City Council - Regular Meeting

Where's Gary? Great job on this briefing. I get a lot of complaint, the Pickleball Court, which you mentioned in here. Sometimes they have two court open and they block half of it because for basketball, but nobody's shut for basketball. There's a plan that your staff got in place. If nobody's shut for basketball, most old people like me don't want to play basketball. So you can just expand it out so we'd have more people get opportunity to play Pickleball.

Thank you, Gary. Good problem to have, right? As a parks director, you enjoy too many people wanting to use it, correct? Yeah. These are good things to talk about. Gary, when did you say, as someone who's not 50 yet, so I can't officially use active, When are y'all talking about, you mentioned about like the non-residence fees, when are y'all going through that? And will that also include like, I was even thinking like variable-based fees, like maybe reduction on some of our places where we want more people to go to Summit, to Beacon, to East or some of those. When will y'all do that and have

Council Member Hogg. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Susan. We appreciate what you do in audit. Y'all help us mitigate risk a lot. You're also a revenue generation on creating a lot of those things. So on those construction audits we do, we find a lot of good results from those. Are we auditing 100% of our construction audits or what's the parameter for what causes a construction audit?

And then on the flock safety utilization audit, listen, this keeps escalating in the community, so I appreciate y'all doing this. The audit goes so far as how APD's using it, but also is it what's happening with the data on the other side? Because I think that's the biggest concern people are poking.

Okay. And is that going to be, do you know when that, is that early on you're hoping or later on in the year? I know you're a little short-staffed right now.

Alex, thanks for the presentation, Alex. Clearly, this is an important issue of figuring out there's about 10 or 12 of those houses here so far that we know of that have all those bedrooms. I'm in favor of a little bit of all of those different options. But what I really want to get at is how do we, the 10 or 12 houses that we know of and the more that are probably out there that don't have the permits, how do we especially the 10 or 12 we have that have the permits. How do we go back and sort of dismantle those? How do we figure that out? Do we have to establish some new policy, some new ordi

Right. And that sounds like it's under that third option.

Thanks, Alex. I love the idea of a rental registration program, especially considering the rentals that we have now and kind of where the market is going. And in consideration of we want less apartments in certain areas, so let's make our rent houses really amenable to people. It also is great protection for renters rights as well I think that people sometimes think that renters come in and they devalue a house But there's only certain things that they have control over with the home and so this rental registration program It helps the neighbors it helps make sure that we have some more eyes o

Thank you, Mayor. Alex, thank you for working on this. This has been ongoing for all my six years on city council in several districts, not just mine. And the key is, you know, citizens think, like the mayor said, they have rights and they don't want neighbors doing that. But those owners that have that property have rights to do things. So it's working together. I think the key is, and I keep telling the citizens, they think we can just knock on that door and say, who lives here? You can't. If you see any construction being done on your street, you know, check with the city, see if they've go

How do you handle that kind of a situation? I understand the enforcement's the hard part of this. If a neighbor knows that there's eight or ten different people going into a home back and forth every night, How far can we go in coercing that owner to admit that they have actually not registered and they need to? And what is the best way, I guess, for the neighbors to work with your department on how to report and take care of that kind of a situation?

Okay, and the other thing, you mentioned Fort Worth having two different programs. Yes, sir. Is that something we should look at for the UTA area versus the rest of the city, or is that going to be, is that confusing?

Well, I mean, if we were doing the same thing they were doing, I mean, they've got TCU in the middle of their city. We've got UTA in the middle of ours. Yes, sir. Councilperson Garcia-Demar, I want you if she feels like they need another type of permitting or something, I just want to listen to what she might have to suggest on that. Sure, sure.

So I think just to chime in with that, the rental registration program would be citywide. So they don't have a citywide one in Fort Worth. It's like specialty for TCU and then bad actors. Those are the only two. The rest of it's voluntary. So I think what we're discussing here is a citywide rental registration program. But I will note to Council Member Ware's point that it really ensures that that historical area is It maintains just such a level of beauty over there. And I think what we're saying here is let's do that citywide. That's what makes us special.

