the alachua county board of county commission on special meeting uh workshop for september 2nd 2025 at 9 30. mr chad move approve of the agenda second motion in a second are there any further discussion to the motion are there any citizen comments back to the board those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed same sign motion carried okay first item is the workshop on comprehensive plan evaluation and update housing economic development um mr chair uh ben chumley has been leading these workshops and so he's going to lead you and we have staff from economic tourism and economic development and from housing here who will be able to sit in and answer questions okay sounds great thank you mr chair um this is your second workshop on the comprehensive plan evaluation and update and today the focus is specifically on the housing and economic elements as you know there's been a lot happening in both of those areas since the comprehensive plan was last updated in 2018 2019 so we want to make sure that these two elements of your comprehensive plan reflect the board's current priorities and strategies and is generally that those elements are up to date so the purpose of the workshop today uh is to review the currently adopted housing and economic elements at a very high level we're also going to present some conceptual staff recommendations on aspects of both of these elements that staff believes need to be updated and we're also looking for input and direction from the board on conceptual updates to these elements so after today's workshop you have two more workshops scheduled uh the next is on october 7th and that will be dealing with environmental protection and resilience topics and then october 21st that will be dealing with community facilities and services so things like transportation recreation solid waste for example there will probably be some others as well environmental protection includes storm water yes yeah conservation open space yeah that october 7th will include the conservation and open space element the storm water element the energy element and some of the potable water and sanitary sewer element and waste solid waste right now we have that on october 21st okay um and then we also have a december 2nd meeting that's available if we need it if you know if we can't get through uh everything in these four meetings uh december 2nd will be available as needed so as you give us direction at these workshops uh staff will then go back and begin to draft specific comprehensive plan amendment language which we will then bring forward to the board and to the planning commission beginning uh later this year and early into 2026 and just as a reminder we are required by statute to transmit uh any necessary amendments to the comprehensive plan by april 1st uh or actually it should be march 31st of 2026 so by that date we have to transmit any amendments that are needed to comply with updates to florida statutes so at a minimum we need to transmit those things and we can also transmit any other uh amendments that the board would like at that point um so i'm going to provide a brief overview of the current housing element just at a very high level um the housing element contains three primary goals uh there are several objectives under each goal uh the first goal uh as you can see is to promote safe sanitary and affordable housing for all current and future county residents and then under that goal there are four specific objectives the first objective is to talks about the development of affordable housing that is dispersed throughout the county with specific focus in three areas and those are land use and facilities the dispersion of affordable housing and manufactured housing so the policies under that include things like providing adequate land areas for the development of housing conducting periodic housing studies to identify specific needs promoting the dispersion of affordable housing throughout the community that's proximate to things like schools and employment centers and transit inclusionary housing and encouraging that is is under that objective as well as several policies which recognize manufactured and mobile homes as one potential source of affordable housing yeah if i i don't know if you want us to look for our comments but it it did seem to me there's like a really kind of like outsized and like kind of focus on manufactured housing i'm not sure if that's a legacy issue of like back in the day when we were had that was more a common thing but it was it doesn't seem to be talking about modular housing which i did talk to staff about and they said like you know good modular housing is considered the same as like a stick built home because it's attached the same way and it meets all the hurricane standards and it's built to our building codes but the manufactured housing is is like trailers and stuff that don't necessarily meet all those same standards and codes i just wonder why there's so much emphasis on it in our housing element i think to a great degree um it is a legacy issue um like you said um and i think we can probably go through those policies and and narrow them down a little bit yeah just sort of like compact them it just seems yeah they're there they do seem to be kind of repeating some of the same things um over and over again would we add tiny homes manufactured in tiny homes we do not address we don't say anything about tiny homes in the comp plan now so we probably should add something about that um in there i mean mary mary just continues to talk about how with technology the size and the cost of housing theoretically should be coming down and i think the only place we really address that is manufactured housing i think we really need to this is an aside this is more of an us thing and a housing stuff thing than a comp plan thing but maybe it's a comp plan policy i think we need to figure out how to provide education and work with the builders association with community housing groups to help people understand the difference between pre-engineered housing that is done in a way that's actually more efficient using resources more wisely and then bringing them on site and and making sure they need building code and trailers an old modular house because i think the old school of like building something was like it was a trailer it was a double wide and then you put it there it wasn't very quality they were kind of junk a lot of times they depreciated really quickly but now we're seeing to mary's point we're seeing a lot of innovative ways that people are doing house construction but we're hearing i'm hearing in our meetings no modular housing or don't use that or don't use this and but i think it's because there's not a good understanding of the breadth of what the options are out there for that kind of housing so something in here that talks about our the importance of us working with organizations to educate about updates in housing technology and in the types of housing that are available to meet our growing housing needs it's interesting you said that because at the same time there's this conception that um that tiny houses are always good and tiny houses can be really bad housing as well yeah but people oh why aren't you doing tiny houses or whatever it's there's this you know really but they're going to save a bunch of money when you still have to build a bathroom you still have to put in planning is it like the cost is the cost per square foot is actually typically much higher but the other costs are less but anyway i you know i i agree with you i think there needs to be an education thing and a um i really like what the um city of gainsville has done with some approved housing choices yes and maybe maybe that's where we need to go with the modular we adopted that yeah we did but we haven't adopted the modular oh like you know what i'm saying a set of standards yes you know it's like oh we looked at this and here's here's something that that we think meets our quality standards that's an interesting idea like not necessarily a regulatory set of standards but more of like a pre-approved like these ones just a thought anyway sorry sorry it's all right that's right good should we uh everywhere where we say affordable housing should it say affordable and workforce housing or should it not or attainable or yeah and that that's actually something we're going to get to later on we we are required now to specifically address workforce housing in the comp plan by statute so um we do need to kind of weave that that term in throughout the whole element and we did have uh i mean he was going to bring it up later but we did have a conversation at ahac and i think one of the things that we wanted to be careful of is um what what was brought up is that it's not it's not easy or reasonable probably from our perspective given how we do most things by enforcement to like have a situation where we're regulating like the leases that somebody has with someone that they're a working person or not a working so what um the shimberg center recommended was instead having a like the the income levels that tend to be our working public so we know what our average median income we know what the majority of our people make not average and also just the median income like we know what that is and where most of our people sit and it's somewhere unfortunately it's in like the 55 000 ring yeah so like having that target which we've already kind of done so it works well for what our policies are because we've already kind of targeted that 50 percent ami as something that we're working on for affordable housing so they're they're very in line with each other and the other the other piece was um i wrote it down was making sure that it's close to amenities um so it's affordable to the typical worker um and close to work centers and amenities necessary for the working public so it's defining working housing more in the terms of the ami and the amenities that are needed like transit and and you know those sorts of things and where the working centers are like close to you have close to hospitals close to the activity centers rather than it being kind of everywhere i don't know if you guys are open to that that seemed to be where ahack was going with it so we're not trying to ask our staff to like police you know the least just like it passed down on what we are calling workforce housing over time yes then maybe we just need to update the terminology so that maybe that you know because if it's that's what i mean the definition yeah and i think they've done that words but the thing is too that when you're talking about manufactured housing you know i know there has been all you know this the thing about the mobile homes you know trailer parts and that sort of thing and historically but i've seen some really good ones too and i think the manufacturing standards have increased particularly the requirements from florida that have these homes have to stand up to a certain standard but we've got people who are living in rv parks too you know i mean we having whole communities that are coming so you know i don't know if we need to address rv living or not as accessory dwellings or as actually standalone community which is happening up in walto which is happening in i mean they are whole community towns small suburbs that are being built of rv parks so i don't know if that's something that we need to address um do you guys want to tell what currently i mean i would say this i would say i mean i think an rv park is an rv park and that's what it should be it should be temporary housing like people are there i mean they could be living in it full time but they're moving around they're not staying here yeah but that's not how that's not housing that's safe in florida it's just not like if a hurricane comes but it's not happening under our policies it's not happening in the unincorporated areas permanent housing mr chair um i think jeff was going to tell you you changed your code not too long ago for rvs yeah mr chair so right now in our land development code and this is as you were having the discussion i was thinking um in terms of policy backing and the comprehensive plan it it is an area if we're going to maintain it um that we probably should have some policy backing so a few years ago you added the ability for someone to have either an rv or a tiny home on wheels and we went through the process of defining that as either a principal unit or as an accessory dwelling unit in your agricultural zoning district so those are allowed in those areas the next step up from that so those aren't considered they're not considered as i mean by the manufacturers to be permanent housing the tiny home wheels is a little bit there's still gray area there in terms of the the manufacture of those at the state level the next step up from that is manufactured housing and so you allow manufactured housing and that's what you would think of traditionally as a mobile home they don't it's a different standard than it was back in the pre-70s mobile home standard so i go to lots of conferences where the manufactured home association is is touting how great the standard is now and how well they're built don't have a reason to doubt that but in terms of our comprehensive plan and land development regulations so we allow mobile manufactured homes in your agricultural zoning districts in a mobile home park in a manufactured home park or we allow them in r1c which is we have some areas in the urban cluster that are r1c so that's at the four units per acre inside the urban cluster those are traditionally some sort of legacy areas where manufactured homes were allowed you can think of down near aridondo off of archer road is an area like that and then as commissioner presia stated modular homes in terms of of building code are considered a single family dwelling they could be built anywhere a single family dwelling could be either as a principal unit or as an accessory dwelling unit so those are sort and then of course we have site bill homes that we do full building department just to be clear you can have it as your principal dwelling or your but you that's like one per five acres and clustered if you have more than that like you can't just build an rv park and call it housing that's correct that's correct so to be to be an rv park you have to have tourist entertainment land use and rm1 zoning and where we allow those right now typically we have tourist entertainment land use is at ri 75 interchanges um and we do get a lot of requests to build rv parks um and uh we do have some language i think benefits if we haven't already addressed it in the earlier workshop we will one of the ones coming up um we do feel like we need some direction on that because one of the things about tourist entertainment land use i think actually we did bring it up at the last workshop the tourist entertainment land use does have some uh the locational criteria is not really clear for staff because a lot of it says it can be adjacent to other natural areas we have a lot of natural areas in elatto county now that the county's bought preserves state preserves etc so we do feel like we need some more guidance because we get a lot of questions about building rv parks and those are for temporary residents we'll have to check um we discussed it a couple years ago and we'll check as you guys are having the rest of the discussion we did that for we also have manufactured home parks we did do that for manufactured home parks we took the the reference away for rvs so i'll look in rm1 we'll double check that but in terms of these um the mobile home parks do we have any oversight over those in terms of quality because i know some of them are in really you know well kept taken care of but others not so much um i think there have been issues that i can't remember the one now out on um 39th headed past the airport or around the black one yeah some of those you know that do we have any oversight or codes i believe they have to meet the the property maintenance code just in terms of our code standards um and we do we permit them as well so there is there are the standards that are that come along with getting a permit for them because i know lamp lighters it's a really nice location out there um but i just you know this sometimes the quality of the places are questionable as well as the safety of the area so i didn't know if there was anything that we could do to regulate um the the standard of the quality of the of the housing thank you the i think the problem is that they just deteriorate really quickly so you can have a really quality one when you build it but the problem is that they they just don't hold up well those probably it's an older development so that's what i'm not saying if the newer if there should be you know if we have any kind of requirement for for for for the quality of the housing um because the newer things i think you know are are probably built to a better standard so far and so much i guess i i don't know about that one on the quality but i will say i i am not in favor of us creating rv parks as permanent housing in our county i don't think that that's a safe or effective way to create affordable housing like we have we have a real affordable housing crisis and we need to solve it but i don't think the solution to it is perpetuating people living in temporary housing that doesn't meet any kind of permanent housing standard and then we have a crisis on our hands when a hurricane comes and none of those people you know i mean i guess they can pick up and drive away but beyond that they don't have a lot of options it also most of them are pretty limited in terms of their you know their sewer and water capabilities and most of them are on a tank that they have to pump out on a regular basis and then that perpetuates the need for those pump out stations and how those get handled and where the waste goes i like it the way we have it we're yeah zoned in and toward development in the right places yeah if you all have a chance to go to waldo and see that facility out there i mean they've set up their own it's a lot of retirees you know people are this is how they're opting to live not in the city limits of all right right i don't it's out there by the motor park and you know where it's between yeah that's in the city i think it's in the waldo city yeah so it's waldo choosing to do that i mean i just don't i i don't think it's doing anybody any favors i'll just say that i mean like it's one thing if you're if you're literally an rv-er and that's what you do right you live in your mobile home and you try like you drive it from rv and you drive it from place to place and you spend three months here and three months there and three months there that's a different story but if if you're living in it permanently affixed in one place all the time then an rv is just not really it's better than being on the streets it's better i actually don't know that i agree i mean i don't i agree with that in general but i think that we have better opportunities to provide better housing like i don't think that that's a solution yeah but we're behind we're behind in that kind of housing you know i need to prioritize it we have 54 million dollars sitting in a bucket so you know we've got we've got opportunities to build housing to buy land and build housing we've got an opportunity to do a lot mary's brought forward some really cool ideas you know with the with the manufactured pre-engineered housing ideas i think we just we have to get on top of it and prioritize it but i don't think that the answer is substandardizing the housing that we're expecting people to live in i that just can it really concerns me that we just and then and then it looks like what you're talking about we have this deterioration of housing and then it's not safe and it's in substandard places and it's it's not kept well you know it's all these things and then we're talking about that instead of talking about like quality housing for people like housing is a human right i 100 believe that but i don't believe it's like sticking anybody in whatever we can give them you know building some like tent homes or rv parks and calling it a day like that's not housing go for it that's all i could say just go for it yeah i think though we have to recognize i i recently drove for a mobile home park that's over in southwest gainesville uh kind of between celebration point and the um the public's out there i can't remember exactly where it is but it's out there