Open Data in Denton – Putting Government in the Hands of the Citizens
Cities around the nation are fueling innovation both within and outside of City Hall by unlocking city data and making it accessible to citizens. What do they do with it? Whatever they find useful, of service to others, or even profitable for them.
We are all aware of some examples of government open data and the services and businesses that have been created around it: Global Positioning System (GPS), National Weather Service data, local crime data, street and building data, public transportation data, and the like.
Cities are starting to get into this game and joining the Open Data movement, or Gov 2.0. Check out what has come about as a result in these select cities:
Austin
Chicago
Boston
San Francisco
Having two major universities, ranking 6th in the nation for high-tech jobs, and fostering a growing and engaged creative class, Denton is ripe for the power and possibilities that would come with opening up our data. You might recall a hackathon I hosted at my house last Spring which resulted in the creation of VoteDenton.org – that serves as a great example of what happens when you put government data into the hands of engaged citizens seeking innovative solutions to civic problems.
In my role as Chair of the Council Committee for Citizen Engagement, I’ve brought this concept up for council consideration. I recently presented the following overview of Open Data and why I think it is good for Denton. Read up and let me know what you think…
A Few Comments on the Eagle Ridge Lawsuit
Many of you now know that the city filed for a Temporary Restraining Order last week against Eagle Ridge Operating LLC to stop drilling operations on wells near Bonnie Brae and Vintage. You can read up on that case in the Denton Record-Chronicle. A hearing for a Temporary Injunction was scheduled for next Wednesday, October 30.
It is important to note that on Tuesday afternoon of this week, the city filed for “non-suit” in this case, effectively pulling out of the lawsuit. As such, there will be no hearing on this issue next Wednesday.
As news broke on Wednesday that the city had done this, understandable concern ensued from many people in the community who had been following this issue. Here’s what I can tell you:
I assure you that the city is fighting to preserve the integrity of the ordinance and the citizens and environment that ordinance is meant to protect.
The city initiated last week’s request for a Temporary Restraining Order because, as the legal documents made clear, we demand that all operators follow our laws. This continues to be our stance and Tuesday’s move to back-off this particular suit is not a retreat from that position.
Realize, however, that there is a bigger picture here of vested rights and a bunch of existing well sites out there where claims that our rules don’t apply will continue. Many of these sites happen to be in parts of the city where we anticipate some of the biggest population growth in the next 20 years. Check out Professor Adam Briggle’s brief article visualizing the drilling landscape in Denton and notice how many well sites exist in the Western part of the city. It is therefore imperative that we get this right and proceed prudently to set legal precedent in our favor.
As you saw from the judge’s initial rejection of our request for a Temporary Restraining Order, these issues are highly complex, legally speaking, and aren’t always as simple as “this is a clear violation of the law, now punish them.” We expect any successful legal strategy defending our ordinance will mean we have to be committed for the long haul.
The drilling that is occurring in that area is awful, given its proximity to homes and kids who play in their streets and yards. I urge all of us to temper our initial desire for quick justice in this instance with what is in the long-term interest of our community so as to make sure we are in the best position to defend our ordinance from here on out. I’m asking for patience and a bit of trust while we work to do this right and reorient our strategy to achieve the best possible outcome.
City Council Preview – October 1, 2013
Despite the dysfunction in Washington, your local city government continues to operate, pass balanced budgets every year, and get things done. As such, it’s time for another City Council meeting in beautiful Denton, Texas! Tuesday’s meeting begins with a Work Session at 3pm followed by a Regular Session at 6:30pm. Click here for the full agenda with backup materials. Here are a few items that might interest you…
POSSIBLE BAN ON USING MOBILE DEVICES WHILE DRIVING
The city’s Traffic Safety Commission recently recommended an ordinance making it against the law to use a mobile communication device while operating a motor vehicle. We will hear more about that recommendation, how other cities approach this issue, and so much more during this Work Session discussion. We are not voting on an ordinance, rather we are hearing the information and giving guidance on whether or not to proceed with exploring this possibility.
