Good afternoon and welcome to a workshop meeting of the Book of Ritone City Council. It is Monday, August 26, 2024. The time is now 325. We have no presentations or proclamations today. So our next item of business on the agenda are board interviews. We'll first seek applicants for the citizens, pedestrian and bikeway advisory board. We have any applicants here today. Right, we'll make a note that for this and all other boards we are also interviewing tomorrow night at a regular council meeting Tuesday at 6 p.m. You do not need to be present tomorrow night to be considered if you interview today but of course you are welcome. We'll turn to the community appearance board and the applicants. Yes welcome please come forward to the lectern give your name and address and you'll have to three minutes to tell us why you want to serve. Welcome. Good afternoon mayor and council. My name is Daniel Oye, 33 East, Camino Real, Boca Raton, Florida, 33432. I am originally from El Paso, Texas. Move to Boca Raton, Florida about three years ago and have been engrarained in the community ever since. I served as a knocked official out there in Texas. So when I move to any city that I get to, I always feel like joining a board is necessary. Being in any community involvement just shows you that you care, and you care about the constituents and the people that want to be a part of that. My daughters are here with me as well, I'm not sure if you're going to see the rest of our lives. I'm sure the rest of our lives are going to be in the out of the way. I'm sure the rest of our lives are in the out of the way. I'm sure the rest of our lives are in the out of the way. I'm sure the rest of our lives are in the out of the way. I'm sure the rest of our lives are in the out of the way. and we're excited to kind of be a part of what we can do for this community. Currently, I serve as a director of business development for a landscape construction company, and I was at the Book of Return Resort for about three years. So the history, I served on their history board with Timothy Holmes, love the historic community board and whatnot, and I'm excited to give my input and feedback and a different perspective to what Book can offer from now into the future. So this is what I have to offer. I look forward to your consideration and I'd love to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you, Ms. lawyer. Council members, any questions? I have a few. First, could you remind us or what elected position did you hold in Texas? So I served as a youngest elected official in Texas for the Securro Independence School District. And I served as an appointed committee under Rick Perry, Governor Rick Perry for a couple of the boards out there for the Board of Relations Committee. Very good. Are you familiar with the specifics of the community appearance boards, current responsibilities, and what we have been discussing since May about a change in those responsibilities? So I spoke with Brooke Liberty. She touched base a little bit with what we had to do. She said there were some changes coming up. She was going to send me a packet coming up here soon in regards to what those changes were. I don't know the specifics. Specifically she talked about just engraving with what we have to do versus the downtown to the west side of Voka and how there are different parameters that exist for those sides. for those sides, but anything else, I'll be up to date and current. If I do get chosen, I'll make sure to stay up to date with all those discussions and parameters you have said. Well, thank you. Well, only because you mentioned paint color, one of the things we've discussed is streamlining this process to cut down on the work and give more assurance and certainty to applicants, residential and commercial. So, staff should be finalizing their proposal that we discussed in May, which is having a preset set of paint colors and reflection rates. So, you're not looking, it's less artistic design by the board and more. Staff are ready. Staff are ready. We already have a approved set of parameters. So, I hope that's consistent with what you would envision doing. We hope so. I think when we sat on the book, Riton, the iconic pink building was such a discussion, you know, people painting it. They're like, it's now a different color pink when we were sitting with the resort. So people were so concerned about that. That of course standardizing it makes the most sense, right, to say people won't be rejected because of this type of parameters that are set. So standardizing something and making them straight across the board will be really beneficial for now in the future for that. Okay, well good. All right, thank you. Any other questions, Council members? Thank you for your application, Ms. Leia. Thank you all. Have a great day. Thank you. Any other applicants for CAB here? All right, and we will turn to the General Employees Pension Board. Any applicants here? Yes, please come forward. Give your name and address in the older than three minutes. Good afternoon. Aaron Lally, 401 Southwest 15th Drive. So in three minutes, I'll tell you who I am, why I'm qualified for this role and why I want to do it. So Aaron Lally, Liv and E. Spokka, with my wife and three kids. I have three girls, two, four, and six. I'm a partner with Makita Investment Group. So what does Makita do? We are a national pension investment consultant. So just like I know, you're the two pension boards in Boca, engaged with third party consultants to provide advice and governance, that's what my company does. So I work with about a little more than a dozen plans in the southeast and attend and present probably 40 to 50 pension board meetings a year. So I think I'm uniquely positioned to help this pension board with what I see across the southeast or across a number of pension plans. I'm also active with the Florida Public Pension Trustees Association. That's a group that has about maybe 500 members public pension trustees across the state. For the last seven or eight years I taught a class at their trustee school to a group of new trustees over here. Hold a degree in economics and a number of designations including the chartered financial analyst and chartered alternative investment analysts. So why do I want to do this? Got three kids. We're here to stay. Not looking to leave Boka. Trying to find ways to get more involved in the community. Not really interested in politics. So this board, I think, is a perfect venue where I can share some of the knowledge and expertise I've developed over the last 16 years and also benefit from the board and learning more about the city and the people that are helping make decisions for my family. So thank you for your consideration. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Lally, Council members, any questions? Mr. Wader. Thank you very much for your application, and certainly your qualifications seem considerable. Just as a standard procedure, have you considered in terms of an evaluated to make sure that there's no potential conflicts of interest with your current position or with some of your speaking engagement or other associations as with this position. Yeah, so yes, I've considered that and I've discussed with my company's compliance department if this is even doable. They say it is. Essentially, by joining the board, I will effectively eliminate my company's chance of, you know, working for the board. So I recognize that and that's totally acceptable. Thank you for looking into it and checking with your compliance department. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you. Further questions? Mr. Lalli, how do you find out about this particular vacancy? There's an existing board member that I've met at these conferences and had lunch with and he has been recommending that one is a vacancy. I should pursue it. So he shared it with me and following up. Thanks. Who was that? Rob Safar. Thank you. And then you said that you'd attended to City Advisory Board meetings where they have this board or another board. The police and fire board. So many years ago, we were a part of a finals and request for proposal to be the consultant for that board. We were not selected. We actually presented in this room before you had this big stage. And this was just like a multi-purpose room. But so there was one meeting here and another meeting. I guess it was. It was down in the government buildings there. I don't remember which one it was. This was a six or seven years ago. All right. Thank you, any other questions? Thank you for your interest. Thanks again. We'll make the appointments tomorrow night. I believe that's it. We had, that's all for General Employees Pension Board. Any applicants for Marine Advisory Board? Parks and Recreation Board? Yes, Mr. Nelson, welcome. Good afternoon. Keith Nelson, 841 Park Drive East. As a resident of the Barry Rallye for over 20 years, I feel I may be able to bring a different perspective to this board. The beach parks are also my neighborhood park. In the July City Council workshop, it was mentioned that some of the beachfront parks were in need of renovation. I spend many hours a day in the park walking the trails every morning and most evenings of walking probably six to seven miles a day. And if anyone hasn't walked the Gumballimbo ramp, it's a great exercise and a great view. And you go at sunset, you're the only one there. Maybe not, maybe the secret's out. But regular walking is one of the best exercises. And due to health issues, many people can't participate in the organized sports that are offered by the city. I feel parks and rec can do even more to encourage walking in our parks. I presented some of my ideas to the Beation Parks meeting at the recent meeting and Brianne Harms shared my ideas with a director of Greg Stevens. So I'm very interested in contributing into making our parks even better and more engaging questions. Thank you, Mr. Nelson, Council members, questions. Right, thank you for your interest. Thank you. Any other applicants or parks and rec board? Right, permitting in construction or view board. We are still looking for an architect and an electrical engineer. Please call your friends and neighbors we may have to change the composition of this board. It's not meeting yet but it will perform important functions. We've actually we welcome your canvassing others. All right that concludes our board appointments. We'll now turn to item three public request. I do have one card from Mr. Chris De Silva who I don't see in the chambers but perhaps he's outside. If not he can come back after anyone also wishes to speak. I know we have at least one person. Mr. Anjit, why don't you come forward? Anyone wishing to speak and under public request please give your name and address. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to ask the question. And that tri-rail is the commuter rail. Again, when talking about this area's development, 20 units an acre in the city of Ocarotone is nothing. That's why you don't see development on unless they're passing density. Passing density is the only way residential development happens around here, otherwise, it's just not feasible. So I just again asked this council to think about that. And maybe in this area, increasing the units per acre to something that's more suitable for this city's future. So again, I'd just like to reiterate what happened for Jamie Danberg. I'd like to hopefully have you have a discussion because this is going to be a Appearing at the September 11th special magistrate hearing so first off I'd like to point out none of your special magistrates are from the city of Boca Raton I think that's important because what skin in the game do they have? So when they're then asking and they're certifying fines and things like that you certified a fine for $50,000 that they had levied a fine of $150,000 at the last meeting. So you levied a fine of $87,000 to Mr. Dan Burke from his non-compliance. For whatever reason in the agreement that Mr. Brown has agreed to single-handedly in backdoor meetings at City Hall, what was an adjudication instead has turned into a negotiation and now the goalposts have moved dramatically. So there is no sponsor for a text amendment. And the reality is, is building permits should be issued and should be immediately done in the most time consuming manner, time urgent manner of 90 days, let's say, for what realistically should be. So in the last special magistrate hearing, the attorney stated multiple times they weren't seeking a text amendment. What I fear for with an April 2026 date is that there will be a new council member up on this. And this will indefinitely turn into postponement after postponement because there will be another election before April of 2026. So that's not fair to the community who has promised this as part of a development that needed this component in 2015. So again, I just don't understand how this can be. I said, think it, I know it sets an absolutely terrible precedent for all code compliance in the future that you cannot comply. Come back to another future meeting and say, let's negotiate this thing. I can't understand it. I don't understand how it's in the city's best interest and where I talk about corruption, the last city attorney, the last city mayor almost ended up in jail. Okay. The reality is what happens in these backdoor meetings. There shouldn't be any. There shouldn't be backdoor meetings. I'm under the storage and things expired. Mr. D'Sullva. I would not like to give my address because of the scenario man. My name is Christian. If I'm inaccurate, it can be adjusted in our apologize. Motor unit, I'm just saying that randomly. Thank you for allowing me to be here and everything else and speaking. I also think my snorke can look good, better, and continue improving, not degrading. It does look good. It's a little risky, but you gotta take a risk sometimes. Okay, brief overview of what is to come, how it's supposed to go, or how it can be. Addressing the council for future ideas and changes. I feel law enforcement should have to perform in civil litigation, civil matters and open discussion, which is their whole purpose, how I