City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, it's six o'clock, city council meeting, uh, Tuesday, February 17th, 2026. Uh, we're going to go ahead and call to order. We have a quorum and BC Beard's going to give us our invitation.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for allowing us to come in your presence again, Lord. We we thank you for all that you've done for us. Lord, we ask that you'd bless this meeting. Lord, we ask that you'd lead, guide us, and direct us. Lord, help us to do your will in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Thank you. To the flag of the United States of America to the standy for all. All right. Thanks, DC Bear. All right, we're going to go ahead and move into public comments. The city council welcome citizen participation and comments at all city council meetings. Citizen,

sorry, if we could go back up to open session number one, please. Oh, all right. Sorry. Item number one is recognition to employees who help during the winter storm. And I'm guessing that's Yes, sir. That would be me. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, mayor and Mayor Part, he's not here this evening, but if he's listening. And then members of council, uh, we we have quite a crowd here this evening. Some of them are inside, some of them out out in the hallway. But, as you as you're aware, the most important asset that we have as as an organization is our employees. And we definitely want to take the opportunity to recognize them whenever it's deserved and whenever we can. Tonight, we're taking a moment to recognize the employees who came through for the city in a big way during the last winter weather event. While everyone else was at home and warm with their families, they were out working in frigid weather. They were uh with the treacherous roads to and from work and of course while they were here. Um but they did their duty, but they did it under under extraordinary circumstances. I would like to take this moment to bring attention to the fact that they did again they did their job but they did it when everybody else was home. Is it is it expected? Yes. But is it appreciated? Yes. We just want you to know that you're appreciated. Your efforts did not go unnoticed and we'd like to recognize them here in front of council in front of the public tonight. So, uh department heads if you would you give you this chance to introduce each of your employees. Eric first. Yes. you don't mind?

Good evening, council citizens. Uh, tonight I'm be presenting the public works uh, employees that stood out during the winter storm. They were the first ones to volunteer to work all the overtime hours over the weekend. Uh, tonight we have Chris Barbosa street department, Ronnie Barnett, Salvador Estrada, Brad parks department, Walter Middleton, Riley NS, David Schultz, park uh street superintendent, and Odessa Taylor. I just want to say I appreciate you guys and thanks for everything yall do. Thanks, guys.

Aaron, if you would come up while he's coming up. Each each employee not not only gets a certificate, but we're putting something in the personnel file, so it's something that they'll have into the future as well. Good evening. Tonight, I have two of mine. And if you know uh Junior or James, it's it takes a lot for him to get me up here. So, at least got to give him kudos for that. Um, I have a total of nine. I have Cory Adam. Um, Cory Adam, Michael Underwood, and Romero Gonzalez for the sewer plant. Uh, they helped run the sewer plant when it was having issues. One even stayed the whole entire night to make sure it would run for the rest of the day. Uh for the water plants I have uh Paul Reyes, Edund Turner, Jose Perez, and Derek Dar Rio. They ran the LBS water plant. It's usually a weekend turned off plant, but we ran it there in the weekend, so we made sure we had plenty of water for the city and county. And then I also have Ray Aguilon and James Bradley are junior. Um, if anybody knows the maintenance department, they handle all the small issues and make sure that all the complaints or anything going on is taken care of. And they even went around uh filling generators up for all the generators that had been running to make sure that we would still would have power even if we let lost electricity. So, I'll give it to you.

I've mixed them up, but they're in there. Okay. Thanks, guys.

Either fire chief or police chief, whoever like come up next, please. As you know, our our firefighters are on duty 48 hours at a time. They work 48 at night, 48.96 chill. But these guys, because of the weather, we had them come in extra. So, uh, some of them worked up to 14 to 24 hours extra to make sure that we had enough people on staff because again, if we'd had something really bad trying to get these guys in when they live far away, uh, that could have caused a lot of problems. So, we went in and had extra staffing. So, we'll recognize the ones that are here tonight. Danny Beard, Jace Collins, Cody Craig here, Caleb Daniel, Adam Decker, Brad Eubank, Lance Hall, Eric Cart, Jay Higenbotham, Trevor Jesse, Brandon Null, James Riley, Steio Rodriguez, Kenneth Roseell, Casey Sanders,

Connor Ces, Adrian S. Payton Willlet. Again, these are firefighters that came in did extra duty. We also provided transportation for the uh civic center folk. They didn't have proper vehicles, so we went picked them up, got them up to the civic center, got them take. Thank you guys. Good evening. Grateful to be here with you. Um, from the police department, we uh I'll start with animal control services. Animal control officer Drake Moore came in every day to feed the animals, make sure they had water, also make sure we didn't have any power issues and do some cleaning of the kennel. So, he came in every day from Friday through Tuesday as long as we were close to make sure that happened. Um, he's not here tonight, but I'm grateful for his service. Uh, dispatch, obviously, our dispatch center answers 911 calls for the entire county, including fire and, uh, EMS, which we then transfer, as well as the county sheriff, which we then transfer to center. So, uh, I'll thank some of their family members who also drove them in from home and four-wheel drives. I noticed um tonight uh Emily Haidider is here with me representing all of dispatch because we're a little short-handed. And so in addition to Emily, we had Eric Hall, um Colton House, Isabella Medina,

uh Iris Paco, Art Ramirez, and Kiana Stewart who all came in from dispatch. So, thank you, Emily, and from our dispatch. Um, from the we also had our you guys probably heard about a baby who got got dropped off in a parking lot and our crime victims advocate came out and worked several hours with patrol that during that day. Melissa Horton came in um and worked during that storm as well. And then for our police officers, um, for them it's and dispatch is kind of business as usual because they just know they're coming in. But, um, they do the same thing. They sometimes leave very early to get to work on time. There was a lot of crashes. A lot of those calls went to dispatch and then our interstate kept us busy some of the time and some of the roads as they pushed a lot of vehicles back onto the speed or got them going. So, um, I have tonight with me Sergeant John Beasley and Officer Caesar are here. I think the rest of their crew are currently on a call. Um, so they couldn't come in tonight. In addition to them, um, from the police department, I'd also recognize um, I have a little bit of a list. Sorry. every shift we had at some point worked because of the way their days rotate uh between graveyards day shift and then C also came in and worked. So, I have um Detective Melissa Ayala, Detective Mark Quinn Brewer, Corporal Carrington Burns, who works the night shift, uh Officer Kimberly De Jesus, Sergeant Chris Durant, Officer Chris Foley, Corporal Corey Fox, Officer Ashlin Gdoy, Sergeant Alfredo Garcia, Officer K9 Officer Skyler Harvey, Officer Joshua Hayes, K9 Officer Jason

Hill, Corporal Hunter Jackson, Calvin Officer Calvin Lamont, Officer Maril Lee Manduhano, Sergeant Angel Mendoza, Lieutenant Mark Miller, Corporal Jennifer Miller, Officer Angel Nava, Lieutenant Travis Nichols, Detective Cody Odum, Officer Trevor Patton, Officer Adam RS, Sergeant Marcus Dax, and Officer Tatum Müller. So that's who came in from the police department during uh that time to serve the city and I'm grateful for their willingness to do so. Thank you.

Believe we have one more assistant city manager Webster. saved the best for last. So, we have from the airport and I did see Paul here is John Earl and he is not here, but I did tell Justin who is not here that next to the police department. They were number two on the list. And so, they stayed overnight to keep the civic center open for a warming center for anybody that needed to come up there. They slept up there. So, we're very appreciative for them. And so that was um Justin Beard here is civic center manager, Desiree Britain, Brian Hereta, and Paul Thomas. And so we just want to thank them for all of their hard work and dedication.

That's all we have. Thank

All right. Thank you everybody. All right. We'll go ahead and move on to uh the public comments. Uh the city council welcomes citizen participation and comments at all the city council meetings. Citizens comments are limited to three minutes out of respect for everyone's time. The council is not permitted to respond to your comments. The Texas Open Meetings Act requires that the topics of discussion deliberation be posted on the agenda no not less than 72 hours in advance of the council meeting. If your comment relates to a topic that is on the agenda, then the council will discuss the topic on the agenda at that time that the topic is discussed and deliberated. Do we have anybody that has public comment? All right. All right. We'll move on. We'll go ahead and move on to uh item or we're going to go ahead and move on to the consent agenda. Items on the consent agenda are approved through a single council motion which applies to all items listed. Consent agendas items are considered routine, not likely to require discussion or deliberation, and may be discussed prior to making a motion. There will be no separate discussion on these items unless a council member requests an item be removed and considered separately. So, u item number two is consider approval of February 3rd, 2026 meeting minutes. Item number three is consider pay request number 33 for Drake construction for work performed on the southside WWTP. Item number four, consider pay request number 16 to Wicker Construction for work performed on the West Loop wastewater collection. And item number five, consider pay request number nine to J2 Construction for work performed at the industrial lift park. Does any member wish to remove any items from the agenda discussed?

All right. If not, if there's a motion to approve all the items on the consent agenda, I make a motion that we approve on the consent agenda number two, three, four, and five. A second. All right. Madam Secretary, can we call the vote, please? Yes. I I I pass unanimously. We'll go ahead and move into the regular agenda. Item number six, monthly financial report for month end January 31st, 2026. And this will be finance director gate.

Good evening, council and mayor. Um, so last time we saw December, now we're already into the January report because of all the delays and everything. So January will be the first four months. So 33.3% of the way through the year. So we'll move into it. So we have our general fund uh revenues. We're sitting at 47.1% for uh the first four months. That's much above much higher than 33.3. That's of course due to property taxes which we'll see in a second. And uh prior year was 44.2. So, we're doing better than the prior year overall for uh revenues for the general fund. And now we'll look at property tax. And there we see that giant spike of the green line finally coming back up. I did realize today that there was one entry that was reported to a different account. So, it's not reflected on here, which actually makes our um January actuals almost equal to the budget line. So, right now it's slightly below, but I realized there's one entry that was done incorrectly and it's now fixed that corrects that and puts that line right at where the budget is. Um, so there is that and it so currently for the first four months we are behind what we budgeted that is partially due to um how the budgeted monthly is calculated. it is only calculated based off two years whereas these sales tax ones we'll see in a second the monthly percentages on how much each month typically gets is based off six years worth of data and so there's a lot more flexibility in yeartoear so it's not entirely accurate on that count but we are seeing all the money come in as it should and there's no concerns there and then we move over

to the sales tax uh we saw this graph last month uh January still coming in strong. We are 8.82% ahead of budget for sales tax as of um January. That's real good. We like to see that. And we move over to the expense side. Some of the um individual departments seem a little high for the month, but if you look at their year-to- date percentage, they're all falling right around or within the 33.3% for an overall year-to- date percent of 33.0 compared to 32.8 last year. So, expenses are staying right in line where they should be for uh a third of the way through the year. and we're looking at a $2.3 million excess year to date compared to prior year was 1.8. So that's higher excess than last year at this point in the year. We expect to have that excess because of the uh property tax coming in early and not later. So that is the general fund. Then we'll move over to the utility fund. Uh revenues there are looking at 33.6% compared to 24.1 for the prior year. So, those are coming in strong uh across the board and uh all good there. We'll move over to the expense side. Uh again, a couple of the departments look a little high, but if you look at that year-to- date percentages, they're right where they should be uh for 29.5% uh year-to- date expenses. and it gives us a current excess of 1.1 million and compared to last year where there was a slight deficit. And so that's a really good thing. Of course, in the utility fund, we are trying to build that fund balance up. We see we have the $884,000 budgeted excess and so that $1.1 million falls right with that. We're doing good

for it. And then we have the sales tax for February. We like to see that green line still st stand standing tall and we are at 9.39% ahead of budget. So those are still coming in strong. We're well prepared if any uh shortfalls come in in the coming months. We have a good amount backing up. So that is the financials. Do we have any questions?

