 Good evening and welcome to the Fort Worth open space conservation program public meeting. I would just like to let you know a few housekeeping rules. If you have any questions or comments, please use the chat feature and you can share. Your comments and we'll try to get to them as we go through the presentation and then any of those questions that do get submitted to the chat. We'll be answered during the question and answer session. So we'll make sure to get to everyone. And thank you for joining us and for all of your feedback. This is going to really help us make sure that we're considering the right things as we develop this program. And so I want to start with tonight. Sorry about that. I want to start with tonight's agenda. We are going to be going over an overview of the open space conservation program. We're going to talk about our modeling goals and that'll make a little bit more sense here in a bit. And we're going to talk about our public survey, and then we'll have our question and answer session. Okay, so first of all, the open space conservation program was developed to conserve high quality natural areas in the city. And this is especially important as Fort Worth continues to grow. The entire region has experienced tremendous growth over the past couple of decades. And so as we continue to develop out, we want to make sure that we're capturing these natural spaces that provide environmental benefits and recreational opportunities for our residents and as well support economic development and enhance our. And so one of the reasons we want to conserve open space, it helps us achieve our vision of being the most livable city in the country. And it also accomplishes a lot of our city council strategic goals. So we want to make Fort Worth the nation's safest major city. And it may not be obvious right now about what open space has to do with safety, but one of the main categories that we're looking at with open space is flood. Protection and stormwater detention. So things that will help prevent flooding in the future, as well as provide those natural floodplains. And we want to improve mobility and air quality as we preserve these areas, these natural spaces with trees that helps protect our our air quality. And obviously, these open spaces are attractive. You know, we've got some beautiful open prairie and river scenes and lakes and want to make sure that we preserve those for future generations. And we can also strengthen our economic base as a lot of companies want to move to this area. They are looking for things like open spaces for their campuses, places where they can allow their employees to recreate on their lunch hour. It helps us improve the sustainability of our development. When we preserve these open spaces, it allows for higher density development around those to give more people access to these places. And so 1 of the 1st questions that always comes up is, what is the difference between open space versus Parkland? And the biggest thing is experiencing nature. So in a park, like you see in the right hand picture, you may have more mode lawns and playground equipment, basketball courts, things that are very structured. Whereas the picture on the left, you're seeing really natural spaces with maybe just a few paved trails and very little in the way of actual physical structures or pavement. We really want to connect people with natural spaces that are maintained in a different way than your traditional parks. And so the city started looking at this. We've got a great park system, but we also want to make sure that we have these green spaces that are preserved in a more natural state. So we brought in people from across the city, all different departments that are part of this ongoing team. And this program started in the fall of 2019 and incorporated all of the different departments you see here, as well as some of our partners at the Council of Governments, Streams and Valleys and the Regional Water District. And then we also brought in a contractor, the Trust for Public Land, which is nationally recognized for their work in open space and park conservation. And so the other thing that comes up right away is, how are we going to pay for this? So some of the ideas that we're proposing for funding sources are future bond programs. There's a lot of partnership and grant opportunity that comes up with this through entities like the Texas Parks and Wildlife or our regional government. We're also going to utilize some of our gas well trust fund money for this park dedication fees. And then maybe some special revenue funds. We could be looking at open spaces that we're acquiring jointly with the water department where they may need to place some infrastructure, but we could also preserve natural space around that. The same for stormwater and environmentally to protect our streams and rivers. So we have a lot of different opportunities with open space for funding. And one of the first places, actually the first place that we were able to acquire under this program was Broadcast Hill. And this was just in June of last year. And so we used some of those gas well revenue funds as well as funds raised by the community. So Broadcast Hill came to our attention from residents. They wanted to protect this as an iconic place in the city. And it was also adjacent to the Tandy Hills natural area. And so it has remnant prairie. It's got a lot of species that you don't find in large areas like Broadcast Hill across the city. And so we worked with community members to make this our first open space acquisition. And then we, as we were going through this process, like I mentioned earlier, we contracted with the trust for public land. And what they're doing for us is we are giving them all of the data related to open space throughout the city. And they are creating a tool that helps us prioritize areas. So that's the big question is what areas are more important for us to go in and acquire through this program. And that's what this tool is going to do in a very objective way. And so we have all of these different goals that we want to accomplish with the model. And they're listed here under recreation, community health, equitable access. So we're taking all of these different goal areas and we're putting all of the data into the model. And this picture is an example under our equitable access category. We're looking at the percent of low income in our different census tracts. And because we want to make sure that we're not just serving the