City Council - Regular Meeting

It's fun. It's community. It's comradeship. I'm doing something useful and I enjoy it. We're actually doing something for something that needs to be done. Animal shelters and helping take care of the little critters that wander through here.

When you think about legacy, that impact is something that they take and they pass on. Because if whatever it is dies with me or just one generation behind me, then it's just not good enough. And so how can I help others build a legacy that's enduring? Went through my military career, total years of 23 years. So my goal was to be a Green Beret in the Army. And so I put in my request to go to selection and there's a process. And we started with 375 people and only 50 of us were selected.

You tried to sneak it on. We're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the Arlington City Council meeting to order. It is September 8th of 2026. There's currently one and pursuant to VTCA Government Code Chapter 551.071, 072, and 087, we will now go into an executive closed session. Mindy, before you get going.

I love doing this when the city attorney freaks out because I go off script.

And will you come help me up here, please? Come up here and help me with this. I wish I could say this was all my idea, but a number of council members have come to me. Lauren has been here all summer long helping us as an intern, so we're gonna do a little something special for her. For Lauren Villegas, in recognition and sincere appreciation of your outstanding volunteer service and dedicated contributions as an intern, with the Office of the Mayor and City Council of Arlington. Your professionalism, commitment, and spirit of public service exemplify the values that strengthen our community. The Mayor and the Arlington City Council proudly commend you and thank you for your dedicated service to the American Dream City. Thank you. Get out here where we can get it, in the middle.

Hello again. Mindy Cochran, Executive Director of Housing.

Before y'all get going, Lauren, if you'll ask me later, I'll tell you which council members really thought you did great and which ones don't care anything about you. Okay. 3.1. Mindy, please.

All right. This is a Housing Authority annual report today.

This is just the agenda that we're going to go through. The Housing Authority supports, as you all know, low-income families throughout the year. We had about $52 million budget. You can see the budget for the various programs there. Our Housing Choice Voucher Program for FY27 is going to be about $55 million, so $3 million more than it was in FY25. This shows our balance sheet and our revenues, and our total revenues were almost $56 million. We're projecting $60 million in FY27. We were serving about an average of 3,200, almost 3,300 families throughout the year. By the end of this year, we're going to be serving less than $3,100, and the reason for that is rents are still going up a little bit, and our funding is not keeping pace. Our staff performs lots of different activities throughout the year, and this chart shows some of the activities that they perform. On the right-hand side, I think that's really important. We're charged with making sure that all of our programs and the clients that we serve follow the regulations and our administrative plan, and when they don't, we call them on the carpet. So about 30 families were terminated for violation of program rules over the course of the year. I think this is a great little slide as well. This shows the number of inspections that are done throughout the year. And our inspection team is a team of three. Two full-time inspectors and a supervisor that also supervises housing rehab. So they're a very efficient group. They do a lot of work and they're led by Jessica Perry sitting right behind me here. Our Family Self-Sufficiency Program is for folks that have decided that they don't want to be in this position all their lives. They want to improve their situation, whether that's their income or their credit score or their education. We have a team that supports them through the Family Self-Sufficiency Program. They set their goals. They have five years to achieve them, and we had seven graduates last year, and have had over 175 since the Housing Authority's been there. Currently, we have 103 families. Those families can also use their voucher to purchase a home and the easiest way to build wealth for an individual or a family is through home ownership. So we set a goal every year of four families achieving home ownership. Last year we had one achieve that. And if you think about, these are folks that are very low income to start with, right? So they have to have the same credit, employment history, savings as anybody else that's buying a home. So it's a really difficult thing to achieve, so we're always happy to celebrate when we can do that. This slide shows our many, many homeless programs. So all these programs here, Nurse Family, Shelter Plus Care, they serve different populations of homeless. So they each have their own individual eligibility requirements and program requirements. So lots of small programs, which honestly makes it more difficult to administer. And all these programs plus FSS are administered by Ms. Jimmy Sandberg, sitting right behind me in the red. So I'm gonna go back to that real quick. We're concerned about some of these programs because HUD has been sued twice now over the notice of funding availability. So we're not quite sure what's gonna happen with renewals for some of these programs. So we'll certainly keep you all informed as time goes on. Our housing rehab program helps strengthen our communities. We had about 40-something rehabs done over the course of the year, and this was with home and CDBG dollars. You all have the CAPER, the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report, from the grants team in your board packet. It was presented at C&D Committee earlier. These dollars help fund the housing rehab program. and Jessica Perry also administers that. This is one slide to give you an idea of really what an impact it can make in our neighborhoods. So that's all we have in our annual report. It's very, very concise. I didn't introduce Borhan. He manages our $60 million programs sitting here. He's our assistant director of finance. When you go back to your offices, you'll have a copy of our annual report. We're required to create an annual report, and we used to create a little booklet, and we have drilled it down to one page. So it's a nice handy-dandy little tool if you have questions about any of the programs at housing. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Any questions from council? Mayor? Yes, sir. Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you, Mayor. Mindy, do you mind introducing all three and have them stand up? Absolutely.

We have Borjan Uden. He manages all of our finance and audit functions. Jessica Perry does inspections and our housing rehab program. And Jimmy Sandberg, all of our homeless programs, our family self-sufficiency, and our home ownership programs. Becky Salandi is our operations manager. She's not here today, and she manages the housing choice voucher program.

Thank you to all of you all.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Council Member Pham.

Mindy, for the program that they can purchase the house, they have to go through your office, right? They have to be awarded a voucher.

They have to already have a voucher, and they go through a homeowner education class, and they, just like anybody else buying a home, they have to have the sufficient savings, good credit, employment stability, everything that a bank would ask of anybody else.

We have one success story last year.

One success story last year.

How long this program started out here in Arlington, do you know?

50 years ago, when the Housing Authority began.

So how many people, the numbers?

Homeowners over time? Yes. I don't know. I can get that for you, though.

You can email all of us. I'm curious. I'd like to.

Sure.

Now, I know a friend of mine, he owns a lot of rental property in Dallas, in the city of Dallas. The voucher program now, people are trying to move around. They give you 60 days. After 60 days, you can't find another home. They take it away. We have the same program here that you can't hang around your voucher and

So generally, you're issued a voucher, or if you're going to move, you're issued a voucher to move, and we give you 60 days to find a place to move. Otherwise, it's very difficult to manage a program if you've got, say, 50 vouchers on the street, and you don't know which are going to lease and which are not, because we want to spend every single dollar that we have. Also, we can issue you a voucher, an Arlington voucher, and if you want to move to Seattle, you can take your voucher. They're portable, and you can move to Seattle. Again, that's a lot of movement in there.

So when they move to Seattle, we lost a voucher, we can open up?

So there's two options. If Seattle has room on their program, they'll do what we call absorbing the voucher, and now it's a Seattle voucher, and they go on about their merry way. We get our voucher back, and if we can afford to, we'll issue it to the next person on our waiting list. If Seattle can't afford, then they will bill us for it.

Oh, okay.

So we have two options on how that would work. We can either bill or absorb it.

Well, thank you Mindy.

Sure.

Any other questions or comments? Thank you. Appreciate you. 3.2, Spencer.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Spencer Slaughter. I'm your Chief Financial Officer. I have before you today our third quarter update on the Council priority, preserve financial stability and resilience. As a reminder, this priority was created last year and is a consolidation of multiple priorities, but the main goal is to ensure we're spending your money in the most wise way possible to protect your dollars now and make sure we're investing them wisely over the future. This year we have 43 business plan items. And going over the business plan, as I've done in the past, I'm going to have a mix of new projects to show you, since it is such an expansive priority, as well as some high-priority projects that we maintain on here until they're finished. First up, one you have all seen before is the progress on our North Police substation. It's continuing to go well. I think construction is looking to be done sometime this winter, and we don't want to place exact dates yet, but probably looking at a grand opening sometime in the spring of next year. Another item that should be new to you all this year that I'm showing you is our eBuilder integration. What this is doing is consolidating two different software programs, the construction software that our public works, water, and construction teams use. And this will reduce the amount of labor they're having to enter both in Workday and eBuilder and ensure we have accurate financial information so that we can make sure we are doing the best with the resources we have. Project we've recently completed is a AI-enhanced call center that we're using for the Action Center. That was recently finished, and that will allow Jay's team and CLA and the Action Center and Gil's team to help supplement the staff they have while being able to onboard and scale up resources up or down without having to use human capital. And then fourth, we have our e-discovery software replacement that we're in the process of implementing for the city attorney's office. This will allow their staff to more wisely use their time to search for records that they need so that they can focus their valuable time on other legal items without having to dive into reports. Some more highlights we've recently finished the RFP for our budget software a new vendor You know was selected which is a workday platinum premier partner, so there will be no issues with integrating into workday Additionally this will be the first time we've updated the software I believe in about 15 years this will not only allow enhanced forecasting and reporting But you will see next year a completely redesigned budget book which will be hopefully easier to digest information and help illustrate our budget story not only to council but also to residents and And then a quick update on the challenge grant that you may remember from last year. As of the end of the third quarter, we had 16 of the 22 positions vacated, either through filling in new positions elsewhere in the city, or they voluntarily found other work. Since then, that program is now complete. So there is no need to riff employees at the end of this year. And that benefit of adding the challenge grant funding for one year allowed those employees sufficient opportunity to find other employment. Two more program highlights. We're in the process of upgrading the mobile forms platform for our e-citation technology for the police department. This will allow them to better use their time and efficiency of the process when they're writing. I believe this is for the tickets and report software out in the field for them. And then the Parks and Recreation team recently launched a mobile application to help ease engagement in signing up for events and items and registrations at the event centers. Since it was completed, it now represents almost half of their total registrations, which is up from 10% of their historical numbers. Quickly going over our scorecards, we've chosen four new scores to show you this quarter. You can see, for the most part, everybody is within line of what their metrics they're trying to target this year. The only area we slipped slightly is the recycling curbside collection. And that is still a little under 96% of what their goal would be to have that box show up in green for you. So they're well within their targets for their annual collection, even with a slight downturn in Q2. And then finishing up, we have some upcoming projects that you will see in the future that I'll try and highlight for you when I do the fourth quarter. Two that are kind of tied together is our P-card modernization effort. We're in the process of starting to look for a new P-card vendor, but not only looking for new purchase cards. When we go out in that process, we're looking to increase any ways we can mitigate fraud in the city. So the two big items we're looking to enhance our process this year IS A DEDICATED TRAVEL CARD PROGRAM WHICH WILL ALLOW US INCREASED ABILITY TO TRACK AND MAINTAIN OUR CONTROLS ON TRAVEL FOR EMPLOYEES SPENDING TRAVEL AS WELL AS LOOKING TO IMPLEMENT A VIRTUAL CARD PAYMENT SYSTEM FOR OUR AP PROCESS WHICH WILL GREATLY ENHANCE OUR FRAUD MITIGATION ON THE AP SIDE. and then hand in hand with that a big project coming up for fy27 is the purchasing team to review and update our purchasing policies to ensure that we're always in step with best practices and working to maintain state law and mitigate fraud prevention for the city Two other items that we are following up on is we are going to have our triennial audit of the city's franchise payers. That's a contracted resource to make sure that we're getting the money we deserve from our franchise fee payers. And then the big project for Gary's team is the parks team is going to start looking for any alternative sources of funding to help them continue to rely less on general fund source and making them more self-supported. I know we are short on time today and that was kind of quick, but I'm available for any questions council may have.