feel, and the constitution. You do criminal but not civil. You do not do banking, but you do mental health. When did you get to picking decide? Outside an inside court and civil and criminal, you must be available or have a department that deals with civil for 70,000 plus a year. You can perform all tasks. I showed and others have shown that it is possible. Have a paid reduction to pay them 30,000 a year because I'm sorry, but they do not perform to the standard I expect. They mess things up on purpose and try to get out of stuff. But I probably would too if my higher ups and government were not stepping up and concerned about and more concerned about corporate world, not not you guys, corporate world instead of reality. You don't go, wait, you don't do civil, you don't do banking nor divorce, but you do traffic, criminal and mental. Your mass mandates was a civil issue and you all were involved. I hate to tell you this, but you all are not allowed to not make sense. And if you don't, I gotta start off with again. If you don't have enough sense, gas can be unavailable at the gas station, like saloon, or that day that everybody forgot about when we had no gas. I feel how I feel now I feel now it should be I feel I think it's how I feel how it should be mandated I feel like now it should be mandated that police performance civil to stop criminal prevent and preserve freedom and it And it is clearly in the Constitution a main purpose of our Second Amendment. If it's 70,000, if it's 70,000, you can do it or 30,000 and split and match categories in different departments. You guys love tricks and loopholes. The Knight of the Amendment says the rights and laws have not stated or for for for in towards the citizens. I can bypass local legislative because of this loophole and legislative or not. Mr. D'Sullivan. Sorry to interrupt your time. Is expired. Could you please conclude? All right. I loophole and legislative are not bill or law creators for the most part but really a representation of needs and in the people they represent I'm almost done and in their district area and territory. Here's another trick this is not. Mr. Nielsen. Yeah. Thank you. All right. I'll be back tomorrow. Thank you Anyone else wishing to make any public request of the city council? All right, thank you. This concludes the time for public request mr. Brown could you just clarify a little bit Please because the situation with the magistrate on the matter that was referred to earlier the magistrate directed the parties to to confer could you elaborate please? Oh,. The magistrate directed the parties to confer. Could you elaborate, please? Yes, the magistrate. The city presented the certificate to the magistrate certification of $87,000 worth of fine. The magistrate after the testimony that was given by both parties at that particular hearing directed both parties, the city and the alleged violator to go see if they could work something out that would resolve the matter. I'm summarizing, I was not present at the hearing and I have a read the transcript, but that's basically what occurred. City and the alleged violator subsequently met on a number of occasions to see what could be worked out. What is in the proposed stipulation is what has been agreed to. It will put some finality to the situation as it currently exists, provides specific dates for compliance. If those dates are not met, there are two dates that have to be met. If those dates are not met, then we will be back to certify fines. Thank you for the questions. Ms. Nathles. Thank you, Ms. Rae. I have some comments on that, but I was going to save it for my report. You can save it for them. Thank you. Ms. Rucker. This is the appropriate time. I definitely have some comments. Do you want the report? Or do you want it on the damper issue here? Why don't we save it a report? Okay. All right. Thank you. Anyone else? All right. Thank you. That concludes public request in the review. We'll turn to review of regular agenda items. This is an opportunity for council members to ask questions concerning tomorrow night's agenda. Mr. Thompson will start with you, please. No questions. Thank you. Is that was no questions. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Rucker. No questions. Thank you. Mr. Ruggler. I have asked the deputy city attorney to look at one of the items on the agenda, the billing for one of the law firms that's asking for an increase tomorrow. So I guess in advance I'd like that pulled from the consent agenda without the only question that I had. Certainly, Mr. Rader, was that 9C for Lewis Longwood Walker or 9D for Weiss-Sorota Health Man? Weiss-Sorota I think is the second one. Thank you, 9D isn't David. 9D, that would be the only concern I have. All right, thank you. Any other questions? Thank you. All right, thank you. We will pull that tomorrow and make a note. And I have no questions for tomorrow night's agenda. So we'll take it up then if anything comes up. We'll now turn to item five, future agenda matters or items of council or public concern of which we have none. So now we'll turn to item six, City Manager Reports and we have a number of reports starting. I believe with our emergency management update, Mr. Brown. Thank you, Mayor Christine, which are emergency managers going to give a brief emergency management update. And I hope that she will also give us a little summary of her experience in Swiney County with Hurricane Debbie. Welcome Ms. Mucci. Thank you, Council. As stated, my name's Christine Mucci. I'm the City of Booker Tone's emergency manager. I've been here for a little over two years and I've enjoyed my experience so far. No swarms have happened during my time frame so I think I have a good track record so far. I just wanted to start out with kind of what emergency management is. Many people in Florida think emergency management is all storm related but we're actually an all hazard approach to disasters so we take anything from mass casualties, city event planning and being proactive, to of course, storms and everything. So emergency management is not necessarily the response to a storm. I'm not out there holding back floods or stopping crimes from happening, but we're providing the resources to the people on the scene. So they're able to do what their response is in an organized manner. Immersed management, oops, sorry. Immersed management has four phases. There's the mitigation phase, which is more of a prevention aspect. There's preparedness and its plans, actions taken to prepare for an emergency. the city's decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making and the decision-making As I mentioned before, emergency management is definitely in all hazards approach. We do anything from cyber attacks, work with IT department on what our response structure would be for in the event of cyber attacks while also working with them on mitigation efforts to prevent from happening. Facility security, preventing people from just walking up into employee's offices so that there's those security measures in place, also adding a new security guard to the front desk area to help prevent that as well, event coordination, mask casualty, and weather-related incidents. So the first step that we're gonna talk about is mitigation. As mentioned before, mitigation efforts are sustained actions that serve to reduce the occurrence of incidents and their impact. Some major things that we do are environmental projects. So this includes beach renourishment as well as sand dune maintenance. So our municipal services does that on a regular basis to make sure that the beach is renourished. But then post storm, we go out, we do a pre-storm assessment as well as a post storm assessment to make sure that we are returning it to what it was before storm. Sustainability projects, flood reduction projects, again with our municipal services, drainage projects, as well as constant maintenance for our flood and drainage systems. Storm ready, so about a little over a year ago, I worked with the National Weather Service to get the city storm ready certified. What this means is we do protective measures, we have an alerting system, and we also have a monitoring system. We're actually the only city in Palm Beach County to be storm ready certified. The county has a whole emergency management has it. I know airports have it as well, but we're the only municipality in Palm Beach County to get that. So it's a big win for us. We also are part of the local mitigation strategy committee. That's working with cities across the county. We're actually in the process of finalizing our 2024 LMS strategy plan, which will be presented for approval here. It just got the states approval. These are projects that by being a part of this committee, we can submit projects for mitigation. So when a storm happens to us, funds are given to affected areas, as well as the state as a whole to be given out and we can use those funds to help fund mitigation projects throughout the city. And then as all of you I'm sure where we also are part of the CRS project which is put in place to help lower our flood insurance rates for our residents and they recently went through a whole review process and everything, and they're waiting on FEMA's final approval to, because we've improved our rating this year, but they're waiting for FEMA's final approving to announce that. The next phase is disaster preparedness. This is the phase that I like to focus on a lot, because while response is fun, I like to be the preparedness part is more fun for me. This includes things such as creating plans, public education, trainings and exercise, and all these are essential to the preparedness phase. So these are a few plans that we've been working on the past few years. There's the debris plan. That's things from what's called the first push. So right after a storm happens, our municipal services and rec services and utility services, they go out to make sure that the roads are cleared for emergency access, as well as we have access to our lift stations. So we have that first push access. But then also the longer term process of gathering the debris after the storm and making sure that it's disposed of correctly and working with our contractor for that. We have their distribution plans, so that's in the event. We need to distribute water, food, tarps, and essential supplies to residents. We're able to do that. Reunification plan. So this is one of our non-weather related plans. This is in the event of a mass casualty or a big incident. It's reuniting those people that were affected from the incident with their loved ones. And we've worked with PD as well as our FD to work on our reunification plan where we have different buildings throughout the city identified as our locations. So it's a matter of pulling out a plan and we have a whole kit that's created that has forms, caution tape, pencils, pens and everything so we could do the initial 100 or so people that show up and so that it allows us to do it a lot more quicker. We also have our city employee shelter plan as well as our emergency donation process. So this is emergency donation is in the event an incident happens within our city and we decide we would like to collect funds for our residents instead of Joe Schmo's setting up a go fund me. We decide that we want to do that. We've come up with a whole process on how we would do that and what that would look like. And then we also have our Florida Recovery Obligation Calculation Program, which is put on by the state and actually I'll go in more of that with our recovery phase later on. So another big thing is our public education. This is anything from city events. So we participate in the booths at different city events as well as social media. So you can see there we have our pet preparedness, social media. We also just posted about the emergency supplies tax-free holiday that the governor has put on. And it's actually taken place from now through September 6th. So hurricane supplies are tax-free during that this time. We also participate with library hurricane events. So every year we do, we participate in the steam through September with the REC services program and we do a hurricane chasers program with our residents there where we get them to build their hurricane preparedness kits as well as know what a storm is. Every year, we also partner with WPBF for their Hurricane kickoff presentations as well in their meteorology department. And then we also do HOA meetings. This past year, we've finalized a debris agreement with HOA companies. So in order for us to legally go and remove debris from private property, we have to have an agreement with them that they're intending us from everything and they're not going in seeking reimbursement for actions we're doing. So we're working with HOAs to get them to sign on pre-storm so that it's quicker for us to be able to do it in the event of an event but that also would apply to building damage so not just for storms, but if you know, knock on what a building collapse were to happen and we would have handled a debris of that That agreement would cover that as well Trainings is something that I have been really big on this year. So there are three different types of trainings that we focus on here. There's what's called the table top exercise. So that's where a bunch of city leaders will gather around and we'll basically talk through what our plan is. So this past year we did mass casualty, flooding, point of distribution, and cyber incidents. And so those were our tabletop exercises that we did. Those tabletop exercises allow you to talk through a situation, see what we have in place, what we don't have in place, what we can work on, and everything like that that to then get to your functional exercise, which is what next. You can see in the bottom left-hand corner, that's what I did for our, again, our pod or point distribution. I put up maps and gave sticky notes on how many tents, tables, chairs, cones, and everything that we had, and they had to place them strategically where they would, and then I would throw things like, oh, we got a delivery of shipments in between in the middle of operations. Where's that going? So