City Council Preview – November 19, 2013
I dedicate this City Council Preview to my counterparts on the City Council in Toronto, who just had to strip their crazy mayor of most of his powers. The ongoing Toronto saga is one way to get citizens interested in local government again…
We’ll get started with an early 2pm Work Session on Tuesday followed by a 6:30pm Regular Session, both at City Hall at 215 E. McKinney Street. There’s whopping 1200 page backup to this week’s council agenda, so go here to see everything we will be talking about and get to reading.
Here are some things you might find interesting…
CONVENTION CENTER
The City has been pursuing the concept of a city-owned Convention Center for some time now. Our most recent discussion involves a developer, the City and UNT, whereby the old Radisson Site on I35 (across from UNT) is redeveloped into a upscale hotel (with restaurant) and a convention center. Here’s a very rough site plan to give you an idea of the layout of this…
You can click here to see the agenda sheet for this item along with the Power Point presentation we will be seeing at Tuesday’s meeting. There are a bunch of agreements included in the full backup in case you need more info on this.
The land for the project is being leased from UNT. A private developer is building, financing, and running the hotel and attached restaurant. The city is contemplating financing, building, and owning the Convention Center at an estimated cost of $25 million. We are also contemplating using Certificate of Obligations to fund the project, with revenue from the Convention Center going to service the debt. Part of the agreement also contains the provision that the private developer (hotel owner) will make up the difference in what the city lacks in debt payment should that be necessary.
It is hoped that this agreement can be reached and finalized before the end of this year.
DENTON HOLIDAY LIGHTING FESTIVAL
Mark your calendar for Friday, December 6 – the night every citizen should be bringing their family downtown for the annual Holiday Lighting Festival. The council will be voting on an in-kind sponsorship of up to $13,000 to help with this event. On a somewhat related note: spend time that night reflecting on the fact that there will be no parking or driving on the square for that evening. Yet somehow, an estimated 10,000 people will go, find somewhere to park far away, walk as far as need be, and it will be awesome. It is times like these where it is worth challenging the hypothesis that more parking is the key to a more commercially viable and vibrant downtown.
PARKING CRAZINESS ON PONDER STREET TO BE FIXED
Have you noticed this? The recent removal of no parking signs on Ponder between Oak and Scripture have created a chaotic scene for every form of transportation. It’s sort of the UNT student parking equivalent to the “Give a Moose a Muffin” story. We will hopefully be voting to create an ordinance to allow us to post and enforce NO PARKING on both sides of that street.
RECONSIDERATION OF A ZONING CHANGE DECISION
During our last council meeting, the council voted 3 to 3 for a motion to approve the rezoning of a property near Ryan Elementary School. As a result of this split vote, the application was denied. At issue for some of the council members was the presence of a gas well in close proximity to the development plans – in some cases, homes were planned as close to 250 of the gas well site. To be clear, our ordinance allows surface owners to “come to” a well with only a 250 foot separation. But as we are seeing in other parts of the city, that sort of development near well sites which can seemingly be drilled and redrilled into perpetuity (thanks to state law) is proving very problematic. I was concerned about that setback, especially without any assurance of notification of future potential buyers of homes in that area.
Since that meeting, the developer has indicated a willingness to work with the city on notification provisions aimed at alleviating this concern. This is certainly a promising move and I look forward to what comes of it – exploring this issue might help us as we look into the possibility of writing something more permanent and universal into our code. A motion to reconsider a vote must come from one of the three of us who voted against this rezoning.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please contact me at Kevin.Roden@cityofdenton.com or 940-206-5239.
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.
Sriracha2Denton Update and Media Coverage
To catch everyone up on the fast-developing pitch to bring Sriracha to Denton, here’s the rundown. Late yesterday morning (October 30), I read this Atlantic Cities story about the legal battle between Sriracha’s Huy Fong Foods and the city of Irwindale, CA. Shortly after, I pitched the idea of Sriracha moving to Denton via Facebook and Twitter.
The Dallas Observer was the first to write on it.
I then huddled with our Economic Development team and drafted this Open Letter to Sriracha on my website (thanks to Lou and Katie Kelly Korom for the great pic headlining the letter).
New traveled fast, even reaching folks at Huy Fong Foods headquarters. The major media outlets in DFW jumped in. Catch up on the stories and see Denton and #Sriracha2Denton featured:
- Dallas Morning News
- WFAA Channel 8 ABC News
- CBS DFW Channel 11
- NBC DFW Channel 5 News
- Fort Worth Weekly
- Texas Monthly- Central Track
We’ve even seen some play in California:
- Los Angeles Daily News
- Silicon Valley Mercury News (where I get a promotion to “Congressman”)
- NBC 4 Los Angeles
- NBC Bay Area
And let’s not forget the international press:
- For those who can speak Chinese
- For those who can speak Vietnamese
The stories keep coming – check here for some of the notable write-ups:
- Wall Street Journal
- D Magazine – The Savior of Sriracha
I followed up mid-December with an official letter to Huy Fong Foods – that led to this reply from the company on December 20, 2013:
I’ll leave you with a sampling of the Twitter discussion about all this…
Sriracha: Come to Denton, TX!