Questions or comments from council?

Council Member Gonzalez.

Question on the budget software. Have we already selected the vendor?

Yes, sir. Who is that? It's called UNA. UNIC? UNA. UNA. Thank you. Yes, sir.

Any other questions? Thank you, Spencer. Appreciate it. We're going to move on to discuss our informal staff reports. We only have one to talk about today. For the sake of time, we'll ask Kenneth Bloom to come up. and answer any questions you may have on 4.1 Capital Improvements Program Advisory Committee. Any questions from council on that? All right, seeing none, we're gonna move on down to 4.2 on Committee Meetings. Council Member Hogg.

Thank you, Mayor. We had a wonderful meeting today with a lot of visitors, so much that, sorry if we've messed up any of y'all seats in here, but we had to move the committee meeting into this room with a lot of visitors, a lot of good feedback. So the C and D committee met. The first thing we covered, which is, I thought what everyone was there for, but they weren't. The program year 2025 CAPER, which is a Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report. For those of you that don't know, we do this. We review this every year. It's about the progress toward the goals outlined for the 2025 through 29 Consolidated Aid Plan in our plan year 25. Annual action plan for and home funding tracy graham led this tracy's new to our team grants managers come on about four months and you can already see some really good reporting and what she's trying to do to show that for the future it reviews overview of project accomplishments funding allocations performance outcomes. in areas such as housing, homelessness, community development, and services for special needs. It shows the city invested approximately $4.5 million to support programs benefiting over 28,000 residents with a strong emphasis on affordable housing, homelessness prevention, and youth services. Most subrecipients met or exceeded their performance targets. The presentation also marked the closeout of the first year of the 25 through 29 consolidated plan. They're preparing for the CAPER for consideration of council action on September 15th. That will be during our budget vote. We usually just vote in the budget, but we're adding a little piece in there to make sure we hit all the timelines to get that submission to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on September 8th, 2026. So look for that. You'll have that in report in your next council meeting. And if you'd like a copy of the CAPER, just let your admin know and they'll send it to you.

And you'll also have it in your next board handbook.

The second part of the meeting was a community neighborhood development. We met to discuss the regarding single family shared rental property that we as a council discussed the last meeting. So it was brought before our committee. Most of what you'll see in the report, the report was almost the same as what you saw a couple of weeks ago on that. But staff recommended ordinance modifications. relative to the permitting, which is like reasonable regulation of bedroom sizes and number of bedrooms that can be added during their model of a home slash garage conversion, maintenance of the home, which would be adoption of the International Property Maintenance Code, and operation of the home, limitation of one lease per rental property. The committee supported these recommendations and asked staff to bring the ordinance modifications forward for council consideration. Staff also provided information relative to single family rental registration program and a software component to track single family rentals and individual bedroom rentals. The committee requested staff solicit feedback from other cities, which they did give us a report Of what's being shown on properties, but also get a little more details from those cities, the type of programs as well as we're asking to do a stakeholder outreach and a town hall meeting on this and also meet with stakeholder outreach me with our board of realtors. to talk with them, and then there's a lot of citizen feedback on this, so we do believe a town hall is appropriate to get the feedback. They'll compile this information and present it to CND at future committee meetings. We are working expeditiously, but also going slow enough to make sure we get it done correctly and right. To my colleagues, Ms. Hunter, Mr. Galante, or Ms. Garcia-Dumont, anything to add for that today?

Awesome, thank you guys. Thank you, sir. Okay, let's move on down to 4.3. Ms. Garcia, do we have any appointments to boards or commissions this evening?

Mayor, we have no appointments to boards and commissions tonight.

Thank you. Evening agenda items. Council have any issues or questions concerning the evening agenda items? Just so everybody's aware, I intend on pulling 8.21 from the consent agenda for further discussion. I've had a number of people express some concerns or issues regarding 8.21, and we're going to talk about that further this evening. Yes, Council Member Pham.

Yes, Mr. Mayor, are you going to... Discuss 12.1 tonight about the leaving taxes for fiscal year 27. Yeah.

Actually, we're going to let Trey talk about that here in a little bit regarding the budget stuff and all of that, and we'll address it during that time this afternoon. All right.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Any other evening agenda? I have Councilmember Gonzalez.

April.

8.24. Yes, sir.

TREG, cover it unless. Go ahead. Yeah. So we had a chance to talk to the council about this a couple months ago. It's just been one that kind of sat on the back burner. But this is a change in their agreement to count total sales versus taxable sales. Part of how they transact their business is they sell initially to a financing company. That sale is tax exempt for Canalys. When they're selling it, they don't collect sales tax. But then the financing company does collect sales tax when they sell to the end consumer. Rather than adding the financing company and starting to get a whole bunch of other layers of reports that we'd have to get, we decided to revise the agreement. So we're capturing total sales that Canalys makes rather than taxable sales to count the full volume of what's moving through their store at the location there on I-20.

Okay. So I couldn't remember that. As soon as you started that, I remembered that. Yep. Thank you, Molly.

Any other questions, evening agenda items at all? Council Member Garcia-Dumont.

I have a question about the one-way street. Which item is that? Sorry, 12.3. Is it just... We're just adding in that one-way street there?

We'll let Keith come in here to... Go ahead with your question.

Yeah, my question is, I'm sorry, when I click on it, it goes away. I'm opening it back up. Two shakes. Going fast. 12.3.

The one-way revisions?

One-way revisions. Uh-huh. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more? Is it just we're just adding in the one-way for those two streets? Is that what it is? Oleander and?

Well, no, so the street is basically just Cope Drive. Oh, right. So where the school is, where the Crow Leadership Academy is. Right. So basically in the mornings and afternoons, the traffic really goes westbound. Yeah. And in talking with the school, actually the school contacted us and working with our traffic engineering team, the decision was made to reverse it, where it goes eastbound for one hour in the morning from like 7.30 to 8.30, and then for pickup, for the parents picking up the kids from 3 o'clock to 4 o'clock, it'll be a one-way going eastbound, but any other time, it's a two-way street. Two-way street. Yeah.

Did they, and this was a recommendation from the school?

Yes, it was. We work with the school.

So I'm assuming it has general consensus from the neighbors this is a positive thing.

I don't, well, the neighbors are never gonna. Schools around neighborhoods is always tricky. I think this is gonna help hopefully make it better for the neighborhood where it's better flow. But there's always going to be, you know, it's just the nature of schools in your neighborhoods.

Sure. And so this changes it for the foreseeable future? If for some reason we switch this, we make the traffic go, you know, the different direction.

Most definitely.

And it doesn't work, we can come back and figure that out?

Yeah, we can always change it. This is just to make it official in the ordinance.

Sure.

So for enforcement purposes and things of that nature, there's an ordinance that backs it up. But yeah, that's the ideal of it. We work with all of our schools, see what is the best plan as far as traffic flow. And if we see something's not working, we get with the principal and we say, hey, what can we do to make this better? Are there some things you can do on site to make traffic flow a little better? Are there some things we can do to help with traffic flow? And so we work really closely with our schools to kind of help them out with that.

And when will this be effective?

So I think there's a second reading. I believe there's a second reading for this. The first reading is tonight. And then the next, whatever the next council meeting is, that would be the official date for it.

Okay. We're changing it in the middle of a school year, so I just want to be sure it doesn't create too much of an issue there.

No, they're asking for this. Okay, good. Normally, we work to have signs and all of that already ready to go, so when it's time, we're implementing it.

Yeah, so that's just my final question. Like, we're putting out signs. Is the school doing correspondent, like, communication? Like, this is happening.

This is happening. Now, as far as what communication they've put out, I'm not sure. But we'll work with them to see what help that they need. Normally, the schools, they're pretty good about putting out communication to the parents and things of that nature. So we'll work with them closely on this.

