City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Today is Monday, July 6, 2026. It is 6 PM, and the city council has a quorum present in the work session room. First item of business this evening is item two, citizens input. At this time, comments will be taken from the audience on any topic. No action can be taken by the council during citizens input. I have one request to speak quorum from Mark Tashik. Mark, if you'll state your name and city of residence, you'll have three minutes.

Mark Tashik, . I'd like to talk about two items, streets first. I'd like to know when the city is going to have an opportunity to fix the potholes on Heritage Parkway in Warwick. I've been in that area for 27 years now and I've never seen the streets repaired other than a little patch on a pothole. That'd be nice to see. Some of the potholes are getting substantially large. second item the lighting ordinance that's coming up next month i'd like to offer any help i can into city staff for technical input into the lighting ordinance to make sure that the city has an optimal and very good robust ordinance thank you all right thank you sir do we have anyone else from the public who wish to speak this evening

All right, seeing none, we'll move on to our work session item. First item is item 3A, establish the Rollitt 75th Anniversary Celebration Task Force. And are you presenting this item? Awesome. I am.

So, no, thank you, Mayor, for passing it over. But I know we know that September 4th of 2027 will be our 75th anniversary for the city of Rollitt. So this presentation is really just talking about a working session for everybody around the table to understand what parts of the task force, how it should be built, and we can discuss that as we go. But ultimately, so, recapping what I said, on September of 2027, Rowlett will turn 75, and with that, I want to be proactive and allow our citizens to be engaged, and having them hopefully be seated by September 2026, which is a timeline, there's a timeline on slide four, so you can walk through that and see how we get to that end. but ultimately milestones such as 75th anniversary conference signature events. I know we heard about this budget from Malcolm as far as what that looks like. He asked for, I believe, 18,000 to see how we could market that in the community. This is a volunteer model based public ownership and distributes the planning and the workload among city staff as well as our citizens here in the city. And then ultimately our lead time. So venues, sponsorships and vendor contracts. So there's a subcommittee within the committee that I kind of parsed out that will show you how they would go about making commercial entities work with them. So ultimately, I've left council liaison as a blank, so if anybody wants to join that as far as all of our council members here around the table, we can figure out who wants to be there, aside from myself, but ultimately, 10 to 13 at-large citizen members, residents, business owners, long-time residents. I know Malcolm wanted history about what the city has been over the past, the present, and also the future of our city here in Rowlett. And then also our staff liaison. So you can see there, I see a sign from city managerial staff. I know Manal has been a big voice for it. I also know Malcolm wants to play a part in that too. So Christoph, whatever you see best fit to help with this initiative. And then ultimately too, a chair and vice chair so of that 10 to 13 citizenry based task force they'll be able to choose their first chair and their second chairperson to lead them as a collective any questions there

Are they all going to be voting members or are you going to have alternates?

So that we can put in alternates if we need. Right now, I was just looking at actual, these will all be voting members, so to speak. Granted, this is a task force, so they'll all have different parts of it, which on slide five will show how they will be parsed out. Slide four, this is the timeline. So here we are in July. our July 2026 city council meeting. Hopefully, in a perfect world, applications will open in the middle of this month, so a little bit two weeks from now, and giving us a month timeline to actually get responses from the community on who wants to do it, and then late August, having a interview round period so we can make sure as a council we know who they are, and then having appointments, sorry. Sorry. Thank you. And then having appointments in September of 2026. So September, September 15th isn't exactly one year. I was looking at that from the standpoint of that's the most time we could go having them give as much runway as possible before September 4th. So that's about. a little bit less than a year about 11 days off then ultimately the task force will be seated in october so they'll be able to plan that throughout this year leading into the meeting into next fall in 2027. ultimately i know the mayor's objective of wanting to have a big event that we could have multiple years and moving on forward with that so if you can see our sunset date of november 2027 That, to me, is critical, ultimately, because we might not have the Sunset Day. If it's a success for the community, we can keep them going. We can say, hey, we want this to move forward. We want this to be a raw-lit celebration for every birthday that we have, whether it be 75, 76, 77, but an event that we can continue to bring the community together for. So that's why their Sunset Day is a month after. That's kind of like a review of how everything worked. Ultimately, this is also our recruitment and application plan, so a part of the city website, a dedicated 35th anniversary landing page to understand what's going on, why we celebrate Rowlett, what that means, social media, Facebook, I know we have a lot of citizens there, Instagram, Twitter, next door even for advertisements there, Garland ISD newsletter, parent communications, press, local media, flyers at City Hall, the library, and then also direct outreach to the Chamber and HOAs. And Christophe, I know we have some data on HOAs, so you'll be able to configure that. Our application content, the best part that I have on this one, part three, is what does Riley's 75th anniversary mean to you, and what would you like to be celebrated? Ultimately, showing the fast buy-in of why they want to be a part of it. So what does it mean to them? It gives us a few of those stories of like, hey, how has Raleigh grown? What have we seen? And availability confirmation. So the monthly meetings from September of 2026, once again, all the way to November of 2027. So look at eligibility. We can have some nuance there, but Raleigh resident, we want them to be a resident in the city. We also want them to be above 18. No specific background because some will be business owners, some will be long-term residents. We want the whole the whole gambit because the next slide will show you that here you have invention programming as far as how they can be parsed apart. So invention programming, our history and heritage, I know that would be a really big one for us as far as what happened before. Our sponsorship and fundraising, so that group as far as corporate sponsorships, I know Malcolm spoke about that and so did Council Member Fassett at our budget meeting last, on June 29th, how does that tie into it? marketing communications, logistics and operations, and then ultimately our community and youth engagement. So if we have 13 members, that kind of mapped out to about two, two per group, which is good, so that we can have as many workers as possible helping out our city staff as well as our citizens. And then ultimately, our budget support. So this was made before the budget meeting. So I did not know that Malcolm wanted $18,000. So take that into account. But ultimately, staff support needed. Our city secretary's office, as far as our application intake, billing application, communications department, building our landing page, promotional outreach, staff liaisons, so attending the task force meetings, making sure that they can coordinate with departments, and then ultimately Victoria, our city attorney, confirming that they fall under the applicable meeting, Open Meetings Act and things like that. the eligibility reminder is the same thing as far as like how they can be eligible to apply and then lastly this is just a recommendation the next step slide just formally saying hopefully council will authorize the creation of the robert 75th anniversary task force as appointed by citizens to be a voluntary board and direct city staff to begin the application process and recruitment process And then these are just the five steps, just recapping everything from 12 to 15 council appointments, our first meeting to be held in October of 2026. Any questions? So is that staff to be on there? What staff are you targeting to be on the board? So can we go back, Debbie, as far as like this one? Yeah, it's the other one. Just this one down here? The top one, I think. Going back to the slide three. Yeah, the one right above. No, one more, one more. Above the timeline. So to answer your question, Marvin, so ultimately, staff, liaison. So I know Manal and I have had conversations about this as far as how we should celebrate Raleigh. We want to celebrate the wins we have. But also, too, Malcolm, as far as being in community engagement and our communications team, also would love to be a part of it. So I kind of just gave it to Christoph as far as who he sees best fit from our appointment and managerial staff. help be the staff liaison for the task force.

So it would likely be either Malcolm or a member of the staff. Malcolm or a member of the community event staff.

The ones that throw events right now? That's what I was looking at. so that we'd have some kind of guidance to get there.

Just one piece of clarification. The $18,000 came from a proposal from a previous council member. So it isn't something that was generated by staff. It was carried forward by a previous council member's request. And I think that the assumption they were making was that most of the resources could be volunteer. Of course, I'm clearly a little skeptical on that. But that's kind of where that came from. Gotcha.

Um, so tell me a little bit about, you've got a board that you're calling the task force, which I appreciate because it seems like they're going to be given a kind of an ad hoc scope of work here, right? Is the idea that this board is advisory to the council or are we actually giving them the authority and direction to work directly with staff on coordinating and planning and executing the event? Like where is their line of authority drawn?

So line of authority, and Mayor, perfect question because this is where I feel like the fungibility and malleability here. But in the original thought for it was that I would love for them to work alongside the city staff in that capacity, not so much advising us because this is also a citizen's event. We want to know what they want to celebrate because that's where it is in the application question as far as what would you like to celebrate. So we're actually asking them directly how do we want this to represent the best parts of Rowlett for what they think. Yeah.

From the staff perspective, Christoph, is there, like, how does that work? Can you kind of talk about the logistics of that? Because I'm not familiar with any other board that we have that kind of functions in that way where they're truly, like, volunteers, employees of the city in terms of planning events and things like that.

I think that that's something we want to be very clear about. My recommendation is that we use a tool that's called a project charter. where we actually define sort of what the goal and scope is, who's responsible, what kind of outcomes we're looking for so that they have some clarity about if we're giving them or delegating to them some level of authority that's outlined in that document. So if the council is comfortable with them, you know, making some decisions about what the signature event's going to be, you know, then you can certainly make that clear that regarding this event, you guys have the responsibility to get, sponsorships, fund it, do it, or are they, as you say, is it just limited to them making recommendations to council and bringing those back to council and making a request consistent with other sort of advisory boards? Certainly you could go either way. My request would be that we make that clear through some sort of foundational document as we start out.

I'm not opposed to them working directly with staff. I think that certainly would streamline some things. I just don't have any experience in how that works. I'm glad to hear there's kind of a concept out there around making that functional.

So back in the day, when they started doing the July 4th events and stuff, it was the Festival of Freedom, and it was like a citizen-staff, not staff, committee. And they formed their own organization or whatever it was, and they worked with the city. And If you remember, if you were here then, they threw on some big shindigs, three-dayers, and they're very well. I think maybe we should reach out to some of those members like Becky Sebastian, who did a lot of that stuff, and some others, and maybe she can give some insight on how they did that. Do we want to do the board, or do we want to keep it separate of the city where they can go out and solicit funds and do, what do you call it, donations and stuff to make the event better through businesses and stuff?

Would we ever anticipate, as the task force gets going, do we anticipate any action that would have to come back to the council for any kind of approval? I mean, funding is going to probably be at a level that is approved, right?

Yeah. That's correct. I certainly would still be looking for your input in most cases unless we were very clear about what you wanted.

I don't know if that would be a council liaison's responsibility to bring it back to the council when we get to that particular point. a juncture in the road that you need some kind of input from the council.

And I believe too, Kristof, just as far as the project charter, just identifying that explicitly, that would be a council leader's job to ultimately bring that back to the council because, yeah, we wouldn't want them to just spend dollars that they don't have. So Mayor Pro Tembrin, I think that's a fair point.

Mayor, maybe even reach out to Mark Haney because he was a big part of that stuff too when he was mayor. I'll do that.

Just talk to him one more. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I appreciate that question. That's a really good question. To me, it's almost like our fireworks on main event, right? We have very little input or maybe we give some unsolicited feedback, but we have very little input into the process of planning and executing that event because it's been going on so long. Certainly this is something new, but I would love for this this body, for the most part, to guide and direct where that goes Since we're looking for, I don't have a problem with that.

I just, I was just trying to anticipate it. No, it's great question. Oh, we really ought to take this to council. I don't know what that would be, but.

us to be there just to remove any barriers that might exist let this let this board or task force excuse me i keep using that word board let this task force just go and make it happen if if it comes up that hey there's a liability question or there's staff is not being cooperative or whatever the issue is okay bring that to council then and get that council liaison to come to us let's add it to agenda and try to remove that blockade

I think it's a good point. You're trying to streamline this thing as much as possible and not being part of an expert.

We're waiting on something to be approved. And Mayor, quick point out to the November 27th date as far as the sunset. If it does become a board, if we did decide as a group, hey, we want to keep this going. we could amend that and make it a board. Right now it's the task force. It's the pilot. We want them to do this for the first time so that it works. But it's not in a board capacity to where we want this to keep continuing.

I guess we'd have to make the decision. Is it a term after that or what? How do we keep going?

