Good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Charlotte County Board of County Commissioners regular meeting for Tuesday May 13th 2025. We'll let the record show all commissioners are present. If you wish please rise for the invocation given by Pastor Jacob Bester of the Bernstor Presbyterian Church in Punnagora followed by the Pledge of Allegiance is the pastor present. He is not. So I will do the honors. Please bow your heads. Dear Heavenly Father, let us take a moment to come together in gratitude and reflection as we prepare to serve the people of Charlotte County. We honor the dedication of our military personnel, first responders, and all those who protect and serve our community. As we move forward with today's agenda, may we be guided by wisdom and integrity. Help us make balanced decisions and promote good governance. May we continue to protect our community and safeguard its future for generations to come. As we strive to represent our citizens to the best of our ability, in your name we pray, amen. Amen. I have pleasure allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Next we have changes to the agenda, Mr. Flores. All right. thank you, Mr. Chair, commissioners. We have three items today. The first is change number one to item F1. We updated the wording, the dollar amount, and then added two attachments. Change number two to R1, added the presentation, that's for the 2025 upcoming hurricane season. then deletion number one to item L1. Is there any further discussion? Any opposition to the motion? That passes unanimously. Move the proclamation. We have motion to move the proclamations any further discussion any opposition to the motion passes commissioner Constance you have the honors and that will be followed by employee recognition Thank you, Mr All right. We have five that we read this morning and there's another I think five that are registered. The first one is with regard to our artists of the month. Whereas the Visual Arts Center activities in Charlotte County make a significant contribution to cultural expression in our county as well as promote the economic vitality of the community through job creation, sales tax revenue, and aesthetic enjoyment. And whereas the Visual Arts Center of Charlotte County has charged with the responsibility of developing programs that support all artists performing music and visual arts. And in January 24, the Visual Arts Center developed the artist of the month program to support and recognize achievement by local visual artists. And whereas by providing works of art to be displayed in public locations throughout the county, these artists generally enhance our opportunity to enjoy their creativity. And whereas the Board of County Commissioners supports the visual arts center in its mission of support and recognition of these local visual artists embodied in the artists of the month program therefore, we have proclaimed that the month of May and June 2025 shall be known in all Charlotte County as Paulette Morris' visual artist of the month. Is she here? Come forward. Thank you. And her works have been displayed in our lobby, so everybody who's here can enjoy that. Our next proclamation is regarding emergency medical services week. Whereas emergency medical services are a vital public service and the members of the emergency medical services team are ready to provide life saving care to those in need 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And whereas access to quality emergency care dramatically improves the survival and recovery rate of those experienced experiencing sudden illness or injury. And whereas emergency medical services have grown to fill a gap by providing important out of hospital care, including preventative medicine, follow-up care, and access to telemedicine. And whereas the emergency medical services system consists of first responders, emergency medical technicians, paramedics, emergency medical dispatchers, firefighters, police officers, educators, administrators, pre-hospital nurses, emergency nurses, emergency physicians, trained members of the public and other out of hospital medical care providers. And whereas the members of the emergency Medical Services teams, whether career volunteer engage in thousands of hours of specialized training and continuing education to enhance their life-saving skills, now therefore be proclaimed that the week of May 18, 2024, May 18 through 2024 of 2025, she'll be known in all of Charlotte County as emergency medical services week. And I forgot my paper up there. But we have all these gentlemen. Do you want to send them up here? Yeah. Something tells me he was violent told. I can tell by the activity over here. Thank you, Commissioner. Yeah, we appreciate all the sacrifice you guys do. I see you in the hospital all the time. And we're going to take a big picture out in the lobby so that's after we're done here. Okay, next proclamation. This one is actually with administration so I have a copy here to read this deals with family abduction awareness. Whereas this day is dedicated to raising awareness for those impacted by family abduction, a crisis that inflicts profound emotional and psychological trauma on abducted children, their left behind parents and extended families, and presents an opportunity to combat such abductions, reunite missing children with their families, and honor those who safeguard our most vulnerable by strengthening community prevention efforts. And whereas a family abduction occurs when a child is taken, wrongfully retained, or concealed by a parent or family member, thereby denying another their right to custody or visitation, even in situations with unclear or absent court orders, and is even often driven by personal grievances toward the left behind parent, the legal system, or other circumstances. And whereas although non-family abductions account for only 1% of missing children reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, family abductions make up a significantly larger portion. And whereas, Schraulekinder remains steadfast in its vigilance against the dangers facing our children, recognizing family abduction as a serious crime, that law enforcement must address as severe child abuse rather than a treat as a minor infraction. And whereas it is imperative that the law enforcement agencies maintain written protocols outlining prompt actions and procedures to address family abduction cases thereby ensuring that children remain with their lawful custodians and that court orders are verified to safeguard public safety. Now therefore be it proclaimed that the month of May 2025, shall be known in all of Shala County as family abduction awareness month. Pest newly adopted this 13th day of May. And we have, we're going to send this to Chris Felder. Okay, thank you. This next proclamation addresses our water. Whereas safe, clean and sustainable water resources are essential to Florida's environment, economy, citizens, and visitors. And although Florida's water supplier finite the state's population and need for water, resources continues to increase. And whereas water reuse provides a means for conserving and augmenting Florida's precious water resources, and Florida has risen to the nation to be the national leader in water reuse, reusing 900 million gallons of reclaimed water per day, approximately 55% of the wastewater treated to conserve fresh water supplies and recharge our fresh water resources. And whereas, Florida's permitted reuse capacity is more than 1.5 billion gallons per day, approximately 60% of Florida's total permitted capacity. And whereas Charlotte County is joined the Water Reuse Florida, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the South Florida Water Management District, and the Southwest Florida Water Management District in encouraging and promoting water reuse and conservation. And whereas Charlotte County is implemented, a water reuse program and encourages efficient and effective use of reclaimed water. Now, therefore, we proclaim that the week of May 18th through May 24th, she'll be known in all of Charlotte County as Florida Water Reuse Week. And we have Dave Watson the United States Thank you. Our final proclamation to be read this morning as with regard to Rolling Thunder, Florida Chapter 5. Whereas Rolling Thunder is a diverse group of like-minded individuals committed to keeping POW-MIA awareness and veterans' rights issues in the forefront. And whereas their diversity forms from their members, young and old, male and female, veteran and non-veteran, biker and non-biker, they are a 501C-4 non-profit organization where everyone volunteers their time and effort because of their mission. And whereas their goal is to publicize the POWMII issue and to educate the public of the many American prisoners of war left behind after previous wars. And whereas they are committed to helping American veterans to help correct the past and protect future veterans from ever being left behind. And whereas their mission is shared by more than 90 rolling thunder chapters nationwide, and whereas the local Florida rolling thunder chapter was founded over 10 years ago and has over 40 members. Now therefore be a proclaim that May 25th, 2025 shall be known in all of Charlotte County as Rolling Thunder, Florida, Chapter 5 day. And we have Carl Steinoff and several others. Come on forward. Thank you. All right. commission. This is for our teammates that hit their milestones of years of service in the month of April. So I appreciate them for their dedication and thank you for recognizing them. So turn it over to Jody from HR. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. We'll begin with five years of service from community development, Thomas Finnady III. From utilities, Philip Zoller. From budget administrative services, Jordan Silver. Also budget administrative services, Michael Gallagher. Michael Gallagher. With ten years of service from Public Works, Roland Snipes. With twenty years of service from Community Services, Mark Solomon. From tourism, Sean Dority. And from Utility, Selena Frost. I'd like to mention those who are unable to be here today from utilities with five years of service, Jared Murray, also from utilities, Rudy Burry, from public safety, David Chin, Logan Massey, and Matthew Chica Rico. And with 20 years of service from public works, John Neesavik. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, next we're going to move on to public input, agenda items only. Anybody wishing to address the board during this portion of the meeting must fill out a card, state their name for the record and state which agenda item or items will be addressed. Remark shall be limited to three minutes and shall be addressed to the commission as a body and not to individual members. I have one speaking card, Mr. Jeff Lustig. The report was about the Affordable Housing Act. I attended the meeting there and it was very interesting as we're using this process of the community land trust to get properties land that we can build upon. The question that I had and the question I think that the people at the meeting has is is what do you want to accomplish? Do you want to accomplish a rental type situation? Because what they're doing right now is is they're only selling the property to the Individual who is purchasing it at a reduced rate and keeping land in a land trust. It requires a very delicate balance of oversight to maintain the levels that you want to achieve economically speaking. Do we want to have these houses be held in perpetuity for the person who's paying off the mortgage so that they can build intergenerational wealth? Which is one of the main factors of owning a home. If you don't actually own the home and you don't own the land, and you're not allowed to pass it down to the other individual, except on certain circumstances, isn't it just better to scrap all that and just do rentals? And do very long-term rentals. The point that people put land in the community trust is to preserve it as it is. Not, I mean, whatever their requirements are. I just think it's a very confusing model to use and what the purpose that we want to achieve. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anybody wishing to speak on agenda items only, please come forward, you'll have three minutes. Agenda items only. There will be a section for public input on any county-related matter, but this is for agenda items only. Okay, seeing nobody come forward, we'll move on to consent. Commissioner Deutsch. Mr. Chuwaks. F17. F17. Commissioner Constance. Just checking. That's the real estate. Yeah, I want to talk about that too. Thank you. And then D1. Just real quick. D1. And Commissioner Dordy. Nothing. I have nothing. Move the balance. Second. Motion to second to move the balance of the consent. Is there any further discussion? Any opposition to the motion? Okay. That passes unanimously. F-17, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I asked this to be full because, and I've had some conversation with the administration and Mr. Kippa, I'm having a hard time swallowing a 55% increase and I tried to walk through and understand where we were and we were at $14.77 to square foot, which is significantly less as noted. But I just, I can't logically wrap my head around this. I need to walk through it. I understand the cost of moving. I understand the cost of build out. When I ask, you know, what changed there? They made some improvements, which I call maintenance. Not improvements for the tenants benefit, but maintenance. And so I'm having a hard time justifying this 55% increase, even knowing the other comments I made. So Mr. Kipling, can you kind of walk us through from the 2017 signing of the contract, how it stepped up each year and why this junk right now? Yes, sir. Stephen Kippe, roll state services for the record. In 2017, we entered into a three-year lease with two one-year options. All of those leases had a 3% annual increase. And in 2022, we did an addendum to that lease with a three-year flat lease with no options with the same thing 3% increase. Bringing us to today where we are as Commissioner stated, 1477 square foot. Since the the prior addendum was done there has been a new owner of the building who has made improvements New roof impact windows things of that nature however, like you say they do benefit the owner more so than the tenants initially However in October we did reach out to them but reach out to the sheriff as far as far as okay, our lease is coming up, what do we want to do? At that time is when they told us what the rate would be. We started looking at other options, staying within the geographical boundaries, and we were finding the same size footprints at the same rate or higher in that boundary. Most of those had inferior and needed required build out, and did not have the built-in evidence rooms in my weapon storage rooms as well. I appreciate that clarification. I think it's important that the public understand. and did not have the built-in evidence rooms and my weapon storage rooms as well. I appreciate that clarification. I think it's important that the public understand where we are. I also know, and I'm gonna, before actually, before I make further comment, I'm gonna let Commissioner Constance weigh in before I make my other comments. Yeah, Mr. Director. Yeah, no, I just, I'm appreciative of the fact that you brought it forward, because I saw the same thing. We were paying significantly less. You know, six years ago, Mr. Kippit has gone through the whole thing. So yeah, I just jumped out the same way it did to you. So I think it's good that we're talking about it. I think I'm gonna have to probably support it because, you know, trying to make everybody jump around hopefully this is the very last lease because we're going to have a new building and then we're going to have ownership so we're going to have the word about that. I'm going to take a tool out of your box. This is going to be the last lease. Look, I don't think we have any other option and then to accept this and approve it. And I think that the new owners know that. And I'm going to remember that for a long, long time. But I do want to make sure we did want to make sure we had this conversation because I do want staff to understand it is a goal now to make certain we never have to sign another extension for this property. They had a good tenant, a very punctual tenant, a very adding a lot of amenities, tenants with safety and those types of things. And I think that this is unfortunate, but I'll move approval of the item. Second. We have motion in second to move F-17. Is there any further discussion? Reluctantly. Any opposition to the motion? Hearing none, passes unanimously. Thank you, sir. Do you want? Do you want? Yes, sir. Do you want us to scheduling change? And I was able to make adjustments to keep things basically exactly where they are. My only request is that we move the meeting May 20th to 1pm, and I believe all of our schedules will allow that. So just earning that transportation quarterly local transportation meeting an hour earlier. So that's my motion. Second. Okay. We have motion a second to adjust the schedule to one hour earlier on the transportation. From May 20th and keep October and then leave, you know, I called both of them, but leave the October 21st. This meant to say May 21st, right, in our published agenda, it says October. So, Mono, make sure. So A would read, local transportation meeting, quarterly on May 20th at 1 PM, and And then B would read quarterly local infrastructure meeting on May 21st at. Hang on. Or these just, yeah, these just transfer. B would stay the same. They would stay the same. Got it. Okay. Thank you. I'm thinking about the fact that Thursday we have infrastructure, but this is just dealing with transportation. So we'll leave be where it is. That's the motion. Thank you. And Commissioner Dordy, you had a comment? No, I was just trying to help clarify. Yeah, okay. Okay. Just to comment. This gives me the opportunity to speak about last week when I wasn't here. I had personal business for my company that I needed to take care of, and so I was not able to attend. And typically I look at I look at calendars and I try not to move people around. I have no problem accommodating this because I'm available quite frankly. But I do know that Tuesdays are meeting days and I try not to have to utilize those days. I did have to fly on a Wednesday last week and I apologize for missing that. But I do have opportunity to go back and watch that which is good and so I appreciate that and I just wanted to bring that up because I know that and I actually appreciate there was some concerns bill okay where is it and I do appreciate that it means a lot to me and I'll try to make sure that I clarify with the team here a little more of front about why I'm not gonna be around certain occasions. And typically if I fly on a Tuesday it's because it's an echo. So, or something else but usually an echo. So anyway, I'll support the item today and just wanna say that, thank you sir. Yeah, appreciate the comments. I think we all need to be respectful of the schedule. And it's not just the five of us. It's staff. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts. When we change one piece of the puzzle, it kind of scrambles everything up. And it becomes an issue. I mean, obviously, when we sign up for this job, I know the schedule. I'm front loaded on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays. I'm walling with with the county because that's that's the go time right and then Thursday Fridays I'm a little bit more open for my constituent stuff, but that's just the way the schedule goes, we understand it. So I appreciate everybody being respectful of every one another's time. So we have motion to second, move D1 with the change. Is there any further discussion? Any opposition to the motion? Hearing none passes unanimously. Okay, gentlemen, that brings us to the regular agenda. The Hurricane Update, Mr. Fuller. You are recognized, sir. Good morning, commissioners. Patrick Fuller, Sean County Merd's measure. There was one moment. I can't believe you're here again to talk about hurricanes. It comes about quickly. Yes, it does. Mr. Chairman, this is not a hurricane update on the past hurricanes. This is getting ready for the next round. Yes. There we go. Well, unfortunately, it is promised rather quickly. a little a little less than three weeks out from the start. The official start of the 2025 Atlantic Hurricane season. And we'll go through some of the outlooks that the, what we experienced in the past and what we're looking at going forward, commissioners. The official hurricane season is from June 1st to November 30th of each year. Although the National Hurricane Center does start issuing tropical advisories beginning May 15th. This is a change over the last three or four years. Because there is the possible that we receive some tropical weather, some tropical cyclone activity earlier than June 1st. In fact, it can happen really any time of the year. It's just most likely during the June 1st, June 30th time period. Right now, we are in a neutral Enzo that's El Nino Southern Oscillation. Essentially last year, we're in La NiƱa, which creates conditions that are more favorable for hurricane development. Primarily, lack of winds that could inhibit some growth of those systems and development of those systems. Right now we're in neutral. El Nino tends to inhibit development. Neutral doesn't do much. In fact, there are many years there are just as active as Aloniniya during a neutral season. We may see a shift back to Aloniniya or fall on El Nino at some point, but right now the forecast looks like over the next several months at least we will will be in a neutral condition. Numerous atmospheric conditions and environmental conditions certainly apply to what we could foresee in the hurricane season. Many of you may have seen that there's several news outlets that are indicating that the temperatures in the main development region of the Atlantic are several degrees less than they were this time last year. Last year they're incredibly hot. Is a good sign, but we need to keep in mind that the Gulf of Mexico were those storms that generally impact us. It's still very warm. There are no seaharen winds, or I'm sorry, seaharen dust plumes right now or any other inhibiting factors. So what we need to keep in mind that these conditions can change pretty rapidly, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes not. So it's a dynamic year, it's a six-month season, conditions to change rather rapidly. Speaking of rapidly, I think we've seen over the last several years and you see in that graphic up on the top right, those are the major hurricane landfalls on the Gulf Coast of the United States since 2017. We had a couple more added this past year. We're seeing more of these intense storms make Lampalls, especially in our area of the Gulf region, that is due to rapid intensification. This is when you see several categories increase in intensity over a very small period of time. In fact, several of these storms, you only see one there that is indicated as a category five that was Michael in 2018. Several of these storms were category five intensity but lost some level of intensity prior to landfall. Not a happy story but something we need to pay attention to, the reality of living on the goal. But the message, the overriding message really is always going to be the same. It just takes that one storm to make it a very busy year, very damaging year for us here locally. So we hope our residents are preparing the same way each and every year, regardless of what that outlook is. I don't love sharing the seasonal predictions because of that last message that it only takes one. But in case you're wondering, the seasonal average remains of the last 30 years, at almost 14 and a half, name storms per year was seven, a little more than seven, developing into hurricanes, and a little more than three major hurricanes. If you remember last year, the prediction was 23 name storms. We didn't see that level of activity, although that would have been a hyperactive year, but it was still, and we all are contested, it would have been incredibly busy year for us, regardless. Those are the predictions for at least three of the predicting bodies out there. Calvary State has generally looked at as the climatological experts, and they're putting that number at 17 name storms, nine of which developing into hurricanes for major hurricanes. I want to go back to the last slide real quick. This is from Storm Geo, our subscription-based meteorological services service. And they indicate some potential tracks. This doesn't change much from year to year. Essentially, if we're in the southeast United States, touching either the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf, you stand a chance of being impacted by a storm. Just to review, our four primary general population shelters remain the same. Although we, two of those were not usable during the Hurricane Milton incident, do the potential storm service, those being liberty and Neil Armstrong