Regular Meeting @ 11:30 a.m. - Jul 14, 2026

Good morning, everybody. It is July 14th at 1130. It is Pastor A.J. McManaman with Canvas Show. Oh, yes. Come forward. If everybody could please join me, stand for the invocation. And then if you'll stay standing and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Pastor, thank you for being here. Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to join together in the betterment of our community. We pray for wisdom. We pray for intelligence. We pray for your grace to be able to better the lives of those that are being served here, for those that are being led. And we just pray for the lives of those who are in the position of leadership, Lord. We thank you for our commission. We thank you for their heart of service to others. And, Father, we just pray for your grace always. We thank you and love you. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Pastor. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the Republic, for which we are one nation, under God, indivisible, liberty, and justice for all. Okay, commissioners. I had a hearing aid appointment, so we're getting close. I don't have a hearing aid yet, but I'm not going to use the iPod, so bear with me if I can't hear so well this meeting. But I didn't do a very good job at the last meeting, so I'm setting the expectations low. We've got a lot on the agenda today, from appointments to action items. Do we have any changes, Madam Attorney and Mr. Manager? No changes? Okay. Any changes, commissioners, to the agenda? I'll take a motion. Move approval of the agenda. Second. All right, and that will include the consent agenda. Is there anyone from the public that wishes to speak to the motion? Hi, welcome. Thank you, and good morning. You can just introduce yourself and give us your thoughts. Yes. I'm Vicki Haynes Johnson. I'm the daughter-in-law of Lloyd William Johnson, Sr., and I just want to speak for myself, first of all, for my family, and for my nephew, who has spearheaded this request to approve a resolution dedicating a portion of Southeast 185 Avenue in honor of Lloyd W. Johnson, Sr. I just want to say that certainly my remarks may be biased because I am a daughter-in-law, but he is or he was certainly a man of courage, a man of faith, and a man who really was a citizen, as we know, a citizen to be of the community. And for that, we say thank you to the Alachua County Commission for considering a further resolution in consideration of dedicating Southeast 185 Avenue to my father-in-law. I'd like to read this statement from Curtis Taylor. He is my nephew and Lloyd W. Johnson, Sr.'s grandson. It's on behalf of Curtis Taylor. Curtis is the president and CEO of the Tallahassee Urban League. I'd also like to acknowledge Delatere Hollinger. He's the co-executive director of the Florida Civil Rights Museum. On behalf of the entire Johnson family, we are deeply honored and sincerely grateful to the Alachua County Commission for bestowing this historic honor on our father, grandfather, uncle, etc., and citizen of Evanston, Florida, Lloyd W. Johnson, Sr. He was a man who was really a pillar of the community, a devoted member of his church, a guiding force in his community, and certainly a man who all would like to pattern themselves after. He was an example to everyone. And Curtis, who sent this statement, has been the CEO of the Tallahassee Urban League, having worked there for 49 years. He recognizes his grandfather as a devoted parent, grandparent, and also a devoted citizen of the community. Curtis wants to thank the commission, and so does the entire Johnson family, for considering dedicating the road to Lloyd Johnson, Sr. Thank you. Thank you for those comments. Is there anyone else? Yeah, let's give him a round of applause. Commissioner Pritzia? I just wondered if we knew when the signs would be going up. The family might know when we're planning to post the signs. Have we got that scheduled yet? Have they organized that yet? No. Okay. Well, maybe we can coordinate with the family on a timing for that so that they can honor. Thank you. All right. Let's bring it back to the board. So with this vote, that will be done, and we will be naming Southeast 185th Avenue Nevison in honor of Mr. Lloyd W. Johnson. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. We've got an agenda, and that is done. So thank you. First up on the agenda is the announcement. Mr. Sexton, you're recognized. Good morning, Mr. Chair. Mark Sexton, communications director. A few announcements this morning. We wanted to congratulate our Interim Fire Chief, Jeff Taylor, for earning the prestigious CFO, Chief Fire Officer designation, through the Center for Public Safety Excellence and Excellence. There are only 2,000 people in the world out of 8 billion or so that have this designation, and our Interim Chief is one of them. And it is well-deserved, and we congratulate him. He is out of town right now, or he would be here to let us adore him. But we'll do it in absentia. And, Mr. Chair, also just a reminder that Jackie Chung's annual and important Disability Awareness Expo is coming up. It is going to be on July 29th from 10 to 2 at the Martin Luther King Multipurpose Center located at 1028 Northwest 14th Street in Gainesville. On our website, you can still find the form for becoming a vendor at that event, and it's held each July, and it is really important for folks, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, private businesses to showcase services and resources available to our residents with disabilities. So, we encourage everyone to go. If you have questions, you can call 352-374-5275. And, finally, we had a great event on Friday, and my crew was there with cameras running, and we wanted to share it with you. Okay, watch the beginning of the video. You guys are going to get to see my Rex. He makes a cameo at the Ribbon Cutty. There you go. We are opening for the first time our Little Lake Santa Fe Preserve. It is located just east of Waldo, and we think it's going to be a really good opportunity for some of the local neighbors to get out and take a mile hike in the woods. None of this happens, what we're doing this morning, by accident. It happens because citizens decided that it matters enough to fight for it. Over 20 years ago, Jill McGuire started pushing for the protection of this shoreline. Little Lake Santa Fe Preserve is one more piece of what she and Allison started. You can fight every little development that comes through and wants to take up all the wetlands and put docks through the rookeries and all that, or you can get ahead of that and try to be proactive in your approach to conservation. But all told, in this whole region, about 12,000 acres in the Lake Santa Fe headwaters are in conservation, and that's just, you can't do better than that. This Santa Fe River was a very special place for me growing up, and as a college student, we led lots of canoe trips on the Santa Fe River. We recognize this as a celebration of the partnership between the county, the state, and all of the conservation-minded organizations that helped to make this happen. We have the new commissioners coming out of Waldo who have also embraced this as a real jewel in their community. And I even heard the commissioner say that she thought this would be a great place for a field trip for the kids who are now going to school in Waldo. This preserve is about 69 acres. Most of that is upland. So most of the trail kind of meanders through the forest. It's really nice and shaded, good visibility in the understory, and then part of the trail wraps around the edge of a basin swamp and a bigger wetland system that eventually goes out to Little Lake Santa Fe. Right now, what people will mostly see is the Wablawi pine trees, cypress, tupelo trees, various marsh grasses and wildflowers in those areas. Animals that you definitely would see out here would be deer, turkey, lots of birds, hawks, and warblers, and then potentially near the wetlands some more water-based birds. If you're walking the trail and looking at the pines and the uplands here, this is the area you'll see the most change happen in over time because this is the area that has been most altered through past practices. So the Loblawi pines that you see behind us will either be being thinned out through nature, which is what's happening right now, or also through staff to open up more light to the ground cover, which will increase the wildlife diversity as well. So over time, you'll have the opportunity to see this step closer and closer to the original habitat type that was here, which does host a much broader range of plants and animals that are just a delight to see. I live on Lake Santa Fe, and so when I get my coffee in the morning where Rex swims, where I watch the water change the seasons, that's what this preserve means to me. So when I tell you that it matters, I'm not just reading from talking points. I'm telling you about the water that literally is outside of my home where I spent this morning. Thank you to Alan and Josh on my staff for that. And I wanted to share with you that the pictures of the little doe going across the trail, Andy snapped those pictures of that morning. On the walk. Yeah. So anyway, those are the announcements. Great job. Thank you, Mr. Sexton. Thank you very much. Okay, commissioners, next up we've got the approval of the recognitions. I'll take a motion. So moved. Second. Motion and a second to approve the recognitions. And before we do that, we'll do the employee length of service award. Any comments from the public on the recognitions? Back to the board. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Okay, Mr. Clerk, first item on that. Mr. Chair, first up is the employee length of service for the second quarter recognitions. Thank you, sir. Good morning, commissioners. Thank you so much for giving this opportunity to come and recognize our dedicated employees and their years of service. This is an amazing part of my job, which I love very much. In my last seven months, I have greatly appreciated this opportunity. As we call your name, if you will come see Ms. Aletha, she will give you your certificate and pin. And then if you've been here 25 years or longer or retiring, feel free to speak. Even if you want to speak, feel free to share. So first, Melissa Ann Baker, Animal Resources and Care, five years. Laura Menya, Community Support Services, five years. Matthew Foltz, Facilities Management, five years. Taylor Rollerson, Fire Rescue Services, five years. And once I call your name and you get your certificate, please feel free to stay up here. Moe, I knew I was going to say it. I practice it. Rishiselli, Office Management, budget, five years. We just call her Moe. Just Moe. Dan Gargis, Growth Management, five years. Congratulations, Steve. Kathy Niederloh, I know it's the county attorney's office. And is it 10 years? I survived. That's okay. 10 years. Congratulations. Brandon Boothby, Fire Rescue Services, 10 years. In my younger days, I probably could have seen that mark, but not so much anymore. I'm teasing. I have to look at this one. Luke Holton, Fire Rescue Services, 10 years. Congratulations. Brandon Starr, Fire Rescue Services, 10 years. David Likens, Fire Rescue Services, 10 years. Matthew Desir, Fire Rescue Services, 10 years. Erica Anil, Fiscal Services, 10 years. Robert Lawrence, Fiscal Services, 10 years. David Owen, Public Works, Road and Bridge, 10 years. Ramon Garavete, Public Works, Road and Bridge, 10 years. Nicholas Geis, Fire Rescue Services, 15 years. Devin Stichter, Fire Rescue Services, 15 years. Wayne Ehler, Fire Rescue Services, 15 years. Michael Freese, Fire Rescue Services, 15 years. Stanley Young, Fire Rescue Services, 15 years. David Hoyt, Land Conservation and Management, 15 years. Mark Shelton, Fire Rescue Services, 20 years. Alan Williams, Fire Rescue Services, 20 years. Lalit Lawani, Public Works Development Review, 25 years. Would you like to say a few words? All right. And then our retirees, Harold Theus, Fire Rescue, 32 years. Also known as Chief. Jacqueline Hines, Fire Rescue, 22 years. Happy retirement. I know she will be greatly missed. Ann Marie Langley, Growth Management, 22 years. Congratulations on your retirement. Marilyn Orozco, Environmental Protection, 21 years. And again, we would like to thank all of our dedicated employees and all the years of service. Thank you. And if you will stay up here, we'd like to get a picture with you and with our commissioner. Thank you. Mr. Lucky Dan. Okay, Mr. Clerk, next recommendation. Mr. Chair, next up is the presentation of our proclamation recognizing July as Disability Awareness Month in Alachua County, Florida. Good morning, everybody. This is an important proclamation for me. As I've said many times, I grew up with my dad being legally blind and still managing to own a company and be an electrical contractor. Strangely enough, he was able to do that. He would have somebody stand next to him to tell him what color the wires were. But he was such a good electrical contractor that made him mad, but the inspectors would do what they call windshield inspections on his work because he always got it right. So he had a photographic memory and could quote the code book to you. But anyway, that's always made me very – and I guess I have to say also I've had a cousin who was profoundly deaf. I've had – every family has folks that have challenges in them. And so I think it behooves us to recognize everything that we're going to talk about here in this resolution. So thank you for listening. Alachua County, Florida, a proclamation declaring July as Disability Awareness Month in Alachua County, Florida. Whereas a nationwide campaign conducted in July 2026 will mark the 36th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, ADA, and the 53rd anniversary of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which was the first law to provide equal access by prohibiting federal agencies from discriminating against individuals with disabilities. Whereas the ADA has expanded opportunities for Americans with disabilities by reducing barriers, changing perceptions, and increasing full participation in employment, housing, public accommodations, and education for people with disabilities. And whereas on the 36th anniversary of the Americans with disabilities act, we celebrate and recognize the progress that has been made by reaffirming the principles of equality and inclusion and recommitting our efforts to ensure equal access, equal opportunity for employees with disabilities. And whereas Alachua County Government and Citizens Disability Advisory Committee join the nation in celebrating 36 years of progress and access and inclusion for all citizens. And in partnership with the city of Gainesville will co-sponsor the Disability Awareness Expo on Wednesday, July 29th, 2026 at the Martin Luther King Center. Participating vendors will include public agencies, private businesses, and community organizations that will offer local support services, assistive equipment and devices, vocational training, and peer support. And whereas Alachua County and the Citizens Disability Advisory Committee will sponsor a disability-friendly employer award to be presented in October to recognize local employers who demonstrate commitment to the higher, support, and advance disabilities, or sorry, will demonstrate commitment to higher, support, and advance individuals with disabilities. Now, therefore, through the authority vested in me by the Board of County Commissioners of Alachua County, Florida, I do hereby co-proclaim July as Disability Awareness Month in Alachua County, Florida, duly proclaimed this 14th day of July, A.D. 2026, and signed by all the appropriate people. So, thank you all. And I have to tell one more story. So, before I was born, when my parents were married, they were students at the University of Florida. My dad wanted to be an engineer. And he was taking a variety of engineering classes, and it got to be exam time, and he came into the exam with a magnifying glass, a pretty large one, because that's the only way he could see to take the exam. And the professor told him he was not allowed to use a magnifying glass to take the exam. And that's why my dad did not become an electrical engineer, but became an electrical contractor instead. So, the Americans with Disabilities Act had real impact to people's lives, and it literally changed the trajectory of my father's life. So, would you all like to say a few words, and which one of you would like to give us this? Okay. My name is Christy King, and I am the current chair of the Citizens with Disabilities Advisory Committee, and I'd just like to thank you so much for this proclamation. And we encourage people to attend our event of the Disability Awareness Expo, which is taking place on July 29th, 2026, from 10 to 2 at the MLK Center. Thank you so much. Thank you. Put a picture? Oh, they're getting a picture, Mr. Clerk. Our next item will be? The next item is the presentation of a proclamation recognizing July as Parks and Recreation Month in Alachia County, Florida. Okay. And for this one, we've got Commissioner Wheeler, and we've got some of our parks public servants, and some special guests from the Cuscoilla Camp, I see. I didn't see you all come in. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you. We're going to have you introduce everybody. You guys are going to introduce yourselves, too, okay? Tell us who you are and all of that. All right. I even wore my blue dress for water, right? We're really lucky in Alachia County to have so many resources for the summertime playground that we have here when these kids are out of school and able to get out into the woods. I call it park or nature therapy for sure. Alachia County, Florida, a proclamation declaring July 14th as Parks and Recreation Month in Alachia County, Florida. Whereas Park and Recreation Month highlights the power of Parks and Recreation and the people who make it all possible, Parks and Recreation foster connection, bring communities together, and create spaces where all people can gather, celebrate, and belong. And whereas play and access to nature inspire creativity, joy, lifelong learning, and overall well-being. And whereas inclusive parks and programs promote health, resilience, and a strong sense of community for all, now, therefore, through the authority vested in me by the Board of County Commissioners of Alachua County, Florida, I do hereby proclaim July 14th is Parks and Recreation Month in Alachua County, Florida. I do hereby duly proclaim this 14th day of July, AD 2026. And it's signed by our chair, Ken Cornell, and it's got a nice seal on it here from Jess Serby to make it official. So I'm going to hand this off to you to introduce. These folks are part of a program that we got going here eight years ago when I first came on this board. Thanks to the Board of County Commissioners and thanks to all of you who made Cuskawilla happen. It belongs to you. You bought it and paid for it. It's yours. So I hope all of you all will listen to what these folks are going to tell you about their park out there and that you'll take advantage of it yourselves because you own it. All right, my dear. Thank you. Jamie Bass, Cuskawilla Manager, and I brought some friends with me today to share about what we've been doing this summer. We have been all over Alaska County and more traveling on our field trips with our wonderful new bus and going on different excursions and then also learning from so many of our local partners, such as the museum, the Harn Museum as well. Even today, Alaska Conservation Trust is visiting us. So we've had so many wonderful educational partners coming. And I wanted them to be able to share with you about their favorite things. So they're going to say their name, their age, and what their favorite thing about camp is. And so thank you for having us, and thank you for your continued support for Parks and Alachua County. Okay? Hi, my name is Aiden Davis, and I'm nine years old. And my favorite thing about Camp Cuskawilla is swimming in the pool and going on field trips. Hi, my name is Luna, and I'm eight years old. And my favorite thing about Camp Cuskawilla is going on field trips and swimming and hanging out with my friends. Hi, my name is Jaleesia. I'm nine years old. And my favorite thing about Camp Cuskawilla is swimming, gaming with friends, and going on field trips. And the staffs here are very kind to me, and I like it that way. Hi, my name is Ava, and I am seven years old. My favorite thing about Camp is arts and crafts, pool, and field trips. Hi, my name is Avery Maxwell, and my favorite part about Camp is all the staff members and the field trips we go on. Hard to beat that. All right, let's line up and get a picture. And I love at an early age your favorite thing has a bunch of ands in it. Yeah, that's really, really good. See how they did all that? Yeah. All right, let's give one more round of applause. Okay. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Commissioner Wheeler. Okay, Mr. Clerk, I think it's 12 o'clock. We'll go ahead and open up for public comment. Yes, sir. All right, so twice a day during our meetings, we give the public the opportunity to come and address the board on anything not on the agenda. You'll have three minutes. We've got a light system. Green means go. Yellow means 30 seconds. Red means next person's turn. If you'll just introduce yourself and give us your thoughts. Thank you for being here. Good morning. Yes, thank you. My name's Al Schmidt. I'm a resident of County Road 234. Runs from basically Pearl's Country Store on 441 and 234, and it runs all the way up to 26, you know, U.S. 26. And I'm here on behalf of my fellow residents. I live right across from the Alachua Conservation Trust. And where they stopped paving the road is from 441 at 4.1 miles, I believe it was, just up to where the Payne's Prairie Facility Management is. Some people call it UF, but just past the Oak View Cemetery. And when they paved that, I don't know what the thought process was, because that part of the road probably wasn't as bad as the rest of the road, in my estimation, my humble opinion. So I don't know what the thought process was, but they did a great job, and it's wonderful. But when you get to the end of that, and you have to go down to Camps Canal, you have to drive, and this is literally every part of 234 up until you hit 26, you have to drive left to center. You have to have your wheel in the median, or you have to have the wheel, the right wheel, on the white line. You can't ride in the tracks. If you do, it's unbearable. You better have good dentures, because they'll fall out. I'll tell you that right now. It's just bad news. But what I wanted to say was, and I've spoken with Mr. Gavaretti, and I understand his constraints. I get that. I get the budget process. But somewhere, we need to find some funds to be able to repair it. Now, I had written an email, and I'm sure some of you got it, and I have to apologize, because I use the word P as in mad. And so I will apologize for that. But I was at the frustration point where I just didn't know what to do. And as I mentioned, I had a conversation with Mr. Gavaretti. He's going to try to get out there, but he hasn't been out there much. And I know from one of his crew chiefs, he says the proper way to fix that road is to cut squares out. And they did that in a couple of places, but that's only like maybe 1% of the entire road. If we did that type of repair, we would be out there every day until next year, and it still wouldn't do the job. He says that if we don't do that properly, and if we just put asphalt in those holes, it's just going to tear up again. Well, so be it. It's going to have to tear up again. We're just going to have to fix it, fix it, and fix it until it's right. I did take a picture I didn't bring along with me of an area where they did put asphalt in, and it took and it held for a long time, and it's still there. So I don't agree with him in terms of cutting out squares. That road is just horrible, and I think some of you have been invited, and thank you so much to go out. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thank you so much. Hi, welcome. Hello. My name is Dr. Stephanie Grant. I'm a proud resident of Windsor, Florida. Unlike my neighbor, I just moved to this community a year and a half ago, so the roads are new to me to have such demolition in our neighborhood. But I wanted to explain why is it that Windsor is a little bit more important than we should consider, why we should be taking care of this place. A community that is apparently forgotten exists, and I wanted to just read to you guys what Alachua County has written for Windsor. Windsor settled in 1846 as a cotton plantation and named after its English founders. The town prospered as a citrus center in the 1880s. 1880s. During these years, it also attracted tourists and held a population of more than 400. The freezes of the 1890s destroyed the citrus industry, and now only a few homes remain, one a historic site. So, yes, the population has gone from 400 to 257. I think we currently stand in the census. But I just wanted to explain a little bit more as to why Windsor is so important. Right next to Windsor sits Lake Noonan, formerly Lake Pilachoco, which was its original name, one of the most archaeological significant sites of all of North America. Over 100 prehistoric canoes dating back 7,000 years were discovered on that lake. 7,000 years of human history. It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And the road that leads to this treasure, County Road 234, which is where my house is right in front of, has not been paved in over 50 years completely. They just keep adding more asphalt. It's like putting glue on top of glue, and it's just making it way worse. And then we asked about the repairs. I called myself. They told me we're not slated to be repaired in the next 10 years. So that's 60 years, right? Today, this county is proudly proclaimed Parks and Recreations Month, and yet the second boat ramp giving public access to Lake Noonan, giving runs directly in front of County Road 234. People who want to enjoy your parks cannot get to that boat ramp without risking damage to their vehicles. I say this because I've already had several tires myself that I've had to replace. You're celebrating access to nature while blocking the road that leads to it. I'm sorry. As a citizen, it's kind of embarrassing that this is where our historical monuments and our parks and recreations, and we don't even have proper roads to get to them. Windsor's not forgotten. We are still here, and we deserve a road that reflects the significance of the ground beneath it. Fix our road, please. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Grant. Okay, next speaker, please. I need to get an overhead for some of them. Yeah, can we get the overhead, please? Is there? I just didn't see it. Thanks, Mark. I'll get started. Well, he can find that for me. Commissioners, my name is Chris Stoich. I was seriously disappointed in the $53,000 independent investigation of ACAR. I don't disagree. I didn't agree with the conclusions from an investigative position. Being a member of a family with scientific researchers, I know how a question should be asked to prove or disprove a theory or idea and come to a conclusion. The work of coming to the conclusion must be objective, and evidence and documentation must be shown that either proves or disproves the question. I acknowledge that this investigation was not scientific, but it is rife with subjective evidence in its conclusions. Excuse me, please. It lacks factual evidence and documentation. It would not pass a preliminary peer review. It was also, shockingly, full of vicious scapegoating and vilification of a former outreach supervisor with no reason given for why they did that. With my limited time, I would like to present a few examples of how I would have examined verifiable facts. First, with respect to the complaint concerning the slate of euthanasia that occurred in December 2025, specifically December 16th and 17th. This event is what inspired our group to begin asking questions. I will refer you all to page 21 of the report for review of the entire description. The conclusion was, the animals were euthanized at the time of the case intakes, coinciding with the needs for kennels, but the decision to euthanize those animals was not made because of the incoming case animals and the need for space. It was noted that two of the personnel that would be included in such decisions were on vacation, but the decision had to be made. I'm confused, because if the dogs weren't really euthanized for space needed for case dogs, why did they have to be euthanized before two of the most knowledgeable people of the shelter dogs were absent? Why not wait until they came back? One theory would be that other supervisors didn't want them there. I looked at the data available as public records requests and found some facts that troubled me. The first is the euthanasia history on those dates. Overhead, please. Okay. Can you see that? Okay. Gina Peebles is listed as the authorizing supervisor on five of the seven dogs. I have looked at seven months of euthanasia history records, and there is only one other time where Gina Peebles' name is listed. That was on the revised February report that showed that ACAR dogs were used in the euthanasia training. On that report, she authorized all of them. I looked at the individual dogs' records and found something else troubling. Edited results. All the dogs that had point-in-time animal conditions as normal, treatable, rehabilitatable, had their conditions changed. May I have someone cede me your time? Thank you. Thank you. Unhealthy, treatable on the day of euthanasia. A couple here. Can you start the time, Mr. Clerk? You can see that they were, appears normal, treatable, rehabilitatable, and then it becomes the same, but it's edited that day to say it's unhealthy, unhealthy. And then the dogs were euthanasia, and that is all the dogs but one of those seven dogs had that same, you can see, appears healthy, but then all of a sudden it's edited to say they were unhealthy. You know, as everyone knows, euthanasia is part of the shelter medicine, but that's not right. I'd like to correct the time in the shelter also that they noticed. Annabelle was there for 13 months, Stephen 3, Kane 11, startled three and a half weeks, and two stray dogs who were only in the shelter four days before being euthanized. If the investigators were troubled by the edits, they would have referred to e-mails between the software provider to the shelter in Maymower. I found two support requests for audits to be run on several animal identification numbers and found that those numbers were of the dogs that were either euthanized on December 16th and 17th and all the dogs from Emerald Shores. I have that here. Support. And there was a second request that was all the animals that were in the whistleblower comment. So I have it there and then here. And then when they asked them, sorry, when they asked them, when she asked them, the people from the software asked what she was looking for. She said she wanted to see if any memos had been changed. So I'd like to know whether she found anything about that and why the investigators didn't ask that. When it was time for my interview, I had records proving that owner-requested euthanasia was being improperly applied to the euthanasia record. The investigators had not done any research in this area, even though it spelled out in a whistleblower letter. I provided more than 100 pages of detailed records of dogs recorded as ORE that clearly were not. Remember, ORE is not recorded in a live animal release. And just as an aside, for the first six months of this year, 73 dogs out of 143 total euthanized or coded as ORE. There was only 54 reported for the entirety of 2025 and 36 for 2024. The fate of 50 Cent and Lily were not addressed at all in the report. Although they were the face of the 11 dogs that were sent to Emerald Shores and fate became unknown, there was another dog I'd like to highlight. Don Julio was abandoned after his owner had been taken by ICE. A homeowner called the shelter and he was transported to the shelter. Estimated at 12 years old, he had worn teeth, heartworm, positive, but friendly. I have just one more sentence. The North Central Florida Humane Society had committed to pulling him on February the 24th. He was sent to Emerald Shores on February 22nd. The shelter paid $175 to send him there. The Humane Society doesn't charge. Thank you, Ms. Deutsch. Anyway, thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Next speaker, please. Hey, good afternoon. Good morning. I know that I'm going to go over, but I believe I have some people to cede time to me. My name is Patricia Antonucci. Yeah, let's go ahead and see. Who's going to cede time? Okay, thank you. Go ahead. Patricia Antonucci, I'm here today to address just a few of my many concerns with the ACAR investigation report released on July 1st, 2026. I don't have time to address all of them since we're limited to a few minutes. And unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to fully engage with you the way the ACAR investigator and county management does. We do try to supplement our time by sending you emails, but we rarely, if ever, receive acknowledgement or response. I do remain hopeful that you will all respond to my July 6th and July 9th requests for individualized meetings to address this investigation report in full. In truth, citizens have been operating at a disadvantage since we first came to BOCC meetings on January 13th, 2026. Though we consistently brought you evidence gathered via PRRs and our direct experience, we were told our concerns were uncorroborated and insufficient to require immediate action, despite the literal life and death of animals being at stake. Following a whistleblower complaint in March of 2026, we were ensured that a full, neutral, independent investigation would take place, and that the investigator would be able to review every concern we raised. What followed instead was an investigation that treated the whistleblower allegations as a PR or personnel issue from disgruntled former employees, instead of the serious and well-documented complaint about animal neglect and shelter management that it is. The investigation did not care about issues outside the four corners of the complaint, and the neutrality of the investigation was unfortunately non-existent. The only people outside of ACAR who were interviewed were those of us who initiated that process on our own. County management coordinated the interviews, and they were held in county offices, hardly neutral territory. The investigator did not reach out to any volunteers, assorted former employees, or even members of the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, including Dr. Julie Levy, I apologize, at UF. She did not reach out to the authors of subsequent emails supporting whistleblower allegations, or to persons from Polk County who provided information on current ACAR staff. She did not even interview the county manager who oversees the shelter. By and large, the volunteers who offered to be interviewed sat for sessions where we were challenged instead of asked exploratory questions, and forced to defend ourselves and our interest in ACAR animals. We conferred post-interview and largely agreed that the investigation's conclusions were reached before our interviews even began. Yet, the finding included in the investigation report, and indeed, the amateur nature of the report itself, did surprise us. Said report, funded again by $53,000 of taxpayer money, does not include supportive documentation for review, neutral or evaluative criteria, nor single pinpoint citation to its sources, with the one exception of the Merrier-Webster definition of lynch. So let's start there. Aside from the actual definition of lynching, the report includes a separate definition provided to the investigator by Gita Peebles, which was also shown to volunteers during their supposedly neutral interviews, and thus concludes both that Ms. Peebles had no racist intent, and that she was justified in using the term lynching ladies to describe concerned volunteers. The definition Peebles offers, which is copied into the report, lacks any type of citation. Frankly, this is just not how definitions work. Furthermore, the evidence presented as justification for use of the term includes emails and comments on social media, cherry-picked out of context from the original post, but even more importantly, every one of these comments was made after the whistleblower email disclosing Ms. Peebles' nickname for us was published. As such, they are inherently post-state Ms. Peebles' use of the lynching lady's term. Did the investigator not know this or just not bother to check timelines when reviewing evidence presented to her by ACAR? The latter appears true, as much of the protocol measures and best practices in animal care cited within the report to counter allegations of whistleblower complaint were also implemented after or in response to the complaint and citizen reaction to same. Aside from timeline errors, the investigator devoted over two whole pages to speculating and improperly disclosing the identity of whistleblowers or whistleblower aides without ever even suggesting that the information these individuals were shared was presented in anything but good faith. Their fear of retaliation was, apparently, well-founded. The immediate progression into ad hominem is the first clue that the report lacks critical, reliable substance, but there are so many additional issues with the methodology of this investigation. Alleged wrongdoers were interviewed first, before volunteers. There was no attempt to interview neutral parties. There was one site visit to ACAR, and that was only after employee interviews had concluded, so employees were on notice to expect it, but before interviews by volunteers who could have explained what to look for at the shelter. There was disregard of PRR records in response and suggestions that accurate record-keeping was not important. Consultation with an expert who had been a vet for five years and spent much of that time in academia versus in actual practice. Inconsistent standards of proof, speculation, red herrings, misdirection, lack of foundation, adulterated evidence. Use of ACAR employees endeavoring to do something as evidence that it was done. Determination that lack of medical notes for sick animals indicates no ongoing issues versus either poor documentation practices or failure of care. Incomplete review of 10 dogs euthanized in December of 2025. Only five of them are mentioned in the report. False statements as to the status of a behaviorist on staff. There is still no such staff member. Failure to use objective evidence, such as charts marking dog timeout in the kennel instead of relying upon staff statements. Faulty semantic arguments, and zero attention to concerns about the animals disappeared under the care of ZooTrek, 50 Cent, Lily, Don Julio, etc. All resulting in an overtly biased report reflecting an opinion rather than subjective conclusions after a thorough investigation. Commissioners, have you all read this report in its entirety? Given all these issues- Patricia. Thank you. Thank you. Given all these issues, can you honestly say you are satisfied with the investigation and feel the public- Patricia, how much longer do you have? Not much. Okay. We're adequately addressed. We advocates and volunteers have nothing to gain from any of this except protection of the animals we love, so where do we go from here? And I just want to hand in a copy of Best Practices of Whistleblower Standards from the Office of Whistleblower Ombuds in the House of Representatives, and this county's own revised ordinance, 2026-4. Thank you. Okay, if you want to give that to the clerk, we'll make sure we have a copy. Thank you. All right, next speaker, please. Hi, I'm Melissa Wilkosch here on the June. No problem. I'm not going to talk about it. Okay, so I'm just going to jump right in. The entire report is framed in the context that it was written by Sarah Gilley. We were- I was under the understanding that the report would deal in verifiable facts. The idea that Sarah Gilley wrote this- wrote the Whistleblower email is completely unfounded. There's no evidence given in the report that she wrote it. The report was signed by Anthony Friedle. To my knowledge, he has not come forward to say that his name was forged, that he did not write the email. It's based on the opinion of people that were interviewed. The only evidence that was given was that Anthony was quiet and Sarah was more outspoken and a creative writer. That's not evidence. That's opinion. The other piece of evidence that was given is they quote the Whistleblower email out of context. And I'm just going to briefly read the full context because they point out that the email refers to this supervisor as evidence that it was Sarah who wrote it because she was a supervisor and Anthony wasn't. So the full context is though an increasing number of euthanasias were being processed out as authorized by the one supervisor who would not sign off on these logs, ellipses, then it goes on to say the discovery of falsified records is one of the many reasons this supervisor resigned. This supervisor, the antecedent to that is clearly the one supervisor mentioned in the previous email. It's not referring to the author of the email. That's just that I was honestly, I was stunned by that because it just seems so sloppy and it's just reading comprehension. The identity of the person, the text message exchanges between Sarah and another employee, the identity of that person is not included in the report. I was told that anything I said in my interview would be a matter of public record. It would not be held confidential. I wonder why that person's name was not disclosed. I wonder if that person's personnel file was looked into to see if that person was a reliable narrator. There's nothing about her in there. Sarah Gilley resigned. She was not fired. She resigned in good standing with the county and she has not said one word publicly about any of this. Not on social media, nowhere. She has not sent you emails. She has remained completely silent on this issue, yet she is one of two people found at fault in this report. A cursing incident is mentioned as being significant. It seems irrelevant in the scope of the investigation, which was supposed to be centered on the allegations in the email. There were no allegations made against Sarah Gilley. So I understand that who authored the email is important, but zero, zero evidence is given to support the idea that Sarah wrote it. Yet the entire, that is how the report opens, the entire report is framed in the context that she wrote it. To your point about why people would be anonymous, that this is why. This is why. Sarah, this is retaliation. I don't know how else it could be framed. This retaliation against someone who has not said anything, who has not made any personal allegations herself. This is retaliation. One of those text messages refers to a former employee. The intent seemed to be to completely, to burn her to the ground. She is young. She, I mean, I sent you an email praising her. I cannot speak highly enough about her. None of her achievements were included in this report. None of the good things that she did. She expanded the outreach program. She talked about sending, taking home hundreds of animals. She always had kittens in her office during kitten season. She took them home. She would stay up all night, bottle feeding kittens, and then show up at work the next day. You know, I mean, it feels, it's almost like, it's almost embarrassing to read this because it's just not what I was expecting. I didn't expect, like, the county to be done at fault for anything. So that part wasn't a surprise. But I also just, I did not expect that the report would focus so much on one person who, a very dedicated employee, who has, who is not, she hasn't said anything. She hasn't said anything. So I don't know how that gets remedied. But I hope that you all are hearing me right now. And I hope that something is done to remedy that because her reputation has been tarnished by this. This went out to every media outlet in the county. Everybody's read it. You know, people, everyone in the animal welfare community has read it and has read these allegations against her, which are completely unfunded. I want to say that also things at the shelter right now seem really good. Dogs are getting out. The kennels are being cleaned. I'm so happy that we have an interim director who seems confident and invested, even though she's only interim. And I hope that we have a permanent director soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Okay, next speaker, please. Hi. Welcome. Greetings. We're ready for the, um, is it a timer? Yeah, so it'll be the green light. We'll start. Okay, my name is Anu Naku. I'm an indigenous practitioner of African traditional medicines. Quarters, quarters. Quarters, quarters, community, farm and garden. We're having a benefit. We're having a hip-hop concert on July 25th, Emmett Till's birthday. I came to share this because somebody said this is an opportunity for you to present this. And it's no light thing. Our youth need safe space, sanctuary. Our young black men are under extinction, literally. Look what just happened again. And what are they comparing it to? Interestingly enough, Emmett Till, when the vision dropped to do this for this community, it's imperative because it's about ancestor energy. As one of the sisters here was running down the lineages of all the history, all the blueprints, all the footprints that have walked through here. And at this moment, the indigenous tribes are speaking. And melanated people, this is our time. And we have our rhymes. We have our reasons. We have our particulars. And we have our passions. And this is about the young black men. It's the youth. And daughters need to feel safe. It's a whole movement happening. And it's happening July 25th at the Porter's Quarters Community Farm and Garden in Sawajira Village, of which I am the matriarch and the caregiver and energy space holder there. You know, we offer a lot of indigenous practices, all of us, all of us collectively. Porter's Quarters, I don't even know all the history because I've been implanted, but I'm invested. And so I would give anything. I've been eating, sleeping, drinking this. And so I'm putting it out there. I'm putting it out there. And it's not ask us how you can support this because that's respect. You know, you don't just give us what you want us to have. You know, there's so much energy on this. It's like we're regenerating a time because the civil rights hasn't happened yet. We're still in it. And our future is important. So if you want to know what you can do, give me those youth. I want the ones that are, I'm up at the courthouse handing out flyers. Y'all know people. You know people. Overhead, please. Make it happen. You say July 25th. What time? July 25th. It begins at 333 vendor setups for food only. We need food vendors still. 