 My name is Ty Thompson. I'm assistant director over development services in the specifically the infrastructure division. I perform basically, if you flush a toilet, get a drink of water. Or drive your car, those are the things that I'm responsible to oversee. So not, not a whole lot. I don't do bridges. So don't worry about that. Uh, but we do, we have experts for that, but everything else I am responsible to make sure it happens. So today, I'm going to go through a few slides. Uh, first, I always like to start off with the city's mission, vision and values. And the reason why I like to do this is because this is important. This, the mission statement gives us purpose. It gives us clarity on what our job is, what we're trying to accomplish. So Fort Worth will be the most livable and best managed city in the country. That's our mission. Our vision, which is our goals, that's where we're trying to be is working together to build a strong community. I'm sorry. I got those reversed. Uh, I look, look at that. So obviously that's that's attention to detail that engineers are better than most. But unfortunately, I'm not that not that strong, but so those are actually swapped. But your vision is your goal. That's where you want to be. You want to be a Fort Worth will be the most livable and best managed city in the country. And our mission is working together to build a strong community. Um, our values, that's how we perform our work. That's experience, accountability, continuous improvement, exception, exceptional customer service, ethical behavior, diversity, and mutual respect. I think the last one there is really important. Mutual respect among our peers and among our customers is most important. That's, that's how we get a quality outcome, not just an outcome. We're not just checking boxes. We're trying to meet the needs of our customer. So going on to our next slide. These are the city managers office expectations for development services. I'm not going to go through all of them. I'll let you read that. But obviously we want to partner in the development process. I think that's very important. Our customers come in here and we want to make them part of our community. We don't want them to be fly by night. We want them to understand and get involved in how to better Fort Worth and to make it the most livable city in the country. Innovation and problem solving. That's what we do. We are supposed to be transparent. DJ is very big on transparency. And I feel like I'm going to echo those sentiments because it's very important that we tell people, you look, we made a mistake, but we're going to fix it. That's more problem solving and innovation coming in. We are creative solution makers. We can find the best solution for you in the most impossible situation. That's what we're here for. Development services department is basically we resolve development issues. That's very important because when somebody comes in and they need a building permit, they're not looking for a lot of routing around and looking for a bunch of people. It's our job to provide them with exceptional customer service and to make sure that they achieve what they're looking to get done. Sometimes we have to say no. Unfortunately, what we can do is instead of saying no, we can say or not unfortunately, but what we can say is yes, that's not possible, but this is. So there's always a better way of handling the situation. We're going to get into my division now, which is we're responsible for the engineering construction documents. We approve minor waivers and variances and we work with our other internal departments. Those are very strong relationships that we have to take care of on a daily basis. Those that's with the water department, TPW, property management, parks and recreation and others that we have to lean on for their subject matter expertise. Maybe the permit is in their realm, but we need to make sure that we're always strengthening those relationships so that we can be effective and streamline the development process. Got a little stuff going on there for you. Some neat stuff that I did with PowerPoint. I'm very proud of that. But we deal with review except in installation of private development and it's comprised of five sections. Those five sections are stormwater development services, infrastructure plan review, development services, water section, transportation development review, and finally our parkway and permitting inspection. IPRC, they've got 11 folks. Well, we've got 11 positions total and really what they do is somebody comes in and they give us a set of construction documents and our job is to review them based on the design criteria and ordinances. We make sure that we are building the city in a very systematic, organized way. Now, not every site has every site has its own challenges, so therefore we can't always treat everything the same. So the criteria needs to be looked at in relationship to how we can best apply it. That's where variances and waivers come in. But as you can see, we also deal with our other departments that we lean on and we are actually responsible to get plans reviewed in a certain amount of time based on state law, which is House Bill 3167. State law is very important. It is not up for discussion and we have to comply with it regardless if we like it or not. Stormwater Development Services, they have nine employees but they have three third party consultants which help review all of our drainage studies. That is also, they look at flood studies and floodplain. So if anybody has ever experienced flood studies or floodplain, you know how important those studies are. What we are trying to do is mitigate those when we get that information from that study. That involves a variety of different measures that look to either eliminate the flooding in an area or reduce it greatly. They are part of the Development Review Commission or committee which we review PLATs in that group so that we understand that the PLAT has all the necessary information on the PLAT related to stormwater utilities. And they are responsible for coordinating with TPW stormwater management. Again, this is another, this is one of our internal department stakeholders and we want to make sure that we strengthen those relationships on a daily basis. Development Water Section, they have got eight folks. They are responsible and for review of the IPRC plans are part of the plan review team. They look at preliminary and final PLATs to make sure that the information is provided that related to the water department. They also are a member of the Development Review Committee and finally they're responsible for coordination with the water department. Again, another stakeholder that's internal to the city of Fort Worth. We look at encroachments, abandonments, building permits, everything to make sure that they are meeting a city criteria or ordinances. Transportation Development Review. This is, so if you've ever been stuck at a stop light and you're wondering why it's taking so long, these are the guys that are responsible for it. So that's Tom Simmerly if you ever get