City Council - Special Meeting

Good evening. We're gonna call this Monday, 05/18/2026 special meeting of the City Council of New Braunfels to order. Missus Wilkinson, will you please call roll?

Council member Carter? Here. Council member Capizzi?

Here.

Council member Edwards?

Here.

Mayor Pro Tems Bradley?

Here.

Council member Lebowski? Here. Council member Ryan? Here. And mayor Leonard?

Here. We have a quorum. Council member Edward is gonna lead us in the invocation followed by the pledges.

Dear heavenly father, we come before you with our words of prayer and hopes that you will help us seek understanding and wisdom that leads us to confidence and courage to do your bidding in all our decisions. Though in our search for understanding, know full well that there will be many positions to consider, many voices to hear, and in some cases, many words, facts, fictions, and beliefs to liberate and weigh in our path to actionable decisions. May we live up to the task and stand by our decisions with conviction. Conviction. We pray you watch over our first responders, our city staff, our community to keep us safe and out of harm's way.

May you especially watch over the firefighters we have sent to assist in the wildfires in Texas. As we sit before the citizens in you, Lord, let us use your gift of choice and free will to the following of your teachings. May we choose love rather than hate, laugh rather than cry, create rather than destroy, persevere rather than quit, praise rather than gossip, heal rather than wound, give rather than steal, act rather than procrastinate, grow rather than rot, pray rather than curse, and live rather than die, and live your life with love. For all these things we pray, amen.

So tonight we're recognizing our graduates from City University. So if you're here with City University, if you'd like to come on up and join me. So whereas New Braunfels City University was launched in 2011 to give residents more insight into the day to day operations of the city New Braunfels and provide participants with a greater understanding of their local government. And whereas in 2024, the city added a youth component and reserved spots in the class for a high school student from each council district. And whereas, City University promotes and enhances community engagement by providing a quality program that connects New Braunfels residents with each city department to learn about the services, programs, initiatives, and projects offered by these departments and the challenges and opportunities facing our community.

And whereas with the graduating class of 33 students, more than 390 New Braunfels residents have connected with their local government and increased their knowledge of municipal services by completing this enlightening course. Now, be it resolved that I, Neil Leonard, mayor of the city near Braunfels, hereby recognize and congratulate all our City University graduates. And each one of you is gonna get your own proclamation. So, this one I guess will hang up somewhere but you'll each get your own personalized proclamation. Why don't we get together for a group photo centered under the seal?

Okay, the next item on our agenda for tonight is to discuss and consider the approval of the Downtown Parking Revenue Reinvestment Annual Plan as recommended by the New Braunfels Downtown Board. And just to clarify, this is just to consider and approve the Downtown revenue reinvestment annual plan. This is not a discussion or action on any policy regarding the plan.

Mr. Jewell. Economic and Community Development Director. Thanks for the opportunity tonight to talk about the revenue reinvestment plan. This was something that we've discussed as part of our ongoing discussions around downtown parking to bring forward the proposed plan and projects and expenditures so that the council could consider how those revenues that are being generated out of downtown parking would be reinvested.

But just a little bit of context first. Managed on street supply through pricing time limits or permits was one of the key recommendations that came out of multiple downtown parking studies that have been undertaken over the years. These on street spaces are some of the most valuable parking spaces in the system. But without a better way to manage those systems and those parking spaces, we found ourselves without any on street parking really in key priority areas, especially during high demand areas. So where previous to our time limits existed, the council voted in 2025 to adopt an ordinance that implemented a limited pricing plan on two fifty three spaces in the downtown environment.

Coincident with that shift, we doubled efforts to address other recommendations from studies over the years that meant addressing how to get downtown employees off of those on street spaces and get them into some lots. Making more clear that there was actually publicly available and free parking in downtown, both off street and on street. Communicating about the usage of other public lots, mainly the county lots that were previously kind of had signage that looked like they were not really available, but actually they are available after 5PM and on the weekends. So again, making better use of the existing parking supply And addressing the varied and confusing signs throughout downtown. And really the very punitive nature that a lot of private owners employed in downtown, which was really towing.

Which has become pretty much I'm not going to say doesn't happen, but it's very, very rare when that does happen. And so we've continued to increase public awareness of available parking through the revision of signage communications. This is an ongoing effort and one that never really ends. Ends. But City Council approved the creation of that parking revenue fund with the direction that the funds that were being generated out of that would be reinvested back into downtown improvements.

And so you all approved the creation of a downtown committee that was formed out of members of the downtown board that was established to provide recommendations on how to expend those funds. The downtown board met the Downtown Committee met in February and March over a series of three meetings and adopted three key priorities. First pedestrian safety and comfort, improved parking experience and additional parking supply as well as the recommended addition of a full time landscaping and maintenance worker to focus on projects, maintenance and upkeep in the downtown area. So the action before you all adopts the policies and categories as put forward by this parking revenue committee and as adopted by the downtown board. The framework will help guide the research that staff needs to explore and develop projects to be brought forward for consideration on an annual basis.

And under the input process that the City Council has established, namely the parking revenue committee and the downtown board. The proposed expenditures I'll talk about in the presentation really get to address long standing deficits that have been identified in the Downtown going back to the 2010 Downtown implementation plan. They were not created out of thin air. They're actually using adopted plans as well as engagement, both with downtown businesses and stakeholders, to begin addressing the needs that were identified then and have continued to be unaddressed since. So the projects here not only expand the work that's possible, but we're able to do more.

But it also relieves the general fund of certain expenditures that are currently being made, whether it's public works that's undertaking some downtown striping or utilizing professional service budgets to design pedestrian safety improvements. Some of these improvements happen in the downtown area. But with this dedicated fund, that relieves the demand for those funds so they can be put to use elsewhere in the city. This slide provides an outlook of this year's program revenue, expenses and the funds available for reinvestment. It also takes a forward looking picture through the next two fiscal years.

Really, those are just forecasts about what could be available. And it also gives kind of maybe a longer maybe more of a medium term look for projects that may be more expensive and may take a couple more years to fund, one of which we'll talk about later. So the expenditures and projects we're proposing in the following slides are those that will be completed within the with the currently collected revenue as well as the revenue we anticipate collecting by the end of this fiscal year, which is September 30. So on the revenue side, project by the end of this fiscal year there will be about five and forty one thousand dollars collected with citation revenue of about $81,000 for a total amount of close to 6 and $23,000 And again, I'm not going to spell out what 26,027 thousand as well as 27 and 28,000 look like. But those are projected estimates.

On the expense side, interstate parking is the city selected contractor. They manage both the river paid parking and the downtown parking. So under that contract, we proportion out some of those expenses to the downtown. And these are the expenses that we estimate this year as well as the next two fiscal years after this one, as well as the sales and use tax credit card fees payable. So for total enforcement of expenditures, $249,000 So this is basically the net revenue available to reinvest back into downtown according to those priorities that were put forward by the downtown board.

And that Parking Revenue Committee as well as the Downtown Board basically broke some of these expenditures up into these three priorities, which are pedestrian safety and comfort, parking experience and parking supply, of which I'll go into more details about what these proposed expenditures end up being. So pedestrian safety and the purpose of these within a downtown parking revenue plan is to make the parking system function as part of a broader access and place making strategy. So they're really designed to improve the overall experience of being in downtown and encouraging more of a park once and walk orientation. So from a parking management perspective, these improvements are important because they directly increase the utility of the parking system itself. It helps visitors feel safe and comfortable if they walk two or three blocks And reduce demand pressure on kind of some of the front door very valuable spaces that we see in our downtown where the managed parking system is in place.

Some of the planned projects. About $80,000 towards sidewalks and curb repair and construction. We have a lot of deteriorating or insufficient or non ADA accessible sidewalks in our downtown area. So continuing to build out those sidewalks where there are gaps in it as well as curb and repair and reconstruction really throughout the downtown area. There's a proposed plan to restripe the main plaza as well as the crosswalks around there.

And then a future effort with TxDOT to restripe all of Seguin Avenue. And so the cost for that project is still being determined, but these funds would go towards the city's cost sharing in that potential project. Another priority project that we've identified is curb reconstruction at Call And Castel. This is right adjacent to the city's free public parking lot And constructing two ADA accessible curbs at this location is going to cost about $60,000 In the realm of pedestrian safety and comfort, working to light Bridge Underpass. This is a project that's been identified over the years to bring electrical power and enhance the lighting for pedestrians going underneath and coming from Bridge.

Updating and refreshing Main Plaza Island landscaping. Continuing to evaluate and install crosswalk protections. We've been able to do intersections throughout downtown but continuing to expand on this. So about $35,000 every intersection costs about that much to end up from design all the way down to implementation. We're also working on future projects to include downtown tree replacements and additions.

