City Council - Regular Meeting

to welcome you to the regular meeting of the Temple City Council. Please rise as deputy city. Gracious God, we pause at the beginning of this meeting to give thanks. Though 2026 is already moving at rapid speeds as we are now entering February, I thank you for carrying us through the past year with its challenges, its lessons, and its moments of growth. Let us pause to look back and give thanks for the year behind us, for the hard work, the lessons learned, and the way you saw this city through both good days and tough ones. As we continue to turn the pages on the calendar, we ask for your steady hand to guide us. May this year be filled with hope, cooperation, and a shared commitment to do what's right. We lift up our council members and all who serve this city. Grant them wisdom in their decisions and patience when the work feels heavy and unity when opinions differ. Remind each one that the choices made in this room touch real lives beyond these walls. We are grateful for the past, hopeful for the future, and thankful for the chance to serve today. In your holy name I pray. Amen. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. So, as you as you can see, Mayor Davis is not with us here today. Um, he did have a death in the family and is out of town. Um, so, of course, our thoughts and prayers are with him, but the city

work continues. So, um, we're going to move on to public comments. Citizens who desire to address the council on any matter may sign up to do so prior to this meeting. Public comments will be received during this portion of the meeting. Please limit comments to three minutes. No discussion or final action will be taken by the city council. So, uh we'll start off with Mr. Alan Lidle. Yep.

Allan, you're working without a net. Yeah. You don't want take your walker with you? I got this to lean on.

Okay. Proton mayor, fellow other council members, thank you for having me out tonight. My name is Alan Lidle. I live here in Temple. I want to start out with during the ice storm several days, the offices were closed, but the utility workers, the water department, our firemen, our police, all of them did a stupendous job to keep the city safe and to do the best they could with so much ice on the roads. So, let me start off with that. The reason I wanted to talk to you tonight, though, was uh on your consent agenda, item F is a a detention pond for over $2 million. That has to be a heck of a detention pond because I can't imagine spending that kind of money to dig a hole. And you and since it's a detention pond, it doesn't even have to be lined to hold the water because you want the water to seep out and go back into the ground. So just really confused that we're spending that kind of money on this one project. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Leland. Thank you for bringing awareness to our frontline workers during the ice storm. Um, next we have Gretchen Balinski. Hello, my name is Gretchen Balashinski and I live at 1313 Blue Leaf Drive in Temple and uh today I really want to thank all of you. I was here a couple of weeks ago and we talked about um the struggle that senior citizen have to go through and you are very well aware of that and I just want to thank you for your quick action and uh and uh think of other possible facilities which are temporary home for us. I think Wilson center center it's a it's a good um good place for us to to kind of expand our classes and our social um um um area as well. So one more time thank you and I have just one question. Um, a couple of years ago, a year ago, I believe that city of Temple was talking about making this beautiful area a blue zone. And anything new on that subject I we would love to hear because that would be a beautiful marriage between the summons and and and and the blue zone because there is a lot of lot of us that pass our 80s and 90s and we still in a great shape physically and mentally. So thank you.

Thank you uh Larry Quick. Thank you very much. Uh my name is Larry Quick. I live on Oak Creek Drive in Temple, been a resident for nine years and have loved every minute of it except the first three or four years. Um, we very quickly fell into social patterns with our neighbors and people at church, but we just weren't making steady progress with the rest of the town and we felt left out. So, when we finally joined, got smart enough to join Salmons and that's what I'm here to give my support to them. Uh that worked wonders for us because for once my wife and I could go to two different things but at the same place. She could line dance and I could go use the computers and just all all along has been so helpful to us to have multiple things that are able to go on at the same time and get to meet people. And lo and behold after we've been in salmons for a couple years now I greet people at ATP and everywhere else. It it just is a great mixing pot. And so I echoed Gretchen's thoughts uh with the group is nervous at salmons. They don't know what's going on. And if you can picture 250 or 300 at a time of old seniors, they they kind of gossip. They kind of complain. They they don't know what's going on. And we're trying to help smooth that over. and and I echo your comments that uh you know it came out of the clear blue sky to us sitting in the exercise chairs that wow we're going to get invited to the Wilson Rec Center which made sense to us because it's got

