HVAC issues. We're digging some, doing some drainage stuff around it right now. So that's an option too. We don't have to use the full 4 million, right? Whatever y'all want to use, that's an easy way to do it.

The only conversation is that, and Jonathan brought it up, and so I'll, again, I'll be more blunt about it. It was 4-3. So, I mean, what you're asking for us is to revisit that vote. What was 4-3? Limestone. Limestone was the competition we had. Did we vote on that? I don't remember voting on that.

That was a general consensus.

Yeah. But I've also talked to some of y'all since and it was like, no, that sounds okay. So... This is how we get to the end of it. And that's the point, right?

Well, it's trade-offs, right? What is the most important? I mean, my position was that Limestone Commercial is a developer project.

Yeah, he did say that.

You know, there's other considerations, and I think we should, if a developer can go and do that project, that we should let them do that rather than the taxpayers doing it up front.

I believe we had an ask right to come back with what that looks like.

That's in the works. We are in discussions with that developer.

I just want to remind that developer there are phone calls out there waiting for a call back.

I expect to bring that to the next meeting. But to your point about benefiting a developer, whether we don't build it or we do build it, we're benefiting somebody. So we build this road, the person that owns that property benefits. That developer benefits.

I don't like when a developer makes a specific request that we don't do an infrastructure project to benefit them. That is a line that I will...

I think it's one consideration. I think it's one of many considerations.

I think it's important to be very clear on that. The developer who we need to acquire property from in order to perform that investment and... complete that project and if that developer is unwilling to contribute property to that project and going to be adversarial in that process i'd rather them take on the burden of building it i agree i think it'd be fantastic if they do it i would like to see that on paper i yeah i was just going to say james james said i already said it so i'm going to repeat it

What's coming from their end? I have not heard back. I'm glad that's the discussion, but I want to see what they're actually doing to that, because at this point, they're going to do it. That's cool, but I want to see it. Do I want to see a contract? Absolutely. But I just want to see what they do.

So to that end, on these proposed items, I'm going to tell you to focus on the first two. If we want to leave it in like this until we actually have projects come forward, I'm fine with a budget amendment in the future, but do we want to change numbers there? Because it sounds like you've vetted out these numbers already.

I could probably do with a little more on the animal shelter. I mean, a couple hundred thousand bucks, we can try to make it work.

I was going to propose we move the 500 from 1849 Phase 3 up.

Did you hear what he said? He said 1.3. I mean, yeah.

Well, you're saying we got $500,000 there for 1849. Go ahead and move that, and then the drum improvements.

would handle remediation, potentially additional for now.

He's burning a hole in your head while watching you right now.

We have had trail improvements every year, so we are actively investing in our trails. We are also the trail capital of Texas. And how many is it, 74, 78 miles of trail?

Oh, sorry, I was talking about 1849, not the trail improvements. And I say that partially because our residents haven't seen the benefit of all of the amazing work that's been done in phase two yet. And I think it's just a fantastic way to let them start using that this year, over the course of this year. And we can put pencil to paper again next year on what to do next.

And you know, I mean, I probably have all of us, I probably use the parks more just because of coaching and everything else over there as well. And it's astounding what phase two looks like. Like phase two blows the water out of, and it's the reason why Round Rock is building, like I told you all, we had the conversation about, what they're building, because we're taking part of the market share with that. I know land doesn't get cheaper, but I think the reality is that, as we talked about and Shane articulated, even if we were going to try to do something right there in 2027, we're actually looking probably at 2030 anyway.

So I'd like to move us forward on this. Do we have direction? So one more consideration.

We also do not have funding to purchase land for said Reunion Park. That was part of the bond prop. So you could use part of the trail improvements to help with that too.

I think I would like to see that in a future amendment, see what we can accomplish on Reunion Park. I know we've got some other things on our plate related to that. I agree. So I'm going to say, yeah, Don't spend the trail money on day one. Sure. Day 25.

So you are okay with shifting the limestone funding? with what I've heard on the top two projects. I don't think I heard that.

I think that's what the budget needs to say right now.

It's just moving it one year, right?

You could. I think I'm fine with the Councilman Coughlin's suggestion. I thought she was saying, yeah. Put that phase three money into the animals, at least part of it.

But all of the money has to come from somewhere. So I want to be clear that I don't have the full money.

He's talking about reallocating within there. Go ahead and scratch phase three, put it in the animal shelter. And yes, the limestone commercial, in order to accomplish this, we recognize that that needs to be scrubbed.

So it's not pushing it a year. It's using those funds for these projects.

So David, are you okay with that? Yes.

Yeah, I mean, I'm okay with that.

Same practical input. But hold off on the, what we're doing with the annual trail improvement.

And that's the same way they voted last time. So are y'all okay?

That's fine. So am I good to shift Limestone at least a year? Yes. I think that satisfies both of, like, we're putting somewhat of a time frame on it. Y'all okay with that? I think it's probably more than that.

If there's enough other people that are comfortable with it.

Because I'm going to make changes to the budget document. That's why I'm talking to this side, because these folks, we already know.

So we're bumping Limestone a year. We're moving forward with the Reunion Park ASAP. We're increasing the new animal shelter from one to 1.3. We are pushing phase three back a year, and we are not spending the trail improvement money on day one. What's your thought about when we move forward with the trail improvement?

Well, the reason why you said not day one is because... My expectation is later in the year it may need to be relocated to the animal shelter or reunion park.

So let's... Not until we're satisfied with those projects.

Let's keep our powder dry and see what comes back.

So I need to be clear on, we can't just bump limestone a year. It would keep its funding, which does not give us any money for any of these other projects.

We are talking about unfunding it in this budget.

Gotcha.

Just to be clear. I see what happens when it comes to a vote. Can we move to your next slide?

It died. It stopped working. All right.

We got four at least. We got there a while ago. I don't have to agree.

Y'all keep saying something different than what Tracy is saying, so that's what she...

well i saw i saw him getting outvoted so i'm just smiling nodding i think that i can use what you've given me and that's really the end of my presentation and my clicker died anyway um so we will be back on september 8th um for a public hearing on the tax rates and also the ordinances for um

Tracy, I do have one question for you then. The median home last year versus this year, how much can, and the median, of course, that's half of all properties, half of all homes are less, half are more. How much can they expect their taxes to go up based on this budget?

It's actually going down by $54 annually.

I'm sorry, you said it's going down?

It's going down by $54 annually.

So the median home will be paying less annually? next year than they paid this year. That's correct. That's a great story to tell. Thank you for that.

But there are 50% of the homes that may see an increase. They're above the median. Yeah, above the median.

That doesn't mean they'll see an increase.

it depends on whether valuations yeah but some of them will um so it just really depends on your taxable value from last year and this year i love sitting between you two i mean my taxes will go up so i did the math this was a public hearing so i'm just saying you know there are people that will have increased taxes yeah i had someone reach out to me today and we looked it up and and there's we go down

It was $370, so they were in pretty good shape. This is a public hearing on the proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. At this time, I'm asking if there is anyone from the public wishing to speak on this proposed budget. You got one. You got one? Yep. All right, come on forward. You'll have three minutes.

I think I'll take class. I just have a couple questions. That's all. All right. I'm Trent Barlow. I'm also running for Pflugerville City Council, place four, if you guys don't know me. So look me up after this. See if you want to vote for me or not. It's up to you. But shout out to Rudy. Good to meet you. He's in place four right now. Term limited. Term limited. Not running against him. Just so we're all on the same page here. Sorry, I just had two questions about the budget this year. So we're talking about median home property taxes going down just now. And I just want to clarify, I think And correct me here if I'm wrong, the tax rate is going up, but because the median home value has declined over the past year, the actual dollars paid will decrease for the median home. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay. So we are raising the tax rate, but the median home value has declined. Okay. And then I had a question on the... The animal shelter, I understand that it's in disrepair and it needs fixes. It was my understanding that there had been a proposal floated as well to possibly outsource animal shelter services to Williamson County or another nearby municipality. And that would actually be a lower outlay every year. But again, could be misinformed there.

No, I'll answer that because that's why I'm glad people come to these hearings. That was an idea that was floated. The reality of the situation is that they're at capacity, and they have their own issues, concerns. They went to a countywide animal shelter, thinking that they were able to pool the resources together to be able to go ahead and have a bigger, better animal shelter for everyone involved, and they're running into the same issues and concerns that you're seeing down in Austin as well. And frankly, for our purposes, and you know, what is it, like three to five percent of our cities in Williamson County? something like yeah about a hundred records yeah yeah or so you know for us to i mean we had this conversation years ago um it it wouldn't make sense and they wouldn't really like for us to actually try to even attempt to move that way so the reality for us right now is that we have a shelter that um that we've said over and over again for a better term is no kill just given how things are with our animals right there um and we're trying to see what we can fix here because this has been an issue not one year, two years, this has been, how long we been again? 10? When was the last time we had that vote?

2015.

2015? 11 years. 11 years in the making. Before my time. Yeah. So at some point, we've just got to do something. Sure.

Well, we did. The council did do something.

Outside of remediation. Outside of remediation.

No, they built a new intake building in 2018.

How did that turn out?

There was a new intake. So something was done which was listed as Phase 1 and Phase 2 had not occurred yet.

Thank you. I think I'm probably out of time.

He did say two. Is there anyone else from the public wishing to speak on the budget?

Move to close public hearing.

I have a motion and a second to close the public hearing. The public hearing is now closed unanimously. This was only a public hearing tonight. So the next item on our agenda is to conduct a public hearing and consider approving the first reading of an ordinance with the caption reading an ordinance of the city of Pflugerville, Texas amending the city's unified development code chapter 157 code of ordinances as a zoning map amendment by changing the zoning of properties located at 1304 and 1312 Taylor Avenue. from Agriculture Development Reserve Zoning District A to a Single Family Suburban Zoning District, SFS, and providing other matters related to the subject. We have our Planning and Development Services Director, Ms. Bailey. What do you have for us tonight?

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Just for the record, this is going to be a public hearing. I'll try to get this through this... Oh, it's in there.

Okay.

we may have um a slight issue with our slides tonight um to go over this this is just under three quarters of an acre it is at the north northwest corner of taylor and russell over in the historic colored edition you would have seen this back in may for a comprehensive plan amendment it went through unanimously to change this from ag open space over to single family and this is the follow-up rezoning to be able to have that rezoning for the single family this is an ancestral property and they have desired instead of the park that was originally planned in the aspire plan in 2022 they do want to build two homes across this the property has already been plotted this is the very last step before they are able to start developing that as their homes the public hearing did notice went out there was one public hearing and response that came back it was from an out-of-town owner that owns one of the commercial lots adjacent they did have a few concerns but the property would not be taking access from where they were concerned about so i think we should be good the property owner is here should you have any questions they are out in the hallway if you want them to come up council do we have any questions all right this is a public hearing i invite anyone from the public wishing to speak on this item

Move to close the public hearing.

Second. I have a motion and a second to close the public hearing.

I'm sorry, do I have someone wishing to speak? Yes. Yes.

Would you like to speak on the item? Yeah. All right. You'll have three minutes. You can come up to the podium here. You'll have three minutes. If you would, state your name.

My name is Bernard Bennett. I live at 311 Caldwell's Lane. And I know that, like, this seems like a very small thing to change the zoning. Everything in this area, well, not everything. The zoning for this was agriculture zero. Is that correct? Mm-hmm. And now y'all want to change it to single family three, single family S, I don't know, single family. And... There are homes in this neighborhood that are built there on agriculture zero. So I'm just wondering why do you need to change the zoning? And there already are homes built there that when it's already zoned to agriculture zero, who wanted to change the zoning? And do you know the historical reference of changing zoning and what that means in the precedent? It says when you change the zoning, even if it's just from agriculture zero to single family. So it's kind of a two part question.

Sure thing. So I can tell you that the properties that are already built are what we call legal non-conforming use. They were built before we had zoning. So they get to stay. They get all the rights and privileges that they have currently. This would be to enable more people to build their homes and occupy the area, which I believe they're building, as you mentioned, on ancestral land.

And then the second question was about the precedent setting of changing the zoning. And you're saying the reason why there are already houses, because those houses were built before there was even zoning. So you're saying basically to be able to build homes now from agriculture zero, you can't build a home on agriculture zero. You can only build a home on single family.

Correct. I believe on agriculture zero, you could build a home on a three acre lot or some such like that. But yes, agriculture is also known as our development reserve zoning. So that is what anything that's annexed into the city goes into, call it by default. And then at that point in time, once someone decides what they want to do with that land in the future, we look at the comprehensive plan, we look at what they want to do, and we try to get them there.

So the people who own the property, they want the variance? Yes.

Yes, they are asking for this so that they can build the house. And that property has been in their family. Forever? Forever.

If I may ask, is Judge Bennett your dad? Yeah. Okay. Let's vote, and I'll talk to you in a second. All right.

Thank you. Anyone else from the public wishing to speak on this item? All right. We already have the motion and the second. The public hearing is closed. This is also available for consideration. Approving the ordinance on first reading. Move to approve. I have a motion and a second. I have Rudy step away. Motion passes unanimously. That brings us to item 6A, discussing consideration to approve construction contract with Chasko Constructions, Constructors, LTD, LPP, by Chasko Constructing, GPLLC, its GP, and the amount of $3,174,744 for construction services associated with the TR 2501 Parkway Drive Street Reconstruction and Drainage Improvement Project. We have Gabriella.