555. The concert starts until 1010 at night. We're going to have a film presentation. We're going to have poetry. We're going to have fire lightings. We're going to have, after the concert, panel talks of fire-ups around the circles because it's the indigenous practices that get results. Not in rooms like this. Pardon me. Forgive me. Farege me. You know, but I'm a traditionalist, and my traditions don't differ from anybody else's. It's about value, not jumping through hoops. Thank you. So thank you. Thank you for your time. Okay. Next speaker, please. Mr. Morris, welcome. Hello. Hello. How are you? My name is Todd Morris. I come to today with two pieces of good news. As you know, I have been asking for some time for you to reassure the homeowners of this community that you are going to make special efforts to do everything you can to protect their interests when development is occurring. I spoke to you on several occasions relative to that. My good news is twofold. One, this is the last time I'm going to be doing that, and I imagine that makes you very happy. The second thing that I want to tell you is that I was informed this morning by Mr. Chestnut that he is enjoining the other two commissioners here to make that commitment. So now we have a majority of the commission that is saying to the homeowners of this community, we're going to take care of you. When development occurs, we're going to make sure you don't get hurt. And I'm happy about that. I appreciate it. And I'm happy not to talk again. Mr. Morris, thank you for your persistence. You have a good day as well. Thank you. You got a round of applause. Even though we're not supposed to be clapping, we're doing it today, I guess. And I can't hear out of one ear, so I don't hear half of it. Okay. Kali, welcome. You are recognized. You got to clean that wax out. No, it's wax free. Good afternoon. Since somebody spoke about whistleblowers, some of you may not know one of the champion whistleblowers of all time. His name was Lyndon LaRouche. You know that name? Lyndon LaRouche used to prowl the calls of the Hart and the Russell and whatever the other name of that congressional office building and nick things off the desks of members of Congress. He got from Jesse Helms' desk one time a document called Global 2000. And this was in 1979. I saw it because I worked with the Republic of New Africa, and we had an independent newspaper called the New African, and that's the kind of outlets that LaRouche shared, all the materials he grabbed. This document talked about getting rid of pockets of useless eaters. It talked about withholding food and medical aid, fomenting wars, et cetera, to get rid of pockets of useless eaters. It sounded like it was talking about foreign issues, international relations. But it turns out that document is the ancestor of Project 2025, and that program is domestic as well. The current administration's biggest goal, two big goals, one is to replace the Constitution, and the other is to cull the herd. Now, we see big headlines with things like ICE, ICE, which should be retitled Murder Incorporated, taking out one or two people at a time. But very little headlines to the hundreds of thousands dying because of the withdrawal of things like PEPFAR and food aid to hungry children, et cetera. So that's what we're really dealing with in this time is an effort to cull the herd globally, especially getting rid of pockets of useless eaters who sit on great resources. Africa has the largest deposits of 26 minerals that are instrumental for modern technology. So we need to see what's really happening. And on another account, I usually say that this body is always doing things better than those other ones across the street. But one thing I wish you would change is put your consent items at the front of your agenda. That's a minor thing. And also, something they do across the street that's really great is public comment time. You're allowed to comment on agenda items if you cannot stay. We allow that. We allow that. Oh, you do? We do. Oh, okay. Thank you. It's not playing on the agenda. So thank you. Yeah, we do. All right. Anyone else? All right. Let's go to the phones, Mark. Do you have anyone on the phones? All right. No one's on the phone. Okay. We'll go ahead and close public comment. All right. Commissioner, any comments to public comments? Nope. What I was going to say is I'm happy that we seem to be moving forward in animal services in a positive way. I was really happy to see and get approved on consent to three full-time equivalent positions, one animal care technician, and two veterinary technicians. I also had a nice meeting with Diane, and I know that I was attempting to talk to the manager last night at 8, but she was unavailable working on another interview for the permanent position. So we're not getting there fast enough, but, man, we're trying as fast as we can. Appreciate the comments and the feedback on the report, and I'm really focused on moving forward. That's where I am. Anyone else before we continue on our very busy agenda? Commissioner Prizio? Yeah, I guess I just wanted to – I'll say this. I want to say thank you to everybody who's leaned in on animal resources. We know there's challenges there, and we are working towards the future. I want to share that I think while the report, I agree with you, had some gaps and some challenges, I believe that the investigator did do their best to be objective and to look into the issues that were in that whistleblower report. And I think if you look at her experience and background, you'll see that she is an attorney with quite a history of doing a good job of investigation into issues related to HR and whistleblower-type experiences. So while I hear your concerns, and I'll definitely dig in, and I'm happy to meet with whoever wants to meet with me, I do want to just say that I do not think that this is – any of the challenges and issues that we're facing and that we're working towards remedying have anything to do with that investigator specifically or particularly. Thank you. Commissioner Alford? Yeah, thank you. I wanted to go back to the very beginning of public comment and address the comments by Mr. Schmidt and Dr. Grant about 234. We got an email last week from our director of public works, and he made an announcement which I think is really, really useful, which is that they're going to take two crews that are normally doing work like mowing the sides of roads and things like that and reassigning them towards road maintenance, and they're going to do that at least until the end of this fiscal year. That's important because we've gotten behind on our work to do good repairs to the roads, and I think this will make a big difference. I'm actually hoping that we can go a little longer than past – to the end of the fiscal year, but I've been in big discussions about a road with similar issues out near Archer, which is County Road 346, and that road also is extremely scary to drive on, and it's got – we have roads like this all over the county. 234 is just one of many roads that have big issues, but I do think by doubling the number of crews that we've got out doing this work that we can make a big difference because not only are we changing the way that we're doing the repairs, we are also changing the length of the road that we're addressing. So if you put in a work order for a pothole, they're not just addressing that pothole, they're going to address that entire little stretch of road that is affected. So I think a number of policy changes are going to help us carry these roads through until we can get the funds to get them paved, and I think that's important to note. And on the animal resources issue, I will say that it is not the report that I would have written, and I'm still digging in myself on a number of issues. Thank you, Commissioner. Okay, Mr. Clerk, I think we've got to move on. The next item is presentations, Gainesville Thrive's Early Literacy Initiative. Yes, sir. Okay, the recommended action is to hear the presentation. I know that we've got some folks from Gainesville Thrive's here, so welcome. And if you are here for the appointments, we are close to that. We will be with you shortly. Yolanda and Rick, welcome. Yes, thank you. For being here. So I'm Rick Carnell, board president of Gainesville Thrive's here together with Yolanda. Sorry, Yolanda Hagley, our executive director. And we have for you some sample books from the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, also some samples of items that we distribute to parents as part of the guidance we offer about the best ways of helping their children with literacy, literacy kits, tip sheets, for example. So Gainesville Thrive's is a nonprofit organization of promoting child literacy. We encourage parents of preschool children to read to their children early and often, to instill in their children a love of reading, to help their children develop literacy-related skills, and in so doing, to increase their children's readiness for kindergarten and for continuing success in school. Reading to pre-K children has great benefits. It strengthens literacy-related skills. And I'm going to be using that term multiple times, so I'll look at it more specifically in the next slide, it helps children develop a love of reading, it enables children to become better prepared for kindergarten. Even reading to two-year-olds can make a big difference. So here are five crucial literacy-related skills, skills that lay a foundation for children to learn to read for themselves. First, becoming aware that words on a page can convey sounds and stories. Second, knowing the letters of the alphabet. Third, associating letters with their sounds. Fourth, building vocabulary. And fifth, knowing how to tell a story. We work with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which offers high-quality books that children and parents can enjoy together. The first book a child receives is The Little Engine That Could, and then for their fifth birthdays, when they graduate from our program, they get, look out kindergarten, here I come. I could have used a book like that. Here's a model of how the Dolly Parton Imagination Library works. Every month, it mails an age-appropriate book to the child, along with a book-sharing guide for the child's parents. The idea is for parents to read aloud to the child every day, to ask the child questions about the reading, and as the days or weeks go by, to read to the child from the book multiple times. Actions like these have important results. The home becomes a better environment for literacy. Parents read to the child sooner, they read to the child more often, and they read to the child for longer periods. In addition, the home has more picture books that young children can enjoy. The child and the parents become more enthusiastic about reading, the child asks to be read to more often, and the child and parents work books into the child's playtime. As a result of all this, the child develops increasingly stronger literacy-related skills and becomes increasingly more ready for kindergarten. Children enrolled in the Imagination Library are much more likely to be read to at home than children not in the program. And that's a good thing, because reading to children at home is a significant predictor of whether they'll be ready to start school. It also significantly reduces the risk that children will lag in language and cognitive skills. I want to point now to three key activities of Gainesville Thrives. We do other things, but I want to focus on these three right now. First, we provide parents, sorry, we recruit and register families to receive Imagination Library books. We have 1,900 children currently enrolled, and we could enroll many more if we had the money. Second, we pay the Imagination Library for each child's books. The cost is $31 per child. We bear that, but the books are completely free to families. Third, we provide parents with guidance about the best ways to help their children develop literacy-related skills. Since we began our literacy work, we've served more than 3,700 children and delivered more than 85,000 books. The Children's Trust of Alachua County is our largest funder, but for the current FISTO year, we also received a $30,000 grant from the County Commission's program to combat gun violence, and we thank you very much for that. We also received grants from foundations and corporations and gifts from individuals, and we are deeply grateful for all this support. We must constantly reach out to additional families as new children are born and as children graduate from our program on their fifth birthdays. During the past five years, we've reached out at nearly 500 events, such as public library story times, and we've conducted outreach at many, many locations. Our literacy nights are important ways of offering parents guidance about the best ways of helping their children with literacy. At these events, parents gather for reading activities and hands-on projects. We give parents research-based literacy kits, and a literacy kit for a particular age is among what we passed around, literacy kits to strengthen their children's literacy-related skills. The kits include a six-week curriculum booklet with easy-to-follow activities. Parents also learn practical strategies for using the kits. Here are photos from recent literacy nights. I should mention Yolanda Hagley is just absolutely marvelous at recruiting parents, getting them enthusiastic, enthusiastic, and providing a practical guidance about how best to help kids. We currently pay for children's books if the children live in one of eight zip codes, eight Alachua County zip codes. We want to serve children countywide, but we've not had enough money to do so. We now propose, with your help, to begin serving children countywide. This will include children in 14 new zip codes. Carry out the proposed expansion. We'll need to recruit and register additional children. We'll need to conduct additional literacy nights. We'll need to pay for additional books, and we'll need a staff assistant to help with recruitment and with literacy nights. So our request for you is for $82,000 for Imagination Library subscriptions, $8,000 for literacy kits, $20,000 for the expenses of literacy nights, $29,000 for a staff assistant to help with recruitment and literacy nights, and then $1,000 for transportation, for a total of $140,000. The stakes are high. Literacy is crucial to success in school and in the workplace and in much more. It's also important for democracy to have literate citizens. The best time to fix literacy problems is before they start. Let me underscore that. The best time to fix literacy problems is before they start. Let's not wait until children are struggling in school. Let's seek to prevent problems. Children who enter kindergarten with strong literacy-related skills and a love of reading are on track to avoid literacy problems. They're on track for success in reading. We ask your help in making that possible for more Alachua County children. Thank you, and I'll turn to my colleague, Yolanda Hagrid. Thank you, Mr. Cornell. Thank you. Yolanda, welcome. Thank you, Rick, for that. I want to try to address some of the day-to-day details that we do with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library and with Gainesville Thrives and Literacy Nights and the importance of those things. If you have a book in front of you, I want to draw attention to the inside cover where you can actually see that there are additional supports that are provided through the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. So these books are mailed directly to the home, so even if they're in the rural area or they're in areas that maybe the library is not as close to, they're able to access this, and these books are delivered to their home with the child's name. We have many success stories of parents talking about how that child literally goes to the mailbox waiting for their book to be able to come. So we are instilling that joy of reading. We also have success stories where parents have said that this is their child's favorite book. They carry the book in the car with them because this child has that ownership. We're building libraries within their home. And so we just found that this is a way that we can really impact every child. And we do have the challenge. We're in those eight zip codes, and when we're out there doing outreach, we have to tell parents that it's not available in their zip code. We try to give free books as well when we're out there, but there's just so many other families that can benefit from the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. And we, you know, thankful for the opportunity to be able to talk to you guys about that. I also want to address the literacy nights. We have, we've been able, with the funding, we've been able to add the literacy kits. And when the parents come, we come every other month. They come, and we're able to go through that curriculum. We're able to go through the manipulatives. We're able to provide them encouragement and support. We recently had, for one of our literacy events out at Lee's Enrichment Center, where the director said that this was one of their largest parent involvement meetings that they've had in years. So we know that this is beneficial to the parents. We're providing that level of continuance guidance. We're not just giving them a curriculum. We're not just giving them manipulatives. We're actually meeting with them, empowering them, and showing them how to use this, to use these manipulatives with their child, as well as we provide dinner for them so they don't have to worry about that. And then we provide instructions for them to have engagements. And those were some of the pictures that we shared earlier, where the parent and child are working together with that, as well as they're getting that reading and literacy support. So we add all that in as a support unit. I also wanted to briefly talk about the fact that we've been able to work with the Children's Trust, the Dollywood National Foundation, the Alachua County School Board, and Angel Thrives. We've worked together to be able to look at the impact of the children that have been involved in Dolly Parton Imagination Library and their scores when they enter into preschool. And so we think that with the expansion of that, so that we can enroll those parents, that we'll be able to even have, be able to show an even greater impact of what we're already putting in place. Bonnie is here. If you have any questions, she's here to be able to ask that. She is the lead principal researcher in that effort. And so we're just very pleased to have the opportunity to present to you. I'm here to answer questions. Okay. You've got some lights, so let's do some questions. Okay. Commissioner Prizia, Commissioner Wheeler, and then Commissioner Alford. Thank you so much. Thank you for the support you're giving our children. I remember getting books in the mail. I don't think they were Dolly Parton Library books, but I do remember being so excited, like, running to the mailbox. I think it was Scholastic, yeah, to get my books. So I really appreciate the work you're doing, and I know it's such a joy for the children and their families. A couple questions for you. The first is on the literacy nights, I would love to know if you all are doing follow-up impact on those literacy nights, like if you're following up or if you're providing any follow-up supports for the families that attend those literacy nights and get the kits. Absolutely. So we are tracking the kits. We're tracking the attendance, and we're also asking the parents to come back. So when they come back at the next literacy night, we're going through that curriculum. We're going through that curriculum with them to ensure that they know how to do that correctly. And if you look in your literacy packet, you'll see a phoning phone. You would be so surprised at how many parents that we introduced that to, and they had never seen anything like that. They were super excited. And, yeah, there it is right there. They were super excited to be able to recognize and know that this is a way that their child can hear themselves when they're speaking, and it helps with their phonemic awareness. So, again, we're putting these types of tools into the hands of parents. So not only are they being positively impacted and being educated about this, they're able to now, in turn, work with their child in that. And so that's why we introduced the literacy kits, because if you look at your packet, you'll see how we have a curriculum where we come and we work with the parents. We do engagement with the parents, and we show them how to interact and add everyday literacy engagements with them. But the literacy kit actually introduced a research-based developmentally appropriate curriculum for them to now work at home with their child. Right. I guess my question was more like after you've introduced the curriculum to them and you've trained them on the curriculum in these literacy nights, are you doing follow-up with the families to see if they're using the curriculum, how effective it is, and if they're seeing results with their kids? Yes. So the literacy kits were just introduced over the last two months. Oh, okay. So we were doing follow-up with the literacy nights, and we saw that as we introduced the literacy kits, now we're able to work on tracking that. And, yes, so we have a QR code. They go in. We're able to communicate with them, connect with them, and follow-up with them. And I will also add that in doing the literacy nights, we have had parents come and then say, can you do a literacy night over here? We know this location would be able to do it. But, again, we're not in, you know, those areas. Yes. And that was my other question. I know you listed 14 zip codes, but do you have literacy rates by zip code? Like, are there zip codes that you really want to target that you haven't been able to target if you don't go county-wide right off the bat? Right. So right now, our existing sites are, we are in the majority of our zip codes are in East Gainesville. So we're in 3-2, we're at the OneSource Community Center, we are at the Grove, we are at Lake Terrace, we are at the Oak Tree North, the Oak Tree South, we are at Lee's Enrichment Center, and Patty Cakes Early Learning Center. Oh, I'm sorry, at the Family Learning Center at the Gainesville Empowerment Zone. So those are our eight that we're doing right now in those key areas. And they do include Archer, McAnopee, and Hawthorne. Right. Well, yeah, right. So we are doing Archer, McAnopee, and Hawthorne in regards to, but we have not been able to expand to do literacy nights there, because right now we're at max capacity with the eight that we're doing in those areas. But those are the areas that are wanting us to be able to come and provide additional literacy supports there. I should mention that Yolanda has no paid staff assistant at this point. And having a staff assistant who could take on things that could be done to other people would free up Yolanda to do the things for which she is particularly gifted. I guess I'm part-time, I'm not full-time. I guess my question for you was, if you weren't going to expand to the entire county, but you were going to target zip codes, do you know which zip codes you would target next? Like, I guess that's my question. I will tell you, we are leading toward, we would love to be able to do Waldo. We're currently in Archer and McAnopee. Are you in Swag? Pardon? Are you in Swag? Like the southwest area of Gainesville? Linton Oaks? Okay. Yeah, so our zip codes, I think it also might be, it was in the presentation. Our current zip codes are 32601. Yolanda, if you could speak into that microphone. Oh, I'm so sorry. That's okay, just pull it up. Pull it up? Okay, all right. So our current zip codes are 32601, 32607, 32608, 32609, 32641, 32641, 32618, 32640, and 32667. And what we're asking, the zip codes that we're asking for the additional support would be part of the... All the others. Right. Yeah. And that, you know, we're looking at the Waldo, High Springs, the La Crosse, and also there's a lot of zip codes, you know, in this area that are not included in that as well. So there's some cities, there's some... I conclude. Commissioner Wheeler and then Commissioner Alford. I have a question about the parents. Yes. The parents that you have bring... that are coming in with the kids. Is there any way to track... Well, let me go back. I taught special ed for a long time, and I would invite parents to come in as volunteers to help in the classroom. I found that the parents were learning along with the kids. Yes. And this is... Are you all tracking that any way? Is there any way you can do that without embarrassing anybody, you know, the adult community? So that has been actually, I think, a strength of ours because when we're breaking down the literacy kit and we're going through the curriculum, we're able to tell when we're interacting with that parent where they are. So if there's a parent that's able to move forward, we're okay with that. But the other ones are able to come knowing that we're going to walk them through all of those activities. And I didn't mention this, but the literacy kits that we're providing are from infant, meaning all the way until fifth grade at this point. So the parents that are coming that are not in preschool, they're also getting a first grade literacy kit, second grade literacy kit, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade as well. That has a very similar manipulatives and also that curriculum that works with it. But we have, if we were to check, I can safely say that we've already connected with over 75 families in the local area within the last few months. So if the parents are non-readers, this gives them an opportunity to learn with the child. And this is important, I think. The support. It's not just the kid that needs those skills. It's the adults in the home. It's a safe way to do that because we're helping the parent teach the child. And so in supporting that parent, you see that they're going to be more likely to do it in the home as well as feel comfortable as their child's teacher. And their skills will improve as well. If there was some way that you all could monitor that, it sure would be interesting information. You know, I know that would be hard because you don't want to test an adult coming in. But at the same time, it sure would be good information if you could get it for the power of the program. So we are doing focus groups and we are doing surveys from the parents. So we may see if there's a way that we can include something along those lines where if they feel that they've had any gains in coming to the literacy nights and working with the literacy kids. And then that way, we are able to look and see if they're identifying gains. But I'm not sure that we have the resources. No, I understand. I understand what that would be really. I would love that. Yeah, that would be great information. And maybe the indicator is that they keep coming back, you know, and that they see their own growth. Yes. And the attendees are growing every single month. I have my intern here that can attest as well to say that every single time that we come that it is growing. The last one that we had, we over 35 people came to that literacy night. You're teaching the community. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Commissioner Willow. Commissioner Alford? I have to admit that when I met with Yolanda that we had a half hour scheduled. I think we went darn close to an hour. We did. Because I just got so into this whole conversation. I think you guys heard me at the library board. The scariest statistic that I've heard most recently is that 50% of adults are reading at a 6th grade or below level. And that, to me, that, to me, is why this is so important. If we can engage the parents with the kids, then we can raise the literacy level of the whole community. It has to be, you know, we have to get out there and get to these folks that aren't being reached. We are working as a commission to distribute workforce folks and have folks live where the jobs are. And that means we're going to have folks, and we do have folks living in every single zip code that are going to need these resources. And I do support taking this to every zip code in the county if we can. We also talked about a program where we might have firefighters and police officers and commissioners reading books. And I talked to Yolanda about that, too, and she said that they're actually going ahead and getting the permissions to allow that to happen because, like, we can't just do that because there's copyright issues and things like that. So they are moving forward with that. And if we're going to work with our communications department and put this out as a resource for all kids, then it needs to be for all kids in Alachua County. We can't just say, well, we decided not to do your zip code. I just don't. I feel like we're going to do one thing. We have to do the other thing. That's my thought. I did have one question. Are there any resources for kids that are growing up in a Spanish-speaking household? I'm so glad that you asked that. So we're super excited that the Dolly Parton Imagination Library has actually opened up. And now they'll be offering Spanish as of next month. So we are super excited to be able to have that. Yes. So I just want to say I would – I don't know. We know if we were to fund this, we would have to not fund something else because I assume with Tommy sitting at the other end, he would tell us that we have a budget right now that would require that, I guess. But I would be willing to try to find this money to make this happen because I think that the whole future of our county rests on us working on literacy issues and putting our money where our mouth is on this. Thank you, Commissioner. Yeah, I'm a supporter of the program. I think you all know that. I think that $31 per child for the entire year is a – and then leveraging the infrastructure that already exists to put books in kids and parents and families' hands I think is a great use of our resources. And so I would be in support of it as well. Commissioner Prezio? Yeah. I mean, as you all know, literacy has been kind of a big push for me since we started the conversation about the countywide literacy initiative, and I do – I totally support this. I feel like it's light, like, serving that many zip codes and only having $20,000 for literacy nights and $29,000 for a staff system. I mean, that's not even a living wage. So I don't know if that's a very part-time position or – Right. It's part-time, and we're hoping to be able to figure out ways to leverage it. Okay. Okay, great. I'm glad to hear that. I just – So people – I want to make sure we're not, yeah, creating, you know, another person who's struggling themselves as they're working in these programs that we're trying to support. Yeah. I'm definitely supportive of the program. I'm sure we can find the $140,000 – Well, and I would say to my colleagues on the Library Governing Board, that's another potential place that we can reach out to Ms. Livingston when we have that next opportunity because there's – Maybe they can partner with us. Yeah, maybe we can partner with them as well. With the cost. Okay. Any – anything else? So we're about to get into our budget discussions in the coming weeks, and so thank you for the presentation. Is there anything else we want to do, Commissioner? Do we – You want to refer it to staff? I would like to – yeah, I would like to make the motion that we refer this to staff and we want to look for ways that we can fund this and maybe partner with some other county groups like the library or even friends of the library that might be willing to help fund this so that we can make this happen. Second. Yeah. Okay. Got a motion to second to refer to the staff. That's the best option that you could have asked for, so thank you for that presentation. Any further discussion? Any public discussion? Bonnie, thank you for being here. Children's Trust, we got some really good outcome results from her when this was presented to the Children's Trust. Yes. Okay. Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yolanda, thank you so much. Thank you. We will be in touch. Okay. Commissioners, who is here – I'd like maybe to do some agenda management. Who is here for the appointments to the boards? Would you all mind if we do those real quick? Yeah, let's do these. All right. So why don't we go ahead, Mr. Clerk, we're going to do the board appointments. So we'll start with local planning, then we'll do the Elastford County Regional Airport Authority, then we'll do the rural concerns, then we'll do the environmental protection, and then the Disability Advisory Committee, and then the Historical Commission. If you are here for any of those appointments, let's go ahead and open it up. Come forward if you'd like to speak to us. Tell us your name. Tell us what board you're looking to be appointed to, and then we'll go through and do the election of each of them. Does that be okay, Commissioners? Yep. Sounds good. Okay. Wes, come forward. You get us started. Thank you for being here. If you guys could queue up, we'd love to hear from you and just tell us who you are and which board you're applying for and why. Thank you, Mr. Chair, Commissioners. I am Wes Wheeler. I'm applying for the Environmental Protection Advisory Committee. I want to thank you for your time. I looked through the packets, the applicants last night. You've got some tough choices. A lot of great folks who are applying, and I wish you well. Thank you for your time and consideration. Wes, thank you. Thank you for applying. Okay. Next person, please. Todd, we're going to get to you. I promise. We're working on it. Yep. Okay. My name is Mary Crenshaw. I'm applying for the Rural Concerns Committee. I'm just an ordinary citizen who's chosen to make my home in the rural areas of the county for the past 45 years. I've been a taxpayer and property owner for over 40 years, and I've raised my children here. I retired from the city of Gainesville after 20 years, which included work with the city attorney's office and Wild Spaces Public Places Program, so I'm familiar with how municipal government works. I also have over 20 years of experience in the legal field. Those of us that reside in rural areas do so for a myriad of reasons, from just enjoying the beauty of nature, space for gardening and raising livestock, peace and privacy, less congestion and traffic, the ability to see stars in the night sky, and many other reasons. I've seen and experienced a lot of growth and change in this county in the last 45 years, and as a long-time rural resident, I believe I can offer some valuable input to help protect and shape the future of the county's rural areas. If you choose to give me the opportunity, I'm prepared to be a receptive and productive member of the committee. Thank you. Mary, thank you. Thanks for waiting, and thanks for your contributions today. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon. It's an honor to be before you this august body for consideration for rural concerns as well. My name is David Tuthill. I am the co-owner, along with my partner, Rebecca Fox, of River and Root Farm. We've owned the farm now. It's 30 acres on Racetrack Road, up on County Road 225. I think Rebecca and I were here for a proclamation a few months ago for Agricultural Day. We think really highly of the work you guys do to protect rural, our way of life. I personally am a fifth-generation Floridian. I come from Pinellas County. I guess you could say some of the first climate refugees after the hurricanes out there really tested our resilience out in Pinellas County, and we just decided we wanted to have a different way of life, and we got our 30 acres. It's being run historically as a blueberry and bamboo farm. We are very committed to regenerative practices, teaching people about regenerative practices and creating a really robust agritourism business out in northeast Alachua. As Ken said when I did my application, it's about as rural as it gets out there, so the concerns of the rural community, both in Alachua County and North Florida in general, are very important to both of us, and I drew the straw for this one, so we will continue to be strong stewards and advocates for protecting wild Florida, old Florida, telling that story, building a dynamic agritourism business for ourselves and for the community, and to continue to be great stewards and educators of the land. And I would really be honored to be in this position and rural concerns. I think, you know, there's not a lot of young farmers out there that are getting into this line of work, and we need more of them out there, and those people need to be involved in government. And I have a lot of experience in government and civic affairs, I understand, especially at the state level, state policy very well. And so I will continue, no matter what happens today, I will continue to be a strong, staunch advocate for regenerative farming, rural Florida, wild Florida, and the rural concerns of Alachua County and North Florida. So thank you very much for your consideration. Thank you, David. Thank you for being here. All right. Anyone else? Okay. Mr. Clerk, let's get started with the local planning committee. Yes, sir. We have two appointments for that, and we have three applicants. They're Darrell Bagby, Rodney Stavina, and Terry Thomas, and I'll call on each commissioner for their top two, if that works. Yep. Top two. Two nominees, please. Stavina and Thomas. Commissioner Chestnut, your two nominees, please. Stavina and Bagby. Commissioner Prizia, your two nominees. Stavina and Thomas. Commissioner Wheeler, your two nominees, please. Stavina and Bagby. Chair Cornell. Thanks, guys. They stuck you with the choice. I'll go with Stavina and Thomas. Move Stavina and Thomas for the local planning agency. Second. Motion and a second. Any discussion? Anyone from the public? Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Stavina and Thomas, welcome to the planning commission. Okay. Next up, Mr. Gordon. This brings us to the regional airport authority appointments. We have one appointment. We have three nominees. There's Rawston, Bartlett, Chuck Parker, and Fred Posner, and I'll call on each commissioner for their one nominee. Commissioner Wheeler, your one nominee, please. Boy, these are all good people today. A lot of good appointments. Oh, my gosh. Fred Posner. Commissioner Parizia, your nominee, please. Yes, sir. Commissioner Chestnut, your nominee. Posner. Commissioner Alford. Posner. I'll make it unanimous. Ms. Posner for our Gainesville-Electric County Airport Authority appointment. Second. Motion and a second. Any discussion? Any public discussion? Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Welcome, Mr. Posner, to the airport authority. All right. Next slide. Mr. Chair, that brings us to the Rural Concerns Advisory Committee. We have two nominees and one appointee, Mary Crenshaw and David Tuthill. And I'll call on each commissioner for their one. And when we do the motion, if we can just add Kevin Crossner. Sounds good. Wrap that up. Commissioner Chestnut, your nominee, please. Mary Crenshaw. Commissioner Parizia, your nominee, please. David Tuthill. Commissioner Wheeler, your nominee. That's a tough one, isn't it? It is. It is because they represent both sides of the county that we really need represented, you know. Mary Crenshaw. Commissioner Alford, your nominee. Mary Crenshaw. And Chair Cornell, your nominee. I was going to say David Tuthill, but I think Mary's got three, so I'll say David Tuthill. Okay. We need them all. Yeah, okay. Can I just quickly say, David, please keep your application in and active because there are often positions on that board, so. And you can attend meetings. Yes, please. Even if you're not on the board. Yes. Move Kevin Corris for the member of the county extension office and Mary Crenshaw for the member in unincorporated area. Second. Motion and a second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. David, thank you for being here and thank you for being active. I know one of our grantees and you did a great job with your farm, so. And tell Rebecca we said hi. Okay, next one. Mr. Clerk. Okay. This is a little bit more complicated. We have several applicants. Rauston Bartlett, Wes Wheeler, Bob Tansig, Richard DeVose, Annick Whitfield, Jennifer Worth, Sarisa Boudou, Maren Hawk, Roland Fulton, Rodney Sabina, Jan Fretzner, and George Papati. The first category is for two nominees for a term ending June 30th, 2029, so I guess we'll call for two. So, hold on a second. So we've got two for the citizens at large, three for the citizens at large, and all these names are the same. Yep. And then we have one for the alternate, so why don't we just do our top three. Top three. See if that sorts out. Right. Is that okay? Yep. Yes, sir. Go ahead, Mr. Clerk. Commissioner Prizia, your top three, please. Wes Wheeler, Bob Tansig, and Sarisha Boudou. Sarisha Boudou. I'm sorry, what was the third name? Sarisha Boudou, Bob Tansig, and Wes Wheeler. Okay. Commissioner Chestnut, your three nominees, please. My three. The first one would be Barlett, Wheeler, and Fulton. Sorry, what was the third one? Fulton. Fulton. Okay. Commissioner Alford, your three nominees, please. Bob Tansig, Richard Devereaux, and Wes Wheeler. Commissioner Wheeler, your three nominees, please. Wes Wheeler, Bob Tansig, and oh my goodness gracious, Richard Devereaux. Commissioner Cornell, your three nominees, please. Wes Wheeler, Richard Devereaux, and Roland Fulton. Fulton. West Wheeler, and Bob Tansig for the two citizens for a full term ending June 30th, 2029. And what about? Because they got the most votes. The others are tied, so we're going to have a conversation. I think Richard Devereaux has three. Correct. I have Devereaux at three, Tansig at three, and Wes Wheeler at five. Okay. And Richard Devereaux for the citizen at large appointment for June 2028. And then I think Fulton has two for the alternate. So does, so does, oh no, you're right. Richard Devereaux. Okay, yeah. And Roland Fulton for our alternate. Good. Okay. So do we have a, we have a second? Second. All right. So we've got Wes Wheeler, Richard Devereaux for the term ending 2029. No problem. Yeah. Tansig for the 2029, Richard for 2028, and then Roland as the alternate. Yes. All right. Any further discussion? And I want to say there were amazing candidates for this. Oh my gosh. Absolutely amazing candidates. I've never seen a list of more qualified people to do this work, so. It took me two hours to get through just the resumes. The resumes, yeah. Y'all had a tough decision. Yeah, and. If we could please, for those not appointed, reach out to them, ask them to keep their applications current. Definitely. And then certainly they're welcome. Climate Advisory Board. Right. We have so many other advisory boards where these folks would be excellent members of, so putting that out there. Yes, the CCAC is still taking applications, so I will definitely follow up with them. Yeah, please follow up with them. Especially, I know a couple of them indicated that what was interesting for them, Saoirse and a few others. All right. Any public discussion to the motion? Wes, thanks for hanging out with us. All right. Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Okay. Mr. Clerk. We're almost home here. Do we want to go back to the Florida Workforce Housing? No, let's do the Disability Advisory Committee. Oh, I'm sorry. Those are annual reports. Yeah. Okay. That's it. All right. Thank you for our agenda. We're back to G2, Florida Workforce Housing Council. And thank you, Mr. Ralston, for your patience. Who do we have here? Give us a presentation. I see some familiar faces. Mr. Chair, commissioners, hi again. It's good to be back in this chamber with arrows not coming at me. So, I appreciate it for the record. My name is Lee Feldman. May's early, Lee. It's true. I'm just kidding. My name is Lee Feldman. I am a strategic advisor with the firm, the Euclid Group. And I'm here today with Mike Strutt with Plenary. And we're here today to talk to you about the Florida Workforce Housing Council. We have had the pleasure of working with staff, working with constitutional officers. We've met with individual commissioners. We've had a presentation before the AHAC. We've had a presentation before the Housing Finance Authority. And we're here today to present this formally to the commission with the idea that you would take some action to move this forward if you so deem that you'd like to. So, I'm going to turn it over to Mike now to run through the presentation. I believe some of you have already seen this, either through Zoom presentation or through the committee presentations. When Mike is done, I'll go into next steps and talk about some of the conditions that would be unique to Alachua County that we would present as well. So, Mike. Thank you. Good afternoon and appreciate giving us the time to speak about this program. Welcome, Mike. So, the Florida Workforce Housing Council that we're working to set up within the state of Florida is a unique program that will help expand and deliver workforce or middle-income housing opportunities to people within specified income bands. This program and this council would be set up to have implementation of workforce housing as its sole purpose and by the structure would be controlled by public entities and define specific criteria that all projects that are brought into this program must meet to ensure that those objectives of workforce housing, attainable housing are achieved. The reason for this program and taking it forward and seeking to implement it is because there's a recognized need throughout the state and certainly in parts of Alachua County to provide housing that is affordable to folks who have incomes in the middle range of the income bracket, which generally is defined as 80% to 120% of AMI. And, but in particular, and this is kind of one of the specific unique criteria that we've talked about for Alachua County would be working to expand that down to the 60% bracket as well. What's unique about this particular approach and program, which is modeled off a program that's been implemented for over the past decade in California and taken the best practices and lessons learned from that program to implement here is it results in public ownership rather than private ownership of the housing facilities. But it leverages private financing, which is tax exempt and private sector management and ownership to defined criteria of quality throughout the life of those facilities, all while retaining public sector oversight and control over the program. What the program will implement through its defined criteria is income restrictions and therefore reduced rent within these housing facilities. And so any property that is brought into the program would be mandated to offer its units only to people, to tenants who are in the workforce housing income brackets. And for each individual project, the specifics of which of those brackets, whether it's 60, 80, 100, or 120, will be predefined before that project proceeds. And for any existing tenants in those facilities who live in those units already, who qualify within those income brackets, their rents would be immediately reduced, a minimum of 10% from what they currently are. And all other rents established for the program for new tenants coming in there would also be set at that reduced level as a baseline. And there's a multi-prong test of what rents can be established at initially, as well as their growth. And it's always the lesser of each of those three prongs. So it's a minimum of a 10% reduction versus current rents. The second prong is rents that are established by HUD as being considered affordable for that income bracket. And the third prong is growth over time. It can never grow greater than 3% year over year. So it has to meet the lesser of whichever each of those are in each individual year. Over time, as you'll see on the graphic here, while initially you may end up with a 10% or 15% difference versus market rate rents, given, you know, as we've seen a couple of years ago, the drastic annual increases in market rate rents, that gap will continue to grow and these units will continue to become more and more affordable over time. As I talked a little bit about before, the structure of the council comes together by multiple municipalities and counties within the state of Florida joining together under an interlocal agreement. And that establishes the board, which establishes that public governance structure that's controlled by the public sector. Alachua County, by joining the council as a founding member, would have control over how the program is implemented in Alachua County, as well as broad oversight of the council as a whole. And through its role, would also receive a benefit from any project that's delivered throughout the state, if other counties and cities join the program to implement there through nominal issuance fees for each individual project. But the council, as an entity, not the county, is the entity that sponsors each individual project, subject to the restrictions of each member that they have set for its implementation within their jurisdiction. And so through this structure, you know, how is the county protected? It's the council acts as the conduit for the issuance of the debt. So there's no recourse back to the county. There's no reliance on the county's credit or anything of that nature for the financing of the projects. The bonds are fully non-recourse or with recourse only to the physical property themselves, not back to the county or the council or any entity of that nature. All the costs and expenses of the individual project are funded by that project itself. So this requires no subsidies or ongoing support or anything of that nature. And that, you know, validating that is all key to the initial underwriting of the bonds because those bonds for acquiring and bringing the project into this program rely solely on that project supporting itself subject to these restrictions for that project. The leasing services are managed by a professional property manager and the property condition has defined criteria within the project documents and the bond documents as covenants that mandate their ongoing maintenance and quality over time to make sure that not only is this an investment on day one, but it's an investment for decades to come to ensure that these are good quality places to live. Property value here at the end as well. So while a project or a facility is within the program, it is held through the council. But once the debt that was used for that particular facility has been paid off in roughly 35 years or so, any project that is within Alachua County, that property transfers free and clear the title of that property to the county. And so the county has the option at that point in time to do whatever it would like with that property, whether to kind of re-enroll it in the program and spin it forward, whether to take it and use it for a different use, maybe through its affordable housing programs, whether to sell the property and use that value from that for other county purposes. But that's all within the county discretion to make those decisions. And there's a debt-free title to that property that the county would hold. So summary of the public benefits of this program is it's a mechanism, one tool in a broader toolbox to address the varied housing needs that exist. And this one is focused on an approach to dedicate hundreds of units to the workforce or middle-income residents for several decades by reducing