pockets that people can do more than one thing at a time but it's still not our neighborhood and uh you any of us that are speaking about salmons don't believe there's any place as good as salmons here in town so we We're we're pushing and hoping and praying that in the wisdom there's a way that this current salmon's facilities can be repaired, replaced, whatever. And we're here to help support that. So, what what would be really good is if I I know it's hard to pin dates on things, but it would be really helpful for us to say first of all, the council is planning on doing this and we're not going to throw you out of the Salmon's neighborhood. And secondly, we'd like to have a rough idea of the timeline on planning and then the timeline on renovation because my suspicion is it's two years um to get all that planning done and a big project done. So, and and we'd like to just kind of talk quietly to the people at Sammons and sorry and let them know that hey, just be patient. It's coming through and it'll be fine. I thank you for your attention. Um, and hopefully we'll have an update, I think, by the next council meeting. Does that sound right? So, we'll we'll be able to give you more information then.

Yes. Uh, Gloria Bell, I really don't need to speak. Just say ditto speakers. That's all. Okay. All right. Thank you. Appreciate that. Right. Pass these down, Carl. All right. Um, all right. We're going to continue on to reports. Receive an annual report from Tim Temple Economic Development Corporation. Mr. Candidate, welcome. [snorts]

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tim Council. So good to be before you as per usual annually we uh come before you to talk about our partnership in economic development and all that we're working on as a community to grow opportunities for our citizenry as well as revenues for the city as we go forward. I think I have a presentation that will be brought up. That's okay. Um, one of the things that I will say while we're waiting on that presentation to come up is, uh, it truly is a pleasure to work with the city of Temple, work on behalf of the city of Temple. We do not take lightly at the Economic Development Corporation uh the great responsibility we have and the great opportunity we have to be lead ambassadors for our community as we go out to the business world domestically and as you'll see also internationally uh to promote uh the city of Temple as a place by which to do business and to bring capital investment in new jobs. Uh just as a quick reminder uh we're a private not for-profit corporation. We're a small team uh but uh we take a lot of pride in what we do and you can see some of the faces related to our efforts in economic development on behalf of the city of Temple. And one of the things as we think about uh the partnership uh that I really do appreciate uh the foresightedness of uh past leadership to bring uh the city in to our boardroom table and uh to have you here and provide appropriate oversight for all that is going on with respect to our economic development efforts. Of course, Mayor Pro Tim, you sit on our board, our city manager sits on our board and our executive committee as well as our mayor. And we really do appreciate that partnership because we know that ultimately if we have great success in uh folks having interest in bringing investment uh and jobs here to our community to create new opportunities, we're going to need you all to provide those services uh to support those businesses. So, we appreciate your participation there. You know, our mission is quite simple in vision. We want to bring new investment and jobs here and we also want to try to retain the jobs and investment we have

here and look for opportunities to grow it and we want to do it with absolute excellence. And as you uh take a look at ever our contract with uh you all it's all about increasing tax base uh in economic development we say uh there's a couple of ways which you can bring and and raise revenue in the community. One is to increase taxes. I don't think any one of us wants to do that. Uh but the other part is to uh increase the number of participators into the tax base. And so that's a critical part of the value that we bring uh to the community and partnership with you all. Uh and we've had quite a bit of success just over the last year. There's been 8% increase uh over the last fiscal year in taxable valuation across the city of Temple altogether. But in our reinvestment zone, which is primarily our industrial park, uh we've seen 177% increase in tax base, not taxes, but tax base. Taxpayers paying in, new taxpayers paying in uh to our industrial park from all the growth in our industrial park. And really, that doesn't happen overnight. That happens over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years of commitment to economic development and watching those existing companies grow over time. We'll talk a little bit about that later on in our slide presentation. And then also sales tax revenue is a big part of revenues to the uh city. All of that industrial tourism is what I like to call it uh has in increased sales taxes for all the construction going on and the restaurants that they're dining at and so forth. And so we've seen some success there. Uh as we think about our community, job growth is a big part as I mentioned. Uh 6,000 new jobs over the last five years. again projects that we've worked on and then also total jobs in Temple uh have grown uh and the average wage has grown quite a bit. Some of that is due to market demands for employees but some of that is because of an actual um focus on trying to bring