News spread quickly that the beloved Sriracha (Huy Fong Foods) is caught up in legal woes with the city of Irwindale, California. Millions of fans of this spicy treasure are anxious that prices will rise and access to this special sauce will be limited.
We’ve got a plan that can save Sriracha and everyone who loves it: move your operations to Denton, TX.
As the indie music capital of Texas and a city of 48,000 college students, Denton is home to myriads of Sriracha’s customer base. We’ve got cheap land, shovel-ready industrial sites (far away from neighborhoods to avoid your current complaints), 40% wind power, competitive costs, and award-wining reliability from our city-owned electric company, an emerging urban farm district ready to start farming fresh jalapenos, location at the convergence of I35E and I35W and centrally located for efficient transportation and distribution, a city-owned airport, research universities ready to work with you, the nation’s 6th top high-tech hot spot, and tons of college students seemingly willing to work for a daily supply of free Sriracha!
And here are more reasons to come to Denton, TX…
Manufacturing In Denton, Texas from Brian Daskam on Vimeo.
High-Tech Denton: Hotspot, yet Still Low Priority for the City
By now many of you have read and probably participated in the flurry of re-postings of Richard Florida’s recent piece for The Atlantic, “America’s Top 25 High-Tech Hotspots,” where Denton (the county, at least) was ranked #6. There is a tendency among those of us in leadership to cheer lead such news, as if it is the result of some great strategy coming from city and business leaders. It’s not, as I’ll point out shortly, but I certainly understand the inclination to celebrate. After all, any solid economic development plan for a city involves savvy marketing and painting a pretty picture of what we want people to think and feel about that city.
This is where civic and business leaders can get tripped up to the detriment of the health of a local economy: we believe the hype and lose sight of the important distinction between the marketing and the reality.
The reality is that Denton has no strategy to foster or leverage our high-tech assets. If something good is happening locally in this industry, it is the result of an organic mixing of assets, which we have in abundance, that cities all over the country are tripping over themselves to get: two major universities, a growing creative class who want to stay in the city, an indie music and culture scene that is touted in national and international publications, a concentrated, creative and cultural sense of place, centered geographically with our downtown, and an enormous DIY ethos and ecosystem. We are ripe for our own tech boom, a vibrant startup culture, and the go-to city regionally for creative technology.
But this is not reflected in our economic development strategies, now going on 10 years old.
Knowing this and hearing a consistent concern among citizens that Denton needs a stronger employment base for our college grads, I developed a Creative Economy Initiative my first year in office to begin moving us in that direction and to begin the process of creating more substantial jobs, particularly within the creative tech fields, to our city. That led to the first Denton Creatives Mixer, where Denton’s best and brightest came together to connect and strategize. As a result, CreateDenton.com was launched to highlight our high-tech assets, DFW media outlets began paying attention, and businesses and collaborative projects were spawned. We began talking about the possibility of creating a collaborative, co-working space in Denton and started collaborating with experts at our two universities. Knowing that smart people want to live in a city where innovation is valued even at City Hall, we began to activate our top tech minds to find technological solutions to civic problems.
I sat down with city leaders, business leaders, and economic development leaders to push us in this direction, understanding that cities around the nation were quickly retooling to best situate their strategies for the rapidly changing 21st century economy and knowing that other cities in our region were already taking advantage of our city’s best assets for their gain. I submitted several budget proposals during this summer’s budget talks aimed at targeting this industry, including an updated economic development strategy plan, a plan to get downtown outfitted with the fastest internet in the city and develop it into an Innovation District, city partnership in a collaborative workspace, and city programs aimed at incubating and accelerating startups with high-growth potential. The response? Let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing.
Meanwhile, startups are on the rise, tech firms are beginning to realize that we have an abundance of talent, many of whom are willing to work for less than their big city counterparts if it means they can stay in Denton, and we have hoards of independent tech contractors, like this guy leading an IT team at LivingSocial, working in and out of our city’s coffee shops and bars. We are seeing tech-centered companies relocating to Denton and bringing in higher paying jobs than many of the companies receiving economic incentives from the city. GSATi and the marketing arm of the Dallas office of Spain’s Santander have both recently set-up downtown, the latter selling their bosses on the fact that the bulk of their talent pool was coming from here anyway. It appears an ed tech cluster is beginning to emerge, pioneered perhaps by formerly Denton-based eInstruction (their early tech talent still very present in Denton) and joined by the likes of All In Learning (spin-off of eInstruction), iTeach Texas, and ReadyRosie (disclosure: my wife is the founder). We’ve got music tech, film tech, marketing tech, and even animal tech!
