Item #12.  Resolution R-01-1849 – Authorizing the City Manager to work with TxDoT concerning the modification and/or removal of the temporary medians along State Highway 26 (Colleyville Boulevard)

Note:  Comments referenced in the article are highlighted.

Mayor Donna Arp:  Before I open the public hearing, actually, the city attorney tells me that I can do this, and I’m going to do this because it may answer a bunch of questions.  And then we’ll have the public hearing and be glad to have all the citizens come up and speak, but I have been asked over and over and over how this got started and where did it come from and we’ve had…actually the city manager and I along with some of the city council members and city staff have had two public hearings..  two public hearings? (speaks with city manager) one work session with the community and then had a Highway 26 meeting where we had a lot of our business owners come and I think it’s real important to at least give a history of this and how it got started and we have done a lot of research at the city as to where the medians came from, when they started, how they started, and we were working from time to time on limited documentation, but think we’ve found everything and have made all of our documents available to all of our media sources and I’m going to read a statement and then I’m going to open the public hearing.

Statement:  In December of 1998 Colleyville’s elected officials and the city manager at the time, Bob Stripling, authorized a Huitt Zollar traffic engineering study that related to potential improvements on Highway 26.  And I  meant to have that and I’ve got it in the back, and I’ve got documentation just about that thick that we’ll certainly make available to anyone who wants that.  The Huitt Zollar report made specific recommendations that the city should consider before taking any action relating to or affecting Highway 26/Glade area.  These medians that now are a problem were devised at that time.  Huitt Zollar strongly recommended and emphasized the need for Colleyville to hold public meetings with our business owners stating and I’ll quote:  “the medians can have a negative impact on abutting businesses”.  Obviously, public meetings should have been held immediately.  Instead of conducting the public meetings the council and Colleyville Mayor at the time, Richard Newton, led the 1998-99 council and we moved forward with finalizing the Village zoning.  Council members at the time, and I want to be very clear, were Donna Arp, Ginny Tigue, Steve Helling, Frank Carroll, and Nelson Thibodeaux. As part of the developer’s agreement Richard Myers was required to pay $70,000 for the medians and he was required to hold Colleyville’s public meetings.  This action in effect placed in my view a city responsibility on the shoulders of a developer.  The city staff nor I can explain the course of this action.  It is highly unusual.  Unquestionably, the entire sequence of events has produced a lose, lose, lose situation.  Richard Myers lost $70,000, the city lost untold dollars in sales tax, and businesses lost revenue.  All of this now is in the past, but as a result of all of this we have a problem and we need to fix it.  Toward this end tonight I place a resolution on the council agenda.  Now we’ve clarified the history, and now we’re going to work to fix the problem.  So I said this tonight, and it’s all public information, it’s all available to the public, and we have those studies.  We went back in our files, we dug up every single thing we could.  I still don’t know why the developer was required to hold the public meetings.  I still don’t know why the developer was required to pay $70,000 to build it, but that’s irrelevant at this point except to him.  It’s certainly relevant to all of us that we want to fix it and that’s why we’re dealing with the resolution.  So with that I think it gives you a history of what has happened and what we know and now I’m going to open the public hearing. (calls up Jim Moore)

Jim Moore:  Jim Moore, 1416 Glade Road.  As I like to call it the yellow snake road on 26, it’s something that obviously the engineering firm could not have been qualified as a traffic engineering firm that has to do with what is good for the business of Colleyville, and I hope that being the case that we don’t use them again.  But I think in this case I don’t want to see the citizens of Colleyville, taxpayers, pay another engineering firm to make any kind of study.  I just think that what they need to do is the city manager needs to talk to TxDoT and set up an arrangement to remove this median.

Arp:  Norman Gibson.

Norman Gibson:  Norman Gibson, 1137 Timberline.  Whose median is that anyway now,  do we know that?   I’m asking a question.

Arp:  Mr. City Manager, who owns the median at this point?

Lindley:  Being located in the state right of way it is the property of the highway department, state of Texas.

