It will likely be a long and late meeting as your Denton City Council kicks things off with a Council Work Session at 1:00pm, followed by a Regular Session at 6:30pm. Check out the full agenda with backup and see below for the highlights…
SMOKING ORDINANCE DISCUSSION
You might recall the City Council amended the smoking ordinance a couple years back and extended the indoor smoking prohibition (which already regulated 99% of businesses in Denton) to include restaurants and bars who allowed admittance to minors. Though I thought at the time that Denton should pursue a more comprehensive prohibition on smoking in indoor workplaces, the votes were simply not there to move in that direction.
We will discuss a number of new possible amendments to this ordinance, including:
- making it illegal to sell e-cigarette equipment to minors
- a consideration to remove the bar exemption from the ordinance
- a consideration to include smoking e-cigarettes under prohibited activities and prohibit their use wherever smoking is prohibiteds
- a discussion of whether or not to prohibit smoking within so many feet of an entrance to a business
As it did last time, this topic has generated a lot of community conversation – that’s a good thing. A few polls have been conducted to gauge public opinion. The city put out a poll on Engage Denton recently on the question of whether or not to extend the current smoking ban to stand alone bars. 78 people participated over a 11 day period with these results: 69% indicated they were no in favor of extending the ordinance this way while 31% said they were in favor of including bars in the prohibition. But there are more…
The city did a similar poll in 2012 on the same Engage Denton platform – the results were very different. This one included 295 votes and the results indicated between 70-80% support for a comprehensive smoking ban across all age demographics.
I ran my own poll over 2 days this weekend and it had 245 responses with the following results:
FIRE AND EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES TO ROBSON RANCH
Because Robson Ranch was developed a good ways away from the core of the city, getting typical city infrastructure and services out there has been tricky and expensive. Nevertheless, as taxpayers like everyone else, there is significant interest by this neighborhood to decrease the response time of emergency personnel. The council will hear a report on some possible pathways of getting such services in place.
REORGANIZATION OF DENTON DEVELOPMENT CODE
This will be the second part of an ongoing discussion about possible changes to the Denton Development Code aimed at making our development process more efficient, easier to understand, more customer-friendly.
AMENDMENTS TO THE GAS WELL DRILLING AND PRODUCTION ORDINANCE
We will be continuing a public hearing on much anticipated amendments to our gas drilling codes. While we are posted to take a vote on the matter during our Regular Session, I fully expect that a vote will not take place. Instead, there is interest to allow for an extended time of public discussion among the council on the proposed changes, ideas that have come from the community, and digging into differences that might exist among the council. I expect that we will do so and allow for public comment from anyone wishing to speak.
If you want a good idea of the direction of this ordinance and the issues that are live and open for debate among the council members, this is the meeting to attend.
As always, if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them here or contact me at kevin.roden@cityofdenton.com or 940-206-5239.