Trees and Parks Board - Regular Meeting

All right, I'm calling to order this regular Trees and Parks board meeting as your afternoon chair temporarily on June 17, 2026 at 4 30 p.m. We will have a roll call to established forum.

Moira Martin.

Here.

Carly Camp.

Here.

Thank you. Uh, Joseph and Sandra London. Here.

Good. We have a call.

Thanks.

I was making sure I got everybody's name right because usually there's nameplates, and so I can better look at the nameplates. We'll move into the consent agenda, and I realize that you all were not present for that meeting, so this is somewhat of a formality. What we would need is a motion to approve the consent in a second.

I motion to approve the consent.

Second. Thank you, and we'll hold the vote. All in favor, raise your hand and say aye. Aye. All four ayes, carry it. I don't have a formal report from y'all. Just thank y'all for being willing to participate in your local government. Y'all are on the most fun board, so I anticipate a lot of good things and fun times for y'all. You see our regular agenda there, and then we'll talk about the considerations for future items at the end. Yes. Are all of us new to this board? Yes.

Okay. Awesome.

Yes.

I feel like we've crossed paths. I think so. I recognize your name.

Justin is a master naturalist, right? Her husband is a master naturalist. All right, well, we'll move into your regular agenda. So this is discuss and take possible action to elect officers of the trees and parks board. So essentially you need a chair, which does what I am doing right now. And then a vice chair who would fill in for that role should the chair be absent. And there aren't a lot of other duties other than just working with us on getting your agenda set. Just motion to nominate someone. As the chair and vice chair, someone can also volunteer. I'm not allowed in general. As the chair? Yes.

With the work situation being what it is, I just am hesitant to take on a big leadership role, but I'll try to be as helpful and I would second that.

Well, thank you.

I will say, this is my first board that I'm currently on. Well, thank you. Yeah, obviously. Yeah.

So if a true league is...

I was going to say, he did not walk through on the screen. No? Why does that turn on? That is strange. He's been in a need all day. So if it truly is just working with them to set the agenda, I can take on that.

And I do most of the work for the agenda, then I just sit and I'm like, does this look okay? Yes or no?

That's fantastic. Okay.

And as the primary goal is just running a meeting. All right, we'll go ahead and have a vote on the chair of Jill Cooper. All in favor say aye. Aye. And then we need a vice chair to fill in should Jill be ousting one day.

Do we have one?

Okay. Great. Carly nominates Sandy, right? Moira. No, but Sandy. So you go by Sandy, right?

Okay.

Sandy's second to Moira as the vice chair. Because your application said Sandra, didn't it?

I don't know. My name is spelled all kinds of ways.

Great. Sorry if we messed that up. all right um all in favor of moira serving as the vice chair please raise your hand and say hi hi hi all for i takes it um and then our ordinance says that you guys can elect your own city secretary but that's kind of an old habit we had from a previous staff situation but our current city secretary is more than happy to serve as a city secretary and um it's actually more efficient that way so we're not taking you know three times so you don't have homework either after there's a motion to prepare And Carrie is our official secretary for this meeting. Thank you. Yay. Well, next we're moving to discussing and taking an action to set your date and time. A vote. Oh, sorry. Voting to approve. Carrie is the city secretary. All in favor raise your hand and say aye.

Aye.

Okay. All ayes. And now I'll go to the date and time.

The only challenge for me is I'm in Austin all day Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, you know, Wednesdays were great, but we can't do Wednesdays.

You can just ideally not the third Wednesday then.

Well, okay. Third. I can't do Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Okay, good. All right. So you can't do Tuesdays, Thursdays. So Wednesdays, just a different Wednesday. First Wednesday of the month. First Wednesday of the month at what time? 4.30? I like that. Okay. So who made the motion to make running the motion I second. And we can change that.

Yes, you just have to pull them up. Yeah. And that would be something like the end of each meeting double check to make sure.

If you needed to, basically before we set a new meeting agenda, if it was turning out that like Carly's job was like absolutely not on that time frame, then we would just put it on the agenda again and you revote. The reason why it's important is because of transparency for the public that they know when to expect these meetings. Also, when you hold a meeting that's not your regular meeting, you actually have to have a supermajority vote, which is rarely an issue on a board like this, but it just changes the most of it.

