Good morning. The Thursday 13 March 2025 strategic workshop for the city commission will come to order. Madam City Clerk, please call the roll. Commissioner Perrine. Here. Commissioner McGurk. Here. Commissioner Ashley. Here. Vice Mayor Martin. Here. Mayor Cleveland. Here. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate that. So we're at the Brandon Center, and the House is full of staff. We're going to endeavor on our new newer city managers first endeavor to take us to 50,000 feet and observe what we want this city to look like in a few years and in a few more years and many more years. And so he has prepared his staff and so we will hear a series of reports and then we'll have an opportunity to ask questions and interact with the city staff. And then we'll be led by Mr. Calper through a journey of what we have input to him of what we have thought priorities should be. We'll break for lunch after that. And then we'll come back in and have a robust discussion about where the city should be heading in the future. With that said, I'd like to invite the public to comment about anything pertaining to city matters in the strategic vein. So if you have an idea or a concept or a view on what strategic planning might mean as it applies to your business or your neighborhood, we invite you to come forward. You'll be given three minutes to have a conversation. Actually, this will be your monologue, not a dialogue, and when you come forward your name and address for the record, please. Anybody for public participation? Mr. Williams, welcome. Thank you, Mayor Bob Williams. 767 pine shores Boulevard, but I just wanted to say on behalf of the Southeast Fulusha Chamber of Commerce, and particularly the Advocacy and Economic Development Committee. We want to thank the city for being a strong supporter of that. I want to remind you that for over four years now, we have been working and have published a regional economic development strategic plan, and where all the cities of Southeast Fulusha have agreed on some basic principles and then each and the hope is that each individual city will work within that framework so that we can collaborate to make our whole Southeast region thrive and improve our quality of life and provide good jobs and reduce the tax base. And I want to thank your director, Samantha Berseran, who is a very, very much a part of that development of that plan and has been very supportive and the going forward. So thank you all very very much for making this investment in our community. Thank you so appreciate your comments. Anyone else for public participation? Okay thank you I appreciate that. Good morning Mayor City Commission City staff, Randy Herman, 108, Esther Street. I woke up this morning and it was a full moon, it was pretty spectacular and I understand tonight there's going to be a lunar eclipse so I hope that augurs well for a productive day. I salute you for doing this task. I think it is more necessary than ever at this current time. Just a couple of comments I'd like to make. One is, like many today, I am quite concerned about the state of our nation and the state of our state. The word chaos comes to mind when we look at what's been happening both in DC and here in our state. And I really feel like perhaps the full-crime for democracy make really lie in our local locality. And to me it's more pressing than ever that our community demonstrates democratic process. And to me, this day is an example of that where you're taking a deep dive not only in current issues, but shorter term and longer term issues. So I salute that because I really am worried about our current nation and what's happening economically, socially, and psychologically what it's doing to all of us in a way. So I salute you, you're endeavor. The other thing I'd like to salute is the approach that's been taken around stormwater and looking at regional issues, because we know water doesn't stop at the boundary of New Samarna Beach. So anything that takes us beyond our city boundary and some of those major issues, I really would encourage us to continue to do that because so many of those issues don't stop. I'm in beach traffic and water quality and storm water. So much of that is not just within New Sumerna, but it's within our region. So I hope that's included in the viewpoint as you work through today. And overall, I think there's been so many exciting things happen. And the last point I wanted to make was when I first came here about 15 years ago, the city really focused on 24 neighborhoods. And there was a lot of energy going into the planning department and development department about going to each neighborhood with emissions and goals. I think that's fallen by the wayside. It then came the loop where there was a huge emphasis on uniting the west side with Canal Street and with Flagler. And then that went by the wayside. And then this building hosted sustainability workshop for a full year where the concentration was city-wide with a theme of sustainability. So I'm not sure exactly what map we're using as we look at our city, whether we're looking at neighborhoods in the relation to the 24 original, or we're looking at districts since we redistricted after the census, but I think it would be good to clarify sort of what the focus may be as we move forward short-term and longer-term. And as a famous photographer said, when giving 10 tips on how to make a best picture of a sunset, the last tip was make sure you look in the other direction. So oftentimes I think we get focused and there may be some beautiful light or some creative ideas on the other side of us so I wish you well in looking at all sides of the issues today. Thank you Dr. Herman, appreciate your comments. Good morning, Joe., Commission and glad to be here. My name is Joe DeLueback. I've come from 3587 because of the Circle in Venetian Bay. Only two points that I'd like to make. Number one is while we're talking about the long-term strategy of the city, we cannot begin to think about implementing that until the near term, the immediate issues that the city has are addressed and solved, not just addressed but solved. The second point is that all plans are great. The issues tend to be in their implementation. If Venetian Bay as an example of past performance, we need to make sure that we are staffed to implement that plan and not allow the developer to be the controller here. We are the ones that are in charge. In the past, the city commission would, during their annual report of the city, state that We were the next to the lowest, if not the lowest, mill rate in the county. The issue is you get what you pay for. It takes funds to make things happen. And the city had difficulty managing Venetian, a single development, now we have three on our plate between South Village Innovation Park and what used to be called Shell Point. So, please keep that in mind. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Appreciate your comments. Good morning Cindy. Good morning. Good morning Cindy. Good morning Cindy Cisec, 512 U-Pong. It's really a treat to see the whole leadership team here because rarely even at budget time do you get the opportunity to have a check in with everyone? So I'm pretty excited about today. It's really the first strategic workshop that I've been to. One thing, the reports that came from the different organizations were pretty different. So I don't know if we can kind of have a template going forward. The ones that had org plans, that was really, really helpful to understand what was the hierarchy. So it would be nice to have them for the others. Also, based on that 2020 plan, there was a laundry list of strategic objectives based on those groupings that the consultant worked with with the public and with you. And some of the plans that the staff updated reported on accomplishments to those objectives, but at least half did not. So I bring that up only because the best strategy in the world, if you don't measure and monitor what's going on with it, it's just like an endless do-lube talking about it, talking about it, talking about it. So the example of stormwater management is a great one. There was a lot of energy put behind that in the last two years, and some really, really tangible results. So I don't know a part of today will be kind of a check-in on those objectives or whether we're starting over again. So thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate your comments. Anyone else for public participation? Thank you, seeing none, public participation is now I think that turn it over to our city manager to sequence the briefings and we'll talk about the protocol for those in just a second. Thank you Mayor. So my goal for today to start out with is for this to be very relaxed and iterative and conversational. So you know, I wanted to be in this facility not in the council chambers where things are a little bit stiffer. So I appreciate everybody coming over and being here. So to kick off, I just wanted to lay the groundwork on where I see is going today, what I'd like to get accomplished. So as was mentioned in the comments, the city went through a strategic planning process back in 2019, 2020 document was produced and by all accounts the staff has been working to implement that plan over the last several years and every month there's an update at the staff level about what is happening. This is kind of time to you know check in, reboot and restart as basically I think commission of work is the only commissioner that is here that was here as part of that 2019 strategy. You have a new me so it's a good time to Kind of kick off something. I think you're all aware that the city charter does have a statement in it that requires an annual meeting strategic meeting and then specifically calls out the need for implementation strategies as a part of that. So to kick off, I asked the city department heads to think about the future and what their priorities were, any plans, programs, all those kind of things, and just to think in terms of short-term, mid-term, long-term. I specifically didn't give a format of what I was looking for. I just kind of wanted to see what would be produced and I provided that to you as part of this program and there's some very very detailed strategies. There's some other big picture stuff and there's no right or wrong. It is just an opportunity for the department has put out there what they were thinking and for you to review that and provide whatever learning that you could get from that. So, today, whatever learning that you could get from that. So today, if, you know, particularly this afternoon, as we're talking, if you know particularly this afternoon as we are talking, if you want to ask questions of the department heads and talk about what they are thinking, that certainly we can provide an opportunity to do that. Today I'm going to set the stage this morning and kind of give you some background information and it may be a little bit of a struggle to hear some presentations but I think it's important at this point that we hear some updates of where we are, particularly about our financial condition and our personnel resources. And then we have so many capital projects underway. I think it's important to get some updates on where we are. So we'll spend a good bit of time this morning listening to some presentations. After that, my goal is to give you some of my thoughts, some kind of strategic priorities that I think we need to be focused on, and then we'll break for lunch this afternoon, we'll come back and have commission discussion input. So at the end of this process, I hope that we're able to put together some kind of strategic document and that we can then use that as a basis for our budget development as we move into the budget process. That will start as early as April. And you guys, as commission, will be starting your meetings in May. So it's time is honest for budget. And my goal is to connect the strategic plan and the budgeting process in as much as we possibly can. For the department heads as we develop the big picture of this strategic plan, then I hope to align there what I would refer to as business plans, their individual department plans to align those plans with the strategic, the bigger strategic vision. So that's kind of an overview of where I'm thinking and where I think we should go. And I've been through several processes like this before, it can be a little bit sloppy to begin with and kind of like let's figure this out and This is a lot about me trying to understand from from you Big picture and what your what your interests are so that we can align the strategy and the departments and and everybody's thinking so that we're headed in a singular direction. So, let's, with that, get kicked off. Yeah. Right before you get your first presenter, which I assume is Joanna and the financial overview. I'd like to allow the commission an opportunity to say a few words about where strategy is in their head and alignment with what you have just said would be important. As has been our cuss of the past, I try to go to the guy who has been here or whoever has been here the longest to talk about where we have come from what you saw previously previously. And so now Commissioner McGurt with the new table set, with a new manager and a new idea about how to do this, linking the budget to the strategy. If you would give us your thoughts about what you've seen that worked successfully in the past, what you might have a view of where we might go in the future. I think it might help set the table for all of us on how it's been done before and how we might either capitalize on the greatest part of that and what you'd like to see is the deficit so that Kevin can be informed to guide the ship, if you will, as the chief operating officer, the chief executive of our city, and our strategist largely, we're in the what business here. He's in the how business. And so if we could help him with the what's and where it goes, he'll get us there. Do you talk about that for a little bit. Sure, thank you, Mayor. So, going back in time with the strategic plan, I would say probably the most important thing about the strategic plan that worked very well was the outreach and support in the community, was engaging the community to give us their input. That while it's been a little messy at times but I think that having strong community engagement in the strategic plan, when I look at where we were coming into 2019 and through 2019 and where we are today. You can see just by the comments that were made in the public how that's changed. There was a lot of, I don't want to say mistrust, but there was a lot of lack of understanding or lack of feeling of participation by the public. And I think that having a strategic plan and having the community participate in developing that strategy has gone a real long way in having people trust the process, most importantly understand the process and feel like they're part of the process. There's probably a few things in there that we could, you know, some of this was lengthy. We get into budgets, we talk about budgets and, you know, when you're new, line item budgeting is very important. One of the things that we did was we had, relatively have a monthly budget report starting in January up to the budget. That has been very good. I think that a lot of the goals have been accomplished, allows the commission in each individual person to be able to understand the budget their way. It starts that process very early. So that was another positive. So going forward, I think the more established you are at understanding that the more comfortable you are and you can, as the commission understands the process, they're able to articulate that to the people in the community. So it wasn't the benefit that I see of doing the budget process throughout the entire year. A loud each commissioner be able to answer questions to their constituents in a much more articulate and intelligent way. So that's gone a long way for it. And it really has taken the rumor mill and shut that down to some degree. How we do this going forward? That's a good question, Mayor. I don't necessarily see, you know, I don't want to speak for anyone on the commission on what their goals are. But I think that we're on the right path. I think there's little areas where we can tighten things up a little bit. But the community engagement process of the strategic plan, I think is the most important part of what we actually did. Thanks sir. Appreciate your comments. Commissioner Perrine you've had extensive time in the private sector and probably set through several strategic planning sessions. Do you have some views on this? A lot of my comments are going to be as we go, but I think I wrote a book when it came to this and sent to Mr. Calper, but I have a lot of opinions with this strategic plan. And we're probably going to differ a lot between us all with my objectives and your objectives. But what I'd like to see were the same things that I actually ran for my platform when I got elected. And some of the things I've seen come to fruition and some I have and some were whittling away in its process. But a lot of the things I'd like to see is transparency, process improvements, better strategic objectives between our boards. We have 18 boards. Communication needs to be there between all of us. Objectives need to be set between us and staff and feedback. I've been annoyed a lot over this past couple of years because I don't really know what the boards are doing and I don't have time to go to 18 board meetings. I mean, every quarter, all year long, and just isn't going to happen. So more feedback from the boards before we appoint people, revenues for the enterprise. I've been a little bit annoyed that this hasn't been done quicker, where we break even on some of them. We're making dents in that parking and traffic huge airport future use is huge for me. Land conservation, that's big. We're buying the land but we've got to maintain it. I'd like to see more public and private relationships between land conservation and historic instead of depending on taxpayers with this we've got to start bridging this gap and have preservation and foundations set from the private enterprise to have many going into this to where they can maintain a lot of that like a lot of states do. Homeless has been great We've got some numbers that huge impact we've made in this community in the last two years and I'm very happy to see that I like to see more communication and citizen feedback versus the same people trying to dictate our city actions and more letters, feedback, email going out to 32,000 people versus the same 30 people that are always giving us feedback. I'm happy to see that, but I don't want them to dictate our staff. Less government control, more trend analysis, benchmarks, and definitely process improvements. And I think we'll build a great community. It's all about diversity. We've got a lot of issues with affordable housing. We just have a lot of things that we can tackle with this strategic plan and I'd like to do a little differences like he said a lot of us are very detailed. I'm very detailed on these things and they will fall within those categories and a lot of times I've mentioned this and I don't want the can to get kicked further down the road. I think we can drill on seminies throw them in these little buckets because when I've asked throughout the year, oh we'll talk about that in the strategic plan. We'll talk about that later. Well it's later is now. So we need to set some things for our city. Parking in traffic, I've been here for a long, long time and that keeps. We're working on it. It doesn't happen overnight and I'm very impatient moment. And I know that we are looking into things, but Canal Street and those type of things are very important to me and moving the things out west, but when we do it, we've got to to do it right and I think we're starting the foundation for all of those things and we're being ultra sensitive with flooding but we just need to continue with this direction. Thank you. I appreciate those have ridden a lot of those down commissioner Martin. I'm sure you have a view as well. Well, I think that many of my comments are actually under the umbrella of making a high value city. And there are things like, I want more bike and walking, safety paths. These are things that are proven to be hallmarks of high value cities. The conservation, the greenery, these are all hallmarks of high value cities. So the things that we really care about, the other one with the stormwater, I'd like us, we're all focused on what happens after the rain comes and how that storm water is managed after it's been here. We can also look at measures to say, how do we not make it worse? And FEMA has coastal construction recommendations for building that allow a free board water to flow under it, and there are probably a number of other measures so that we can continue to grow, but let's grow in a way that does not geometrically increase our need for storm water management. So again, this is all environment, it's conservation, and it's all about making a high value city that will attract more people. Thank you, ma'am. I appreciate those comments as well. And the newest member of our group, Brian, you also have had great experience in corporate America. I'm sure you've done some strategic planning of your own. I'd love your input Thank you friend my background is the private sector and I've worked for Fortune 500 company a couple of times and set that through meetings like this My point of view right now is in terms of customers and markets. So what I'll do at some point when my level of education is ready, I will tie city stuff into my background of corporate America. But when I say that I look at markets and customers, I look at opportunities to do things differently and please the customer. And I think that my personal journey here, I've been a little confused about who the customer is. Because I think the customer, I think our main customer is the homeowner. So there are a lot of people in the city who aren't homeowners, and certainly their customers too like renters I was a renter for many many years They certainly have rights Homeowner has a lot of stake and it seems to me that developers our customers too, but they seem to be different kind of kinds of kind of customers than homeowners. And I'm kind of in my own mind waiting through the differences and it seems like a maze a little bit still to me now, but that is my position and point of view right now in terms of how to serve the needs of the city. Now, I'm also learning about the needs of us as the stewards of the city and fitting that into where I've been so far in my mind about customers and markets. It seems to me that if we have an opportunity to spend more money and increase the quality of anything we should do it, our focus should not be to save money. Our focus should be to increase the quality of limit period. And I think that my point of view, and it may be unpopular in local circles, but it's very inexpensive to live here. And if it's a little more expensive, that's no big deal to me. And if it's a little more expensive, and some people can't afford to live here, that's the way it goes. I mean, we have a wonderful community, and it should stay wonderful and get more wonderful as time goes on. So, for example, in my home, when I get three bits to do anything, I don't automatically take the lowest bit. I take the bit that I feel that will number one, the contractor that will do the best job, and number two, the contractor that I can communicate with the easiest. So, I bring those kind of values to this position. I'm nowhere near being as knowledgeable as I want to be about City Affairs yet, but I'm glad we're here. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. I'm sure you wanted us to go discuss our specific strategic issues. My mistake. It's not required. We're going to do that this afternoon for sure. And it was just to give you an opportunity to let the public here and have me on the record for where you are, where you've been. And I use you as a historian to tell us about that journey. So you'll have ample opportunity to go through all of your things. I come from a private sector and a government sector passed with a variety of opportunities to do strategic planning. Strategic thinking, I think, is a skill set. And it doesn't resident in every one of us. And it isn't resident in all our people. And it doesn't't have to be but we do have to have a strategic leader and I view the city manager as the how to get to where we think the city ought to be you heard each Commissioner talk about what things are important to the what of the future of the city and I think that part, and that is exactly what we need. You heard another talk about stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders? There are many. Yes, the residents, yes, the businesses. But the county is a stakeholder. Our neighboring cities are stakeholders. The state is a stakeholder. We have many stakeholders and so tending to those is important. I think and reference to Mr. Blueback's comments about don't don't yes do strategy but don't let the cart get out before the horse. I kind of use this analogy you have to eat the hot dog from both ends. If all you do is tactical thinking every day and tactical execution and you don't have a strategy, you're gonna be used all your bandwidth, all the city staff's bandwidth, handling the emerging prices of the day. If you have a time out for strategy, which you can't afford to work all the time because then you don't get the day-to-day things done. You're going to get fired. So you have to have that bright balance of working on the strategic issues, the things you put on paper, in addition to handling the day-to-day. Another citizen said, you've got to measure. I'm a measure fanatic. I've learned through trial and tribulation and mostly failure that you get what you inspect, not what you expect. And so to just assume it's going to happen is not a wise strategy. You must measure, measure, measure. Couple last pieces, the absence of a strategy means that any path will get you to nowhere. And so the second order of effects of that are that if you don't strategize to where you want to be in the future and take the effort, take the fight to the opportunity and the challenges. You will be overcome by sprawl, by second order effects you didn't plan for, by unintended consequences. So there's no way that we should not have a strategy, just why our charter says you you must review, you must keep strategizing for where the future is going to be. I think we're in a good place to start that in 2025 for the next decade and under new leadership of Mr. Calper, I am confident that we will actually invent the what here and give him a site picture and let him come back as the clock ticks with the how to get there. With that said, sir, we're ready for you and I'm sorry to have messed up your timing. No, sir, that is great. I appreciate that input very valuable. If we can start the day with financial overview and Joe. So Joe is newer than me at the city but I promise you she has been working hard and her staff has been working hard so that we can get an understanding of our financial condition. So Joe is going to give you kind of a snapshot of where we are today and some of the things that we're looking at going for. So Joe, you have the floor. Thank you. Joe, as we go, do you want questions and comments at the end or as you present your choice? Your preference, you can ask as we go along. We'll do it at the end. And I'll do my best to answer. We'll do it at the end. OK, so good morning, everyone. As Kevin mentioned, we're going to go through a financial overview to kick off this strategic plan process. It should be about 20-ish minutes. It's a lot of detail, so I'll probably be talking pretty fast if you need me to slow down, just let me know. So this slide presents a summary of the adopted budget for the current fiscal year. As you can see, it is balanced with 136.9 million in both revenues and expenditures. This slide breaks down budget of revenues. Property taxes constitute 28%. Charges for services make up 24%. And funds carried forward from the prior year contribute 16%. Other taxes such as sales tax, communication services tax, and gas taxes account for 11% of our revenues, while intergovernmental revenues, including grants and federal state contributions, represent another 11%. Licenses, permits, and miscellaneous revenue make up the remainder. On this slide, budgeted expenses are categorized by function. Public safety, which includes police and fire, makes up 26% of the expenses. This is followed by culture and recreation at 21%. Transportation expenses at 20%, general government expenses at 18%, physical environment at 9% and miscellaneous expenses cover the balance. This slide presents budget expenses in a different way by type. You have operating expenses which constitute 37% of our budget personal services which are your salaries and benefits make up 32% capital accounts for 28% in debt service expense which is principal and interest on your loan. services, which are your salaries and benefits, make up 32% capital accounts for 28% and debt service expense, which is principal and interest on your loans constitute 3% of the budget. This slide illustrates the trend in property tax revenue over the past four years, including three years of actual collections in the anticipated amount for fiscal year 2025. The total property tax value of $7 billion includes a $669 million increase from the previous year. This increase is attributed to 1.4 million from annexations, 120 million from new construction, and then remainder from increased property values. As you can see, most of the property value is residential, comprising 83%, followed by commercial properties at 10% and other property types at 7%. The bar graph here shows the historical general fund milled rate over the past four years. The box on the left displays the current year milled rate including the voted debt service milled rate for the Turnbull Creek Conservation Land Acquisition Bond, which brings the total city milled rate to 4.7265. The city of New Sumerina Beach is the fourth lowest milled rate in the county. Here we have a sample tax bill or excuse me, this slide illustrates the components of a Newsom Arena Beach tax bill. It shows that 28% is allocated to the city. 34% is related to the county. 32% is related to the school board and 6% to other jurisdictions such as the hospital district. The actual millage rate for each jurisdiction is displayed on the right. In this shows you a sample property tax bill for a home valued at 450,000 with a home state exemption. The total tax bill is $6,700 of which 1800 is related to the city of New Sumerna Beach. That's about $157 per month. The remainder of the tax bill is related to other jurisdictions and that's about $4,800. Over the next few slides we'll take a closer look at each of the city's funds. The city has quite a few funds. We'll start with the general fund. The general fund is the primary operating fund of the city and the most flexible. It supports a broad range of government functions including police, fire parks, public works, and the other activities listed here. This slide provides a high level overview of the general fund as of February 28th. At this stage of the year, with five months elapsed, approximately 42% of the budget is expected to be recognized. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was 20.9 million and by the end of this period it has grown to 34.6 million. Of this amount, a 25% reserve of 12.6 million is required. 