And those project costs are currently being developed. One of the key recommendations that really came out of working with the downtown board as well as a need that we've identified really in the long for quite a while is the presence of a full time landscaping and maintenance worker in the downtown. There's a lot of general maintenance and landscaping needs that need to be tended to in and around our downtown. And so they've recommended and put forward the addition of one additional full time employee that actually becomes part of a parks and maintenance crew that they will then spend that crew will spend one day a week in the downtown addressing items that we worked to develop as well as, of course, work with different stakeholders to identify whether it's general landscaping maintenance to light repairs to sign installation. So that is a recommendation.

And that's estimated to cost about $30,000 through the end of this fiscal year as well as $50,000 annually going forward. Some of these tasks that this particular crew would look at is sidewalk and curb cleaning, trash, graffiti and debris removal, like I said, some minor hardscape repairs as well as seasonal decor and banner installation, maintenance and repair. The second priority is the improved parking experience. And generally this refers to reducing friction, uncertainty and inconvenience associated with accessing the parking system. So it's not about necessarily providing more parking but making parking more easier to understand and access.

And so we've identified additional ADA accessible spots in the downtown, but reconfiguring and restriping those spaces does take funding as well as the signage updates for that. And finally, the third priority is additional parking supply. And these investments are intended to strategically expand the available parking where in support of accessibility and long term parking system performance. So we've had some success at leasing private lots for publicly accessible parking. We're going to continue to go down that road to make sure that owners are willing to make their lots publicly available for free to the public at certain times with certain conditions.

But sometimes that does take a lease payment. One of the projects that we're evaluating is the reconfiguration of existing publicly parking lots to add capacity. This was a recommendation that goes back quite a while. One of those projects that we've evaluated and have actually studied is the addition is a reconfiguration of the Cole Castell lot where we could get about 40 spots today for a cost of about $750,000 In terms of reconfiguration, you have to repave. It's a pretty significant project.

But again, that's a strategic add to new parking supply in the downtown. In terms of program oversight, our department has proposed to implement these priority projects. As I mentioned, we would be coordinating maintenance efforts with that proposed park staff and the parks team, of course, conducting those inspections and responding to maintenance concerns that we hear, preparing quarterly progress these reports, and then working with that downtown revenue committee and the downtown board to provide them with updates. Next steps, of the maintenance position at a future meeting. If the plan is adopted, we would begin implementation of those projects specifically that we talked about this evening and then of course, like I said, reporting to the standing committee quarterly.

Collectively, these policy priorities work together to reinvest into pedestrian safety and comfort, improving the parking experience and expanding additional parking supply to help ensure that downtown remains convenient, accessible, attractive and economically vibrant into the future. So with that, I'll answer any questions.

Questions for Mr. Jewell?

Yes, thank you. Great presentation, thank you. I do like the fact that you are looking at making changes and on repainting downtown on the parking sidewalks, all that stuff. I do like that you're putting the disabled right there on Cole Street where most people park at the Civic Center. So I really do like that a lot. And I'm hoping that y'all put more lighting downtown especially by the courthouse because it is dark at night in that area and I think we've already had one incident there in that area also.

Thank you, Councilmember Lebowski. Yeah, the ADA accessibility is an issue that's not just limited to that particular area. There's lots of areas in the downtown that given the pretty significant cost it takes to actually build those, we've got to kind of digest those one bite at a time. The pedestrian lighting is something that we are continuing to look at in downtown. And So any other opportunities we can do, that does take coordination with NBU, but we're starting those conversations around how to improve the pedestrian lighting in downtown.

A few questions. If downtown parking is a priority and the acquisition of possible new locations, would we not set aside a reserve account to X number of dollars to build to the account where we wouldn't have to rely on lending as much for the acquisition and redo? A, do we have a problem? If you answer that, I have three other questions.

I think that the discussion of how the fund balance build is certainly a great one for the City Council to provide direction on. We were able to identify a host of projects that does leave a little bit of a fund balance. But we've talked about it before that any significant solutions are very, very expensive. And so if it was the direction of the council, again, are recommendations that are coming out in terms of those priorities. But if there was some direction to begin to build that fund balance to make larger capital improvements.

I think it's also important to remember that the tax increment reinvestment zone does have some fund balance built in there and with I think some future direction around parking solutions, larger capital projects for parking. So this is not the only source that we think will address parking, but we'll take any direction the council has on the fund balance.

I just think if we have that, if we found a piece of land that all of a sudden we could acquire, we at least have enough to get it in escrow to be able to get moving forward while we work on the rest of the funding. And I think the citizens and some of the feedback coming to me is they anticipate that this money goes to Adams Spaces on a regular basis or making it better for them to do. The concern I have on one thing is with landscape given the dedicated person are we taking for Peter to pay Paul in that particular case and we're just shifting the burden over and now we're extracting from the parking side. So that's my second question.

Well, the way I would answer that is that the dedication of a maintenance person focused on the downtown right of way, basically what the city owns has been identified as a need going back to 2010 in the downtown implementation plan. And so we have always tried to figure out how to address those needs on a periodic basis, whether it's sidewalk cleaning or landscaping maintenance, and we do use contractors to do that. So really we anticipate that the employment of a person that's part of a parks crew that's dedicated into the downtown one day a week is actually going to save funding that we're using today to address some of those other issues, whether power washing or small paver repairs or small general administrative things

like

that.

One last question. One of the burdens on downtown parking is employee parking. And now with the advent of us adding Rio, it's helped on getting people to work, but we can't get them home. We have to either shift to Uber or that. So what would the likelihood of us being able to with the success so far extending the hours to where we would be able to help workers and those intoxicated get back to location.

Also, it says that if we had that arrangement that after hours parking like at City Hall for get a of

We're town is the employee what issue and how early can we get

a people there and how late can we get them home. They're different issue but they can be combined.

Councilman Carter.

Can on the handicapped spots, can we also add, I don't know if you can, I don't think you can mess with those blue signs, but add a secondary sign for DV plates so there's not confusion that folks can park in those spots?

Are you talking about explicitly on the signage that's denoting that it's an ADA spot?

Not necessarily explicitly because I don't think we can change those. Can we? I thought those were

Well, I'm not sure about

by law. That's correct.

We can't change those

signs. But so then my question goes to, can we add a sign or I don't know if he can be on the same post to eliminate having a post. Sorry,

Carter actually when you do use the app to sign up for a parking space it now gives an alert saying hey if you are part of this if you have one of these types of plates reverse and don't and you don't have to mess with any of it. So right now the app does have that built in capability to alert the consumer about any exemptions that they might have before they pay. So I'm fairly happy with that. It seems yeah it definitely gives that warning so.

Right but a lot of people don't wanna even go to that app. And then the other thing is can DV plates go into the designated handicapped spots?

Yes. Yes, ma'am.

And that's where I'm asking for the signage is on the spot so that there's no confusion We'll or less

take that into consideration. We're always trying to evaluate ways to make things more clear. So we're always taking suggestions about how to improve that. So we'll evaluate the addition of some other additional sign maybe on the same poll. But Council Member Ryan's right. Mean that we built that into the system to let people know that yeah, if you are Right. Have a placard or a DV plate, you don't actually have to use the system. But we'll take that under advisement and look to add something to make it more clear.

Mr. Joel, what you might be able to do is do some kind of like a public media campaign to let the veterans know what they can do and what they can't do.

Thank you, Mayor Brewer, Ms. Farley.

And to bring this back, are there any questions for Mr. Jewell about the reinvestment plan?

Yes, if you can go back to the slide with the recommendations from our committee. So when we were talking specifically about the pedestrian safety and comfort, we brought up that there would be full time position or an equivalent of forty hours. So realistically this is one individual person that we're hiring correct. This is forty hours that we would be utilizing someone that has already been, someone that already currently works for the city and those forty hours would be allocated within parks?

Employees I

To both of your questions, no it's the addition of a full time equivalent to parks and landscaping crew that goes around to different city facilities. So the augmentation through that additional person and having that entire crew come into downtown one day is the equivalent of forty hours per week. So that's kind of how we were thinking about that. But it is a new person.

Okay. And will that person, you said they're going to be operating out of the parks department. Yes ma'am. But obviously your department would have kind of oversight of them as far as direction of projects, prioritization. If something isn't getting taken care of, you guys are the ones we contact to make sure it does?

That is correct. We're the ones that get contacted anyway. But we've talked with our parks director about how this potential interface is going to work. And so we have a list of things for them to be focused on. And so our intention is to really sit down with them on a monthly basis and figure out what needs to be tended to in the downtown area as well as to provide kind of really a rapid response effort as well. For example, if a banner goes missing or a truck hits a banner placement, then that team or that person is going to be to respond to those one on one maintenance, one off maintenance needs that we tend to see in the downtown.

And if there's something that maybe the committee doesn't bring up or that an individual person that lives downtown or business or property owner, how would they be able to communicate some possible issues? What would be, what would that look like for the citizen?