Arp:  TxDoT

Gibson:  OK, I didn’t know.  Like you said Richard was stuck with all of this, the public meetings and everything else, but I’ve got a letter here – you know where the donut thing is and the snow-cone stand – I’ve got a letter here that says since we met with Richard and asked him not to have the raised median in front of the donuts and all this – I’m not going to read this whole letter, but what it says here, this one paragraph “by striping the turn lane rather than constructing the raised median, southbound traffic traveling on Highway 26 will still have the ability to make a left turn into your property, as they do today.  The striped portion of the turn lane would stretch the entire length of your property.  We have included a concept plan,  which reflects the revised median striping improvements for Highway 26.   The highlighted area reflects that portion of the turn lane that would be striped” which is what was done.  But it’s a solid stripe because you have a left turn lane only feeding into the Village.  So consequently anybody coming up to that light if they go past the light a little bit they can’t turn left.  So this letter is useless because of the way that mess is out there.  Now if you scrape the median and just put a turning lane down that whole thing you’d solve all the problems.

Arp:  Cecil Williams.  (speaking to audience)  I’m going to ask you to refrain from clapping and I know that we’re all anxious to get this done, so I think, but I appreciate you coming up, Mr. Williams.

Cecil Williams:  To the mayor and city council members of the City of Colleyville, Texas, we, meaning my wife Betty and myself, Cecil Williams, own and operate the Red Barn Saddle Shop.  We’ve operated this business for nearly 31 years.  Many of our customers, especially horse owners, have been with us for more than a generation.  This road median project has made it very difficult for our customers to get into our business for saddle, boot and shoe repair, and supplies.  We’ve lost a lot of money that we’ll never be able to recover.  We’ve lost a lot of customers that will never return.  And I ask you, please, to remove the medians.  Please remove it all.  Please remove it now.  And in the future, please, let’s not handle any project like this one has been handled. Thank you very much.

Arp:  Thank you, Mr. Williams.  Jerry London. 

Jerry London: My name is Jerry London.  I live at 4928 Lakewood Drive in Colleyville.  I’m here to speak against the medians, as I suspect most of the people are.  I first noticed the medians one night when I was leaving Sonic and they were not colored at all and I drug the bottom of my car crossing the road, and then a couple of days later it seemed to be nothing but a field of yellow.  Beautiful yellow, I’m sure, in somebody’s mind, and now then it’s just along the edges.  So there’s been a lot of expense in putting that up, painting it, un-painting it or blacking it out or whatever it is, and obviously it’s just a pain in the knee for everybody that drives down that road.  I came out of one building and had to drive nearly a half a mile to turn around and I think that’s ridiculous and I hope you agree with me.  I’m recommending that in my opinion the city of Colleyville should do everything as expedient as possible to get those medians out of there and return that road to the drive-ability that we enjoyed previously.  Thank you very much.

Arp:  Thank you, Mr. London.  Rich Driscoll.

Rich Driscoll:  I’m Rich Driscoll.  My office is at 5005 Colleyville Boulevard.  I want to first of all commend the city council that’s trying to make this as expeditious as possible in trying to get some  resolution.  According to a letter that Mr. Gibson has from Mr. Glenn Elliott of TxDoT to Parsons Transportation Group – you’re all probably aware of this letter – it required all the businesses to be notified and sign off on the project.  And we all know, or to the best of our knowledge, this didn’t happen.  Had it happened we would not have signed off on it.  Therefore, I would really see that TxDoT really doesn’t have a whole lot of other alternatives than to get rid of the medians.   Right now cutting them up or modifying them really isn’t an acceptable solution.  I think everyone probably would agree with that.  It would make it more dangerous.  It would look worse.  The way it is now, we appreciate the no U-turn signs coming out, but that’s actually made it a little more risky.  Before, when you had the turn lanes people would come across – they couldn’t get across both lanes at one time – they’d come across, wait in the middle and then wait for the traffic to go and then merge in.  That’s not possible now, so really, getting rid of the medians would be the only solution there.  Sometimes people want to make U-turns there and now that the signs are gone if people want to turn the way it was actually intended they are at an impasse.  There are close accidents with people coming out of businesses and things like that, so if you could lean on TxDoT, I know they’re probably difficult to lean on, but if you could lean on them and make it clear to them that really taking out the medians is probably the only solution.  Thank you.