2.7 million is committed to future fleet vehicle replacements and incumbrances that will be liquidated in the 2025 year. This leaves an uncommitted balance of 19.2 million. This balance will cover expenses through the remainder of the year as revenue collection slowdown and expenses hold study. This slide provides a high level overview of the Brandon Center, which is a subfund of the general fund as of February 28th. This fund encompasses the revenue and expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the Brandon Center. Overall the net income for this period is a loss of 48,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was a deficit of 31,000 and by the end of this period it has decreased to a deficit of 79,000. A 25% reserve of 160,000 is required leaving a balance of 239,000. You can see at the top of the slide however operating income and loss if we just look at the operating revenues and the operating. The year-to-date loss is only 7,000 where it was budgeted to be 297,000. You'll see on many of the slides I've tried to aggregate operating revenues and expenses so that you can see the day-to-day, how the fund is doing, and then the non-operating or extraordinary items like capital or transfers out have been segregated. The next fund is the golf course fund. This fund includes the revenues and expenses related to the operation and maintenance of the golf course. It too is a subfund of the general fund. Overall, the net income for this period is 168,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was a deficit of 414,000. By the end of this period, it has improved to a deficit of 246,000. A 25% reserve of 545,000 is required, leaving a deficit balance of 791,000. But again, if you look in the middle of this slide, you can see here today just looking at operating revenues and expenses. The golf course has made a profit of 224,000. Now we're going to look at the other operating funds of the city. We're going to start with stormwater. This fund accounts for stormwater fees, which are restricted for expenses related to stormwater operations, maintenance of the stormwater system and stormwater capital improvements. The current stormwater fee for residential properties is $104. Overall, the net income for this period is $985,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was $9.3 million, and by the end of this period, it is increased to $10.3 million. A 20% reserve of $2 million is required, leaving a balance of $8.2 for stormwater utility activities. This fund accounts for airport-generated revenues, which are restricted for airport-related purposes to ensure airport resources benefit the airport and its users. Overall the net income for this period is 102,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was 1.7. And by the end of this period, it had increased to 1.8 million. A 15% reserve of 554,000 is required, leaving a balance of 1.2 million for airport activities. This fund accounts for building permit and plan review revenues which are restricted for enforcing the Florida building code. This includes expenses to maintain safety standards, protect public health and ensure that construction projects meet legal requirements. Overall the net income for this period is a loss of 269,000. At the beginning of the year the the fund balance was 1.4 million, and by the end of this period, it had decreased to 1.2 million. Currently, a 20% reserve of about a million is required. This leaves a balance in the fund of 162,000 for building future building fund activities. This is the parking fund. This fund accounts for parking revenue which is restricted for maintaining and improving public parking infrastructure. Overall the net income for this period is a loss of 1 million. At the beginning of the year the fund balance was 3.6 million and by the end of this period it has decreased to 2.5 million. There are no required reserves for this fund leaving the entire amount of 2.5 available for future parking activities. This live provides overview of the Community Redevelopment Fund. This fund collects tax increment revenue from real property within the CRA boundaries. Revenues are restricted specifically for expenses outlined in the CRA plan and are intended to assist the CRA in achieving its goals and strategies. Overall the net income for this period is 2.5 million. At the beginning of the year the fund balance was 5.9 and by the end of this period it is increased to 8.5 million. There are no required reserves for this fund, leave the entire 8.5 available for CRA activities. This fund accounts for Marina-generated revenues, which are restricted for Marina-related purposes. It ensures that Marina resources benefit the Marina and its users. As an enterprise fund, it operates like a business with the goal of being self-sustaining. Overall the net income for this period is a loss of $433,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was $612,000. And by the end of this period, it has decreased to 179,000. A 15% reserve of 65,000 is required, leaving a deficit balance of 212,000, after an investment in net capital assets. This fund, the Solid Waste Fund, collects garbage fees, which designated for the collection and disposal of waste. As an enterprise fund, it operates like a business with the goal of being self-sustaining. The current fee for residential property is $25.95 per month. Overall the net income for this period is $434,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was $2.5 million, and by the end of this period, it had increased to $2.9 million. A 20% reserve of $2 million is required, leaving a balance of $920,000 after counting for net investment and capital assets. The fleet fund, the purpose of this fund is to finance the costs associated with maintaining and operating a fleet of vehicles. This fund operates on a cost reimbursement basis. We're various departments are charged for their usage of the vehicles. Overall, the net income for this period is a loss of $788,000. At the beginning of the year, the fund balance was $961,000, and by the end of this period, it had decreased to $173,000. There are no required reserves for this fund, leaving a deficit balance of $14,000 after counting for the net investment in capital assets. Now we'll take a look at the other non-operating funds. There's the American Rescue Act Plan Fund, which was established to manage the federal grant proceeds received to help the city respond and recover from COVID-19 pandemic. The fund received a total of 13.9 million, with 633,000 still available and not encumbered. That's primarily from interest earnings and non-restricted grant funds. So this has a lot of flexibility on how it can be spent. The law enforcement trust fund accounts for the sale of SEES contraband with revenues restricted for activities that enhance public safety and law enforcement capabilities. There's currently 217,000 available in this fund. Now we'll look at the city's capital-related activities. As it relates to all the impact that I'm going to talk about, they're currently being studied to determine if the current rates need to be adjusted. And I'll talk about each one a little in a little more detail. So police, impact fees are collected to fund law enforcement, capital, and infrastructure projects to support new development and population growth. The current residential rate is $360 per residential unit. And for fiscal year 2025, you can see the list of projects here. There is a balance in the fund after these projects of 982,000. Fire impact fees are collected to fund fire and EMS capital and infrastructure projects to support new development and population growth. The current residential rate is $460 per unit. There's a few projects or purchases here in the balance available after those is $606,000. The recreation and park impact fees are collected to fund recreation and park capital and infrastructure projects to support new development and population growth. The current residential rate is $1,350 per unit. There are no planned projects this fiscal year, and there's 1.89 million in the fund available for Park and Recreation Capital. Transportation impact fees are collected to fund transportation capital and infrastructure projects to support new development and growth. The current residential rate is $1,750 per unit. for fiscal year 25, the plan projects include a traffic signal at station 52. The remaining balance in the fund is 4.5 million. We have two general obligation bond bonds that were issued that have funds remaining in them. The first is the 2005 general obligation bond, which was issued to equip a police station, three fire stations, an emergency operation center and sidewalks. The original bond was refunded in 2016, and the refunded bond was paid off in 2024. For fiscal year 25, the budget includes 171,000 for sidewalk projects. The total amount available for additional expenses in fiscal year 25 is just over a million dollars. This includes a balance of 700,000 in the Capital Project Fund and 356,000 in the debt service fund. The 2018 GO bond was designated for the preservation of land along Turnbull Creek. The bond will be paid off in 2039 with an average annual debt service of 610,000 and an interest rate of 2.45%. The VOT debt service milling rate is currently 0.0895, which translates to about $8.95 per 100,000 of property value. For fiscal year 25, the balance available for land acquisition is 947,000. Additionally, there's an extra 5.5 million that can be borrowed. Under current rates and market conditions, this would require an additional levy of 0.0594 mills, which equates to about $5.94 per 100,000 of property value. We have a large capital project fund that's funded with a variety of sources, impact fees, storm water fees, parking fees, general fund money, debt, federal state grants are all transferred into this fund. The projects listed on this slide account for about 85% of the 2025 budget, which totals 36 million. And Jesse, I'll be talking more about these projects a little later this morning. Now let's transition to discussing other crucial financial elements, including cash, debt, reserves, and the importance of maintaining a structurally balanced budget. The city's cash position typically fluctuates throughout the year with higher balances observed in February and lower balances in September, as you can see on the graph. This pattern is due to the collection and subsequent spending of property tax revenues. For instance, the cash position was 74 million in September of 2023 and increased in 91 million in February 2024 after the majority of property taxes were collected. As of February 2025, the cash position stands at 103 million. It's important to note that 79% of this cash or 81 million is restricted and can only be used for specific needs. The remaining 21 million is unrestricted cash and can be utilized for general purposes. Moving on to debt, the city's total outstanding debt is 31.4 million with a total maximum annual debt service of 3.2. Detailed information on each debt issue is shown on this slide, providing a breakdown by individual debt. Typically debt service as a percentage of legally available revenues falls between 10 to 15%, which ensures that a government can comfortably meet its debt obligations without compromising its ability to fund services and operations. The City of New Sumerna for comparison purposes is at 4.3%. General obligation debt has a dedicated property tax revenue string so it doesn't come out of general revenues. Reserves you heard me mentioned the reserves required in a variety of funds as we looked at individual funds. This just will summarize that information. In general, GFLA, government finance offers association recommends that two months or 16.67% of budgeted expenditures be reserved to mitigate current and future risks such as revenue shortfalls and unanticipated expenditures. The city's fund balance policy, which was established by resolution 18-19, set the following reserve balance targets for the funds we discussed earlier. We are currently in the process of evaluating and updating the reserve requirements and a recommendation will be forthcoming. Finally, I just wanted to talk about structurally balanced budget. While it's required to adopt a balanced budget, as you saw on the first slide, where revenues and expenses equal each other, meaning that meets the statutory requirement. For a budget to be considered structurally sound and balance, reoccurring revenues should be sufficient to cover reoccurring expenses. That ensures that ongoing expenditures are not financed by non-reoccurring sources such as the sale of an asset or dipping into reserves. So one-time revenues should be allocated for non-reoccurring expenses such as capital or one-time projects. That will help maintain long-term financial health and stability. And with that, that concludes the overview. So I'm hoping to questions. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate that. We're aware to begin. As you mentioned, Joe, in your early comments, a lot of what you've presented is woven tightly into each department. So we can very easily get into a discussion about any one of those which would lead us into a department. Goals type of thing. So I caution us to think about that because I've got tons of questions that will lead lead that way. So any comments or questions from my colleagues? Mr. Martin. Okay. What is the collection rate for our property tax? I would say 97%. Yeah. Typically you budget about 95%. but it's going to be huge. And can the parking fund be used to repay transportation fund for 120 flaglars, for example? Where's our latitude there? It depends on the use of the building. So if it were to house your parking enforcement or parking activities, then yes, that would be appropriate. Nice. How is the solid waste fund used? So the solid waste activities are outsourced to a contractor. Yes. The revenue comes in to pay the contractor for trash disposal and recycling. Maybe I missed it but it looked like there was a surplus in there. Yes. And so I'm asking asking what use can that surplus be used? How else can we use it if we pay our obligations and there still is so much over revenue? How can we use that? We'd have to do some research, look at the city charter, the ordinance, and see what flexibility there is there. Thank you. And I'm with under the understanding, and perhaps I'm wrong, that any uncommered funds, ARPA funds, anything that was not encumbered by 1231-25, we lost. Are you saying that that's been extended somehow? No. It is a little bit confusing, but the ARPA funds that had to be and come by 1231 have been what's left in the ARPA fund that can still be used for something else is interest that was earned on the 13 million because we were given that all up front. And then some funds that were allocated to revenue loss. So everything that was required to be committed has been. Thank you. And last question, do we have any federal monies that might be affected? affected by the closure of different departments at the federal level? Yeah, the federal level. Because I assume we get some money from the federal level. Yes. And so is any of that federal money effective? At this point, we're not aware of it. And we are being updated by our federal partners on the status of our funding for things like VOCA. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate that. Anyone else? Commissioner Perrine? A lot of mine are going to wait, but I did to elaborate more on the ARPA availability of the 633,000 being interest. If we haven't designated that, how's that going to go into the general general fund or do we have to vote on that? It could go into the general fund. Right now it's sitting in its own fund, but it has flexibility and it could be used for anything the commission desires. Will we be voting on that during the budget? Yes. The parking fund, and I don't know if we're gonna have so many speak about that. It was in a million dollar loss is that because of all the AOB expenses that we hit it this year? Let me just take a look. Most of the AOB expenses this year are not related to parking. I think it initially started as a parking project but as Jesse will talk about it's the floating docks, the shoreline improvements. Let me just look at that. So is this the slide you were referring to? Yes, okay. The year to date. Yes, so yeah, at the end of February, there is a $991,000 deficit. It is related to that million dollar transfer, which went to capital projects. And I'd have to look at the detail of what those projects are. But you do have quite a bit of fun balance. You had 3.6 million. So the money that was brought forward from prior years is assisting with that transfer to pay for one time capital. So the target for the end of the year, the 2.5, even after the million year-to-day at loss, are we still going to be good for that? Yes. Yes. Good, very good. Thank you. I think the rest is for later. Thank you. Appreciate that. Commissioner McGart. Joe, thank you very much. I just need some clarifying. Percentage of revenues, 10% was commercial, 83% residential, 7% was other. That'll be institutional properties. It could be agriculture properties. OK, so my question, not my question, but when we look at the 83% residential, we have a unique situation here in New Smyrna, which is our residential values have always not have been high. Additionally, they've skyrocketed. And one of the unique situations about New Sumerna is we get a very high amount of adverb and tax revenue because of our unique high demand, high value of properties. So when I look at the 83% residential, if I took a city, our sister city, down south, and Edgewater, and I took their values of residential, that would be much lower. And then that would make our commercial revenue as a percentage go way up. So when I see the 83% on the surface, it looks like we have a really big disparity of where generally we should be with commercial residential. But because we have such a unique, uniquely high residential, advolume tax revenue due to our values. I mean, I just talked to someone who just built a new beach house, they're paying 60,000 a year in tax revenue. So we have a lot of homes like that where they're on the river or on the ocean beach side. Not even including our just generally high values. So I think it's important when we look at the commercial to residential, we also need the factor in that equation where we want to be. Are we back at, I've heard where at the lowest millage is that been recalculated now? Are we actually back at the lowest millage rate in the county? If you compared to the other jurisdictions were the fourth low list. Okay, that's what I thought. I was here. I thought I was hearing with a low list during, okay, thank you for that clarification. Enterprise fund operates like a business, but the Marina for example, we have not included, For example, the debt service in the Marina expenses that's been taken out. Has that been put back in or is that still taken out? I would have to look into that and get back to you on that. It should include the debt if the Marina has debt. Well, historically, the debt service has not been included. So if we made $2 million in repairs at the marina, that is not in the general operating figures of the marina. So I just wanted to clarify that, make sure people understand it's not necessarily as profitable, but please, yeah, it's then me an email on that whenever it's convenient for you. It's not urgent, but It'd be important to know if that was put back in now You say that I'm that can I clarify is it you're as a finance expert? It's you what I heard you say was it is proper to have it in the the account That's great. Okay, and so left your own devices you would actually put put it back in there if it was taken out. Yeah, and that's something we can just got. I don't think it is, or at least it hasn't been, but certainly update me on that. And we can probably have a future discussion about that. The $5.5 million that you said is still available for us to borrow on the Turnbull WAN. If I recall correctly we had about 16 million. Is that in addition to the 16 million originally or have we just used about 11 million and we have another roughly 5 or 6 million to use from that original bond? The referendum approved borrowing 15 million. The city only borrowed 9.5. Okay, so this. Okay, and when we borrowed that money, we borrowed at a very low interest rate. Yes. Now, if we went into that 5.5 million, are we still gonna be at that very low interest rate? No. We have to. So it was a big mistake not to borrow the full 15 million and put it in some kind of reserve that to let it sit out there because now, yeah, we had a crystal ball. But Joe, we're going to. So, I mean, there's arbitrage you'd have to worry about. True. Yeah, if you don't. You're limited on how much interest you could earn on that money. Well, I meant the borrowing, the interest that we're going to, we wouldn't want to borrow now at a high interest rate. Is it your point, Mr. Manager, that we couldn't have borrowed more than what we needed to get that property because of a- Right generally speaking, I mean if you'd borrowed that much money and then you're sitting on ten or twelve million dollars in the bank then you're earning interest. And so these are tax exempt bonds and there's a lot of rules about how much interest you can earn on that. So if we earned a lot of interest we would probably just be giving that back to the federal government because of arbitrage. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. That's good to know. I'd like to do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a, yeah, it's not a money making And we part if we do borrow this money then what rates are four and a half five? right now? Yeah, 4.5, 4.75. So it's still. Well, I want those rates. Still pretty good. I mean, those are tax exempt bond rates. Yes. You know, there's a lot of discussion too at the federal level about doing the way with that. Yes. We're monitoring that as well. Right. Thank you. Good enough. That's it, Mayor. Anyone else? Yeah, of course. Sir, one of the very first slides, transportation was 28%. Yes. And I just wondered what was included in transportation. Transportation would include your street operations. It would include capital, building of sidewalks, resurfacing of roads. So it's not just the operating, it's the capital that's invested in our transportation infrastructure. Why do some funds have reserves and others don't? The required reserves that I presented were based on the policy adopted by the City Commission. That policy can be changed so those additional reserves could be added or the amounts could be changed. Would you advise one way or the other? Yes. Yes. The Government Finance Officers Association recommends that your operating funds have about two months worth of expenditures set aside for a rainy day. Okay. So we'll be evaluating that and bring it back to the city commission. Okay. And I think I heard that the marina is considered a business operation but the golf course isn't? Correct. Any reason for that? I believe in the history it's changed at one point it wasn't enterprise operated as a business. Then it wasn't Kevin and I are evaluating that and looking to make some changes in the next year's budget. Yeah, we, I think there's been a lot of history with the golf course that's gone back and forth and it's clearly been subsidized over the years with General Fund, which I think is the reason they took it out of being an enterprise operation. I think my preference, Joe's preference, would be important to be an enterprise operation. So we're gonna look at that. Yes. So that was gonna be one of my questions. I know Commissioner Martin's got a view on it. Yeah. The golf course was an enterprise fund. They would borrow from the city. They could never pay it back and rather than continuing to show. And I think, Carrie, were you on with this happened? Where rather than continuing to show this red ink and feeling that it would never be able to pay for itself, it was decided to put it in the general fund. Is that a reasonable synopsis? From what I can recall, yes. Anything else? So I'll start there. It's usually a city-managed philosophy in coordination with the finance director. So, I favor the opportunity to have anything that can be an enterprise fund, should be an enterprise fund, but that's Fred's philosophy. We'll have to listen to what Kevin thinks the way it ought to go. But knowing that a receding cost a gazillion dollars and that it would take years for them to get out of the red after they've receded and any time they bought a tractor or any, you know, it was tough to make it look like it was a business. And so rather than bail out over and over again, quit pretending you're a business, you're not a business. And then his predecessor said that it is righteous for a city to offer services to the public and like a park or a golf course or whatever. And so therefore it should be a natural expense of the city rather than have it be a capitalistic approach. I favor the capitalistic approach and if there was ever you know I prefer to work the revenue side of that equation and what else can that we're not doing at the golf course and I have opinion from the public that says there's a lot, and there's a lot of revenue to be made. What is it we're not doing to make that, what is it, Joe, is about 250,000 a year, 2 million a year, what's the number? So, the revenue, annual revenue. Annual revenue is two million from operations, green fees, and companies. So, is it a $2 million operation, or it could be a $4 million operation? And then at that point you can actually be a self-sustaining Business like we're all familiar with and we'd love we'd love to see But Brandon Center's another topic, you know that goes before we're sure If this golf course was the brainchild The municipality then I would tend to say it'd probably be tough to make it an enterprise entity. We have a Donald Ross golf course here. That is a gold mine ready to be mined. I mean, a Donald, people golfers travel all over the world to play one Donald Ross golf course after another. It isn't, we don't have an ordinary golf course. We have a very special golf course. And to pay a few bucks more to play it, to me, is not a big deal. And it would, marketed correctly, it would attract people of wealth to visit here in a greater proportion than they do now, market it properly. And that's just how I see things. You know. Huge opportunity and I'll look forward to Director Salazar would Rob comes up to having that discussion. It's not the first time we've talked about it so it'll be good to have your new set eyes on it. And like the record to show us, surcharge to the commissioner when he plays golf, it would be appropriate. I'd be glad to pay. Just to note, I believe that property is deed restricted. I believe that it was donated to the city with the deed restricted to golf course. So whether we like it or not, it's a golf course. No, but yeah just take fees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think what he's saying is, make a lot more money with golf. No, no, I'm saying it's the only option is for it to be a golf course and to market it correctly and increase fees. I think it's a beautiful idea, but it is a golf course and we'll stay a golf course. That's it. All right. So in the absence of the mystery, what's your and Joe's philosophy on citywide enterprise versus general fun? I want you to expand on the Brandon Center because you were going to say something about that. Brandon, we've been tortured by, we've tortured Rob Salazar and he's still decided to keep the job about quit losing money, quit losing money, makes a money. And then we were given away, you know, we would give it away to charity events, time and time again and say, okay, we really didn't mean it. We want you to give it away to the colonists or to the Sheriff's Department or whatever. And so it was both sides of our mouth, right? And so it was torturous. So it's tough. And so we've got some new management here. Jonah is doing an amazing job. We're starting to get the revenues. If you look at his deficit of the plan was 297, he's only losing seven. So it's pretty amazing where he's come from. This could have been a re-regarding the brand in center. Let me give you a specific example. I went to the Beatles tribute band concert. I don't know if anybody else did hear it, but it was fantastic. Now the ticket price was $15. That's ridiculous. There should have been a100. You still would have filled the place up. There were at least 200 people here, all mostly retired. So they had a little bit of dough. So I would say that those kinds of thoughts about revenue should be maybe a more active, like ask me, maybe. Sure. Absolutely. And as a beetle fan with beetle ties, I appreciate what you're saying. Mark Monison is kind of our coach. He's a, you know, I call him our musical ambassador. And so I, I share your, you know, with their side, lots of quality. We had Tommy Dorsey van here for God's sake. We should have, and it still is for Chief. The counter to that is, hey, the city's now involved. We're offering a service, we're offering a feature, and it's a subsidized event effectively. Should we be in that business? Let's have a robust discussion about, no, we should charge market rates by golly. I was just gonna say that, you know, number of us are blessed to have a reasonable income, but and Samantha is out of the moment, but when you average out the income across the entire city with retirees and all of that, many of them cannot afford. So if we're offering a city service, I can understand not putting full market rate out because there's, I would venture to say for most seniors in this town, $200 assuming two people is a lot of money. And I think we need to- Will you go for 50? I'm not the person in that, right? But my point is that I think we need to be cognizant that in fact the majority of, and last I remember median incomes 51,000. I hadn't think about 100 when I said it too, you know, I just threw it. No, I, yeah, I just, I think we need generally as we're talking about strategic plans and funds and now we spend money to be aware that not everybody in the community is affluent. That's all. Huge, huge, huge piece of real estate, one of the most valuable ones the city has, and so are we doing the right thing by the city in how we use this building? So those are debatable items that I'm delighted we're gonna have that discussion as the clock ticks here. So, Kevin, what are you and Joe's views on how to do enterprise versus general funding and how do you want to play the ball going forward? Well, I mean, I think exactly what we've talked about here today, if it makes sense for it to be an enterprise operation, if it's a break even or potentially profitable business, we'll look at the enterprise operation. So golf you know, golf course, certainly, I had a loss still why the solid waste fund is an enterprise operation that doesn't make any sense to me, but that's an easy fix. Brandon Center is certainly something that we're looking at with the profitability. But I think this has a larger kind of community good. So, you know, I'm not sure wherever going to get to the point where this is profitable when you take into consideration ongoing maintenance capital, all those kind of things that we'll have to put into it. But I certainly think with what Rob is doing, looking at different business opportunities that we can close the gap on that. So we'll continue to look and make some recommendations in the next year's budget. I have a question. Yes, ma'am. We've seen reports from Rob before that didn't include labor. Labor included in the operating expenses on this. Yes. Okay, very good. Last question from me anyway. How is our debt compared to other cities of our size? Joe, any ideas? low if you get to that debt slide. So on average local governments probably have debt service requirements that are about 10 15%% of their generally general revenues. Newsomers at 4.3%. So low compared to other cities of our size as your view. Yes. Okay. Excellent. And then last is just a comment. Anxation is a revenue generator for our city. We have an odd, you know, I've heard former Commissioner Hartman talk about the donut and how inefficient it is in the middle of the city where it's actually county property and so the county actually does all of their services and we drive around it and the rescue business and Sean and Chris's business where there's jurisdiction oriented, it's not efficient. The cash cows on the other side of the bridge down south there and the rules set has been set up against us so that you can't just one Z2 Z annex in, it has to be a majority of the residents there that want in. And those people are generally vacationers. So the full boat at the Lorm tax is a monumental number. Having New Sumerna have that in our house would be a game changer for our city. It's been pitched before and the old guard down there and said, no, we don't want anything to do with you guys. That's slowly but surely melting and the efficiency with which we could offer their services is attractive to me and which would be attractive those residents. What does it start? It's a bit thin or something. Silver sands and baton beach. Well, that's a very good point you're making. And the key to what you said was, I think there's a lot of people who are changing their attitude. The no, you know, I have my own theories as to why there's such a strong no, and I think those people have aged out. And I think that was so those people have died now. A lot of people but I agree with you very that is the biggest low hanging fruit that we have and that's something that the city should probably make a run hat in the future. Okay. A couple of A couple of notes? Yeah, please. A lot of people down there are deeply attached to their septic systems. They consider it onerous to have to pay the Utilities Commission. In addition, Bethune has never allowed short-term rentals. And if they annex into the city, the way the city is set up now, it would probably allow short-term rentals there. They also have much stricter building regulations. So there's a number of reasons why a lot of people don't want to annex in. In addition to the few, and I've had to explain to a few, the have to be contiguous for the city, to be able to annex in, they're really sad that they can't annex in from the middle of Silver Sales or Bethune. So it's a mixed story. Well, we provide them electricity. If we do, we should do it. And I think that's, I'm not sure that's accurate about the short term round. And if the county has stronger building code than we do I'd be very surprised Yeah, I thought it was the opposite that they can do short term rentals if they came into the city They wouldn't be able to know Change our zoning map, right. There are huge there was a period not too long ago if that it was considering changing The short term rentals and there were fields of signs saying no, don't allow short tar rentals. So in any case, I mean, that's something, my point mainly is that it seems really simple to us, but they still believe that there are complex issues. And it's a mixed bag of people who are saying, let me in, let me in. And not on my life or yours will I go in. So what's interesting about your comment is there was always a lot of misinformation that was intended by a small group of people who wanted to influence that. So it's interesting because that's exactly the kind of scare tactics that a few use for the mass when it was an accurate. So it's up to we need to look into to confirm whether or not that would be one way or the other. And a lot of people still won't annex in because they think that they have to be on sewer to annex in, not knowing that a few years ago we figured out that the septic fields don't know about the borders. So another advertising campaign about saying, I don't know how you dispel that septic rumor, but that's why a lot of people refusing to say, no, no, no, no, they'll make me go on sewer. So this is a good discussion we need to we need to keep this warm and another setting. And there are lots of there are lots of misinformation there are lots of tactics there's lots of going on there and the county's not silly. They know that it's the cash cow so they're going to keep that alive as long as they can. And I do think the melting away or the aging out, whatever you want to call it. And there are operatives down there that would like us to come and they've asked me several times. I said, we're not coming to sell, we're coming to educate if we come at all, because we just want to tell a story. And we have to get our act together and our fact straight and have the manager lead the way to say, hey, here's how we run things here and make that a comparison to how they have it run in the county. Good, good. So, Joanne, in honor of Financial Professionals Week upcoming, you got to go first. The bad news is all our speed and energy usually gets drained for the first speaker so the beneficiaries are the folks at the tail end so thank you for tolerating all of the scrutiny and what have you. It is the most important and I'm hoping you're going to remain because some of the presentations by the directors will also have a financial piece to it. Absolutely. We're great for what you had to say. Thank you so much. Thank you. You want to keep going? I want to take a break. Five minutes? We're late. How about five minutes? And so we'll reconvene at 45, please. 