City Council Preview – November 5, 2013
Before highlighting tonight’s council meeting, realize today is election day. There are a series of constitutional amendments on the ballot and one very important bond package for Denton ISD. However you vote on these issues, get out and vote today if you haven’t already. I am a strong supporter of the Denton ISD Bond initiative and would encourage you to vote YES on this item with very real local impact. Go here for more information on that along with info about polling places today.
The City Council will meet on Tuesday, November 5, 2013 at 3pm for a Work Session, followed by a 6:30pm Regular Session at City Hall at 215 E. McKinney Street. Click here for the entire agenda and backup information. The following are some items you might be interested in…
CITY BOND ELECTION – NOV 2014
The council has given direction to move forward with pursuit of a city-wide bond package to place before the voters in November 2014. The city staff has already provided a list of needed and desired projects to the tune of about $300 million over the next 10 years. To help the council prioritize these and other projects, determine a reasonable total amount of the bond package, and engage the community on this important project, the council will be putting together a 50 person bond committee to serve this coming Spring and Summer.
- Go here for more information about the bond program and process. - Want to serve on the Bond Committee? Go here to apply and then let me know.
- Have an idea for a project you’d like to see considered? Go here to submit it.
TRANSPORTATION USER FEES – FIXING OUR STREETS
A 2009 study on the condition of our streets indicated that our streets were bad and quickly getting worse. It is estimated that we need to be spending $12.2 million annually to stop this decline. In other words, $12.2 million is needed to maintain the status quo. We need to be spending significantly more than that to begin to see our overall street condition improve. We’ve made some changes over the last few years that has increased our annual investment in road maintenance and road reconstruction, but we are still heavily relying on debt financing to fix this problem (last November, for instance, voters passed a $20 million bond package dedicated to street reconstruction projects).
Transportation User Fees, or Street Maintenance Fees, are a way to increase revenue for street projects by charging monthly fees to utility customers. This tends to change the way we view our use of city-owned streets – they become a sort of “utility” that requires constant maintenance. Just as we pay monthly for other sorts of utilities involving costly infrastructure, a monthly user fee would be our way of paying for the cost of streets.
If council chooses to go this route, there would likely be a set fee for single family customers, multi-family customers, and various designations of commercial customers (depending on their determined “trip generation”). To give some context, a single family customer in Denton could pay anywhere from $5-10 a month for this fee ($60-120 per year). We’ll be looking into this some more during today’s meeting.
As always. please let me know if you have thoughts or questions.