The one caveat there would be if you have this as a task force, it likely wouldn't conflict with anybody who currently serves on the Board of Commission. But if it turns into an ongoing body, then someone would have to potentially make a decision. Where do I want to serve? Do I want to serve on the task force or do I want to stay on my board right then? I mean, I'm in support. I will reach out to Becky and Mark because I do want to hear kind of how they did it. And I'm not opposed to going the route of setting up a separate nonprofit that things are a little bit, there's a lot less red tape, put it that way. However, since this is a city celebration, I would love for the city to be kind of the key stakeholder here and having folks work directly with staff to make that happen is probably the best way to keep that as close to us as possible.

You know, I may be wrong. They may be working under the city of Brown. I just got to enjoy it. Yeah.

I'm in support of moving forward with the creation of this task force. What about everybody else? How we feel?

Yeah, I'm OK. the other game you know what's the numbers going to affect financially and the outside support that'd be where i'd like to know where you're going to go with additional sponsors or whoever which puts it back on the notice of what was what is the expectation of the final bill look like is it contained within whatever number we agreed to if there's one there does it surpass that number obviously the council should be involved at that level if we have to start surpassing some and i know that it gets into a thing of within your abilities to approve but if you're just talking about the future going on the next year the next year the next year if that's possible then that may balloon itself right how does that look like to us financially um this is a big deal you know obviously so that council should have a little bit of equipment there but not too much i mean obviously we don't want to do all the day-to-day stuff but um Like you, I'm in support of the offer just to make sure that we keep that in-game dollar piece. Whoever's in our run is going to find an outside sponsorship, or what does that look like exactly. Because what we don't have right here is any, which we would not have for the cost of time. Expectations of what a cost may be because we don't have a clue what is going to be included. So just other than that, I mean, I'm in support of celebrating 75 years nationally.

I mean, your idea, Mayor, was to kind of do like a founder's day every year, right? And Rockwall puts that on, too. I mean, any help that we can get to understand it a little bit better, where we're going and what we're going to do. But definitely, I don't think the city can fund big events like that all the time. I think it definitely needs to have a sponsorship. And that's where the volunteers go and do the legwork and help make the event successful.

I was just going to say, be sure to include the church's Sacred Heart, First Methodist, First Baptist. I didn't see that in there. They're certainly a big part of the history of all that. And then maybe put someone from the senior advisory group on a position in the board, because obviously our seniors are listening to them.

It's really important. Mayor, I have a question. As far as, like, who do you think you would want to have serve as far as council liaisons on the dashboard?

I'm pretty open. I mean, you clearly have a passion for this. I'd be fine with you doing it. If there's anybody else that has a – I don't have a strong preference, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

I was going to ask Council Member Kazar, as far as being the local business owner, to serve alongside the council liaison. Council liaison. Yes, yes.

I would also like to see something spawned further on that. We don't have anything that is interpreted as a historical society or anything that leads into more information that leads to the historical value. That's what it looks like. i don't mind trying to help out in that area but again i just um i really want that to represent the history of the city um obviously a passion for mine as well but as long as it's not too engaging okay any disagreement with

No, but I do want to point out it's going to be Mayor Pro Tem Britton's birthday, too, and they're equal in years. Yeah, there you go. That's what 75 years now looks like. Wow. That's cold.

You saw that bus coming and just jerked you right out.

I pointed at him, but no, he's coming.

First off, just a quick question. You know, if they engage, you know, businesses and stuff for donations or sponsorships, how does that work?

If they're not, if they don't create a separate organization, then the city can't accept donations and sponsorships. So the city can't accept them?

But they have to use it for that, right?

Yeah, we do a little donation agreement with them. And then, you know, I think this is a conversation I've had in the jurisdiction and I had to check it, you know, if it worked in Texas. But we're a tax-exempt entity. That's right. So you can give money to us if you want a tax break. In fact, you know, if anybody wants to write a check to the city, you know, let me know. We'll make sure we accept it. That's a good information.

Yeah, we did have, you know, we had a couple sponsors for fireworks on Main, for example. So having those sponsorships is valuable. We've done fire, we've done sponsorships for the ice rink when it was open. So there's opportunities there and, you know, donations of physical goods as well as we get closer.

Yeah, I just wasn't sure if it had to be some kind of umbrella, a special umbrella.

I mean, that's when Councilman Pizarro mentioned kind of the historical society, that's what made me think maybe it was run under some organization like that. Because I know we used to have a historical society and certainly probably would have existed as a 501c3 that was doing that type of thing. So having that separate entity somewhere down the road is... Definitely on my radar. I just would love for the city to be separate from the historical society. That gives them the opportunity to do things like apply for grants and they have the freedom to operate however they want to operate without the encumbrance of all the red tape that comes with being a municipality. Okay, so... It sounds like we're ready to move forward with a board or the next steps that we're going to draft a excuse me, a task. Thank you. The next steps to draft a charter or is this, we can form this task force by resolution or does it need to be an ordinance resolution? Okay. All of our boards and commissions are formed by ordinance.

If that sways your opinion at all, do you want it to show up in your, um, I guess if it's a one-time thing, no answer. more like a founder's task force or just a 75th anniversary task force?

Well, so 75th anniversary, I mean, I know we were looking at some like language around Founders Day or Malcolm Luther King, so it's the same thing. It would be a 75th anniversary task force, yeah.

Then I'd say resolution, yeah, because it's going to . You guys can do that. You can work on a project charter, which it doesn't have to be. Again, something that is formally adopted by council as long as it's something that circulates here and we all are comfortable with it.

So who's going to draft that resolution? Are you going to do that before me? Okay. And you'll bring that back to the July 7th, whatever it is. What is it? 21st. 21st, thank you. Okay. Okay. Anything else? All good? Okay. Very good. Thank you very much, sir.

Great presentation.

Next we'll move on to item 3B, receive a presentation regarding an update of the traffic signals control project. Gary Anna.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Gary Hinn. I'm the interim director of Public Works. And with me I have Bobby Hill with Consolidated Traffic Controls, as we call them, CPC. And he will share more about himself and the current system after I provide a little background information and the scope of the project. So on March 31st, 2025, council heard a presentation on the traffic signal condition and functionality. Traffic signal network faced several operational and technical limitations that reduced efficiency, reliability, and the ability to proactively manage traffic conditions. The system was not integrated, which limited coordination between intersections, causing inefficient traffic flow. Many signal controllers and detected systems exceeded their expected service life and created challenges in obtaining replacement parts and technical support. Our last support system, they had one SME and a lot of customers. When you have traffic signal issues, you definitely want fast response. So we definitely have a better system in place now. The system had limited remote operability, which required field visits for adjustments, and the system did not collect performance data for planning and operational decisions. During peak traffic time, we would station traffic tech at State Highway 66 and PGBT to observe traffic and make comments on the flow, which is definitely not efficient and not the best way to capture the data. So the system also did not have automated alerts via SME or email, so the problems would go undetected until reported issues by residents, law enforcement, or field observation. So after staff shared the deficiencies in our system, they also shared what was possible for our system with a foundation for future technology improvements in daily traffic management. The traffic signal modernization program will transition the city from an aging, reactive system to a more reliable, proactive traffic management network. So I saw a demonstration with all the upgrades Bobby Sherwood's the other day. I was long away from our past system to the new one. I didn't know advance that much over a short period. So very impressed with the system. It provides a better traffic flow and intersection coordination, increased reliability and reduced equipment failures, improved pedestrian and driver safety, enhanced ability to monitor operations and respond quickly to issues. on march after the work session council identified the need for modernization traffic management system and directed staff to move forward in the next day of the council meeting council approval project so i i can't emphasize enough how how the system works compared to old and bobby's going to share a lot of these items i've talked about more in depth and then provide some visuals here so i'm going to turn it over all right thank you Let me share here about the funding. We funded this $4.1 million through a bond program. Let's click one more. I got ahead of myself here. I'm so excited. So the scope included 28 intersections. The ones in red were already updated prior to this, so we excluded them from the program. And one more intersection, Miller Road at PGBT is in line for a upgrade of the turn lanes. so we do not want to put all the systems in i have to move it with that program so we're going to wait till that one's complete which it should be starting soon and then bobby and his staff will come back and attack that intersection so i say the installation and program was completion in july except for miller and pcbt so we can you know otherwise they cannot move the system to us

so sorry yeah no problem gets you all excited so mayors council executive staff thank you all for letting me come tonight i'm excited about this project brett in the back sitting back here we've been working on this for about four years working on this and we were slowly fixing things over time I'll give you a little bit about me. I've worked for the city of Garland for 24 years. I retired as a traffic signal supervisor over there. I came over to CTC, retired, came over to CTC and I'm the senior vice president over there. So also I am on an organization called Deep South Institute of Public Safety. I'm on the executive board there. It's a training for our small but very powerful industry that we're in, the traffic signals and the signs and markings for agencies. So tell a little bit about what we've got here. This is some of the things we've done in Rowlett. This device here is called MileVision. MileVision was started, it's a Canadian company. They moved their operations, they're building operations to U.S. so we can meet all the federal requirements. But they started in this industry counting cars, that's all they did. Then they started classifying cars. Well, they've... evolved into a uh a system where we can count classify cars we have an onboard modem in there so we're putting an alerting another alerting system demand for rally this is just will be a redundant so a redundant path for both things so this thing will do not only vehicle detection we'll talk a little bit we'll show a little bit about that but uh The way that this does detection, it does, you see the purple lines or blue lines, things like that. We actually are detecting vehicles based on what we've trained it. So it's been trained by watching basically videos on what a car looks like. We have to tell it how high the sensor is. So we're basically using, you know, artificial intelligence to train these devices. You see in the bottom left, we see what pedestrians look like. We put them in zones. We count those. You know, the whole mile vision wheel is what we call it. It does detection. It does classification. It does adaptive. It does Opticom. connected vehicle applications. We also have an onboard agent, AI agent. He's almost like our traffic signal instructor, where he gives us all this information. We can ask him certain questions about traffic. And I always say we trust him, but we verify. So the system is very expandable. The main thing is we're going to get good data now. We're going to get good, accurate. We're going to know when something's wrong with this traffic signal. We're going to know. How many vehicles went through there? We're gonna know how many light vehicles went through there. We're gonna know how many bikes, buses. We're gonna know all that information, which we can use to better time the traffic signals, right? At that point, it just becomes math. If we have the numbers and we know when they're there, the math is better. Here's our pedestrians. We can actually use this to uh detect we we actually are using it to count pedestrians but we can also use it to detect pedestrians so if we wanted to we could put a zone inside a crosswalk like you see on the bottom left here and if there's somebody in there we could hold the signal all red for example to allow no movements to go once if their time's already expired they go to a yellow then a red we could just hold it all red until they clear Just things that we can do in the top right, we see the turning movement counts. It looks like purple spaghetti to me, but those are all the lines and all the possible paths that those vehicles could go, and we do not count them until they, once they've left their zone, until they exit all the way through the line. That way we get good accurate counts, and we know exactly what type of vehicle it was, If they go straight, left, right, make a U-turn, go the wrong way even possibly. The system, some of the enhancements of the system is if you see in the top left there the fog, we're actually working in the fog there because we see that vehicle approaching. We're not looking for We're not looking for the old systems. We're looking for a number of pixels, and you have to break a number of pixels. We've been tracking that car since this camera's seen it. Now, if we can't see anything, we'll go to what we call a fail safe, where we will put a call in. But that also allows us, since we're tracking those cameras from, tracking those vehicles from the entry, from the time we see them, It allows us to avoid any occlusion issues that we had with traditional detection systems. So we don't have to worry about any of that. Snow is no problem. The glare is not a problem, as long as we can see that vehicle or have seen that vehicle. If we see a vehicle coming and we don't see it exit because we're tracking it, we're placing a call there. This is what one of my favorite features is in mobility reports. So the mobility reports, again, we're classifying and counting every vehicle that goes to that intersection, which is great. We can break it down by day, we can break it down by month. We'll also be able to say, okay, how many arrivals, I'm getting a little traffic nerdy here, but how many arrivals on red did we have, right? If we have a whole platoon of cars arriving on red, that's bad signal timing. So we need to adjust it. With our own board agent, we can ask it, hey, how can I adjust this signal timing to give me better performance to have more arrivals on green? so do you do you just you just track numbers do you track classification we actually classify vehicles so you could we could know how many commercial vehicles are going down around that road i can i don't i can tell you uh tractor trailers and i can tell you bobtails right so uh we'll say like an ambulance is classified as a single unit truck an amazon truck is a single unit truck Even though some of the lawn companies are single unit trucks or bobtails and stuff, but I can give you a classification of how many of those you have. Pretty amazing. I mean, we have this system in Wiley and we had on 78 right near the Walmart and there are days that 4% of the vehicles were tractor trailers. like 60,000 vehicles and 4% of those were tractor trailers.