same parts of town that we are capturing everyone that we're getting to our underserved communities and making sure that they have access to open space as well. And so once you have all of these different layers been in the model with all this different data, we're going to wait the different criteria. And that's where the public input comes in. We want to know what is most important to you as we go through these goals. And so I'll go into a little bit more detail here on the goals. So when we talk about recreation in natural spaces, we might be talking about things like kayak launches, trail heads. It would be more natural interaction, bird watching, things that you would do on hiking trips and things like that. When we're talking about community health, we want to reduce exposure to things like the urban heat island by maintaining some of the natural spaces in our very developed areas. We're going to be looking at health data. So zip codes that tend to have high instances of things like diabetes or asthma, things that are related to lack of access to recreation. When we're looking at equitable access, again, we're looking at those underserved and marginalized communities. And then with flood control, we're looking at not just our flood plains, but other flood prone areas throughout the city so that we can help alleviate some of that flooding by capturing it in these natural spaces. And then we're also looking at stream, river, and lake health. Any of our environmentally impaired water bodies, we want to make sure that we're protecting the areas around those to prevent additional pollution from entering those streams, rivers, and lakes. And then with economic development, we can help spur development in certain areas. When we're looking at mixed use areas and transit oriented areas, we want to make those trail connections and we want to provide that open space for as many people as possible in these higher density areas. And then with ecosystem preservation, these are woodlands and prairies and endangered habitats as well as the habitats of endangered animals. So we're looking at all of these different things together. And that is what we're going to get to in our public survey. We encourage everyone who's on here to take our survey. We want to hear feedback from you on what's most important in those models. So is recreation, the thing that's most important to you, is having access close by? Is it protecting certain habitats or flood control? Because each of those different categories and all the data that goes into it is going to be weighted differently according to the feedback that we get from our residents. So it's really important that we hear from you. And you can access this survey directly through the links that are shown here and I'll make sure to put those in the chat box so you can grab them. But also want to show you our website. You can go to FortworthOpenSpace.org and that's going to pull up the joint website with the Trust for Public Land in Fort Worth. And you can scroll down here and we have the English and Spanish versions of the survey as well as some of our resources and videos from our first stakeholder meetings. You can get additional information on our website as well. And so let me jump back in here. And if there's anything that you think of beyond this meeting, please feel free to contact us at Fort Worth OpenSpace at FortworthTexas.gov. So I'm going to grab these links real quick and then I'm going to jump into the chat box so I can start answering some questions. So give me just a moment and I'm going to put these in here for everyone. Okay, so there's the English survey and here is the link to the Spanish survey. So in the first questions we got, oh, how do you define high quality? Well, that's a good question and it kind of goes back to the modeling goals that we're trying to achieve. So high quality can be defined, high quality habitat might mean that there are rare or endangered species versus a lot of invasive species or things that we're going to need to clean up environmentally. So we really want to capture those natural spaces that are as close to natural state as possible versus something like a brown field that has already been developed that we would have to turn back into a natural space. And then the email address, you can absolutely reach me directly brandy.kelp at fortworthtexas.gov or you can email our open space team and this goes to everyone on that team. So sometimes we're able to get back to you a little quicker. I want to make sure that you have our contact information and then scenic fort worth board. Oh, you guys are here. So welcome and then what I'm going to do, I'm going to jump in here. I'm going to unmute everyone and then I would like to hear from you. So if you have any questions, please feel free to share them at this time. So brandy, thanks. Margaret DeMost here from scenic fort worth. I apologize. I was having to, I don't know, WebEx wanted to upgrade itself before I signed on. I didn't hear you introduce yourself. What department are you in? I'm actually a senior planner in our stormwater department. But before I took on this role overseeing our open space program, I was actually in our environmental quality division and I oversaw our keep fort worth beautiful litter volunteer program. Okay. So this, so this initiative does fall in the stormwater department. It does but you may not have seen our slide. I'm going to jump back here because our team that meets on a weekly basis is very much cross departmental. So every week people from across the city meet on this program and it's been a great opportunity for us. We've really been able to identify a lot of challenges and overcome any issues very quickly because we're all working together. We've got our park and recreation department, development, we've got environmental, property management, everyone is collaborating on this and it's made a really robust program very quickly because we started this program came into being at a meeting in September of 2019 and by June of last year we had already made our first acquisition. So it's moving very quickly and I attribute a lot of that to the cross departmental work that we're doing. I love that. Thanks. Were there any other questions or comments out there? I want to make sure that we get to everyone. All right. If there are no other questions, oh, here we go. How much do you think public support popularity app will affect the city's ability to acquire? So actually we've had broad public support