then they'd have to move the tables on how they would do and everything. So it allows you to really walk through all those incidents that could happen while not having the stress of actual moving parts. And then at the top right, we were able to do a full-scale pod exercise this year where we went to DeHonley Park. We distributed about 300 boxed lunches to city employees and this allowed us to test our traffic flow of what our layout was as well as get employees the practice of actually distributing food to people with that kind of less stress environment of an incident. We also were able to do a functional EOC exercise this year where everyone came in and we were operating as if it was two to three days after a storm happened. So it's the initial life safety has stopped. Now we're clearing roads. Now we're restoring our utilities back. And what does that look like? And when I threw in checks at them, like the mayor needs an update right now. How are you giving an update? Or press release is needed right now. So marketing had to write a press release to get it out. Or, you know, we're thinking of limiting access to the barrier island? What does that look like? So, then we had to be able to talk through that in a more realistic environment. So, response is the third phase of emergency management. And, like I said, this is the one that gets the most highlight oftentimes. There's the leading up to the storm that's happening and the news gets on it or the initial what we call bang of an incident. And that's what everyone's responding to. And typically this phase of emergency management occurs between one to two weeks long. And one thing that we did work on our operational structure was this year is in our emergency operation center, we introduced what's called the Incident Command structure or ICS, that is a nationwide structure that allows for multiple agencies to seamlessly work together. You know, like we can work with Palm Beach County, we can work with Broward, we can work with Monroe County if they're coming over from Mutual Aid or we're providing Mutual Aid. So by doing this incident command structure, it allows us to focus on the four major areas which is finance, so it's cost tracking as well as reimbursement tracking logistics, which is making sure that we have all the resources and needs for the responding personnel operations, which is what we're all used to, and then planning, which is instead of thinking about what's going on right now, we're planning for one to two operational periods in advance to make sure we have the resources for what we'll be going on then. As mentioned by George, our city also participates in what's called deployments. So in the event something happens within the state of Florida, our police services, utility services, fire services, as well as myself have responded to different agencies to provide mutual aid. The police services went over to Sanabaya Island for Hurricane Ian in 2022. They sent a whole bunch of people over there to help with road closures, as well as traffic diversions. Our utility services went up to the Panhandle in 2018 to help out with Hurricane Michael and restore their water systems over there as well as some of them went over for Hurricane Ian to the West Coast. I went up last year to Taylor County for Hurricane Idleia. It was me as well as about 20 others from South Florida. We're called the Southeast Regional All Hazards Incident Management Team. That's very long on a t-shirt. But we were all deployed up there. We were their EOC up in Taylor County. They're a very small county. And so they only had one emergency manager and they didn't have any supplemental staff like we do here so we were able to help them up there and then this past year I just got back from Swanee County and helping out with Hurricane Debbie up there. That community has experienced two hurricanes and a tornado all within under a year and so they not only were their resources limited from the beginning, because they are counties about 45,000, but they're also going through that exhaust period of, oh, another thing happening. So not only were we there, there's four of us from down south, three from Pasco County area, and one from Walton and then about 18 others from a private company that were all deployed up there to again help run their EOC and try to help them stay afloat with all the things that they've been going on with. The last phase is recovery and this is often the longest phase. It can happen anywhere. Recovery basically starts right after an incident happens and can last up to two, three years after depending. The main thing that happens during recovery is community resources. That's initial things that go out. That's any distribution supplies that we need to get to people that's setting up assistance centers so that if FEMA individual assistance has been activated we're able to bring FEMA to the table so that they can get their help we bring our permitting department so that we can expedite any emergency permits for their houses as well as any businesses we bring an SBA to help out with any businesses that need disaster loans and everything like that. And our debris operations are obviously community resources. Then there's city infrastructure, so any building facilities, operations, roadways, those are all, those restorations of those things are taken place during the recovery phase. And then the big part of recovery is reimbursement tracking. things are taken place during the recovery phase. And then the big part of recovery is reimbursement tracking. So that's anything from FEMA to state grants, to federal grants, to what I was mentioned is the state's FROC program, Florida Recovery Obligation Calculation Program. So with this program, before this program, the typical reimbursement process was the entity Encures the costs then they submit all the paperwork needed to FEMA Then FEMA takes their time reviewing it and then eventually Between back and forth of why'd you do this why didn't you do this? They obligate the money to the state of Florida, then the state of Florida takes their time reviewing it, and then oftentimes up to five years after the city or entity finally gets their money. Meanwhile, this whole time, the entity has to try to stay afloat with whatever funds they still have. With this FROC program, once the money is obligated to the state by participating in this and doing some preparedness activities. We can get up to 80% of that money reimbursed to the city once it gets to the state while the state does their review. So it will at least expedite a good portion of the amount of money that we can get. So what can the residents do? We obviously encourage residents to stay connected with the city. The most important thing you can do is follow us on social media as well as subscribe to both our emergency notifications via myboco.us slash alerts or city notifications, myboco.us slash notify me. Another way is to go on our myboco. checklist to make sure that you're prepared for the event of an event. And you can also get involved with our new city cert program that's run through our the city's community and the community community. We're going to be talking about the city's community and the community and the community and the community and the community and the community and the community and the community and the community and the and preparedness activities as well as from my deployment and trainings and everything that have gone on. So, with that, any questions from anybody? Thank you, and thank you for preventing hurricanes the last two years. Please keep it up. Council members, any questions? I just, I know CERD has run through fire rescue and we recently had some classes. Do you know any more information about upcoming classes? I do believe the next classes are in October, but I know you can go on the website to find out for sure. Great, thank you. All right. If there's no further questions, thank you for that. Thank you, everybody. Mr. Brown, Public Art Program Update, please. Thank you. our public art coordinator is going to make a presentation on the work that has been done and what is planned. Your mic's not on. Daria, I'm here today. So, thank you. Good afternoon, steam council members, mayor on city staff and workshop button these. I am Veronica Hatch, public art coordinator for the City of Boca Raton. Today I will share information about the program's progress, highlight accomplishments, share current initiatives and short-term plans. One of the first things that we did was to form the PACT, which is the Public Arch City team. It was, this was originally formed to maximize the cityACT, which is a public-card city team. This was originally formed to maximize the city's internal resources, open multiple lines of communication and perspectives, and also to work to align the program with wider strategic planning goals. The focus of our group is to identify share objectives, provide recommendations, and assess various needs. The plans of the future are to develop a public-owned work plan, including programs, guidelines, and site selection, pilot a project-based selecting panel, a comprised of PAC members and community members, and research funding mechanisms for public art. Brand development. Along with communications department, we developed a fresh identity to solidify the program's brand. This tool is to update, provide updates to the public and to be a resource for artists, creatives and the community at large. This will include upcoming cultural artists, links to downtown happenings, amphitheaters and community events, as well as arts and cultural partner events. We also were able to inventory the public collection and create an interactive public art map, GIS. As part of the city's public-car program plans to preserve, maintain the public-car collection, we're working with direct services and facilities to continually document research and inventory installations throughout the city. This first step of document in public-carred was a drive to work with specialized GIS specialists to create the first public interact map for the city. This app is a sign to enrich the cultural experience of all visitors and residents in the area. As of now, the app highlights public cards, public cards that are within the city, funded publicly or part within the city, and also with plans to add public card within the public realm. It also I'm happy to say that it will highlight the city's libraries in work that they do to highlight local artists as well as their public exhibitions. The city working with the Communications Department were able to do a press release, which of course would public art on the map. As you can see, those are all the traction that we gain in terms of media. We're very excited and we're very excited about that. Community input is an ongoing and integral part of the program's development. The first step was to launch a public art survey which provided community feedback, supports the development of the program, and also helps cultivate the cultural and aesthetic vitality of our city. Some of the things I would like to highlight from over a thousand and thirteen respondents today, 82% of our respondents believe that public card is important for the quality of life of Boca Raton. 89% consider the purpose of public card to beautify the streets in our spaces. 67% thought public card creates welcoming spaces. And to highlight just two types of public art. The respondents consider landscape art, which is path, planters and fountains, and functional art, seats, shades and lighting to be one of the kind of topics. Upcoming community outreach events and educational programming will expand on thoughts on public art. Types of works, site selection, and the role of artists. Partnerships, we continue to solidify strategic partnerships with cultural organizations and the private sector to increase program outreach and participation. The city participated in an organized tour, as you can see here, that was hosted by Palm Beach County's Mosaic, with the Mosaic Family Organization tour, which highlighted the city's attractions and supported our community partnerships. I was delighted to host the share and share our wonderful city with Palm Beach and Broward Art and Culture influencers. Now, I'm going on to more partnerships. Oma Yami, as part of expanding our Centennial O2 Boca Poetry Initiative reach. We met with South Region representatives within the School District. With news to share, we received wonderful feedback from our superintendents, and we plan to implement all the vocabay schools starting in the fall. So this will not only sort of defied all the vocabay, but spread the word throughout our community and schools. Public projects that will stem from this partnership with the plastic poetry on city property, as well as digital banners and signage in private spaces like the mall, Maesner Park, etc. Best practices, I was able to attend the fourth international place making week in Baltimore. This was a immersive experience meant to engage attendees throughout HANTON sessions, workshops, tours, and networking. This will assist me with continued research and based practices, as well as their working opportunities. Master Plan Consulting, Funding, and Grant Resources that should come from counties, state, and national levels. This also will provide and we continue to inspire innovative strategies to enhance the city's public spaces and experiences. I'm happy also to share and please save the date and join us to provide your input on public card on our next community conversation. This event will feature a panel of local community arts and culture and place making experts who will speak on the vital role on public card by enriching our community and creating a sense of place. The talk will be followed by the most important part of this community conversation. It's an input workshop session about public art in the city. We're hoping during that event to have theme, strategic themes throughout the tables and workshop these ideas and expand on the public art survey input during this session. Now let's move on to current initiatives. Sugar Sun, the Sugar Sun Moose Eye mural, is a