Alachua County/City of Gainesville Joint Commission Meeting - Dec 10, 2025

our agenda and then i think the city will open up their meeting and adopt their agenda so motion of adoption of the agenda second motion a second to adopt the agenda any discussion any public discussion on the motion see them all those in favor say aye aye any opposed that motion to be honest mr mayor all right welcome to the uh to to our side of the the joint meeting and uh madam clerk where you got here yes mr mayor we have the adoption of the agenda so moved we have a motion second to adopt the agenda as printed and distributed uh any public comment nope all right all in favor please say aye aye any opposed all right we have an agenda um mr mayor for the approval of minutes i'd like to review uh the minutes and i would just request that we just push those to the next meeting we'll move that to the next time unless somebody's got specific questions so mr mayor is that your introduction um because i have a couple words i want to go ahead yes okay so um first of all happy holidays after this meeting is over this i think is our official last meeting of the county commission and um the mayor and i had an opportunity to talk uh what's that with mtpo oh we do have mtpo okay well um as far as these two boards one of the things that um you know i was really proud of with the mayor and the city's leadership is how we came together on the snap emergency um and so that's why that's on here uh the county has taken with commissioner prisley's leadership over the last two years a lot of moves to um bring food kind of into the public discussion uh at the county and so we've asked our staff to kind of let you all know what we're doing there's no ask we're not like asking the city for any money we just want to just let everyone know what's happening and we know that through that dialogue that there will be opportunities for us to improve what the county's doing um the other reason we asked to have the the other item on the agenda is i know that um commissioner duncan walker has been spending a lot of time over the last well since you've been a commissioner and since i've known you talking about kids and so um this is really important from the county's perspective and i've asked the children's trust leadership to be here and so at the meeting we've got marcia kiner our executive director and krista goldwire and we've got some folks from the resource centers that are also here and so when we get to that i'd like to invite them up so that they can contribute and participate in this meeting and so that that's um that's really all i just wanted to say because i think uh i think there's a lot of good work that's going to come out of today um and kind of lay the groundwork for the work that we're going to be doing in 2026. so that's my welcome and introduction okay very good uh let's go ahead and uh matt clerk you want to roll us into the first item yes mr mayor we have uh business discussion item 2025 982 cultural arts center discussion with the recommendation that the joint city county commission hear a presentation from city staff concerning the work to date on the cultural arts center and discuss as appropriate the work after um the city completed a feasibility study uh last year and where we are right now is it uh as we close on uh the calendar year of 2025. andrew i'm sorry are you talking about the video no the video i think we'll show after the uh the presentation i don't think we've received uh i think it's in the city's back up oh we can pull that up online we we can find it but i would sing but i yeah okay yeah i'm not going to sing for you all you don't want to go next time we'll send you we're working on this room soon it will be much better it's okay mark's working on technology for the space soon we're actually getting a much bigger table for us for mtpo too and the new chairs i'm excited we're redoing this room yeah yeah i heard it's going to be around too while you're waiting i just want everybody to know how much i appreciated the work you all did for the christmas parade it was really amazing thank you it was wonderful just to be able to sit on the sidelines and not have anything to do with it except the dance flavor you know it was uh it was really wonderful it was one and and i'm still amazed that you're able to get uf band to come do that pretty remarkable i'm happier to have the east side of it of course those bands we are go-to kids you know i'm always about the band for sure but um that that they would participate like that this is their second year it's pretty amazing too but you're right so the bands are what got me through high school i i kind of hope that next year the uf band is unable to participate but i don't have that much hope in uh in the football program honestly that was recorded that's true well we get the band if they don't go to atlanta so that works it's christmas turned a little spicy i tried to get you in to open up the field there for us to have the band competition statewide you know for the high school bands to come in and do that at the university it seems to be it would be a really good vehicle to recruit you know but uh didn't have much luck with that one yeah it's all about the the right number of zeros all right uh so uh no further ado um uh this is as i mentioned uh opportunity to share information uh regarding the city's ongoing work on the cultural arts center so uh as uh commissioner cornell mentioned this really started back in january of 2022 when commissioner duncan walker presented a vision of the cultural arts center um the city and um the parks recreation and cultural affairs um department uh developed uh based on that initial discussion a request for proposals um to develop a cultural arts feasibility study that study was uh work was awarded to ams a firm that had extensive experience in working on cultural arts uh center uh feasibility studies around the country uh in 2023 in february the city commission adopted um a declaration declaring that gun violence is a public health crisis this is important because it then fed into ongoing work between um the departments of uh public uh sorry parks recreation and cultural affairs and gainsville fire rescue uh in developing the one nation uh one project um uh work that was recognized the role of the uh arts programming in preventing and um uh improving community health and preventing gun violence uh in may of 23 to the end of the calendar year ams conducted a number of site visits community workshops um during their work on the cultural arts center um in january of 2024 as part of that work it's uh cut off on the screen there but um commissioner duncan walker moderated a panel with marshall davis of the marshall davis african heritage cultural arts center marian caffey um from the apollo theater who is also uh your grand marshal um for the holiday parade this year um at the cotton club cultural museum um about the importance and the meaning of a cultural arts center um and particularly that uh of the uh um the uh african heritage cultural arts center in miami and how that model could be uh potentially replicated here in gainesville in march of 2024 ams and staff presented the findings of the feasibility study of the city commission uh uh just a few months ago in august and i'll touch on those results in a second but in august of 2025 the commission revisited um this discussion uh and made a motion to continue to continue uh to staff to continue working on the the cultural arts center um and in september of this year uh commissioner duncan walker um with our office uh led a group of staff and community members on a three-city tour um in uh the miami area of uh existing cultural arts centers uh research libraries performing arts centers to show essentially what could be possible um and then uh since that uh motion in in august there's been a internal working group of staff many of whom are here in the room um to continue working on this um so just to touch on the a little bit more on the cultural arts feasibility study um as i mentioned it was uh commissioned as part of the uh the discussion about um a cultural arts center here in gainesville um the work really revolved around the uh bringing a cultural arts center and what were the sort of preconditions um necessary to bring one particularly with a focus in east gainesville that was a um the original uh impetus behind this was um was really focused on um a cultural arts center and bringing that um to east gainesville to help support the local arts community and youth programming and that study essentially came up with uh eight recommendations and importantly these recommendations are made uh that were to essentially bolster to continue to develop the local arts community youth programming with uh ultimate goal of a standalone uh cultural arts center um that could support all of these uh various arts activities um similar to many of the examples that um that ams included in the report and and we can certainly uh if uh the county is interested if you don't have a copy of that report we can certainly um follow up and and provide you all a copy of that may ask a question on that side are these things that that you have all since those recommendations incorporated into budgetary plans or plans or are starting to many many of them uh have been um uh i think have been the recommendations have been uh it's a work in progress in terms of integrating that uh some of those recommendations into the regular um work that um prca and the cultural affairs division within prca um uh uh do just as part of their regular basis there are some i think that are still um works in progress that are that haven't been um advanced forward um and some of them as you'll see like have uh community partnerships um uh element to that and so and i'll if uh um if there's opportunity i can have uh carol richardson from our cultural affairs area come and talk a little bit about what we've done today okay yeah i just i guess one one of them stood out number five stood out to me about having like a festival because we have the cultural arts coalition that does the big fifth avenue arts festival like i was just thinking about things community partners that are logical for those sorts of things i'm wondering if you were already on that trajectory yeah yeah and certainly it's been um and you know i'll be completely honest like i'm speaking a little bit out of my depth here but um but that has been a real i think focus of um the cultural affairs area in um parks recreation and cultural affairs in terms of uh really leveraging community partnerships both in terms of supporting arts programming and and youth development um but also really kind of activating a lot of our community centers um especially in a time where we have don't have as much staff in terms of being able to run those ourselves um so uh just to conclude where we are right now as i mentioned um back in august the city commission uh adopted the following motion which really kind of gives uh direction uh to staff to continue um working on this uh building um some additional uh data to support uh cultural arts center um we have a staff working group that's been um working for for several months now um and they help coordinate the um the tour i mentioned um down in miami where i actually have a and i'm sure commissioner duncan walker will want to highlight this we'll we'll be working on uh coordinating another tour in february um i didn't get to go on the first tour i'm looking forward to uh hopefully being able to go on that the uh the one in february um and uh and really kind of one of the motions was to uh continue discussing this with with other partners in the community and so this was an opportunity to have this um discussion at the joint meeting and there are some uh links in the backup uh from some uh news articles and then some of the commission um discussion points in case um uh in case you want to um access those and uh with that i'll i'll conclude um and then i think we would like to cue the video next if possible thank you and i would note in the uh on the uh the second to last slide there um we're talking about what's next we were very very clear uh at the city that uh we need to find uh outside funding mechanisms to uh to make this happen we are not sitting on a pot of money ready to say let's go do a thing um i think everybody in the community is well aware of our budgetary situation and we are getting by really well with with what we have but we don't have an extra pot to to just say oh let's do this chart rent the liberty city is not really a city there's no bear it's a title we gave to this area because we think that's what it is it's about us finding out on liberty find our way to express our center there are just too many fires to put them all out in miami's liberty city section today when i got here it was right after the mcduffie riots and all so a lot of people did not want to come to this area there was not even a theater in the community they originally planned to bring a teen center here and it was thought the kids would be more engaged and we had a cultural arts center for the opening of the center back in 1975 it was smaller back then there was some renovated buildings the dance studio was a meat market art room was a former dance station about 1982 someone told me that there was a job opening here at the aqua church cultural center i started at the top started as the manager director i had the intention that we could actually prepare kids for colleges to be professional artists i remember the first time that i met mr davis it was like i remember i think the word whoa might have came out of my house i designed a program that included all the arts theater dance music instrument music vocal music and had the intention to make sure that the kids got the fundamental of all those art forms i did not know living so then i'm now at the cultural arts center where not just living long but being happy and doing the arts and being able to fulfill yourself and express yourself in a very interesting and fun way was introduced to me they didn't dummy things down our approaches as oh they're just little kids they can only do this no they really pushed us and encouraged us to be our best and to reach high levels through the arts and that was the goal to get these kids who came here to be able to reach that professional mark i wanted to be a visual artist when i got to college i found out i didn't have the skills no one taught me about different paint brushes how to mix colors design concepts any of those things but i had this natural ability to draw when i got to college i was not prepared for that experience can you look at these so you create your own characters are you copying characters this is good opportunity is good characters you got talent you got talent i came here with the intention to make sure that any child came to this program they was prepared for any experience that they want to have in the arts so that no child would leave this program and not be able to actualize themselves in the arts i was a student here since i was alive it kind of changed my life here at the african heritage cultural arts center this shaped who i am today vocally and it inspired me about what i want to do in the future currently i'm a full-time college student at berkeley college of music on a full-rise scholarship thanks to the arts we pretty much guarantee to the parent if your child come with us summer school and we know the parent many times cannot afford to have an instrument but they can't afford to get a mouthpiece we say get the mouthpiece we have the instrument we're going to teach your child how to play that instrument how to take care of that instrument but i remember the feeling of like finally putting that mouthpiece in and blowing the instrument it was just like you know you make the sound you're looking at all your friends like yo did you hear what i just did i did the same thing because all you need is a little taste that's all i needed to taste and i was like yep i'm in there hook for life as you see when you really engage yourself with these kids you see them evolve you see them change themselves socially you see changes in the academics you understand sometimes why i gotta read why i gotta do the math you put an instrument in your child hand you help you understand why i have to don't know they're doing fraction but they're doing fractions we're so happy today to launch the instrumental start fellows awards program and happy to be able to identify some of our most talented young people who will be receiving their awards today the instruments of their choice this is a new journey for us a journey where we're not only teaching kids how to play an instrument a chance to take the instruments home they get a chance to have that develop themselves in art this is a transformation i actually played the alto saxophone coming through the culture art center he was actually playing the recorders they started out in the recorders so now he's actually getting into the instrumentation part and he's going in there with a new saxophone that he called his you're going to name this thing i didn't name your mind so one of the things that we like to do is bring in professional artists so today we have with us the cleveland orchestra band students these are the students that want an instrument our instrument to start program so they was here for the summer and it was identified by mr sands and other teachers as being some of the ones that was worthy of getting an instrument for life and then we also trained them and also give a year-long scholarship are you guys ready to step up next level so you get a little more focused the sound is better it's easier to play it's also a wonderful opportunity for these young people with someone that has had the same inspiration and aspirations that they have that they have become professional keep it up hey christoph i can do it you can do it in these communities that have been marginalized and left behind they've only seen a couple of avenues right for you to get out playing basketball playing football or rapping the other aspects of it the dancing the artistry the poetic components of it they don't connect those things with success because those things are not taught to them and pushed at them at a very young age and this place was a jewel sitting right in the middle of one of the most depressed low-income marginalized communities in the united states and he also goes to barry jenkins and terrell alden mccrady we have numerous students that come we have to real mccrady academy can really be here and be somebody two boys from liberty city up here on the stage representing 305 i have bianca miss jackson and beyonce we have william delaford who has traveled the world at the accomplished jazz music everything that i learned in the program prepared me for the life that i have now we have marshal davis union my own son the tap dance has been on broadway the list goes on and on and on robert battle receiving on behalf of alvin ailey robert battle came from the aspen herpes cultural arts center and now heading up this wonderful company alvin ailey i found the cultural arts center to be a safe haven that i could express everything that i wanted to be or saw myself as and be encouraged to go even further in that when i met robert he was in the ninth grade and i gave robert some really hard movements he did the movement he worked the choreography he worked with the dancers and you could see how serious he was about learning this craft i remember being so afraid being pushed just going across the floor but i remember she saw something and she made me go across by myself me something about courage because i learned in that moment that courage was not the absence of fear it's the presence of fear but doing it anyway everyone who are the battle give them a hammer i was a young kid who wanted to dance i had all the makings of being teased wanting to dance are you kidding me is that you still have the sensitivity you still are this shy person but she said do it anyway still feel child going across the floor cultural arts center i also still feel that feel that little hand behind me saying do it anyway that's what i've taken but everybody will see what these young people understand the importance of boarding because for me it was life itself i knew you as a young man but the man that you are i'm so proud of you you gave me that big because of my experience of being talented and not having someone to groom the talent that i had i think would be ideal for this program to be in other places when you see arts being eliminated from our public systems and most of our young people who attend the public school system there needs to be these organizations that give them that experience of art i'm here at games for today at the invitation of commissioner desmond walker to talk about how the arts can impact this community in a positive way knowing what we face here in gainesville with this increasing rise in gun violence knowing what we face here in gainesville with the increasing rates of illiteracy the cultural arts center just makes so much sense i got a chance to visit i was really impacted by it you got some challenges here just like we have in mind you got to save lives transform life you got to put yourself on the back burner monday morning everybody should be calling the commission office they put my name down i would like to be a part of i want to be a part of this new culture program i want to teach a class volunteer the kids lives are too valuable for us to miss this opportunity to forsake this moment that we have to make our community better you have cultural arts programs yes you do and you have people that are doing wonderful work all over this country but what marshall davis is doing i think is a little bit different a lot of folks like to say it takes a village to raise a child that's the truth the african heritage cultural arts