City Council - Packet - briefing

Good morning. I'll call 730 packet briefing order. Ann, please call the roll.

Mayor Morgan.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Montgomery.

Here.

Council Member Lee.

Here.

Council Member Flores. Here. Council Member Fleming.

Here.

Council Member Ortega. Here. Council Member Stephens. Here.

All right. Citizen communication. Anybody wish to speak? Seeing none. Staff briefings. Consider staff briefings and council member discussion and our questions regarding items on the agenda for the September 24, 2026 meeting. We have several proclamations. Consent agenda. Anybody have any questions on the consent? Resolutions. G-1, consider a resolution authorizing the mayor to execute change order number one to the agreement of spa glass constructors.

Good morning, mayor and council. we have for you is a change order number one change order number one with the spa glass construction company for the GMP for the Lakeview build-out this is for ninety two thousand four hundred and eighty six dollars the two drivers of this one is we added some electrical pedestals and had to rework a couple electrical pedestals out there at at the Out there at Yonder's Point, excuse me. So we had to make some changes out there. And then also there was an ADA clearance issue on the landing at the pavilion where we were kind of short by about 16 and 1 half inches. So we had to do a little rework on that one. Good news is this cost is going to be captured by outside contingency of the GMP. So we'll be covered on that. With that, I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Questions? All right. Thank you, Corey. Yes, sir. G2, consider a resolution. Authorize mayor to execute an amendment to the residential, commercial, and downtown commercial district for service rates for refuse.

