During Tuesday night’s Denton City Council meeting, just one person came to speak during the public hearing required before the council calls the November bond election.
(Denton voters will consider whether to authorize $20.4 million to reconstruct city streets. There’s about $96 million in failed city streets that need to be rebuilt. About $400,000 of that bond will go to street-related public art projects.)
Denton resident Stewart Morehead, of Ruidoso Court, told the council that he relocated to Denton from Fort Worth in part because of its vibrant arts and culture scene, but he thought the combining of the street work and the public art into a single line on the ballot was too risky.
“I’m extremely concerned that people not interested in public art will vote down the necessary street repairs,” Morehead said in his testimony.
He encouraged the council to keep the items separate on the ballot and let the city’s nascent policy of committing 2-4 percent of a bond project to public art to live or die on its own merits with Denton voters.
Even though the Citizens Bond Advisory Committee voted unanimously to present the bond as a single proposition, City Attorney Anita Burgess reassured the council that when the final ordinance came before them to call the bond election later this month, they would be provided with the option to call it either way — one proposition or two.