center is that proverbial village in the heart of liberty city we have to have one in every city in this country it doesn't begin in studying but just as sure as there's fire in the belly just as sure as there's even a grain of talent and god love those teachers who work in centers in small places in communities but who have a heart and a spirit to give to young people god love those people because i trained with people i can imagine a program like this all kids are brought in nurtured are exposed to the arts exposed give them no child thanks for for that um uh mr ducken walker did you want to follow up with absolutely so um first of all i want to start with a thank you i always like to begin from a place of gratitude because um it is not lost on me the initial conversations that we had mr mayor i believe you're the only other individual that's currently around the table that was there with me when we first had this conversation uh all of the rest of our city commissioners uh weren't yet here but you saw then my passion uh and so as this has kind of evolved over the last few years as we went through uh the conversations with the consultant as we got back from uh from them that there was no place to do it as we learned that we faced different financial challenges that might make this impossible i'm grateful for colleagues who were willing to reopen this discussion who were willing to hear my level of persistence because there's a reason that i'm persistent about this you just saw where i used to work you've heard me talk about the african heritage cultural arts center in miami but it was important that i have the opportunity to show you this snippet today because i wanted you to see it there is absolutely nothing like this space and i say that not just because i am an arts practitioner i am a performer i say this because i've had the lived experience of seeing how this space has literally changed and saved lives i've had the lived experience of seeing how it has created jobs how it has stimulated economic development in the heart and you heard it of one of the most depressed communities in this country and so i've always had a firm belief that though i went away and i stayed away from gainesville for about 25 years that when i came back i was supposed to bring back whatever i got from wherever i was back home my experience in miami day county at the african heritage cultural arts center was something that i wanted to bring back home so i thank you all once again to my city colleagues for being willing to reopen this conversation because it was one that we thought we would have to table for a lack of resources and a lack of space but i over the last couple of years have been having some amazing conversations with individuals both in gainesville and other places who want to see this happen and who want to be able to provide those resources in order to enable us to do that so with that being said i want to also say to my colleagues from the county thank you because you have also become a part of this journey and you've begun to walk with not just me but an entire community who understands the necessity of safe spaces who understands the importance and significance of the arts and who also wants to see that happen so i'm grateful to every county commissioner who is here today and even those who are not who have had conversations with me and expressed your support and your willingness to try to chart a pathway forward as to how to do this i also want to say that there are some staff members from the city who had the opportunity to go with us and actually who were very very instrumental in making that trip possible mr john alexander and mr mike powell who are not able to be with us here today because they are i believe at a conference but i could not let this conversation get underway without a deep thank you to them because they took us to miami in september to see both the african heritage cultural arts center and actually about nine other spaces and they did an amazing job of coordinating an effort there are a couple of staff members i see with us today in the audience who did go on that trip and perhaps at some point during this conversation they'd like to come up and talk a little bit about their experience but i wanted to share that the opportunity to bring this back to the table and discuss how we might be able to do this is one that obviously keeps our youth at the core but i want to offer this as well a cultural arts center of this type obviously presents opportunities to present the arts and cultivate the arts in young people but it also does so much more it also presents the opportunity for workforce programming it also presents the opportunity the much needed opportunity for economic development in east gainesville as well as community development and so what we have now are groups of people that are congealing in the community and coming together to make sure that they were part of this process in helping this move together i just want to say that to the community that has really begun to come together under this umbrella i am so inspired by them because they're taking a leadership position and want to be a part of this so i say all that to say that my vision for this mr mayor to the point that you just made about the limited resources that we have trust me from the beginning when i first brought this forward i understood the constraints because the reality is if we do this in a way that's going to be impactful it's a major project and we don't have the financial resources solely at the city to do this so i have always envisioned this as a public private partnership i'm pleased to announce that we have several individuals who have stepped forward to announce that they want to be a part of this and so let me just kind of step back just a little bit and go back to september of 2025 when we took the trip down to miami we had a cohort of about 10 individuals i don't really want to name them all but i will tell you some of the institutions that were represented we had of course several city staffers who went down with us to include john alexander mike powell mike drove us safely there and from we appreciate that and i also think it's important to note that i spent my city budget to do this because it was important that i was not dipping into city coffers to move this idea forward i wanted to make sure that i was utilizing my funds to provide support for those who wanted to go and so expended my complete travel budget to make sure everyone could go free of charge the only thing that people had to pay for was their food i covered their lodging i covered their transportation and i covered their admission into every space that cost something to get into well so john alexander mike powell uh we had representatives from santa fe college we had uh the university of florida had two individuals that had planned to go with us but at the last minute had an event at the university of florida that prevented them from being able to come so they've signed up to come with us in february uh we had individuals uh also from the community we took about 10 people and so like i said i won't list them all but we had an amazing amazing time we started out that sunday night at the 50th anniversary celebration of the african heritage cultural arts center which was at the adrian arts center for performing arts and i wonder carol and roxy i see you back in the back can i get you guys to come forward just a moment these were two of the staff people that traveled with us that had the opportunity to experience sunday monday and tuesday on monday and tuesday we visited about nine different facilities each one of them very unique of course we started out at the african heritage cultural arts center we were met there by the miami-dade county division of cultural affairs and they gave us a tour of the facility and gave us a really really good talk staff had the opportunity to ask a lot of operational questions they asked funding questions etc etc and then they kind of turned us loose on the rest of the city and on broward county where we concluded our tour but i wanted to give staff an opportunity if they would like to just speak briefly to your experience in miami both on that sunday evening and on monday and tuesday hello commissioners chair mayor roxy gonzalez director of the parks recreation and cultural affairs department i'm originally from miami so it's a pleasure to go back and see the city all over again and see where it's at today um i've was born and raised in that area as well just on the outer skirts of liberty city um and was astounded and floored by um the african-american heritage center that's there the impact that it makes really gave me goosebumps sometimes it's hard to give me goosebumps that gave me goosebumps um it really did the the capability of that facility as a cultural arts center and the impact that it has within that community was huge um and the capability of the facility on how it is adaptable for community use as well as programmatically was really really really really something to to look into um it's it's a hidden gem within that area which also floored me as well because when you look on the outside you're like oh what is this place once you go inside you're in a whole new world um it really is a whole new world and it is as welcoming as you can see it it's hard to gauge through the video and through the pictures but it is extremely welcoming um i've seen the pictures i've seen the videos i've heard about it growing up and i was like yeah i don't know but when i walked in there it was night and day um really was very impactful um and i do see how gainesville ultimately as a whole or even the whole county um as a whole uh benefits from some from a facility similar to that 100 percent alachua county and city of gainesville is known for its arts and the impact that it makes through its arts um i learned a lot um and i learned how and just looking at that how much it really did hit a core that i didn't know existed within me and i'll let carol thank you mayor chair commissioners carol velasquez richardson cultural affairs manager city of gainesville i too was um really just moved by the trip first of all mike powell and john alexander were hilarious on the van um and so they made it very wonderful um to ride down to miami and show us these really amazing places to eat but the facility facilities were fantastic um and what i left with having an arts background um and when desmond was in um commissioner walker was in miami i would visit her off often what i left with is how intentional that the cities and the counties were in building their arts and their commitment to the art even much so as new development would occur in miami-dade county they would actually add a theater to it or they would add a gallery to it so it really showed the partnerships of everyone coming together to create this and then with the actual um cultural center i thought to myself in gainesville we have so many wonderful places but it was really nice to see it all housed on one campus so that you can get that complete experience and you didn't have to take your child over to here or there but that it was in that community and it transformed that community but i really left um thinking wow this is really nice how when you build apartment complex wouldn't it be nice to put a theater on it or one center we went to where you had the theater on one side you had a a garage in the middle and then you had apartment complex on the inside so that meant that the artists were there in the beginning and they were at the table and i really appreciated that and i got to see that through this trip thank you roxy and thank you carol for that and so to staff's uh points we had the opportunity to visit about 10 different locations and all of them were different when you've heard me talk about cultural arts center it's very easy to think it's just it but no it was really here is uh particularly in miramar the miramar cultural arts center was literally it was a question of which came first the chicken or the egg and i actually asked the mayor who actually joined us uh for a conversation and took us on a tour um which one came first he said well it all kind of happened at the same time because the artists were in the community they built housing to support their cultural arts center and then added additional housing after that cultural arts center was built and so when we think about economic development in east gainesville i mean the possibilities are endless we saw potential models for what we might be able to do that will do what we know needs to happen in east gainesville right we have literal initiatives that we have built around growing east gainesville this is one of the ways that we should consider that we can do that i want to give a very special thank you to the children's trust i do see them here in the uh in the audience with us this afternoon from the very onset of this idea i had spoken with miss kiner and she had expressed her support many many uh well many years ago when this first came forward and i'm i'm pleased that they're here today because once again when we think about the programming aspect of it the young people are at the core so for them to have the opportunity to hear this is really critical today this coming summer we are going to enter into a pilot experience that gabby over at the hippodrome is facilitating and leading see this is the type of synergy that's building up around this people who love the arts people who believe in this want to be a part of this and want to see it happen and want to help facilitate moving it forward so the hippodrome state theater is going to be a part of a pilot program this summer that is being supported i'm proud to say by dr brody at santa fe college who's bringing in his teachers to teach classes at the hippodrome so right now what's happening is gabby is working with santa fe and they are charting a path forward figuring out what does this first group of students look like um and where do they get the money to do this so marsha i think you'll be getting a phone call about how what programs and opportunities may be coming up at the children's trust that they can take advantage of but i say all of that to say this that there is some very clear synergy and energy around this cultural arts center and so many people want to be a part of uh of bringing it forward when we think public private partnerships we have individuals that are already asking to go on the next trip in february and so i'm looking down the table at commissioner wheeler who some time ago made a suggestion from the dais and we all kind of chuckled because we were like yeah that'd be a great place to consider i'll bet the price just went up when you mentioned that um but i would like to state a thank you to you commissioner wheeler because after your suggestion i did make it my business to go and tour the jones edmunds building and i was fortunate enough to tour it with the individual that i believe is the listing agent who's actually a former commissioner but then also the owner joined us and that was the most exciting part because sometimes owners don't join you on those tours during that time i took the opportunity to share a bit of the vision for this and so we are going to have him join us in miami on the next trip because right now it seems as though there is some interest in helping to see this through from that perspective so what am i saying i am saying i'm not asking the city of gainesville for anything right now but this conversation i am saying that moving forward what i'm looking at is the opportunity to bring the essential parties to the table institutional partners philanthropists uh right now we also have the community foundation that has expressed the desire to come aboard and help to move this forward so it is an exciting space that we're in and it's called a good beginning i think so i'm excited for that i wanted to just simply take this opportunity today to show you where we are i wanted you to see the trip that we took um and i wanted you to see a path that we are charting forward this is very very new very very new it's the beginning stage i have to with that in mind say that apparently on the news this morning there was some conversation around uh duval elementary and this conversation today being about that and money and space no no no no no no in fact this agenda doesn't say anything about that so just to provide a level of clarity for anybody who may be watching and even anyone who in this room thought that that would be the conversation no we're quite a distance away from that i even fielded a phone call from one of my dear colleagues over at the school board this morning about that and uh reassured them that no we certainly aren't having that conversation but they too are excited and i will take this opportunity to say that i've spoken um with pretty much all of them and they are in support in fact thomas vu took the trip down with us in september and had a wonderful time we'll have to pull out the photos team uh at the next meeting and show him in some costume uh so we had a really really great time uh and with that in mind um my goal really mr mayor and mr chair was just to kind of set the table today for this conversation um and really uh begin to bring it back to the forefront we have mr john alexander who's coming back to the table and he has a lot of great photos and some footage that because he's out of town was not included in this today but i think at the second meeting uh or the next meeting that we have as a joint body i'd like to bring this back because i imagine by that time there will be much more formulated ideas i know that the staff's working group will have an have an opportunity or several opportunities from now to that time to have met and things will be much more solid and i think that where we go in and certainly having a better idea of how we want to move forward will be something that we'll be able to discuss at that time but simply bringing it back to the forefront saying thank you to all of you for being willing to open the conversation back up and to the county being willing to consider how you might be a part of this is certainly what i'm grateful for so thank you once again thank you commissioner so um yeah yeah so um thank you commissioner you know i know the city has had a lot of opportunity to have these discussions um we really haven't we've we've said it kind of in passing maybe at a commission comment hey go look at that building or hey have you talked to commissioner duck and walker this is an opportunity though where um if the county commissioners are open where they can express kind of their their brainstorming thoughts and um so if if it's okay i'd just like for us to kind of go around the room and and get their thoughts would that be okay you want to start our teacher you must start with me sure well no i'm i'm really excited about the idea like why what's gonna happen no no i you know i've been pushing this for a while i feel really strongly about there i went to see this with uh miss patricia lee because she's you know it's been a champion of trying to get economic development on that part of town so i went to look at the facility with her and when i saw it i knew what you were trying to do in terms of community center and saw the potential there with a gymnasium that is i mean it's a big piece of property there's a lot of space there that you could have lots of opportunities the parking is amazing it's right in the same vicinity as the whole area that that the city was talking about developing anyway so it just made sense to me because it was a joining property that we already owned that we would invest with the city to make sure that that got into that compound because it's a whole sector that we could we could promote and build that was already there we just have to repurpose it that's all with with the amount of money that's going towards rebuilt building new it didn't make sense to me to put money into new dreams when we could have an old reality and uh just repurpose it you know put some paint on it i'm theater too i work my way through the university of georgia building costumes that was my work study 22 years at gcp teaching art for all those years as well so but i've also been a performer you all have didn't know that much about me so i'm but yes i have done that as well i play upright bass and oral harp y'all sing dumb barton's drums with the best of them just saying but in any case my whole my whole experience has been in the arts and i know that's how i was to stay in middle school for 22 years is through the arts and that's the way that we engage kids particularly at that age where they're trying to decide which gang to join which church to join you know whatever it is that they're deciding at that age the arts is the great way to make sure and so i'm all in and have been from the very beginning that i heard that the city was talking about a senior center community arts center however you want to use it it's a facility that i think we could repurpose it for much less than the amount of money we're talking about building a new facility and uh besides there's history there there's history and charm and charm thank you thank you commissioner mary um i two two things that come to mind um first i i sat on the board of in kwan does cultural arts coalition for a period of time and um you know she's done on a very small scale which i think what i think you want to do in skeinsville at a much bigger scale and with much bigger vision and um and i certainly can see the value in that having watched the success that she's had on her small scale doing the that kind of work right with kids and and adults and everybody um the second thing that comes to mind is um the journey of the hippodrome i remember seeing mark sexton even um in a play in a warehouse you know and and you know and in the middle of nowhere where it was um the space wasn't what