Good evening, Mayor. Good evening, council members, and good evening, members of the public. My name is Gabriela Djokovic. I'm the Assistant Director of Transportation. So, yes, indeed, for today's item, oh.

Oops.

Can you help me? Sorry.

I asked to approve the construction contract with Chesco Contractors. So, Parkway Drive Improvements is a project that is long overdue and it has funding from CDBG, our Community Development Block Grant. And we had only five bids for this project. So the project itself is the reconstruction of Parkway Drive to improve the roadway conditions, drainage and safety and that includes retaining walls for drainage between the streets Frost Circle and Po Circle and that includes also ADA compliant sidewalks and traffic signals, illumination and pavement markings. So we have reviewed the submissions that we've had. Three were disqualified because they didn't comply with all the requirements. They didn't submit all the documents. And the two we reviewed and we evaluated based on the professional and the funding and, of course, the project schedule, the calendar, and the funding that they submitted. Now, the roadway is a section of 0.64 miles, and the cost per mile is at $2.44 million, which includes, as I said, so it's a one lane each way roadway with improved ADA sidewalks, improved drainage and illumination. So we reviewed the market and it is within the market compared to other projects that we have to bid in the past few months. So by providing all this information, we request you to approve the construction contract with Chesco in the amount of $3.174 million for the Parkway Drive Street Improvement Project.

Thank you.

Mayor, I move to approve.

I had a question.

You had a question, and I just want to clarify, this does have, how much is the CDBG funding on this one?

So to date with the amount that's going to be approved over this fiscal year is about $800,000.

$800,000? We're leveraging CDBG to assist in this project in this area. That's a really great use of funds. Melody, you had a question?

Yeah, my question was that the overall total budget in our CIP is $3.2 million, and the contract just for construction is coming at $3.2 million.

That's correct.

And so I know that the CDBG is part of that $3.2 million. So I'm just wondering, where are we going to be funding the overage?

That's correct. So we did identify in general funds additional the amount available for the additional funds that we require. So the OPCC that we had available last year was at 2.8, which we had estimated for construction. But since then, with all the changes, we did end up to have a higher cost. So we have identified the additional funds that we require in order to complete the construction of this roadway.

So what do we estimate that number to be?

Did I hear that right? That's about $400,000? Yes, that's correct. You know what you said?

Yeah. So that's the difference, yeah.

So, and then, if I understand correctly, one of the reasons that this is a little bit more expensive is because the additional drainage work that we have to do to bring it up to code and our standards for the rest of the city?

That's correct, and the retaining walls and everything that we have to put in place next to the drainage, so yeah.

You're saying when we annex roads into our city, they're not at the same level as our city standards? That's weird.

Jonathan, did I hear a motion over there?

Move to approve. Second.

A motion and a second.

Thank you.

Motion passes unanimously. That brings us to item 6B. Item 6B is to discuss and consider action to approve a master services agreement between Flock Group, Inc. and the City of Pflugerville for the lease of automated license plate readers, ALPR cameras, and licensing in the amount of $87,500 per year. I would like to open this item quickly. I have quite a few folks who are signed up to speak on this, and I do want to make sure that everyone has the most recent information available. When it comes to public safety, I mean, that is something that we cherish in our community. I know that our police department, our officers, have relied on this technology in the past to close cases and assist with enforcement in the area. But public safety means more than just enforcement. It also means safety. safety, it means security, it means feeling safe in your community. One of the things that I think we had a revelation yesterday that the vendor may not have had as secure data as we had expected as was in our contract despite our staff Despite our staff configuring everything properly, I don't know if I would call it a violation of the contract, but it's definitely a violation of trust. And as such, since we are already out of contract with this vendor, this afternoon I asked the city manager to bag and tag the cameras around town. we we can't we can't engage with organizations that we can't trust unfortunately uh so i will be uh calling individuals here to speak uh i don't know if we uh require a presentation at this point in time but uh if you are wishing to speak i have I should also mention...

When the time is right, I do think Chief has something to say.

I should also mention first, I do want to be clear, I think I received... I was going to tell you I received about 100 or over 100 messages via email about this issue, and then I checked my email again here just a minute ago, and that number has grown dramatically.

It's over 150 now.

Yeah, well over 90% of those asking for... this particular action uh tonight but uh i want to make sure that the citizens know that they are heard that i do read all those emails even if i don't respond to each and every one of them not every one of them has requested a response but there are quite a few of those and you're you're being generous so you know which is good because you're the mayor so i get to be blunt

This is crap. This has been crap. It has continued to be crap. And we've had this discussion for at least two and a half years now. I remember specifically coming back from Houston Tillotson. Mimi Stiles was doing an AI conference regarding what's going on with generative AI in general. And we came back and talking about cross-racial identification and that being one of the biggest issues that are happening and that's affecting particularly people of color, what they're looking at from there as well. You and I went back, we had lunch, we had a conversation about this, an expression of concern about what do we do, how does that ultimately play out. And then we started to see, over and over again, different instances about just how bad of a, not, let's be blunt here, they're a terrible company, not a bad partner, a terrible company. And to see over and over again, them not learning for us. We were in this room, what, six, eight months ago? Yep. And lying to our face about what the hell they do over here as well. And I got to give you a lot of credit because you've shown a lot of restraint of not saying or doing anything online about this. I give a lot of credit for Jonathan telling folks about what the... heck is going on here. But the real problem is this. Years ago, we served on a board and we had a partner in a contract. And that partner proved to be an unreliable partner and a false partner. We went about and not only instructed our staff to go ahead and terminate that contract, we asked for who else they were doing their relationships with so we can warn them about that. Yeah, you're smiling because you know exactly what I'm talking about. We've been doing this a long time. And they didn't listen to us, and they got screwed, too. I'll be damned if this time around, we don't go around telling these folks, not only here in Central Texas or in the state of Texas, but everyone across the state about what the hell Flock has done and why it's done a disservice, not only to our citizens, but to our police force. Because it makes them have to go ahead and question what the hell they're doing over here. And so we can't just bag and tag them because they've actually shown numerous times where even if you go ahead and you put a cover on it, if you go ahead and tell them to stop it, they still record. We need to get them the hell out of here.

Yeah, I think if you don't mind, I... Councilmember Mateo, like you said, it's not just a policy decision, right? So 24 hours ago, I had this great speech written. I was going to tear up all the loopholes and the risk that this contract was going to expose Louisville to and our residents.

They did a good job of that for you.

They did it for me. Not necessarily now. I was going to walk through why we can't trust them as a company before this even happened, including six of the agencies that we agreed to share our data with who have had public reported instances of abuse and we still had them. They were still in our system.

It's ridiculous.

And then beyond that, and the mayor and Rudy mentioned this as well, the enormous public outcry of this. So I'll speak to some of the numbers because I went through this afternoon and I counted. So Council and the full mayor, we've gotten over 150 emails from folks in the community. These are all residents. The social media threads have had over 400,000 views, over 2,000 comments. And I can tell you, you can count on two hands how many people were supportive and wanted us to renew that contract. So I cannot think of any other issue that has united. Quite frankly, it's more messaging and comments than we got in our water emergency earlier this year. And I think that was exciting. So while I am hurt and pained that this is how it happened, it absolutely needs to and has to happen. And I also want to add on that because we also have video cameras going through the Flock system, we need to get those turned off as well. We need to not pay Flock another penny of our money. We need to cancel all of the other contracts that we have with them. This is just the one for ALPRs, the license plate readers. We need to cancel the one that does our video surveillance cameras and get those out of here. There's plenty of vendors that can provide us a secure, non-shared surveillance camera for the security that we legitimately need in our parks, in the library, etc. And so I think we've got to take more action than just canceling and not renewing this contract.

And to your point, Jonathan, this is what's... She's in my words. What's really frustrating about this, and some of y'all weren't here at 5, I said 5 a.m., 5 p.m. We were having a discussion about why y'all don't hear us discuss things online. One of the things that we have to worry about is a walking corn. So y'all may not hear us Because we're worried about getting thrown in jail, as Doug reminded us. Fair. I thought I was talking about the fee that goes with that. But we read and see everything that y'all do. And we appreciate that from there. Not in a surveillance way. I love it. We pay attention. Now, that's a joke as opposed to the improv. I love that. Now, I know many of y'all have asked about legal ramifications, and I just want to assure you that these are discussions that we take seriously, and that just because we're not coming on them, just because we don't say anything, is because you don't litigate in the public. You go ahead and take the facts, you hire attorneys, and you take care of it that way. But to Jonathan's point, we're not gonna let this go.

So I wanted to commend Jonathan as well as a number of people that I see out here that brought this issue to our attention. I was concerned about when I learned about FLOC last year, but I didn't know enough about it. So I really appreciate everyone who has advocated on this issue. But my concern is broader than just one tool or one company or one department. We don't know what's going to be considered in the future. But it involved the amount of vehicle location data being collected, how that information can be searched and shared across agencies, what capabilities may be added in the future, and a number of software that we may or may not have in the future. And the civil liberties concerns that residents have raised about a large network of cameras tracking vehicles that are not suspected of any crime. This is also why I've supported a broader citywide data governance policy that we were discussing for high-risk data. We need consistent standards for how sensitive information is collected, accessed, shared, retained, audited, and expanded over time. Because these concerns are not going away just with this one company, with this one software. So I didn't know how things were going to go a couple of weeks ago or this last month. So I pushed hard for revisions in a contract because there's a plan A and a plan B, right? So plan B, we still want the best contract possible. And also improvements to our police department policies, because I want to determine whatever we have, we have strong safeguards that can address these concerns. And so things like stronger cybersecurity requirements, SOC 2 audits for data security, retention periods and additional safeguards. Those are important to have in any contract that we have with these types of software. So I just want to thank everyone in the community again, because like it's been said, we may not read every single comment on social media that would take forever, but... I do read as many as I can, but I do want to express appreciation for you taking the time out of your evening with your family and your personal time to come here and advocate in person because I say this a lot. It's great to comment things on social media, but all seven of us may not be seeing the same thing or hearing the same thing. If you email us, we all get it. If you come in person, we all hear it. And the more people that have direct communication, with raising issues, but also come with solutions too. Maybe we haven't thought about it. Maybe there's a creative way. That's important. And so I'm glad to see you all here. And then I think hopefully coming in the future is a committee of citizens that will help craft and review and provide suggestions for data governance. And so I encourage any of you out here that are interested in that or have professional experience, we want to hear from you. We want to hear pros and cons of all different suggestions and ideas. So I encourage you when that opportunity comes available that you do come forward and apply because we need you.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And the only way you're going to go ahead, because again, you're the product. You are the product here. And the only way you're going to figure out what the hell's going on is by you being involved in joining a committee, a commission that has true oversight so you as civilians can see what the heck they're looking at here from that. That's the part that, I mean, she said it to you and we're going to say it to you back right there. A community has the right to decide how it's going to be policed. That is something we say over and over again, and it's flat out true. You've demonstrated tonight how you want to be policed. I personally think that nobody should be using Flock anywhere they go right there, and any community that finds out what happened here should go ahead and go from that. So what we need for you folks is to continue to be involved in this stuff. Understand ramification. Hold us accountable for these things and hold horrible, horrendous companies who are selling your data and selling you out and allowing for horrible things to happen in this country. Yeah, you don't want me to get political, David. Fine, I won't get political. But under a certain administration that's happening right now, we need to go ahead and make sure we watch out just as important what's going on.

Sorry, one thing I can say. I did want to, I'm sorry, I forgot this, and this is actually really important, is that I have the utmost confidence in our police department and our police officers. They are out there serving our community, helping us be safe, finding the bad actors in our community and dealing with that, and they put their lives on the line every day going out for our community. So I want to make sure that we separate what is happening with this from the men and women that are out there serving us, and I met with them, and they need tools to be effective, but it has to be the right tools. So thank you, Chief, and thank you for everyone on the police force for serving our community.

I'd like to build on what you said and Council Member Mateo as well in terms of Sunshine. I don't want to gloss over the fact that it was a resident through an open records request that identified this issue. The city gave the data to a resident who did the analysis and found it. So that, I think, to your point, is absolutely why we need actual governance and oversight, including resident information. oversight. Just have to. It's not optional anymore. And I will also say, as soon as I heard about the situation, I contacted the city manager, city attorney, and our chief of police, and they immediately went into action to figure out what was going on. It was within a couple of hours, I think, that they confirmed that it was nothing that we were doing. They contacted the vendor really quickly and have been in communication with all of council as well. So I do want to point that out, too, that as soon as there was an issue that we understood had happened, they were on it. And I really appreciate you all for doing that because it would have been just as easy to wait until tonight or push it off, have more conversations about it. But you took action immediately without any of us.

And we can't be surprised. It's a crap company that does crap things.