The interface that has been set up for us is through our parking revenue committee and our downtown board. That is who we will speak with about this. Being able to take ideas though about what things need to be tended to and looked at, we tend to get input from business owners about, hey, there's this issue over here. And so we can think about that, about how to create a conduit for people to let us know about issues that might be existing in downtown that we don't know about. We can evaluate whether this team can tend to it or whether we need to find some other resources to do that.

I mean

I know Mandy Scott loves me calling and bugging her all the time, but if there was some other process whether it's after a downtown festival and we see a street maybe didn't get it's you know the barriers picked up or you know we see you know an issue with an abandoned guard. Just those sort of minor issues that way we're not, I would love to just have a designated person or a place where as people that see these issues we can kind of constantly like log those and say like hey report an issue kind of situation. I would love to see that some sort of form. That way we can also constantly rather than waiting for a board to meet quarterly to come up with some things, foreseeing some low hanging fruit that can be taken care of, I would love to see that happen as well. And one more point to the island landscaping and what that looks like with participation of TxDOT.

You stated that we have about $10,000 that we would want to budget for that project. I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong, that we're planning on using native Texas native plants on this and maybe highlighting an opportunity for a pollinator garden or something else.

Well, the landscaping on the islands have not been addressed in quite a while. And so the thought is in terms of again improving the overall aesthetics of downtown was to use of course native plants. But to add some color in there and just refresh the islands. They just haven't been touched in a long time. And that's the kind of work that TxDOT does let us do.

Of course have to adhere to visibility and site. They can't be too high because of the site distance issues. But the intent is to use native plants and we've been talking to our landscape architect about what kinds of plants can go in there.

Wonderful. And one more thing about the plaza. Didn't see this mentioned, and it's not necessarily related to parking specifically, but I think it is something that the plaza is utilized by citizens and by the community in general. I know the sound system there is not the greatest. I'm just putting it out there.

I would love to see us have a sound that is more conducive to the crowds that we have down there when we're doing these events. So as far as enhancements that I didn't see listed on here, I would love for that to be passed on to the committee. If there's any wiggle room for us to kind of make improvements to our stand. I would love to see that happen. That's it. Thank you.

And council member Ryan, is Jenna and I were actually talking about that this weekend. And so between parks and recreation communications, have started that conversation.

Love it. Thank you.

I have have one more question. How far are we going out on the map with downtown on this beautification with the parking? Like I have on Castile And Yon, I would like to see something at the corners where it's painted like at San Antonio Street And Academy because there's only a stop sign on Yon, but there's no stop sign on Castel. And the Thai place is wonderful, but when people are parking over at the edge of each corner of that area. When people are trying to cross by vehicle or cross by bike or in person walking, it is hard to see another vehicle coming on Castel Street.

That is a very good question, Councilmember Lebowski, about the boundaries. We have typically thought about them as downtown TURS boundaries, but I think that's a great conversation for counsel about how far out can these funds be expended. They are collected again from those two fifty three spaces. In fact, I have a map here. So this is the downtown tours today outlined by the black lines.

You can see that that actually does go down to about Jan down there going down Castel, which is out to the East San Antonio Street Bridge up to about Muisbacher, down west down into Guinther. So that's the downtown Turz. We generally thought that the improvements would be made in this boundary but would certainly take the feedback about anything else.

Crowded It in that area on Yonge Street and Castel and people are enjoying that typhoon but again it's really hard to get out of there.

Okay. We can take a look down there as well.

Okay. Any other questions about the revenue reinvestment plan?

Can we set

up

a queue for service calls versus these individual calls because that's just gonna take another city person to answer the phone. And at least a queue would be where online you could sign into it and say this is downtown and it can go to that resource. But in that way it's transparent too that the service is being dispersed and not just

I think that's a great idea. The idea of kind of crowd sourcing the future projects and things that need to be addressed, we can evaluate that with our IT team and figure out how to develop some kind of interface around that.

Okay, thank you.

For some, I don't know if it's even functional anymore, but a number of attractions and locations still use radio to broadcast events and parking instructions by tuning sixty six point five AM or whatever and it's broadcast in the downtown area. I don't know if we need to do it. I'm just saying if we're having a communication problem, additional communication in some sort may be a thought. I haven't had any issues parking myself and my staff says I'm technologically impaired. So, anyway,

it's a thought. Thank you, councilor. There's no other questions, we'll open this to public hearing. If you'd like to speak to this item, please step up to the podium, state your name, whether you're a resident, non resident, you live in the ETJ and please keep comments related to the revenue reinvestment plan and not to policy.

With that, Jim Holster, resident. I appreciated the comments from Mr. Edwards about Ride the Rio. That sounds like an excellent idea that needs to be considered for implementation to get the employees over to a safe lot because which relates to what Mary Anne said, the recent incident of shootings downtown. And I don't know whatever happened to the employee if enough people stepped forward So it is a serious issue.

It's not the first time. I am one of the older persons that comes up here and speaks. If back in the, I think it was back in the seventies and and which goes back to shootings down in front of the worst fest, a man was killed and shot. And he was a motorcycle gang member. And if any of you were around here in that time and remembered or if you, so it does happen. So I think pedestrian safety does is something you need to consider. Mr. Edwards suggestion is a good one. It relates to what you said. So thank you very much.

Good evening. Larry Lane, resident council, mayor, attendees and staff. I appreciate your hospitality. At risk of showing how easily I am confused, in one of the first slides, there was a stated purpose of avoiding an oversupply of parking. Several slides later, there's a stated purpose of enhancing, improving, adding parking to which I would probably look at that $750,000 for $39.39 spots.

That's about $20 a spot. We won't go there. Obviously, that would not be paid for entirely with these parking fees. Now we've got overlapping, pardon me, overlapping funding sources which would make it difficult for folks like me to follow where the money comes from and where the money goes. My last comment for tonight based on the presentation, I've gotta get I've gotta get a way to generate slides.

Looking at the finances, ending this fiscal year, approximately $600,000 gross. With approximately a $170,000 commission going to our contractor for moving money from this side of the table to the other side. Just points to consider, I would like to come back and address these directly as this goes forward. Again, thank you for your hospitality.

My name is Richard Kelsimer. I'm a resident. I just had one suggestion that might be considered. I'm not sure this is an appropriate place to do it in front of the board. The suggestion is that they consider possibly for residents that are seniors, offering them a pass that they could buy, $75 to $125 a year.

They can park anywhere they want. They don't have to mess with the app with their phones. I think it would be actually, if it was publicized properly, I think you would get a lot more revenue from people. And I don't think they would utilize it as much as what they might think they would. So that's just a suggestion that you might want to pick up consider and think about because I'm sure it would help those that are elderly. Thank you very much.

Good evening. I'm Pat Butler, and I'm a resident, but I would like to speak to you as a longtime member of the downtown board. We commend the committee that was created. The downtown board authorized this committee, It's made up both of downtown board members as well as other citizens. And they have done an outstanding job, we think, of looking at the priorities, going back and looking at things like the downtown implementation plan and needs that have been there for a very long time.

And it's just very exciting to me to see actual specific projects being proposed, things that we have talked about for years and have never happened. But in the last year, with the implementation of the managed parking, there are so many things that have happened in downtown to alleviate the parking problems, to increase revenue, to be able to do some of these things. So I just want you to know that the downtown board fully supports the work of this committee. We unanimously approved all of their recommendations, including the addition of the full time employee to work in downtown. Thank you.

Seeing no one else, we'll close public hearing. I'd entertain a motion. I motion for approval.

I'll second.

Council member Lebowski moves for approval. Council member Ryan seconds. Any discussion? All right, all in favor raise your right hand. Motion carries unanimously.

Mr. Mayor with the approval of the plan we will be bringing forward to the very next council meeting an action item for you all to increase the number of authorized positions that would include this full time position that was discussed tonight as well as some other positions that we had previously discussed with you in development services one at the airport and then additional position over at PD that we'll be

bringing to you on May 26. Thank you, sir. Yes, ma'am. Next item is a presentation of the 2026 New Braunfels community survey results. Miss Vinson.

Mayor, council members, my name is Jenna Vinson. I am the city's director of communications and community engagement. And this evening, we will be providing an overview of the 2026 national community survey process and results. Before we get into the finding themselves, I wanted to briefly explain what the survey is, why the city does it, and why it's such an important tool for city leadership and decision making. The survey gives us a scientific snapshot of how residents feel about the quality of life in New Braunfels and about the services that the city provides.

The National Community Survey is considered the gold standard for local government community surveys. It's developed by the National Research Center at Polco in partnership with the International City County Management Association. What makes this survey especially valuable is that it's standardized and used by hundreds of communities across the country. So we're not just looking at our own data in isolation. We're able to compare New Braunfels to national benchmarks and also compare our our compare ourselves to our own survey results from previous years.

This is the the sixth time New Braunfels has conducted the survey. We've previously done it in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2024. That long history helps us track trends and identify areas we're improving or where residents may want to see more focus. One of the biggest strengths of the National Community Survey is benchmarking. Benchmarking simply means comparing our performance and resident feedback against data collected from communities across The United States.