was important it was the work that was taking place that was important and so if we can start with that and and start with the work and hopefully the the space and the vision will come with that because look at the hippodrome now it's a cornerstone of our downtown i think that we could you know i think that's kind of the way to approach it i think sometimes people see the really big vision and they get like oh there's no way we can ever get there but we have to remember that sometimes some of our best successes started with um that modest step and i think that that's that's uh you know the direction that i think we're looking it going right now so thank you commissioner hannah yeah i mean i you know i guess i'll say you know i got the chance to meet with desmond a few times over the past couple of the past year for sure and most recently specifically on this issue and you know i mean you know i'm all in i mean it's for me the idea of creating a space a safe space for our children to realize their value is really what's about them seeing themselves in a in a way that they they don't get to see themselves in their everyday lives is there's there's no real dollar value you can put on that right and but and i understand that the city's in a tight place um we don't know where we're going it may be the same situation for us given what's happening in tallahassee with property taxes but at the end of the day to your point you know with private partners with philanthropy with institutions i think we can make something like this happen and i think that what i'm excited most about is that you know when i when we started we is the grand we really at the city started talking about um east gainesville and the work you were wanting to do at eighth and waldo you know in in my mind it was always something way bigger than just renovating a community center it was always something way grander than just like having a new set of basketball courts and a nicer swimming pool and you know to me that corner there's so much opportunity there right it's a massive intersection in our community we now have our ccc we're gonna have our combined communication center and a bunch of our eoc operations there we've got that corner that is your all's community center and the vision for creating more sports and events there's just so much opportunity in that arena to create not just a cultural destination but an economic destination and with all that's going on with the concentrations you know the concentration equipment concentration site and the airport gateway i just see that this this cultural arts center could be an anchor and an opportunity along with the work that you all are already doing with your wild spaces dollars and your parks and rec dollars and you know to begin to create what we've always talked about which is truly creating vibrant energy and economic opportunity in east gainesville right and i see this as a real way to catalyze that conversation because people love the arts and people want to see art and arts and culture is a part of the fabric of this community it always has been and so to me it just makes sense i you know do i know where the dollars are going to come from no um but i know that you've got the will to see us all through this path um and so i'm excited i'm excited about the opportunity and i can see the links too to the work that we're doing around food and that's our next conversation so i'll be quiet so we can get to that because i have a lot to say on that one too but um i i can see the ties there i mean food is culture and food is art and there's a lot of opportunity to um work with the organizations like working food and the cultural arts coalition and greater duval who have been at the forefront of thinking about how do we train our youth to be leaders in our food system and how do we help them understand both the economic cultural and and artistic ways that they can do that so i think there's a real link between these two thank you yeah thanks anna um okay i'll just give you my thoughts before i invite um the children's trust to come up and i did want marcia to just after seeing what she's seen to just give some initial thoughts uh from the trust because everything that you all are talking about uh with regards to impacting kids is literally at the center of the mission of the children's trust i've had the opportunity to be the chair over the last year that's transitioning to a new chair next year but the strategic plan that we're finalizing in or hope to be close to finalizing in january builds right into everything that i just watched on the video as a county commissioner with my county commissioner hat you know at the front of every county line on the sign it says where nature and culture meet it's literally like in the ethos of alachua county and i share with what my colleagues said that it starts with all of the programming when i looked at the city's slides the second or third to the last slide the eight recommendations one through seven had nothing to do with funding from what i read real quick number eight is about okay how do we bring private partners institutions public funding philanthropy to the actual facility but to mary's point it starts with the programming and much of what you all are i think already doing and have continued to do ties right in with our gun violence initiatives of the county i'd like the county to be a part of that and to build on that i'm glad to hear that you've had conversations with each of our school board members i will tell you and superintendent simon was here we had and there was i believe a plan for duval school and it involved it involved these types of activities and so uh hopefully after this meeting our board your board i would like to invite the school board into this discussion i'm ready for them if they're ready to let's take that asset where my wife started teaching second grade with dr mcnealy that's where they met second grade teachers 1988 let's take that asset and let's um see how the community can help change the lives of our young kids in a way that is in the right location with the right programming and so i'm glad to hear um the work you've done with dr brody i know uf and santa fe are are all in on this discussion so i i actually was trying to think about well who's not in favor of this initiative like like who who's against this and and i and it's kind of like when you go to the state and you start talking about children's trust we talked about this on monday it is literally the most bipartisan issue whether you're a democrat or a republican everyone cares about our kids when we um asked the voters to authorize the funding for the children's trust we had seven city commissioners five school board members five county commissioners we had 17 elected officials that were endorsing that and so i i don't know of anyone in our community that actually is not for this and if we're all for it let's figure out how we can all make it happen um sooner rather than later i think it builds right into the moonshot of literacy that we have over the next three years uh and so i think it's kind of the next step to that actually you know we have got to fix some stuff and we're working on that at the trust and at the community foundation um and all of the different institutions but i i am ready uh to work mr mayor with with you and and with your your board each one of you commissioners to see how we can make this happen um so that's where i am um commissioner alfred and then marcia if you don't mind coming up and just you know giving us your your marcia thoughts marcia as you all know and i went to high school in 1984 go bobcats oh sorry marcia go bobcats and and marcia you know knows this community as well of if not better than all of us and so um she's been our executive director for two years now and three years now that's right and so marcia do you want to give some thoughts before we go to commissioner alfred or did you want to comment i can yeah she'll wait she'll wait um i don't know what he wants me to say because he literally just said it all but i i concur um first of all as a child of this community seeing that i sat there smiling and thinking about how great it would be for this community's children to have that type of a of a center here um truly life changing um while um i am artistic and creative i uh went in a different direction but i've often thought that had i had something like that my life would be very different um some of you may not know my story but um i wanted to go to la uh applied to usc applied to uh ucla was accepted um and uh fear blocked that dream um what if there had been a cultural arts center in this community that would have said move past the fear and an attempt you know what what could my life have been and i've had a a fairly good life right um but i want that for the children of this community um just as i know all of you do so um we are uh supportive we will uh be happy to sit at the table um and hear uh what the collective comes up with and uh with uh my now uh board member uh past year uh as yeah as well as others um i can't imagine that we will not uh be a part of this work um and then certainly looking forward to the meeting with uh the folks at the hippodrome and hearing from dr brody about what you all are trying to do um because there may be some funding um that we can lend um to support so thank you thank you thanks yeah one thing that um didn't get brought up is i feel like such a a facility would have regional impact and with that regional impact i i wonder about um not just thinking about while our focus is alachua county not just focusing on alachua county but thinking about it as a tourist draw and if we think about it as a tourist draw then i wonder about the opportunity for using um some of our monies from uh you brought it up i think it unlocks a lot and yes is here and is in and um you know in the audience um i think really this is just an opening discussion so our managers here and our county staff are here and they'll probably well that's why i wanted to make sure that you know we just didn't get stuck on it as as just a resource for alachua county children because i think that by from the very beginning recognizing that it would be a facility of regional impact that um you know that we keep in mind that we could have tourism dollars that can support it i think that's important i do i guess i can i say one more thing please yeah i the other thing i want to say about this is that i think you know i mean we keep we talk a lot about like east gainesville and a cultural center on east gainesville but i think one of the things that really is rooted in what you showed us from miami is an african heritage cultural arts center like it it has a real identity and a root in a in a historic in a history and a diaspora and a conversation about a lot of things that are challenging but need to be talked about and i feel like our truth and reconciliation project and program has really been focusing on that as well and i think it brings in the conversations about all of our small municipalities and and all of the different committees that have been a part of that conversation and the trail that you all have been creating the larger county-wide trail that we've been creating with the map and the website and so i think that there is some opportunity as well to think about how this space is is truly that cultural heritage center that's it's not just about the arts or about economic development or about community but to the tourism side and just to the sort of like storytelling and education and not doing ourselves to repeat history side of things like being able to have a space that is an anchor for all of those conversations and that is a place where we can root those and in a physical destination is is really really exciting to me yeah and while i think it's really you know good to have the jones edmunds building as a starting point i think that the larger goal should be something bigger and better and that's why i brought up the hippodrome is that whole goal of something that is um you know a size that justifies the whole journey can i jump in here really quick uh mr chair you mind because i wanted to speak to both of those things really quickly first of all thank you for dreaming big because that is actually the entire goal here everything that both of you said and i think we've kind of both touched on that in our on our individual meetings um with each other but the idea of regional impact is definitely something that is a part of the vision i believe that if we do this in the spirit in which it's actually intended it will have regional impact it will draw and that lends to that economic development piece it feeds definitely into the history and the heritage preservation piece absolutely i hope i can't pay for it but anybody that wants to go on the next tour please come because i will tell you that in all of these 10 facilities that we're going to tour the last one that we toured well it ended up being the ninth one of the 10th because we added one at the very last minute um the ninth one that we toured was the african american research library in broward county and if you're not familiar with it please take a look at it and certainly come on on the tour okay but that is a regional draw for broward county but you probably also heard that i said research library library system okay it is a part of the library system so ms shaney livingston is going with us in february because once again as we explore how this comes to fruition she has to be a part of that conversation perhaps that's what it is right now we're figuring this out you got three library board members uh sitting you know four commissioner chest five you're on it now uh yeah so everyone you've got um five of us on the library board so um okay let's do commissioner book and then back to commissioner wheeler and then maybe we can open up to the public and yeah have some comments as well i forgot y'all city i thought y'all talked about a lot of this so we we have talked a lot about it but i want to share some things with you all to remind you about some things that it that get left out in the conversation there's a whole lot of things that the city of gainesville is already doing awesome that i want to make sure you all are aware of and not believe because i don't want anybody watching this from home thinking oh they're not doing anything they're starting from scratch doing a lot already yeah i don't know i know people think that because i've had people say to me how come y'all don't do anything for this so it's important to remind people turn it over yeah so i'm up yeah all right so thank you commissioner duncan walker for bringing this up and it sounds like you you assembled when you did your tour many of the most important governmental partners and even then you mentioned community and that's really important because that's where you start i do think there's a little risk every time we mention jones edmond all what happens is that the price goes up by another hundred thousand should that ever be considered so we probably should be less focused on the specific location and more of how do you get to a vision regardless of where it is in the community it does make me think always what are the next steps that you can do that don't necessarily involve you know this term funding on any given given time and one of them is you've mentioned so many non-governmental partners and and non-profits and we have such a robust i'm assuming mr mayor you're probably going to go there we have a very robust arts community right now whether it's the visual the digital dance performance you name it we have dance companies we have um you know three performing arts centers and all those would be really important to get around the table and it may be i'm just i put this out there as something is sometime in 2026 you bring them all around for a workshop and you say we know what you do tell us what we're missing and what can you do for us you have to ask it's just like when i was doing um neighborhood associations and crime watches they would ask us to do many things for in the interest of public safety and then i'd say we can do these things what can you do and because we have such an incredibly robust arts community that's not coalesced like i think you're thinking about in the nature of a cultural arts coalition the question would be tell us what you do and tell us what you can do and tell us what you're what you're willing to do and that might be something to think about for you know mid to late 2026 and they'll all come because they'll buy into the vision just like you said um uh commissioner you said is is anybody going to say they're against it i can't imagine that's the case uh why because it has fundamental concepts of mentoring and youth development and education and literacy and all those good things and then the arts prevents people from then maybe going astray i um i am so you said you're artistic i'm not artistic but i was an artistic dad you know and and my daughter danced and trained at alvin ailey and miami city ballet and um that kept her having a really good head on her shoulders to this day all the performing arts and stuff so thank you for bringing it forward i appreciate the discussion today and the question is where do you where do you go on the next steps oh i'll leave one question out for the ams we don't have to to mention that today what the answer is but they had a recommendation that said fully fund 352 and that struck me as very odd because we have so many arts coalitions and organizations to say fund this one and specifically mention it and when there's so many others that have been here for many many years they're a wonderful organization but i wonder what what led to that but that's a conversation for another day so thank you very much for doing this thank you thank you both chairs thank you i just wanted to say quickly um those arts organizations are all struggling to stay alive so they don't really have anything to offer but personnel perhaps and and i just want to shout out to some of these that caring and sharing we've seen they work really hard with what they've got with the children uh saint barbara's i don't know if you all are familiar with what their programs are but they are amazing if you haven't seen go get a tour and get in on one of their programs the star center and assemble uh and kwanda who's been doing all of this work all of these years you know these are people who are have targeted a certain group of children in the community and they're very fortunate to be in those programs they're very fortunate but there's a whole lot more out there that don't have access to those programs because a lot of these are are private or they they are determined um by transportation you know so i am all about putting this thing at the edmunds jones getting it going now and setting these programs in so that the kids across 8th street can walk up there to these things and get music instruments put in their hands i just bought a saxophone for a little kid at sixth grade at my bank who's going to be playing saxophone up there and so you know i'm all about this and i'm about doing it right now because the prices of everything are going to go up no matter what the longer we wait and so but a shout out to these people that are doing something with nothing now but if you haven't had a chance to go see these programs in action go and see because amazing what they're doing thank you mr chair thank you mr willis yeah so i i want to make sure we not to be a part of who brought in this but like a lot of those recommendations it does cost money one of this to to put some of this in reference and i came kind of in the middle of this but it was in the middle when the study came to us really that study one of the things that identified and it wasn't just like should we do this it's a little bit about like the whole overall arts community and the big thing when they said they said there's not a space for it but i think if i am i'm right and i can be corrected by staff it's really that there was not a available vacant kind of at this price range i mean there's you know we could have just bought land and built whatever we want if we had unlimited money so the the record the the study came back and said there's not the ability to move forward with a physical space but what it did it really it really did say in essence perhaps the way i took it was even if you had the money you're not ready for this because you haven't the infrastructure the organizations the coalitions the different pieces that that what you should what we should do now we're not quite ready for it but what we should do now is some of these recommendations because we had complaints that some of our city facilities and just be clear we do not have the staff all the volunteers in the world uf people santa fe great artists professional dance alive they can say tomorrow we're available for 100 hours this year to do whatever we don't have the staff we literally don't have the staff time and money to keep some of our centers open that extra bit it might be able to push something else out or you know lay over but so we but we still directed as i remember i think the commission directed our staff to really focus in on what we still can do to utilize some of our spaces like portage community center uh clarence r kelly community center wilhelmina johnson center less so because it is currently programmed out but we're in the middle of at least two million dollars that we're going to spend we've already spent 250 000 just on the study but envelope study so that's a smaller building that we're putting money into but not necessarily new programming but what i took from the recommendations originally were that we with the current buildings everything we do we really need to figure out um and almost like we need to have so much of the people and the programming infrastructure that if we did this