Question. Thanks John. Appreciate it. All right. going to go ahead and move on to item number seven. Discuss, consider, and take appropriate actions on the first amendment to lease agreement for revive aluminum ink. And this is our executive director Carter will present.

I'm going to go ahead and recuse myself for items seven and eight at this point. Good evening, mayor, council. I am going to three items that are very similar. Uh we are going to talk about the lease agreement. We amended the lease agreement uh with the Lumens Corporation just to allow their feasibility period to uh end on February 1st, which we're already past that, but with all the the ice and snow and lack of a quorum on one meeting. Um but we still need to amend the lease agreement. All that does is extend their feasibility period, which is ended now, but it did extend their feasibility period. the board um voted uh on January 8th to extend that feasibility period to May 30th. So the the original had expired on May 1st, but we extending that feasibility period to May 30th. It doesn't change um their lease payment to us that begins um later on this year. It just allows them more time um to access the property and to do further testing on the property. And Before I forget, I do want to uh introduce Larry Harmon. I know y'all have met him, but he's here with the Lumen Corporation. Thank for being here.

I would certainly answer any questions on the lease amendment. No, this is something you brought up to it. Yeah, we talked about it in in executive session. Yeah. Anybody? All right. So, uh, let's go ahead and get a motion. I make a motion to approve first amendment to performance agreement for Revolve aluminum. I second. Madam Secretary, can you get a vote, please? I I Yes.

All right. Move on to pass unanimously. We'll go ahead and move on to item number eight. discuss, consider and take action appropriate action on first amendment to performance agreement for revive aluminum ink.

Okay. This uh first amendment would uh allow the alumins corporation or revive aluminum inc to commence construction by June 1st, 2026 and complete construction by June 30th, 2028. That um changes their construction start date by about eight months. um they um they are working on their um bond financing and um expect that to happen in the next um four months and so uh we expect them to start by June June 1st of 2026 uh and then that would they would need to complete construction by June 30th 2028. The the EDC board did approve that on January 8th 2026. Like I say it doesn'tffect release payment to us. It just affects their construction date. We want them to be successful. So allowing them a few months of grace on starting on June 1st um really does not have a large impact on us as a community by allowing them to start later than expected. Any discussion? Okay. Get a motion. I make a motion that we accept the um I'm trying to make sure I'm on the right line. Uh the agreement for revive aluminum the first amendment for performance agreement for revive aluminum DBA alum secretary could vote please. I

Great. Moved on unanimously. We'll go ahead and move on to item number nine. Discuss, consider, and take appropriate actions on the second amendment to performance agreement for Revive Aluminum Inc. EVA Lumens.

So, what this amendment would do is it would allow um Revive Aluminum Done Businesses alumni to access some of the funds that were committed uh in the original agreement that the the EDC board approved and city council approved uh earlier in the year. This would allow them to access up to $750,000 of qualified expenditures. And what that means is those expenditures have to be related to equipment, construction or site preparation for the site that that they are leasing from us. Um these funds would only be paid as a reimbured expense. So they have to expend the funds um first and then they they can um submit uh those paid invoices for us to um reimburse them. With these early reimbursement, we feel that the 750,000 we have protection on that 750,000. Um it's either going on the site that we own or it's going on equipment that we could recoup um if if the project were to fail. uh you know, fortunately we don't want that to happen, but we want to protect the taxpayers uh of Mount Pleasant with this and it gives us an easier um avenue to all that money back if something were to happen or we would have we would have that expense that went to a site that would help us um utilize that site further on down the road if this didn't the board did approve this on January 27th, 2026. All right.

And and those funds would come out of their original agreement. It's not an addition to what we already and that's what I was going to bring out. Three points. One is the money is already approved and has been since we got into this. Yes, ma'am. Secondly, that there's no money upfront. This is what they will be reimbursed for things done on the land or equipment and this was already approved. So there's nothing that's left up front without any documentation. That's correct. Yes, ma'am. We got them. All right. Let's go ahead and get a motion.

I make a motion to approve the second amendment to performance agreement for Revive Aluminum. MPEDC board approved on January 27th. Got a second. Second. All right. Madam Secretary, can you vote, please? I I Yes. Pass unanimously. Larry, we appreciate you and Richard and we appreciate you. Thank you. Awesome. Appreciate y'all. Appreciate the partnership between the EDC and the city. I think things are clicking along. Heck yeah. It's exciting.

All right, we'll go ahead and move to item number 10. uh Mount Pleasant EDC quarterly report update.

Yeah, I'm going to go through several slides, but if you have a question as I'm going through the slide, just stop me and we'll we'll talk about it then or you can wait till the end, however you want to do that. This is our quarterly update that we've been trying with weather and and being gone. Anyway, we're doing two quarters at once and then we'll try to catch up and do it, you know, on a quarterly basis. So, um project highlights, we had uh three projects in the last two quarters. We had Ruby and Beonia first. Uh that happened first couple of months I um came to town. They did a uh an addition to uh their property over there and then added some employees. Laura's Cheesecake. They are adding a commercial kitchen on uh over on Ferguson Road. Uh, and so that's exciting to deal with their distribution and manufacturing of of their cheesecakes uh out into the world, not just in Mount Pleasant. So, and then mobile medic conversions, that's the ambulance um retro uh fit where they take the boxes off, completely redo those, and then put them on new chassis. And so, a little over a million and a half dollars in capital investment in those project. uh and then over 26 um full-time positions that'll be created in the next two years. We had our office ribbon cutting. Um that was in I'm gonna say late August I think late August or early late August. I know it was before Labor Day. And so if you haven't had the chance to come by our office um it's a beautiful piece of property. It's inside of the the Vera Bank. Um completely redone. Very proud of our office. I will tell you, I've been in several EDC offices and uh our office matches up against anybody. BR visits, I think this is one of our most important things that we do is for

us to be out in the community as an organization. And so BR that stands for business retention and expansion. That's where the most of our business um is going to come from. You can see the three projects that we did. two of those were expansions. People that already know how great it is to be in Mount Pleasant and then we had one that moved in. But um we did 13 of those uh before the first of the year. Um these great companies on here and if you're listening and I'm going to say this tomorrow at our state of the economy, if I haven't had the chance or we haven't had the chance to come to your business and haven't uh met you yet, I would love for you to reach out and for us to come and take a take a tour of your uh business. And so, uh, I know that, uh, city manager Vine is, uh, reached out and wants to go on some of those BRE visits. I think that's important for him to be there. And mayor actually went on has went on one with us when we did the bowling alley. And so, I think it's important for us to partner together and see that. But, um, we had great tours of these awesome businesses that are in town and tell the story of Mount Pleasant and how great it is here. Uh, I mean, it's incredible the companies that are here. You know, certainly being new here, I'm very impressed with what's here and and u you know, we're going to tell a little bit more of the story tomorrow at our state of the economy event, but it's incredible to see all the manufacturing um the food processing that's here and just the the different um you know, facilities that are here and and what kind of workforce that we have in Mount Pleasant. Also with those VRE visits, we did uh we toured all the educational institutions in Titus in in in our area in Titus County. Um we started with Northeast Texas Community College and then did the three uh schools, Mount Pleasant ISD, Harts Bluff ISD, and Chapel Hill. I am going to give a shout out. If you haven't been, you're missing something.

If you haven't been to the Tiger Den yet, you're missing something. That is the culinary arts program at Mount Pleasant ISD. Um they serve lunch on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. $7 will get you uh a chicken fried steak and uh including your tea and your and your tax. So, it's a great deal. If you haven't had the opportunity, the kids completely do that program. And so, uh it's it's an incredible deal. We've we've been a few times and so um the work that uh that Jud and uh as a superintendent of schools there and those the kids are doing, it's an incredible um um opportunity, but um I will tell you um with the smaller schools, Harts Bluff and Chapel Hill, they've got awesome career and technical education program. Very impressive for schools their size. And so um you know the uh and I will give kind of give an update here on the workforce grant that y'all approved um and our board approved. We did get approved from the state. So we are going to be able to expend those $100,000 worth of funds. We're going to match our 50,000 with 50,000 from the state. Um We're we're meeting with the schools right now to go over what kind of equipment that they're going to buy for their CTE uh program, but very excited about what the schools are doing. Um starting at Norththeast Texas Community College and then going down to the high school level. Our business parks um we operate uh two of those. Uh Cypress Industrial Park, that's uh down south right across uh to the west of the airport on 271. Um, that sign was a little uh rough whenever I got here. We uh finally got some letters, painted them gold, and uh I was reminded one of our board members goes that way to work every day, Daryl Grubs, and he was telling me the letters were off about the first month I uh was here. And so we finally got that fixed. And so anyway, I do want to shout out to Newlyweds. Um they're going to start maintaining that area around the sign

for us as just a courtesy. That way we don't have to try to get somebody down there to mow that. I appreciate newlyweds for stepping up and and taking care of that. I30 uh business park maintenance. We've done a lot of work um at the at the business park as an entity. Not that I was out there chopping trees or anything, but every tree in the business park is down. Um we actually um finished that up a couple of weeks ago. There were trees in a phone line that we had to have special they came and pulled those trees actually up instead of knocking them down. Um they reworked the creek. You can see that. And then um we had a a group come in, redo all the landscaping, plant some trees, and so it's looking great. I can't wait till spring when it starts turning green and what that looks like. But uh we did have the letters painted on on that business sign as well. And then we added um lights to the um to the signs on both sides of the I30 business part. Uh they were the old uh kind of were in very bad shape. So, we had to changed out the LEDs. And so, I I do want to say give a shout out. We do uh appreciate Garrett and his group helping us with with the lawn maintenance there. Appreciate that. So, if you haven't had a chance to go by and look at those, um we're going to start marketing the heck out of that business part. We're going to try to get it filled up. This is something that uh we did I think 10 years ago as as a country um opportunity zones. And so um with the new bill um that was passed um House Resolution One that took effect this year, the opportunity zone program is going to be renewed. And so each county can uh submit up to 50 tracks in their

