City Council - Regular Meeting

Okay, good afternoon, everybody. We're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the Arlington City Council meeting to order. It is September 29th, 2026, and the time is 1248 p.m. We'll now go into an executive closed section pursuant to VTCA Government Code Chapter 551.071.072, and .087. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the City Council meeting back to order. We're gonna start with 3.1 with Deputy City Manager Jennifer Wickman.

Why aren't you working on my state of the city, then? Because, you know, I get stuck with that young lady sitting right behind you over there, and she gives me a hard time every week.

Questions, comments from council? Yes, council member Ware.

Personally, all I've seen that we've done here commands standing ovation for all of these people that did their work. I would like to make sure they understand. I hope I didn't steal any of your thunder.

I actually was contemplating just sort of the rest of us sitting here and letting you stand by yourself.

That would have been very awkward, and I wasn't. Most people think I'm that kind of character. I'm used to awkward. Yes, Council Member Galante.

Thank you, Jennifer and Brent. Great, great work. This is when you do your victory lap, right? The victory lap was a lot of learning, a lot of accomplishments. Quick question. We got a lot of learning from this event, right? What stands more in your mind that is the biggest take that we got from the World Cup in understanding big events and worldwide events?

I APPRECIATE YOUR FOLLOW-UP. I HAVE A QUESTION FOR BRENT. ON THE HOSPITALITY SIDE, I'M REALLY CLOSE TO THE HOSPITALITY COMMUNITY. WE HAVE, YOU KNOW, SOME RESERVATIONS BLOCKED AHEAD OF THE GAME, THE GAMES, AND THEN WHEN YOU COME REALLY CLOSE TO THE EVENTS, THEY'RE SENDING BACK TO THE HOTELS, THEY HAVE TO SCRUMBLE. AND THEY DID A PRETTY GOOD JOB, RIGHT? SO WE SHARED THE SAME BOARD WITH THE CVB BOARD, WHICH I'M PROUD OF IT. AND WHAT LEARNING EXPERIENCE WE TAKE FROM THIS AND WHAT CAN WE DO TO MAKE IT BETTER FOR THE HOSPITALITY ASPECT IN RETURNING INVESTMENT FOR THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY IN ARLINGTO

Thank you, guys. Congratulations again. Cheers to you all. Thank you.

Mayor, I got a quick question. Go ahead, Council Member Shelton.

Great presentations. Thank you all very much. I got a fun question. So I always think about what's next. Is it feasible that could we actually host the Olympics? I know we can't do it ourselves here in Arlington, but can we do this in light of hosting such an internationally focused event? Can we do something like that here? Is that the next thing here, or is that a bridge too far?

I don't see what's next after. I mean, that's got to be the next logical step.

I know that with me having an opportunity to meet everybody from the prime minister of Spain to the king of Jordan to all the council generals, they were floored by Arlington and they all knew where they were. there was no doubt about them being in Arlington, Texas. And in spite of everything else with Dallas being plastered on the stadium and all of that, they all knew that they were in Arlington, Texas. And it just speaks volumes for what our staff here in Arlington is capable of doing. So I appreciate y'all. Anybody, anything else? Council Member Gonzales.

Thank you, Jennifer, for representing the city. You did a great job, and everybody spoke very highly of you. And that's everybody involved, but I just heard a lot. You were at a lot of meetings, so great for being such a great professional. Appreciate you.

Okay, thank you. We're going to move on down from all the wonderful stuff at FIFA to talk about erosion policy at 3.2. Amy, you've got quite an act to follow now.

Questions or comments from council? Council Member Galante. No, I've already called you. Go on. I want to get you over with.

All right. Amy, thank you so much for the follow-up, and I think we work a great deal already on looking at updating the stormwater plan that we had before, the review, plus this work that you've done, so congratulations, really good information. Questions really for Trey here, so what are the options here we have for a program, right? At least take a look at a program, not define what the program is, but what are the options for a program here? A dedicated program, erosion program.

Thank you. Thank you for that, sir. Thank you. Council Member Pham.

Well, Amy, on the slide, it says 140 stream miles. Is that all public, right, that we're working on? And to fix it, the estimate cost is $1.1 billion. Is that correct, on the slide that you show us?

Is that all together, public and private?