if it dropped out of the sky we could pull these from all of our small centers our cooperations with uf santa fe the school system uh the county and suddenly they would go there but that we don't have them right now to go pull over and i remember a year ago our cultural arts affairs board had like five vacancies since then we have filled some there's still two vacancies so i put i encourage people anyone who knows someone lives in the city gainesville cultural arts cultural affairs board or not even in the city i think we've appointed some that don't live in the city people people who do culture or inside the city um so i just want to i want to mention that so i took it as and i think staff has done a good job i don't know if if park staff wants to pcra staff wants to talk a little bit about they've been trying to make sure get the word out what our facilities are what's the ability so that some of our partners if it's merely them not quite knowing or needing that extra invitation like hey we do have a physical space let's see how we can fit in with our current staffing but i will say that my understanding from both on the ground parks and rec staff um like low level like you know lower level but also from what i hear from um leadership at the city is that we don't quite have enough money to fund enough staff people because it does you know you got to open a building you got to do this you got to all those kinds of things um but that we really do rely on the community to help program um so there's and like an example of like we spent was it a million dollars on oakview park some of that's the park but some of it's the building there right to have some other facility and i bring this up because we've had it sounds like we've had a strategy of lots of chunks of money in different places but not one big place so the kelly community center great place we spent a lot of money and it's got you know it's not a big art center but it provides a lot of our partners could be using it or use it more porters william johnson's a good example where we're spending money but it's in one very tight place not a bigger and then i'll just leave with um it really you know so this is is the the cultural center there it's miami day it's the county's facility right it is but we took a trip to several some cities some county uh some independent so we had a chance to see a broad range some in the library system so we saw a broad range of how this could be done i want to make sure that i reiterate this idea because i don't want um any of my colleagues at the city once again to think that this is our project right i don't envision this as that this is a partnership that we're still trying to determine what it looks like and who brings what so the vision is the vision and i think you know prca is has has done what it can do but the truth of the matter is it is under resourced in terms of its staff and frankly in terms of its expertise so at the end of the day you don't have right now existing staff that is why it is so important to bring in the county that is why it is so important to bring in meaningfully our other institutional partners and right now like i mentioned we're at the very beginning stages of this so i i want to kind of caution us from thinking about uh the idea that you know what we don't have you're right we don't this is a vision that we're moving towards so all of this gets created we're in the middle of a creative process or the beginning of this creative process so to as much as my colleagues at the city commission are willing to dream with me that will determine what the city's involvement in this is because right now what we have is a group of individuals in the community who are coalescing to the point of forming a non-profit organization that helps to drive how this moves forward so it's it's a lot of energy it's just about who does what at this point this is the first conversation that we've had between these two entities at some point the school board will get brought in um and i feel like i want to say this too at the very beginning the conversation uh was that we were looking or that i had expressed the desire for duval obviously there was a a real desire to talk about duval duval is where i attended where my parents met as my dad was singing on the stage in third grade so it's it's a space that's important to us for a lot of ways and you're right um when superintendent simon was here there was a plan she and i had sat down and we talked about it y'all were in second grade together right best friends in second grade see marcia that she tells ages two no i didn't oh oh that's why she didn't say 1980 what year was that i'm not telling but but the idea um that a lot of people have kind of coalesced around this um for a while now is is a very real one and so i think in those conversations we always understood that it was about what resources each individual could bring to bear if the vision was there who can bring what not city you need five million dollars to do this that's not what this is this is if once the location is determined it needs to be rezoned let's do it this is county how does how do we deal with the tourism piece and position this facility to garner that type of money you see what i'm saying so i want to make it very very clear this is not commissioner duncan walker walker asking her colleagues at the city for a dime right now i'm asking you simply if you see the vision and to consider what the city's level of participation will be on this project that wasn't done thank you so i what i want to i want to talk about those little pieces because i want to make sure that people our county partners and other partners understand that or at least i think what we can still be doing now and with with great vision in the future but all those other little pieces are some of the things that these were real recommendations for a reason it wasn't just like sorry it's not a uh you know a consolation prize it is the this is still what would be required you know because you're not going to have your building for a couple years or whatever still so i want to make sure that we continue that i that our city staff and possibly county staff and our partners can still take some of these pieces and and go forward with it knowing that this is where it could lead um because i'm really excited so i will say selfishly i'm looking at the gainesville sun building down on southwest 13th it is it's all my in my district but between our two districts they're not for sale i'm sure it's going to be too expensive i know my neighbors don't want that developed into to really dense housing it is a big-ish building with decent-ish parking and surrounded by trees on major um so i so i get this idea like something bigger it's not maybe even duval isn't big enough edmund jones is 50 000 square feet seven acres and 4.9 million dollars listed right now or as commissioner books it's 505 million dollars it's 100 000 more as we speak but um i had that kind of big big dream for this as well that it it can it can serve a lot of functions that it just you know it's a community center it's ours it's performing it brings in you can just imagine that school districts outside of the county are bringing their students here for maybe it's a half day here and a half day at you whatever they are going to be doing and we're bringing the school board i'm really interested in as well because it's not as if school board does only their facilities and we the city or the county only does theirs we're building a competition level swimming pool whether we say it or not in essence largely so that the school board has a great a great pool um at at eighth and waldo already um so the idea that you know pulling them in because they need the same kind of things facilities that then they can be a primary potentially renter of you know because they need so that's really exciting and i just want to uh in liberty city is about 20 000 people it's just a neighborhood right it's just a neighborhood 20 000 people and then allapata is immediately south of this facility it's 54 000. so it is and that's just two neighborhoods in miami but then it's close it's not that far from hialeah so really it pulls in hundreds of thousands of people it's i looked on a map couldn't quite grasp where it was um but i remember and then lemon cities are just you know right next to uh liberty city um so it's very interesting that that that's a big big dream facility but i like that idea and so i think of those big buildings like the gainesville sun is one i think of because it probably is big enough to you know an existing building a reuse and i like the idea of reusing i think that's kind of what the study originally was looking for a facility that we could probably not build from scratch but renovate that's how i remember the study but i can't quite remember anyways so that's what i've been thinking a lot about this i know that if i had magic money i would buy that gainesville sun building because then it would be very centrally located for kind of the whole county easy to get to on williston road um and it could that's what i envision because i think it's also an interesting building that i don't want to see torn down when they decide to sell it for apartments later in the future so thank you mr chair well the thing the thing commissioner is we did couch this when it was put forward as something in east gainesville thank you commissioner will it's mr duck walker go ahead commissioner engel um so when i saw that video i am the exact opposite of those kids right can't draw can't dance can't sing can't play any instruments like whatever a black hole of music is that is me like i i'm as unartistically talented as you can figure somebody doing but you got a lot of trash i do i like being around artistic people and in part that's where i'm going so if you hang around many artists at all almost universally they will tell you like how i guess uh impactful the art was on their life and how that that saved them from a terrible childhood or it really let them out of their shell or whatever it was almost universally artists will talk about what it did for them well i'm here to tell you like without those artists we don't get that either because music and art and theater you know they all have a huge impact on my life as well and i can't do any of that um so so i said it's it's not to me just a benefit and we talk a lot about the benefit it is for kids to be able to come in and pick up that instrument and be able to do something with it and change their life and that's great and i'm glad that happens but it changes our lives too i think that's important to remember when we look at this is it's not just for the people that are attending these programs or that directly benefit from them but for us untalented folks out there as well maybe there's a corner in there where they're teaching people how to be roadies and i could probably help out with that but electricians are really good that's that's the next that's the next piece that's the next piece the workforce development piece and i know you legitimately you do need sound people you do need that's right you need to learn that tech work as well and that's where you know some of us be pat on the back and told we could participate too so um so i'm very much in favor of that um you know talking to a lot of musicians in the area things as simple as there's not available practice spaces for bands thank you it's a huge deal you know back in the day you would get a mini warehouse and bands would play in the mini warehouse and that's where everyone practiced and that's like the genesis of i don't know how many bands in here a lot of those places have policies where you can't set those up for music so there's a real dearth of places where people can go just to get together and play those things and having is something as simple as that i think a big benefit and a recording studio a recording studio just you know um and the ability just having like kind of like we've got like 3d printers and makerspace and all that at the library if you had something where and you can get by with some pretty basic tech now i mean just an ipad and a decent microphone can get to the point where you could mess around with a little bit of recording and start picking some of that up so i think there's some real opportunities on on that side of things to do something like this and then really what i always try and think of is when we talk about making sure we are taking care of the arts and that we are encouraging the arts i want to make sure that in that conversation is we are taking care of the artists as well you know because what i don't want to see a success video being like this person went through this program and look how great they're doing in la now or this person went through this program and because of that they're super happy in new york city right now um you know y'all i'm pretty tight with a couple artists um and i will say that this is a very hard town to make a living in as an artist and if we really want a decent arts culture we can't expect artists to starve on our behalf to have so just as we continue to have this conversation i want to make sure we focus up on those elements as well but i'm this is a project i'm very in favor of this is something if you see the amounts of talent that has come out of gainesville without us really having like a formal program of really trying to nurture that like you said we've got several several steps in several different areas that we're working on this thing but without really having like a unified goal of how we can encourage some of this i think there's a lot more we could do on what's already very rich so a very good project and something that i'm not sure exactly how it happens but like you said keep pushing forward to make sure that this is something we can do that's all i've had thank you mr angle so a few points that need to be made i like what commissioner alford said earlier about using the space we have while we develop and toward that end i want to make sure everybody knows that we have been doing that at the mcpherson center which by the way thursday evening i forget what time five o'clock maybe six o'clock there's a community input session about what we hope the community hopes tb mcpherson can be as we move into making plans for that so put that on your calendar but but know that we've been we've had a community group in there using that space the same is true of the oakview building at oakview park we partnered with with the university of florida they put a program in there that was terrific it was really cool i mean there were kids learning how to record in there there were kids drawing there were people who weren't just kids and they're doing lots of real art and we have done that in multiple spaces we're going to continue to do that as we are able to do that we are using our spaces that currently exist and when i say that people don't know what we're already doing trust me you don't know what we're already doing because i don't even know everything we're already doing because our our programming is is widespread i do want to ask um our prca staff to not necessarily go for you don't need to talk about it but but make sure please that that everybody has the latest copy of our our quarterly offerings or for programming because we do um we do put all that into a compendium both online as well as physical so you can see the stuff that that's going on that we're doing and i'm sure that not everybody does know that moving beyond that though just what the city's doing as several of you have mentioned this community does a ton and we probably before we before we are specific about where we want to go and what we want the building to look like and what we want to happen in it we ought to do an inventory of what's available uh what we haven't talked about is something that i saw several of you at the the ground breaking for is the uh the dance alive facility it's going in the 39th and and 34th there's been a whole bunch of money in there it's put together that's terrific but i mean the point is they're they're building a great building there and that is right down the street from from probably the neighborhood that that needs help and support more than any other neighborhood in the city of gaysville less pine ridge you know maybe phoenix i could use the help more than pine ridge but we are we're serving lots of different in the community now none of this is to say that we shouldn't do a facility but we need an inventory of what we have and we don't have that right now and we popped in different ideas every time somebody talked there was a new thing that we'd forgotten to mention and it would be i'll promise you somebody's watching this right now thinking you didn't mention my organization and and we need to be really careful with that because those are all going to be valuable members going forward with this the biggest organization that is doing commissionering what what you were talking about every day in generating new artists is the alchua county public schools all our elementary schools i believe through the tax that we all pay has a music program the middle schools have music programs and when i say they have arts and music programs they're not just checking a box they're my kids came up from elementary school to tell me about who woody guthrie was they came home to tell me who muddy waters was they they they're actually learning about music both classical music and every other kind of of indigenous folk music that there is in the united states and around the world and and they are they're they're doing this right now so we need to make sure that that the arts and music teachers at alachua county schools are part of whatever we do going forward as well because they're really doing it they're producing great artists we've got you know you mentioned there are three reporting studios in town pulp arts is doing phenomenal work call the folks at pulp arts if you haven't toured there call them they they love showing off and it's an unbelievable space in east gainesville so what i'm saying is let's get an inventory as we think and move forward of what currently exists not just physically but the organizations and the people that we have because we're going to be shocked at what there is and if we can then turn that coalesce that into a physical space that can serve lots of people who are trying to figure out where they're going to where their band's going to practice and where they're going to teach and all that sort of thing we can have as we always do an impact that is much larger than the 290 000 or so people in alachua county so i don't even know who to task with with that kind of inventory because i know that our staff is overtaxed already um but it would be really useful for somebody to to get that list together as we go through a process of you know what spaces do we have what spaces are we currently building and who's doing it and what are they doing so that we're not leaving valuable pieces behind because i i always fear that last thing i'll say about this um if we were to go if somebody made a motion today i'm not advocating this somebody made a motion to go by that jones edmunds building today it's not just the sale price keep in mind it's going to cost two or three times the sale price to go in and make it usable for what i'm talking about we're not going to all get together go paint it and say isn't that great it is it it is a very i've walked it multiple times it will take some rethinking and and money spent to make it usable doesn't have to be that space it could be that space that's across the street from what we're doing um what's going to be a magnificent community and sports set of facilities but we also are in the process of building out east side health and economic development initiative on hawthorn road we have built infrastructure there we have with the county and uf health's partnership we have a health facility on site we are going to build out a transit transfer facility on site there is more space to do more things i'm going to talk about that again when we go into the uh uh the food item but there is space to build there if we want to purpose build something we already own the property and it has great transportation opportunities there and it has health facilities built there and it has guess what gtech right next door where there lots of we're about to approve that building but they're already incubating multiple businesses in that space so there's opportunity in lots of places to move this kind of thing forward let's not walk into one tax revenue producing facility that currently because we got to talk about that i mean we when we talk about taking something off the tax rolls we're taking it off the tax rolls and and i am keenly aware of of that sort of thing yes exactly so that's a lot of talk there but i i it was important to me that we had all those things out there and all this thinking about things a little bit differently all right do we want to go to uh i just want to say i want to say two quick things i guess i want to say one thing i you know harvey i hear you on the inventory but i feel like every single time government does something they like stop they're like let's ask everybody what we're already doing and here's the thing we know what we're already doing we have i mean we maybe didn't mention everything here but we know what we're doing i think between tourism development and parks and recreation and the children's trust like we we could just pull together the documents we have and have an inventory like i don't think we need to do a like a exhaustive search around the community to find what we're doing but i do think you're right i do think that you know having a conversation with the arts organizations and communities around what are their visions and how do they see this thing being supportive of the work they're doing is is useful because it gets more