Mineral Wells seeks drainage study grants

By GLENN EVANS gevans@weatherforddemocrat.com




MINERAL WELLS — When it rains, it pours — like a swollen river along West Hubbard Avenue and other low-lying sections of Mineral Wells where drainage issues prompted city council action on Tuesday.

“Part of my understanding is when it rains it builds up on (U.S.) 180 over the years — it was always like that,” Mayor Regan Johnson said, shortly after the council agreed to have engineering consultants prepare detailed grant applications for the home of crazy water to put one category of water, rainfall, into therapy.

Tuesday’s action triples the city’s chances of landing grant money.

Council members in July hired Gauge Engineering to prepare a grant application to the Texas Water Development Board.

On Monday, and on the recommendation of the state water board, the city asked Gauge to apply for two federal grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Those are under FEMA’S 2022 Flood Mitigation Assistance and 2022 Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities programs, recently passed by Congress.

City Manager Dean Sullivan said Gauge’s work will provide grant judge’s with detailed assessments of flood-prone parts of the city and the risk those pose to public health and property.

The engineers will include fact-based assessments as opposed to anecdote or theory, he said.

Gauge Engineers will be paid $16,000 counting the July contract.

Action on hiring those consulting engineers was part of a consent agenda, which does not require separate votes on individual items unless a council member wants to pull it out for separate consideration.

That meant the council was able to move, eight minutes into the meeting, to its next item — a closed-door discussion of an as-yet undisclosed amendment to the city’s agreement with the Baker Hotel & Spa.

A beneficiary of the city’s Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, the city icon is slated for reopening in late 2023 once renovations are completed.

The increment zone, or TIRZ, mechanism funnels property taxes into two city funds.

The property taxes paid from the value of the building as it stood when the TIRZ was created goes to the general fund like those of any property owner.

Taxes based on improvements to the property, in this case the renovations to the hotel, go into a separate, TIRZ fund. The TIRZ board then approves annual payments to the investors, in this case Baker Hotel Development Partners LLC.

Last year, that return on investment was around $900. The TIRZ approach is popular in cities because it funds investment without asking residents, other than those in the investment group, to pay for major improvements to their communities.

The investors’ incentive agreement with the city also collects one-eighth of a cent in sales taxes, under a state law allowing those revenues to spur economic development.

That fund is at about $4 million now, but is held by the city until and if the investors meet certain conditions spelled out in the agreement.

The council emerged from the 38-minute closed session to authorize the mayor “ …to execute an amendment to the economic development incentive agreement with the Baker on or before closing of permanent financing,” according to the motion by Ward 3 Councilwoman Beth Watson.

Watson and the mayor declined to discuss what the amendment is, citing the pending real estate deal exception to the Open Records Act.

Tuesday’s meeting opened with a standing ovation for Backpack Buddies founder and executive director, Judy Jackson. The nonprofit program has provided local school children with weekend meals since 2007.

“She has set an example of civil engagement that all residents can aspire to,” a proclamation from Texas Sen. Drew Springer read.

Backpack Buddies feeds up to 1,200 children weekly and expanded this school year to accommodate the district’s new four-day school week.

Jackson spread credit for the proclamation around.

“And it also goes to all the great volunteers we have,” she said, before declining Johnson’s offer to use all three minutes of the open comments segment of the agenda: “I’m a packer, not a speaker.”

“We just want to thank you for all that you do,” the mayor told Jackson, who attended with her husband, Rick.