10, 45. 10, 45. 45 please. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I do. Yep, it's working. Okay, order will reconvene and I see Heather in the batter's box so our director of human resources. All yours, man. Alright. I'm going to invite you to have a look at the community. I'm going to invite you to have a look at the community. I'm going to invite you to have a look at the community. I'm going to invite you to have a look at the community. I'm going to invite you to have a look at the community. I'm going to invite you to have a look at the community. I'm going to invite start with our city organizational chart. This is the same chart that you see in our budget book so you've seen this before. It has our citizens at the top because that's who we are here to serve. The city commission takes direction from them who gives their direction to our city attorney, city manager and city clerk. And then I won't go through all of the areas there. You can see that our city manager has certain departments that he oversees directly. Our assistant city manager has departments that he oversees directly. And then of course, we all work together very well. This chart just shows our fiscal year 2025 approved FCE. At this time, we're at 348.5. I put them in order so that you could see where the majority of our FTE falls within our departments. We've got a couple there at the bottom who only have one and two people in their departments, but there is important as everyone else. This is just a different way to show that. So you can see the percentages, that 25% is our police department, 19% of our FTE is in our fire department and then 6% and 5% fall into our building inspections, leisure services and golf course. Everyone else comprises between one and three percent of our full FTE. I wanted to look at our FTE versus our population history so we pulled some information going all the way back to 2010. I know it's hard to see on those little tiny slides up there. But if you look at our FTE on the left, it's increased 35.67% since 2010. So you can see the trend. There was a little drop there for a while in 2011, 2012. That's after the 2008 recession and when they did some cutbacks. And then it slowly come up from there. If you look at our population on the right, it's done almost the exact same trend. So it's increased 39.3% since 2010 with that same drop a little bit in 2011, 2012 and then a steady increase. So I thought it was important to show that we have about the same increase margin in our FTEs. We have in our population here in the city. I also looked at our FTE per 1,000 population since 2010, and you can see that mostly that is an even line. I know it looks like it goes up and down a little bit, but it's really static for the entire time. So if you look at one FTE per 1,000 people that we have, we've stayed about the same since 2010. Some big changes in our FTE since 2010 that I wanted to point out. Our police department has added 21.25 FTE. That's a 33% increase over that time. Our fire department has added 16 FTEs, which is a 32%. And then just because I thought it was an interesting number, our building and inspections department has added 15 FTE, which was a 218% increase, which sounds like it's crazy, and that sounds like it's something. But when you're talking about they only have If we go back just a little bit you can see down here at the bottom. They're only at 22 people So they only started with seven so it sounds like a big increase So when we see those numbers I like to I like to look at those and be realistic about what we're really looking at when we look at those numbers also Some other changes that we've had since 2010 that have contributed to our FTE changes, they've created the Brandon Center FTEs in 2015. They've not changed how many FTEs they have there in that entire time, so they've had four FTEs from the beginning. It's not changed. We pulled out code enforcement and created that in 2020, and that FTE increased by 30 percent, but I think we've also during that time we've looked at different items that that code enforcement handles how far they take their duties. There's a lot of reason for that and there's usually justified. We also created our parking enforcement in 2018. That has increased by 850 percent and their FTE, again, I ask you, go back and look at what those numbers look like. When they initially created that parking enforcement, there was one person. So for it to have increased that much, they took one person, they quickly added a second and they've added where they're at now. Over the course since 2020, 11 of our departments or divisions have decreased their FTE or stayed the same and 17 have increased their FTEs. I wanted to take a little bit of time and look at our personnel cost also. What I would remind you is to make sure that you know that these are only numbers through fiscal year 2024. So because of the comparisons, I can't add anything for 2025 yet. This slide shows you the five year average percentage of total personnel spend. So for each of our departments and divisions that we look at in our budget, this is the percentage of our total spend that they each have. So you can see that police and fire take up the biggest portion of that. With some of our other departments taking up the rest of that. If you look at this slide just shows it in dollars so that you can see where it's at with our police and fire approaching six and seven million in our spend and our other departments. We have building and inspection inspections. I'm sorry, approaching two million and everyone else much further underneath that. This slide looks at the five year average of their percentage of the total budget. So here we looked at when we take out just those personnel spend that we have, how much of our total budget from our city is that. You can see that again, just like the slide before, police and fire take up the majority, it's still less than 9% of our total budget. So you've got, they take up about that and the rest of it taking it up. And what you can see here is that the blue portion here is our personnel cost for the total budget. On the right is the list of how much they all are. We're only about that 32% that Joe had mentioned earlier. So that's all that they're taking up of our total budget. Next we looked at our five-year average turnover through 2024. So you can see the percentage in each department or division what their turnover has looked like. This is a five-year average. So I took fiscal year 2020 through fiscal year 24 and average did out so that you could see where everybody falls. We've got a couple of departments that are reaching over the 10% or 15%, which is pretty average when you look at different markets. And what I did was I took the, any of them that had 10% or greater turnover over the last five years and measured those out per year. What you can see is if you look at areas like the sports complex, there are only have two years here that are above that 10%, but their average is 12.5. So everybody's a little bit different. It wages. I tried to look at trends. There was nothing specific that was there. It was totally different. Sometimes in the fire department or the police department specifically, we would have a year where we had a whole group that retired all the same year. We noticed a couple areas where you could tell when there was a department had changed. We had a little bit of turnover and that can be due to the employees liking or not liking the new director or the old director. It could be for the director making changes within the department that were needed. There were lots of different reasons. So I didn't see any specific trends that I felt like it was important enough to bring out for you. Next we'll look at our current vacancies. I listed these just by the largest department's or divisions down to the lowest. So our approved FTE and police is 86. Right now they have 14 openings and we're working on that. Most of that is in our police officers. Fire department right now has two openings. They are doing some recruiting. They have some promotions that they need to work on. So they're gonna get those done before they bring in two new firefighters. Building in inspections is fully staffed right now. Leisure services is actually doing pretty good. They have two part-time positions that are available. I know they're doing interviews so they're working on those. The golf course, we have an equipment service technician and one part-time golf course attendant but they stay pretty well staffed most of the time. It's been that way most of the time that I've been here. Our parks department needs a couple people and they're working on that. Streets is fine. Finance we're recruiting for our risk manager. We just recently up that to a full time FTE. We've got a ton of great resumes since we've done that. So I know that Joe and I've been reviewing those. We have some interviews that we're going to be setting up. So we're excited about that. Planning and engineering here has stayed pretty steady for lots of years. Our parking enforcement has stayed steady for a while too. At the sports complex, we actually just did an internal promotion. So we only have those three part time positions available there. Some of our others you can see on this page are mostly staff building a maintenance has a trades worker position that they'll be staffing shortly. And then the last of the positions that we have, we do have some openings in the city clerk we're working on those areas with her so that we can get those staff for her in sanitation. they just made an offer yesterday for their solid waste compliance officer, so that will be closed. And then we'll be talking about our new mobility director that we'll be looking at. I know that's something that Kevin's been working on. I wanted to pull out some miscellaneous stats that I could just give to you so that there were things that you could think about. Just really, truly miscellaneous stats. The average age of our current employees is 46 years old. The average tenure for our current employees is 6.3 years. And the average annual salary right now, and that includes our part-timers who work a portion of the year sometimes sometimes is 54,400. I wanted to look at our residency of our employees. So right now out of our 340 employees we have 128 live in New Sumerna, 73 live in Edgewater, 56 live in Port Orange, 73 live in Volusia County and we have 10 employees who who live outside of Volusia County. So they love our city enough that they're traveling to come and work here with us. I just pulled some average stats off of Zillow, is where I pulled these, the average home price in New Sumerna is $448,000 right now, and the average rent is $1,500 a month. So I want to make sure that we're looking at those kind of things when we're thinking about the people that are coming to work for us also. Under our benefits, I wanted to make sure that everybody understood the benefits that we offer. So under retirement, we have two pension plans. Our police pension right now, our employees contribute 8% and the employer contributes it's 31.6% and that comes from the actuarial calculations that we get each year. We have 54 participants in our police pension right now. For our fire pension the employees contribute 10% and our employer contribution is 29.4 and we have 54 part- And then for the rest of our employees, they get a 401A. Our employer contribution is 8% and we have 185 participants. And we also do the 2% matching. So if our employees voluntarily contribute into their 457, the city will match up to 2% of those contributions. We have 103 participants in that. And you'll ask why the difference there. Some people just choose not to do that. We, I actually have my team making a push to have anyone who's not making that contribution, try to find out why. Do they just not want to? To me, that's a benefit that they're not taking advantage of. I can't force them to because it's a voluntary 457, but it's something that we put out there for them. We want to make sure that they understand it's a benefit that they have. And then in our 457, which is voluntary contributions for anyone who works at the city can make those contributions, we have 152 participants. So that means we have some police, some fire, and some part-time employees. The employer pays 100% of the employee premiums and 50% of the dependent premiums for medical and dental. We have 290 of our full-time people enrolled in medical and 286 enrolled in dental. And then the vision our employee pays 100% of those premiums. We have 224 participants there. The last part that I wanted to look at with you all was some of our recruitment and and the entertainment challenges that we have here. So I gave a little chart together that showed the issue what's needed from the employee standpoint and some of what I see that we need and then some of just potential resolutions, things that we could look at that would help us take care of those issues. First and foremost, I think is the cost of living in New Sumerna Beach. A lot of our employees make comments that they can't afford a home in New Sumerna Beach. And their only resolution is higher compensation. That's what they're looking for. So as you know, we went out for RFP for a compensation and salary study. So we're gonna wait and see what those results bring bring back and we'll see if that makes any changes. If there are any recommended changes to our salaries or our pay bans, we'll look at that. The other thing that we have some issues that we want to work on are our pay structures. So one of the things that I hear from employees and from supervisors and managers is that we need more pay bands to recognize different levels of education and experience. So within a certain pay group or a certain position group they are different levels. You can work in a position for a long time and do the same type of work but you have more education that is needed. You have more certifications, different things like that. So again we're gonna look through our compensation study to see if they can make recommendations to any pay-band changes or structures that we can look at there. Advancement opportunities are another issue that we face, our employees, and again, our supervisors and our managers, ask about additional levels in positions for someone who has certain education or certain Experiences or certain certification One that comes to mind quickly is our permit text we have license in permit text and we have zoning and zoning text and There are so many things that cross over for them and so can how can we structure and the structure, advancement opportunities for them when they gain knowledge, when they gain certifications. What can we look at? So one of the things that we've looked at as a potential resolution is to change and position structure within the department to address the knowledge that comes with education or longevity. Next is one of the issues that we face is that the level of work that we expect out of our employees is not compensated to how they feel it should be compensated. So one of the things that they think that we need are different, more positions or more people instead of piling work on overachievers or increased pay is being offered to match the expectations of performance. Some ways to do that and things that we can look at are merit increases. Again our pay structures, those are things we can look at. We can look at incentive pays. We can also look at changing our philosophy to hire within the pay band and not just at the bottom every time and that accounts for the experience and the education and knowledge that people bring to us. Another issue that we look at is just competition that's out there. I think I've mentioned before for a long time we, our only competition was other cities. That's not true anymore. We have competition everywhere. But I think one of the things we need to do to see where we are at is more monitoring of employees' satisfaction. So if we can seek more feedback from employees through surveys and talking with them and getting that might be something that we can just internally take care of. Relocation and remote work opportunities are something that everyone's been facing since 2020. The workforce now is not afraid to relocate. They're not afraid to try out new opportunities, and they're not afraid to take those work from home positions. So we may want to consider offering more flexible scheduling options where it's available, and or remote work where it's available. That can also look at some other cost savings in other areas for buildings and things like that that we have to look at. And then the last issue that I looked at was longevity. We've noticed over the last few years that the workforce just doesn't stay with a company for long periods like they used to. So how do we combat that? I think that if we can provide some more opportunities to challenge or satisfy the need for people to move around, do something different, or we can offer incentives for longevity, those may be some ways that we can look at making some changes to that. That's my presentation. I'm ready for questions. I think you may appreciate that. Commissioner Perrine. I hate that you call me first and this one. You're welcome. So when we first started a couple years ago, I was pretty shocked that we didn't do performance reviews. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around because I'm corporate and not government. And the other thing that shocked me the most is that we give everybody the same race. Everybody gets 3%. I don't understand that. I still don't understand it. In the corporate world, we do, okay, the top performers get 3 to 4%. If you just show up for work and you do your job, and you do your objectives, you get 2 to 3. And if you don't do your objectives based on your performance review, you get 0 to 2. I don't understand this concept of government, but that's just me. The other thing I don't understand is the building and inspection department Having that large when our numbers for permits and inspections are down. I don't understand that I've asked that before so I guess my question for Mr. Calper in Heather is that we've got 14 vacancies and And how do you determine before you just go out and hire somebody that's in that pool of vacancies? Do we need that person? Do you have to go through an analysis because I've seen sometimes we've gone a year or two years without replacing a person and then all of a sudden that number is still up there and we've been saving on that salary that we budgeted for. But do we need that person? Do you just keep that little pool to make it look good? Well, I mean that's a great question and we have looked at some of those vacant positions that have been carried over. And then, in fact, used some of those FTEs, moved them around to create positions that we do need. So we've just done away with some positions that just haven't been filled, haven't needed them. We need a risk manager, so we did some magic moving and created the ability to hire that full-time person. So we're doing exactly what you're suggesting. I hope the public heard that because that's why we approved your race. Well, thank you. Because he did move people around and I love that. We need a risk manager and I love that. And you have, you know, the public safety departments, you know, my experience is that our level of vacancies is not uncommon in public safety right now. right now. There's so much competition for those services. There's a lot of movement around and there's not a lot of young people wanting to get into that profession. So it's become quite competitive. But we're making good strides in recruiting for those positions and doing some things out of the box in terms of advertising and recruiting that I think will help. So the other thing this has happened to us in the last two years is the lack of cross training we had an employee that's no longer with us now, but he kind of made demands on us to give him this raise because there wasn't anybody to fill in his place because we didn't have cross-training and those advancement opportunities when it was like, well, the person that's underneath him doesn't have that license. And I know that you guys have been working hard on that. So I would be in favor of making sure that we have cross-training, we have education available for these people, and that we do have a plan carved out of where these people can go. And because when like a progression of having opportunities, I know I'm here that if I get this degree or this certification, this is how I see my growth within the company. And a lot of times it's not about money here. It's about opportunities being recognized for your achievements because if I show up to work every day and I'm not doing as much as this person killing himself, he is going to get more work put on. Why are we making the same amount of raise? I don't understand that. I'll never understand that. The last thing I would like to look into that comment that Commissioner Ashley made, that we had them any to pay these property taxes right here just shows you we're in a community that 83% of the people are paying our budget for property taxes residential. But then right here, our own employees can't afford to live here. This is a problem. Affordable housing is huge. We need to look at ADUs. That's a bill that Carrie talked about, that they're going to pass, hopefully, in the next few weeks or months. And if we do, we need to offer that not to non-residents. We need to look at being able to prove that and offer it to our staff. Our locals, our teachers, our servers, because what happens when you travel to these tourist towns, and you can't even find employment. Like we're lucky that we only have 14 vacancies. I've seen I mean, I've been to these meetings when I was a citizen and seen our police force a lot shorter than that. We're doing well with our police force compared to past years. And I don't have those numbers, but I know from being at these meetings, average salary 54,000 for city workers. You put part time in that. I think that's excuse that. But average home price 449 in relationship to the average salary pulled those part-timers out of there. None include them. It's not looking good. It's tough. So that has got to be part of our strategic plan as affordable housing. And it's going to be more than just given our employees raises to accommodate maybe because they might need to be market base. We need to look at that in the corporate world. Certain areas of the state, different states pay different wages in relationship to that and that is to attract people if they're going to have to pay $450,000 for a house. Edgewater housing prices are going up in relation port orange. It's all over here. We've got to look into that when we approve these raises and hire new people. Can they afford to live here? Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate that. Commissioner Ashley. Could you put up the challenges? Sure. Just a little bit again. So I love this. I think it's great. But I think it really needs to be delineated by departmental most. Because if I think about the police department, and then I think about finance, I have two different thoughts about that. So one line might be important to one department, and not important at all to another. So that was one thing. The other thing is, I think talking about affordable housing can be a little dangerous because I think if we approach affordable housing from helping people who can't afford it, subsidizing them, and you think about that over time, I mean, at least in my mind, you know, 50-year-old affordable housing is filled with kind of undesirables, you know. And I think about my friend who was LAPD. Okay, so in relationship to the people who make money in LAPD is very underpaid. So the LA city, I don't know if they still have it, they probably do, but he bought a condo for something like 700,000, because that was, you know, like middle of the road there. And he couldn't have done it without the help of the city. The city had a program that helped police officers and firefighters, and perhaps other essential city service workers a way to get into a home. And there were guidelines. It had to be in the middle, you know, but back then 600,000 was in the middle in LA. So we have a similar situation here. And Kevin is like a magic magician making money appear. So maybe there's something there. That's a very good Commissioner Martin. My three are well first of all we all know the 80 20 rule no matter what is happening 20% of the people are going to do 80% of the work it's just human nature. But there is no incentive in my mind to work well or do anything beyond the absolute minimum. If you know you're going to get an automatic pay raise. And I come from my background 30 years is corporate high end sales. And when I worked I got a lot more commission and so I had a built-in incentive if you will. So I really am supporting this method to to send somebody, how do you incentivize somebody to get more education, to work harder, to really am supporting this method to incent somebody, how do you incentivize somebody to get more education, to work harder, to excel in what they do if you just, here's an increase, here's an increase. And I also wondered when the compensation study is going to begin. So we're actually going to bring the recommendation for the company to you on April 8th. And so as soon as we get that approval, we'll get into a contract and we'll get that started. Thank you. Welcome. Okay, Commissioner McGurt. We pay 100% of the premium on an employee and 50% on the dependence. Correct. I want to thank you for that. I appreciate that. I think that is fantastic. And we're beating a lot of the private sector on that. Yes. A lot of private sector is is 15% across the board. I think that's awesome. That should definitely be something that we pat ourselves on the back and use it as a marketing tool of why people should come here. I'm off for certifications and getting our, I love hiring from within a lot of times. And if we can, someone starts at maintenance and can work their way up even through different departments, I'd love that. I love that kind of a program. I also love the idea of incentivizing people to get certifications or additional education so you can't promote them and they can go with the higher paying jobs. On the flip side of that coin, I want to make sure that we're getting those people. I know it's happened here and it happens at other places. We can pay to and encourage people to get certifications and then they do and they get recruited away from us. So that also plays into what we pay them. So they can be much more valuable to another city. So that, and I think it's key that if that number one, we do that, we're proactive at getting people certified into a certain path. And then, but we also need to protect ourselves. So that person is here for a certain amount of time. The remote work, it was interesting. COVID was a big master test at that that and I will tell you that from everything I'm seeing in the private sector most companies are trying to get back to people in house. I agree with that. All the studies I've seen, all the personal experiences that I've seen and had, I'm not sure that's something we want to promote. There may be some unique situations, unique jobs where that works well, and I'm off for that, not saying not to do it. But I don't think that the great test of remote working has been very successful. And regarding the affordable housing, I'm off for affordable housing to show me a program that has actually worked well. So, thank you. Appreciate that, sir. And first of all, gratitude for Heather and your presentation. It's my view that the HR process under a relatively new HR director and a very new city manager is a journey and we're not there. We're on the journey to excellence. After I'm done I want the city manager to talk about the conversation we've had about pay for performance. Which is a private sector norm and not always a public sector norm. Because Nussumerna Beach has such a cache with living and working here, I think we can leverage that in a lot of ways. And so I too favor, as many others have said, just now, a performance-based compensation in certain areas, some things are uniform, but certainly when it when it comes to the pay or raises, a more entrepreneurial aspect would be great. That said, based on the hours that consumed this job, I'm at a rate of $6.11 an hour. say my wife included that I'm overpaid for this, but all kidding aside, it's an honor to have this opportunity to get into this. And I don't want a year to pass before we make some traction. I don't want to be sitting here next year and say, what one thing did we do this year? Because we don't have time for that. We got to move on our people, which is our number one thing. And if we really believe that, we got to get on it. So that means we don't have a whole year to say, OK, we're doing, now we're going to do performance evaluations. Well, I don't know that we've taught people how to even do them. And I'm not really in love with the one that you've got right now, which is not enough categories, not enough qualitative information, it's just a number. And... people how to even do them. And I'm not really in love with the one that you've got right now, which is not enough categories, not enough qualitative information, it's just a number. And the rules set around that. Everybody can be a five. You've got somebody working their buns off in department X, and they get a hard grader like Joanne, and she grades them all threes, which is competent. That's the norm, that's the average, that's where you should be. And you get a very easy, greater, like Cleveland, and he runs the entertainment organization inside of the city. And he works him, he says, oh, he's show up, you get a five. So that rule set, and not having a rule set that says, you can only have, if you've you have a department of X size you can only have two in the box of the five scale and one in the box of the four scale and everybody else needs to be three and below. That type of rule set will change the behavior inside the organization because it accounts for a small, medium and large size organization. And then teaching how they're teaching our people how to do it. We've said you got to do it. All right, so I think Merrow and started that, or maybe we started it since then. But we're now going to 90-some percent people doing performance evaluations. I'm not sure we taught anybody how to do them. I know that as executives, we know how to do them. But I'm worried that we haven't taught people down the chain. Certainly the directors can do it. But then what about the frontline supervisors? Do they know how to grade the people that are out there doing the real work? And everybody's doing it. Everybody's doing what we ask them to do. I just want to make sure we gave them the tools to do that. What's the total, what did you say, 358 FTE is the total? And how many folks are we down total? We are down, oh, I didn't put the total on there. I thought I did. I apologize. About 20, between 20 and 24. Okay, 20 and 24. Okay, good enough. And a big portion of that is in the police department. And so, Chief, just, those, do those count people in the pipeline that coming to you, or is that separate? The vacancies reflect the lack of people on the road. So we have about 10 people that are in various stages of onboarding between recruitment and getting ready to go to the academy, currently in the academy, or all the way up until they start with our training program. So there you go. That's a narrow, better reflection. Very good. That's an important fact. He's not down 14 people. He's got people in the pipeline. Eventually, we'll be blessed up and maybe two or three vacancies. With the pedigree that he and his predecessor have developed, we're going to have people that are attracted to the Newsborne and the Beach Police Department. Less the public think we have 14 unfilled spots. Just know that that's not accurate. We have people in training and eventually will be full. I appreciate that. And as I think Commissioner Prince said that we only have 20 some vacancies in today's economy and today's demand for employees that we just can't find. Certainly our service organization around New Sumerna Beach struggles the most with getting people just to get in there and show up for work. So whatever's going on at the very nascent level of employment is happening globally. Certainly around the United States, certainly in Florida, certainly in New Summoner Beach because we're a tourist town and we, whatever it is, if it's the leadership, if it's the compensation package, whatever it is, we're doing better than everyone else. You cited the population growth and then the city staff growth. Is it your view that the city staff growth should be related to the population growth or just in certain segments? I think in certain segments definitely. I think we see obviously in our public safety areas, we need a certain amount of people to cover the area that we have and the number of people that they're serving. In some other areas that may not be quite as true, for instance in human resources. I wouldn't relate my human resources staff number to our population. I would relate it to our employee population. So overall, I think it does depend on which department or division you're looking for. Delighted to hear that approach. I think that the public facing staff is good to parallel the growth and then those that are in staff functions not necessarily. So anyway I guess my biggest point is on the evaluations and how we consider people and I'd like Mr. Copper to expand on his when we first got him here he talked about a performance-based relationship with his directs, a contract with his directs. And so I want that to be public because it's a great best practice and Kevin, God bless you for doing that. That's what's needed. So can you talk about that a little bit? There will a couple of points on this particular graphic. This is good, and often we hear people say, well, the staff is growing, and we're not growing outside of relation to the population growth. As we continue to grow in population, and as we continue to implement technology and other best practices, that gap will certainly grow between population growth and city population. You won't see the city staff grow as big. as big. One other thing I wanted to make sure that you understood Heather showed a graphic of the percentage of our budget that goes to personnel costs and Heather was at like 38% or something? 