buy-in it gets more opportunities to be creatively thinking about this expansive space and who could be a partner at the table and i so i love that idea i just don't i don't know that jessica's behind you going yeah exactly like i think that's huge you know i i think we also have to be careful about trying to be all things to everybody because like one of the things i was actually working on the idea of practice space with our bands because you know when they lost their practice space um in the warehouses because the warehouses were like get out you know we don't have anything and our bands are really struggling and we have an amazing music community here and um but you know i couldn't figure it out because nobody wants to practice in a space owned by government right because like part of being a band is like being funky and being loud and being different and like painting anarchy on the wall and like doing whatever they want to do right and like that just doesn't jive with like institutionally owned spaces or spaces that are have little kids in them that are trying to like learn how to dance or you know so we have to be careful about trying to be all things to everybody and either having a large enough space that it and configured in a way that it does allow for that or being very very being very as we narrow our goals i guess as we have those conversations to start narrowing the goals on what we are going to be and what we aren't going to be and being clear about that because i think sometimes we want to promise everything to everybody so that we can be expansive and collaborative and inclusive but in doing that we sort of limit our ability to actually be the thing that is our primary goal which i think in this instance is about culture african cultural heritage and youth programming and support for our young people i mean that's what i hear in what's being done two out of three kids African American kids are not reading exactly right that's the essence of the literacy movement that's it we've got to change that yeah exactly well that's a whole other story but i just wanted to say that and just say you know i just want to be careful one i think yes we could bring some people together to kind of figure out what people's visions are and two i think um we got to be careful about being all things to everybody and i the last thing i want to say is and this isn't meant as a dig but i think a lot of times all of our governments both county and city i'll just say maybe i'll just leave it at that i'll leave the others out although i would say this is true of the school board too we like to build things because we get money for infrastructure and we build things we're not very good at taking care of things and i will and and i know that our staff work their butts off to do the best that they can with the resources that they have but we have to get better about investing in maintenance and investing in ongoing care of the things that we're building because when i look at you know the facilities that our governments own that aren't new they're really kind of embarrassing and depressing you know i walk in to name a building you know community center x community center x park building x school and i am just like you gotta be unless it was just recently built you know it's this is broken and this doesn't have a piece here and this room only has five of the five matching chairs and the rest are just hodgepodge that they pulled out of their offices so they could have a meeting for people like it's it's really sad and so i think just to the point of like funding and using the spaces we have and programming and staffing i just want to say that as like government entities in general like it's really easy to build infrastructure it's not so easy to maintain infrastructure and so i hope that in this conversation and then all our conversations we're really thinking about that piece too if we're going to start thinking about how we use the spaces we have for arts and culture and music and ask our community partners to program in them we have to make them worthy of that programming good point thank you commissioner can i add something really quick so sorry and then i promise we got a lot to do and i want to give the opportunity to the public thank you oh yes absolutely uh just to that point um because we talked about on on the city side i heard it mentioned that we do have spaces and we're already doing this work we are but i want to add this that most of our spaces are not equipped to do this art and so when you talk about investment the reality is you don't have springboard floors for dance we don't have the uh the equipment for the art and all of the other things we're talking about doing this wonderful work and we can call on our community partners to come into tb mcpherson and everywhere else but you're going to talk about significant investment in that space if you're talking about turning it into a real legitimate arts facility so then the conversation has to be had about what do you do do you just do something go along to get along until we get to the bigger thing where we can do it the legitimate way with the actual materials and the actual equipment the legitimate way to give the children and the people the real experience or do we wait which one is it because either way you're going to be spending money it's just a matter of how we do it and i think there is a strategic way we ought to move forward but i had to make that uh known because i don't want anybody walking out here thinking oh yeah we can just go and do it in our spaces we can but the truth is you're not doing it at the level that we're talking about here when you look at the african heritage cultural arts center and for those who went you saw it the very first space that we walked into was a black box theater space that was a changeable space it had a floor in there where real dance productions can get done it's attached to the set and scene shop commissioner it is also right next door to the art gallery everything is right there but these are the spaces that are designed to do the work so if we're going to do this meaningfully we have to design these spaces to do this work and do it permanently and do it permanently and have a maintenance plan in place so 20 years down the line we're not looking at having to raise a building thank you commissioner so we're 45 minutes past what we had talked about on this item but we got it got a little bit up to the public so who here wants to speak to this item raise your hand we got one okay we're good colleague you are recognized you know the drill three minutes yeah it's hard to compress it into three minutes but i was fortunate to go on that trip uh down to miami to liberty city also and liberty city and other places uh but i first want to say something about other agencies uh years ago as a volunteer nurse at a buddhist study center in weston we had a conference called practicing buddhism as people of african descent and in that conference they took us over to that research library in fort lauderdale i was blown away you know professional level stage full-size auditorium research library uh uh uh instructional rooms uh gift store hospitality space everything and uh i came back here and saw hersch at the time i said you should see this place and he said he said oh i've seen it i want to do exactly that but nothing ever happened but saul hersch was the library director at the time and so what i'm saying is that this is not something that has that is alien to or has not been thought about in the library space i want you to think about them as an ally and as far as the school system the schools are now facing this thing that the state wants to do where any charter school can walk in commandeer underutilized space and the school has to the school board has to maintain the building and all the services so they're losing twice they have to pay to maintain it and they're losing the money that's coming out of public education to go to school choice so they should be anxious to to totally program up every space they're handling or they get it's taken from them and they're forced to support it so those agencies need to partner with you and mr engel uh it's not just the people outside connecting collecting applause all kind of artisans that needed to maintain that stage and the space of the scaffolding the lighting run run the sound so is that for everybody who's out front taking a bow there's five behind the scenes uh so this trip i was looking at it as one who has also studied community development so they took us the first night to a celebration of 50 years of the liberty city performing arts facility and the film they showed us i hope you get to see it up here eventually uh showed not just performing arts but total academic support and these were kids coming out of liberty city that people were afraid to go to at one time and coming out of the projects and there are uh department heads at colleges the artistic leader of alvin ailey troop for several years i mean not just success but stellar success and beating all the stereotypes of the neighborhoods and households that they come from single parent impoverished people in the projects and that center its success it's not just hope but hopes fulfilled its talent has been the linchpin of improvement of that whole community people aren't afraid to go there anymore so this is an investment in this community's future to create a center like this and all that it can result in and there's so much more to say but i'll catch every one of you individually and make you listen quite certain that you will colleague thank you anyone else for the public okay why don't we end this uh uh this okay uh commissioner i think we did have oh yeah come on up come on up please thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you um just speak right in that microphone so they can hear you at home they're all watching you okay um i mean this is the present in the present moment here so um i enjoy this present time that we have amongst each other we may speak about the past or in the future but um the present the present issues that is happening right now to um persons like myself um it's a lot of scrutiny a lot of pain suffering that's happening right now uh a lot of uh roadblocks that is uh hurting the upward upward mobility as we pursue a single parent myself with two daughters pursuing our goals and dreams and lives arts and music and academics athletics we're finding a lot of roadblocks along the way and these roadblocks are predicated on uh situations of things that we dealt with in the past our family our ancestors uh biases uh prejudices um i mean there's a list of things and names that we can uh speak about um what do we do today what can we do today from those things i hear the terms african-american or in these terms there was a reclassification of my family and people we're still seeking to actually know our demographics and our backgrounds that mean indigenous americans we get labels in terms that actually are not ourselves so this is a misinformation disinformation a confusion that continues this cycle of wilderness approaches and walks and as the youth are coming in they wonder what are we doing are we hearing them are we actually bringing about resolutions that will sustain us in the future there was a resurrection of a well a reestablishment of a confederate statue in washington dc that was a sign to let us know we still have a lot more work to do but to not hear us and to classify us in in your own accords i don't think that that's right i think it's very valuable to hear us my grandmother woods she was used as a breeder to wrap up you can just wrap up your comments and these are things that we speak about at our house at our households and what we need is a seat at a table and a structure as in the male figure head in the household and to be able to help with everything else in the house but if we're instable the man the male the woman is left out there to be scrutinized by other beings and males i hope that we are able to come together in unison and love unconditional love without any biases and prejudice thank you yeah thank you anyone else okay i think we've uh we've given this at least a great start you know i'll just end with courage the president of fear but doing it anyway and i think that's uh i wrote that one down i circled it because i think that's um where hopefully we will go as united boards all right let's um move then madam park to the next side yes mr chair um we have 2025 977 food assistance update with the recommendation the joint city county commission discuss and take action deemed as necessary okay i think the county is taking the lead on this one i believe and not at all can i say something before they jump in yeah please go ahead so when this got agenda it was it was i think at first it was like oh as food assistance like an update on what we did with staff and like how we all kind of put our heads together and solved the community um potential crisis or mini crisis in and did it quickly and then um then there was some ask from commissioner cornell later that we also add food systems update and um and so i just i think that there's a lot of things that we could talk about under that initiative it's pretty expansive i've been pushing a lot of initiatives since the beginning and as mary has as well and i think um so we've got a lot that we're doing and i think what i want to share quickly is just that i think just so that you can kind of understand the approach that at least that i've taken in terms of how this works is sort of like that we have sort of three pieces you know we have the land piece that's really important to our food system like without the farms that grow our food we don't have food um and so we're we're working on the agricultural lands easements program which will help to protect that piece of it but beyond that we have the food piece right we have the farmers who are growing the food the people who are in the food system itself right and the food system is farms but it's so much more than that it's it's really about what i call the man behind the curtain all the pieces behind the food system that are what get your food from the farm to the plate and right now that system is very exploitive that system is exploiting our environment it's exploiting people and it's exploiting our economy um in ways that are mostly hidden from us and what i think our goals are with the work that we're trying to do with the food hub and things that the staff will share with you is to change that trajectory it's to have a conversation about relocalizing our food system about bringing up the opportunity to support those local farmers and that land that we're protecting and make sure that it's vibrant and that it continues to be food security for us locally but also that we are bringing the conversation about food as medicine food is health to our bodies back to the center of the conversation and that everybody that's a part of that system has just as much right to that as the people who are eating it at their plates and their dinner tables right and that the people who are working in the fields and the people who are processing it the people who are serving it to you and the people who are working it for you deserve that as well and so in order to do that we have to change that system you know we can't just lean in on the same systems that we've always had which is hard because we're used to as institutions in particular being like we have a dollar 25 to feed our kids at school lunch a dollar 25 that's insane right and when you talk about trying to pay a living wage and package food and wash food and process food and cook food and get it to the table for a dollar 25 you're going to be serving primarily junk right and so we when we talk about food being cheap i think we have to be careful of what we say i think that's one of these conversations i always get into and i just want to bring that up because i i want people to understand that we're still paying the prices we're just externalizing those prices right now we're paying them to environmental destruction we're paying them in terms of health care dollars at the hospitals and diabetes care and heart disease and and we're paying them in terms of people not getting paid fairly and people being exploited and people not being able to take care of their families because they're working these jobs that nobody else wants to do and so that's really kind of a big piece of what this food systems work is about it's not just about it is about economic development and it is about like getting healthy food and food security but it's also about those things and then the last thing is the eaters the all of us that eat right and so we want to be able to support the eaters too and do education and outreach and make sure that everybody has healthy food access and that's where the conversation of the city around the grocery store and the work that we're doing with the farmers markets and the work we're doing with the farmer small farmers grant so they can get more of their food into these food systems um is a big piece of this as well and our work with the resource centers and the children's trust to ensure food access and the snap benefits stuff comes into play so you know i've just really tried to take this kind of full systems approach to what we're bringing to the table around the food system but it isn't easy to change a system that wants to go in one direction and and is built in a capital society to go in that direction really really successfully right like we wanted to make cheap food easy to access and we did a really really great job of that as a country and you know trying to shift gears to making food healthy and nutritious and accessible for everyone like that's a completely different story so i just want to put that out there because our staff are working really hard and doing a really amazing job with all the stuff that we've thrown at them over the past five or six years and not to mention mary's efforts around education and working with extension to think about how we eat what we eat and how we know about what's grown here and what's seasonal and recipes and all those things and i think there's a lot more that we could do collaboratively especially around gardening and the work that you all do with community gardens the work that we do with extension and i do think there's a lot more opportunity there but i just wanted to kind of put that out there before our staff give an update because i think it might make more sense hearing it in that context rather than just sort of like here's what we're doing so thank you for indulging me thank you commissioner for framing it because um let's kind of commissioners get this benefit of hearing you repeat it over and over and over our time but none of us could frame it like that so thank you all right thank you good afternoon mr chair mr mayor my name is bailey mcclellan i am agricultural economic development coordinator for alachua county with the tourism and economic development team and i am here this afternoon to bring an update on our recent initiatives and efforts in food assistance in response to the snap cutoffs which occurred november 1st so i'm just going to do a quick recap of what's occurred in the month of november so following that november 1st ebt snap cutoff in the moment of our government shutdown commissioner prisia motioned at the november 4th meeting to allocate a hundred thousand dollars to bread of the mighty for the purchase of healthy staple food items a hundred thousand dollars to farmers markets to implement fresh produce voucher programs and then utilizing that same hundred thousand dollars to go towards family resource centers that are in partner partnership with the children's trust of alachua county for the purchase of fresh local food farm food veggies and fruits and also the authorization of a chair letter from the city of gainesville and the children's trust of alachua county to one match the bread of the mighty funding a hundred thousand dollars and the family resource funding of another another hundred thousand dollars so immediately following that board motion staff went to work we had a fantastic internal accounting team of my colleagues and community support services procurement and then our team with tourism and economic development to pull these implementation efforts together so immediately following we with the authorization of a chair letter we're very glad to see the support from city of gainesville commissioners with the allocation of a hundred thousand dollar match to brother the mighty for healthy food items and then likewise with children's trust of alachua county with a hundred thousand dollars for farm products to our family resources resource centers additionally bread of the mighty i have some updates on each of these pieces since we're about a month then to since this board motion there is a hundred thousand dollar purchase order issued to support food pantries across the county direct to bread of the mighty they have yet to receive their full delivery of those products that they're ordering with that hundred thousand dollar county funding so there have today to date there has not been a distribution of food products throughout the county from bread of the mighty specific to this funding i talked to patrick dodd this morning of bread of the mighty and he did inform me they're anticipating product to arrive the week of december 12th december 15th so that's just this coming monday and immediately upon receiving shipment they are going to start deliveries he informed me their delivery routes include six to seven county deliveries per week and that is about hundreds of families served at each distribution site and that he would be happy to share an update as soon as shipment comes in following that we contacted all the farmers markets across the county to see who has the capacity to implement a fresh