partnership project with the Greater Book of Rotten Beach and Part District to commemorate its 50th anniversary. This mural will be a permanent and sustainable approach on vertical services, is a mural that, which hopes that we can create a mosaic mural throughout the city. This is a commission based artwork and is being created by National Recognized Artists, James Prosek. This artwork will speak about the interconnectivity of organism in the local environment including the Lok Sahti River, Everglades National Park, and the native environment, including the Loxahatchie River, Evolucleate National Park, and the native environment of our beautiful city. You'll be able to spot on this mural, species including the saddle per meadow, mangroves, spoonbills, ibises, cibers, butterflies, osfrey, tarpons, and more. This is just a little snippet of James at work. He has done extensive work on motifs that include Flora and Fauna. So very excited to bring him aboard and reveal this mural at the Sugar Sun shortly. As part of the console initiative to activate the park, we're planning to bring an interactive temporary exhibition to the Walfour Park. These frame houses resemble porch swings where people of all ages socialize in playful spirits. Artists, actors, Rawa and Nassio Cadena were inspired by lively streets markets around the world where human connections are made every day. These red frames illuminate within demonstrating the warmth, comfort, and safety of our homes. This exhibition will be facilitated by Krause. Another initiative is actually still waiting for Palm Beach County Permit and Review, and it is the wildflower and silver palm connector. We have so far re-engaged the artists and proposing a revised mural concept that will showcase a fuller range of the city's parks, the city and the parks, environmental diversity. Under one of the public arts and tenel related initiatives, we're also engaging with a local manufacturer to bring the all book return welcoming sign as part of this idea to bring the past and the present and the future together. So one thing just to consider for this project is it should be a permanent project and the termination where this project will be is still under ARM staff review. We also are working with internal staff to bring a public or project. We're hoping perhaps to be more of a fountain reveal, reveal tellization and working internally as well as to propose a public project for Sanborn Square. The plan here is to commission a artist to envision a place full site specific mural and asphalt work That aims to tell the story again of the city and its beaches and all the places and parks that we have throughout the city And so these are the two locations which is Under you see that splash pad that's a little bit worn and hopefully one of the Class Hates, you hopefully one of the facets, you know, one of the walls either west or north facing walls, other wildflower park. And one of the last initiatives I'm presenting today is will be as well to commission an artist to create a work that we call Fiverr work, which is to bring flags of sales again through a line with Centennial for past, present, and future and flags that will be right on the center of the South Beach Pavilion at the end of Palmetto. And those flags themselves will also represent the beauty and the colors. We'll align with the centennial style guides that we have determined. 24, 25 work plan. We're working on developing guidelines and an ordinance with hopes to create a project based selection panel which will be a way to pilot and working with PACT and community members to select artists for upcoming projects. We also are continuing and this is on progress still assessing and maintaining this existing murals and artworks throughout the cities as well as focusing on centennial related initiatives. Our data reflects and identity and history of our city enhances the quality of public places, promotes local culture and creates a sense of place. As evidence, as we talk here and here about what other cities have done and other support, the potential public card attracts visitors, boosts confidence, quality of life, and possibly impacts on the city's economy. So without any questions, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Ms. Hatch. Council members, any questions? Ms. necklace? That's right. Iatch council members any questions? It's necklace I don't have any questions, but I want to say thank you I had asked for this presentation and and I'm so happy to hear all the initiatives that you have planned and All the ones you have on your list or all the ones I was hoping to see on your list so Very excited for this upcoming year and thank you for all your hard work Thank you all for having me have a good evening. For the questions. I just want to say thank you too. We had only recently talked about restoring that mid-century modern sign and you've already executed a design in living colors so thank you and for everything else. Thank you Mayor. Thank you. Now we'll turn to the CIP highlights and overview Mr. Brown. Thank you. To observe us, our financial services director is going to give a brief CIP highlight and overview of what is planned for next year's capital improvement program. Mr. Zervis. Thank you, Mayor and members of the City Council. As mentioned, we're going to provide a brief overview of the CIP plan that's tied in with the budget that will be coming back before your board, September 9th and then the 23rd for formal adoption. And so the CIP document was distributed to you all. It's a fairly large book. We're going to take a high-level look at some of the big projects that are coming before your council this next year and kind of what this looks like for the next several years. This book as well as the operating budget are available to the public online on the city's website. So if you go to the financial services department into the budget section you'll find these documents in more detail as well. So this is the capital improvement project for a six year period of time starting with 2425, so the fiscal year that starts October 1st, but it includes five out years. So this is really a planning document, a long-range planning document to help guide our operations. It ties into the citywide needs as well as your strategic priorities and is funded by a number of different sources. So you can see a list here of different funding sources that contribute, namely an 8% share of the ad ballorum taxes, property taxes that is infrastructure surtax, 1% from our utility taxes goes to fund the CIP program as well as outside agencies. So the Boko Routon, Beech and Park District, as well as sewer and water revenues. So there's a wide variety of revenue sources that come into fund the different projects included in this plan. It is developed based again based on city-wide needs, balanced with Council's strategic priorities. The department heads all provide input into this program and ultimately it comes before the city manager for review and recommendation to your board. As mentioned, it is really built around advancing the goals and objectives that are memorialized in your adopted strategic focus areas and priorities. So like the operations budget, what you'll see in this presentation and throughout the CIP program is that every project that is being proposed ties in specifically to one or more strategic focus areas and priorities. So just for review, there are seven strategic focus areas with several priorities listed beneath them, community safety, financially sound, vibrant economy and quality of life, each with one or more specific priorities. And those priorities in bold there are actually referenced as we look at the specific projects that we'll be reviewing today. The last three focus areas are world-class services, transportation and mobility and growth management. So taking a look for the six-year period of our capital improvement program, what you see is over a billion dollars of projects are included in this program. So this is a very large and ambitious plan and this is again a six-year period and that is six billion really plus the vehicles and machinery component that comes in on top of that. And in reality it's likely that very likely that will actually be investing more than that in the community. So if you look at a timeline over the six years you'd see about $287 million of that is actually planned for this next fiscal year, 2425. These projects by their very nature usually take more than one fiscal year to build and complete. And so the out years in this plan have between $150 million currently slated. Those are things we know about. But every year as we move forward and update this plan, we're adding to it and we're building upon it based on needs, based on council priorities, and based on funding sources that are available. So it's more than likely that that $1 billion will actually be a bigger number by the time it's all said and done. And what you see on this slide in front of you on the bottom portion is really a breakdown by department. So although municipal services accounts for 48.6% of that total, that includes the fact that municipal services oversees the construction of projects that go to benefit a wide variety of our different departments. And so that's all encapsulated within municipal services. We'll look at some of those specific projects for this next fiscal year in which priorities that they're advancing. But you can see utility services and the rest of our main operating departments here that make up that $1 billion. These next two slides really show all of our funding sources. So as mentioned, the CIP program is really funded by a variety of local, state, and federal investments, different funding streams. And so these show where this is coming from, I would say the top five here, I know these numbers are small, but hopefully you can see them on your screen. The top five sources account for 74.33% of the total. So really, the bulk of it is coming from those top five. Those two of the top five, one and two are both utility related. So that's this water and sewer infrastructure. So this is funded through our rates and funded through through other sources but primarily investments in infrastructure and water and sewer. That's about 42.37% of next year's investment. Number three is $31 million from a revenue bond that will be supported by the Sanitation Department to build a facility. I'm sorry, the fourth, those are really the top three. General fund revenue is the fourth at 10.75. So our general fund contributes about 11% of revenues that go to fund the CIP, and then the fifth is building permits. So what I want you to kind of take away from this is that all of those are local. In fact, if you look at the top 10 categories here, all 10 of those are locally generated revenue streams that go to fund improvements within our community. So in fact, if you don't get to an outside source until you get to number 11 and that's the IST, that's a first non-local source. So those top 10 account for 90.02%. So you have 90% of our CIP just off the top 10 is locally funded. So when you look at all the work that's being done, the heavy infrastructure, the improvements that you see here, those are local tax dollars, local rates287 million worth of improvements coming just this next year alone. They will likely spill over into the following year just because of the workload and getting everything done. But these are included within the budget for fiscal year 2425, and these are the things we're gonna be focused on. I'm gonna go into each of these different categories. You can see on the bottom, it's broken down by department. I am gonna take a minute to highlight some of the main projects within each one of those departments here and give your council an idea of what it is we're gonna be focusing on and what to expect within the community in this next year. So again, about 276 million of this is projects and then another roughly 11 million is in capital equipment and vehicles. These aren't cars and pickup trucks. These are fire trucks and kind of big pieces of heavy machinery that we've included in the CIP. So the first department we'll take a look at is police services for 2425. The CIP includes $3.8 million of projects and about 1.5 million in vehicle and equipment. Those key projects you can see at the bottom and you'll each one of these slides is formatted the same so it will show some key projects and then on the right hand side shows the funding sources. So where does the money coming from in order to complete these projects? The two key projects here being the Public Safety Deescalation and Accountability Technology Investment and then the public safety information management system upgrade or improvement project. In the fire and rescue services department, there is roughly $1.9 million of projects and $3.6 million in vehicles and equipment. That project being a station alerting system replacement. So that's the systems that alert our first responders when they're needing to respond and upgrade in that system and then two new fire trucks coming on coming hopefully soon but being ordered at least in paid for within this budget, you can see those on the bottom two bumper trucks. In municipal services, again, this is a large category. I think I have two slides here that illustrate the $100 and almost $35 million of capital investment in projects plus 4.1 million in vehicles. So some of these big ones we've talked about many times. Your government campus master plan, transit oriented community project that we've been speaking about here this evening. That is one of the key projects in this. It is one of the higher profile projects, an expansion to the base building. this is one of the higher profile projects. An expansion to the base building that is in here as well. That's been talked about quite a bit as well. And then the railroad crossing at Jeffrey Street expansion is another higher profile project that municipal services will be overseeing as well, supporting transportation and mobility. Also in municipal services is the Northwest, Southwest 4th Avenue widening project and the downtown walkability improvements, both focused