mad and we'll give you his contact information. So if you get stuck at a traffic light, he's the person that's responsible, not me. No, just kidding. So there's four FTEs in that group. We've got one consultant that reviewed our traffic impact analysis which basically takes in that we get the study and it tells us exactly what kind of impact it's going to have, the development's going to have on our traffic system. This is very important information because we don't want people stuck at lights because what happens is when car is idle, it creates a lot of carbon footprint and that goes to global warming. So our job is to try and not only help manage mobility and navigability of the roadways, but we are looking at social environmental justice that's part of this product. We also review sidewalk waivers. I know that we are a blue zone city, so it is one of our ordinances that we put in sidewalks, but we also have something called safe routes to schools. It's very important that we provide children the ability to walk safely to their school. Usually within, if you live within a mile, statistics show that about 60% of all students ride or walk to school. That's a lot of kids on the street. We want to make sure that it's safe. We want to make sure our parkways are navigable. They're already broken sidewalk and those kids can get to and from school in a very safe manner. Parkway permitting. These are the guys on the ground. This is Jeff and Jorge. Now, they are very important. The group actually has three. We're looking for a couple of inspectors right now. They look at all parkway permits. Now, what that is is your sidewalks and your driveways. People don't take this into consideration, but it's very important that the sidewalks meet ADA compliance that your driveway is a specific width because that can create a traffic problem, as well as they're not too far into the right-of-way where they're creating a traffic nuisance. They not only inspect and issue the permit, but they review the plans before they go out. They do it all in one shot. They coordinate with traffic development or transportation development review and other traffic engineering-related groups in TPW to make sure that they are staying on track with all policies and criteria. The infrastructure plan review is responsible to streamline. We've got a new program called the CFA Express. What it does is it takes your plan review time and cuts it almost down to six weeks. Debbie Wilhelm actually leads that group and she's doing a fantastic job. These are 23 priority initiatives, which are very important because it goes to one of our main values, which is continuous improvement. Again, I don't know if you heard. We need to listen to the voice of the customer. It's important that we take in what their experience is and try and modify our business process to make it as effective as possible and create that quality outcome that everyone's looking for. Having said that, I'm going to go ahead and move on past this one. The Stormwater Development Services Priority Initiatives. We're working on the Stormwater Facility Management Agreement Ordinance, which is to try and develop and adopt an ordinance covering all private detention ponds. That would streamline a huge process that we have currently. We obviously are going to create positions, which we did for the SDS section to reduce workload for staff. That's something that obviously there's a lot of folks. We've added 40 personnel and it's been those were to also help the workload throughout the department. Transportation Development Review continue to do training related to new policies. Make sure everybody's on the same page from our consultants to our internal partners and continue working on creating the Parkway Permit process to allow minor streetlights. This is something that really will help small infill projects because that is something that a lot of them are having trouble getting is a single life single pedestrian light that can't get a contractor or an engineer because it's just not enough money for them. The water section, we work on tracking encroachments. The reason why we do that is because we want to find out what are encroachments, variances and different stuff that's actually coming and how that impacts the city. Should we change our code? Does that mean that certain things need to change so that we don't have so many variance requests? Parkway Inspection doing a great job and continue. We're going to have expand that group to five people so that we can get they do about 16,000 permits or I want to say 16,000 permits a year, which is and I could be off on that number but obviously it's quite a bit for one or two guys to take care of or three. Transportation Development Review we've talked through. They're going to continue to work with TBW Streetlight on streamlining that review process and we're going to create a rough portionality policy. For those of you who don't know what rough portionality is, it's very confusing. I do actually maintain that for the city but it basically is an exaction for a developer to provide the impact from their development. So if you come in and you build 500 acres of single family residential, you owe us so much money so that we can build roads to support those new homes. And one of the important things that I like is standard operating procedures. As you can see under development water service section we're working on our SOPs. That allows people who come into the group to understand what everybody's job but it also helps us explain to our customers what everybody's job is. That's very important. You need to be able to explain what you do and why it's critical to the development process. A new group that we're looking at creating is the miscellaneous projects. Initially this will be supported by third party consultants and contractors but what we'd like to do is expand the existing miscellaneous projects program that's in water currently and add sidewalks, driveways, small storm sewer development. Like it's too going on. I'm sorry. Hello. Okay. Everyone please remember to re-mute yourselves for the best listening opportunity for all of us. Thank you. Go ahead say. Okay. This group is basically it's an infancy right now. We've received contracts or bids from consultants, engineering consultants as well as contractors for reviewing them and determining whether or not we're going to move forward with it. But if it does it's going to help small infill projects and small projects in general throughout the city. So it's going to spur development hopefully. And with that here are all the people that are responsible for the infrastructure division. I'm the assistant director. Vic Tornero is over IPRC, Taylor Gunderman is over development water section and Tom is over TDR. We are looking for storm water management, storm water manager right now. That was Steven Nichols, but he has since been promoted into another position. Congratulations to him. We do miss him and but we will be looking for his replacement. So if you know of anybody, please let me know. And with that I'm going to open up the floor