for this program. We did a survey before this program and found that about I think 80% of the city wanted to see open space preservation. So it seems like there has been across the board support. We've received a lot of support directly from our city manager's office from a lot of our council members. So it has really been robust. Right now we're working on identifying all the different funding sources and one thing that trust for public land is doing for us is they're benchmarking other cities. So they're asking how other cities are funding their open space programs to give recommendations to our city council so that we can make sure that we have the funding necessary. But we've already been given the okay to use some of those gas well funds and we're working with parks and the water department and some of our other departments on joint acquisitions where it makes sense. So it really hasn't been an issue so far thankfully. That's great. Actually one reason I ask is sort of out of fear maybe I'm sort of thinking back to the era of the Tea Party and just how challenging you know there are kind of cycles in public opinion and rightly so right there's kind of a you know push and pull there of the demand for and desire for great civic assets and then the you know the the voices that say now wait a minute is that really our priority and so absolutely seems to be like parks open spaces etc are always vulnerable you know to austerity voices and so I was just thinking about this because I don't know when we get a chance to speak again that I hope that that we are collectively mindful of this just so that we're making and I think you did a good job by the way but thinking about how how how we like my mind goes to sort of long-term economic health of cities and yeah right now I'll just plant the seed in cases of any value with with what it's a totally different you know decade or decades of people choosing where they live based on where they work in my opinion cities are entering into an arms race of amenities and I say amenities that doesn't mean you know the kind of amenities you put in parks but rather how great of a place do you offer talented people who can afford to move wherever they want how great of an environment do you offer those people and of course no city can afford everything but I think that it's it's probably wise to look at it through that lens and and if you look at one of the the categories where we're probably a little weak currently it would be this sort of thing it's access to nature you know especially in light of how people have needed to clear their head walk in natural spaces in the last nine ten months I just did it today on the river that having not just quantity of spaces but quantity and quality of spaces even if it's a drive to you know for people is is the difference between you know recruiting some people who are really desirable people who will kind of drive the next employers in town pay a lot of taxes etc so I think there's an indirect payback that maybe trust or public land and somebody else has some data that they tracked on that but yes we don't already have a mountain next door oh yeah no we've um that's part of the consideration that goes into this whenever we're looking at properties that we may want to acquire you know if we put in you know if we if we preserve these open spaces you know what does that allow us to do that allows us to make trail connections that may not have happened and we know that property values around those trail connections tend to be higher allows us like I said to build at a higher density which again increases our tax base and gives more people access to these places at the same time so there's definitely a lot of synergy between open space and economic opportunity while growing sustainably and so it really the open space program really helps us achieve so many of the city's strategic goals and the overall vision of being the most livable city and I think that there's broad recognition for that both within the city and with the public and like I said it's received such broad support because each department can see the value of open space for their own programs and I think that really helps drive this program forward and is why it has moved so quickly and so successfully so far are we looking at that conservation easements as a method to achieve either you know contiguous open spaces or or just pre-standing ones yeah conservation easement it's one of those that's in the toolbox of course that's applied to private open space so that would obviously and I should say when we're looking at acquiring open space we are looking at voluntary acquisition and any conservation easement would also be voluntary as well but we would absolutely encourage you know developers property owners to look at conservation easement as a tool we're also looking at the potential for the land trusts and things like that that some of the other cities might have and where it's operated by a third party and so we're looking at all of these different tools as a means to achieve the same thing so whether the city owns it and operates it or whether there's a conservation or public access ability you know on a private open space we're looking at all those different options absolutely and it we have another question here from Margaret is there a budget goal for the percentage of public and private dollars so far we do not have a goal specifically for that we're still taking a look at like I said the benchmarking from other cities TPL is still working on that and we're also looking at the total budget for the program as a whole it is so new and it's still in development so we don't have the final numbers yet and a lot of it comes down to the cost to acquire the property varying very widely depending on if we're talking about an open space in an infill developed environment or if we're talking about an open space like in the extraterritorial jurisdiction you know the land values can vary you know widely and then with public and private dollars I'm not sure if we're going to set a goal we'll find out but we always keep the option of private funding and donations like the donation of land or the donation of funding for acquisition as well as time we are going to be looking at potential volunteer programs for this because it's not just the initial acquisition of these properties it's the ongoing maintenance as well and so we're looking at all of those things and working on developing a budget for that but it's something