Because the survey questions are standardized, we can make comparisons with other cities and also establish trend lines year over year. That consistency is really important because it helps us measure progress over time instead of relying on assumptions or anecdotal feedback alone. The database behind this survey represents feedback from tens of millions of Americans, so it gives us a very strong and reliable point of comparison. For the 2026 survey, there were two ways to participate. The first was the scientific random sample survey.

In this process, households are randomly selected to participate, which helps ensure that every resident has an equal chance of being included. And the second option was an open participation survey that anyone can take online. The important distinction is that the random sample survey is designed to be statistically representative of the entire community, while the open participation survey allows for a broader public engagement and additional feedback from residents who want to participate. Together, these two approaches give us both statistically reliable data and expanded community input. What makes the survey scientific is the methodology behind it.

First, the questions themselves are professionally developed and tested to make sure they are unbiased and not leading respondents toward a particular answer. Second, the sample is randomly selected, which helps ensure results reflect the broader community and not just people who are most vocal or most engaged online. And finally, the data is weighted and analyzed using accepted statistical methods so that the results closely mirror demographics of the actual community. That process allows us to have a confidence that the results truly represent the residents' perspective citywide. We conducted this survey because local government works best when we understand the needs and the priorities of the people that we serve.

The survey helps city leadership make more informed evidence based decisions based or about services, programs, budgeting, infrastructure, and long term planning. It also helps measure resident satisfaction, identify emerging concerns, and track how perceptions change over time. While the city receives feedback feedback from residents year round through meetings, emails, surveys, social media, and other engagement efforts, This survey provides a consistent scientific foundation that helps put all of that feedback into context. So with that, I will turn it over to Tobin McCarron with Polco, and he will walk through the survey results and provide a deeper analysis of what the residents had to say this year. Good

evening. Thank you for having me. I'm Tobin McCarron, a resident of Lucas, Texas, which is a small suburb just north of Dallas. I was in the Air Force for twenty five years, retired after being an economist and a pilot, joined JPMorgan Chase and leading internal consulting teams, and eventually joined Polco, which is the company that administers this survey. Was the VP of data science for a few years before I became the COO.

Before going, I'd like to thank Jenna Vinson, who has been instrumental in the survey development and implementation process this whole time. Also, I'd like to acknowledge my colleague Grace Arneson, who is the project manager for the project for the NCS here in New Braunfels and gets to do all the work while I get the glory of just presenting the results. A little bit about Polco. She gave you a good history of the survey and why it's important, why we do it. Our whole goal is to get the resident voice into the hands of the government decision makers so that they can make better data informed decisions.

We acquired the NRC, which is the company that created the NCS amongst other surveys, an employee survey, a business survey, an older adult survey. They've been administering, and we've been administering now that survey for over almost thirty years. So we are able to represent over 50,000,000 American voices and benchmark you as she had talked about. What is the NCS? It's a five page questionnaire that dives into these 10 different domains you see up here.

These 10 domains have been identified through extensive research to be the most integral ways to value a resident's quality of life. We ask very broad questions in each of these domains and then we ask very specific ones. It allows department leaders of these specific facets such as the economic and community development or the parks and rec department to kind of dive in specifically in the area they want in case they don't want the broad view. Maybe they just want to look at their one area. They can then focus in on those results pretty easily in the survey.

So what is it we did this year in 2026 with New Braunfels? First, we purchased from the USPS all of the addresses that are within the zip codes that serve New Braunfels. We then use the GIS boundary file that your city provides in order to eliminate the addresses within those zip codes that are not in the city of New Braunfels out so that we only have addresses within the city. As she said, we then randomly sample amongst those addresses. We actually sent out letters and mailings to 4,500 different households.

The first mailing went out on January 19, and then the survey remained open for roughly two months. The first mailing that they get is a postcard that invites them to take the survey, provides a URL link that they can go to access it. The second mailing is a cover letter explaining what it is that is being requested, also provides a URL link, also provides the survey, the five page questionnaire with a postage paid return envelope. Out of those households that got that, we saw that we had four twenty six different responses, giving us a 5% margin of error. So what does that allow us to say with these results I'm about to show you?

If we were to administer this over and over again, then 95 of the time, we would expect the actual value of what your residents think to be within five points of the values I'm going to show you. In order to get about a 10% margin of error, you need about 85 different responses. In order to get the 7% margin of error, about 200. The 5%, you need about three eighty five. And then to go to 1% margin of error, you'd actually need about 10,000 responses.

As she said, we also did the open participation, which is just the non random, where anyone can go on and take this survey. You were able to get another twelve seventy eight responses, which provides great feedback and great data for you to be able to look at. I am not presenting responses in the percentages that I'm about to show you with those twelve seventy eight because it is not statistically valid, but it is a good representation of what's going on in your community. After we get those responses, the last thing we do is weighting. Jenna talked about the weighting also.

Just to give you an example of what weighting is, is let's say that you had a thousand males and a thousand females in the community, and we surveyed 200 of each and you heard back from 100 males and 50 females, we would just double the weight of the female voice in that instance and example. She's already talked about the benchmarking database, so I'm going to get to the results. I'm going stay very high level at first, and then I'm going to dive into six key findings that we found that we think are important for your community to be aware of. Realize in the Tableau version online or in the PDF report that we provide you, you can get much more detail and much more granular into these results. So on the broad level, we ask questions about the quality of each of those 10 facets that are represented here, and the residents then rank them as, Is the quality of the economy in the community excellent, good, fair, or poor?

I am showing you the percent of residents that ranked your economy as excellent or good. And everything I'm gonna show from here on is going to be amongst this percent positive idea of the top two positive values, and you will see how many said a positive gave you a positive remark. And so here, you can see amongst quality, education, arts, and culture and everything above is very similar to the national benchmark, and utilities, community design, and mobility was rated as lower than what we get what we see in our national benchmarks. In order to be outside of that range, it has to be 10 percentage points or more different. This was quality.

We also asked about the same 10 different domains for importance, And here you can see how your residents rated the importance of each of those 10 different domains. All of these are along national benchmark standards. The only kind of anomaly here that I'm seeing is that typically we have economy and safety as the top one, two, or three. Here, you can see economy is third, but safety is down fifth. We don't normally see utilities and natural environment being more important to the residents, but in your community, we do see that.

We like to throw these both on the same graph to give you a quality importance blend, so you can see where it is that the residents actually rated the importance and what is the quality of that different domain. This allows us to see where should resources in the community probably be focused. Here, you can see that mobility community design seem to be the largest gap, where the quality is the furthest away from importance. Utilities also being kind of far. However, we know resources are limited and scarce, you can't just probably pull something out of the magic hat, and so you've got to pull resources from somewhere.

Where is it that you might be able to find money, resources, people, time? Perhaps you would want to look at the parks and rec, the health and wellness, or the safety areas because there, we see that you are matched up pretty good. And we would love to have everything matched up perfectly. Communities never end up getting a perfect match on every one of these. They have to make trade offs. This is no not unlike any other community we see, except that we are seeing these three areas that you could really focus on. Two more slides that are kind of overall. How do you compare in the 122 different questions we have, how do you compare relative to the nation on your residents' ratings? You can see that most of the time you're similar. You do have four that were higher, and I'm gonna go over all four of those throughout this presentation, and you had 18 that received lower ratings.

Those 18 that were lower were mainly about mobility or community design. We can also compare you to your previous year you did the survey, and we could compare you to past years if you wanted that instead. Here, if I compare you to what you did in 2024, you can see that, again, you're pretty similar to how you did, except you do have some that receive higher ratings, 17, and then you have six that receive lower ratings. Again, I'll go into more detail of those in a little bit. So getting into the key findings.

Most importantly, that we should all be proud of, you should be proud of what you have accomplished, is that residents do experience a high quality of life. The whole reason you all probably do what you do is to make sure the residents are having a good high quality of life, and they do. After each one of these key findings, I'll then give you a slide or two that kind of dives into the details of why we say that key finding. So here you can see that eight in 10 New Braunfels residents actually recommend excellent or good. Sorry.

They rate as excellent or good New Braunfels as a place to live, as a place to raise children. Like the overall reputation or image of the community, plan to live here for the next five years. That's really good marks, really good high percentages. It is similar to the benchmark, but it is on the high side of what we're seeing, so congratulations on that. And 75% would recommend living in New Braunfels to someone who would ask. Number two for key findings. Most residents feel a strong sense of safety in New Braunfels. And why do we say that? If I look at how residents rate the community, they think it's very or somewhat safe in each of these areas that I'm showing you. This is on par with the national benchmarks.