Good morning, Mayor and Council. Good morning. This item and the next ordinance, I'll kind of talk about them together. But once a year, Republic Services can come before us and petition for a rate increase. It's based on the Consumer Price Index, which was 3.86% this year. So I'll go through some slides here, kind of talk about what those rates will look like, and then kind of give some updates on the solid waste program in general. Like I said, there are 3.86% is the urban garbage and trash recycling CPI for the year. It's based on July numbers. So every July, we look at that number. That number cannot go above 5% on any given year. So if the CPI is above 5, we put a cap on it at 5. This year is 3.86. And vice versa, if it goes negative, the most we can reduce the rates is 2%. And that's in the contract with Republic Services. We have three different rate structures for solid waste. We have the single family rate structure, and then we have commercial, and then we have this downtown district. And I'll kind of talk about all three of those. If approved by council, the new rates would go into effect for the building zone starting November 1. And that's similar to what we've done the last couple of years. For a single family home in the city of Round Rock, your current Garbage and recycling bill looks like this. We pay $19.71 to Republic Services for the services they provide. We do include this in our utility bills. So when you get a utility bill, it has water, wastewater, drainage. It also has trash and recycling in the bill. And then we remit payment back to Republic Services at the 1971 for each house. We had an administrative fee of $3.10. That number has been pretty stable the last quite a few years. That helps us fund the deepwood recycling facility and any other programs that we do. And also, some of it goes to our street maintenance program because of the trucks running down the streets. That's what we spend that money on. And then you can tax your garbage and trash services. So the total bill. is $24.69 today. The change is right here. It's the 3.86% increase from $19.71 per house to $20.47 for a total bill of $25.51. How do we compare to some of our neighboring cities? You'll see the two bolded line items are what Round Rock is. So currently it's $24.69, and we're proposing $25.51 This is not apples to apples by any stretch. It's very difficult. But as you see, we allow seven additional bags next to your trash container each week. Some of our surrounding cities have started to use that as well. Not all the cities have a recycling center that you can use. All the HHW that folks take there, we have to pay to dispose of a lot of that. So that's all included in this monthly fee for Round Rock. You look at Georgetown here, a little bit higher rate, but you have to pay for every bag you put next to their cart. So that can really add up quickly. So it's really not apples and apples. We feel really good about our program. We also allow several other things right here just to kind of give you a summary. You get once a week garbage pickup at the curb. Every other week is recycling at the curb. We have an annual on-demand bulk pickup. And I'll give you some numbers on how that's going. That's when the residents can call in and once a year can have a couch picked up or things like that. We have annual shred for pause calls. I'll give you some summaries on that. And then our HHW program at the Deepwood Recycle Center. Shred for Paws, we've been doing this since 2013. If you have any documents you want to get rid of, hard drives, paper copies, et cetera, once a year we have a program where folks can bring it by. It's part of the service we provide. But if you would like to donate to the animal shelter, we do collect. money, dog food, cat food, etc. You can kind of see right here that's some of that. We do take it down to the Williams County Animal Shelter, hence the name Shred for Paws and Culls. That's kind of a summary. So it's been a great program, very popular. It's one Saturday a year. Lots of folks utilize this. Back to the bulk waste I mentioned earlier, the on-demand. In the past, if you recall, we would take in the spring each week in April, for example, of the four billing zones, folks could just put everything out there, and we would have to pick it up in that week. Because Round Rock is not a small town anymore, it was almost impossible for us to get it all picked up that week. And then if you do not get it picked up that week, then you're already starting the next week, and then you fall behind. So two years ago, we changed this program where each home can call in and set up a one-time-a-year pickup. So you see on the last line item here, 3,156 homes have participated this year. As a whole, that's only, what, 10% of all of our homes? But not everybody participated previously. But it is going very well. You call in at least a week in advance, you put out Here's an example, which you can put out, five cubic yards. And it'll get picked up on the same day as your normal trash day. So if you're a Wednesday, you call in the previous Wednesday. If Republic has enough space to get you that Wednesday, they will tell you next Wednesday, set it out there. If they're already filled up, It may go two weeks. Generally, everybody's getting picked up the very next week during their normal recycling and trash pickup day. So that program is very good. I think it's been a positive change. I know we had big discussions on that. And you all wanted to know how it was going. I think we're going really well. Nothing but positive reviews so far on that. First year was a little rough. People would put out more than five cubic yards. But now we're kind of getting there. We've got a lot of pictures on the website. We talk about it, so it's really really going as planned. Household hazardous waste, another change we made last year, if you recall. It used to be just the first Wednesday of the month you could go out there and drop off household hazardous waste. Now it's open every day where you can go out there. And here's the items that you can dispose of. We do not want you burning them in your backyard over here. We don't want you taking them to the landfill, et cetera. This is a good way of getting rid of these materials. If you're outside the city limits, we will take some of that. But there is a charge for you to do that. And then recently, we implemented an automatic card reader. We do not want to handle cash. So that's going well as well. So household hazardous waste. There's kind of the materials that we do collect at the recycle center over the past year. Lots of different materials, as you see. Automotive fluids, cardboard, batteries, fluorescent tubes, styrofoam. A couple of these we are able to sell. Styrofoam, we can package up and resell it, cardboard, plastics, et cetera. Some of the other items we have to pay to have companies come and dispose of it. The downtown district, as you recall, we've got five blocks now that we've transferred here in downtown where you used to be, where a business would have its own container out back. To clean up downtown Round Rock, we went to one enclosure per block. The city of Round Rock owns this enclosure. We handle the billing for all the businesses on that block. And it's based on the size of your facility. So if you're a small commercial or a large commercial, the rates are established that way. But everybody shares this enclosure. There is a combination lock on the back, so everybody can go open it up, put their material in there. This is behind Long Branch Saloon. This is what it used to look like before we changed this program. Terrible. That's all been ripped out. Now we have these enclosures that's working well. Here's the latest one we just completed this year on Lampasas over here. We had a dumpster in the alley behind Brashtop over there. Very complicated to get out since we did the paseo. So we placed this. The negative, we did have to take out two angled parking places. But we have this nice enclosure here for folks on that block to dispose of their material. To give you an idea, a couple of years ago, we changed our program on commercial, where we had the five different vendors running around town, and the business could contract. On the left, that's what we used to see, different containers from different businesses. On the right, here's what we have now. We're still discussing commingling. So if you have a strip center, can we get to a point where we have one big dumpster and everybody's using it, instead of still everyone having their own? Even though it's all Republic, which is good, it's all the same color. The truck comes there and they pick up everybody. There's not this all day long, different trucks coming in. So that program, from an efficiency, is working well. And the commercial businesses have really adjusted to it. And that's just an example of what behind a strip center kind of looks like today. And then this past year, Republic donated $250,000 to a play for All Abilities Park for some equipment and playground material out there. So some of y'all are in this picture right here. A couple of things upcoming for the year. We have some money dedicated to the Deepwood Recycling Center to make some improvements. still doing that. We're starting to do the design. The reason it's taking so long is the deep wood recycle center, the soil conditions there are not so good. There's quarries over there. It was filled in. So when you start, say we want to put a pole barn over there or a building, we have to be careful. We can't put it towards the back because the soil conditions are just not conducive for that. Most of that site is in the flood plain as well. So we've had to readjust some of our plans there, but We're starting the design work of what we want to do there here soon. And hopefully within the next year, we can make some construction improvements to that facility. So we're still working on it. I know we've got some money on the table to do that. And then another thing is electronic recycling. We do not currently have that. We get a lot of requests for that. That's TVs, computers, those types of things. We are looking at some opportunities. One recently is we're talking to the Dell Diamond about their parking lot and working with Republic and having an electronic recycling day or something. And we've got to figure out how we pay for that and how that logistics of that. But we are discussing an opportunity for electronic recycling, because I know everybody's dealing with old TVs, old computer screens, et cetera, and see what we can do for that. So that's the update. The 3.86% CPI, I talked about residential. But on the downtown district, that 3.86% goes to all of those different accounts as well. and the same for commercial. So everybody's getting a 3.86% increase for those items. And with that, that's the update for our solid waste program. Jennifer Trogdon is our coordinator. And then we have three other folks that work at the Deepwood recycling facility. So there's four employees that are part of the program. The center at Deepwood is very popular. If you've been out there, it's very well used. So I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Questions? Council Member Flores.