Have thoughts on this? There’s a great discussion taking place on my council Facebook page right now – join in.
I35 EXPRESS PROJECT UPDATE
As early as later October, construction on the I35 expansion is set to begin with an estimated end date in 2016. We will begin seeing work in Denton at some point this summer. The goal of this phase of the project within our city limits is to see an additional general purpose lane in both directions from the city line to the South all the way to US380 to the North.
Council we hear an update on the project and more information on how to stay current on all the upcoming changes. In the meantime, I’d encourage you all to head over to the DCTA website and begin acquainting yourself with the ins and outs of the A-Train. The mess of I35 these next couple of years will cause many people to reconsider their relationship with public transportation.
CONVENTION CENTER UPDATE
We’ll hear another update on a possible Convention Center project that has been in the works for some time. This has been a goal of the city, the university, and the business community for several year and the issue has been a source of contention in recent city council elections, with those advocating for it being elected each time. As we get closer to a possible agreement, council will continue to vet the terms of any such agreement to make sure the city is not only well protected, but that such a project brings the city many benefits.
VALET PARKING IN DENTON?
Because Queenie’s Steakhouse (formerly the Love Shack) in downtown is interested in running a valet stand outside their restaurant, the city is having to look at its policies in this regard. We’ll be hearing about suggested ordinances.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel to let me know!
City Council Preview – September 17, 2013
Tuesday’s Denton City Council meeting begins with a Work Session at 3pm followed by a Regular Session at 6:30pm at City Hall on McKinney Street. Go here to see the full agenda with complete backup material.
Here are some items that might interest you…
ADOPTION OF 2013-2014 BUDGET
After a couple months of discussions, it seems we are now set to adopt the budget for the next fiscal year. This city’s budget is set at $825.4 million for this year and the city is made up of 1450 employees. Only $99 million of that is considered “general fund,” meaning it gets its revenue from the typical sources of property and sales tax. The rest is made up of a bunch of other funds due largely to the fact that we are a full-service city and provide things like electricity to the city.
While I feel confident the city is in good financial shape, I’m concerned about our outlook moving forward. We continue to have major infrastructure needs – this is most clearly seen in the condition of our roads. We are addressing this with more funding this year and are set to pursue other new paths to raise revenue for it throughout this year. But we have yet to get us to a point beyond just NOT declining in the overall condition of our streets.
I’m also concerned at what appears to be a stagnation of our revenue growth. The housing market has stabilized, but we are seeing only modest growth in property tax revenue. Sales taxes revenue this far for FY 2012-13 are only .93% higher than FY 2011-12 and less than what was predicted or budgeted. This combined with predicted growth needs of the city (beyond the growth of the current revenue) and our five year projections includes the assumption of a tax increase for the next fiscal year. That is not a great place to be in considering we are moving forward with economic recovery and considering that other cities in our region are able to experience much more significant growth in their revenue streams.
This is part of the reasons why I have advocated additional investment in economic development resources heading into this next fiscal year. And this is why I have advocated approaches to this that are a bit different than what we typically pursue as a city. We can’t simply bring in more box stores to up sales tax and bank on the next major industrial corporation to relocate here to up property tax. We need to begin the long, yet healthier process of building our economy from within. This means ramping up our efforts of fostering entrepreneurship, targeting industries such as high tech that better matches the skills of our workforce (and allows us to retain more of our smart college graduates), innovative approaches to building out brand as the startup capital of North Texas by ensuring our creative downtown has the fasted speed Internet in DFW and creating a downtown Innovation District, and tackling the growing gap between the rich and the poor on Denton. We can’t celebrate our prosperity when 1 in 2 school children in Denton qualify for free or reduced lunches. We can do better and it will involve innovative approaches and innovative leadership moving forward.
In the meantime, here’s where you can find everything you ever wanted to know about the budget we will be voting to approve Tuesday.
BETTER BLOCK IN DENTON?