mobile home yeah yeah it's full of yeah of of rvs i think that you know to mary hillen's point we need to recognize the fact that we have many residents living in this some of them have been in the same rv for 10 or 15 years and it's you know they've been through hurricanes they've been through all kinds of things if if we are going to yeah they go to our shelters and they risk losing their housing which their housing you know the cost of those older mobile homes is five to ten thousand dollars where else can you right find a place to lay your head for that amount of money and um so i think if we're gonna start taking those options away then it needs to be in a stepped process and we need to have a plan i don't want to take it away yeah i just don't want to add it i don't want to increase where we're putting rv parks okay we've already increased if somebody wants it on their individual lot in a rural area we're allowing it like you know we've actually increased since we've been here the amount of opportunities for people to use those as homes the the problem comes is if you want to allow the tiny houses on wheels then the way that you differentiate between those and a travel trailer just you know or whatever is is very hard because and we don't allow i'm just saying i'm talking about parks i'm talking about rv parks where we're perpetuating a developer buying a piece of land instead of building real housing i understand but those are where people park tiny houses on wheels and there is on their lots some people do but there's i've had many people email me and say where can i park a tiny house on wheels i you know if i'm in boca raton they have an rv park that i can use that allows that long-term living and so i i just feel like you know we we have to think about it carefully because i think there's that overlap is is kind of hard to to differentiate okay um my gut tells me i'm with an on this but i also recognize that there are um there's migration of more affordable housing in the cities that are not in the unincorporated area which cities are allowing more rv parks have they changed their comp plan is waldo is the one in waldo or waldo change to their comp plan or how is how is it happening mr chair i'm not i don't know about the cities um we could look into that more i don't know mr chair i can only really speak my only uh concrete knowledge is on the city of gainesville where i believe they did extend it to industrial areas so if you think of the one that was constructed on 53rd avenue that isn't an industrial area zone so i know the city of gainesville yeah it would seem like they would start to pop up in the smaller cities before they would seek the unincorporated and i am with an and i don't want developers looking for plots of 10 acre land where they can put an rv park and create a bunch of conflicts in the unincorporated area because we will have a lot of conflicts with the surrounding folks i think some of the small towns still allow mobile homes just i mean that's kind of my question right where where else in alachua county in the incorporated areas are they allowed for the rv parks we can we can look into that mr chair the ones that i'm thinking of that are not in the county but in the cities like water are in areas they may not have the same land use as us as tourist entertainment but that's where they are this rv park is near that tourist entertainment areas yes okay which is where we allow right now and i'm okay with that and i i did misspeak we did not take out the 90 days for rv parks we left that in we just added rvs to be allowed in mobile home parks that's what that's what we did yeah that's what i think was a good change yeah about three years that's the mary's point is that yeah yeah i just i've watched the one in keystone heights grow bigger and bigger river around lake santa fe and you know it's happening whether it's in our county or the next county over and i don't know are there any regulations that would restrict us from we're restrict a landowner from putting a mobile home park i mean our would our comp plan then override anything coming down from the state saying how a person can use their land you know we have that by our zoning yeah well this is what i'm asking you know do are we in conflict with the state if we're telling someone that they can't set up a mobile home park i don't believe we're in conflict with the state i mean you you would have to have the proper land use and zoning to do the mobile to begin with so and in order to change they would have to be changed in order for someone to do that so mr chair where we allow mobile home parks currently is in um we have a special zoning district just for mobile home parks called rm it implements the medium and medium high land uses so areas where you could otherwise have multi-family development we allow mobile home parks and when we did have this similar discussion several years ago that was and we were also at the same time struggling with the tiny home on wheels conversation and at the time you know we we had arrived at the rv was a way to to implement the tiny home on wheels so we did as missy stated remove basically allow rvs in mobile home parks you can think we don't have any rm zoning that's not developed there's no rm so it's basically someone would have to come in in medium or medium-high land use and request an rm district to be able to do that to further expand those areas and those require water and sewer they're all in the urban cluster where it would have to be implemented and we have relatively little medium and medium high density designated currently there's not a lot of acreage um with those designations either those aren't required to be hooked up so you're saying they're water and sewer but they're not requiring i mean rvs and tiny homes on wheels and stuff aren't hooked up to water and sewer in a mobile home park they would be required to to have a hookup okay but not in a not in on a rural setting well they're required in our in our rural areas the one thing we do is a zoning check where they we have to have a they have to have a septic and be able to be hooked up to the only the only occurrence we have where they don't have to be hooked up is in a farm stay where you allow the four or five units on a farm stay and those can have they don't have to be hooked up you can have a mofa rv spot but those are also supposed to be temporary that's not supposed to be permanent living yeah those are people just visiting yeah but i think that most of the parks uh folks actually rent the property of the land and they have their own trailer so all of them are not owned by the trailer park so they're just owned by some of the folks but they paid a lot rent i think that's what they call it a lot right uh there so i i think it's fine but i i do have that comes to mind for me is safety and i don't think there's safety in a storm or hurricane i just don't i just don't feel that they're really safe and so we'll be putting our citizens at risk i think that if we allow that to happen well it sounds like we've been more expansive we're allowing them in mobile home parks now we're allowing them on rural agricultural lots now so we have been more expansive in terms of people's ability to use them and we're not necessarily expanding the places where i wouldn't build like a whole lot of them and you know what i mean like create like a development of rvs we do have fairly strict tie down requirements for these i remember going through that during our thing and if you think about travel trailers they go down the road at 70 plus miles per hour sometimes with a headwind so they're getting hurricane force winds so the big question is tying them down to meet those hurricane requirements that is you know where the risk part comes in or when people stick a pertinence is all over the outside things like that but you know in in general they they they are they do meet wind loads better than you might expect yeah but in some communities like marion county i was just in pinellas park recently and but they look like they're old established type of mobile home parks and they're well maintained i mean the roads were well maintained everything the the buildings and all of that so so some communities do have them support you said it's a safety issue in the hurricane season especially in florida um if you don't mind if i address the housing standard question while we're here just so we don't lose it um so we do have our minimum housing requirements that would affect even mobile homes or manufactured homes if someone were renting problem is is someone who's living there in a lot of these cases they do own them themselves or if they are renting they can call us and they do have to meet those standards but that doesn't mean the entire park is going to be kept up because a lot of them now if it was falling apart and unlimited could address that as well and as far as the location that we do have and i don't know if ben's going to get into it policies about the location of affordable housing near employment centers near transit things like that we also have that if you'll remember in our checklist that you approved for the ist money is they rank higher based on locations to employment or transit or good or services grocery stores things like that i think that's all fine yeah i don't see any changes okay i'll uh go ahead and continue um so going through the housing element um when you get into objective 1.2 that talks about evaluating the land development regulations for impacts on housing prices of course that ties back to what you're just talking about um under that objective there are policies that talk about incentives for higher density development incentives for affordable housing generally such as reduced fees expedited permitting density bonuses and reduced lot sizes and also just generally making sure that the development regulations are not causing an undue burden that raises housing prices i had one comment on this section that was just um in other places you talk about development and redevelopment so i was just hoping that we could put the word redevelopment in here as well because i think in this instance this is a really important part where we want to incentivize redevelopment towards those larger projects and then also you don't mention parking so um like reduction of parking was something that we that i know was in the florida housing coalition's recommendations and i know that we've been trying to do generally speaking so just being able to have reduced parking as another incentive okay yeah we can definitely add that objective 1.3 speaks to coordination and collaboration between the county and various agencies and groups that are involved in the provision of affordable housing so that would include the municipalities and housing advocacy groups the alachua county county housing authority and partnerships with developers of affordable housing those are fairly standard policies in all comprehensive plans objective 1.4 then talks about the county providing funding to ensure access to housing for all income levels and that's where we have policies that talk about your ship program and cdbg program uh the use of a sheeted properties for affordable housing is addressed under that objective as well are we adding the ist and the affordable housing trust fund into this section or that that is one of the recommendations um that we're going to get to in just a couple slides um okay so moving on to goal two of the housing element there are three main goals goal two is to maintain and improve the existing supply of affordable housing and provide for redevelopment and that goal recognizes that existing housing is typically more affordable than newly built housing so there is a focus on maintaining the county's existing housing stock and the policies under this objective um or under that goal i mean objective 2.1 talks specifically about just having a systematic approach to identify preserve and redevelop neighborhoods and existing affordable housing and there are several policies detailing how that should be implemented your objective 2.2 promotes the construction and rehabilitation uh to enhance the long-term usability of affordable housing there are several policies under there about energy conservation strategies sustainable building technologies in terms of materials and water fixtures and energy conservation okay commissioner cornell and then commissioner prison so ben is this a place like you would say provide a systematic approach for the identification preservation and redevelopment of neighborhoods and existing affordable and workforce housing across the county is that where you would have that where there's affordable housing and workforce and workforce yeah and we're i think in going through the whole element i think we're going to have to generally everywhere we're talking about affordable housing and that's a lot of places we're going to have to add workforce housing okay yeah and and include a definition for that okay i just wanted to point out policy 2.2.6 it talks about considering a pilot for landlords to improve energy and water efficiency and thanks to mary we now have a program so we no longer have to consider it i think so changing that language to something like content you know support or continue to maintain um a program for landlords something that highlights that program and make sure it stays stays there and our comp plan is a priority and and you know possibly consider other ideas because they have other ideas could yeah i mean one is i mean there's is like actually for homeowners and i think we talked about this a little bit at the last meeting and we we we um made the motion and approved the idea of like moving our rebate funds into that revolving loan or that revolving fund that they're working on with the new empower group and i think that one is going to be more for homeownership right because a lot of those neighborhoods are owned homes so they don't have access to our pilot so i think you're right i think adding like exploring funding opportunities for this stuff not just for landlords but and i think that is in here actually there's financial incentives um piece that i read earlier so i do think it's in there a little bit but okay okay so on a hack do y'all talk about the difference between affordable workforce or do you just call it like attainable we we've talked about it i mean i think that the conversation is such that like workforce housing is a subset of affordable housing like affordable okay it's like yeah for working people like there's also disabled people and there's like retired people and but like anybody who has like a limited income has a has a an affordable ceiling right for their housing and so we kind of see it as a subset and again there's a lot of requirements from the state and the feds and in terms of like how money flows for affordable housing and the conversation usually is revolving with the workforce housing around wanting to make sure that you don't unduly limit or further restrict the opportunities to access that funding or to create regulatory hurdles for us that we can't enforce or that are really difficult to enforce that make it impossible for a landlord to want to participate in a program so instead of having a workforce housing thing based on like the individual that's living in the home having it be based on so should we change this affordable to affordable and workforce or should we just call attainable and then define attainable as affordable and workforce and senior i think we have to talk about workforce housing for the state now so i know it has to be in workforce and workforce is defined in the statute i think it's 80 to 120 percent they have like a specific definition i can't remember if it's the 80 nami or there are the 120 but but either way it falls within the the realm of other things we're talking about for affordable housing so it's it's within that um low or moderate income range which we already talk about in policies it looks like the state kind of falls either they either fall at 60 or 80 to 120 as what they talk about as yeah as workforce housing yeah so the 80 to 120 sort of workforce housing and below that is is affordable but affordable covers from zero to 120 so it's all all right okay sorry you got it okay um objective 2.3 uh then goes on to talk about funding for rehabilitation and redevelopment of affordable housing you have policies under that objective that talk about use of ship funds for down payment assistance emergency repair and rehab there are policies under there talking about utilizing housing finance authority bonds to provide low interest mortgage loans to eligible households uh and additional policies talking about the use of cdbg funds for improving housing within neighborhoods objective 2.4 goes into uh this is somewhat repetitive but ensuring that the land development regulations are conducive to the cost-effective redevelopment of affordable housing within neighborhoods um on objective 2.3 one of the things that i'm concerned about with um potential federal changes to fema is that we really think about the hardening of structures with respect to hurricanes especially existing homes that weren't built under the more stringent building codes that we have today that we know work really well with respect to hurricanes and so i i mean i don't know where this falls into all of our processes but as we think about not having fema you know money potentially and and relying on lesser state resources i think one of the things that we have to think about is going to be making sure that our housing stock is robust and so i don't you know i don't know how that fits into this i just feel like we need to keep it in the back of our heads when we talk about rehabilitation and redevelopment in terms of um you know looking at uh looking at our existing housing stock and looking for where those where those uh weaknesses are i mean i guess it would be interesting to know if there's a set of specific things that tend to be there and then not there and if we have that list maybe it's something that we could include in the ship evaluation and then if there was excess funds in their ship application they could be real simple would be the would be the um the the the inspections that are often done when someone buys a house which are the you know five point inspections and the and the what's the roofing one the um yeah yeah yeah and you know but things like that those would be like simple things that we could maybe incentivize people getting those uh types of certifications because it would point out the weaknesses and maybe you know we can help incentivize getting people's roofs just a little bit better or whatever just just uh something to think about because i think that could be an inexpensive way for us to you know potentially save a lot of money in the long run well i like that as a as a policy update is sort of like including hurricane readiness for you know older housing as a part of the evaluation in support for renovations upgrades and things like that to housing the other thing i was going to say was um if we could if if y'all are okay with it i think we've done we've adopted the city's you know adu plans which i think are great you brought them up you know and i so i think adding something in goal two um you know a policy that talks about us providing like ready to go like plans that are ready to go like first step lists like all the things that are sort of like in that that make the development of this this redevelopment of adding adus or doing a different type of housing where it's allowed to make it easier by pre-adopting things that people can just get off of the shelf so i don't i don't exactly know how that language plays out but i think our staff could play around with it and bring us something back if you guys are okay with that idea are those inspections still 125 bucks typically yes i just got four point yeah yeah i just got one i think i paid a little bit more i think i paid one i think i paid like 150 150 yeah but it also dropped my insurance rate right and that's the other thing if we incentivize things like that we we not only get this potential um knowledge about where where um housing our our housing stock is with respect to to uh vulnerability but we also can potentially lower our residence insurance costs yeah which i think anyway just throwing that out there is like an inexpensive option to accomplish and to what you're saying a lot of people are dropping their homeowner's