Great. Thank you, Keith.

You're welcome.

Any other questions or comments about evening agenda items? Okay, very good. 4.5, fiscal year 27 budget, Mr. Elberton.

Mayor, I just want to follow up a few more questions that we've received since we last met regarding the budget. But I think based on y'all's prior guidance, we should be situated to proceed to make a consideration for your approval tonight based on the recommendations that were there before. I don't expect there to be any adjustments beyond one that I'm going to identify for you here in just a second. And again, all this is out there on the website. It's linked to your packages if you want to look back at any of the history. The one item that I want to highlight is a proposed modification in the Convention and Visitors Bureau. contract and funding. And this came up as an adjustment of two things. One was when Mr. Hogg and I and I think Mr. Galante were at the last CVB board meeting, we heard a big report regarding the rebranding effort that they were going to be undergoing. And we've been making years' worth of progress to build up their reserve dollars, and then they're going to turn right around and use the reserve dollars for their campaign. Well, hotel occupancy tax is doing pretty well based on this year's activities. So with y'all's blessing, what we'd like to do is increase our hotel occupancy tax projection for next year, which I think is a safe bet, just a partial safe bet at $195,000. That provides them the money so that they don't have to touch their reserves for their rebranding campaign next year. Kind of makes it, we achieve our objective there. We're also working within some existing line items based on Carrie Berry Parker, who many of you know has been on the city's team. We're moving her to the Convention and Business Bureau team. And so as a result, we're shifting dollars out of one account into another and offsetting it. So there's no new dollars there, but it is a shift. The new dollar is the $195,000, which is increased hotel occupancy tax revenue. So that's the only change that we're looking to suggest for you to consider. And this would align to the CVB contract that you all would see at a future meeting. So it would all line up. Follow-up questions that I've received from you all kind of collectively at times of the last week or two. Follow-up questions regarding kind of how does the projected Cowboys agreement extension affect the budget? And kind of the short answer of it is certainly this year it does not affect the budget because it's a separated project. funding source. It's a dedicated sales tax dedicated to the venue projects and will be for the foreseeable future. At some point when the projects are funded in completion, and I say projects because we've got two, Cowboys and Rangers, when they're completed that sales tax goes away. And when that sales tax goes away, it's available for other priorities as the council may see fit and as the voters may see fit. So it can go back to the voters for parks or crime tax or libraries or whatever we might want to do. But until those agreements are fully complete, those funds are dedicated and earmarked and can be spent on nothing other than the venues. So it doesn't really affect us this year, 15, 17 years from now. That window starts to become an opportunity where it might have some flexibility for us to consider. I also received a question regarding kind of how the future bond elections kind of impact on the budget. And what we do, just from a public perspective, today's work and consideration is really around the operating budget. A piece of the operating budget has debt service payments for things that have been approved in prior capital budgets. And we pay for that, usually it's a general obligation bond for a street, a park, a fire station. We approve that each year, usually in the winter time, February, March. And when we approve something in February, March, it shows up in the September, October budget window. And then the cycles just kind of repeat each year. So next year's funding will depend on what, or next year's budget will depend on what we operate in this year for February and March. And as we know, we've also gotten on a cycle where now every three years, the council's decided they want to consider a off council member election for charter and bond questions. So we will see, probably need to talk to you all earlier, mid next year, about creating a bond committee for something that we would take a look at for the May 28 election. where we don't have candidates up for election, but we would have charter or bond. And so the bond things that we would be able to consider at that time would be based on how we're doing on overall economic profile and debt service, right? So we'll be able to come to you and say, here's the next set of streets, the next set of fire stations, any other public improvements that we would want voters to consider, want you all to ask voters to consider. and then we will be able to factor that into future elections. So our goal is to kind of always keep our debt service proportional to the ratios you all have set in our financial policies, which is less than 10% or less than 20% of our overall operating budget, less than 2% of our overall ad valorem tax base, and then whatever the per capita amount is that's been set. So we have ratios. We stay within those ratios. As the tax base grows, the amount we have to invest in our streets grows. If it shrinks, the amount we have to invest in our streets shrinks. So it depends is the short answer to the longer question of what would future bond elections look like in our budget. It depends on how much you all decide to allocate in the capital budget, which is in the wintertime. and then future bond elections that you all will need to kind of hone in on. So this year's budget has, I think, 18.52 cents allocated to debt service, which are past projects that we're paying off, the various fire stations and streets that are out there. We've also talked, had some inquiry about compensation. And I want to highlight this just kind of from a historical perspective, what we've done for employees. This year's proposal is 3% across the board, which follows similar last year. The year before, it was 2% for all employees with an additional 2% for law enforcement because the market showed that we were behind in the law enforcement area. And you can kind of work your way on back. 2023, coming out of the COVID rebound, was a particularly healthy year for employees as they took no pay raise in 2021 and across the board in 2022. very kind of steady as she goes here given the environment that we're in but at the same time we have done the comparisons to know that we're holding our own as it relates to the competitive marketplace there's there's maybe one other place i can think of that's doing anything bolder than we have but otherwise we're we're kind of holding the steady part of where we want to be compensation wise and then the last thing i've heard some questions about was water rates which continues to be kind of a question. And I want to highlight, you all know, I think, that we set rates based on volume of use. We know that most people, 82% of our folks, use under 10,000 gallons of water. If you think about it, you go to the grocery store and you buy a jug of Orzarka, a gallon jug, right, and what you might pay for that, $1.99, $2.50, whatever it might be, and what we're talking about here, these rates are for 1,000 gallons of that at a time, right? So when you just think about just the value comparison, the volume of water we're providing at the value that we're providing it at is extremely positive, but at the same time, We've got fixed rates for connections, water connections, and then the volumetric is the more you use, the more you pay. The prices are higher the more you use. It accelerates, and it's intended to ensure or to encourage conservation. That's why that weight structure exists in that way. And so what you're able to see here is on the water side, the fixed rate is increasing 4.8, but the volumetric rates are increasing at 10.5-ish. And then sewer fixed rate is 8.8 with the volumetric at 1.7. Depending on what class you're in, it depends on how your water rate's gonna move. It's very individualized, just like our individual tax situations with the IRS, who can deduct what, who has family, who doesn't have family. It's all very different. Water use is no different. Some people have pools, some people have irrigation, some people don't. Some people are one household, some people are 10 people in a household, and they use a whole lot more water. But when you take a look at how we aggregate and average out, our average user is in this category. For illustrative purposes only, we used 8,000. That's the average user. Of course, in this band, it goes up to 10. But the average is 6 and 3 quarters, or 6.37. If you're a low user, it's 4.7, and if you're a commercial user, 7.89. This is gonna be one of the largest cost drivers of our budget in the future, is increasing water rates. Supply issues, cost issues of treatment plants, the plastics in the water and all that are driving costs here. This will be a continuing challenge for us to help keep things affordable. But just to help people understand, and this is what I continue to try to use to help explain, is this is that inclining structure. The more you use, the more you pay. But you pay incrementally based on how you do it. So on this very far out example, you're going to pay a fixed rate, and then you're going to pay the 2,000 gallon rate, and then 8,000 more to get to 10. And then you can see how it kind of ranks up. And the more you use, the more you pay. And it just builds on itself, right? We have tons of tools online for people to monitor and set alerts to control their water use, to see their water use on a daily basis. Occasionally, if your water is a little bit out of kilter, you might get a phone call or an email from us that say you might check for a leak because we can see a really big change in your pattern right so that's a little bit about how the water pieces work and of course even with the changes that we're recommending to you all we still are at the very low end of the residential marketplace providing the best overall value and water cost in the region we're proud of that Which kind of leads us to where we are today on the tax rate. Y'all have seen this chart before as far as the things that we were considering, you know, kind of in this kind of gap that you all created between what we proposed at 62.98 and the proposed flexibility to go up to 63.63. Based on the feedback that y'all have given us the last couple of meetings, we don't have anything to add into this area. And y'all's feedback was let's stay, at least the majority of your feedback was let's stay at 6298. On your agenda tonight, and this might be what was Mr. Pham was alluding to, you've got to do a couple of budgetary actions. One is to adopt the budget, the spending plan of the revenues and the things that are in there for staff and headcount and funding vehicles, et cetera. And then another is to levy a tax rate which will fund that. The budget that's in here is funded at what we propose the rate at of $62.98. We created the ability to potentially go to $63.63 because we have not added anything to the budget. You do not see any increase in the city's spending plan. So you have two actions, to consider the budget and to consider levying taxes. Tonight on your agenda, because of how the law reads, you have an item that says you need to consider a tax rate of 63-63 because when we took that action to say we want our maximum to be this or to consider, it's that. That's what the last formal action was that y'all have taken. Tonight's action will reverse that essentially based on what I understand y'all's intent is. So it's 63-63, but we need, and I think Spencer has sent you all either put it at your desk or sent you an email with an alternative motion, which would need somebody to make a motion and second the fact that we want to put the substitute ordinance forward, which says that the substitute rate is the original rate of $62.98. So once you make that change, and a majority of you all consider that, then you'd have first reading of a budget and tax levy for tonight at the 62-98 level, pending any other action that you all want to consider. But I kind of got from the last meeting that we were kind of wrapping this up. And you'll have to do that again on the 29th, or actually not 29th, but next week, the 15th, we'll have a special budget meaning which will have the second reading of whatever action you all take tonight, plus a litany of other budget-related topics that will be the Worker B resolutions and items relative to your overall budget. So those are the follow-ups that I'm aware of, and we're happy to take any other questions as we try to land this.