Not surprised. Once again, I just want to take this opportunity. I'm sure everyone's already said it, but thank you so much for being here. This is actually how advocacy and local government works. Your voice actually makes the difference. And again, I'd like to give a shout out to the city staff as well for taking immediate action on this um i'm so grateful for that um and the idea is that we are building public trust that's what this is really all about and so again thank you all for being here continue to come to city council on second and fourth tuesdays we want to hear from you thank you i read all those emails too

Chief, did you have something you wanted to say? I'm sorry, you were at the podium. And I want to recognize that I understand this has genuine operational implications for you. This was a tool that saved staff time and effort, and it is no longer available. Can you give us an idea of where we go next?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I appreciate the opportunity to speak in regard to the Master Service Agreement with Flock Safety. I want to highlight that just the advent of technology in the industry that we're in and the day and time we're in is advantageous when it's used properly and effectively following constitutional guidelines and how we police ourselves and each other. There are times when it's helped us identify and engage someone who's experiencing mental health trauma and they're lost and they don't have their phone. There are technologies out there to help us do that. Identifying people who have burglarized mailboxes and have nearly 90 pieces of personal identifying information from our community going to commit criminal acts. Identifying people that burglarized a GT's distributor store, took guns and altered them, making them assault weapons. So the technologies do assist us in policing. It is paramount that we find solutions to that. It assists us in intercepting a young individual in our community that went to take his own life. And technology helps us find them. We can't miss the advantages of technology. It's how we use it and the companies that we do it with. These are just some of the demonstrated value that technology assist us with in keeping our community safe and looking out for one another. However, over the past several months, we've conducted our due diligence in preparation for the renewing of the city's contract with Flock. We've identified significant issues that have made it difficult to have confidence that our data, the city's data is protected and that our system configuration, what we set in place is intact and enforceable. As a result, my confidence in our ability to use a system designed to improve our community and ensure appropriate data tracking and usage controls and enforcement and safeguards are in place has been reduced significantly. Clarity around how we protect community data, uphold expectations of data preservation, and maintain proper security measures is essential. And currently, I do not have that clarity with Flock. At this point, I cannot recommend renewing or creating an MSA with Flock.

And Chief, if I may be so bold, You know me well enough to know I will be. We need you telling this story to other people in law enforcement. It's one thing when lay people talk about this. This is something that you've experienced, that you've seen firsthand. Because you know what they're going to say? Mistakes happen. I'm so sorry. Wow, we're going to go and fix this. It's a bug.

Yeah, it's a bug. They launched a marketing campaign about how trustworthy they were two days after we postponed the discussion on this literal agreement. nationwide media blitz, talking about how trustworthy they are. And then immediately afterwards, we get this.

So we do, we need you to please talk to other people in law enforcement and let them know your experience here. Because this is not, it is not atypical. We have found plenty of ways. This is not atypical. And I get that it's... No one's going to say that it's not a helpful tool. We're not going to say that. But what we'll say is that when you have a horrible company that is advertised and worked for that's preying on people that you can't trust, what the hell, what downward ramifications does it have in law enforcement as a whole regarding community trust?

Thank you. I do have a handful of people signed up to speak. I'm sorry, David, do you have comments?

Chief, thank you for that. I know it's difficult. First of all, I want to say democracy goes to those who show up. And I want to thank all of you for showing up. It's very important. If you don't show up, you're ruled by the people who do. This is a very important lesson for all of us tonight. I want to amplify something that Councilman Kaufman said. I want to recognize For the particular individuals that gave me a lot of information and insight about this, Mr. Alley, Mr. Kreider, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Mitchell, thank you for the work that all of you did and for spreading the word and spending significant time educating me and other members of the city council about that. Again, democracy goes to those who show up, and you all showed up. My favorite living economist likes to say that there are no perfect solutions, there are only trade-offs. Who's this living economist? What? Who's this guy? Thomas Sowell. And While there obviously are costs associated with working with this company and their product, and I think we've all heard a lot about that, particularly in the last 24 hours, there are benefits that we are losing when we cut this off. I'm not saying there is a cost benefit discussion that has to be had. There are lives that have been saved for using this technology. Those people might very well not be alive today but for this technology. And we will continue to do our best to keep people safe. We have an excellent police department. They're very dedicated. They are losing a tool but it is The judgment of this body and I think of the majority of the people in in the city of Pflugerville That they're willing to take on that additional danger for the protection of their freedom Freedom is not free Okay, there are risks and there are costs associated with every decision that we make about freedom People Especially in a city like this for about 15 percent of our households have veterans in them We understand that those there are costs involved, but that freedom is worth that cost and We're making the decision tonight that the surveillance from this system is untrustworthy and We need to set that aside and we're going to take the risks that are associated with that and I think that's a wise decision. But again, it's important to recognize that there's a cost associated with the decision that we're making. It's the right call, but it's not free. So again, thank you all for showing up. Democracy belongs to you because you showed up.

Thank you, David. Like I said, I've got a handful or a stack of people who are interested in speaking on this item. I will call you up in groups if you want to come forward and form a line over there near the guy in the pink shirt. And if you no longer wish to speak, that's okay, too. But I'm going to invite four people up initially. That's going to be Nate. Is it Koo? Cook, Victoria Krause, Michael Cecil, and Alan Kreider.

No, don't let this guy up here.

If the four of you would form a line, and then when we get to the last, I'll call three more.

No, I'm just a pink shirt man.

So, Nate Cook,

All right. Well, I appreciate what you guys have done here. I think I'd just rather use this time to talk about the surveillance state writ large. I mostly want to talk about my neighbors here. You know, in the digital surveillance, we're all guilty until proven innocent. I look around the room. I see friends, family, neighbors. And I don't see criminals here, and I would like to keep it that way. I'd like to treat our community that way. You know, I personally have survived two hit and runs, only one of which was solved. The surveillance would have helped. The police solved the other one without surveillance. I just don't want to... treat everyone in here the way one bad apple was. So I don't think we need flack. I don't think we need I think we need to consider any other tools. We've talked about just one company. I think we need to look at any tools we implement in the future about what we're trading in terms of freedom and in terms of how we're all treated, how we look at each other. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Victoria Krause. I am a previous resident and longtime lover of Pflugerville, Texas. This town holds a special place in my heart because it's where I get to see my niece grow up and create memories with family. It's also the town where I began my career and lifelong dedication to supporting survivors affected by intimate partner violence. I've sat on the other side of the phone listening to survivors share their stories and recount their anxieties and fears as we create safety plans on how they can remain as safe as possible. It's also the reason I'm standing here today. Flock cameras are a danger to survivors of domestic violence, and renewing this contract means putting their privacy, sense of safety, and lives on the line. One of the forms of abuse I learned about through my work and continue to work with today is technology facilitated abuse. According to the University of Texas at Arlington, technology facilitated abuse involves the misuse of digital tools to harass, threaten, and exploit and control another person. Common tactics of technology facilitated abuse include tracking someone's location with GPS enabled devices, surveilling conversations through email or shared phone accounts, monitoring online activity, or filming someone without their consent. If it is abuse for one person to have unauthorized access of someone's location, personal information, digital privacy, what does that mean when that's being applied to an entire town? How can our citizens and community consent to flock cameras when we haven't been part of the conversation of how they get there, how they are operated, and who has access to the data? A healthy relationship of any kind, especially between the community and the government put in place to support them, is built with a foundation of trust and transparency. As we have all probably already heard, there have been numerous cases of flock cameras being used to perpetuate technology facilitated stalking and harassment. In response to these cases, there have been discussions about how law enforcement will intervene and prevent these situations from happening. However, according to the Institute for Justice, only a few of the dozens of analyzed cases were initially discovered through internal investigations, according to media reports. Most incidents only came to light after victims reported the officer's behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation. If the majority of these cases are discovered after they have to be directly brought to the department's attention, how can we trust that the proper safety and oversight policies are working, especially when the data from these cameras are being saved through a third-party entity? There are already three known cases in the state of Texas where flock cameras have been used to stalk, harass, and intimidate a romantic partner or previous partner in Fort Bend County, Pasadena, and Katy, Texas. These are only three of numerous cases where flock cameras have been used to perpetuate harm and abuse. While I believe we deserve a safe and secure city, I don't feel confident or any safer having these cameras around. Without accountability and a solid audit system, these cameras will not be an asset to our community.

Thank you.

Thank you Victoria. Michael Siegel.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Hello. My name is Michael Siegel. I'm a resident of Austin and a member of the Austin City Council District 7. I represent constituents that border Pflugerville. I represent people who attend the Pflugerville ISD schools. And really, on behalf of the city, I want to thank and congratulate Pflugerville for joining us and having a flock-free zone here in Travis County. It means a lot that y'all have taken this step. Like the city of Pflugerville, Austin found a lot of problems with our relationship with Flock. For example, they promised us a data retention period of seven days for all of the city's data. And then after kind of a forensic review of the contract, we found that all of the data was being fed into their machine learning artificial intelligence system. So does a machine ever forget? I mean, we know it doesn't, right? And there were significant other problems with how Flock And frankly, Axon, another ALPR company, negotiated with our city and kind of provided these take-it-or-leave-it contracts that obscured how they were monetizing the people's data for their own billionaire profiteering ends. I know y'all have taken some really strong action to put something on the ballot that's going to fix up how we analyze in Pflugerville as well as in Austin these types of contracts. And I just wanted to share with you what we learned in Austin and the action we took. We adopted something called the Trust Act in Austin. And the idea here is that cities like ours haven't really stepped up in the information age to understand procurement when you're talking about AI and some of these new tools, right? For example, our Parks Department was buying cameras and didn't realize that these cameras are equipped with surveillance technology, artificial intelligence, and that the data wasn't just being kept by the city but was being captured by the company and then sold with their other clients. And so we really do need to reform municipal governance to understand procurement. And I think this is some of the direction y'all are taking, I understand. But what the Trust Act in Austin does is make sure that sophisticated technology experts analyze any surveillance technology that the city has or wants to acquire before that's put into place. This analysis results in what we call a surveillance impact report that's made available to the public at least four weeks before any technology is deployed and gives council a chance to take action to reject such tools if the people don't want it. And so I would encourage you all, you know, happy to share it with any of the council members. But the Trust Act is something that we've modeled after communities in California that are facing similar threats of surveillance technology. And this is one of the ways we can protect our citizens. But I really want to congratulate you all on the action you're taking tonight and thank you for your service.

Thanks for being here, Mike. As Alan Kreider comes up, I'm going to invite Les Wall, Jeff Cohen, and Joshua Lambert to line up. Kreider.

All right. Good evening, Mayor and members of the City Council. My name is Alan Kreider. I live in the Highland Park neighborhood, work in cybersecurity governance and compliance, and also volunteer with the Pflugerville Citizens on Patrol program. Tonight, you face two intertwined issues, the ALPR Camera Contract and Councilmember Kaufman's Safe Technology Resolution. I recognize that this is a fast-moving discussion, and Council is actively considering amendments tonight. I offer this analysis as an operational baseline to assist you in your deliberations. Public safety and privacy governance are not opposing forces. To touch base on what the police chief has already said, PPD has demonstrated sound internal practices like visual hit verification and 30-day data purging. These cameras provide critical investigative leads for our detectives. Last week, ALPR cameras identified the suspect vehicle in the GT Distributors burglary near my home, leading to the recovery of stolen firearms equipped with illegal Glock switches. That is a real public safety achievement. However, the public records disclosure showing 1.6 million outside searches across 459 agencies revealed a profound governance breakdown. As we learned today, even though PBD configured the system to block statewide and nationwide sharing, the platform shared the data anyways. And that's an issue the vendor has now acknowledged. The public has every right to be alarmed. This demonstrates that software settings and informal guidelines are not enough. We need an enforceable municipal policy. The City Manager's decision today to pause operations and cover the cameras was a necessary interim safety measure. As Council considers a formal direction tonight, we must ensure that we have a clear, audible path forward so our officers do not permanently lose an effective investigative tool. Because the prior contract expired on July 31st, Council holds significant leverage during contract negotiations to demand that any renewal strictly conform to a binding governance. So, I believe the safe resolution on tonight's agenda provides the exact operational framework to fix this. One, we need to classify LPR as a high risk under Section 3 . That will mandate a strict 30-day data retention ceiling with automated certificates of destruction across all future contracts. Number two, we need to enforce Section 6 for data sharing controls. Immediately sever vendor-wide sharing pools. Instead, we need to require individualized council-approved MOUs tied strictly to documented local investigative cases. Number three, we need to implement independent auditing. We need to direct the city manager to utilize city IT or external cybersecurity reviewers to conduct quarterly log audits, ensure searches match active case numbers, and verify that vendor configuration matches our policy. And four, we need to require annual governance reporting. We need to mandate an annual public report that tracks verified public safety outcomes. As staff negotiates contract terms and addresses the software failure, council should adopt the safe resolution to establish the baseline criteria required before any system is reactivated.

Thank you, Alan. I do need you to wrap up.

All right. And then basically this ensures that if cameras only return to service with a strict 30-day purge control, severed external networks, and verified independent audits. All right. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Our next speaker is Les Wall.

Well, first off, let me say that what y'all just revealed a few moments ago kind of blows what I've got on here away. But anyway, when I first saw it come on the agenda, the first thing I wrote down is I don't trust them. And that's my first point on here. What do you trust, though, Les? That's a different conversation. Yeah. From where I stand, when I look at the Constitution and what it gave us, when there's no accusation of a crime, how in blazes can you share all this information? Now, I will say that Texas U.S. Congressman Keith Self has introduced legislation at the federal level saying federal agencies, you have to have a warrant to get this information. Now, whether that's going to come through or not, we've got to see. They can't even agree what size table to sit down at. But anyway. But anyway, one of the concerns I've got now is much like the old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Who do we trust to make sure that they won't use this information in ways that we can argue whether it violates rights or not, but in ways that will come back to harm the community and harm the citizens? I don't think it's a money problem, at least for the cities to decide who they want to go with. It's going to have to be a trust problem. And from the citizens' standpoint, from what I understand about the flock contracts, we don't own those things. We're basically leasing them or renting them, if you will. And even after our contracts expire, they can still use that data. They've got it stored, and after I saw this on the agenda, there were some flock reps that started going to news agencies doing little interviews. Again, told my wife, don't trust them. But number two, they were saying that they'd delete everything after 30 days. I don't believe that. I believe they're going to keep that thing perpetually, and they'll use it whenever they want to, to whatever benefit benefits them. But I do praise you guys. I think you're making the right decision right now. and do a diligent search for a company we can trust and use that information so i do thank you for your time thanks guys

First off, I'd like to thank the mayor for demanding that the flock cameras be covered because it's obvious that citizens don't want them. This turnout shows that we don't want them. Nobody trusts flock. And it's not just flock. It's the whole idea of license plate readers. without a warrant, they shouldn't be allowed. And before this council would approve a contract with any other agency or any other company wanting to install license plate readers, I think the council would be obligated to ask the citizens to vote to approve.