around that transportation and mobility strategic initiative and then sandborne square renovations and activations and alternative energy projects. So what you'll see throughout all these slides is really hitting on each one of the different strategic priorities that the council has adopted but these are some of the the larger projects that will be taking place are within municipal service or higher profile, maybe I can say. Utility services, we don't necessarily talk about these a lot, but there's a big investment here and there is every year, 120, almost $126 million worth of projects and $840,000 in equipment. And this is just, as a reminder, this is just $24.25. So we have a billion dollars in total, almost half, $500 million going into utility services. Here's $126 million being invested this next year. And this really does keep this community ahead of the curve when it deals with heavy infrastructure. It's, you know, there's not a lot of talk and kind of buds words around it, but when you see communities that fail to make these investments, it goes really poorly. And it really hampers not only quality of life, but our ability to invest in economic development and grow the community strategically. If you don't have the infrastructure in place and your council and this community has done a very good job of keeping pace with that. Here are a few of the projects that utility services is investing in. So rehabilitation of water and sewer systems based on the critical infrastructure assessment and there's a few communities there where you see those improvements Also under utility services. We have wastewater treatment facility improvement So this is rehabilitation of a lime softening and water treatment facilities And so that's another one of the key projects as well as a wastewater upgrade and replacement expansion replacing upgrading and expanding of the wastewater treatment facility to meet state and federal regulatory compliance. So I think that concludes the utility services overview and finally recreation services. We have these numbers again they look small but remember municipal services overseas a lot of the physical construction of parks and so the even though these dollars look small we still have big investments in parks here in Bocca and recreational service master plan will help kind of outline those investments for the future and what those future investments look like as well as some playground renovations taking place as well. Information technology, we have a $9 million investment in two main areas, public safety CAD and record system. So that's the public safety software and systems that drive that as well as phase two of our financial system enhancements. This is really building upon the ERP, the Oracle ERP implementation that's been completed and now there's kind of a round two of additional improvements and enhancements to optimize what we're doing there. When you look at our capital investments in the CIP by strategic priority. So if I total all those numbers that we just looked at, both the orange, which is the $1 billion dollars or the blue, which is the $287 million investment in fiscal year 2425. This is how it aligns with your strategic priorities. So those codes at the bottom, we couldn't fit all the names on here, but those reference the initial slide if you're interested in seeing where those investments are. This slide hopefully illustrates that we are focused, where we're focused on achieving those strategic priorities and how those investments look from a financial investment over this year and the next six years. That concludes my overview. We do, as I mentioned, have a lengthy budget document for the CIP that includes detail on every project that's included in the next six-year plan. That is again available online on the city's website. We'll be back before your board or before your council on the 9th talking about the budget and having a budget workshop. workshop, this going forward will be a part of that broader budget discussion and then we'll be back on September 23rd for potential adoption of the budget. If there's any questions I'm happy to answer them. Thank you Mr. Zervis. Council members, any questions? Mr. Riger. Yes. Thank you Mr. Zervis. We've been corresponding back and forth over the last several days, weeks, months, et cetera. So I appreciate everything you did. And obviously the transition between Linda Davidson and yourself, I'm very pleased that you guys have been working so well together. So I just want you to know we appreciate it. With respect to the funding of the projects, you mentioned briefly that there was a revenue bond of $31 million just for this year. But looking at the page that I'm looking at is page 19 of the big book. It looks like over the next six years, you have slated out here $106 million and change for bond initiatives. Can you explain a little bit about our bond practice here and especially with interest rates being a little bit higher now, how we're being maybe a little conservative on that? Sure, so there are some projects that we look at bond funding. Those are typically large heavy infrastructure projects that we're going to pay for over time. And there's a couple different, some of the projects, for example, it might be, just as an example here, the rail crossing at Jeffries. That's a significant investment. We don't know how much yet. What's in the budget now is just to start that project and get to the point where we have some better estimates on what that looks like. And one of the thoughts around or one of the philosophies around how you finance these kinds of major infrastructure projects that are gonna be in use for the next 30, 50, 100 years is to spread out the cost of those to better align with the people that are actually going to benefit from those. So part of it is financing and how do we pay the cash for it. There's an equity discussion also about who pays and when because people are going to benefit from those investments over a significant period of time. So we're always trying to look to recommend to your council the best way to structure that and balance cost, the cost of financing given the interest rate environment, the cost that we give up in having money invested and in our own portfolio. And also the equity balance of how we align that to those benefiting and in what opportunity costs we give up based on how much cash we decided to put down on a large project like that. So as we get closer to any kind of bond issue and obviously we would have much more detailed discussions with the council about what that looks like and what projects may be considered for that. I think the last bond that this council or this city did was for libraries and fire stations. So that's a good example of a kind of community investment that was bond finance. We have very little debt in this city and that's a good thing and we intend on keeping that way and being very strategic about when we recommend access those capital markets. And frankly, that shows in how well the city has been financially managed over the years and the fact that it's one of the few communities to enjoy a AAA bond rating as a result. So we are intent on maintaining that status. And I hope I answered your question. But it is in the plan to cover some of those, potentially some of those bigger infrastructure type projects. We're not talking about fire trucks or short-term smaller investments, playground equipment. We're talking about major type of infrastructure investments. No, thank you. I appreciate it. And certainly being fiscally conservative, you know, and respectful of the taxpayer dollars is of paramount importance. So I appreciate, you know, the sincere look and consideration. Thank you. Thank you. Further questions? Thank you, Mr. Service. We appreciate it. Thank you. Mr. Brown, Mr. Service. We appreciate it. Thank you Mr. Brown economic development plan Our economic development manager is going to give a brief update on what the plan has been doing and where we think we're going to be going Thank you, Mr Like you and I know we've all seen your slides just would ask if you can keep your presentation about ten minutes Just so because I want to allow enough time for questions because I know we have some. Thank you. Absolutely. No problem. We'll go through and then any questions we can obviously take as much time as you'd like. So just to go to our office of economics development and we'll go through as quickly as we can. There are about seven core strategies to any economic development plan. As you can see, business recruitment, retention, expansion, workforce development, I'm not going to read them all to you. But that's for any... You don't have to rush. I said to the end, it's don't feel pressured. Okay. So, this is for any city or any municipality. They have all these core strategies that we all utilize. We all utilize them a little differently, depending on our community. I'll go into kind of what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. So business recruitment, everyone's very familiar with this one where we identify contact and recruit companies in our targeted industry to corporate relocate to Boca Raton. This is the biggest portion of the news, the press releases that come out, the new companies. We work really closely with commercial real estate developers and property owners. Economics development is a very relationship-based sport. I guess you would call it. It's a team sport. We have people in the field, tenant reps that are representing companies every day. That's their full-time job. It's to bring companies into commercial space. And we want to let them know that we are here and we're available to help them. Major portion of business recruitment is site selection. We have our available with the relationships we have. We know commercial properties that are on coming up that are available that are not on co-star but we also offer a co-star available commercial properties on our website. This is really big for a city. We pay for this service. It's like the zillo of commercial real estate. And we geo-offensive to Boko Raton. So people anywhere that are looking for space in Boko can go onto Coastart and look at Class A, Class B, close to 95, whatever their parameters are. Again, we don't charge for that service. We pay for that because we want people looking at our city. Another thing that we're doing to recruit businesses to develop two sustainability incentive programs. We're in the midst of this right now with our office of sustainability. This will allow us to not only attract clean-tag green and sustainable companies because they hear what we're doing, it also improves the infrastructure of our office space. We have a little bit of an older inventory that over the last five years has gotten drastically better, but these types of improvements really get us on the map. Business recruitment, we attend industry conferences. The first one is really important. We meet one-on-one with national site consultants. This is a conference we do annually for the most part, except through COVID, obviously. We sit down with 20 or 25 national site consultants that are currently working. Corporations are planning to work corporate relocations and there's 20 or 25 of us economic developers We pitch our city why they should look into to Boko Raton We get to do a presentation about Boka and again one-on-one. It's about 36 or 48 hours of intense one-on-one meetings with these executives Like JLL executives across the country. We have some outreach we do to the finance industry in the Northeast, and we just ordered some jump drives that look like credit cards that we will be using for mailers. You know, the classic jump drives, you can't mail. So we're loading up with all our information, and we're sending it to the same targeted list that we have that we got through our first outreach that we did, probably about three or four months ago in partnership with our communications team. You guys all know we do the sponsorships, the ESPN, the Book of Retomble, gives us three commercials and the James Hardy Pro Football Hall of Fame International on the golf channel. We've been able to negotiate out of our office four extra commercials, so we're up to seven commercials through that program. They're very good partners of us. It's kind of the target market. We want the people that are watching that golf tournament to see that we're in Boca Raton. It's beautiful. And there's companies around surrounding the whole golf course. We are currently in the midst of working with a recruitment company. They will provide services for us to take a proactive approach to have office attraction and retention. This would dedicate, excuse me, this would require a dedicated staffer. So a blueprint for action would be developed and to be implemented we would have a full-time staffer dedicated to putting this to work. We are currently working three confidential projects and we partner with the BDB on product turtle right now. Innovative solutions you all are aware of. We did that probably about three months ago where they will create, they committed to creating 30 jobs at 125,000 average salary. We wanted to show some graphs to give you an idea of what kind of the outputs and the outcomes. So we have three projects we're working. The potential of new jobs for those three projects is 1,000 new jobs. We've had over the last year new business starts of 715, the two sponsorships, the 10 commercials, and the 5,000 financial firms based on zip code in the Northeast. Business retention and expansion, this is probably the most important, this is definitely the most important aspect of economics development. It's not me saying that. It's the industry standard. 