32. 32%. So that is a phenomenal number that we are at that point. For example, at my last stop in Doathen, we were right around 50%. and bigger older cities would probably be 60 plus per percent. I think probably some reasons we are as low as we are. Maybe the pension costs that a lot of places have, we don't have in our general employee categories. You see the difference between the 401 contributions versus what we're paying for the police and fire pensions that we have. That's a big difference. But that 32% number is a phenomenally low number for a local government. That's very good. So I just wanted to make sure that everybody kind of caught onto that. Heather and I have had a lot of conversations about what we need to do in terms of the employees and moving forward in terms of how we evaluate our employees and how we pay our employees. And I think we are certainly looking at a lot of different programs to implement in terms of the certifications and moving employees along. But one of the basic things is having a pay structure where you can move from one grade to another based on your performance. And so just as the mayor said, if you're giving everybody 5s and everybody's getting a 3 or 5 percent raise, that's not really what you want. We've got to have a distribution of performance and pay. And certainly in terms of the department heads we have more flexibility there. And my expectation with the department heads I'm going to evaluate them based on their accomplishments and their performance. And if we're making the progress, we need to be making, then we'll certainly be willing to reward that hard work. So we've got some distance to go with where we are. We're a growing organization, a changing organization, an emerging organization, let's say. So I'm happy with the progress that we're making and the things that we're going to look at to get implemented. Heather, thank you. That was really good presentation. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate that. Would you like to do capital improvements next or any? Just see in the battered box. All right. Well, hello, everybody. It's time to wake up. Ready to do this. All right. First slide. Just I love celebrating wins. I love talking about accomplishments and progress. As all of you know, especially from those from the private sector, you get the right people in the right place and doing the right things with the right support. They can move mountains. And I feel like that's what exactly what happened when recently hired four months ago, Olivia Thomas, who's actually in the room. And Olivia came on from the county. She joined us in our CIP department. She has experience not only with projects, but with grants. And one of the biggest things is with FEMA and hazard mitigation. She came on right after the hurricane storms in October and started with us in November. And from my experience here last time with the city, FEMA is crazy. And going through the FEMA process is crazy. There's all kinds of documentation and all kinds of reporting that I don't understand. And when Olivia came on board, not only does she have the experience, but she has insurance adjusters experience, so she's not just navigating FEMA or our side, but she's navigating FEMA and helping drive that. On top of that, we've tasked her with creating a grants master list when she first started, because as you know, the city operates on grants, a lot of what we do is grant related. Each department had their kind of own grants and own things. Olivia took all of that data and information and compiled it into one place. And then off of that information she used some data analytics and uploaded it into our project management software which we're now using also as grant management software. And through that we have better access to the grant info. We're sharing across departments. So other departments have easy access to this information. They can pull it up and see what the grant is. When the reporting cycle is, and if anybody follows grants, you know that a grant usually has a monthly, quarterly annual report that you have to do and on top of that, even once the project is completed, you have to do it for the next 20 years. We currently have 56 grants related to the CIP department. So that's a lot of reporting that has to take place. As we were doing this and as she was building this out, we were going through all of the grants that we have and we came to realize that we're eligible for over $2.1 million in reimbursements for things that we've already completed. And so we submitted the proper forms, got together with finance, got all the information, and put in our reimbursement requests for that money. So in four months, she's helped us find $2.1 million that we're eligible for. So I just want to give a shout out to Olivia and her hard work and how she's helping us grow and improve. Go on, Olivia. Thank you. That was a good hire. I did not cover all of our projects in this presentation because we have 44 active projects. So I condensed it to the ones I think are most important. And then Airport, Arvind, we'll tackle theirs. They have 15 projects. We'll start with two new projects, which are both at Pettis Park. These are both CDBG-related projects, each have about $120,000 for the project. The top one is the pavilion. There's an existing pavilion there that's, well, it's exceeded its life expectancy. It's the concrete pads, this, you know, cracked broken the poster rotted underneath. And so this is a concept of a new one that might be installed. So we're going to install a new pavilion and a new concrete pad with some additional lighting to make it even nicer. We've recently issued the notice to proceed, and we're expecting our design to be back to us by next month, and then we'll go out to bid for advertisement for construction. The bottom one is for the playground equipment there. We're looking at adding a shade cell over the playground equipment just to enhance it for the children and to make it on super hot days in the summertime that they have some shade and it's a nicer park to be at. That one is currently getting ready to advertise for design build and should be out for solicitation in the next two to three weeks. All right, 27th Avenue on beach side. We have two separate projects at that location as well. The top one is for replacing the playground equipment. We're expecting the new playground equipment to arrive on the April 2nd, and then we'll demo the old stuff, David Racymo. Demo the old stuff, and then we'll start on the installation of the new playground equipment there. The funding's $500,000, and that comes from the general fund. The bottom one is the boardwalk Water Repair and Ramp Replacement. It's been damaged by hurricanes, multiple hurricanes over the last couple of years. This is a project that we've done certain stuff in conjunction with the county, and then the rest is on us. This project is gonna be advertised for a construction, and probably the next two to three weeks as well. The funding's coming from General Fund Reserves and FEMA reimbursement estimated costs is going to be about $1.1 million and this should be completed around November of this year. This project should be completed. As we know, storm waters become an incredibly hot topic here in Florida and it's not only only for us, but for the county and statewide. Earlier this year, we had a stormwater public hearing and we sat and walked through a lot of our stormwater projects and our plans. One of those that we talked about is the citywide master plan. It's a two phase project. The first phase was serving the needs from from the city And then it was collecting the data and then taking that data and putting it into a model of how can we manage our storm water system? Phase one, which is that portion is currently at about 92% complete and is expected to be finished in April So next month and then it then it'll move on to Phase 2. Phase 2, we received funding through the Transform 386 program, around $800,000, a little more than $800,000. And for Phase 2, because of the funding that we've received through Transform 386, the county will manage the second half of that project. So they'll take phase two under their purview that will be consulted and informed and do it alongside them, but that's how that portion will go. Corbin Park, as you know, all stormwater projects are kind of to reduce flooding and prove stormwater drainage, make enhancements for that specific neighborhood. For Corbin Park, we've just entered into and are finalizing our joint project or participation agreement with the county. They funded a $6 million for this project, which is huge. The overall project is estimated to be around $8.5 million. $6 million will come from the county, $2.5 million from the city's stormwater fund. And because the county gave us the money they're also going to manage this project so they'll oversee the advertisement for the RFP and then they'll manage the construction portion as well and we'll be involved throughout the project with in conjunction with them. Historic west side evaluating solutions to reduce flooding in the you areas in the neighborhood. We're currently working on a joint participation agreement with the NSBU as well for that and looking for additional funding where we can apply for additional funding to help support that project. Estimated total cost is about $5.2 million for that project. Most of that will come from right now in our storm water, historic west side storm water fund, and then we're looking at other grants that we can apply for that will help with the storm water funding. North Atlantic drainage project, we just went through the advertisement for this for construction, so design is finished. It's getting ready to move into the construction phase. We're building an X-filteration trench and pipe system that will reduce the storm water flooding there. That will come before the commission on the 25th of this month to award that bid for construction. So that's going to be on your guys' plate in a couple of weeks. funding for that stormwater and DEP matching funds. Each party will contribute the 837,500 for that. And Kyle is here, so when it comes to question time, I'm gonna sit down, let the expert come up, and if you have stormwater-related questions, Kyle's gonna handle all that. So we're doing a couple of dredging projects throughout the city. One of the dredging projects we received $3.5 million in funding from FDEM to do dredging at four different locations, which includes Pine Island, Gaburi Canal, Old Monork and Pond and Seminary Canal. The Monork and Pond is done. The other three locations we're currently working on permitting, it takes a lot of work. David and his team are working on that to get those permits through. Once we get the permits, we'll continue on in the other three locations. We're expecting to have Pine Island done next, which I think is anticipated to be done around September of this fiscal year or of this calendar year. Turnbull north and Turnbull or Turnbull Creek Canal, we're doing dredging on both the north side and the south side, which are kind of considered two separate projects. The south side is where they started and they're currently dredging that. They're on track to be finished on March 21st, so just in the next week and a half, two weeks, the south side will be finished. They'll relocate all of their equipment to the north side of 44 and continue dredging on the north side. That project is funded for $1.6 million, 75% grant related and 25% will come from the city's storm water fund. All right, the PD station, we currently have two projects with the police. One is the boat house, which you guys have been familiar with. Last year, the police received a fine grant to help purchase a boat or a marine vessel for rapid response on the intercoaster waterways. We also applied for a fine grant to design and build a boat house which the city received and we're currently working with dredging marine consultants on the design of this project. The design is anticipated to be done by August of this year and then we just applied for another fine grant for this next cycle to do the construction of the boat house, which if is awarded, we would receive an October of this year and start construction December or January of next year to build the boat house itself. The second project with the police department is earlier was mentioned as a police expansion, but we're now changing the language to a detached garage. We were looking at building an expansion in the corner of the building, but we believe it maybe makes more sense to build a garage offsite because it's primarily to put motorcycles, the command trailer, bear cat, their side-by-side, some of fire department's equipment and there as well. And so we brought an architect out the other day, walked the site with all the parties and looked at best location to possibly build a detached garage to house all of those vehicles and equipment in. We also recently submitted a list of all the equipment that they would need so that architect could map out space. And so he's going to put together a proposal for us for what that looks like. We have $200,000 to do the design work this year and that is coming from police impact fees. All right, North Causeway. This has been a popular topic for a lot of years. And it's a project I'm actually really excited about. So phase one, which when I started, was initially just a year, a little over a year ago when I started, this project was kind of dormant and just sitting there. So I think what excites me is we got the flywheel turning. And we got motion going, and the design has been completed. We advertised for construction. And it'll come before the commission on April 8th to bid award for the contractor to start construction. What we're doing at this site is, as anybody who's drove by the Causeway site, knows that a lot of those docs have been damaged. And so we're going to demo the damaged docs and we're building a new system, a floating doc system that will last longer. It rises and lowers with the tides. It enhances voter safety. And it's the most used boat ramp in Newson, or in a beach. So super excited to see that fixed and to be used at a higher level. So construction is going to be starting soon and it's anticipated to be done by around November or December of this calendar year. Also at the North Causeway site we have Phase 2. We're doing some shoreline revetment stabilization and this project should be out for bid in the next two weeks, two to three weeks as well, for the construction of the shoreline revetment. This is find funded and general fund reserves for the shoreline revetment. We're also pursuing our consultant, dredging marine consultant, contact, and somebody that might donate some of the rock which will reduce the cost. So we might get some of that donated to us to help reduce the cost of that project. Brandon's Center Doc, which is where we're at. This doc was also damaged by hurricane. I don't know about Rob. He's kind of smirking over there because Rob, myself, Jonah, I know other people get calls about every other week. When is this going to be repaired? When is it going to be fixed? I'm hoping to get married and I want my pictures on the river because that's what people love That's what people want. I just tell them don't do it But What, where we're at with this project is it's going to come before commission on the 25th as well to award for construction. We're planning on 120 days from when construction kicks off until completion. And the estimated cost came in around $823,000, maybe a little bit more, because we're doing some concrete piling. And so it's funded partially by fine, and then rest from the General Fund Reserve. But this should be finished by around October or November of this year as well. Hopefully sooner. For all of our pickleball lovers, Paige pickleball courts, this project's been crazy. A year ago, we were ready for construction, and it got halted. We had to remove some things around, redesign some stuff. The good news is, we put it out to bid. It's coming before the commission also later this month, and we'll be starting construction in the next month or two, hopefully. We currently have 650K from the General Fund. We're also looking at using some park impact fees. And part of what we're doing is two phases on this project of designing the courts, but then we're also going to install a bathroom, install lights, and make the facility really nice. So it's really cool to see this project almost coming to fruition. Two of our most popular streets, most used streets, in city. We received some ARPA funding, same dollar amount for both to do some enhancements to the street. Both streets are somewhat similar with some landscaping enhancements, some curbing, and then they each have some of their own things that we're working on. For Flagler Avenue, it's about 70% complete, complete and the artist because we're going to make it really artistic since we're known as an art town are doing some work on the trash corals and other things to just make it look more fancy and cool so they're the last 30% about and some lighting that we're working on right now. Canhouse rates about 80% complete and we're expecting both projects will be fully completed by August of this year. So we got some good traction and movement on those. Street resurfacing, this is an ongoing thing every single year, right? We budget money that comes out of our gas tax to improve our streets and each year we we pick different streets, and we actually, I believe, David has an index predictor that helps tell you what streets you've done, which ones need it next. And so this year we're focusing on 12.5 miles of streets throughout the city, and they started construction on the resurfacing earlier this month. And so we did some last year, we're doing some this year, we're almost likely to do some again next year, that's just continual improvement on our streets in the city. We have $2.3 million that is going to cost to do that this year, and that's coming from our gas tax. Barracuda Boulevard improvements. This project has been long in the waiting because we were waiting for the bridge to be finished. The bridge has been completed. It looks really nice. And now we're going to focus on making those roadway improvements from the light to the bridge. And that's currently going to be advertised for bid or might be advertised right now. Cliles that advertise you are we getting ready to? It will be advertised next week. It will be advertised next week to start construction on that and the funding for that comes from the general fund. Washington Street, this project is crazy. And when this project started, it was going to be be which I don't know who thought of this but it's wild. They were going to put a median down the street with beautification things in the middle. That street's tiny. So thankfully we chopped that chicken's head off. And now what we're doing is resurfacing the road. We're upgrading the sidewalk and improving the sidewalk. It'll be ADA compliant. We're installing some trees and some light poles so it's more traversable to the public and easier to walk on. And then we're also taking all of the utilities, which is this part is going to be really complex. We're taking all of the utilities, the telephone poles, all of that. We're taking it and moving it underground. So, which is a huge safety hazard because those poles get hit, clipped, often, somewhere on the sidewalk, somewhere actually in the road itself. So we're removing all of that. What that means though is I don't think people realize how complex this project is. Of all the projects we have, of 44 projects, this one makes me the most nervous. And not because I don't think it's accomplishable, but because there's so many intricacies. When you're moving power and internet and all these other things and you're taking it and shutting it down, you have to do that in such a way that every house doesn't lose power for weeks, right? So you have to have it all set up to where they're going to lose it for a day or not even a day just like a little bit and we reconnect so that they don't have downtime. That also means how we run it underground with water, how it changes storm water, how we still keep good storm water and drainage. We've spent a lot of time this last year and a half working through all of these details. And some people wondered, why is this project taking so long? We're trying to do our due diligence to anticipate all the different risks that come with this project, to mitigate them and get ahead of them as best as possible so that it goes smoothly. So I don't know about you, but I'd rather slow down and do it right, then just do it to make it people happy and then it go bad. Does that make sense? So we're trying to slow down and make sure We cross our teeth, daughter eyes, do as smooth as possible. So we have trying to slow down and make sure we cross our T's, dot our eyes, do as smooth as possible. So we have as least amount hiccups as possible. This project is currently being advertised for CEI services, which means when we do a project with F dot, we hire a third party consultant. It's a requirement that helps manage the project and is like a liaison between the city and the contractor and they do inspections to make sure along the way it's all going smoothly. So we're currently advertising for those services. Once that's done, we'll turn around and soon advertise for construction. Another complexity to this project is we have to get easements. So in order to move the utilities underground, we have to get easements from property owners to put a transformer on their property. Out of the seven easements that were required, we currently have four. We have one more that we think we'll get this next week. And the last two, we may or may not get, which means we have to do some redesign work to our electrical system on how to make it work. We can't make people give us portions of their property. We're trying to help them see the advantages, help them appreciate the improvements. At the end of the day, it's their properties, their choice. So we put a cut-off date if we're not able to get the easements by the end of this month. We're going to do some redesign work for those two properties and what we need to do to keep the project moving forward so it doesn't sit on hold for indefinitely. That's actually been the thing we've been waiting on almost for the last six months is working on the easements from the property owners. So I know there's been lots of questions over time about Washington Street. I do believe it's going to start construction later this summer and we'll see that project move forward. One of our newest projects is the hazard mitigation for homes and this was recently passed at the City Commission to demo and rebuild for homes that were previously damaged by hurricanes. This is our third project like similar to this. So this is kind of new in the start and the commission approved us to go ahead and award that to the contractors. We're working on the contract details. We'll soon issue them there, notice to proceed to where they can begin work. A few details, like I said, I didn't cover all of the projects because we have over 44. We've completed nine projects so far this fiscal year. I wanted to give you a comparison. In 2023, we've completed nine projects the whole year. So from October to today, we've completed the same amount of projects that were completed in 2023. Last year, we completed 16 projects. This year, we're on track to complete around 16, if not more. That means we've improved our system. We've improved our ability to communicate with the contractors, work together as departments. We've made our how we do it more efficient and we're getting less change orders. Last year we saved over a half a million dollars or reduced our change orders by half a million dollars. Because we're engaging better, we're doing our design work better up front so we have less cost later on down the road. Change orders will always come, right? That's just a part of projects and a part of construction. But we're reducing how often that happens and we're increasing how fast we're moving projects along. We've created monthly stormwater reports at Kevin's direction so that you guys are getting monthly reports on our projects. We're doing a monthly CIP report, kind of hitting the highlights. And that report report usually shows where the projects like just which ones are moving along, right? We also have updated our city map. This wasn't when I started this wasn't being used at all Been working with Lonnie Russell. We've updated this and every month our city map gets updated And so this is on our website and I don't feel can I use your computer to show people how to access this or could you I'll coach you through it because then we can just coach everybody at the same time I've robered. Go down to Capital Project. It will pull up the city map and on the left you have all the projects that we've really haven't heard of. And then on the right you have the map. If you go to click on, if you were the Brandon Center. Since that's where we're at. It'll zoom in to the Brandon Center Pier. The map will show you where the projects take place. And then on the far right it'll give you the project name. The section is the current status of the project. It'll give you a brief like the statuses in phase phase, and then it'll give you a brief description and kind of next steps for the project. So a lot of the information I just communicated today is on our interactive city map, which is available to anybody in the community. And they can check on any project at any time and just remember it's updated monthly. So, and information often changes a little bit. So we update it at the end of every month for the beginning at the very end or the beginning of every month. So by the first week of every month you'll have the most up-to-date information. We do this for every capital project that we have. So all of our projects are in this map. And for the ones we didn't cover today you can go in, click on that and find most of the information you need or just the basic information about the project. So I feel like we're doing some really good things. I don't know if everybody knows this. I shared this before in the past. Most places in the private world you have have a project manager that manages about six to 10 projects per person, depending on the size. As you saw earlier in finance, a big portion of money ghosters, capital projects. We have 44 some projects, and we have David Ray, who's a department head and a director, who's not only running his department, but managing projects. We have Rob Salazar, who's a department head and a director, who's not only running his department but managing projects. We have Rob Salazar, who's a department head and director, who's not only running his department, he's managing projects. We have Olivia Thomas, who just started, who's our coordinator, not only doing all the grant stuff and the FEMA stuff, but managing two projects. And then we have the airport who's not only doing all their stuff, but Arvins managing projects. Kyle is not only an engineer, he's managing projects. I'm personally managing about nine of the city's projects, plus helping oversee all of the projects, plus the department. So all that to say for, I feel like we're under-resourced to be honest for what we do, yet we're kicking butt. And that's because David's awesome, Rob's awesome, Arvins awesome, the team is awesome, and we have people who work together really well, find that helps us, legal helps us all the time. So I appreciate everybody's help, but to put that in perspective, we're doubling how fast we're completing projects while being understaffed. I think that's pretty cool. That's it. Awesome. Thank you for your presentation, Vice Mayor. Oh, OK. Two, one is that I think you represent the 80-20 rule, where 20% are doing 80% of the work. Thank you. And the other is that your design for 27th didn't show any shade for David you want to speak to that the plague are you talking about the playground yes the shade is what they're staying okay okay so we will have shade thank you Yep. Thank you, man. Appreciate that. Commissioner Parade. So thank you for all of this great information. I have a lot of gray here from this. Most of those projects are in my zone. I just counted about 12 of them and I just went through the Barakuda Bridge and the Fist Street Bridge project and I've never had so many phone calls in my life. And one of a couple of things I'm going to recommend based on, I inherited the Barakuda at the end. That had started a long time before I became a commissioner or a while. And the way you guys handled, I think Kyle did this for the fifth street. He had a workshop and had all of the people come and a point of contact. And it really helped me because every time I got a phone call about somebody having a whole dug-in there yard or something I had needing anticipated I could give them the number of either Kyle or that contractor's number that came and said please take all my calls. So the comparison of that fifth street bridge to Barikuda, handstand, fabulous job on Fist Street. It went fast, it was smooth. I had a couple of I-rate neighbors, but staff handled all of those. I just hope we do that again for each one to have a public, I'm already getting threats about Washington Street, about rerouting the traffic traffic if I've been accused of all kinds of craziness. If we have traffic go down my street I'm going to get sued. I've been told that. So it's difficult when we live in a neighborhood and we go through challenges like remodels, street improvements. But like I said in our state of the city address last year when it's all said and done, you're going to forget about those pains and it's going to be beautiful and it's because of all the work that staff does. Yeah, we're going to have to go through some gray hair here and I've got a lot of this in my plate and I already foresee a lot. For state of the city, I need help here because I had thought of three things I was going to talk about and I'm going throw those out. You know, it's like I've got 12 things here. You're making fills head explode over here. I don't even know where to begin here. So I think the best thing for you guys to do after seeing these, what do the citizens, what updates, when, you know, obviously everybody's interested in our homelessness, you know, if we're going to do state of the city, maybe I'll kick that to Chief Kirk and not talk about it. But I don't want to talk about something that the mayor is because I've got 12 things here. So I'm going to kind of pass this to you guys to tell me what do you want me to talk about? Don't have me write this speech because I've got way too many. I mean, if we go by money, the West area and the storm water, I definitely need to talk about that. You know, and now I'm dredging, it's going to start pouring. You know, there's a lot of areas that I don't know, as Zen 3 and 4 has, is much stuff that I guarantee. Lisa and I have a big chunk of this. So we don't want to repeat what our mayor's going to talk about. So please help with this, because I have to have mine done before the 26th, a march. So I'm getting a lot of gray here just singing about all of this. Need to. Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate that. If you'll just fix the rainfall and be accountable for that, that'd be good. Commissioner McGurk. Jesse, thank you. Is this part? Yeah. It's back. Jesse, thank you. I'm just going to head about to bother. Commissioner McGurk. Jesse, thank you. Is this working? Yeah. It's back. Jesse, thank you. I'm just going to hit a bunch of bullet points. What are the northern limits right now of the Turnbull Dredging? Where does it end on the northern? I'll let Kyle or David. Are you talking south of 444 North? No. 444 is in that by the trail. On multi-use trail? Okay, so I'm thinking of the first move going to the room and around. That was in the case of the subdivision. Correct. Are you just creating that area? Of course, of it, yes. Yeah, how far north is that? That is going north to the multi-use trail. We're not doing the DOT pond area, but we're doing north of there to the UC corridor. Where our 12-foot wide asphalt trails, that's where we're stopping. Okay, thank you. Washington Street, man, I've been listening to that as better part of the decade. You're absolutely right. It is a super challenging complex issue. I appreciate the one point. There's proposal for a roundabout at Faulkner and Washington. We had the medians, the big boats being pulled through, I think a nice stream line redesign like he's done is fantastic. So great job, great job on that. We need the intersection improvements at Washington and US one. Specifically Northbound, US one turning right onto Washington getting getting a right turn on there would be great, a right turn lane going westbound on Washington onto North US-1. It backs up, it's pretty amazing how much that that backs up from the beach side. And so once we get done with this I think that's definitely a big priority for that intersection improvement. And change orders, saving money on change orders. You're right, change orders are part of the game. But being able to reduce and realize the number and the cost of them is a talent. Thank you for that. That's great. And I want to say that as I look at you, Jesse, and the rest of the department heads here today, I can tell you that I have the most confidence that I've ever had in the leadership in the city and the department heads that I've ever seen. I will tell you, this commission, I remember when the financial collapse hit and we lost a lot of good people. And I will tell you what took us up until this point to go through and try to find and replace those people. So I think we have an amazing team with everybody here today and those also not here but I can't look around this room and notice that I don't have any kind of concern over who is in a department level or a leadership position right now in this city and I think that's a wonderful place to be we need to make sure we keep it. Thank you very much. Sir, you've got a commissioner Ashley. Jason, that's very reassuring, considering I'm a new guy in the block. So I have the same observation, but it's a lot more not even years. So I'm glad to hear my observations are being reinforced by somebody with all that experience. Jesse, it sounds like your department and the people you have in your department are fantastic and it's a good feeling. Could you go back to that citywide master plan, Matt? So the arrows is water flow. Is that what that is? All that Kyle speak to this project. The arrows, the areas defined are watershed basins and the arrows are the general direction of the overland flow. So everything goes into work towards first-grade. Is it always that way? Is that storm water? Is it a little bit of rain on everything? It's just going to go that way. That's the way it is, no matter what kind of rain we get. That is where all the ditches, the canals, the waterways, correct. That's the current flow pattern. And they all discharge north and to the Spruce Creek Rose Bay area. So those arrows represent ditches, not natural flow? No, those areas are general representation. That's just a, you know, a 5,000 foot view of where the water goes. Those are not ditch locations, per se. But those are just there that are covered up. There's tributary ditches, canals, rim ditches, everything. But the contribution to which way the water flow. Right. Convenience pipe, that type of thing, box covers. That makes sense to change through any new development, any new project, which way the water flow. That's the natural drainage system. So that's before we even put any improvements in. These are historic ditches. So is that the red line going across that's 44? Correct. In the middle of the year. So I'm thinking about Deering Park. So when we started to develop farm from Deering Park to that area, the middle area with the arrows was part of that 46,000 acre natural. Conservation area? I don't know with that 46,000 acres. I can't tell you about looking at this map. Well, what I'm getting to is that when we start on gearing for which way, what's going to happen to the drainage, what are we going to do about stone water? Well, do we have some help right here? Yeah, I actually looked that up when we were talking about this earlier. There's a commitment in the MDA that the stormwater will not go north of 44 into Venetian Bay specifically in the NSBU plan. So they must have some sort of design. That's why that's why it's called because right. Would it make sense? I mean, what we're talking about is changing the water for the, the, the, the, the point that their PUD, the MDA, they have, as a matter of fact, the attorney just up by my office yesterday. And it's amazing what plan they have in place with regard to enforcement, management of the facility. It's done annually. There's a fund that's set up that they have to maintain the conservation. And it's all going to go through the rigors of review from the city and from the permitting agencies. OK, what I'm hearing is that you're okay with it. You're okay with daring park and you're okay with it. I'm okay with it. They're going to submit the specifics later on. Yeah, yeah, but you're, you know, I'm seeing what I go one way and you're saying that they're going to, we're going to do it so it doesn't go that way and it's great. And I believe it. I'm not an engineer, so I just want to know. We're not going to impact the project to the north. Exactly. so it doesn't go that way and it's great. And I believe you. I'm not an engineer, so I just want to know. We're not going to impact the progress to the north. Exactly, yes, yes, sir. I actually have the same question. Thanks, Kyle. I actually have the same question about the pickleball drainage. So that pickleball court that we're building, would that affect surrounding neighborhoods as far as drainage goes? Is that a Kyle question too? I'm both. The design engineer that did this one is actually a dry retention system, so it doesn't discharge off site. So the soils are so good there, you know, it's like a low water table and high perks soils, type A soils. You'll see size of the pond. It is extremely large. That's fine. Okay. Yes, sir. And it's a dry bottom. So obviously being near dog park or children, whatever you don't want standing water. So it will capture all the runoff from the imperfect surface created by the courts in the rest room facility. Thank you. That's it. All right. Very good. Good questions and good response. So Jesse, first off, thank you for coming back to the city of New Smurrow. Where your talent is evident and always has been to me. So delighted. And thank you for finding Olivia. She's a joy. And you can tell that she's just all over it from the stats that you gave us. Do you all and your grant management initiatives include Echo as a source for a variety of opportunities or have you not tapped that yet? Like Echo that supported the skate park, is that what you're talking about? Yeah. So we include them and we're like Olivia and I just had a conversation the other day and we've talked with Rob a little bit. What are we going to do for our next cycle? Where do we want to focus in the future? And so that's some of the things we're working on right now. So did you have a recommendation? So yeah, there's one of our citizens here and I'll get in touch with you and connect you, who is on the Echo Review Board. And I've got some experience from charity work I've done. We can have several projects in one time. They're flush with money, millions of dollars, and they're anxious to help us improve features that are recreation-based, ecology-based, et cetera, around our city. So if we don't have three in the hopper all the time, we're missing out. Okay. You answered a lot on the Washington Street and so with the history that Jason gave us, did I understand you have two property owners yet to go that you're trying to get or have just refused to allow you to do what you need to do. We have three right now but we believe one's gonna sign within the next two weeks but we're not positive on the other two. And you have a workaround if they don't? Is that what I heard? So yeah so we've been working with the NSBU on how do we redesign the electrical for that portion and we do have a workaround for that. Okay, fantastic. the NSBU on how do we redesign the electrical for that portion and we do have a workaround for that. Fantastic. You're aware that the conversations with the police chief and others about that live along that corridor about the traffic calming initiatives and what have you. You heard about that question? For Washington Street? Yes. Okay. If that's part of your solution, that'd probably be a good thing. You talked about the project management and I share your feelings and sentiment about our department heads. But as we have talked privately before about what the best practice for your business would be, where you have Rob doing some and you have David doing some and y'all are doing the line share of that, is there, would you apply for a second about a best practice and what you told me before was a center of excellence for project management that wouldn't have them doing their day job and their other job and their other job, but you could actually deploy a group to train or teach or to run a project. Whatever you, I can't remember all the details. We just spend a minute or two talking about what that in front of the public and the city managers. a growth there was a growth opportunity, where we would be wise to spend some more FTEs to do this and work smarter and not harder. The department ends up working hard. Sherry, I'd love to have something that was more efficient, more effective way to do this never ending. It's not going to end. It's not like get them all done because we're going to keep inventing new things we want. So, you know, you're like on a treadmill. And so I worry that eventually after years of time they're going to say, I can't do it anymore. I'm tired and I don't want to do it anymore. And we're going to run them off rather than have a center of excellence where it can be sustained for decades. Yeah, so I have two recommendations that I would ask the city to consider going forward. The first would be to, at some point, hire at least two full-time project managers. One that would be dedicated to maintenance ops and leisure services. and they would pretty much manage the projects like through the CIP department on behalf of Rob and David. And David and Rob then could be consulted and informed on like the major decisions or some, you know, directions or money. But then that project manager would actually manage those projects for their department on their behalf. And then that way I can keep in touch with them on project management, project management practices, and that frees them up to be department heads and directors without that extra stuff. This project management is a skill, right? That's why every other organization hires project managers to do that portion. And I think that would increase our ability to continue to do projects at a higher level while freeing up them as leaders to do what they do best and that's lead their departments and grow the vision of their department. So I think hiring at least two, I don't think for right now for our size we would need more than that. So that'd be one for them. I think the second one would actually be for engineering and Shane Corbin's team with the, whether it's strong water and engineers, the projects that they oversee, that they have a dedicated person to managing projects, and that way the engineers can look at it from an engineering perspective and speak to all the engineering related things, but then the project manager could do the project management stuff. I know working with Kyle, he's bogged down all the time because not only is he doing engineering, he's trying to manage a project at the same time where he could be freed up at a higher level to focus on what he's great at as an engineer. So I think having those two would be a powerful move for the future moving forward. The second thing which were started some conversations on with David Ray with Rob I want to talk with Thomas Farmer about more is looking at asset management software. So you can take and this is what I did when I left for a short stint and worked with municipalities all across America is developing asset management software that you capture all of your assets throughout the city from buildings to roads to bridges to Peers and docks to whatever It takes about a year and a half to capture all of those assets and inspect them properly But then what that does is once you have it in the system kind of like the stormwater model is it'll tell you based on the information you put in. If you say, hey, where you want to spend $10 million on roads next year. Help us. It's kind of like AI generated to a certain level. Where would we get the most bang for our buck? It'll analyze all your data, your inspection records, cost, and tell you how you can best use your funds. Which then when we come to you guys, we can say here's the actual priorities. Here's where we've assessed the greatest needs. Here's the even to routine maintenance for like HVACs for all the buildings in the city. Right? Now you have a maintenance plan, you have a replacement plan. So we could do that for every asset. I think it would take about one and a half to two years to build, but the benefits that you would get on the backside once it's built are almost boundless. Because now you're using data-driven decisions to prioritize. You have a better idea of how much it actually costs because you put your, the data comes from historical data, so you're you're basing it off historical data, capturing inflation as it goes so that you're predicting things at a much higher level. I appreciate that. I think we should go right ahead. I thought our Kevin and David were actually converting all that already to asset management program that we're in the midst of that. All that you speak to that since she said. We're in the process right now of getting everything on a GIS map and working towards that. And we're working and actually towards one of the programs that Jesse is talking about. So we're on the same page. Thank you. Any other re-approaches? City Manager, anything to follow up? Well, just to say, obviously, Jesse's moved this along brilliantly, is doing great work. The highlight I would make here is the transparency and communication efforts we've made here, so that everybody knows what's going on. If you want to know what's going on with the project, you just go to the website you can find out. You look at our monthly updates and find out what's going on. So that was one of the early pushes just to communicate what we're doing. So I think we've made a great strides there. Thank you sir. Appreciate that and thank you Jesse for your presentation. So do the launch. Maybe we can cut it to 20 minutes. Okay. So, with the consensus of my colleagues, city managers ideas we break now and maybe cut lunch to 20 minutes and then come back if that's acceptable. Any objections for that? Okay. All right. So we're at 23, so we'll come back at 45. How about that? Thanks. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're going to break and recess for a lunch. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you And get started with the next, which is the next one. and get started with the next, which is the strategic priority themes or an overview with the city manager. Thank you, Mayor. So I went back six months ago and part of the interview process for the City Manager job was to think about the first year and some strategic priorities. So I went back and looked at what I had done there. And I was pretty dead on. I made a few changes to this presentation and wanted to go through some big picture of things that I'm seeing on the horizon. So these are the nine strategic priority themes that I'm going to hit on today. And I'm going to go through this pretty fast, try to get this caught up a little bit. But we can have as much discussion about this as you want. So the first priority theme is the city organization itself, and if we're going to have a world class city, we're going to have a world class organization. And I want to hit here on HBO, high performing organizations. You'll hear me talk about this. So what does that mean? I think it means a lot of different things to different people, but to kind of help bring it into perspective a story for you. So this couple of photographs, I took about in 2010 in Auburn, Alabama, and this is a street called Glen Avenue. It's close to the campus, and so this was an area where students would drive to and park. And so guess what, we had major parking problems in this area. So like here, I was telling our folks, look, you've got to organize this parking, you've got to figure out where you can and can't park and make it apparent. And so they were painting the yellow lines here on the curb to say that you can't park there. And they came across a pile of trash. And they painted around the pile of trash. And I thought that was about the stupidest thing I'd ever seen. And you know, I generally't get mad or upset. I was pretty upset this day when I saw this. So that kind of really brought things into perspective for me, where we were as an organization in Auburn and kind of where we needed to go in the future. So this is my friend, Alvin. And Alvin is a lifetime Auburn resident, and Alvin is the epitome of a high performer. This guy, you can tell, he's a maintenance guy. His job is to maintain the downtown area. And so Alvin would be at work at three or four o'clock in the morning. The students had just left at two o'clock in the morning, partying at the bars. And you can imagine a downtown college scene. You can imagine game weekends and what have you. Downtown Auburn was trashed after the weekend. And Alvin came in and cleaned up downtown. And this was a proud day for him. I'm not just bragging that Auburn were the champs that year. But this was a proud day for Alvin because he'd gotten this new sidewalk sweeper right here. So we were taking his picture. He was having a great time. His son, Alvin could barely read and write, and his pride and joy was his son, and he wanted them to go to Auburn University. He got accepted. He graduated at the same time, my daughter graduated from Auburn University. So he was just a static about all of that. But what makes Alvin special is that if you asked Alvin, what is your job, Alvin? What do you do? Alvin's response would be something like this. He would say, I make downtown beautiful so that when people come here, visitors, residents, they have a great time. That was his answer. He didn't say, I clean up the nastyest stuff you can ever imagine. See, Alvin, he got it. That's it. It's like, I'll make this place beautiful so we can have visitors come here. The visitor spend money. The money goes into the tax coffers, the tax coffers grow. I get a pay raise. He kind of knows how all of that works together. So when you can have people like that, all level of the organization from top to bottom have that understanding of the bigger picture of the job then you've got a high performing organization. So that's my story for the day, the department heads are used to my stories. I spared them this one but just really brings home what high performance is all about. So our priority here is to build a high performing, transparent customer service focused organization. We have a future where we are known as a community for excellent governance. We're well-managed in a financially strong position. We are utilizing technology to benefit us. We're investing in our personnel resources and we're cultivating a high-performing staff, engaged, innovative, and accountable. That's the organization that I see for us in the future. Neighborhood, health, and safety, in some of the organization, and it's all those kind of things. So we talked to hit about neighborhoods a little while ago, and then ports of neighborhoods to our community, the tax base, and just the essence of New Sumerna Beach. So we have these assets that are neighborhoods that we need to protect, and we need to look at it that way. So I'm seeing a future for us where we have strong healthy neighborhoods where we're protecting our neighborhoods from detrimental activities that could be land use issues, noise issues, whatever the case may be. We talk recently about a neighborhood where they have a resident that's criminal and how badly that has impacted their life. Those are the type of things I'm talking about here. And that we have a public safety system in place that serves and protects those neighborhoods and that they wealth trained, engaged, and neighborhood friendly. Communication and transparency, we've put a lot of effort into this in the short time I've been here, I'm talking both about communication within our organization, how we communicate as a leadership team, how we communicate between departments, and how we communicate outside of the organization, generally to our citizens, but I've highlighted a few organizations, types of organizations there that I think it's particularly important to communicate with. So the future there is a community that's transparent and communicative with our residents and a community that embraces the diversity of opinion that we have. Building our social and civic infrastructure, these are the types of things that I'm talking about, when I talk about civic infrastructure, this is as important as your physical infrastructure, the things that kind of go on behind the scenes to make a community work. We commissioned a pre-prime brought up about homelessness earlier and how we take care of our homeless. So the feature I see here is a community that is continually investing in human and civic capital that we're utilizing those organizations that capacity to benefit the community. So as a city commission, as a city organization, we cannot do all things for all people. we need to leverage these assets to help solve problems or address issues that we aren't set up to do. And then finally a community that has top notch recreation that we have facilities for learning that we're promoting the arts and culture and Just being a community that is supporting those types of active healthy lifestyles business Few of the things I see there We certainly have some commercial corridors that need some help. We've got some regulatory barriers to development and redevelopment that are concerned. The future here is promoting business growth and development in a way that business growth and development in a way that makes our community attractive and a community with a strong identity that we're promoting a diverse economy and that we are a business-friendly community that has a thriving business community. And then, as I said with neighborhoods, it is as important to protect your business assets as well. And so we need to be sure that we're paying attention through our business districts and maintaining their health and safety. Downtown, so continuing to enhance our downtown and New Smurner Beach is a little different than most places. We have two of what we consider to be downtowns And so we want to continue to build and develop those areas so that they are tractors for the different types of activity, culture, arts, entertainment, all of those kind of things. And that they create a very strong sense of place. When you're downtown on Canal Street and Flagler it feels very authentic and it's a good, that's why people want to be there. It just has a different authentic feeling to it. Growth management and sustainability. I think we've got a lot of work to do here. The future that I'm seeing is a community that really embraces smart growth, sustainable development practices, a community where we are protecting our critical natural resources that we're utilizing state-of-the-art development practices and that in the future that we are a community that is known to produce model sustainable developments. structure, talking primarily here about physical infrastructure, those are the big three. We need to utilize our infrastructure as part of our community and economic development. We need to invest in that infrastructure concurrently with growth and development. And... We need to invest in that infrastructure concurrently with growth and development and not only do we need to be focused on the new, but we need to be looking at some of the older infrastructure in the older areas of town that is inadequate. We need to develop programs to upgrade that infrastructure. And then finally, economic development. I've talked about this before. Big part of economic development for us is creating this quality of place. And if we do the things that I'm talking about and create place, excuse me, the economic development will follow. So these are the future that I see a place offering just this outstanding of life. And that's what I have. So welcome your thoughts and feedback, and we'll use that to kind of kick off your discussion. So that is the afternoon. That's right, there are no more presentations, and this is our time to spend wisely. I think we just might be well served to start with Kevin's pitch and if it's okay we just dissect that a bit. I loved your theme idea and I think that will instruct or inform our comments and questions and what have you. But while you guys are thinking of brilliant things to ask and say, let me offer, we are often accused of too strong a word. We're often told that we have, our growth has outgrown our infrastructure. Please, Mr. Mayor, don't allow it to grow anymore. And the city is never going to catch up to being what it needs to be to support what we have already let alone any more people that ever come to this town or any more businesses. Can you talk for a second about what that infrastructure in your vast experience of doing this for more than a decade or two? What that infrastructure we have in place needs more, needs help, needs to change, and are we poised for the growth that's going to happen whether we want it to or not. So I think the answer to that is yes, we are well poised, excuse me, well poised to deal with those issues. As I said, we've got to build our organization to accomplish that. I'm voice is just, excuse me, I'm so sorry. But yes, you know, I think we have the knowledge and the interest to grow correctly. And I think that's what's important. There are plenty of models out there for this type of growth that we can follow. And I think the desire in the community is there to do just that. So certainly we have some things to overcome. A lot of it, they just, beach side, the area around here just was not built to the modern development standards that we would have today in terms of the infrastructure, the road infrastructure, the drainage infrastructure. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. So there's a lot of work to do there, retrofitting. But to a large degree, there's only so much capacity for that infrastructure that we have to work with. You can only widen a road so much, right? So we've got to look at other possibilities, too. But I mean, I personally feel very good about the future of New Spurn and Beach and what we can do. Yeah, from a physical standpoint, I think about what Lisa's enhancements ideas are. I love the ideas of the full canopy and bike paths that the company walking paths and what have you. Unfortunately we got this old town and the new and the streets are narrow in a lot of places. How do we how do we work our way through that? I think everything we do new has got to make provisions for all that and where we can retrofit we do that. That's not what I was referring to, the fiscal infrastructure, more about is road management, is the police forces, the fire department, is are the public facing services poised to, you know, to move with the growth pattern that we've been seeing? That's really what I was. Well, I mean, I would say the unequivocal answer to that is yes. I mean, we're certainly poised to do what we need to do. You've got a very good team in place that has great support and great knowledge. So I feel very good about what you're asking for the good. And the second point is about high performance teams. Haven't been a member of a couple high performance teams delighted that you want to enter into that realm with your staff. It is a journey of worthy labor and perseverance. And there are several tests for high-performance teams of how do you know? How would you know? And what are what things are you measuring and who are the stakeholders that are recipients of this high-performance? So that you up for that type of journey and one of the solicit input, I would for one say let's go because the citizens will benefit greatly. It talks about efficiency, it talks about effectiveness, it talks about for sure transparency. And using all the resources that are available inside the city staff, not just for their day to day, but let them, the answers about how to make it better are usually out on the shop floor or out on the beat from the cops or at the fire station. They will lead us to the solutions for problems that we know about. It's the opening the door to management to, we're not asleep. We really want to listen. We really want to do what it is that you believe in can take us to a high performance condition. So I salute you for that as well. Vice Mayor, comments? Yeah, well, I certainly agree. And by the way, one of the things about working harder on the bikes and the safety for this high quality is the thought of, you know, when you do destination driving, I'm going to store a restaurant X. And so I go from my home to that one point. But if you're walking or you're biking, you have the time to look at all those other storefronts. So now you're thinking, well, maybe I want to stop here on my way there. So it's a big economic addition also. And so I think it's important to keep that in in addition to safety because each side I've got families walking down the middle of Pine Street because there's no place for them to walk and I really worry about that in you know it's in the dark. I'm happy that we don't have a lot of street lights around out there. So, whatever. I will say that with the NSBU, the electric and, you know, our water facilities and wastewater, they have a very long range plan. And I feel they've done a great job of hardening this system over the last few years. And I feel very good that they are always incrementally making it better and planning for the future. So if that part of infrastructure, I feel good about. Other than that in terms of the high quality team that you're creating, I think it's fabulous. We have other issues, but we tackle them as best we can, don't we? Yes, ma'am. Yes. Mr. McGurt. All right. So of course, as we all do, the list could be a mile long. I'm trying to narrow it down to a few things. And I think what City Manager was talking. It all boils down to quality of life for our residents. Having spent fair amount of time on the commission, I've had the benefit of seeing the ebb and flows of what people want and believe it or not, it really hasn't changed. And that's a good thing because the problems or the things that people that people in our community want solved has been fairly consistent. Traffic, you know, I spent almost two decades on transportation committees and the one thing that I learned was nothing even starts until something starts failing. And our definition of failing is not the same, is the criteria for transportation road to get funded. And I'm gonna use our own state road 44. One of the reasons why nothing has been done on it is because it's only us that see the problem. Because you drive there at 7 p.m. tonight and you're not going to have any traffic law. Let me back that up tonight in my view. But throughout the week I continuously hear people from outside our city say, stay room 44. You don't have a problem there. Over here we have a problem. You know, and here's what happens with development. You can only look to LPGA that has only recently been developed out there within our immediate last 10 years or so. And now all these emergency funds from TPO and other places are going to LPGA to deal with the emergency problems of traffic there. So the point is you've got to be very proactive on these things, specifically traffic. When Kevin asks, what are my goals? One of my primary goals, even though we have a million things we'd like to do is we have to get the mission roads, they've road 44 intersection done as soon as possible. And that has bogged down and bogged down and bogged down. And I will tell you that we have to make it a priority or it's going to continue to get bogged down. Now the good news is we have Todd who used to work here for a little while at FDOT. And he is a great asset we can work with. And we have to figure out whether or not we need to hire the right lobbyist or what we need to do to go ahead and get that fast track. because it's just sitting out there and the reason it's sitting out there is because it's only a problem to us. And this is, you know, hate the game, not the player. Well, we need to figure out what we could do to really get that moving. And I've said this before, so traffic around town, it's not a problem for the tourists. They expect that when they come in, but for us who live in this town every day, we need to develop the network of roads for locals to move around on. And it's actually not that complicated. What I mean by it is, as long as we can stay off State Road 44 as much as possible, that is the entire South part of the town goes to State Road 44, whether it's beach side or main wind. In the tire north side, we do all of our shopping. We all get bottled on it there. So as much as you could do lateral roads and then get to State Road 44, when only when you need to use it as much as possible, that's huge for the locals. And Colony Park Road is a great example of that. If you don't, Colony Park Road has been used by everybody on the north side of town. It's amazing how much it gets used to how it used to be in the secret. But that one road is a great example of how, and we paid for that ourselves. We had that on our local road budget. It was huge