county to be uh put in the opportunity zone program that wasn't previously. You can resubmit some that were in um but there also you can submit some that were not with the old rules. 10 years ago each county was supposed to submit like 10. Some counties submitted 30 cheated. I will just say that. But and a lot of those counties got those 30 because they oversubmitted and we had the So this time they're they're saying that 50 is what we can submit and they're going to hold everybody to that 50. So um I know that I'm going to be working with uh Rob and then um county judge on what to submit there. They're supposed to be bringing out a new map of the census areas that are going to fit because there is some income qualifications and some areas are not going to qualify for opportunity zones. This this time is going to be handled through the governor's office for economic development is going to handle the opport opportunity zone mapping and all that. So, we have to submit everything by June, but I'm going to get with Rob and and Judge Cooper on what tracks maybe to submit. So, I know we'll be setting up something um soon to kind of look at over that, but just kind of when we get that on um everybody's radar that we want to do that, what it allows us to do is to attract outside investment in our community u to and it gives them some tax breaks for going in some um low income census areas. Our our I30 business park is currently in an opportunity zone. State of the economy lunchon. I talked about that. It's um open to the public and it is the chambers helping us put that on. But we're going to have a greeting from the the mayor is going to be there um to do a greeting and then Rob is going to talk about the state of the city and

then um the EDC will talk about the state of the economy from the EDC perspective. It'll be some of what we talked about tonight and and maybe a couple of things more and then um we're going to have a guest speaker Lori Vincent um who is one of the experts on rural economic development in the country. Some other updates. Uh we did receive our last payment. Diamond C paid back um their incentive that they ended up not taking. So we have gotten the full repayment of $1.4 million. I think we had all of that was paid except for uh there was one payment made in October. So we have one payment that was made in this fiscal year. Uh we did change the EDC meetings to every second Thursday of the month just to kind of have that set except for this month. I've messed that up. But um we're going to move that towards the end of the month. But we did do a Boots and Biz leadership dinner that was hosted I think in November. We're working on a few things with the city. Uh and I've gotten the preliminary um kind of agreements to look over um for the city attorney to look over and that is a fiscal agent agreement. We don't have a fiscal agent agreement with the city. We pay $15,000 um the EDC does for um for our financial accounting for for us being on the city's payroll. And then also um I have uh worked on updating the bylaws and then uh I know that Rob is working on an incentive policy with the city. As soon as we get that done, then the EDC will work on an incentive policy as well. Um EDC staff uh did attend a few um different things. We attended all three staff members attended the TDC. That's our Texas Economic Development Council. That's our state association, our annual conference. Um Janette and I attended

the Team Texas Summit. That's um a group of site selectors came this year. Waco hosted that. Clerbell uh attended basic economic development in Dallas. Janette and I did a sales tax workshop and required of us every two years to attend. Um and then I attended the economic uh workshop that's um there was about 27 or eight stock consultants that met in Atlanta. Coming soon we are working on our website. We're going to premiere that um tomorrow and so kind of a teaser for tomorrow. We're going to at least let you know what it looks like. It won't be operational tomorrow, but we're hoping in the next week or so, but we're at least going to get to see what the theme looks like. And it is going to be bold. I'll just tell you it's not going to be uh a website um that anybody's ever seen. It's I'm it it took me a minute to get there, but you know, the website for the EDC is not for, you know, the folks in in Mount Pleasant. It's for folks that want to come to Mount Pleasant for like that want to bring a business. So, we are really marketing towards um site consultants and outside companies that want to come. So, it is a bold looking um website as far as recruiting. And so, I don't think there's one like that. There's a lot of black and white pictures. And so, that's kind of the teaser for tomorrow. I'm excited about that because there's some colors that stand out in those black and white pictures that really make them really vivid and I'm excited about our website. So, I would certainly answer any questions. Uh I just want you all to know uh how much I've enjoyed the last um I can't believe it's already been six months. Um I think we've got things uh rocking and rolling. Um obviously, you know, we've got to get out there and do

some more marketing. We want to fill up that I30 business park and come to y'all and spend some money and buy some more land. But um I want to fill that up before we do that or at least halfway fill it up before we do that. But I certainly uh appreciate um the opportunity and certainly would answer any questions if y'all have questions. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for working with us and thank you for everything that you bring the hard work. And I know the EDC board loves you and I'm grateful that we are where we are. Thank you. Appreciate that. The words right out of my mouth, council member. I know you got question. It's not a question. Just she took the words out of my mouth.

Breath of fresh air and it always happens. So anyway, but that's okay. She just moves quicker than me. But thank you for everything you're doing and I love the progress. Thank you. Appreciate y'all. Yeah, we appreciate you, man. Thank you. See y'all in the morning or tomorrow.

All right, we'll go ahead and move on to item number 11, presentation of the Mount Pleasant Fire Department 2025 annual report. Mayor, council, just want to you should have a copy of the whole report in your your packet and we'll just kind of go through some of the highlights. So, basically, it's an overview of of our operations and what we got accomplished and the trends, our volume, our staffing response, and some of the challenges that we're facing with with service delivery. Some of the things we're able to accomplish accomplish is uh we added more uh portable radios migrate towards our 700meg system. uh the police department. We're actually trying to get that countywide uh getting everybody over onto that. Uh the alerting systems at both stations, that's when the police department, the guys are asleep, what wakes them up, get the message to them. Uh we're continuing to buy uh turnout gear so they have two sets of gear so when they come back from a structure fire, they can take one set off, put it in the in the washing machine, get all the carcinogens out of it, and basically cancer. What's getting our people, the firefighters, not necessarily ours, but nationwide thermal imaging cameras. We replace some old ones. Those allow us to uh see through smoke. Basically, it it reads a heat signature. So, if we're inside looking for a victim inside the building full of smoke, uh it's kind of like looking at a black and white TV. You can see the outline of the body. It also helps in finding hot spots. We've got the fire knock down, fire hiding in the walls. You can use that. Find those. Then also gas monitoring. We have four gas meters, natural gas meters that we can use, go

out and detect present gas leak. We also started replacing our hose. Some of it quite old with new hose and nozzles, which is quite more efficient. Uh delivers more water, less pressure, uh not as hard on the guy having to maneuver those things. We're also able to restore one of our firefighters. Budget. Uh our budget was actually about 300 something,000 less than what it was in 24. Uh busiest day of the week, Tuesday. Busiest time of the day is at 3 p.m. Really don't know why that is. That's what it shows. Uh we do public fire education in all the schools K through four DD county that's about 2500 kids. We go out we've got some of our guys you kind of see up there that are dressed up like clowns. Some days they don't have to dress that way but uh anyway we go out and and try to do fire prevention with all the kids. Uh we do fire inspections. We have 11 certified inspectors in the in the department. Our inspections are based on one, two, three year period and that's based on how much hazard there is to a business. Some are low, some are high like the schools every year, hospital every year, nur nursing homes every year, some of the ones in businesses maybe two or three years. Uh we did 294 inspections this year. Emergency management is also in the fire department. Uh we have an emergency management plan that has 22 annexes over a variety of different things. We have to review those every year and then every five years we have to resubmit them to the state for their approval. We have two an emergency operations center which the primary is station two. Uh the backup is that the central station. This is where we go if if we have to have a a

disaster hit the city. That's where all department heads would go and handle the exercises. We do an exercise every year. We've done an exercise every year since 2004. Six of those that focused on active shooter incident might not prevalent. I think we were going yesterday or day before across the country. ISO uh that is what insurance companies use to determine uh how much your insurance is going to be. Uh we are at ISO3 one's the best 10 is basically hasn't got anything. Uh we were just regraded uh in the last few months. The prelim preliminary results show that we're going to be a three. Uh we're just about that close to being a two and we may be able to achieve that maybe in the next year. Training um detective commission on fire protection requires all of our get at least 20 hours of PE every year. Uh this year they did a total of 2634 hours of training. Uh we had two intermediate firefighters advance or advanced to two their intermediate firefighter. Five of them got the rope rescue and technician level certification. A fire officer one, fire officer two and a fire instructor in addition to their other CPI. community growth. Um EDC talked a little bit about that. Uh we're the city 16 square miles. The county is about 426 and we're responsible for all that. Uh retrail re retail trade area based on chamber number is about 106,000 population that might come into the city and on any given day about 24,000 people are supposed to be in the city

estimated. So we continue residential, commercial with the Anderson crossing, the new apartment buildings, hotels, the chain stores and homes. We continue to grow within the city and in the county. Our staffing, we have 32 total firefighters. Uh two of the shifts have 11, one of them has 10. Our minimum staffing is eight because the guys have to take their vacation, sick leave, that kind of stuff. So our we will not run with less than eight. Uh We still have four firefighter positions that that remain unfilled. U combined department experience with 528 years command staff. Uh 80% of them have over 20 years on with the rank and file. Uh they average about 10 years. Our volunteers fire departments out in the county which we depend on when we go out there. seven volunteer departments, but just like all the departments in the state and nation, they're having trouble getting good people and retaining them and being able to respond. We appreciate the ones that do. We have some that that are really dedicated and and make the calls that we depend on them to bring up water in the county. There's no hydrant out the county. So, they have to bring us water and we depend on them for manower. Again, there's 94 members on the BFDs. Only 21 of them are trained to help fight inferior structure fire and then only three of those consistently respond to call of the overall 24 of the 94 respond to 25% or more call. So you can see we really again they do the best they can. You know it's just not like it was 10 or 15 years ago where people were able to get off jobs, be able to respond whenever they could.

