 I'm gonna kick it off and then turn it over to Jennifer who really did the work. How about that? Actually leading a team, I'll do more of that in a minute. So we're gonna talk about open space and I'm gonna tie it a little bit to growth. When we talk about growth in the city, we focus a lot about the population growth. We talk about 20,000 new people coming every year. So when you think about it after five years, that's another 100,000 people. Or we talk about it in the way the city grows in square miles and we're now up to somewhere around 350 square miles or in that area. So when we talk about growth, we think about population and we think about land area. Another way to think about growth is when we convert land from a natural environment to a built environment. And so what we've been doing and for worth the last couple of years is to the tune of about 53 acres a week, we convert from a natural state to a built environment. When you think about it over one year, that's the equivalent of almost 2,800 acres that we took from a natural state and put it in a built environment. You'll hear in a minute from Jennifer that many of our plans that are included in the comprehensive plan have open space goals tied to them. But I'm not sure we have a way to prioritize open space across the city, nor have we identified how we're gonna fund open space acquisition if that opportunity presented itself or if we wanted to do it in a proactive way. Over the past several years, we've responded or reacted to isolated instances. So when you think about some of the stuff we've done at Lake Worth, what we've looked at around Lake Arlington, when you think about Randall Mill or Benbrook Lake or I'm leaving some areas out, Walsh Ranch. So we asked Jennifer if she would lead an internal team to look at this issue of open space, right? Cause it involves park and rec property management, a lot of different departments, solid waste, environmental, she'll talk about that in a minute. And so she's led an internal group so that we can begin this conversation on open space. So this isn't the end of the conversation, this is the beginning of the conversation to talk about open space and whether we should have a more proactive approach and a way to take advantage of prioritizing open space and knowing what we want to protect and then being proactive in doing that. So with that, I'm gonna ask Jennifer to come up here and talk about her work in the open space area and then both Jennifer and I will be available to answer any questions. Thanks, Jennifer. Thank you, David. Mayor and council, let's see. So as David said, I'm gonna talk about why we should have an open space program for the city of Fort Worth. And so as he said too, this is not a stormwater-led effort. I think many of you see me and you think, oh, this is stormwater, but this was really exciting for me. We really just started this effort in August and so we've been meeting with this very collaborative group of the departments on the screen. We had our partner organizations, the COGS, Streams and Valleys and the Water District present as well, really collaborating since August on what this program could be and why it's so important for our community. So today's presentation is really gonna go into why we should preserve open space. How do we plan for those areas? How do we identify the key areas for open space? How do we fund the acquisition and then what our proposed next steps forward to actually move forward with this open space program? So why do we even need to preserve open space? So short and simple is it helps us achieve our vision of being the most livable city in the country. So as David said, everyone knows that Fort Worth is experiencing rapid growth. So here the kind of blue-gray line in the middle shows the growth, huge significant jump over the last 20 years. And so as the city has grown and more and more people have moved to the area, more land is being developed and so there's less open space. So this exhibit is in far north, Fort Worth, just a little south of the Alliance area and this really helps show the impact of development on open space. And so the areas in pink are the past FEMA floodplains along these channels. So you used to have more stormwater storage along these channels, but over time development has pinched down these floodplains and this is allowed. And so you see more development over time and you see the loss of one of these more beneficial types of open space, our floodplain storage. So it really brings up the question, what kind of community do we wanna be? Do we wanna be a community that's just all built environment and poorly planned or do we wanna plan to protect one of our most valuable assets, our open space, and have a dense community with pockets of those high quality open spaces where people can go and escape the built environment and then go energize and then go back to their work and their lives. So what we did is we went through and open space actually helps us identify and achieve all of city council's strategic goals. So it helps provide a safer city, it helps provide flood control, it even helps with crime prevention and some of the research and journals that we've looked at. That was a little surprising to me. It helps improve mobility and air quality. So having, leaving those trees helps filter out pollutants. It lowers the heat and cools down the land in the area. It provides opportunities for trail connectivity so people can actually ride their bikes to places and walk instead of just getting their vehicle. It helps us create a clean and safe and attractive environment, a place for where wildlife actually have a home. They don't have to live in your backyard, they can live in the open space. It allows for water quality improvements. It filters out sediments and pollutants before they enter our water sources and provides opportunities for natural recreational opportunities and education. We had a 2017 economic development strategic plan and so open space can help attract the right people, the right jobs, talented people and organizations to the city of Fort Worth, people that want these open space recreational opportunities through the city can help promote tourism and increase our property values. And then lastly, it can help promote orderly and sustainable development by identifying and preserving those key open spaces for the community to use now and then in many generations to come. So as David said, our comprehensive plan actually has all of these adopted plans as a part of it and all these adopted