Council Member Pryor. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Bushkin, thank you so much. My answer to your questions is yes, yes, yes. You know, all of them of what we do. Mayor, one of the things I would recommend, should we, I think the faster we go, the better, but also to get it vetted and put in, should we take it to the MPC or the Community Neighborhood Development Committee and let them and Two weeks, worked with Alex. put all the things together and then bring it back to this group?

We've been doing the code for multifamily on that. Yeah. Perfect, thank you. Alex, let me ask another question. Yes, on restricting your rooms, I think the IPMC is a good parameter to use as miss garcia dumas said um to make sure we're not just going nilly willy on what we're doing um from that side alex one of the things we face is and the mayor said it um when this happens you know we're all a fan of you can do what you want your property but when you do some things it can affect street parking it affects all that um A lot of these are done by garage conversions. That adds rooms, that adds t

I don't want to get into the weeds. We'll get into that as we get into the committee on that. Thanks, Jencie. Alex, let me ask one other question. As what we've done with short-term rentals, we put a policy in place. It's actually worked pretty well. No policy's ever perfect, but it's actually minimized it. We've talked about... right after World Cup, going out to RFP to do a new bid to really make sure we have a program evaluating all those short-term rentals. As we get into rental registration and things, I just did a quick search on Spareroom.com, there was 143 rooms listed. On Roomies.com,

Okay, perfect, we got work to do. I think we all learn new things and sometimes uncover things we weren't doing as a city, so I appreciate it.

Hi, Marty. Hi. I have a question. Asia Town Square, is that what's the new development in Benton? Or what is Asia Town Square?

I know what Asia Times Square is. I know what it is.

who is involved with him a little bit on some of that.

That's great. That answers that question. Yes, ma'am. And along with Bintan Plaza and Asia Times Square, always looking for what's the next thing in the international corridor as well. Do you have any kind of update or anything on the horizon or any great ideas for the international corridor? Sure.

Do we know about when we'll know when we get those or which opportunity zones we get?

No, we, WE HAVE ON THE STAFF REPORT THE PRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE FILM AND MEDIA INCENTIVE PROGRAM AND ALSO ABOUT THE BOARD MATCHING FUND PROGRAM. and the small business program update. Those are on the informal staff reports. Anybody can access to it. And we had also a discussion of business incentive, which was dealt in executive session. That was the Economic Development Committee. Thank you, Mayor. Sorry for my voice.

Thank you, Mayor. Today we started off the election with officer elections. I will remain on as the president. Treasurer will be Brittany Garcia-Dumas. Secretary will be Dr. Shelton. The staff was provided a template for reoccurring monthly reports related to the properties that we partner with. That report's going to include statistic information such as location, property manager, and office hours. The board also recommended approval of a variance to a regulatory agreement for center place apartments. And it looks like that is it. Any questions or comments?

Mr. Mayor? Yes. I'm pulling my two CBA appointments for approval in a future meeting. Thank you.

Item 35, I think we all received an email regarding that, so I don't know if we want to, I think there was a lot of questions regarding that, so I don't know if Lindsay just wants to give a brief Summary, I think there was a lot of confusion about how much money was being used. I think people were getting confused with the amounts and everything else. So I don't know if you want to address that or not.

I think the public infrastructure is important. I think, you know, that includes sidewalk sewer. Uh, whatever else it was, I think there was a public water. Those are all drainage, landscaping, those are all things that we'd be doing, so this is all part of that project. And I think there was some confusion about how much was being put in. I think there was two numbers that were being added together, but really it's only one number. So it's what? 19 million, right?

And one of the questions that I know we've gotten is, and I I don't think anything of it, but the question has been, why was this on the consent agenda rather than an item that we would discuss openly?

Thank you, Lindsay. Appreciate you taking the time.

Trey, thank you so much for this. Can you pull up that tax rate continuum? This is something that I had asked Trey to pull together. I think lots of us kind of contributed to needing this. Because I think when the residents see this, $2.2 million is a large number. But when you break it down, what is it actually going to cost the resident? And not even just the resident, but the entire... home as we break it down um i thought that this was just such a more clear look at that rub that's been discussed between raising the taxes and getting services from the city and so i know that i probably hea

And so that, I'm assuming it was, that's a strategically placed fire station, right?