Also, it could be during the, like in the morning, too, if they wanted to.

You could. You could choose that. I mean, kind of a lot of jobs doing well.

Thank you for being here. We're about to start that other meeting. You can have a seat wherever you want. Okay. All right. So are you still good with that date and time? All in favor of first Wednesday at 4.30, raise your hand and say aye. Aye. All right. Last little items. So you all have some pending business. The main, most important thing you all can work on for us is the Parks Master Plan. So this is kind of a review of what exists, suggesting updates to it, and then kind of like a long-term projection for parks in the City of Hood Creek. And we'll work on that in a future meeting. The other thing Council has sent to you is a consideration for a bulletin board to be installed at the Triangle Park. It's coming directly from them as a package, although you all in your report back will be able to make adjustments if you think they should be installed somewhere else or not installed. You would just make a recommendation to Council. And the only other real random, it's not on here, but a random kind of pending business item is there's been discussions of like a dog park in the city. So it was supposed to be taken up by a previous parks board and it just never made it on. So kind of in cleaning up pending business, it, you know, red flagged for me. I was like, okay. sent this to prex twice and it's never been discussed so even if the discussion is as simple as we don't need a dog park is good for wood creek or you know a lot needs to be purchased yeah we'll discuss that in a different meeting at a different time and then we'll come on your agenda i am your current liaison that might change you don't have a staff member serving that role that doesn't mean i go anywhere it just means that as a volunteer and unpaid i won't have as much work for myself. Do you all have anything you wish to be considered at this time? I know you're new, so you might not already be in that front.

Becky Denton, you told me about something, and it's probably hit me now.

So yeah it's the rfp yes yeah yeah so we posted an rfp for landscape maintenance and like kind of like a specialty gardener for our parks. So we'll get those proposals in and then Council will select someone and so basically we're just allocating for a specific contract service to help serve in that capacity, because we have a landscape or we have a land management company. And we have an arborist company, but we don't have somebody to help manage the actual gardens, right? So we've got people mowing and hacking stuff up, but we need people who can do it. So that's a door.

Okay. I do have a retroactive question. I've got point one. Where can we find the most current updated person? Is that the one that's been emailed to us?

Yeah. And I'll send an email to everybody again.

Okay. Thank you.

I don't know what you're talking about.

It's the security cameras. Council elected to go ahead and solve cameras. We have some weird vandalism in our parks and like actually truly strange stuff. So these are not... they're basically they're not constantly monitored if that makes sense it's in the event of an incident we have now a way to kind of check and see who was there what were they doing and how did this happen and they're being installed at all the city on properties we've had them at city hall for like 20 years but yeah we didn't have to agree yeah we installed a lot of really extensive assets so it's just a kind of a deterrent hopefully too more than anything yeah all right any other questions or announcements

Has there ever been any volunteers? I don't know.

We have been relying on volunteers. Volunteers are amazing. They have installed most of this stuff, to be honest, everywhere. They hang up with any volunteer, not to speak of anyone in particular, but we come into service and we need support. and so we've had a few we've been very lucky to have some consistently do that work for like 10 plus years like jane little but others just sort of want a break and one of the things i've been really committed to and something that our city administrative consultant we have hired mike bay's career professionals they talk about getting things out of volunteer hands and into paid staff hands because it helps with the longevity of things the longevity of programs so in this case I think in this case in particular one of the ways you can best preserve all of this and make sure it's maintained is actually to have a professional and the cost of the city is a little bit but know to kind of rely on volunteers and the change of volunteers kind of creates like a bumpy and inconsistent you know then one volunteer comes in and they're like i hate those bushes and another volunteer is like i installed all those bushes so it seems better yeah so it's coded another thing yep so and then stuff gets installed and then nobody ever hears from those people again sometimes so it's like now we have the same the maintenance and we don't know how to do it so um yeah so it's just kind of a way to keep programs running it's this month okay and and not dependent on any one person in a way you know what I mean because the contract service the city reflects and renews and it's you know kind of this like eventual recycling versus you know Sweet Becky did all that work and she would like to take a little bit of a break but without her doing it there's no way of picking it up so yeah yeah all right y'all we're gonna have a motion to adjourn at 4 45. And if you're sure, Jill, you will do what I just did. Awesome.