And then the $10 that we collect currently, we get per month, we collect around $20 million a year, and that used to fix all the, like this District 4 key branch, remember, that that money used it for. So we only get about 20 million when we charge everybody 10 bucks a month, correct? Yes, and so we have a- So with that kind, the only way if the city council will get involved, they're going to cost a lot of money because we had to fix the, we had the public, and then we got private. Now, I was told that private, you have to, the HOA got to be responsible to keep maintenance, and some people ov

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Trey. Thank you, Amy. This is an ongoing problem for many years, and I'm really shocked at how many emails we've gotten regarding, you know, trying to help Arlington families with erosion issues. So I don't know if somebody said something or what, but I just noticed it's really increased a lot. Trey, so one of the questions that I've gotten many times is Six Flags with the creek going through it, UTA with the creek going through it, do we help them at all if there's any type of issues there?

So, which is the same concept that we do with homeowners now. We offer expertise on how to fix things and everything else. And the reason I ask that, because I knew the answer was no, but there was a lot of people just assumed that we took care of all the creeks throughout the city and we're just not taking care of homeowners. So, when you talk about erosion issues and a dedicated fee, I mean, what you said a few minutes ago about a fee, Can you explain that a little more? I'm not saying we're for it, but I just want to be able to, that people that are listening can understand

And that's sort of the same scenario with several neighborhoods where they have the lake in their backyard and the silt's going in and they have to dredge it and it's going to cost each home $100,000. And now they're requesting all the HOA members of that community because, hey, that's a benefit for our neighborhood. But it really isn't. It's for them, especially when you can't even access it. So it's the same scenario. I mean. So it's the same thing. It's like, yeah, it's great, but I hate to say it, it's not my problem. And you don't want to pay for it.

Trey, just complementing what he's saying. So the argument out there is that in 1961, the city was 44,000 people. Now we have 400,000, basically almost 10 times bigger than it was. And now this water that rains affect everybody in a different way. They flow to city-owned infrastructure that we take care of it with the $20 million. We're not going to talk about if that's enough or not, if this is enough or not. but also goes to some private creeks, and what they're saying is that there's more water being handled by those creeks and they have more erosion now. If that's true or not, so leave for

Let Amy address that. She's the engineer.

No, not what can we do. The argument that over the last 40 years, Arlington has grown so much that now we have more parking lots, we have more businesses, and we're causing The runoff into these private creeks that's doing the erosion is that the catalyst for this? Or what is causing the erosion over the years?

On a PID, you're going to have to have a buy-in from all the people affected by it as well.

Which is a whole other... ball of wax. Here's my concern is we have a stormwater utility fee that all of us homeowners pay into. We can't realistically look at creating a creek erosion fee because when we do that, that's another form of taxation on our citizens, and we all pay into that, and then we're going to get a couple of issues that come up where A, I'm not having a creek or any erosion issues on my property, but I'm paying into it, which is much different than the storm water utility fee, and B, let's say we're able to get five to 10 million a year on a fee. Well, that doesn't begin to

Let's wrap up. We're going to continue exploring solutions for it.

I think that's what we, we can look and, I think what we need to do, and that's not a job for Amy's team or anything like that, it's more of a job for our legislation, our legislative team, to say, listen, is there a way that we can get and it'd probably be best to wait till after November to see what happens and let things shake out, get to a point where we can leverage some of our representatives or senators, either at a state or federal level, to help communities, because this issue isn't unique to Arlington. It's happening all across our state, all across our country, and I think that coul

Okay? All right, thank you, Amy, I appreciate you. Okay, we're going to go on down to 3.3, Marty Weider, Opportunity Zones.

Sir, thanks for the presentation. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Opportunity Zones. They're great, don't get me wrong. My hate is that back home in Ohio, our family business was taken through one through eminent domain years and years ago. Good Lord, it was 25 years ago. But I have to be honest and say, the city's vision for that property still exists today, and it's thriving in downtown Cleveland. So my point here is that I think this is great for our city, that we have this, but we've gotta be purposeful about where we want this to what we want in these particular locations as

Thank you, Marty. My pleasure. I was laughing because I love how much Marty loves economic development. He's the right man for the job. I don't know who this is to, but with Jason's question, that sounds like I would love to see the Innovate Arlington plan with a opportunity zone overlay. Could we see both of those together? Or form-based zoning with the opportunity zone on top? And we talked to John Chapman a little bit about There's so many different layers of the city and different things that apply to one place. I think these opportunity zones would be great to see that laid on top of thos

Hey, Marty. Yes. So this won't go into effect until 1 January 27, right? That's correct. So for the Opportunity Zone, so if you in there, you have some investor willing to invest, you know, they'll be eligible for that incentive from the federal government. That's correct. That's correct. And there be a certain amount or, you know, there's some, how much they will be eligible for if somebody willing to invest.