that's ongoing as of this time thanks so in your benchmarking with other cities and other similar programs is there a recommended minimum size for these open spaces I'm thinking of our you know our pocket parks which you adequately you know differentiated between parks and open space but is there sort of the smallest minimum recommended for open spaces we don't I don't know I don't have the answers yet from the benchmark but I can tell you as we've given our own recommendations into the development of the modeling tool we've specified that in highly developed areas like downtown you know we really want to look down to things that are maybe a quarter of an acre or even a little less because that size of an open space can actually have a huge impact if you have a large community or transit oriented development around it so we haven't developed really any specific cutoffs but I definitely think that the range you know in that inner city area we'd be looking at at least a quarter acre above and then probably more out in the far west or far north where you have that extra territorial jurisdiction because there we'd want to be capturing large habitats and contiguous open space brandy but again you can give those recommendations for us in that public survey so absolutely please give us that kind of feedback brandy this is Judy Harman and I'm also with scenic port worth and I want to just give underline the need in the center city where we have mixed use and urban residential and the other more highly dense developments we are not capturing space there to make them long-term to maintain the long-term value and to make keep them livable and healthy so I just want to underline that need yes in a lot of we have a specific economic development section in the modeling goal but even in some of the other areas we prioritize based on land use and again you can help us determine those weights that you would like to see but we are specifically looking at the future land use in Fort Worth like the mixed use areas and the high density and transit oriented development and so those particular land uses can have higher values in the modeling tool so when it calculates all the different weights from all the different layers you know it's assigning those higher values to those types of areas especially when we're talking about certain modeling goals and I definitely that that is one where we're really trying to push to weight more heavily so that we are improving the sustainability of those areas and driving the economic base as well just like you said and did we have any other questions this is kind of a tactical question I suppose it's land acquisition is very labor intensive who on staff is doing that so we actually have multiple people but property management actually heads up our acquisitions they have the expertise and the knowledge to do that so once we find an area we say yeah that we want this this one is the one that we're interested in we ask our property management to come in and get involved so that they can help us with the appraisals and all of those different things like the due diligence of the site so again that really comes back to being that interdepartmental effort if you were if you were speculating at this point do you think we'll see some kind of large-scale uh you know what currently is ex-urban sort of perimeter etj locations you know that will be surrounded by homes the next decade or two like and and potentially would you see you think that those would span a bunch of different current property owners and like floodplains probably yeah um so floodplain again is one of those things that we're looking at you know those higher weights um and one of the challenges with the etj the extra territorial jurisdiction is that we have less data for that area um so we've tried to counterbalance that by weighting some things in the etj a little bit higher but we definitely have to prioritize the need of our current residents um and so they may or may not be served as well by the etj but that is included in our modeling area so it's it's something that we've looked at and we're also considering development pressure so we're looking at places where we know there's a lot been a lot of development interest in saying okay we need to get in early and our parks you know our water department already does this um when they're looking at infrastructure and so we're saying okay what do we need to acquire to be able to support development in this area from an infrastructure standpoint and so now we're kind of bringing in the open space concept to that idea and did that answer your question specifically i i don't know if i i skirt it around listening for was whether you were going to say look you know if it looks like it's three to a complicated we'll probably stay away from that or that's where i was thinking easements might come in so there's some sort of thin connection or something you know or it sounds like maybe they'll they'll tolerate more complicated transactions i'm not sure oh yeah no i mean if there's multiple um uh landowners involved and things like that no that's not going to knock it out it's it's not it's not part of our modeling criteria we are looking for those high quality spaces and then once we find them we'll have to look at the you know cost to acquire and and those other factors but um know that that doesn't get incorporated into the model and so if we find something great and there's 10 property owners attached then that's what we'll do we'll work with those property owners and again like you said we may we may be looking at um working with them from a conservation easement standpoint or um some type of land trust so we'll use every tool available to help us acquire those spaces that we identify great i hope to answer your question i know we're running a little over time but i don't want to leave anyone out if there are any further questions i'm more than happy to answer them all right well um if there's anything else that you can think of of course you can reach out to us um at the open space uh at four over texas.gov email address and again you can visit the project website and please if if there's one takeaway from tonight i cannot stress highly enough please take that survey so we can get as much feedback from the community as possible and i hope you all have a fabulous night and um keep an eye on that website we'll be putting all of our updates on that as we develop this program thanks for doing this so thank you all and have a good night