produce voucher program and we found that the markets who are currently authorized usda ebt retailers had the capacity to do so grove street farmers market just here in the downtown area they had the capacity to implement five thousand dollars for a voucher program so we let the farmers markets tell us what funding they could use to support their shoppers who are facing food insecurities grove street farmers market requested five thousand dollars and additionally high springs farmers market could utilize one thousand dollars to support their shoppers and how these programs work uh it's high springs is running a token program grove street market market is running a voucher program basically they're almost one in the same shoppers facing food insecurities can go to the market the on-site market booth and receive 25 per market day per week to purchase direct from their market vendors fruits and vegetables and other high quality farm products and to date i just checked in with the markets this morning grove street grove street market they've served 15 people with a spend of 375 high springs market served 11 people so far with a spend of 275 and both of those markets operate once a week they took a pause the week of thanksgiving so they're really just getting these programs in place right now the family resource centers you know so there's a hundred thousand dollars to split with the farmers markets and split with the family resource centers farmers markets are utilizing six thousand dollars of that so that leaves ninety four thousand dollars for family resource centers for food distribution we our internal department county team found a wonderful relationship with frog song organics which is a farm in hawthorne to essentially aggregate their farm produce and farm produce from the general region and actually deliver direct to these family resource centers so they've been an incredible partner and we checked in with them this morning they've delivered approximately 8 500 pounds of farm product fruits vegetables very specific to our region to families in need and we've partnered with six of those family resource centers that have uh the partnerships with children's trust subalachua county and that is and i believe a couple are in the room also deeper purpose community charities hawthorne area resource center library partnership one community the swag center and willie may stokes community center and wrapped up in this motion was also the authorization for these resource centers to request refrigeration units up to five thousand dollars willie may stokes community center has requested one unit of cooler unit and deeper purpose community center has requested two refrigeration units to limit food waste a lot of these farm products they need refrigeration so if they can't do just-in-time delivery and have distribution days and times to line up correctly they can store the farm products in a refrigeration space until the distribution day so this has been an incredibly uh quick education and um of how this all works so so it's been a good learning opportunity and it's really almost been some case studies that we can touch on and some other opportunities that initiatives that are living with this department in the food system so with that um i think i want to move into a very you know quick overview of what does the last what does the alachua county's agriculture uh mean for our community and what who's out there producing what are they producing and thank you uh bailey before you move on to the agricultural landscape can we come back to uh i think the food distribution i think when you when the county came to the city we were told that 32 000 or 42 000 people were on snap and needed help and needed help immediately so we're saying that those people did not get the service on what's happened with snap and bread of the mighty did not receive the food in order to get it to the families immediately is that what we're hearing that's an update we've received from the bread of the mighty funding that they have not received their distribute their shipment of food um if so is the snap back operationally yes ma'am snap came back online november 12th um let me ask this kind of give an update because she had a conversation thank you patrick as it relates to the resource centers and she can give that update yes um so i think we we all were disappointed that the turnaround wasn't as fast as we thought it would be the way it was uh presented to us was that bread of the mighty had to wait for the food to be to come to them um as of monday and uh bishop stokes is here you can correct me if i'm wrong uh i know five of the six resource centers had requested the boxes that the trust was um funding and those were delivered uh but that literally was this week so but i just want to just want to be sure the 32 000 people who were snap recipients are receiving snap today yes that's what i want to your benefits were thank you stated reinstated november 12th okay thank you i was going to say early november um but from what we understood you know that took time um and commissioner we also learned i'm sorry we also learned that the federal government issued a statement that any um snap funding that was provided by a state or other local government could be clawed back and so we had to on the fly make some adjustments to how that funding was classified for female people if we were to provide snap funding then the funding that got reinstated could be clawed back as i understand that is that right michelle yeah so but yes everybody that's on snap but to be clear the the funding that the city provided we did not directly tie that to snap it was it was the initiating event but we we didn't specifically say this only goes to snap and the county trust and the city all kind of were working behind the scenes to make sure of that sorry marcia go ahead i'll just say i also want to thank you my understanding from bread of the mighty okay well first of all when we made the motion our understanding from bread of the mighty was that they they were ready to go with their food box program and that they were going to be able to deliver this at the at the time it sounded like the next day yeah and um so it was we're frustrated to find out that that wasn't the case um they did buy i guess they did use half of our funding to buy food right out of the gate and were able to do some boxes initially i thought like the first round of boxes already went out i don't believe that was my understanding okay well that's what he told us at the last meeting when he came here he told us that they had bought fifty thousand dollars worth of food and that that had already been packed and they may have okay my understanding and please correct me if i'm yeah i don't interpreting yeah no um there hasn't been any charges from the from county funding there's been no invoices it must have been y'all's i think they did that before we gave them the money yeah they had bought probably had uh boxes already on hand and they were going to be able to put those out they've only received twenty thousand dollars from us because i did not want to give them 125 000 up front um and so twenty thousand dollars our folks just received their funds received their boxes this week and we will be watching to see um how many families are in need our dollars specifically said it was for snap families and i'm sorry i'm not at all okay so i think that that was my misunderstanding i thought we were trying to help people immediately we were who were snap beneficiaries so let's be careful how we talk about it also that we don't end up having money clawed back um the snap the the snap issue created a demand for food insecurity an enormous food insecurity demand um and currently not only in gainesville and alantua county but across the nation there are longer food lines than than in anybody's memory so it's not like this is going to waste there's no there's no end to the current need so yeah i will say this 30 before snap was cut in november we were already seeing a hundred percent increase in demand for food assistance programs and a 30 reduction in the funding available for those food assistance programs due to federal cuts that had already come down the pike and then the snap cuts came and then on top of that we're getting ready in 2026 for the big bill that bill i don't see anything beautiful about it but yes um is going to kick in at you know and and in 2026 after the election even more of it will kick in and every time one of those pieces kicks in we're going to see additional cuts and additional reductions so we were anticipating food security demands being higher and knew that when snap cuts came it was going to create this massive demand so we wanted to make sure that food security initiatives across our community had enough resources to answer food insecurity challenges regardless of who was in line if they were snap eligible or so the word i need to use is food insecurity correct but we did think it was going to be immediate and we're disappointed that it wasn't thank you thank you and it wasn't for lack of effort on their part it was it was you know because there was so much demand across the country that that the suppliers just wouldn't be able to keep and go ahead maybe this might help clear some things up we did receive an update uh via email from patrick and so as of today and this is an email that came through yesterday so still accurate today as of today no boxes have been distributed the first half of his order that he's anticipating to arrive arrived just yesterday so that would have been monday or tuesday and the remainder is scheduled to arrive december 15th and once the product is in the warehouse they will begin boxing and distributing that's the update we have all right thank you thank you mr chair yeah and that's from the county's and that's from the front the county funding so they're separate both about children's trust right right yeah commissioner williams and i i remember um bread of the mighty and mr mr god did make clear to us that this is a whole the whole system is being stressed at the time because we weren't the only place that said let's get some money and they make the bulk food orders that are not the normal system um and that there are already there are already issues with the funding and the increased need before you know in the beginning of october this was already starting to happen and so that to some degree specifically i remember they said we're going to spend money now and anyways and we will have nothing left on x date i forget the date he told us where he said we've already moved up some of our normal purchasing and so i i understood to some degree it's a bit of a backfilling so that so that so that because we didn't know how long the pause and funding would last um so that definitely would come in so i'm i'm still fine with where we're where we're at on this it's disappointing but i also know that we were making a a decision to to hold our community together over not just a one or two or three week that i think we understood other people didn't that this wrench in the system was going to have months worth of of fallout because the system isn't designed to work like this and we were stepping in so i i feel okay and i just want to make sure i think that's well well said there for yes um mayor for 10 i can call you that now well not until january okay all right mr willis bailey could we pause briefly the trust has to leave at three 15 minutes ago and i just wanted um this board to hear you know five minutes that's your okay all right so you all are touching on um chair uh cornell just asked us to be able to give you an update um thank you for um sharing what you have and i'll let bishop stokes speak for himself um the process took longer than we thought um however uh boxes are being delivered what we plan to do is uh continue to receive updates from our resource centers about the number of families that are coming in what the need is um after the first of the year we will then come back to our board give them a report uh and uh if we need to to make some changes in the process we will do so at the time um i do believe that bread of the mighty is doing the best that they can um under these circumstances with uh the way that they receive their products so i do want to i want to go on the record of of of saying that and that we still support um the work that they are doing um additionally we were asked about um resource centers in general i don't know if that is a part of your conversation if you could just give a two minute on how you work with the county to convene the resource centers yes so um i want to say that there is a difference between the community centers and the resource centers um understanding that the resource centers uh are uh receiving funding from us uh the list there uh is uh the sixth that we fund um it is uh they are uh provided with as we bring them on they are provided with uh consulting um that walks them through the five factors uh that talks about uh how they can um assess their community for uh the priorities that they are going to um they are going to house so some may have a food bank others may provide clothing uh some may have a a resource center in terms of uh you know career career source workforce uh engagement um but they all are different based on the community that they are in um i wanted to bring that forward because i think it is important to understand the difference between a community center and an actual resource center um our funding for our resource centers and christy giving me that information christy will you hand me that folder that's right by my um just to give you all a little bit of an understanding we are providing uh right around a hundred and uh fifty thousand dollars to each of the resource centers um some form of support additionally some of our outline uh areas that do not currently have resource centers receive a navigator that is someone that goes into goes into those communities maybe housed at a library where families can come and receive support from that uh navigator on that particular day that um that person is in that community how are you getting out the information about the navigators i live in archer for instance yes we actually are having a conversation uh started a conversation with the city of newberry um to talk about uh bringing a resource center to that community the ultimate goal um is to have a resource center in all of our municipalities um so information goes out through the libraries uh through we have very good relationships with um with our municipality leaders um there could be a community group in that particular area so um christy what am i missing those are all the churches certainly churches most definitely um i think that was it i think that's it okay thank you thank you for being here today okay okay back to you i think it is worthwhile bringing an overview of alachua county's agriculture and food systems industry and what's going on who's out there and what does that mean to the economic value and impacts i think what's essential for these conversations is defining what is a farm we're going to look at a lot of census data in the next just one or two slides and what does that mean usda defines a farm for the purposes of the census as an operation producing or expecting to produce one thousand dollars in agricultural products and what is important to know and that's it's no matter its size or location so think of a farm we're you know typically considering rural communities um there's been a growth and interest in urban farming and that ties right into our next my next point that i wanted to highlight we're looking at i zoomed in on florida we're looking at alachua county's food shed region a food shed is a geographic region that supports fresh foods to a certain community so alachua county's food shed region consists of 15 of our neighboring counties as far north as duval down to marion county out west to dixie and so we have our 15 county neighbors of our food shed on this map and what's very interesting is that alachua county is one of two counties in this region to actually experience a chain an increase in the number of farms just behind swanee county and these are census data collected from 2022 so we're probably experiencing some change the next census is not until 2027 so this is what we're going off of and this increase is due to probably a two-fold factor it's an increase of small and mid-sized farms so we go back to that definition that's no matter its size or location so we may be seeing some of our large farms selling and parceling out so maybe there's a hundred acre farm they're parceling down to 10 10 acre parcel size that's 10 new farms into our market on the other side of that it could be this increased interest in small hobby farms you know if they're being defined as a farm one thousand dollars income you can make that at a farmer's market so that can be some of our small hobbyists who are out there generating income from their business so it creates a great opportunity for us to market and support those small and mid-sized growth very interesting i love this chart to see who's out there and what they're doing and my next slide is an incredible figure that we just received from our partners with uf-ifas they took the 2022 census and ran economic contribution reports and we just got our hands on this in the last couple of weeks the value of agriculture in our county and what are they contributing to the economy alachua county agriculture and food systems combined the direct contribution is 2.6 billion dollars i am incredibly impressed by our producers out there and what does this figure include it's think of agriculture and food systems of the industry as a whole so crop and livestock sales any forestry activity food production manufacturing food distribution so it's really kind of encapsulating the entire industry and they're generating an enormous impact to our county and to our state and the second figure i thought is such an interesting tidbit alachua county consumers spent 145 million dollars in 2024 on produce that's averaging almost two thousand dollars per household now this is not drilled down to show this isn't local produce spending but it presents a great opportunity for us to start and for me to start seeing how can the needle begin to move on capturing some of those dollars to local produce spend and it's another interesting piece of i didn't include it in the slide but nationwide it's a common thread that people are increasing their spend on food away from home so we're out to eat and we're not cooking dinners across the nation alachua county is actually seeing a little bit of a change in that there is a greater spend on food at home so people are purchasing their food and cooking it at home for sure is there any um link between the amount of money a household spends on produce every year and health is i mean i know there's a link but is there a a way to compare that i mean it seems to me that might be a number we not just want to track but we might want to grow right i agree i'm sure there's some tie-in to that and i don't have the data but i'm almost betting somebody out there does that we can look into and especially going back we'll probably only do it by zit you might be able to do it by zip code okay yeah very interesting it might be an interesting pilot as we try to increase access to fresh foods because i i feel like the you know the food is medicine program all of that is trying to increase the amount of vegetables that we put into people's bodies and we want those to be local vegetables so exactly and i i love this figure i think it was so interesting and if there's a way to drill down and what's the spend of you know your general consumers at a grocery store and um to one who's actually sourcing local produce i think that's very interesting um and to tie that back to any food is medicine efforts and see those changes we do have a study that's probably almost 10 years old but had some of that done through surveys and and efforts with the economist at the university of florida that i can pick up it's old um but i think it would be at least a start yeah maybe model some stuff after that who's out there in our county producing and by producer this is a another definition from the usda and what does that mean when we're talking about total producers in alachua county we have 3 084 producers out there as of 2022 and that's the person or more than likely persons on a farm who are responsible for the day-to-day operations the decision making you think a lot of these family generational farms it's the family running that so we have just over 1700 farms in alachua county and just over 3000 producers operating those farms usda classifies our top commercial production as blueberry bush beans cucumbers sweet corn watermelon that's according to 2022 numbers of what they say what is being produced for the purpose of commercial farms and then i want to take a look at the livestock inventory and where we rank in the state i think that's very interesting to place alachua county on the map in regards to our colleagues across the state cattle and calves we're ranking 11th in the state of florida and that figure represents beef and dairy calves our cattle and in our county we're ranking 26th in meat type and layer chickens with 7 000 7300 and then actually six and hogs and pigs with you know only 816 but that's still we're quite high up in there in the number we're in the ranking the last thing i wanted to show i think this is also another common thread we're hearing across just in conversation across the state across the country farmers are beginning to age out i think we've heard this several years now it shows in our census data for producers so you know 53 percent are or excuse me yeah 53 percent are 35 to 64. 