You can see here that you actually have an improvement relative to last survey year from property crime, so rating has gotten better. But your neighborhood during the day and the safety they feel, that has seen decrease. I told you about the 10 percentage point in order to have the comparison amongst national benchmarks. For the time trend, it's a seven percentage point difference from what you had last year. And then if I want to look into specific parts fire, police, EMS you can see, again, getting very good accolades and good rankings of excellent or good in every one of these, and you actually saw an improvement in crime prevention relative to year 2024.

Third key finding: Affordability and employment opportunities remain key challenges. We're seeing this nationally, and you'll see this when I start showing you the benchmarks. But really important to highlight here that you do have three areas that are actually doing better than the national benchmarks. Those are the ones that are in dark green, so as a place to visit, shopping opportunities, and the vibrancy of downtown and commercial area. I'm sure that's partly why you have a parking problem in downtown, because everyone wants to be down there.

So you should be happy about that. It's also creating this problem then that you've got to fix. The other areas are all on par with the national benchmarks, and you can see that relative to '24, you did have a decrease in your overall economic health. More on affordability. Here, you can see you're similar to the national benchmark when it comes to availability of quality food, health care, mental health care, quality housing, cost of living, quality child care, and preschool.

You did see an increase on the availability of affordable quality housing, and you did see a decrease on quality health care relative to the survey two years ago. Value the city's parks and recreation opportunities. Why do we say that? Here, you can see that seven six, seven, eight out of 10 people are ranking each of these as high, excellent or good, and fitness opportunities and above. You did have one that was below the benchmark.

The availability of paths and walking trails actually was below the benchmark and ranked 55%, which you probably would like to get that higher. We didn't have anything significantly different from 2024. The fifth key finding is community design measures received mixed ratings, and this one I'll show you two slides on this. First, the overall appearance, well designed neighborhoods. All of these are on par with the national benchmarks.

So you could be happy, and you should be happy that you're on par, but you're probably not happy when you see that less than of your residents are actually thinking these are excellent or good. So we can improve these, but you are on par with what we're seeing nationally. That very last one, well planned residential growth, is below the national trend, but on a positive side, it is trending up from what it was in 2024. And you can see that quality housing and well designed neighborhoods are also trending up from what they were in 2024. And the last key finding, mobility remains a potential area of opportunity.

This is probably the biggest area of opportunity. You saw that back on the very initial slides when I was showing overall the mobility gap between importance quality. Here we're seeing when I look at how people rate the ease of travel by car, walking, parking, bicycle, public transportation, those are all below the national benchmarks. And except for that first one, which about half the people said excellent or good, all the rest get one third or less of the residents thinking these are excellent or good. No significant time trend differences between 'twenty four and 'twenty six, though.

On the positive side, you are on par with the nation when it comes to these different parts of mobility services, specific parts that had to do with kind of safety stuff and what keeps people going. And you did see an increase in sidewalk maintenance relative to your '24 survey. You had two special questions or custom questions that you actually asked to have. The last one, the question 14, is just trying to get an idea of the different responses you were getting from the different regions. That can be seen in the Tableau report.

I'm going to show you this first one, which is just how it is that your residents actually hear about what's going on in the city. And here you can see that direct mail and city website seems to get most of the people's attention, and they seem to be paying attention there most. But Facebook, email notifications, and text messages are the next three, also pretty high marks on how people are getting the information about what's going on in the city. Summary of the six key findings are here, the ones that I went over. Happy to talk about any one of them in more depth or other stuff if you want.

And last, I'd like to mention, you are a customer of Polco. Customer, you are subscribed to our platform, and you have the ability to use our Engage platform. Think of it like a SurveyMonkey, but with the ability to verify residents and use a panel. Your panel right now has 900 plus people on it. That means that people in your community have raised their hand and said, hey, if you have more questions, we would like you to ask us questions because we would like to give you our opinions. Maybe you want that, maybe you don't. Hopefully, you do want it. That is free, a free service to be using since you are part of the POCO community. You could post one question. You could post hundreds of questions.

You could do a survey that was 20 questions long or just one off. So you can give history. You can really make that what you want. You do have a customer service representative from Poco that helps to show you how to do that and make sure your questions are unbiased and don't lean towards someone answering something specific. And so we encourage you to use that if you want to dive deeper or to find out how things are going. You also have the ability to use the track dashboard, which is our aggregation of many different public data sets to let your community see how you're doing relative to other communities in the state and the country and the population bin that you're similar to, so that you can see how you're doing when it comes to public data sets. Happy to answer any questions if you have any.

Any questions for Mr. McCarran? All right, we'll open this to public hearing. If anybody would like to speak to this item, please step up to the podium, state your name, whether you're a resident, non resident, or live in the ETJ. Seeing none, close public hearing. Next item is a presentation and update on the ADA self evaluation and transition plan. Mr. McClellan?

Thank you, mayor and council. Good evening. Scott McClellan. I'm the assistant director of transportation and construction services, also the ADA coordinator for the city. So tonight, we'd like to give an update on where we're at with the ADA self evaluation and transition plan, and also talk about the public outreach opportunity that we have starting today.

So, as you can imagine, under ADA, under that umbrella, it's a broad umbrella, there's multiple federal guidelines that regulate everything that people commonly refer to as ADA. So going all the way back to 1968 with the Architectural Barriers Act, and then in 1973 the Rehabilitation Act was established. The big thing about the Rehabilitation Act in 1973 is that Section five zero four tied federal funding to complying with ADA requirements. So any agency that received federal funding was supposed to be compliant with ADA requirements. Then in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was established as well.

So currently, all three of those are still law. There's still things we have to follow, and things that we have to reference. Within ADA, there were these different titles established. So we fall as a Title II agency, which are public agencies. So state, local governments fall under Title II.

So as a Title II agency, the city is required to ensure that our programs, services, and activities are accessible to individuals with disabilities. And so that leads into why we need a self evaluation plan, also or a self evaluation and transition plan. So the transition plan is really what comes out of the self evaluation, as the name might suggest. So in the self evaluation phase, we're looking at all of our assets, all of our programs, everything that we offer, collecting that data, getting it, identifying barriers that might might exist, ultimately ranking those things, creating a database. And then that helps inform our transition plan.

So the transition plan is the how are we gonna correct it, when are we gonna do it, and and how are we gonna spend the money to make those corrections. So across the board, during each one of those phases, we're getting feedback from the community because we want to know important, what are people encountering out there, what programs or what facilities do we have that are creating a barrier that maybe we aren't aware of. So the way the oversight works on ADA, this is the chart for the state of Texas. It doesn't apply to every state, but for us, the organization that we have to report to on ADA items is TxDOT. And so that again goes back to that section five zero four, where because we receive federal money, we have to report that up through TxDOT.

And so within the state of Texas, TxDOT is the agency that oversees all of the other agencies that receive federal money. So that's local governments like us, MPOs, colleges and universities, all of those agencies that receive money. And then it goes up the chain from there. And so easy way to think about it, the enforcement, the oversight, everything follows the funding. So the funding goes from USDOT to Federal Highway to TxDOT to us.

And so then the reporting goes back backwards the same. So where we're at with our transition plan right now, we do have a consultant on board. So PAPE DOS and engineers is our consultant to complete the project. They have experience within their team, and they also have consultants that are helping with different portions of the plan as well. They actually did TxDOT's statewide plan, and so they because of that oversight structure, it's really great to have their experience on how they're familiar with how TxDOT thinks about things, and since we have to report to them, that's definitely beneficial.

And so the city started the transition plan all the way back in 2019. It's a phased approach, which is acceptable. We don't have to go through every one of our we don't have to complete a full data collection. We can go in phases, and so for various reasons, and funding, and all the other reasons why plans can take a while to complete, we've been working on it since 2019. So over that time, we've assessed the public facilities that we have, parks, a portion of the right of way, our websites, and other digital applications, and also our policies and procedures, which are important on how we actually interact with the public.

We also, during this time, we prioritized citizen requests. So, of the things with not having a complete data collection set is that we don't know what we haven't encountered yet out there as a barrier. And so, over this time, listening to residents that might come in, making us aware of a barrier, that then we can actually prioritize that as a request that's affecting somebody's life, and we can get in there and do that as we're working on finishing the data collection. We've improved policies and adopted new procedures. This is really an effort to centralize how we manage ADA items in the city.

That we found as we started to dig into it, there were different departments that had different ways of handling ADA requests and items that would come up. And so really improve that by just centralizing how we handle ADA here in the city. So appointing a new ADA coordinator, so that's me. And then also advancing our training. So that's another thing that just getting into it and getting out to departments, just inconsistencies in training, and so trying to trying to get training that'll help help the entire city improve our service when it comes to ADA items.

We created the ADA Cohort. That's a group within the city that there's one representative from each department, and that person is the liaison. They're the point person for any ADA item that happens in their department. This has worked very well. Like I said, it was kind of decentralized before.