Arp:  Thank you, Mr. Driscoll.  Keith Dale.

Keith Dale:  Good evening, I’m Keith Dale with the Flower Market of Colleyville.  We’re at 5013 Colleyville Boulevard.  I’m not going to waste your time with reiterating everything that everybody has said.  I agree.  I think the only solution is to take the medians out.  I don’t think the road is wide enough for the medians yet.  When it’s width is expanded, by all means, we could reconfigure the medians and we’d have the space to do that, but right now I don’t think they should be there, so I think we ought to remove them.  And it is my understanding that if the city council hires an engineer and recommends that to TxDoT, TxDoT will take them out.  Thank you. 

Donna Arp:  Thank you, Mr. Dale.  That’s all the cards.  I’m going to close the public hearing.  I know the council members are going to want to say something about this and I’m going to ask the city manager also…….that’s all right.  Normally we don’t do this, but I can tell that Don Noblit has one question to ask us.  Mr. Noblit, can you give us your name and address, please.

Don Noblit:   Don Noblit.  I live in North Richland Hills, Texas.  I represent …….(can’t distinguish).  It was said tonight that we don’t own the medians any longer, so do we have the right to remove them or, and is the state then going to spend funds to remove them.  It’s a big concern.  That’s my question.

Arp:  Thank you, sir.  Public session is closed.  We’ll ask ….we’ll hopefully try to answer that question here in a minute.  I think there’s no secret the city council, certainly I, and the city staff want to do some, either remove the medians or certainly redesign them and the reason I say that is because there’s two issues, there’s a lot of issues.  One is certainly any business loss and the well-being of our businesses, but a big part of  it’s safety, too.  You know, we can’t ignore that.  TxDoT has been wonderful to work with.  They have understood.  They are certainly working with our city manager and I’m going to have him give us an assessment of where he is with TxDoT.  I see Mr. Myers here and I’ve got some questions for him. We’ve done our best to reconstruct why in the world the city would ask a developer to have public meetings.  I can’t find that that’s ever been done before in the city, maybe it has, but the city manager and I have searched and the city staff, every record we could possibly find and dug up everything that we think is in our files so we’re going to talk about that in a minute.  We’re going to talk about your question, Mr. Noblit, and what our process is, hopefully, and how quickly we hopefully to be able to get this done, but TxDoT has been very, very nice to work with.  One question Mr. Moore had was about the Parsons Group and why in the world we would, you know, whether they’re bad, good or indifferent.  We’ll talk about what TxDoT wants us to do along that line, and so I’m going to ask the city manager and then I’m going to ask the council members if they have any questions.  Can you give us an assessment of where we are with TxDoT?

Bill Lindley:  Thank you,  Mayor, and I appreciate the comments by the citizens and particularly I appreciate a week and a half, two weeks ago, when a number of you came out to the short-noticed meeting that the city put together to visit with you, to answer questions and to receive your comments.  Following that meeting staff reviewed the various ideas, options that were presented as we discussed with you.  We met then a few days later with TxDoT area officials to review some of the ideas to see what options we had available.  I will say that that meeting was very productive.  TxDoT understands the issues, the concerns, with the medians being there.  They recognize the impact the medians have caused to property owners.  That’s a very major concern that the city council, the city of Colleyville has for the impact of the medians to our businesses, and TxDoT recognizes that.  TxDoT has requested, not requested, TxDoT has required, that the city retain a consulting engineer, a traffic engineer, to review the various studies that were performed, to make an assessment of the appropriateness of removing the medians or providing other modifications to try to assist the property owners there along this strip of right-of-way.  We are in the process of talking to the consulting engineer.   TxDoT has required that we go back and use the Parsons Group who was the last group that had done the study.  Unfortunately the engineer that did that work is no longer with Parsons.  He’s with another engineering firm, but TxDoT has requested that we utilize that engineer to go back, look at the current conditions to see if it would be appropriate to remove the medians and present that data back to TxDoT.  Normally TxDoT would require on an issue like this a traffic study to be prepared.  TxDoT, though, recognizing the need that we move very fast in coming up with a solution to the medians, has agreed to allow us to just present a letter from the engineer providing his view on what could be done, what needs to be done, and then TxDoT will review that very quickly and get a decision back.  I’m hoping that we could have the engineer in place by the end of this week and have engineering review done by next week, and TxDoT would commit then to very quickly, within a few days, looking at that and getting a decision back to us.  If TxDoT is unwilling to remove the medians because of traffic concerns, we have talked to TxDoT and they are very willing that we would come back and have another meeting with the property owners to walk through the various issues from a traffic safety concern that TxDoT would have.  As the question was raised, these medians are located in a state right-of-way and it is ultimately the highway department’s decision on whether the medians are removed or not removed.  Obviously, the city’s position is that we want to remove the medians – all of the medians.  That’s the effort and the direction that we are taking.  We have heard you, the city council has heard you, and I can tell you the city council has given me strong direction on what they would like to see happen is to have those medians removed and that’s where our work effort, Keith Fisher has been assisting me working with engineers to move forward on this issue.