Awesome. I also love that we have this option of, or we have so many options, but one of them presented is to be, as you said, to just do the streets, right? And I think we all hear all the time, fix the streets, fix roads. We have an opportunity to do that. And I say we take it. Because again, if we don't take it now, it will be more costly in the future. And this isn't 30 years down the road future. This is like two years from now future when things are even more expensive. And so I think we've done, and Trey, really, you have done such a great job in laying out what we get for what. And thi

Trey, thanks a lot. Appreciate the presentation, sir. Forgive me, I've been here since 9 o'clock, and my brain is starting to get a little tired. But I think I heard you say something that I wanted to go back on. Did you say, sir, per that same slide that Brittany, excuse me, Council Member Dumas asked you to bring up, did you say that... that the average resident of our city might see taxes declined by $5? Did I hear you say that? Yes. You did? I heard that?

OK. So let me also translate this, because again, I'm getting tired. Layman's terms, I remember in the last meeting we had, and Spencer was here, And I asked, what does all of this translate to overall? And at the time, you all were kind of theorizing and saying that it might cost us on a monthly base, the average household, about $15 a year. Right. And then now you've done the math, and you estimated it might have been $1.30 something, and now we're at $1.29. So, per Councilmember Garcia-Dumas' point, if this is true, Trey, I would love to encourage our colleagues here to consider this slight

But compared to Saturday, that's not a significant fall. In other words, if we were to bring it back, if we were able to have this program run on Sunday, in other words, people will be using the program significantly on Sunday as well, correct, ma'am?

Yes, ma'am. I'm off my horse, but I just want my colleagues to think about the importance of this in a city this size where people can't get to church on Sunday. And I know that's really important to a lot of us. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mayor. Trey, can you go back to option one? So are those reoccurring, or is that a one-time deal, all those?

Yes, Council Member Locke. Yeah, real fast, and thank you, Trey. Just you and your team's professionalism on a budget is truly impressive. Someone who's done a lot of these for over the years. I just can't thank you enough for, y'all take some steps, and you take some bold steps on some recommendations. Can you get, one thing I do think we need to look at, I saw Tarrant County College is considering like a 13 cent increase, and I don't know what they finally decided on. They're a very small portion of the tax. I think Tarrant County, as a county actually maybe did a small reduction. 0.02. 0.02

What they proposed, yeah. What they proposed. Because it is... Listen, we can talk about ours all we want. Homeowners, see it as a whole, right? So we've gotta see it as a whole of what the school district's done, because now they passed a bond, so they've got a little increase in their bond rating. So I'd like to be able to see what that is as a whole from that perspective. I, of course, lean towards the proposed tax rate that we came in. The one piece I can start looking forward and start really having some concern about And we spent a lot of time as council talking about street maintenance

Thanks, Mayor. I'm gonna agree with you as well. That's kind of where I stand.

Same. I agree with you, Mayor. Adopt the tax rate as proposed and take option one as we have extra incomes coming in. Focus on option one priorities out there.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Trey. Just like Boobie said, you guys are so professional, especially you, the way you present it and everything else. And you make it, it's up to us. No, seriously, people need to understand that. It's important that the way our city is run, I mean, you know, when you hear all this negative stuff and everything else from other cities, I mean, we're lucky what we have. But I'm going to agree with the Mayor. I've been doing this for 17 years. and the prior two years was just the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make. And I'm just, you know, I think the citizens, you know, I know it's not a lot, but it's just we don't know what's going to be next year. You know, if we do something this year and then again next year, that will be four.

Well, I do concur with you, Mr. Mayor. If we go to the no new tax rate, I mean, three years in a row, we increased taxes. And I know it's not a whole lot of money, but there's a lot of people, they live on fixed income and it doesn't matter $1 or $200, it's too hard on them. And that kind of sent the wrong message. If $2.2 million gonna hurt our budget and we have to cut this, cut that, I understand I'll go to the new race, but last year we increased three pennies to bail us out because it's not our fault. But, you know, most people in here should know. That's why you be careful who you nomina

And then, so I, the current rate, I mean, I support that to keep, leave it the same, you know, so. But you gotta remember, what you can do, you can hurt your city. That's all I'm saying. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Councilmember Shelton. I just want to ask a final question, and I'm a player for Angel's Advocate, and that is, I swear I heard Trey say that the average local resident is going to experience a $5 decrease. So I hear y'all, but I mean, I kind of, I need to hear where, and I know that I'm outnumbered in the room, but I mean, can somebody tell me where the, if average person's gonna get the decrease?

