Let's celebrate. For the first time in a while, every substantive agenda item deliberated by the Richardson City Council had an outcome I liked. And I'm not easy to please, I know. The three topics were CDBG, UDC, and Naming Things. The first two will take a long time to implement. I'll cover those in this week's council recap. The third will be decided when it comes back to council in a week or two. I'll cover it at that time.
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG)
Six months ago, the City Council discussed ways to address housing needs: zoning changes, "Housing Finance Corporations, Public Facility Corporations, Opportunity Zones, Community Land Trusts, Community Development Block Grants, and more, all of which offer different variations on tax breaks or other financial incentives for builders, owners, or the City itself."
Monday night, Maureen Milligan, director of Grow America, presented options for Richardson to apply for funding from Community Development Block Grants. CDBG is a program of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that funds a broad range of community development activities including housing, infrastructure, and local nonprofit services. CDBG activities must benefit individuals or areas with incomes at or below 80% of the area median income (AMI). Garland, Plano, Carrollton, Frisco, and Allen are peer cities already participating in CDBG. If accepted, Richardson could receive an approximately $800,000 allocation for fiscal 2027-2028. Supporting "Aging in place" projects would be a strong CDBG fit and meet a recognized need in Richardson.
Individual council members raised concerns. Can we trust the federal government to continue this program? How much up front investment would the city have to pay for? How much ongoing administration costs would there be? Could CDBG funds be used, for example, to pay for water service connection repairs and replacement to individual homes of low income residents? Getting encouraging answers to all concerns, Mayor Amir Omar asked the council for a "general nod in the direction of let's move this forward." He asked City Manager Don Magner to come back with more detailed answers to the concerns and next steps needed to moved forward with making a CDBG application.
So yeah, I'm enthused that the city is adding a program for helping low income residents do important home repair. There are still other programs that the city needs to investigate (Housing Finance Corporations, Public Facility Corporations, Opportunity Zones, Community Land Trusts, etc.) but we're off to a good start.
Universal Development Code (UDC)
"The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small..." — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The second substantive agenda item was to discuss proposals for creating a new Unified Development Code (UDC). The purpose will be to combine zoning ordinances, development regulations, sign code into one document. The contents will be updated to be compatible with the Envision Richardson comprehensive plan, planning for which was launched in mid-2023 and adoption was in November, 2024. Now, eighteen months later, the city is finally beginning the process of updating ordinances to be compatible with the comprehensive plan. Tina Bergen, Director of Development Services, suggested this timetable:
- Phase 0: Consultant selection (Now-Q4 2026).
- Phase 1: Assessment of existing Plans and Codes (Now-Q4 2026).
- Phase 2: Assess the 5 special Enhancement Areas (2027).
- Phase 3: Draft the new UDC (through 2028).
- Phase 4: Adoption of new UDC (Q1 2029).
The schedule was OK with council, but there was a lot of discussion about the process, specifically the public engagement. Tina Bergen says it should be different than Envision Richardson, which already provides the vision. The UDC is the technical mechanism. Public engagement should be late in the process to review whether the draft UDC aligns with Envision Richardson.
Councilmember Dan Barrios supported the project and suggested forming a citizen advisory committee for better community input. "While it's technical, it's a good thing we live in Richardon, Texas, where we have a lot of engineers, and we're a city built on brains."
Councilmember Arefin emphasized the importance of having a technical team work closely with the consultant.
Mayor Pro Tem Ken Hutchenrider expressed concerns about the financial implications of the project and suggested reducing public engagement. "I'm going to disagree. We already have the CPC. We have the Sign Control Board. Those committees are specifically set up to deal with what we're talking about with the public engagement that we've always done. I don't see the need need for that additional committee."
Mayor Omar had his own view. "On this advisory committee question, I did a quick search as well, and to Councilman Barrios' point, there's a number of cities that are doing it, bigger cities than ours, cities that don't have quite as many decades before a rewrite, and yet they also decided to pick a new advisory committee for this particular task, and they're all cities that I think are probably doing it pretty well, and the caliber of people that they've got on that particular advisory committee, although they have amazing people on their own CPCs and other boards, I'm sure those advisory committees seem to be loaded up with pretty talented people, and I know we have a number of talented people on our sidelines that we could pull on to help us with this."
Mayor Omar is big on asking about "best practices" but apparently the City Manager hasn't yet taken him up on the practice of studying best practices as the first step of a new project. In Richardson, we wait until everyone on council offers different suggestions and only then does someone ask how other cities do it.
Mayor Omar had other concerns, not with a citizen advisory committee but with the role of the consultant. "I'm always hesitant on the consulting engagements, especially the size and scale, and I suspect maybe the overall budget that we're talking about here could potentially be maybe multiple consultants for different parts of the project, or perhaps it's just one overarching one, but I'm hesitant to get super excited about a consulting engagement of that size, partly because I haven't been just super blown away by what we have had from consultants in the past, and I want to maybe at least understand a little bit more just what we're going to do differently this go-round in a consultant selection that would help us make sure that we're picking someone who's actually going to do something that's going to move the needle for our city."
Councilmember Jennifer Justice would be guided by cost. "I'm comfortable either way. If you come back to us and tell it's going to be a million dollars extra to do an advisory commission, I think we might have a different tone on the dais, right? So I think bring us both options, and we can have that discussion later."
Councilmember Curtis Dorian agreed with Barrios: "We have a lot of engineers in the city, a lot of brains in the city, be nice for them to participate in that public engagement." He also agreed with Justice. "I too can go in the direction, depending on what the city manager and city staff bring back for recommendation."
The question of what kind of public input we'll get was left up in the air, but all council members agreed to move forward with the multi-year plan to create a new unified development code. So, yeah, let's celebrate.
Naming things
The third substantive agenda topic was about creation of a policy for awarding a "Key to the City" and a policy for naming city assets like buildings, infrastructure, programs, projects, and services. I'm not going to cover the deliberation here. I'll wait for a week or two after City Manager Magner drafts a policy based on the deliberation of the council and presents it to them for adoption.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
"Years before results.
Months even before ink dries."
The future beckons."
—h/t ChatGPT
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