Elementary School, because they are on the lower end of the sea evacuation zone. But we were able to use Kingsway Elementary and Harold Avenue, as well as some of the facilities out in the Babcock Ranch. And those are still available to us. We coordinate with both public schools and our friends out in the Babcock and the state of Florida for use of facilities if the need arises. So we go through our normal preseason activities in each and every storm season. We have lessons learned and we refine what we do, but first and foremost, as always looking after our vulnerable populations due to the demographics of our community, we do have a number of our residents who register and qualify for the special needs registry. By statute, these are the individuals who are either electrically dependent upon medical devices or have a cognitive impairment or disability. Right now, as it stands, as of yesterday, we have 505 individuals registered on that registry. We scrub this each and every year. We make contact with them. Let them know what we expect of, they should expect of us, what we should expect of them should be faced with tropical cyclone. Additionally, our statutory requirement of reviewing the healthcare plans of several ACA regulated facilities to include hospitals aimed to our surgery centers, adult daycares, assisted facilities, and skilled nursing facilities. Those plans are reviewed annually and ensure that their comprehensive emergency management plans include all those provisions that they need going into every hurricane season. Understanding that execute, having a plan is one thing and executing is another. We try to create that dialogue so that they understand the expectation that their patients have the, all the protections that they have could possibly have. Additionally, this is something we've done over the last several years. We have sit-down meetings by facility type. Having a further dialogue to really get to know the individuals, we don't want to be trading business cards in the midst of an event. We need to have a dialogue going into hurricane season each and every year with our, not only those ACCA regulated facilities, but facilities like our dialysis centers. So we know their capabilities, they know our capabilities, they know what level of reach back they have to the emergency operation center so that we ensure that our residents have the services, the care that they need before during after storm. Training this is one of those things that we certainly review each and every year, coming out of this last season with the incorporation of additional county employees and the mass care mission. We identified the need for enhanced training, additional trainings, and we're doing that currently. We've had our first shelter training this past week, primarily focusing on community services staff, but we'll be having as many of those trains as need be to ensure that our county employees, if the need is there, then they're called upon that they can serve that, whether that's a shelter or a point of distribution, you name it, we want to ensure that they have the tools they need so they can execute the mission as necessary. Shelter logistics each and every year we go through and do a dry run of moving our shelter supplies to at least one of the locations knowing that our mobilization crew has the process down and you know we stopwatch it they know exactly how long it takes to mobilize get things in place and get a shelter operational. As have become pretty infamous our EOC exercises that will be June, we try to make these challenging. We try to make them realistic. We try not to tell the future, but unfortunately those scenarios do have similarities to events we've experienced afterwards. This year, this is taking place mid-June, and we're really hoping to test the new folks who have not worked on the EOC environment to try to increase that bench deeper and deeper every year because we know the cumulative effect of not just one activation but multiple activations on our staff and want to be able to have the ability to rotate people in and out of the emergency operation center as well as the other functions that include disaster response in recovery. Are you going to expose the new people to the dad jokes? Absolutely. Okay. You got to break them in on this. Mr. Chairman, that's part of the suffering of a campaign for disaster event. Yeah. Listening to Patrick's dad jokes. Oh. Commissioner Constance. Yeah. Commissioner Constance. Part of the emotional stress of the trick. Patrick, just question if we're doing anything different this year with regard to asking for sort of a pre-authorization of like a DMAT team for Punnogorda, because we don't. We won't have a hospital. And even if that hospital Were somehow not affected and were able to stay open through the storm It's not there now and so worrying about being cut off to the north or all the possible Extra needs that will have that we just We need to have something pre planned in my opinion where they're already aware that they're going to drop something in punnabor. If we hit a certain level, it's already ready to go. Absolutely, Commissioner. In fact, that's one of the next, the FDM logistics bullet. We had a preseason meeting with the Florida Division of Emergency Logistics section. It was before that that we filled out a survey. I completed aggressively indicated the things that we would need in the event of a catastrophic event. With the caveat that we don't anticipate that each and every storm that may, we may encounter this year asking for all these things. But we gave them a heads up. One of those things was increased medical support due to our impaired medical infrastructure with the Pondagora Hospital. We have pre-identified locations for those types of operations, both both sides of the river, east, west, south, county, mid-county, and even out east. Primarily we try to use county-owned facilities because we can speak for those, we have access to those, but working through real estate services, we're also trying to build our inventory of privately owned locations that we can have an agreement in place and say going into event, we need this much square footage of heartball surface for these types of activities, whether that's a pod, a DMAT operation, a mobile clinic. We have those identified, the states aware of those locations and should be as seamless as disaster operations can be when it comes to the logistical support from the state. Yeah, one site which is going to be available for at least the next few years and it's relatively high and dry is the old decommissioned F.Rest area that's going to become a truck parking area in 29 or what. So we have a few years out but that's a really great location to put a bunch of medical tents and it's nice and centrally located to a lot of areas there. Certainly, and that old rust application because of a strategic location to the interstate Jones loop and Piper Road and so forth, it comes in high demand. A lot of people out we've seen after disasters, stakeholders want to use that and we try to coordinate that through our amazing Mr. Kippah from real estate services is the air traffic controller when it comes to property within the county. We've really enhanced our coordination with that. Very good. Thank you. That is a great comment. He's the air traffic controller of properties. That is really good. Commissioner Dordy. Yeah, just a question. I guess I'm familiar with the private Surgery Centers here in Mid County but what do we have South County none? None the number where there was one Just west of the hospital that was the commission the mannings had a And that that's been defunct for at least 10 or 15 years. It's been repurposed as Something else, but it's not John Steve Manning. I remember yeah, so there really aren't any That I can really think yeah, so that that is an issue Thank you mission Deutsche For point of information. We're still under a couple of states of emergency right now. How many is it two or three? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The other item there under exercises, no notice exercises. For the first time, I went ahead and to the shittaker of the emergency management staff did a no notice exercise in the emergency operations center. Very often, we are the controllers of guiding exercise participants through the EOC exercise. This time I wanted to focus just on emergency management staff because we don't necessarily get to play very often. So we got to play. This was last week, ran them through just the paces of the standard products that we'd had to produce. This used to be done at the Division of Emergency Management when Craig Fugate was the director up there. He used to call them Thunderbolts. I'm gonna come up with some of the catchy name, But we're going to try to do these regularly. It provides my staff, you know, not that they haven't had enough practice in real world events, but just to keep us sharp in our game and what we do to manage the emergency operations. We are additionally able to do our stakeholder meetings. This has become even more focused. Now that we're expanding the recovery and resiliency effort, We're meeting individually with not just our county departments, but our other stakeholders in the county to include the City of the School of Sheriff's Office to ensure that we know their capabilities again going into the season. Do they have any concerns? Is there anything we need to be prepared for mission wise and also how to craft our communication message to our general public before, during an after after an event. Shelter supply replenishment, unfortunately, last year, you experienced when you opened up shelters, you experienced shrinkage of not only consumable items, but what should be durable items, just because of the nature of having several hundred, if not thousand people in a facility, things become broken, we have to make those replacements, those that took place earlier this year. We do contract an MOU review, we have a number of things that are contracted to include generators and the use of linens and medical supplies for a special needs shelter, oxygen, all that has been done. Again, our recovery and resiliency effort, really tying it into not just the response phase, but this is a continuum of preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation, and trying to tie it all together, working very closely with our stakeholders to do that and gain ground in that regard. We have ongoing WebEOC training. I don't know if it was the extreme activity we had last year, but we had more people sign up for training this year than we have in any year that I can recall. And the WebEOC as a reminder is that software platform that we use for mission management, situational awareness that is also what the state uses. We have our local instance and we interface with the states as well. Last year was for the first time we actually deployed what we call information hubs. This was an eintn takeaway item. When we lost connectivity to all things digital, we had to go back to analog methods and based off of the feedback from numerous participants in Hurricane e-n's response, we came up with the idea of information hubs. These are static locations at our rec centers and libraries. They're the old school newspaper dispenser machines where we have printed materials at least to begin with. Over time, more resources may be placed at these locations in the form of limited pot operations, perhaps a Wi-Fi hotspot, but at the very least our residents, we're trying to get this message across. If you lose all connectivity, you should know where your libraries and rec centers are. You can at the very least get a printed off piece of paper that tells you, hey, there's pod operations here, there's feeding operation at these locations. Here's the number you need to call if you have the ability to to get FEMA assistance or the call center. It's that singular analog lifeline that it worked well. We're gonna refine that process, but we'll continue to keep that in our toolbox going forward. In addition to having those printed materials at the ready for our field crews, our first responders, our national guard partners, so that as they engage with our public, they have the ability to share critical information with them as well. Elevate Florida is that program that came about this year. It's administered by the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and it's still in its very early stages. The application deadline was April 11th, but we did a lot to try to push this over charcoal cares and through social media. This is the program that uses mitigation funding from the federal government to either elevate an existing structure, demolish and rebuild to higher elevation structures, purchase property that would then be used as green space and a perpetuity or mitigated against some other storm related hazard. I'm proud to say Charlotte County was the third highest number of applicants behind Pinellas and Lee County. Pinellas outpaced everybody with several thousand. We had 1300 I believe should have that number with me. But we made our residents aware of this program. They're not going to be able to serve all the applications. There's just not enough funding out there. But the Division of Emergency Management hopefully will be able to make some gains to reduce the vulnerability of some of our residents' homes to not only storm surge in floods, but there is also wind mitigation they can do as well. Co-AD activities, this is our community organization's active in disasters. This is certainly matured and developed over the years. At the beginning of the pandemic, they broke into work groups and started tackling some of the needs of our community. The unmet needs that were out there, whether that was feeding or information or childcare. It's since morphed over our many storms and it's really become a resource. It's clear that government isn't the answer to everybody's problems at all times. We need our community organizations to work together to try to address on met needs cooperatively and the co-add services that we had a kickoff meeting. There's a board who's steering the activities, but there's great participation amongst the nonprofits and community organizations, civic organizations within Charlotte County. They've divvied up into individual work groups focusing on specific tasks, but I think they're a great resource in becoming only better each and every year. We'll continue to look to them and partner with them. Vonable populations, you know, I mentioned our special needs registry, but there's individuals that either don't qualify or qualify in special needs registry and the special needs shelter is only one of their need. Because of vulnerable populations and how they are disproportionately are more impacted by disasters, partnering with human services and they're really taking the lead on a lot of this is a program that we're rolling out called safety networks. This is for those individuals right now beginning with the the clients of the human services department who will receive levels of training and preparedness. I think there's some grant funding available to provide them with a basic emergency kit, but really doing what we can to educate them on disaster preparedness, try to link them up with other people in the community so that they're not going through disasters alone and hopefully reducing some level of vulnerability. Human Services is making great strides in that program and we're excited about that. The last thing I wanted to really highlight and I do this each and every year is outreach. It's that public education piece that's so incredibly important. I think we've seen through the Metro forecasting briefings, the rapid increase in population and every number I see tick up on that population total is potentially someone who's never been through a hurricane before. Getting out to those folks, not only are our brand new residents but a long-term residents who maybe mistakenly think they've seen the worst hurricane that's possible. And unfortunately, every storm is very, very unique. And I'll get into that in a little more detail. But educating our residents, getting that base level of knowledge on tropical weather preparedness, but also getting our brand new residents somewhat acclimated to the idea of a six-month hurricane season where they need to be paying attention and prepared to ensure they put themselves in the best place possible for recovery. So some of that messaging beforehand, it doesn't change drastically from year to year, understanding their risk. The very colorful map that we always point to is our storm surge, evacuation zone map. Southwest Florida has the unfortunate designation of being probably the most vulnerable to storm surge along the entirety of the Gulf Coast. And with that probably the entire country, the Atlantic Coast has a less of a vulnerability to storm search because of the depth of the continental shelf. Because of that, it is incredibly important our residents understand that you, if you live in Charlotte County, you almost assuredly are in an evacuation zone. We, for the first time in any of our histories, we saw what storm surge truly looks like in the 24 hurricane season, but what's also important to recognize is that was not extreme storm surge. That was probably moderate if you had to put a title to it. We could have seen much worse and it's that type of thing that you can't survive. You know storm surge is what takes lives. It's 90% of fatalities associated with the direct direct fatalities from storms. It's associated with water you know about 80% of that is storm surge. So getting our residents to understand that when an evacuation is called it is because you potentially are in a life-threatening situation and you need to leave that location. So understanding their risk by knowing their storm surge evacuation zone. Also, how old is your home? What building coves a build to? We almost always evacuate four water in the form of storm surge, but mobile homes, older homes that don't meet building code, current building code, those can be susceptible to wind events. So they need to understand their home, they know their home better than any of us will. If they have concerns with the worthiness of their home against wind events, they need to pay close attention to these storms. Making a plan, detailing that plan out, where are they going to go when they're told to evacuate, really harping on the message that our residents don't have to travel to Tennessee, they don't have to travel to Georgia, they don't have to necessarily travel to Orlando. They can get out of the most extreme life-threatening conditions by traveling tens of miles, not hundreds. You travel hundreds of miles, you run the risk of putting yourself on clogged roadways with limited gasoline supplies or if they're electric vehicles, limited ability to charge your vehicles. You're better off finding a location, whether that's a friend or family members home within tens of miles, a hotel if you can find one, or a last resort, one of our shelters. Shelters are there, but we want our residents to look at those as lifeboats. They're not the ideal location, but if you have no other options, they're absolutely there for their protection. Building that kit, there hasn't been to date, and I don't anticipate one, a sales tax holiday this year, but now is the time. Build your kits, those non-perishable food items. You can over time slowly build up what we say five to seven days worth of supply of those foods. There's things like flashlights. We have a very extensive list that's here as part of our disaster guide, where you don't have to do much thinking. Just slowly check off those items as we get further into hurricane season. And I promise the accumulative effect that we felt last year is only going to be made worse when we're facing a storm and really one of the best ways to alleviate some of that stress going into hurricane season is doing everything within your power to prepare for hurricane season. Knowing it's not going to be a stress free event, but reduce what burden you have. You don't want to be making decisions or trying to get supplies going into a, or be in within the cone of a storm, do it now. Staying informed, we do an amazing job here in Charlotte County with our social media and our regular communications. Our local media stays on top of weather events. We want our residents to not turn off the communication forms going into hurricane season. They need to stay attuned. Don't let a storm jump up on you and not be aware. Unfortunately, we do get those phone calls after each and every hurricane event saying, I just didn't know until my phone blew up with notifications. Well, you really do need to pay attention that at least in the six months of hurricane season, it's a dynamic situation. Please pay attention to what's out there as well as sign up for alert Charlotte That's our quickest way to reach out to our residents to let them know when they're at harm's way That is that a free system Notification system that is bred by the state of Florida They can sign up for phone call alerts text alerts email alerts one or all and they pick what they want to be notified on. So I can't plug that enough. Alert Charlotte is still a system that we rely upon and want our residents to register for them. Really hammering home the point that no two storms are like. We have the unfortunate designation as receiving probably the peak storm surge from the Hurricane Milton event, the official report from Milton indicated 10 feet minus out of key, and within the harbor around 5 to 8 feet. The trouble with that is everybody now thinks they had 10 feet of storm surge, and that's not the case. Everybody in the harbor might think they had 8 feet, and that's not the case for every location. It's different heights and different locations. We could have seen much higher amounts. 13 feet was possible at one point within the harbor. Residents need to take every storm individually and understand that those two events, Helena Milton or storm surge events, we didn't get much in the way of rainfall. We didn't get much in the way of wind. Some low end tropical storm and storm force winds. We've luckily, most of our storms have had really one hazard or two hazards that have accompanied those storms, whether that's our wind events from Charlie, Ian. Ian had rainfall, but we haven't had all three storm surge damaging winds and heavy rainfall. That is entirely possible, so I want to residents to understand, you know, not to be frightened of it, but just realize that every storm is different. You have to take into account the factors, pay close attention to what's being communicated to you and make the decisions based on the information you have. I really want to jump into the next slide regarding the during and after. If you are told to evacuate, it is incredibly important that you evacuate. Best case scenario is you move to a safer location and that hazard that we were concerned about being in your where your home is never came about the storm surge never materialized that's best case scenario. Worst case scenario you evacuated or sorry worst case scenario you didn't evacuate and that that hazard that storm surge took place. If they've made a decision not to evacuate, which I do not recommend anyone ever doing, if they're told to evacuate, they need to move. If they have not, obviously, the same thing, the same safety message that you have for tornadoes, go to a centralized room, away from windows, don't go outdoors, even if it's the eye of the storm. If you're in an area that you were told to evacuate to not and you have rising waters, go to the highest level of that home possible. This is a situation I hope none of our residents encounter, but it's a reality. If you've made that decision, that personal decision not to evacuate, you're putting your life in risk, you need to move higher. Post storm safety, unfortunately, indirect fatalities and injuries always outpace the direct fatalities and injuries. You need to move higher. Post storm safety, unfortunately indirect fatalities and injuries always outpace the direct fatalities and injuries associated with storms. And these are those unsafe conditions after a storm. If you've done the things you need to do to be on your own for five to seven days after a storm, you shouldn't have the need to go out on the roadways, you shouldn't have the need to get out and go disaster sightseeing. But if you are in unsafe conditions, you need to be aware. You shouldn't be wandering through flood waters. Downed power lines very likely could be energized. If you're operating a generator, unfortunately people lose their lives to improper use of generators on a regular basis after these storms. Operate safely, there's a number of those tips and safety considerations within our disaster guide. We're also sending that information out post-storm. But I hate for someone to have made it through a storm, and then unfortunately become very injured or potentially lose their life because they didn't operate safely after an event. Really want to get that across to our residents. And really planning for disruptions, these events, they come with power outages, they come with those commodities like our stores, our grocery stores, our big box stores, not being available, do the things you can do now to alleviate and to plan for those disruptions afterwards. And you're gonna be better off after a storm. With that ends my presentation. I'm open to any questions. Commissioner, it's your ex. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Patrick. Thank you for the presentation. Couple of things, the information that we put out at the libraries and the rec centers, do we have dates on those as we put them out so that people know this is current information? Is that? Yes, they're part of the template is the date and as soon as another one is printed on the next calendar day, they remove all the old ones. So that's the idea. It's removing the old ones so that they don't have maybe stale information that could be distributed in there's no longer relevant. I assume that was a case, but I wanted to make sure because I know I get stuff sometimes from various entities and there's no date on it. So I don't know if it's yesterday or yesterday. So I appreciate that. The Elevate Florida program, I know they had like $450 million, I believe it was, it was sent down from the federal government for that. But what I understand is I've looked at a couple of these. the houses some of the people that are applying their houses really in my opinion don't qualify because they are so old that you have to do everything to bring them up to current code not just elevate them. Do you think we'll sift through some of those and some of those will be eliminated from the list? I think that's entirely possible the eligibility criteria and the engineering review is done at the state level. I fully anticipate there being ones that they won't pass the benefit cost analysis and they'll deem them in eligible. All right. And last thing, for this board, last ditch scenario is Commissioner Dorities' house is in a very high and dry dry area and I can share that address with if you don't know it Elevation 27.23 I just checked it 10.5 On our flood maps my house happens to be in a green zone little pocket a green Commissioner Constance. Thank you. Yeah great for station Patrick. The disaster supply checklist is that federally created or state created? What's the source on that? The one that's within our guide is created and we used several examples to put it together. We created it locally. There's also ones out there at Ready.gov and that American across. But the one you showed us today that's ours. Yes it, it's really comprehensive. I think it's great. And then the other question is, you know, where is, what's the status of first met? I know that's not for the public to use, but is that fully operational in Florida now? Where are we at this point? So first net being the priority cell and data service that's available to first responders and emergency management types. We have a cash of phones here within the county. We've used them after several events. The idea being that there's more reliability and the priority service over other cell phone traffic. 18T received the federal contract for that system and the state contract. And the idea was they would build out specific infrastructure for first net. I don't believe that infrastructure is completed in entirety, but what they do is piggyback off of existing infrastructure. So it's worked well in other storms. I know I have a first net phone. I had great service within the EOC because we have boosters and some other things. I provided that to someone in the field after Ian and it was really the only means of communication that they had during that event for the first several days or week maybe. So the infrastructure is there, it's not the specific infrastructure for the AT&T service, but they're able to piggyback off of the other carriers microwave towers. So here's a thought because I know this this occurs towers go down these cell providers have the ability microwave towers. Okay, so here's a thought because I know this this occurs. Towers go down. These cell providers have the ability to fly drone pods. They have the ability to put dirgable, you know, small dirgables. They get FAA approval and they bring them up. So are we are we talking to the providers in our county or regionally through DM and to say, okay, how are you providers? It's not necessarily us, but a storm hits. Verizon and AT&T, the big carriers, there's only really two or three networks out there, and everybody else piggybacks off, as you say, all the other smaller cell companies. But there should be a way to get something up in the air so that everybody's system is working here. Because it is so critically important for folks to be able to communicate, hey, I'm alive, or hey, I'm hurt. Or I'm having a medical issue. And if all the towers are down, we know landlines are a fraction of how people communicate. I mean 25 years ago when Charlie hit almost everybody had a landline than they did the next day. But again, you know, there's another issue. So I guess we need to be thinking and planning proactively on we're not going to have anything we currently have. So what are you big boys throwing up in the air because you have the resources to do it, and you can fly that stuff around for a week or two until things get back up to, and I just don't know that they're actually doing that. So where are we today in 2025? So we try to think of catastrophic events and the potential for complete loss of infrastructure. We have some internal redundancy that will allow us to operate, whether that's satellite phones, something called a pod runner, which allows for data and to voice in a mobile environment. But we also have a dialogue with Florida Division Emergency Management's Emergency Support Function 2, which is communications. They have the corporate representation of all the carriers in the Emergency Operations Center at the state level. We know some of the capabilities that they have for deployable assets, things like the cows or cello on wheels or colts. And I don't remember what that one stands for, but we know of that, but we also rely upon the state to be able to identify the emerging technologies, whether that's inflatables or whatever it might be. We provide them the need. They find the capability within the commercial care. Right, but when we, and I appreciate that, we have missions where we need that stuff. I'm talking about serving the general public. The storm hit with Ian and Comcast was nowhere to be seen for weeks and weeks and weeks and that was a real Strap on folks, you know some people had voice over internet phones. They didn't you know that was there so Again, I'm trying to I'm trying to push this forward a little bit for you to bring to your working group with the state and say listen Wherever it hits they need to know that it's upon them, you know, it's really health, welfare and safety. We're not talking about just, you know, calling your neighbor and hey, what are you doing? It's making sure that folks have an ability to communicate because we want our, you don't want them to suffer. We want to make sure that they get the services they need or get evacuated or whatever it is. I don't't know that as government, we have the ability to tell a private corporate carrier, hey, put something there. But if you bring them in on the front end, then you can say, who we talked about this? So I'm calling you now because we have a huge need here that you're aware of. I think this is the time to start doing those things. And we have built some of those with the common carriers, the Comcasts of the world. We incorporate them into the EOC, even if it's on a virtual basis to try to get those updates. I think the ground to be made up is really at the corporate level with the state and we'll continue that conversation. They do deploy resources. I know when it comes to cable internet, they're very often they have to wait for the power restoration crews to be done with those poles before they can restore their service. But that's just part of the equation. And again, I think I'm just thinking more about cell service. So somebody has the ability to power a device. I just want them to be able to communicate. And that's not, I don't know that it's that hard to do. Yeah, it's resources. It's going to cost them a little bit more money for that time frame. But again, having that dialogue now and setting to them, not only, hey, think of a plan, but show us the plan, show us. So we know what's coming. And then we can pick Callie up and say, hey, I don't see anything flying around. We need your help now. Thank you. Mr. Turex. Thank you, Mr. Turex. But I was just going to point out to the public. If you go on our website to Charlotte County, fl.gov, you go to our departments and then public safety to the emergency management page. The disaster guide is on there. It's extremely comprehensive. It's not just about hurricanes, but I really suggest that you go to that. That's where that list is to show you what to get. Make sure you have your kit prepared properly, but there's also a host of other information on there that's very pertinent to disasters, including shelter listings, emergency orders, New Year's zone, also how to sign up for your Lord Charlotte, and so on and so on. So I just wanted to point that out for the public that that access point is extremely important. Don't wait till we have a storm coming to access it and get ready. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Commissioner Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just an item I observed during the last events, you know, Haleen and Milton. There was some confusion with folks. They may know they're finished floor elevation Red in the red zone, orange zone. But when they heard the storm surge, they were equating that to an elevation versus the depth of water over the ground. So I think it'd be helpful to, again, you've done it. But to continually reinforce that to the public that, no, when you hear we're gonna have six or seven feet of storm surge, that's the depth of the water over the ground so it may be well above your finished floor all of it. Absolutely that's been a point that has been very confusing since the National Hurricane Center kind of changed how they communicate that. To be technical the data on their use is mean high high water mark and it's who knows what that is. So really when we say it could be 13 feet, it's 13 feet at high tide at the waterline and you know don't try to do the math in the moment. We're doing that for you is really the message. If we've told you to evacuate because there's potential for life-threatening storm search in your location. Even if your home is elevated above, you might be islanded. And you won't be able to get out, people won't be able to get to you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Question on the know your zone. I remember before I was a commissioner, there was a program where we color coded the stop signs. And I think we discontinued that. Is that the case or are we still marking those signs? We're in the process of replacing all those that were lost in the many thousands of stop signs that were lost after Ian. We're going to slightly change that design but they're going to be put back in place. Okay so it'll be color coded. Going back to one of your slides that talk about no two storms or like. I don't want people to get lulled a sleep to sleep because this past surge you know if you were on east of the Maaka you know or the Tom Adams Bridge for that matter you did not see the sand and the devastation that we saw on the beach side and a lot of people still to this day are like well it was really no big deal big deal. No, it was a big deal. So while no two storms are like, no two scopes of damages are like. And I still hear people today say, well, just north of us, they were able to repair their stuff and the beaches are open. But they don't realize that the damage that they may have taken and the damage we took were two different scopes of damage. I remember it was after Hurricane Charlie. I left my house. You literally could see the debris field and as I got into Northport, they had electricity, gas stations were open and I was literally just a few miles away. So you know you kind of scratch your head how could that possibly be? But that's how defined these eyes are and the windfields are depending on how wide the windfield is or how condensed and tight it is. And that can mean all the difference. I remember doing work after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 I moved to Miami and as you got closer it's like oh this is no big deal and I got the Pembroke Pines and I started getting down at the Cutler Ridge and you can just see some of the trees were bent you go another quarter mile some are fallen over then another quarter mile they're snapped it literally you can go by the quarter mile and see a defined wind field of damage and then you got into the into the mess and you started seeing trusses just like dominoes on the older homes, where the roofs got the integrity of the roof was damage and wind got in there and the plie would blew off. I mean, that's they were using staples to staple the plie wood on the roof. I mean, that was code, even in the 80s, you were allowed to use staples to staple the plywood on. So I would just remind people your correct no two storms are like and be you know after after Hurricane Milton it was just a big yard cleanup for me that was pretty much it. So you might say oh well wasn't a big deal. No,, it was a big deal. So it just depends where you are. And I have five gallon jugs of gas. I've already filled three of them up, and they're in my shed out. And if there's no storm, I just use them to cut the lawn for my mower, or I'll just put them in my car after the season's over. But I already started, because I did not. I waited. I thought I had plenty of time, but no, there never is enough time. So yeah, go to that kit, check. because I did not, I waited. You know, I thought I, I didn't, I thought I had plenty of time, but no, there never is enough time. So yeah, go to that kit, check the box, make sure you do everything you need to do, for sure. Any other questions on this item? Okay, thank you, sir. Thank you, John. We're gonna move on to item R2, primary public safety answering point, Task Force update and I have Mr. Flores here. He wanted to make a few comments on that. We also have some representatives from the city here. We have the two chiefs and also the city manager, Mr. Flores. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Commissioners, bringing back to you the item from our last meeting and it's just to pull together task force. You see the attachment, you know is fact finding. And I want to thank I know interim city manager Melissa Reichart's in the audience. I'll thank her for the coordination and getting this crafted for you and before you today. I know she ran it through the council and they were good. But again, fact finding, we want to bring to you some more information on two critical areas that we heard your comments, response times and any financial impacts to, you know, if we get there to that full consolidation effort. We'll certainly report back to the board. The attachment shows the proposed committee members made up of our staff, administrator city manager. the Charlotte County Sheriff, Puneagorta Police Chief, our fire director, our fire chief, public safety director, their Punnagorta Fire Chief, and then also a representative from the school superintendent or his designate. And then a couple things to get some more feedback from you. There was a 60 to 90 day timeline thrown out there, so I look for some comments related to that. And then also, I'll see the intention, as I think after the task force and any final decision, is I think it's valued everybody at the table, just to continue formally, I call it a stakeholder group, a user group, just to give everybody a voice at the table. And however the dispatch and the calls come in, however, they land, that everybody has a voice and makes sure that it's operating properly for everyone's intentions. I'm open any questions. Mr. Consuz. Thank you. Yeah, I think this list is spot on. It's very comprehensive. I think it checks all the boxes. I would think this is going to sort of become, I agree, a quarterly public safety working group. I think that's probably what I would envision that we should, you know, and they can meet more frequently if they need to. But I would hope they're going to meet very soon. And, you know, I don't, so I, it's hard for me to give you an answer on the 60 or 90 days but you know I'd like to maybe bring this back at the next meeting and find out what their schedule is because if the city's on board we're on board I'm assuming the school boards on board so that's everybody but let's get you know I don't want this to just kind of fade away bring it back in two weeks with a schedule of how they're going to move forward. And then I think I can land on a better window, but I think a couple meetings and they should have a lot of things ironed out and could even come, we could even get them back. Somebody representative with a progress report on, you know, you could do that and just tell us where you're at. Maybe, I mean, I would say under comments, but I think I'd like to have a more formal placement on the agenda until we get to a steady state. So that's my comment. Thanks, sir. Commissioner Dory. Take him, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, purpose looks good. Proposed committee members right on. I agree with Commissioner Constance. Very happy with that breakdown. Having subject matter experts available to help out with the group. That's a good idea. As far as timeline, sooner or the better for me. I mean, I think quite honestly, this is an ongoing entity. It doesn't need to solve every single detail right out of the blocks. You know, it needs to get the major items, in my opinion, identified, make sure we understand where we're going. But I got to believe within 30 days that can be accomplished. And I really do, I mean, if everybody knows of the grindstone, I think we really need to remember the sheriff needs to staff that center out there. So employees need to be a consideration. We talked about that the last minute. So we can't drag this on. But I really think we can get it wrapped up before we go on break for sure, Hector. So I mean, that would be my goal is that in no later than the first meeting in July or something like that, we're rocking and rolling on this thing. That's my opinion. Thank you. Mr. Trux. I agree with everything. And I especially agree with the timeline because my goal is before we go before August 1 I want to know what's going on. Doesn't mean we might not need more time and I understand that but I think we could have a very thorough update at that point in time and maybe even be completed with the first task And I also agree that a quarterly meeting is going to be important if not more for this group to stay in touch with one another to make certain that everything continues to work well in perpetuity. Forever. Yeah, my comments on this item. Well, first I'd like to thank the city and the city representatives. I watched their council meeting when it was presented to them and it seems like all five were positively wanted to move forward on this item. I also spoke to Superintendent VNLO at an event a couple of days ago, and he was really excited to be part of this process. Now, you're going to have to get together and form this working group and calendar everything, because now you've got a lot of moving parts with different people and have different responsibilities. So I think our hopes and I think what we indicated is that now that both agencies being, you know, the county and the city are on board, you need to commence that initial meeting and figure out the ground game and timing. I am in agreement though with the sheriff and the construction. If this does move forward and we have a joint meeting with the city when it's all said and done and we all agree if the outcome is to move forward, the sooner we know that the better because it could save everybody a lot of money and timing of things. So I had marked down 60 days but I really need to have your working group come back as Commissioner Constance said, give us feedback from the original meeting, float those times out. We certainly don't want it to be six months. We need to know sooner rather than later. So I'll look for a date after you get feedback from everybody in this working group. Also, one element that was really important, I talked about it at our board meeting when this came up on our last agenda. And I've heard from stakeholders on both sides, city and county. I think it's very, very important that as your group goes out and collects data that you also bring back to the city and the county, what these consolidated, what these consolidated, the framework of the consolidation in terms of dispute resolution. Cause you've got a lot of moving parts and a lot of different agencies involved, you know city fire, you know, and you've got the Elected things like that. So we need to have I need to know what these other Consolidated counties are doing to make that work where everybody has a seat at the table And there's no one person who's calling the shots because Because when I did speak to Highlands County and I asked for the pros and cons, that was the one big one. And they meet monthly. So I did speak to legal and I guess there are some models out there for resolution. I'd like Jeanette, maybe to Mrs. Nolten, to chime in on that. There is. It's chapter, Florida, such statues chapter 164, typically used in land use, but we used it with our dispute several years back with the water authority. And this is off the top of my head, but basically the dispute resolution process is it starts with the city manager, county manager, meeting and if they can't resolve it, then an elected official from each group. And if it doesn't get resolved at that point, then there's a joint public meeting between the boards. Yeah, and I think we need to look at models like that and what others are doing to come up with something that the working group is comfortable. So I'd like to see that come back. I know you're not making recommendations but you can at least present us with what other policies are that are out there that's a fact you know so and they're there to matter a public record because that is going to be important and I also want everybody to know that this working group by no means is a commitment to consolidate. This is a fact-finding mission you're gonna come back and we'll have that discussion and a joint meeting with the city. So I just wanted to make sure that that was clear to everybody. Okay, any other comments on this item? Commissioner Constance. Yes, thank you. Yeah, and I think it's important to... Again, I really would like this to come back to the next meeting, at least with a schedule. I don't think that's a tall order, so I'll put it on the agenda, even if it's under consent. So we can just see that everybody's on board and there's several meetings scheduled. And then based on that, we can have you come back with an update. I do want to highlight the fact that actually legally and help me out here. This is for entities, right? This is the county, the city, the school board and the sheriff. You know, we're asking him to do this. He made very clear. He doesn't specifically answer to us, but I think he understands. This is really important of this work, so I appreciate his cooperation. And those are the four groups that have to get together. So by, I have really high hopes about this. I'm really glad we're at this point now, which I think is a far better position than we were about a month and a half ago. So yeah, can't wait for the next meeting to find out how we're at. And then you'll hopefully have some initial feedback for us, Mr. Flores. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Any other comments on this item? Okay. Thank you for the update. All right. Mr. Chair, could we do the presentation from the consultant? Okay. Well, if there's no objection from the board, we can move that up. The tourism research results update. Yeah. Is there any objection from the board if we hold off on sales tax update? Okay. There's no objection. So we will move to the presentation agenda item T1, tourism research results update. And we have our 20 year tourism veteran. It feels like 20 years. Yeah. I didn't have gray hair when I started. Yeah, you know, I was about to say something about the gray hair. I had no gray hairs before I was a commissioner. And they're starting to pop. So, so you're starting to get more gray hair than I have. I just can point that out. I have two teenage years. And what I got 20 years on years on, how do I, why didn't have 10 years? Good morning commissioners for the record. Sean Dorit, tourism director. Today I have with me Joseph St. Germain with Downs and State Germain Research. He'll be doing a brief presentation on our tourism research results. He'll be focusing primarily on the final results from FY 24, but we'll also touch on the Q1 and Q2 from FY 25 to show where we stand there and then I'm going to hop in on the back of it and do a few slides on these sports chores and aspect of things. As you all may know down the St. Germain we've contracted with them since 2018 and you know through their efforts of collecting and compiling and helping us analyze the data it really allows for us to make some really data driven decisions on on how we want to deploy our marketing efforts throughout the years. So without further ado, I will give the floor to Joseph. Thank you very much. Again, Joseph Saint Germain, President of Downs and Saint Germain for the record. Thank you for having me today. I'm going to start with an overview of fiscal year 2024, as Sean mentioned, just so everyone on this panel knows. This data is collected throughout the year. We do over 2,000 surveys with visitors while they're in the market and then we use it to calculate these economic impact numbers that I'm about to go over. The full report is much broader in this. As Sean mentioned, it helps us understand the visitors so they can market better for this board. We are focusing on the economic impact figures and what they mean to the county. To start with, let's just start with the big numbers. The economic impact of tourism in fiscal year 2024 was $1.26 billion. That's up a little bit over 8% year over year. That stems from over $859 million in direct spending. That is what we get from our, from the visitors, we ask them what they spend to various categories and that helps you understand. So that's not just in hotels and accommodations, but it's also restaurants, groceries, transportation, attractions, entertainment, et cetera. That also was up year over year, a little bit over 8%. The number of visitors was over 1.1 million. That was up 4% year over year. So one thing I want to just mention that not only did you have more visitors but the increase in spending was greater than that of the number of visitors so you're getting a higher yield per visitor. Before I get into what this means I just want to give you the trends since 2022 and are going to look at the same with different numbers. But if you look at the economic impact from fiscal year 2022 to 2023 to 2024, you see a gradual upward trajectory. It's always good to see direct spending the same pattern and same with visitation. Again, overall, just kind of gross since from 22 to 23 and 23 to 24 Well, and that's I get to give this presentation a lot in a lot of different places and now we get to the point where People ask like okay, what does this mean? You know, those are big numbers. That's that's great But what does it mean first of all it means jobs and wages when you look at that spending it supports over 12 or Sports 12,800 jobs and near an over $390 million in wages to Charlotte County residents. When we look at how it benefits the county, when we look at the taxes supported by visitors to the area and we take out their estimated cost service because they are using the roads and things that nature it ends up being a positive to the county in tax dollars of over 35 million dollars. And then finally when people ask like what does it do for me if I don't work in tourism? I don't do anything for me. Visitors to the area support taxes and it saves the typical household $1,078 per household. Now that I think that's an important figure because that number isn't anywhere. There isn't your property tax bill and said it would be $1,078 more. It's just one of those calculations that helps the typical person understand how visitors are paying some of the tax bill overall. And that again is just the current level of services that you currently have. As we look at, so that is last year, but Sean's asked me to give you a sense of where you're at halfway through the year and coming off season, Janu from March, usually your biggest quarter. Visitation is up year over year, about 1%, so we're ahead of the pace that we just heard about or 2024. Spending is up by 1.3% over 500 million thus far this year. And when Sean asked me to give a forecast, you know, when it comes to tourism, there's a lot of things that Sean's team can do. There's also some macro effects and you know, there's a lot of economic consumer uncertainty right now which may have some impacts as we move forward. The one thing is, if did the same forecast a month ago and then a month prior it would have fluctuated greatly but at the same time there are some macro effects which I think will impact the rest of the year but overall as we look at this year so far we're ahead of last year's record pace overall so that's a whistle stop tour through it and Sean wanted me to stop here to answer any questions you may have before I pass it back to him and talk about sports tourism. Any questions? Commissioner Constance? Yeah, no question. Just you know I appreciate you coming in at the presentation. So great at tourism. I thought it was important to show it to the other commissioners and to the public to make them understand that all those cars on the road during season actually do have a really positive impact to their bottom line. And that, you know, used to be, I think, 800 now. It's over $1,000 a year. And that's significant for some tax bills. So. No, 100%. Thank you. Thank you, Rodney. Thank you. Yeah. You know, Commissioner Conses, that, you know, thank you for your comments. But there's some legislations swirling around regarding tourism. And I'm just wondering you know if our tourism budget is cut what do these net numbers look like you know do obviously people are still going to come regardless of how much we're selling Charlotte County but what we don't know is is if the budget is cut what will these numbers look like and that's what we don't know unless you is if the budget is cut, what will these numbers look like? And that's what we don't know. Unless you have an algorithm to figure that out. Not an algorithm, but there's a case study word it's been done before. It was in Colorado and off-Loward-Up, but it's last time they cut tourism. The last time tourism marking was cut within two years, all these figures dropped by about 30%. So just take, I mean, that's a broad generalization, but at the same time, the last time it was done, that's what happened. So it is, I mean, it's happened before and that was the impact last. So things to take into consideration. So based on these numbers in that study, we might see close to a $10 million decrease in net benefits of the county if we're using $35 million and 30 some odd percent. Correct and again that's just using a previous case study but that is our best our best case or scenario. And maybe Sean can answer this what was our total receipts was like $7 million in in tourism tax dollars. This past year it was 8.7 million. Okay so we would actually using that study, let's just again say we go down 30 some odd percent, we'd have a net loss to the county. You know, if you look at it that way, assuming the budget gets cut, we lose this net benefits gets reduced. So you know, those things really need to be looked at. Instead of these knee jerk reactions, honestly. Obviously the intent is to help the community and you've you've already shown your slide on what tourism means in terms of savings of over $1,000 per household. So I mean, that's significant. And piggyback on what I just said about that Colorado case study, one other factor to that is once they realized the mistake they had made, it took about 10 years just for them to get back to where they were before they made the mistakes. And don't like you just turn the fast back on your back to where you were. And here's the thing about tourism. It's competitive. So if we're not investing in tourism here in Charlottes County, somebody else is somewhere else in a different state maybe and they're going to track those people. So yeah, I mean, I have to assume that people up in Tallahassee get case studies like that and review it to understand the issue. Yeah, the Colorado one was a pretty famous one. I know if it's Florida that's used it in the past to legislate your, you know, reflect that same type of issue. So I don't think they're unaware of it or most of them are probably not unaware of that case study. And I've heard there's other case studies too. That's probably the most popular one. But I know there's been other ones where things have, you know, they've tried to send some more type thing with the same results. Well, they have a churn of new people up in Tallahassee too. There may be some that just don't have that institutional knowledge and understand it like others may. Commissioner Truex and Constance. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don't think some of the people in Tallahassee understand the benefit quite frankly. I was going to reserve comment but I just can't at this point. I'm just going to try to pick my words very carefully. The benefit of sales tax for our community, which this has a lot to do with, right? We have applied that very scientifically and also very beneficial to our community over the many many years we've done that. Obviously having tourism come here and affect our community, there's a direct benefit to the resident of our county. To remove this and we'll go back to the 1028 I think it was was dollars that it helps to reduce those are monies that are being brought in by people utilizing our infrastructure that are now helping to pay for our infrastructure and why shouldn't they why should we bear the burden as residents of the entire infrastructure when we have people and I invite them I think it's great that's how I found in good with Florida, Florida. That's why I moved here. I love it. But I was a tourist first. And a lot of tourists turn into residents, but at the same time, the taxing of our roadways and the taxing of our parks and the taxing of our beaches of these folks. It has a negative impact. And if you're not going to have an offset, then why have tourism? And I just really have a problem with the mindset of individuals who don't look at the full picture in Tallahassee they just simply want to cut cut cut cut cut cut there are some things that can be cut and I'll not name the county but there's a county near and dear to us that had Jesus is like four or five years ago. They had 125 million in reserves from tourism dollars. I don't think they need to continue to have the same type of income having those types of reserves. And in fact, the commissioner was embarrassed that they had that much money sitting there and still charging the same thing. There are areas in their counties that could make adjustments to their tourism tax dollars. They could. But there are counties like ours that it's very important that we continue to have these tax dollars coming in from those that visit our area, whether it's from bed tax or sales tax or what have you. It helps to spread the cost of operations of our county, our community across the board making it much more palatable for people, particularly when we have only about 40% of our population in the workforce, meaning that most people are retirees and probably on a fixed income, not all but most. So I really My day of tribe about the state legislature has not been short this year. I'm not pleased with the leadership in Tallahassee. I think the Senate president is the only adult in the room, quite frankly. And I thank him for that because he is a voice of calm and a voice of reason. And is really trying to navigate a situation that is not palatable to most of us in the state of Florida who are having to run local governments in local counties. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for those comments. Commissioner Constance. Yeah, no, and you stole my thunder, Mr. Chair, but I think it's worth reinforcing is that just because we stop advertising, the rest of the world is going to continue to advertising. If everybody stopped at the same time, it'd be an evil mind. Playing field, but that's not what happens. And then the catch-up is just horrific. And... the rest of the world is going to continue to advertising. If everybody stopped at the same time and being evil in my playing field, but that's not what happens. And then the catch-up is just horrific and very expensive and you never get back where you were because these guys have built a brand. Think about how much time it's taken us to go from the golf islands or whatever our marketing was to point of word angle would be each to figure out our identity is, then to market appropriately, then to find good marketers like we have with Aqua that really figure out how to make the lemonade out of whatever is happening. The latest thing I was handed at our tourism because our beaches have been harmed is we got a golfers guy, I think I showed that to you guys. So it's just what assets do we have that we still can promote? These are always looking to try to keep the ball rolling. So I think it's just so critical that Sean and his team are doing the job they're doing. Thank you. Yeah, Commissioner, you mentioned cuts. And yeah, I have no problem with cuts, but let's not cut off our nose in spite of our face. You know, that's the thing. You know, you really have to study these issues and none of this knee jerk stuff. And I agree with your comment about Senator Albret as I read news coming out of Tallahasseh, he seems to be the adult in the room and the pettiness that's going on up there with this fighting, the fact that the budget's not even done and who knows what that's going to look like. That's not a good place to be, but a lot of uncertainty and that's not good for local government. It really is. Because we've got to plan prudently and we're not getting good signals out of town, that's for sure. Any other comments on this item? Okay. Oh, Commissioner Dordy. I'm going to the sports. Okay, I'm sorry. Don't demote him. Commissioner Dordy. I'm going to go to the sports. Don't you? I'm sorry. Don't demote him. Commissioner Dordy? Yeah. No. Commissioner anybody. So I just want to kind of give a little idea of what sports tourism brings to the table here. So when you see the numbers that just have put up there, a lot of times people kind of think along in terms of our marking and our promotions, maybe our media and our PR, but we do a lot of sales, you know, whether it's our sports. Put your microphone down. Sorry. Whether it's our sports, our meetings, or our leisure sales, and I'm just going to kind of drill down a little bit here on the sports side of that. So sports tourism, the impact nationwide, this is from 2024, I believe, no 2023, I'm sorry, Sports CTA came up with this figure, $128 billion nationwide. Now that does not include professional sports, that's just your youth and adult amateur sports, it also does include your college tournaments, but not your college regular season type of things. So it's really just kind of that stuff that we are attracting to our destination just like everybody else's. In 2024, Florida took over that number one destination for sports tourism. So that really shows there's a lot of demand from all these sports organizers that want to bring their events to the state of Florida. Since 2021, and actually I've gotten some updated numbers on this, since the end of April, since FY21, we've actually hosted 240 sporting events here in Charlotte County. That's with 27 events having to be canceled due to Hurricane Ian and Helena Milton. That generated $180 million dollars economic impact and over 117,000 roommates. Also, I wanted to point out that also does not include spring training for our destination. I just want to kind of give you a little sample size of a few events that we've done recently and kind of those individual impacts. We hosted the USA BMX Florida State Championships back in March. Had 791 racers, which was a record for that event here. In addition to that, they brought over 2,300 family members. That generated over 2,500 hotel room nights, generating a $2.9 million economic impact, just that one three-day event. But if you drill down even further into that, you'll see that it also generates almost $18,000 in local sales taxes, or TTT of almost $24,000 and other local taxes of over $27,000. In addition, USABMX is really good at doing the social media thing, so leading up to the event, during the event, and even after the event, we got 1.2 million reach on Facebook Instagram and X just through their social media efforts. Another event that we hosted this was just last month, the United Soccer Association Championships. Unfortunately, we can't do a lot of soccer events because we don't have the number of fields in one location that we typically would need to do that. But staff was able to bring this event in here where they split the event up between the four fields at South County and at Centennial Park. And that event brought in 3710, which does include the family members as well. 915 hotel room nights, $1.5 million economic impact. Sales tax is almost, just the local sales tax is almost $9,000, TTT, 8600, and other local taxes is almost $14,000. Also Also in March we hosted the destination, Athlete Centennial Invitational, which was a swim meet over at Centennial Park. Had 452 swimmers there, I think that was also a record. They also brought in 44 coaches and 860 family members. That generated almost 1,400 hotel room nights, $1.8 million of economic impact, and then you can see the local sales tax over 10,000, bed tax over 17, and other local taxes over 16,000. Now this event was a really good example of bringing an event and having something else come out of it. Staff was there at the event, spoke to the coach of University of Rhode Island, and they're going to now bring their team down here for the winter training, which is going to have 50 of their swimmers here the first week of January this next year, and they'll be staying at Sunsieger and also, so it's great that a lot of these events can actually turn into another event, as well as become, you know, regularly occurring events as well as this one has become. Lastly, we host the World Pickleball Tournament. We've actually hosted quite a few pickball events out of the Pickleplex over the last several months. This one was held back in February, which had 860 attendees generating over 500 room nights, 642,000 economic impact. And you can see the local sales tax is almost 4,000. That tax is 6,700. And other tax is almost 6,000. Now, in addition to those numbers, the financial, oh, well, let me say this first. So how do we come up with those numbers? So in addition to having Joseph's team, part of what comes with that contract is they'll do economic impact studies of two events each year for us. That comes as part of that contract. It would be very cost prohibitive, however, to have them do one for every single event we do. So what we this is kind of the next best thing we subscribe to this economic impact calculator. It's something that was commissioned by Destination International and is really tailored to each individual destination. So they have on the back end they know what our tax rates are and things of that nature and our ADRs for our hotels and other lodging and everything. So if the same event took place here that took place in Miami, for example, the impact is going to show greater in Miami because those things are increased over there. So it's a really good second best thing to having a full blown economic impact study done. But in addition to those financial benefits, there's also other additional benefits to bringing in sports tourism. So there's the entertainment value which increases quality of life. Now, not every single event that we bring in is that spectator type event that people want to go run and see. You know, usually the under 10 little league event or something is really just going to be moms and dads there. But we do do quite a number of events that do draw spectators, whether it's water fest, snowboard baseball, some of the BMX events, and pickable. Also it provides the opportunity for local sports leagues to participate without the calls to travel. I know some of the kids that are participated in travel ball and it can be expensive. My daughter currently is participating in travel soccer. We've gone up to Lakewood Ranch many times, up to Tampa, Lakeland. Recently it went all the way to Myrtle Beach. Next month she'll be traveling to Texas for a tournament. It'd be nice to have one in our backyard. She did participate in that soccer event, I just mentioned. It's great just to go through a Centennial Park rather than having to go all over. So there's that benefit to our local leagues as well. Also, sports tours and this goes sort of the means, market two, can serve as the initial exposure for people that become leisure visitors in the future. They only came here because this event was taking place here. They had to come here. They didn't know anything about our destination. They get exposed to it and then they decide to come back for a future visit. One thing I did include in here that I kind of touched on with the USA BMX event is the media component to which is very important additional benefit. Some of these whether it's the social media piece of it or some of these events will be live stream like water fest snowboard baseball. That gives us the opportunity to get that exposure to people that can't make it in town to see the event but one of you from afar will have a commercial or whatever on that live streaming to really get additional exposure to our destination. Any questions? Commissioner Trux. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, this is great, all great stuff. The travel ball thing I am fired for 18 years, love travel ball, a lot of families come in. It is very beneficial, but obviously the college, the snowboard classic has a very large impact because you know dads are probably watching the game maybe some moms are, but there's also some spending and some other stuff going on while they're here, which is always really, really good stuff. I wanted to specifically speak about the BMX national. I heard some different numbers out there. All I can tell you is is that it was majorly impactful to go out and see the number of participants, families, and the organization of that is absolutely amazing. They've done a great job, and it seems that it just keeps improving every single year. I had no idea of the economic impact of that event until probably about eight years ago. And it's an excellent event for our community. I'm not into pickleball yet. Maybe someday, but that's quite the complex down there and I think it does a great, great job for our community. Hoping that water fest is going to be able to be off the ground and successful this year, little pressure on our staff obviously to get the beach opened up fully so that it can accommodate that, but another huge impact. Not just, I think, feel good for our community. You know, it's something that the community puts on as a strong event, but it's got a huge economic impact as well. I think sports is a great, great thing. And I'm looking for actually the opportunity, hopefully, to see the Snowboard Classic expand over the year, two years, three years, whatever it is. But I think that the Snowboard Classic can make a huge impact in our community if we have the opportunity to grow that. So thank you. Yeah, I agree, and the new owners are working really hard to do that. And I think we have plenty of confidence in them that they'll be able to really expand it. They have another huge tournament that they put on in Central Florida and all, and that'll really help them to expand ours down here as well. Mr. Constance. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, and I think it's important, you know, if you go through the items you highlighted, we invested very little in the beginning to get that BMX track up and running. And, you know, Amanda Karin, her team, have just, you know, flourished. So we're not investing very much, but generally we're marketing the area. But as these things self-fulfill, the set, the prophecy that's been set up, I mean, it's been great because they just continue to bring things in, and you never know. I mean, we're leveraging sports fields that we already own and maintain and getting additional impact, positive economic impact to the community, and also some taxes, centennial pool. I mean, we knew that it was going to, you know, emerge as a premier place to have these events and you're right. As somebody comes down to watch an event that's connected to another group, they're like, well, this is great. I mean, there's hardly any traffic here and, you know, compared to lots of other markets and the ability to access the facility and then the hotel space and so forth. All of a sudden, we're in a nice place to hold an event and in a series of events within the region. So I just look at everything that you put together and pick up plex. We actually never really invested in from the county. even go forward to the marketing dollars, but it's just taken off on its own. So yeah these are all great things and I think your right sports tourism is you know we think of the beach and we think of you know people coming and going to places to just enjoy the ambiance and eat food and have a few drinks but really this is this is families coming in and that's a whole other level of economic. Yeah, another benefit of sports, the terms that I didn't mention that I had before is that it's very recession resistant as well. So you remember when we went through recession back and whenever that was 2008, 2009, 10, around there, that was one sector that didn't really drop off. People are still gonna go do their sports tourism type events and all. So, and I also, I can't say enough about Charlotte BMX, Amanda and her team do a great job out there and they really allow us to have the confidence to go after a big event like USA BMX and bring it in. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, I was at that BMX event last year, it was very well attended. I think Commissioner Chu actually were there this year. So yeah, it's a wonderful event. I was just, you know, you mentioned room nights and a lot of the people coming into Charlotte County now for these events and you mentioned Sunseeker. I read something, I can't remember where, but it was in the past week or so, saying that Sunseeker's been a flop for Charlotte County because it's up for sale. I just read in the paper, I think they made their first quarterly profit of $4 million or something like that. But I know I did a speaking engagement there with Coca-Cola, had it not been for Sunseeker, they would not be here spending money. And they have other events that they host where those different businesses would not be in Charlotte County if it wasn't for the facility that we have. And I know and speaking to you and staff, I believe in and you could speak to this, the impact on our bed tax or tourism dollars that Sunseekers had. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt about it. And I think one thing people don't either don't know or they forget is that you're one of a property like that coming online, a big percentage of what they're going to bring in business-wise is going to be in the meetings and convention business. You don't usually get a lot of that business in year one because meeting planners plan a year or two out. And they're very hesitant. All the lag sign on the deadline for a building that's not open, especially one that kept getting delayed opening to begin with. So it wasn't a surprise really to me that that year one was gonna be a straw. I don't think it was a surprise to them. But when you look at the year we're in right now, and I think the difference, I think it saw something other day that the key one of this year they're at 70% occupancy versus 40% of Q1 last year. So it definitely trending in the right direction and I really do have a lot of confidence in everything that will continue to occur as we go on. Yeah and I also read that you know they failed to bring jobs to Charlotte County. I just don't know what people are thinking There's hundreds of people that work there every day and Yours wouldn't be open if no one was working there Yeah, I guess it goes along the line of the massive traffic jams We were supposed to have that never materialized and they are putting the signalization up there the foundations are in So I'm just saying I mean some perspective now that we can look back and at the numbers. You know, we looked at what was proposed prior to them coming now. Now we have tangible numbers. We can examine and see if there was a net benefit to the community from the project. Any other questions for staff? Okay, thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Does anybody want to move S1 dispense with that? It's a second quarter budget adjustment. Let's go to S1. Good morning commissioners, regard their fiscal services. As you know, we monitor the budget on an ongoing basis throughout the year and quarterly. We bring back any necessary adjustments to the board for review and approval. So this is our public hearing for the second quarter fiscal year 25 budget adjustments. Okay, any questions for staff? Okay, we're going to open up the public hearing portion of this item. Anybody wishing to speak on S1? You'll have five minutes. Please come forward. State your name for the record. Anybody wishing to come forward on item S1 Mr. Chairman I see no one rising to close public input public hearing we have motion and second to close the public input portion of the public hearing is there any further discussion any opposition to the motion okay public hearings closed Mr. Chairman move the resolution second okay motion second to comments closed. We have motion second to move the resolution. Is there any further discussion? Any opposition? That passes unanimously. Okay, we're going to move on to item R3 sales tax update and I see Mrs. Lewis approaching to present. Good morning commissioners. All right for the record of my Louis Deputy County Administrator here to talk to you about our 2026 sales tax initiative. It feels like it was just 2019 we were having these conversations and here we are. I'm a six years later and ready to start our next process. So just to give a little bit of history on our sales tax we've had a sale a 1% local option sales tax in place in Charlotte County since 1994 Five extensions have been passed and that has provided over six hundred and eighty six million dollars in capital funding for infrastructure quality of life life, and public safety projects throughout Charlotte County. It's huge benefit to our community to have those who not only live here, but those who visit and enjoy our Paradise contribute to the projects and places that we enjoy as residents living here. In 2020, we had a 21 member committee that helped vet the projects that were put forward to the voters. Those members represented a wide variety of community groups and organizations as well as residents that were appointed directly by the Board of County Commissioners. We held 11 meetings and reviewed over 30 projects in 2020 to arrive on our list of approved projects. In that process, that committee goes through a pretty rigorous process of reviewing each project. Each project is presented by the department or the entity organization that is sponsoring that project. There is weights and scores that are applied to the projects and that committee really looks at, you know, is it a need, is it a want? They look at, is it going to increase our operating costs in the future? And what is, what are those operating costs increases? Because that obviously has a budgetary impact to the county. After they go through that process, they score each project individually and then we average those scores multiplied by the weights to determine the ranking of the ranking of projects. What that results in is a list of recommendations that come to the board of those projects based on the scores and weights and we typically divide those into two tiers. Tier one is the budget that we are planning for for the six-year referendum. In 2020 we used $20 million as our average. We're pretty conservative in what we estimate in collections and so $20 million annually. So our first tier was $120 million with their projects. Tier two is a list of recommended projects that move forward. Should we collect an excess of $20 million? And those are also arranged so that the board has a good overflow list of projects. For 2026, our goals today is really to talk about the 2026 focus group membership so we can kick off the recruitment for those committee members who will participate in that process. We'll talk a little bit about our education budget. Review the projects that are going to be presented so we have concurrence from this board for those projects to move forward and provide direction if external projects will be considered. I just want to touch on how projects end up on the list here. This board has been very proactive in looking at the 20-year capital needs of our community and really projecting that forward. We've used that tool to help improve the sales tax project over the last couple rounds. And so we take our projects directly from the capital needs assessment, those projects that you've been vetting through your strategic review of the capital needs assessment and our CIP process. And those are the projects that are coming forward for recommendation to move forward through the sales text project. Just to run through the timeline, we are planning to kick off our focus group this August. This is a really rigorous process. So those residents who participate in this process have made a huge commitment of time and energy to review these projects. So they meet sometimes by monthly, sometimes more if they need to, between now and March of next year. That focus group will hear presentations from each department. They will have some really good conversations around what projects as you'll see today when we present there's a lot more projects than we will ever have funding for. And so there's going to have to be a conversation about what takes priority over other projects. They will bring that as a recommendation to this board. And then in April of 2026, this board will determine how long you want the sales tax referendum to be for. If we stay with our six year program or if we talk about extending that beyond six years, and the final selection of projects. And then that will culminate in an ordinance that will be approved by the board for a ballot referendum. Okay, for the 2026 sales tax focus group, we've made lists of recommended entities and appointments. And so just to run through that real quick, we are recommending a representative from each of the chambers of commerce so Charlotte County Chamber the Punnagorta Chamber of Commerce and the Inglewood Chamber of Commerce the Charlotte County Tourist Development Council the Charlotte DeSoto Building Industry Association our Economic Development Partnership the Punnagorta Port Charlotte North Port Association of Realtors member of Charlotte County School Board, and it's important to note that we're asking for non-elected individuals to serve on this board, so typically it's the superintendent of schools and then the Charlotte County Airport Authority in the past that has been the chief executive for the airport. In addition, in order to make sure that we have diverse representation of residents participating in this, we're asking each of the board members to appoint one individual from your district. That way each district is represented and then one at large member to serve on that committee. And it is our plan to announce a call for volunteers who would like to serve on that membership on this committee for the appointment process. That way you will have applications coming in from members of your district to vet through. It is our plan to mirror the process that we went through in 2020. Again, that would be an organizational meeting that will hold in August. Depending upon the committee composition and the board's desire, we could internally facilitate that or as we did in 2020, we could look for an external facilitator to come in. That way it's a very independent process. So I'll take direction on that if you have thoughts around that. And then project ranking to be complete early spring 2026. Did any members want to comment on the independently facilitated or internally? Commissioner Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, I think with the sizing of this group being 15 members, it's manageable. I think we can do it internally I don't think we need somebody from the outside the larger group in 2020 was Stuff so but I think this with the size and I like the composition that's being recommended I think that looks good and I think we can handle it in terms Yeah, my only comment with staff on that one was You know the optics does it look like we're driving the train here? You know, so that would be my only concern. I know we can do it objectively, but it's totally optics. You know, that would happen. I don't have a problem with it being done internally. The facilitators do stand up there and just listen and write down the same things that our people are going to do. So I don't think we need to spend the money on that quite frankly. Yeah. These are public meetings held in the Sunshine. So everything's recorded. Correct. Yeah. And where would the internal facilitator come from, what department? You. That would probably default to me. Looking at Mr. Flores, you would decide who would be the facilitator. Hector goes for a point. Okay, so it would be administrative. Yes. Okay. Any other comments on that item? Sounds like you got some head nods on that one then. Okay. If I could, on focus group compositions, everybody comfortable we have consensus with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay with it. Yeah, appreciate that. We will start advertising tomorrow. On the educational program, we do set aside a small budget for education once we have come up with the projects. Typically in a normal year, that means we would go out and talk to anyone who will listen. There are some guidelines that we have from the state that some rules that we have to play by, and we stay very mindful of that. But y'all know have been this process. I will literally talk to anyone who will listen to me talk about sales tax. And so we look at HOAs. We look at our MSBU advisory boards. We look at anywhere we can go to help educate about the benefits of the sales tax and what the projects that are being proposed are. We do put signage at past and current projects. We will print materials, however, we cannot directly mail them to residents, this go around, that is a change from the state legislature. We do partner with entities who do support the sales tax and they will take on that effort privately but with public funds we don't mail to homeowners. And then we will do outreach through our normal media channels, social media, our media partners and get the word out everywhere we can. What is the budget for the signage and print materials? It's around $30,000. Do we reuse some of the materials and signs? When we can, if you notice, and if you've gone to our website, we've already updated with 2026, we do change the penny that we use on the signage, so it'll change for each year that the project was funded so that you can tell when it was a part of the sales tax program. You've changed the date on the penny? We do. Yep. Okay. Yes. Because it's still a link in set every time. It is still a link in set. Yes. The year changes. This is the years we have a penny. Yeah. Well that's what I was going to say. They're doing away with the penny because it costs two and a half cents to make one penny. This is one thing I will say with us our staff is pretty mindful of being as conservative as they can with spending. We do as much as we can digitally. We put as much as we can out through our social media channels. 2020 was a different time for us. It was the first time that people were not gathering. We couldn't get out and do traditional talks. We did a lot of virtual meetings. We did some virtual town halls to help get the word out, but we did print bookmarks and gave them out at our libraries because we were doing curbside service at that time, right in the middle of COVID. So we get pretty creative, but we are very mindful of expenditures. Thank you. Okay, as I mentioned before, the construction program is really projects that come forward from the departments that are based off the capital needs assessment. We really look at what the projected sales tax revenues are. We are a pay as you go kind of project program. So we do not expend funds until we've collected those funds. We have not bonded sales tax in the past or used debt service in order to make those products come to life. We really construct as we collect. And so we pay attention to the life cycles and when projects are slated in. And also that committee is very mindful of the operating costs that are associated with those projects. We typically categorize projects either by public safety, infrastructure, and quality of life. And in this last citizen survey that we did last November, I will mention that infrastructure was one of the top concerns for our residents, specifically transportation infrastructure. So I know that there's going to be an emphasis on that. Our estimates that we use in 2020 were based on the current construction estimates at the time. It's very, very difficult to estimate a project in 2019 that's not going to be built until 2025, 2026, given the changes in economic conditions. I think you just heard from tourism that their projections can change months and months based on what's going on in the economy, much is same in the construction industry. I will say one of the added benefits we've had or one of the improvements we've made in the process this time is that our facilities construction department has really focused on the cost estimates and made sure that they are applying multipliers You've seen that in the budget process as we've gone through the CNA. We've done the same in in our sales tax program So with that I will get on with the projects This is the the projects that we are recommending move forward for infrastructure And I've broken these down by roadway and water quality and then other infrastructure projects. So for roadway projects, we have Harborview Road widening. This is from Date Street to I-75 with an estimated cost of $52,452,000. Edgewater Drive widening phase five, 41 million, and $40,000. We have burnt store road east west corridor. That cost estimate right now is 46,176,000. There's still some tweaks in there because we have some right away acquisition still to do. Great your comments. I'm sorry, real quick. The italics and the 41 water is that just because it was carried over from the phase five. It has there's no significance that. No sir. Thank you. It's really because I put this together in one day. OK. I figured I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. Thank you. Taylor Road, $11 million, $296,000. This is probably a new one for you. You'll see when we talk road infrastructure and our transportation projects. If you recall, this has been on the DOT work program for quite some time. They turned it back over saying it's cost prohibitive for DOT to do it. But this is the widening of Taylor Road from airport to 41. From airport to 41, not from airport to Jones Loop. No, I believe this goes to 41. Pretty sure. Yep, to 41. Because a lot of people are walking and biking very in a very unsafe conditions the other way. Correct. With drop-offs that are in some places six feet deep with no- That's- That's the section from airport to Jones loop that will be that will be a part of this project yes and if I can Mr. Chairman yes sir just want to point out that there's a railroad crossing that we're gonna have to deal with yes this will we'll go the full the full route so it'll cross over Jones loop all the way to 41. Okay. So airport to Jones loop to 41, not from airport back to 41. We're going to for lane within the city. I mean, the city. So, okay, got it. Are we taking that in pieces? Because I think the piece from Jones, you know, from airport Jones loop is critical. And then I don't, I don't disagree that at some point we do need to do Jones Loop to 41, but I don't know that people are in harm's way as much in that direction. Well, in that direction you have a number of, and it's commercial. There's a lot of things. There's a number of communities that have come in that have been required to construct sidewalks on that side. So those are already in place where you don't have that from airport to Jones Loop. So yes. Okay. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. And in the bicycle pedestrian trails and sidewalks, this is not a new project. This is a continuation. This is a great kind of placeholder project where we need to construct sidewalks. We find where those gaps are that are not contained within MSBU or that are connectors to major infrastructure. So for roads we have about 158 million plus in projects. I want to stop you right there. Are we going to be using our conservative revenue estimates? Like in the same amount we did last cycle? So in the last cycle we were collecting We we used 20 million dollars very conservatively right now I think we're going to be looking at between 36 and 38 million dollars I tend to be on the more conservative side so I would say 36 think budgets. So we're getting close to 200 million is that it? Correct. Okay, because it's good to have that number because you have to have a number. Even you know, some type of estimate to work around prioritizing. You're looking for some direction on where we should go on this. And I'm stopping your roads because I don't disagree with you. I keep hearing people want infrastructure, transportation, and sales taxes play the key role in that for decades since we've had it. I don't know if you're subliminal messaging here, but you literally put the order that I would probably choose. Harborview is critical. It's already a sales tax project. It's critical to evacuation, plus the growth that's going on along that corridor. That I would probably have to put that at number one because we're in process and we're working with FDOT and there's value there. Edgewater, again, that would be close to first, if not first. It's almost a flip there. It was a sales tax project. We're going to be mobilized. It's going to kill me if we cannot. During one mobilization to the project as a whole and have to have a piecemeal. So to me that's right up there with Harborview. Burn store road of course is important, but you have to pick, right? And I'm looking at the numbers. If I had to pick two heavy burden on the sales tax, it would be those two, and that eats up what, 93 million, almost half. But to me, we need the infrastructure. We have to deliver on the infrastructure. So for me, those are the two that I believe have to be on the list, just to give you some direction on where I'm at. I don't know if I got commission or Dory than Truex. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Yeah I guess you know I was you hit the points you know I was I was doing some quick arithmetic knowing roughly what we were estimating for our annual revenues to be on this and you know it's not multi-dimensional calculus it's under two hundred So, I mean, we can burn most of it out with the roads. But I do agree, Harborview and Edgewater. I also, to try to distribute things around, I wouldn't be, you know, of course the focus group is gonna, this is gonna be their challenge, is ranking all this. But I do see these was connectors being really, really important for South County. So, but after that, we don't have that many dollars left. They won't have that many dollars left to come back with. So, you know, we're. So, but after that, we don't have that many dollars left. They won't have that many dollars left to come back with. So, you know, we're going to have to, those are easy. I agree. Infrastructure is priority, I think. You know, that's why we talk about some other things. External is in other words, a request. I think we're going to have to really focus on our CNA and our top priorities, especially relative to transportation and it's going to gobble up most of this money. But people want the infrastructure. They've been very clear. really focus on our CNA and our top priorities, especially with relative to transportation. And it's gonna gobble up most of this money. But people want the infrastructure. They've been very clear about that. You noticed it during the campaign and staff is hearing it as well. So, but a lot of other needs here, they were really important, but we just won't be able to afford it with this one. And I'll stay. Mr. Chair, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Couple of things. I- with this one. Still stay. Mr. Chairmen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Couple of things. I agree the first three are of major priority. No problem there. I'm struggling between edgewater and harbor views to which one's more important. I know they both are. Edgewater to me is something that is a West County benefit. There's no projects in West County. This is definitely a West County benefit. I'm going to tell you right now. Come in this way every morning. There's a number of people that use that direction right now. What we've done on Edgewater has been a huge improvement. And I look at that as wow, again, Commissioner, so Edgewater needs to all be done at one time. And I know we can phase it, but as long as the funding is coming in, we continue to do this. I think that this will work out. So, probably harbor view is needs to start getting the money first and an edge water second, but I'd like to monitor that very closely, depending on coursework, the focus group indicates. But I think that these three are extremely important for our community to need in our community for the near future. Agreed. Mr. Gratzin. Thank you, sir. Yeah, I agree with all the comments. I really would like to see Taylor Road broken into like part A and B because it may be possible to at least fund from airport to Jones-Luke because I think that's the critical portion for safety. And Jones-Taylor has now become sort of RV Condo-Roe. And so you have all these large vehicles trying to get in and out of those Condo complex boxes and then you've got pedestrians and bicyclists and it's not, you know, a two-lane road with no shoulder is not compatible with safety and quality of life. So for me that's going to be a priority that I'd love to hear from the focus group, hopefully get kicked up. But I don't think it's going to be a huge price to pay. That piece might be $7 million. It's not nothing, but I think it goes a long way to save lives. I do think that that portion of the project probably has a higher cost just because of the deep swales and the amount of work we have to do around storm water. But one thing I want to note, and I appreciate the feedback. One thing I want to note is, as a board, you all have put a lot of emphasis on transportation and that's one of the reasons why you approved two new quarterly meetings just to deal with transportation infrastructure. There will be a lot of conversations around what are the potential revenue sources and how that gets applied. We will be taking that information and also feeding that to the sales tax committee. So if in your transportation meeting you determine you want to put a certain amount of impact fees into a roadway that will be factored into the focus group process. Question on the east west. Were you done sir? Sorry, in a minute. So, could I just ask if we're having two quarterly meetings a year isn't that actually a biannual meeting or are we going to start having them every quarter? The goal is to start having them every quarter. We've already had one this year and so these are the next two that we could fit into the schedule this calendar year. When we go to build this 2026 schedule, you'll see them pop up every quarter. May, October, and then we may squeeze one before the end of the year, or January might be the start of the next one, or something like that. Correct. I was unable to find another date that worked for us. That's fine, and I think quarterly is the way to go. So thank you, okay, let's do it. Thank you. Refresh my memory on the East West corridor connector in the right of way and the funding. Can you refresh my memory on that? So the board advanced funding for us to acquire a parcel. And I believe we use capital projects fund for that. That was around the Notre Dame area. It was about 88 very long skinny acres that we are also able to use for fire station 17 and for a water storage shower. There's still some right away. We're gonna have to acquire as we get towards the burnt store road. Yeah, so yeah, that was my question. I knew we had some limited right-away acquisition. That number that you present here, that's the total cost with right away. Correct. What I'd probably like to see is a break down of what are the right-away costs. So, you know, we're not looking at such a big chunk because, you know, when the mix comes back to the board and the recommendations, it's kind of like what we did with Harborview, the $8,250 went towards some right away acquisition. Get that number, we might be able to do a little something. I don't know, I'm just suggesting it on the right of wayside. And you mentioned the impact fees with the amount of growth that's going on down there along that corridor. And we're going to have an impact fee discussion in the near future. That might help augment, you know, if we can get right of way money, help augment construction. When these projects right now, we're just talking to high level on these projects. When these projects come back to the focus group, they see every component. They see it similarly to how you review a capital improvement program project. They'll get a CIP page, they'll have a full presentation from staff. they will see all of the components that make that up, and they'll have the option when they rank to scale these projects. So they may not recommend the full amount, they may recommend some portion of that. Okay, like right away. Correct. Okay. Thank you. I can't talk about road projects without the water quality components that go along with them. And so our utilities has two projects that they put forward to help to implement water quality initiatives with our roadway projects and that is for edge water. It's the flamingo between Samantha and State Road 776 component of the utility line relocations. That's $10 million. And then Harborview Road, that entire corridor is about $16,300,000 worth of relocations that they have to do. So we've included those in this part of the infrastructure. Okay. Other infrastructure projects that are not road related. Under facilities we have the clerk's record warehouse. That is about $9 million to relocate the current clerk's record warehouse from an area. It's currently over off of enterprise drive in a more low lying area into a more hardened facility long-term. We have a fleet management building to completely replace our fleet management building and right size it for the amount of operations they are doing. We are it's a 22 million dollar project. The Mid County Annex as you, we have Annex is located throughout the counties to make it more accessible for residents to get to the tax collector, the DMV, the supervisor of elections. And so this would be a Mid-County Annex that would be located over in the Westport area to centralize those services in one accessible location. We've also looked at if it makes sense to put building there and ease some of the congestion here because there's not a lot of parking. So looking at that as an option with that project. The Mid County Public Works Operations Facility, this is to completely relocate their M&O operations into a more centralized area. They would still keep their their J.B. yards in regional locations but this is to co-locate all of their staff which is currently scattered throughout the county in multiple facilities. And then the Babcock Ranch Community Library in Annex, that is a project. Currently they're're listed as two separate projects within the MDO. We have been looking at, does it make sense to construct two facilities, or does it make sense to co-locate that and make it a kind of a community central facility that has library services as well as all of those Annex services for the Babcock Ranch community? Yeah, that that one's in the developer agreement. It is. Are we bound by a time certain based on the growth out there that we have to produce this facility? Yes, currently in the MDO, I believe it's scheduled for 2028. 2028. Okay. Is the timeline, although that gets adjusted based on their growth numbers. We review that annually and make adjustments as necessary. But that is, we are providing a lot of services to the Babcock residents. In our library services, there's a high demand for those services. So we are seeing that demand continue to increase. I guess my point is, if it's not on sales tax and we're obligated to do it based on on on an agreement we have to live up to our end of the agreement. Correct. Where would the funding be coming from? Capital projects. Okay so we would have to and has that been built into capital projects currently? It's in the CNA yes so when we get in. But that's funded. Correct. All right. Well, that's going to be important that we understand the timing of that in relationship to the agreement and also an unfunded facility in our CNA. So that one's going to be important because we have a contract. We have a contract. I'm going to hold one party responsible for living to there and we have to do do our so that's going to be important that I understand that. You mentioned the mid county annex which maybe the Westport property when that becomes ill. What about the South County? We had a board discussion about the flooding down there in the need maybe for supervisor of election and a South Annex because that place is so antiquated. That's that's not in the mix here. No that is currently a Tier 2 project for 2020 sales tax so we've already advanced that that's already been pulled up and is in the process of being they're doing site evaluations right now. But was that for an SOE office as well or just the annex? That will come into play when they do the site analysis and programming of the South County annex whether we're building facilities to include the SOE or not. Yeah, because I remember that facility flooded. Yes. And it was during election time. We can't have an election office that floods during election time. That's not a good thing. So I just wanted to bring that up because, you know, I've been thinking about that. That facility, I know Commissioner Constance had talked about, what can we do? It looks like the piece that's there is probably not really an option to stay on the piece of property that's there unless we can come up with some really creative flood planning. We have to look somewhere else. It's our intention to be able to address that within the 2020 program. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Just to give you some examples, again here's Edgewater Drive. you know, our objectives here is really widening it, adding those medians. And there has been decorative lighting installed along edge water, which has really kind of elevated the aesthetics of that roadway. Hey, but we gave direction to go with the standard. Yes. Okay, because I saw the fancy lights there, but that's on the old. Those are already in the old sections. Yes, okay. All right. For water quality projects, just an overall review. Our utility, we've taken the approach with our utility system that improvements are for the system wide. And so, potable water, sanitary water, and reclaimed water are all included in those projects. So they have system-wide improvements in not any individual area. Mid-County Annex, just again, that'll provide access to government services and essentialized location. What you're reviewing here is a picture of our West County Annex. It's a beautiful facility over off of San Casa and has served that community well. Okay, moving on to public safety. For Fire EMS, we have, we're continuing with our efforts to harden our existing facilities. And so Fire Station 4, which is off of Marathon, in Inglewood, that is a full replacement of that station, which has reached its end of life. Fire station 18 is a new station. Also, they believe that's in the Collins Wood area. Fire station 19 would be, again, a West County station. And then, stations 20 and 21, those are both new stations in Babcock. And then we also have the need for our emergency vehicle maintenance expansion. So that's an expansion within the existing site to provide additional storage and base for work on our vehicles. I have Commissioner Truex, he was going to wait for the end of the slide. Well, it's this portion. Okay, so I just wanted to say if we could add for feature reference the locations the geographical area for 18 19 20 21 we can thank you under the sheriff's office we have the jail administration renovation that's really the kitchen and laundry facilities so it's a little misleading in the title that that will increase their efficiencies and their abilities to serve the population that they serve there. And then the warehouse at headquarters off of Loughlin. This is a hardened warehouse for stationing of critical assets for the sheriff that can be deployed. Again, just a review. Station 4 is currently off of marathon, kind of reach end of life. We've had some storm damage to that facility the last couple storms and have to evacuate the staff. Our MRC vehicle maintenance warehouse, which is currently off of airport road, that's just an expansion on that existing site. then again stations 18 19 20 and 21 due to to growth demands. I have a question for you. Going back to the county, Charlie County Fire EMS live with the fire stations. When you prioritize those and the committee looks at those and it comes back to us, is it going to be based on which ones are of the worst condition, like end of life, or did it need it? It's still got life left in it. It just needs to be expanded. So we only have one left that we have to harden. And that's that station four, that's the last one of our hardening of stations. The remainders are all new. Just all brand new. We will present them in the order that they are in the scope of cover based on population growth demands where they're most needed. So that will be one of the factors that the committee ranks on. They definitely ask the questions of what's first need. I know we on our impact fee schedule we made some changes. I can't quite remember 100 percent I think we dropped parks and rec Correct But we did have public facilities in there and which went to fire Sheriff any public or what I think we had a separate one for fire didn't there is a separate one Yeah, I I'm gonna fire you miss. Yes, yes, yes, but nothing prohibits the board from using public buildings to To supplement fire from the impacts. I don't believe so, but yeah. Good morning, Commissioner's ledger, Assistant Country Administrator. That's correct. So you dropped regional parks, but kept community parks, or it was the other way around. I don't remember exactly which one. Public buildings you kept at 25%, you do have a separate impact fee for fire, but you can use public, that public buildings want for general government uses, so you can use that for fire stations if we have to. Yeah, so this is going to be an interesting conversation because we have to update our technical report and you're going to pull the same information he's going to need, right, of our capital needs when that. Yes, that's how we do the impact fee studies is we pull what's in those capital needs and what's that future projection over their lifetime of the collections and then figure out from there what we need impact fees for. That is why we want to time the impact fee study after the sales tax referendum. We will start having the conversations before the sales tax referendum, but in prior years we've actually had the consultant have to do two studies. One if sales tax passes, one if sales tax doesn't. So it's kind of doubled up the work that the consultants had to do. So we want to have the consultant do that pre-work. Sorry. And then be able to make those final calculations based on the referendum. So we're not doing that in double work, if you like. Yeah, only because having that information would be important to me, maybe it is double work. Because understanding how I prioritize when it comes back to the board from the committee, how I prioritize some of these facilities in the back of my mind, I may want to know what role impact fees are going to play. We haven't had that conversation as a board yet because we don't have the technical report. Because that may be, you know, that's going to impact my decision on how I look at sales tax. If I know we've got this other funding, I may say, okay, we're going to cover it here. Now I can put more towards the roads. You know what I'm saying? Because public safety is important too. And I, you know, in my opinion, I believe we're going to have a good discussion about Public safety in these fire stations at least fire station for for sure but to me I'm gonna really want to understand that that impact fee component in relation to this So we could certainly do that the the technical the Ordnance states that we will do that study in 26. Right. Doesn't say when in 26. We are funding it for 26. So if we want to start it as soon as we get into fiscal year 26 and do what we've done and that the person have those two separate, those two studies, one of sales tax passes, one of it doesn't, we can certainly do that if that's the will of the board. Okay, Commissioner Choux.'m going to digress just a second. Just very briefly. Although I want to hang with the impact piece for just a second, if you can tell us what the cost is going to be to do that dual study, because it's not twice, but it's still significantly more... It's not. I'd have to pull up exactly what we spent last time, but I think it's around 100,000 to do the study. To do both. And that included both last time, yes. Okay. Because it's really just different scenarios if sales tax passes, if sales tax doesn't pass. Okay. And then the aggression is, when is three scheduled? Because I know that's already in the line to be done, but four triggered three. And so if you can just remind us. So three with station three that's just a readiness what we're talking about. Station three is a 2020 sales tax project. We are we have just had the engineers look at the existing site to see if we can rebuild on the existing site and I think Travis might what beat me over the head if I say I believe we are able to construct on the existing site. And I think Travis might beat me over the head if I say the wrong thing. I believe we are able to construct on the existing site. Wow. That's a tight site. It's going to go up. Oh, it has to. Yeah. Yeah. OK. OK. Travis Purdue Facilities Director for the Record. Yeah. work station three is currently is in its final qual I'll try to produce facilities director for the record. Yeah, where station three is currently is in its final qualifications to where it can remain on that location. We've got the sizing correct for the station to support the neighborhood and the community there. It'll be like a hybrid of a station six design and a station ten design based on the demand that that area requires. So it's not a one for one for like a station ten size and as it you know requires different things for that area and a station six or three or old three would be. So they're fine tuning that. They've determined that the site can accommodate it. They won't have a drive-thru capability, but working with public safety and chief fair, they're okay with that. Because it just eliminates a lot of our effort and signalizing, trying to find land in that region that's all flood, you know, issues. It's very difficult to find something, not having to purchase that additional property. So that's the critical path that we wanted to design consultant to really nail down for us as can we do it. And so far, they've determined that it looks like they can. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, sorry to go back, which but it was, Mr. Constance. Quick follow up. So if they say it's okay to stay there, Can they build the plane while they're flying? In other words, can you still function out of that station while it's being built? Or you would move services everywhere else and know that we've got to have mobiles to kind of serve while the whole thing gets raised and then rebuild. The plan would be to put a temp station somewhere in that region. Got you. To support that. Got you. Turn it down and rebuild. Thank you. Travis brought up a good point on signalization. Again, I say we get better at this every time. support that. Okay. Turn it down and rebuild. Okay. Thank you. Travis brought up a good point on signalization. That's, again, I say we get better at this every time we do it. That's one thing in the past. We have not always looked at the insulery things that are necessary for a station. And so, you know, when we get into the conversation about station six and relocation of station six, there wasn't funding allocated to that project for moving an emergency signal. And that's, you're talking million dollars plus to move a signal. So those are important conversations and things that we've added to this process to make sure that we are counting for in the project budgets going forward. Same thing with if we have to acquire land, we've built that into the project budget. So I think just get better at this every time we do it and making sure that the cost truly reflect the cost of the project. We should do it. Yeah I just wanted to comment Mr. Chairman on your your comment about the looking at the two scenarios on sales tax if we're looking order of magnitude the study is going to be hundred and hundred fifty thousand something that. He probably would be good data to have both scenarios. So we should probably get going on and I agree. I mean, I was previously not thinking it was that then important, but it does provide us another option on funding and we see how it's going and what qualifies and so forth. So it'd be worthwhile to do what we've done in the past. I agree. For the kind of money we're talking about, it makes sense. Yeah, I mean, the impact fee categories may change. We may have a board of discussion about what has changed, what's more important now that I think we've adopted the same categories for a while, right? How long have they ever changed? Or is it pretty much been the same bucket of here comes clear? We may technical changes. This is Claire's area of expertise. The names may have changed, but the actual categories have not over time. So what you actually put them into have been the same buckets. Is it mycon? Oh. Yes. Okay. Same. Just short. Okay. Clear a job for the record. Yes. Clear a job for the record. Yeah. So you've had slight tweaks in the names, but the actual categories have really not changed. I think we broke out some of the parks a little bit differently, but you've still been collecting the basic categories. Yeah. we have to update it with the most recent localized data we've chosen every six years along with the sales tax, right? So that makes sense. Yes. But I know other communities that don't have the same mix, some of them only have maybe two or three categories. You know, I can envision where we have a discussion about two things, transportation facilities. Instead of ten different categories, I might make it easier in the technical report too. So I mean,'s the kind of conversation this board's going to have to have because at some point we've got to catch up. You know and I don't know what that looks like but it'll be an interesting conversation. So I just want to make sure that we're not tied to just a certain category just because that's what somebody did 30 years ago. No absolutely not you you. That is your direction, whatever you want to do. Yeah, okay, thank you. Okay, we turn to our regular schedule programming here on sales tax. All right, moving forward, CCSO, just their projects is the warehouse for essential equipment resources at headquarters, the renovation of the jail, admin, kitchen, and laundry facilities to gain efficiencies and prolong the life of that facility. Now moving on to quality of life because there's a lot of those projects as well. Under quality of life, the first project we have is Bissett Park Phase 2. This is a restroom replacement fishing pier playground and walking path. And then we have Phase 3 which is the recreation center. It is important to note on Bissett Park. This is the area that we have targeted for a shelter, a hurricane shelter for our residents. It is in a green zone. One of the very few that we have in our inventory in Charlotte County and so so a great project for not only quality of life, but potentially public safety in the future. Centennial Park that's continuing on with the master plan of Centennial Park under Phase 2 includes the sports courts, the pavilions, the restrooms and additional parking at that location. And Phase 3 is an integrated water feature, lazy river, additional lap lanes to our pool and shade structures and retractable bleachers. And then the final phase is the Recreation Center renovation. Hard to believe it's a brand new facility, but by the time we hit the end of this program, that facility will be towards the end where we have to look at the additional recreational center that goes in with our regional parks. Under Charlotte Harbor Event Conference Center, that's our parking garage. That was a project that was put forward in 2020, has remained on our CNA and another project that we think has value for consideration in 2026. GC Hearing Park that's Phase 2 of that park and then we have our Charlotte Sports Park Paving Improvements that's increasing ADA Paved Parking as well as additional parking spots converted from grass to Paved Parking. I got you right there on the Charloharbor event conference center parking garage. The city of Punagorda, they get 10%. They do. Yeah. So they're going to have to go through this process as well. Correct. That one's interesting because I know they've talked about parking issues down there. We'd like to see more parking at the event center. They'd like to see more parking. We don't have events every single day at the event center. But they have parking every day that they need. That would be an interesting one that could be a joint project to me where we look at the costs and does the city want to use maybe 50% of their funds. And we look at it as a 50% where it's a joint project project because I think we both equally benefit. We could reach out to the city. They have their own process that they go through very similar to ours with their focus group. I don't know if this is a project that they're presenting but we could inquire if it's something that they would consider. And it would be billed at the higher elevation to commission your concerts. Thank you. Yeah, if you could just for our background, could you get us the city's 2020 list? Because I don't have that readily available, just to kind of see where they landed and then see what potentially they're looking at now on top of seeing if they would want a partner. Maybe not, I don't know if they want to go 50-50 because they don't have a lot of, you know, compared to what we get, they don't have as much and they have to look at all their needs, but I think that's a good idea. I don't know if they want to go 50-50 because they don't have a lot of, you know, they're not going to, compared to what we get, they don't have as much and they have to look at all their needs but I think that's a good idea to see what they're willing to do. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I just remember speaking to folks over there and I know they had concerns about parking. Yeah. And still do? It's a facility that's offers reparking. You can just park in there and walk down. It's right there. So I will be sure to send you the list, but just for public education, our sales tax website has every project that's ever been funded both on the county side and on the city side with sales tax funding. That's under past projects list. Good afternoon. Okay, moving on quality of life. Mary Cabo kids space park that's a replacement of that playground in that park. I believe that was constructed. That was a that was a leadership Charlotte project. Yeah 92 or 93. 93 I think. My Aca River Park Phase 2 that's continuing on with the master planning of that park and build out of the amenities there. The Placita Passive Park Phase 3, this is probably when you're less familiar with. If you recall, we acquired a parcel across the street from the Placita boat ramp. This is continuing with the acquisition of those parcels that are on the water. We would like to put them all in conservation and create a passive park at that location. So we are looking at other ways to fund acquisition of those properties, but certainly one that warrants consideration. South County Regional Park Recreation Center renovation. This is adding a second rec center onto that site for continued build out of our master plan there as a regional park. South County, South Murdock Community Park, that was a park that was identified in our parks and rec master plan. And then Trangali Community Center replacement, it is at the end of its life there. A heavily used facility, it served us well, but it needs to revamp. And then we have William Argane's Junior Veterans Memorial Park Phase three, the long awaited splash pad is a part of this project. We also have various park renovations. These are just renovations throughout our system that have been identified. Finally, we have our Cultural Center replacement, project we have talked in great detail about for a number of years. Currently, they're going through the programming process of that. We have a place holder in here for construction of that facility. And then the Grace Street complex. That is really looking at that Grace Street location and how we can best lay it out for future use. Commissioner Deutsch. Yeah, maybe I missed it, but I didn't notice anything down in the Bernstore road area because we had talked about the need for a recreational facility or park down there. And there's some pieces of property that's still available. That is accurate. That is in the master plan and what we've seen in terms of population growth through the Metro forecasting as the need for a regional park in the future down there. We had a lot of other needs that were more eminent that we felt warranted coming forward. What's the size range on the regional park? How many acres is that? I believe it's around 100. I sort of remember it being between 80 and 100 acres. Tommy Scott, can you serve as the director for Charlotte County? You're both right. It's a range between 50 on the low end up to 100. So I don't even know why I show up for this. I appreciate it, thank you. Okay. Visit Park, again, I highlighted that. A phase two includes the walking past the playgrounds, restroom facilities, and a 12 foot fishing pier. Phase three includes the construction of the Recreation Center Fitness Room and catering kitchen. For those who are not familiar with this park, this is in South County, in the Pentagon Heights Tropical Goal Fakers area and is an existing park actually for those who haven't been there it's beautiful they've got a really nice playground and then our sports park again adding 800 paid parking spaces and 50 ADA accessible parking spaces yes I already know the question yes we've already explored feasibility on that. What do you think? I was going to say, Mr. Jordan. I saw the eyebrows. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, that was something I would have done 40 years ago if I could, when I permitted that facility originally. However, at that time, although it doesn't matter whether it's paved or grass relative to water quality, those volumes are provided in the design. However, the water management district did not frown upon increasing the quantity, the peak stages, and all that flow is going to the west out of that lake. The other factor is that when I did the original design, one of the requirements of the Water Management District was the thing they called historic basin storage. That's in the flood point. And that's one of the reasons if you look at the design for that grass parking lot, it's consistent. And it's basically the same elevation. It provides storage for the 100 year storm event. So all some things to take into consideration, the future engineer that's going to look at this thing, I will have some very detailed questions for that individual at the appropriate time. We would expect nothing last. Thank you very much. It's nice to do though, we can do it. Well, it raised my app, Ralph, based upon our previous conversations about stormwater and retention and we can do it. I mean it's not something I don't want to do. Maybe we can do 400 if we can't do 800. Again our various park improvements include restroom and for-billion replacements at various parks. We are retrofitting those parks that don't currently have restroom facilities. We're going back and adding those. So this is again a scalable project that can be plugged in if we're looking for for those scalable projects. Again, we have 38 proposed projects. Exceeds $593 million. I think we're all good at math. We are estimating revenues at $36 million annually, although that is very conservative. Subject to maybe go up a million here or there. And the duration of the program influences the number of projects that we put on tier one and tier two. So when we get to that point, if we end up with a six-year program, we will estimate and budget to what six years of collections would be for tier one, and then come up with a reasonable overflow program for tier two Again, these are prioritized by the committee those are recommendations ultimately the Board of County Commissioners has the final Decision on what the project ranking and the list ends up and we emphasize that throughout the process But that is why you have an advisory board to kind of help and guide some of these conversations. And then I wanted to talk about process for adding additional projects to this list. We have. Emily, one minute, please, Commissioner Deutsch. That comment. Yeah. Didn't mention the one on ones and it came in about that time. People are dying off, so we don't get as many phone calls about the cultural center when it's gonna open, what's gonna happen with it. And I think pretty much, most folks have accepted the fact that that facility is not gonna be, it's not usable, and we know that. However, the concern, it's been an ongoing one, there are still, even though there's been a metamorphosis and some services may have changed. But that facility served a lot of functions to our community, trumpeting as simple as a dance class or a computer class to educational activities. And you know, and some of them moved other places, but there are some that I think they still are demand and need. Now, there's many parts to this. There's a lot of spokes on this because we don't even have a concept on who or how we would run a new facility that would provide those types of things. But it's something I don't want to see it sluice from our radar. And it's something I think we should keep in mind. And not only was that the university, as I recall, when I first came here in the 60s, was sort of incredibly significant to the community, but it's changed, obviously, over 60 plus or minus years. But if we were to, and I know Tommy's overloaded with all the stuff that we're trying to put back together because of the storms, I think this is something that I don't wanna lose sight of. I think we have to keep it in our mind and on radar. And maybe even have some discussions about it. Because a new cultural center facility is going to be a long way off in reality. However, if we were to move or make some decisions, and that's a board decision, if we're going to do it, if we're going to go out to another group and do it, as You know, there are some facilities available where we could start that type of programming. And in fact, someone, and I hear about this, maybe once or twice a month now, someone suggested the old area where the sheriff used to be behind the wind dixie might be available. But I mean, that's way off. But I think, and I'd like some feedback on this, that it's something we should consider putting some thought into because it was so significant up until the day, up until COVID. So if I might, you are going to be having a presentation on this at your next board meeting. The consultants coming in to present their programmatic site discussion and where we've landed there and get some feedback from the board. It is on the list of projects for the committee. Again, if you keep it on, if you pull it off, that's a board decision. You have me to your point. Yeah, it's still on the on the radar I mean we're coming back we've directed staff to go ahead and do these the outreach and and the fact that it's it's on here I think it's definitely on on the radar we you know but what's the new iteration you know what's the new I think Commissioner Constance said cultural center 2.0 I think you coined that term after the demise of the old one. I think we have to give some sort. Not even so much where it's going to be, but like we would envision happening would it be something we would be directly involved in or is it something that we would go out and have a community group but a lot more discipline than we had in the past but run whatever we talked about. That'll be an interesting conversation when it comes back as an agenda item. If I might wait in, when we are talking about the Cultural Center, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we have a library that is functioning on that site and scheduled to be replaced. So that has to be a part of the conversation because that is a very heavily used library and a huge asset to the community. So I wanna make sure that we're keeping both in the conversation. The library is scheduled for a full replacement in our CIP. That it's certainly on the list for consideration. We've put a $60 million placeholder for that on the list. So I haven't heard anyone say pull it off at this point in time. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So moving forward. When it's talk a little bit about process for adding projects to this list, we have historically in the past received recommendations from the school district on projects that are of need for them. They have submitted to for us for consideration as well. So I just wanted head nods for those to move forward. One is for $10 million for continued school security and improvements and enhancements throughout there. I believe they're at 17, 18 schools sites now. And then the other is a $5 million request for their career and technical training program. It's for the facility that they're constructing out of the airport for advanced manufacturing. Commissioner Dirty. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, relative to schools, I Would assume it'll come in it'll be scalable I think last time you in my one-on-ones we last go around they got five million correct So you know that they're now at 15 On one of the two requests I think we need a lot more detail. I mean especially if it's on security security, I would tend to want to really look hard at that, you know. But other aspects of it, maybe we find some kind of a balance, but I think more detail, a breakdown, what that all means from the school board is going to be really important. Thank you. requests when they were developing these projects that whatever they submitted be scalable. I did provide the superintendent with the history of funding for the schools so that they could see everything that we have funded in the past since the inception of sales tax for school projects. So he's aware and I think they've submitted projects that can't be scaled down and would still be constructed regardless of what size or amount that we provide. Commissioner Dordey. Just as the follow-up, Mr. Chairman, in the breakdown, the global breakdown is 10 for security, 5 for this technical. Yes, sir. Okay, bring it. Okay. All right. So we've talked about the school district request. I just wanted some feedback on external projects. We have done it both ways. We've not opened it up to the community and we've also done a community process where we have done an RFP for external projects. So just wanted some feedback and guidance from the board on what you would like to see in this process. I'm going to come to you, Senator Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, I just think our CNA is so, we got so many extremely important needs, priorities that we're going to, especially with these road projects, we're going to gobble up so much of the money right there. I don't see this go around opening it up to external. I just don't think we can. I would like to, we just don't have enough revenue to make that happen. Thank you. You recognize Mr. Drex? Thank you Mr. Chairman. I concur, Mr. Dordy. I just, I have a real hard time looking at these numbers. You know, no one what we're gonna have, we're gonna have like 216 million available potentially. Right. Maybe more, that's fine. We have $593 million with the projects. And there's a lot of needs in that list. There may be some we want to consider once in there. And I know we need a balance moving forward, but we have a significant amount of need that we need to be the most responsive and responsible to the taxpayers. And I think that we have a very extensive comprehensive list of those needs with probably some wants sprinkled in, if you will. And I don't, I really think we need to cap it where we are. We still have to look at school board and we still know the city's going to get some as well. And I just think we are where we need to be. I agree with those comments. Any other comments on it? No, it's agreed. Okay. Thank you for that. All right, so next steps. I should have put it in here, but I will start advertising for sales tax committee members, so we'll push that out through our website. You'll start to see that on your agenda as vacancies or opportunities for volunteer from the residents. And then with the plan to bring back the focus group final recommendations before you break in August. So we'll put that out starting probably later this week, and hopefully either by middle of June, so late June or your meeting in July, you'll have the discussion around focus group participation. We plan to convene the focus group in August. Again, we will start with our bi-monthly meetings and increase frequency as we need to get through the projects. We will be providing you periodic updates on that process and where we're at as we go through with the goal of March 2026 that committee to finalize their recommendations to the board and for you to have your conversation in April to determine the final projects selection. In May, we'll have the agenda item to approve the ordinance for the ballot referendum. And then we will start talking to anyone who will listen to us about what the projects are and what the benefits are. Any questions for staff? Okay, thank you for that presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we're going to move on to public input. Any subject? Anybody wishing to address the board during this portion of the meeting must state their name for the record? Remarks on any counter related subject? Shall be limited to three minutes and shall be addressed to the commission as a body and not to individual members. They will not be any discussion. Well good afternoon commissioners county attorney and county administrator and everybody in the chamber. What an incredible planning and zoning meeting last night. I want to thank Michael Graveson, Chair, District 5, and Stephen Vera, Secretary District 1. I think they are setting a new president for Charlotte County. commissioners I'm I'm going to really do you all a solid. My education, my dad, I'm sure you could relate to this Joe, but let me tell you not anybody could shine his shoes. That's what you said about your dad. I remember I was here. My father was one of the top management consultants in this world. I didn't need to go to a college, but I had the University of Southern California offer me a scholarship when I was probably about 14 years old. Because most of you don't know, but I can play football like you have no idea. Matter of fact, you can look up one of my childhood buddies, Sam Anno. He's one of the grapes at the USC. You all might know a guy by the name of Stephen Kerr. I kept him to the lowest scoring points ever in the Herb Firth League. You wanna know who Herb Firth was? He was the scorekeeper for the UCLA Bruins. Now I want you all to know this right now. I've spent a lot of time here with each one of you. And I did a polling a few weeks ago. Almost a month ago. You better get a grip on the development. Mr. Richard Russell and I have tried to help all of you. Tonight, I'm going to invite each one of you, especially you, Commissioner Truex. I'd like to see you at B. Fobreides at 6 p.m. I saw you at the BLM protest, and I want to educate all five of you and and burned in moody if you're listening. It would be who you to get to B. Fobreides tonight at 6 p.m. I'm going to be giving the first ever real presentation about the Charlotte Harbor National estuary, the Peace River, the Myakar River, Charlotte Harbor, and the relationship with Mosaic. And lastly, Senator Albert, and if you want to be the adult, get Mosaic to start putting those industrial wastewater facilities at each facility. I hope to see you all tonight. Thank you for your comments, sir. Thank you. Good afternoon. afternoon. Ursula K's retired CPA. Tax payer here in Charlotte County on Creek Drive Southeast. About six tenths of a mile from Charlotte Harbour Beach Park. Place I used to walk to. I want to thank everybody for their extreme focus on public safety. It's very, very nice to see that. And it's very, very, very important. I'm not here to belly ache. I'm here to share a concern, because I too am concerned about public safety. I get to walk to the beach park and stand on the grass and look at the fence. And look out and see people enjoying the beach park from the water. If the water is that unsafe, why aren't we cleaning it out for the people who are accessing it from the water side? I happened to drive yesterday along Bay Shore Drive. I love that drive. Beautiful view of the harbor. I have to look through what I call the concentration camp fencing, because that's what it reminds me of. And I happen to see a gentleman in the water walking along with his fishing pole in hand. It was like lucky guy. And he looked like he was really having a good time. But goodness gracious, did he know how unsafe that water was? I understand that there's a two-foot drop at the Charlotte Harbor Beach Park. I remember going to Englewood Beach just a couple of years ago after a major storm. It was just a wind storm. It was a five-foot drop from the water erosion. I'm from Michigan. I lived on the west side of Michigan on the shores of Lake Michigan and one of the things we did is teenagers in the 60s in St. Joseph, Michigan, was to walk along and see how many houses were falling into the water. That's beach erosion. A two-foot drop? Yeah, someone could sue over that. But is that a sufficient cause to fence off all these parks? I don't think so. I was horrified when I came back from Milton to see all of the damage. I understand that. But come on, there's money. You can do what's needed to be done to take those fences down and make them accessible to people from the land. That's all I'm asking for. That's all a lot of people are asking for. Thank you for your time. Thank you, ma'am. Anybody wishing to speak? Please come forward. You'll have three minutes. Please state your name for the record. I've never done this. My name is Carrie Herbie. I'm here on behalf of my clients, Stephen and Jacqueline Mitchell. They purchased their dream home for $433,000 with a significant down payment on September the 4th, 2019, a two-story estate home nestled on two acres over Batpacock Ranch Preserve, and beautiful and a beautiful design home with a courtyard, a wraparound balcony, an elevator, and every feature you could dream of for them to live in their forever home. They were assured by Charlotte County Code Enforcement at the time of their purchase that no manufactured homes or any structures that align with the manufactured home would be in their community and the integrity would be permitted in this area. Your code enforcement representatives were present and gave the reassurance as directed. However, in July of 2021, what started as a single mobile home was placed near the road and we assumed it was temporary during construction. It turned into something entirely different. Not only was it permanent, but residents started to perform more quickly and soon followed numerous mobile homes, cars and other residences, portable parties and everybody living in these streets like you cannot imagine. They started to pile up, violation after violation after violation with no code enforcement. It has gone so far that individuals are reported digging trenches across the road and dragging alligators that they slaughter and consume on their own property. My 73 year old client recently got her vehicle stuck in one of those trenches and had to call her 75 year old husbandold husband to come and help her out of this trench, just to get home to her own house. I then had to list their property. I'm sorry. I then had to list their property last July. And since then, I have had 17 showings, which were all praised that this is a beautiful home and a beautiful neighborhood. But unfortunately, what has happened throughout the neighborhood, nobody could proceed. Nobody could proceed because of what has happened to the neighborhood and it has gone downhill. Even with a 2.25 transferable VA loan because my client is a disabled veteran from the Vietnam War. They are now left asking why is the neighborhood and the Charlotte Ranchas being zoned as they have to take care of their own property and maintain their own roads. Your time is up. I understand my time is up. How do we, how do we fix this? You can send an email. I'm really unsure if there was a lot of things going on. The starter was sent to you, Mr. Constance. No, Matt, we don't talk back and forth, but if you want, you can certainly communicate through email. You know what, this is not where we're gonna, where is, I think we have a staff member in the back who'll get with you. Go ahead, sir, come forward. Yeah, you'll have three minutes. Hi, name is Sebastian Cantoli. I am a new resident of Gulf Cove. I'm here in regards to the Gillette Blitman Waterway Project. It's a bridge that's been out since Hurricane Ian. Being new, I did some research on the internet and your county does provide our county provides an end-to-end site of a schedule.. We were expected to start construction on a bridge on 512 of this year and unfortunately at the point of impact of 512 there's no longer a schedule and there's no longer a turnover in close out schedule. That is gone wayside. Now I understand the product has state funding. It's been approved for state, but we have not received those funds But I just feel we're falling on deaf ears that we're sitting and waiting For that money to come I understand it's been I spoke to the project manager and we're sitting and waiting I mean we should have some contacts to push that money down here so we can get that bridge done. There is barriers going through and homeowners driveway for the last two years. I mean, can we get some urgency on this project to get completed? And I've asked you to provide that urgency as if them barriers are in your own driveway. Thank you. Yeah, stick around, sir. We'll get an update. Stick around. Anybody else wishing to speak? Please come forward. You'll