And if the citizens don't want it, and we'll live without them.

I think that's just the only moral thing for our elected representatives to do. And I know you also mentioned a committee for in the future to, if there's ever something with, you know, approving new ones or some other technology, I volunteer. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. As Joshua Lambert comes up, I'm going to invite, I believe it's Mason Mikel, maybe Judson, and then Tyler Rothley and Corbin Black, if you would all get in line. Mr. Lambert.

Thank you. My name is JT, and I'm here today to make a comment on Resolution 6B. in relation to the renewal of the lease contract with Flock Safety, as well as express my severe dissatisfaction with the recent crop-up of several Flock Safety automated license plate readers placed across Pflugerville. These cameras, whose cost was supplemented originally by a grant, are aggressively marketed by Flock as a boon to public safety with inflated crime resolution statistics, when the actual efficacy is significantly lower. One argument commonly seen in favor of having this surveillance dragnet is, if I have nothing to hide, flock and other forms of AI surveillance do not affect me. Worst argument ever. But you do not decide what may be suspicious tomorrow. These ALPRs indiscriminately aggregate every vehicle that crosses their path into a much larger data set, your license plate, the make and model of your vehicle, identifying features and marks, and even your travel patterns day to day. You do not have to be in commission of any form of wrongdoing for your information to be collected and made searchable by law enforcement, or more realistically, anyone who has access to the data shared by Pflugerville. Without the need for a warrant or any form of oversight, Not to mention several cases across the country where the ALPR's AI recognition mistakenly identified the wrong vehicle, leading to the wrong individual and sometimes their loved ones being pulled from their car at gunpoint. Another common argument made is that these tech companies already have all of our data. So why does it matter? Not reading terms and conditions and blindly agreeing to your data being sold is vastly different from your local government selling your data for you, be it knowingly or unknowingly. The real product for Flock is the data that they aggressively collect themselves. The Pflugerville Flock Transparency Portal makes claims that this data is not sold to third parties. Unfortunately, this comes as hard to believe. When seemingly from an outside perspective, not even the city staff responsible for facilitating the communications with flock safety know the full scope of who can access these cameras and their data, let alone the city council members responsible for making the decision whether or not to renew this contract. Pflugerville would negligently be opening itself to the risk of misuse from an outside department or organization. Safeguards may be implemented here, But how is that to stop any of the 459 organizations outside of the city's control that seemingly have access to the data from abusing it? This discrepancy showcases a glaring lack of transparency on someone's end of this deal. The Fourth Amendment does not allow the government to set up a surveillance state. The very idea of circumventing the need for a warrant by leasing this technology historically rife with misuse and security flaws from a predatory tech corporation and compromising the liberties of individuals residing in Pflugerville is disheartening to say the absolute least. Thank you.

City Council Mayor. A lot has been said already about how I feel about these cameras and this kind of technology. I believe any privately owned network of always-on cameras and listening devices will create some sort of dystopian panopticon, and I have serious concerns involving use of any cameras like that to police our community. Technology is rapidly changing our relationships with one another and our communities. You could argue whether or not that's a good thing, but what has been proven over time is that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As is now apparent from the recent audit, we've all read this invasive, powerful and yet ineffective surveillance technology cannot be trusted. It is flawed. It is dangerous. History tells us that once a system or infrastructure is put in place, it proves difficult to uproot. The longer it stays in place, the more likely we become a system we rely on to maintain our baseline. The more likely the infrastructure will be utilized in lieu of building something new or something better custom to our community. And it will just permanently alter the way in the manner in which we live, in which we work, as we're constantly being under surveilled. The technology system and those who oversee them change over time. The police chief is great. Without a doubt, there's going to be new police chiefs. And also, without a doubt, any company that comes in with this kind of hardware is going to be adding more features, OTA or over the air, and adding more or different, more invasive privacy invading features over time. Mission creep is just really built into this company's roadmap, all these companies' roadmaps, actually. And for instance, last week, residents of Northern Virginia found themselves crept on. They found themselves literally policed by flock cameras, acting in lieu of traffic officers, and getting citations for violations of basic traffic rules, like stop signs and yellow lights. The truth is this level of surveillance becomes the means of the state to manufacture a criminal intent. Furthermore, visual evidence presented as undeniable proof of a crime becomes a steep and arduous climb towards exoneration of the accused. Because of the extreme lack of friction and work required to obtain such evidence, the burden approves when innocence is compounded, severely hobbling our constitutional rights as citizens to be considered innocent until proven guilty. As your constituent, I urge you to do everything in your power to end the use of this invasive, dystopian technology in our community. Automated license plate readers are dragnet surveillance tools that fuel abusive policing practices, giving ICE, giving Border Patrol and local police the ability to track people and repress dissent. Rather than spending taxpayer dollars on dangerous technology for police and ICE, we should be investing in resources that are proven to keep communities safe. Those are jobs. That is housing. That is health services. That is education. Please join the leaders of other cities and towns across Texas and the nation and cancel these contracts and be done with this. Thank you.

Thank you, Council. Came with an outline tonight to talk about my concerns with FWOC, privacy. Thanks to the hard work, Councilman Kaufman, we don't have to have that full discussion tonight. I do want to outline a few items, though. For one, this fight does not end here. Drive up to Home Depot, dozens of flock cameras. Drive by PFISD, dozens of cameras. This is all warrantless mass surveillance still in our community. I ask on the council, please consider how we address those issues in our community. Do we continue to let private businesses sell our data as we drive by on public roads? In concerns to legal framework, there's a lot of discussion around governance, controls. The Constitution is clear. There's a search warrant requirement when these searches are executed. I don't know why we need 30 days retention, why we need who has access. A judge can make that call. We talked of GT distributors. Go to a judge. If you have probable cause, you can never get a search warrant. Like, I don't know why this is so hard. So, you know, Rudy wants us all to go spend money, raise the sales tax. I'll cut it short. There's so much going on in the world today. Flock, you know, it's one thing. Watch out for your community. Watch out for your neighbors. There's gonna be more fights. We need to stand up, be vigilant. Thank you.

Corbin, as you come up, I'm going to call also Trent Barlow, Jim McDonald, and April. All I have is April to line up.

All right, council, mayor. You know, I haven't seen this much unity in the room in close to a decade, it feels. But it seems like we all finally agree we don't like Flock. Just to say, like, growing up, the concept of a permanent record used to be the boogeyman we would scare little children in grade school with. And now Flock has made it a business model. And I keep hearing automated license plate readers. Let's be very clear. They are doing much more than reading license plates. They're picking up on Bluetooth, your phone, your watches. Even as you drive by in your car that's connected to your phone, they're picking up on it. So even though they're black bagged, every one of the flocks is still collecting data on us and intimate data from watches, from headphones. So as much as we think we understand what this threat is today, tomorrow they may decide to turn around to sell this data to advertising agencies. And if we know anything about advertising agencies, it's that they got a lot of money, deep pockets, and they do not let up. And they will buy every bit of this data and absolutely monopolize it. It's not going to get better. We have to take a stand now. And we really... everything that's been said tonight about privacy data retention and going forward technology uh contracts absolutely has to happen and it's going to need to happen faster and faster with the current technology technological landscape and the speed at which it's happening three years ago no one knew what flock camera was and now we have multiple tick tocks a day of them being torn down or city councils like this where they're being restricted thank you

Hello. There's been a lot said about Flock tonight, and I think most of it is everything that I wanted to speak to. As people have already said, and I'll echo it again, Flock is unconstitutional. It violates the Fourth Amendment, which is our right to avoid unreasonable search and seizures. There is a warrant that's required, regardless of whether you can argue that an automated license plate reader in a quick snapshot that's deleted is, in fact, a search or a seizure. The fact is that these create maps of people's locations over time, and that in and of itself is an unreasonable seizure of private data and an unreasonable search. So a warrant is required, and that's constitutionally upheld. The Supreme Court has also ruled in Chantry v. U.S. that using, even on public roads, GPS data to track someone's location over a period of time is against the Constitution. And this is the exact same thing. So I'm philosophically opposed to FLOC. I do understand the value that it adds from a public safety perspective, and I don't want to discount the value of digital tools in public safety. We need to evaluate those on a case-by-case basis because there's an infinite number of permutations of those that are going to come before us. It's not going to be flocked tomorrow. It's going to be a new, different company that's doing something slightly different, and we need to evaluate it the way we've always done. We need to weigh it against the Constitution, and we need to weigh it against personal liberties. Public safety is very important, but it is a slippery slope that leads us to a surveillance state, and none of us want that. I'm very happy that the council has bagged and tagged all the flock cameras. The announcement that I read on Facebook states that the city is still waiting for official direction from the council as to what to do with flock going forward. I would implore the council to please cancel the contract and to make sure that all the flock cameras are removed from our community for our own safety. Thank you for your time.

James, did you feel like you got direction from counsel?

Jim is next. I'm next? Jim is next.

Hi, Jim McDonald. I'm not an attorney, but I've played one on TV before. Sat next to a couple of fine attorneys, so it rubbed off on me. But just brief history, April 2026, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. You can look it up. Council members in Oshkosh Police Department reversed course after discovering the flock representative made inaccurate claims During an open meeting regarding whether their automated license plate readers could generate tracking heat maps, apparently the chief of police went back to his office and did exactly that. To borrow from David there, Thomas Sowell talks about gains and costs. The gain, of course, of an ALPR is high-tech tools can deter regional networks moving between cities. The cost, of course, misleading statements from vendors destroy trust, causing public backlash that can paralyze city council operations. Steve? I'm going to talk a little bit about three causes, again, my attorney role, three causes of breach of contract, misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance. These are also the three ways that you can tell a lie. Nonfeasance is knowing a truth but not telling it when you're supposed to. So, for instance, If there is a software switch that I click that says turn off data visibility outside my network, and I know that switch is broken and I don't tell you, that is a clear case of non-feasance, which is one of the more difficult legal terms to prove. Misfeasance is saying that you're going to fix something, saying you're going to take an action, but doing it in a poor way. So in other words, we're aware of this vulnerability with our system, and we're taking every possible step to address it. How long has this vulnerable persisted and how long is the next patch going to be deployed to actually cure it? Maltheasance, the one that we're all talking about, that's the one, did you take the cookie? And I have crumbs on my face and I say, no, I didn't take the cookie. That is telling an overt lie. And I think time and time again that we have seen flock tell overt, egregious lies. A breach of contract in this case may mean nothing other than simply canceling the contract. I don't think there's any punitive terms within the contract, so I'm sure Flock was careful not to put any in there. However, given the numerous cases that we're seeing nationwide with all these cities, to me, this seems like a perfect landscape for a class action lawsuit in which damages can be assessed and awarded. Thank you very much for your time, Counselor. Thank you for your time.

And April, as you come forward, I'm going to call up Maggie Spear, William Landon, and Cameron Puckett to line up behind you.

Did I really not give you my last name? Like, was I distracted when I felt that? April. Well, give me a go. Okay, sorry. So my name is April Sassani. Good evening. My comments tonight are my own as an individual resident of Pflugerville. I ask you to immediately end any formal relationship with Flock tonight. I understand you can do that with the LRP. And then, of course, the additional ask is that you pursue in your very next agenda any termination for any further agreements that you might have. And then I also ask you to adopt item 6C with an emphasis on creating pathways for residents to meaningfully impact these standards. As a mom of a toddler, I'm deeply concerned about the data that's being so casually collected on my family in the only place that my two-year-old daughter has ever called home. As an advocate for women, children, and all survivors of abuse, I am deeply concerned about the harm that can be done and has been done when this data is in the wrong hands. And as someone who studied and worked in local government for 20 plus years, I am deeply concerned about the institution's delayed response to this issue and ask that this be a springboard for centering community input upstream before critical decisions are made. The decision to cover the cameras late today was the right one, but it's not lost on many of us that it wouldn't have happened without community advocacy. This was a fantastic public meeting theater this evening. But a lot of us and a lot of those in the room have been speaking with you all about this issue for some time, right? It's not like we just learned this week that flock is evil. You just learned that the public cares so much that flock is evil, right? And it troubles me that a resident felt a higher degree of curiosity over your contract oversight responsibilities. On a national scale, many of us are looking at our neighbors and our loved ones, wishing they could find the humility to say they were duped. I'd ask those of you on this council and this administration that are still in support of this technology, it seems we have some consensus to reflect on if you may have been similarly duped. And even if you have, maybe it's time to publicly declare that, right? So again, I ask you to immediately end any formal relationships with FLOC tonight and I ask you to adopt item 6C with an emphasis on creating pathways for residents to meaningfully impact these future standards. I'll leave you with this. My life as a public servant fundamentally changed when I no longer saw myself as the expert, but as a steward and an accountable gatekeeper.