insurance because they can't afford it yeah so you know we're already older than 15 years what can't be insurance going and home insurance going you know then you know what are we going to do i mean we can only put so many safeguards in for housing and for homes and for people there's only so much that the county can provide right okay um objective 2.4 again that's talking about your land development regulations and making sure those are conducive to cost-effective redevelopment under that objective you have policies about minimum housing standards for health and safety we were just talking about that also there are policies there talking about the establishment of your code enforcement program and assisting homeowners in abating code violations as they relate to housing there are policies under there that talk about adaptive reuse of of existing structures that are vacant for the purposes of affordable housing for low very low and extremely low income households so that would be something like the hotels for example and the third and final goal of the housing element is to ensure access to housing opportunities for residents with specialized housing needs objective 3.1 talks about housing housing opportunities for groups having special needs and that would include things like group housing foster care facilities farm worker housing housing for the elderly and it talks about working with partner agencies to address housing needs of homeless persons and as well as during the last comprehensive plan update we added policies that talk about the continuum of care model so that is all under objective 3.1 currently quickly um just i know probably healthy staff already pointed this out but i think we need to update our partners in this because it talks about the alliance for the homeless and hungry and that's not who manages our coc anymore so just maybe we just say the coc and that way if it changes hands again it's not referencing a specific agency or we need to change that to keys to home also i wanted to ask if folks were open to the idea of us adding a policy here um that talks about working with reent or released reentry and the sheriff to provide rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing options for those returning home from incarceration um as a as a strategy that we're trying to work towards um everyone's okay with that and that would be an additional policy that we would add and would help strengthen the work that we're already starting and talking about with them are we working with any partners currently that evaluate homes for folks that are becoming elderly to make them safe for aging in place doing that in advance of someone having an accident you know what i'm saying there i know other counties have these programs out there where um you know you can request somebody to come look at your house and um potentially connect you with funding to add grab bars to um uh evaluate for ramp even though you might not need one yet but have a plan for all of that there's um or do we work with anybody that is that are providing services like that right now rebuild so now don't they they do a certain amount but uh ralston rudica housing uh director we do actually so as part of our ship home repair program um our partners do those type of assessments uh for seniors to be able to age in place so rebuilding together definitely emphasizes um life health and safety measures so anybody can call and ask for that type of evaluation to their home or is it only for folks at certain income levels they generally do it um for income eligible homeowners um but again it just depends on other funding sources in addition to the ship i mean there are businesses out there who have the have the money you can hire someone to come in your right but this is for the low income the well the big issue is is incentivizing people to actually have the inspection and to have the plan before they have an accident because you have a lot of seniors that own homes that they can afford right now if they were forced to move because their home wasn't accessible because they broke their hip and they can't get around in a wheelchair then that whole that whole situation changes so the the the thought process is is that you get people to evaluate their homes early on in the aging process and have a plan and understand where the vulnerabilities are and you can present there's a bunch of statistics out there for that maybe a strategy that we could include would be again it's sort of from that education standpoint is sort of like working with ifas and creating like an educational materials that talk about aging in place like what are some of the things you want to evaluate in your home maybe a checklist and something that they could partner with rebuild together on so rather than us like having to hire or create a right right i don't want to have the have at least have the documentation they may already have that but i would say that's a great thing to add under because i know if this is in here so maybe that's another thing we could add is sort of like working with them on yeah i think it's really important because you know you do have a whole population of folks that are very stable in their housing if they manage their income and if you know they take that away because all of a sudden they broke their hip and they they're not going to be able to manage that then it changes there with my mom right now i'd love that checklist bring it on community action agency does some of that community action agency okay good to know so we could partner with them that's a great another one to add community action agency rebuild and ifas to elder care collaborate with the county on developing educational materials for aging in place great and i would instead of adding names i would just say our partners we have a lot of names all throughout this thing and i think it's important we could say and others i think it's important to name names because then like we follow up on these right like i mean it's wild to me like i've been reading and like we name a lot of them and there's a lot of places where we're now doing the things that were in here that probably got written in here as we should do this and now we're doing it because it was written in here and it was a policy you like the names i like the names i think it i think it gives staff also some support on who you know like maybe they don't know that folks are working on those areas and then it drives them towards it and they can always add people i mean our staff also have expertise in this area may know other organizations to bring on board but i don't think other community partners right exactly and other community partners yeah and i think it helps us prioritize where we put our money sure you know and um but i mean i i just felt like in our comp plan just listing that aging in place thing and recognizing that that's something needed to be yeah yeah that we recognize we need to keep people in their housing whenever we can can yeah good point okay uh moving on objective 3.2 talks about uh ensuring that the land development regulations dealing with special needs housing meet statutory requirements and do not present any uh undue barriers to the development of special needs housing and under that objective the policies talk about farm worker housing and community residential homes objective 3.3 then uh talks about providing a dedicated funding source for special excuse me for special needs housing and participating in partnerships with local groups for providing special needs housing that then goes on to discuss using ship dollars to assist agencies that provide special needs housing and assisting local agencies that provide special needs housing and securing additional state or federal funding funding and participating in local advocacy groups that provide assistance to people with specialized housing needs so do we have a dedicated funding source for the person with special needs housing so we did in the past we had a special needs um strategy in the l half that we partnered with the cd gainesville to an interlocal agreement but we just have not funded it um probably in the past five or six years so that that funding we typically had um change shall to may change shall to may if that's the case right yeah so we did provide funding to um the arc electric county um some of the other organizations that provide special needs housing so that's something we can look into again yeah i mean i think it's only worth exploring i know there's a lot of groups like looking at this idea of our special as like some of our young people age out of the special needs supports that they have as young people through the school district or through other systems foster systems and others like where they're going to live long term and i know there's been some folks working on that idea with pro hub and others so i'm sure they're going to come knocking they see shall provide where in um the policy would we talk about uh boarding houses which is um a concept that is uh gaining steam as a potential solution to um housing for some folks um and i i'm curious where that would fall in and if you guys agree that's something that we should you know address as a potential in terms of multi-family or um other kinds of housing um mr chair i mean i think it would make sense that it would be under this section about specialized or special needs housing um we can look at um what we may need in terms of enabling language in that regard if the board would like us to do that i mean in a way our permanent housing is a boarding house of type of sorts it is that i i just feel like you know there's a real need for that and i would like to be able to point to something in our comp plan if i were to talk to someone that might be interested in developing something like that you know um i guess i feel like it almost has to go in the reverse or i mean not necessarily but i feel like the regulations around it like what our expectations would be would be similar to our farm worker housing like i would want to make sure that the the size of the rooms and that the provision for cooking facilities and laundry facility like all those things were there in a way that it wasn't exploitive housing type so i guess i would want to look at all the hard work that our staff did around the farm worker housing to get that to be like you know meeting our minimum housing standards and meeting the sort of requirements it can be a lot different because for instance sorority homes and fraternities are are in a way boarding houses they have a shared kitchen shared kitchen yeah i just would i'm just talking about like making sure we have minimum standards for this oh i agree we don't end up with like i i just want to make sure we don't go too far to the other way so we're actually just making small apartments so that you know that's uh but they're rooming houses yeah they're rooming houses you just want a room and you share a kitchen yeah or or meals are provided is another option which is i think what we did with the farm worker housing it allowed for like just having a small room that then had like you know we had like certain minimum number of bathrooms for people right for people and the minimum number of like kids cooking spaces to people so you don't end up with this like one kitchen for 60 people or something you know unless they're expecting to get all their meals provided but yeah i think you know i agree i think that we do we do need a minimum standard and that's why i wanted to bring it up the second question i had was as we look at incorporating affordable workforce housing into the rest of our housing i've brought this up before i am a and this is something we would have to get developers to buy into but i am a fan of what's called mansion apartments is where you build a house that fits into a neighborhood it looks like the same size and feel as other big houses in the neighborhood but that house might have three apartments in it their dock ponds have them all over the place but i want to figure out how to write that into our code so that that's that's allowed it's multi-family right it is but it would be in the middle of a single family neighborhood i know as a realtor that really freaks you out that's a big one yeah well i mean that was a big fight at the city right they they want to eliminate single family housing and i think but that's a different that's different because i think that they i think that what she's talking about is doing it with nuance requiring the same design standards that exist in the neighborhood and requiring that the same housing type but not restricting who can live there so instead of the house being just a single house it looks just like the house next door but it has it's a duplex but it's a duplex or a triplex right instead how would we do that when we have single family zoning zoning i mean that's a whole that's a that's the whole thing that's the whole inclusionary zoning conversation i mean that i think we've started that conversation by allowing the adus and starting to expand that and reducing that they don't have they no longer have to be um over occupied so i think that's a big step in the right direction i hear what you're saying though i think by calling them something else besides duplexes or triplexes a mansion apartment thing actually is a term that is used so could that be allowed in a pud like there was a pud that had it was a typical single family housing neighborhood but this developer wanted to build in a hundred houses he wanted to have five multi-family houses that looks like the single family could that be put into a pud or no mr chair what i would say and and the things that we've done over the last 15 years with our single family districts is when it comes to new development so traditional neighborhood development cottage neighborhoods by and large we've allowed every everything you've just discussed so you we allow full-scale multi-family small-scale multi-family single family attached detached in a traditional neighborhood development pattern and those are allowed by right in all of our single family land uses and zoning districts okay the distinction um where we haven't at least uh explicitly crossed the threshold is in existing neighborhoods right so existing platted subdivisions um so the city does have something called small-scale multi-family which allows two or three units um and maybe up to four units per um per structure so but they're separate units um we don't allow that we do have some some issues in terms of like where a duplex is allowed or where a triplex is allowed and that is sort of a missing middle that was some of the recommendations that did come out of our occlusionary housing study was to find a zoning district that allowed it or to allow it in our existing zoning districts and that's one thing we have not yet done so that's out there um and if if this board wanted us to pursue it in one way form or fashion we would want some direction to do that yes well i'm i'm okay in new neighborhoods i have a problem changing zoning and existing i guess i'm i guess i would love to give staff direction to explore that and to bring back some ideas and recommendations so we can at least hear what where we even have some opportunity and what it would look like not necessarily in existing neighborhoods or not existing but just generally to give them guidance i think to bring back opportunities that's kind of what it's not in existing neighborhoods i'm okay looking at it as long as it's not in existing neighborhoods well i'm interested in bringing back all the ideas and then you can argue for why not in existing neighborhoods well i don't need to argue i'm just telling you where i am on it i mean i'm very i mean i i remember the city's argument i was involved in it i saw all the neighborhoods organized against protecting single-family neighborhoods i'm not i i don't want to open that up yeah but the city did it in a they did it okay i'm not gonna i'm not gonna i don't want to criticize their neighbors but i'll just say this i don't think that they did it with any kind of nuance i don't think they did it with any kind of thought or any kind of community involvement but when we talk about wanting to diversify affordable housing across our whole county when we talk about wanting to spread affordable housing and not have it concentrated the only way to do that is to have this missing middle type of housing or one of the ways one of the major ways to do this to have that missing middle housing in existing neighborhoods right like you could have places in town of tioga where there's a house that's a rental house and it has three units or you have in one or you have like that's the ways you do this like we would we could buy lots in existing neighborhoods and make them attainable and make them affordable so i'm i'm open to it in new developments um and i'm open to the adu thing in existing neighborhoods i'm not open me personally now if i'm in the minority here that's fine but me personally i'm not in the you have a single family and you can change that into multi-family in the existing neighborhood i'm not oh well i mean i guess this is a conversation for another day are you open for our staff to bring back ideas and recommendations that we could explore for the missing for missing middle housing in our zoning and because here's the thing for new developments yes not for existing single panel i'll tell you that during for infill during the uh economic downturn back you know 2008 2012 that orlando had just experienced this huge boom in building big big houses yeah and many of them were just sitting on the markets while they had a housing shortage and there became this whole movement of three and four families all sharing these big mcmansions and turning them into apartments and they a lot of it happened under the radar and um how many different families can live in a single family house do we regulate that i know that used to be not more than three different or is that just a city thing um no mr chair we we've had similar regulations i will say we have made some alterations in our 2020 code update and even actually through the farmworker housing we've made some alterations in that language um to more to more you know generalize it away from family like a family unit yeah i feel like we've already done that and that does get to the single right and that's what i mean it's occupancy conversation somewhat and that's that's one thing that we could look at in terms of in terms of that policy and just say okay what we think we allow yes yeah today um okay i'm okay not like building a mini apartment complex that's what i love that's a little bit yeah none of us want that none of us want to build a mini okay if that's if that's what you're okay now hearing you say that i'm okay yeah yeah it's more of a new one it's it's it's it's it's just repurposing housing so that it's more i think we're allowed for now anyways yes mr chair the one thing i would say that we don't do now and i think you know a lot of this conversation is nuanced and a lot of the the um thoughts and opinions in the community are nuanced in terms of a lot of people can look at the housing you know a four unit structure in the in the duck pond have no issue with it um because the architectural form is pleasing um and that's something we don't do in single-family neighborhoods we don't we do not do any kind of architectural review in a single-family neighborhood so if we are to bring you know if that if we're trying to sort of thread the needle here that might be something that we look at for when we do multi-family in a single you know i call it multi-family but multiple units that's something we could at least look at missy's gonna we'll have to look at that because there's a state statute that you couldn't regulate that in single-family neighborhoods a while back i'm not sure how that would play into it you could or could not single family homes or single family well i think i think there's some nuanced ways that this could happen and one of the ways that the whole mansion i hate saying mansion apartment it sounds so offensive um is there's one door like there's one front door and you walk in one front door i mean they're all over the duck pond you walk in the front door of those victorian homes and nine out of ten of those victorian homes are three or four apartments but the duck pond was built in the 20s and 30s yeah we're still building houses that big yeah no what i'm saying is the