plans all mentioned open space. But the big key is there's no overarching citywide criteria for how do we actually go about identifying and prioritizing this open space. And then the comprehensive plan also talks about the different things that are actually important in open space. So it talks about stormwater conveyance and riparian areas, trails, trees, unique vistas, water quality and environmental quality. So we already have all this information of these types of things are important should be considered for open space. So then we have all this information and we realize it's a huge benefit. So how do we actually go about planning for open space? So when we're talking about open space, the big thing is we've got lots of, we want actual natural areas that can be used for trail systems and not turned into ball parks. We don't want manicured golf courses or like my HOA front yard has to be mowed every week. We want natural areas where people can go and get away to nature and then are a low maintenance too. We have to think about, we've got limited resources so we can't go out there and mow all the time but we wanna provide these areas for people to access. So our group went through and we brainstormed what criteria are really important for the city of Fort Worth? And so we came up with this list on the screen and the longer the bar we all actually voted on what criteria are important. We started out with this list of like 40 different criteria and we're like, wow, we got it. So we kind of all combined them together and we came up with a list of around 10 criteria and we narrowed it down further. We also utilized the resources of streams and valleys in their recent confluence plan that was adopted last year. They had a whole lot of public engagement on what the public felt was important for the confluence plan. And so we use that too to kind of help us categorize all these different benefits and criteria that we could use to identify and prioritize open space. And so we came up with health and recreation. So the big thing, we want this for the community. We want people to be able to go out there and utilize it and utilize the trails and it links to our big blue zone initiative. Second came in was flood control. So we've got limited resources, we can't go mitigate all these flooding problems but if we can keep our flood plains natural and we can use them to hold back water that can have huge benefits to our community. Access, we wanna make sure that these open spaces are in identified in areas where people can access them and think about equity and think about those disadvantaged populations that don't have easy walking access to get to parks and open spaces. Iconic places, places that people look at and think about when they think about home and they think about Fort Worth and their community that they grew up in, we should think about protecting those places. And then lastly, economic development and ecosystem preservation came out too. So all of these criteria are things that we should think about when we evaluate what areas we want to identify and preserve. So lastly, affordability. Obviously we've got limited resources but we don't wanna just throw costs out there to begin with. We wanna go out and identify what those key spaces are and then think about affordability and think about how we could work with our partners possibly or what resources we have available to actually go out and identify sites. So if we were to do some kind of big GIS analysis and overlap information on all those criteria, what types of parcels do we think would actually show up as high priority open space areas? So here's one example is the Lake Arlington shoreline. And so what we did is we just kind of put a 500 foot buffer along the Fort Worth side of Lake Arlington. And so this actually has been identified a section of this in our recent active transportation plan as one of the top 20 priority trail alignments along Lake Arlington. So if we were able to preserve the buffer along Lake Arlington as a green space, so not just huge spaces but you're treating, you're keeping the water quality, you're keeping the environment there and then you're allowing great development up along that green edge so everybody can access the lake and not just house after house but opening that up to the community. So if we were able to do that, that would be really awesome. Here's one opportunity. So if you flip back, this area is like right around here. And in 2015, this is what the site looked like. So there, that could be a great site for an open space to park or trail along that area. But in 2019, this is what it looks like today. And if you go drive down and do street view from Google, what you see is this is a home to those big metal boxes and manufactured homes that are sitting waiting there to be delivered somewhere else and you can drive along the road and you can look over and you see the lake over there. But this is not what we want for our community. This is not what we want for right along lakefront footage, this kind of storage. So we need to be ready to act and to know what land is really important for us. We don't wanna go out and acquire all open spaces across the city of Fort Worth. We wanna acquire those key open spaces. So the Marys Creek area in West Fort Worth is another potential area we could do open space acquisition. So we know this area is growing. So you've got Walsh Ranch that's just starting to develop out here. So soon you're gonna have all these people. So before the people all get there, let's start planning and thinking about what open space we should preserve. Marys Creek is also really important in terms of flood control downstream along Marys Creek and in the Trinity River. And so in this area, maybe you don't follow really, really small parcels. We look for larger parcels that we could use both to protect Marys Creek and then also to reduce flooding downstream. So the Sycamore Creek area is another example of where we think would stick out as good possibilities for open space. So this area is a little bit different. We've got our super majority minority areas. So really trying to look in how we could help these disadvantaged communities connect to the river and connect to open space. So on this left side, you see a lot of green parcels. We've already got a lot of parks actually along Sycamore Creek. So if we could try to connect those focusing on the riparian quarter along Sycamore Creek, you could have a great trail system. And this is another segment that's been identified in