And it's not just titled that's across the state mutually a so again like if Mark needs help there's trained TLO which is their equivalent of this commission fire protection they have officers within the county and around them that are trained and can come help them for us for us to get certified firefighters we can along Long up spring area that's an hour hour and a half to wait for us to get people that are fully trained structural fire. So the city county fire protection agreement this is our second year of operating uh under the new agreement in years uh the funding was reduced 50% from 1.3 down to 650 and there's no escalator so the city has to absorb all the increases in any operational cost overlapping incident and generally what that means is we're on a call somewhere and we get a call somewhere else uh 257.3 of the calls 70 out of 957 were overlapping. However, uh in 22 it was as high as 15% of the call overlap. We've been extremely lucky that those overlapping calls weren't two critical calls at the same time. Response performance for city structure fires. We met NFPA, which is the National Fire Protection Association standard for for responding to a structure fire. Their standard is getting there four minutes. The first piece of equipment 90% of the time we were able to make it 82 88% of the time. The average response time for a structure fire in the city is 4 minutes 39 seconds. The county structure fire

response again to meet the standards are different. It's 14 minutes 80% of the time. Again, ironically, at the same percentage, 88.2% of the time and the average response time for the county structure fire at 9 minutes 57. The drought through this center. You may wonder why that what validity of that. You'll notice Titus County is now in the extreme drought, which means we're going to be more susceptible to grass fires until we get green up in the fall or in the in the spring. And these fires are going to be harder to contain, which means we're going to be outside the city working on those. U again, our volunteers may not be able to provide the amount of help we need. So, we're going to be there while waiting for the forest service or or somebody else to come help. Structures and grass fires inside the city. Again, we've saved about 88.2% of those. When we say save, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to go back tonight, spend the night there. But pictures, keepsakes, guns, things that can't be replaced, we were able to savage those out and let them have those prom dresses, wedding dresses, that kind of stuff. We didn't have any fatalities in 25 uh structure fires in the county, 58%. Same thing. They don't necessarily going to be liveable. Got stuff out. As far as grass fires, control burns, 52% of those uh what caused fires in the city. And same thing out in the county. 59% of them are started by control burns getting out of control. Uh the year this year started off kind of the same way. The grass fires that we're going through are basically people out burning.

Um, far as city county incident comparing 24 to 25. Overall, our calls were up 78 7.8%. Our structure fires went took a pretty good dive. It went down 32%. However, our grass fires went up 54%. Again, this is combined, city and county. When you break it down to just the city, again, our structure fires went down by about 20%. Our overall calls went up only 3%. You can kind of see the rest of it kind of. When we go to the county, uh, county calls went up 17%. Structure fires again came down pretty good, 41% there. Grass fires though went up 68%. Vehicle extrication went up 75%. And miscellaneous calls 58. Miscellaneous is like power line catching trees you know things like that smoking air. So when you break it further down for city calls, this is strictly uh significant calls, the ones that are highlighted in yellow, structure grass, motor vehicles, and 42% of those are in the city. And if you can see kind of above the red line, 63% of the overall calls uh occur in the city. When you get down to the county, 57% almost 60 or 58% of the significant calls are in the county and again 36% almost 37% of the overall call we make are in the county. So in 2016 we had a study done city and county went together and and funded that at that time was 10 years ago 45 firefighters were recommended that would

have additional 15 firefighters at that time. Uh they also recommended a third station. We had increased firefighters to 36 which was nine short of where we needed to be before the plan was halted because the lack of fun. Uh and And we actually went backward. We went down to 31 again. This, excuse me, this was 10 years ago. So, a lot of things have happened. We've annexed a lot of property into the city. The city and county continues to grow like we talked on a while ago. And the other thing about the growth that's going to bring more people in, more vehicle traffic, more more opportunities for people to have wrecked and need fire protection. So the bottom line is we don't have enough on duty firefighters to safely and effectively handle a working structure fire in the county nor enough left the city to handle a structure fire should one occur while firefighters are working on an in county. This was revealed 10 years ago. Uh it was being addressed as I said but we had to halt it. So when we're on a call and we don't have enough people, it puts our officers in charge in a place where they have to make pretty difficult to not

I do not have a If I I gave my phone, it's back there. So 17% of 650,000 is close to $111,000 basically that we're not being covered for going out in the county. I'm assuming that those numbers are right. Again, you kind of got to consider the big you kind of got to consider the big picture, too. That it's not just the call we're making in the the call itself is you have to pay for the whole picture. You know, the guys are on duty 20 well, they're on 48 hour, 24 hours a day. the standby time to keep the lights on, keep the gas on, keep all that all that kind of has to be considered. So, if you my budget this year is a little over $4 million. If you just take the calls that we make in the county, u I think it was like 36% of that. Roughly 36% of $4 million is about $1.3 million.

And since your calls are going up in the county, that's what I was looking at was county and vehicle extractions. Is that like the vehicle extractions with that I30? Uh a little bit everywhere. I30, 49, 67, they're all they're all over the place. In a lot of the we'll talk about it. Uh the next item I've got to talk about a lot of these vehicle accidents, these aren't people from Titus County or even Mount Pleasant. They're just people passing through that decide they want to have the wreck here or They didn't decide that, but that's what occurred. So, we have to go take

I saw a lot of comments lately about the fire stuff and all. Is this report Can you make this available to anyone who to come and get a copy of it?

Yeah, we usually post it and I'll get with Candace. Uh, we put it on our website QR code link. Anybody can get to it. Oh, I can get you a piece of paper, too. Oh, you Yeah, you should have it there. But yes, uh this is available to anybody. Yes. Yeah. This is this is open record. We've been doing a a report about like this for about the last three years. And the previous it was just kind of some, you know, here's what we did last year, we did this year, but we started doing a more indepth report about the last three years. Again, our the guys that were here, we just recognize they're going to do the best they can with what we've got to work with. The outcome just might not be what we want it to be.

Any other questions? Thank you. We appreciate it.

All right. We'll go ahead and move on to item number 12. Discuss and consider adoption of ordinance 2026-1 amending chapter 95 health and sanitation of the city's code of ordinances to require the use of the company contracted by the city for all commercial trash, garbage and refuge collection and remove including providing and removal including providing rolloff dumpsters and providing for penalties for violations including denial of building and other permits.

Yeah. Good evening, mayor, council. So, this was the item from last week. If you're not familiar, I know you weren't here, Mr. Hegman. I'll cover it real quick, but it was tabled uh due to adding some language for um contractors owners that are doing projects and own their own trash removal um devices. So, our contract um exclusively under number 21 says the contractor shall have the sole and exclusive franchise license and privilege to provide residential, commercial, and industrial rolloff, refuse, collection, review, uh removal, and disposal services within the corporate city limits. temporary including temporary rolloff containers. So um last week there was some discussion about um allowing individuals um that are pulling permits that own their own equipment to be able to haul off their own trash. And so this was the uh language that was added under the general requirements and it basically states the same thing as the contract except it says except that it shall be a violation. It shall not be a violation of this section for the owner, occupant, agent, contractor, builder, developer, person or commercial or charitable entity to use any self-owned waste collection including the use of rolloff dumpsters or temporary rolloff dumpsters. This section does not apply to recycled material as well. And then there was also an additional section added under commercial haulers. And this is for developments like prefforts and other um businesses in town that utilize materials that can be recycled or used as a commodity. And so at the end of the section down here, it says um this section does not apply to recyclable materials as defined as by chapter 361 in the health and safety code. And then there was one other section added under section four that basically just clarifies again that this ordinance does not apply to recycled materials. And just a reminder, this is an ordinance to basically cover I guess it's 26 year 26 years I think we've had this.

That's correct. Yeah, the the current agreement was signed in 2020, but it is a 26 year old agreement if you go back. It's just been resigned every so many years. There's just no ordinance was ever there was no ordinance to enforce it. That's correct. Any question?

Yeah, I have one. So, I I did get a few phone calls on this and just coming from the construction industry. Um, you know, it did raise an eyebrow when I had a few guys say, "If we're forced to use a Republic dumpster, you know, if and you know, I'll just pick, you know, a con contractor gets a commercial job, has liquidated damages tied to it, they have to use the Republic dumpster. Uh, Republic picks and choose when they want to pick up the dump. you know, contractor's on the hook for whatever that that value is. If they miss their dates, how uh you know, what's the commitment from a public um if if that contractor is forced to use that dumpster to follow a a given schedule to uh you know, to not cut people's wings off effectively. Yeah, he was there was actually a representative here last week and he basically said that, you know, he would ensure that I think they have is it a one or two day turnaround or something, but other than that, you know, if they need additional dumpsters, they typically he would like them to schedule in advance. So, for example, if you're doing an apartment complex and you know, hey, tomorrow I'm going to need five dumpsters. If you contact Republic and say, hey, the next couple days we need you guys to come change them out, you know, every four or five hours, then they'll they'll make that happen. They'll put a dedicated guy, he said, on that particular project to make that happen. So, so what happens when they don't

Oh, well then the contractor's probably going to call me and then I'm going to get a hold of Republic and say, "Hey, we need to get somebody out there to get that stuff picked up and we'll see what the response is." I mean, according to the gentleman that was here, they would take care of it, but time will tell. Okay. Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Is there anything we can add to the ordinance for that protector? Because I got several calls on that. Also, the biggest complaint was it not being picked up when it needed to be picked up, not really the cost. So, I mean, that's why they were turning to those the rental D because they need that stuff gone when it's supposed to be gone.

I would think that's a city attorney question as far as if we can like something in the contract to basically penalize Republic if they don't pick something up in a timely fashion essentially. Okay. I mean, that's that's something that online. Oh. Leah, did you hear that? No. So, they were asking if there is something we can add to the ordinance to penalize Republic if they don't pick up a trash container in a timely manner.

Um, it's really more of a contractual matter than it is a a ordinance matter. So, I was just I had the contract up uh and so I was trying to look through it and see a couple of things, but um I think it's more I think it would be handled as a as a matter of contract and so that contract they'll be I mean it's they'll be held to it. So, as long as we enforce it, as long as we know too, right? People are letting us know about it. I think it's something that we can we can help with, you know, just the accountability portion of it. Yeah. So, Okay.

Let me just ask, Lee, when you're making it a contractual thing, it's not in the contract today. So, would that mean an amendment to the actual contract outside of this ordinance? Yes, I I think yeah, it would definitely be outside of this ordinance and um uh but yes, I think you would um without without having read the contract for this purpose, but I would say first you would you would talk to Republic about um your expectations on that and then um work on some sort of uh potential uh amendment to the contract to to address it if needed. I didn't hear I I mean my thought is if we need to like before we pass an ordinance like sounds like we need to like get the contract squared up. If we pass the ordinance then there's no need to resolve the contract. That's what I would there's

basically we can put that ordinance in place but correct the contract so we can put it in place to protect our taxpayers. Okay. I know you're going to kill me, Ch. Was that I said I know. Sorry, I wasn't here last week. No, it's just Yeah, I don't know what I guess on this one. You just deny the ordinance then at this point because if you table it, I have to bring it back again next week. Well, I think there's another Right, Lee. We don't have to table it. We can defer it or there's some other word to use.