Thank you, Trey. Councilmember Pham, did I answer your question earlier?

Yes, Mr. Mayor.

Okay, thank you. Any questions from council on budget stuff? Council Member Garcia-Dumas.

Hi, Trey. So when we looked at the options when we were considering 63-63, some of those things included the real-time crime center to 24-7, the gas mask, the expanded homelessness services, Arlington Life Shelter, that whole thing that you have right there on that slide. So the budget that we are voting on tonight, because it's at that 62, we're saying no to these things.

Yes, ma'am.

Okay, so you had made a comment of maybe we could find a place to fund these. How realistic is that?

So I think what we'll do, and we identified those all as priority unfunded areas. It doesn't mean that they're priority areas that aren't going to be thought about or tried to be addressed in some other way. And there's a couple of primary ways that we would try to address that. One is taking a look at the year end, when we end on September 30th, We probably need 30 days or so to kind of let the dust settle, maybe early November-ish, where we'll take a look and see, how did we end the year? And are there some one-time revenues that we can allocate to some one-time expenditures, such as the equipment items in particular there? I would be cautious about putting any of that money towards ongoing salary costs. but not buying gas masks or other equipment for firefighters. Those are things that we would look for. That is an opportunity. And then we would also look at our current operational situation, and we may make, for example, a call on the Real-Time Crime Center in particular because I'm a fan, as I'm sure many people are. We might need to take a look at how we – de-emphasize some areas within the police department to let us populate the staffing in that area because we get more bang out of that right so it's not funded but it doesn't mean that we can't work on trying to make it happen but it may mean something else that we've been doing becomes a lesser priority because we'll borrow resources to make some of that happen sure

Yeah, and as we look at that, I am really interested in that very innovative plan for the Arlington Life Shelter of paying for the water bill to see if that would increase their capacity for all those beds that exist, but they cannot fill them. That seems like an ongoing issue that we're going to keep having with homelessness. So it was a really innovative way to look at that. So I'm interested in that as we end the year. My last question was about the CVB. Maybe you have it. Could you go to the one about the CVB? Okay. So, and maybe this is just my misunderstanding. So, modifications to this year's contract, a one-time contribution to their reserves, the CVB reserves?

Yes, ma'am.

Of $847,000. And we've never done that? No.

We have done that in the past. We had a goal to get that to 1 million. We've been incrementally working our way up to that. This year was the year to get to 1 million. But because of their other plans, they wanted to work on that rebrand, and it left them a little bit short, and they actually adopted a budget that was slightly deficit. It's about an $8 or $9 million budget, and it was short about $200,000, the 195 that I'm suggesting. That gave me some heartburn, so I wanted to try to augment that to where their budget can be in the black, day one.

So the 847, that is around what they get every year?

No.

No.

It's building a reserve to that amount. So next year, things work.

A contribution to the reserves of 195.

Right, that should be zero next year. They'll have a million dollars in the bank to help them bridge that. operational issues like a major event trust fund kind of item or something like that, but we will not continue to add to their reserve once we fill the bucket on that goal of a million dollar reserve target.

Okay, so they currently have a reserve of $847,000?

No, they have a reserve. It's low $300,000, $400,000-ish. So this amount gets us up, plus whatever they were planning on pulling out for it this year. The goal is that they would have a million-dollar reserve. That's the goal.

Okay. Did we do a contribution to their reserves last year?

We did.

Of what?

Don't recall. We'd have to look and get you that information.

Was it as high as 847? It was not.

It was not. Because we didn't have the resources last year to do that. Yeah. It's been about a, this would be I think the fourth year to kind of work our way up in that way to get to that goal.

Does the CVB already receive funds from the city outside of that reserve, that contribution to the reserve?

Yes, they receive a contract from the city. I want to say it's around $9 million total. It pays for virtually everything you see over there. About 90% of what the CVB does is funded by the city. And so all their staff salaries, their marketing agreements, their matches for trust fund agreements and their reserves, 90% of that money comes from the hotel occupancy tax dollars to advance and brand and market the city and to bring more conventions and business to town.

Okay. And so we are giving them $847,000 this year? More for a reserve. Okay.

You'll have a contract on your agenda next time that will have a very large number on it. It's their annual contract of around $9 million. It will have incremental amounts on it to their reserve.

including the 250 and the 259?

Those are embedded already in there. And so we're just moving, well, it's embedded in the budget. It's not embedded in their contract. So the 259 is the Carrie Berry Parker position that I was talking about earlier. It's been on the city's books. We're moving it to their books. that and their associated public event kinds of costs that are there. And then the increased destination marketing also comes from, that's what they do, right? And if I'm going to give them more money for anything, I want them to market the city more. And if resources are more adequate, that's what we want to do.

Okay. I guess maybe I'm just not understanding. So is it 847 plus 250 plus 259?

These are the modifications to this next year's contract. It's not the contract. It's modifications to the contract. Additional. There's a base amount that's already $8.5 million, $9 million. These are additive to that.

Yeah, so their contract plus 847, plus 250, plus 259.

Yes.

Plus 195?

No. 195 is the revenue that's funding a portion of this. It's revenue into the fund. Expenditure coming out is partially offset here. Otherwise, the dollars already exist in the fund, and we are modifying what was previously in the budget book. So it's a shift of priority in the book's explanation of how the dollars are spent with 195 new money. The other stuff is not new money. It's repurposing of old money.

Okay, and does the CVB still manage the ACTC grants?

They do.

And are they managing it, or is the volunteer committee appropriating those funds?

So a good question, and you asked that question last time, and not to take anything from Mr. Hogg, but just to make sure we're all on the same page around that. The ACTC money comes from the city to the Convention and Business Bureau. In a contractual way, the Convention and Business Bureau is responsible for allocating those dollars. How they allocate those dollars is they have an Arlington Cultural Tourism Council that has now met separately and come up with new guidelines and new rules and policies, which have been passed back to the CBB board and then back to you all through Mr. Hogg's report about how that would work. So, ACTC will be kind of the main recommender of how the monies will be allocated pursuant to the new updated policies that were created and adopted by the board and funded by you all and ratified by you all that that's how you want the money to be allocated. Not to who it gets allocated to, but this is the 85-15 policy split that you want for bricks and mortar versus upstart kind of organizations, right? So my suggestion is to you that The city, these are hotel occupancy tax dollars. They are tax dollars. Therefore, we're the ones ultimately responsible for it. We contract with the CVB to do this particular function. They use volunteers through this organization to recommend back. The board approves contracts for everything pursuant to what we gave them contract money for.

And that's new, right? The CVB hasn't always done ACTC.

No, they've done that now for probably eight or nine years would be my guess. Over the years, the city has done it, and we were told to move it somewhere else. The Chamber of Commerce did it for a few years. They said it didn't, ultimately after doing it, it didn't align to them. So the place that made the most sense, because the funding of the arts comes from hotel occupancy tax dollars, the CVB is responsible for generating hotel occupancy tax dollars. It made the most sense to have alignment with them as long as the alignment is with what you all want as a council policy setting body of how much money you want to spend on the arts and how we can make that work. So it's been with them for a good eight or nine years.

Yeah, I remember two years ago being on that board, and it was the first time we voted as a board to approve those dollars.

So it may have been with him for a very long time, but the board didn't have any... That was a new process that I requested because I was uncomfortable with the control mechanism that was in place. That we had a group of individuals making recommendations but weren't really responsible for the recommendations from the group that appropriated the money in the first place to the board who was contractually responsible for it. So I asked the CVB president to make a change so that those recommendations came forward to the board for approval so that we had a good contract trail on all of that. That's what that was about.

Yeah, so the reason for my questions about this is because the CVB does have that part, the ACTC within it. And the arts love the hot tax, right? And that is part of how we fund our arts organizations. And so in many ways, the CVB is a part of making that decision. And so if we are going to give the CVB a one-time contribution to their reserves to the tune of $847,000. I mean, that's a lot of money. I love the CBP. That's a lot of money, and they have their hands in where our arts dollars are going. So it's just, we just really, I want to be mindful of where this money is going and making sure that the money is... We know kind of all the sieves that it goes through you know like as it gets to each of our Organizations because the CVB does do such a good job This is a large infusion Just want to make sure that it's all getting to the right places It will and if you remember part of what we also did in this year's budget Hadn't been long ago.

I think it was oh wait oh nine Arch grants funding in Arlington was zero and So we've started to incrementally work our way up a little bit at a time. This year we will allocate the full state law maximum of 15%. So the full 15% will be available for arts investments in our community for the first time ever as part of the budget.

Great, thank you.

Any other questions? Comments from council on the budget stuff? Mayor. Yes, Council Member Gonzales.

Thank you, Trey. Thank you, Mayor. These are not questions. This is basically a comment. I just want the citizens to understand that the budget is a full-year project. It doesn't just start in June, July. When we get the notebook in August, you have to really go through all of this to really know what's going on and understand the history. If you can see, I've marked quite a few because I do read every single line. And I'm not bragging. I'm just letting people know. I don't want people assuming that you can come on council and all of a sudden making all these changes. You've got to realize in the past we've had conservative valuations. The property tax rates, we've lost over a billion dollars of value through protests. There is no reappraisal plan, and this is all stuff that you have mentioned before. But it's important to know because we don't know what's going to happen in the next two years. You know, when you look at the compensation, you know, I mean, we've been very blessed that we're able to give our staff compensation Races, they're not very much. But if you look at our staffing, we've cut back staffing, not get rid of positions, but people are taking on more. And that is a big deal. So you have to pay the employees to what they're doing or not you're going to lose them. So that's always a priority along with police and firefighters. With police and firefighters, they require a little more money. And we've been blessed, like you said, over the salaries. You know, we've given 3%, but if you look at it, I mean, in 2020, like you said, I'm going to put these in dollars. We didn't give anything because of COVID. 2021, we gave everybody 2%, and it might be a little off. That's 4.1 million. 2022, we gave everybody 3%. That's $6 million. In 2023, that's when we had a little catch-up. And so it was $15 million. So think about that, $15 million for every $4 million That's a penny, is that correct?