Arp:  Thank you, Bill.  Council members have any comments or questions on this item?

Hocutt:  Yeah, I’ve got a question and maybe this is for the city manager since he’s gone back and looked at the record.  Why did the city not have meetings with the business owners once the zoning for the Village was approved back in January of ’99?

Lindley:  Unfortunately I can’t answer that.  We’ve looked in the file. All we can find is the letter that was sent by Mr. Myers to the property owners before the meeting.

Arp:  Well, I was one of the council members.  Councilman Tigue was one of the council-members during that time.  I can’t answer your question either.  The zoning was approved for the Village on January – this comes from going back in the files and researching, Councilman Hocutt.  The zoning for the Village happened on January 19, 1999.  The Huitt Zollar study was ensued.  The earliest we can find was in December of ’98 and the city manager can and Keith has looked at this closely as well, can chime in here if there’s been something found since I spent my last day researching last Friday.  The Huitt Zollar report was apparently asked to be done sometime in the fall of ’98 because it’s date stamped at the city – the final report – which is very interesting, is date stamped at the city a week after the council took action on the Village.  Now, why is the Village important? And I’ve heard all of your comments and the city’s given everything to the Village and all this, which I think our business owners and our citizens can say and should say anything they want, but the one thing you need to understand is the reason the Huitt Zollar report, from what we can tell, was supported by the city.  It was not signed, by they way, by the mayor.  The mayor by charter signs all contracts and this one was kind of strange in itself that the mayor didn’t sign it.  It was signed by our city engineer.  The charter deems that the mayor sign all city contracts, so we can’t, we don’t know why that is either.  But, anyway, at that point the Village zoning was coming up for second reading and the council took action on it that night and approved unanimously the zoning for the Village.  So there’s some historical things there that we don’t know why, apparently Huitt Zollar, in their recommendation, you’re welcome to read it, makes a recommendation that the city should have meetings with it’s business owners because businesses can be impacted, or potentially will be impacted by, medians.  So, I don’t know.  I don’t know why there weren’t public meetings held along that time.  I have no idea. 