You could table it until another date certain. Like you could say you wanted to table it until the second meeting in March or whatever you wanted to do. Um uh but or you could table it until uh after uh you know some discussion with Republic of this contractual matter. Yeah. Because I want to look at uh the rates and stuff as well, what is in the contract and and see about maybe negotiating those possibly if that's where we decide to go because I know that's one of the reasons people use the other companies is because it's half the price,

right? Do we just want to punt it till March at the end of March and then if we can get the meeting because we don't know when that's going to be. I think that that gives us some time and if we need want to pull it in maybe we could. I'm not going to be voting on it. I think we should table it. Yeah. All right. Let's table it until we can at least talk to Republic. See if we can get that verbiage in there. I don't think they would have a problem with that. Do you rough?

I don't believe they would have an issue to come back to speak with us. But I will quickly for the rates um that in cities that do not have rolloffs included, they do not have the exclusive rights. We could take that out of the agreement, but what that would do for every residential is increase the residential cost between $68 per month and possibly move from twice a week to one. Yeah, we were talking about that. So, that's that's going to be a cost to the taxpayers. This provides low cost for for trash pickup for our residents, right? This is to supplement that. So, if people are passionate about it that are in the city and don't mind their their trash rates going up that much, just let us know. Which

Yeah, exactly. I think anybody's going to do that. Yeah. But I mean, I think end of the day, the way I read this ordinance and how the contract's written, I mean, I think the intent here, right, we're we're trying to get back to before 2020 when how it was, but something's changed there. We have people that have created a business in that gap, right, that could potentially be impacted. So I think in my opinion this ordinance would if we can change it to to help the contractors not not be impacted on their agreements because they have to you know win a bid whatever that looks like um then really we're really focusing this on just I would call it bad actors right people intentionally trying to subvert and that's a smaller population but

well something yeah something from the last meeting Republic was talking about things they have to deal with is franchise fee um I think a $5 million uh insurance that they have to keep. And I they were asking that the people with the private dumpers, do they have that and that kind of thing. So again, we want to protect everybody, right, that is using our dumpsters or or their dumpsters, you know. So that's something we got to think about too on the Yeah. I'm just falling back on the schedule, right? That's why Oh, yeah. You know, cost the cost a contractor tens of thousands of dollars depending on the project. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we'll table it. Yes. All right. and we're just long enough for us to talk to Republic. Thanks, John.

Mayor, mayor, may I suggest that you have a formal motion to table it until uh I guess the matter with however you all, however council sees fit. All right.

Good afternoon. Listen, my leg is asleep from bouncing so hard. I'm a nervous duck. I hate speaking in public, but here we are. Good evening. My name is Taylor Smith. I'm a local business owner, property owner, and proud member of this community. I'm here to speak about the dumpster ordinance and what it means not for just businesses like mine, but for the citizens, property owners, and families who rely on local service providers every single day. I would like to clarify something important that the contract with Republic grants them service rights, but it does not require the council to criminalize competition or eliminate local businesses through additional ordinances. This council still has the authority and the responsibility to act in the best interest of the citizens. Creating a monopoly is a choice, not a legal obligation. Local businesses don't just provide a service. We provide accountability, responsiveness, and compassion. Recently, we helped an elderly widow whose home had become unsafe due to hoarder situations. We donated 740 yard dumpsters and only charged the landfill fees because another community member was doing all of the work with him and his wife alone. Today she is living in a clean and safe home again and that would not have been possible at corporate pricing. We also recently donated a dumpster for an upcoming benefit for a young man in our community who was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. The same disease that took my own father from me just 10 months ago. We didn't ask where he lived, if he was in the city limits, who his trash provider was, or if he had a contract in

place with anybody as such. We helped because he have one of he is one of ours. I have to ask under this ordinance, am I supposed to stop doing that? Am I supposed to add disclaimers before helping someone in need? Am I supposed to help tell a struggling family no out of fear of violating an ordinance in our city? Because that's not who we are as a community. My company carries full general liability insurance. We have a perfect safety record. With a fleet of approximately 50 dumpsters and two drivers, our average turnaround time is about 18 hours. We operate when our customers need need us to so their homes, projects, and livelihoods don't sit still waiting on services. We offer transparent set pricing, no hidden fees, no fuel search charges, no delivery fees, just honest service. I would respectfully ask the council this to consider this. If Republic is the second largest waste company in the nation, why are they leasing trucks from other companies, dumpsters from other companies, drivers from other companies to meet the demand? Local businesses are not the problem. We're helping carry the load of this growing community. Competition protects citizens. It keeps prices fair. It keeps service responsive and it keeps providers accountable. This decision is not just about dumpsters. It's about whether local businesses are still allowed to serve the community that we love. Because when someone in this community is hurting, I don't check a contract. We show up and no ordinance will ever

change the fact that this is our home and these are our people. Thank you. Hey, Taylor. Um, how long y'all been in business? What's the name of the business? Where all you serve? I mean, are you serving primarily in the county or city and county?

We serve all the way from Paris, Sulfur Springs, New Boston, and even have a couple of dumpsters in Long View. Um, I would say 10 to 15% of our dumpsters are close to the city, if not in it. 10 to 15 a month, I would say. Um, the name of our company is Smith Waist Solutions. They're the hot pink ones. See my hot pink shirt? Um, you know, 10 to 15 dumpsters to Republic is not the end of the world for them. But you know what? They they had mentioned that they donated $10,000 to a community to a a U charity in our area last year and I was thinking, golly, if you're the second largest in the nation, I went and checked my QuickBooks and we had given back $27,000 back to our community because that's the kind of people that we are. And uh if anybody asks to donate, here I am. And uh I want to serve our community and help people not as much as as much as I can. And taking this away I do believe will harm people. It not harm but make it to where they are unable to afford some dumpsters in some situations. Not all. No. But I would not have been able to help the two people just this within the past 30 days that we helped. And that hurts my heart.

How many other um companies are y'all competing with besides Republic?

I only know of two. Israel Mart, I think that was his name. I think he spoke last week or two weeks ago. Um, and there's a one out of Tex Arcana, but I don't I think they just have one or two here in Mount Pleasant. Oh, Jots out of Long View. Long View. Jots Rentals. They also do portaotties about five years. Thank you. It's not not easy being there. I know. Especially when you get emotional that it's a hard thing to do. From all that I have gathered the last couple of weeks, most everybody started this four or five years ago. And I apologize for the city for getting this far because I was here and we enforced that ordinance even then. and how we got where we weren't advising people that that was in effect that was in the contract. No matter how this goes for that, I apologize to all of you that came here and opened a business and weren't made aware of the issue.

Thank you.

Yeah, and that was the one thing I wanted to say. It's not the contract has been in place for like 26 years. It's just it should have put this ordinance in a long time ago. So, we're just trying to do what we're supposed to do as a as a council. So, I'm with you. You know, the monopoly thing and everything else is is throwing me off, but I also understand that I understand the franchise thing with them, you know, with the rate that they give the residents and stuff like that. So, it's tricky. I have a question because I'm not an expert, but with the franchise agreement, so McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, Burger King, Sonic, don't they all come with a franchise agreement that nobody can make a Chick-f another Chick-fil-A sandwich or another McDonald's sandwich in town, but they can make another hamburger or another chicken sandwich? Is that correct?

Is that kind of how that is? This this agreement is exclusively with the city. So McDonald's does not I'm just making a comparison. Sure. Sure. But they McDonald's the other restaurants, they don't have an agreement with the city. If they did, then you might have something like that. This is just specifically for Yeah. And that's the point for the franchise is to get the lower residential rates. It's the same way whenever I first got here. I think the cable company was franchise here also. But people had to look elsewhere because their rates were so astronomical, which was what caused these other businesses to form. So,

so we're definitely Jimmy Bond, council mayor. Uh, last time when Republic The man gentleman on how much his insurance was liability million dollar I believe million question

I have a $ 1.5 million general liability policy policy that I pay yearly and I pay a lot for That's great. I mean, not that you pay a lot, but that you have the insurance. Yes, sir. Yeah, that was we were talking about that. That's a concern of mine of of the other people not having insurance, too. So, we want to make sure everybody is protected in this situation. We're safe. We've practiced all safe things and have zero track record in the five years that we've been in business. And yes. Cool. Thank you. Anything else? So, we're going to go ahead and we need a motion to table. I make a motion to table this until the second meeting of March.

I second. Can we get a vote, Madam Secretary? Yes. I I I passed unanimously. We appreciate all the participation on that. Uh let's go ahead and move into uh item number 13. Uh discuss and consider ordinance 2026-4, a budget amendment for $129,000 and sorry, $12900,000 for prior fiscal year auction proceeds to go towards the purchase of a new backho and this is financial director Gatewood.

All right, I'm back again. So for this, it's more of a housekeeping thing. We got the auction proceeds last year and we allocated money to go towards the purchase of a backco, but because it's such a large piece of equipment, it took too long to come in and to get the invoice and so it moved on to this fiscal year. So, this is just correcting those funds and reallocating them. Any questions? Yeah, tell us about the backho or who what department has the backhoe? That would be Garrett.

Good evening. Uh so this is uh we had a big auction auction off some old equipment and uh this backho is going to the street department and it is uh it's got a new piece of equipment on there. It's called a hydraulic thumb. We'll be able to clean out ditches way better. Uh anytime we have clean up, uh disaster clean up, anything like that. It's got shell on the front for grading and uh it's just a and it's also four-wheel drive where in the past everything we've had is two wheel drive so can do a lot more work that back up. So this was old equipment that y'all auctioned off to get the

Yeah. So in addition to that we were able to replace most of our flew parks department and the street department saw a lot of improvements. You see nice equipment. We were able to do that with the old equipment and replace pretty pretty significant portion of fleet. Good job. Any more questions? All right. Is there a motion? I make a motion uh to approve ordinance 2026-4 amending the fiscal year 2026 budget for the purchase of a backhoe. Second.

A second. Madam Secretary, can you get a vote, please? I I Yes. I passed unanimously. We'll go ahead and move on to item number 14, discussion of potential and desired changes to the city of Mount Pleasant zoning codes and related uh considerations. Speed development director Barrett.