people that move into the duck pond moved into a neighborhood with that expectation they understood what they were moving into what i'm talking what i'm talking about trying to protect is people a brywood or a yeah a different neighborhood a still wind where they moved into that neighborhood with a different expectation and they don't want still wind to become the duck pond they don't want brywood to become a duck pond well aren't there neighborhood covenants already preventing that from happening where there are covenants there are but there are many traditional neighborhoods in our community that do not have covenants that are sewn single-family residential yeah well and i guess i would like to at least have the conversation about the fact that i understand what they want in their neighborhood to be protected they want sort of architectural integrity they want single they don't want an apartment building next to their home but them saying that they don't want two two families to live in a home that used to have one family is in my opinion pretty nimby of them no no no not two families living in one home two homes in one home well and but what happens though one door but there's still two apartments inside what happens though is we end up this happens all over gainesville because of students you get five students moving into a house in effect they all put their mini fridges and their microwaves and all their crap in their rooms and it's not safe you have fire hazards you have you know i would much rather see us have a rule that made it easier to make those into apartments that met code than to have two or three families moving into a house and plugging in a whole lot of things and installing a bunch of things that are under the radar and don't meet code does does that make sense it's like exploring i mean yeah i think it's worth exploring it makes sense and places and i think it's happening already i think we're seeing that right now happening in my era they're turning to rentals well it happened 50 years ago there's a quadruplex over there in the duck pond that paul lived in and it's only two stories paul lived in one 50 years ago here or no sorry 40 years ago here oh they've been around for a long time yeah in the duck pond right a quadruplex two stories two apartments upstairs but that's not how they were built and it's not how they were built it was originally it was a victorian home that had one family in it and part of the reason why and i remember when gainsville went through these changes because my dad was a contractor right and part of the problem was is they had these big houses full of hippies because it was the 70s and the um there were people making them into apartments and they weren't safe and so they they started allowing people to turn them into apartments and so that it was a it was actually a big safety thing my dad was an electrical contractor so that was a big thing they had a different address uh-huh different address yeah they added addresses yeah well i grew up in a victorian home and we split the upstairs into two apartments to serve the military at the 101st and so they had that was during world war ii so it happens it can happen i just anticipate over the next few years we're going to see different economic circumstances and i just feel like our our comp plan should have the bones in there to address the kinds of things that might come forward you're not talking about eliminating single families no not necessarily do okay well that's that's my concern yeah how is turkey creek golf doing it because they have they have they have apartments along with the fancy houses around there i know he's probably loving me saying they didn't have any new arms sorry about that adrian yeah it's the architect so have you all seen the turkey creek golf facility out there that that they have they have uh multiple family right along inside with with with these fine homes out there around the golf community so i don't know what that's the name is i'm like what that's the thing in our single family zoning we allow we actually allow for all kinds of things if people come in as a tnd or tod they can have all kinds of mixed use okay that's a new development it's not an existing you know in existing developments i think what we're talking about is sort of like there's a lot that hasn't been sold say that's vacant and they want to build on it and rather than building that house as a single family house they want to build a house that looks like a single family house has all the same appearances as a single family house as a single door as a single mailbox whatever but inside there's a b and c right and there's three apartments inside that one single family house so you walk in the foyer and you can go to apartment a apartment b apartment c and they're a little mini you know like like you're talking about like in the duck pond or the other places like is there a way for us to allow that to happen so that we can expand the opportunities for mixed income housing within single family neighborhoods without compromising the look the feel and the sort of like cohesion of those neighborhoods right because when you start to build large multi-family housing apartments or condos or whatever you you in that sense change the dynamic of the neighborhood right the parking changes the look and feel changes but if you have a house i mean i think the duck pond is a great example i know to your point maybe some of the people that moved in there moved in there after a lot of those victorians will turn into apartments yeah but maybe not you know in the last three decades so you know so but it hasn't it hasn't changed i don't think i mean there's certain things that have changed the dynamics of the duck pond but i don't think that's the major one so with the turkey creek thing again if they wanted somebody wanted to get in there and build another it looks like an apartment complex would that be allowed even though it's new and that pud it is allowed isn't it it's a i believe it's zoned as a pud yeah um okay so that would be a problem for you no it's already been that way okay you just have to meet your density whatever the underlying lane needs density that's it and we do have flexibility in some areas with that like in the tnds so you could add it in well i guess i would just ask we give staff direction to bring back some ideas and options for how we might address the missing middle housing opportunities within our zoning they can bring it and then we can see if they you know i just don't want to eliminate single family i don't either okay all right i heard you and mary both say that yeah well we're not eliminating single families all right um i will continue um so looking at the housing element um you've given us great direction today um there are a few things that staff identified in the element that we think need to generally be updated um first is that uh we think we need to broadly update the housing element to reflect what was in the um alachua county housing plan that was adopted i believe last year so there's a lot of new ideas in there that need to be built into our comp plan housing element um secondly uh currently we do not have any policies that recognize the infrastructure surtax um that came that's happened since the last update of the comp plan so uh we do think we need to incorporate at least some general policies in there that recognize the infrastructure surtax and that those funds are now available for affordable housing and similarly uh the affordable housing trust fund uh we had we have policies in the plan that we're talking about exploring the possibility of establishing that so now we have that we need to revise the policies to reflect that that fund now exists and what its uh purpose is and i wanted to bring up two things one you just brought up but one is um our definition of affordable housing in the comprehensive plan i believe we need to add utilities um currently it says affordable means that monthly rent or mortgage payments including insurance and property taxes do not exceed but i believe no it says utilities utilities including insurance and property taxes do not i must have an older version um maybe it's already been updated i believe when we did the inclusionary housing comp plan amendments i believe we added utilities in so that should be in there but we'll okay great it's already announced great the others with regards to um infrastructure well i'll talk about that later it's all right all right i'll leave that um the next staff recommended update would be to uh add a policy or policies to recognize the potential for the county to undertake motel conversions um those are you know we've we have a general we have a general adaptive reuse policy um and that probably more applies to if a developer is is wanting to do something like that um what we're talking about here is more a policy where the county would undertake um a motel conversion kind of like that uh the ones that we're doing now would it just be for motels are there other options you know there are some other people that are using um abandoned uh small areas you know for housing and that sort of thing too that would so that we're not restricted yeah i mean maybe this is just a policy to recognize pendant for adaptive reuse for affordable housing by the county as well as by other i mean i i guess i don't understand why we fall under the same rules of our comp plan that everybody else does i feel like policy 2.4.6 kind of covers that but if we need to shift it to have some language about the county we'll do we'll do we'll look for these opportunities too or something and mr chair that's kind of the the idea um with recommending this policy is that that we will the county will consider um doing those in the future oh okay if that is the board's intent more as a county program the way that we're doing it now not necessarily as a land use allowance so it is allowed and it's allowed through live local and a lot of other right it's a matter of us as policy saying this is a type of affordable housing we might want to pursue with available i guess i feel like i'm interested in us having a conversation about that because i i i guess i'm interested to really think about that like what is that what would what does that do because we also talk about not concentrating poverty right and then we're like taking all these people that have really intense needs and really intense case management we're putting them all in one place right and all those a lot of those hotels that are up for sale aren't the hotels that are in like nice areas that were they're like all concentrated on southeast 13th street so then we're concentrating all this poverty these people with a lot of special needs all in one place i feel like it's a recipe so i i guess i want to have a bigger conversation about that before i just like drop that in the comp plan um but i am interested in something in the comp that the county is looking for potential for adaptive reuse for affordable housing broadly with motels as one potential but i think if we're going to add motel conversion as a strategy generally then we probably should have a bigger conversation about how much in one location or how we're doing that and what what the wraparound services are going to be and what the level of security and support is going to be on those sites and things like that which i know we're getting ready to have for i think our hotels are coming to us next meeting yeah next meeting so maybe after that meeting we could have or at that meeting we could have that conversation and not all yeah not all motel conversions have to have the same kind of use right right they don't be all permanent supportive no they don't they could just be apartments yeah yeah you know and and there are some on north 13th that i think that are also i think right yeah i agree yeah where north 13th north on 13th yeah like like the old uh power johnson's stuff like that great opportunity for infrastructure surtax sorry yes just keep saying it we'll eventually spend it um recommendation number five um from staff and this is more of a technical issue we hit on earlier um having to do with workforce housing the statute does require that the comprehensive plan address the county's strategies for providing workforce housing and that is defined in the statute as 80 percent ami or lower so that's the the low income level that we already define in the comprehensive plan um and we do have several obviously policies throughout the housing element that talk about providing affordable housing at the different levels like low and very low and extremely low but we just need to build in the term workforce housing um as well as the definition number six uh staff is recommending uh building in additional cross references in the housing element to the inclusionary housing policies that were just adopted a few months ago we think there's a few policies in the element that that probably need those cross references that we didn't catch when we were going through that process initially and then number seven i think this was mentioned earlier as well we will go through the element and just generally update anywhere where we have names of agencies that have changed different housing partner agencies maybe they don't exist anymore they've changed their name we'll try to catch all those and update those as well um and that's it as far as staff's uh presentation on the housing element before we move into the economic element do you have a quick question i've heard you all be concerned about not spending the money that's in this fund is there anything i want us to spend i know is there anything that we should do then to say year to year that this amount of money should be spent out of that that that that would require that money to be spent i don't know i'm not you know that the money is in the account and it's just i would hope it's accruing interest of some kind that um we we expect to spend this and then i know i know some of them i mean we were waiting to have our plan now that we have our plan adopted i think the goal is that's going to be bringing it back projects of how this project happens okay so we're just once this is all done then we can expect it okay so we wouldn't have to require a certain amount of time that just money be spent yes i'm sorry no no i'm kind of out there so your net not the next meeting not next week but the 23rd of september and then the august night the first meeting in october october so the last meeting in september and the first meeting in october we're going to allow to have a lot of housing items on it i believe the ist is not coming back to october because we split up the to kind of balance the agenda but i think we can have that discussion there i'm not sure exactly how that would fall into it but we're going to bring back though the where we are already spending the money on the multi-family housing that you heard about and the down payment assistance that we talked about and things like that and we could have that full conversation there which if there was anything we wanted to add to the comprehensive plan is still in plenty of time for ben to incorporate yeah i guess i'll just quickly say this now i do think one of the things that i i've been thinking a lot about the conversation that we had with regards to sort of home ownership trying to drive that piece and then the conversation around the real need the big gap in housing that we keep getting pounded on us at ahap which is that 50 ami and below which really aren't in a position to be able to own homes like even if they even with down payment systems or double down payment systems they might be able to afford the home but the carrying costs of that home and the management of that home are just not there so trying to sort of like figure out that like we have this goal of creating opportunity for wealth and upward mobility right through land ownership which is the primary way we do it in our country and then like this idea of like trying to meet the gap we have in housing with this funding and we've been kind of wrestling with that and so one thing that i wanted to just throw out there is something that other places are doing is something that they're calling social housing i mean whatever you can call it whatever you want but essentially you know the government is buying and building the housing um or partnering to build the housing with with non-profits or other community organizations or groups but then it's done in a cooperative model so it's cooperatively owned by the people who live there so it creates kind of a condominium opportunity but it provides an opportunity for those people who would otherwise normally just be renters to have some ownership the land stays in the government ownership it's a land trust they own they own their they own their unit and they get to help make decisions about those units and about sort of the management of the roof and the management of landscaping so they start and a certain amount of their their mortgage payment is going into there so there's a whole bunch of this happening and they're creating co-ops yeah so i think that could be a good middle ground for us in terms of meeting that goal of ownership and meeting the goal of that missing housing stock rather than just doing down payment assistance for existing homes that was the original idea that hutch brought up for the land trust yeah they would own the land and then the individuals would own the units on top of the land and and and they could resell that right yeah but this is more of a multi-family model this is major multi-family yeah yeah they've been doing this in europe for a long time this is new in the united states yeah yeah so it's co-op managed or co-op run by the people who live there and own it and then there's so anyway that's just a i think a strategy that would have like kind of meet in the middle of what we're all trying to get at and the things like those hotels could be great opportunities for adaptive reuse to create something like that where or we could build from scratch on on on on lots you know but that that would be an opportunity and it could be an opportunity to partner with say the school district or other institutions that have land you know that could target workforce housing for our fire rescue department for our school district etc etc yeah yeah so for all of us i just wanted to throw that out there as a strategy that i i'm i'm i would assume staff are probably already exploring but something that we could ask them to add to that conversation when they bring forward ideas and i and y'all talked about this today hack we talked about it at a hack a little bit and um it was a major strategy conversation in the i i was in an affordable a cohort for a like sort of a group of people around the country who were doing thinking around housing and housing leadership and these examples were ones that they brought up again again they're primarily happening in large urbanized areas like la and new york and like where housing is so expensive it's like not attainable at all anymore to anybody so that's where they've sort of grown popped up the most but there's lots of examples of that it's been happening on a small scale even here nancy darren's previous residence was um i i helped work on that design but it was basically for um not really apartments but like uh bedroom suites with a larger shared kitchen model but everybody owned part of the home like they bought into the process they didn't just pay rent so they were they made an investment into a shared living space and then who owned the who owned the land underneath it erin oh she owned it yeah but that's another example of something we could do in that single-family housing designation that would allow it to stay single-family housing but be something where we own the land and we fractional ownership of the property yeah i'm okay with that yeah i think i think it's a really good way to build well yeah yeah thank you for bringing that up i was going to and i couldn't figure out how to do it in a way that made it sound like everybody would want to do it well i just think it's in the middle of that idea of ownership but also you know it's in some ways it's like an apartment it's small like a rental and the cost is like that in terms of your your average that you're putting out on your income be as big or as small as you want really i mean in terms of the you know investment process it's it's like a condominium in a lot of ways right