Mm-hm.

Tax, okay. So and then 2024, we gave 9 million again, because we're still trying to get caught up. So now you've got $24 million in increases in salaries, which you will have to continue to pay. So that's something we have to consider. 25, we gave a decent raise, but that was 6 million. 26 was 8 million, and this year with just 3%, it's 8 million. I'm saying this is important because we can't just focus on, oh, what do we need? You know, there's a lot of wants. There's two things we can do. We can take it to the voters and tell them this is what we're going to do. And especially when you hear about streets and infrastructure that we're falling behind. Absolutely. You know, if we raise that to whatever that 6.3, if it's all for streets, I'll be for it. If it's for other things, I'm not going to vote for it. People have to look at how we balance the budget this year. We moved from the Cowboy Stadium rent and name to the general fund. First time ever. That's $2.5 million. That's $0.75 a penny to balance the budget. The business is continuing to fund $4 million. Like Trey has said, there's a chance we're not going to have a baseball season. That's going to affect our sales tax. So this is all, you know, not scary, but it's reality. And as city council members, we have to look at all of this, not at our projects or a certain group or whatever. We have to look at everybody. Litigation loss reduction. I'm concerned that we've lowered it to 1.4 million. We don't know what's going to happen. If we have a lawsuit that we lose, like you said, we've got to come up with that money somewhere. So when we talk about money possibly being saved for something else and, hey, can we use it for that, we don't know what's going to happen. Workers' comp is another one. So I just want everybody out there to know that this is not an easy process. It's not in here to start looking at it. It's like, why didn't this get funded? You've got to go through this entire book and look to see what's going on. This has changed over my seven years. I've done this for 17 years, and this is probably one of the most important things as a city council member because we protect the citizens' taxes. I know taxes, one penny is not much, but when you're talking about gas going up, everybody's, you know, no... Like I said, if we're gonna raise taxes this time again for the third year in a row, it's gonna be for street repair. That's the only thing I'm gonna do because that needs to be done. But I think it's important that the citizens understand that when they vote people in, that this is what this is about. They've got to understand that somebody's going to be there to answer emails for the citizens, return phone calls. It is a tough job. It's a full-time job. And I just want to understand that, you know, we're having an election coming up next year, and I want to make sure that we get the right people in here because I love being with these guys, and I'm going to be gone, and I want to make sure that people understand how important this is and how important our staff is and we have to take care of them. So thank you, Trey.

Any other questions or comments from Council?

I have a question. Trey, thank you for the presentation. We still, and you presented on the budget the first presentation, we still have one of the lowest water rates in the DFW area, right? If not the lowest, one of the lowest, correct? Yes, sir. I remember we have a graphic, right? Right there. So even knowing that we have to do some adjustments, right, on the rates to maintain the quality of the services, I want people to realize that we purchased the product, the water, we purchased from Terra Water District. And when they raised the fees, which they did, because the state of Texas is doing a lot of infrastructure investment, so they raise their water fees. I run my business, and your product that you resell to the customer, we resell the water. We treat the water that we buy, and then we resell it. That's basically what we do. When we purchase the product for a higher price, Unfortunately, unfortunately, it's a decision, it's a tough decision, but we have to pass the cost forward. Of course, there's some savings that we do for efficiency, right? And we are doing this, doing capital investments to be more efficient when we treat the water and cost us less in the long term. But I agree with Council Member Raul here, but we're talking about one or two or three years, it's hard to change the picture in one to three years because those capital investments, they occur in cycles of five to seven years, correct? Yes. And that was my question, one of the lowest. And I agree with him. So I've been here for two and a half years, and I learned a lot. When I came for the first time, I observed the budget process. Basically, you have one month, two months to get your feet wet and say, okay, this time I'm just going to look at it and let me learn with it. So the next year, we actually have a tough year that we have to make cuts. And I commend your team. This is a lean team. Lean machine, run very tight. We have savings of 9% in the first year, 7% this year. We are forced to do that because of the Terran appraisal district, property taxes. We have not enough funds to balance the budget. And I commend you guys because the process that we had last year of working the budget for one year, one full year, It gave us the knowledge for a much smoother process that I see this year because the procedure was there, right? So we're already looking. Everything is going on for the entire year. And when it comes time for budget, we already know what to tweak and what to expect. I appreciate you guys, what you guys do. And I commend your work, your leadership, and everybody in the finance spaces out there looking at me. Congrats, Spencer. Congrats, everybody. Thank you so much.

Any, I'm almost afraid to ask, are there any other comments or questions? Thank you, thank you, Trey, I appreciate it. We're gonna move on down to 4.6, Tarrant County November Election Polling Sites. Ms. Shortall.

Yeah, Mayor and Council, bringing this item back at your request, and we've got a couple things for you at your place. First is a draft resolution that you all asked to be brought back for your conversation. The other is a set of maps. There's actually four sheets of paper here. So the first two show early voting locations. The top one should be 2022. The second one, 2026. So just showing a comparison between November 2022. Last time these seats are in these positions that are up for election November were on the ballot to the adopted early voting locations that the commissioner's court approved last week. And then the second set would be election day voting locations comparing 2022 to 2022. at the 2026 adopted locations for November. So wanted to provide this information to you and then obviously let you all discuss the draft resolution.

Thank you for doing this. I kick this off because I'm concerned about what the county has done in decreasing the number of polling sites here in Arlington and throughout Tarrant County. I realize that the vote has already happened in Tarrant County, and this will likely fall on moot ears. However, I'm also a believer that we owe it to the residents of Arlington to speak out on their behalf that we don't agree with the reduction of the polling sites. You can argue about whether or not you're saving money, whether or not you're doing this from a financial perspective or not. But as the resolution states in here, City Council recognizes that every level of government has a responsibility to be prudent stewards of taxpayer dollars and to make difficult budget decisions. However, fiscal responsibility and voter accessibility do not have to be mutually exclusive. sound financial decisions can be pursued while also instilling public confidence in our elections and avoiding unnecessary barriers to civic participation. That's in paragraph three of the proposed resolution. I struggle with any reduction of polling sites, especially in light of the fact that Tarrant County's population is growing and voting percentages continue to grow. I also struggle with a reduction of polling sites that unnecessarily disadvantage people of color and people of poor economic means. So I'm in support of this resolution the way it is, but I'm open to entertain other ideas or thoughts from council on it. we would have to put this on the agenda. It's not something that will be on this evening's agenda. So anybody else? Council Member Shelton.

Do you need me to say I want this on tonight's agenda?

Well, it won't be on tonight's agenda regardless because it hasn't been noticed for a vote tonight. So it would have to be on the next City Council meeting.

Well, I want to do whatever is needed to put this to a vote, to some sort of recognition to our community. I sat in this room four years ago next to him, and as former chair of the Unity Council, one of the most significant accomplishments we had was a map of this city by our racial composition. And for even Trey, it took him by surprise to see the racial composition of our city on a map and the line of Cooper and what side of town that was predominantly white and people of color living west or east of Cooper. And when you look at these two maps, Molly, thanks for giving this to us. It's clear that particularly on election day voting locations, it is east of Cooper where a majority, I would probably say an overwhelming majority, just looking at my eyeballs, looking at the data, it looks to be where these polling locations have been removed. And so I've said it before, my grandparents came of age in the segregated South, in Birmingham, Alabama, the belly of the beast. And if my grandfather was alive today, he would say, boy, this is what it looks like in modern day America when they're making it harder on people to vote. And so I hope that we can put this to the floor and people can make our committee can say at least to make a statement on the difficulties it made to vote. And so and the last thing I'll say is, Molly, I appreciate this draft. If there's one sentence I would revise, it would be that very first sentence in the third sentence of the. First paragraph, fewer polling places have the potential to make that right, the right to vote, more difficult to exercise. I think it's far fewer. I'm not saying these are the language, but it's far fewer polling locations in our city. We've lost about a third. And so you and I can debate whether middle class people have cars to make it easier to vote, because some of us do. But as the mayor said, lower income people don't have the car to make it easier to get out to vote. They've got more work to do to get to the poll. So this is clearly more difficult for people to vote.

And I've said what I had to say. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, sir. Any other comments? Council Member Gonzalez.

Yeah, Mayor, I looked at it, and you know me, I'm not about race or anything else, but eight are on the east side of Cooper and 11 on the west side of Cooper. So I understand what was said, but I don't think, you know, I was on the committee when they looked at Like I said, Tarrant County, you could vote anywhere. And it was amazing to see how many places there were where there was two polling places right next to each other. And if you look at it and you circle the ones that are gone, yeah, like UTA should not be gone. That's one that I don't understand at all because that's where students go. But if you look at the ones that are gone, I mean, they're not that far apart. I mean, they're literally from one corner to the next corner. There's one that has four within a block, and they got rid of three. I mean, so if you look at it and compare what you have, and I get it. I'm along with Mr. Shelton. I don't like what's being done. I don't like to. I think it's important, and it's, you know, whether it's dollars or not, I think it's important that you look at what you're doing rather than just picking and going. You know, when I was on that committee, I was appointed. They didn't want to have the – they appointed me thinking I was going to vote against having – The ability to vote anywhere in Tarrant County, I thought that was important because that allows anybody where you're at, whether it's at work or at school, to be able to vote. So I think they were shocked. But I think, you know, when you say they're mostly down on the east side, I count them. There's eight and there's 11. And I'm not arguing. I'm just letting you know it's not, you know. I don't look at it that way. I look at it like, hey, we lost 19 spots here in Arlington, which is a lot. So thank you, Mayor.