Good evening. Um, this has been uh a long time coming as far as overall zoning code discussion and what our codes are and some common sense ideas for um moving forward in a um a realistic and economical way. So our code is quite old. It's 1987. It is um structured a little differently than the modern codes. um it does regulate our planning and development processes and so we'll go through that in a little bit. Um prior to this administration um there was a contract to completely rewrite it. However, state law changed in the interim and it was going to be extremely expensive to notice every resident and business owner um property um owner in the city because of the way was uh completely overdone uh redone. And so an incremental approach for shoring up some of the issues and and making some changes uh along uh modern lines on some of the um items things in the economy of change and that sort of thing are more um achievable. So what's planning anyway? a lot of people don't know and so uh because the codes I'll address that we'll just kind of go through this really quickly um and sometimes it helps to uh just kind of have uh visuals and so basically what kind of tools do we use and some other questions how do we want to become our community of choice and where people want to come what does that

the water needed vision which the city has plenty of the planning we're putting in place and our comp plan is already done utilities are underway and the ordinances are a big piece and of course street are also important Everybody loves a new development. We've got quite a bit. So, um, don't they look at what new residents can do, but then they also slow traffic and overcrowded schools. So, there there's pluses and minuses all over development. They have to be um considered all the way through. Same new businesses. We're excited. They're bringing jobs. They're contributing to our sales tax, our revenues. We get services and products. But again, traffic, congestion, they strain utility services. The planning isn't correct and impact the existing businesses that are in place. So, how do we get those benefits and minimize the negatives? planning and we use tools codes in particular that regulate the infrastructure the traffic economic viability compatible uses to make things uh flow and also help uh with the growth rate. We don't want to grow too fast. There is such a thing. So this is what we can do. um help strategic plan to prioritize the needs in the city. The capital improvement planning that we're that's underway. We have to keep our comprehensive plan current. Um the parks plan, utility master plan, those all

help. And then the development parameters for uses and standards such as the zoning code, which is where we are today. So it's kind of an overview. um zoning and protects values, public health and safety using development standards, uses what are allowed, what aren't allowed, and we any newly created districts um or change districts. That also is an increase in flexibility for um special use permit or specific use permits. We're going to talk about one in a little while. um and plan development in our city. So, proposed changes. So, these are kind of where we are, how we got here. Um they pertain to the land uses and the standards and control the types of development. They're defined in the code. They these are all the things are um all specifics in our zoning code. um setbacks, height, specific use permits, all of those things. Um they do follow the comprehensive plan. Um and there is an ordinance required to approve any of these changes which will um uh notice property owners in both public and in their specific ones within 200 feet of a proposed property that's affected. So there are three different types of specific changes in the zoning code. Um one is a development standard, the second one is uses and the third are the districts and boundaries. All of them require property owner and citizen notice. Specifically, I've broken them out um with some of the items that we've talked about that will be coming in groups because it it becomes a little

overwhelming to try and do them all at the same time. Um, some of the things that we have run into in our department are the the lack of an requirement for engineered plans for commercial construction that is protective actually um for new structures and or any additional square footage over 2,000 square feet. and also for all building permits uh within the historic district that do any structural um changes whatsoever. We had an issue with that. That's a lot of these are because of issues um that we've run into. Um revise the nonresidential parking lot paving requirements. Currently, they are for concrete only. Um, this would allow asphalt to be used under certain conditions. Um, obviously if it's heavy traffic, a lot of turning motions, big trucks, the asphalt will break up and cause pretty turn into gravel pretty quickly, which is kind of a mess. It gets in the roadway as well. So, um, those are kind of staff decisions based on what sort of, uh, non non-residential business it is. They might want to just have a dress shop or something. People come with cars. That's asphalt's perfectly fine. Concrete's necessary for industry and truck for example and of course require a concrete approach um to protect the rightway the first 20 ft so that whatever is brought in and out it doesn't end up in the in the street and be a safety issue. Require all residential parking of any vehicles to be limited to paved driveways and parking pads. Currently, we do not have that. Many cities do. Um some of us are from cities that um we

take this for granted, but we do not have that. And so from trying to enforce the code and um help people keep their property up, it's becoming very difficult to do that without that require um let's see uh limit listing the allow fencing materials and that sounds kind of counterintuitive in fencing material fencing material. No, because we don't have it specified what sort of fencing material. Um, people are using anything and everything to make fences and the uh impact on trying to keep our code uh enforcement activity um to in and I guess just empower our neighborhoods to look better and be more safe are running into some of these as um issues. So, for example, not pallets or pieces, tarps, whatever people have laying around. Um, if you have a fence, you have to put a permit, you get a full permit, but it also has to be one of a long list of materials. You know, anything that is acceptable for fences would be allowed within certain limitations. Probably not obviously not going to have barb wire, but um same thing same sort of thing with screening materials. So we have of course they have landscaping screening but we also have screening materials people can use um to hide items that they uh are don't want visible from the street um for example but right now they're using anything and everything including all the mentioned tarps pallets you name it. Um and so those would be limited again to building code materials or fencing materials. um limit automotive repairs, vehicle

storage. Um the numbers that you can have on a property um and require the screening uh of any excess in the rear portion of the property hidden from view so that we do not have just the complete uh almost looks like junkyards everywhere. It it over time we don't have the codes in place to make that happen. and then more specific noise limitations. For example, we we really don't have um enforcable noise and in in limitations and there are some um uses such as data centers that are extremely loud. you don't have um parameters in for that also uh you know night singing and and those sorts of things. You don't have some kind of common sense ordinance that addresses those and even maybe it has higher limits in industrial areas and lower limits near housing for example. We don't have that. Um most cities have some sort of graded uh ability for people complaints to get some relief. The second one is districts. So, um, one of the things that many of you probably know is we are working to create and to find a new downtown zoning district um that will protect uh the vibrancy and the actual character of our downtown and enhance it. We're going to also allow new uses and development standards that are specific to downtown. One of the things that the group that I'm working with um committee members from Main Street were passionate about particularly when they found out there was such a thing is an entry corridor that would enhance the the aesthetic um

look moving into downtown um from 16th Street into town would have additional requirements for setbacks landscaping kind of materials for fencing, all of those things. It's called a corridor standard. You can't actually um without a zoning, you can't limit uses, but you can have a higher standard for um certain aesthetics. not overboard, but common sense over time will uh that doesn't mean that everybody that owns property is going to have to have something they have to pay money for, but if they want to improve their building, then they have to add certain landscape elements or certain fencing, that sort of thing. So, over time, it improves um the the look of the city. And the of course the downtown is one of the ones they were excited about, but also a lot of cities have an I30 or the interstate overlay. So that when you were going through the city over time with development, there are standards along that overlay that say Mount Pleasant is a great place to be. Again, each each project with development, that's when it comes in. And then any other entry quarters that come up and the final one is usage. So there are new types of uses coming um all the time. Data center for example, we don't have one. Um we also don't have many storage and so trying to fit things that are new into what we have. Um, it's an interpreted interpretive process, but we want to add some of these new uses because there are standards that could be applied to them that would make more sense for the

nuances. Um, for example, the uh mini storage has a different parking um matrix than than warehouses, which is the closest thing to them. Um, create new single family attached use. So, we've done several town home PDs. Um because we have no single family attached use in our code, which is pretty standard as as people um like that kind of urban feel and particularly in close and in downtown especially um people smaller yards and and you know under under um parking inside all of that. That's kind of a new use in ' 87 if people weren't doing it. Well, they are now. So we want to use it u strategically and allow it with particular development standards and where it makes sense. Um and the land use table that we have right now um just to make that into an easier matrix to read and understand for people because a lot of the uses are the same. But for example, we don't have a car wash used. We have a car laundry. I mean there are a lot of little nuances that need to be cleaned up as well. So any questions? That's that's it in a nutshell. This is a process and it takes quite a while. People have to be noticed and we are working on trying to get the easy ones, the lowhanging fruit to you. And if there are any that really jump out at you that you want us to that you've seen, u please let us know either tonight um or uh anytime.

Hey Lynn, quick question. Now I I lived all around and you know Dallas and Waco and I've been all over the place and and for the life of me I can't think of an area I've ever been at that doesn't allow any residential street parking like that. I I'm just imagining a Christmas party for instance and a bunch of people show up. You got 50 people. Of course, they all can't park in the driveway and then they all come out and then their cars are towed or something or got a ticket. You know what I'm saying? Because it says here, require all residential parking of any vehicle to be limited to pave driveways or parking pads, which means you can't park on the curb.

You can park on the street though. All right. I just didn't read that way. So I was like, uh, so yeah, we allow parking street. This wasn't this wasn't because you can't park it in your park. You can't park in your backyard in sideyard and front yard and grass. That's what I mean. In the grass. Anywhere in the grass. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's fair. So I I was curious about one thing is like uh with the ashvault and stuff like that, who makes that final decision on whether it can be ashvalt or

it would be it would be the planning director of the building. based on what kind of heat. So if somebody comes in and they want a warehouse truck going into concrete because when you turn truck heavy equipment it tears especially when it's 100 degrees outside it mess up. But if it's a barber shop

you know a little something people go in and out um we will have asphalt standards right now we don't I think it was once allowed perhaps it is in a lot of cities. standards just like concrete standards. So if you want an asphalt parking lot, then you build those standards and they are pretty, you know, I mean they're pretty reasonable. They they hold up to the kind of traffic that they're for. It would be a development decision just like every building permit site plan. Okay. That we look at. So there'll be requirements. It's not going to be subjective. It'll be it either has to meet Yeah. one or the other.

Okay. And then on the fencing material, uh I know like we got a lot of neighborhoods, you know, there's standard cyclone fins with, you know, standard fencing stuff. Um and I heard you say bobwire. I do know there's some I don't know farm's the right word, but larger lot, you know, acorage, I guess, in town where people have Yeah, they have bobbire. It's still fenced out like a farm, you know. I'm not sure how big, but I know there are a handful of those still in the area. Would that affect people like that that have, you know, over 10 acres for instance? We can. So that's one of the beauties of code. Yeah. So um and I was not aware that barb wire was loud in our city, but if it is, it's probably

well grandfing because that's where Most of this is not industrial. So you can make the determination that nonresidential fencing commercial fence can be any commercially available fence except if you don't want electric fence something like that. And then the residential fencing would have to come from one of the mainten what we have now that You wouldn't think that that people will use anything even cardboard and

so what if there is a large lot like a 10acre lot with I know the frontage on mine is probably a couple hundred yards half of it is barbwire from probably 30 years ago. Yeah, they might have been they might have allowed it a long time ago. Okay. Right. So, it doesn't belong in res. Okay.