Brad Rice:  Madame Mayor, if I may, along with Mr. Hocutt, we’re still technically I guess, well, in light of Mr. Orrell down there, no longer the newest kids on the block, but came on board here after all of this was decided and can tell you it has not been pleasant to get emails from citizens who are wanting to know what’s going on and having to tell them that’s a good question, I’d like to know what’s going on, too.  The idea that the city back in 1998 would get a recommendation from the engineering firm to hold public hearings and not do it at that time is unforgivable.  The fact that the city would at a later date then slough that responsibility off on the developer is just as unforgivable.  So the city has definitely made some mistakes. I’m not going to sit up here and point fingers.  I’m not sure where they should be pointed and from what I hear I don’t know if anyone knows where they should be pointed and quite frankly, nothing is going to be served by pointing any more fingers in this situation.  What needs to be done is these medians have to be dealt with.  And if anything comes out of this I hope a lesson comes out of this for this city, and one of those things is communication because we’re getting ready shortly to do some major work on Colleyville Boulevard and Highway 26 and the businesses along there need to be involved and committed.  I understand that Richard Myers had sent out letters to some businesses.  Those of you that might have gotten those letters and for whatever reason ignored them, don’t do that in the future.  I mean, obviously if you get a letter from someone that says they’re talking about putting some medians or doing something to the road in front of you, pick up the phone and call and find out what the situation is.  Those businesses that didn’t get the notices – that obviously was a mistake and it needs to be dealt with, but we’re working on 26 now to come up with a plan to build that out, to put in the landscape, to put in the drainage, to put in the zoning, whatever we need to do up and down that road, and it’s going to be a lot smoother if we have an open line of communication with the city and with the businesses.  So I want to see the businesses getting involved, but first and foremost, I agree that we need to work with TxDoT and get these medians out of there.  I understand the safety issue, certainly suicide lanes down Colleyville Boulevard are not exciting.  But this is another one of those situations where you’re looking at a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The traffic study comes in and says we’re worried about the cars so we need to put up the medians so we avoid accidents.   So what do we do?  We put up the medians, which the businesses go out of business cause they’ve got no traffic so we don’t have accidents cause the traffic disappears cause there’s no businesses to go to.  It’s nuts.  We need to get rid of the medians as soon as we can.  I know Mr. Lindley is working hard with TxDoT.  Working with a state agency is never an easy task.  It is seldom a quick task.  And if we can get any type of response out of TxDoT in the next weeks it will be a yeoman’s job from the city in doing that.  As much as you are sending emails to the city, we have state representatives also who have influence in the legislature and the state agencies.  Please don’t hesitate to send them the same emails and let them know what they’re doing in the city. In this time of economic downturn I think everybody’s a little more cognizant of what’s going on and I think we need to get rid of these as soon as possible.

Arp:  I, I, agree with you.  Councilman Hocutt, and then I know Councilman Feldman has something.

Hocutt:  Well, I’ve just got – I mean, obviously, I want to get these medians removed as soon as possible.  That’s my objective.  I’ve made that very clear to the city manager.  After we get that done, I have a real problem in a contract being signed by an engineer that the mayor should have signed off on.  This is the same situation that happened on the Hall Johnson project where the contract was signed, it’s my understanding, by the city manager, and not by the mayor, which is a direct violation of the charter of this city as I understand it and we need to investigate that.  I mean, that is just unacceptable practice.  And city manager Lindley, I ask that you look at that, and I don’t know, I’m a little bit frustrated because I feel like we’re kind of cleaning up behind the elephants, being the new guy.  I mean, I look at the dairy museum project that we had to take on that has done nothing except stall the park and recreation because it was part of the master plan that we had to take off in a priority session.  We’ve had the Hall Johnson issue that we’ve had to deal with and now we’ve got the medians that we’re dealing with and I’m ready to do some positive things, looking forward for the city opposed to cleaning up behind those that I have followed.  It’s just sickening to me, you know, my only concern is what else are we going to find as we go on down the road.

Dana Feldman:  Well, for somebody that’s been cleaning them up for a little longer than you have, I’m gonna ditto on what both Councilman Rice and Councilman Hocutt were discussing.  During the course of the year we have found a number of contracts that didn’t appear to be signed by the appropriate party, which is why council possibly wasn’t on line and properly informed.  The council is making sure that the procedures are properly followed and we do the best to follow the charter.  I’d like to see the medians removed just like everybody else would at this point.  I came back from vacation to get the first yellow splat email and have been actively attending the meetings, some of which a lot of you were at.  We’re looking forward to getting this taken care of and taken care of and resolved and one of the things that we have to do is that the notice requirements that we are required to follow and the notice requirements we should be following or should I say notifications that we should be following differ.  We’re required to give notice to the property owner, and what we have been finding is that typically the property owners and the people that are actually have their businesses located in Colleyville are two separate people.  We will try and endeavor to the extent we can not just inform the property owners we are required to notify when we have these things come up but to actually keep track of the businesses that are along Highway 26 and other areas of town to the extent humanly possible and to make sure that they are notified as well so that they know what’s going on because the absentee landlords do not always notify and keep their tenants abreast of what’s going on.  Thank you.