Several of you came out to the late August info meeting about the Better Block project. Click here to catch up on that. The entire council will hear more about the project, what it could do for Denton, and some of your ideas from that info meeting. We will be giving direction on whether or not to pursue this for Denton. Here’s why this is a great idea…
CONVENTION CENTER UPDATE
It has been a while, but the city is still working on a possible partnership between us, UNT, and a private hotelier to develop a hotel and convention center on the site of the old Radisson near Apogee Stadium. We’ll get an update on the project.
REORGANIZATION OF PLANNING DEPARTMENT
The city’s Planning Department is set to brief us on a new organizational structure it hopes to unveil. It will create two distinct groups: Neighborhood Services and Development Services. This is meant to tackle the “silo effect” found in many large institutions and encourage an interdisciplinary approach to community building, problem solving, and customer service. From the looks of it, we are heading in the right direction.
Downtown Vehicle and Pedestrian Safety Report
In July, after meeting with the recently formed Denton Downtowners (an association of downtown residents) and a couple of unfortunate accidents around the square, I requested a report on traffic issues in the area along with an analysis of possible solutions to make the area safer for the many people who visit and walk around on foot.
The report was released last Friday – you can read it here.
City Council Preview – September 10, 2013
Today’s Denton City Council meeting begins at 2pm with a Work Session, followed by a 6:30pm Regular Session – all at City Hall on 215 E. McKinney Street. Go here to see the full agenda complete with back-up information. Here are some items that might be of interest to you…
Hickory Grand Street Project
You will soon see work beginning on a project to better the streetscape along E Hickory between the train station and the downtown square. In fact, you have already seen improvements between Bell and the train station, including the addition and widening of side walks, street trees, cross walk enhancements, landscaping, and public art. Click here to see a recent presentation detailing the plan. Council will get a chance to chime in on these plans prior to final designs being submitted and the project beginning.
Road Impact Fees
The condition of our streets has been a major concern of the citizens for several years. During this budget cycle, we have been exploring new avenues of generating revenue to help us with street repairs, street reconstruction, new streets, and the widening of existing streets. Two suggestions that have arisen as part of this process are Street User Fees and Road Impact Fees. Street User Fees would collect a regular fee, attached to their utility bill, from people residing in the city in order to raise additional funds to repair and reconstruct our existing roads. Road Impact Fees are meant to encourage “growth paying for growth” by adding fees to development projects that impact traffic flows to and from that new development. The fees collected would be used within the development’s geographical zone in order to increase capacity to roads already identified as Capital Improvement Projects by the city. We’ll be discussing whether or not to head in this direction.
Continued Discussion on the 2013-2014 Budget
We are a week away from formally adopting the budget for the next fiscal year after months of discussion. Go here to see a previous post I did on the budget to learn more.
City Council Preview – August 13, 2013
My family is growing – little Pearl Elizabeth (center) was born on July 15. She’s enjoying a morning reading of “Go, Dog, Go” with her big brother Francis and her big sister Rosemary.
Council will meet for a 2nd Tuesday Session at 3pm at City Hall. Such sessions typically involve only Work Session items and we will be taking no official action during the meeting. Nonetheless, we will be providing “direction” to the city staff on some very significant issues. You can find the full agenda here along with 220 page of background reading for your late Monday evening, early Tuesday morning local government reading time.
Wanna impress your friends and coworkers with your knowledge of city government? Then brush up on this…
MUNICIPAL SETTING DESIGNATION
One of the barriers to redevelopment in older parts of the city is the required environmental remediation that must be done per Texas law. If you think about the multiple uses that have occurred over the years on any given property in the greater downtown area, the possibility of necessary environmental clean-up are great. The use of a property as a gas station or an industrial shop at some point in the past will typically involve significant deposits of bad stuff into the ground below. Texas’ TCEQ is rightfully concerned about the safety of the ground water below and one of the typical requirements is getting the property and the ground water below back up to safe, potable standards.