Or whatever number that y'all think it's reasonable when we bring 10 acres and you say, "No, I think it should be five." But we'll have a starting point with these. And each one of these has a specific section in the ordinance that it will go to. So, we'll bring a number of them that are amending C. certain sections and it'll be this section and that section and they'll drop right in. So, we'll review the ordinances before anything. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. This is this is just

this is in answer and to um Debbie basically hoping and wanting to make sure that we're on track on trying to do this. We are. Um and so that this common sense needs are kind of what we're addressing. These are the lowhanging fruit. They're not the only lowhanging fruit. They're just the We have to be um somewhat we can't do the entire ordinance because that that's huge unless we do exactly what they did with the consultant. There is a there is a new ordinance that the city paid $55,000 of the $60,000 contract, but it really doesn't solve the problems that we're trying to solve. and it opens up some things that we might not want that are more because I think their model was from the Metroplex on a lot of that. So, we've set that aside and we're trying to do it peace meal to get our most bang for our buck, but I'm very flexible. So, if you have an issue, let me know what it is and we'll try and put it in.

So, Lyn, I'm very excited for what you're saying and and presenting. Uh, one thing that I want to um suggest to you and I think I've suggested to John also in the past um when I look at our town and I look at east side, west side um and and close to the park, those are our historical neighborhoods. We are approaching a lot of these houses being a hundred years old. Um, if these houses were built in the 30s, we're close. Um, 40s,

we're very close. And and there are some that were built in the 20s. And I don't really know, and that's what I'm hoping y'all can find out. Um, once we get the Main Street Historic District, then we go into our neighborhoods, there could be money, grant money, or to help our historic neighborhoods. Um, go back to charming way they were back in those days. Now, I know people have bought them. They have different um opinions. It would have to be something that grow with us, but also there's been a one house I know of that uh it's not a mobile home, but it was purchased and brought in and and that area is historic. Uh surrounded by older homes. And I I really think that we need to address that situation because if there's some older homes that are not taken care of and they're burning or coming down, um the houses need to be in line with what the rest of the historic houses are.

So just to get more specific about what we're doing downtown, there is going to large zoning district. So the zoning downtown district will mostly won't have anything to do with historic preservation because the ordinance already has historic preservation in it. Um, we wanted to change that that separate from the downtown zoning code which is expanded and expanded to uses and the sort of protections that you get in any zoning code whether it's you know the commercial phone single family one all those setbacks all those things can be added and applied to downtown because currently we don't have that and we also don't have the flexibility to have live work for example um we don't allow living living in commercial district here, you know, we don't or we don't do that. And so we are because it's not a good idea. But downtown it worked. We have a single families and single family districts that are only single family and somebody wanted to um re renovate a house and do a coffee or tea shop. This happened in every city all across one. you just mentioning Jonathan. Um they uh can't because they're zoning single family and it's a big enough area. So they're not even adjacent to other commercial uses where we could reszone the property. So we would make it have some parameter for allowing mixed use in those areas to protect the uh the home. We are usually residents because the homeowners are mostly in the area that we're going to include or mostly um absentee landlords. But we we have the ability to do that in areas and make certain parts of the zoning code apply

with different slightly different standards. you know, if it's a res a mostly residential area, could it could have a different um overlay applied to it that would allow some things but not others. For example, you wouldn't necessarily want to have um a hopping restaurant right in the middle of all houses that people are still living in. The chances of that happening are not real great. But as you get development, most of the our a lot of our tear downs, for example, that you've been um approving are in some of those same areas that we're going to look at. So, we've got our eye on that. Um the the other piece about money with having a downtown zoning district when and if we have some reinvestment zones done where some of this great development's coming in. What happens is the increment between raw land value and what what the taxes bring in when they are developed. Um the difference in that the increment a part of it can be earmarked for uh infrastructure and other types of programs in the reinvestment zone or applied to other re other areas that are designated like a zoning downtown district. So there is that would allow some money to do some things. Generally, the city can't specifically help a particular land owner do a particular thing, but it can put in place grant opportunities for signage, uh, grant opportunities for landscaping and street amenities that help everybody. So, there are lots and lots of tools we use and that that's why the downtown um district so important also to keep the the kind of uses out that we don't outlaw. So, you wouldn't want to see homeless shelters. You

wouldn't want to see um plasma centers. You wouldn't want I mean, there are lots of uses that don't really um go well with the downtown. You want a vibrant, you know, where people come to play and eat and stay and walk around and shop. You don't a lot of things you don't want um in your downtown. That's why it's so important to get the zoning.

Any other questions? I will say this that the single most important thing any of us are doing while we're serving the city is if we don't take care of our residential areas, it won't matter what you've got downtown. It will not matter what you've got coming in on the interstate, our city, our residential area is the most important thing that we have. People have to come knowing that they're going to live in a clean, safe neighborhood, that somebody's going to be watching and looking out for and and that's that's my calling that you know where I'm standing and I appreciate what y'all do and I just want to make sure that we move forward that we get some of these things done and that we recover a lot of stuff that's been slipping by and that we get this moving as quick as possible and I appreciate you very much.

All right. Did we get a motion? Oh, I thought we did. Oh, no motion. No action.

All right. Okay. So, we'll move to item number 15. Discuss and consider actions to approve a request by applicant V. Venton Huber on behalf of CTG to recommend an extension of the July 15, 2025 city council approval of specific use permit SUP 20-2025-03 to build a communication/sell tower at 1706 West Ferguson for an additional six-month period per city code chapter 155.458. So, um I believe most of you um probably remember the cell tower on Ferguson that was approved back in the summer. Um they um was for AT&T and they had issues getting lined out on how they were going to do their contract. Our specific use permit process says you must have a building code within six months. They didn't. have asked us for an extension um for it and the conditions will remain the same. It's just a refresher constructed by the site plan. See that in a minute. Parking and drives plan paved. Screening fence will have a landscape buffer and building permits will be obtained prior to construction. We didn't have any opposition for this case. Um and they're require they're requesting a sixmon extension. Again, our ordinance didn't say what the extension should be, but it made sense if it was for six months in the first place, six months would be what they would get. So, I basically said six months.

Is that what they're saying? Makes sense. They said they could get it six months. So, we went forward with that. This is a this picked up from um previous. This is what it was going to look like. And you can see um it's where it is. It's far enough away from everything. It meet met everything. City council approved it. um unanimously and um it would expire. Um and this is this is some of the details we just went over. Planning and zoning commission heard it and recommended it. Um so they're just wanting an extension. Pardon? Six month extension. Yes. For the project

in order to get there. Now that's not to finish building it, but they at least have to pull their Okay. Yeah. I was just going to ask uh you know just ask the question what if they have another I mean how many of these extensions we going to keep doing? I've worked with AT&T. I know how it goes. That's why I'm asking or like what value are they adding? What what's the purpose of this cell tower? I think I think that um I can understand with logistics Yeah. that per perhaps they again the holidays it would get a little bit behind but they're ready to move forward and that's why they're asking okay so I I think it's prudent if if they ask for another extension you certainly tell them no

that's fair yeah just not saying no to this one but just don't want it to turn in this like an eight-year project to get a contract with AT&T and what I I didn't share but if you remember um the consultant that came in with that they there's a coverage map and that fills in right there. And we also have just gotten a new application for another cell tower on a Walmart park on their parking lot which is a different completely different area of the city and also taking that. So that one will be coming to you fairly soon. So I mean that that expands our um services to our res. Great. Thank you.

All right. I get a motion. Yeah. Uh, I'll make a motion to approve extension of SUP 2025-03 for an additional 6 months to allow the new cell tower developers to proceed with their AT&T project at 1706 West Ferguson. Second. A second. Madam Secretary, can you get a vote, please? Yes. I I I item passed unanimously. Let's go ahead and move on to 16. Mayor, yes.

Before you go on, I would just like to make an announcement that YouTube went down worldwide. So, in case you get complaints, um, YouTube is down at the moment. Mount Pleasant did it, right? That's impressive.

Wow. Awesome. All right. Okay. Item number 16. Discuss consider action to approve the preliminary plat for a one lot, oneb block Mount Pleasant Trails addition subdivision being a 4.368 acre property in the multif family zoning district. Property ID 15338 described in instrument 20253555 in the real property records of Titus County, Texas and addressed as 399 Penison Road.

Thank you. So um last year right about this time um this particular group came and asked for uh support from council for a tax credit um uh resolution that they need to apply and they were awarded the project. So um this is the first step which is a preliminary plat of the property in one lot one block so that they can build on it. It was part of the Southgate subdivision but it wasn't really recorded. It was kind of in limbo. Um it had been zoned uh several years prior for multifamily. Um of course we require a flat in order to get a building permit here. So that's why this is coming first. The site plan is coming right after this. Um what but the plat needs to be go forward first and then it is and we've been reviewed. It's in conformance to our subdivision ordinance and then of course it has to have a final plat be approved before any building permit inspections occur or certificate of occup. So preliminary plat comes first, site plan comes second. They get a building permit start to build and they turn around and apply for a final plat and it comes back.

Pretty normal. All right,

there it is. So Tennyson Road um subdivision is to the rear. The property does uh touch Allen Drive on the back, but it will not have any um access into the project. You'll see that on the site plan. Of course, um the they show the plat um on the right hand side and it's kind of ghosted in what sort of an overview of the site plan. Normally a plat doesn't, but it it shows that so you get an idea. There's a one building on it and it's it's right in the center of the property. So planning and zoning commission voted unanimously five to zero to recommend approval for our staff recommendation on February.

All right. Any questions? All right. I make a motion that we approve the preliminary plat of the Pleasant Mount Pleasant Trails Addition subdivision which is also known as 399 Tennyson Road. a second. I second. Madam Secretary, can you vote, please? I I I Yes.

Excuse me. Item passed unanimously. We'll move on to item number 17. Discuss and consider action to approve and request by applicant Mount Pleasant Trails LP for site plan approval of Mount Pleasant Trails Department a senior tax credit project consisting of 52 units on 4.36 acre property addressed as 399 Benson Road. So as promised this is the second piece and the site plan approval is required for any multifamily uh construction in the city. Um it is also required anytime more than one use for buildings are put on a on a property. So um any kind of uh multiple strip center that sort of thing. It's our code requires that it come back through the process to be approved. Um, and so this is it was approved by the state for funding and then they're they're kind of back through for you again. So on the left is site plan and it has a lot of detail. There's really no way to make it readable for you to see what bushes and what plants and we have landscaping plans. We have we have parking calculations. We have um the tension pond. All of those things have been vetted through the development review committee to meet our city standards as far as all the setbacks are met. Um fire lanes and all of those things. As you can see, um Allen Drive has no access to the property. So, that was one of the things that BNZ asked about because apparently previous years, probably most of you being on council. Even there was something that one of the PNC members remembered that got a lot of uh people

upset because they did not want anything in front of that people cutting in and out through um into their streets in the Soviet. So I want to make it clear it does not um and so it meets everything. It has the landscaping you know u have requirements on what sort And all of that detail has been checked. Is there going to be a fire gate on the other side? Like another entrance or you just have one entrance going in there?