yeah just like call it that people will think it's more sexy you know really i mean we associate condos with well i mean essentially it is it's common ownership of the land and then you have joint ownership of and you have your individual ownership of your unit community condo okay um yeah um mr chair rail the call plan not at all um so the next part of the presentation has to do with the economic element so i can pause here to see if the board has any additional direction on housing or we can go right into the economic element any questions we didn't ask that you expected us to i want to open it up for the public on the housing yeah okay yeah all right are there any public comments on the housing part of it yeah they created it we're here i don't buy it you can go first it doesn't matter i'd like to speak to you about the legal headwinds blowing into your face and tell you that as a landlord since 1975 i am very disturbed about the cost of what we call housing i think um not if but when the high winds come we're going to lose about a third of our housing because the trees are going to fall into them it doesn't matter how they're built they're going to be destroyed the power lines are coming down we've seen that all over the place north and south and we'll we'll get that a dwelling is a building with a bathroom and a kitchen if you have a building with no bathroom and kitchen it is not a dwelling but by definition agricultural buildings are immune from all local regulation including zoning for 10 types of farms subject to state of florida best management practices i have a timber farm on 36 acres you neglected to buy when you got to 202 acres of henderson they planted it i bought it so wouldn't be loaded up with trailer parts and septic tanks i propose you buy it from me in 88 you will never buy land for me every ask missy it would and then i sued you to stop at rv park bobby summers rv park right here patrice boys stopped the permit i found an archaeological survey they were going right into an archaeological site with rv park that was stopped the subdivision was nullified out of technicality so i gave henderson a big haircut and i was fine with that because i'm not trying to develop the land so during the virus i decided i was going to construct an off-grid agricultural building and the building has no toilet no kitchen no septic tank no well and no high voltage right here i was raided by the county walk right past the no no trespassing signs and what we came to understand is this is a non-regulated building this is a resilient building this is an agricultural building this building was built for less than the price of a mobile home because they didn't run afoul of your regulations what i discovered when i by hand reforested the land picking up the garbage first is that i had a plethora of native and rare plants residing here that are potentially worth a huge amount of money but in terms of ecological value it's irreplaceable this land is everywhere in alachua county where it was logged and left alone and not disturbed so it's just a gold mine so what i would say is this i would um really differentiate between an agricultural worker and agritourism if you have cotton and you have shanties to have people picked a cotton yes that needs to be regulated but if i have an eco paradise and i want to have educational activities i want to have hunting i wanted to have um demonstrations and sustainable building construction to educate people on the techniques i use i can do that without restrictions you can't touch that and you need to say and this is the final thing i'm going to say this is the final thing i say where a farm comes in contact with the government it's the state and that's human waste and human wastewater and a farm is not immune from those regulations but they have certain protections against accusations that the average person we need to promote we need to be patient enough okay we need to promote i've been patient enough we have other folks and we have a long agenda here today sir we need to promote what you can do legally regardless of any regulation you thank you kelly you have half your time now okay i'm worried no i i don't appreciate it i i gave some leniency and when i give leniency you take the advantage of me i don't like that i really really don't so so please go ahead um i i am concerned about the uh timelines we talk about i i agree that we want a permanent and long-term solution but people who are in need now are not going to go and suspended animation waiting for the years that that takes so cutting out opportunities is is a really serious issue uh even if it doesn't look like good housing it still gets people out from under the sky and they need that they need to have color number one and you need it as soon as possible so uh i wish you would allow for uh i mean years ago people selected life in a vehicle for for for wanderlust and a sense of adventure but now for a lot of people it is essential and maybe you can talk about the ability of these things to continue moving perhaps if you have an rv park you make sure that those things stay uh mechanically able such that they can drive away when there's a storm and not just but uh the people need the cover um are there any city commissioners no current ones okay i'll talk about them uh they talked about an inclusionary zoning plan no ownership component at all uh 80 percent ami and only 10 that set aside which is enough to give you uh a window dressing but not to transform problematic housing patterns so i hope you are considered you are thinking about the goal transformation deconcentration of poverty mixed income mixed use uh uh construction wherever it can happen such that in our lifetime it can be across the jurisdiction universally thank you hello patricia lean i didn't mean to uh talk about this but living in rvs seems to be something that's popular in ocala because as i go down 75 there's an rv park and they don't leave they stay there all the time so that might be an affordable option what i wanted to share with you was last year and i'm going again this year i went to the florida planning association's conference and aarp it was either that or the uh for the policy institute conference i went to aarp was there and i learned that they have an affordable housing initiative i did not know that before and one of the things that they shared uh and they shared some communities that they have building and and suggest one of the things they shared can almost cut these expensive housing plans in half and that is by using more duplexes in communities than even quads that reduce the density and the trouble that comes from having these large apartment complexes that are not managed after a few years they start to go go slummy so i did pick up one of their brochures but i forgot to share it but i'll make sure i get another one this year because it's packed up now but i think that that would be a good option at the national black and latino economic summit they had two tracks one for affordable housing and one for commercial real estate development i was at that a few weeks ago and uh i followed the commercial track but i did pick up on some of the stuff that they talked about in affordable housing and since i've been going a few years hoga hispanic you know in arizona and there's a group in south carolina i think columbia or columbus whichever one uh both have some really good results with their affordable housing initiatives and we might want to look into that um the other thing i thought about is because i like westerns when you watch westerns you always see when you're going to a small town there was a boarding house and a boarding house concept may be a good thing too and even when i was a young child there were boarding houses still there was one in high springs that i knew of and there was some in gainesville as well and i think even a lot of way had one so i just wanted to mention that and also i wanted to suggest that although some of the partners in the affordable housing uh program does education and training you might want to consider putting that as a part of your plan so that uh excuse me so that you can um provide education rules and policies for people who get and live in these affordable houses so that they stay looking like we wanted to look and have the kind of element and behavior in them that we would want to have in them and commissioner prinsley you were right on with talking about um the mixed use housing and uh what have you thank you thank you further citizen comments okay i did a quick search on aalp uh housing initiatives there's a nice couple of uh pages on their website so the education could may be something i don't know if that's something that we need to include or not but i think it's an important part and that may be part of the oversight i guess when we are putting folks in so like you know how to own a house you know that sort of thing you know how to be a homeowner i don't know where you could put that in there but we could certainly look for somewhere to some place you know that we do have that provide provide information we do have it for ship and we also build it into any down payment assistance we do with the isd but we can certainly i've got notes i'm sure ben does on the further education that you guys were talking about in general on all of it okay great okay so uh i'm going to go ahead and move on to the economic element if that's all right yeah go ahead no i was just gonna are we gonna are we going through the economic element step by step or i'm going to go through it at just kind of high level um objective okay i just want to bring up i mean i read our economic element and i guess i feel like our economic element kind of needs an overhaul okay it just feels like it needs the like we need to hand it to the new economic development department and have them like bring back like a wholesale rewrite it just it's very old school you could tell it was written a long time ago and we probably just re-upped it and re-upped it and re-upped it and it doesn't highlight a lot of what we're doing i mean don't get me wrong i love this section because i helped i helped with part of it back as a community partner back in the day with all the local food stuff that's in here and i don't want that to disappear but i think we're doing a lot of the things that are in here now and we're we're kind of on the on our way to the next step so i mean i see staff nodding so i'm glad to see that i guess i just before we just i mean we can still go through step by step and people have notes but i just i guess i'm more interested in seeing like what this looks like you just want to make a motion redo just redo redo let's go through it yeah we can go through it so people can at least have comments but i do think it needs all kind of a wholesale rewrite mr chair i'm happy to go through the presentation and kind of hit on all of the objectives that are in the current element we also have jessica and sean here with some pretty specific recommendations on how we could reorganize the element uh and rewrite it uh so to speak so i we can do whatever the board would like us to do proceed with your and then we'll get shot i'll i'll um i'll go quickly through the the existing uh element um so the economic element currently contains one overall goal uh which is to promote the economic prosperity of all citizens of alachua county address economic equity and expand and diversify the county's tax base there are 10 objectives under that goal and numerous policies to implement those objectives objective 1.1 speaks to trying to achieve a diversified and sustainable economic base to minimize the vulnerability of the local economy also providing economic opportunity for all segments of the population as well as seeking to eliminate the disparities that were identified in the uh inequities report that was published by bieber in 2018. i just if i can under policy 1.1.1 we do we kind of have we have a list of targeted industries it does says not limited to obviously but i guess um you know i i don't see agriculture and food systems in there at all even though it's a strategy we talk about throughout the comprehensive plan and we've created a whole group to work on so and so i hope we'll add that and then it talks about logistics and distribution distribution in particular which i think we've seen is not serving our county well as a strategy for economic development i mean it's low paying jobs and it's tearing up our roads so i guess i'm interested in seeing that struck from this as a as a as a priority target industry the distribution industry i mean in general like those large-scale distribution like amazon dollar general disco i mean we do have some i guess smaller scale distribution so maybe there's a way to specify or create something that's focused around that area that talks about the kinds of things we're looking for when we talk about distribution but the way this is worded i guess just made me think about all the big distribution companies we have that are now tearing up our rural roads yeah i mean we can't take them out though right we can't take them out but we can stop having this is listed as a strategy for the types we're trying to attract and so i'm just saying i don't know that we want to attract more large-scale distribution facilities just like we don't necessarily want to attract large-scale like warehousing of data like the large-scale you know data farms or things that are really intensive in terms of resource use so that's how do you all feel about that what's that how do you feel about that i agree with that i was also going to say one of the things that um in terms of innovation economic development and sustainability is attracting businesses that are codependent on each other in a lot of ways where you have um right this guy makes this in that widget and that person uses that widget to make something and i know there's a word for that i just can't think what it is right now but um there is something called like economic gardening where you're like working on like you like look at an industry and then all of its component parts and you're trying to attract as many of those component parts as you can some of that's happened in our biotech world because it just naturally organically grew up that way but i think if we are going to look for um you know like the economic or the uh industrial park they're looking to build in hawthorne i talked to them a little bit about that it's like are you looking for industries that might you know work well in in concert with each other to lower their overall environmental impact and that may be a place where distribution makes sense because it's on a rail line so they could get that out without having to use our you know our road infrastructure like they can put on the rail and get it out so that may be another an example where it makes sense so i don't want to wholesale get rid of it you know right or if it's regional and i wanted to say you know i wondered if we needed a line there about our uh eco our eco loop project is you know maybe should be uh listed in that one point one one is you know targeted industry i mean i guess i'm still in i'm again i this is why i go back to like i'm interested to hear what sean and jessica have to say about rewriting it because i feel like maybe it all gets if it got reorganized around efforts and work that we're actually doing in economic development these policies but all they would probably a lot of the same concepts would be there but they would be written differently or you you would change targeted distribution areas around rail right exactly around rail or around regional regional distribution networks as opposed to multinational you know like i'm not interested in amazon locating another distribution center here but if we have a small you know regional person who's trying to like you know like our food hub will be a distribution center of sorts so expanding existing expanding local and regional businesses and allowing them to make connections with each other rather than attracting these multinational corporations that are just extractive and by and large providing low-wage jobs right so like training right there yeah okay and then uh objective 1.2 of your economic element uh is to provide a comprehensive economic development strategy for the county and that kind of gets into what you were just talking about identifying the kinds of industries and economic activity that the county wants to promote so i think some of the reorganization and rewrites or a lot of it will come under that objective yeah i feel like we talked about a lot before we got on the board was this yeah yeah i mean policy 1.2.5 feels like it could be sort of the highlighted sort of strategy of the whole thing sort of lifting up our local businesses and thinking about those under under appreciated industries like you're talking about mary and really and the underemployed segments of our community and how do we address those with these specific projects like what we did with the um heavy industrial or heavy diesel mechanics program or you know these targeted like where do we have industries that have needs and where do we have underemployed people and how can we fill those gaps by developing pipeline strategies that are education to job pipelines things like that yeah 1.245 is good yeah um objective 1.3 uh then addresses issues of environmental quality and resource conservation as it relates to economic development talking about promoting industries that are compatible with our natural resources or even complementary to the county's natural resource protection goals objective 1.4 then talks about education and employment and that addresses things like educational vocational and technical training opportunities and how the county might help to coordinate those opportunities with the needs of local employers objective 1.5 is to expand economic opportunities and reduce poverty uh under that objective you have policies that talk about emphasizing economic development activities that increase opportunities for persons that are at or near the poverty level and activities that help to redevelop economically distressed areas and this also talks again about uh working to eliminate the disparities identified in the inequities report uh that was done in 2018 by bieber yeah i'll just i guess i want to say i mean i think that report is really dated at this point and probably not super accurate so we may want to remove reference to that and think about other ways that we're like data that we're our own data that we're collecting in our own strategic plan and our own sort of metrics that we're developing with our staff internally but also i think this is a really good place for the forward focus information and talking about what we're doing in eastern alachua county um seems like that's an important thing to add here since it's such a big lift in terms of economic development opportunities and upper mobility opportunities for half our county one thing that i would like to see added also in this section is um something uh encouraging the development of live work type units which i've talked about before but you know office space is a deterrent to people that are trying to start small businesses and if we can uh encourage the development of um or uh incentivize the development of live work type units where people can have homes in areas that are conducive to commercial activity and and have office space in their home or small things like insurance agents or you know attorneys or whatever kind of small business space that makes sense in in areas where there's commercial traffic and residential space i have seen that somewhere else in our somewhere else where is that mentioned was that mentioned in our land development i feel like it was in the land development section there was something about home-based businesses maybe it could be under home-based businesses um we do mention that in the comp plan and it's addressed in the code as well but i think this is an up you know this is like a real opportunity to put it under economic development because it is it can truly um make a big change in a neighborhood um objective 1.6 uh talks about creating livable communities which is kind of a buzzword that i think just talks about making alachua county a place that could potentially attract economic development opportunities and the necessary workforce to support those opportunities the policies that are under that objective emphasize the importance