With so much already happening and untapped potential for partnerships, initiatives, and targeted programs ready to be leveraged for relatively little cost, why hasn’t the city, Chamber, and Economic Development Partnership Board rushed to capitalize on our high-tech credentials? I’ve discovered some problems in the way we tend to think about economic development in Denton, but chief among them is this: we have a tendency to focus primarily on the economic indicators of property and sales tax and measure our success accordingly.
These two comprise the bulk of the revenue into the corporate entity that is the city. As such, “economic development” becomes synonymous with the growth of the city’s revenue stream. While necessary, they are not sufficient for a healthy local economy and tend to distract from other economic realities affecting our citizens. For example, much cheerleading surrounds our quick recovery from the recent national recession, as seen by these two indicators. Meanwhile, our median household income is a mere $42,000, an estimated 40-50% of our city’s kids attending Denton ISD are on free and reduced lunch, and our best and brightest are forced to take low-skilled jobs in town, commute South, or leave our city altogether in order to find substantial employment opportunities.
Most tech industry companies in Denton, especially in their early stages, don’t change the city’s property or sales tax game. Santander, our new downtown firm, has brought twenty higher wage jobs from Dallas to Denton but will not capture our attention precisely because job growth on its own is not a metric of success for our economic development efforts. We have a bunch of techies working in and out of coffee shops pulling in $100 an hour. We have profitable startups working out of homes, bringing outside money into Denton with potential to scale big. With a little bit of fostering, we can make sure these firms, workers, and startups see Denton as a vibrant place for them to innovate and hopefully stay when they get big. Instead, the bulk of our attention is given to bringing in the next Walmart (sales tax) and the next Peterbilt (property tax), whether or not they bring in more substantial jobs for our citizens or improve the local economic landscape – their contribution to the city coffers is what is important according to our current metrics. We need to broaden that focus.
Here are my suggestions of where we should go from here in order to take advantage of our high-tech assets:
MARKET THE HECK OUT OF THIS: we need to create a great looking, yet simple website devoted specifically to Denton being the 6th Top High-Tech Hotspot, featuring our existing tech firms, startups, and independents, and claiming to be the region’s go-to spot for their creative tech needs. This is easy and very inexpensive.
CREATE A DOWNTOWN INNOVATION DISTRICT: we’ve got great restaurants, bars, music venues, and a growing number of apartments. Now let’s bring more significant jobs to spend their money at those places and foster a culture of innovation by taking advantage of the only clearly-defined sense of creative place in DFW. Boston did just this on top of an existing Arts District with great success – check them out.
HIGH SPEED INTERNET: high speed fiber is to the 21st century what electricity was to the 20th. We need to make sure our entire city has access to the best internet options available, particularly our downtown area. And we need to get aggressive, researching possibilities with existing dark fiber and leading the charge to change Texas’ statutory monopoly of Big Telecomm (which prevents cities from creating their own internet utility). Imagine if we found a way to get Downtown Denton the fastest internet in the state? See what they did in Chattanooga and how that’s been an economic development game-changer.
LEVERAGE UNIVERSITY ASSETS: UNT has resources, programs, and experts at the Murphy Center for Entrepreneurship, research partnership possibilities and incubator space at Discovery Park, the state’s top young tech minds at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (recently recognized as having more Siemens Competition semifinalists than any school in the nation), and a culture of innovation fostered at the Innovation Greenhouse. There are hundreds of cities that would love to have any one of these assets at their disposal. We can begin by simply cataloging the resources that are accessible to any entrepreneur and market these as assets and resources to foster entrepreneurship and innovation in Denton. Then let’s be about coordinating high level, mutually-beneficial strategies aimed at incubating and accelerating new businesses. Find successes, advertise them, and let this momentum build.
FOSTER A START-UP CULTURE: make it a point to celebrate and encourage making, creating, risk-taking, innovating, hacking, subverting, and the like. Help make entrepreneurship sexy in Denton and watch it and our economy grow. I recommend Brad Feld’s, Startup Communities as a great starting point to thinking about this. I also love this Bloomberg article on The Reality of What Makes Silicon Valley Tick.
DEVELOP “ECONOMIC GARDENING” STRATEGIES: most job growth in cities happens from within local businesses, not from bringing in outside companies. Let’s develop metrics that encourage our economic development partners to invest our time, money, and resources where it makes the most sense: local companies with fast/high growth potential.
COLLABORATIVE CO-WORKING SPACE and INCUBATOR: As we get serious about fostering our economic ecosystem, we can move more quickly if there was a centrally-located place by which to attract attention, find resources, host programs, and house our budding startups and independent tech contractors. A joint university, city, and private partnership could speed this along and become a center piece for our Downtown Innovation District. See what McKinney did with their recently-opened Collide Center.
6th top high-tech hotspot in the nation… We can celebrate this news or we can take advantage of it.