for an entire section of the community. There's an intersection of Wayne and Halle, again in Northside of 44. And so the Northside of town. And that's where everyone in Northside used the back roads to get out to 44 and out west towards Homedipo and public and all that stuff. And it used to be just a two-way stop. And the county put in a four-way stop sign there. I used to back up 2025 cars, D. That doesn't happen anymore. A simple four-way stop sign fundamentally changed the traffic flow of that little bottle neck. And those great flashing lights which means you can't not see that much of a flashing stop sign right. So the point I'm getting at is our quality of life can be dramatically changed by simply looking at where we can put right right turn, left turn lanes for away stop signs, or maybe a cutthroat that helps the locals, the tourists and the people visiting aren't affected by that. But we are and that's the key. How do we create and maintain our quality of life while still benefiting from the people coming into the community, the businesses make money off of. Parking. And I'm gonna, a very blunt about this. We've talked about parking as well before, I got decades before I got on, and I'm afraid we may be just doing a lot of talking decades after I get off. The key for us I think is to make bold moves. You make a mistake, you move on, you fix it, but the worst thing we can do is not be proactive. There's a current of people in the community who feel we should not do anything about parking because the more you build it, the more you parking we provide, the more people are going to come. And I got to tell you that, if that's a position that you support, let's flush it out and talk about it. Because if we're not, we're going to hem in hall and things won't be done that can otherwise, we can agree to disagree or we can agree to agree and we can move on to something else. The example I want to give is they're building some townhouses on North Crossway. That was a site that was proposed by 15, 20 years ago as a perfect location for a parking garage to the three stories high. It was between Flagler and the Kenhouse Street districts. The businesses that have opened up on North Causeway would all benefit from that increased traffic and they didn't have to be some huge overburburdened parking garage. But it also gave the opportunity for a private sector to create little transportation networks. Golf car business, anybody to move in between Flagler and Ken Alstray. That opportunity is not in the land was cheap. The land was actually going to be very cheap to purchase. But it flutters away because we're not having the discussions that I think we need to which are painful and may be awkward. But we need to have these discussions and that was a missed opportunity I believe and we'll always believe for a two or three story parking garage if not just surface parking. So we have to have direct aggressive conversations and what we think needs to be done for quality of life, level of service in this community. You know what let's roll our sleeves up and get into it. Water. We're doing a lot of good things on water. I hope that the big picture really comes out which is probably what I believe needs to be a complete study of the entire Turnbull Bay watershed and probably some sort of drenching and clearing all the way out to the three bridges in New I knew Smurna passed the Turnbull Bay Bridge. But I'm positive, I'm happy and I'm optimistic what I see in the throughout Southeast Valucina County is that there is a very proactive approach to try to deal with this. So I'm optimistic about that. There's still some large chunks of land in the New Samaritan area that we can purchase. I would propose creating another bond for the purchase of some of these big pieces of undeveloped property. And it has additional from water benefits. It also has the benefits. There's many other benefits from it. That would need a voter referendum in next year's election. I would like to see that happen. Does the money have to be all public through taxpayer? No. But that is, as far as I can tell, the only way where we can get a large chunk of money infused quickly through a bond to start purchasing these properties. So I think that would be a point. It's voter approved. So we're not forcing anything down anybody's neck. And I think it would be very beneficial. I think that what the termable land bond showed us was, it's successful. It has been successful. And we should build off that and not just be scared about, not build off a success for sure. And the final thing is, the CRA was, current CRA was based off US one, the crime statistics, the lack of revenue generated from that commercial district. What I would like to see the motels, at one point I counted 12 motels in a one mile area. None of not a single one has any real viable business. It would be like ten gun stores, ten liquor stores, imagine ten ice cream stores within a one mile radius of each other. They wouldn't work. They would go out of business. But the one thing, the common denominator of almost all of these motels is they have a criminal element they make money off of. And that's where the vast majority of the crime statistics in this community, especially in Long U.S. One, all come from these motels. Chitwood wants to describe them very accurately as crime incubators. And the idea was the sooner we get rid of those, the quicker we save money and efficiency in our police from our police. And then these properties, commercial properties, can be reinvested in as a new use and actually start generating revenue that it should. It's kind of like a business product but product within a business. It's underperforming in the revenue of generates. So I would love a very clear and coherent strategy within the CRA of going after these motels. Nothing that's going to be infringed on anybody's rights, just identify the motels and have a coherent marketing strategy through the CRA that is going to target the motels and fund it as much as it will need to be done to encourage people to reinvest in the U.S. one in these motels. And Sam's already started doing that. The question in my mind is how far can we go to making sure that this happens because the big part of the CRA was we used these motels to justify the CRA, but there's still pretty much all there all operating in the same capacity that they have been now for 30 plus years. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. That's a lot when you dissect all those. Commissioner of Pring. So a lot of Phil, Commissioner Prin's, there we go. Perfect. They switched them out. I guess they've got the trouble. There you go. Is that? Yeah. So a lot of these things overlap, I think. And it's all about balance. Our budget's all about balance. When citizens approach us and scream no development, then how are you going to pay for the police, the firemen, our budgets for the city that's not a viable scream for them to say because we've got to collect our revenue somehow. So then I've heard okay let's do redevelopment instead of development instead of the During Park project and let's look at that. So we have talked about for the last few years, maybe in the City Utilities Commission out west on the land they already own and redeveloped that because there's 40 parking places there that employees are taken up. The buildings locked and closed down where citizens can't get into it. And we have the sheriff there that don't do business here in the city on Canal Street, but they're taken up all that parking. So if we screen, let's redevelop and get our economic development that way, we have the naysayers, oh no, I don't want to move out west and develop and cut trees down. So what do you want? How do you can't have it all? It's got to be a nice balance. We've got to get revenues from somehow. We want more bike paths. We want parks. Well, we're limited on land here in the city. We've got to go out west for that. We can have all kinds of bike trails out there if we do it right. Just because Venetian Bay messed up, doesn't mean that every single development is going to be messed up from here on out. So wipe that out of your mind because we've got enough experts sitting right there in those chairs that they're going to tell us how to do it right this time. If we need staff that will help us do it right then we do it right and we get that and you're going to present to us why we need what we need. I like what Jesse said about thinking out of the box and project managers and what we need. So then we look at enterprise accounting. We have all of these nice beautiful places just like the building that we're in right now. And it's about potential. We've got this building, but are we using it to our potential? Do we need someone that dedicates their entire time marketing the things that we already have so that we make money? Because we already heard that Rob is doing a project. He's doing as an project management. He's doing this or that. So how is he marketing to get the weddings in here? How do we plan on breaking even? We've got a beautiful golf course. We've got a beautiful building here. Before we renovate other buildings, we need to look. What's a potential there? Do we need that building? Do we need parking? What is the best use for each of these places before we throw more money on it? Revenue is important. We've got to have the right people that do the right thing and for staff that can actually market to get these numbers up to where we need to be. Look at the redevelopment. If we did redevelop every single thing we have here, is that 85, 15 taxpayer residential gonna change? I don't know. How much is redevelopment evening an answer? Then we look at annexation. Anxation, I was at my bank yesterday and this lady hit me up, why don't you guys annex us? I said, where'm going to be a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little You'll save a few hundred dollars on your property taxes. It's there's no charge to annex. What if she goes because my neighbors don't want it. She goes I'm on septic but I got a I got to put a new septic in and I want on city city water. So that's another thing. People are screaming, earn your money through annexation. Well, there are pockets. We had Commissioner Hartman that that was his big baby. He wanted to annex. It's still not enough to drive this 85-15 down to where we should be. I like the mayor's thought process of the getting that the old city and the new city get some of the traffic out of this area. Get it out west where people, if they have to go to work, how much money will the sheriff save being out there versus driving all the way here? We need studies that say, okay, we redevelop the city Utilities Commission. How much is that going to bring into revenue, not only to making it, whatever they make it, but additional tax revenue and additional people coming into all the businesses around they're using their restaurants and everything. that we've got a lot of missed opportunities here with parking, with traffic. We probably need to shift that traffic. No, when you say build it, they're gonna come. They're gonna come anyway. I don't care how much you say that. I've been to every city in Florida and they're there and they're coming here too. We've got a thousand people a day moving to Florida so Flipkwon where they're going to land. We can be proactive with a strategic plan and plan for the people that are moving here nonstop and retiring or we can just let it happen willy nilly which isn't what we want to do. It's important that we help and support the staff with what they need. If we see that all of the enterprise accounting isn't profitable, then what do we need to do to get it all done right now, that way, to where it's either profitable or break even? I'm not in favor of throwing another bond out there before we've even used the current bond that we have, especially if we're accumulating taxpayer money to put towards this bucket to buy the land. We've still got, I can't remember what they told us two, three million left and the one that we have before we have to borrow. So five million, thank you. So what I'm in favor of and I've reached out to people and a lot of states are doing this is a preservation fund ran by citizens and people when they pass away, they put it in this fund that they want land conserved in conservation and they work with us, same with our historic preservation. Instead of letting the women's club go dilapidated and some of the other buildings, they work with us, people that really want that, they have fundraisers, they raise money, they establish a board, and they buy the land, or they buy the historic buildings that they want. There's a state of Ohio right now has a beautiful preservation fund. Instead of having to go out and borrow money against taxpayers to buy land, that not all taxpayers want to go buy land. So the ones that do, then they start a preservation fund. They have fundraisers like we have for the homeless shoulder. We raised 300,000. They do that every single year that adds up to millions. They work on that the same time. We're working on our projects of buying the land that's left in the bond many. And then when our starts depleting, they've already got several million accumulated on theirs. We keep buying this, but we gotta maintain what we have. We've gotta maintain this land that we've already bought before we sit there and go buy more. Let's take care of all of the land we've already bought. We've been seeing that for years. I'm not gonna be be in support of another bond until we take care of the land we bought already. So there's just a lot of this. I think I'll have the same ideas that we want. It's just how do we get there to make it all happen? How do we educate the citizens that the money has to come from somewhere, saying nothing or saying no more development isn't an answer that makes no sense because we have property on our rights too. So I think we're off to good start with this. We just have to make sure that our potential is being at its best in that we continue to strive to look at all the things we already have in place. Thank you, Madam appreciate that. Commissioner Ashley. Thank you, Mayor. I think that we have the right team in place in terms of staff. Kevin, I liked your presentation. I think that it was extremely complete. It had a lot of scope. It had a lot of reach. I think that every department, heads presentation, was extremely informative to me. And I do think we have the potential to create the customer service vision that you have. And I like the fact that you use the word customer service because I can relate to that. I want to go back to what Dr. Herman said at first, that it all starts locally. And I think that we have a chance to be an example for a lot of other cities, not only in Florida, but around the country. And I would like to somehow, I like the word citizen. I do not like the word resident. I like the word citizen. And I think that if you look up, which I've done a little bit on the history of a citizen, being a citizen is a source of pride. It's also a source of responsibility. And if we can somehow promote the idea of citizenship in New Smirna Beach and take it all the way up to being an American, I think that that's where the strength of this country lies, starting right here, right in the city and right in this city. And that concept excites me. And I want to touch on what Lisa said about 80-20 at first. And being in business, we did a lot of 80-20 studies. And one of the things that I found in my career is that the 80-20 rule applies to more than work. It applies to results. So 20% of the people get 80% of the results. You can look at two people who are working, and they both look like they're working hard, but the one gets the 80% and the other gets the 20%. So what that means is that you have to be working on the right thing. If you can work your tail off 100 hours a week, but if you're working on the wrong thing, you're wasting your time. So what we have to do, and I think you touched on it, Kevin, is making, and so did you, Valley, making sure we're doing the right thing. Not pretending to work hard or giving the illusion that we work hard, but doing the right thing, working hard. So that's all I have to say. And I'm happy to be here, very happy to be here. And I think we have a great, great organization. Yeah. Really good. Well said. There are themes from each of your words and recommendations that I could repeat. But the risk of doing that, taking it up to the 50,000 foot level. I think it was Jefferson that said the government, the government's closest to people, governs best. And we do a very good job of doing our best to get input from the people. We have had a tool in the past that aided in that. And so to pick up on Commissioner Prin to Valley's comments about we are grateful for the regulars that show up at our commission meetings as representatives of themselves. Prior to my time here, there were these neighborhoods. Part of what Kevin started with in his preach, neighborhood health and safety. And these neighborhood folks would come in together the 24 different neighborhoods we designated in town, and they would offer opinion sought by all the citizens in their neighborhood. And so we were, we may have been so informed then, I don't know why the practice went away, but I liked, I liked the way that feels, I liked a representative former government, which is what we have here. We have the zones that certainly wouldn't get in the way of your jobs, but it would be an aid to you. A formal technique, there may be neighborhood meetings. There may be everybody wanted to get on this train, right to citizen XYZ, and I'll bring that to the commission for us. So it's something we've done in the past. I would love to have a conversation about how we start that up again and test it and see if it's supportive about our historian here to find out maybe what was good about it, why it't work, or why it went away. But it appears, it just seems to me that we would get a different perspective if we'd listened better and provided a mechanism, not that you were trying, we're all trying hard. But we don't have a mechanism in place. We have public participation and that's what we get. And otherwise we got the email, the phone calls and stuff like that. And some will play ball with that and others will say, well, I don't want to bother those guys. But if we could neutralize that by deputizing zone and then neighborhood folks that say, hey, I'll take the responsibility. I'll gather the information. I'll canvas my people and let you know what I think. I think that would be a... I think that would add to the bottom line of his presentation, the quality of life and the quality of place. People want to be heard. The axiom is, I've been here for 30 years, I know why things are happening. Well, I'm not sure you do. I like to use math, logic, and science, and just about every big decision that we try to make. People that come and talk about flood water. They're passionate, they're hurting, they're desperate for some kind of activity, and they say, I've been here for 30 years, it never used to flood. To me, that meant that a feggly in company have done a brilliant job making it work for so long. It doesn't, I saw a presentation by Ben Bartlett, which I hope, at the county, which I hope to bring to you, that says there are cycles of additional rainfall and we have been in a cycle of unusually high rainfall for five to six years. Prior to that there was a 10-year law and before that was another period of high rainfall. That's science. That's a little bit of math. It counters the argument that I've been here for 30 years, and it's never been this bad, something's terribly wrong. Look, I've been in McDonald's for 50 years, but I don't know how to run one. So because I'm there, I'm not going to learn. I'm not going to tell people how to run the French fry machine. So because you've lived here, doesn't mean you understand the science behind water flow. You just know it's worse. And you don't really care how you got there. You just want it fixed. So I think it's up to us to make sure we maintain or improve that basic Maslow's hierarchy and need level of safety and security to make the flood thing go away or mitigate. I'd like to say it's proactive, but we're really reacting. And it may be a cycle of reaction that we need to go after. So I would think at the basic level as a priority would be, hey, whatever we do, we will do no harm, but in fact we're going to get ahead of that and we're going to use all the resources possible at the county and state and federal level to figure out how to neutralize the storm water problems to town. And as Commissioner Prince said, it doesn't mean you can't build anything. It doesn't mean that you can't have another business. It doesn't mean you can't have another pick a ball court. But we have to have a big plan. We have to have a master plan. And we have to start now. And so I think that is job one. For quality of life, quality of place. We have an old city and people love it. We love the charm. We love the features that feeling local community have. We're on a coast. We have two major bodies of water. We're rich in that perspective. But what we need to do is figure out how to leverage that toward the future. And my idea is that we need to protect it, severely protect it. Be very cautious about anything we do on the city center or old town, whatever you want to call it. And as we move to the west where the only room for growth is, and it will happen, we need to be thoughtful now so that in a decade from now, our follow-on folks don't say what the heck were they thinking they didn't look to where we are right now and look what we have. Look at what they did. So I think we have an opportunity as the leadership of the town to say we're on it. We're looking forward. We know they're coming. We've got statistics about how many people are coming to Florida and in Florida we have a gem. If you look up and down the east coast of Florida and even north of here, there are places that are desirable none more than New Samaritan Beach. None more for a variety of reasons. You can't pass through this town. You must go to the town. It's not like the major highways run right in here, and you can just blow right through. You have to come and arrive at the destination of Newsomernabeej, and that is a gem. That is what people are looking for. And I think we have to strike a balance between, yes, we have a great retired group of folks that are a fixed income. We have a new group of people coming in. And that's new to this town, back in the day. I called it the cheap and cheerful new Samurna. We didn't want much and we don't want to pay much. We have a new influx of folks that are coming. So without forgetting about our roots and our past and our seniors and our young people that can't afford to get here, we do need to tend to a new influx of folks that have figured out spaces precious. New Samaritan Beach is the place I want to be for a wide variety of reasons because when they already have a high quality of lifestyle and they have a high quality of place. So with those in mind, if that could shape your list of priorities and not that we have to do them one at a time, your predecessor would say we're a big staff, we can do more than one thing at a time. I think we ought to talk about the sequencing of what are the next steps to how to preserve that quality of life and to improve that quality of place. I think that's very important. There are many details around this plan that need to be fleshed out. Each of you brought up a lot of things that need to have the nuts and bolts put to them. I think that's the how. I think that's what you get the big bucks to do. And I'm confident that with the outline that you've given us and the superstars that you have in your team, new hires and people that have been here for a while, that you will deliver that to the city. So I'm excited about that. I'm hoping we actually do have a real discussion. There are a number of other things that I'd like to bring up. Yeah, yeah. That sounds good. This discussion was about, we've kind of more from the strategic priority theme overview to a commission destruction of priorities. I think Jason gave us a bunch of his and the others did. I thought you had given us what you thought your priorities are. I want to caution us. Let's fill up the bucket for sure of telling them all the what's. Let's not, please not tell them how to get there. Let's allow the manager to come back later after he's studied it and set a list of priorities and see if we like that list of priorities. With that said, yes ma'am. Okay, well I've always been a big believer if I'm going to say a problem, I do my best to propose a possible solution. But one of the things I'm looking at is other ways to get money for the city. And we talk a lot about store water. I'd like to increase our store water fees to about $1.50 a month, which would over the year. I mean, still not a lot of money, but it would be a huge difference for our stormwater systems. And diversifying again the tax base, I'd like to see an NSB adding a dollar or two to every night in transient logic, because I've been trying to figure out for a year how we could get additional income without penalizing our residents. And I think just a dollar or two for a night transient lodging, it's not much, but it adds up. I also have noticed that some other cities on their property tax bill have separate items for say police and fire. And they have some additional things too, but the police and fire really stuck out to me because it's easier for people to say oh I am paying two dollars towards police and I'm not paying fire those are sort of almost tangible you can almost feel them whereas if we just increase the property tax, it's sort of like, you know, there they go again. They're just sort of stealing from us. But adding specifics, breaking out specifics, might make people feel more like they know what they're getting. So that's a big thing for me in trying to be creative about new revenue sources for the city. And then of course, you know, we have things that I think we can do. And again, I expected this to be a real discussion back and forth. You know, I get a lot of speeding complaints on beach side because we have very narrow roads. We have a lot of tourists, particularly tourists that have come to Flagler for the party. And so they leave Flagler still partying. And I'm thinking it would be nice to set the tone for the island. Remember, we wanted to sort of relax and take a deep breath by setting you know all roads that have all two lane roads with houses on both sides at 20 or 25 miles per hour. I think it would reduce complaints and also sort of set it tone and perhaps increase safety. So if you want open discussion, we can do that. I've got, I take that one up with you. Talk to Chief Feldman and Chief Kirk about flow. And so if we could all slow it down to five miles an hour, no one would get hurt and no one would move very fast. So, I'm exaggerating. So there is science behind how fast things should move. And I'm not the expert at that. And I know you get a lot of folks that yell about the speeding. I'm driving 25 miles an hour this week past and the lady looks up and yells slow down. I understand. Because it feels different if you're standing in your yard versus when you're driving in your car. So they're not experts at speed control. They just know they don't like whatever it is you're doing. It's also confusing. Like south peninsula is 20. North peninsula is 25 miles an hour. was 30 is 30 miles an hour. There are street, beach side that I've seen a 15-mile an hour block. I've seen a couple of 20 at mile an hours. You've got 30. I mean, 25, 30. It's a conglomeration. And I don't believe any of those speeds have been looked at in over 10 years, which is a big difference as we know over the last 10 years. So I was just looking at some standardization and if we take another look, it may look differently now. I hear you. It's worth it's worth it doing. I think about US one and I never knew there are 55 mile hour speed limits on US one and there are 30 mile hour speed limits on US one Just depending on what the environment is that you're passing through so I worry that the standardization Of saying oh everything will be 20 you know, I've heard you time again say 25 miles hour beach side would be nice But I'm not but I'm not sure to practical too lame Two lane roads with houses on both sides. So it's a very specific area. And for example, US woman, where down by the airport, there isn't a lot of traffic. There isn't a lot of walkers. But as you get further into town, that very definitely changes. So it's that kind of difference. And of course, my favorite are how many speed limits do we have on the South Causeway? I know at the top it's 50, then it goes back to 45. I think it starts or ends at 40, but it's several on that short thing, which you know, you wonder why people come on to third avenue at 60 or 70 miles an hour, it's because they're still riding on that top speed. But it's good to look at it. I think the science is resident in the engineering team and the police department about how to do flow to its top efficiency in Lorde Knows as you pointed out. We have people that come to town and it all jams up. So what's the best technique to handle most of the crowd and then during special events maybe you change it? I don't know. With them that would be my question and I'd love to hear from my fellow commissioners, is do we prioritize people in the community? Special events maybe you change it. I don't know with them that would be my question And I'd love to hear from my fellow commissioners is do we prioritize? People are in for you are in for the day or do we prioritize the people who live here? Which is our number one? Well, I mean more definitely chime in on my opinion on the speeding around New Samaria I have many people who are very upset with me because we keep lowering the speed limits. There's a guy in my neighborhood who won't even talk to me anymore because we keep artificially lowering the speed limits. Everybody feels that their neighborhood is special, their street is special. One of the problems that I see is, and it was ironic because everyone's complaining about the traffic around town But then we were artificially lowering speed limits to accommodate golf carts slow moving vehicles We've done it on a number of streets in town There's a number of streets that people want that to continue with my problem is If you're if the 85th and theory the 85th percent tile is what a street should be marked at, which is higher than most of the streets are currently marked now because the cars aren't from the 1960s or 70s when they add breaks that locked up and you know you move the steering wheel like this so I understand what you're saying in some areas if you you know, Flagler, Canal Street, high density streets, you need to move very slow on lots of pedestrians. But I have a lot of people who are very upset. So every time someone comes to a commission meeting and says, you know, you lower the speed limit, it's two minutes in your day. Well, guess what? I fire people for being two minutes away. And people tell me all the time, two minutes through the retiree is not a big deal. Two minutes to somebody who has to be somewhere on time is a big deal. So when we get into how we deal with the speed, I will listen. I have lots of people who are constantly telling me they want traffic calming and speed and ironically I have a lot of people who are upset about what we're doing. My biggest pet peeve is when we artificially lower speed limits for example to accommodate slow moving vehicles like golf carts and then our citizens get ticketed when it's an artificially lowered speed limit to accommodate a slow moving vehicle. In theory they're really not speeding certainly if we were operating at the science of the 85th percentile. So North Causeway is the biggest this is a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of a promise of gets complicated. Like I said, I got a guy in my neighborhood won't even wave to me anymore because he's so mad about us lowering speed limits and putting in speed bumps all over the place. And I hear you and I'm trying to avoid speed bumps as much as I can. And I'm not really sure that inlet churres get the high tourist traffic that the area surrounding Flagler does. But that be that as it may. One of the things I understand from the science behind traffic decided when is when, you know, they put down the court to see how many cars are going what speed. Therefore, if 80% of the cars are operating 5% are currently speeding, they then can increase to that. So I'm not really sure I'm comfortable with that perspective either. Oh, because everybody's speeding lets increase the speed limit, which then of course encourages people to speed beyond that. So I have some, you know, it's like, I'm not so sure that that's really all that helpful. So that's it. I have some complaints periodically about speaking on Faulkner, speaking on Washington. And the offsets of that is if we slow those streets down then it's gonna back up that traffic worse and what's already backed up on Washington. What I get more than speeding complaints is when the traffic comes to a complete stop because of the train that is what what I get more than I like that you guys did that traffic calming manual a few years ago. And that's what I do is when they complain about a street, I direct them to that and let our police handle it with the traffic calming because it seems like it's a solution and sometimes they fix it, sometimes they determine that hey where are the experts here? Everything has a reaction and when we need jerks something that reaction just caused this just like it did with Magnolia, putting in the speed bumps, it shifted the traffic to riverside. So I don't know that one size fits all is going to work for our city. San, let's do 25 for everything. I think that traffic comming