and restricting rent to affordable levels for those citizens. To the extent there's any excess net operating income that comes off of the project in any given year, that money goes to the county. The county doesn't incur any liability costs or responsibilities. There's no request or need for any payment or subsidy to support the program. There is an exemption from ad valorem taxes under Florida statutes because of the income restriction covenants of the property, so similar to any other property that is implemented in that manner. And the county, as I mentioned, gets titled to the property once the debt used for its initial financing is repaid. So that's kind of the end of the initial overview. I'd be happy to have questions. The one thing I'll say is actually to maybe close out is through the conversations we've had with you all and with the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee and others, we've received some feedback. And one of the unique things about this program and the way that it's set up is that each county or city that joins the council has the ability to take the baseline criteria, which apply for any project in the program of restricting the rents and so forth, but then tailor the program within your jurisdiction in your county to how it is implemented here. And so we've identified, based upon that feedback, some specific additional restrictions or tailoring of the program for how it would be authorized if the county so chose to join the council and implement the program here. And so in particular, the proposed approach, based upon that feedback, would be an initial authorization of up to 500 units. And given the nature of the projects, that's probably about two apartment facilities that could be implemented. There would be no restrictions on tenants, so it would maintain open access to all qualified residents, regardless of age or student status or working status or otherwise. And so the projects would not be allowed to implement any specific age restrictions to be offered only as senior housing, for example. That would not be allowed. It would have to be open to anyone who meets the qualifying income bans. Similarly, for students, it cannot be offered or tailored to be offered to students. It has to be made available to all qualifying tenants. It won't be allowed to have or maintain any other discriminatory occupancy standards. In addition, to further tailor the program, the proposal is that under the initial authorization, any projects implemented by the council within Alachua County must be located west of Main Street in Gainesville, Florida. They will have to include in their capital investment plan that is used to underwrite the project and then implement it, programs to implement energy efficiency upgrades for those facilities. And that helps ensure that, obviously, the utility expenses of the tenants are also affordable, as well as, in particular, here is part of that underwriting case for the particular project, maximizing or optimizing the number of 60% units that are allocated within that facility. Okay, we've got a couple of lights here. Commissioner Prisian and Commissioner Alford. I guess I just wanted to give my fellow board members sort of some light on what the Animal Housing Advisory Committee discussed. I think they saw this as a good tool in the toolbox. You know, it's not going to be like a, it's not going to be the only thing. It's not a silver bullet, but, you know, we need all the tools we can get to. The nice thing about this, I think, largely, it's targeting a lot of the student housing that is not really student housing anymore because all the student housing has moved closer to campus. And so there's a lot of housing opportunities down in the South 34th Street corridor, the 20th, you know, that area off of South of Archer Road. It seems to be like one of the primary targets, I would say, of these types of projects. And I think that will help us to retain some affordable housing or begin to build affordable housing as the market continues to change and flux. We did feel pretty strongly about making sure that we did keep it as a limited thing to start out with so that we could kind of monitor what was happening over time. The other thing was that we wanted to, we wanted these to continue to be mixed income. Oh, good, one of our members is here too. We wanted these to continue to be mixed income housing developments and not, you know, concentrate poverty or challenges in one area. But we also wanted to make sure that we were, if we were giving access to this bond capacity, that it was really focused on affordable housing. So trying to put some parameters around the levels, you know, that they needed to have of different affordable housing or at least a cap on, say, you know, 40% had to be 80% or below and the remainder of the project could be flexible, something like that, you know, thinking through some of that piece. And maybe we could ask staff for some recommendations on that based on what they've seen in other projects. And then the last thing I think is that the part about us being able to own these and to have title to them and being able to have first-rater refusal if something goes wrong is really important so that as we're using our bond capacity, we have the opportunity so we don't end up in another sun rising scenario where we've got vouchers or we've got other housing, affordable housing connected to this and then we're stuck, like, trying to scramble to find the funding to buy it out. So trying to make sure that, you know, we have that capability as well. Those were the big things. I guess my question for you all that I didn't ask before and so that the public understands, essentially your goal with this project is just to have access to low-cost debt, right, low-cost bond capacity. But are there equity partners that are, like, waiting in the wings for these types of projects? Is that something that Plenary is already teeing up? Like, where is that kind of conversation going? Yeah, good question. And one point of clarification I want to make before I answer that question, just based on some of the information you shared there, is this program does not touch or utilize the county's bond capacity at all. It doesn't require any of the allocation for the housing finance authority or the county either. So it sits fully separate from that. So that's another just advantage of the structure. And so then as far as the financing and the equity, there is no equity ownership involved. The ownership is held by the public sector. 100% of the financing that's needed for the project is raised through the tax-exempt debt markets. And so Plenary's role is as a service provider. And we provide the service to the council of going out and identifying the project, structuring them, raising the debt, and then providing that management and oversight of the projects over time to make sure that they're implemented in accordance with the program on behalf of the council. But there's no equity ownership, no private ownership or private profit from the ownership of the assets. And is there an attempt to get LIHTC or some kind of tax, no tax credits, no equity, exempt from all of that? Coming off of the tax roll. Yeah, I know. In exchange, we're giving them. Correct. So with regards to the management then and sort of the long-term, like how are you, or is it the rents and management fees that are being charged that are going to be what fills the bucket for long-term maintenance and care for things like the roof, the air conditioning, all of that? Yes. And so in particular, one of the things that I didn't really touch on when I went through this, but the council, so as I talked about, the council has kind of the baseline parameters and guidelines for the program or requirements for the program. And then I talked about the additional specific constraints that could be set up and tailored by Alachua County. But the details of those baseline requirements kind of skipped over beyond the income restrictions. But in addition to the income restrictions, they set out requirements for what the financial model that is used to underwrite the additional issuance of the debt and the purchase of the property to bring it in must include. And that requires that that pro forma validates that the funds both pay for, obviously, management and maintenance of the property on the annual basis, but also funds a capital reserve for major maintenance and rehabilitation over time. And the size of that funding must be consistent with the size of the funding for capital maintenance that a private purchaser of a market rate property would put into their facility. And so that makes sure that this stream of money is established or carved out within the revenues of the project, not just to do the daily or the annual management, but also when the roof needs to be replaced or the AC units need to be replaced, the irregular maintenance, that there's a fund available for that. And when it comes to the rents and like, are there a lot of fees then that come along with that then? Or is it a one price fits all? Like they're not going to be like, oh yeah, now you have a laundry fee and now you have a pet fee and now you have a parking fee. Yeah, it would be entirely consistent with kind of standards. So there may be something nominal for pets that would go in there, that sort of thing. But otherwise it would just be rent and then your utility costs that you would pay through. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Halford. Oh, thank you. Quick question. So, you know, we have our own implementation conditions that we've asked for. I just wanted to ask, will the restriction to not exceed 500 affect the pro forma in any positive or negative way? Or is that number workable for you guys? That's a large enough number that that's okay? Yes. I'd say generally most projects probably have between 200 and 350 units within them. It's two pilot projects is what we're talking about. So it's probably two projects. If the first one we found was 300 units, then the 500 might be a bit of a constraint to do the second one. But you'd come ask us and we'll... We'd come back and say, hey, we found a second one. And the second question is, because of the economies of scale, are you only looking at larger complexes? Okay. Because we have some smaller complexes, particularly in our outlying areas that, you know, this would be great for. But I understand the economies of scale. Yeah, it's largely driven by just, there's the issuance costs of putting a debt financing like that together. And that only ends up kind of... That only works. ...work once you get over about 200 units or so. Yeah. I kind of knew that, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Anyway, I really appreciate you guys taking the time and effort to look at the things that we need here in Alachua County. I'm particularly grateful for adding the, including in the capital investment plan, the energy efficiency requirements, because I know some of these older complexes have real challenges in that area. So thank you for adding that in there. But I think this is the, like Commissioner Prissey said, I think this is another great tool in the toolbox. So thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. A couple quick questions for me. Where else has Plenary done this around the state? So it has not yet been implemented in the state of Florida. So the program, the concept of the program started in California in about 2015 or so. And then that's where Plenary became familiar with it. We also have an office in Los Angeles. And as we got involved in the program there, we, by being here in Florida as well, saw the housing challenges here. And so I've been working over the past few years to work within the state statutes to determine how this structure could be implemented here. What do you envision the term of the founding members? So if we get involved with the city of Moorhaven and is there anyone else you're speaking to? Yeah, we've had conversations or are having conversations with three or four other cities and counties. We've tried to kind of tailor that to places where this is an identified need and they kind of have initiatives already addressing affordable housing and so forth. So I would envision over the, hopefully the balance of this year and into next year, then the additional members would grow. So we've started conversations with Hillsborough County, Pinellas County, West Palm Beach. Clarified. Commissioner, I think with regard to founding members, there would be two founding members. Then there would be other members that would come on as projects were identified within their communities. They can join through interlocal agreement. But Moorhaven and Alachua County would be the two founding members. Okay. And that term would be, I guess, to extend through the term of the project's financing, which is typically 30 years or 40 years? That's right. It'd be 30 to 40 years. It'll just depend on the market at the time the financing is done. But yeah, the term would extend through then. Yeah. Okay. So I'm in favor, Commissioner. It's another tool. It's something we could try. It's something that we've been talking about, trying to figure out how to, I mean, essentially what we're talking about is taking property off the tax rolls that would either be redeveloped into the private sector at a higher rate and providing more workforce housing by using tax-exempt bonds and exemption from ad valorem with an operator that would handle that on our behalf, limiting the exposure of the county from both the debt capacity and also our own funding. So it's basically using funds of the private sector through the advanced tax benefits. Okay. Commissioner Prisky. And then Commissioner Chestnut. Or Chuck, did you want to go first? Tommy, yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Chuck. No, no. I just wanted to state that I support it. And I think that one of the things that impressed me the most is that there's a maintenance part of it in terms of what has happened. I can remember, I hate bringing up Kennedy Homes, but it was a housing division that had the lack of maintenance, and it got so bad that they had to condemn it. But having this component to this makes it more viable and make it last a lot longer, and the maintenance will keep it viable for more renters in the future or owners of whatever. Yeah. One thing I just wanted to speak to that point as well, those program guidelines that are kind of the baseline criteria of the council also include that Alachua County, being the authorizing sponsor of any projects within the county, has the right, not the obligation, but you have the right to provide oversight of the projects here. And so, in particular, you would be able to oversee and validate that those maintenance funds are being maintained, that that maintenance is being performed, and then the right to kind of intervene and cause us and the council to act differently if those standards are not being met. Yeah, it's a good control. Mr. Crosby, and then Commissioner Prizzi. Mr. Chair, so from a staff perspective, we have had these conversations, and we also include the clerk in some of these initial conversations. I would say that we have not totally vetted everything about the program. I mean, it has been very, what you've heard and what they've presented other places. I would say that if the board wants us to continue to look at this tool in the toolbox, we're not disagreeable to that. Nothing I've seen, I haven't seen a lot of red flags, if you would. There are some questions I think that the board needs to have. We need to have better information, so as staff and the attorney's office, I think we would like to work in conjunction with them. This is kind of new to Florida. I mean, you've heard that. It does come off the tax roll, so there is a financial impact to the county. We kind of probably need to vet out what that looks like, especially under the new legislative statutes that passed just a few years ago that we've been talking about, housing coming off the tax roll. So what that impact is, I would like to get a better understanding of the occupancy level needed to support, because obviously this is mainly supported by rent payments is how you're repaying it. So what kind of rating they would get from a bonding agency if they're going to get a rating. There are some questions, I think, financially, with the clerk's office, we need to further vet. And also, I'm sure the attorney's office, I won't speak for the attorney, but I'm sure legally we need to look at some of those things. And so if the board would like us to continue down this path, I would ask that you refer to staff and we bring it up at the budget meetings in August when we talk about affordable housing and CSS and those times, probably a good time to then kind of vet it into the entirety of the other tools that you're wanting to use to then say, yeah, you know, we're comfortable to get the legal documentation, the paperwork together to do these things and who we'll be working with and who the other founding members would be, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what I would ask. It would help us to dig a lot deeper in and have some comfort in what we bring back to the board as a recommendation. Okay? Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Commissioner Prisky. And when we did that, perhaps we would have a pro forma of a sample first project, what that might look like as far as the taxes that might come off versus the housing that would be provided. Yes, sir. Okay. Commissioner Prisky, you want to put together a motion? Yeah, that, I mean, that's great because that's exactly what I was going to say is I think the next step is refer to staff so we can get more of the nitty gritty. Like we've had the high, kind of high level, but really being able to understand the, how it works, you know, like the devils and the details of like what is it all, what do the documents actually look like? The other thing that I would ask, so I would move the staff review the program implementation with the conditions that the county has already put on it along with the request that the applicant has made and bring it back to us in August with the additional request that staff come up with a recommended minimum with regards to the affordability components that we can always adjust if a project comes forward that's needed and it makes sense, but also that we look into some form of tenant relationship being involved in governance so that we have a tenant representative on the council or in some way represented in terms of the governance and the long-term advisory board or something, some kind of structure that would allow the tenants to have some say and being able to report and give us information about what's going on in those locations because I think what I've seen in all projects that I've been working on with colleagues across the country is that those that have some tenant oversight tend to have the best outcomes when it comes to long-term maintenance and management and so I'd like to see that built into the project if at all possible. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second to refer this to staff with those additional items as far as recommended minimal affordability and a tenant rep for governance. Bring that back to us in August with some recommendations. All right, any further discussion from this board? All right, let's open it up to the public. Is there anyone from the public that wishes to speak to the motion and what they have heard from the presentation? Mr. Blunt, welcome. I'm a member of the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee and the Housing Finance Authority and the Alachua County Housing Authority. I'm not speaking for those groups. I'm just saying that so you know I'm not just giving you a gut reaction. I know some stuff. Your League of Cities and your Association of Counties are so capable of forming this kind of alliance. You have talent. Shut up. You have talent in your staff, your housing division, your growth management, Ralston, Candy, Claudia, Jeff. All these folks have the talent and knowledge to do this kind of idea. I would prefer to see you channel all your energy and resources into actual builders of units. consultancy does not make a bedroom for anybody. What I see is a structure being built for the opportunity of collecting administrative salaries and that resource needs to go into actual units. There's a lot involved in putting together financing in the managing facility and so I do hear what colleagues said but from our staff's perspective that is not something that I think we would be asking them to do with regards to putting together financing and actually running a facility so I don't necessarily agree with that. And we're not always the most efficient but either financially or time-wise to make things happen. Right. Okay. Any further discussion to the motion on the floor? Okay. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? That motion is unanimous. Okay. Mr. Feldman, thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you. Time invested. We'll keep moving it forward. Okay. Mr. Clerk, I think that brings us to the Disability Advisory Committee for plan. Yes, sir. All right. So we've got the Alaska County Citizens Disability Advisory Committee Annual Report. Recommended action is to accept the report. They have graciously stayed with us through the proclamation and we really appreciate the work that has been done over the last year and look forward to the report. Welcome. Okay. Go ahead and pull that microphone up and that way, there you go. My name is Christy King and I am the current chair for the Citizens with Disabilities Advisory Committee. And our co-chair is Jacqueline Trento. The Citizens with Disabilities Advisory Committee assists the Equal Opportunity Office in reviewing the county program, services, and facilities to ensure equal opportunity and equal access to people with disabilities. Committee members are individuals, comprised of individuals with disabilities or advocates for people with disabilities and we assist the county in implementing its responsibilities under disability rights laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act. Committee members are invited to participate in ADA walkthroughs of newly constructed or renovated county facilities to evaluate accessibility and raise concerns regarding any potential barriers to access. We recently participated in an ADA assessment of a county department's programs and services and will assist in reviewing the recommendations of the consultant. The committee works with the Equal Opportunity Office on promoting disability awareness and educating the public on disability rights and services and rights and resources. We have two upcoming events, one we were previously mentioned, which is the 2026 Disability Awareness Expo, which will be held on Wednesday, July 29th, 2026 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Multi-Purpose Center from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear from a panel of speakers regarding disability rights, services, and products. And as well as having the opportunity to visit booths to learn more about, to learn about accessible products and services and resources for available to citizens with disabilities in Alachua County. The committee is currently solicit, is also currently solicitating applications for the 2026 Disability Friendly Employer Award, which will be presented in October in observance of the National Disability Employment Awareness Month. For more information on these events, you can please visit the Equal Opportunity Office website or call 352-374-5275. Okay. Thank you. Any comments? President? Thank you for all of your hard work. I know that it a lot of times goes unappreciated and unnoticed throughout the year as you guys are doing this, but we really, really do appreciate it. And I hope that everyone in the county knows what an amazing disability resource we have in your committee and in the work that our EEO office does. and if there are ever anything that you all recognize that we're missing, please do bring it to our attention. Thank you. Commissioner Alford and Commissioner Wheeler. Yeah, I have a quick question. So during your expo, will there be included materials and information for families that are dealing with or taking care of someone that is autistic or has similar kinds of disabilities? Well, we are currently recruiting vendors to participate in the expo. And so, you know... Depends on who comes. Correct. In the past, has that been someone that has been there? I had someone text me and ask me that question. Well, I do say that one of the vendors that is going to be there is the Center for Independent Living, which provides... Right. a wide range of services to all people with disabilities. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Excellent. Commissioner Wheeler. I would just invite you maybe to check in with the animal shelter, too, that we have shelter dogs that might, you know, serve as service animals or therapy dogs or just at least lighten up the energy of the place. So, you know, check and see if they have a dog or two that they could bring in that would kind of, you know, make it festive. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. All right. Thank you for your presentation. Appreciate it. Okay. Mr. Clerk, next item. Mr. Chair, that takes us the Historical Commission Annual Report, Work Plan, and Accomplishments. Okay. I see you come forward. Yes. Thank you for being here and thank you for hanging out with us. Hello. Hello. I'm Camisha Alexis, staff with Growth Management and staff liaison to the Historical Commission. I am here to introduce Trey Asner, the chair of the Historical Commission, and he will present the Historical Commission's work. Okay. Trey, thank you for your patience. You have been here since we started. So... Good afternoon, commissioners. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'll be going over the accomplishments and work plan for the Alachua County Historical Commission for you. So, let's first talk about the mission of the board, its history, and the members that currently are on the board. The goal of the board is to promote, preserve, and protect Alachua County's historic resources, keeping the past present for current generations. What are the responsibilities and duties of this board? We provide historical research and provide documentation as needed for exhibits, programs, and pamphlets that have to do with the county's history. We encourage local organizations such as museums, libraries, archives, archaeological, and geological societies and other institutions to have historical objectives, which we support. We assist this board in locating grant funding and, when directed by the BOCC, assist in the preparation of grant applications. We make recommendations to the BOCC in regard to the modifications and revocations of scenic highways and corridors because our natural resources and scenic corridors are very important to this county. We review and we request letters for support regarding applications to Florida Communities Trust and other grant programs that require review and documentation of historic resources. And we also review site nominations for the National Register of Historic Places. We review applications for site markers, tablets, and monuments to commemorate historical sites, events, and individuals. You can tell a lot about a community based on what they erect the sign for. Some of the history of this board. So, in 1956, the Alachua County Historic Society was created. In 1972, this society evolved into the Alachua County Historical Commission, which replaced the historical society. And as of this date, July 14th, 2026, we continue our mission to operate as an advisory board to help protect and interpret Alachua County's history. Who are the members on this board? Melanie Barr, she's here, out back, in the back of the room. Ashley Wood, myself, Trey Asner, Barry Baumstein, Caitlin Hoff Mahoney, Karen Kirkman, Dr. Jacob Gordon, Val Marroca Fernandez, Dr. Cynthia White, and Gerald Cheeseborough. We have a great group of people who bring expertise and insight into the management of our board. What are the accomplishments and goals of this board? We provided support and guidance to the Newberry Historical Society on proper object handling and the preservation of their historical collection. We completed an Alachua County Talks interview about the history of Alachua County to celebrate the bicentennial, which I was happy to be a part of. We completed a marker text for the Cuscoilla area and that county marker has been placed on the site and there's an application in progress to upgrade to a state historic marker. We provided a recommendation to the BOCC to support certified local government status and offered input on that. We provided guidance to the community planning collaborative consultants with their work on the city of Gainesville Heritage Trail and we are, we've completed a data gathering on the history of the Alachua County commissioners from 1824 to the present day. Oops. Wow. Hey, the present's gone quickly become the past. What do we like here or not? Good for you. Are there any notable ones that we should know about? You'll find out soon enough. We completed two historical readings at the BOCC regular meetings, the prettiest and oldest block of buildings on North Main Street presented by Miss Melanie Barr, resilience and education, the stories of Union Academy, Midbane and Lincoln High by Gerald Cheesborough and Melanie Barr and Dr. Jacob Gordon organized the first biennial roundtable of African American history. Members participated as panelists and participants. member Karen Kirkman assisted the county in performing ancient records research and the transcription of documents in ancient records, assisted the Female Protective Society with their historic marker efforts, and we worked on the truth and reconciliation project, including ongoing historic research on lynchings in the county, worked with staff and historical commission members on the Alachua County Remembrance Project and member Karen Kirkman was the lead commissioner on that very informative project. So what are some of the goals currently? Assist county manager with BOCC assignment on truth and reconciliation, assist with the Black Heritage Trail website if needed, assist with research on our local Native American history and indigenous people and discuss any research inquiries that are submitted by the board or county administration, continue to work with the EPD on the Black Lake Alachua County Forever Project and parks on possible Cuscoilla State marker project. We want to continue to add to the documentation of cemetery sites throughout the county. They were alive once too and they deserve recognition. Continue with ancient records research, help with, help current property owners research their properties to unlock the past of them and their historical significant value to the county. continue our efforts to write state markers, expand upon our county marker collection, organize dedications to highlight awareness and work with other organizations as needed and overall to preserve our county historic preservation initiatives. We want to assist Mount Carmel Church with the preservation of their structure which has significant ties to the black community and the local civil rights movement, set up historical tours of local communities and coordinate with Visit Gainesville to highlight those historic resources, remain in the loop with the current condition of the Rochelle School, a historic late 19th century school which is worthy of both local and national designation and assist with designations at the local and national level. We want to promote the work of the historical commission, its value to the public and help the public be able to understand what we do to allow them to engage with us for the preservation of our local resources, participate in more discussions at the local level and continue efforts to help designate and preserve, conserve scenic roadways throughout the county which Alachua is known for. Some more goes here. We want to finalize the process for the local designation of historic structures. You can't protect our history unless it's designated and it's appreciated and people know about. We need to have an enhanced historic preservation ordinance, a framework to protect what matters to Alachua County. Our black history, our Native American history, our agricultural history from Evanston to Cross Creek to Jonesville. We want to work towards achieving certified local government status. that will help support the mission of this board. The COG program was created 40 years ago and it's a one-two punch thing where we need this infrastructure to support historic preservation initiatives and we need the COG status. There's been many counties and cities this past year who have been granted COG status. We need to do that as soon as possible. And part of this is to begin developing a historic preservation master plan to help highlight these resources. We want to further assist county organizations and agencies with grant writing and research and create letters of support for these efforts. And we have many historic sites and objects here in Alachua County. We are a place of culture. We're a place of history. And as part of that we need to update the Alachua County Historic Structure Survey so we know what historic resources we have here. So as we get development applications we know what's in that area. If there's Indian burial grounds, if there's the foundations of 19th century early Florida pioneers our 17th century Spanish frontiersmen that we know that those resources are there so we can mitigate to protect them as the county begins to develop and grow. We need to be prepared to protect our historic resources as we lay the groundwork for our future. So thank you from the Alachua County Historical Commission. Here is a wonderful picture of our board here. A lot of smiling happy faces. we love what we do and I'm grateful to have each and every one of those people on this board contributing their expertise, their insights and their passions for preserving our local history. Thank you. Thank you. Very good presentation. Hardworking board. Commissioner Alford and Commissioner Wheeler. Thank you. This is the history of Electric County is important to me. I sit on two boards outside of things that I do for the county. One is the Community Weatherization Coalition and the second is the Matheson Museum because I do think Electric County history is interesting and there's a lot of it and we do a pretty good job here and so thank you for your efforts contributing to that. A few quick questions. How does the board work with the Matheson Museum? How do you work together, utilize their resources? How do they utilize you? Is there any crossover? It's a developing relationship. We're working with them right now in order to be able to put on an annual gathering of historic organizations in the county so we can know what we're doing and work together to help preserve our local history. So it's a growing relationship and I hope that we can develop that relationship and for us they provide us with historic documents, access to their archives so we can perform the necessary research when responding to community inquiry agenda items to develop development applications. That way we know the full historic context of what we're working with. Very cool. Thank you for that. So you mentioned tours of some of the small towns. You said updating those. Do we have those somewhere now that can be accessed? I believe there was a discussion about that before I joined the board so I am not certain but there have been people within the individual municipalities who want to figure out a way to highlight their historic resources. I would love to see that so I think Melanie has some information about that. Melanie, you want to add to that? So many years ago the county published brochures of the outlying areas. I remember that, yeah. So visitors in Convention Bureau actually paid for most of that. They haven't been updated in really quite a while, 10 or 15, 20 years but we do have copies. In fact, the Matheson had an excess of one part of the tours and they were giving them away. Maybe you've seen them when you go in there and I have quite a few copies but that was something that we did. Each member took an area, we went out and photographed it and then we set it down in a driving tour. Yeah, that would be great to have online now. We had. Nowadays. Maybe online. Yeah, yeah, that's why I was curious. Okay. We definitely have paper copies. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that and then my last question, you mentioned the Historic Preservation Master Plan. Seems like your whole presentation was like the very, was like the Master Plan outline almost, right? Is that what it would look like? I've never seen a Historic Preservation Master Plan before necessarily, so. Well, we would include such things as a designation process for historic resources. You know, people make the assumption that historic places are going to be protected and then when the left deteriorate or development comes in, then you realize that there's no local protocol to mitigate their loss. so it would include an outline of what makes a property significant architecturally, socially, and a process to ensure its preservation, whether that's through documentation, relocation, access to grants, community outreach program, is basically ordinance, a guide for the county to be able to protect the places that help tell its story both. So it's less of an action plan, more of a policy document. More of a policy document. Yeah, which is excellent. So thank you. That's really, that's really helpful and I hope that we can accomplish that. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Wheeler. Thank you, Trey. Good to see you. I'm sorry we have to keep meeting like this. We're going to, I promise, we're going to get down and sit down together and go through this stuff. I promise. It's okay. It's a pleasure always to see you, Commissioner Wheeler. Thank you. Thank you. Windsor, Island Grove, and Cross Creek, you know, some of these little hidden gems that we have in the area here. Do you guys have your eyes on those so that we can, you can share with us what we may not be seeing from those communities? Because a lot of times they don't come forward to say, except for roads. You know, and we've got new people moving into Windsor right now too who appreciate the history there. I've met a few who have come in and are trying to perk that place up up there. Are you guys in touch with those communities to kind of help make sure that they don't disappear from sight? Personally, I'm in touch with a few people out in Cross Creek that are concerned about the preservation of their community. I think this is where part of the master plan in establishing historic preservation program that promotes outreach and gives citizens in these rural communities a pathway to understand how they could protect them and highlight them. I think that would be very important. And in communities like Windsor, Cross Creek, Island Grove, I see that many of the issues of preservation come about because people don't know the process to engage with their county and start having that discussion. Gotcha. And you all could maybe be that link? Absolutely. Part of the mission of this board, the Alachua County Historical Commission, is to identify and protect historic resources. So it started out with a historic preservation-minded component, and I think that as time has gone on, we've kind of strayed away from that in a way. and that's why we need the certified local government because that is what sets up more support for this board. And that's why we need the historic preservation ordinance because that will set up the framework for this board to start conducting more historic preservation business. And as the county develops, it's going to put more pressure on our historical resources. So we need to establish a process for handling such situations. Gotcha. Thank you. And, you know, there's a black historic church from the late 19th century out in the county that's deteriorating right now, and here it tells the story of education, of black history in Alachua County. Having a COG certified government, having a framework for historic preservation ordinance would help us protect those historic resources before they're lost forever, and part of Alachua County's story is the roads. We cannot say what is lost. And I'm going to add to your list to Asbury Cemetery. We still are looking for someone to take it over. The owners of the property are willing to give it to somebody, and I think the county, you know, we've looked at it, but the county was looking to, now, where do we give it to for actual maintenance and care? You know, so just keep that in your mind, too, because we've been working on that one for about eight years now, and I'm coming off the board, and I'm looking for people to hand these things to, you know, but that cemetery up there is on, is registered, too. It's just not being cared for. So that's out there. And then I'm, the linkage along 41 for, you know, Payne's Prairie, Cuscawilla, Lake Tuscawilla, you know, Micanope, all of that. So I appreciate the focus there, too, in terms of indigenous peoples and the focus that we can put on that stretch of road. And anything you guys can do that way, let me help. If I can, I'm trying to look for some sponsors, too, for things that we can actually put at Cuscawilla that would help document, you know, the history there, too, of indigenous peoples. I appreciate that, Ms. Wheeler. You know, when people think historic preservation, they often think buildings, but includes landscapes as well, especially cultural landscapes, sorry, cultural landscapes where there's been an interaction between humanity and the land. And that applies to our Native American peoples here, our indigenous peoples, as well as the frontiersmen in the 19th century. Thank you. That's beautiful. Very poetic. Hold on to that. So as you go forward with that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. Yeah, I feel like we got kind of off track here with the tax reform and, you know, not hiring any more FTEs. And I do want us to continue down this path of a historic preservation ordinance and ultimately trying again for certified local government as we move past November. I think other counties have done that successfully and it's in what we talk about, nature and culture. And so I appreciate the work of this board. Let's continue moving forward. What would be involved from the board's perspective in a historical preservation ordinance with regards to what we need to direct, if anything? So if we were to create a historic preservation ordinance for Alachua County, there are two options here and we'd have to consult with staff. One of those options would be to officially make the historical commission a historic preservation board and give it the duties and privileges thereof. The other option is to create another board, a historic preservation board separate from the historical commission. My immediate thoughts on this are that the Alachua County Historical Commission can conduct the business of a historic preservation board. I believe that everybody on that board already has a sensitivity to the understanding and value of history and you have two people on that board with master's degrees in historic preservation, Melody and myself. I'm a former historic preservation officer for St. John's County and I think that we can guide this board into any potential evolution into fulfilling the responsibilities of historic preservation board as I believe it was intended to be based on the mission statement and the supporting language in the county documents. I think we did have a discussion about this I think four or five years ago and I think we didn't want to create another authority with regards to a separate board but I do think we should continue down this road once we get past November of maybe pursuing certified local government. I think that's something that's probably a step before that at least in my mind. Okay. Commissioner, is there anything else? No. Thank you. Okay. Trey, Melanie, thank you guys so much for your presentation. Very good. All right. Next item is the Axeline Bryce House. Is that right? Are you doing that one as well? I'm doing that as well. You can't get rid of me that easily. Nope. Todd, hang tough. You're next, I promise. You're very patient. It will only be three minutes, I promise. All right. We have a light system for three minutes so we'll see. All right, Trey, you are recognized for the next item. Thank you. All right. That's spooky. I'm going to be presenting a short history of the Boss Bryce House located in Cross Creek. Cross Creek is located between Orange Lake and Lake Locke Lusa in southeast Alachua County. It connects the two lakes and has been the site of human habitation for thousands of years. The small, unincorporated community was the subject of Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings' book, Cross Creek, where she spread the names, places, and values of the rural Florida hamlet across the world. In her book, Cross Creek, she described the home of her closest neighbor, Boss Bryce, as a Rococo two-story affair, tall and gling-gling like an antique spinster. She went on to say that the house is on the opposite side of the road from mine, just out of sight. This house that she described as an antique spinster was already old by the time of Marjorie's arrival in 1928. It was built half a century prior in 1885 by Jasper Axline, a produce merchant from Cincinnati, who wanted to get in on the citrus boom of the 1880s and built the home as part of an orange grove operation. The creek's proximity to the railroad would allow oranges to be distributed up north and his fortune made. Axline constructed what was then a very modern and attractive two-story dwelling in the untamed Florida wilderness for his family. The exterior featured turned columns, brackets with jigsaw-cut geometric motifs, eaves supported by paired corbels, all topped by an elaborately carved gable truss. The two main entrances were each surmounted by a single-pane colored glass transom, one being blue and the other one being red. This was an architectural statement that represented Axline's wealth in a time when such features were very expensive. Another notable feature was a porthole window on the front-facing gable that looked out on what was then a very rural Florida landscape. The house featured extensive moldings, carved fireplace mantles, a detached kitchen at its rear, a butler's pantry, and a plumbed bathroom fed by a water tank in the attic at a time when such modern convenience would have been a novelty in the city, let alone rural Florida. Axline died in 1900 and the property was neglected by his wife and sons until it was sold in 1911 to William Riley Bryce, Rawlings' neighbor. It stayed in the family until 1971 when it was purchased by Gary Haskins and his wife Kate Barnes, both artists who fell in love with the rural setting where they could work on their art. In 2015, the Axline Bryce House was designated on the National Register of Historic Places, and just this year the Latchwell Conservation Trust purchased the surrounding 46 acres for conservation. The Axline Bryce House is an important reminder of the once booming Florida citrus industry in the late 19th century and a window into a Latchwell County's historic past. And here is the house as it currently appears. Awesome. And I believe the intention right now by Ms. Barnes is to leave the house to the Latchwell Conservation Trust so it can be preserved and the land around it conserved for future generations. Now, make no mistake, even though a structure is on the National Register of Historic Places, that doesn't mean that it's protected. That's why it's so important that we have a local ordinance to locally protect these historic resources. I'm friends with Ms. Barnes. She's a wonderful woman and she has lived in that house for over 50 years as a wonderful store for it. She's a character. She is a character. Thank you. I have one of her paintings in my house. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation. Very nice. Yeah. I didn't know that was for Kate Barnes' house. Yeah. Okay. All right. On the agenda, now we have public comment, but we've gotten past that. So we're going to go ahead and move to our action items. And Mr. Clerk, it's your item. Mr. Chair, first up is the Latchwell County's 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report and Independent Audit. All right. And the recommended action is to accept the fiscal year 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report and the Florida State Comptroller's Annual Financial Report. Authorize the chair to sign the certification form confirming the report's transmission to the state. Acknowledge receipt of the audit reports. Letters for single audit report from the county's Independent Certified Public Accountants, Purvis Gray and Company, LLP. And authorize the clerk to transmit the ACFR and the single audit report to the Auditor General. Acknowledge receipt of the SAS 114 letter from the auditors. And Mr. Hutchison, you are finally recognized. Thank you for being here. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Todd Hutchison, Finance Director for JKJS Irby's office, the Latchwell County Clerk of Court. Nothing like the word audit to clear out a room. I'll tell you what. All jokes aside, though, we have, I think, some good information for you this afternoon. In just a second, I'm going to turn the presentation over to Ron Whitesides. He is the audit partner with Purvis Gray and Company that performs the audit. I always think in these settings it's important to hear from the auditor first because if he, if the audit firm doesn't find, you know, give you an unmodified opinion or a clean opinion on what you're about to hear from me, then you can't really trust the numbers that I'm going to share with you. So he's going to go through what are called the single audit reports and management letter. That's in your, you know, in the backup in the PDF. I've put it in a PowerPoint here so he can hit just the page numbers that he's going to be going through from that single audit. There's also some letters that go to those charged with governance called the SAS 114. That's also in one of the titles in your PDF. As soon as Mr. Whitesides is finished going through those audit reports, I have a few highlights that I'm going to go over from a financial perspective. Most of my comments are going to focus on the general fund, your MST law fund, which are both primarily funding sources or through property taxes. I'm going to touch on a couple of statistical tables that I think are beneficial to the board and the public. And then we have a secondary presentation that's going to show you some trends and some history on actual audited tax collections. Well, we'll actually have a trend of actual numbers. Yes. That were audited. Yes, correct. Thank you. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ron Whitesides. Mr. Whitesides, thank you for your patience as well. Great to see you. Certainly. Good to see you all again. As Todd said, Ron Whitesides, I'm a partner with Purvis Gray. We conduct the county's outside audit under Florida statutes. You're required to have an outside audit performed every year. So this is the end moment of that process. So we started back in the fall. We sent teams of auditors to each of the constitutional officers. We're here working with the clerk's office, audit the board of county commissioners' information. So the purpose of this is to let users of the financial statements know that they can rely on these reports, whether those users be citizens, yourselves, lenders, or others. On the slides here, we've got a number of the reports that we issue. The first one is the independent auditor's opinion letter. You want this to be what's called an unmodified letter. That's what it is. That's a clean opinion. That's the highest form of assurance your auditors can give. As I go through these reports today, I'm going to fly pretty high on them. We had a meeting a few weeks ago with the chair, county manager, county attorney, Mr. Crosby, and others. So this will be pretty high level. So if there is something you're dying to know about the audit, please just ask as we go along, and I'm happy to try to answer your questions. But an unmodified report. We do have, you see at the bottom of this page, an emphasis of matter paragraph. That means we adopted a new accounting standard this year that essentially expanded the liability for comp time, PTO vacations, things of that nature. The GASB that sets standards for local governments periodically is passing new standards, and we adopt them as they're passed. So this is customary. So again, a clean auditor's opinion letter. What's next is a letter in accordance with government auditing standards. So, of course, being a government, we conduct your audit with the rules governing and governmental audits. That includes that we issue this letter that reports any internal control weaknesses that we identified over how you gather and report financial data or comply with various laws and regulations that have a financial bent to them. We have no findings in this letter for this year. So a clean report. Next, we have a letter that's issued when we conduct what's called a single audit. So when you get grant funds from the federal government or the state government, we have to do a deep dive test on some of those grants. Of course, grant funds come with a lot of restrictions and reporting requirements. This is also what's called an unmodified letter. So that's a clean report. The schedule gives a little bit more detail on the single audit. And you see item seven there lists the various programs that we did the deep dive with. So four different federal programs, three different state programs were subjected to the single audit. And again, no findings this year. We did have a recommendation last year that dealt with the SHIP program. The SHIP program we looked at again this year. That item had been corrected and no additional items this year. So all the programs tested passed the single audit. This letter deals with a Florida statutory requirement that we look at how you handle your investment of excess funds. Essentially, the statute says you can't be speculative with taxpayer funds. You have to prioritize liquidity and security of those funds over rate of return. And so all of your practices and policies and procedures conform with that. This letter deals with 911 fees. Again, there's a statute that requires that we look at certain things on how those funds are expended. We did, and we had no issues with how those funds are being handled. And then we issue one more letter that the rules of the Auditor General require. It requires that we address a laundry list of items in statute. This is a standard letter. Addresses all those items, but no unusual items or problems or concerns of any sort in this letter. So it is also what I would characterize as a clean letter. And then finally, this last item is communication with those charged with governance. So these are required communications from the auditor to you as the governing body. It's designed to give you a little more insight into the audit process itself. First item here deals with accounting policies. As I mentioned, you did adopt one new accounting policy as required this year. All the rest of your policies and practices are customary for local governments and Florida counties. It discloses that we have a couple of new ones coming up next year. The GASB never rests, and we always have new standards to implement. So we'll be talking about those next year. Various items in here are estimates. So not everything in these financial statements is known historic facts. Some of those estimates are large items that deal with the pensions and the OPEB plans that significantly can move these numbers around from year to year. This is just to make a user and yourselves aware that those types of items exist in the financial statements. And then finally, this last page deals with other items that give insight into whether there are any issues we had when conducting this audit. So did we have any difficulties? Were we proposing significant adjustments to your financial statements, which would be an indication that maybe management is not doing what you want in terms of how they capture the financial data, or if we had any other types of disagreements. So we had none of those items. This is, again, a clean report. And as has been the case in, I think, all of the audits that we've done with Alachua County, we find that your staff is well prepared, ready for us when we conduct the audit. So what we do is really an audit process. We're not here helping you clean up the books or correct issues or adopt accounting policies. Your staff is capable and does a very good job of all of that. So we truly conduct an audit. It allows us to focus on the things we're supposed to focus on. And, again, just an excellent result, again, this year. I think Todd's going to talk about some of the financial information. If there's any audit questions you've got right now, though, I'm happy to try to answer them. Thank you, Mr. Wattel. Any questions for the audit? Clean audit? Wonderful. Okay. Thank you. Okay, Mr. Chair, I'm going to pull some of the slides I'm going to show you are basically screenshots right out of our audited annual comprehensive financial report, so the big PDF. This is the cover page. I want to give communications. It's got this picture for me from Charlie Howder. It's a picture of Buck Bay Flatwoods Preserve, so I want to give him credit for that picture. I also want to point out each year we go through a pretty extensive process, an application process, to submit your annual comprehensive financial report to the Government Finance Officers Association to try and achieve this certificate of achievement for excellent in financial reporting. I'm happy to report we were just recently notified that your submission last year for fiscal year 2024 received the certificate again, and we have already, back on June 30th, I think it was, or June 28th, submitted this year's ACFR in order to hopefully get the certificate again. All right, so give us the page number, Scott, so we can follow up on this. Okay, page 106 in the big ACFR book is where my first comments are going to be directed, so about halfway through the book. But this is one of the few places you can get budget actual information. So in the first of the book, it's, you know, showing actuals, the actual results of operations, and the notes, the financial statements. I didn't get this far, Todd. You didn't get that far yet? That's okay. Well, I'll walk you through it. So this is our general fund, or the Board of County Commissioner's general fund and budget actual. So the comments I'm going to make right now are actually going to be the base for the second part of my presentation when I pull up some additional slides, and I'll admit to show you some historical information. But this page, page 106 for the public, is where you can see budget to actual information for the county's general fund revenues and expenditures. The very first line item, right, this is a big topic of discussion, is taxes. So in this presentation, that is not just property taxes. The $180 million that is listed there is broken down. I'm going to read it to you real quick. Property taxes makes up $171.2 million of that $180 million total. And I'm going to have this in a different slot as well in a few minutes. I just want to make sure the public understands when we talk about taxes in the general fund, there are other taxes besides just ad valorem or property taxes. There are also public service or utility service taxes included in that number of $7.1 million, and some communication service taxes included that number of $1.8 million. So that makes up your $180 million there listed for taxes. As we work down the page, the next sort of largest contribution to our general revenues is charges for services. That's at $21.4 million. That is primarily in the general fund the charges that we collect through ambulance billing is the biggest contributor there. Of course, we have other charges for services. Animal services has fees. Parks has fees. But the biggest component there is that. Down just a little bit further, you see investment income. We had yet another banner year. That's just because short-term rates continue to, investment rates continue to remain higher than historical rates. So we're benefiting from that. All in, total revenues were $225.3 million. The next set of numbers talk about our expenditures. You can see the biggest, in the general fund, the biggest component from a functional standpoint is public safety right at $40 million. Running on down through, total expenditures from an operating standpoint, before we start talking about transfers, was $127.1 million. So it looks like, wow, we had revenues exceed our expenditures of $98.2 million. But we have to take into account the transfers, right? So if you jump down to the transfers, the transfers out that we send to the officers was $99.4 million. So that's the funding that goes to the five officers. They do send some of that back, kind of above the line there, that you see a transfer in back from the officers. That's what's called excess that gets returned to us. We run through all of those numbers. And the net effect of everything is that we had a net change in fund balance for the year after accounting for our other financing sources and uses through transfers of a negative $3.5 million. So we used $3.5 million in fund balance in our general fund in 25. But that was planned. So we have ARPA revenue recovery funding still in the general fund. It's in a sub fund so that we can track it separately. So that planned use of fund balance was actually tied to three non-recurring expenditures. The Scottish Inn, which now is, I know, named something else. Sunrise Inn purchases came out, you know, helped reduce the fund balance in 25. And we also had some money to Meridian for the central receiving service operations that came out of this. So that was the main contributor to the planned reduction in fund balance for 25. I want to, so we ended the year with $113 million in your general fund fund balance. If you back up a page on page 105, I want to break out for you what makes up that ending fund balance because it's not all just available. It's already, a good portion of it, has already been assigned for other purposes. So on page 105, if you go down near the bottom, you can see the breakout of fund balances on the screen for those watching at home. You'll see that at the end of the year, at the end of FY25, we had a signed fund balance of $54.9 million. That is made up of $27.1 million was assigned in the ARPA revenue recovery sub fund for projects. And we had another $24.6 million that was assigned to build the current budget that you're in, the FY2026 budget. So that budget was balanced. Portion of that assignment was for reserve for contingencies. And then there's another planned use of fund balance through that assignment. We finished the year with unassigned fund balance of $57.8 million. That equals about 24% of your general operating revenues, which is right in target with best practices. So the general fund is your primary operating fund. We do not receive property taxes until near the end of the calendar year. So in October and November, in the first part of December, you need cash float. And that's really where the fund balance is important, to have unassigned fund balance. Because on October 1, the sheriff's expecting a draw, right? November 1, I have to make draws. We have money going out the door to fund other operations. And so that is right where you need to be. You would probably, you know, at worst case, I think the minimum recommendations are 212th or around 16% as far as fund balance. So you're right in line with where you would want to be with a strong fund balance. Pause there for just a second. And then I'm going to switch gears and talk to you about MSTU law. Any questions on that one? Okay. Keep going, Tom. MSTU law. Okay. Okay, up on the screen, this is on. You can look at these actual numbers in two places, either page 89 as a budget tax or page 26 is where we have the audited results for the MSTU law enforcement fund. So what I really want to drive home here is, unlike in the general fund, the taxes listed here is the $32.8 million. That's all ad valorem taxes. There are some charges for services listed here. That is some contracts that the sheriff has, and then he remits those contract payments back to the board since the sheriff is operating as a budget office. Any fees that he collects, he remits that to us monthly. Is that where also Newberry's contract flows into that? It would be any contract they have for school resource officers or Newberry. Yep. It would go right there. Schools in Newberry. Yep. So you run down your page, right? We have some general government and public safety. The public safety cost was just some indirect costs. The general government is basically commissions that are charged for the collection of the ad valorem taxes. But as you can see, if you go down to other financing sources and uses, the entire funding sources are used to transfer out for law enforcement operations and a small portion for operations of the combined communication center. So when the public is discussing, you know, having debate about the referendum, this is the type of fund that would most certainly be directly impacted because its sole source pretty much is ad valorem taxes, and it is 100% used for public safety. Okay. That's going to conclude my comments on your two sort of primary ad valorem taxing funds. The next comments I want to make is back in the statistical section. This is back on page 167, so a little bit of the same information here, but this is going to give you some trend information. So we're going to have five years' worth of data, and I'm going to expand on this for you in just a minute and compare it to sort of population changes and inflation increases. But in this schedule, you can see at the top, in your book, you just see taxes. I've broken it out on the screen to kind of split taxes out between property taxes and other taxes, and we'll distribute this after the meeting. So you have that breakout of what's in the book with where I've broken out 2025 into 204 property tax, 204 million in property taxes versus other taxes of 67.7. That total would be the first line in the book if you're looking at the book itself. So we run down this. The main thing I wanted to do in this presentation is at the top here, I show you how much of ad valorem taxes are making up of our general revenues every year. So in 2020, it was 46.13% is how much, that 144 million of property taxes, that's how much it made up of our total revenues of 312 million. In 2025, that number is now down to 39.29%. So we collected 204 million in property taxes in 2025 out of a total of 519 total general revenues. And these are just from governmental fund balances. Running the page down, you can see all the functional data for... Hold on one second, Todd. Sure. So... 167 of the ACFR. Yeah, so... Yeah. I can't... It's only the first... The only... The only... The only... The first two lines are different. I broke out taxes for you on my... On my presentation. Oh, I see. Yeah, so if you... The 144 and the 30 is the 182. Those first two lines. Right. So he's got property taxes, which is the ad valorem, and then other PST, CST taxes. Right. I just wanted to split out... Yeah. And so the 271, you've got 220, 204, and then... And 67. 67. Correct. Yes. So in 2024, if you're looking at the book, you'll see 252.1 million in taxes. It's just called taxes in the ACFR. This book follows kind of the format that I'm given by GFOA, so I can't really... I don't really mess with it too much. Right. So here, I'm just trying to break out taxes includes not just ad valorem taxes, it's other taxes. And so on the screen, we try and break that out for you. The PST, CST would not be affected by the ballot, so it's just trying to break out the ad valorem piece of the taxes number. And then everything else in the slide is pretty much a screenshot of this, of page 167. Understood. Through expenditures. I kind of leave off the bottom here to kind of drive home another point, right? So we go down, we look at government fund balance expenditures. This is all funding sources. This is not just general fund and MSTU. This is all the governmental funding sources that we have is in this chart and showing year over year changes. As you can see, 40-ish percent of our expenditures are in the public safety line item. So the second line down in 2025, we had $197 million in public safety charges. If you work your way down, in the green here on the chart above, so this is not in your book, okay? I'm going to hit a few highlights for you because we are in budget season and rightfully so, that's your biggest policy document besides the comprehensive plan. So you should spend a lot of time talking about the budget. I think sometimes it's lost. The public assumes that the entire budget is spent, and it's not. As a matter of fact, there's so many things done for transparency reasons in the budget, they're non-operating. They don't actually, they're between funds. They're intergovernmental. So the general fund is paying another fund, and then that fund pays something. Well, unfortunately, in the budget, that's basically counted twice. But we don't spend it twice. So if you, on the screen here, I'm going to give you an example. For 2025, our total governmental expenditures were $515 million. We had enterprise fund expenditures, so that's our solid waste system and some of the things that we run as enterprise funds. That was $22 million. So we had total expenditures, total audited expenditures of $538 million. Our budget for 2025 was $866 million, right? So we were under budget, about $328 million. Similar story in 2024, similar story in 2023, right? So it's really just to kind of drive home the fact that the adopted budget has a lot of non-operating uses and sources in it, and our actual expenditures are much lower than the overall total budget. Sorry if that page was confusing. No, no, I get it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of data. It's hard to see, for me at least, the green. Oh, I got you. I don't know if that could be bigger. Mark, do you know how to blow it? Mark probably can't do it. Mark's being asked to do something. It's a lot better. There we go. So yeah, so to scroll up to the yellow real quick, if I don't mess this up, again, the property taxes and the second line, other taxes, the combination of those two lines add up to the taxes line in the page that you were looking at in the ACFR. And then down at the bottom, we've listed what your total audited governmental fund expenditures are. That's the $515 million. I add in the net cost of transfers, because those do have an impact. Add back in your audited enterprise fund expenditures to get your total all expenditures for each of the years from 2020 through 2025, and then compared that to your total adopted budget for the year, to just show that your actual expenditures are typically way under your budget, because your budget has a lot of, again, non-operating items in it. Right. Okay. So the next item, we're going to close out the first part, is page 170 of the book. This is where we have millage rates. 170. So I want to blow this up, because it's slightly different than what is in your book. Again, the statistical section I have to put together kind of in accordance with GFOA. I've added a couple of columns in this book. What's not in the printed ACFR is the rollback rate. So we've added that in this table that I have here in the PowerPoint. The three years of fiscal year 2018, 2019, and 2021 are highlighted as green, because in those years, you either set the millage at the county rollback rate or less than the county rollback rate. The far right column shows the county increase over rollback rate each of the years. Okay. Then down at the bottom, we show what the average increase over the rollback rate has been for the entire time of this schedule, from 16 to 25. That average has been 3.24. The average increase over the rollback rate since COVID, since FY 2021, is 4.96. And then down below, which is going to be important in the next set of slides that I show you, we list and source what the population increase each of these years has been and what the change in inflation had been each of these years. So the average since FY 2021, sort of comparing to this 4.96, if you adjust the change in population increase and the change in inflation, that total change has been 6.7%. So we're actually under. Where can we get that chart? What's that? Where can we get that chart? Oh, I'm going to, it'll be made available. It's definitely, and you're going to see even more in the next set of slides I'll pull up. That consumer price index, that's published consumer price index, not our inflation, not municipal inflation. Correct. Correct. Which would be even bigger, right? So it would be even, a municipal index would even be a higher number than a consumer price index. So the documents, especially, again, all this is building to the next set of documents that kind of show the trends on actual property tax collections compared to a benchmark of population increases and change in the consumer price index, which is what's kind of discussed a lot. That's been used as the benchmark, I guess, in a lot of the reports that the state has published. And so I'm trying to mirror that for you to show at the local level how that's impacted at property tax collections. So simple math, population increase plus the consumer price index increase is 6.74. Average since 2020. Average since 2021. Whereas our millage has increased on average 4.96. 