I asked that for you, Chief.

But some of the things that this allows you to do is, once it's collected data, it never goes away. So you have, for you guys, what you're looking for is to bring opportunity to the city so we can give you counts of how many people go through that intersection every day, every week, every month, What, you know, if you're trying to attract businesses, we have those numbers. They're there. Are they unique counts?

For instance, can you say that car went through and came back, that's two or that's one?

Is it just a? No, we do not track them like that. Now what we can do is we have the ability to track MAC addresses. Right, so MAC address on a vehicle and on board modem or a cell phone, we can do travel times with that. So what that allows us to do is if I'm on, let's say I'm going westbound on 66 and I start at Scenic and I go all the way to Dexum, what was my travel time? And I'm gonna make adjustments and let's see if those travel, and I'm not recording those MAC addresses, I'm just using them for data points. Is my time going down or has it gone up? What's happened? So I can get my travel time throughout the agency. So one of the things that we worked on here was becoming more ADA compliant with our push buttons. I know there's still some ramp work to be done, but this will at least give you guys a head start. APS pushbutton is a requirement through Prowag now. And Prowag is a public right-of-way access guidelines. I call it the... civil rights for disabilities. So when they're building roadways, it's what Gary and his team have to abide by, these rules that have been set up. So we have to put these APS, and I don't know if you guys have seen the APS, they're the ones that you push and they say, wait, wait, our walk sign is on the cross on Main Street. which is great because you know the goal is to give people that are visually or hearing impaired the same information that sighted or hearing people have but we've actually got the ability to go one step further and what we're doing here is we we can set these buttons up and there's an app everybody has an app but our app what it would allow them to do is to actually come up to the intersection know what it is and it'll talk to them in text-to-speech or through their visual and they can push the button, allow them to push the button through that application and The question is how do we get that message out? And that's up to the executive team and council to figure out how do we get that message out once we get this set up. And we're super excited. The manufacturer of this device actually is in Greenville, Texas. And I think they would love to do some kind of article about first agency in the nation to have their whole agency because we've replaced them all. They're all going to be able to have it. So I think it would be a great opportunity to get some good press. Here's kind of how that works. I do have a video, but it's not on here, but this is the information they get, except I don't know if y'all have ever seen the talk-to-text feature that visually, yeah, so it actually speeds this up, and it's like watching a video at 2X. It talks real fast, plays a message, they double tap, they click, and it allows them to, it's called the pet app is what it's called. And Polaris is the industry leader for these devices. Again, they're a Texas company, which makes them even better. So super excited to get this set up. We're close to having all these set up for the city now. And then, like I said, we'll have to figure out whatever advertising campaign we do.

I think one of the cool features you shared with us is do we have any lenses that are obstructed? So you go to AI and say, hey, do I have any lenses that are obstructed? And then it does a test visual for each camera and sends you back, this one has a smudge, this one has lemon. so we know which one to go to and clean them. It's just, it's unlimited options with that AI in there. You know, I think that push button, you can wave at it a little bit.

Yeah, you can wave. It's a touchless button, which came about during COVID, but it's stuck around. So we can do that and we can set the range to where passing vehicles don't trip it and things like that. So it's all good stuff. And I will say on this project, i still we're a little ahead of schedule which is a good thing and i think we're under budget right now so which is even better yeah uh so i have a handful of questions um i may knock out some of the questions other folks have and haven't has in the process

How do we know that this has been successful? I mean, I certainly feel like traffic is better, but feelings are not reality. So do we have any sort of numerical data or anything that shows us that traffic is traffic flow is better throughout the city than it was prior to the installation?

My answer would be no, because we did not have any data from before. Right. We can see the efficiency. I mean, I drive through Rowlett every day just about, and I can tell the difference. Especially with the timing that we worked on, you know, with that Miller Road project closing, we kind of skipped up and did some of the timing stuff in advance, which really helped the traffic. So I can't tell you that, but from moving forward, we can tell you how efficient you are. Yeah, now we're on the benchmark. Yes. We didn't before.

Okay. You mentioned the cameras that exist on the intersections, and I've seen them up there, the big things. The use for those is primarily or solely for traffic counts, tracking, that kind of stuff. They're not red light cameras. They're not block cameras. They're not any of those other things. It's strictly for traffic management, right? That's correct.

There's two cameras on that first slide we showed you in the exhibit. It's a 360 camera. That's why the frame, the picture was... round like it was part of earth and then there's another camera on there that's just for visuals that we would provide read-only access to police and fire and whoever else wants to visualize traffic but there will be no control over the system

something out because what i've seen absolutely yeah again if i'm asking the question somebody else is asking on social media that's probably a good idea if we could um take kind of this whole presentation and distill it down with community engagement through an informative post i think that'd be really helpful to talk about what we're doing why you know what we've done why we did it uh make sure that we highlight that this was a bond approved by the voters and talk about the progress Does PD have access to these cameras?

So yeah, I just shared the cameras over the intersection are there to read only for traffic observation.

Yeah, and so PD has access to those.

They will have access to those. The first question is do we see any improvement? We're getting some data and we are continuing to work on that improvement. So are we starting the baseline? And I believe we'll see it in a month. Yeah.

Is that visual and dispatch? That's great.

All of our Opticoms work now, right? I don't think all of our Opticoms worked with the prior system, but they all work now.

i would hope so i know we had we just we just that was a separate project that we did but i think uh the dalrock and 66 got left off but i think that's been I mean, I've not heard any complaints from the fire crews.

Perfect. We have two that we repaired, but other than that, they're all working as of right now.

Perfect. And, Chief, maybe you know this. Does Garland, so their EMS comes through our city a lot to go to Lake Point. Correct. Do they use our Opticon system to prioritize passage through the city? So I'm not sure what system they're on. I know they have Opticon. You're capable of that, aren't you?

Yeah, so Garland does use y'all's system, and y'all use Garland's going through. Perfect. Okay, that's great news. The one thing that Garland does block out is the PD, except for, I think, at, like, Cheesa, or at Miller, or... Is that Millerellet and Chaha, right over the Redwood? Yeah.

My main concern there, I mean, with all due respect to PD, my main concern is EMS because we have so many add-ons that come through our city on the way to Lake Point, and they have to go across the entire city. And the last thing I want is for someone to lose their life on end and was waiting at a red light because our lights don't work. So I'm glad to hear that, number one, all of our optic arms are working, and number two, that Garland was able to utilize them. all of the underground detection is all gone, right? We don't use any underground detection. The cable loops and all that stuff is all depreciated.

The only one I don't know, I'll be honest is, uh, and I don't think, no, it doesn't have any as the Hawk signal out there, but everything else is either we've upgraded it or it was upgraded as part of a project. Yes, sir.

Okay, good. Um, so you kind of mentioned, the data that we get. And that begs the question, is there a need in the future or at any point for a signal timing study? Or do we have all the data we need now to kind of do that in-house?

I would say you can do it in-house if you have the staff to do it. You need somebody with the experience to know what they're looking at. And you can pull the data. And you can ask good questions to Mateo, and he can give you good information. But that's just kind of a starting point. One thing that this system will allow you to do is to download that data. and send that to the consultant so they have all the counts, anything they need, or in-house. Put it into like a synchro green. We'd definitely use traffic gate steers.

Gather the data. Something with signal timing is something that we wouldn't want to have to mess with the timing on it.

Yeah, we used, I used, for this project, I used a guy out of Houston called Advanced Traffic. they did all the timing so far in the pursuit so we've done a study using the data we have and no no we've not no he he was guessing okay and it gets pretty good but we uh we've talked about this is optimizing it now when do we optimize and i think i think we come to the conclusion we wait till school starts to get some good accurate numbers yeah and then then we do an optimization so we're looking at budgeting that in I think we have the money for it already. We do.

Okay. Great. That's great.

Off your data question, does the data fall off? I mean, does it keep or does it fall off at some point? It does not fall off. It's in the cloud. When will we look at that? So it'll rain on you.

No, that's the one thing that's nice about this system is there's a few things like we talked about that AI agent. That'd be something that you would have to pay yearly for. It's like a, I don't want to say an employee cost, but you can turn that on or off, right? But you have that ability to do that. But the nice thing about this system is once you buy it, it's yours. There's no reoccurring calls. For even the backup sale, it's all included with it. It's a turnkey package. You will never get another invoice from me after this project's complete unless you want to do something else.

I would love for us to ensure that the data from the traffic counts and everything like that is communicated over to economic development so that they can have that when producing metrics and data about our city that all needs to be like when I talked about sharing with PD that we just the standard needs to be all departments should be able to share this information with all departments right it's all great data we just need to know how to leverage it so to me that's a very obvious one kind of when they talked about traffic counts through the city and if now we have a system that can actually do that for free as part of what we're already paying for and is installed let's let's leverage it um gary i've noticed that we still have some of the old They used to be lighted street signs that hang from our traffic signals. Are we in the process of replacing those with the metal ones, or are we in the process of just replacing the closed dams?

What's our plan? Originally, we were replacing them with the steel sign. That was...

but i've also been directed the other way to start replacing the back of the lid inside so let's let's figure out what we're doing so we do one thing and we go in that direction and we don't uh change course i'll put on this direction perfect thank you i honestly don't i almost couldn't care less but it's not an agenda sir exactly it's not as thank you great point One issue we've had in the past has been replacement parts. So Big A and Rowlett Road, we had a signal that was basically completely wiped out by an automobile accident. Do we have replacement parts in the event, or have easy access to replacement parts in the event that we have a signal get destroyed?

Are we talking about a cabinet or?

Well, I guess all of the above, a cabinet or?

We will have two backup cabinets. I will have, so if we get a cabinet that's hidden in the middle of the night, We can change it up like the one on Delrock and also the one on Sprouse. Sprouse got hit within about five hours. We have a new cabinet installed that we're running on a generator until we get the electrical pole back up.

Is it pretty plug-and-play, like you just basically remove the old? Yeah, it's plug-and-play. I mean, depending on what gets destroyed, I guess.

It's only like 5,000 wires in there, but it just takes a little time to give it. But the reason Big A was bad is the pole. was like a six month waiting period right so we ended up having an extra pole up on bell rock we found that wasn't being used so we went and pulled it from there and bring it over there to get that signal up and running so do we have any additional or extra poles in our inventory now in other words if another pole got destroyed and we don't have another backup but the one at big a was a specific diameter pole that we did not have on backup. Are we in the process of looking at having extra poles for the rest of our signals? Yes, I would prefer to at least have one backup

design yeah because i mean anything could happen i certainly don't want to have to go to you know the temporary signals that we have are great they're they're a great stop gap but if we ever had to get into a four-way stop situation many of our major intersections would be a disaster and we also did make elder calls to like six other cities and none of them had that size pole wow okay yeah we weren't and you know kudos to brett for finding that pole by the way yeah yeah i know that that must have come from over where the old fire station was right it was

And I will say, as far as if I'm at liberty to speak, signal poles like that, it's not just one or two. It depends on what year they were put in. So the foundations are different. The bolt pattern's different. Where they connect are different. So it's hard to maintain a good stock. You can, but it's going to cost a lot of money for something just sitting there. No, what you want to have is you want to have a whole assembly with a cage in case you've got to drill one. And for like a 48, you can always cut the end off, and then maybe some of the big ones like Dow Rock and 66 and Rowlett Road. But other than that, I mean, it's a tough game. We had 200 signals in Garland, and we had a few spares, but you just never know what size. They come in four-foot increments.

uh my last question isn't really a question it's more of a comment but 66 and scenic during the afternoon rush hour tends to be a problem so take that feedback for what it's worth in terms of the time and conversation because it is consistently a problem and i would love to get all those rock wall folks that are headed that way onto the bridge where they can sit rather than sitting in roulette well actually that that's a lot of the problem uh

so i go home that way uh it's usually backed up the bridge is backed up traffic can't move believe it or not that and then there is a lot of demand off of scenic coming from the hospital and even the side street so one of the things that brett and i talked about is we got we can get the data now to see if uh that warrants just running those together and maybe not doing a protected movement for north and south there.

Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see. Yes, I've seen it clear up fast enough that you wouldn't have to have a protected life for more. That's a good point. Okay, that's all the questions I have.

Council to my question. I just want to comment that when you're saying that it's not recording the data, you would say no facial recognition as well, because that's a big hot button. And then we've had some complaints about crossing guards. signals changing when there's people, the walking students. You said you had the ability that if a crosswalk is occupied, red light, I think that would be very important in all of our school zones.

I agree. Do you know if there's a specific intersection where that's been mentioned?

so can i tell you what we did there recently so we implemented a change uh there because brett's recommendation is whenever the buttons pushed and the crossing you know it used to have the flashing went to the flashing yellow arrow we've suppressed that to where it's just a red ball so there's no uh there's no flashing yellow arrow for people to

turn into there they have to wait till the crossings done so and I think that came from the crossing guard as a matter of fact he actually suggested that but I would think the next step would be if it's occupied it's red yeah i think that's what he was kind of saying that there's if it yeah if it's occupied right yeah okay so not just when the thing not just when the hand is up yeah that's a timing issue that's right i think if it's there's a crossing guard which you won't know but if it's occupied you know especially that

It's the only signal in the area, too, so it's not coordinated with another one. So it's more apt to be adapted.

Thank you for that. I think it got answered, but you asked the question a little ago, did the police have access to the cameras? And they also have access to data, right? That's why I asked the question. an uptick on what we think is commercial vehicles for 18-wheelers, you know, they could deploy their commercial vehicle enforcement guys just to, you know, tap down on that.

I'll definitely see if we need to give access or send it to a daily, weekly, however they want. I'll definitely meet with the chief and probably approach with this.

I have a couple of questions. We talked about all that data that you're retrieving and assuming you're storing it someplace. I think you've been able to track future actions of that. One of the other capabilities of the system that we're not talking about is the ability to track some mobility aspects of it. Yes, it talks about cars and trucks and people. what else what's the what's the other piece of this data that that you're not talking about today so any that's there that it can track you know things like license plates or things that whatever this nature is

One of the things, we talked about this connected vehicle. I talked a little bit about a connected vehicle. So that connected vehicle aspect right now works with certain manufacturers of cars. They have a device on board, and so it gives them a countdown to green, right? Or how much time they got left on their green as they're traveling through, and pedestrian information. So that is actually a free service that they offer, and the business model of that is they sell that device to the car manufacturers, and they put it in, but they need the data from the agencies. Well, you guys have the data that they're doing, For that, they give you what's called telemetry, and that's basically insights to one central storage place to go collect all this data. Even if it's not their detection system, we can still pull information The counts will be dependent on what video detection or radar, whatever system you have. But we can still set them up to pulse so we can get counts and numbers. That may not be as accurate, but we get alerts and things like that as well. And as far as the actual data, the data right now is your data, right? Your data. We're just storing it. It's all your data.

I understand. I just... When people build databases, I come from a background in that world. You're using, obviously, you expand its capabilities, whether it's going to be useful today or normally added later. You use the term plug and play. When we added data elements in our piece before, it was very easy to simply go and put the plug in. Now I've integrated some new data into it that would be able to track the data. And this is the question, because I don't know. There's going to be people who are concerned about that what exactly are you tracking? I mean, obviously, when you talk about trying to get somebody who's traveling down the road, again, using that two months ago. Yes. There's going to be consumers who are going to ask that question about, well, now, what else are you getting from me? And as a skeptic as I am with the data world, only because, again, I've owned a data company for 20 years, it puts into perspective about what the capabilities are of the data source. or data software program so to make sure i i appreciate saying we we have act we have control all that data which is wonderful but who we are is still the city government and what we do with that would be just we haven't discussed that exactly yet i don't know just designed for traffic flows and traffic betterment if you will uh and then the other question to get behind that is where is all the data stored is it cloud-based is it Is it within some hardware someplace? I don't know. It's on my laptop now. It's on your laptop.

There you go. No, they use AWS servers. That's where they store all that information in the cloud. And who all has access to that data? Whoever's accessed in your system. whoever's in yours, like I'm in your system right now as a user, and whoever else is in your system, and then they have access, their engineering team, they call them a field service engineering team, has access because when someone complains, that's who gets the call, they need access on the back end to see your system. And that is through that onboard modem that they have, not through your actual city network. So they don't need access to your city network to figure out what's wrong with their hardware.

Who controls that access? Is it the city manager or some department? I don't know. It's administrator of the program. Administrator of the program.

Talk to the city mayor's office and decide.

So if you have a person or a department that's mandated. Yeah.

And one of the things that on the system, I mean, I'm getting a little deeper than I thought. But that's OK. I'm a traffic nerd, OK? So one of the things we have is the ability to do multi-factor or single sign-on. So if Bobby, you decide I don't want to do business with Bobby anymore, you can kick Bobby off. Or if Gary is a member of the system and Gary does something and we terminate his employment, as soon as his email is terminated, he's out of the system, right? It's all managed through there. But whoever is in that, whoever we have authorized, and we have obviously a hierarchy of tier of users within the system. You have a view only, you have administrator, all the way from view only to administrator.

That's part of our onboarding and offboarding system. It's ran by our IT function. We assign who has rights to what systems, what level of rights they have, and it's all documented within our HR process.

The only other question I have is if you could tell me again your timelines. I saw that earlier, and then I just kind of make note of the expectations that there's been for all the traffic.

It's already done, except for Miller and PGBT, which will be done 1 to 3. Yeah, we should be.

We're very close to all the hardware upgrades. I mean, we initially planned an 18 to 22 month timeline. So, you know, we're well ahead of timeline and everything.

It's probably one of the floppy disks.

So Route Road 66 would still need to do that, that intersection. Just one more question while I'm saying this. I don't know if I just think through the process now. Is the abilities to enhance or change the schematics of that actual software, is that for those programmers who develop that, do they have accessibility to modify or enhance its tracking capabilities and what it's tracking? Is that something that is?

Yeah, so the way that would work is if they had an upgrade, and you can opt in or out of upgrades. It's up to you. They'll do it on the back end through their modem, upgrade the system, and you have the ability. They're going to send you an email and say, you know, the administrator, and, hey, in two weeks we're doing a system upgrade of all the systems. You know, if you want to opt out, just let us know. And it kind of gives you what the bug, I call them undocumented features, what it's fixing, or if there's a security threat. And they, who's they? Myovision is the company.

Myovision, yes, sir. Sorry. I'm sorry. All right, that's all we have. Thank you so much.

Oh, yeah, no problem. I just want to verify something. I think I reviewed this before we made this contract. It was clarified that we didn't have any capacity in the system to actually record video. Is that accurate? Yes. So we're not recording video. We're recording data. We can see video real time, but we don't have a recording of that video that we maintain. How do you track them down a roadway?

MAC addresses? MAC addresses.

And again, that's... I go out and I buy a car that has that capability to talk to the signal light. That is my choice to buy that car. That's not the city invading anybody's privacy without them.

Sure.

I just want to be real clear that the public hears that because they might hear, oh, the MAC address on my phone contracted to the city. No, not really. You bought something that allows that to happen. And by the way, if you're worried about invasion of privacy, you better throw this away.

Is it captured by the security camera? Is it catching? I've got my phone sitting in my car and I'm driving through.

If the signal's strong enough, it'll catch it. And again, we're just looking for unique MAC addresses. We don't care who it is.

But for all the people listening and watching, listen, wherever you drive.

Yeah. If I'm driving and I have my Wi-Fi turned off on my phone, I'm not broadcasting my MAC. But if I'm anywhere in a room and I'm using Wi-Fi or have my Wi-Fi enabled, I'm publishing that MAC address out.

They'll be able to test this out. Just go walk around the Home Depot or Walmart. In about 10 minutes, you're going to get it in a section you're going to hit. Your phone must be slow. Welcome, Marvin.

I don't want to delay from that. First off, back to your statement. Do we have the option to record the video? No, he's not thinking.

helpful maybe in an accident investigation i don't recall do we have the option to add that feature to actually record video yes yes you do it was really expensive you wouldn't want to keep it for a long period i'm just thinking 24 hours yeah we hadn't but we didn't build that capacity in the system so didn't explore what it would talk to add that capacity

My only reason to say no to that or to ask us to consider against that would be what that would invite upon us from an open record standpoint because suddenly we have created a bunch of data that somebody now might want access to. um and it might be an unintended consequence of i agree trying to do the right thing and have because certainly would make traffic investigations easier when you can just look at a video versus having to rely on witness statements but creating all of that data that now becomes an opportunity for someone to request if i could say something if if i could do anything i would store it for two days and ride over you know if you have that ability

Because one, I can see, get those accident reports, I can review the video, things like that. And then most open records requests come in over a week after something happens. And if you've overwritten it, you don't have it.

Yeah. Well, yeah, kind of.

The only thing is weekends and maybe the investigative team is different. But that's just a recommendation or just thought. That's what some people do. Because you can spend a lot of time as a city and have a lot of open record requests.

I do worry about the financial piece of it, if it's that much more also. Because right now we've purchased and owned this data versus if now we're asking cloud hosting to store all of this, it might be very much more expensive. Certainly. Even if it's only 24 hours.

If you want us to get a, you know, explore it, we can explore it and bring it back up to the council.

okay how long will we have the system looking uh we have all but one all but one so those have been i think i think chisa and miller was one of the first one and it's probably been in three months now yeah i'd recommend wait six months

evidence or information dictates that you know it'd be better if we would add something video for a little bit

But it definitely opens it up. I can tell you, even at my place, I have cameras outside of the showroom streets. Yeah. At front of my place. And they, at least once a week, I'm getting the call, hey, can you go back in your cameras and look at this? And most of it's just a bunch of nonsense. But sometimes it's helpful. But that's what you get a lot of. And I don't know that I would be really wanting to jump down that road, because that's a lot of work.

Yeah. Yeah, they're designed to be... a traffic management tool, not a recording device.

Well, I just want to say thank you for all y'all have done, because I'm not kidding. I've had a lot of people in my neighborhood. I live around the Chaha area, and they really hated that light, and they hated having to turn right and do the U-turn all the time just to get through the intersection. Now they don't do that, and they're very impressed with the lights, and I've told them pretty much where they are. I've informed them that that's a camera up there. This is the thing. That's not a flock camera. And not a red light camera. And not a red eagle in Texas. And I have noticed it going through town, and it does not make you wait. Rowlett, I mean, Rowlett Miller and Carla used to sit there all day. It recognizes you get through it. You moved through the city very well. Thank you very much.

A child relic is much, much, much better. I go through there every day.

I'll say, you know, I used the AI agent the other day on board, I think, Gary and I, when we were playing with it. And we were looking for the signal that had the most split failures in Rowlett that are on the system right now. And the one that had the most split failures was State Highway 66 and Cheesa Road, northbound, left turn.

because of the miller road construction before y'all opened it up yeah i don't know i guess it's open now but yeah that was causing so much havoc right there but you i mean we knew that but we didn't know it was the worst one in the city so and i think it does better too because you know it used to be on the timer and now it's taking a picture that knows how many cars in that line so it's gonna get through there if i'm correct i think i am because i've been way back when there's no way i'm going through this line i'm sitting again and i make it no issue It just feels like they're smarter. It really does.

Yeah, a lot of that's good timing, too, though. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much.

All right, next we'll move on to item 3C, receive a presentation to discuss the city's organizational staffing, current vacancies, and future action plan to address open positions. Rick, audio. Audio.