In areas where it is unlikely that the ground water will be accessed for drinking purposes presently or in the future, Texas has made a provision whereby a city can declare a certain area with a Municipal Setting Designation – designating the water below as undrinkable and thus lowering the requirements for remediation up to that level. As an example – imagine the lot across from Oak Street Draft House is purchased and redeveloped into first floor retail shops with some apartments above. It is very unlikely that the owner of that property will ever opt to tap into the groundwater below for the purpose of providing drinking water to these tenants. We will look at the options of pursuing this designation for a certain part of downtown so as to lower the costs of redevelopment.
HOW TO FIX OUR STREETS?
The city has been aggressively upping our funding of street repairs and reconstruction in the last few years. You might recall the voters approved a $20 million bond package last November that is dedicated to reconstructing streets beyond repair. We are making progress, but here’s the problem: Continuing on the path we are on will only result in the “stabilization” of our streets’ Overall Condition Index (a fancy engineering phrase for an objective analysis of a given street’s condition) to 2009 levels by FY 2017-18.
Let’s be clear about what this means: The streets were in pretty poor condition in 2009 and things have been getting worse each year since then. Continuing on the present funding path, all we will be doing is getting us to the point where the poor conditions of 2009 do not get any worse.
This highlights how societal decisions and commitments of previous years often have enormous impacts today. At some point, we decided to build car-centered cities, resulting in a radical redefinition of city layout and planning. The “freedom” of the car meant I could live wherever I wanted, shop wherever I wanted, and work wherever I wanted. That possibility led to sprawl and, with it, a commitment to building the transportation infrastructure necessary to maintain such “freedom.” We have committed ourselves to a never-ending cycle of building more and bigger roads.
I’m of the opinion that this commitment is unsustainable. In Texas, home of the apparent economic Texas Miracle, we have yet to figure out how to fully and properly fund our transportation needs. In our own city, we are told we need to spend at least $10 million a year just to maintain roads to 2009 OCI ratings – again, that’s not getting ahead, it is simply maintaining inadequate road conditions at the time of our last street study. As a “younger” council member, I am keenly concerned about kicking this can down the street (pun intended).
So today we will be looking at additional options in hopes of trying to get a better handle on the situation. I don’t know the answer, but I know this: whatever we do to tackle this problem will likely be politically unpopular. A strange situation for policy makers given that the condition of our streets is one of our number one complaints. I’ll update you as we move forward with additional recommendations.
EXPLORING A 311 SYSTEM FOR DENTON
311 Systems are quickly becoming the standard for cities serious about improving the citizen experience. It allows citizens the simplicity of going to one place (one phone number, one email, one text message, etc.) to get all of their city-related questions answered and service requests sent in. As it stands currently in Denton, you have to have a pretty extensive inside knowledge of the inner workings of our city government in order to ask your question in the first place. That increases the possibility that you will be passed around on hold, lost in a phone shuffle, given wrong information, or a longer wait time to get your question answered to get a response to your request.
Check out, for example, how they do this in Chicago. You can take a picture of a pothole, a grafitti problem, or problem at the park and send it directly from your phone to one place. You are then able to track the status of your request through completion. They have then jazzed up their 311 system with the power of Open Data to provide more transparency to all the requests going in and out of their system. Imagine the 3rd party applications and policy possibilities that can result from data heads trying to figure out request trends and the like?
I chair the Council Committee on Citizen Engagement and this has been on our agenda from the beginning. We recently heard an update from a city task force on the matter, complete with recommendations and costs. The entire council will hear this same presentation at this meeting.
BUDGET DISCUSSIONS CONTINUE
Once again, we are in the midst of our annual budget talks. Read my earlier post on the matter. This meeting should have a more substantial conversation on the topic as we have just received some responses to several questions raised during our first full council meeting on the budget.
As always, let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Better Block Comes to Denton?
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” ― Jane Jacobs
Join us on Wednesday, August 21 at 5:30pm at the Center for Visual Arts on the corner of Bell and Hickory for a presentation on bringing Better Block to Denton. Please join our Facebook event page to stay on top of all the information.
Just how fast can an area be revitalized? Some cities are doing it in days, not years using the Better Block. The Better Block approach to revitalization begins with temporarily transforming a single block into vibrant destination that illustrates the potential for new business, safer streets and improved livability. Built with community talent and resources over a weekend, the result is a vision for an authentic place and the momentum needed to make it happen permanently.