high wage employers into our particular area as we think uh larger about a growing temple. I think everybody uh can speak to I heard a gentleman talk about nine years ago he moved here. Nine years ago he moved here. I moved here seven years ago. Uh and it used to take me about 10 minutes to get to the office. Now it takes me about 20 minutes to get to the office. So that's part of uh the consequence of of a growing community. Uh but we've seen tremendous population growth in our community. We're right at 100,000 people uh as reported by a lot of uh data uh sites. And I would say that if you were to look inside the the real numbers, we're probably well over that 100,000 at this point. 103 105,000. You can see demographers who've actually been on the ground, looked at zip code analysis, look at cell phone analysis says we've actually, you know, uh reached that plus 100,000 plus uh watermark. So that is significant for a community. What we see in economic development when the community starts to reach about 120 125,000 people, you start to see critical mass. We talk about retail services, entertainment, all those things that bring significant amidity to a community. So, we're pretty excited about that. You know, I mentioned uh we're essentially a marketing entity. You all know that. And for the community to understand, we take our job seriously. Uh and so, we approach our marketing efforts really aggressively. We have a dedicated role. Our VP handles all of our business development activities. And this is just a list of some of the places we've been uh around the country and even abroad. Uh last year we uh remarked in our annual report that uh we brought in a new Korean steel company project. Uh that project looks to be opening their doors around May June time frame. Uh but what we've seen is tremendous interest out of that market into our community. And so uh myself and a delegation of temple uh uh leaders include the mayor had an opportunity to reach a lot of those folks in Korea and Asia as well through our marketing efforts but you can see we're quite

active throughout the year uh when you look at our website. And so one of the ways that we uh attract folks to our area is not only businessto business, personto person uh but also through digital marketing efforts. So you can see the increase in website visits over the last year uh and how that's grown as well. Some of the successes I'll whip through uh quite uh uh quickly, but over the last year we've announced over $1.3 billion dollars of new projects. It's new projects that have come in to uh the city of Temple or decided uh to continue to grow in the city of Temple and the creation of 94 new jobs. Uh to no surprise, a lot of that has been in the data center industry. Right now uh we have sites available for that. We have infrastructure available for that. And one uh which is under construction now is a 80 million data center $80 million investment in a data center an edge computing data center about 60,000 square feet that will bring a few new jobs. And one of the things that we see in this particular industry those wages are really high for our community. 100,000 plus in average annual wage for a lot of these positions that work in these facilities. So we're excited about this project that's underway and under construction off of Everheart Road. Uh Encore uh has been a wonderful uh supporter and partner in our community. They uh we're taking a look at uh developing a new regional service facility to serve the area. Uh they actually have a a presence here in the community in their regional service facility, but it's quite antiquated. It's quite old. Uh and so they were looking at options all across the region to potentially move outside of even the city of Temple. We were uh had an opportunity to bring that project home and they'll start construction here probably in the next 3 to four months uh on their particular facility, $13 million capital investment in those retain jobs. Uh there's been a lot of conversations about Rowan and what they're doing. They're well underway and moving forward with their project. $700 million of investment uh related there too. Uh and then Meta continues to grow in our committee. We know about their initial project. It's very close to