of quality of life factors like health care education public safety mixed-use development transportation and having high-speed internet uh the importance of those things and attracting and sustaining businesses in the community and may mary maybe your work from home type spaces could be under 1.6.3 where it talks about promoting reduced home to commuting distances and encouraging those maybe that's where you know in addition to talk about tods and to talk about opportunities for live work you know strategies and other areas of the county i agree with that that could definitely go there as well but i would like to see you know that i and that that would make sense because i would like to see our our tnds and our tods address that you know on one or more of their streets which i've seen done in orlando and a couple of neighborhoods successfully and then the last four objectives of the economic element relate to local food systems and food production i believe food systems were addressed uh generally in the community health element and the energy element prior to the last update of the plan but those objectives and policies were then greatly expanded and then moved into the economic element um during the last comp plan update just because of the growing significance of those industries uh for the county's overall economy so those policies are now in the economic element objective 1.7 talks about maximizing local resource and energy uh energy efficient food production and processing within the county's local food shed it highlights the benefits of a robust local food system such as maintaining agricultural lands providing income for family farms stimulating local food industries enhancing agritourism there are public health benefits that are mentioned as well as increased food security objective 1.8 then goes on uh can i just stop right there the only thing that i noticed in here that i didn't like i mentioned is i think that this is the area where we could really more robustly talk about urban agriculture i know that urban ag and community gardens is mentioned in different parts of the comp plan it's probably mentioned in land development regs and things like that too but i think highlighting the importance of urban agriculture as a strategy here makes sense because it sort of then can bounce off the land development side of things or the other elements especially for urban ag on vacant land or as a development and redevelopment strategy for open space use things like that um and and um i know we just did our i talked to several and i know we just like changed the allowance for like what people can put in their front yards and things like that but to the home-based business thing the opportunity of somebody has a small farming able to have like a farm stand or some small access to just be able to buy their home-based farm products like on-site and what what you know kind of what's allowed there sort of encouraging that idea of those home-based businesses that are aggregated and what that but making sure we have any kind of requirements with regards to what that might be and i mentioned that under 1.9 too is that again having ifis sort of it talks a lot about ifis and that one and just in our partnerships with the library districts and others and just thinking about community gardens and urban agriculture being really important strategies that we haven't really touched on and like we have agents that focus on commercial ag and then we have home port which is really like landscaping and but we don't have that urban ag and community garden piece and like exploring with ifis how we might be able to better support urban agriculture and community gardens is a thing i'd like to see us add in to this element i think we could take away the green roof section yeah they've they've died a slow death okay well they've died a pretty quick death in florida it's gonna be hot here it's too hot well they just you know structurally they just don't work well here with our rain and lack of it at the same time you know in terms of the environmental quality and resource conservation too i was looking we don't engage with any local we don't engage with uf we don't engage with any of our you know businesses who are doing the research actively researching the newest innovations in these things and i don't know if that's something that we need to build into this but it bothers me that we have resources in the community not only who are currently working at uf but also who have retired in the community who are experts in a lot of the areas you know that we are concerned about in terms of waste or um you know how how we are um how are how we are uh dealing with our solid wastes and i agree with mary helen on this one it seems like the big one that we're missing here is health care right but then also the 16 colleges at the university each one of them is their own economic engine and for this community and and from what i understanding of this gentleman we just met last weekend at lake lake dwellers is that we don't even have to just engage with the university they're individuals who are doing their own research separate and apart they may be funded by the university in some parts but they're getting grants from other places too and so they're doing their own individual research projects that may be something we could use at the eagle loop we don't have to engage with the university we can engage with individuals who are actually working in the fields yeah but i mean the university does have hundreds of millions of dollars of grants that really are the economic driver for this community it'd be nice that'd be nice yeah why because the majority of the funding that comes into the university for research is not applied research there's not a lot of interest in general i mean it's changing some of the funders now although again with the feds changing everything that they do that may change again but um employing all those people it's employing all those people but the majority of their research is in very um it's not necessarily it's just not necessarily applied research so it's not necessarily something that you can take from like the research they're doing in their lab and then like turn it into an industry or like take it and you know there's a few people like the ann wilkes of the world to talk about waste right that really do look at strategies that are very applied that are very much like here's a technology here's it here's it at scale and here's how it could be implemented in your community but that that isn't typically the way that research is funded or done at the university which is fine i mean that's what they're supposed to be doing right is generating new knowledge and adding to the body of knowledge that ultimately allows industry to innovate and then industry is what takes that research and then innovates it and makes the private sector investments to take something from like drug research and then you have private industry that puts tons of millions of dollars into that drug and then that's what i'm talking about is the private industries that are funding these individual researchers but those all have a i mean we have to be careful though because they have a they have a vested interest right i mean they're not objective science we just look in for information that's all right because they're meant to be informed it's like knowledge transfer is what right what you're saying is what you're talking about is knowledge transfer and so you know that's that's an interesting thing to think about in terms of economic development for sure is knowledge transfer and so i think that um uh you know i've i've i've spoken at a couple of knowledge transfer conferences in the past and it's super interesting to think about like the cutting edge stuff and how it does become applied in a community well i think you know it's interesting you say that because it's sort of like ifis is i mean we're an extension university right and the land-grant university the job was an extension was a partnership between the local communities and the university to bring knowledge transfer to bring extend the research of the university out into communities but the way that uf is structured that that lives in the college of agricultural and life sciences so it's only the knowledge and the research that's happening in ifis that we're getting so it's not like they're extending the college of engineering's research or they're extending the medical school's research but that school is employing people right but i'm saying like i'm just saying that if ifis if extension at the university of florida instead of it just being confined to college of ag and life sciences was extension of the whole university then we would be getting more of that knowledge transfer and like it's definitely a conversation to be had with uf like how could extension expand its boundaries beyond just ag and life sciences and into other industries other sectors of research business economics engineering i think our best knowledge transfer comes in our and our um our uh citizen advisory groups yeah which is where you know we get those experts from uf they sign up to on epac we had like some amazing folks from uf that came in and talked about um you know micro particulate you know nanoparticle air pollution and how that affects our community and things like that in ways that you would never expect to hear that kind of you know expertise at a citizen advisory level group but it was you know super interesting and actually even helpful as we you know made decisions about what kind of industry belonged in alachua county it was um so i think you know it it's uh even some of the retirees from the university are still working in the field but they're doing their own and they're doing their own work like this gentleman that i was telling you all about that we met who is still doing research with pfas but he's worked in universities all over the country and they're still doing the research designing these programs and we just don't have access to them you know maybe our committee you know would do but we're not getting the information here in order to make any kind of um aggressive i think we are though i actually don't think that's true i guess that's why i'm surprised to hear you say that because i feel like our environmental protection department does a really good job of connecting with the latest research and like reaching out to community groups like the springs institute and the springs council and who are connected right in with these researchers and they have data and information well maybe but maybe maybe the thing is now that we have an economic development department and as we uh you know we have environmental um and sustainability uh uh events that we do you know through the year at some point maybe we'll have economic development events and maybe as part of that we yeah that's a great idea you know so i i think that we're we're at a place right now where we can have that kind of change and we can recognize those needs like asking those people to come and share their ideas i've been on those springs boards and i've worked with all of those folks and they're excellent and our our environmental people are top notch they always get in there fighting right but this is a small small area you know and when we're talking about our waste management you know that impacts a bigger area than just our county and uh because we integrate our stuff into other counties yeah so you know i just feel like i'd like more information and i i you know try to educate myself but i'm also marvel at the intelligentsia we have yeah in this community that perhaps we could um we could use more better more better yeah i agree with you mary ellen my my comment is policy 1.10.4 where we talk about how we're partnering with ifas i think that's well written and probably could be expanded i think we could do one like that for the vet school for the construction school for the school tourism and those areas that are providing economic development to our county that's good um similar to how ifas is i guess that's when you said i feel like this need to be rewritten that's where i kind of went to that and and you know there's nothing in here about tourism and the event center and we've got to expand that and so and there's 16 colleges i mean there's they are the economic driver of our community there is i mean we have a financial commitment to ifas and extension but yeah right but but when we're talking about economic development when departments that you have higher at least from the realtor's perspective that's when you see the economic development you know and when when uf kind of pauses we catch a cold our community catches a cold where i think we should we should understand the the nih funding that's happening at the federal level because that's what's driving a lot of our employment locally and it's getting cut back that's a risk that's why that's why the primary goal is to diversify in the different industries because we're so reliant on that but it doesn't mean we can't connect the dots it can't add to it right but i've talked to karen at university um when the she's inviting us to uf in the community the breakfast i've asked her you know the the speakers that she has right are not generally speakers that we know about uf in the community about but these things we would know about uf in the community if they were actually engaging with with us and also us going into their meetings to say you know this is where we partner well that's chuck clemens now so y'all just reach right out that's right well i know it's karen i'd rather talk to karen did you but in any case the whole idea of integrating uf into the community if we could figure out a better way to do that and have these departments talk about how it is that they're working with us i mean they're the leading experts from around the world in many places exactly they're right here in our doorstep some of them are retired like you said but they're still doing their research that's right well you know and some of them have done you like the uh program for resource efficient communities has done you know major projects in our town that have had major economic impact so yeah yeah well my only other comment on 1.10 for what 10 for is under ifas is i do think we should add um food safety as a priority for county extension to start working on in a bigger way particularly with all the work we're doing and this idea of working with working food food processing and the food hub like we're going to need more support in the realm of food safety training um and i already mentioned community gardens and urban agriculture program like the idea of working with them to develop an urban agriculture and community gardens program um i think is important and you know particularly one that would support the idea of you know pool sharing bulk compost purchasing like those sorts of things so an actual program that supports the ability of our community to do those things not just add it to someone's job description like the potential of exploring a new a new agent or a community or a coordinator of some sort somebody that would actually do work in those areas also we should probably add something about circular economy yeah not zero yeah i mean to her point on the waste thing it's not really in here but you know we have the eco loop like you said and it needs to get added in here and that idea of looking at circular economy as a big part of our focus for how we're doing economic development and that could get into your idea of tapping into that expertise as well so a lot of that should have been sorry yeah so maybe maybe sean and des will tell us what they yeah and i was just going to say um at this point now is probably a good time for me to segue into uh jessica or sean to to come up and uh review some of the recommendations we have for uh reorganizing and restructuring this element before they come up and one of the things also we talked to eric when eric attended our meeting that we talked to you know having engaging the chamber with what industries they're looking at not so much recruiting wise because i kind of hear your comment there but expanding uh that already exists right well now that we're the edo i think we have a better opportunity to coordinate with them in a little bit more strategic way that you know so that should be in yeah for sure i'm very happy to be here i feel like someone snuck you all of my very suspicious ben uh so i think the next couple of slides are going to talk about three kind of very broad-based organizing pillars for how we're approaching a rewrite of the economic element we have noticed that there are there are a lot of great ideas legacy ideas that exist with the economic element but there's opportunity to create a better structure intentionality around what we hope to achieve and i think a lot of this is going to come from a shared understanding and appreciation for what is really coming out of the tourism shop is uh data amazing amounts of data and interpolation so we're going to bring in about that as well as how do we tell the story of the community overall and some of getting from here to there is recognizing what we find in the information where our core strengths lie and recognizing what we are as a community you a lot of you were saying this when you're talking about uf and ifas and what's the potential economic opportunity here a lot of this comes from the fact that you know we're an education community and more so even more than that we're a health care community um approximately like 36 000 people are employed paid around the average annual salary seventy thousand dollars a year on the education side that's a little bit north of 25 000 by industry type and they're being paid approximately 89 000 in average annual salaries per year um commiserate with that you know there's another opportunity area thinking about large industry types and where do we build a foundation from for opportunity to do that economic gardening there's also the scientific and technical communities that exist out there which is if you compare them to the um the first two which are the principal employers and drivers of the industry here in the community it's a little further down it only employs a little north of 8 000 individuals but an average annual salary of around uh 89 000 a year again that's a real opportunity area and uh part of that's uh related to the life sciences industries that exist within the community a lot of what's going up on 441 as you get up to the latua area um some of it's dealing with what happening at uf innovate uh some of it's being driven by uh what's happening with the institutes that are coming out of the university of florida like the semiconductor institute and the australia institute all these things we're very interested in following because of what it pretends for that again that economic gardening opportunity to build off of our core strengths for what we have so that we're not having to develop something out of whole claws i guess i would just want to i guess i just want to emphasize i think something that we do a lot is we call uf education but uf is a research institution with an education like layer you know what i mean like it's an r1 institution like it's primary driver economically is research like it does provide education in a massive and meaningful way and those students have a huge impact on our community but from an economic development standpoint it's actually research and healthcare that drives things it's not so much the education piece the education piece frankly is primarily a drain on our economy in a lot of ways just because the students you know take up a lot of the affordable housing like there's a lot of pieces to that that actually cause challenges for economics and affordability in our community but i think the research is where it's at so i just yeah just thinking about what would you call that land-grant research like just research recognize the leverage strengths and research and healthcare as a driver of economic development like it is the research that's bringing the faculty that's bringing the money that's bringing that yeah the part process is that with that is uh we need to think uh beyond just uh the phd opportunities we also need to think of the ged opportunities the workforce opportunities beyond the the phd opportunities we also need to think about the ged opportunities yes workforce opportunities so uh the idea that you know we can you know