My name is Maggie Spear and I live in Settlers Ridge right by Moose Park where the flock camera was put up directly facing the playground and I feel like that's kind of where this all started for me was seeing there's cameras on the playground where my young nieces play and I walk my dog twice a day. So I want to thank you guys so much for taking decisive and immediate action to bag and tag cameras and I also want to thank the community members who kind of did the research and brought this to the attention of our council. I think this is a great idea because Flock is clearly an evil company and they do not deserve our trust or our tax dollars. I also really think that the civilian oversight on our city data and surveillance state is highly needed and I support Councilman Kaufman's measures to form a committee and I would love to volunteer for that. I'd also like to say that if you guys need any help taking down the flock cameras, I'd also love to volunteer. Thank you guys so much.

My name's Cameron Puckett. Cameron, all right. I wrote this speech. I spent 30 minutes this morning making this shirt.

Y'all have kind of obviated the need for it.

But I just want to reiterate a couple of things and get home. I got a two week old baby that I got to get to. I'm an attorney. It's pretty plain. It's Fourth Amendment violation just all the way through. And I just want to also reiterate that. We need to be dubious of any other organization that's touting similar technologies because the cash flow situation is going to be the same there as it was with Flock. It's not going to be, they're not making their money for $87,000 on leases to local PDs. And that's basically it. Just be dubious of that. It's a core concept problem, not necessarily a Flock problem, though Flock is bad too. So anyway, thank you for your time. Great point. Thank you.

You are William Landon? Yeah, I'm William Landon. As you're getting ready, I'm going to call forward Samantha Birdwell, Scott Mosier, and Dana Azurin. I'm never quite sure if I'm saying her last name right.

William. Cool. Thank you for your action today covering the flock cameras. But I don't think that this is strictly a flock issue. Something that, like, concerned me was the Community Impact newspaper that came out in July, where our police chief was interviewed. And his initial question about technology assisted policing, he stated that he wanted to have a real time crime center was the first thing they wanted to set up. continue to talk about collaborating with Home Depot or Dick's and having like using, or sorry, and we can't have a police officer on every street and every corner and every crime trend. But what we do have is our community has ring cameras. Our community has technology devices attached to their cars and people video their drives to and from work in the store now. This is like the vision that the police chief wanted and why this was allowed to go on for this long and why it took a citizen submitting a request to do this audit properly for this to come to light. And so I just want to call that out, that it's not just external people lying to us and setting these things up. It's also the vision of our city wanting this to be in place. And that's unacceptable.

Thank you.

good evening mayor and city council members my name is samantha bridwell and i'm here tonight as a pflugerville resident who supports public safety but i also believe that protecting our community does not require us to sacrifice our privacy and civil liberties i'm asking this council to carefully consider the flock camera system before moving forward i reviewed the city's safe technology resolution and i believe it is directly relevant to what we are discussing tonight The resolution recognizes that surveillance systems and external data sharing networks can create risks to privacy, civil liberties, cybersecurity, fairness, and public trust. It defines a network surveillance system as technology capable of collecting, searching, analyzing, retaining, receiving alerts from, or sharing information about people, vehicles, activities, or locations. This is exactly why I believe that flock deserves serious scrutiny. The resolution also identifies law enforcement technology, investigations, public safety operations, public space monitoring, and network surveillance as high-risk uses. For those systems, the city requires risk review, public transparency, safeguards, and affirmative council approval. I also reviewed a flock data sharing memorandum of understanding that allows an agency to access and search flock recordings, including recordings that the agency does not own. That agreement establishes a five-year access period. I want to be very clear. I'm not claiming that this document proves that ICE has access to Flickerville's flock data. It doesn't. But it does demonstrate that flock's technology is built to facilitate access to vehicle data across agencies. And that is precisely why safeguards need to be established before surveillance infrastructure expands. Residents should also not have to wonder whether their vehicle movements are being stored, searched, shared or incorporated into a broader surveillance network. This isn't about protecting criminals, it's about protecting ordinary people who are driving to work, taking their children to school, going to church, visiting family, attending a protest or simply going about their daily lives. If the city is gonna collect this information, then the public deserves meaningful transparency about how it's used and who can access it. I'm asking the council to ensure that Flock and every related data sharing agreement fully complies with the safe technology resolution. And I ask you to consider not only whether this technology can help solve crimes, but whether it benefits and can be demonstrated to justify the privacy risk. I also want to personally thank Jonathan for being open and transparent about the information that he received from a resident. I saw your post on Reddit and that's how I found out about that. I also want to thank the chief for being open and transparent about the flaws and inconsistencies in stuff that he saw personally working with that. I also want to thank the mayor for bagging and tagging those cameras and getting rid of them. Most importantly, I want to thank everyone in our community for coming and sharing your voice tonight. Democracy depends on us and for it to be effective, we have to share a voice and let the people know that we voted into office to represent us exactly what we need and what we demand. Thank you for your time.

Scott, I think you've got a unique perspective to share with us.

Good evening, Council. My name is Scott Moser. For the past year, I've engaged with you on this issue. I've emailed, attended Lunch and Learns, and have spoken with many of you individually about how this technology is used and what safeguards protect the public's privacy. I had to rewrite this three times today as this evolved, so... Despite sometimes feeling like context was missing, I had trust in what staff communicated to council and the public. That trust has been broken in a way that leaves me stunned. A resident, our neighbor Sam over here, filed a public information request for the Flock Network audit log, the record of every search run by users outside Pflugerville PD. The numbers are worse than any of us imagined. Over the last six months, outside agencies searched Pflugerville's camera data over 1.5 million times. Nearly 9,000 searches a day from 459 different agencies, including agencies across the state, out-of-state agencies, private police departments with no elected oversight, and hundreds of searches tied to federal agencies we were assured did not have access. Staff told this council in meetings that I attended that sharing was limited to a defined list of roughly 80 agencies, which I thought was too much. The logs show that is not what has happened. In my personal experience with Chief Richards and Lieutenant Summers, they've always been straight with me and I don't think they'd knowingly mislead us. But what I do know is that a violation of this scale occurred for at least six months and no one in the city caught it. The governance and oversight of surveillance technology is insufficient, and this is a glaring example of it. I'm asking this council to vote no on renewing this contract. I was going to ask that the city manager be directed to cover the cameras, so kudos for that, and open an independent investigation into how this went undetected for at least six months. But the vote tonight isn't really the whole question. The real question is how this council and city earned back the public's trust, because right now I don't think you have it. That's going to take more than one vote. It's going to take the kind of governance and oversight that catches the next problem before a resident has to file a records request to find it. Thank you.

Thank you, Scott. Dana, as you come forward, I'm going to call Derek Miller. Lucas Meyer and Brian Boyd to line up behind you. Thank you, Jamie.

All right, good evening. My name is Dana. As a citizen and resident of the city of Pflugerville, I am here to oppose the renewal of the FLOC contract. There's insufficient safeguards of our data while FLOC continues to profit off of it. For reference, their valuation has more than doubled since from 3.5 billion in 2022 when we first entered the contract with them to 7.5 billion as of today. Why are we paying them to profit off of our data without any safeguards in place for how our data is accessed and without really any accountability for them? Meanwhile, the city has left holding the legal responsibility according to the contract as it stands today. Flock currently has the option to determine their terms and conditions at their whim, as it seems that the City has agreed to terms listed on a website that Flock has the ability to change at any time. Features they continue to add, like integration of systems that have the ability to track all Bluetooth devices in the vicinity of their cameras, are not mentioned in the City's contracts or standard operating procedures. and we continue to allow surveillance system users to access our data with little accountability or oversight via regular audits. This feature is not blocked by the current coverings as you put them in place today. P.D. And city management often cite that these surveillance systems help identify bad actors in our city. Does that include the people like Christopher Goodson, who is a police officer with Haines City Police Department of Florida? Christopher used the flock system to complete seven hundred and seventeen searches of his estranged wife over two years saying media investigated this before the system caught it. This is a single and recent instance of many that show the internal bad actors having access to these surveillance systems can be extremely harmful. I asked the council to consider a plus citizen commission that can put together recommendations for any current and future city surveillance contracts. The committee should also oversee regular audits of any surveillance systems and the use of local data. Thank you for finally taking action to cover the cameras today. And especially thank you to all my friends in the audience today who have been doing this work to bring this to your attention for several months now. Thank you for voting on the contract renewal and for the love of all the citizens in this community that you represent. Take them down.

Yes.

If you don't mind, I want to I want to. mentioned something that Dana touched on just for context. So the contract, the default contract that Flock is offering every single city and agency across the country includes a link to their website, to their privacy policy, that says things like their deletion policies, how long they keep things, some of the sharing. So things that are material to the contract, they can change at any time without notification. It literally says, we recommend our customers come read this periodically. That's no way to have a contract.

So for the lawyers in a room who learned four corners of a contract is the contract, that's not the case here. It's just utter crap.

Thank you. Mr. Miller? Yes. My name is Derek Miller. I'm a Pflugerville resident. I'd like to start by saying I applaud the immediate actions taken by the council to deactivate these systems, given yesterday's findings. As a 17-year professional in the government data privacy, data security, and data integrity space, I can tell you internal audits rarely find any fraud going on internally. The vast majority of fraud and incidents are discovered by whistleblowers outside of the organizations, like the digging that was done by community members yesterday and lead up to yesterday. I wanted to come and put myself on the record as being opposed to Flock and any of its peer companies. This entire industry all have the same products, processes, profit incentives, and motives for defrauding the public and their clients. A classic concept in fraud investigation is the fraud triangle, which states fraud will occur when at least two or three factors are present, the open opportunity, the perpetrator's capability, and the perpetrator's rationale to act upon those. Flock and its mass surveillance industry peers have all three by design. It is the stated objective and business model for all companies in this space. I recognize there are upsides to it that it brings to the job of policing. However, there are other helpful tools that can be explored. And I want to be clear, I'm not referring to shock gloves and attack drones in schools. Further, I would posit, this is not a reflection on our police department, but I would posit that any police department that says that they are ineffective and unable to do their job without these cameras and such mass surveillance tools are by nature incompetent and that maybe a recalibration of their internal processes is needed rather than hoping and relying on a monkey's paw of a magic bullet. I again applaud the comments of the council at the open and appreciate the chief's staunch support of our community. And I appreciate also the council taking the time to put all of our dissent to these systems on the official record as not every city across our nation has given its citizens the same crazy. Wow. Thank you.

There was one last week. Yeah.

No public comment?

Yeah. Hello, council. I'd love to know who read that contract, but first I'd like to take my three minutes. Well, I mean before it was signed and approved. but thanks for following up. Yeah, we're all getting up to speed, aren't we? So my name is Lucas Myers. I'm a Pflugerville resident, a father, a PTO member, a volunteer, a graduate of Pflugerville's Community Police Academy, and a co-founder of People First Pflugerville. which civic organization exists to help Pflugerville residents build a values-based community, get informed about issues that are facing our city, and organize around decisions shaping our present and future. So if that appeals to anybody here, grab me or just grab the website on the back of my t-shirt. But tonight I'm speaking as your neighbor who believes that public safety and public accountability must go together. I support giving our police officers tools that are effective, but effectiveness does not excuse secrecy and public safety should never require blind trust. Transparency and accountability is uncomfortable and inconvenient at times until we get used to it, but they're also an opportunity to make sure that we get things right. I'm here to advocate for that same passion that you put into your speeches earlier about why Flock is the worst to be directed to a very critical appraisal of any surveillance or AI that might be adopted in the future. The people in charge of Pflugerville's stance on surveillance were caught sleeping. That can't happen again. City Council, you are our accountability measure to keep city staff on the ball. The city's website tells residents that ALPR data is retained for no more than 30 days by flock or axon. That sounded really reassuring until you read the police department's own operating procedure, which says that the data is also uploaded to the Texas Department of Public Safety. DPS owns public, excuse me, DPS's own public documentation states that they can retain externally generated plate data for up to a year and make it available to undisclosed authorized law enforcement agencies. I'll charitably set aside any questions about intent, but I think that we can plainly see that the city's description has been so incomplete that a reasonable resident would walk away believing something that isn't true. City staff have come to this council and told them that the state and national lookup functions were turned off. And even today, its website said data is shared with only around 80 approved partners conducting active criminal investigations. And I suppose that Locke said, trust me, bro. But then residents obtained the audit, as we've all heard, and today we know that the city's own records identified 459 outside organizations, 1.6 million searches, including our camera network, in the last six months. That was 28 per day by the police. That was 315 by the outside organizations. We can refuse to renew a system when those whose operations hasn't been understood or publicly disclosed, but we still need to vote for a strong governance rule. Council should adopt Biden governance and oversight rules with teeth. No future surveillance product should be acquired piloted expanded or renewed without a complete public inventory documented authority independent assessment independent audits enforceable limits reasonable consequences and meaningful council approval and also public needs to know about it all right lucas i do need you to wrap it up Council, don't forget that oversight isn't a substitute for justification. There are technologies that were approved without real awareness of city residents and public notice needs to be part of that process. Thank you for listening to the people on Phlox ALPR Nightmare, but please take this opportunity to be proactive and do not authorize more and less and until the city can prove that they deserve the public's trust.

Brian, as you come up, I'm going to invite, I believe it's Jan Everett, Colin Seaman, and Catherine H. Waddy. Line up behind.