Having that group that we meet, we've been meeting quarterly, it really helps. It boosts the training, the awareness of ADA within the departments. Those people in those departments can bring in specific items, and so that's really worked really well over the last year and a half or so. And then because TechSalt's our oversight agency, we've been working with them. They rolled out a survey program of their sub recipients back in 2024, and said we've been responding to those surveys.

We get feedback from that, and guidance from TxDOT on how we're doing with our transition plan. So what we evaluated, parks and facilities. So we have 34 different city facilities and parks that we assessed. The public right of way, to this point all we've done is a pilot study. So we selected three or four different areas around town that were sort of unique, that we could use as a basis so we kind of know what to expect.

So, few different obviously, we know the city is different in different areas based on when it was developed, or the activities that go on there, and so we did a sampling. But the good news is, in last year, we received funding through a Safe Streets for All grant to complete all of the data collection in the right of way. And so we've been going through the consultant selection process for that, and hoping to bring that contract to you all in June, so that then we can complete all of our right of way assessment. The other thing that we've done is assess our website and digital applications. So we reviewed our 28 most visited web pages.

As you can see from the last presentation, a lot of people are getting information from the website, and so we want to make sure that that's accessible to people. And so the good thing with our website, it's very template based. So we assess those 28 pages, but our communications team has done a great job of applying it to all of our other pages. So as we identify things, they can get in there and address those. Then our public facing applications, so we evaluate 17 applications that the city has uses on some regard, whether that's booking a tea time, or any number of things.

We have lots of different apps, reserving library books, that type of thing. So how we evaluated each one of these, as you can imagine, the criteria for evaluating a website is very different than evaluating this building. And so parks facilities fall under the, for the most part, the twenty ten ADA standards. And so that is really broken down into four prioritized framework. And so there's four levels.

The one level one is access to the site. So that's can people get from the public right of way or the parking lot actually into the facility. And then access to goods and services is priority level two, and so that's once they're inside, they access the goods and services that are there. So think of that as maybe like a transaction counter or something like that. And then the third is restrooms.

So obviously restrooms, public restrooms are important, and that falls under level three. And then level four is just other elements. So that would be things like water fountains or vending machines fall under that level four priority. And so as we're going through and evaluating all 34 of those facilities and parks, we have a report that slots each of the barriers into one of these priority levels. Then in the public right of way, we use the Public Right of Way Accessibility Guidelines, or PROAG, as we call it for short.

And so that's the latest standards. So the US DOT began enforcement on using PROAG March of last year. So TxDOT's using that. That's the basis of design for all of our current projects, but then that also is our standard that we're evaluating our right of way infrastructure against. And then finally the digital side is evaluated against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, is the short for that.

And so that dictates things like colors that can be used, color contrast, how you go about navigating. So if you're using a screen reader, how does it go from one selection to another? Things like alt text on pictures, that sort of thing. So each one is very detailed as we go through those different data sets. So our common findings, just high level, public facilities and parks.

So several of those level one items, so parking, accessible routes, curb ramps, those were common things that we saw. Service counters that I mentioned, so making sure those are at the right height, in the right places. Things like restroom stalls, so making sure grab bars are there where they're supposed to be. Doors close on their own, that type of thing. So a lot of consistency that we found in our public facilities and parks.

In the public right of way, that's something that most of us observe on a daily basis, so these are probably no surprise. Things like missing curb ramps, things that we have infrastructure that was installed even before any of the laws were established even in the sixties. And so missing curb ramps around town. Curb ramp slopes. So curb ramps are required to have a certain slope going up, and they can only have a certain cross slope as well.

And so as those get installed, or have been installed over the years, they don't meet current standards. And then sidewalk obstruction, so again, this is mostly for areas that are kind of necked down. So we have places where mailboxes are in sidewalks. We have places where power poles are in sidewalks, or trees have grown into sidewalks. So those obstructions are common as well.

And then on the digital side, a lot of the things that I mentioned that are evaluated in the standards. So lack of proper roles is the that's the screen reader. So if somebody is kind of tabbing between selections, making sure that those actually going to the right places, and they're actually reading out and controlling the website as it's supposed to. Low contrast, so that's the color contrast for someone who has lower vision abilities. They might not be able to pick up on color contrast as much, and then images lacking proper alt text.

So again, for a screen reader, that's how the images are described on a website. I also mentioned on the digital, I mentioned those apps that we have. Most all of those are hosted by a third party. And so we've been working with those third party vendors to provide our feedback, provide our reports to them to say, these are items that we found that need to be improved to meet the WCAG standards. And so we've been working through that with the different departments and owners of those apps.

So, the policy and procedure review, again, the big improvement and evaluation that we took was really centralizing all of our policies and procedures. So if departments had different ways of handling things, we were bringing it together. We needed to have a consistent policy, consistent procedures on how we handle things like accommodation requests. We evaluated all these through, we interviewed every single department with our consultant. We did a citywide staff survey to kind of get a gauge of where city staff is with regard to ADA items, both awareness and also how to handle items if items come up.

And ultimately, these findings will incorporate into the transition plan through staff training. So we've already done a couple with the ADA cohort, implementing that, getting that awareness up. The department procedures. So as I said, it's centralized, but also the departments, every department has a unique need. And so maybe a procedure that would work for the river operation wouldn't work for a camp operation that Parks is running.

And so making sure we have those procedures lined out for what the departments are actually doing. Customer service practices is something we've already implemented with the new intake form online that doesn't require you to print out a PDF and fill out the form or anything like that. And so we've improved that intake form that alerts us, gives a better feedback and customer response time frame for when people submit inquiries or accommodation requests. And then future policy updates, as well as we continue to find items that need refining. So we collected all of that data from all those different sources, and ultimately that's what the self evaluation is, like I mentioned at the start.

That's just giving a baseline of where we at, and then also each one of those criteria that we evaluated against has suggested a baseline prioritization. And so we're working through that right now to get all those into our prioritization, which then will allow us to actually plan the implementation plan of how do we go about removing these barriers. And that's impacted by high impact, high use facilities. So this is thinking about where city hall is going to get more people that come into it than a lot of other facilities. And so that would be a high use facility.

We have parks that are much more popular than others. We have regional parks as opposed to local parks. And so not that those other parks aren't significant, and those are things we need to address, but that all goes into how we time out and prioritize that remediation. And then also aligning it with other plans and priorities. So we have ton of projects going on.

We're working on about 50 or 60 projects, and so a lot of those touch these in some regard, that we're working on projects that can resolve barriers that are identified, and so that's great. We can take credit for those, List those in our implementation plan that we're resolving these barriers based on our evaluation. And then finally, public feedback. And so like I mentioned, we're working on today launches our public outreach phase for the self evaluation, and so that's what we're collecting right now. But also in the future, as we get more feedback from things even like the citizen survey that we just went over, we can look to see how that affects our transition plan.

So to touch on the public outreach plan briefly, it's an opportunity for the community to provide their feedback on what they're seeing out there in the city. They can participate in the plan so that that creates buy in. They're hopefully seeing things in the implementation plan and transition plan that that are affecting their lives that that we're able to resolve. So we're working on actually reaching out to between ten and twelve local groups, either organizations or advocacy groups, to get the survey promoted out specifically to the disability community. We want to know what that community thinks about our efforts, and what they think needs to be included in the transition plan.

And then also it'll be promoted through the city website and social media that if we're opening it up to anybody, we want to know anybody's feedback. Because in reality, a lot of these things, if they don't affect you now, are going to affect you in the future, or in some regard somebody that you're helping care for, or some way like that. And so it's definitely good to get the full public view as well. So we have the public outreach survey I'm sorry, presentation that our consultant recorded for us. It's on the website as of today, and then starting today through June 15, we have this public feedback opportunity.

So we'll be getting that out starting tomorrow, really publicizing that. But this presentation is really the kickoff of this phase of the project. And then we'll include some of those results in the FAQ in the transition plan as well, and help that inform our transition plan. So, again, the survey is out there. That's the website for it, a QR code, and we'll promote that out as well.

And then finally, what's coming up in the final report for the transition plan? Again, it's taking what we've learned in the transition, in the data collection from self evaluation and the public input that we get, and actually going in and creating, like I said, what are we doing? What are the barriers we're correcting? When are we doing it in the implementation schedule? And how are we funding those things?

And so we'll summarize the findings, similar to what we touched on tonight, but in more detail, obviously. Detail out how we did the public outreach that's required, and then that remediation schedule, and strategies of how we continue to improve as well through things like policies and procedures. So we're planning bring the transition plan to you all for adoption later this year. Hopefully towards the end of the summer, August September time frame is what we're tracking for you all to adopt and approve. And then also, just to note, there will be a public comment period after the transition plan is adopted as well.

And so that's requirement to adopt that to have that obviously publicly posted, but also receive comments. So people can continue to provide comments, feedback, so this isn't just a one time shot, we'll revisit it next time. It's a continuous process. So with that, happy to answer any questions you all might have.

Any questions for Mr. McClellan?