Michael, thanks for the update. With regards to regular service standards, are they doing what they're supposed to be doing? Are you seeing any concerns from the community as far as something not happening on a regular basis? So I realize that situations occur in individual one-offs, but in general, Or is this service quality standard where it needs to be?

Well, we're all perfectionists, right? We want to be perfect. But I've learned in solid waste, it's hard to be perfect. Sure. But as a whole, Republic's doing a good job. Do we get calls that a street got missed? Yes. Do we get calls from residents that their container didn't get picked up? Yes, some of those are true, some of those are not. The truck comes by, then they call after the truck's already left. We are very engaged with Republic on an hourly basis. When we hear of something, we jump on them quickly, and they take care of it. Are we happy to get a call that a street got missed? No, we do not like to hear that. But I understand things happen in life, right? Their truck driver calls in sick. They have to get a spare driver to come in. On the back end, sometimes we get caught. If there's a big heavy day of trash, landfills close. So if all the trucks are filled up at 6 PM, they can't dump anywhere. Sometimes that catches us and we have to go get those first thing the next morning. We do try to communicate to neighborhoods when we're running late, et cetera. So overall, they're doing fine. But it's like I said, nothing's perfect.

But in general, there's- And I understand that. But they're responsive to correcting things as they need to be corrected. Absolutely. All right. Thank you.

Any other questions over here? Any questions over here? All right. Thank you, Michael.

Thank you.

I1, consider request from Mark IV capital for a re-answer to Chapter 4.

So this will be presented Thursday night. Representatives from Mark IV will be here.

Questions? All right. E1, consider presentation quarterly update from the chamber.