80% of all new jobs come from the existing businesses you have. We do a lot of umbudsman work where we work with permitting and zoning. That's a lot of work that we do that all we're doing is handing it off, you know. So we don't do a lot of the heavy lifting on that. Our permitting and zoning team does. But everyone in the business community knows us, so they give it to us, and then we kind of work on it with them. We have great partnerships with the Comcast and FPL. We've had companies come in ready to go, and they don't have power, just on their floor. They're taking over the seventh floor. We had an attorney taking over the whole seventh floor of the building, big law firm, and they could not get power to their floor. So we help with that just by business relationships. We do a business survey. We just started this with the Research Park at FAU. We are partnering with communications on this. Really want the feedback. How are people finding doing business at the Research Park that helps us gear programming? Then we'll do it for Tech Runway, and then eventually through BTR, which is our business tax receipt department, where we'll get everyone who has a tax receipt, get their feedback and see how we can implement some new strategies and things to make sure everyone's happy doing business here. Small Business Development Center, the SBDC, we work very closely with them. We do CEO peer-to-peer meetings. These are super important. They don't sound like much, but on a CEO or executive's coming to town, and we tell them folks is great, you're gonna love it. They like to hear that, but they don't want to hear it from us. They want to hear it from those that are doing it and doing it well. So we tend to introduce them to one new CEO in the area so they can kind of get a fresh eyes perspective and then an existing CEO who's been here about five, 10 years. And we want them to be honest. Like tell them everything we want no surprises. We want people to know what they're coming into in our community. We do the milestone acknowledgments and ribbon cutting ceremonies. We recently have been asked to stop doing these events just to give us more time to do other things. But we kept it in here just to make sure you see kind of the impact of what we do. And again, why we do it. So, per million zoning, everything that we're showing here is the last nine months unless we say otherwise. So eight companies were helped. 17 peer to peer introductions were done. Nine ribbon cuttings, nine milestones, CEO videos, and then the one business survey, which is going out probably next month. Here's a look at innovative solutions. So we did our first press release on our ribbon cutting and on their programming. And you can see we had almost 500,000 impressions on that one press release. So it's free publication, it's not pay for play and just wanted to show the impact of that. After site selection, workforce development is probably the most important thing that we work on. We want to make sure that the misconception that we don't have the workforce or the talent here where we do, we work with Lynn University, Palm Beach State, Florida Atlantic University, we're working with FAU right University, Palm Beach State, Florida Atlantic University. We're working with FAU right now, the engineering department on like a reverse pitch competition where a company will help them find companies that are looking for solutions in cybersecurity or AI. And then the students will come up with a solution. And this is great for the students to get practical experience and great for the companies. So we're helping with that. The Palm Beach State College, Dr. Williams has really been great with the community and our biggest partner with Workforce is definitely career source of Pumbi Beach County. State funded program hiring needs on the job training grants which are great for companies looking to expand their existing workforce. Here is a snapshot of what we've done over the last nine months. We've had two job fairs. We have not done one in the summer. We don't do them in the summer. A lot of people don't show up, to be honest. We've helped 95 job seekers, 27 companies, and 15 direct introductions. Not everyone wants to do a job fair. They want to work directly with universities. This is from career source, from the last five years, jobs increased by 7% just in Boko Ritong from 130 to 139,000, outpacing the national growth of 4.3% by 2.7%. That is a really drastic increase in jobs for the city of our size. And there's the workforce, the MBAs and bachelor's degrees. Entrepreneurship, we are lucky. We have a great entrepreneurship ecosystem here. We have eight, primarily eight regional stakeholders we work with. They're all listed there in the interest of time. I'll just go through it. And as you can see, we have stakeholder monthly meetings. We put together the ecosystem monthly meeting probably three months ago with all eight or nine stakeholders there every month. We talk about what's going on, what events are happening because they were having trouble with people having more than one events a week. And it's not the, you know, it's a close knit ecosystem. So we put that together. Before that, we didn't have anyone, excuse me, doing those types of meetings. So very important for us. And we did a business summit with the Palm Beach County State College Entrepreneurship Club and Endeavor Miami. Here's a look at entrepreneurship business panels co-burning of podcasts, regional partnerships, startups assisted, and our accelerator program. We have data on data. I know a lot of people here love data. We analyze commercial leasing and sales activity. Aviston Young, CBRE. Our favorite is callers, and I'll tell you why. They break it down by sub-market. So they'll say Boko Reton, Boko Reton East, Boko Reton North, Boko Reton West. So very important information. And then we put that out into the community. Here's our leasing activity over 2022, 2023, and 2024. I think you've all seen this before, but we wanted to include it outpacing everyone for 22 and 23 kind of equal with everyone in 24. West Palm Beach has 600,000 square feet of office space coming out, so we will see them kind of charge. Collaborations. I think we went through this, here are our partners. And we did 10 presentations with nine partners and we got in front of 1700 people which is great, great use of time. I'm just trying to go through pretty quickly branding, local branding, vocal mag, vocal tribune. We do the airport social media initiatives. We brand our office, we don't market for the city. We want to let people know we're here, we're approachable, we're here to help them, and national branding, self-hard business journal, has a branding that we do for five markets and forthcoming Zillow, so seven local initiatives, seven national, and here's a look at our reach in the last nine months. I think I mentioned that, national branding in the thousands, and I think that's everything. Vibran autonomy, this is our new priority, which we'll be focusing on, and want to make sure that you guys are happy with what we're doing, and how we're getting there. So thank you, hope that was quick enough. Thank you. Thank you, Council members, questions? I have a few I can start. Sure. Thank you, Miss. Obeckio. We see a lot of activity here. Where do you think you've gotten the greatest return on investment and how have you been able to measure that? I think the greatest return is the community partnerships and we measure that by the companies that are coming in the leasing activity that we see for sure. Okay. Of the, what is it now? 13,000 jobs retained are created since we started this initiative. Correct. What percentage of those were expansions of existing employers? Probably a lot of them. I can get you that number. We keep track of that. All right. Thank you. And then how much of that really relates to, I guess, how much did we retain of that subset? How much were we threatened with their going to another city where we had to step in and coordinate with the different groups or office landlords to keep them here? I can get that for you. Okay. It's all on the same spreadsheet, sorry. That's all right. same spreadsheet. Sorry. That's all right. You showed a slide where there was outreach to 5,000 financial services firms in the New York market. It's a very large number. Have you segmented? Have you focused on any particular market segments, like hedge funds of a certain size? And where are we getting the results there? Initially, we just zip codes and now we're going to do in a deeper dive with the 5,000 going into the flash drives that we'll be sending and we'll going into more of the financial services. A lot of banks in that. So we want like the hedge funds, the private equity firms that will target. So maybe only 50 to 100 to start to give them our information. So we haven't yet reached out to 5,000 you're planning. We did reach out to 5,000 with a mail, but now we're going to go in through that list. Because when you do those, you get access to a list. We really wanted the data, right? So we send out this information to get the list and where that list went and who received it and that type of thing. And then we get the list and we can target, whether it be hedge funds out of that list. context now. Maybe I miss one, make sure I'm clear. We engaged a third party to provide a list. As part of that we sent some sort of physical mailer to them. Correct. But the part of the benefit of that is now we have 5,000 leads. Yes. Because no one's really moving a company off of a postcard, right? A lead. Or a cold call. But it's really a data behind it that we try to get access to. So since we've gotten that list, what follow up would be had and what's the plan in terms of more personal reaches, cold calls, phone calls, targeted marketing, et cetera? Yeah, we are, I used to call call for decades at Smith Barney and no one's moving a company off of cold calling. So what we're gearing towards taking that list, putting it into buckets of what they do and having a message. So if it's hedge funds, you know, here are your partners, here's your your competition is down here in Boca Raton or South Florida. If it's private equity, we're going to do it that way as well. So we have to scrub that list for a lot of information, obviously. And then we're going to send the jump drives and we're going to send marketing materials. Yeah. Well, and then tracking, what are we able to do in tracking? I think it was another slide, and let me look forward. It had the Yankees program in the Reacons.com, yes, 24. We've got advertising flat, we've got advertising in publications, on billboards, on websites. What tracking are we doing of that, and how we see that we're able to see, cultivate leads from that, or your constant contact emails. Right, so we have QR codes on most of our marketing materials. The concern or the challenge with that is that if you pull up a QR code, we know you're coming from a certain area whether it be New York or wherever you're pulling that QR code up. But we don't know who it is, but we have data on hits and the location. And we're working with communications now on Google Analytics so our website we have certain hits on our website I think I told you it was about 4000. Yeah, 4000 hits on our website over the last nine months We know generally where they come from but we don't know who I don't know forever know who obviously But you want that activity to know that people are they're typing in My Boca business Booga.com, which is our landing page. So these are not hits that are coming through the main page. These are hits that are coming through. And that's what we use on our publications. When we put something out there, our email address is our landing page, businessboga.com. And there's really nothing on that page. It goes to the city's website, but we're able to capture the data of how many hits we get on that. They call them direct hits. And of the inbound calls that you've received, have you been able to identify or isolate where people are hearing from about us and then pivot and target your metrics accordingly? Absolutely. So we hear from a lot of people in the Northeast. We ask them, how'd you get our name, how'd you get our number. I mean, we had a meeting recently, someone just saw on a national level, they saw that we were presenting at SFOBA and NAAP, and they didn't even know what Boko Reton was. So they wanted to put us on a national stage, just be to 3,500 site consultants, which is pretty impressive. But we asked where they saw that, and that was social media. So it's everywhere. You know we hit social media We have some some print media like you said one medium in particular. That's useful because you have it You have surprisingly you have a surprise you you have a very large following on Facebook Lesson on Twitter and I would have figured the reverse would be effective same Yeah, so a lot of our Views are on Facebook right we have a like you said, a large following on Facebook. And I don't know exactly why that is. I think because Facebook has a lot of business pages, you know? But I agree with you. I know when we were working through COVID on Twitter and building our Twitter following, it was more of the startups and we have like 2,500 people on Twitter, but it's not as big as a robust. And for us, we do Instagram, but it's very hard for us to do Instagram because we have flyers and we have data and it's not, you know, a video. But we still do it to be relevant. But yeah, Facebook would be the probably the most important. It should also mention we launched LinkedIn, which is very important for businesses, obviously. I know when we were with innovative solutions, he said he found us off of social media. It's pretty amazing. You don't know who's watching. I know we want to know who's watching, but it's very hard to see who's watching. All right, thank you. Thank you. The questions. Mr. Reiter. Yeah, thank you. This is very informative. There was a couple slides there. You were talking about the population of workers increased to 139,000 over This is over over five years. Increased to 139,000. Do we know how many of those workers live here? No, but I know the majority of the workers that come into Boca, that work in Boca, do not live in Boca, return. I did have a stat years ago. We were trying to capture that number through COVID for traffic counts to see how many people are off the road. I can get that information for you. Absolutely. I just don't have it here. But I know I can get it because we've gotten it before. It's a large percentage. I'd appreciate that. I think one of the things that I hear