Council this is going to be a additional bit of information that we talked about last week on staffing with a little bit more expanded beyond just the HR staff departure the request was made for us to provide y'all the breakdown of all the current staffing within the city and within the departments as well as vacancies now this is a moving target as vacancies get filled and created on a daily basis but this is as of June we had 48 and a half positions at that time part-time position in the police department versus all the other full-time positions Now, we sent y'all the organizational. 48 what? 48.5 vacancies. You said part-time. There's a part-time position. With a part-time position. A part-time position along with a 48 full-time position. Right. Got that tied. When we look at our vacancies. Can you go back one second? Sure. Oops. Which was. This only goes forward. I think that's our turn. This is backward, bud.

All right. So what is the total budgeted headcount?

The total budgeted in general fund, I believe, is 476, if I'm not mistaken, and 570 overhaul. Total FTE. If I added all that up, what would it be, Greg? that right there would be 500 and we got 574.83 that's the total budgeted head count full and part-time no because that also includes part-time seasonal temporary staff so pars for part-time pars for part-times that are on board

and 48 and a half current vacancies.

Is that roughly 9%? Close, yes.

Do we have any trend on that, whether that's good, bad? It's going down. Our trend was roughly, under prior historical terms, 10 on an average per month. Since the first of April it's gone down to seven and a half and it's slowing down at this point. The hiring has been done a lot more methodically, a lot more That's the best words to use. We're focusing on higher quality talent. We're taking the time to screen them, bring on people with a better skill set, and trying to fill positions with the qualified people that will fit the organization rather than just trying to fill a position in the body. We're taking a more determined approach to the hiring through the recruiter and trying to slow down our numbers so that we can get our vacancies down to a really manageable.

I was thinking, I don't know if I'm wrong, but it's still a question I would have. I was thinking that his question was being me to set a trend with other municipal policies. Are they like in the same percentage we are with vacancies?

it's it's all over the board uh i've sent questions out to a lot of the cities around the state some of them are in the same boat we are they're really high on turnover for a lot of different reasons some of them are a lot more stable again for different reasons a lot of times you're looking at The non-professional positions, the more labor positions, they're more concerned about pay, distance, their traveling, and what benefits do they get, how they can take care of their family. The professional positions will look at that, but they'll also look at culture, history within the organization and the overall stability of management because they want to make sure that they're going into someplace they've got a higher skill set, they're going to earn a higher wage, and they've got a lot more involved in their career that they're going to try and find someplace that they fit into and that fits them as well. So they all look at it a little differently. The trend normally you want to look at a turnover rate of about 8 to 10%. our last year was in the upper 20s. So we're trying to utilize the temporary recruiter we have to shift it back to better people, better skill sets, people that fit the organization, people that will stay for the long haul.

report there's a statement says the city staff has countered large increase in open positions over the last year departments are unable to keep up with the recruitment efforts is that still the case are you saying that you're doing better we it's not the case per se anymore because we are actually taking over a lot of responsibility that the hiring managers were trying to do

We have a lot of hiring managers that have not had the experience in screening applications, knowing what to look for on an application to know whether that's valid or if it's fluff. They haven't been able to talk to the candidates to see if they really truly had the skill set without bringing them in for an interview and then they didn't really have good interview skills and so they kind of get people that were not as qualified as they should if they want somebody in here for the long haul. Our recruiter is doing a lot of that work. My staff in the HR is doing a lot of that work so that we are taking that onus off of the hiring managers within the departments and giving them only the highest qualified candidates that are applying for our positions. So the hiring managers have a lot less time that they have to worry about recruiting. They just go in They look at the applications that we send them, which are the top candidates. They choose who they want to interview. We help them schedule the interviews. At some points, some of our staff actually goes out there. The recruiter will go out there and sit in on the interviews so that we make sure that we're asking the right questions and we're not asking the wrong questions. And then we're getting people in here that are actually going to be a better fit for the organization and that will stay in the long haul. So the trend is changing, but it's because we're actually taking some of the grunt work, the technical work off of the hiring manager, which that's not their job. Their job is to actually go out there and do all the work in the projects and the things that they've got in the department. Our job is to support them and help them get to a point where they get a little bit of time, they come in, we set them up for the interviews, they tell us who they want to hire, and we just take it from there and we bring them on board.

So when I look at this and I see 50% of all the openings are in public works, that points to a problem. What's the trend on that? Is that new? Is that what we expect? Is that good?

That was a high turnover area. because they weren't able to do a lot of the screening for some of the labor positions. And previously, some of the positions that we had right now that were labor intensive, we're actually filling them at a higher pace than we had over the last year because the recruiter actually had a labor market that we didn't know about and we're filling concrete finished positions maintenance specialist one positions more of the lower level positions now in the next two slides we've got the breakdown of all the positions based on professional and non-professional and it gives you an idea of where those positions are because we do have a lot of labor positions that we're trying to fill for for all the public works projects that we've got going on

Anything else on this slide? I would just say in response to what you said, Just in my time here, public works has been one of the most difficult jobs to fill positions for. You look at many of these, not many, look at a lot of the professional positions, and you're sitting in an office or you're in a building working with folks. There are a few jobs in the city that are especially tough. Police officers, one of them, firefighters, another. Public works, the guys that are working in trenches, that's a really hard job. Animal shelter staff, incredibly tough job. But, yeah.

The labor positions, they're looking for pay. They're looking for things that are going to benefit for their family. But, again, there's a lot of them.

I did hear from a city of Garland employee that our frontline public works staff are compensated substantially more than Garland's frontline public works staff. So we at least have one of the right tools in place to be able to attract people.

We have poached them recently. I have no ill will against poaching. On this slide right here, we've got the professional positions that are currently open with some positions bolded and those require special discussions on because the positions were created and not filled or maybe being considered to be reclassed into something else or maybe the position isn't needed any longer. The internal auditor is normally housed under the city council as an independent individual, but that position has never been filled. The fire department has an assistant emergency management coordinator that When you think about it, I mean, is that position really needed? Graduate engineers, we have two vacancies right now. We used to have one. One graduate engineer just got promoted into a more of a full-time professional position. So that opened up another graduate engineer. And then some of these are the department heads that we're currently recruiting for. And then again, the City Manager and Assistant City Manager positions, permanent positions are still listed.

So one thing that comes up oftentimes when we see the word auditor, I just want to cover this topic real quick. The City has two audit functions that we do. One is a financial audit, which we outsource to a firm, and that firm has done our audit service for many years now. They work with the finance department. They will come in and meet with the city council's finance committee members. But the internal auditor is actually a charter established position, just like the city manager, just like the city attorney, the municipal court judge. That is a person that would report to the city council. Back in 2022, we had some newly elected council members at that point, one in particular who came in and he was pretty adamant that we get an internal auditor. And I was very supportive of that at the time. And we had enough council members that were supportive of it that we added it to the budget and we started a recruiting process. Unfortunately, through our recruiting process, we discovered that hiring a standalone internal auditor to come in and work in the city is incredibly niche. and incredibly expensive to find that person so we looked at hiring a firm similar to what we have with the financial audit and that was also difficult to manage and somewhat expensive so we kind of abandoned the idea and it never went any further however the placeholder has always been there year after year for the council to hire a person should they so choose again it is a charter established position so we have the right under the charter but not the responsibility I want to be clear we're not mandated to do it we have the option to do it to hire an internal auditor and we've just chosen not to up to this point so if that's something we want to revisit we can for the purposes of budget conversation when we get into that that may be something we want to talk about Christoph as far as whether or not we want to actually allocate dollars for that position or if we want to sunset that for the time being but you have to amend the check no no because it's not a requirement it's just an option so we can add that in there as a as a financial placeholder if we want to but we're not required to hire a city auditor

I mean, if you were going to do away with it.

Oh, yes, but not.

We'd have to do some research in order to get some numbers for outsourcing an internal audit function. Yeah, we would have to put together an RFP and solicit an RFP and put it out publicly. That's a non-trivial amount of work. If the majority of council wants to do that, we can certainly take that direction.

You know, the charter just has kind of one paragraph about what this process person functions as i kind of view it as a watchdog for the council yeah so i would say if if there's concern about operational shortcomings or things of that nature it might be worth having this person it might cause friction with staff because now you've got another person who reports to the city council who has oversight but not not giving direction to staff so

I would submit, and that's why I'd like to see the numbers look like for the outsourcing so we can make a decision. But regardless of how we got there, past challenges and some current challenges and perceptions, whether they be true or not, it may not be a bad time to consider this and look at it as an option to help establish trust.

I would say maybe. I don't know that I'm interested in having another six-figure person.

Well, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about an outsourced, almost like we do with our attorneys when needed. Well, this is different. Well, no, I think he said we can outsource it.

You can outsource it, or at least I think we determined through our previous city attorney that we can outsource it. The question would be, operationally, how does that work? Because you've got one person that reports to this body, not to any one individual.

Kind of like the city attorney.

Yeah, exactly. Same difference.

I would pose the question, why would you not want to do it under... Current situation.

Finances.

Yeah. Well, that's why I like to see the numbers.

So to do that, first off, we have to put together an RFP and take it to bid. So that's how long, 45 days?

Probably at least 60. 60 days. We've got to develop a document first. We've got to put in a scope of work, feedback from you about scope of work, and then actually put it out on the street and then bring it back to some sort of evaluation.

okay so if that's a future agenda item request then that can be worked out with staff yeah i think with all the terms reconciliations unspent bond there's enough there to kind of

think about how we can reconcile reconcile that and not just tell our citizens it's okay it's all there i think it might be a worthwhile project to look at but again i want to clarify scope when it comes to financial resources and their availability when they're there that's of course the audit we already have

This would be looking more about operational effectiveness and efficiency, you know, basically how we operate as I understand it, not the financial side of the audit.

About 10 or 11 years ago in one of my prior cities, we had an internal auditor and he spent the best part of eight months doing hot tax audits and found hotels and motels that were not keeping up with paying the city the hot tax that they were collecting. And he spent a long time on that one task, but the city recouped a good bit of money from it. But that was their operation for that time, to find out what's going on with the hotel-motel taxes, because tourism was the big thing in that city. So that is, again, one example of the scope of work that they could be doing.

I'm still staying.

something we're looking at and i think it does help establish trust and credibility with the community how about we first do a presentation of what the city auditors entails and what it does so we know what we're getting into before we put an RFP out because most people put an RFP out and we put all these people through the ringer and then all of a sudden we all say thank you for applying but never mind all right so I would much rather know what we're looking at because I really don't know the whole scope of it probably if we the request is for a work session I would say that work session needs to define the scope which

It's in the charter and all it says is the city council may afford a city auditor. The city council, by ordinance, shall define the responsibilities, compensation, and authority of the city auditor. If we already have an ordinance, which maybe Victoria's looking at, I don't know. Okay. Then maybe we need to find out if we already have an ordinance that defines the scope and responsibilities of the city auditor. If we don't, then that would be part of this process is to pass an ordinance that defines that. And then from there, maybe see what other cities do. have or don't have. So we'll have to do that at a future work session. Can't make that decision today. Before we go on, I count 16. This says 14.

Is this 16 of 48? The two that actually have two, there's 16 positions.

um well you got you got 16 count but there's 14 different positions there's two positions that have a vacancy of two so so the 14 vacancies is 14 positions that are like 14 vacant positions would be going to say that 14 positions would be 16 vacancies okay yeah and it that is part of the 48.5 is that correct and also before we move on the plan or two

It's got two vacancies. Looking at the summary, it looks like, if I'm working this correctly, these positions were included last year.

Is that correct? On the summary for the Planner 2s, we had one initially and then one that was a reclassification for that position.

We have two vacancies.

We have two vacancies at this time. Yeah, we had one at the budget. Then it was revised. The planning, the plan or two position was revised to two because we reclassified a position to be a plan or two. We found that our planning area was sorely needing help.

the addition let me jump in on this one so we have planners at different levels so we have a couple two plan positions sometimes we have a plan or one and a plan or two imagine about two plan or twos it depends on the capabilities of the people we have in addition or the qualifications of their group so we do move those around between different levels

I have some more information because I was involved in this. In past years, we've had a planning division that had a neighborhood planning supervisor position that was more of the long range planning function which no longer exists, but the position was still alive. And so we were able to convert that position and beef up the planning division, the current planning function, which is these two planner two positions that we're dealing with right now.

we didn't create we didn't create any new positions we reclassified of the new creation yes and we're in the process of interviewing but did they come under the last budget or it's just something one day one of them did we had one and then we reclassified the neighborhood planning supervisor we dissolved that one and moved it into the plan or two

What is a graduate engineer?