Rice:  Mayor, and to go along with what Councilman Feldman says, you businesses that are along Colleyville Boulevard, you’re the best source of information for each other.  We as a city are required to send the information as she says to the property owner. We try to get it to the tenants, but you folks who are next door to each other and see everybody when you come in in the morning and go out in the afternoon, if one of you gets a letter don’t hesitate to talk to your neighbor and say “did you get this letter?” because something may have gotten messed up and he didn’t, and it’s important that we get that information to the different businesses and to the citizens in general so that everybody is informed and we don’t have this situation arise again.

Arp:  Let me answer Councilman Hocutt and then I’ll go I’ll go to you Councilman Tigue.  I know you have something.  In your question about mayors signing contracts, Councilman Hocutt, I can assure you after the Hall Johnson Road project the mayor of Colleyville signs all the contracts, Mr. City Manager is that correct?

Lindley:  Absolutely.

Arp:  We do find that it was very customary in prior years – ’96, ’97, ’98, ’99 – and I haven’t even gone back further than that – that mayors did not sign contracts from time to time.  I don’t know why.  Our charter’s very clear and we have one of our charter architects in the audience, but it’s very clear on that.  So we have changed that as Councilman Feldman said and the reason for that is to keep things like this from happening.  It’s a bad situation when the mayor and council is not apprised of what’s going on, whether it’s because the mayor’s looking the other way, whether it’s because the mayor didn’t bother to sign it, but it’s important to know that for very situations like this.  Councilman Tigue.

Tigue:  Well, I guess I’m appropriately dressed tonight.  We need a little levity here.  It’s embarrassing for me to say anything because I’ve been on the city council the whole time this has all been going on and it’s really hard.  I mean it would be so easy for me to say I wasn’t informed and all this sort of thing and I can’t honestly say I remember this sort of thing going on or what was happening.  So it’s – I would like to apologize because I don’t think it’s fair for me to point fingers and say it was so and so’s fault and so and so’s fault.  Somehow the ball got dropped, we made some mistakes.  I don’t think any of us like these medians.  We all hate the medians and we all want to get rid of them.  Let’s move forward and we will do whatever we can to get rid of them and we apologize profusely to these businesses.  Hope that we can get your businesses all back and going again and believe me, we will do whatever we can to make this better.

Arp:  I agree with Councilman Tigue and I want it to be very clear about she and I being here during this process and I apologize as well.  It was shocking to stand at that meeting and hear you.  It was not only shocking, it was disappointing and hurtful.  It hurt you and it hurt a developer who probably didn’t deserve to be hurt and there were lots of divisive comments made and they’re made every day and I see them every day, but I want you to be very clear on what we know and what we know is what we know.  I do want to quickly invite, ask, Richard Myers to come up here to the podium and tell us if you will if there’s any information that we’ve left out from your standpoint, Richard, as to what the process was and why in the world, I’ve been asked by Councilman Hocutt and Rice about 20 times why you had meetings instead of the city. 

Myers:  Richard Myers, 300 Lloyd Circle, Colleyville.  We were asked to have the meetings by the city engineer at the time and we, as I recall,  I think discussed the process with the city staff and……(there’s a gap in the tape here where it was turned over)…..and I think we had 2 or 3 that either showed up or contacted us you know shortly before or after the meeting. 

Arp:  Unless council has anything else, I just wanted to make sure that we were, that you were clear, and we were reading it the right way cause there’s not documentation that we can find where the city notified Richard Myers – must have been orally – to have the meeting.

Myers:  To do it?  Yeah.

Arp:  Yeah.

Myers:  Yeah.

Arp:  OK.  Anything else from the council?  If not, I agree with Councilman Tigue.  We need to get on with it, get it done, get it done as quickly as possible, and once again I want to say thank you to TxDoT for working with us on this process.  Anything else?  If not, we’ll need a motion.

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