All right, that was quick. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Just as a context, again, we'll give you our quarterly update. The last time I did this update was in May. So kind of everything I'm going to recap for you was really over the summer, June and so forth. So I'm going to start with a momentum program. Again, you all know it's our public-private partnership. We've had several great events. So quarter two in June, again, most of you were there. We had our quarter two event for our investors. where we gave our annual business retention and expansion results and had a great keynote and update from the governor's office. And then just, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, we had probably what was our largest attended Momentum event ever. The topic was water, obviously a very important topic. But great attendance, great turnout, great speakers. Michael, great job. His fan club was there for sure. But a really great update on water. So I was excited to see really strong attendance for that event. And some of that is we've been also really out there working on our Momentum 6 campaign. Hard to believe the Momentum 5 campaign will end in December of this year. Our next five-year campaign starts in June. Sorry, January of 2027. So just want to give you kind of a quick update on where we are with this. Again, this was sort of our high-level timeline. You know, mid-June, July, we really relaunched all of our marketing materials, updated everything with our strategic plan, did a soft launch in July. At the end of July, we're kind of in our quiet fundraising campaign right now. And then we have our official launch on October 15th. So again, kind of revamping all of our materials, we did that strategic plan last year. And everything that we've done in here is really tied to how do we go out and execute the strategic plan over the next five years through the public-private partnership. We upgraded and updated some of our levels and actually added a fifth level for additional investment from the private sector. And that seems to be going really well also. Again, this was our kind of private soft launch event. It was really with our highest level investors Many of you are there, so thank you for your support. And really, we're able to kind of kick off, share a little bit more about the new campaign, and go ahead and get some early commitments from our current investors that are renewing and upgrading. As of today, actually, we had another pace that our level come in last night. So this is not up to date. I think, Danielle, this probably puts us over 50%. Of our goal, our goal is 2.5 million to raise from the private sector over five years. That's the highest we've ever tried to fundraise. And happy to say 1.225 plus 50,000, I'm not going to do the math, is where we're at today. So it's going really well. And seeing a lot of upgraded investment, renewed investment, and then even some new companies that have never been a part of Momentum before are signing up at higher levels. So great to see the activity moving forward there. And then again, just as a save the date, Our official launch, October 15th, will have kind of a big kickoff. We'll share where we're at. Our goal will be to say we're at 70% of our goal by October 15th and really use that event to kind of drive us forward trying to get to our goal of 2.5 by the end of the year. But we'd love to see you all there. Again, that will be across the street at the City Arts Center. So it should be a great event to officially kick off our campaign. On the economic development side, again, the activity is very strong. Danielle and the team are staying constantly busy. We've had over 130 new prospect leads. I think our goal was about 120, so we're already 120 to 150, so we'll beat our goal there in terms of bringing in new leads. We've submitted about 51 proposals, so we're actually seeing a lot of leads that we are going after that are within our target industry. So it's good to see those. Again, sometimes these projects move quickly. Sometimes they last five years. But again, seeing a lot of really great activity generally. And we've already announced three projects for the year. One of those most recently over the summer, I think you all have heard, Revco. It's a defense and dual use technology company. Actually a great success story. They were a G beta. They went through our G beta accelerator program. that we all have a partnership with through Generator, graduated from G-Beta, went out and fundraised, and now they're needed in a physical space. We were able to kind of recruit them, keep them, and have their headquarters in manufacturing open up here in Round Rock. And so, again, we got a lot of great coverage from it throughout the media, social media, et cetera, but it was a great win. Again, homegrown company accelerated them through our program with G-Beta, and then now they have a physical space in headquarters here in Round Rock. Another win, kind of a nontraditional win, I think you all are familiar with the Opportunity Zone 2.0 program. This was something that the chamber worked really hard on putting an application together that we submitted to the governor's office for consideration. And again, this is a incentive program that will help with redevelopment and new development in certain industries, or sorry, in certain areas based on the census tract. And so we really honed in on downtown with all the work that the city had done with the rezoning of some areas in downtown, plus the strategic planning that you all have done, we felt that the downtown census tract would be the best one to kind of go all in on. So we put together a really strong application. We got letters of support from many of you, from many business owners downtown, other elected officials, county judges, et cetera. And we were able to actually receive that nomination from Governor Greg Abbott Washington so those nominations have been sent up to Washington for review We don't see any reason why this wouldn't be approved from the federal government So if everything goes according