getting off the ground as far as a standpoint of opening those doors and and getting all of those servers uh uh uh hooked up. Uh but they've also committed an additional $500 million of capital investment uh into their current site in our community. So, we're pretty excited about that. All in all, want to give you a quick snapshot of our project pipeline uh by industry. Uh it's a pretty diverse pipeline, but you can see a lot of it is still based in manufacturing. As Texas continues to grow, right around 30 million plus in population as we continue uh to bring uh new industries and new companies in significant companies, that's bringing a supplier base to uh the state of Texas and an opportunity to attract those suppliers. So in the last year, we worked about 66 projects. When I say work, we submitted RFIs for projects that we actually uh uh felt like we qualified for and some of them are various due diligence stages of evaluating our proposals in conversations with city staff as well as uh the EDC staff. Uh and you see that breakout by industry. Uh data centers is a big part, food service, health and bioscience is also shown up on the radar and of course distribution and logistics makes a lot of sense uh because of our location. As I turn the page, and I just have a few more slides. I don't want to be too long-winded. Uh, as we turn the page on our business engagement effort, we've always had an existing industry program that goes uh out to our industrial park, visits with our local industry, make sure that they're well taken care of by us as as a uh as a facilitator of of resources, but also the city of Temple on you all's behalf to find out uh is this still a good place to do business. And I could tell you uh the feedback has been phenomenal. In economic development, we say in any given year, uh, and this is really across the United States, about 60% of new investment in new jobs created in any given year are created from homegrown community or homegrown businesses or I say homegrown, but businesses that are already situated

in a community. And so, we've actually seen that quite a bit uh as we visited with uh some of our local industry. We connected with over 35 employers. Uh also hosted industry tours for 100 plus community leaders as we went out and hear uh about what all is going on in our industrial park. It is amazing uh when you see how many lives are touched by all the employees that are in our industrial park and we're making products that are shipped not only across the United States but around the world. And one of the things that we really wanted to hone in on is there's so many legacy businesses who've been here 30, 40, 50, 60 years. We were just with the CEO of Wilson Art uh uh yesterday in a meeting uh and they're going to be celebrating 70 years in this community. We think about what that industry, what that community or what that business has meant to this community with Ralph Wilson Youth Club and all of the investment and all the philanthropy that they've made in our community over 70 years. uh this year will be a big celebration year for them and we'll be partnering with them and inviting our council members as well to participate in that. But we've we've uh been able to highlight a couple of businesses already through uh articles and we intend on highlighting more as we go along. What industry leaders are saying just a couple of insights. Uh the tariffs have been all the rage and conversation. Folks said they're moni they're monitoring that uh changing dynamic and they're optimizing their supply chains to accommodate for that. Uh and there's a lot of conversation around AI. What does that really mean? Is it going to replace jobs? Uh what we have heard from our industry is it's going to be a big part of making sure that uh uh plants and uh manufacturing uh facilities can run at peak efficiency. Uh and it will also offer an opportunity because of the skill sets running those automated equipment in those manufacturing positions. The wage uh will come up because the skill sets will be more demanding as we go forward. I mentioned local employer growth. Uh we have a existing pallet manufacturing

company that just opened up their new facility, 60,000 square feet that they uh uh constructed off of Wilson Art Drive in our industrial park in September. Uh East Pin, when we uh uh looked at uh or we did bring that project uh into the community in the way of a new investment on a green field opportunity, it's $106 million of investment. They talked about 250 jobs being created in that facility. They're now up to almost 400 jobs at that current facility right now. And so they continue to provide opportunities uh for our citizens uh to earn a living wage uh and to have pride in what they do. The story of HB goes on and on. 1,700 plus employees when they open that fac that facility. They started with about 200 to 300 employees. Now 1,700 plus employees at that facility. they continue to grow and Polar Beverages has brought $30 million of investment uh since 2021. So, uh a lot of growth happening in our community, a lot of it because of the hard work of the council and the staff. You know, I see faces Tracy and David and Kathy and there's a team and an army of city personnel behind them that are supporting our economic development initiatives and supporting the future of this community. Uh it is really uh easy for communities who uh in in in uh administrations of of municipalities to get bogged down on just keeping up with the day-to-day. Uh and we have a gradea high level team at the city uh in the staff that really not only takes care of the day-to-day supports our citizenry and making sure that those uh roads get deiced and uh the water continues to flow through those pipes, but also takes care of the community's future. So, we thank you for the partnership, Mayor Pro Tim and Council.

Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. We appreciate your your partnership with us and the great work that you're doing on behalf of the city of Temple. Thank you for coming today. Thank you.

All right. Now, we're going to move on to the consent agenda. All items listed under this section are considered to be routine by the city council and may be enacted by one motion. If discussion is desired by the council, any item may be removed from the consent agenda at the request of any council member and will be considered separately. So council, this is a consent consent agenda items 4 A through 4X less item 4F because we were pulling that for a separate vote. Um are there any additional questions that y'all have? Anything else that need to be removed besides 4 F? Nope. Okay. If not, I'll entertain a motion to approve the consent and a good that's a tough one to say. Consent agenda items 4 A through 4X

minus F. I'll move to approve the consent agenda items 4 A through 4X minus F. Second.

Okay, we have a motion by Council Member Pilington, a second by Council Member Kirkindall. Please cast your votes. The consent agenda items uh 4 A through 4X moves forward with uh four votes. Yes. Let's see. Now we need to go back to item 4 F. Let me read that in. Item 4F is to consider adopting a resolution authorizing a construction contract with RT Schneider Construction Company of Belton, Texas for the construction of the Friars Creek Detention Pond project in the estimated amount of 2,156,790.90. Someone like to make a motion. I'll second.

Okay, we have a motion to approve by council member Grant and a second by Council Member Kirkindall. Please cast your votes. It passes. Three votes, yes and one abstension. All right, on to the regular agenda. I've got lots of papers here. Give me one second. All right, here we go. [clears throat]

There is more to it than just building a detention pond. It's called the detention pond project, but it covers a a very large area with a lot of drainage work throughout the area, a lot of engineering. It is much more than just simply building a detention b pond. It includes all of the ancillary work to get to that point. Just wanted to point that out.

Okay. On to the irregular agenda. Um item number five is a first reading a public hearing. Consider adopting an ordinance authorizing the voluntary annexation of 212.121 plus or minus acres located in the city of Temples, ETJ, Bell County, Texas. Described as parcels 63668, 63670, 70517, 73794, 949225, 91503,10008, 418-579, 418580, 418581, 418582, 546468, and 526469. N Miss Strickland.

Good evening, Pro Tim Walker, members of the council and city staff. I think maybe second longest legal description. [laughter]

So, this is before you for a first reading this evening um and second reading on February 19th. There's a few owners of a variety of parcels that are here for voluntary annexation. As you can see on the vicinity map on the left, um so it does span a little bit of um off of Lraine Avenue and Bob White as well as FM 3117. Um this is located in the northeast section of Temple. Um that's just kind of a hop, skip, and a jump from Loop 363. Uh so this is intended for the industrial uh development of um the Synergy Park um expansion. Um and this is just coming before you for voluntary annexation and all the utilities and everything will be determined at the platting stage. And the um MSA was uh sorry uh was sent by certified mail um on January 21st and accepted by all of the appropriate entities. Uh so we uh it wasn't on January 21st and then officially and formally adopt or accepted on January 22nd. Uh so the MSA um will provide services um at the time available um when they become available through the annexation process and water and wastewater again will be determined at the platting stage. There will be a subsequent resoning case um and an sorry a resoning case and plat that will follow the annexation. because staff does recommend approval of the voluntary annexation and I'm happy to answer any questions should you have any.

Any questions for Mr. Strickland? All right, then I'm going to go ahead and open the public hearing. Um, anyone wishing to speak on this matter may do so. Please step to the podium or raise your hand on the virtual platform and state your name for the record. Would anyone like to speak? Nope. going once. Okay, there being [clears throat] no further discussion, I'm going to close the public hearing and I'll ask council if they have any more questions. I'm assuming you do not since you didn't before. And um I will entertain a motion on item number five. [laughter]

Do I get that? Yes.