manual is working unless you guys tell us that it's not. Every time we think that we have a solution to something just like Magnolia to Riverside it's going to happen. Oh Fogner, when they did the one way on orange it shipped a traffic down my street and I never had traffic. So every time you do that you think it's a solution but you got to be like Brian a chess player and see what that move strategically does to everything else. Very good. So less the crowd think the commission is strategically centered on traffic as their main theme. I think we've drained that one really good on the what we'll put it back over to Kevin and his team for the how. And that's the risk of opening it up to your favorite list of pet peeves when you're at a strategic planning session. So is there anything else, maybe, of a higher calling on your list of things? Well, yeah, I mean, and I'm not sure what qualifies by your standards. I mean, for example, sustainability, what I broke things down into was policy and potential action. I'm sorry. And for example, we talk about sustainability and resilience. I'm sure Jason, you remember the coastal resiliency study from 2018, which shows how long we've been playing and I noticed that many of our fellow cities have a sustainability resiliency, environmental, whatever you want to call it, director. And they have formalized that as a position to have an overall view. Some have formed an advisory board, but I think it's worth a position that would be able to take a little bit off of you know engineering shoulders and little bit off land development and aggregate things to be looking at proposed projects in that light so I'd love like the the commission to consider that as a possibility or Kevin somebody. I certainly speak in favor of that. I think you can't go further to the west without thinking about resiliency and sustainability and back fit all of that that we already have that was built well before that that term became popular. There's so much that can be done in old town and midtown. And we should be able to start anything out west without thinking about self-sustainability and resiliency. So I think it's a bigger job than just say, well, the manager will make sure that because it's got some elements and some specificity, and there is a skillset. It is a career path now and there's candy in it in is Olivia still here. The grant, there are grants to fund positions that will, for cities that will put in a director or manager of resiliency and sustainment. So it doesn't mean like we have to go it on our own, we could actually get funding to have that. And the city could be rewarded richly for thinking always in terms of sustainability and resiliency. So I think you've got, that's a great strategy for us to think about anything we ever developed in the future must be. It's like a, I don't want anything going out there that's going to mess up the stormwater. It's already bad enough. Got a 10 to that. I don't want anything that gets going to crowd up 44. Got a 10 to that. There's about 10 or 15 of those things. That's what resiliency and sustainability guys know how to do better than me. I don't know if you've seen these very expensive study from Coastal Resiliency 2018, the news burner did. resiliency and sustainability guys know how to do better than better than me. I don't know if you've seen these very expensive study from coastal resiliency 2018, New Spurn it did, but I do have a copy of it if anybody wants to see it from then. But so thank you, and if we can get a grant for that position that would be fabulous. And this all sort of comes into like, I want to minimize, I hope we all do. Future requirements for new store-modern. Because not only is it expensive, there's only so many pipes you can put in the ground, but in the immortal words of our maintenance op-director, pump it to where? If everything around you is full, and then as Dr. Anderson says, the only thing less permeable than concrete is water. You can't pour more water into water. So if we look at, for example, FEMA has recommendations for how to build in coastal communities. And that's why all the hazard mitigation grant program houses have to be on peers and have to have free board under them, because that's a sustainable way to build. And again, we may be able to get grants to change to a, I want to look at future development so that we're not creating more problems. Look at it not just below the ground but above the ground. You know the Commission of McGurk said something in a commission meeting some time ago that was similar to that and it was what is the capability of the watershed areas, the Turnbull Canal,, Spruce Creek Canal, the Indian River Lagoon, Halifax River, to accept more. What is it that we keep piling it? At what point it is that go, nope, can't get there? Well, it's the tide for one, and it's sea level rise for two, and it is volume for three, and there may be another one. And so having spoken with the county engineer, who works with Kyle directly, the answer is a motive flow system, a mechanical system, if you will, that will push the water well past that. And so he is of firm belief as the engineer for our county that absent that we will be facing whatever the tide, whatever the luck of the tide is during the storm, during the rain that we get. And so that is where the future is, is investing in a series, a pump system which will allow those bodies of water to eventually make it to the ocean through those other shed areas that I just mentioned. That's where we are. And we're going to have more that's coming in, more impervious that's coming in. And so at some point, we have to get serious as a county, as a region, as central Florida, in how we move the water mechanically. And that's where our county is headed. Well, I'm just, I'm not excluding anything or suggesting that we exclude anything. I'm just saying there are passive methods as recommended by FEMA that would be part of the solution to the problem ongoing. So yeah, I mean, so one of the big things on my list is I'd like to hear what people say about recycling. Having been an avid recycler for 30 years, when I did some research, it indicated that our recycling isn't really doing what we think it is. And there can be a case made that the carbon footprint behind our attempts to recycle is worse than just putting it in. And I see Jason nodding, right? So I feel like a heretic, but I wouldn't be the first one to suggest this. Other cities have already done it. I would suggest we save everybody a few dollars and stop recycling. There's a lot, this is a worthy topic. It may or may not be strategic, but it ought to be drained anyway because I've heard that whether some math behind this go ahead. Yeah, I'm just going to say Lisa, you and I are literally two peas in a pot on this issue. The biggest hoax ever pulled over on everybody is recycling. It just really doesn't happen. And everybody is told what they want to hear except what they want to hear. We charged for glass recycling when we directly knew that it was not happening. It is the heaviest part of recycling. Most people will literally want to fight me when I insist to them. The vast majority of your stuff does not get recycled. And, you know, where do you start that conversation and when people don't want to believe they've been ingrained for 30 years with that and gets recycled? If we had an environmental director, we could ask that person to come up with a recent study and And God knows there's a lot of them where they're finding city trash in the May Kong Delta. You know, US city trash. So to support that, it would be handy if you had something that we could, we could hand out saying, I understand. We really, really want to recycle, but here's what's really happening. But the problem that I run into is they want to believe what they want to believe. And how, you know, I'm with you, but how much time and effort do we want to put into this? I mean, I'm for it. I think we should just stop recycling, send out the bold facts and stop. But I will tell you that it would, to try to this. I mean, I'm for it. I think we should just stop recycling, send out the bold fashion stop. But I will tell you that it would, to try to educate all the people who would be really upset that don't want to hear what we have to say is going to be a lot of time. But it may be, but it also would save us a lot of money. Well, Ellie. So there are a lot of times, Charm. There are a lot of cities that have stopped recycling for that same reason. So I'm going to third that support because every time I see that truck go by on Wednesday, I'm like there goes our tax payer money down the drain. No one's really leaving recycling and they throw all this stuff out and as I walk the the I see all everything co-mingled that shouldn't be. So a lot of cities have made this happen and it works. They just ripped the bayonet off and stopped. So I would say find those cities that have stopped it and let's model that and stop it. We're wasting tax money on that Wednesday truck that goes to the city picking up stuff and it goes in the same landfill That the other stuff is people don't want to pay for that if it's not really being recycled They're smarter than that. Can you imagine the irony the headline? Higher resiliency director. We stop recycling So I'm in touch with a recycling or a waste management consultant. He comes to a lot of events that we all show up to. And the psychology of recycling has a lot to do with how good, how much can you afford to feel good, right? And so when he said that, I was like, what the hell are you talking about? He says, Fred, it doesn't work. It doesn't make financial sense, and it doesn't make ecological sense. Because we track, let's use glass. If we could find an end user to redo glass, then game over. That would be great. But there is no third and fourth party user of old glass, like there used to be. Right? So, you're done. Canada fixed it by charging. When you bought the six pack of whatever it was, you paid extra for the bottle, and then you brought the bottle back to the recycling facility, and they did something with it. They did something with it. We don't have that infrastructure anymore in the US. So when I first got in, I said, I hear up in Flagler they're doing something with road under the underlayment for new roads and we got new roads coming all the way. Wouldn't that be great if we just turn all the glass into the underlayment behind paving roads. They tried it, the glass broke down over time and the roads fell apart so they couldn't, that wasn't it. Now you've know if there was money in it and you could get free glass, the industry would be all over it. Get free glass, do some processing to it, and sell it to the road maker to the road the road companies that would be great. But it doesn't it doesn't pencil and it doesn't work. Yeah and we get into the the reality of it. My box is from my business is considered the best quality that you can actually have in recycle. They still have to pay $130 a month to get it picked up. I can't even give it free to anybody and it's the highest quality box that you could possibly use to be recycled. So that's the reality of that. And I was going to say by the, a couple of states do still have the recycling charged. So it's some places in the US it's still working. And the first time I heard about the glass in the roads was, I think it's Sweden where they were using it as a road base. And it would be. All right. Well, that's a good one. And now, you know, we'll see if this commission is bold enough to take that one forward after CalPerties it up it's a you know it's voting your conscience versus the popularity of this I think you know if we hung together and do the right thing we could survive that what else you got on your list again it depends on, for example, we talked about community involvement in neighborhoods and I don't know whether you're talking, I keep thinking yes I would love neighborhood councils again but where would they meet? That's one of the great things about Coronado Civic Center. I can at least have a beach side place to go. But as we know, there's large portions of town that don't have a convenient place. On the other hand, part of that pre-pandemic, we had a Citizens Academy, which was a great program. And that's one way to engage people. And I'd love to see that started again if I have support. So, and that is, that's a big deal. So, something to think about. I remember a while ago, Kevin talked about a rolling two-year budget. I think that makes a lot of sense in smoothing out our budgeting process. And one of the big things for beach side, I call it preserving neighborhoods, there are companies that specialize in farading out illegal short-term rentals. It's a really bad, I think, use of our code compliance time. When sometimes they're sitting there looking at their screens for advertisements. And they're not experts at this. They don't know everything that needs to be for Florida for being able to enforce it. So using a special company, outsourcing that might be helpful. And I said, I don't know, I'm guessing you have it in your area, too. We have a lot of short-term rentals in town, and it would be nice to anecdotally. It is so blatant that last June I wanted a place for my family to come and I thought I'd get my short-term rental. Asked one of the real chers who sent me a list of places that they had for short-term rentals that were not in a short-term rental zone and or did not have a business tax receipt. And I'm thinking that's blatant to send that to a commissioner. You know, so it's those kinds of things. I'd love us to talk about finding a compromise between commercial and budding residential. That's an ongoing issue. What do we as colleagues think we should be commercial abouting residential, so that for example, the Victoria 1883, we have other areas around town, and it's true. If you come down Flagler, the streets on either side of Flagler are residential, and we have that in several places around town. How do you do it? There are a lot of houses behind businesses on US one. So how do we find a compromise to take care of the business and also take care of the resident? I don't have any ideas, but I'd love to hear what my colleagues have to say. On that rental list, there are huge fines through the resident. I don't have any ideas but I'd love to hear what my colleagues have to say. On that rental list there are huge fines through the board of realtors for not having a proper rental listing, like $10,000 plus huge fines. So I take that list and march down to the board of realtors, first of all. But yes, that's an issue in every city. I don't know how we even go about that. And by the way, Colledin, I had talked about speaking of the Board of Realtors and investigated, I think, through Kerry, can we require a new smurner beach notification when you're buying or selling a property? And saying, isn't in a legal short-term rental zone? Because I've heard salespeople say, oh, yeah, no problem. I was like, one of the avenues. You pay your mortgage with the renters. Well, let me tell you, it's not legal to rent on eighth avenue. But it's used by many realtors as sort of a closing deal. But you find people who, what do you mean? I mean, a historic overlays, what do you mean? I mean, there's a number of airport overlay or historic overlay, or overlay or any of the different overlays we have. It would be nice to have a checklist with the documents making sure that the property owner knows what he is selling or knows what he or she is buying. Yeah, because there's that whole last. Right? Thank you for all the information. Something like that already for airport. Well, there is on your, if you look at zoning, you'll see a for airport overlay. Right. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the people who are buying it go look at the zoning map. So there's not a notification requirement. We got a real turn. Go ahead. So we had a meeting recently at the airport about asking for disclosure on that. Remember that? I don't know where we are with that. But the flip negative side to heaven disclosures for yes or no. I'm in or 30 day or less rental. It's really difficult. This is kind of the job of the board of realtors to educate their realtors not to say this house is in a 30 day or less rental because we already know right across the street it can be different. You can have one house on the street and right across the street. It can be less than 30 days. The one across the street can be 30 plus, like county rules. But that's why I'm looking at per address. Per address. The problem, yes to the airport noise, yes, to historic overlay. That's why we've talked about the historic push for. Yeah, we don't want that. We want to volunteer because of the reasons when you go to resell the house. If I go toll my house and I have to disclose and I'm in a local overlay there goes a value in my house and it'll be once it's I'm gonna see the city for that. So it gets messy because if you go and start making disclosures. This has happened in other cities. We can, but if I have to disclose that I've got a lot of airport noise on the seller side, and it hurts the sale, and it drops my value, and that's one thing. And then it goes the other way, if I go to buy it, and you don't disclose, then I'm gonna be mad because you didn't tell that. So that's when NAArgetson involved national association of realtors. And I know that Colled was working with Scott in the board on all of that. That's a decision that's going to have to be okay. As a city, we make that decision to require a disclosure for airport noise. And then it just happens as a city, but you can't do it by address, because if we require this address to disclose and not another one, then Carrie can chime in on that. It gets really messy on the seller side and the buyer side. It's a lot of cities have noise ordinances where you have to disclose for airplanes and take offs and all of that. And it's a rating between zero and 10, but we don't have that in our ordinance. And trust me on the airport I wasn't suggesting that we assign a number just I know very few buyers that check their zoning before they buy a property. They just don't I mean it would never have previously occurred to me but if you just simply say you are in the airport overlay zone, you can say just like we have a rule that if there's sexual predators in the area as a rule tree, you can't disclose that, but you can have them sign a disclosure that they are the buyer and you're doing your own due diligence and you're responsible for checking all that out. And a good brood tree will say come into this neighborhood and check your house at nighttime, at daytime in the morning and be there and go knock on the doors of all your neighbors and see what has that house flooded. Does that house have a lot of noise? And that's where you have to do your own due diligence. What do you do? But I think very, I know one person who built a three-story house on Jessamine in that area, not knowing that it was not a short-term rental location. What do they say about stupidity? Well, there is. So there's a fine line for sure between government overreach or government involvement in commercial activities. I think the border realtors should be. We can always talk to the border realtors in influence or encourage. But I respect the fine line of less government is probably best. I don't think we do all the things that we need to do, but we try to walk that line between reaching out, past what a government function is. And whether we regulate or legislate that or not, we could toss it around and see what that, you know, if that's something the crowd would want us to do. Again, a notification, you know, we can have the usual folks come in and tell us what their personal individual ideas are or we could institute an infrastructure that canvases all the neighborhoods and ask that question and have a system of delivery back to us somehow. Whether we find a place for them to work or to meet or not, whether they have a night, you have that Coronado Center, it's just beautiful, but we can, we find places for them to meet the neighborhoods. Yeah, the neighborhood. Yeah, anyway, anything else? So the strategic nature from any of us before we turn it back over to the city manager to encapsulate what he's heard and see if something stuck to the wall and if something didn't, well, we can never make that concern. Should we be involved in fluoride? The fluoride situation. Fluoride. Fluoride. So I thought we had a pretty good discussion last time at the meeting there that perhaps it's a citizen decision and it's not free and so it'd be costly to remove the infrastructure that is there so before they make a move I think they're going to freeze and then it was at least Valley's position that the group of five and this group of five should not make that decision for the citizens and that maybe it's a referendum and let the citizens decide if they want to pay for the floor. And we're not going to wait till Senate Bill 700 gets determined. That's really good. And then we'll move forward on to that issue. But I don't think the community should be nervous or afraid to have this discussion. So you know what? But I was just going to say two notes on it. What I have learned is that the fluoride and the water is different from the fluoride that naturally occurs in our bodies. And number two, that the fluoride they put into our water is such hazardous material that they have to take all kinds of special precautions with their employees. So you also have to ask, do you want that in your drinking water? I want a dentist that is an expert or her trade to advise me. That's what I want. Just for that, I still think there are a lot of dentists that shut up the other night that want it. But then we've got a lot of people that don't. So we've seen from the COVID controversy, you can't always listen to doctors in on a pro or against for aid or any of it. I don't care. I have no say in it. I would say kick it to the citizens on that on the ballot. But I do have the the board processes that we have. I would love to discuss that. Because we have 18 boards. And when it comes to us to pointing these boards, when I'm out and about, and I see someone that we've appointed to be on a board, I'll say, so, how's the board going? And they're like, well, we haven't done anything. And I'm like, well, why haven't you done anything? Well, nobody's given us anything to do. So we're at weird space to oversee the board and we haven't written any objectives for any of our boards to my knowledge in the two years that I've been here. But I said then it goes to that staff director that it kind of oversees. We've got the airport, we've got the economic development, we've got code enforcement, we've got all kinds of boards. And so that a lot of times I'll pick up the phone and I'll say, hey director, how's this person on your board? Are they contributing? Have they met your objectives? Do they offer anything? And they'll give me feedback, hear your name. And sometimes I'll vote without saying what they told me in such line because it's awkward. It might be that person isn't doing a very good job. Or I'd rather have this person, they know much more about it. So, you know, there are two or three different people running and all I have to go off of is that staff recommendation because I don't know if they're doing their job or not. And we're up there trying to point. We just got into a big mess with the Utilities Commission board because I called EFRIEN. Hey, do you want this person reappoint it? Yeah, they're doing good. And then we have another person that might be better. Our process is broken with this. And I don't know how to fix it. And we don't tell Mr. Calper how to do his job, but this has been broken long before you came. The other thing is we have coalition that kind of sacks these boards sometimes. How do we stop that? You know, the only concern I have with the neighborhoods is that we're going to have 20 of these little coalitions running around, which is better, I guess, than, you know, when coalitions say they represent the whole city when they don't. So I had advice from a wise previous city manager that said to not let the squeaky wheels dictate your city and your city staff because it's going to get you in trouble and then another squeaky loud group is going to be another thorn in your side. So I like the neighborhood thing, but I don't want all of these people trying to run you and trying to run our staff when it's not the real 32,000 people. When we interviewed Mr. Calper, something that stood out with him that I loved, and this is why I liked him a lot is, he had a situation with one of his enterprise accounting, and it wasn't breaking even. And I know it's expensive to do this, but he asked the entire city by ballot, by voting or whatever he did, but he got feedback and it shocked him. The answer was they wanted this water park and they were going to close it down. I hadn't forgotten this because this is why I really liked you. Because they didn't listen to a coalition that has 3,000 emails out and 20 people that show up. They listened, you listened to 32,000 people. We should do the same. Just because a few people have time to come to our commission meetings and yell, that doesn't represent the whole 32,000 people we have. So how do we get this out? I don't know if it's by neighborhood. I don't know how we can advertise that we have board openings and attract qualified people. One of the gentlemen said that he's concerned with our nation. Well, it's the same with our city. How do we attract the best in it? A lot of times you don't like who's in office or you didn't like who is in office before. But those are the two we had to choose from. Sometimes when we appoint people on boards, it's all we have to choose from. We might not only have two, and we may not like either one, but that's what we have to choose from. How do we fix this? And I mentioned that to one of the past commissioners, well, they don't do anything anyway. Then why do we have 18 boards? And if you ask staff, how do you feel about the boards? Well, we don't want them anyway. They don't help us. Why don't they give them ajective so that they do help them? I don't really understand this disconnect. If we have boards working for the people, then why aren't they doing something? I was on a board for four years, so I can honestly speak from experience. And then those boards aren't reporting to us quarterly annually semi-annually whatever so we don't know what they're doing and then when they do do stuff they say why don't you give a speed back I'm like because I don't even know what you're doing to begin with there's 18 of them I don't have the time to go to 18 different board meetings four times a year that fill my calendar every day so we've got a problem here. What's the answer? So we've got a couple of different things there. They're wrapped in the one. Let's see if we can unpack those. The first is a mindset of the utility of a board. I understand from council that we're required to have certain number of boards. Some of those are statutorily required. We'll keep doing that. But the other is one that I too brought up to the manager when we got here. The mindset in our city from the inside has been conflicted. We had the city clerk that was required to do the recruiting the city manager appointed the staff to do the the technical work Meeting with the committee many like the airport manager meets with the airport committee stuff like that But the mindset either needs to change or we need to admit what it is and not change it and you're the lead horse on what the mindset is for your advisory group. And so maybe you want to think about it or maybe you want to declare it today, but the department heads will follow your lead. The previous lead was don't let them get out of control, give them crayons and let them color within the lines. They're going to cut out paper dolls and don't let them get us in trouble. And we really don't need any help. I come from a different place. I think that our talent and citizenry has a multitude of skills. Many of them are retired professionals, executives, laborers, workers, people that know all aspects. And if we wanted to use them as an extension, as a free labor force, as a free incubator, as a free and invention laboratory, we have that opportunity, but you get to drive the train. And so whatever you say will guide, I think us on how, how aggressively we recruit the people that come up to us and say, I want to help you. I want to help you. Tell me what I can do. Well, I've called none of my folks and say, I want you to serve until I can guarantee that they don't come and have to cut out paper dolls because you only get one chance. You waste those people's time. They won't be back and they'll tell their friends, leave the city alone. They don't want your help anyway. So we either get the mindset figured out or change it, or we accept that we really don't want the citizen to help and slim our boards down. help anyway. So we either get the mindset figured out or change it or we accept that we really don't want the citizen to help and slim our boards down is my personal view. I don't know what your council is on that. And then carry before we finish it and get it going. There are some rules that you warned me about, about oversight of the committee bias, by a superior body, so how much I can go in and meet with or talk to another subordinate group and try to influence them. So both those topics need to be aired out here today if you don't mind. You're always good, right? Well, I was just going to say, and this has been something that Commissioner Perim has spoke to me weekly about the boards. And as we've done some reorganization in the City Manager's office, then that's opened up some opportunity for me to kind of refocus some of what Phil has been doing. And so in addition to helping with all this strategic plan stuff, he's also going to be helping me with the boards and commissions. So, you know, specifically preparing a quarterly report on the boards and saying, you know, these are the boards. They met this many times and, you know, these were, you know, whatever the results are. You know, obviously you've got planning and zoning commission that meets frequently and does a whole lot. And then you've got other boards that never meet. Most recently, one of the boards where we were looking at re-appointing somebody was an animal control board. So we have an animal control ordinance. And if there are problems and violations, then we have to have a process for people to appeal. And then that leads us to the creation of the Sanable Control Board, which we have, but they haven't met in, I don't know how long, I guess we've not had any issues. So it's legally required. And so then my next thought is, well, conversation with the city attorney's probably coming next. Can we not have that board, could that code enforcement board maybe do what they're doing? I don't know the answer to that, it was kind of like the first thing that, and so we can run down some of those things where we can kind of think out of the box. But my first approach here, you know, value, you know, very succinctly said what you think the problem is. So I kind of want to do that research and start by looking, you know, hey, what are these boards actually doing and put some resources toward finding out that information? You've got, if you read through some of the department head business plans, you'll find some nuggets in there concerning the boards and commissions and some thoughts that they have on the direction we need to go with some of the boards and I'll certainly be following up with that. But you know whether we you know we're gonna have to have a certain number of boards that are legally required and others that are more advisory and capacity. The know, the Turnbull Bay Preservation Committee comes to mind, I think, you know, they've got kind of a specific task and stuff that they're doing, but you don't really know what they're doing. So then, I need for you to be informed about what they're doing. So, you know, with the next meeting, they're going to come do a presentation to tell you what they're doing. And that's just part of that communication. I have an idea. So when we appointed the charter, we each got two people. What if we did something like that with the boards that we have to have and consolidate the ones that we can or the ones that haven't helped like certain directors if the board hasn't helped them, then we can look at not having it. I think I was told that some of the people maybe not on this commission board and past commission boards, they felt powerful to be able to point people, I don't care, I don't need power. I just want that if they're on a board to show something they've done that helped the director help the objectives. But what I don't like is that in the past, I didn't even know that position was open until I was getting ready to vote on it. Like how do we even know which board positions are coming open? How did Kelly reach out to people to let them know? Was it just a Facebook post? Not everybody's on Facebook. I don't like that either. So do we need to recruit some of these really important boards? I don't want one coalition to be stacking our PNZ board either. So there's got to be some nice balance here. It's got to come from, you know, when we just had a year ago, two people, and that was it, and it was like this the best we got in this city, we had a pick one. No, I would have rather said, I'm not voting, but no, it's a rule that I have to vote. I don't want to vote that night. I don't want either one of them. So I'd rather have zero board. I'm going to have a say. It's not going to be pretty incenscind. And that's the thing. If I know something about this person and this person shouldn't be on this board, I have to say it incenscind. I don't like it. Well, I think, you know, you know, certainly putting in place a system with the city clerk