have three minutes. Okay. Oh, we have Mr. Lusted coming up. Hi, Jeff Lusted. First about Pintagorda and the parking garage. That was mainly discussed because of the new building at City Center and they were only going to have one car per every thousand square feet and we realized they would need more parking. The project itself wouldn't have enough parking for the retail. The other thing that I thought was interesting was the build up on Harborview Road. I remembered many times that you said we didn't have the money to do that. And when did this become a priority? It must have happened fairly soon because you guys expressed that that wasn't a project that you were going to be able to fund. And now that's become a major priority. That's great. But the reason why it's priority is because this 40-year-old or 30-year-old builder who had this land tied up all this time is now requiring these things that the government has to provide for him to make it manageable. He should bear some of the cost of that, and especially a large corporation like Bucky's. The citizen shouldn't have to pay. I can't go as a small businessman in my life and say, here, please pay this road. I want a certain access to it. I guess I could, but I don't mean the normally that wouldn't happen. That's a real cost, $52 million to have this new development. I'm just wondering, there was an article today about impact fees, and that's definitely an impact fee for this project. I'm all for the project. It's just they should pay some of their way. And there's one other thing, but thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Anybody wishing to speak? Please come forward, state your name for the record. You'll have three minutes. Okay, I see nobody moving forward. So we're gonna move on to to comments. Commissioner, administrator, iter flores. Great. Thank you. No comments today. Thank you. Okay. Mr. Nolton. And commissioners, as you know, the Babcock folks have requested that we adopt an ordinance prohibiting e-bikes on roadways and sidewalks and Babcock. Actually they define e-bikes as unregistered electric or gas powered mini motorcycles, mini dirt bikes and class three e-bikes. So it's something that we are looking at if the board has any input. I'd appreciate hearing your comments. That's it. Okay. Anybody have any input at this point? Commissioner Deutsche? Yeah, I think we ought to look into it because those things are all over the county. I see them all the time. I think they're dangerous. I think we're going to have some young people that get hurt. There are no definitive regulations regarding those vehicles. I have a copy on my desk of the state. Laws, I've talked to the sheriff about it. And I don't want to see a youngster or anyone else hurt. But they're flying down the street. I see them in my neighborhood all the time. Well, we don't have, well, on the sidewalks on Harbor, I see them in the middle of the road. They go in and out of driveways. And maybe that's like 10, 11, 12-year-old kids do. Not that we ever did anything like that. But my concern is that some point, someone's gonna get hurt, bad. And I think we ought to look into it because it might be served as some kind of prototype for us to consider. You know, if they want to get going on this, I think it makes sense. We could keep somebody from getting hurt and again, maybe have a model that we could look at for other parts of the county. Thank you. Commissioner Dordy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, that was actually the one or only comment I was going to bring up today is that I would entertain. I think it'd be appropriate for the attorney's office to proceed ahead with looking at that draft ordinance for Babcock. I think it'd be an interesting neighborhood to test this to see how it would work, how it would be enforced, those types of things before it extrapolates to the rest of the county. But yeah, I'm okay with moving ahead with it for Babcock. Yes, so am I. Any more comments? No. That's it. Thank you. OK, then we'll continue with the... I'm done with moving ahead with it for Beth. Yeah, so am I. Any more comments? That's it. Okay, then we'll continue with the. I'm done, sir. That was all I had. Commissioner Constable. I was gonna weigh in and say, I think that's fine. We do golf cart ordinances in different locations of the county to allow. so this could be something where we restrict as long as it's not county wide. I think we need to make sure that works and I think it'd be a bit of an enforcement nightmare for the sheriff. County wide, so I think we need to make sure that works. And I think it'd be a bit of an enforcement nightmare for the sheriff, county wide. So I think that works. Just briefly, we had another good tourism event. Robin Madden was our tourism person for the Wall of Fame. She's done a fantastic job out Barrier Islands,, Palm Island Resort area and you know I just think it's great to show because it's not just the people that run the businesses but it's the back office folks, Commissioner Toe Sayon, and Commissioner Doerch were both there as well so it was a very good event. And I just, I want to talk some glad into transportation is coming up because there are things that I invite the board to bring intersections where you feel like there might be an issue just this morning. I was on veterans turning on to Murdoch Circle. And there's only one turn lane. We could have two turn lanes turning into two lanes of traffic. It started to stack up so much that it was in the left lane. We have a lot of areas where little things, which are not that expensive, could really improve traffic flow. So I don't see Mr. Fackery in the room, but he's got his work cut after him. And so does Mr. Lyos and that whole team, because they really have to look at counting traffic and asking everybody in the county, all county employees. If you see something, say something. If you think there's an issue, certain times of day, it's not every time. But certain times of day when it's really backing up and it's causing a significant problem, we need to know about that because we should be acting proactively just to handle the congestion problems that we're hearing so much about. Yeah, thanks, I think the core door study on veterans identified, some of those I can't remember about that particular turn lane. But yeah, you can go up and down veterans during certain times of the day. You cannot get into the turn lane. But yeah, you can go up and down veterans during certain times of the day. You cannot get into the turn lane and you miss a whole light signal change because you're stuck. Some people are going over those manable curves and making their own lane. Yeah, and it happens every day. I drive that every day. There's literally accidents weekly. I just saw a T-bone, probably two accidents, within a four day span. It's an everyday occurrence. Anybody that drives that road understands that. Commissioner Dorty. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One question for public works. And I'll just, you don't have to answer today, but I've observed to a lot of the stacking, the storage problems we have at some of these interternt sections is the result of fact, the old standards on taper when you go from the through lane to the actual storage lane is a very long ratio taper, which I believe it can be shortened today under the new standards. To give you more storage. Yeah, like it. As opposed to having stick them way out in the through lane. So again, just to request, Mr. Flores, the public works looks at that and see, you know, those problematic intersections that you're talking about, Commissioner, I think there may be some solutions, geometric solutions that are fairly reasonably inexpensive. But you mentioned inexpensive in roads. Those two things don't go wrong. Relatively inexpensive. Okay. For a road. Commissioner Consist. Yeah, just the news about LKNAN dams resigning in a positive way, but just ending his service after 20 years and going into the private sector, it's going to be a very bittersweet meeting that we have next week. He was an asset to Charlotte County that I can tell you. I can't believe eight years flew by. He's by far been such a great asset. Yeah, thank you. I understand he's not going to be attending our MPO meeting. I always know. That wax told me that yesterday. I'll need to confirm that with wax. Yeah, thank you. I think you're correct. Yeah. Because I ask who's sitting in and it's somebody else. So we will see. Commissioner Trevix. You're good? Commissioner Dewey. I've got several. Go ahead. I'll pick up from the last few meetings. First of all, several announcements, you guys may have made. You should be getting an invitation this week for the FOP. A warm and foster memorial day is going to be held on Tuesday evening, a week from today at the WMI Games Park. And if you've never been to one of those programs, it's a pretty significant impressive program and we'll be recognizing the eight fallen law enforcement officers and our community. Weekend, and we had a proclamation on it and it's gonna be be right again a couple times that weekend. But rolling thunder is may know I think we're all aware of it. They're going to be coming into the county on the weekend of the 23rd, 24th and 25th. And they're going to be having a concert at the Alastair Park on the 24th and a program there, I think that wouldn't supposed to be around two o'clock. And then there's going to be a ride through the county and they're going to be heading over towards the Twisted Fork, a holly deal if you're interested in that. But it's something to see. The problem is going to be where SMA is going to be 500 plus motorcycles, not the 100,000 they had in Washington a few years, about 500. And another date you may wanna put it on your calendar is that on Monday morning, the 26th of May, we'll be celebrating Memorial Day in Shally County. The program will be at the replica of the Vietnam Wall of Punta Guadalu, when we had the Vietnam Memorial Day, they told us we had close to 600 people there. And to me, the most exciting thing about these events is I don't think that we do them for ourselves, but we do them for the young people in the community, because it's important for them to be aware of, particularly in Memorial Day, the sacrifice that was made for them to have the freedom that we all experience today. And what I feel best about in our honor guide, we've got six youth teenage groups that will be clearing the flag. And I think we had five for the Vietnam program, but this is sort of kind of amazing. On last but not least, I had mentioned a couple of meeting a two ago about the situation with the veterans clinic. I can give you a lot of detail and update on it. It'll probably take three or four minutes. No one seemed particularly interested in hearing about it last reading. But okay, Chris has gotten on his head, that's okay with me. Let me fill in and do this because I think we should all share the history. Getting involved in veterans events and never registering with the VA until very just a few years ago, but somehow I'm one of those people that got lost, and they had told me my records that got burned out in Minnesota or Michigan, in some way, but that's another story. But for the first time, I went down to the Veterans Clinic in Cape Coral, probably about six, seven years old, something like that, I think. And I had a lot of the veterans who were complaining about the services and what happens here at the VA clinic. And they have to go to Cape Coral for a lot of simple routine services. And depending where you are in Charlotte County, if you're down in West County, I've sort of kind of towards the place here. You're looking at it close to an hour ride to get to Cape Coral. If you're over here, depending on traffic plus or minus, 25 to 35 minutes and Bernstler road, maybe 10 minutes closer. And it's a great facility. The biggest problem with the VA is the bureaucracy to get hold of a live person because usually, I find, do that pretty good. Anyway because of the comments I had, I made it a point and made one or two special visits down to the facility which is an incredible facility on diplomat if you've never seen it. It's a great hospital for us. At any with, I never met with the administrator. I always had the temporary acting assistant, something or other person, but I did meet with them. And after a couple years, I was finally told about four years ago, yes, they're going to expand the clinic in Shala County, because we notice a lot of veterans there. I mean, I talk about 35,000. That's probably pretty close, because there's no way of really identifying veterans that haven't registered or haven't put it on their drive as license or a lot fall between the cracks, or don't bother to do anything. So I never told, yes,, we're gonna expand the clinic. And I got the, I believe it was the assistant minister to actually come up to a Charlotte County Veterans Council meeting. And it's important that this happen because we saved the minutes. And we have the minutes of two meetings which were held the winter three years ago. And Joe and I can't remember his last name came up and he said we're gonna expand the clinic in Charlotte County. We know you need it. We're gonna include new services. It's probably gonna be about 32,000 square feet. And we were thinking that it could be somewhere maybe between Kings Highway or 41 or somewhere and by the way subsequent to that I'd recommended a whole bunch of other places for him including 776 whether in the little commercial area and it actually talked to it was a cult of the developer over there and they said yeah we'd be happy to that in. Well anyway, I would periodically check every six or every nine months and I was told the money was allocated to do it to build a 32,000 square foot facility in Chalacate. But it wasn't appropriated. Well, we all know how that works. So every year or if the year I checked, not hearing anything, I probably had in checked in six, seven, eight months because I have very frankly figured the county would know about it, the congressional group would know about it, our legislators would know about, we would know about it. Never heard anything. Then I picked up a newspaper in January with a press release that the Shawl County Veterans Clinic is going to be expanded. And it's going to be put in Northport 12, 15 miles away from here. And that's sort of kind of what I shared. And the interesting thing was I made some visits down to the clinic. I was there again this morning. They have picked up on the fact there's gonna be a new clinic in Northport and they're gonna close our clinic down. Now that's what they understood. However, we sort of formed an ad hoc group and virtually everyone on it is a veteran. We ended up having a Zoom meeting with Congressman Stubi's office and subsequent to that. The congressman came back and said he has spoken to the secretary and they will be leaving the clinic in Charlotte County. Stubi's office was upset. I've never heard from Scott's office but they they were never contacted. I checked with the administration. We never got any contact. I think, you know, if any of us would have got a contact, I would have had some idea about it. But there's still a lot of concerns we have because there, I suggested Stubi's office that he'd get it writing. And I've had several discussions with General Hartsell, and the last one was Sunday, and then we missed each other, and I'm supposed to call him today at tomorrow to get an update. Because the responses I got from the general, and he's a great guy. I think some of you may have met him when he came to visit us once for one of the events at Keynes Park. And he basically gave me what he was told from the VA, which was a lot of bureaucratic words that say, well, they looked at the area and, you know, north, what might be in the center of it, and it's going to still maintain veteran services and such. And, you know, but there is the update on it. And part of the argument that I presented to the congressional delegation and everyone else is I thought we had about a dozen veterans that used Charlotte Transit to get there. The guy's at the clinic said, there's probably two or three dozen veterans that count on Charlotte Transit to get back and forth. By the way, they acknowledge they have 10,000 different patients that go to that clinic, probably 95% of them are from Charlotte County because I have a friend who comes over here from Northport because it's closer. Also important is we look at this and bring it up today. There's an incredible clinic facility in Lee County. There's a facility right now in Charlottes County, I'm sorry, in Sarasota County on Beirut Road that they're going to be expanding somewhere. Northport has about 90,000 people, I think, something like that, I'm not sure of the exact population. According to our most recent consultant, we have 224,000 people. And our estimates now, we've got somewhere in the up 30,000 for veterans here. So I'm happy to keep you posted. We're supposed to have another get together with the congressman coming up. Administration's been very involved in this from the beginning and supportive. But I think it's important that as a body, this group let our congressional delegation know that we want to not only keep our VA facility here in Charlotte County, keep the clinic here, that we want to expand it. By the way, I made it as concise as I could. I could go on, but I think those are, that's basically the facts. I don't know if you have any questions or anything else and Hector's and, you know, administration is up to date on a few more facts than this, but that's it. If you have any questions or... Is that all you have? Okay. Thank you, sir. Real quick, update on that bridge issue, Mr. Elias. I just want to make sure I've got the correct one in my mind that I'm thinking about. Yeah, that... Yeah, if it was a gelat bridge, that's the one that got, I went out and looked at that, it got side swiped, and there's a residential home there where there was some erosion. I think that's the one I went and visited. For the record commissioners, John Elias Public Works Director, so you are correct. We completely empathize with the citizen. I can give him my commitment that we've been trying to get this done as quickly as possible. The challenge we've had in this particular situation is it's an FHWA road. So we work with FDOT to get FHWA funding for it. It's in the form of a lap agreement. We've done all that. We've put the project out the bid. I think you all approved it at the last board meeting to move forward. And in theory, we would have probably been starting construction here any second. We've been in contact countless times with FDOT. There's a hold up on it with some particulars as it relates to the FHWA funding. I've had four meetings with Wayne with FDOT and administration is met with FDOT as recently as yesterday with LK to try to navigate through this and we're still trying to make this move forward but there is some sort of funding hold up through the FHWA. Yeah, my understanding and staff did brief me on. I just want to make sure I had the correct one. Correct that we were ready to go and then we hit this snafu with one of the agencies. Yep. And that's where it's, you know, it's, it's not that we're not trying to get this done. I went out to that site. I remember I spoke to you about it, sure, on what's it going to take to get this thing moving, funding sources, things like that. And then I come to find out it was literally, you know, within the last few days that we had to put a hold on until these issues can be worked out. The timing of it, we really don't have a timeframe on. We're trying to move through it. Again, we're meaning with FDOT later today on a different subject. We'll probably touch on that again. And I think administration set up a meeting with the players that we need to talk with to try to figure out a lot of what we think it is in our discussions with it, including Kim with purchasing. It's like a vernacular issue like they we said we're having a pre construction meeting and they were like you can't do that. And it's like their version of a pre construction meeting is a pre award meeting. Then we cut a PO for the contract, and they thought that we didn't go out the bit, and we're like, no, it was comparatively bit, so we just think there's a communication. a pre-award meeting, then we cut a PO for the contract, and they thought that we didn't go out the bid, and we're like, no, it was competitively bid, so we just think there's a communication issues what we're challenged with right now. Yeah, I mean, it's always something. So I would just say to the constituent, it's not that we don't want to get it done, we get stuck with these hiccups and other agencies that are out of our control, but there's no doubt it's a priority this board. We advanced the approval to get it done. And again, I complete complete I give them a card I completely empathize with the situation. I've been out there a couple times myself You could walk under the driveway at one point. I think we've done some stabilization effort there But um, we are deaths desperately trying to get it completed well Just get it done as quickly as you and staff can navigate this issue so we can give this project rolling. I mean, I don't want to hold it up on our account. Now that we're stuck waiting for an agency, we just have to keep pushing. Sure. Okay, any other comments on that one? Okay. On the VA, I have had discussions with staff regarding the potential for the VA to move out of the county. We've talked about it, we're a purple heart community, we value our veterans here. And that would have an impact on veteran services here in the county. And I don't think the board has a board position on the issue. So I don't know if it comes up if we can do it through head nods or have some discussion or put it on the next agenda, head nods. Okay, so I think head nods I'm hearing from Emily. Mr. Chairman, I need more information. I haven't gotten any factual information delivered to me in writing as to what all's going on. Okay. So I'd like to have all that first. Sure. I would say if you haven't gotten with staff or they haven't given you the information, make sure you get with staff at your earliest possible convenience. Get any information concerning the issue. Well Emily's up. Emily, can you come forward real quick? I want to make sure I have the same information. Good afternoon. for the record it Emily Lewis deputy county administrator. So it's our understanding that our VA clinic is not moving which is great news. I think the request at this point is just to reemphasize from this board that we want to not only keep our existing VA clinic we would like it expanded for the numerous veterans that we have living in Charlotte County. And I think it's appropriate if the board wants to weigh in for us to just send a letter noting that that's our desire. Yes, so if you can craft a letter, get a copy to all of us and then we could have a comment if we need more information, But I don't have an issue with crafting a letter to that effect. I don't want to lose the VA clinic or even have a threat and I want them to know that no, it's here and here to stay and we even want to expand it. Now I will say when it comes to expansion, much like the state, the federal government has to create a budget and they've done that through CR for a number of years. And so that will take probably some advocacy at the federal level, and probably not a one year effort. Yeah, I think it's important, because I don't think we want any one commissioner coming up with their stance. I think it should be something that the board agrees. This is what we're going to, our official position on the matter, Commissioner Doich. That's where I've ridden up because I thought we should be doing this aboard. Let me just catch up. Well, you could have did that in about 60 seconds. Yeah, nice to see you. Well, I did a couple meetings ago. Okay, go ahead, sir. The interesting thing is in our minutes, we have the administrator here at two different meetings where he said he mentioned the area as I did. He also said 32,000 square feet. And the latest thing that we got from Stubi's office was it's going to be 28,000 feet. And it going to be a north port but ours will stay. We don't have anything in writing at all. I'm going to try and get it and I don't even know if the congressman's gotten it and I'm supposed to have a call with General Hartzel today. If he has any update I'll get it to Hector and he can pass it on to everyone. That's exactly where we are right now. Okay, yeah, so if you could craft a letter, get it to all the commissioners for comment. Like I said, we did have a conversation at my one-on-ones and we did discuss it on the fact that, you know, if it moves, it could be an issue here for our residents. So that is a problem. So let's, I would just do that if there's no objection and we can all comment it through the one-on-one process. That's all right. Okay. Good with that. All right. Anything else? Okay. We've completed our agenda. This meeting is adjourned.