Council Member Hogg. Yeah, thank you, Mayor.

Molly, in this resolution, you said Arlington lost 22 locations. How many did we have total?

David, do you have the total? I think we went from 50 to, I'm sorry, Arlington's total count election day.

We can look it up.

Yeah, give us just a second, Bowie, to pull that.

Yeah, if you're gonna do a resolution, why are we worried about Tarrant County on the listing and not just list Arlington from what we're doing. We don't list anywhere in there that UTA should be a polling site. Mr. Gonzales, I miscounted. I was a little off, but I think you're right on eight and 11. I look at it and your eyes always go to where you live the first, and I see four that were in my neighborhood and now are down to one. And boy, Remember, in 2019, they totally changed voting so that now you can vote at any location at any time, which is a great addition for them to be able to do. And it was not a cheap addition because it then required digital polling sites at each location so that anyone could vote at any location, and so I remember specifically in 2022, I'm not thinking of this, I remember going to, I think it was St. Stephen's United Methodist Church, and there was no one, like there, no wait time, and you can see the wait times now on the website from where it is, so I just, I think we're getting, listen, if, the resolution's fine, if we want to, doesn't say a whole lot, and it's going on deaf ears, and I think we're getting in the middle of people using this as a political fight at the county level, which is what I think is occurring across the board for this fight. And it's, I wish I could say I think people are doing it just for the good of citizens. I think they're doing it just for their own political will on either side of that from what they're doing. So I see some of these numbers and I see the change from 2019 to 2022 in reductions in Mr. Gonzalez's number. And it's already been voted on. It's already been decided. I don't see. If we want to do something, allocate via on the day of voting to take people to polling sites if you want to do that. But I don't know where a resolution gets us.

Yeah, I think. The via allocation is something we did last year, and it's certainly something we would have to do again this year, but for me, the via issue is separate and apart for this. I counted it up. I got 13 to the west of Cooper, eight reductions to the east of Cooper, so my count is a little bit different, but more favorable what you're saying. For me, it's not about the number on which side of the street it's on, it's about, With the two combined voting day dates here, we're eliminating 21 voting day polling locations in the city of Arlington, 21. And when you look at certain areas, like the areas right inside Pantigo that are right next to each other, They're not doing the reduction of polling places like they're saying by eliminating those that are across the street. That's true. They're keeping the Pantigo ones all within just a several block area and two of them right next to each other because they're doing it because of, in my opinion, political bias to try to get more of those voters supporting the people doing this.

Good point.

And that's what drives me crazy is when you look at the clusters of polling places being done in predominantly white neighborhoods, that's problematic. They're keeping those but eliminating others. When you eliminate 21 polling places on the day of election in Arlington, Arlington has grown. We have become, since the last time any of this was looked at, we have become the most diverse city in the state of Texas. Our polling locations need to be reflective of those neighborhoods. This is a political move. I don't want to make this political. For me, it's not political. I could care less about any of this stuff. For me, it's about keeping things decent and fair and respectful to the communities and shutting down 21 polling places on the day of election and then keeping this cluster of four of them right within several blocks of each other and Pantigo is pathetic. And I'm tired of this type of behavior in Tarrant County. We're better than this in Tarrant County. Absolutely.

Mayor, if I could have got the information that Council Member Hogg asked for. So for early voting 2022, there was a seven total. There are six proposed for 2026. They removed two and added one. For election day, there were 64 total in 2022. They retained 38 of those, took away 24 and added two back for a total of 42. So again, election day, the change went from 64 to 42 locations. An email with the information. Correct. Yep.

So what, Molly, you said 64?

64 to 42.

Okay, got you. Thank you. Council Member Garcia-Dumas.

Yeah, so... I agree with Council Member Gonzales. I want to do whatever we can to get UTA back. That is such a disservice to our students and to District 5 and to Arlington. Somebody said, we shouldn't get involved, and it's not that many. At what point are we the stop gap? At what point do we say, How many is too many? How far is too far? And going from 64 to 42 in our city, is too far. Removing this amount of voting locations is too far. And if we do not stand in the gap now, it will just continue to go back. And so this is a line I am willing to hold. This is a place I'm willing to stand and not move. And, I mean, the bravest thing we're doing is a resolution after the vote is already gone. I mean, it's the least, it's the least we can do. We are elected officials. And these polling places are what got us here. And so we're going to be passive as they get removed. I hear you that it's not that many to some people. But to me, it's too many. And at what point does it stop? And so we have an opportunity to make our voice heard for our residents now. And I am in favor of doing it.

Council Member Pham.

Well, I remember years ago when I lived here, moved here, I have to vote a certain poll, and sometimes they keep changing on me, and I have to go to this school to have me go to that school because my precinct changed, okay? And I don't have no problem. They get less poll than they do now. We're not stopping by from voting because I used to be a poll worker. You got your ID, we let you vote. If you don't have certain correct paperwork, we let you do provisional ballot, okay? So we never turn you away unless you're from Dallas, you got Dallas driver's license. However, even you got Dallas driver's license, you got a water bill in Arlington, we still let you vote. Now here, however, I know they cut from 64 to 42. Here, I can propose this. It's too late now because the commission, of course, already voted in. How about... On that day, we give a discount for the VIA because the pole opened from 7 to 7. We charge people $1 a ride. So you go back and forth two bucks, and that can solve a lot of problems. I don't want to hear excuses. I can't afford it because I don't have the ride. And we can use VIA for one day.

Let's stay away from the VIA issue for just a little bit here because I want to focus on what this resolution is doing It's eliminating one-third of our polling locations on election day. One-third of our polling locations disappear. I understand that you can vote at any location around the county, however, however, you should always be focused on making it easier for people to exercise their civic duty, not more difficult. And then when you look at this map here of what they're doing, they're making it easier for some people, predominantly white people, and more difficult for the rest of the city, which happens to be the most diverse community in Texas. So for me, it's not about the fact that you can go to any polling location. You're shutting down a third of the polling locations in Arlington. That's a substantial amount. So I struggle to find how that is beneficial for our residents who want to exercise their vote. I sound passionate because I'm pissed off. I'm tired of people being disenfranchised and disrespected by people for political grounds. I'm tired of it. Salamander.

I like it. Remember that.

I know, but I knew I was on the edge of it. Council Member Gonzales.

You know what? I think everybody needs to focus. Just look at Dalborn Gardens and Pantico. Just look at it. No changes were made. Not one. Now, there was two next to each other, but they got rid of the one on Fielder. which was closed. And then they got another one that was on Arlington side on the other side. But not one was changed. So, you know, I don't understand the reasoning. And, you know, I hear all the other stuff, but you are... It makes no sense how they're doing it. And I agree with you. I think it is to make, you know, keep people from... Voting, because that's very apparent, that part right there.

It's obvious. That's why you've got to look at that. And I understand they've already voted, but let me tell you, Fort Worth put forth a resolution, a unanimous resolution, before the county commissioners voted on this issue, and they paid no attention to it. And we did a resolution back when they redistricted. where they admitted that they solely redistricted for political reasons, for party reasons. We did a resolution and they paid no attention to that either. So I don't hold any hope that had we done it before the resolution that they would have heard us and not done it. My hope is our community hears us and they say thank you for standing up to us. for us and thank you for saying something about it. Because that's what I hope. Our community needs to know that we have their back on this thing and that we're not afraid to butt heads with people who are doing our voters, our residents wrong. And in this, when you're cutting a third of our polling places, you're doing them wrong.

I totally agree. We represent the people and we need to speak up.

Council Member Galante.

Yeah, I agree with you that no matter what we do, if we did before resolution or after, nothing's gonna change, right? But looking at the numbers here, EAST SIDE OF THE COOPERS, OR WEST SIDE OF THE COOPERS. SO IF YOU SEE HERE, COMPARE THE MAP, EARLY VOTING, WHICH I CONSIDER EARLY VOTING, COUNCIL MEMBER HOGG ALREADY POINTED OUT THAT YOU CAN VOTE ANYWHERE NOW. YOU CAN BE WORKING SOUTH, EAST, WEST, YOU STOP BY AND VOTE ANYWHERE, RIGHT? HECK, WE STILL, WE HAVE PEOPLE FROM GRAND PARADE VOTING IN NORTH ARLINGTON. THEY COME FROM GRAND PARADE VOTE, TARRANT COUNTY LOCATION, FROM DIFFERENT CITIES. But when I look at the early voting here in 22 and in 26, so there's four locations west of Cooper's, four locations, and now they have only three locations. And those are the locations that are open for 10 days, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And people can vote anywhere. If anything, I feel in the previous map, 22, and the current map, there is a poll location that could be served the people on 287, really southwest of the city, closer to Cannondale, because it's kind of far to go all the way to across Cooper to vote, right? And then when you look at the election day, which is just one day, you have 10-day opportunity window to go and vote, and you have, there was four locations before, There was three locations before on the west side of the city. Now we have only two locations. And then when you have the one day only, I agree. I don't get it. Why two locations are side by side on Pantigo? But now you have only one day. with couple more locations, actually almost the same number of locations that you have on the map in 2022. Because we had early voting, 10 days, 30% less location on the west side of the city, only on the election day you have couple more, actually two more locations on the west side of Cooper. The east side of Cooper, right, close to 360. If you go north and south, they took it out almost the same number of polling locations north and south. Across the board, yes, it's 22 locations. But we gotta think about accessibility. Let's take a good look at the numbers here. You had three locations. For early voting west of the city, now we have two. If we start saying, okay, the white people live on the west side of the city and the colored people live on the east side of the city, now who has, you know, theoretically the advantage here? It's the people that have more locations to vote on early voting. During 10 days, they can go out there. And I know it's not going to change. Saying anything or doing anything is not going to change the fact that it's done. I don't like it. But those are the facts.