It's a trainer, trained. Somebody's got their EIT. I don't know.

I didn't know. I spent that afternoon, but I didn't know it. No, no.

do certain processes and get a certain amount of time under a licensed engineer, then they have to take their test and then it goes from graduate engineer to planning manager. But we're paying these folks, right? Yes. They've gone through this education and they're working on engineering projects and CIP projects under the leadership of a licensed engineer. They just don't have their P.E. yet.

Well, I was thinking, but you won't get to see them except certain times of the year, right?

No, no. They've graduated. They call it a graduate. That's just the title. It's graduate engineer.

So, Kristof, of these except for the auditor, of these two that are bold, do you see a need for these?

Emergency coordinator? Assistant? No. We've discussed that before, but I don't really see that we need that additional position. Graduate engineers, definitely. I'm not sure why that's bold. That's needed. That's needed.

and you said it a while ago about some some positions basically reclassify them into two positions or something to help make the processes better for people trying to go through planning or whatever correct yes yeah so and i couldn't remember that yeah we've actually moved a number of different positions around in the community development

trying to find the right mix of capabilities and strengths. I mean, one time we had a planning manager, then we didn't have a planning manager. We had a senior planner, then we had a planning examiner. So we've kind of moved the, there's a lot of movement in that area as you try and grab people to get current planning, long-range planning moving forward effectively. Our first priority, of course, is current planning. We're a little light on long-range planning.

And I know y'all are still working on that, on the community services side of it, because there is a lot. And from my time when I had them under me, that I knew that that's a very important position that you have, that you're having to go through code and anti-patrol and everything that you got. You have to be able to wear each hat each day, you know, find that right person to be that manager to change hats every day.

The other challenge, of course, is that we have two different zoning codes, which we're trying to fix. Preston's been trying to help us with that for a while now. Yeah, trying to move to, and Carter was part of that process, too, trying to move to one zoning code. But right now, you have to administer two different zoning codes, which is unusually complex. Yeah.

I want to be sure you got your question answered about the plan or two. Was that?

I'm still pondering the answer. We'll take all three answers and still do the math.

We didn't create a position.

The position may have changed names, but we did not create a new position.

Yeah, I'm just curious on the, I mean, how long is it baking? I see two and I see 26.

um we're doing interviews we've had a hard time finding qualified candidates in that position it's a very competitive position uh regionally and that's why we're having real time with the director position as well lots of cities have that issue planners and engineers are highly sought after not only by the public sector but the private sector and the private sector dangles a big carrot of money

to work 80 hours a week. And sometimes they just want that versus long-range stability and career that you're going to have in municipal work. So we're having to fight that battle. But we hit the websites that are for the planning division, any of their associations. We advertise on those. We do reach outs for anything else. And that's another reason why we actually have a referral program within our policies, is do you know somebody? Departments have to ask for that to be for a certain hard to fill position, but it says, okay, mayor widget do you happen to know anybody in planners that is your field i don't have access to all those people do you have anybody that you might recommend and by doing the referral a the employee gets a little bit of money but two you get somebody that you know is good in that field and it's just as good as coaching for another city but you're using basically the to bring in some assistance to the organization that you work for and you're trying to take care of to help for the betterment of the overall organization?

should have opportunities here. Certainly could be. I think the challenge we have here is without a director in this area, it hurts us both on the recruitment side and on the flexibility regarding training somebody who's an intern. Because interns are great, but you understand they're not free. They take care and feeding and compensation. And I think that right now it's kind of hard for us to find the capacity to do that care and feeding. But I think long term, that would be an excellent strategy to try and develop some internal candidates.

so the question is are we competitive for these positions that we're trying to get is that the problem is are we not competitive in financial and everything else or are we just have an issue because i guess we're not to the state of positions on people's minds well a lot of it is the plan again planners and engineers notoriously for decades have been a hard position to fill because the private sector is very enticing with the money granted they have to work 80 hours a week but We keep on hitting any universities.

We hit, again, professional organizations, and then... Richard, did you come back to... From a salary survey perspective, we're competitive, actually. The challenges are more marketplace as far as availability.

Does Dallas College have a program for this?

There's more universities. It's a four-year degree for planners.

I think the Alice College.

Alice College does have some four-year degrees. I don't think they have this one.

Maybe something we approach them with. Is the kid local going in there and learning? What about internships? It makes care and feeding that

The next slide that we've got is the staff side, which is where a lot of the labor side is the hourly positions. We do have the one position under the city manager's office that's highlighted as grant coordinator. That position was filled at one point and then as of 2023 was vacated and has not been filled since. But as was brought up earlier, the operations side of Public Works has a lot of different positions and then a quantity within a number of those positions of vacancies because of all the projects and stuff going on. Now, I do know that some of those numbers are gonna be, the numbers are not gonna be accurate as of today because it's two weeks after the slide was, were created. We have filled some country finish positions, a couple of the other positions we filled. We're bringing on a police officer so that we'll have one less there. So I mean we're trying to keep this as current as possible, but labor positions are hard because these guys are out there working on the surface of the sun and they really, really It has to be a special person to go out there and do all that. I mean, that is, to me, next to a dispatcher, this is rough. Thank you very much.

Rick, you? Go ahead. Rick, you?

we talked at the budget meeting yes sir you had mentioned something specifically about the concrete finisher position yes sir have we filled all of those at that point or a couple or we had a couple of them that they're they're still in play right now we're doing the onboarding of them yeah so we that four is going to be down to two or one uh i'm guessing within a week i mean you mentioned you mentioned your position in particular we had because we had a number of them at the time and when I talked to our recruiter, she said that there's two of them that they're working through the onboarding on to try and get those positions filled because when I came onboard, I think there was 10 to 11 ago as of June, and we didn't know what labor market to attack to try and find them. We were trying to steal them from Garland or wherever else we could. But again, private contractors, go down any road in this state and you've got somebody doing construction, laying concrete. So trying to find concrete finishers to work for a municipality, we just have to show them what we're trying to build. The recruiter actually had a labor market that I was not aware of, and she's been advertising through that. And we've been bringing in concrete finishers and a lot of the other maintenance positions, a lot of candidates for those positions, because that's what they do. They don't have the skill sets for management or office work. This is what they do. They do the labor work. And so a bunch of these numbers are going to be going down because of the work we've got with the recruiter.

Any other questions on this slide? Next one's questions.

Next one's questions.

So I don't want to sound like a shill for staff or anything like that, but Rick, tell me how long you've been employed with the city. Since June 2nd of last year. So aside from your wellness coordinator, June 2nd of last year, so you've been here a year and a month roughly. Yes, sir. Aside from the wellness coordinator, you have a staff of how many? A total of six. With all of us, it's six. With all of you, including the wellness coordinator?

Yes, the wellness coordinator, assistant director slash risk manager, Three generalists and myself.

So how long have your generalists been employed in the city?

Everybody came on in July.

So everybody was hired in July. So they've been here just half a year. Yes, sir. Okay. And your assistant director was hired? Same time. Same time. So everybody pretty much started around the same time. Everybody's got about a year under their belt except for the wellness coordinator who's been here longer.

They all came on about within a week of each other.

And so when you got here, there was, I mean, Tell me the state of the department, because I know there was a ton of turnover, not just in the city, but specifically in your department shortly before that.

When the director had left in December, one generalist, one senior generalist, they were leaving the 16th of May. I interviewed and got the job at the beginning of May. I had to work my time out at Richland Hills. The administrator who was doing risk management, he was like the number two, he got another job and he left, I came in on a Monday, he left on a Wednesday. The last generalist that was in the department actually passed away on that Friday. So it was just myself and the wellness coordinator. We had a couple of interns. Basically, we had an individual from the library that was helping us out. She just got her HR degree. And then the finance department had an individual that had been working here for a while. She knew the system. So she was helping out in processing applications for the wet zone and other things, basically just doing the transactional work. and I had to hire and fill positions within 30 days.

Because that was the ask at the time. Hire very fast, right?

Hire very fast, but Luckily, I had the positions being, that was already posted. So I was getting applications in. So I got in there, I looked at everything, and I found the people that I wanted based on the fit. They all had some experience in HR, but I knew that they would fit as a team. And that is critical, especially within HR, because everybody's got to be helping each other. If somebody takes a vacation day, whatever, somebody else has got to fill in doing everything. And they've got to be able to come together and grow as a cohesive unit. So I found them, brought them on board, and got them into positions that would best fit the HR department. And then we just started growing them. So that's the transition. Now, when I came on board, my ID number was assigned to me. And they're all in sequence. As of the end of March, we had hired 100 more people. than my number was when I came on board, and that was nine months. So we're trying to slow that trend down. Outside of seasonals, we're trying to slow that trend down so that we don't have as much turnover.

So I say all that to kind of say, to everybody in here. You guys are building the ship as you fly it. And that's part of the problem. You've been building processes for recruiting. You've been changing the way that you've been doing recruiting. We've never had a recruiter before that I know of until recently because by necessity. And in that time, you've taken the days from finding somebody to hiring them from 100 and- It was between 100 and 120, depending on what month, down to 83. 83. You've taken the annual turnover, as I calculated, you said it's down to seven and a half per month. so you were in the upper 20s yes down to 15 and a half percent over the course of a year i mean that's pretty substantial and you've got our open positions down to 48 and a half which is the lowest it's been in how long a long time a long time so i mean to me that means that you and your team are doing a really good job of not only recruiting, but hopefully recruiting the right people. That's right. Filling some very difficult positions. And I know we still have positions that have been open and we've been utilizing an outside recruiter even for those positions and we're having immense difficulty Certainly the culture of the city is haunting us right now, and it's incredibly difficult to find those positions. And the onus is on all of us to set what that culture looks like so that we have a place that people want to work and feel comfortable coming to work. And I know part of it is simply that we don't have a city manager today, right? We're actively recruiting. That's going to continue to be a problem because you just talked about some of the reasons that professionals want to come in is they're looking for a good boss and they're looking for stability. i've heard the quote i don't know if it's john maxwell or somebody else if people don't quit jobs they put their boss right right so people want to have secure city management that they know they can come in and not worry about this city council making a decision that hires a city manager that comes in and gives the heave ho to half the professional staff that are in existence around the city yes sir all right thank you guys for what you're doing are there other questions that really wasn't a question just more of it i did um

One comment and then a question. One of the things, I'm listening to you, and you're really, I like the analogy, you're trying to fly a ship while you're building at the same time, and I really think that's important for people to understand. And one of your challenges is you can get the bodies, but then you're having challenges with, I mean, especially people who have been in the job for six months or a year, actually doing effective interviewing, which is a skill set by itself. Yes, sir. My question or my comment is, is it possible to leverage across the entire city, yes, the police department, yes, the fire department, and others who do a lot of interviewing, in seeing who has that skill set and put them part of a team, a three person team on interviews. I was put on those teams on a regular basis where you're and also everybody learns all parts of the city because you're looking for concrete finisher. Well, I can be spun off pretty quick on concrete finisher. So I'm just throwing that out as a leverage of people out there about those teams until they're just a

but the labor positions we stick with the hiring manager and maybe one more person within the department but we will go out there at times and sit with them to make sure that they don't ask the wrong questions and get us into another liability issue but we do that for the professional positions especially i'm just trying to get an economy scale definitely but i still see i mean we still have you know and i just know this is a big concern for a lot of constituents out there

the vacancies of the community developer director the economic director and public works which i would argue all three were critical yes sir so where are we at on those i think that's a great question community development directors have been we went through one round and the two applicants that we interviewed were not they would not handle the position

I have an interview tomorrow morning with another candidate who's highly qualified, but we're lucky to come here. So my job tomorrow is trying to convince them this is a good place to work.