So this is one part of the Big Beautiful View or something? That's correct.

It's good for 10 years, okay. Yes, sir. So we submit eight, we got four?

Does an opportunity zone apply to nonprofits or only for profit development?

Thank you, Marty, for that explanation on opportunity zones and how it works. The part that I didn't realize was taxpayers. So any taxpayer could get... invest in one of these, and how do they go about doing that?

3.4, council priority, Jennifer Wickman.

Council Member Gonzalez. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Jennifer. I didn't have a...

A long time to look at this, but I want to thank you obviously for our notice that part of the plan is to include other school districts now in some of these strengthening learn to learn not to burn and stuff like that. So I really do appreciate that so. and continuing that for future generations. I did notice, though, we do have a strong relationship with AISD on different things that we offer that we don't offer to other ones, so if there's anything I need to do to connect with some others, I think it's the unity plan portion somewhere I saw that, They're visiting all the schools and everyth

Any other questions? Council Member Garcia-Dumont.

Hi Jennifer. I just want to give hats off to the library and Norma and her team. I mean everything that comes out of there is so fun and engaging the community. It's a free resource to our community and I want to encourage everyone to use the library. I guarantee you 50 percent of the things you do for fun, you could probably do for free at the library. It would help our city by using the library. I love Library Kit of the Month and I also hats off to Culture Pass. That's really exciting. It's engaging so many of our arts and non-profits and city funded organizations. I know that the library h

Thank you, Jennifer, for the update. Some of those, can you send a digital copy for us on an email? Okay, so we have it on file. And a lot of those priorities here, we're going to double check on the fall retreat, correct? That will be the opportunity to go ahead and... And cycle some of those priorities.

Any other questions? Thank you, Jennifer.

We're going to move on and talk about our informal staff reports. Everybody's received the written reports in order to keep things moving along here since it's already almost five o'clock. We'll address any questions or concerns or comments you may have on a particular report. So let me first ask on 4.1, 2027 neighborhood matching grant call for projects. Any questions or comments for Cynthia? Seeing none, look at you, you got off easy today. Perfect. 4.2, update on efforts to combat human trafficking in Arlington. Questions or comments for Chief Jones? Okay, is Chief out there in the hallway

hi chief jones so i was the one who asked for this and you guys can see all of that in the staff report um this came from a report that we had at meadowbrook and so i followed all of it through and asked chief and um and tank who's over the heat team what is arlington's process how do we go about all of this and the things that i learned were just truly incredible and so A tremendous hats off to your team. Just really quick in there, I wanted you guys to know that in Dallas a few years ago, there was a huge investigation that said that there were hundreds of unprocessed rape kits that were liv

Absolutely. And when you compare what Arlington Police Department does and the work that you do, especially with the cities around us, it is head and shoulders above the rest and of how we're taking care of our residents. I wanted to know what happens when children are involved, what happens when it's a resident, what happens when it's sex trafficking versus a rape that happens for the first time. And The city of Arlington provides tremendous services to our residents, should they want them. Not every resident wants them. All of our children are referred to Alliance for Children. They all rece

It's okay, Chief. I'm taking full credit. laughter

Could you just very briefly talk about your relationship with Rescue Hill? It's an organization here in downtown.

I know that this is a dark subject and we hope to never have to discuss it with anybody that we know. Our crime is down in Arlington and that is all hats off to you guys. But this does still happen in Arlington and we need to be prepared. And my concern was, are we offering any type of resource to our residents who may go through what is the worst day of your entire life? And I was so pleased to know that yes, yes, yes, yes. There were so many resources and robust resources and time that's being put in. So I really appreciate your work and I appreciate your work, Chief Jones. Yes, ma'am.

Any other questions or comments? Thank y'all. Appreciate you. We'll move on down to 4.3, questions or comments on data center background information. So, Jensi, I have one question. It sounds like we have a little bit of a gap on our UDC and how we address data centers on there. It looks like that could be something for a future agenda item for y'all to look at how we can better address data centers. We've sort of been lucky that we don't have a ton of them knocking on our door and saying we want to put them everywhere because we really don't have any way to specifically guide them through the

Okay. I'll bring that up in the future agenda items then as one of my requests. So thank you. All right, we're gonna move on down 4.4, Arlington Film Incentive Program. Any questions for Marty Weider? Seeing none, 4.5, Economic Development, Councilmember Mauricio Galante.