Thank you for the presentation. So if you go back to the one slide a couple of slides ago where they can right there. So how do people that are vision disabled or deaf, how do they how are they going to do this survey?

Yeah. So the big thing is we have that disclaimer there. So if you need an alternative format or require assistance in some way, they can submit that through our website or directly. That's my desk phone number, that's my email. They can submit a request directly to me. Yeah, we have several different avenues that people with various disabilities could be able to reach out. So either by phone, email. If you can't do the survey here, you can ask for assistance. We can print them out on paper and get that submitted however however people need.

Alright. Thank you.

And and to that point, do we plan on training any library staff in the assistance of taking the survey where we could direct people to either the Westside Community Center or the main library branch for them to receive assistance in filling out these?

Yeah, so that's one of the things we worked with the cohort group to identify different places where we can put put surveys or have the QR code at different places to help hopefully boost the results that we get. But yeah, certainly if staff is around they're able to help. The library is great. They're used to helping people. And so yeah, don't think there'll be any problem with the library. We haven't specifically advertised that people can go there. So that might be something else that we can do in some of the the posts that we can work with the communication staff on.

Wonderful. Yeah. I would definitely like to see that. And I had a question too when it comes to just general enforcement, right? Or the next step of corrective measures.

I see a lot of sidewalk obstruction like you mentioned you know we have some infrastructure that does that but also trash cans, businesses tables, A signs. What do you, I guess where will that live kind of in this whole process? How do we encourage especially in our downtown area where the utilization of sidewalks happens by businesses? What does that process look like and making sure that ordinances in our codes, the ability of a downtown business to operate, and these ADA compliant issues are all worked in together to not detriment one or the other?

Yeah. So I'd say first of all that's definitely one of the benefits that we've seen in centralizing ADA because an issue like that several years ago would have you probably could have asked several different departments and got several different answers on what the policy is. And so I think that's the first big step centralizing it, that then when those things come up, if somebody has a question, at the very least they they make me aware of it, bring me into it. And so not to say that I have all the answers, but hopefully then then I'm aware of of other things that are going on. I think for downtown, there's definitely different efforts that are going on with the curb management plan, a few different plans that we have downtown looking at how we address that.

And so from the ADA side, I'm involved in those to kind of see what the making sure we're compliant. So we've done you've gone out a couple times with Bandy on a couple different things and looked at different pictures over the years that have come in of is this an obstruction or is this not or is this an encroachment. Making sure that what we're approving in encroachment permits meets requirements, and as those, like we mentioned, proag is relatively new, and so that changed some of the requirements as well. So how do we do we handle that moving forward, adjusting our policies, and and what we're approving. So I think the answer is we don't we don't have have it yet, but but we're working on those plans that'll help inform those policies, procedures, how is that handled, making sure that the people that are approving the encroachment permits are aware of the ADA requirements, and the the when we receive complaints or concerns from from citizens that we're getting that in and using our using one policy to to enforce those consistently and actually being able to enforce enforce those things.

Because

we're looking at both public and private on the public side, which is us, it would be nice to know from our own research and detail how many areas are we non compliant that need to be addressed? What's that total list of how many projects? Next, out of all those things we get, what's is

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Look what I did for my district. But if we have one district that is way behind the curve, then it tells us we need to work on that because maybe it's been neglected for years. Okay.

Can I just make a comment on Yeah, that real to, so this presentation, yeah, certainly we're not going to dive into all the data? As we're going through getting towards adoption, we can definitely share more of the data. And certainly the implementation plan will help with that as well. I think to your point about the districts, so the prioritization that's included within that right of way assessment contract that we're going to be releasing that was funded by Safe Streets for All. So that prioritization is a whole matrix of different components.

So in theory, it's not, you know, this project is in this district. We're going do this one. This project scores very high on the prioritization. That's why we're doing this. And so to make it defendable both to the public, to you all, to Texada as our oversight agency of why did you pick this as opposed to this, we can clearly go back and say, well, is a top priority based on our prioritization matrix that normalizes those. More to come on that for sure as we get closer to adoption.

I just want to say that I do like Council Member Edwards' question in regards to how many are at each district. So, yeah, I'd love to see those.

Okay, yeah, and that's another piece of getting through the transition plan is the monitoring and tracking phase. So this will never end. It's going to go on after we adopt. Then we go into monitoring and tracking, and that's some of the things that you all are asking about is, how many have you done in my district, or how many exist out there. So yeah, we'll be working on that after we get the plan adopted as well.

Okay. Thank you, Mr. McClellan. We'll open this to public hearing. If anybody would like to speak to this item, please step up to the podium, state your name, whether you're a resident, non resident, or live in the ETJ.

Seeing none, we'll close public hearing. Next item is a presentation and update on the city right of way beautification team. Mr. Warner.

Thank you, mayor. Members of council, you'll remember that in the fiscal year twenty five budget process is when we implemented both a a six person crew for right of way beautification efforts. And while that was coming up on two years ago, when you think about the time that it takes to order equipment, have it delivered, hire the staff, that crew is real those crews, I should say, have really only been effective for about a year or so. So we felt it was a good time to bring you an update. I also want to extend our appreciation to our public works team, specifically our streets, drainage and facilities crews.

Those are the teams that we gave them the opportunity to expand services, and they've embraced that. They've enjoyed that, and we're proud of their efforts so far. Just a reminder, we felt this initiative back in fiscal year twenty five really correlated well back to the citywide strategic plan. Within the community identity strategic priority, we have a milestone specifically about allocating resources to community wide beautifications and streetscape enhancements. And the right of way and beautification crews align perfectly with that.

You'll remember that our primary motivation of these crews was to start providing regular maintenance on all TxDOT right of way throughout our community. As we know, TxDOT's standard and there really is no deviating from that is to come in and provide service on TxDOT right away twice a year. And during rainy seasons and even during non rainy seasons, can get quite unsightly. We know that that's one of the main complaints that you as council members get and certainly one of the main complaints that we as staff members get. And so that was our main motivation.

And we've got a good cadence, I think, now on, again, augmenting those services throughout the year. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. Diving into that a little bit deeper again, the goals was to augment that twice per year tech stock maintenance effort. Again, kind of a secondary goal was to have a facilities crew, really a true beautification crew that was focused on providing service on all of our city facilities and a number of other city properties with a goal of reducing the cost of outside landscape contractors. Over the past years before this crew was implemented, the cost of outside landscape service had increased significantly, and we felt confidently that we could do this more efficiently from a cost perspective by bringing in a crew.

And we've done that, though so far reducing annual expenditures to outside contractors by over $225,000 annually. As of right now, one half of the team is supporting some of those efforts that Jeff talked about earlier, trying to provide support indirectly for downtown beautification initiatives. And then, again, just general, as these teams are driving throughout the town, they've been instructed that, hey, if you see illegal dumping on the side of the roads, stop, pick it up. If you see grass growing between sidewalks, intersections, make sure you report that back to your crew leader, work that into your intersection for service. And so I'll say this a couple times tonight.

You all, along with your constituents, really are the best resource for us to also identify maybe where those areas are throughout town. And so anytime you or you get an inquiry from one of your constituents, please feel free to either send that directly to me or Greg Melodica so we can make sure and get that on the schedule for our teams. We also have an online tool for our public works department where citizens can put a service request of any kind streets, drainage, and the like. And these types of requests are starting to make their way through that online portal as well. So just an opportunity to plug that this evening.

So just by the numbers, we have seven staff members that are allocated to the beautification team. You may be thinking, well, wait a minute, we added six. That's correct. But we did pull one person permanently over from Drainage because really that right of way crew for the matter of safety and providing maintenance and service on state right of way, we really needed to have them at a minimum of four person teams. That's the reason why we have seven that are dedicated to it.

So far we estimate that crew has picked up about 10,000 pounds of litter, again just in their regular services and again as they see that throughout the community. The city properties that are now maintained by landscape crew as opposed to outside contract is now up to 25. Again, we talked earlier about the acres of right of way maintained. That's 147. Those were, again, properties that were maintained by outside contractors.

Those are city properties. And then you add that to the three fifty seven, again just a little over 500 acres of property that that crew of four is maintaining. And again, we've not only staffed up, we've ordered a good amount of equipment to make sure these teams as effective and as efficient as they can be. So just drilling down a little bit into those two separate teams that I've kind of been talking about throughout the presentation. Again, we have a four person team that focuses primarily on those right of way areas, both TxDOT and city owned.

And then we have the landscape crew that operates within the Facilities Division. Those are the ones that focus on city facilities primarily, Walnut Avenue, a number of other city owned properties, again providing that indirect support to the downtown area as well. And again, that just goes into a little bit more detail as to what that team's working on. Again, you can see they're trying to provide biweekly service on all those facilities. The high profile properties receive weekly service.