41 are 65 and older and that leaves a tiny sliver six percent of 35 and younger and that ties i'll get into some of our initiatives but what an incredible opportunity there's so many there's so many organizations who are developing the workforce and teaching our next generations what's farming what does it mean to produce agriculture how to cook nutrition and so it's there's organizations out there in our county doing that work and then there's some initiatives and efforts in our department to support those and getting our next generation interested in farming and producing healthy foods a large chunk of my responsibility in this position and a huge effort for our county very proud to say that the fresh food pathways project food hub feasibility study study is in the tourism and economic development department it's very crucial and important to our economic efforts this is a if you've heard it kind of in the chatter around the community it's a 30-month study that alachua county has engaged with food system consultants new venture advisors you probably will see them referred to as mba more than more often than not this 30-month study is to see what what a food hub look like for our county and i want to say what is a food hub i love this diagram a food hub is a facility an organization a business who provides coordinated services such as the aggregation sales distribution and marketing to connect small and mid-sized farmers to large large food purchasers for this study specifically we're looking at institutional buyers and that could for example maybe a university of florida santa pe college the hospital systems jail system community resource centers or food banks school board school district school board absolutely it's all in there and so that's what we're looking for and i think this this diagram really shows it best of its one entity or a collective of entities aggregating from farms you know they could be doing like processing they're doing the marketing they're doing the sales to get these local farm products within alachua county and maybe from our food shed that hundred mile radius 15 counties into our food system and get people eating locally and we're about 13 months into this 30-month study a large portion of 2025 was spent on a very comprehensive market analysis and community engagement portion and that wrapped up in october and that was provided in your backup if you ever want to poke through that and what did these consultants find out about our our community and our community's needs it's very informative i recommend it some of the figures from earlier slides are pulled from that report and then we moved into conceptualizing operating models and that fed right into our next phase where we are right now we're in phase two of the project and really the meat of the project the a pilot project so we are nva new venture advisors is seeking an organization to test real world real world market conditions for an aggregation and distribution type facility there's actually an rfp out on the streets right now as of thursday so this is all just happening right now to seek an organization that can distribute farm products farm products to institutions locally and what does a food hub look like in real practice food hub in real practice food hubs are a lot of different things they don't look like one thing much like family resource centers they really kind of mirror the the what their communities look like but i'll say this the main thing that they all have in common is that they're all doing aggregation and oftentimes distribution or have a distribution direct distribution partner that they work with to get food from our small and mid-sized farms into wholesale markets sometimes they have processing so sometimes they're like washing and chopping and freezing those things or preparing meals sometimes they're doing value added like making salsas and jams and jellies to go on grocery shelves sometimes they have a commercial kitchen they rent out like what working food is doing sometimes they have a retail component that is like a grocery that people can access it really does depend on the makeup of the entities that are operating them and what the community's needs are so some of this pilot project is a bit of that um proxong if you've ever been up to proxong organic farm they actually have a small yeah they're already aggregating produce and they're the ones so when you say aggregating so some type of warehousing so warehousing so they're buying so so what happens is that like the big dogs in the farm system i was telling you guys know about and buy every day from that like the larger farms you know they have the wherewithal to buy the equipment and be able to process it and move it through the system but our small farms don't they don't grow enough to meet the demand they don't have the equipment to process it and grade it the way it needs to be they don't have the food safety plans that are required for insurance and things like that so these food hubs provide that technical support and that physical effort if you will to kind of be the middleman between the institutional institutions and the small and mid-sized farmers and the the big distribution warehouses and the u.s foods and the air marks and the cisco's of the world don't really have interest like we've tried through those avenues and they just don't really have an interest because they have a model and it works and also from the other end if you're the restaurant you have one place to go if you wanted to serve a whole local menu and exactly you know you go to big cities and they'll list where all your food comes from we don't have that here because a restaurant would have to go to five different farms to put all that together and there's a lot of really great models particularly i mean up and down the east coast this is actually happening there there's some really really good models in western massachusetts and in vermont the center for agricultural economy the western massachusetts processing center and albuquerque there's some i mean they're all over the country we're really kind of the last frontier with some of this work um which is ironic because we're the produce basket but i think some of that commodity lobbying is part of why we're the why we're the last frontier um but yeah they they look different depending on where they are but they all have that same thing in common they're buying from small farms and they're providing physical and technical support for small farms to access new wholesale markets in in western kentucky farmland big lump the amish have bought up a lot of the family farms and what they do is bring in their produce and then they auction it to the restauranteurs the grocers they come in and buy up weekly from whatever the farmers have brought in i don't know if that would fit more with our local economy or not but just a place where you bring your stuff in and all the people who would need that food come in to purchase directly when i was a kid we would drive to um stark i can't remember but my dad would take stuff to an auction there was a farmer's market i mean so the state once upon a time had some of these facilities they divested from them and primarily now lease them out to private entities who run them for their own corporate business models um but you know it's it is it is in a way kind of going back to the way things used to be and trying to create new systems that can help our small farmers compete in a largely globalized food system at this point so you've already got this on the street for rfp uh so there's not so much you can talk about i realize but did you anticipate do you know who you anticipate coming in um or is it just we'll put that out there and see who comes in yes more on the second one i mean i i think the real point and commissioner prisley nailed it and when she talked about the food system because we as a county commission recognize that the current system is extracted it's taking profits out of the community and our whole goal whether it's waste or food or economic development is to make it circular keep it in the community um that is a big nut when it comes to food because the university of florida the school board the all these large institutions you know they have their national providers and so i'll say my hope i mean i don't know but my hope is that there's a number of organizations that are working in these arenas already in our community in very small ways that they can come together and build a collaborative model to do a pilot that would scale up what they're doing a step and prove that this is possible and start to develop the partnerships that are necessary so that we can take the next step i think the key thing with this conversation is one seeing what we get in terms of successful bids on the pilot i think two it's going to be how we start to prepare for phase two so that we don't just let it die on the vine like they don't do the pilot and then they have to wait two years for us to step up into the next level of how are we going to do things from moving into the next phase of this and i do think that there's opportunity from the city side to think about the partnerships you know you all have set aside funding in the cra to look at retail grocery we've had very little success with that to date this is a lot about how do we get fresh and healthy nutritious food into our community the opportunity to think about food access is part built into this rfp so we're asking these people to also do food access projects as a part of that including one specific that's about around the holiday season doing giveaways um and so i think there's opportunity there to think about how do we partner these things you know it rather it's at ihedi or rather it's in another location how do we think about dovetailing the efforts that we've been pushing since the day i got on the dais when i made the first motion for us to put a grocery store in east gainesville to where we are today with having tried that several times and failing right so i mean the idea that's going to be a grocery store you know maybe that'll happen one day right but the grocery store chains have made it fairly clear at this point after we've specifically run rfp recently i know it's they're not interested right um even with with support you know with dollars these often have a retail component so there's an opportunity there and yeah and and i i mean i don't know where this would likely land but again we can purpose build things at ihedi yeah for sure and it's on a a major highway yeah and serves it's a whole eastern half of the county yeah i mean it's a great site it's a great location no joke i mean really truly it is in that area is a great opportunity i mean from my perspective some of this is going to be who the partners are but you know my dream world is pilot happens pilot successful in the meantime we're figuring out phase two for an expanded pilot and we're going for appropriations fit state and federal appropriations and grant funding to be able to build and purpose build the infrastructure that's necessary to have a real world food hub that's going and it may be a hub and spoke model where there's a there's a large scale warehouse and retail component in one spot and there's smaller you know aggregation spaces in the outer you know in communities on the west side or closer to other parts of the farming community you know out in the ag tech park in newberry or something like that but i think there's i mean really when you see what's happening in other communities that are way smaller than ours and have way less um you know people buying food and how successful they've been i think you can see that sometimes being big is actually bad right because the systems are in place at the institutional level and it's hard to break in we're kind of that in between you know we're that in between right and and we're actually in a really interesting place economically with the sale of one dixie and the sale of and the closure of hitchcocks you know i know you're going to talk about this too but the um you know the hitchcocks and and you might have more information but the hitchcocks in um hawthorne was being sold and that sale fell through right and then there's a winn dixie and melrose but that's going to be closed to become something else i don't know the liquor store so what that was that it's a liquor store no that's williamson's williamson's yeah oh winn dixie up in keystone oh gotcha yeah so you know that leaves there's no grocery store from you know waldo all the way to um you know at one time we we leveraged walmart by saying if you're going to build on the west you will give you permission to do that but you're going to have to build in the east as well and i don't know as i'm watching the all these stores go up in the western side of the county you know if we could not all these is also all these is on south may know right they're in the oh one dixie oh they are oh okay okay well that's something see but my closest grocery store so thank god yeah yeah yeah but i you know we we've done that kind of horse trading before with with some of these guys may or may not have been the right thing to do i don't know i use that one a lot let's keep going bailey we have um we're trying to conclude like we have two more okay what else is tourism and economic development team up to in food system efforts the alachua county small farmer grant program this has been ongoing since 2021. this grant program is for small farms in alachua county to purchase up to five thousand dollars in capital investments to support the economic sustainability of their agricultural business to date we've had 79 farms supported across the county that's representing all municipalities across alachua county with total funding of 394 387 dollars the fy25 cycle we said we have so far supported we're running right now we've got farms receiving their reimbursement 27 farms all nine municipalities and it was a total grant investment of 115 753 dollars and then i just recently finished up the board directed farmer's market survey that was i rocked that up in november so over the fall season i was out at eight different farmers markets throughout our county uh surveying direct to our vendors and our shoppers and collected uh just over 300 surveys um good for you and yeah it was a great project and the the purpose of this survey was to gather what motivates a vendor a farmer in participating and selling in a market and likewise with the shoppers what's participating what's motivating them to step foot in a market and purchase locally and what are challenges uh preventing that or and is that marketing is it other other things so right now i'm going through the data and i hope to bring survey results back to our county commissioners early 2026. tying back to some of those workforce development where we saw some of those aging out farmers we have a program just just under 250 000 to working food and non-profit whose whole thing whole purpose is supporting youth and supporting farms these funds specifically are to value-added kitchen programs so farmers and food entrepreneurs can enter the working food commissary kitchen and begin producing items like canned jellies and different hot sauces and all kinds of things ready to eat meals to then sell at a market or sell even on a retail shelf somewhere a portion of that funding for working food is to youth programs to get youth a safe and structured environment to learn nutrition and farming and cooking they are wonderful partners and doing really incredible work in the community those are the some three topics we have a lot of yeah i just want to say if i could hop in on the two those are the farmers market many of you might have heard the rumors of the farmers market is closing so our i i want to put some of that to rest a little bit our our fire rescue department is going to be building a like training center over time on the existing site of the farmers market we already have our we have our training building there and they have need for tower and other facilities that they want to put on that site that site is also our farmers market that well it's not ours but the alacho county farmers market site which is a non-profit that runs the farmers market there they were also outgrowing that site and ultimately needing something that was bigger and better we let them know that they had at least through the end of this season meaning next basically end of this fiscal year like through september 2026 at a minimum on that site probably longer really because you know everything takes longer than it does with government but definitely they had through september 2026 but the farmers market board made the decision to go ahead and move the market so january 7th i believe they're moving like after christmas they're moving their market um and the alacho county farmers market which is actually not alacho county it's a non-profit that runs it um is moving to santa fe tech park where they will be hosting their market now in alachua well between us and alachua yeah about seven miles north of their current location they'll be located at santa fe tech park um and uh so i just that's one thing i just wanted you guys to know but as part of that we're recognizing that with that move and and and just sort of talking with some of the vendors that's where the farmers market survey came up as we wanted to understand what all of our farmers markets needs were for infrastructure and support so that we could be thinking strategically as we're talking about the food hub and as we're talking about investments in infrastructure what are the ways in which we can support our farmers not just having wholesale market access through food hub but also direct market market access right because i mean from my perspective in an ideal world we could have a market that's open all week long and farmers could have refrigeration and they could have you know just like you have those stalls where antiques people go in and buy antiques all week long and there's one person running the register and they got a little number attached to and they get rung up like those same kind of models exist all over the country for farmers markets and and then there's also the big big ones that you know have like stalls for ready-to-make food like pikes park market and things like that where they have all kinds of cool vending going on inside a market hall and so i mean that's my dare to dream that's my cultural art center version of what's possible um but i think at a minimum we wanted to hear from the farmers markets what are their needs um and how might we be able to incorporate the corporate those into efforts we have to make more investments into our food economy so i'm excited to hear the results of that survey and begin thinking about how that dovetails into the other things that we're doing and working foods efforts have all been in the community like their model is to like lift up existing entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations that are working in the communities that are most impacted by food security so their partnerships are with the swag community center with the greater duval neighborhood association and with um underground kitchen so underground kitchen is their primary um chef entrepreneur who does all of their culinary training and workforce development training and certifications and then they work very closely um with the greater ball neighborhood association on youth leadership programming so they've been doing it since the little and with cultural arts coalitions they've been doing youth gardens programs with the littles um since elementary school and now those kids are in high school and they're graduating and they're becoming they're getting youth leadership um youth food leaders like uh scholarships basically like internships where they're actually coming in and being the leaders in those gardening programs now and helping lead the children in their own communities so the goal is to slowly and they are doing it pretty well like hand over the leadership and build and empower the communities to lift up their own leaders and build their own food sovereignty so that you know yeah so it's a pretty cool model and we're really excited to be a part of that as well i think it's really important to mention how much they're doing to maintain food culture yeah that's yeah that too seed saving and thinking about the culture of food and where food comes from for sure and thinking about the art side of and the cultural side of food not just the sort of we need to eat it and help the nutrition side of food the last thing i will say about that too is that it does tie in again to the the um grocery model because working food we funded uh and and the city also gave support to working food early on back when i was working with working food um to help support their kitchen incubator model and the kitchen incubator model was really really successful and um they they have shutter they are shuttering their food incubation component they're still going to be working with farmers to provide a commissary kitchen for them to be able to produce value-added products to some extent but they're not just going to be a kitchen for any entrepreneur that wants to make a food-based product anymore but they showed a real demand for that in fact they have like almost a 200-person waiting list most of those probably i would say half of those are are serious and the and then another half of those probably would get any further than the front door when it came to actually doing the work but even if a quarter of those that's you know that's 50 people that are looking to start a food-based business that need incubation space we've started that conversation i think one of your professors commissioner eastman was at that conversation with santa fe college so we started to think about like how do we build that kind of incubation kitchen with the wrap around business and workforce development support services that are needed working food realized that they just weren't capable of doing that level and