to any questions people may have. All right. So we do have a question in the chat. One question on route proportionality. Does it apply to infill developments too? And if so, how are the quotes or contributions calculated? Okay, great question. It does apply to infill development. We have two times that we can collect either we collected the plat or we collected the building permit. How it's assessed is based off your use. So if you're coming in with say an office park, you're going to have a certain amount of traffic trips that are generated. If you have a drive through, you're going to generate more traffic. So your RP would go up quite a bit. For instance, a quick trip, which you might think would produce a lot of traffic, actually is assessed at about 169,000 for one example. And then a McDonald's, which has a drive through produces even more trips. And it's about 350,000. Thank you. Thank you, Ty. I do want to let you guys know that we will be sending a link this meeting has been recorded. So for those of you who haven't been able to listen to the whole program and its entirety, it will be put together and have a bow on it and be sent to you. All right, you guys, we have another question. What can rough for proportionality be mainly used for capacity only improvements, maintenance related items if condition is bad, that would worsen by development and storm water water sewer. This is a question, Ty. Okay. So rough portionality is used for water and sewer that's calculated through the water department. Rough portionality for roadways is based on capacity. It does not apply to maintenance. Maintenance is the city's problem that we need to take care of ourselves because we already own it. But if we're expanding a road, say from two lanes to four lanes, then we can apply rough proportionality. In the event that somebody develops next to a roadway that's already been developed out, it's got its four lanes, or it's three lanes or whatever this maximum street section is supposed to be. I can't apply rough proportionality. All right. Thank you, Ty. We have another question. So you have early kudos that you have a very helpful presentation, which it is. And here's the question. What is the best way for supporting departments to receive timely feedback on how we are doing to support and streamline the review process? So the best way to do that is to come to my office and slap me and make sure I know what question you have. No. Reach out, buy an email. If you don't get a response, pick up the phone. I have a one email rule. If I don't get an answer, I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to call you. It's our responsibility to be good. That's why I talked about mutual respect. We need to be good partners with each other. So you shouldn't feel, if you're asking the question that you're bothering anybody because you're not, you're actually trying to help a customer and you're trying to better the development process. So reach out through email. If that doesn't work, give them a call. And if that doesn't work, give me a call. All right, Ty. We have another question. When will the various engineering manual updates be released? Wow. That is a great question. We are currently working on them. We have been for some time about 18 months. Unfortunately, as most of you know, when we start talking about ordinances and policies, it takes a little while to get everybody's input. We are finishing up the final touches and going to DAC in March. We're going to let, if you're not familiar with what DAC is, it's the Development Advisory Committee. We meet monthly with these folks. They represent contractors, consultants, developers within the city of Fort Worth who have invested interest in these new design criteria and policies. We're going to let them take a look at them. We're going to get them back. And then I would imagine sometime in June, July, they're going to be updated and go to Council. Thank you, Ty. We have an additional question. Do you have an estimated date that the Streetlight Initiative will be rolled out? The Streetlight is still in, are we talking about the permit or are we talking about miscellaneous projects? It doesn't specify. Okay. So the permit is, we already have a prototype that's going through right now through TPW. That's with Clint and Courtney. We're using it as a permit. But we also, the miscellaneous projects group is slated to come online in July or June of this year if all things work out with our contractors and we get everybody on board. All right. Thank you, Ty. Are there any more questions? I don't see anything else in the chat. I didn't know if someone wanted to raise their hand or just do a quick outburst of a question. Yeah. Well, one last thing I always like to talk about this is about leadership. I want everybody to know that you are a leader. You are responsible for doing a great job, but you should feel comfortable in your work environment because it's important to get along with your peers. It's important to get along with your supervisors and your subordinates. I like to use the, like to talk about we work together. You don't work for me. In fact, if it should be known as an AD, I work for you. So you tell me what's going on in the department and my door is always open to any kind of improvement that we can make. So just remember, I work for you every single day. You're the reason why I come to work. But having said that, I want y'all to know it was a pleasure being able to present to you today and I thank you for your time. Ty, we have some more questions out there for you. You are popular today. All right. So another question is, can you come back and tell us about the manual updates? Absolutely. All right. That's an absolute from Ty. And then we have another question. What are the plans for development services to consolidate expertise under development services group, such as transportation elements and others? That's a really good question. The idea behind streamlining is we want to clarify purpose or every section's mission. So we don't want ancillary processes that interfere with the development process. We are right now, we're going to be taking over some street lighting responsibilities. So they'll be within development services. That is the the kind of, as far as we're going to expand at this time, I know that that is, I don't know if personnel are going to be involved in that, or if we're just talking about tasking. But that's the only thing about combining any additional expertise into the group. Thank you, Ty. I think that wraps up all the questions that we have right here in the chat. We appreciate you for coming and presenting for us. You gave us some great information. I want to remind you guys that we do have another development review process training coming up March 17th of 2023 on strategic ops and permit building permit team. So I want to thank you guys for staying with us through our little challenges with tech and we will see you next time. Have a great day. Bye, everybody. Have a great day. Good weekend. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good weekend.