Okay. So, Council Member Kring made the motion. Council member Grant second it. Right. Please cast your votes. Okay. The item passes four votes to zero. On to the next one. This is a first reading and public hearing considering adoption of an ordinance authorizing the voluntary annexation of 1.63 plus or minus acres of land located in the city of Temples ETJ Bell County, Texas, a portion of Witter Lane adjacent to property ID 532805 to the intersection of Forester Road. Miss Strickland again.

Uh good evening again. So this one is just a little bit of cleanup annexation. Um, it was brought forward to us with a an intended reszoning case that but the west of Whitlane. That reszoning request is currently on hold. They're looking at making a couple of changes, but originally when these parcels were annexed in, Witter Lane wasn't part of that. So, this is just cleanup. Witter Lane is a a substandard road and we would like to um make sure that the city has maintenance um oversight over this road and when and if it it needs to be expanded or improved, we we have the ability to do that. Um so this did go to the Bell County Commissioner's Court and um it is they they released it so it's now ours. Uh so it's just the annexation for that that road network and it goes down to Forester Lane. And that way we just have a clear delineation of like what's our responsibility versus what the county where the county's responsibility for road maintenance will will start. Uh so this uh again nurse was sent by certified mail January 6th and um was also the MSA was accepted on January 6th as well. So it's just here before you for approval and it's just for the the right of way. the the parcel itself is already within the city limits and it'll be followed up with a a zoning case that's just currently on hold like I said and staff does recommend approval for the road annexation and I'm happy to answer any questions

questions okay I'm going to go ahead and open up the public hearing uh anyone wishing to speak on this matter may do so please step forward to the podium or raise your hand on the virtual platform state your name for the record anyone driven down witter It's pretty bad. It's going to be good things. Okay. There being no further discussion, I will close the public hearing. Um, council again. I move to approve as amended. All right. [snorts] All right. Motion by council member Pilington, second by council member Grant. Please cast your vote.

And it passes. Four votes. Yes. All right. Our last item is um a first reading and public hearing. Consider adopting an ordinance amending chapter 28 police article 3 burglar alarm system to conform with the city's contract with PMAM a full service alarm management program. Miss Rodriguez or Chief Tustin.

In October of last year, the um police department entered into a contract with PMA Corporate Corporation, which is a fullervice alarm management program. And now we need to update just a couple of um portions of our ordinance in order to bring it into compliance with the terms of our contract. Specifically, um, these changes will eliminate alarm renewal fees for citizens over 65 years of age and adds a $3 convenience fee for citizens or businesses that elect to pay their renewal fees online via credit card or debit card.

Tim Walker, what she said. So, [laughter] that's exactly what what I would have presented. It's just two amendments, the $3 uh convenience fee and also the waiver of the uh fee altogether for citizens who are 65 or older. And staff recommends approval. Sorry. Sorry. [laughter] Okay, now you heard it twice. All right, good to know.

Okay, but it is a public hearing. So, at this time, I will open the public hearing on item number seven. Again, anyone wishing to speak on this matter may do so. Please step up to the podium. Mr. Lidle, state your name. Um, for the record, my name is Alan Lidle. I live here in Temple and I have an alarm system and I messed up. I went and paid for it today. So, apparently I should have waited in a week and then I wouldn't have to pay. Right. Okay. But for the other people who aren't quite as old as I am, will they still be able to go to the police department and make payment whether or they're going to have to do online credit card stuff instead?

Yeah, we'll still be able to take payment at the police department if you choose to do that. Okay. Obviously, I won't, but [laughter] thank you very much. Already done it. Oh, do I get my 15 bucks back? We'll talk about it. Okay. Anyone else wishing to speak? Nope. Okay. So, um I will go ahead and close the public hearing and ask council if y'all have any questions for Nan or Kathy or Teith or Allan. Nope. All right. Um then I'm gonna entertain a motion on item number seven.

Okay. Motion by council member Grant. Second by council member Pilkington. Please cast your vote. Item is approved. Four votes to zero. That is it. Thank you guys so much for attending today. It is 5:40 and we're going to journ this meeting.