provide a catalyst for uh groups like santa fe college to support and help them to develop both curriculum and certificate programs that are a pathway to the middle class that's going to be very important to us especially as we go forward with projects like the ford focus these are all influence you know how we come back to you with a future strategy but you would add emphasize partnerships with research and educational institutions well i think he's rewrite huh i think he's do that research and educational institutions emphasize partners with educational and research yeah yeah because i mean they are providing education and workforce institutions i mean it's he has santa fe uf and santa fe college but we've also got career source and we've got other community partners now the military um and others that are here in our community that are creating real workforce pipeline opportunities food systems it's good speaking of food systems um in tourism we've been focusing on messaging our community and visitors about the local food opportunities farmers markets how they can engage with that so i think that our newly formed shared department having a dedicated staff person focused on agriculture farmers market food systems where the tourism arm comes in is we can then go ahead and sell that so what we're interested in and you know not to reveal anything but i really see local food as a key market differentiator for alachua county in the state of florida over 70 percent of our visitors come from somewhere within the state so their primary drive-in market and i don't see anyone else out there in the state um focused on the importance of and the experience of whether breweries or restaurants serving local food our farmers markets and agricultural products coming through um so what tourism is ramping up to do is to do a full force marketing campaign just focused on um how can we attract people here for the culinary scene and attract them here um to participate in the restaurants and all of the ways they have to engage with agriculture we already oh sorry i just want to say i want to be i i love that idea and i want to be careful like a lot of our local food establishments aren't necessarily buying from our local farmers like there's very few so i just you know i'm all for it like support our local restaurants support our local businesses and heck yeah support our local food system but and i think we're building that infrastructure that's going to be needed like the local food hub work and all the work we're doing with our small farms support and land is going to lead us in the direction of having more of that availability and opportunity because i don't think it's for lack of want i think a lot of our restaurants and institutions would love to be able to serve more of our locally farmed food but it's how do you get from the farm to the plate you know and some of and all of the challenges that exist in that which is what we're trying to address i just want to be careful we don't grain wash you know because it's really easy i think i've noticed as some of our restaurants talk about how they're farm to table and you know they have like one item on their menu that they buy from local farms and so i just want to be careful that we do that in a way that's thoughtful as we're doing it and like that is also maybe from an economic standpoint providing incentive opportunities for those businesses that are doing this like maybe there's opportunity for us to incentivize their participation you know with you know i don't know what that incentive might look like but and actually we have to come up with our ideas for the pilot program for the food hub yeah for next year so maybe that's something that we can explore for a food hub pilot program yeah how are we getting these into our restaurants and do some kind of culinary month and here's a way to celebrate all of the local products at all this array of restaurants so that could be one of those but i think for food too you know we're in probably month nine of a three-year program to explore this food hub and i think the most important thing too is that we can have an outcome at the end of that of something that we can go ahead and actually get off the ground yeah because we have a lot of county resources both financial staff time community member time focused on this process and so primarily in our mind is how are we ensuring through all of this that there's something actionable um to come out of this study i um i've been getting a lot of calls about our farmers market closing right and so i feel like this could be an opportunity to really help lift up all of those uh vendors that are at our farmers market that are uh losing their what you know the security that they felt for 30 years being in the same place if we can you know roll that um promotion up into help building them up whenever i visited city my favorite thing to do is to go to a farmer's market yes and and because that to me that tells me about the community that helps me understand that community when i go to a farmer's market and and ours has been great and so if we can you know make this whole promotion part of food systems and farmers markets part of our our campaign and maybe that can help ease this transition to the new location wherever that is i don't know but have they identified a new location i think that they i don't know if the board wants me to say where they're going yet or not but they are in negotiations with for a new location that's what i heard okay yeah and and i've been getting lots of questions and i just tell them to call you yeah they call me i don't know if they've signed their agreement i know that they were in negotiations to move um but i don't know that they've finished those so i don't want to like okay but i create more rumors in the communities and don't end up being true you know right but i do think that you know we could help if we can make that part of this whole um promotional thing agree because if we can drive more customers to our farmers markets we're directly supporting them and we're bringing the spending to them and um i completely agree with you when i do the same thing when i travel i find the farmers markets and um bring back ideas yeah that's where i get all my that's where i get all my souvenirs but but anyway i just wanted to bring that up because i think there's a lot of angst in our community right now about the farmers markets i got in multiple conversations over this weekend we're getting ready later this month to start our farmers market surveys we'll be out at every single one um between now and november and we have two different surveys so we have a consumer survey which we're just talking to the shoppers why do you come here what percentage of your weekly grocery budget is spent at the market um what are obstacles what are advantages to coming and then a series of questions for the vendors themselves and what kinds of you know what revenue really what percentage of your operational revenue can be derived from the farmers market and how can then we take that data and figure out ways to get them more revenue in their pocket from those shoppers i'd be very interested to know how um traffic our farmers markets on saturdays correlates with gator game activities like does it go up because we have more visitors in town does it go down because everybody's at the game and nobody wants to deal with the traffic you know what i'm saying is that kind of stuff that i think could be really interesting and i think definitely for the hail saturday market um it's very touristy because they have a lot of in addition to just food which may not be as prime like i may not need to come and buy broccoli but they do have a lot of prepared foods people can buy and other kinds of um interesting homemade goods that they may just want to shop for and take back home um but yeah we're 441 maybe not so that's more of the perhaps more of the local i'm coming here because i want to buy my groceries that i can prepare for the week right yes before you all go on and get past this the um the amish in kentucky where where i it's i grew up in a farming community and the amish bring in all their goods weekly and have an auction it's under and then that's where the restaurants and the uh grocery stores come in to buy from the local folks if we had this indoor market you know that everybody's dreaming about with the big you know that we could have it gone going then our restaurant people could go in daily you know for what they could order in advance right order it right whatever so that it's it's an indoor market where it could be an ongoing but we just need to find that spot uh and actively you know engage in trying to get it going because that's when your local folks would use the produce from the farmers exactly if it was dead i mean that's what the food hub will hopefully do and it will also have an opportunity for it to be at wholesale prices rather you know so that people can actually access it when they're doing volume and be able to partner with a lot of the local farms so like you know mr nix may not be able to grow 100 acres of cucumbers but he can grow 10 and you know and a sandbrook can grow 10 and nikoya can grow 10 and then they can bid on a contract or you know a restaurant or a us that wants a hundred acres of a coupon right just go in exactly one box of cucumbers or the one box of you know whatever happens to be in season at the time yeah exactly okay we talked about where nature and culture meet the importance of quality of life um the same reasons that people want to visit here are the same reasons that people would want to live here and begin their family here or relocate for any of the jobs that we're discussing at uf or uf health or any of our employers so um all along i know you all know this um what visit gainsville does is distribute the advertising outside of the county so i see us as the marketing agency for the county when it comes to visitation how we're joining with economic development now we are now the marketing agency for attracting business and attracting relocation here so there's a lot of those same kind of core efforts and communication messages that we already are putting out for tourism and so sean and i now that we're the edo um you all had a resolution to appoint us as the edo that makes us the state liaison to florida commerce and select florida so that when there is a company that's potentially interested in relocating here it will now be sean and i that provide a beautifully designed rfp to that really promoting our area saying all of the reasons why we fit what this company is looking for and with the board's action in june for the edo and the fact that we have edac as our but we have two amazing advisory boards we have the tdc we have edac and so when we look we have others that we communicate with such as rural concerns board and we were just out there last week but with our two incredible advisory boards um we do have subject matter experts in both tourism and economic development and i feel like that is the conduit by which we become the local conveners city of alachua has their own economic development staff city of gainesville has it we have two important chambers that we can work with so so i see our newly formed team including visit gainesville sean and myself bailey doing agriculture and now we have our new sports and events marketing staff that we will become that convener and make a place for everyone at the table through our municipalities to be able to have one unified message going out about these are the things that differentiate us make us special and make us a place that you would want to do business um visit and live so we're looking at that there's been some how i see there's trade shows we can go to um if we're not present selling our community no one else is doing it for us so we do this in tourism now we go to trade shows um the sports commission sports commission goes to sports related trade shows and now we have sean and i and some of our tourism staff to go to the economic development trade shows to be making our presence known we're here and we're ready for businesses to understand all of the advantages we have number one we have seven exits right off i-75 makes it very easy to do business here and come into our community so that's what this speaks to we put the board invests millions of dollars every year into our arts nature culture and sports groups they in turn use that for their operations and their marketing so all of these things now roll up into the overarching investment that the board is making and really being able to see visitation as an important driver of our economy 26 percent of all consumer spending in our county is a visitor spend so when we think about increasing visitation we're increasing direct revenue right into our local businesses and none more important than our actually our restaurants and our attractions community okay commissioner cornell and then commissioner alfred and then frizzy yeah so i think this is great jessica is a really good start i think um this is also where the cities i guess come in like what you did at waldo at that joint meeting was fabulous i think every city has their own story that they're telling um i like that you've got the sports side here so the games of sports organizing commission um and also all the uf sports i mean there are we have professional level sports at the university of florida that attracts a lot of people so i think this is a great start really good uh similarly i'm i'm confused why arts and ecotourism are in this on the same line because i feel like we have this whole nature group of people that come to alocho county to experience the outdoors to experience the springs and then that we have a whole different group of people that come for our museums that come to the performing arts center that come to the hippodrome and while they're sometimes the same people i i don't think those are typically the same weekend you know yeah we fund it no i'm with you well right now we're not really funding i mean right now we fund we have arts and culture and we have sports but we don't have anything for ecotourism like resource-based right and i i kind of feel like we need to break that out and we really need to like put some oomph behind that personally i i mean i don't know what y'all's research says but i kind of i i just thought it was odd that those were that was like one line because i feel like we have two really strong separate categories there that could be really really beefed up so i appreciate yeah that's easy for us to separate out um i pulled up before this meeting just kind of what are the primary places people go when they visit here um through that we understand what are some of those motivators for visitation um to your point earlier about uf being the number one obviously uf is the number one reason for visitation um about 24 of all people who come to our county come here and then go to the uf campus so um that's number one second after that is retail we know we are a hub for shopping and we draw people from a lot of our surrounding counties um to come here and go to butler plaza they come here and go to celebration point um so we know even though it's not like maybe top of mind for a lot of people their spending is critically important to all of the businesses and they come here to shop maybe have lunch they may not spend the night but their dollars are just as important as anyone else's dollars even if they're coming doctor visits so third after that to your point is outdoor recreation um we know that that's number three and that's because we have eight state parks we have lots of city and county parks we have our springs rails to trails some of those yeah birding huge bird yeah yep um and then fourth is medical so when it comes so medical is a huge reason for visitation um they have a big marketing department at uf health and the veterinary college so um they are pushing that out all the time for people to come here for the excellence of the medical facilities that we have in our county and then fourth after that is arts entertainment attractions festivals all of the kinds of ways that people can participate in the local culture and um so with that we are focused on this and we're focused on just educating the local community visitation is much larger than um six football games a year and it's much larger than some baseball tournament it's every single day and so we have over 6 000 hotel rooms in our county we operate at about a 70 percent occupancy so i always tell people when we go to rotary or places to make a presentation on any given day we have over 3 800 hotel rooms filled and it's not as visible because they may be here for meetings or they may be here for uf related business but the visitors are here and they're spending money and so we can bring more on that too i would really like with the updates to the comp plan to have it based in the data so we have the data of where our visitors are coming from we have demographic profiles of who the visitors are we have the data of where they're going when they're here and how the county can maximize and get more of them and get more of the ones who may not be coming here coming here yet but um that's what we're focused on is just deploying the messaging around to the visitation to increase the positive benefits that our visitors bring through their spending yeah so yeah i guess i i do want to be mindful of the fact that a place can be visited to death yes and i think that asheville is a great example of where tourism has kind of overtaken a town in a way that prior to the storms that was really intense in terms of the way that it then made life for the everyday residents and so i do think that something in this comprehensive plan that talks about analyzing the impacts of that tourism like i think about our springs they could very easily be loved to death and we've seen that in other communities you know they have had which i'm so proud of them for putting regulations around what you can take on the river and all of those kinds of things but i do think that having some thought and intention to how we attract those people who we're attracting and what policies we layer in to make sure that we're protecting the natural resources that we're attracting people to play in um is important so i you know i just i'm i on one hand i'm really like all for us like carving out ecotourism and agritourism and creating it as its own bucket with resources and support the same way we do sports but on the other hand i want to be careful and mindful of the fact that regardless of the type of tourism whether it's art or culture or eco or sport or agritourism it can it can get to a point where it's a tipping point where it kind of creates a us versus them mentality with tourists versus the people who live in a community and i don't want us to do that to our community so i do want to be mindful and think about what are some strategies that other communities around the world or around our country have done to ensure that there's a balance there and and and it's a good point we just got back from the florida governor's conference on tourism last week and um one of the presentations was um active campaigns from other cities about don't visit um the city of miami really won a big award for a campaign they did about spring break like we're breaking up with spring break and love to death yeah that well they just wanted they want a different demographic they do so they don't want that student what we've done with the springs um specifically is i work with stacy greco to make sure anything we're putting out for the springs is in alignment with their messaging and then we can take content that um epd generates about feed up and flow like don't put your feet on the bottom of the springs and some of those strategies and then we can use our marketing budget to push that out so that it's focused on if you're coming to the springs here's how to safely participate but i agree with you we especially when it comes to ecologically sensitive areas um making sure that whoever is visiting is well informed about how to deceively engage with it and that we are not going to create a situation that people are over visiting those springs right like yeah i mean i guess we just have to keep mind might be mindful of it like how often are our state parks hitting capacity like is that every day is it 10 days a month like getting some of that data you know like i mean you know i mentioned this a