to plan starting in January we will have an opportunity zone designation Which will be the first one that round rock has ever had since this program started And then again that kind of ties nicely into the downtown task force So this was something that came from you all from our strategic planning retreats and really wanting to kind of utilize the chamber's relationships to convene downtown. Right now we're not doing downtown business owners, but we're doing building owners and landlords. And so we kind of launched this task force in the summer. We've been convening every month. And really our goal is to kind of bring recommendations to you all for how do we prioritize some things for downtown that you can consider for the next annual retreat. So we're looking at everything from infrastructure and parking. If we have these new development and building codes, how are we able to truly develop in those areas? Retail recruitment is something that we've all talked heavily about in bringing in the right retail downtown, daytime retail. Are there incentive structures that we should be looking at to bring that retail here? We're studying what have other cities done across the country. And then, again, how do we go out and attract new development for downtown? So that is happening. It's happening monthly. And again, we'll have a more full report to give you all by the end of the year for consideration in the annual retreat. On the marketing and attraction front, this is just our snapshot of our calendar. We've had a busy year so far. We're rounding out a lot of our travel. But a couple of things that we were busy with over the summer, Danielle attended the Bio International Convention. Again, this is the largest life science convention in the United States, and it really is a global event. life science companies from all over the country come and attend this. So Danielle was able to represent us with the state of Texas. So it was the BioTexas booth, also a partnership with Opportunity Austin. And again, having some networking events and really representing Round Rock at some statewide initiatives, again, in partnership with the governor's office, BioTexas, the Texas Economic Development Corporation, and others. So great representation there as life sciences continues to be one of our target industries. Fed Supernova, this was in Austin, but again, we kind of treat this as a conference. Again, it's a national conference that comes to Austin every year focused on the defense and dual use. The two individuals here, those are two companies that were actually awarded a defense innovation fund from the Round Rock Chamber, so they are growing their defense businesses here in our community, but we're able to kind of host a big networking happy hour, a private dinner for prospects, and then again, we had our Round Rock table that we were used to market all the great things that we're offering for defense companies as that also continues to be one of our top industries. Again, not really a recruitment effort, but this is, in some ways it is, but this is an event. It's called Fiesta. This was also at the Capital Factory. It's happened monthly. Again, at Capital Factory, Fiesta stands for founders, investors, entrepreneurs, startups, techies, and at the time, Austin newcomers. So now we're going to have to figure out what the acronym is, but this is a huge shout out to Adriana. She had been attending Fiesta events and building relationships down at the Capital Factory and said, hey, why do we have to drive all the way to downtown Austin to be able to have these events? It features startups that pitch their companies. There's no money or awards given out, but it's just a great opportunity to network. After quite a bit of relationship building, they finally said, you know what, we'll try it. We'll do one time. We'll kind of see what it looks like. If we were to bring this event up to Round Rock, and just see how it works. It was also a great partnership with G Beta. We kind of have ambassadors that helped put the program on. Melissa and Bjorn, they were also G Beta graduates. So kind of good to see them staying involved. And I would say this is the first night. Wildly successful, hugely attended. We were really close to fire code. We were worried about capacity over here at Centro. But we had about 200 people almost come in and go throughout this evening. And again, had about nine or so startups do a one-minute pitch. So it was a great event. It's going to continue monthly. And so they're excited to have Fiesta Round Rock become official. So that was another kind of cool entrepreneurship win that just shows the amount of interest and startups and entrepreneur activity here in Round Rock. And then lastly, to round out the year, we do have a recruitment trip to New York City. We'll be bringing our top level investors, community leaders, and partners to New York to really meet with site selectors, prospect companies, tour some industry best practice examples. The New York Stock Exchange is going to be hosting us. So excited for that last rounding out of our recruitment efforts at the end of October. Workforce initiatives you're familiar with these again a huge shout out to Zach we did our teacher externship program I will say it was smaller this year. We only had 18 teachers That was because the state had a longer requirement for full two weeks of hosting, but thanks to everybody I know the city always host externs the chamber hosted externs, so it was a great celebration Excited to say that the state has already made the decision for next year to go back to the one week so that we can open it up and allow more teachers and businesses to participate. So we'll see that number hopefully grow again next year, but always a great opportunity to bring the educators into the businesses, and then they go back and teach to their students kind of what they learned over the summer. Coffee Connections, this is kind of our virtual summer workforce program. Again, just kind of one day throughout the month of July, got to hear from different organizations about what's