Is there's one entrance but they're 52 units and so 52 units and one entrance is not the standard is in cities that have a standard we don't. But in cities that don't that that have a standard it's usually 75 or 85. So, um, it's it would meet normal standards even for an apartment complex, but in particular if it's seniors, they're not all going to work at 8:00. Oh, no. I was just thinking an emergency situation.

So, they're not going they do not have a second entrance. Bigger complexes are are required to have them for safety reason. You can't get in and out. Um so yes it's um the utilities are adjacent and um we went through all of it including the fire review and and we uh have discussed that the even the detention pond is adequate. All of those things have already been looked at. Um, even though a lot of times if it's not a multif family, the site plan process is done as part of the building plan review and y'all never you don't see very many site. We do site plans on every single building permit we do. Um, they come through us. So, we've already vetted them on everything else. So, one of the requirements is to show what it's going to look like. Um, and Gabriel Loft is here. He's come from Dallas all the way to um if you have any questions, but this is what they provided. This is kind of a view of what it's going to look like. Three stories um 52 unit. They also recommend it.

Yeah, Jimmy had a question before I hop in there. Go ahead, Jimmy. Oh, no, I wouldn't say that, but it's something we haven't talked about yet. Um knowing that there, you know, understanding that road's fairly small. Um, I know we have an apartment complex already on that road and we're going to add another one. Um, and not saying for against an additional apartment complex, but uh not sure if we've considered uh from a city perspective any kind of traffic study kind of from the safety comments I've heard things like that that's necessary. Just thinking about it.

So, one of one of the issues with that is we don't have any traffic requirements. However, uh an apartment complex, particularly senior because it's limited. The state limits it um would not have a major impact and it's 52 units. So, it's not that many. We don't have any TIA requirements. We don't have any um any requirements for um if it was uh egregious. Text dot does for turning lanes and safety for motoring public. and if there are issues with uh intersections but this and some cities do require TIA but the thing is you can't pick and choose because it becomes an unfair you know if you let this 52 make them do it then the next person that might be somebody that's developed here forever is going to have to do it instead of just deciding which streets or where we don't have anything in our code about traffic analysis being required for these sorts of projects.

I know, but I watched your presentation earlier and you had a real big X on the traffic. So, I mean, I don't know if we want to consider that, you know, since right we're adding apartments everywhere.

It is it is an it is an issue. I I I understand exactly what you're saying. And when we get to a point where we we get to that that point um in this case uh tax credit departments have a a specific start and stop date because it's a state funded project. They have to uh have it basically completed in a year and it was awarded in August. So they really don't have the luxury of they they look at what our codes are ahead of time. And so having a traffic impact analysis on that street had not come up. And of course we just um I know that there's a uh an apartment I think the apartment complex that currently exists in the middle has another piece of property that they may develop later. We have um of course the town halls that hasn't even broken ground yet uh is uh closer to the intersection. So we um did not make a recommendation based on this particular street having 52 being now if it was like John Anderson's 190 that'd be a little different. Of course we wouldn't have one way in either. So

yeah and I wasn't trying to tie it to this just just wanted to ask uh since you had it on that presentation and I I'm saying okay great you're paying attention.

Come on every once in a while. All right, Jimmy Jimmy's turn. The question I have, I live over in that neighborhood and I go down and where the exits and entrance is going to be, it's the lowest part of that part of the road. And if we have one of those floods comes all the way down from all four directions and lives over there. You have a road right behind it called McMed. Yeah. I mean, I just I don't know. Two interestes just seem safer to me regardless of what's going on. I never like one way in, one way out. Okay. We get a motion on this.

I make a motion to approve SP 202504 for the Mount Pleasant Trail Senior Tax Credit Project as presented. Second. Yeah, I'll second it. Madam Secretary, can we get a vote, please? Yes. I I I

motion passed unanimously. We'll go ahead and move on to 18. Discuss consider ordinance 2026-5. Thank you, Lynn. By the way, 2026-5 for Fire Recovery USA establishing and implementing a program to charge mitigation rate for the deployment of emergency and non-emergency services by the fire department for services provided rendered in the city of Mount Pleasant chief. So, we're going to kind of tag team this. I'll turn part of it over to Lee and let her explain part of this. But in March of 2016, we entered into an agreement with Fire Recovery USA for them to uh go after insurance companies like we don't wreck hazmat call vehicle fire and what have you that people's insurance has a some of them have a a clause in there that we could recoup some of our money. And so what Fire Recovery USA does, that's what they do. And so we entered into it u in 2016 and they get 20% of whatever they collect and it's just an insurance. If insurance don't pay, we don't go after the the people that we write that off. So um the money uh goes into a special account set up where we can use it to buy equipment, training, fire materials, that kind of stuff. Since we uh wind effect again is about 10 years. We collected a total of about $54,000 and about half of that came from the county, half of it came from the city call. So, um what fire recovery USA has asked recently is instead of an agreement they wanted in form of an ordinance and so u the the ordinance uh

as Lee will explain here in a minute will only allow us to to file an insurance for Rex in the city. The calls we make in the county, uh, we would not be able to to do that. So, I'm going to let Lee explain why that is, but Lee, you may be on mute. Okay. Can you hear me now? Yep.

Okay. So, uh, mayor and council, the, uh, proposed uh ordinance is limited to uh applying to the city of Mount Pleasant. Um as a governing body, you can only pass ordinances that impact the city of Mount Pleasant. You cannot pass ordinances that exceed the jurisdictional limits of the city. And so, um, even though you have a contract with the county that you provide services for them, you cannot pass an ordinance that allows for you to recover for, you know, uh, that that impacts basically county territory.

So, do we not collect money on that? I guess that is that the punch line? Did someone hear it? You you you I mean if you wanted if you were entering into some agreement with the county about it, you would have the county pass something and that it would allow the city to recover the funds for it. You know,

Rob, Mr. Vine, are we going to include that as an item to talk to the judge? That is something that we can discuss with them but we have not approached that. Yeah. Fair enough. All right. Any other discussion question? All right. Can we get a motion on Yep. I'll make a motion to approve ordinance 2026-5 establishing and implementing a program to charge mitigation rates for the development of emergency and non-emergency services by the fire department for services provided slash rendered in the city of Mount Pleasant. I second.

Madam Secretary, can we get a vote, please? I I I Yes. All right. Item passed unanimously. Thank you. Thanks, Chief. We move on to uh item number 19, uh, city manager report.

Mayor, members of council, just another reminder of tomorrow morning's event at 11:30, the state of the economy, the chamber and EDC event. Uh, this director Kevin Carter stated him and I will be there presenting, giving presentations on the state of the economy. Those in attendance, as reported a few weeks ago, our finance director is leaving the organization. She was uh moving on to degree in green her pasture called called marriage. We're very happy for her but she will leave a uh leave a leave a gap. Uh so we are working with strategic government resources to locate an interim and then also a permanent uh person to fill that position. We're staff is also continuing to search for a main street manager. We have had multiple interviews over the last few weeks. We do have it narrowed down to two individuals that we will be calling back for a second round of interviews um or second interview. Uh both of these positions are key. So we are definitely taking our time to make sure we get the right people for those positions. At the next council meeting, a list of projects programs will be brought to you to determine which council member or members would like to be a liaison for those particular projects or programs. So, if there are any programs or projects you would like added to those list to that list specifically, please get with me this next week, but I will bring that list so you can let staff know who so you're invited to meetings when we have those meetings. With the rise in availability of popularity of of using artificial intelligence, the staff would like to get ahead of that. We do not have there is no ordinance, not ordinance, but a policy in place. We would like put a policy in place to establish as clear appropriate guidelines to make sure we maintain transparency and accountability and also that we want to protect vital information from being mishandled. So that that will be brought to you at next

council meeting and lastly at that next council meeting I will bringing be bringing uh what I will call the council initiative and transparency protocol. So this will establish a formal and predictable pathway for city council members to introduce new projects, new programs or new processes. So if if a a citizen comes to you and says I would like to start this program, you can fill out this form throughout this process, bring it to the entire council. That way uh the entire council gets to vet that project or that program or that process before staff and resources are committed moving forward. I think it should lend uh go a long way to uh lend more credibility, add more transparency in the county.

Yeah, and I appreciate that too. We had talked about it. A lot of people think that we, you know, we're not we're not communicating with each other and we do. We're just trying to make it more official and and more transparent so people do see we're working on the items that they're they're asking about. So, thanks Rob for a report.

All right. All right. Council comments limited to announcements of upcoming events, recent council member activities, or request to add agenda items for the upcoming meeting. Two minutes per council member. All right. No comments. Uh we're going to go ahead and move into the executive session. Pursuant to the Open Meetings Act, chapter 551, Texas Government Code, the city council will recess into executive session to discuss the following. Consultation with attorney, Texas uh Government Code 551.071 and personal matters, Texas government code 551.074. Uh A related to appointment, employment and duties of city attorney uh discuss city attorney candidates. B related to appointment, contract and duties of municipal judge, court judge and C related to appointment, employment, evaluation, reassignment, duties, discipline or dismissal of public officer or employment or employee city manager. Just so yall don't freak out. That's just his review. So, not that anybody would. Uh, all right. We'll go ahead and um move into executive session. The time is 8:19. Didn't didn't want anybody going. Oh my god. 10 seconds right.

That was good.

Yes, sir.

Yeah. I'm sorry, mayor. Let me look back at the agenda. I'm down on page something or another at the bottom of the agenda. So, so Oh, okay. I'm sorry. You're We're back into regular session and at 10:30. Yes, sir. So you are correct that um council's discussion in executive session on item 20 um was to table this item until um uh whenever you all want to take it up again if you want to do it in 30 days. Do we need a motion to table? Correct.

Yes. Motion to table. Make a motion. I make a motion to table item 20 to discuss and consider an agreement a municipal court judge services uh for 30 days. I'm going to recuse myself. A second. All right. Can we get a vote, please? Yes. I I So it passed unanimously. Uh next. So go ahead. I guess 21 item 21, right?

So there's there's nothing to there's no action to be taken on the city attorney. Uh but there is action to be considered on the city manager's evaluation. All right. So, I guess we're calling this item 21, right? Sure. All right. That's great. I didn't know if you needed it or not. Okay. Can we get a motion on this?

I'll make a motion that in executive session, the evaluation of our city manager, Robine, was a good evaluation, and I recommend I make a motion that we accept the evaluation and give him a Right. Per the contract. I'll second that. Madam Secretary, can we get a vote, please? I I I I Yes. Pass unanimously.

All right. It is 10:33 and we will journ.