Brian, boy. Yep. Hello, my name is Brian Boyd, and I've been a Pflugerville resident for 10 years. Admittedly, this is my first council meeting, but I felt this issue was too important to ignore. I had a speech written, but since the council does not appear to need more convincing, I just wanted to mention a few things. First, I'd like to thank Councilman Kaufman for his clear communication and focus on the matter. Your updates have been extremely valuable, and they're greatly appreciated. One thing that Councilman Kaufman has been bringing up for a long time is expressing the importance of AI data laws. I'm really curious why these data laws were not in place before this contract was signed and why they continue to be ignored and not become a priority for what's happening now. I would really implore the Council to research these high-risk AI contracts more in the future. I would also like to say, as someone mentioned about Home Depots and other local businesses in the area, local MUDs and HOAs may also need to hear this from you guys and hear what happened in Pflugerville to implore them to also take down their flock cameras. A few final things, I would like to mention that based on data I found, the police budget has increased to $21.3 million this year, which is a 21% increase in the past two years. While they may have used flock to help, I would really like for them to see them do more on the ground policing to keep our community safe and not rely on mass surveillance. Finally, I would just like to say that I would love to see a black bag over the ice concentration camp down the street next.

That's right.

Hello, my name is Colin Seaman. I'm very encouraged to hear the statements from the Mayor, the City Council, and from the Chief of Police regarding taking down and not renewing the ALPR license with FLOC. If any further sort of technology comes through, it's definitely going to be developed and it's going to be pushed on everyone uh there it's really important that the city council have tools in place like really strict governance rules to make sure that anything that we do sign up for we fully understand the implications of that based on our fourth amendment rights and other things that that my neighbors have mentioned. I would also recommend doing independent penetration testing into any sort of security flaws in this. There's a lot of technology packed into these cameras that can be accessed by things that you build at home. So even if someone doesn't have access to it through a license, like a member of the police department, someone outside of that could access the system and use it to do harm. So very encouraged by what I'm hearing today. I'm going to be continuing to be involved in this. Thank you.

Hello, I'm Katherine Hagarwadi. I'm here for the Party for Socialism and Liberation. A lot of what I was going to say has already been said, but I do have two things. One is that I hope people here, everyone here is involved and responsible, but especially the people cutting the checks for Flock and the people using Flock should have a good look in the mirror tonight and understand that they will never see a lot of the people that will have harm done to them because of this technology far into the future. The second thing is that Flock or any alternative ALPR should not be used and it shouldn't exist in the first place. That means, again, no ALPRs. I'm glad it seems like I've got some good company on this side of the room. On this side of the room, I've heard people really emphasizing how Flock is a terrible company and how data governance resolution is going to fix the issue. But I don't think that's the case. Any surveillance technology that captures, stores, searches, and shares civilian information is a mass surveillance tool. And any searching or sharing that happens with these tools are part of the capabilities that the systems were built to have. Any use or misuse, accidental or not, of a surveillance system is a part of the design. I'm using one of my friend's terms here, but the system is what the system does. The system is what the system does. Moving forward with any ALPR or surveillance technology, even with revised policies or increasing auditing, is not going to change anything because it's still mass surveillance. I don't think that's something people should accept because they're being told it will make them safer. There are other ways to approach safety. There are other ways to approach investigating crimes. And there are other ways to build communities that are actually safer and thriving. Thank you.

All right. Did I have a Jan or John Everett? I'm going to call up another three. Christian Sevadol, Danielle Kaling, and Jess Ramos. If you would line up.

Hello, my name is Christian. I am with the Party of Socialism and Liberation as well. I am a curse to always be a satellite person of Pflugerville, but always privileged to come here, bring my children to the local parks, meet my friends throughout everything on Pekin Street, grab coffee, all those great things. What is discouraging to hear right now is there is a consistent conversation about pointing this towards Flock. Luckily, I have heard other people here who have kind of said differently. Flock is not the main issue. It is surveillance and it's over policing. These are the issues that affect our communities. It has already been told to you, plus there's been plenty of news across the nation or specifically in Texas as well, of showing how police officers and cops have used this tool in a way that has breached people's safety and their rights. It wasn't the tool that did that. It was these police officers who had done this. And again, things that were revealed later by outside sources, not by internal investigations. Surveillance here is collecting our data, and it's not just Flock that does this. A key thing that I want to talk about here is something that's not really mentioned. A lot of this tech comes from places where it's used to over surveil people, oppress them, and cause even death. We see this as being used and tested on Palestinians way across the world. brought back here, how it's used, and again, shown that agencies can't access this data, how ICE has been using this to kidnap our neighbors, to kidnap our family members, kidnap our friends. And I will be honest, too, there's that facility on Ongar Street, one that was not announced, and it took local activists. to kind of bring that to the public's attention, much like the information that is now showing how Flock has, as other people will say, duped this particular city council. The issue is over surveillance. The issue is over policing. So when you are deciding this, it is not just about who do we go to and set a flock. It is we need flock out of here, we need Clearview out of here, we need AI out of here, and we need mass surveillance out of Pflugerville, period. Thank you.

hi good evening mayor and members of the city council i'm here tonight to thank you for the decision not to renew the flock automated license plate reader contract i would like to be clear that i'm not suggesting that this technology has no public safety value Pflugerville police reported that between 2023 and 2025, flock supported 333 arrests and helped recover 219 stolen vehicles. Those are meaningful outcomes, even if some of that data probably overlaps. But those numbers also raise really important questions. Pflugerville's flock data is currently accessible to more than 80 outside organizations. Turns out it's a lot more than 80. Public reporting does not tell us the details of how many of those arrests or vehicle recoveries occurred in Pflugerville, involved Pflugerville officers, or simply reflected our cameras supporting another jurisdiction. That matters when you are being asked to approve an $87,000 annual contract paid for through the general fund. grant funding help establish this program and we still await the outcome of the newest project safe neighborhoods grant application if taxpayers are now being asked to absorb the cost this is now an appropriate time to demonstrate the value we also do not have any public data showing what percentage of hits and searches produced an actionable result how many cases were actually cleared crediting flock data or how much officer time the system actually saved i I also encourage you to look closely at Phlox recently announced bad faith safeguards. The company has publicized a new seven-day default retention period while allowing all existing customers to retain longer periods. The agreement before you still described Pflugerville's retention period as 30 days, something to keep an eye on in the future. Similarly, requiring a case number improves accountability, but it cannot authorize a search or determine whether that search was appropriate. Reporting has already identified, as has been mentioned, more than 50 officers accused of misusing flock and other similar technologies, including searches involving personal relationships and stalking. Requiring a case number may make those searches easier to audit after the fact, but it does not prevent an inappropriate search from occurring in the first place and doesn't keep anyone safe. With Pflugerville's data accessible to such a large number of outside organizations, you should be asking not only whether the searches are logged, but who is conducting them, under what use standard, and what meaningful controls exist to protect us. I'm not asking you to conclude that FLOC has no value. FLOC may have been a useful investigative tool, but usefulness alone is not the standard we normally apply to public procurement, especially when this technology raises legal questions that remain unsettled in federal court. The question now is whether the benefit can be genuinely measured if the risks have been thoughtfully controlled and whether the contract adequately protects the city and its residents. I thank you again for your decision not to renew the contract and look forward to the opportunity to volunteer with your community board.

Thank you. Just real quick, are you Jess or Danielle?

Danielle.

Danielle. All right. Sorry, was there a Jess Ramos? All right, next I've got Jennifer Barnes, Mike Siegel. I thought you already spoke. Yeah.

It's my fault.

Paul Lewandowski. And let's go ahead and get Doc Casey in line. Jennifer.

My name is Jennifer Barnes. I am a local community activist with No Kings Pflugerville. I am also a Democratic precinct chair, and I have been a part of the No ALPRs movement that started in Austin, Texas for a little over a year now. First of all, I would like to thank the Council for the swift movement on addressing flock safety's exposure of our community to the dangers of unlimited access by anyone with a password to a flock account, because that's what we just uncovered. And thank you, Mayor Weiss, for making sure that the cameras were immediately covered. That is important because last summer and, excuse me, last year in April 2025 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, that city entered its flock contract and there was a delay in taking down their cameras. It took a couple of months. And a journalist decided to do a freedom of information request about those cameras. And it turned out that even though the contract had been canceled, it had been recording the movements of people in that city for months. Those requests had not even gone through a police department. Much like we may have just been exposed to through this bug that we have discovered with the flock system. FLOC has a storied history of violating contracts. Just do a Google search of FLOC and contract violation and you will have hours of reading. And last fall, you know, even with Guthrie in the news, the Austin campaign, as Austin council member Siegel said earlier, we succeeded in getting Austin to not take on a new contract, but it also took months to get those cameras taken down. And there was a lot of resistance to that. And we found out about Guthrie that galvanized the movement. And at the end of the campaign to get those cameras taken down, I happened to be the last person who spoke at the Austin City Council about it. And I had gone to discuss another flock issue that came out in the news only a couple of days before. Flock didn't have basic tech security measures on any of its counts. Not even sending a code to your phone or an email. You could share a password with anyone. My Netflix account cares more about who logs in. And because it was so easy, passwords were being shared between departments.

Feel free to wrap up your thought.

All right. Russian hacking forums were selling passwords that were easy to access. Anyone could access them. Anyone could get into them. And there was Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the FEC asking for an investigation into the massive national security threat that a vast network of unsecured cameras that could track anyone was easily accessed by stalkers, by abusers looking for their exes, by pedophiles wanting to know when your children were home alone. These things have been in the news for over a year, and I thank all of you for taking swift action, but we told you so.

Thank you, Jennifer. Again, Mike Siegel, Paul Lewandowski, Doc Casey, and up next behind him, Lauren Rangel, and Brandon, I'm going to go with D, maybe Rangel.

It's D. It's D.

Hi guys, my name is Doc Casey. I live just down the road here. I've been paying attention to you guys for about the last two years and some change. I've been a little bit upset. Particularly, let's go ahead and start with Flock. This issue is something that has been going on since basically the dawn of time in surveillance. Let's go ahead and talk about aerial surveillance because I came from El Paso, which is the borderland. So we deal a lot with surveillance over there. No, I was not raised there. I was not raised here in Pflugerville. I was actually raised in a little bitty town north of here. And so I, too, I'm not from Pflugerville, like our mayor. I understand he's from Plano, of which thank you for a little bit of what you've done here, specifically with the water issue. I know we've talked about that a lot in the past. When we go back to this surveillance, particularly we need to look at this as a golden apple of discord that we're just sitting there dangling not only just to our constituents, but our police officers down there. And no, it is not fair to them to sit there and say that, you know, they're always going to sit there and abuse this power. There's been recently there was a temple police officer who got in trouble. for using these flock camera systems in order to, I think, surveil an ex-girlfriend. Yeah, something along those lines. I mean, guys, this was put out in fiction back in, like, what, 06, 08, somewhere around there, with Batman and... He was looking for the Joker. Anybody remember that one? It had Christian Bale in it. There you go. Okay, so it's exactly the same thing, guys. The only thing is we're saying, hey, we've got AI now. This is going to sit here and help us be nice little people. It's not. I don't care whether you're the Pope, the police chief, nice guy, the mayor, misaccountability. I want to see more. We need to make damn sure this doesn't happen again. This is a systemic issue that is going to come back. So if you don't stop it now and put a safeguard in place to keep something like this from happening again, it's going to happen again. It's just going to be a different flavor. Again, aerial surveillance. Okay, now we're just going to put a camera on a stick and face it at you. If anybody has paid attention to anybody who was a... Oh, shoot, man, I just... If anybody's talked to any politicians other than yourselves, what's the first thing that you learn? If there's a camera pointed at you, you better consider it to be on. That's exactly what those things are, and they're held by the government. On top of that, people have been sitting there talking about Home Depot, Lowe's, all those other kind of places, whatever it is, where they've got their own surveillance. Yes, it can be incorporated. It just depends whether or not somebody's going to flip a switch. That same kind of situation happens with vendors. It happened here locally in Round Rock with people doing sweepstakes games. Pay attention to what goes on. Those vendors can flip those things in a minute. Thank you.

Lauren?

Hello. Good evening. My name is Lauren Rangel, and I've lived in Pflugerville for about four years. I initially came here tonight to urge the City Council to immediately shut off, physically cover, and remove all flock cameras, including ALPRs and video surveillance cameras, take the system offline, and cancel our contract with flock. I applaud you for the commitments that you have made tonight. But now I also implore you, the council, not to move forward with any similar network surveillance and data sharing contract here thereafter. I'm deeply concerned about the proliferation of mass surveillance technology across our state in particular. Existing flock devices seemingly innocuously recording our community members as we go to the grocery store, take our children to the park and go to work can and have been misused as we have discussed tonight. To know that the system was engaging in statewide and national sharing outside of the city's agreement without community knowledge or consent only confirms the concerns that I came here with tonight. That brings me to my next point. Cameras don't prevent crime. They are reactionary at best. I too want a safe city and diverting these funds from mass surveillance towards community needs that could support initiatives that actually advance community well-being and safety of our community are paramount. Worse still, these systems are not infallible. According to the Institute of Justice, dozens of innocent motorists have been pulled over, detained at gunpoint, or jailed because of errors involving automated license plate reader technology. As someone who got their passport this year out of concerns for being profiled, as being an undocumented immigrant. I am just deeply concerned about the use of this technology beyond the blatant violation of our Fourth Amendment rights already presented by Flock. In a time when our state legislature has previously put forth legislation to criminalize citizens exercising our First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceable assembly like people did outside today. When residents fear racial profiling and wrongful incarceration and ICE detention, and when our bodily autonomy to seek various types of medical care has already been restricted, having any such contract threatens our residents. I do not want Pflugerville's contracts or dollars to render us complicit in the large-scale surveillance of our neighbors. We should be investing in people, not building infrastructure that can track and harm them. In addition to bagging, tagging and removing flock cameras and canceling the contract that make many people in the community like me feel unsafe, I urge the council to not replace it with another mass surveillance system. Thank you.