There's one other that just recently applied that I knew from a different city that I wanted to have the city manager and Manal take a look at, just get their thoughts on it. Public works director, we have two candidates at the moment, for sure, coming in next week for interviews. We're trying to see if we can get a third. But again, same issue in historical. We've got to make sure that they want to be here. We're trying to get everybody to understand we're trying to build something here. And we need their help to build their part of the whole organization and get somebody that's excited about that, that's qualified, competent, and has the skill set to lead people. We are trying our best to not get somebody in here that's going to be just total chaos when they get in, wanting to move things around. Take the team we've got and build just a manager because if you can lead people we're not going to have the turnover true that was a new one that was requested by council we have some people that we've been trying to we went through a new process once we had three candidates we interviewed one of them was fairly strong we made him a job offer and tried to negotiate and it just gets squirreled

uh so we can consummate that offer so now we're going back out for an interim we've got two candidates to look at as you know just to talk about the thoroughness of that process because i know we've had that conversation kind of talk through outside resources that you saw in interviewing for that position yeah we brought in current economic development directors from two different cities to bring in and help us with the interview and evaluation process we included in there both an interview a presentation and a written assignment again i don't care where you got doctorate's degree i want to make sure you can actually write And I found doctorate people who can't, right? So I test those skills to make sure that we get, you know, because there are people who interview well, but even when you interview well, you don't necessarily, that's not necessarily a good judge of future performance. So I want to use whatever tools we can to judge their performance. So we ran through that, and they helped us evaluate and did identify the candidate that we actually made the offer to. They also recommended that we not move forward with another recruitment until after we have .

You know, there's a concept in business that you can get something good, fast, or cheap, but not all three. You can get two of those typically. So we can hire somebody that's good and we can hire them pretty fast, but they're likely to be a consultant and they sure aren't going to be very affordable. And I know there's angst amongst the community that we want people in these roles, and I get that. I really do feel it, trust me. But we've got to get the right person, because otherwise we're going to find ourselves in a similar position that we've been in.

Yeah, I really appreciate you being methodical in making the quick hire, because that's going to buy us into it.

And my thinking, certainly for comments, if you see it differently, on the interim economic development director, For a permanent development director, we're really looking for somebody who can create relationships. I'm going to de-emphasize that to some extent when we're talking about an interim, because they're not going to be here very long to create relationships. So I'm focusing more on the side of strategic expertise, so they can give us some good strategic guidance as we work toward the permanent candidate who would definitely be somebody we want to have stronger communication and partnership development skills. So that's kind of the strategy that we're having for right now.

I would only counter that with they should have the relationships. If you're in economic development, you should have those relationships. That's going to be positive, yes. That's not something you create and say, I've always wanted to be an economic development person. I'm going to go create something.

They should come in with those. And therein lies part of the problem, right? The folks that are already really good at economic development within the DFW area already have a really solid role or are going to be recruited into a role where they're going to have more tools in their tool belt than they do in Rowlett and certainly have a more stable, longer lasting culture. that really makes it a challenge for us to find that superstar that already does have all, I totally agree with you. I am hopeful that we can find that person, but it's a lot more difficult than it sounds.

We're not the most attractive location for economic development right now.

Great. So we don't have those funds.

Right. Or that little baton. Yeah.

I just want to comment on your shill comment. This was not a question about whether HR is doing a good job or not. Sure. So I don't think you have to defend them. I think it was the analogy is much like the traffic lights. We didn't have a base. We had no base point to say, are we doing good or we're not doing good? How are we doing? So we've established a base 48.5. We'll track that. We'll see this from time to time. The results will be there. So I think it was very important to have this conversation for the public and for us as we move forward. So very happy to see the data now will go from here again.

And that's exactly why I want to say those things for the benefit of the public, because they might see this meeting and think, oh, my gosh, we have all these vacancies and we've got holes in our staff and things like that. You've got an HR staff that, I mean, they're literally toddlers right now. They just learned to walk in their respective roles, and that makes it so difficult to, you know, I don't need an abrasive. They're green. Yeah, they're green. There you go. a lot of people they want to be hired in a position where there's already stability there's already process to build and they can just kind of come in and just carry carry the water right it makes it a lot easier when that's in in almost every position in the city we're asking people to come in and not just do that but go above and beyond and build processes and and as you said build something special kind of make it their own right and we're looking for people who really want to come in and take ownership and that just requires even a higher caliber person than

Well, I'll go back to economic development for just a second. I don't want to belabor the point, but I think we have to be creative, certainly in this market. As I was exiting my career and my job, someone came to me and said, they were a graduate of UTT in real estate. They needed an intern, knowing that I was going to retire. And they took my job. And it was a great reward for me. It was a very rewarding experience to train the person that took my job. They're doing an excellent job now. So it's a very creative approach. And I know Texas Workforce Commission has training, especially skilled training in road construction. because they know of all the road projects and all the things across the state. So I just ask us to look outside of the traditional models and think creatively as we look at all these positions.

I've been working with two departments recently to try and create succession plans to try and be able to bring in somebody at a lower skill set at a lower pay to learn and bring and grow them into a position. So we're working on a couple more just like that.

And similar to that, one of the biggest problems we have in public works is we don't just have a director. We have both assistant directors missing too. We've had this conversation about under hiring. We've got to be very careful if we do that. Because right now we don't have anybody to train them, to be honest. It's going to be an all or me. So we are looking at potential to maybe bring in somebody who doesn't meet our experience requirements up front. Higher meta, lower pay scale, until they can .

We need to have them change, create a new position for that.

So we're looking at sort of how we can do that in a way that doesn't create risk to the organization, but gives us an opportunity to actually bring some resource in, because right now we just got, the gap is too large is my fear. It's too large. I'm not sure we're going to be able to go out and find three highly qualified individuals to step in and actually lead that department effectively.

Any other thoughts? All right. Thank you, Rick. We appreciate the presentation. Thank you for your time. And gentlemen, I know you guys were the ones, I think, that had asked for the org charts. Did this kind of satisfy that request, or are you looking for more? I think there are a lot of holes in it.

I don't think it's... Holes, not just vacancies, but like... Yeah, like missing data. I would say it's not complete. It's something to work from, but I would ask that it be... We're working on a more cohesive model.

We'll get back to you. Needs to be built. I think we're just talking about, I said the police one, where it has shifts. What's the number each shift? You're wanting spots like that. Is that right or not?

Well, I was starting with how many vacancies we have. We didn't have that data. What are the positions? How does that fit in? How does that fit in the budget? So sort of a holistic look drilled down to you know i'm over hr for a second and i can look and i can say well we're missing this slot it here's here's the slot i don't think you can do that with the data that we have here nor do i really want to do that but i think as we get through the budgets and we look at positions it's very helpful to have the data yeah and this this data will also be important when we're doing the city manager search and we're talking to applicants and interviewing is you know this is the reality of it you're going to walk in with

somewhere between maybe 30 and 50 positions that sit vacant, that you're going to be at least partially responsible to get filled as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And I think that's the purpose of that to really understand. I mean, it's a tough discussion and we're not even done. And I do have a much better understanding and appreciation. And what I do hear and at some point I hear it's going toward the plan. What a plan. And I hear lots of pieces of the plan. And they're very well-intentioned. I love the idea of become part of something new, become something. We're rebuilding the city. And you're going to get on the ground floor. But a plan of how we're going to achieve that. So I think that's something we've got to start working towards. Because I hear a lot of good intentions. You're doing great work. But they're almost like in silos a little bit because we're basically putting out fires. So I mean, I'm really appreciative.

but i think sometimes you gotta have that just pull it together the personnel summary sheet that i sent has all the vacancies by position within each budgeted fund so you can kind of track that as your base And as we start filling these positions and we can bring you, we can update your information from time to time as you request. And you'll be able to see how we're moving and filling those positions. And then any new ones that come open for whatever reason.

I mean, I personally, I kind of like, I was looking a while ago at the, each person had their organizational chart. And if you put numbers with those, I can see a visual of what's missing. You know, what's not there, what's not there.

I'm vacant in those slots. I'll put the police logo.

It just had the number 111 on this. It didn't have numbers in it.

Oh, OK. One position open, I guess, right now? Almost nothing. Three. Three?

OK. Yeah, we do need consistency. I saw some that you can't tell.

But I mean, it's a start. So I think it's good. And I'm not a big ask.

OK. We'll do what we can to get to your information. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, with that, thank you, Rick. Appreciate it. We will take a brief recess. We'll be back in about five to ten minutes. It's 8.05 p.m. Thank you. All right, we are back. We are on item 3D. It's 8.16 p.m. Item 3D is receive a presentation regarding proposed amendments to the Relic Development Code and Form-Based Code regarding requirements for a special use permit for data centers.

Good evening, council.

Good evening.

The purpose of tonight's discussion is to discuss the process for requiring a special use permit, an SUP for data centers in specific zoning districts within the form-based code and the development code due to the rise or increase in this land use that we've seen in and around the area. Council, I do owe you an apology in advance. There are a couple of typos in one of the draft ordinances and possibly limited to them. Forgive us. We were in a hurry to make sure we included those ordinances. That was my error. And so we will tidy that up should you decide to proceed forward. It was a standard SUP template that we used for this. So this is definitely not a filler slide, please don't think that's what it is, but this was a visual representation that I wanted to draw to your attention before we dove into the actual aspects of this land use. I'm not going to read verbatim what is on the slide, but you can see what really draws my attention, at least, is that cluster map that you see on the right of the screen. I do want to preface with there are different types of data centers. They offer different uses. So that being said, that was the intent and purpose of this slide. It is an increase in land use that we see in and around the area, and they do offer different models and uses. So by way of background, I do want to emphasize that right now our development codes do not offer a definition of this land use. And as you are aware, uses change and become refined or just new uses are created, those have to be incorporated and memorialized into the code. So in this instance, it would be, should the council want to move forward, that data centers be defined and codified in the form-based code and the route of development code and only be permitted with the approval of a special use permit. We did some research in and around the area. This is in your packet as well. Once again, I will not read this verbatim, but it gives you a good idea of how cities that currently have similar uses or are about to have uses, how they're tackling this land use and what their goals and intentions are with this land use. So we looked at Garland, we looked at Irving, Lewis, Gill, Denton, and Plano. There is another city. I don't believe they've formalized their ordinance adoption, I'm not sure, but there are other cities that are moving forward with these models, and they're looking at what their surrounding partners are doing to further identify how they want to define that scope within their codes and ordinances. The staff report is pretty in-depth. In fact, thank you, Victoria, the ordinances she prepared are so thorough. And so with that, I'm going to, for our viewing audience, for our audience seated here, as well as for you, of course, Council, I want to go through some key elements associated with proposed amendments to the development codes if you choose to incorporate this use. So first and foremost, we would be looking at the definition. This I will read verbatim so we can all understand what this land use is. Data center would be a facility building campus, portion of the building, or a group of buildings used primarily to house, operate, manage, process, store, transmit, mine, support or maintain computer service, digital data systems, cloud computing systems, artificial intelligence, computing systems, telecom equipment, blockchain systems, cryptocurrency mining systems, co-location systems, or similar digital infrastructure. And if you recall at the onset of our conversation this evening, I mentioned that data center is, it's a broad use. It's not just one specific thing. It is not just mining. It is not just crypto mining. There are different components and elements of a data center. So that being said, Should the use be codified, we would obviously want to determine what land use designation it would be committed in by SUP. And as it relates to the Railroad Development Code, the RDC, it would be in your manufacturing districts, light manufacturing and general manufacturing. And of course, in the form-based code, it would be the commercial center district. But this is just the beginning of this. There are other components associated with this ordinance. Because it is an SUP requirement, and Victoria, please correct me if I'm wrong, because it is an SUP requirement, we have the opportunity, and with specific plan use, to create certain development criteria, creating neighborhood parameters, adjacencies to neighborhoods, how these facilities should be designed, what those setbacks are. And quite frankly, there's a very comprehensive discussion in the draft ordinance that addresses this. So let's talk about some of these elements, noise and vibration. Again, the nature of the use, it would be the recommendation and as presented in the draft ordinance to have sound absorptive barriers in materials. And of course those can vary depending on what they are. Building height limitations. Now we do have specific maximum building height requirements within each zoning district. But those, because you're requiring an SUP, could be assessed, revised, or considered. Do you want to go higher? Do you want to go lower? Again, there are other ways to then also look at muting perhaps the use through visual buffers, landscaping and hardscaping elements, the building design, the type of design, not using reflective exterior finishes, for example, not necessarily saying it shall be brick or masonry, but choosing materials that are not so reflective in nature. Lighting, the type of lighting you use, the glare emitted from that, again, following the lighting ordinance is an option, but then again, depending on your adjacencies, you could modify through the SUP what those parameters would be, including for your screening and visual impacts. Proposed development standards. Now, this is the massing and siting of the structure itself, not being located within 3,000 feet of any existing residential structure, not the zoning district, but the structure itself. And then not being located within one mile of any residential zoning district or ag district, residential future land use areas as defined in your contract and in your future land use plan. And not located within one mile of any school, religious institution, park, trail, hospital, et cetera, that's reflected on the screen. And this is in your packet too. category identified in the development standards is the use of best practices, whether that's through water capture, whether that's through having a closed loop system, whether that's through having hard scape, zero scaping, how you do your design, that could obviously benefit the development and the environment. Third-party inspections being mandatory where the owners or operators of said facility would submit a third-party inspection annually of all the noise, visual, and resources that they've used to the city. This would enable the city to ensure it's compliant with the approved specific use permit that's been adopted.