Well, and the fact is, on the early voting, if you want to get into it, they shut down one polling site. That was UTA, with a population of 44,000 students at UTA. What is the purpose of shutting down these young people's ability to vote while they're in between classes? Or the professors that are there? And I would argue that that reasoning is based more politically than anything else.

You're right, Mayor. You might be well beat. Councilmember Schell.

I was going to shut up, but you all kept talking. So now you got me more to say. Again, and maybe I shouldn't have prefaced this by east and west, though that's a part of this, but I'm looking at Nicky Hunter's district. I'm looking at Brittany Garcia Dumas' district. I'm seeing more spots over there. that have disappeared than on other sides of town. So don't just think about east and west, but what we also have to do, and I asked Molly for this a few weeks ago, I saw what the city looks like layered by race and ethnicity across the entire city. And I'm imagining if I took that same map that she gave me with the gas wells, and layered this map over it, it would look that same way. It's not just about east and west. It's about the composition. You also have to ask yourself, why now? Y'all know the hotness of our country right now, what's going on in November. Why now? Last thing I'm going to say is, and I hinted to this earlier, y'all know we are the largest city in the United States of America that does not have a public transportation that runs on Sunday the same way. You know what I mean. But the point here, no, I'm going to go there because people can't get to the poll easy. Mr. Galante just said, hey, you got 10 days to go do it. But you got to have a car. And we don't have it easy for people to have a car. And there's lots of poor people on this side of town. That's why this is a challenge. You're right. We're not going to talk about via today.

Your timing is, or your comment about timing is very on point. There's a reason why things are being done now. And let me say this also. This What has been done in Tarrant County has made national news. It's been all over Fox, CNN, MSNBC, everywhere. It's made national news as the largest city in the country doing exactly what Tarrant County has done. And that is horrific. Council Member Ware.

As long as we're on that one, I think UTA does need a place. But when you look at east versus west, Raul's area had 10 and 22. He's got seven now. That's 30% roughly. District 4 had 11, has 7 now. That's over 33%. Look up north at Mauricio's. He had 10. He's got 6 now. That's 40%. So we're looking at the percentage on these. Look at the percentage on these. East had more places to vote. And, you know, I'm... Let's compare apples to apples on this. Because over in the west side, from where it was, we had further apart on all of them. We had none of them sitting next to each other. I don't know. Down in District 2, there's far too few places in District 2. They should be much closer together. There are more spots in there back then and especially now. So I don't see a great difference in percentage of spots that are disappearing from one place to another. I'm sorry. But let's decide. How far apart do we think these places ought to be? How many can we afford to do around Pantigo and down Worthington Gardens? You've got cities there. You've got two in down Worthington Gardens. And effectively, you've got one in Pantigo.

still do exactly the same.

I would argue that. So we got stuff right across the street from each other. And like you said, they're not closing one of those. It doesn't make sense. There's a number of things in here that don't make a lot of sense to me. And I think we've cut out too many.

So here's what I'm going to propose because what I'm hearing from everybody, not everybody has the same feeling on this, but I hear enough council members saying, let's put it to a vote. So what I think we need to do is put it on the agenda. We can kick it around and we can put it to a vote. And I'm comfortable with whatever council decides to do, but I think we're going to need to put it to a vote. Anybody have an issue with that?

Yeah, no, I don't, I don't. I would like to amend some of the resolution. I think we should amend it to state that it went from, have more specific Arlington numbers in there, from seven to six on locations, also from 64 to 42 instead of relying on the Tarrant County numbers. I also think we should list in there that we recommend reinstating a UTA location, because I think everyone has a disagreement with a UTA location. I would also recommend that we do list that we are going to provide VIA for all voters, because I don't think that's something you kick down the road. I think it should be included as part of that, that that's something we will do to institute on that resolution. Any recommendations we make to Molly, I think we should try to include them in the resolution.

I don't have any issues with anything you just said. Is everybody okay with including free via transportation to and from polling locations? Yes. Okay.

Which we've done in the past. We've done it. We've done it in the past. We'll do it again. Since when did we start that? Since the beginning. We've always done that. And I'm fine with the amendments that you discussed. Just say, I think we should list that we're going to continue to provide via transportation. Not like it's new from a change. We're going to continue because we have constantly said that is important to help people get to the polls. So let's get some credit for something we've done in the past and are continuing to do.

The resolution will request the UTA location to be open again, right? To be reinstated. Yeah, we need to be reinstated. We need to request that.

I think you could just do that in the whereas, the second whereas, when you add the Arlington piece on there and also that somehow list the UTA location should not have been. Anybody else?

One thing you've got to keep in mind, in South Arlington, we have Kennedale, we have Mansfield ISD, so we have a lot of locations on that border. So it doesn't look as bad as that. Kennedale, yeah, you can vote at Blatton Elementary, and then you can vote at MISD, different places. Remember, there's more than one school district, as you all know, I always say.

Let's make those adjustments so we can get out of here. We still have to wrap this thing up. We'll make those adjustments, put it on the agenda so we can put it to a vote.

Mayor, can I ask one more thing? Can we have someone reach out to the election administrator and ask for the parameters of why they made these, and what they used for those? I think you had already reached out to them, haven't you?

Councilmember, we had actually asked to try to get a member of their group here today that they could not make it. I do think there's a community meeting tomorrow in town where some folks can go check it out. 11 o'clock but we could maybe ask him if we're going to add this to whatever agenda we can maybe ask him to come then or someone from their office to answer these detailed questions right yeah i was going to say if y'all are okay waiting to the 29th not your budget meeting next week we could see about i think that would probably help accommodate their schedule and getting something i'm okay waiting to the 29th but i'm not okay waiting beyond that

because we have a November election coming up and we need to get this thing implemented to them and all of that beforehand. So at the very latest, we will vote on the 29th because they need to know sooner than later that this isn't right. Man, I'm laughing because you know I'm going to be out until the 29th.

So I think I may be virtual. I'm trying to be virtual at this moment. I thought you were just laughing because I'm so... No, no, no. I would also say we're all making a bunch of guesstimates. We have a really good mapping department. Why don't we overlay some of our demographic studies in one of these maps? I think we... Our mapping team is unreal, not that they need any more work, but I do think we should look at that and have that reported out so that we're not all just guessing and blindly trying to count numbers on here, which is, I'm not that calculated.

But what was great about the map you gave me is that it did the racial composition by census tract across the whole city. So for example, to my good friend Tom Ware's point, in District 2, right across the street from where I live, across Cooper, predominantly black between Cooper and Matlock. It's all black folks in there. And I did it because I know, because I block walked it. That's Raoul's area, but it's a lot of black folks there, but they're gone. So I hear your point. I hear your point. But I think that's where, if we can see it sort of colored, and then you see what's here and what's not, that's the power, I think, what will move all of us to see whether Tom is right or I'm right or whoever.

One final comment, please. I think we probably, rather than debating on where everything belonged, where all these election places belonged was, we should have been debating this resolution, which I think is excellent. It was all the detail that we all each believed, and we're looking at numbers here. That's the difference.

Thank you. All right, let's move on. 4.7, issues relative to city or tech stop projects. Anybody on that? Okay, 4.8, Council External Committees. The first one is the Joint Workforce Development and Workforce Governing Board. I attended that, don't make me lie to you, I don't have the note of when I attended that, but it was a couple of weeks ago. The biggest issues was finalizing our budget for the Workforce Governing Board. and our CFO over there has announced his retirement over there, so we'll be looking for a new CFO on there. B, Trinity Regional Water District Advisory Committee, Council Member Gonzales.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Alex Whiteway and myself attended the meeting in person on Thursday, August 27th. They proposed the physical year 2027 rate per 1,000 gallons, and it was reduced by one cent from 1.51717 to $1.00. 50 cents, 8.18. The reduction is due to a decrease in the proposed fiscal year debt issuance from 410 million to 350 million. The fiscal year 2027 revenue fund budget was approved by the advisory committee. Trw is actively pursuing grants and low interest loans to help fund capital projects, which are going to be big regarding water supply. If current drop conditions continue. Trw expects total raw water supply reservoir levels to be around 75% capacity by November 2026. However, with this year influenced by the El Nino conditions, God willing, there's a potential for a wetted winter, which could help replenish the lakes and bring reservoir levels back to normal. That's all I have, Mayor.

Thank you, sir. C, North Central Texas Council Government's Executive Board. A couple of things to report on that. We've settled the lawsuit between RTC and COG, which included the signing of the MPO agreement with TxDOT, RTC, and COG. We also voted, and the executive director of COG has agreed to a mutual separation And he is no longer with COGS, so we will begin the process of a search for a new executive director. And on the interim, Monty Mercer, who was deputy executive director, is the acting ED while the search will continue on that. I ain't gonna lie, it was a very long, hotly contested, heated discussion on what to do, but I think we reached an amicable decision with both the Executive Director and the Council of Governments. D, Tarrant County Homelessness Coalition's Continuum of Care Board. Councilmember Shelton.