All of us experience and hear from our constituents about their perceptions of crime in the city and not feeling safe, regardless of how safe I feel in this city. And here we have an opportunity to bring back a program that's gonna help the APD and do a number of things that's gonna help the APD. So I think that a vast, a strong majority, of course you ain't gonna satisfy everybody, but a strong majority of people in this city are gonna be like, yo, you brought back the real time crime center? Yo, you got gas masks? You got these things to help people, help our APD? I just think that what peop

Council Member Garcia- Yes, I hear you that in the perfect world, we would not raise taxes and we would be able to have all of these things. I also know that only 13% of our UTA students remain here after they graduate. I also know that we are having difficulty getting people moving to this city and remaining here. I also know that we have a large population of people who are about to experience a property tax freeze. And one of my main missions while here on council is getting younger families to move here and live here and leave their legacy here and stay here for forever. So I hear you that

Yep, I understand. The big thing about where people live, including my kids, is where's the jobs and how much are they paying? So it's not tax rate. It's not crime. That's the big deal. So when you talk about 13% from UTA, they go to other jobs that have high-paying jobs. They don't stick around here and start working at Walmart or whatever or even eSpace. We're lucky we're hiring, but that's the key we've got to focus on is economic development. And I get it. One cent is nothing, but when you see groceries going up, you see gas going up, you see health care going up, daycare going up, it's al

Thank you, Troy. I want to just kind of confirm. You did mention that there were buckets of money that could still allow us to do this that we don't know about yet, as in the World Cup, things like that, correct?

Well, population. Have we been going up every year?

Not loud enough, I guess. I wanted to kind of hear what everybody said since I was the guy that brought up the 6363. It's $2.2 million. In the grand scheme of things, is that more important than keeping the taxes where they are, doing what we can? We're suffering from the fact that we've done a good job, and I'd say we, even though I wasn't part of setting the, everything that's going on, but I think our city has done a fine job of keeping taxes low, and it's coming back to haunt us right now. And at some point, we're gonna have to bite off a big bone to be able to make up some of the things t

Council Member Hogg. Like any resolution in Myers-Hodgson, right? Like the devils and the angels and the details. Sorry, there we go.

Grandma Shelton's working over here. You know, with that, I also look at I don't think we should reduce, but I'm worried about just a blanket statement of saying no reduction because. Voting locations have changed as of a couple of years ago, you had to go to a specific location. I think we all remember I've waited in hour and a half, 2 hour lines and I remember these last year. So I'm going up there in the last couple of years and you're going. not voting but it's because you can go to any location now even on election day um it is one and i haven't followed what all tarrant county's doing on

Yeah, and I don't... Listen, we've got to keep the county in our graces. They killed... The proposal that came back to him, I don't know if I fully believe they didn't know what was getting proposed. Listen, we usually know it's getting proposed. So I know how governance works on that side, but getting into something that we don't have the details about a blanket statement. I have a hard time getting into that and I do think. elections have changed. They did implement money where you can vote at any polling site, which has been super convenient. I know it's convenient for almost everyone I tal

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Bowie. I was on the committee when they changed Tarrant County to where you could vote anywhere. And it was interesting to see all the polling sites. And we were, you know, all we did was just talk about and we made the decision to offer voting anywhere in Tarrant County. But when they showed us the map, it was really interesting. Like Bowie says, you don't know what they're talking about is there'd be some place where there was a polling site across from another across the street. and we couldn't decide to give it one. I mean, it wasn't gonna happen. I mean,

Sometimes, we have a lot going on on what we're dealing with, and so I want us to stay laser focused, but it's not saying this is unimportant, I think we should say laser focused.