Join us as we discuss how Denton could use the Better Block Approach to further revitalize an area in need of just that.
Imagine an underutilized part of town with potential – what could that area become? What would happen if we pooled our resources for a weekend – artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, business owners, landlords, city planners, etc. – to show the city how to breathe vibrancy into that place?
Not familiar with Better Block or the impact they are having throughout the world? Check out their website. Then check out this TED Talk by Better Block founder Jason Roberts (of Oak Cliff):
City Council Preview – August 6, 2013
Today’s City Council meeting begins with a 3pm Work Session and continues with a Regular Session at 6:30pm at City Hall on East McKinney Street. Go here to see a full agenda with complete backup material. Here are some items of interest…
BUDGET TALKS CONTINUE
We have a Work Session item devoted to discussing the proposed budget for fiscal year 2013-14. Go here to see my post about this year’s budget along with some suggestions on how to approach it for the first time.
TEXAS LEGISLATURE ON WATER AND TRANSPORTATION
Texas voters will see constitutional amendments on the ballot for water issues (Nov 2013) and Transportation Funding (Nov 2014). What this means for our water and transportation priorities will be the subject of a Work Session item on Tuesday. Go here to read an article on the recent activity in the Texas Legislature regarding this.
NAME THE DOWNTOWN TRANSIT CENTER AFTER EULINE BROCK
Euline Brock, former Mayor of Denton, was a visionary and instrumental voice on many things you now love about Denton, one of which was the idea to bring a regional train to the city. If you are fan of the A-Train and all its potential, you have Mayor Brock to thank for that. So it is only fitting that Mayor Pro Tem Pete Kamp championed an initiative to name the downtown station in her honor. We’ll be voting on that tonight.
LONGER SEASON FOR THE DENTON COMMUNITY MARKET
The success of the Denton Community Market as been remarkable – a weekly place for the community to come together, businesses have been launched, local entrepreneurs have been encouraged, and so much more. Their new model has them open longer than ever – that revealed a provision in our code that prevented this. Because there is strong support of the market by the city, this is a fix that will enable the market to keep going strong.
It’s City Budget Time in Denton!
Admit it, it’s your favorite time of the year – after months of planning and anticipation, the Denton City Council has officially started its deliberations on the Proposed Budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year.
One of the biggest formal powers of this elected body comes with our “power of the purse.” Here is where our policy guidance can have dollar figures attached to it. And because these are ultimately YOUR dollars (the bulk of the city revenue feeding our General Fund comes from the city’s portion of Sales Tax and Property Taxes), it is important for you to get informed and participate in the budget process.
Click here to access a big PDF containing the City of Denton proposed budget. It can appear complicated if you are not familiar with the city budget, but it has some self-contained Cliff Notes for you. Try just reading 5 pages, 15-19, which is the City Manager’s message – it is a great overview of the big aspects of the budget. Then, if you want more, I’d read the section from 29-55 to get some in-depth insight into the main numbers and budget priorities.
Back in mid-June, I released my budget recommendations for this fiscal year – you can see them here. It is important to note that there are several needs in the community that are important and deserve attention and only so much money to go around. This year alone, various city departments and City Council submitted over $7 million in supplemental budget requests (new items), yet there is only a bit over $1 million available for new items. Nonetheless, I am happy to report that this proposed budget includes $20,000 for Economic Development programming targeting entrepreneurial efforts, startups, and local small business development. In an attempt to address the desire for training and workspace for entrepreneurs, the Library team has developed some really innovative ideas to use its space and resources and we see money allocated for a community-accessible 3D printer and software toward this end (you want to make things, they can help). The Public Art Master Plan is also being funded out of savings identified from the current fiscal year 2012-13.
I have more thoughts on all this and recommendations as we move forward. This is just the beginning of the process. The budget will not be approved until September 17. In the meantime, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts and perspectives on this year’s budget and where I think we ought to be heading economically. Read up and stay tuned…