couple it was before the summer i think you know when i went to post springs and i was like oh my god like every parking spot every grass lot every anywhere where a car could park there was a car you know and i was like oh my goodness so knowing you're like you know if that's on a regular basis that that's going to love that spring death so how do we make sure that we're like we have a sense of when we're hitting a carrying capacity like what does that look like and maybe that is a conversation with some of our springs institute springs council epd folks like what does that look like and how do we set those limits in a way that protect the resource and how do we redirect people right right what are some other things that you do springs and they're like holy crap this isn't where i want to spend my day with right or it's closed what are you know what are we giving people to say here are some other options hey you could go canoe at rum island you could do this you could do that like what are you know how do we redirect people when they do come across it's full and it's closed or it's full and i don't want to be here or you know it's because people do they drive here anticipating going to a particular thing are we giving them a choice you know that's one of staff's interest with how do that redirect that opportunities for those those amenities that are being unappreciated or haven't been fully developed yet from a visitation perspective or a quality of life perspective and that's been some of our work with uh trying to talk to communities about the trail count the idea that you know the existing being able to be on a bike trail and do a day trip is great it's a great amenity to have in a community but to be able to encourage a tourist to come and spend multiple days to be able to bridge that ecotourism and cultural divide that you take the trail in from palatka and on the way you stop and have an authentic experience in hawthorne you might go to downtown gainesville and go to a group hub there you might go to university of florida have a cultural event and then on the way out to the west coast you're stopping and you're changing a uh 20 a day visit to a 150 a day visit because there's an overnight stay associated with it and you're putting people on a on a on a surface on a hardened surface that is doesn't have the same impacts as a spring visitation so i think there's there's lots of investments that the the board has made that we've made that are potentially underappreciated and we've seen some of that data that came out of the international visitors from world masters and think about the the spread of visitation and what the preferences are so there's a lot of opportunities to redirect and move visitation into those ecotourism cultural opportunities within the community as a as a more defined strategy so that we don't say well what do you do we just everyone goes to the springs and then no one has a you know a a good experience because it's being loved to death and we don't want to see that it's exciting yeah it's good i like it i know what y'all are doing i'll see me out there doing it it's great so will we get a chance to re-go over that once you guys have rewritten this to one will we get a chance to for all of the elements that you're discussing at these workshops we will prepare draft language and we will bring it back to the board to review so you will see this as actual language great thank you nice job i noticed that the recommendations excuse me only addressed uh prioritizing medical technical and tourism type industries but uh mention nothing about those uh businesses that would support those kinds of industries and thus satisfy your objective 1.5 regardless of the industry or the socioeconomic status of the employee all of them need a place to eat outside of home quality child care uh salon services like hair nails and getting that cut and want to be entertained um and therefore i'm wondering why we have objective 1.5 but nothing really to address that also with regards to the 2018 disparity report that report is seven years old and when you count the time of collecting the data it's even older than that so i'm wondering and actually most bundles won't even accept of the data from it because it's so old um so i'm i'm i'm wondering what it is that um we have not implemented or at least planned for any concrete thing that address those disparities that were addressed in that seven year plus old report number one the other thing is that the disparities discussed there was probably only a surprise to people who uh wrote the report report and requested it those who were suffering from those disparities have known all of that fact for generations as long as soon as they come in in the world and start talking and hearing they know about those disparities so it was only a small group of people about that the other thing i want to share is that one of the plans i put forward was a partial solution to that because as you know all of these quality of life things that was just discussed in part three none of that uh or very little if any of that exists east of of um excuse me east of main street and uh uh only nice eating establishments exists in the smaller cities of the county this partial solution that uh i presented to us that could help to provide what is needed to provide those support services to those industries that we are prioritizing was ignored for the most part but there have been a few who have taken elements of that and put forth and they're all coming out of government and put forth i'm done thanks patricia thank you for having me here i'm landed harrah uh economic development manager for the greater gamesville chamber of commerce i just wanted to say i love sitting around a table and listening to you guys talk about economic development and what your strategy is going to be we are here to support all of you and your vision uh i love the idea of the agricultural incentives especially around food systems i know that's something that our president has been talking to me about lately that we really need to put more of an emphasis on from a chamber standpoint how can we get more of those farmers to the table and more of those businesses to the table to say hey use those carrots use those tomatoes let's find a way that we can collaborate more that's what the word we've been using for five years is our community strategies collaborate that's not going to change we're continuing to we want that word to to rock and roll collaboration in any way shape and form and secondly um with the whole edo status you guys going out and kind of being like the marketing arm for alachua county jessica was right if we don't have somebody at those events uh those you know going to vegas to the big trade shows for airplanes or aerospace or someone going to chicago or these large life uh uh bile sector and life sciences uh over up in boston if we don't have somebody there we don't have anybody representing us and we as the chamber we don't really have the capacity to do that so being having you guys be able to you know have that marketing and that networking and that that arm through florida commerce as well as we're super excited to hear about that so once again just wanted to say we support we we we want to be supporting you and everything that you do uh when it comes to projects when you win we win when we win hopefully you win um so we're we're here to help as best we can okay i just want to comment that um i've really seen a big shift in the chamber focusing on local existing businesses and helping them expand and support and also bring in industries that support them and i i just really appreciate that the chamber historically when i first got on the board was seemed like more of a recruiting arm of bringing people here not very successful to be honest but now with the focus on existing businesses and existing industries um existing tourism smaller cities i think it's been it's been noticeable so i just wanted to tell you that tell eric that thank you i'm sure he's watching appreciate it okay come to the point of your agenda for uh general uh public comments uh may i ask the question general public comment yes how you do my question relates to transportation which was another issue not mentioned in this uh conversation that transportation is very uh germane to economic development also uh i was concerned and shocked when i heard that gaitville was going to cancel the contract with mmv when i first came back to this county i saw that it was 40 or 50 years behind the transportation systems that i had experienced in other cities now even now it's not that good and then to to cancel mv and not listen to the county's uh offer to hold off on that decision a little bit causes me concern i just wanted to know what your alternatives were because the city is not listening and i'm not a big fan of mv uh but they are better than nothing and i've had some experiences with mv when my mother aunt and a beloved sister-in-law or former sister-in-law all used mv transportation but an inadequate transportation system where you're already cutting out uh a large part of it that serves the people that needs this transition the most what are we going to do because that's going to cause some serious problems serious problems with people so that was my question what what are the alternatives now if they move forward with doing this because they're not doing a good job with rts now how are they going to take up art do rts and mv's job thank you for general public comments yeah i just i wanted to respond to some of the comments that were during the economic element a couple things one is um i know it's in there i know it's embedded in there because i know you too and i know your passion for locally owned businesses and stuff but i think because you were talking about the edo and stuff a lot of the emphasis seemed to be on attracting businesses attracting visitors attracting that outside but i think that cultivating the talent that we have here and where we have these existing industries and cultivating opportunities for entrepreneurship and business development um and expand business expansion is really really like sort of the core and if i'm if i'm not speaking out of torn turn the key for what we see as our role and our goal primarily attracting businesses here great um if they're good quality businesses that provide high paying jobs and have a low economic environmental footprint but really ultimately our dream is we build what we have up and connect it to a regional network of other businesses that exist to continue to grow our economy um and i thought that patricia brought up a really good point i think making sure that this element ties to our other elements that we talk about child care um and the importance of that as a as a part of this about what we're doing i mean you guys are working on that because it's such an important part of being able to have successful employees as having quality care for their children um and also transportation to her point you know i know we're talking about the transportation master plan the bikes pedestrian master plan safe streets for all plan and all those are coming but tying those to this element and how they're key not just for making sure that a kid can get to school safely which should be reason enough to do it but also because having a strong and robust transit system is key to us having economic development and investment in our community and i mean we see it again and again and again it comes up at every single conversation around economic opportunity and around honestly around economic strife and those folks who have the disparities like transportation is always next to housing affordability and food accessibility transportation is always the other thing that comes up again and again and again so i appreciate you bringing that up and i think it's important for us to just as we are thinking about this comprehensive plan tying those pieces together so thank you for that just i would just say um i've been work i've tried working with patricia since before right when i first came on the board and she's had this vision and had this vision so i really appreciate you sticking with it uh because she presented the child care issue way back then she presented the the business development out there on that on the east side of gainesville has worked really hard so i i'm just glad to see that that she's still willing to come in here and make sure that we're addressing those concerns that she's had since she's moved back into the community so i i respect that and i'm really glad to see you're here and i need to talk with you more so about your meeting with mr black yeah so uh in response on the mv thing on tuesday we passed a three-part motion so a week ago one was to ask the city to pause i understand that the general policy they declined um two was to agenda it for the mtpr meeting which i believe is on the next meeting in october and the third part was that for staff to bring back some options and understanding existing contract and what some of our options are so i i would ask that our staff if they're ready hopefully bring that back to us prior to that mtpo meeting so we can have that discussion hopefully at the second meeting in september and i don't know if staff was planning for that but that was my kind of a question i support that i just wanted to say also that i cannot imagine that our county is going to leave anybody that's in need of medical transport stranded it's just going to cost us money and that's the sad part to me is that working together we could have addressed this in a in a way to cost less money across the county but if the city of gainesville is going to operate independently it's just going to cost all of us more money and i find that sad but yeah i mean i find it sad too i think that one of the challenges is that maybe we we didn't i mean i wasn't around for the first conversation about the regional transit authority so i don't so i don't know whatever happened with that conversation or what that even looks like but i i do feel like that you know having an actual regional transit authority and thinking about transportation as a region rather than as a city that operates a facility that's supposed to provide a regional service is it's hard for us to expect them to do that as well so you know i can well that's why i made the motion i did yeah no i agree with you 100 and i but i mean i wish i wish that they would pause long enough for us to have that conversation so that we could think about how we do this with the most efficient tax resources that we can rather than having to drain individual institutions coffers to make it happen but you know ultimately a lot of this all is led from the fact that you know our university chose back out of our system so it's not just about the city it's about all of the institutions have to be good players all of them have to meet us at the table and to be a part of what makes this system and i always saw uf's investment in the transit system as sort of one of the things that they're sort of fees in lieu like one of the ways that they were supporting our community since they don't pay taxes and so much of our land is off the tax rules right because it's in their hands and that was a really great investment that they were making in our community and something that they could hold up and with that a lot of that diminished it's making things even harder and it's making the city have to make these hard decisions so i just want to be careful you know to give our city commissioner some grace because they're having to make hard decisions because other institutions made bad decisions in my opinion and it's sort of just trickling downhill and now we're going to have to make hard decisions and i just wish they'd have paused a week and had a conversation with us yeah totally i hear you and hopefully we'll be able to have the conversation at mtpo and you know and you know maybe and i because i don't fully understand what they what they were deciding why they were deciding what they were deciding how they made the cali came to the decision and what their plans are so you know i'm hoping that we can have a more robust discussion at mtpo i hope so too because they you know i'm i'm told they've been discussing this for months but they that's months they could have asked to talk to us as well and they may not have thought about the unintended consequences of them doing this what would happen to the outlying areas and that you know what i mean i don't know i think there's about 50 000 trips 35 000 inside the city 15 000 outside the city and we've got to figure out how to handle we and them perhaps we and them together or we and somebody are we going to be able to talk about that before the mcpo meeting at the board yes mr chair we can we can bring back uh bring back a discussion item on the 23rd um allison and myself are actually meeting with envy tomorrow so we're getting some more information from envy as well okay super so that's great i i you know ultimately our community doesn't stop at the edge of uf it doesn't stop at the edge of gainesville we have you know it's it's it's a it's a larger system and we have to think about it that way for it to work that's you know yeah i guess i i guess i just i i we need an immediate solution to the problem because we have people that are going to be without transport and that's one piece but i i do hope that we're also having the bigger conversation about transit opportunities in these outlying areas because i think part of the reason that we have to have envy transfers because we don't have good transit options in those outlying areas and i know that in some cases we don't have the population to support it so it's a it's a chicken and egg but i do hope that we have that bigger conversation too because i think at some point we're going to have to make the leap and make investments in transit if we want to see the kind of economic development the kind of housing the kind of things that we're talking about and we're building in this comprehensive plan like transit's sort of the key connector to all of it just just for financial stability unless we want to have everybody driving in their individual yeah yeah are there any commissioner comments i just i'm going to add to what they're saying very quickly about this is that um i had read a couple of years ago about two young men i think up at live vogue who had put their money together and bought a a bus and renovated the bus and set up their own circuit you know transit system going around from the communities they set it up yes and it built to the point where they were actually then taking tours you know out they were they and i would love to see that happen here if there's some young people who know how to work on trucks and buses and who could put together something like that and set up a private enterprise you know so i don't know what it would take to actually you know put together something like that if they have any kind of special so it's an rts uber yeah something yeah yeah happens in a lot of places around the world like sort of jitten service small scale it's like not quite taxi service but on demand two men and a truck why not two men and a bus you know i think the challenge is liability and well that would be the other thing but but um it's it's worked in other places so there are ways around that too at least you know i mean if you could get a big enough ridership of you know a kind of continuous route that you know it would pretty well maybe take care of some of that yeah well at the 23rd meeting we'll understand how it's currently being funded the different funding sources federal state and local okay that's our goal great thank you scott i mean scott coons brought it up at the regional transit meeting last thursday i know they were also doing a chair letter and he's a good resource for that because they kind of handled that for the last 20 years yeah well they do for all those other of the regional transit yeah i mean the regional transit regional planning council mary did awesome i have to tell you there are a number of people that came up to me and said mary's so good she was walking around the microphone she was bringing it to people she's an active chair scott was irritated we're meeting with another 45 minutes longer than it normally does but no one left nobody left so you did a nice job mary thank you that was my goal my goal is to get people involved okay if there's nothing else we adjourn