Active Transportation Plan as one of the top 20 trail segments along this reach. Just really trying to connect those parts. Also the very downstream end of Sycamore Creek before it goes into the Trinity is identified for high bacteria. And so as a regulatory requirement from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, we actually have to go and clean that up. And so if we acquire open space, that could be an initiative that we use to help clean up that area and help filter those pollutants out and improve the water quality in Sycamore Creek and then before it goes into the Trinity River as well. So one of the last potential examples of where open space could be identified is on the east side of Fort Worth. And this image right here is actually taken from the Streams and Valleys 2018 adopted Confluence Plan. And it specifically says some of the Fort Worth's last remaining natural open spaces lie along West Fork East. So you've got downtown here in the pink, you see the meander and the river. So here you've got the whole east side. They show kind of all this green area. So this is just zoomed into part of the east side right here at 35. You've got the Trinity River. There's a massive flood plain. So at Beach Street, the levees stop, the flood plain opens up. So there's lots of opportunity in this area to preserve this flood plain, to help reduce flooding, to help bring people to the river. Streams and Valleys has an ultimate plan of trying to protect the land all along the river so people can access the river for kayaking. People can travel along the river from Fort Worth to Dallas. So if we could work with them to try to acquire and preserve open space along the Trinity River, it would help accomplish so many missions and visions in this area. So how do we actually fund all this? So as we know, land is not cheap. So we've looked at different potential funding sources and this is just a very initial start of how we could possibly fund these. And one way is our park dedication fee. So we have that fee. It was actually recently updated. So the big thing is, is that the park dedication fee can only be used in a certain way. So we'd have to make sure that the open space fit the specific park dedication criteria. But it is one potential funding source that's out there. And now there is the future bond programs. So right now we're planning for the 2022 bond programs. Obviously we would have to prioritize in and these would be evaluated against other great projects like police and fire stations and libraries. But open space is another big need for the city of Fort Worth. Partnerships with nonprofits. So how can we work with our partners to possibly fund the acquisition of these open spaces? We've got different enterprise and special revenue funds. We've got our water fund. The number one thing there is that the money would have to first be used to identify water and water investments and to protect drinking water. But as we know, there's lots of linear pipelines that could possibly be used to connect open spaces or could be used for trail systems. So thinking about the multi-use of the property that we have to acquire. Stormwater utility funding. So could we use the funding to actually go acquire and keep those open spaces open to reduce downstream flooding? And then for environmental, we've got the environmental fund. And as long as we are protecting water quality, that could be a use of the environmental funding as well. And then lastly, there's the oil and gas well trust funds which is another potential revenue source that we could use for open space acquisition. So what's our next steps? How do we move forward with this? So our plan is to work with trust for public land to actually help us with our open space plan. And there they've got this great unbiased expertise. They've got a lot of experience already in the Fort Worth area. They helped us with our Lake Arlington master plan with our Lake Worth green print. And so they can bring all this expertise to the table. They've helped Dallas with their open space planning. They've helped Travis County down in Austin with their open space planning. So they're a great resource to really bring them to the table and help us come up with our plan for the city of Fort Worth. So our next steps are really to initiate a contract with trust for public land early next year and then work with them to build a tool to really help us figure out what are those key open spaces to identify. And then come up with our open space plan policy. So another big aspect of this is maybe we don't have to go buy all this land. Maybe we could change some of our policies for how land is developed. Maybe we could make it so we could work with people who come to us and say, I'm tired of paying taxes on my floodplain. Can you take it? Well, we don't want to take everything. We'll then know if it is a high quality piece. And then maybe we can work together and accept donations because we've had people approach us before and then we don't know what to do sometimes. And then also, so we need to think about our maintenance plan and how we maintain this property and how we educate the community that it's going to be natural, that it's not going to look like their front yard. And then ultimately, obviously, we wanna be engaging and working with the public and considering their feedback as we go through this process. And so the whole thought is if we move forward with this process and then for us to look into using our gas well trust funds to jumpstart this effort. So why should we wait and start and wait for the 2022 bond election when there's those key open spaces out there right now that could be developed tomorrow? 53 acres a week could be developed. So if those areas are out there now, let's use our money that we have available and go and acquire them. So in terms of public engagement, we're really hoping to dovetail with the 2022 bond program process. So starting to present information to plan commission early next year, utilizing the information we have so far from streams and valleys and their extensive public engagement on open spaces, looking and seeing what gaps we have in information and then reaching out to the public next summer during our 2022 bond program meetings, also talking to them about open space at that time. Coming up with an online tool to get their feedback as well. And then ultimately in the fall or next year, compiling our information together and wrapping up, having that information on how we can actually go out and identify those open spaces.