Yes, Mayor. The Economic Development Committee met this morning with Full House, and we discussed the C-PACE, so we had a presentation from Marty and his team about the C-PACE commercial property assessed CLEAN ENERGY, WHICH IS ONE OF THE, AN EXTRA TOOL FOR CAPITAL STACK FOR THE DEVELOPERS IN THE CITY. SO C-PACE WORKS ON OFFSETTING THE COST OF THE INVESTMENT FOR ANY DEVELOPMENT FROM SAVINGS ON CLEAN ENERGY INITIATIVES, WHICH ARE ELECTRIC OR WATER OR BEST PRACTICES ON MANAGEMENT FOR ROOM OCCUPANCY, ESPECIALLY FOR HOSPITALITY AND DEVELOPMENTS LIKE THAT THAT CAN BRING IT DOWN THE EXPENSES ON ELEC

Thank you. Councilmember Hunter, Arlington Housing Finance Corp.

Thank you. The Arlington Health and Finance Corporation met this morning. The Board looked over for a second time a request for an amendment to the regulatory agreement for Savita's development partner with the Center Street Apartments. We did go ahead and vote unanimously to support the approval of the amendment, which modifies affordability requirements and increases the number to 60% AMI units in the development. This amendment will be on the 1013 agenda for formal consideration on there. So we had a pretty quick meeting. Does anybody have anything that they wanted to add to that? No, ma'am

Okay, let's move on down to 4.7. Ms. Garcia, any appointments to boards or commissions this evening?

Okay, thank you. Evening agenda items. Anybody have questions on evening agenda items? Councilmember Shelton.

I don't have any questions, but I do want to revisit a spirited conversation we had during our last meeting about the issue of voting precincts here in Arlington. All of us got an email recently from Molly and her team. I asked them for some maps of the city and I want to give a shout out to Molly and her team for that great maps. Basically what they did is they asked for two sets of maps. One set of maps that looked at, imagine a map of the city of Arlington and the census tracts color coded by race and ethnicity, the majority of the racial group that lived in that census tract. And where wer

Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Anybody else on the evening agenda items? I have one issue. I don't know if anybody else has been contacted about this, but I have, and it's agenda 7.22 and 7.23 regarding our renewing of the contract for our tax collection and, oh, my mind just went blank. Court fees, thank you, Trey, I appreciate it. Who can answer some questions on that, Trey, who is it? Spencer?

Perfect. I just need some clarification because we have really only two competing law firms in this scenario here, and I want to know how we came to the conclusion that we did with the, I think a four point difference on the court stuff and a 15 point difference on the tax issue and how that came about. And then I'll open it up to council to see if y'all want to. My understanding, we can either grant it the way it is or we could split it or do whatever y'all want to do with that.

And was I accurate with my understanding of the point difference on the two scenarios there? Yes, sir.

Is that a big difference per your scale? Four doesn't sound like a large number, but is the scale out of eight? Is the scale out of six? Out of 100. So the numbers are fairly close?

Was there any way into any side or the other? Because I know one is a local Arlington law firm and one is not. are the one we currently use is not. Is there any weight given to a local business?

Council, do you all have any questions? Do you want to run it through as is, or do you have any desire to address it differently?

Go ahead. Thank you for coming out. Yeah, just following up on what you said, the RFP process does not have a heavier weight for a local business, right? This is a standard procedure for all the RFPs, RFQs in the city. I mean, by law, we cannot give that, right? Yes. By law, we cannot give that heavy weight, right?

And the committee is not looking for the lower bid, right? It's looking for the best service for the price, right? And how many people are in the committee?

If they have success, they get paid, right? Right. Success is their payment. For small business out there and local businesses that ask, are we giving priority for business that are not outside the city or inside the city? There is a process. There's a committee, seven people that put the work and effort in a most fair way To give the proposal for us, right? To propose which company is going to win the contract, correct? Correct. All right.

Thank you. I did have a conversation with Trey about this this morning. And Trey, I think it would be helpful if you could share some of the points you shared with me this morning, sir.