in the corporate world is that when companies are looking to move here, they're not just looking for the company to move here, they're looking for their people. Where are their people going to live? And so making sure that we have diverse sectors, not just we know we have a great corporate real estate sector, we know that. Make sure we have the housing to support, the workforce housing to support those companies that wanna be here, I think it comes, part and parcel together. And so if we can analyze some of that data, I think that would be helpful especially with all the initiatives and the local act and those things that are happening right now, concurrently, and they're really happening concurrently primarily in our office, in our corporate office district, right? So in theory, or technically, they're happening in the right places, which is good. And so obviously, we just need to start really just capturing that and realizing, capitalizing on that. And so I think it's going to happen more as some of these initiatives come to fruition. But I think that would be super helpful as to find out where that is. And then also, yeah, obviously I agree the LinkedIn, in terms of business and corporate as LinkedIn, some of us with teenage children, and I go on Facebook, and so, you know, you're old because you're on Facebook, they're only on Instagram. They're only on Instagram. They're only on TikTok. Whatever, the other thing I don't even know about. But that kind of thing. So in terms of trying to attract young techie or young corporations, we also need to start adapting to the companies that we're trying to attract. So many. And so know, catching up with everybody on Facebook, but we might be actually not syncing with the companies that we're trying to attract. I agree with you on those two points. I didn't mean to cut you off. The Facebook is more of a community, like to keep the community up on what we're doing, right? To let the neighbors know, you know, we did this today or that today. Because everyone wants to know what's going on in their city. They love to have access to what we're all doing, you know, because those are good citizens. And when it comes to you mentioned having the housing, I went through it rather quickly, but it is important for us to have the housing that's a major concern for people that are coming in. Luckily, a lot of them are from the Northeast, so they still think it's cheaper here. They're still that mentality like I'm saving so much on my corporate space and my taxes. But another thing is education. I didn't go into it because I wanted to kind of get through it, but putting these companies in touch with the universities and things like that, making sure that the curriculum we're working with the Associate Dean at Lane University to make sure that the curriculum meets the workforce that's coming. I mean that meets the companies that are coming. So our workforce is prepared. If we have a cybersecurity company coming to Boca Raton, we want the students that are here or the people that are graduating alumni to have that education. So we do a lot of the work behind the scenes, like a lot of the stuff we do day to day, you're not going to see on social media. But that's so important work, you know, the housing and the education piece are what we hear the most about from the companies. I appreciate that. And if you think about that missing middle, right, we have FAU in, you know, Palm Beach State College, where they're graduating, but we wanna be able to give them that opportunity that they can not only graduate from these great places, but that they can afford to stay here after, and you're gonna get a great job after. So it's really a full, you know, full court press, you know, on something like this. You need multiple prongs at the same time, so I appreciate that you're looking into it. The last question, in terms of the site selection, in my corporate real estate world, that's a huge thing. I think the other thing is, it's a laggard, right? It's like all these things, again, these big companies, they're not moving tomorrow, right? They're moving six months from now, a year from now, two, three, five years from now. So in terms of actually really analyzing the fruits of your labor, of the economic department's labor, I do think there's a big laggard there. We're really, what you're really seeing is kind of just the fruits of the initial concepts. Not, not, not what, you know, it's going to take some time for this to go, but, you know, it's a snowball, right? And that's the idea. The snowball's building and things are happening in the right way. So I appreciate all these things and the data. It's super helpful. Yeah, please anything you want to share. I'm happy to look at it. Thank you. Yeah, I would just say, like you said, using innovative solutions, I used them throughout because of the most recent company we've all worked with, right? But we have dozens like that. But we worked with them for seven months before they even looked at the space. They were kind of put in a towel in the water. They were in town. It came out of Rochester, New York just for quick, I know I don't want to be too long, but you know we met with them at least half a dozen times different executives from different departments because they all have to see it. I mean if you imagine moving your family of four to a new state and a new city, it's very hard. Now multiply that by like a hundred employees. Like you want your executive here to be happy so we do intros in the school system, we We do housing. We do a lot more than just the business, but you're absolutely right about it being a lagging indicator I put this up here for significant leasing activity if you see it's 2022 But we started working with a lot of those companies in 2020 and in the midst of COVID when they wanted to get out of where they were with the Restrictions, but it takes that long to show and I only mentioned West Palm Beach because they have 600,000 class A coming out of the ground and We're going to see that get absorbed. Thank you. Any further questions? Sorry, one last one. You mentioned career sources are most, was our strongest partnership. What sectors has it been helpful in and how has the REACH program been particularly applicable? Okay, so the REACH would be, I'm just going to get that slide so everyone can see where we are. Excuse me guys. Okay, so the reach program is for everyone that's not familiar is when a company, not everyone's growing. So companies are downsizing. And sometimes downsizing, although on paper might not look good, it's good because it means they have, either they acquired another company and they don't need to HR directors or there's, you know, M&A action happening. So they're merging with another business. But the REACH program we've used this before, where people are downsizing their companies. And we want to make sure that these people that are not going to be working at company A, can go work in other companies within vocal retone, hopefully. Or at least the region we want everyone employed, right? So we bring in career source. They give programming, they let them know what type of jobs are out there that fit individuals, very individualized. I mean, you really, the services, great, against state funded, they really do great programs. And then they help those executives, say, 15, 20 people are getting laid off, they help them find new jobs, all no cost to them, make sure that their resumes are polished a lot of times, executives don't have a resume, or a LinkedIn, you know, you start your company and you're not focusing on your social media presence. So they help with that. And from the OTJ grants, very important on the job training grants, you have someone who knows job A very well, let's say 10 people are in this office, this particular, you know, field, and they want to go into this field. In the same company, career source will pay that company for the on the job training grants and it's thousands of dollars per employee. So very valuable for a company and it's great because who doesn't want to feel like they're getting promoted within and it's great for morale but it's also great for the company. It keeps people engaged and then has a whole new set of new jobs that they can hire for new ideas and fresh innovative ideas. So really great programs come out of career source and I do work mostly with them but we do work with everyone on that screen. I shouldn't call them out like that but they're really great resource. Right, thank you. And finance would be the biggest assistance. Very good. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. Right, and now, this round will turn to the city attorney executive search update. Thank you, Mayor, excuse me. Just very briefly, as you know, you all have completed individual interviews with the consultant that we've engaged to assist us with the recruitment. The job announcement is scheduled to go out on September 3rd, and we expect to have a report of recommended candidates by October 7th. We are working on the schedule thereafter. That's the update for today. All right, thank you. Actually, a question for you that I discussed with Mr. Deneen and with you. Apparently at some point, some draft or never adopted job description had been provided to the consultant. You and I discussed this, Mr. Brown, and you said, rightfully so, that the, or code of ordinance calls out nine specific duties of the city attorney. Is it the intention that the job description that are posting focus on what's in or actually adopted ordinance? That is close to that. Yes. As opposed to the job description. The job description was to inform Mr. Janine of some of the things that have, you know, some of the activities that have been undertaken by city attorneys in the past. It was never officially adopted. Yeah. And it's not an official job description of the city. The code of ordinances is the official job description. Good. I mentioned that because that had some things that I don't think the city turn he's been doing because it was again drafted in 2003 But don't know where it went but it also had a very a very I think it at seven years of bar experience three years of municipal experience and I think a city of our Stature would have more we already have people with a lot more in house already in house Yes, that's correct and as I said at the time I am not aware of where that document came from. It was just something that's in our records. Just want to confirm it's not going out that way. All right, thank you. Any further points? All right, thank you. Then we'll turn to City Attorney Reports. Mr. Kaeler. I have no report. Thank you. Council Member Reports, I'll start on my right with Deputy Mayor Drucker. All right. Well, we're going to, a couple things. I'm going to put some slides, but very brief slide. We all of us appear, except for the city deput, the assistant deput, the city attorney at Tenet Floral League of Cities. I set out a breakfast for Gold Coast on the last day of the presentation and they did a really, really nice job in presenting the Live Local Act. And there was a recap of what's to come this year for what they're calling the Glitch Bill to the Live Local Act. So it's back, surprise. So I'm gonna put that together. I have the power point in like not real handy, but in like a flyer, so I have to kind of pull it from there. But one of the things that I wanted to say to the council members, because I was a one in attendance, was it did a really nice job. They gave Booker Return and staff and council. Really nice shout out at that breakfast. And unfortunately you guys were not there. But how proactive we were as a city, how hard we've worked on this ordinances that are out there and that other cities should reach out. To not only us as elected, but also to our staff and our city attorney's office, because we've kind of were a trailblazer on trying to put some parameters in place and working with the development community so that we could do this as a partnership. Some cities, as we know, they're in litigation. There's just a lot of things that are not working well. And I thought I wanted to take that opportunity to put that out there. And then some of the things that they think will come back this year is some questions around coastal lands and development on some of the older buildings or land that's still there. So that's some of the things that highlight that are coming up and then a few other things that they need to correct. So I'll try to put that together for sure. I'll try to do it for the next meeting. I also sat, I sit on advocacy and they kind of went over some of what's to come for the future legislative session as you know they're getting ready to go back to Telehassy some of the lawmakers in about a few weeks actually in about a week or two. Let's start having some some movement up there. We know property insurance is going to be addressed. It's about time so that's something that's coming down and we'll keep an eye on that. They had a little bit of brief discussion on short-term rentals, which I know the mayor wrote an op-ed piece, but also that might be coming back. They talked about form six coming back, as you know, that was appealed. So there's still things that, and I wanted to put that out there today, there's still things that we talked about last year or this year in legislative session that are going to come back. So we need to just be cognizant of that and we need to keep looking at that and as we gear up for legislative session, put something out there. We had a lot of speakers. We had a lot of information coming at us, where we have great pictures, et cetera, et cetera, but I'll try to put something together for the next meeting. Second thing I wanted to come back to, and I hopefully not take the thunder away from Miss Nockles, Dan Burke. I shared my feelings about this with city manager. I thought the fee that's been proposed is too low. I thought the timing that's being allotted to this issue with Danburg is too long and I didn't really get a good answer and I think it's because this is going before the magistrate but last month we kind of put a business out by some of the fees that