You've got a few more to go here. Again, Brandon D. Let's bring up Mayo Castro, Antoine Muthi, and Tori Schletz.

You are not going to be a first grade teacher.

No, I am. I'm doing my best, but oh, I'm sorry. Tori did not want to speak. I'm doing my best. I didn't bring my reading glasses tonight. I'm sorry. Can you give me your name?

That's fine. Maho Castro. I didn't do you a favor tonight. Maria Jose Castro. Hi, everybody. My name is Maria Castro. I'm a Pflugerville resident. I'm also a technology lawyer. I work in the intersection of cybersecurity, privacy, and AI implementation. And even though a lot of people think that privacy is dead, in my belief, privacy is as dead as democracy is whenever we do nothing. So it is really important that we are here today speaking our voices and I really thanks to council Jonathan for the efforts that you've been moving along. I'm here to support them. I'm all for AI governance in our city, highly important. I also understand while working with a lot of business owners and technology, new technology implementation, I am for technology as well. So I'm in a weird spot in where, you know, I don't want to say no to technology, but I want to say yes to decent implementation of technology. I'm a resident here as well. I was highly concerned to see the flog issues. And besides praising everybody here today for the efforts of removing the flog systems out of our city, I want to ask an open question. I am highly concerned of what the people who approved the contract in the first place was thinking the day that y'all approved the contract, maybe two, three years ago. Because I read the contract, put eyes on it, and it's a contract that has no definitions. It doesn't have a clear way to get out of the city. Because even though that tonight we decided that they need to get out of our city, the contract says that they have reasonable time to get out of the city. And if we're dealing with private companies, we know that that can be two years from today. So I also urge you to, as soon as we get out of this room today and word gets out, tomorrow morning you're going to have an email with the new shiny tool that might be good, might not be, who knows, but we need to have a better system in our city for the approval and the understanding of the technology contracts. I want to make myself available as an outside counsel to put eyes on any contracts that At no cost, I'm a resident. I'm just as concerned as everybody in this room is. So, again, my name is Majo Castro. I own Castro & Legal here in the city. Happy to serve you all as well and excited to see what we did tonight. Thank you.

Sounds like another committee member. Sounds like it. Sounds like it.

All right. I've got... I'm going to read these... Anthlon Murthy, I believe, Mimi Stiles, Mark Page, Monique Blaze, and Sean Davey, if you would come and line up. If there's more than one of you here. Mimi, it looks like it's going to start.

All right. Good evening. Just two important things to say, and I'll start with this one. My name is Mimi Stiles. I am the president and founder of a research and data activism organization called Measure. I'm also the vice president of Responsible and Ethical AI at Austin AI Alliance, the chairwoman of the HBCU AI Conference, and I am a Fluberville resident, even though I live in AETJ.

Nobody even knows what that word means.

All right. Councilmember Rudy and I have worked at the intersection of data and technology and accountability in this community for about 10 years now, so this is nothing new. Measure itself has really founded itself in the response of police technology. And I just have a couple of ideas to share. The first idea is rules before tools. That's easy, right? So no AI surveillance systems or automated technology should be purchased or piloted in the city without public policy governing its use, period. Second is transparency before trust, right? Residents must know that data is collected or what data is collected, who can assess it, how long it's stored, and where it's shared. You can't expect trust without that transparency first. And then third, community power before procurement. Residents should have the authority and information necessary to interrogate, to shape, and when warranted, reject these systems before money is spent. I also wanted to mention that I am very much so in support of the work that you're doing, Mr. Kaufman, Council Member Kaufman, with the SAFE resolution. I support this moving forward, but I also ask Council to strengthen it. And that's by requiring, number one, meaningful community review. It's by publishing impact assessments, by measuring disparate outcomes and creating a real process for explanation, correction, and also appeal. The safe technology can't simply be secure and efficient. It also has to be accountable. I really want to move away from this idea of just responsible AI, right? We really need to get to a place of accountable AI. That means we know who we can hold accountable when it does scale harm, because it will.

I love the way you put that.

Yeah. And there's a difference between responsible AI, ethical AI, and then governance. I'm not going to give a lesson right now, but that's something that we all also need to do. The lesson here is technology is not inevitable. And innovation without governance is not progress. And then finally, the last thing that I wanted to say is rest in peace, Dolly Parton.

Thank you, Mimi. I do have four people who have filled out a card noting that they did not wish to speak, but wished for their opposition to be reflected in the record. That is Jessica Robertson, Matthew Greidel, Carrie Davey, and tori schlecht uh one more time these four i haven't heard from yet uh actually i've got a few that i haven't heard from yet that was everyone that i had uh who had filled out a card was there anyone uh who believes i missed them uh anyone i did not call All right. Council, we have action before us tonight. This is just to discuss and consider action to approve a master services agreement between Flock Group Inc. and the City of Pflugerville for the lease of automated license plate reader cameras licensing in the amount of $85,500, $87,500.

Mayor, can we enter an executive session to seek legal counsel on this issue?

Sure. 10.09, we're going to reset to executive session. I think some other folks might take a break on the way.

I'd rather have it consensus. Or unanimous, excuse me. Unanimous, not consensus. Wait, you're all ready? Unanimous. All right.

Time is 1042. We have returned from executive session. No action was taken. We're returning to item 6B.

Oh.

You see what I'm...

So...

So here we are. We have a contract that's already expired. We have an offer for a renewal on the agenda.

Council, do I have any... Mr. Mayor, if there's no motion and there's no second, then we just skip on to the next thing, right?

That would mean that we no longer have a contract.

I'm definitely not making a motion. Is that actually enough? I know that's our normal procedure.

Is that really what we want to do here? I don't think that's enough.

Let's motion to accept and we'll just shoot it down. No, no. I thought that was what we technically have to do. I disagree with that. I don't want it.

I'm just saying that. There's this concept that you have to move to approve and then vote against, but that, in my opinion, is not final action. He's right. I need a vote cast in the affirmative if someone's going to make a motion. So if I need a vote cast in the affirmative, I need a motion to... If you all take no action, then the contract is not approved, right? The old contract is terminated.

Let me try it this way. Mayor, would you entertain a motion? Of course. Mayor, I move that we defund and disable, as well as notify our flock safety that we will not be renewing the contract?

Second.

Would that be sufficient?

Yeah, I mean... You okay with that, Mike? That's an action. We're not being an action. I get where David's coming from, but we need to take a vote.

Yeah.

And then a vote in favor provides for affirmative action that we have declined to renew the contract.

Yes.

Yes.

That's...

To deny. Yes.

We have said that. And this is an action. So it gets around what David's saying. So just press the right button. All right. Everyone good? I hope everyone pressed the right button. Yes, they did.

Mayor, before you move on, if

Mayor Pro Tem I want to bring up something that you've been please do you want to or um yeah I thought it was really important to mention that um not all the flock cameras in the city actually are operated by the city and so I thought it was really important um as we continue to build trust with the residents to let you know that there's still going to be flock cameras in the city of Pflugerville why because they are operated by the school district for which we have no control over So while there was a big move today for the city to bag and tag, as we say, and make the flock cameras inoperable and defund that particular operation, you will still see them in the school district. So the same and all that fight that you had tonight, I need you to take that to the school board. I wanted to say in addition to private businesses as well, I just thought it was really important for you all to completely know the whole truth that it isn't really just done. But the city is doing its part, but we need you to continue to do yours. and take this message to the school board and to everyone for that matter.

So it's, it's, it's, so again, to be blunt with y'all, it's on y'all to go ahead and continue to make sure that this is completely out of our city with other governmental entities, with private entities, and your neighborhoods. Right. That's the only way, that's the only way you're going to have them completely out.

Any other comments? Thank you. All right, Council. We will move forward.

Thank you all.

That was a really long 6B.

It looks like they're still talking.

It's not even close to the longest meeting we've had.

6C is to discuss and consider action regarding the resolution of the City of Pflugerville, Texas, adopting standards for secure, accountable, fair, and explainable technology use, directing implementation, and providing an effective date. Council, we also covered this during our work session. Now you've had some time to digest a couple of the versions. Do we have action tonight, or are we looking for...

further refinement oh I'm so sorry I was gonna I was gonna make a proposal for us to discuss I would like to propose that we do go ahead and pass this resolution this evening however I recognize that councilmember Mateo has additional things that he'd like to see included I'd like to I'd like for us to work with staff in the city attorney over the next 30 days and either an amendment to this current resolution or an additional action to add those in but I also but I don't want to delay city staff being able to start implementing the guardrails and the rules and the oversight that we clearly need I think that's really important because we do have to have an alternative yeah now that we are you know

And my concern is specifically putting, making sure we're talking about audit, we're talking about the definition regarding what's required in a vendor contract. Because it goes down to the contractual obligations. And, you know, what the vendor can actually use with the data, putting those guardrails on there. is huge and significant. For my part, my concern is that we put a policy out here for that and then after that, okay, we're already automatically amending it from that. That's why I was thinking from what Councilmember Ryan talked about is that, you know, we get together this weekend, finish it out, work with staff, and then two weeks, the next council meeting, we have something improved. But my concern is if we don't have some of these things, even the definition of generative AI versus agentic AI. Sorry, y'all. We had this debate earlier. So for some folks who are wondering, wait a minute. Yeah. Well, it's a discussion.

Isn't it a debate? No. I mean, is debate a bad word?

I agree that a lot of your suggestions are material and very important. I would like for us to pass this version of the resolution this evening so that staff can start doing things like inventorying the high-risk systems. Let's make sure that we've got everything covered, right? We know there's at least one other of these products that are in use in the city. I think it's worthwhile for us not to wait to make further revisions when we can start that work now. I completely agree that we need to come back because the other thing that's not in here yet that we need is our resident advisory board.

Yes.

So we bring both of those things back.

And even to the fact, so consequential decision, right? Like there are things that are defined, kind of sound like AI defined as opposed to, okay, listen, this is what the legal specific machinations are with these things. Hiding scrutiny, AI security. What does that mean under the applicable law? That's actually state law. Materials supports, et cetera. Yeah, and I know. I saw that under state law and then I was like, wait a minute. That's not... The way it was written. I was like, that's not the way and I looked it up and I was like wait Okay, so this is a under a of those things from that. What are we gonna say?

I have a procedural question So if we approve something tonight and then we you wait, I think we all agree that there are some important Components that we need to have additive Can we just replace it in its entirety? Because it comes messy if you have it in one place and another and things like that Can we replace it in its entirety? That's my procedural question. We could repeat that.

I mean, we could.

Reveal and replace it. Okay. Because I don't know. Like, I'm just thinking two or three different places is messy. And then are they going to go to the same place for the rule?

Even the definition of sensitive data, the biometrics, identifying information. system inventory, I tweaked a little bit.

So James over here is offering me what sounds like an appropriate compromise. And what he told me here, because he's whispering in my ear, is he doesn't want the goalposts to change. If we pass tonight and then we change it in a month or two weeks, but what he can do is go ahead and get started. Again,

So what I can do is start with the most important thing, right, which is identifying what I believe to be the high-risk ones, right, and doing that work while we're finalizing the policy.

Are there any changes, you think, to how high-risk is defined?

Actually, low and mid-risk is, if you look at, you saw me spell out low-risk, And why, what can be approved administratively or not? And I put it, what is that, page four?

I'm pretty sure that city staff is not going to approve anything here for a second.

We're not going to slide something in under the radar because we postponed it for two weeks.

I will look at the high-risk ones, meaning the software that could reasonably impact somebody's civil liberties. We will identify those. I know what they are. We'll identify those. We'll call out how we use them, what their capabilities are, and what we actually do. That's different, right? It could have capabilities, but we might only use certain features. so i can define those i can start that work yeah while we finalize the policy because if i start that work and then we change the definition and it you know i just i'd rather make it clean uh to your point council member and since you want him to get started let's get him let's get him started sure

I think that is appropriate. Now, I am going to ask, and I want to be clear about this, because staff has spent a lot of time reviewing this policy already. Who is getting together to sort this out?

They're getting together, and it's not wrong.

So you three, go get together, go figure it out. You know what you've already negotiated. Make sure... That doesn't come back.

Y'all need to work together. Yeah.

Did you hear what he said? And I don't really want to engage staff for the final review until y'all are done.

You need a bill instead of a gavel.

Yeah.

Understood, Mayor.

All right, we good?

I mean, did anyone else hear what Kim had to say? I didn't, I didn't. Do I need one of those shoes?

Oh, like, how did she get it to slide that in? Oh, did she say a bell? Yes. Oh, okay. Well, I thought she said a bell, and I'm like, what?

All right, we got it. She said a bell. Yeah, it was totally a bell. We got it. All right, we feel confident and comfortable on that. Okay. All right, then that, everything else on our regular agenda was completed during our work session. That takes us back to our consent agenda and the two items that were pulled. we're going to begin with item 4c an ordinance on second reading with cash and reading an ordinance of the city of pflugerville texas amending chapter 152 subchapter b roadway impact fees of the city code of ordinances to include approving an updated roadway impact fee service area map approving a roadway impact fee study 2025 update and maintaining the roadway impact fee at the current rate for the 2027 fiscal year containing severability and repealer clauses and providing an effective date. James, I believe the idea is we are... You might have one comment on the previous item. Oh. Well, I'm sorry, Scott. Did you have a...