Okay. That answers my questions. Oh, Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you. I just learned something new, which is just amazing to hear that. So I guess I'm asking, what were you asking, Mayor? What were you looking at? What brought this all to the very beginning when you talked about the difference in scoring?

But both scoring had Lineberger, right, on both? Yes. Okay. That's where I was kind of confused on what happened there. Okay.

Yeah, I was just curious about the selection process, how the committee worked and all that stuff. I'm happy to, if, Council appears to be satisfied with the bid process here. I'm happy to leave it as is as well. All right, thanks guys, appreciate you. Anything else on evening agenda items? Okay, issues relative to City or TxDOT? One of these evenings, somebody's gonna have something on that. We could do that actually. So Trey and I recently had the opportunity to go sit down with the district engineer for TxDOT in the Fort Worth division and talked about the priorities of TxDOT and the Fort W

Oh, and the last thing was the southeast connector and the tremendous progress that is being made on the southeast connector. If y'all haven't been down there lately, I-20, A-20 area, just tremendous stuff. That is, and Marty will attest to this, that is an economic engine once we get that thing complete. We'll see new businesses coming in there, places that people can go and kick off businesses. That's gonna be phenomenal. They're ahead of schedule down there. They're blowing and going and just making tremendous progress, so you know. Fort Worth Division is starting to get some legs underneat

Did you meet with David Salazar? Yes. Okay, that's good. Thank you.

Okay. That's the first time we've ever talked about TxDOT projects. I'm going to take that off my bucket list. That's sad when your bucket list is talking about an agenda item on here. External committee reports, training reports from council will start with National League of Cities Finance, Raul Gonzalez.

I did not attend that meeting, so I didn't have a report.

Okay, perfect. I'm gonna handle the North Texas Commission Board board meeting and executive committee meeting. We did this on September 17th of 2026. We had some major new investors that we ratified as board members by the executive committee that include a gentleman from McAdams, someone from the Fort Worth Economic Partnership, someone from Core Construction, the judge or the judge, the mayor from the city of Louisville, city of Denton, and the city of Irving all became major contributors and joined us on that. And Pogue Construction was also a major contributor. We got a legislative update

Thank you, Mayor. I want to make a correction on that. The Fair Committee I did attend, but I didn't I didn't know how to report, so I'll bring it for next time. I did attend, and the next meeting will be October 25th. The RTC meeting we met on September 11th. The RTC approved several items, including federal performance metrics related to congestion mitigation and air quality. The Metropolitan Transportation Plan Policy Bundle, which awards transportation development credits to cities and transit agencies to use in lieu of local cash for federal funding. Arlington was awarded 3,200,000 TDCs o

Okay. Anybody have questions on that future agenda items? Yes, Council Member Pham.

Well, Molly, I spoke with you, I think, last week about unregistered vehicle parking public street. I just happened to be in Grand Prairie, Texas, and I saw this lady come out, take a picture of the last time played a sticker, registered a sticker, and then put the red sticker. So I approached her, and she told me she would code compliant. So she put a red sticker on there, because that car parked there. illegally for quite a while. Some neighbor around there called it in. However, I asked her, what happens if you come back later? She said, well, I come back the second time, we're going to tow

Thank you. Molly, I think we do have this on a future agenda item talking about food trucks, maybe having a discussion on that. But I wanted to add if we could look at some statistics from the surrounding cities and see what works and what doesn't work and consider that for discussion.

I have a few items for future, yeah. Our neighbor to the south of us just passed a resolution opposing MISD's attempt to create single district representation of all of the MISD kids. we have a lot of MISD kids in Arlington. And I'd like to have discussions regarding a potential resolution opposing single district representation for MISD of our Arlington children.

I know I'm not supposed to talk about it, but it's going to affect Arlington more than anything else, what they're trying to do.

Okay. The second issue is I'd like for Gentsy and team to look at what we may need to do to help clarify any future or potential data center inquiries with our UDC. And the third thing is I have a town hall coming up on Thursday, and I've had a lot of discussions regarding the ADO already. I'd like to put the ADO back onto a future agenda to discuss it further about reinstating our anti-discrimination ordinance.

Mr. Mayor, I thought we already reinstated.

We agreed with that, didn't we? it back on the agenda to talk about it again.

You can't get into details. Don't start arguing with it now. But we're going to put it on the agenda and we're going to allow council to discuss it. Anybody else on future agenda items? Okay. With that, the afternoon session is adjourned.