Some of those high profile properties being the police department, Doss Rec, and several others, Walnut Avenue as well. Again, you can see some of downtown beautification projects. They specifically worked on the questions and illustrations on upgrading the Plaza Islands downtown. Jeff and his team have been working collaboratively with Matt Eckman and Public Works on his team on that effort. This shows a little bit of how that collaboration is working back and forth between the ECD department and Public Works.

And then again, I think what we most get excited about is when we see our teams out there on Loop 337. I know today when I was going home for lunch, they were providing service on Loop 337 today. I'm grateful, hopefully, getting that taken care of ahead of a rainy week as we're all hoping for. But again, just to put it back into perspective and as a reminder, the areas that they're providing service for on a regular basis, I-thirty 53 times per year with internal crews and two times with TaxData. As you know, that's a pretty massive effort.

Usually when our team provides that service on I-thirty 5, even though they have four assigned, they're bringing additional crews from Drainage to help with that effort because of size of the project. And then the areas that are being addressed twice per month or one to two times per month is Loop 337, FM 306, 110111021044, and Highway 46. And actually 725 is not on that list, but we also provide service on 725 as well. Again, every textile and right of way area in the city, we're scheduled to hit one to twice per month based on demand and need. Again, city right of way, some of the areas that this crew is also taking care of, County Line, Walnut Extension, so on and so forth, and then a number of flood lots.

Again, those were also areas that were previously maintained by outside contractors that we were able to absorb with this new internal crew. And again, just to be redundant again, really you all, your constituents really are our best eyes and ears out there. So again, please don't feel bad if you are driving by these areas and you feel that the weeds have gotten a little tall, you've noticed some litter that's been there for a couple of days, we're happy to have that feedback. We're happy to get that worked into our schedule so we can get it addressed as quickly as possible. Beyond just the schedules, the recurring work, the teams that are doing the work every day, our Public Works department, specifically Matt Ackman, our Assistant Public Works Director, has really looked for opportunities for not only cross departmental collaboration within the organization we talked a little bit about that earlier with the downtown efforts but also working with the nonprofit groups in town.

Most recently, he worked successfully with the JCs where they did a large mulching and cleanup project on Walden Avenue on the weekend. And so, again, that's a nice opportunity for some volunteer work and some real quick beautification. Again, collecting input from DTA on those downtown beautification projects. The next one, again, we talked about earlier this evening if approved by a council, having a staff member that's supported by that downtown parking revenue again would allow for some more standardization of this effort in downtown for care. And then another cool project that Public Works is trying to formalize is kind of an adopt a spot program, kind of like the adopt a highway TxDOT program where certain areas in town we can work with nonprofit groups and coordinate with them, provide them the materials they need and the staff supervision they would need to have either quarterly or biannually cleanups in certain areas.

Again, we talked about this a lot during the fiscal year 'twenty five process and during strategic plan updates. We're very proud of this effort, taking responsibility for how this community looks, even though when it comes to text dot it's not our direct responsibility. But again, how it looks and feels is something overall that we feel and stated back then is the city's responsibility. So we feel like it's been a very successful program. Hope that you all agree but also open for any feedback and improvements that you think we should look into. And with that I'll pause for any

Any questions for Mr. Warner?

Not really a question, but thank you for the presentation. I just want to make a statement. When I first got on city council in 2021, I was bugging him a lot because FM 306 from 35 to Hunter Road was really bad constantly and then you already mentioned the loop was really bad constantly and people were emailing me, I can't even see the stop sign to get out of the neighborhoods or whatever and I remember going to his office or calling him and saying, if you don't get this taken care of, I'm going go grab my weed whacker, I'm going to start cutting the grass, you remember that? Yeah, and so we went from that to this and what a fantastic thing, Twice a year is not nearly enough and if we expect any kind of rain at all which we are thank God that we need to cut the grass and I very much appreciate this.

Thank you.

Okay I got several things. Go for it. A fellow council person said, this has always been a top concern of citizens in my district as well. So where can we send that bill to TxDOT to for that $3.57? No?

Well at least we're tracking it. And I think that's kind of when you brought this to us the first time and now that we're continuing to show that we are maintaining this, I do think that gives us a little bit of Lagos stand on when it comes to accessing hopefully state funding to cover some of these things down the road. So I really appreciate that we're fiscally tracking, tracking these efforts with the hopes that we could have a path forward to show the state the burden we have taken off of them and make sure that this maintenance is not you know a completely unfunded mandate. To that point, TxDOT has been responsible for several major projects here in our community including the bane of my existence, I35 and seven twenty five. That project has been finished for quite some time.

Can we implement kind of in this whole project? Maybe some sort of coordination. When a project is finished, when TxDOT has said we completed this project, that we as kind of, that this crew as part of our process goes to the site and assesses what actually has been left behind. TxDOT has said that project's finished but they still got cones, they still got signs, they still have dirt piles, they still have not cleaned the entire space of construction. So that would be something I would love to see implemented as kind of a constant thing. Once a project's finished we have some sort of communication from TaxDOT then we go out and assess it.

Yeah we can standardize that a little bit more. I can tell you specifically to that project as well. We have been communicating with them to ensure their contractors demobilize because we have a project in that area that we want to do with these crews like we did on the other side of the bridge. We want to lift up those tree canopies and clear out that area that has been densely vegetated for a long period of time on the East Side Of 35. So that's a project that we want to get started. We really can't do that until all those materials have been removed.

Okay. Irrigation. Does this team know water is a massive concern in this community and I want to make sure that as part of and we know that a lot of water loss we experienced in this community is coming from irrigation systems. I want to make sure that this team whether are they also kind of responsible like if I see who do I call if I see a sprinkler going off when it shouldn't be?

You can still call us or you can even call the parks department as well because while this team does not have certified irrigators on it, as part of that cross departmental collaboration they have that relationship with the Parks team. And especially on Walnut which is the majority of the irrigation that they're working with, connect with the parks department, come out and address it when they have issues.

Wonderful. Last thing, can we possibly utilize our grants to these sort of larger beautification projects you know in conjunction with these efforts that we see statewide for beautification wildflower wise. I would love to see how we can partner with those sort of state wide Lady Bird Johnson organizations to see is there a grant for us doing this for you know we mow it but if we throw some wildflowers down there is there some cost savings for us there? There?

We can look into that.

Thank you.

I have one caveat if you don't mind. It wasn't mentioned on your slides but city manager had coordinated with TxDOT to pick up trash on 35 and I don't know what other various roads but I think that also goes into this beautification plan that they do that as well. I've seen that and it's been really successful.

And I'll just add that I used to get very regular comments about weeds and trash and since this program has been implemented, I haven't gotten a single complaint So about weeds and thank you, it's been very nice not receiving those complaints. I agree.

If anybody ever maintained my right away other than me on Walnut And 46, I'd probably dance in the middle of the street for four years. I've been mowing it regularly. Are we anticipating with Alligator Creek And Sports Park and some modifications to park advance equipment needs that we need to go ahead and get ready for the budget to be able to acquire them when there's an opportunity to do so at a at a value and what additional employees and staff are you that you would need to add to the current time so that it can be considered in future budget?

I can appreciate that question. With these teams specifically, actually mid year we leveraged some funds from our special revenue fund to add equipment to these teams. So I would say from an equipment perspective, they have everything they need to be as efficient and productive as possible. So I believe we've done that. Kind of a broader question that you brought up earlier about when we have new capital projects coming online or initiatives that we know are coming online that are kind of part of the next budget process, we have in the past taken advantage of locking in prices with certain vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers, and actually taking those basically almost concurrent with the budget or subject to budget approval by the city council.

And that's worked out really well in the past as well, whether it's garbage trucks, dump trucks, street equipment, parks equipment. So we always look for opportunities to get ahead of that when we can.

All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Warner. We'll open this public hearing. If anybody would like to speak to this item please step up to the podium, state your name, whether you're a resident, non resident or live in the ETJ.

It takes me a little bit of time. Sorry, Mikey Furious, ETJ. I just wanted to reinforce what April said. I like the idea of the wildflowers. I used to be a full time photographer.

And about this time of year, every year, I'd be out and about taking photos of all the flowers. 337 between River Road and 46 was just a sea of yellow flowers, wildflowers out there. Also there was bluebonnets over by the dog park. You could always count on that sort of stuff being done. And I would love to see if this is part of that program to see what we can do in planning more wildflowers just to add some beauty to the city. Thank you.

Public hearing. Next item is executive session. In accordance with the Open Meetings Act, Texas government code chapter five five one dot o seven one, the city council may convene in a closed session to discuss any of the items listed on this agenda. Any final action or vote on any executive session item will be taken in open session. Tonight, we plan to deliberate the appointment and duties of an interim city attorney in accordance with section five five one point zero seven four of Texas government code.

It is 06:57 on Monday, 05/18/2026. We are leaving open session going into closed session. I guess we've got a quorum. So we will we are coming out of closed session at 07:30 p. M.

On Monday, 05/18/2026, and there's no action to be taken. So we are adjourned.