I have a clarifying question.

Certainly.

With the ordinance delayed, where does this leave facial recognition, Clearview AI specifically? I know it's currently in use. I'm sorry. I was curious, with the safe ordinance delayed, where does that leave facial recognition, specifically Clearview AI? I understand it's in use today.

So I'm going to, do you want me to answer that? Sure, yeah. So I'm going to do the work of calling that out and how we use it. I think it'd be good to have a clear understanding of how it's used. So that's what I'm going to work on. So after I put together that information, we'll have the policy in place, I'll provide to council to make a decision on whether or not we keep the tool.

Okay, thank you so much.

Sure thing.

All right, having read in 4C, James, do you have any introduction to that? Mentioning that... we are keeping the existing fees at their current level in order to review and revise and make sure that we've got our projections correct. That's great. All right.

David, you pulled this item. What do you have? I pulled this item because I still believe that these numbers are these fees are too high and they're discouraging development. And in order to see if there was actually any I don't have an empirical basis for that locally. I looked at population changes in Round Rock, Georgetown, and Pflugerville, all areas in the same general vicinity, and roadway impact from 2020 to 2026, 2025 I think is the last date we have available in the data, if there's any correlation there. And sure enough, the city with the lowest, roadway impact fees. Georgetown had the highest level of growth, the city with the highest level of impact fees. Pflugerville had the lowest level of growth. And Round Rock, which was in between in terms of its impact fees, had an intermediate range of growth. And just to give you a sense of how much difference it makes, Georgetown was just about 2,000 people bigger than Pflugerville in 2020, according to the Census Bureau. Today, according to the Census Bureau, there's a gap of about 50,000 people between us and Georgetown. Georgetown had low roadway impact fees. They put new higher roadway impact fees in effect in 2025. So I would expect that they will start to see reduced growth. We'll see in five years if that turns out to be true. But one of the things we can also look at is, you know, Round Rock, which started at a higher base than either Georgetown or Pflugerville, had lower roadway impact fees than we do, substantially more growth than we do, And even though they started at a bigger number, they had fewer additional residents move to Round Rock than Georgetown did. Georgetown, by having these lower roadway impact fees, encouraged development. They got more development. We had the highest ones in that area up and down I-35, we got the least development. I think that we are at the wrong point in the Laffer curve. And, you know, we've talked about the Laffer curve, and everybody who's still bothered to be here understands what the Laffer curve is. But when you raise taxes, at some point, continuing to raise taxes lowers the amount of revenue that you get. So same thing with growth. So there is a point on the Laffer curve, and the Laffer curve is just a visual illustration of how the correlation goes. There's an optimum point where if you have the taxes at this point, or the Broadway impact fees, you get maximum growth. But you get up to a certain point, and you raise it more, and your growth actually goes down. And we are, in my view, on the wrong side of the lapper curve because, according to the Census Bureau, we've added 3,000 people in five years when Georgetown has added 50,000 people. I think we need to lower our roadway impact fees, and I think we need to do it right away. We're not growing and by not growing that means we have a lower number of people to spread the cost of water and the new City Hall and the Monarch between. If we had added 50,000 people in the last five years, people would not be complaining about their water fees because we'd be spreading them out among a lot more people. Same thing with the property taxes. We wouldn't have to increase the property taxes nearly as much to pay for the city hall because we'd have an extra 50,000 people to spread them among. We can encourage growth, have more people, lower taxes, have better services if we lower our roadway impact fees. It won't happen tomorrow, right? It happens over time, but you know, compounded over five years, Georgetown is taking us to the cleaners. They were the same size we were five years ago, and now we are eating their dust. So I move that we immediately reduce our roadway impact fees in all areas by one half.

Can I get a second? A second.

Okay, discussion.

Let's have a discussion.

See, what's frustrating for me is that you know where I stand on this issue and why I'm sympathetic to your point. But I also can't say correlation equals causation, right? I think I do.

I know, I know. Eventually you have to think maybe there's causation going on. I get where you're going. This pattern isn't just these three cities. This pattern duplicates across space and time.

And so you know, you know very well how I feel. And I thought the fear compromise is what James is offering. Is that listen, we got a year. Let's look over it. We got to look at this, see what's going on, and then make a decision on it. I think that's the fair compromise. Because, you know, I mean, I've said it. You've heard me say it numerous times. Like, I hear this from folks who are trying to go ahead, you know, businesses and other folks for that. But he's saying, give it a year. Let's see what happens. And then let's move forward. I think that's a fair compromise for all of us involved with it.

That's just my opinion. I mean... Because I don't agree with the study. I feel that it's flawed. It wasn't using updated information. The growth is overstated.

And that's exactly the reason why you want to delay this.

Yes, exactly. But I don't want to just see what happens.

No, it's not a see what happens.

I was actually going to jump in on that because my expectation is that staff, they know what the goals are. We've had the strategic conversation. My expectation is that they will continue working on this.

But I thought we were actually going to have more of a strategic conversation ourselves and what our goal is before staff actually works on it. So I think we should do that. I... I'm not ready to just cut them in half without any data behind it.

You want the data before you do that.

But I will not.

Yes, yes. And to that point, again, do we need to say this all, continue to say this? Staff hears us. Like, literally. Like, you and I have had this conversation. They have adopted things and adapted things specifically because it's like, all right, we get where council's coming from on here, which includes growth.

Like, you've heard it from them. Yeah, but there is a number. So if we're going to have the strategy meeting... There's a number of things, including how we calculate population. What are we going to be doing with our master plans that have growth numbers that aren't even supported when we do our revenue calculations? Like, we can't just continue to let them stand, even though they were just approved less than a year ago. Like, so I've heard, well, yes, we could. adjust them, but it doesn't make a difference. You know, like it may not affect this or whatever. So I just, you know, I just want to have this other conversation before we approve this. But it's also counsel. It's not that counsel, like I want to look at real data and be realistic and not what we would like it to be.

I agree. And I think we're all aggressively agreeing. And that's the point of what you're saying.

We're not aggressively agreeing. Not yet. We're not all aggressively agreeing.

No, there is a challenge because one of the challenges that we do face is the idea, the whole purpose of impact fees. is ensuring that development pays its own way. So if we cut impact fees in order to encourage growth, we're putting the onerous expense of the infrastructure on the existing homeowners.

Let's talk about that. We have already put the onerous expense of growth on the existing homeowner. When we decided to build the new city hall, when we decided to build the new wastewater plant, when we decided to build the new water plant, those are the onerous expenses of growth. We've already put them on there. And we don't have any growth because our roadway impact fees are so high that people are going to Hutto or Round Rock or Georgetown or Travis County right outside of Pflugerville because it's cheaper. Capital moves, and it's really easy to move when you're deciding where to build a new development. I mean, that's the easiest darn thing in the world.

As long as you have access to water. Give us some strategic time on that.

So if we are locking up the water and wastewater and we're charging people an arm and a leg, they'll go to Georgetown. And that's what's been happening for the last five years. We're not growing. Georgetown is kicking our tails. We're eating their dust. Why should we let Georgetown make us eat their dust for another year? Let's do it now. Maybe half is too much, although half would be in line with where Georgetown was five years ago when they started its five years of explosive growth. Maybe we want to drop it a third, but not dropping it at all sends a message to the development community that they're not welcome in Pflugerville, and they will continue to not build here, and we will continue to eat the dust of Hutto.

David, you mentioned that Georgetown recently increased theirs. Now how do theirs compare to ours?

Now theirs are almost as high as ours are, but not quite.

Well, can we have a timeline on this strategy discussion? Because a lot of times we say, oh, we're going to have this, and then, you know.

And a lunch and learn is not it. Yeah, no. It's because we do it for 50 minutes. That's a strategy. That is not it.

So, James, my question is, is that, so you, this is, this is second reading, right? Okay. So you see, we, yeah, so we saw where this was going. What do you, what's the timeline that you think you can give on it? Yeah, you need action tonight. Absolutely. For You're talking about scheduling? Yeah.

So what's your expectation on future impact fee updates? Yeah.

Are you talking like timeline for scheduling? No, no.

Tell me timeline for this. When are we going to revisit impact fee? Yeah.

And I figure you'd work backwards. I'm assuming that's roughly 10 months. You know what I mean? Like he knows this and then we work back.

Yeah, they start the budget in March. Yeah.

That's why, I mean, it's going to happen really quickly.

I mean, I have to say that, I mean, I don't believe that everything Mr. Rogers is saying is because of impact fees. But I believe that it is partially correct. You've heard it. You've heard it too. No, I mean, I believe he's partially correct in quite a bit of it. I mean, there are other nuances, of course, that we know of. But, I mean, I have felt our impact fees are high. I've heard them from the developers quite a bit. And to be fair, developers are going to tell us.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know necessarily. And some developers, and just to be clear on the record, some developers said they were fair, which was found very interesting. Well, you know which one they were.

More often than not, I have developers tell me that our fees are way too high, even though they're lower than most places they build. I mean, let's not ignore... Our development staff is too slow, even though they're quicker than everyone else.

We've had this conversation before, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say it. High impact fees impact... are small businesses more than anybody else, right? The big, tract home... They can take it. They can take it.

It was like $49,000 for a 1,000 square foot space of a restaurant.

So, you know... Our totality of fees on a restaurant and a new build are over $100,000 in city fees.

Wait, wait, wait. And let's be clear, because since we're opening that door again... We need to figure out, and I know this is your predecessor, so I'll put it on you, but I explicitly asked, and I think we had an agreement, is that we need to incentivize the businesses that we want. I was told, don't do it through impact fees. We have other mechanisms to do so. I'd love to hear those other mechanisms.

And it sounds like economic development may be a top priority.

Now, I don't know necessarily that Mr. Rogers is proposing. What did you say? Lower by how much? Half. I agree with Melody on this that we should look at it. I don't know about half.

If you want to make it a third, I'm perfectly happy to take that friendly amendment.

Are you just throwing out numbers, Counselor? That's the problem I have.

Because making no change sends the you're not welcome sign. Not if you follow Melody is what we're going to look at. And it also causes the restaurant problem that Jonathan talked about.

All right, on this item, we do have a motion and a second, but we do have a member of the public who has signed up to speak. Mr. Craig Reinecke, do you want to come forward and speak?

We haven't had enough discussion already. You're good?

Okay. All right.

There is a balance between development paying for itself and not being able to have any development.

Or more importantly, we need to be able to go ahead and get what we want here. Because if this isn't the way, that's fine. But David's not wrong in saying that we have heard that from somebody who's trying to bring a restaurant here.

Rudy, can you just say it the other way? David's right. Ah.

Let's not get crazy. Can we repeat what the actual motion is?

So this is a motion to cut the impact fees in half.

And Melody asked for discussion. Melody said for discussion. Melody seconded it. And she's right.

So that we could have discussion. And I appreciate her doing that.

I am open to a friendly amount on a different number. But that's the number that's out there.

I counsel your ballot is in front of you.

I was going to say 1%.

I don't know.

1%.

I think we need to have a discussion.

But you're right. You're right. If I'm right, why'd you vote the wrong one? No, you're right that we need to incentivize what we need. We've got to do something. I'm just not going to throw a number out there.

Do I have another motion, counsel?

Move to approve item 4C.

Second. I have a motion and a second to approve 4C.

That's going to be 6-1. Nope.

seven one what are you voting twice kimberly this is a motion to approve the item is written all right motion passes uh four three that takes us to our next item and they're gonna fix the study they're gonna fix the study what is four three four three

Yes. 4-3. 4-E is next. 4-3 was the last one. Just one more.

The first one was 6-1. I really thought you were saying 4-3. I was like, what are you talking about, man?

6-7.

Item 4e is a professional services supplemental agreement with STV Inc. in the amount of $1,940,480 for additional schematic layout development, hydrology, hydraulic analysis, surveying, and project management for the extension of Melbur Lane across Willbarger Creek north of Pleasanton Parkway to Ashton Woods future development of Carmel East Phase 5. Plans, specifications, and estimates PS&E from Cameron to Pleasanton Parkway and bid in construction phase services associated with the tr 1906 melbourne lane project uh melody you pulled this item what questions do you have uh councilmember ryan did you pull this just so that we could listen to uh the mayor try to pronounce hydrology and hydraulic analysis really quickly are you going to talk about your pronunciation

I had several questions that I sent to staff because the scope in this item and the contract does not match what is in the CIP. So I had questions about that, and I was under the impression that staff was going to... provide more information about why it doesn't match our approved CIP.

I got through most of your questions. Okay. I didn't get all of your questions.

Well, I think you said that there was a, you know, the engineering department or whoever needed to look into it. But, yeah, because originally in the CIP, it says it's going to be extended to Pleasanton Parkway, but this is extending it beyond to, you know, another significant portion. It also, in the CIP, it references Travis County project. which I didn't have any information on there. And then I'm just concerned because we started with the design in 2020, and here we are six years later, and it is a very large cost of $46 million. And then I just am not familiar with this project, why it's a priority, and how many of our taxpaying citizens are gonna be using this road, and whether that's with all the roads that we're doing where this lies in the priority.

Thank you again for submitting all the questions before.

Just to start with the history of this project indeed. It started as a smaller section and then we've negotiated with developers along the way for land