Yeah, I hear you that we do have a lot of stuff going on here locally. And it is our job to hear from our residents what matters to them. And what we have heard is that this matters to them. That what was originally proposed was a reduction of 45% of polling locations. That's wild. That is... We should never make it harder for someone to use their voice. It is difficult to do. It's an insult to democracy to make it more difficult to vote. And what the residents of District 5 that have weighed in on this have said is that this is very important to them, that this affects them. And they have ask

Thank you, Mayor, for not sharing me now. Yeah. I will be cautious to say that we attending all the residents, because the reality is only 9% of people show up to vote. 9% of the residents of Arlington show up to vote. The ones that can vote. 91% of people don't even care. I mean, I came from a country that is mandatory to vote and have one day of voting. And when you go to vote, you stay eight hours in line. And if you don't vote, you quit, you get a fine. So I've been following elections here, and I work the polls. I actually work the polls for some of our friends here, and for the time I go

You work horribly. And you work horribly in Brazil. That's why we have a communist country there down south.

All right. So I appreciate you raising this issue. I'm on board with, of course I would love to see what the actual language would be, but definitely on board with a resolution that emphasizes that we wanna make it easy for people to vote in the great city of Arlington, Texas. And just for the sake of it, sir, I'm gonna fundamentally disagree with you about, I can tell you for certain at UT Arlington, my students, my staff members, faculty members, people I've known at the university for decades, talking about how hard it was to go figure out what to do now after they have relied on UTA as a p

Trey, you know how much it's going to cost the city for this general election in November?

In the past, that's around $88,000, $89,000.

Okay. Now, has the commission, the court, voted in yet? They haven't decided yet how many polls will be closed, right? So we don't know. That's how can we do the resolution. What happened? They come back next week, they vote. They say, we're going to open all of them. And we do a resolution now. We've got to be careful. We've got to find out if they vote for that yet.

Well, if it doesn't cost us, I know all the main polls, six of them in Arlington, we open, and most people do early vote. They got 10-day early votes anyway. So they cut a couple of them during the election day only one day.

All right. CONVENTIONAL VISITORS BUREAU BOARD MEETING. WE WENT THROUGH THE FISCAL YEAR 2026 FINANCIALS. THEY REPORTED $340,000 BELOW BUDGET. THERE WAS SOME ADVERTISING COSTS, WHICH IS GOING TO BE OFFSET IN THE COMING MONTHS. APPROVED THE FISCAL YEAR 2027 BUDGET OF PROJECTED AT $9 MILLION, $9,013,500. ALSO DISCUSSED THE ARTICULTURAL TOURISM CONSUEL CRITERIA. THE BIGGEST THING WAS THE ALLOCATING 15% FOR OPERATIONAL COSTS OF THE TOTAL $725,000. ALSO DISCUSSED THE NEW BRANDING, THE NEW BRANDING FOR THE CITY THAT WILL BE UNVEILED ON THE CVB ANNUAL MEETING. I CANNOT TELL YOU NOW, BUT IT'S PRETTY COO

Really good job, Mr. Galante. We did also add rules for public comment to match what the city does, which is something I know as a city we're trying to do that across any entity, so they're following on that. And then the cultural tourism, we've talked about that as a council before a couple times. It takes it to 85-15, so that we're still funding brick-and-mortar facilities in there, mainly in the majority, but then cultural and tourism things that have multi-day events, then they can receive part of that 15% funding. That's about $900,000 a year that goes into that funding. So it got clarity

For the ACTC, there was discussion about creating a board specifically from members of the CVB. Did that get created?

Yeah, there's a community, there's a group of volunteers that regulates the ACTC, and there was discussion from Brent Durab that members from the CVB board would now become a part of that decision-making process.

We had Brent there, myself representing the city there, and then Valerie, the chair, to help go through and kept it on the cultural tourism committee.

Yes, Mayor. I'm going to report on C, D, and E, so I'm going to put them out of order. E, the Regional Transportation Council.

I didn't know you were on it. Okay. Never mind. I've got C and D, E. The RTC Transit Subcommittee originally scheduled for the 13th was canceled due to an early RTC workshop. COG staff, then the RTC, we had that workshop to discuss elements related to the roles of the RTC and of the Executive Board, including the Metropolitan Planning Organization Agreement with TxDOT, a settlement agreement between RTC and the Executive Board, and two operating agreements describing the roles of each body. Then the afternoon session, began and i i guess i already mentioned that we voted so sorry you threw me