Yes, sir. For the benefit of the public, the Tarrant County and Parker County Continuum of Care is an organization composed of representatives from numerous organizations that coordinate services to support persons experiencing homelessness. The COC Board establishes policy around funding and applies to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, for funding and supporting a community-wide goal of ending homelessness. In turn, agencies, cities, counties, and nonprofits apply for the COC for that funding to directly administer programs serving the homeless in our community. At the meeting, an update was provided on the 2026 notice of funding opportunity. HUD has been sued for the second time over the notice of funding opportunity. And with this suit, it was related to procedural issues. As a result, the competition at the federal level is currently on hold. Even if issues are resolved, there are numerous other issues that are likely to surface related to the NOFO. In theory, Congress mandates that the 2026 funding awards are made by December. but it is uncertain whether that timeline can be met, creating a lot of uncertainty around renewal for funding of existing programs. As a result of the changes being implemented by HUD, the COC Board is considering a system and policy changes that will be rolled out in the coming months. The City of Fort Worth requested that the Board make reducing the unsheltered homeless population a priority. A homelessness fatality report was provided with data reported from 2024. Based on that report, a recommendation was made to focus on inclement weather, shelter, health management, and substance abuse. Some of the statistics included the average age is 52. Majority of folks who are homeless are in the summer. Most of them are men. And the manner of death was mostly an accident, an accidental drug overdose for those who passed away in the shelter. Last thing is various committee reports were provided, but no board action was required. Sir.

Any questions for Councilmember Shelton? Future agenda items 4.9, Councilmember Garcia-Dumas.

Yeah, under the council priorities strengthening our communities, I'd like to get an update from the HEAT team, from APD. I'm sure you guys know we received those updates from the police department, and there were a few HEAT-related instances in District 5. I've met with Chief Jones and Deputy Chief Polk, as well as the leader of the HEAT team and the representative from Rescue Hill, and I would just like to get an update about that program, please.

Thank you. We'll get that to you. Council Member Hunter.

I wanted to see if we could get, I don't know how we would do it, but if we could see about getting a street named in honor of Ms. Tilly Bergen since she turned 90 for her birthday.

I'm happy to put that in the neighborhood committee discussions. I don't, to be candid, without getting into discussion, we've named a lot of things after people, and I'll throw it into the committee. You're welcome, Councilmember Hogg. You don't have to thank me for it. We'll throw it in there and let Councilmember Hogg and the rest of y'all sort of kick that around on all of that. I love her, but I don't know what to say. Go ahead.

If I could just get a clarification, if the committee and or you are willing, a few years ago we went through a process where we kind of looked at several that were being considered as opposed to just one, so that we don't kind of do these as one-offs, but we kind of think of it more systemically. And it may be wise for us to kind of open the door a little bit, think more broadly, and then kind of decide where we want to try to go if y'all are open to that. Council back then wanted to do it every couple of years, and it's been a few years since we've done it. So if y'all are okay, I think that might be a good approach.

I'd prefer to do that type of approach on any type of naming things, whether it's parks, buildings, streets, whatever, that we make a more holistic approach at that to handle several at once for a number of things. And real quick, Mayor, on that, do you want it to go, Trey, in the past, did we take it to MPC or Community Neighborhood Development? I can't remember.

I thought it was community and neighborhood development. I thought it was MPC in the past. Not that I'm getting it out of my committee. I'm more than willing to take it on CND. I think I'm on MPC also. I serve on both, but whichever one you want, Mayor, you can make the call.

Well, why don't we do this? Lemuel seems to know which way it's supposed to go, right? MPC. MPC. We'll throw it at MPC.

Welcome to my committee for not having us tackle it. Council Member Gonzalez.

Is that also the time when you start thinking about unnaming something? Okay, good. Thank you.

Yeah. Unnaming something? Did you say? Yeah, I would say so.

Hey, Mayor, one little quick thing. As political escalations have gone up over flock cameras, I do think our As I talk to police association and how they tell us the number of cases we've solved, how the Amber Hagerman case would have been solved if we'd had flock, I do think it's time. The chief's put out a good statement over that, and we've gotten some data. We've asked the internal audit to review. I do think it's time, and whenever Trey and you find in our agenda to put it on our council for a discussion and hear from the chief, on those discussions. Let me throw it out.

I don't know if I've told everybody what we're doing. I know I've told a number of y'all, but starting next month, we are kicking off town hall meetings addressing certain issues in our community head on, and one of those things being transportation, environmental issues, flock cameras being part of it, housing, and dealing with some of the issues that you spoke on earlier with the, not boarding homes, but what was the other word we were using? Shared single family rentals. Single family rental ones where they're doing 10 bedrooms and all that. We're doing town hall meetings so that we can face those difficult. Type of issues face to face, and it may be a good opportunity for that to include. Well, I know the flock cameras are a part of that as are those single family homes with multiple rentals as our gas wells as our. everything else, data centers, all of that kind of stuff. If you need a list of that, I can get Andy to send everybody a list of what's gonna be discussed and when and where on that. It's called Arlington Unfiltered Straight Talk with the Mayor.

Yeah, that's great. I'm glad you're doing those. I've seen them, they're in our invites. This is going to come up in legislative session. Oh, it is. So we as a council need to discuss that and make sure all nine of us are fully educated on what it's doing and where it can be because this is going to be a legislative hot button item that needs to be discussed. And when you talk to our PD, you hear how cases are solved. You hear how criminals avoid that. So I would ask for that. While I'll attend your event and love it and participate, I think as a council, we need to do it. You're not going to attend those.

Just to add, last week we approved the auditing on the flock cameras, and a lot of people in the community don't know, so several people sent over emails to me, and they did not know that we approved an auditing on the flock cameras. We're doing our part, we've been proactive.

We don't need to discuss arguments one way or the other on it, because that's not on the agenda today, but what Bowie's saying is let's put it on the agenda to address it at a later date. So anything else?

Not the 29th, Mayor, I may not be here. Council Member Pham.

Future agenda. Maybe, Molly, you know, I get complained from Mrs. Sue Phillips about people parking everywhere around her neighborhood. She got to get code compliant or police involved. Now, we all know that if your registration sticker expire, you cannot park your vehicle in the city public street. That's illegal. I would propose this, the city of Dallas doing this right, they got parking ticket. We need to give a parking ticket, we don't need to get warning, okay, because these people, they don't care. You give them the warning, they kind of give you the finger. So you give them a ticket and then they don't pay. Next time they still there again, we can do a study on windshield barnacles, B-A-R-N-A-C-L-E. Haven't we recently done parking updates?

Yeah, I haven't received anything. I could assure you, haven't we? We've done parking updates. Here's what we'll do. I'll ask city attorney or city manager, whoever you are, Trey, I'm gonna ask city manager to make sure he sends you the update that we talked about, because I know it's been within the last couple of months, we've had a pretty thorough parking analysis and update on what's going on. So the police came and talked about all of that stuff.

You drive around Arlington, Texas, you see a lot of car parking illegally on Puppet Street.

I'll send you the information. Anything else on future agenda items? All right, we're adjourned.

Most of the players seem to like the idea of coming to Texas. Boy, that's a new adventure. And they get here, and what they were playing in in Washington was, it was messy, but it had the look of a major league ballpark. I think they took a look here. Well, I know they did. I think they're a little shaky.

When we first got to Arlington, Rich Billings was my roommate and he got us an apartment in Dallas. Dallas obviously is a big city where you would expect to see a major league ballpark. And the first thing that hit me when I drove into Arlington and got off, back then it was the Turnpike, and came to the stadium was, how in the world can there be a big league ballpark in this city? There are pine trees along here. There were no restaurants next to the ballpark. It was like a pine forest and a narrow street that came into the ballpark. And we're thinking, This is a major league team. How did they do it?

It was a very slow town. I mean, there wasn't, I don't know if there was, because it was so spread out to begin with. It seems like when you go down Collins Avenue, you know, it's a town of like 25,000 people. I was single at the time, and I was just trying to find some girl that would date me. And there was only, I think, three or four single girls in the whole town.

And then, of course, we had a labor situation. Players walk out. So it wasn't that bad. It was about two weeks late, that 72 season and starting.

Whatever we were able to do at the stadium, we couldn't do anyway because it wasn't open. So, you know, there was probably 10 or 15 guys here. And we had to work out somewhere. We wanted to stay in shape. We went over to a ballpark in the middle of Arlington called Randall Mill Park, where they played little league games, soccer games, you name it.

Fred Baxter was our equipment manager, and one day when we were at that park working out, a pickup truck drove by, and a bunch of balls and bats flew out of the back of the truck, and Fred was waving and drove on.

Because he wasn't supposed to do that, of course.

But we got by. We got it done. My memory of Randall Mill Park will always be It was my turn to throw batting practice, and Frank Howard was the guy that was going to hit. We had no screen, so I looked around, and the only thing I could see was a green trash can. So I placed the green trash can in front of me, and I had to throw the ball quick and duck down behind the trash can. We improvised. We got the workout in, but there wasn't anything majorly about it.

Vanderbilt's only son used to be a bat boy, and daughter Vanessa sang the national anthem on opening day back in 1972.

I was nervous about it, but I don't remember being overly nervous, but I was nervous. But we went down on the field, and I had practiced with the band, but the delay, the sound delay in those days, of course, was much worse than now, much worse. And they told me then, and we had never practiced on the field, so they said, make sure that you just watch the director, watch the band,