happening, and again, a great teacher participation from this as well. And then lastly, we do our site visitation. We put 200 teachers on buses. They go out and tour communities all over the country, or sorry, all over the country, all over the city, but even brought them down to places like the Austin-Berkshire Airport, got to see some of the new businesses that we've recruited here, like Digital Brands Group was able to host them. So again, just a great opportunity to get teachers out and seeing what's happening in the workforce so that they can go educate their students on career opportunities in the future. Oh, and this is another one, something that's kind of interesting that we participated in, really trying to partner with the state on their apprenticeship program. And so us with Georgetown, RMS, and other groups were able to put together a cohort of companies. So the companies from Brown Rock that participated was TECO Westinghouse and Texan Photo Mask. This was a maintenance tech apprenticeship program. And again, the cohort graduated. These are just some photos. trying to find additional opportunities to fill the workforce pipeline in areas that we know are in high demand. So the maintenance tech apprenticeship program was successful over the summer. We'll hopefully see more apprenticeship programs in the future. And then from the chamber side, just generally speaking, a snapshot of our membership growth. So again, the chamber as an organization is extremely healthy. This is kind of a five-year snapshot. Five years ago, just under 800 members to almost 1,050 members today. So That's continuing to grow and adding new members every month. From a chamber side, we do have our inner city visit. That is next week. We'll be heading to Raleigh, kind of the Raleigh Research Triangle Park. We have a great agenda, a great group of about 40 people that will be traveling on this, but we'll hear from City leadership from Raleigh, their economic development, their state economic development agency will meet with us. Duke Energy, we've got some infrastructure sessions. The town of Cary, which is probably very similar to our community, will spend an afternoon in Cary learning from them and kind of some of the growth best practices that they're seeing. They also have a big arts and culture and parks, downtown parks program. And then, of course, we'll go to workforce. We'll see Wake Tech Community College and then spend a day at the Research Triangle Park. Again, every time we're competing for a life science project, we're always competing with Research Triangle Park. Unfortunately, sometimes we even lose to Research Triangle Park. So it's kind of exciting for them to open up their doors and show us what they've been building over the last 50 years so that we can take that back and implement in our community. If you can believe it, we are already accepting nominations for our annual business awards. The event has moved up this year just so we can have it at Kalahari. So it's January 28. Those award nominations close October 16. So QR code or go to our website. Please nominate people. The award is only as good as all the nominations that we have. So please don't let that deadline pass. We're actively looking for nominations there. And then Jump Start. Jump Start is a program that we launched after the G-Beta, the generator partnership was launched. So G-Beta applications have closed. They're going to start their next cohort in a couple of weeks. But Jumpstart was kind of, we had, for the first G-Beta, as a reminder, we had about 60 applications, and we can only take five. And so what do we do with the other 50 plus? And so we started Jumpstart, which is almost a pre-accelerator that we offer for free through the chamber. So businesses that are maybe in their earlier stages are encouraged to apply for Jumpstart. That closes on the 29th. And then Leadership Round Rock and Ascend applications open on Monday. So I know the city always has a great group of people that go through Leadership Round Rock, so make sure that you guys apply for that. And then kind of some big events. We had our big power lunch. About 300 people came out with Congressman Pete Sessions. And then speaking of, we do a lot of work to build those relationships at the federal level. We're also heavily involved in getting ready for the legislative session that is kicking off in January. In about an hour, we'll have our public policy committee meet. We're updating our agenda for economic vitality, our legislative priorities. So a lot of work to be done there. And we'll be coordinating closely with the city. Last week, or was it last week? Yes, last week we had our K through 12 Power Lunch. It was kind of a unique opportunity. We actually heard from students that talked about some of the stuff that they're doing from a CTE perspective. Really impressive kiddos. And then kind of sticking with the education theme, we are hosting a candidate forum on October 13th. We have four positions open for our school board. So we'll host that over at the chamber and encourage anybody that would like to attend to register. But we've done this. This will be our third time to do a candidate forum for the school board. We do that in partnership with the Round Rock ISD or Council of PTAs. And then our next power lunch, kind of our big upcoming lunch, is State of Health Care. That will be in October. That's our last one before our favorite event of the year, State of the City in December. But that will be Wednesday, October 28, also at Embassy Suites. Lots of other events. We have, again, events every week. We have one tonight if anybody wants to come to our business after hours. We have one on Thursday. We're hosting it at Sociedad. But that will be our Texas Venture Fest and kind of coupling it with our quarterly Spark event on Thursday. But always events happening at the chamber. We'd love to see you guys come out. But with that, I'll take any questions.

All right. Thank you, Jordan. Any questions? Any questions? All right. Thank you. All right. Anything else for the good? All right. We stand by.