Council Meeting Preview – August 16, 2011
It’s a full agenda for today’s meeting – we’ll start with a Work Session at 3pm, followed by the Regular Meeting at 6:30pm at City Hall.
By the way, local statesman Howard Draper and I tweeted back and forth last week about the paperless possibilities for city council meetings. Did you know that City Council agenda paperwork averages around 500 pages a meeting? Multiply that by 7 council members and that’s a lot of paper. The city, therefore, provides the council with loaner laptops and this agenda paperwork electronically via a CD-ROM with a large PDF file. But thanks to that Twitter discussion, I got the idea to try using my wife’s iPad instead of the laptop. I’ve found many applications, including “iAnnotate PDF” to be quite helpful and more “natural” to navigate as compared to the laptop equivalent. And iPads are cheaper than laptops, so maybe we can find some cost-saving measures here in the future. For all the nerds out there, please welcome the first ever iPad experiment at a Denton City Council meeting.
Here’s some issues that might interest you…
BUDGET DISCUSSION
Join us on September 6 when there will be the first Public Hearing on the proposed budget for this fiscal year. Today we will continue a council discussion on the budget and receive answers to questions we have raised over the last couple of weeks. One area of particular interest to many is how the council will prioritize the possible spending of $192,616 that has yet to be allocated to specific projects.
DIRECTION ON COMPREHENSIVE PLAN
The city sets the goal of revising the comprehensive plan every 10 years. We are a bit past due for this due to recent budget constraints. But the city staff is recommending an approximate $800,000 to invest in this new comprehensive plan. I have already asked to look into this figure and will continue to do so. That’s a lot of money to invest in a document.
PUBLIC HEARING ON REDISTRICTING PLANS
It’s time to embark on redistricting the city’s four council member districts. Changes in population over the last 10 years dictate such a re-evaluation. Go here to see the proposed changes and let me know your thoughts – good or bad!
As always, if you have questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact me at kevin.roden@cityofdenton.com or 940-206-5239.