Would we have to add to our noise decimals stuff for this?

Through, when they, let's say we have notification for a data center. Now we do have parameters within our, you know, zoning ordinances, code of ordinances on what those decibels are. Right. But you can then dictate through the SEP what that requirement would be. And they would provide that information on the onset as they submitted their application for the SEP. And so you would have the opportunity, you could call in a subject matter expert to identify, is this sufficient? Does it suffice in proximity? What have you? That's happened in the past with some developments we've done. I remember many of them. And Council, I kept it very short and focused, and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you

The research I was doing on this, as part of the STP application to the Maple Council, and also a public hearing, but a utility impact study should be with this at the same time so we can see what is the estimated amount of electricity, water, and then how, because I found a statement that I like it, and I'm not attorney by any means, but the statement about data centers are used to incorporate best available technology, best available control technology, very, very broad, nonspecific. And I'm sure there might be a reason, but I think that reason could also bite us at a later date and time.

I completely agree with your statement because there's two factors that would happen. One, if we could understand the demand for the use and see if we actually have the infrastructure to support the use. And secondly, understand how innovative is their process to manage said resources.

So yeah, I would like to see if it's even possible legally. But some men are saying that there will be a children's study impact or an impact study to be a person of our selection to do, so we have good data. No different than when you get a permit, it has to come in in a sealed, if you're doing a building, you have to have a sealed engineering report come in. So I would almost like to see if that's possible.

so with the ordinance and correct me if i'm wrong but with the ordinance itself we i think we do capture some of that component that you've mentioned and that's through show us your best practices what are you doing how are you doing not only that if they wanted to develop and go vertical with this facility we'd have to make sure we have the resources not just from cardscape or street but also the wet utilities do we have the resources to support said use what definition do you think would cover

pretty much what we need to cover on that?

I believe so. And again, if the use modifies over the course of the next few years, then you can always modify. And again, there is a component in the RELA development code. If the use needs refinement, it can be reviewed by the director of community development to see how to capture it. And if it doesn't fit in that, then we'll...

I have a question. Sorry. Interim city manager has a question. So of course this is defined as a dominant use. Yes. What if they tried to do something like this as an accessory use?

The ordinance clearly says dominant primary or ancillary or accessory. Okay. So it captures all of it.

Okay. So any kind of, we haven't identified sort of square footage or percentage. Because basically if you have a server room.

That's considered a data center.

Okay.

As in if it were an accessory to the main UCS.

Correct. So we had an applicant come in a couple of months ago and their representative use was a training center. And they wanted this very large building to train 10 people. Train 10 people on computer usage. So the representation of their use, the reason Brian brought this up was, this is a training center. No, it's a data center. But that was not the representation of their primary use. So I wanted to make sure we had, one, that. But I also am concerned that if somebody brings in, truly, an office use, as rare as that may be, and they simply have a number of server rooms to support their office use, Are we going to capture that as well? Is that going to be stuck through this SUP process? And is that our intention?

Our definition actually just says to use primarily the house operating process. And we can maybe look at further refining that. I'm reluctant to go into percentages and square footage because then that could impede our ability to enforce the ordinance.

So we're going to have to make the case. We're going to have to make the case. It's primary.

Right. We had that very issue in my company because we were a technology company. Right. And we had a large server of rooms, but we weren't. It was for testing then, right? It wasn't for storing data or money. Secret.

It sounds like this is the best way to protect us, right, by doing an SEP? I mean, if we don't have an SEP in place for data centers, how do we deal with the one that comes in and wants to do the data center right now?

So first of all, we don't have the use defined. So if someone did come in and say, this is what I want to do, hopefully we would be able to then come forward and say we have to modify the development code to include the use, given the nature of the use. Secondly, if you look at the historical and current elements that other cities are implementing is the SUP. The function of an SUP is to assess the compatibility of that land use with its adjacencies and creating those neighborhood protection standards that allow the use to operate or function as seamlessly as possible.

Because it was through an SUP that we could probably address the utilities. To find out how much water are they going to be using in our city. It's their limits. And can we serve them?

And can we serve them? And that's a function that would happen through the development?

And the grid support, you know, whatever thousand or however many square foot facility is going to operate. That's a lot of heat and a lot of air conditioning and

When I built my data company, this gets into the parameters of that. My first ever database was consumed in literally a desktop. But it had a lot of juice in that desktop to make it work. It wasn't until years later that we grew into what we called refrigerators, and we had multiple refrigerators. But is there going to be a definition that's defined as a data center? Because we, with a simple couple of desktops, we could process millions of records of data based on the fact that the processors that were internal on it. So that's just the question, because I don't know. I don't know if we'd have somebody knock on our door today and have a conversation with that, We've talked about nothing about where they might even go, which we don't know, but the city was mine. And I'll even tell you, which is many, many years later, but my first done housing area without any real laughter around here was literally on Main Street. Right next door to the taxidermist, who I think is still there. I think he's still there anyway. But I put in, ultimately it was six databases in there. desktops we put in there and then we had to grow from there and it took us again a handful of months to get to that point but it was what are we going to be looking for and interpreting what a data center is because you can literally in today's times when they start massive you could process millions of records with literally a handful of desktops which is really no real concern as far as a data center You know, is it going to use up tons of electricity? There's no water, obviously, at that point in time. It's just hardware. You know, is your software capable of handling it? Because, again, as we get into it later, yes, my day at my center was this big. That's how big my surprise at the circle room was. It never was something that was... massively huge, but that's the question I have, is defining what that looks like.

And if you come in for a CO, which you would have to formally say use, then the CO would identify, you would have to say what you're doing, and that would establish that primary use.

But again, the size of that. If I came in and said I processed data, well, are you going to ask, well, how big is your computer? Does that make a difference? Is it, well, I've got a laptop nowadays that could be used to process, or is it going to have certain specifics? I mean, I understand what you're saying about the development of an SUV. If that's come through, you've got to ask the question.

But even when you come in for your CO, we would say, what is your lab? What are you doing for a lab facility? And if you say I'm an office user, then we're going to have to... We always have to think about the intent.

The intent of this is not to get people who have a 5,000-square-foot office with a few server rooms and server racks, right? But I think this is... both clear and ambiguous enough that it accomplishes that. And that's what it has to be. It has to be both specific and unspecific enough to cover both sides of that, to kind of loop in people. Because really what, I'm sure everybody knows this, I hope everybody knows this, what this is targeted to do are data centers that are hundreds of thousands of square feet, that are industrial size buildings that are massive, And those are the types of facilities that are going to, number one, use a ton of electricity, number two, use a ton of water, and number three, create an untenable amount of noise. Those are the three types of, especially the last one, being pollutant, noise pollution, that we don't want. that I don't want personally here in our city or in certain areas in our city. And that's why an SEP is the right approach here because there might be an instance where someone comes in and says, yeah, I'm opening a data center. Okay, but it's 2,000 square feet and he's got four server racks and he's doing a co-locating um server where he's you know selling data space or processing power well he's yeah the servers on their own are going to be noisy but you're not going to hear it outside that building that's a little scary that's right that's right it's so high about hiding in the dissipation of liquidity that we scare off the small guy but i think i think the proliferation what we're seeing now is exactly what

what you're talking about massive if you had your map up again of the metroplex those are massive facilities housing i don't know how many daisy chain servers or whatever for the purpose of ai a lot of them are some of them are so um you know i go i go to my office of george bush all the time and in in plano i think it's plano or richardson there's a big data center there and it's been there for years and years and years and it's

a data center insofar as it's one that was built in the 90s right or the 2000s it's not one of these ai data centers that have insane processing power and just a massive amount of technology so yeah i agree that they're not all built the same what i'm trying to prevent is exactly what you're talking about is the massive and i think that's the that's the go-to i think what we're seeing today absolutely we're seeing

My little hometown that I live in, I grew up in West Texas, it's got one on the west side, it's got one on the east side, and Abilene, you just experience the massive data center they're building out there. It's all over the place. So I think I can actually piece it up a little bit.

It scares the rattlesnakes. Huh?

It scares the rattlesnakes. I would just caution that also when you think about environmental, think about the end, when they return or they leave. What do they leave behind? And if there's environmental checks to protect us, and specifically the generators, because generators build fuel and over time that's a pollution and if you think about where some of our product is located it's near creeks so you want to make sure that we have protection when anybody leaves from this guy type of use in order to get in here there's also environmental factors on the tail end of it where's the water going oh the garland sewer so most of their water actually

It's either reused or it's evaporated. They use it for cooling different equipment. So it ends up just evaporating, unfortunately.

And I think I understand what you're referring to is if we have a facility that ceases operation that they mitigate and bring to its natural condition and remove the equipment with the proper parameters. Right.

did you have checks and balances we had to do that in connecticut and it was the state requires you anybody that leaves go through a very extensive um expensive checklist yeah you don't want a superfund site after one of them leaves right well then that's what that's why that was there where you would have to do like they had to post a bond or something somebody leaves goes out of business they're going to say we don't have your money

So I have to post a bond before they come in and there's the time we leave we're going to use this because you're going to leave us dry and we're going to use this to clean up.

I'm sort of worried about conversions. So could that be a condition of the SUP that they have to post a bond? Because otherwise we're talking about citations and we're limited to $2,000 for a citation, right?

So that does nothing for .

Let me look at that. Okay. Because I honestly don't know the answer and I.

Because we're left with the money kind of .

And again, this gives us the discretion. to decide and i think that's one of the most important parts i mean granted it's it's an sup which is still a zoning action which lives with the site but it gives us it gives us that freedom so if we did have again a small data center that makes sense for ralette and wants to be up in the north shore fine but if we have a 200 000 square foot monstrosity

that might not be the right call or something such that if you think about the bronze warehouse they can't lace it and they're able to convert a piece of it that should fall under this so we it does you know you just need to think through what i think we'll know when somebody's or a data center. I don't think they can sneak that in.

And that's why I like the definition that says portion of a building. So even if it's a where there's subleasing spaces, that portion still qualifies. Victoria, I do have one question. In Section L of the ordinance, it talks about setback requirements and distance requirements. And I just want to be sure that these setback and distance requirements don't effectively create a moratorium. And if you want to discuss that executive session. Yes, I think we should. Okay. So, Council, let's convene a quick executive session just on that question. This would be page... 46 and 47 of the packet. It's Section L of the ordinance. We'll convene an executive session. It's authorized by Section 551.071 of the Texas Government Code. Item 3D will be convened into executive session for the purpose of seeking confidential legal advice from the city attorney on that agenda item. It is 841 p.m. Council concluded items 4A, 4B, and 4C with no action taken. That was at 10.54 p.m. was the last item, and it is 10.54 p.m., and we are adjourned. Thanks, everybody. Have a good night.