that they needed to focus on the local food side of things and the community education side of things but i think that there is real opportunity again not to ask not asking for anything at this moment but i do think that with cra with the city's efforts with and the same phase efforts with gtech and those sorts of things there's a lot of opportunity to think about how we support food entrepreneurship in this community as well and i think that lasts a lot longer because i think people when they go investigate it and find out there is that long waiting list they just give up yeah they've tried to gather as much of them as again which is why that list is so long i think but yeah i mean i think i mean i thought about my mustard right and as soon as i like looked into it it's like that's i can't do that yeah yeah and we do have a lot of people that are actually operating like in the black market of food as well you know people who just want to make you know food out of their kitchen and you know they don't realize that there's only a very short list of things that legally are allowed to make out of your home kitchen and sell um so we do have a lot of that in the community where there's potential to be able to support those efforts but okay bailey last slide and i'll end this with the incredible leadership eletra county has shown in the agriculture and food space this is unified efforts across the work my colleagues across the county and environmental protection department and the brand new agricultural land conservation we have our my colleagues and partners over in uf ifas doing incredible work in the alachua county extension and we have actually a very fantastic committee advisory committee for rural concerns and i met with them they're very welcoming friendly and very wealth of knowledge and then the efforts we're doing in tourism and economic development and i'm for sure missing some i know growth management you know brings they work with the rural concerns and all that to say it's a unified effort and i'm very happy to be in this position and be a part of a county who takes leadership in agriculture and food systems so it's been a pleasure so far and we have a lot of exciting things on the horizon okay okay so the commissioners any comments or any questions before we go to the public yeah i was going to say about a food hub the way i always envision with non-expertise is that someday i hope i know when our local seasons are because the local produce gets cheaper at somewhere where i will see it i know when south florida strawberry season comes in because the big producers strawberries are now you know three dollars for a cart instead of five or 250 and i know when like georgia peach season is in but i don't know when our peach is in because there's no because it's not conglomerated if i went to a farmer's market even there sometimes you can't quite tell same price kind of all the time so in my mind i just have this vision where someday i can i know what is in season local because the price changes because we have this influx of it hitting um and it's it's a more efficient system to get it out there as opposed to uh you know someone's got to charge top dollar because they're small and they've found no efficiencies anywhere and they've got they've got to support everything from direct as opposed to a large bulk portion so i know that when i imagine it that's one of those symbols for me is that i can go into a restaurant and i know it's you know i can tell because a local restaurant starts to do what is in season local as opposed to when it hits in miami when sweet corn in miami yeah you kind of know it locally but you don't know when our season is so i just offer that as a i'm sure at some point that's that's my like consumer side goal of it i want to i don't want to have to be difficult to know when and how to eat local it just suddenly it's cheaper it's the local because it's our season and i go buy it so and i think there's a real opportunity you hit right on it with local restaurants to you know buy local market local people pay more for local they just will so okay anything else from city commission all right anyone from the public which is to speak on this item kelly come on up speak on my experience volunteering with some food shares at cnc i was volunteering a few months with the food share at mount pleasant that was weekly for years and that's died out recently because of changes with the supply uh they were first told that uh through the mighty kept showing up with loads of tackies and soda you know i felt embarrassed giving this stuff out to people so uh i will say the the pre-thanksgiving one at cmc they came through royally fantastic turnout uh lots of produce lots of meat i'm not a fan of but the people were thrilled and uh so it's possible it just happened so badly and the mount pleasant program just died because it was sending us so much junk thank you kelly anyone else okay uh general public comments and that's time that we give to the citizens that want to speak to us about anything not on the agenda is there anyone from the public who should speak to these four or these two boards no one's come twice okay close public comment all right commissioner comments we'll start with our county guys have anything got anything mary i was going to bring up the hawthorn grocery store issue but i already did that so thank you yeah yeah i mean just to piggyback on that i mean i think she's she's hitting the nail on the head like i know that we we didn't really talk about it because we were just giving our food systems update but i do think when we do have conversations the next like cra update i really i know that like the grocery store initiatives the things that we've tried haven't worked um i would really love for our teams to put their heads together with our economic development and food systems team to think about how what we're doing and what you all are trying to do with food access on the east side can work together um so that we can see some real progress on food access and i'm not talking about emergency food assistance or free food i'm talking about the ability for families to go and buy fresh food for the families is available to the eastern side of our county um besides walmart on walter road and even then i mean there were hundreds of people that could walk to the grocery store in hawthorne no matter how bad it was it was you know the only grocery store well unfortunately the owners that bought the hitchcocks was ready to partner and they i think they were ready to partner with us and they were looking at expanding some of the efforts that they were doing in eastern alantua county and then unfortunately the owner of hitchcocks the patriarch of the hitchcocks of that family not of hitchcocks but it had already been sold to a family but that patriarch died and with him died that vision um and now they're selling it off in bits and pieces unfortunately okay thank you uh commissioner chestnut you have anything no mr burke uh just in the interest of time uh very quickly sometimes we we uh receive presentations that are totally out of our area of expertise and we really learn and so to the extent that this is one of them uh miss mcclellan very very informative to learn about food systems and farming and the way you kind of envision how you work for small farmers and um and it is an economic development engine so i really appreciate this presentation by the county uh commissioner duncan walker and i recently had a sunshine meeting and we were talking about fresh food um in east gainesville and uh one thing that i happened to learn recently was that um walmart is using the farmers alliance locally it's a nationwide organization you probably have a whole lot of information about this but but but i learned and the farmers alliance has a local hub in trenton so that's right in our area with many active local farmers so to the extent that that might be a part of a conversation i thought that was very important that was just a fact i learned in touring walmart you were there and and there was a a whole host of people with local farmers um at that and that was it was pretty interesting um lastly our city manager recently produced for us a geographic map of our grocery stores and our community gardens it's probably good it's it's fairly comprehensive maybe we've missed one or two but perhaps um the manager's office could share that i don't think we if we could share that with the with our county counterparts mr manager and thank you for having your staff put that together might be just a helpful resource we actually have a food systems map that our staff are keep that's like a live like uh gis arc gis based map that has a lot of those food systems episodes so perhaps we could if that has an arc layer we could actually put it into our map so that the community at large could have access to those sites that would be great i do think that our local legislative delegation has a fairly strong support for agriculture as a whole again it's out of my area so um you know as the county moves forward you definitely want to reach out to them because it's very close to their heart and they would be looking for funding streams that would help our region thank you thank you thank you you got anything i do um thank you for that uh commissioner book we did have a wonderful conversation that brought in dr danzu and so i think it might also be helpful and maybe interesting for the county to receive the information that she provided to us um interim manager if he wouldn't mind reaching out to her because it was kind of exhaustive i mean we sat in there well past the time that we thought but we really enjoyed uh learning about our edible groves where they're located what's accessible we talked a little bit about the resources that you provide um and one of the things that i recalled in our joint food policy board was the seeds that are available and one of my questions and concerns was how do we help to give our neighbors autonomy in growing their own food well they have to first know how they can do that and there is the seed library here at the library and i wish so much for you that you could have been a part of that conversation but you and i had already i think we had already spoken before commissioner book and i met um and we had a fabulous conversation around the food issue but i did want to say that if we can get that information from dr zoo interim manager persons that would be wonderful i think for all of the county representatives to get as well um commissioner brizzi you and i talked also we did about um something that is probably one of those other visions that's off in the distance as well which is a dedicated position to uh really help us to corral all of the information and give true power and forward movement to how this actually works in both the city and the county yes i mean i think the idea that i had was a little bit more limited in scope i mean i think bailey is our dedicated person who's doing kind of the big picture vision for the county and we have extension that does kind of big picture act stuff but what my vision for was that you know you all are doing community and school garden stuff well community gardens you all will provide you know some water and a fence and um but and i've brought this to the city before back before my commission days and um and i think that and now as a county commissioner and someone who's worked in extension and works with uf i think that extension might be the right place to house it is the idea of a community and school gardens coordinator somebody whose job it is to support those gardens because and people we have a home gardens person in extension and we have um we have like an ag person but those community and school gardens they have different missions and they kind of fall outside of either of those scopes um and so the idea and the vision was somebody who's supporting those community gardens that can help them with we could have a tool rental facility where they could rent tools that they need so they don't have to each own a tiller and and they could have a bunch of tools they could use for big work days so they don't have to have that all the time seed library access they could buy compost and bulk you know things like that and help with coordination with support and training so that as leaders start to wane or burn out or move you don't just the garden doesn't just go defunct because this person is helping to recruit new leadership and build leadership in those community gardens so that was kind of the concept and the idea it's something that i'd love to see i haven't brought it forward because every year seems like we have a lot of priority budget priorities to bring forward um and that would take a lot of dedication and a lot of time both in having conversations with extension and having conversations with you all and conversations with us but it is an idea and a vision i want to put out there and i think it's something that's it's very much in in honestly really almost in mary's wheelhouse even more than it's mine um these days i i i run a lot of gardens but i don't do a lot of gardening because um and uh but i think that you're the academic i'm the hands-on yeah i once upon a time i was hands-on but i haven't done very much of it lately so but i do think that that could be really really powerful um resource as we think about food security as we think about the challenge with people having access to fresh nutritious foods and so that's just another another piece of the puzzle that maybe we can do in detail it sounds to me like that is something that you could really expand with extension exactly extension does a great job yep but not in creating something new but trying to maybe put funds there in collaboration but extend it through them yeah no i 100 agree yes that's where it needs to come yeah absolutely that's where it needs to sit for sure could you conclude uh no i have one last thing just wanted to remind everyone about the important meeting tomorrow night at tb mcpherson recreation complex uh where we'll be discussing the building renovation and the master plan if you cannot make that meeting however interim manager persons has assured us that there will be several meetings uh after that so i just wanted everybody to hear that that meeting is going to take place tomorrow but if you can't make that one there will be several others uh in the works after that okay thank you thank you christian you have anything yes um it's related a little bit to ag and foods i wanted to bring it up just make sure my colleagues of the county can hear um we have a food waste ordinance that applies to multi-family housing in gainesville it was supposed to have been in effect in uh july of 2024 it is probably going to be starting being enforced at some point in the in the newish soonish future um and so i bring it up because this is something where we where the city currently has decided that um people who live in multi-family will will lead the way they are the vanguard of uh increasing the cost to to service their their their homes because commercially collected multi-family that's commercially collected and they will have to find a a uh a vendor to commercially collect food waste um and that is coming and so i challenge both my city colleagues to figure out how we apply that to single family but also accounting to apply that because if the idea that we need a lot of compost to help you know with local ag and food systems uh you cannot just fall on the back of people who live in apartments who we already know are more likely to be lower income black brown uh particularly young immigrant and non-english speaking uh we know that almost everywhere those statistics kind of follow through but in elatra and gainesville so i just bring it up because the the future is coming at some point soon in the future and we'll see how that goes but part of that i know that in general part of that is hopefully is uh compost having that material for ag not merely for landscaping companies which i'm sure landscaping companies will suck up some of that but we may be talking about a volume that really puts it within the reach of of ag local ag to use so that's just something to know that it's coming i don't know if you all heard that about our conversations um but for the county commissioners your constituents is your county-wide 90 of my district is probably multi-family not all commercially collected but in a big chunk of yours that live in the city are going to have something that starts applying to them that does not apply to everyone else in the county or more uh or single family so we will see how it goes i think it is an equity issue i want to bring it up one more time but i do i know that it is not yet in effect truly in effect and we'll see when it actually happens uh but anyways we're moving down that path so i want to bring it up and remind everybody about it thank you mr chair thank you man are you just going to let them pick their own vendor they're putting the regulation in place for the for the vendors to figure out i presume they had to figure i mean for the apartment complexes it's all done so yeah so if you want to go into business doing it right now you know it's a great time to go into business i guess i just want to apologize for being late it's not because i didn't think this meeting started at one i had a meeting at the jail a bit less yeah i just wanted to uh first of all i'd appreciate the agriculture uh conversation it's hard to to do this because you all are looking at agriculture county-wide which almost by definition is outside the city just because we're becoming more and more urban but i i do see opportunities for us to find ways to to make to bring that into the city of gainso at least for distribution and and i really want to put in a plug as we move forward for uh everything from farmers market to potentially more than that at the heady site it is it is available it is the infrastructure exists now there are going to be a lot of people using that not only for for health uh purposes but gtech i mean there are 150 people or so employed showing up at work every day between gtech and mary facility across the parking lot which is part of the overall uh work that that has gone on there very intentionally through the city and there's a lot more to be built there and we need to find a way to make sure that that happens that it affects the population center because this is where most of the people are in the city and the most unserved part of our city is right there where heady is that's why we that's why we did the the work to get it started there so that's great also a little known fact about our our city manager is is that he did academic work on food systems as part of his master's program so you know that keep that in mind yeah he told me that i'm like you better tell everybody that that's awesome yeah we got a food expert across the street so um moving on from that to a bit of a downer but something we need to make sure that we're all thinking about and and prepared to respond not just not alone but as as all of our local institutions um we are facing i believe a whole lot more people living on the street than in our community and in every community in america that that is going to happen that the changes in federal funding for for housing are going to impact people who are currently homeless in drastic ways and people on the edges of being homeless and we have to talk more about how we approach that not in silos but but in general most of our institutions really don't take part in in supporting homeless services but as i have said many many many times if we expect that the city of gainesville and grace marketplace will solve homelessness we're all going to continue to be disappointed if we approach it together we have a fighting chance i know you all are gosh i hope close to opening those motels january okay both though uh i'm not sure and it should be both of them in january because one got to one first first quarter how many yeah but that sounds like a great kind of pretty topic for our next meeting right that's that's what i'm saying is we we need to yeah yeah the only thing this needs to be a a workshop of sorts and it it cannot just be the city and county it's it's got to be more the school system has a stake in this uh college the trust the children's trust the community foundation etc etc have all got to play a part in in this because it is going to get worse and and we need to be aware of that and i just want to put it out there so that we are thinking i hate to put a damper on things right before the holiday season but we need to be thinking about that going into the beginning of the year where these cuts start to to become real okay and um thank you mr mayor you know the the food piece anna said land piece food systems but really the city of gainesville they've got the most eaters you all have the most people and so i think that's i think there is a lot of collaboration i love your idea about focusing in on the e-hadi site i love the fact that your manager has a background that i wasn't aware of so i want to just thank both our staffs i know the city staff did a lot of preparation to get us ready for commissioner duncan walker's presentation um and thank you for all that it's uh it's something that um is important that we finally have a joint meeting to discuss and i want to thank our our staff for pulling together a lot of the stuff that that we've been talking about that we want everyone else to um hear because it's an important priority you heard of this board we've got two commissioners that have a next level of expertise that they're bringing to this community that i i so appreciate that and so i think if there's no further business the only other thing i had to say is um on your way out make sure you wish our county manager happy birthday today is her birthday oh all right and uh and with that we're adjourned thank you