about notifying when board openings are coming up and so that you've got that information, that's easy stuff to deal with. I will say one of the, when I was in Auburn, the City Commission there appointed the school board. And so that was always a very kind of contentious deal because obviously school board is pretty important. And because it was so important, we moved the commission to the point where they were actually conducting interviews for filling those positions just on that one board. And if I remember correctly, they actually had appointed a committee of commission members that did those interviews. So I think they had nine people on the commission. They appointed three of them to do these interviews and then they would report back and make a recommendation to the full commission on who they thought would be the best candidate. Obviously all of that occurred in the sunshine, those interviews and what have you. Now there's a lot of debate about that because people didn't really want to come and be interviewed and they didn't want to put their qualifications out there and nobody wanted to be publicly rejected all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of pros and cons to either way. But for that one board and given the importance of that board, that's what they decided to do. Just another story, just another, that's what we did. But I mean, there are a lot of different options on where we can go. And certainly the boards, you know, are planning and zoning in this murderous, probably, you know, the most important deal, and where we need to be most careful that we're getting the best people there. Plus the utility commission, those two. Can you offer your personal philosophy on the value of boards and how you like your team to behave or what value there is or not value. It will help me and maybe all of us that people come around saying, hey, I want to serve. I don't want to call them in to say, hey, come help the city and it not be a help to you. Well, and that's not an easy question to answer because I feel that if we have a specific task and something that we're trying to get input about that some sort of advisory board is, you know, is worthwhile. So, you know, looking back at things that I've done in Pensacola created what we called there an environmental advisory board. We had a lot of environmental issues and not necessarily beach-type stuff, but more issues like three superfund sites in the city limits, brownfields, galore. And there was a considerable amount of expertise in the community on environmental issues. And we created that board, we staffed that board, and we got a lot of very good information and feedback from that board. So if there's an issue, it could be a broad issue, like the environment, and you can create a board and get good feedback, then I'm all about that. You know, I'm not looking to have a bunch of boards that we have to staff and spend a lot of time with babysitting and trying to figure out what they're going to do. So does that help? Wait, could I ask a question? Yes, ma'am. Do you get feedback about any of the boards, what they've done? Do you get any feedback? I do. OK. Yes. Yes. Some good and some not good. Which then are those does that correspond with the boards that we should be looking at or does that correspond with the people on the boards? Now I think it probably just corresponds To the board itself and what their point and purposes We tried the task board and we censored it and I thought that would have been a good thing. I'm not sure. It was a task board, I know. But we didn't drive it. We didn't assign them any tasks. So Mr. Calvert didn't know we had that board, but we had another one that we censored in the last couple of years. And it was to do like you were seeing target an environmental area or whatever we put them to the task that for some reason that didn't take off. Yeah, Sam, Samantha Burzoran has some ideas about the economic. There was an economic task for her. Maybe that's what it is today, but there was an economic advisory board. And so she's got a strategy for how she wants to run her organization and she plans to use these people effectively to be arms and legs and mouthpieces and receptors for her job. That seems to be helpful. But if that's the type of stuff you support, I like, I can get on board and help you recruit. And how we pick is an interesting discussion as well. And should we sunset some of the boards? I don't know. I don't know if we're allowed to do that. Well, we're going to look at all of that. I mean, it's going to take a while to work through that process, but we'll see where that goes. I'm switching gears back to the stuff, throughout my career, done a lot of neighborhood-based work. One of the things that, again, going back to Pensacola, we built from the ground up there a very elaborate neighborhood development and communication program. One of the things we had, we started by identifying all the different neighborhoods in the city and that could be a subdivision or just a more general geographic area like historic Westside. But we made contact with all of those neighborhoods and we created what we called a neighborhood leaders roundtable and invited all of the presidents or leaders of those groups and they created that neighborhood' roundtable. And then we would meet with them usually quarterly and talk about different issues in the city that we're going on and get feedback from that group that we could report back. Who formed the neighborhood groups that produced the leader? The neighborhood itself. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were the ones that were in the neighborhood. They were groups that already existed. All we did was bring them together and then we said, look, you've got issues, neighborhoods, you're dealing with an issue and, look, you've got issues, neighborhoods, you're dealing with an issue and your neighborhood you're dealing with an issue. So the point was they, for them to communicate with each other and then to communicate with the city. And then we had, you know, when we had hurricane issues, right, in Pensacola, and we had our neighborhood coordinators reaching out to the neighborhood presidents and saying, you know, what resources do you need and your neighborhood is your neighborhood okay, do you need this? And it was a very good way for us to communicate. It sounds like something we'd love to replicate, but we don't have many of those, you had the HOAs, but I'm not aware of any neighborhood. No, but there are others in our community that talk about the days when we did have an active 24 group. They're 24 that they, I don't know how to read. I think it was just Beach Law. The neighborhood council. yeah, well I can put a good set of little information here. Gail Henry said our chief planner at the time took it upon herself to come up with this idea of all the different neighborhoods. The idea behind it was she was going to meet with these people who want to what position head chief planner. Okay. So she was going to meet with these people. Who wants to? What position? Head Chief Planner. Okay. So she wanted this neighborhood council group and we appointed one or two from each, so couple from each zone. And she would meet with them. And the point was when there were development projects or things going on in the community, she can, two, full, one provide them accurate, reliable information. And then the second thing is she would get possible concerns or feelings from that neighborhood on what may be going on there. That was her brainchild. She left. We tried to pick up the ball and keep it going, and it was a complete disaster. First of all, I will tell you that the beachside zone, your zone is a lot different than a lot of other zones. But like almost all the other boards, everybody loved the idea of it, but it was difficult to find people who wanted to serve on it. That was difficult to find people who would show up to it. So I know that we love to beat ourselves up over people complaining about the boards and not doing anything, but the reality, and it always has been, other than planning and zoning or Tilly's commission and a hot button board, it's very difficult to find people who are willing to commit the time. And just because they want to commit the time, doesn't mean they can because they're gonna be out of town, they're gonna be on vacation, they got something that comes up. So it was the brainchild of the planner to get feedback and communicate within the community of what's going on developmental-wise for the most part. And then when she left, she, you know, the key was going to be her, the person, right? You invest in the person, not the idea. She left and we tried to incorporate her idea in time. One of the things I wonder is we all know, it can be really difficult to decide When we should rely on history and when we should recognize a new time and I think we all Try to do that as a balancing act and so one of the things I would wonder we've had a lot of population change and what's that been good 10 years more than 10 years I think since Galic that 10 years, more than 10 years, I think, in scale. No, we just unsaid it that board a few years ago. Oh, no, I was talking since scale left. She left right after the mayor had. Well, yes, she's been gone for a while, but we incorporated this board. We still have said it in a few years ago. And I know I get asked by, well, we all know Randy Herman, frequently whatever happens to the neighborhood council. So I'm just saying I'm not sure that just because it sort of fizzled out we couldn't figure it out. asked by, well, we all know Randy Herman frequently, whatever happens to the neighborhood council. So I'm just saying I'm not sure that just because it sort of fizzled out, we couldn't figure it out last time. I think the germ of the idea is a good one. And I'd like to take it for a spin again if we could. Like the Citizens Academy, which is another way, but that has followed by the wayside, but which I do think provided something valuable to the city. Would you? Yes, go ahead. The word H-A-Wave, be able to be substituted for the word neighborhood, couldn't you use? No, absolutely. And what I'm talking about is not, the commission would not be appointing members to this group. The members already exist, so, you know, Venetian Bay neighborhood, the association has a president. We know who that person is. But what about places like Alboro, Inletchor, and the countryside? The medical places don't have any interest. We don't have HOAs. Well, yes, and it could be neighborhoods. Right, but we could help them build that neighborhood capacity and find leadership. Okay, so we'd be a hybrid. Where there's an HOA, that's a neighborhood representative. And where there's not an HOA, we'd be in there helping define one, right? Yeah, and the idea is what I'm talking about is neighborhood leaders, not neighborhood, not people that you appoint, but who, you know, the historic West Side would be a good example. I don't know who the leadership is there, but I'm sure there are certain people that have organically grown in the leadership positions there. So let me comment on that. I wish we all had a Venetian Bay H.O.A. neighborhood that's as active as what they are because they've been a big help with our issues and going on with G.O.C.M. and all of that. But I would bet if you talk to them, they got really strong because they had to come together because of their problems. That's usually what happens is when there's a lot of problems, then they can involve if there's no problems and things are running well, then don't involve me. My problem with my West District is I can't get anybody to come forward. I can't even get them to have meetings. And I have tried. I've reached out to the pastors. I've asked. I've reached out to community people. I know I would love for them to form a neighborhood like the Venetian Bay neighborhood. They've been excellent, but I can't. I don't know how we can do that. And they come and they form, you know, they come when they have the flooding issues. We've seen a little bit about that, but it's about a specific topic. And then here's the other thing we put things in the park, the shade in the park. We get people that didn't like a spin in many own shade in the park. You know, it's like we is really a difficult thing with the neighborhoods. And when you said that, I love the concept and the idea, but I'm going to need help with that because I haven't I've been working on that for two years. It's going to say you also have an additional problem on the side. It's increasingly owned by LLCs and corporations not people who are living in those houses. So that makes it even more difficult for that area. I think it was spent a lot of time on a board as opposed to- We are and that is the tendency for most. Very few have strategic capabilities of thinking and looking to the future. And so it devolves into what we've just done a couple things. I've allowed Lisa to drain her list of tactical items. Those are all very, very good tactile items, most of which I agree with, but it's not a strategic plan. So absent the, not looking forward to having the citizens that are viewing or watching or will view this tape think that we spent majority of our time solving tactical problems. If we could bring it back up for a second, have the city manager come through, tell us what he has learned from this conversation and what action he may have taken away to try to deliver something and we'll have some closing remarks and then we can be done. Very well. Yes, sir. So, I put together the themes up there, just really based on what I've heard over the last several months from you, from the staff, from the public, just people that I've talked to. And I think that probably pretty well encapsulates what we've talked about here today. There's a lot of different types of strategic planning and commission and McGorart spoke this morning about, you know, like a vision planning process and communities involved and you're having all meetings and shiarets and things like that. You know, we can certainly look to do something like that in the future if that's your desire. What I'm trying to do today is to get information from you all on the issues, priorities, that you see. And I think what I've heard today is pretty much what I've been hearing over the last several months from you, the issues, you know, traffic, neighborhood protection, economic diversity, you know, the list goes on and on. So what I'll do is, you know, you know, you all have submitted stuff to me in writing. I have that. And I'll go back and do some more work and try to put together some strategy, some action items and implementation ideas for how we can kind of get from what we're talking about today to implementation. So it does, you know, sometimes we do get bogged down in the weeds and I expect that that's, you know, where we are. There are a lot of good ideas that we've kicked around today. today. Some kind of micro things and some bigger picture stuff, but it's helpful for me to hear your thoughts on all of that. Ideas that were talked about for, I talked about growth management and sustainability and preserving our natural resources. We talked today about the land acquisition program of sensitive wetlands and other areas and how what kind of vision that we might have for how to do that. We talked about increasing or borrowing to buy more. We talked about setting up some sort of organization or system to manage that land and to fund additional acquisition. We talked about the potential of increasing the storm water fee to put more money at storm water programs. There's a lot of good stuff that you guys have kicked out today that I think that we can certainly work with here. And we'll continue to work on this. We'll put together a document that we can send to you that you can look at. But I don't want there to be any confusion. I'm not trying to do today a, you know, 2050, 2075 vision for New Smyrna Beach. What I'm trying to do today is get your thoughts and ideas for the strategy for the city and kind of that two year, four year, six year increment. At some point, I'm sure you may say, hey, let's do a 2050 plan. Let's talk about big picture ideas. I've got some big picture ideas. I was talking earlier this week about some of my thoughts and ideas about how do we connect the beach flagler to the historic downtown canal and the role of the North Causeway, how do we utilize the assets that we have at the AOB site, how do we use that resource and if we get boaters to come there, how do we get them other places, how do we get people from that area to that park? What does that park look like? How do we utilize the assets that we have across the street at the Marine Resource Center? They've got some fabulous facilities over there. They've got a venue and entertainment venue out there. I don't think I've seen anything that's been scheduled there. I may be wrong, but that whole area to me just is like an opportunity waiting for some vision. Right now, all it really does is move cars from canal to Flagler. That's kind of what it does. We see some people walking and strolling. You know, it seems like such a great area to get out and walk and stroll, but now we know that there are dangers for pedestrians. So how do we kind of take that from just a road and make it into a place, something cool where where you've got great parks, you've got access to the water, what kind of redevelopment opportunities are there? There are some old businesses, there's some vacant stuff, and what could the future of that corridor look like so that you had a real connecting corridor from Flagler Avenue to Canada and it all connects together and creates one big beautiful downtown, right? I don't know if that's but you know we can think and talk about stuff like that and you know I'm sure there are probably plenty of big ideas like that that that people have that we can come together so anyway I I love doing planning like that and you know we've got a good planning team here that can lead us in and looking at some of those things well. So there's plenty of opportunity for us to look. And this is very helpful to me today and you know we'll like I said earlier today we'll utilize this as the basis for making some budgeting decisions on things that we recommend. We won't do a two-year budget the next time, but I'm hoping that we will be able to do that 2027 and beyond. I can only... that's a lot of change and we got a new finance director and so it's going to take a little bit of time for us to get our arms around and move in that direction. But that's, you know, the two-year budget, a six-year capital plan that we're going going to be building, an actual capital planning program where you can see these are the projects that we want to do over the next many years. And these are, you know, the projects we're doing this year are the priorities and then this is how we're going to fund them and six years down the line. These are the projects that we want to do. This is what the cost is going to be and this is how we're potentially going to fund those projects as well. So that way you can see the vision for the next several years. That's the direction that we are headed. Awesome, thank you, sir, to the attorney. I'm going to have to leave early in Commissioner Martin. Is this working? Yeah. Commissioner Martin has requested, I answer that question about Sunshine Law and the boards and about. What the rules are. Right. So Sunshine Law does not prohibit a commission member from speaking to another member of the board, but there's new answers to it. So for example, like when professional staff evaluates application, it's improper for a member of the commission to go tell that staff member why I want you to do it x, y, and z. Same applies to, you know, if the p and z is making a recommendation to the commission, that should be an independent recommendation, not influenced. However, if we're talking about like a task force or something like that and you know you're talking and talking about maybe things you'd like to see them consider or tackle, you know, that's a possibility Or that you know, that's not there's these shades of gray as to what's proper and not proper So the other part to the sunshine law is The whole purpose is to see the process see how we got from X Y you know, A to Z. So if you were, for example, telling them, here's five topics that are going to discuss and you start eliminating topics from that list, then that would be violating sunshine law because you're doing things outside of the sunshine that needs to be part of the process. So kind of the short answer is it depends. So. That's a classic. Classic. Yeah. And to classic answer that in the end. So I'd say that in the end. Up front and early or it depends or good consultant words. How about reporting mechanisms to either the city manager or to us. Is there an annual requirement? Is there, should there be, is there a quarterly, a periodic required, should there be a periodic requirement for us to get informed about what they're doing? That would be a commission preference. There are statutory rules regarding P andZ, our pension boards and things like that in terms of makeup and membership. But in terms of reporting, that would be a policy decision to be made. Thank you very much. Thank you. Wrap up remarks from Commissioner Ashley. I just think this meeting was tremendously helpful and I hope that going forward we can develop the ideas that were put on the table. I really like your idea of that neighborhood leadership board in conjunction with the H.O.A. and in my particular case the H.O.A. is not the overall H. the overall HOA because that is in control of Geosam right now. We have 11 neighborhoods all with HOAs. And from the feedback that I have gotten so far, I think we could get representatives from those neighborhoods to be the neighborhood leader. That's it. Thanks sir. Appreciate that, Commissioner Morgan. Well first of all, I so value the time to actually talk to my fellow commissioners because we don't discuss on the day is. So having this opportunity for interchange, I think it's great and I hunger for more of it personally just to time to exchange new ideas and new concepts and I had always been told that our job as a commission was to set policy for the city manager to implement so my perspective had been what kind of a policy do we have? Do we have a sustainability and resiliency policy? And that's where I had, that was the approach I took. So I wanted to be clear on that. And before we trail off, I'd really like to look at potential other sources of income for the city. So thank you very much for the opportunity to actually interchange with my fellow commissioners. Thank you, man. Appreciate that. Commissioner Perine. Thank you. We all want to help better our community and make our city a place that we want to live in. We listen to our citizens and we listen to our staff. And one of the misconceptions a lot of the citizens have is that we direct staff and we don't. We direct Mr. Calper and we direct carry our city attorney and that is it. But we don't even actually direct them all we do is listen. And we give them feedback of what the citizens tell us. And some of the things on my list, I keep track of what people wanted when I was out campaigning. And I had constant meeting grates, and I know the other commissioners did as well. I took notes and I have a folder, the stick of things our citizens wanted. I'm not walking my neighborhood all the time and I get pulled over by neighbors saying this and that. And then what do I do is I let Mr. Calper know that. We get complaints, we get suggestions and who do we let know that, Mr. Calper? And then in return, he follows through with staff. Why I brought the board things up is because for a couple of years and before that, I listened to citizens about what they thought the boards were doing versus what they were really doing. And I was on that board and I thought before I left this job, the very most important thing I want to do is improve the communications what we have between the board's staff and the commission board us. And that's the last thing really big on my list is how we fix the process. I'm a big process improvement person, big best practice person, what are other cities doing. And all we can do is brainstorm and kick these things around like we do. And I appreciate today. If we might have gotten weeds a little bit on that, but it's right there, number three, communication and transparency. It's number one citizen organization. And it all intertwines because that's a big thing. We've got, you take 18 different advisory boards and boards, multiply that times five or six people or however many is on those boards. That's a lot of people that represent our community. We want to make sure we're doing it right and that we do it right for the future people. And if the process is broken, we look at it. The things we made suggestions on revenue streams, huge for our budget, there's more than just property taxes. There's the side of all the things we talked about today. And one thing we didn't talk about is controlling expenses expenses and one of the things I have to call out, Joe Wown is seeing that that money just went away and never, never land and she rounded it up and pulled it back in. So we got to make sure that we don't spend all of that and that we look at things that we really need and what are the priorities and the thing that I really hope Mr. Calvert does is he doesn't look to us to make the decision on priorities and I know he's going to do this, he's going to go back to staff and tell us what the priorities are because we're not in the weeds with you guys. Again, we are a commission board. We don't tell you guys what to do. Nor does a coalition group or anybody else that tries. I don't want that. I want Mr. Calvert to tell you based on what he hears from us and experts out there that we need to know what. Sometimes we have to make that decision though, and it's not not easy. And you might have a chamber full of people and you know, screaming, but is that a good representation of the whole city? And that's what we have to do our discernment because they don't always show up. They, a lot of people show up when they're upset about something or like Venetian Bay and GEOC, I'm the parking and the flooding, but being over here for a moment, any other time. So it makes our jobs difficult, makes staff's jobs difficult, but I appreciate the software tuning to talk and to make our city better and make us a better board and make our staff a better board. Thank you, man, appreciate that. Mr. McGurk. Thank you, Mayor. As usual, these kinds of discussions are always fun. I apologize for all the department heads that had to sit through this all day, but your participation was greatly appreciated. You know, distractions, what we can do, quality, if I boil down to what I think that our residents want from us, it's quality of life. It's so So easy for us to get distracted with certain things. We're always going to have distractions. That's okay. They're going to be there all the time. But I think it's important that we tackle these issues. And if you look at some of these issues that I brought up. They've been going on for many decades. So the question is, do we want to tackle those issues? Or do we kick the can down the road? And I can tell you that kicking the can down the road is not the way to do it. We focus on what needs to be done. But I do want to point out that we have an amazing city. This city is fantastic. I mean, there's so many healthy aspects of it. But it's our job to deal with what needs to be done and not sit there and pat ourselves on the back of what has been done. So it's easy to get a little discouraged, but looking back at the same issues that we go round and round, they keep coming back around because they're difficult. You don't have consensus in the community. There's a lot of different opinions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be making decisions on them. You want to talk about boards and people who are very upset. I'm not worried, particularly worried about our city boards. I'm worried about the task forces we've created over the decades. Everybody on a parking task force, everybody who's been on a parking task force that this city has created is really upset and they're really upset because we've never really done anything because it's a controversial issue in the way forward is not clear it's not when I say clear let me say it's not easy so we don't like to deal with those issues so when we leave the dius at least when I did when my time's up I'm going to look back at all the things I didn't accomplish that I wish I did. I'm not going to be saying, oh, I did this great, and that was great, this decision was great. I'm going to be moving through the city, looking at all the things that still aren't done yet, and I suspect all of us will. So let's make some bold decisions. Let's move forward on things like parking and transportation. They're right in front of us. The longer you wait, more opportunity is lost. It's like real estate. The longer you wait to do something with it, the less opportunity a lot of times you have. So I love these and I like them because I get a better understanding of exactly where each one's coming from other than five minutes in a commission meeting. And as we all know, but most of the community doesn't know, we don't really get to talk about these things in any detail with each other. So it's very easy also for us to misunderstand each other. I hear you say something and I bristle, but I don't really understand your position. And I may say something and you may bristle, but we haven't been able to articulate and come to the agreement. We're always going to find common ground on issues. It's kind of funny when we sit around with our friends and we all differ in our political beliefs and opinions on everything, but we're relaxed, we like, and we respect each other and we find common ground. So I think that this meeting, these kinds of meetings, that's really what's most important. Where can we find common ground and move forward on? Because if you think there's people mad who participated on city boards and didn't feel like they didn't do anything, you can go back and interview anybody who's been on a parking task force and they're really upset because we haven't done anything. Tanger, why don't we have anything? They have to see it. They're not in our meetings. That's what we're here for. They put us here for that. Let's give the people in the community tangible things that they can see out there that have been done. And I think that's very important. The only wisdom that I really have over the years that I've been on the commission, move forward with getting things done, because the more we just talk it, kick the can down the road. And we don't kick it down the road intentionally necessarily. But the more talk, the more talk, analysis to paralysis. So let's make some bold moves going forward over the next few years. And I think, well, whether they're good, batter, and different decisions, I think that we'll happy that we at least made the decision as opposed to sat there in paralysis like so many other commissions have. Thank you, Mayor. You bet, and thank all of you for offering such good words of encouragement and wisdom about the state of our city and where we're headed. I think we have adopted your strategic priority themes, sir. You've heard flavors of interest areas, but I see a consensus that we have found in you through those themes. Each of us have our pet rocks and that's fine. That's all tactical about how to get to the end goal. The end goal, what is that? Quality of life, quality of place, and improving that and doing the city's work. I favor a bias for action rather than a bias for pontificating over researching and discussing. I think we can make decisions that are well-founded and proper. And when we make mistakes and action oriented groups make mistakes, we can, we have the beauty of being able to retract and say okay we thought we're going the right direction. We're going to make a right turn from now on and fix what we have created. So I'm unafraid for that. My biggest fear is that we don't do anything and we don't move forward. So let us deliberately do the people's will. That's what we got paid to do. We're the listeners for you and we transmit that information to you and you do what you can to deliver the product. We're, I'm excited about that. Your wisdom to bring your staff, I want to say personally to the presenters today, thank you so much for taking the time. I know those things aren't instant putting. So I know they took time and effort to put together. Thank you very much. For those of you who came to listen and hear it directly from us, whether Mr. Copper made you come or you came voluntarily, is irrelevant to me that you were here to listen and get it firsthand will inform your actions and your activities. And you'll remember things that maybe it takes to play the tape for Mr. Copper to remember, but as they apply to your departments, please take those forward and make that an evaluation that you share with the city manager and say, hey, I'm on board with that. Can I move with that? I'm ready to go. Because if you learn, if I learn anything about Mr. Calper's style, is that he's allowing you to run your department, own your success, and he will hold you accountable for that success as the clock ticks and reward you accordingly. That's something the citizens have been asking for for quite a while and I think you will be the group that delivers that. So I'm very encouraged about how this gonna work. To your assistant, Mr. Nivert, thank you Ron for all that you do. We don't hear much from you but we see a whole lot of your work. We're grateful that you're on the team and that you were right welded up with Kevin and delivering these products. Thank you very much Without further discussion let the record show were adjourned at 329