Today’s Denton City Council meeting begins with a 1pm Work Session followed by a 6:30pm Regular Session. Go here to find the entire agenda with backup information. Here are some items of interest…
TREE GIVE-AWAY – PUTTING TREES IN THE HANDS OF THE CITIZENS
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You might recall an idea I floated a couple months back to take a significant portion of the $2 million (and growing) tree fund and use it to scale our tree give-away efforts. This came after a presentation in which we learned that funding a tree on city property (something that is good as well) costs around $1000 a tree. Compare that with a tree give-away tree at $10 with all the costs of irrigation, maintenance, and care passed off to the adoptive citizen. If our goal is to get more trees in our city and increase our canopy, let’s get ambitious.
The head of Keep Denton Beautiful has since been developing a plan to do just that. We’ll be hearing more about the options to give more trees to our citizens during our work session, but you can check out the presentation right here.
BUDGET PRIORITIES FOR 2015-2016
Although we won’t be formally approving the 2015-2016 budget until October, with a general fund budget of nearly $100 million and a total city budget nearing $1 billion, it is best to get started early. The Council Committee on Citizen Engagement, a committee I Chair, has worked over the last couple of years to encourage a more user-friendly budget process in order to make sure those who wanted to learn more about it and get involved could do so.
As such, there is now a dedicated website where you can track the process and also submit your own budget recommendations. Here’s this year’s budget intro video. Let me know what are your budget priorities for next year? Where would you like to see budget dollars prioritized?
HISTORIC LANDMARK APPLICATIONS
Another wave of applications for Denton Historic Landmark houses has made its way through the process and we will be considering three great properties for this prestigious designation.
1109 West Congress
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923 West Oak
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1011 West Oak
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As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below or contact me at kevin.roden@cityofdenton.com or 940-206-5239.