we charge and we reduced. So I need a better explanation as to why are these folks getting away with $9,100? That is not a substantial fee for violating the code. So I didn't get that answer. So hopefully I could get that answer. The other thing that I had here was, let me see what was the other thing I put here, sorry, my apologies. Yeah, the completion dates. Again, I know we wanna have a timeline, we wanna have it done, but what's gonna happen when most of some of us won't be on the council after 2027 and they come back and we're going to really assess them $1,000 per day. Are we going to reduce that? So to me that fine should be higher to send a message that they need to comply with the code just like we do for other establishments. They shouldn't get any other type of treatment. So that's just my two cents on that. And then in terms of the timing, they've had a lot of time to get this done. So again, I'm not sure if we're gonna give the feedback to the special magistrate, but I'm really not interested in this $9,100. And I think two years is a really long time in order for them to complete. So that, one more thing. I wanna say congratulations to all the kids who are going back to college. I wanna give my daughter, whose first day of college was today. I love you and I miss you, and she says she was gonna be watching today, and I hope you had a really good day. Nice, thank you. I'll go to Mr. Thompson now, because I know that I wanna be mindful of certain obligations. No report, thank you. Thank you. Ms. Aclus. Thank you. So I have two quick things. One is to comment on what Mr. Drucker was just commenting on, but this is the first and easy and more fun thing. So just looking forward in March, it's Florida bicycle month. And I would like the city of Boquerotone to hold a bike rodeo for kids. It's, it looks like it's not too hard. There's lots of templates out there. Municipal services is excited about doing something like that. And why would we do it? It's the first step to teaching kids how much fun biking can be while learning the rules of the road. There are lots of partnerships that are available to us whether it's with bike shops or businesses with the Greater Beach Park district with the school district, all different things and it's pretty simple. You set up some cones, you set out some chalk, we have several places where we can do this, whether it's at DeHornley Park, City Hall, any the new municipal, the mall, the new municipal building, even here to set up a cycling skills clinic and agility course, giveaways and finishers, certificates, and just like we do the drop savers poster contest, I thought it would be fun to do a spokesperson safety or pedal power contest, same kind of thing. And lines with a couple of our strategic priorities, and I brought this up at strategic planning. It's several months away. I just wanted to make sure everyone was okay with doing something like this. For I was thinking kindergarten through sixth grade to start out something like this. So I just wanted to bring that up. I hope everybody would be amenable to this. Happy to have staff look at it and figure out logistics given everything else. We discussed it with staff this morning and people were looking into how to pull it all together. Okay, awesome. Okay, so thank you. So the next thing is going back to what Ms. Drucker was talking about. And I too was not thrilled about getting this information last week. And in discussions with the City Attorney's Office, I asked, why doesn't it come back to us for another look or some comments? And I was told that that's just not the way we do things. That's not our process. So I wanted to introduce a concept, I'm just gonna read what I have here, that most code enforcement cases are easy ones, grasses too high, the fences and need are of repair. City Council's CRA don't need to weigh in, but there are some situations like this one, the whole parcel at 6, Congress Avenue where there was a development order approved by City Council subject to certain conditions and the conditions were not complied with. So is there any support for a new ordinance to allow for a special procedure that if a development order or an IDA with conditions for approval imposed by the City Council or CRA are not complied with and the applicant is found in violation. Then the magistrate's order becomes a recommendation to City Council and the City Council or the CRA becomes a decision maker. It doesn't happen very often as Mr. Kailer and I talked about, but in instances like this, instead of us finding out about it at the 11th hour, then maybe we would have an opportunity to weigh in on the fine being too low or the timing being too long. And I agree with Deputy Mayor Drucker. Two weeks ago, we imposed fines that that business owner may not recover from. And we give him 45 days to pay it. And to give years to this when it should have been complied with back in 2015 just does not seem right. And again, I don't think we have a vehicle, Mr. Kaeler can apply more on it, but I don't think we have a vehicle for it to come back to us to make comments. So if respectfully, if I can ask Mr. Kler if he can. Please, Mr. Kler. That's correct. Under the current code and statute 162, those decisions are, the magistrate are the final decision that are appealable to the circuit court. And while I understand we are streamlining, you know, We've been concentrating on streamlining. This isn't something hopefully that's going to come up very often. Most of the code compliance cases are very easy for the special magistrate to take care of. And we don't need to comment. But on something like this that it's been years and there is inconsistent messaging to other people getting code compliance fines and what's happened here. And I'm not going to use the word fair, but we spend so much, and we heard about this a lot during negotiations with Brick, and when we wrote our 10% live local ordinance, we spent so much time to make sure that what's happened with that particular development would not happen again going forward. And I just think that it would make sense if we had a way for it to come back to us to make some comments and recommendations. I'm just wondering if... You know, I think when people wanna do business in this city, I think it reflects positively when they have certainty. When they know even if they're renovating a bathroom or a kitchen or they're building a building that they have a certainty of what they know, what the rules are. And based on my colleagues' previous comments and something I've been thinking about also, this is one of those instances where it feels that it doesn't, where it feels that the application of the rules, however they are, are not being consistent. And so not only do I favor that there's some sort of, has to be some sort of policy created, whether it's in order or in order or whatever, maybe there has to be a threshold if it's a certain size construction, if it's a certain amount of violation or something, right? So for the little, you know, and I think that was, you know, I think that was, let's say perhaps, that might be the traditional understanding, right, is that if it's something, They didn't get the permit for a couple of weeks or something. It would be a fine. It would be a range. But now the range is from zero to $87,000. And so the fact that a magistrate can arbitrarily choose what this number is going to be based on just recommendations to me. It seems that there is something missing, right? The missing is that the person coming in doing business, you know, if it's a small business, it's a pizza store or something, whatever, is that they should have as much certainty as someone who has access to all these lawyers and all of these resources and whatnot. And in this particular instance, I feel that it's not happening. I don't support if the staff is recommending, if the staff, Mr. Brown is recommending, I don't support the staff in this recommendation. I think it's wrong. And listen, these big applications, it's many, many years, it's a multi-site development. Okay, they were entitled to talk to us anytime. These big applications, it's many, many years, it's a multi-site development. They were entitled to talk to us any time. Anybody in the city is entitled to talk to us any time if they support something, amend something. But that doesn't just toll the fact, right? So it's six months to talk to me, and six months to talk to you, and six months to talk to you. That doesn't just toll what's happening. It was an original obligation that it's going to be a mixed use development. The idea is, and now it's taken year after year after year, and of course, COVID was a reasonable delay. But now we're beyond those terms. So I think the time period is inadequate. I think the application or the recommendation by staff of such a low fine, given those considerations and the considerations to other bit. I mean, the person had two units. And there was a discussion for us to reduce it by like 20 grand. Like it was the end of the earth. So I was really surprised as good was. And I think, and I said this before, I don't like to be surprised. We don't like to be surprised. People doing business in the city do not want to be surprised that people are being treated differently. So I do think there needs to be even more than just a one-off ordinance. I think we need to have a relooking, you know, I'd like to see the city attorney's office look into the whole violation fine ordinance scheme of how people are being treated on these violations. And maybe it's time that we look at this. Maybe it's just been a little too long. It's time that we look at this. And like you said, finally, like you said, we spent so much time on brick, on lurp, on the live local act, on the sequencing of phasing, on what we have to do to make sure someone finishes something because of this one application. And of course, there's other things happening in the city where they're still unfinished. So it begs the question, is it, well, if that's what happens, then what do we you know what are all these other things for. So again it just it seems to me that the process is not working here and needs to be re-evaluated. Thank you. Further responses to what Ms. Naclas? Ms. Brooker. And I think the other question that I wasn't able to be answered because I was privy to this information for the day morning was how do we get to this number? Where do we pick this number from? So to me, I know that they're going to be in front of the magistrate. I think it's September 11th. I think we have time to rectify this, to come up with a number that is not insulting to the rest of the people that had to pay fines in the past, and that truthfully we got it wrong. Staff got this one wrong. 9,100, it just seems like a very random number. So unless, you know, and I know we can't say much, but I just kind of wanted to go on a record with that. I thought the fine should be $50,000. You've been in violation for several years. And at one point, I believe they weren't even responding to us. So again, we want to do business with you, but you have to be wanting to do business with us and follow our rules as well. So Mr. Brown, whatever you could do to take that back or to answer my question. That would maybe feel a little bit better about how we've handled this entire process. I don't have the details on the $9,100, but it was formulaic. I will get you the information. Thank you. All right, and then to answer your question, I think at least three of us now have given a policy direction in terms of relooking at what might have been discussed and there is time to review that. So I'll leave that aside. T answer, Ms. Nackles is bigger question. And also to respond to what Mr. Winger said, I'll just say this, hard, tough facts, what is a tough facts, make bad law, or can't make bad law, hard facts, make bad law. we have some hard facts on this This is kind of a very this is a very unique situation It also was complicated by a letter by a former development services director that the applicant relied on or set it relied on and Creates a little bit of a gray area having said that I'm trying to say we just address this particular concern. How we extrapolate from here, I'd like to think about between now and tomorrow, in part because on the one hand we were talking about not having the City Council be the primary reviewer of these things. So that's one concern which I think has some merit. When we started doing these code matters, this is the 1960s, there wasn't a lot going on. This is more fences and grass and stuff. On the second point was Mr. Wigder's about certainty. Perhaps we might give the magistrates who would we delegate more authority to them, more certainty within a frame of reference of what they do. And that's probably a policy discussion for a bigger day. And then tied to your third point, Ms. Nackles, which is special cases. Maybe if you're delegating authorities certain things, if the vine gets of a certain amount, then only then, and only then does it come back before the city council. I've not seen a situation like this one in 10 years. I don't know if this particular situation has ever happened where you had fines imposed, a magistrate direct the parties to come back and negotiate. I don't recall that. We can get more facts on that. But I think let me evaluate it more. You threw out an interesting idea, but I think we've got three competing proposals. We've addressed this concern here. Staff is now aware of what the majority of Council would like to get see from a policy directive here. We can figure out going forward. That sounds fine. policy directive here, we can figure out going forward. That sounds fine. I just wanted to throw out the bigger picture concept and see what you all thought about it, but I definitely agree with W. Mayor Drucker that this should be rectified. And if we can fix this before September 11th, I would say stick with the original $87,000 fine. So we'll go, we'll talk about it more. I agree. Very well. And I will say the rest of my report for tomorrow evening, so if there's no further business to come before the City Council, we are adjourned at 529. Thank you.