4.96. And you will most certainly see that in the next presentation. Okay. I'll show you the actual collections. So it was going to conclude sort of the, that more or less concluded the audit portion. This is additional sort of trend information just for you to debate, for you to have as audited information again, because these are actual collections. So what we did is we put together some tables that you're about to see that show actual property tax collections starting in FY 2020, right? That budget was set pre-COVID. So that's, that's kind of our baseline. That's our benchmark. What you actually collected. We're going to show you what that looks like adjusted for change in population increases and change in inflation. What you, if you, if you use what the state keeps saying is should be our benchmarks. If you use population increase and inflation increases, what you would have collected had you used that, those measures. Actual numbers. Actual numbers. Actual numbers. Not budgeted numbers. Comparing them. Yeah. No actuals. Yes. Actuals. So again, the base year is 2020 actual general fund and MSTU property tax collections. We'll have a slide for each of those. The annual judgment adjustment, each subsequent fiscal year, the benchmark is adjusted by combining the annual change in population growth and CPI. Then we were going to demonstrate to you what the gap looks like, what the difference looks like between what we actually collected versus what the benchmark would have allowed to be collected. I'm not going to share this chart because there's a lot of information on here. I'm going to just highlight one column to show you how it works and then we'll show you kind of the chart data. FY 2021, we'll just start with that as the example on this particular table. The prior year is the base year. So this is the general fund. We collected $121.2 million in ad valorem taxes in 2020. That's the base. Right. That's how this table is going to work adjusting. In 2021, you set a millage that only generated $122.9 million in ad valorem taxes. That was a change of 1.37% over the prior year. That year, FY 2021, population increase was 1.65% and inflation was 5.39%. If you had used those benchmarks to set your general fund ad valorem collections that year, you could have collected $129.8 million. Right. So you would have collected $6.8 million more if we just, for whatever reason, decided to use that as a formula for how you collect taxes. Not by any means am I suggesting we do that, by the way. Same with 22, right? This is how the formula works. And each year it shows 2022 was actually the largest gap. In 2022, you collected $129.5 million in actual property tax collections. That was a 5.4% increase over the prior year. That year, population increased 4.84. And CPI increased 9.06. Yeah, that was a big inflation year. Correct. So had you used those numbers, had you used population change and inflation increases, the actual collections over the prior year would have jumped to $147 million. So we actually collected $8.2 million less than what this benchmark tool said. $18.2. Yeah, what'd I say, $18.2 million, yes. You go all the way through, in essence, in this most recent year is where it's about comparable. Like, it's pretty close. We actually, it's the only year in the model where the collections, the actual collections, were slightly more than that benchmark. But over the cumulative period, the actual collections of $722.8 million is $37.8 million less than what that benchmark would have collected of $760 million. Six years. It kind of looks like this. Six million a year. Right. This is, if FY20 was the benchmark of zero, right, and then we change every year, this is showing how much less we collected versus what would have been allowed at that benchmark. Using the state's benchmark? Yes. Yeah. Which would you do? Well, the best that I can tell in reading the reports, yes. Yeah. From all the reports, and I've, you know, discussed this with a lot of folks, we feel like we're using the exact same population increased tables that they're pulling from, as well as the same exact CPIU for all urban cities. So there's a separate one you can use just for the south, and that's actually a little higher. It would have made these numbers look even, the gap even wider, but we picked the same one we believe they're using. What does CPIU stand for? Consumer Price Index. Oh. Urban, yeah. Consumer Price Index, and then all urban wages, I mean cities. So we did a similar model for just the MSTU law. Again, that's your other fund where you're collecting ad valorem taxes. So, again, these are going to be available. We'll make sure that they're, obviously, they're going to be with Stephen in the minutes, and we'll make sure that you all get a copy, and that we can publish them. Mark can have them, you know, whatever, however you would like to utilize them. But similar comparison here, in FY 2020, the MSTU law collected $22.7 million in ad valorem taxes. In 2021, we collected $23.2 million. That was a 2% change, 2.09% change. Again, in comparison to what it could have been using population increase and the inflation index, it could have changed by 7%, resulting in an additional $1.1 million in ad valorem collections. So that MSTU law looks like this. Here's the sources. So we're going to include that in the table or in the presentation, in the information that's distributed so that anyone else that wants to check the math, you can pull up the table. Todd, why are the state's numbers so different? What did they use? They didn't use action numbers. What did they use? I'm not sure what they used, so I definitely am not going to go on record speaking for the state. Reading between the lines, the best I can tell is that they used their benchmark to adjust your 2020 budget, your adopted budget. They run that number through a benchmark to come up with what your 2025 budget should have been, and they compared that to what you adopted in 2025. And that budget number was based on the transfers out, the bottom, the very bottom number. Yeah, the total – oh, well, the one schedule shows you all funding sources, not just the general fund. But, yes, it would have been – our budget would have included – the 2025 budget that you adopted in your general fund would have included a whole host of additional federal dollars. $800 million, double counted, it sounds like. You would have had some double counting in the transfers, but it also includes all of the ARPA revenue recovery and money – one-time monies that you received from COVID that were still available to be budgeted, right? Even though they weren't spent? Yeah, it wasn't local. And they remain non-spent. We're at 117 instead of – That's right. You still have projects in the pipeline to spend some of that money. Correct. Does everybody understand that? Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe they will. That just summarizes, you know, some of the key points that we discussed, kind of the differences in actual CLEXs versus the benchmarks. So these are good, you know, tools, good to have public debate, but I certainly wouldn't suggest that we solely look at population increases and – I mean, we've never done that. I think it's – I think it makes a lot of sense. One thing that this doesn't really cover that we covered when we had our chair meeting was that, you know, Michelle has been going around explaining, and we have seen the presentation of each of the cities, that we wish we could use CPI, that we wish that roads and fire trucks and fire stations only went up at the same rate of CPI, but we know that we are subject to the municipal price index, and it's significantly, significantly higher. Agreed, yes. You know, and that's something that when people say, you know, why are things going up so much, it's because it costs twice as much to pave a road now, and it costs twice as much to buy an ambulance and equip the firefighter. Sure, road or greater, yeah. And there is obviously payroll stuff as well, but those are – that's something that this doesn't even account for, municipal price index. Correct. I tried to keep this as – not that there is really an apples to apples because I don't have a lot of detail to go off of from some of the information published, but I do know that – I do know the population figures and CPI tables that they're using, so we tried to keep this as apples to apples as we could. Okay. Okay, commissioners, any questions for Todd? If not, I'll take a staff recommendation on the motion. Okay, so this recommendation is what I read before we got started. Yes, I read. Which involves the number of signatures and submissions to the state. So before you vote, I just want to give a – I want to say a big thanks first to the manager's office, the attorney's office, the budget office. We work all – this is their report, right? We prepare it. This isn't – I have – the clerk's office has a separate finance director that oversees the clerk's audit, and that is rolled into these numbers. I think Ron touched on it, right? This is the culmination of six audits. There's been five individual audits, one for each of the constitutional officers, plus the audit of the board of county commissioners' numbers rolled in with their numbers. So I want to thank the finance directors at each of the officers for their timeliness and making sure they get their audits compiled because I can't roll all the numbers and work with Purvis Gray to get the combined annual comprehensive financial report complete without their efforts. And certainly, again, the manager's team and Tommy's team, I really appreciate their efforts. Tommy, well done. Well done. Once again, another year of well done. I don't even know why they bothered to do it. Commissioner. Every time. Have to. Yeah, I'd be fine with it being done every two years or something. Yeah, Commissioner Priscilla, and then we've got Mr. Crosby. Yeah, I thank you all so much for that. It's the devils are in the details, and so it's nice when we can dig in and really show the public that we're spending their tax dollars wisely and that we are doing it all above board and transparently in a way that has a clean audit almost every time. My big question, I guess two quick questions, is with regards to career source and the TPO, now that we're both, like, leaning on us, but how does that fit in all of? So they are actually separately issued financial reports now. There was a portion of career sources fiscal year prior to the make-up, the change of the governance structure prior to each one, one commissioner from each of the six counties being appointed. That happened in March of 2025, so the first portion of career sources financial numbers from 10-1-2024 through March 2025 are actually in this presentation, and they're included in our single audit as what's called a discreetly presented component unit. So it's almost like they're a fund of the county for the first part. But they did issue, the career source has issued its own standalone, actually, I actually got that one issued before I got this one issued for career source. I am working, I just submitted a single audit exemption letter to the state for ILM-TPO or TPO. They did not have enough sufficient, they did not meet the threshold to have a single audit performed. And single audits are not cheap, so there's some advantage to that. But it is something that I plan to work with the new executive director on to do an engagement, to do a mini RFP and select an audit firm to do an audit. We do now have, we've been going through them, we do have all the previous financial records now, so we have been able to compile, because it's hard, you know, I can certainly do an accounting and auditing from the time the county took over the financial operations, but you still have to start with a balance sheet, and balance sheets are based on, you know, previous activity. So, we have all that now, I feel comfortable with the financial information that we've got. We've reconstructed, so to speak, what the 24, 25 financial statements would look like for them. And so, for the 25, 26 year, we intend to engage and publish a separate audit for TPO as well. Sure. Thank you very much. Mr. Crosby? Yes, Mr. Chair, since I'm having to sit at the dice today, on behalf of the manager's office and working with the clerk's office, as well as myself being over the budget office, obviously, we work together very well. It is very productive for me to be able to call the clerk's office and have good conversations, to walk through scenarios, financial arrangements. All of this goes into play. It's not just what we do on the budget side, but it is a constant conversation to make sure that the financial stability of this organization is in good stead. It has been for the 12 plus years that I've been here, and a lot is attributable to Todd specifically, but the clerk's office in general. It is not the case in every county that the clerk and the staff work hand in hand like we do here. So, we're glad any differences that ever pop up or concerns that pop up, we work through them diligently. But at the end of the day, you can see a 50 plus million dollar unassigned fund balance, which is right in the range that we've been talking about. We do that to make sure we know what's coming down the pipe financially, as well as bouncing off of each other, what this means long term. So, we're happy to, I know the manager is really happy with the relationship we have and how close we work together, and really, congratulations on another fine report and audit. Thank you, Mr. Crosby. Todd, how long have you been with the clerk? 32 and a half years. 32 and a half years. I mean, for our county commissioner who's been here 12 years, I have to just say, you know, coming from my background and having you and Tommy here for my entire three plus, thank you, the best thing I ever did was answer an accountant job listing in the Gainesville Sun for the clerk's office the day before I walked at UF, and they hired me the week after. So, I've been blessed to be here. We are very fortunate, and around the state, it's repeated. I know we repeat this a lot with a lot of our different departments, but we're very fortunate to have the relationship that the commission has with the clerk's office and all the constitutionals. Oh, I think the clerk's office would reciprocate that, right? We were very, very pleased to have the working relationship that we do. I am included and know that it's not that way in many jurisdictions, and if they're not fighting, they're suing one another. So, I'm super, super blessed that we're able to not to have the relationship that we have. Yeah. Okay. All right. So, we've got a motion and a second. Is there anyone from the public that wishes to speak to any of what they heard or the motion? Okay. Let's bring it back to the board. Anything else, commissioners? Yeah. Okay. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Ron, Todd, thank you, and to all your staff. Okay, commissioners, we've got to conclude at about quarter to five. So, we've got an hour and a half. We've got RTS. We've got two land conservation items, and we've got three public hearings. So, Mr. Clerk, next item. Mr. Chair, next up is the Regional Transit Services Fiscal Year 2027 County Services Proposal. Okay. And, commissioners, I'm going to just power through. If you need to get up and grab a bite, I understand. Just, we're going to keep going, and I'll take a break so we can be ready for tonight. Okay. Allison, welcome. You are recognized. Thank you. Good afternoon, board and chair. Allison Moss, Transportation Planning Manager. And, I am joined today by Mr. Jesus Gomez with RTS, City of Gainesville, and also Jeff Hayes, Director for Growth Management, in case additional questions come up that I cannot answer. So, I'm here to present the draft Fiscal Year 27 County Service Proposal for Regional Transit Service. A brief overview, first we're going to hit on the proposal, showing both route ridership numbers and also proposed service. An overview of the proposed changes, fiscal impact, and suggested recommended board action. So, first of all, just a visual of the routes proposed. So, this is a maintenance of the existing proposed service in terms of the alignments in the areas covered. So, there are a total of eight different routes. Not all of them are both weekend and weekday. I'll show that in the proposed service table. Before getting to the proposed service table, this is ridership data requested by the board. So, we have all of the eight routes for the year, calendar year 2025, for each month, and then the total listed at the right-hand side. I will note, in case anybody is really a hawk for details, the numbers for August and September appear to be the same. That was pulled directly from RTS data. So, there was nothing we could do to revise that. Otherwise, I believe the numbers are accurate. Here is the fiscal year 27 proposed service. And so, it's a total of 1.8 million. There's largely very little change between this and the last fiscal year's county service proposal. We all know we are both dealing with budget constraints and potentially future budget constraints. So, we've largely tried to maintain service as is. Overview of the changes. There is a little bit of an increase in weekday service for Route 43. So, I'll just jump back briefly. So, if you see in the headway column, kind of in the middle, it says 45 slash 90. And so, the last fiscal year contract included 90-minute headways. So, buses arriving roughly every 90 minutes. This is increased 45 minutes. And I believe that is just probably at the peak hours, not throughout the day. Sorry. Santa Fe is Santa Fe College. Sorry? Santa Fe is Santa Fe College. Yes. Additionally, we wanted to note that the funding for 5310, which is for seniors and those with disabilities, 5311, those for trips outside the urbanized area, are not included in this, with this base contract this year. Those will be included in a separate forthcoming contract. And with changes regarding MV, paratransit, and potentially the RTS taking over as the CTC, some of these things are in flux. Fiscal impact. The authorization of the Transit Services Agreement, as presented, would entail a total contract of $1.8 million and a budgetary increase of $2,542 compared to fiscal year 26. Can I suppose, Allison, didn't we have a bus route that we had paid for? And maybe you were just saying this, and I'm just like, it's like a lot of information all at once. And I was trying to digest it at home, too. And I'm like, the route that went down 13th Street, like it went down South 13th Street to support, I thought. Downtown to Santa Fe College. Our routes, I pulled back up the map for us to look at. So Route 10. Route 10. Goes down 13, and also Route 43. Mr. Chair, there is a route that goes down 13th Street, and the county did use to participate in that, but right now that's being covered by UF, so the reason it doesn't show on this map is because we're not participating in the funding of it. Thank you. Yeah, I was meeting further south where some of our housing is located. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Located, okay. Okay, do I hear a motion? Moves staff recommendation. Second. Got a motion and a second to move staff recommendation. Any discussion? I guess if we weren't in a budget constraints here, would there have been recommendations for additional bus routes? Mr. Chair, I don't have any specific amendments to the proposed service contract offhand. I just know that through the TPO and through deliberations among the county commission, we talk about expanding service. And so, I think, given different sort of fiscal environment, we may have looked more at ridership, which places either have good ridership now and may benefit from increased headways, or where might there be propensity for increased ridership. I think, as is, this is a draft proposal. It's also going to go to the city commission. There were talks about cutting, you know, further from what was presented today. But at this point, the city commission is comfortable with what has been presented today. So, I think this is probably the upper bound of what could be budgeted this year. Okay, thank you. Okay, anything else, commissioners? All right, anyone from public would speak to the motion. Okay, back to the board. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Allison, thank you. All right, Mr. Clerk, that moves us to our land conservation project. What's the first one? Sir, Watermelon Pond Whitehurst option contract to purchase real property is up next. Okay, and we've got recommended action. There's four items on there, which is essentially to move forward with the Watermelon Pond Whitehurst option contract. Ms. Chrisman, you are recognized. Welcome. Great. Thank you, Mr. Chair, commissioners. Andy Chrisman, land conservation program manager, presenting for your consideration the Watermelon Pond Whitehurst property, fee simple acquisition. This property is under one ownership, Whitehurst Cattle Company. It's two parcels, approximately 635 acres in size, currently zoned agriculture with a future land use of rural agriculture. You can see on this map, these are the properties filled in in red. They are located off of County Road 337, south of but within the municipal boundary of Newberry, kind of at the very south end of the municipal boundary there, and adjacent to the state-owned Watermelon Pond Wildlife Environmental Area that's managed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, part of a larger complex of protected land owned by the county and the state. You can see on the aerial photo, the parcels outlined in red. The western parcel primarily consists of former and current sand hill, and in the southwestern quadrant of that western parcel, you can see a darker area. That is actually a, what we think is a former phosphate pit, dug probably in the 1930s from looking at aerial photos. It seems that there's another one on the property to the little parcel to the north as well, and that kind of road that you see going up to that parcel of the north seems to connect the two maybe as a former hall road. Now that pit is fully vegetated and sort of in appearance and maybe to some degree biologically serving as a sinkhole lake, but obviously its origin is man-made. The parcel to the east is partially wooded and partially in agricultural use. Most recently there's been hay and row crop use on this parcel, and that is the parcel that has the primary connection to the Watermelon Pond, WEA, that's currently protected. There's still definitely good quality sand hill ground cover. There's a couple areas of wet prairie, sand hill, upland lake, xeric hammock, and then pine plantation on those parcels. And they are in one of our primary corridor areas, what we call the southern corridor, that connects Pains Prairie through bar hammock going west to Gothi State Forest and eventually towards the Gulf. Because this is a sizable and dry property, we see a lot of recreational opportunity for the community in this property, and hopefully actually to connect recreational trails with the trails that exist on the WEA currently that Fish and Wildlife manages. Some images from the property, you can see about seven-year-old planted longleaf pine in this. A portion of the area was recently harvested, that's the picture on the left, and there's some wooded footprints as well. That's the historic hall road in the upper right that now is actually kind of a nice shaded trail functionally. And still good gopher tortoise population and a lot of what you would expect to see in terms of interesting native sand hill ground cover plants. A couple images of some of the wetland features on the property. And in this slide, these images are from the eastern parcel that has that pasture or row crop footprint, the agricultural footprint, which the most likely outcome in terms of ACF management, should you choose to exercise your option on this property, would be to restore that with longleaf pine as well. And these images are from that borrow pit that I mentioned is in the southwest quadrant of that bigger parcel. You can see our staff walking down to the edge of the kind of surface of the borrow pit there. There's about 40 feet of relief from the top to the bottom. This is proposed as a fee simple option contract with Alachua County as the lead manager, becoming part of Watermelon Pond Preserve with a closing targeted in November. There's no permitted exceptions in the contract. The title work that we received as part of preparing this package for you will include what basically is a title exception for a power line that exists on site, but at this moment in easement has not yet been recorded for that power line, but it does already exist on site along County Road 337. So that would be added to the title work at closing. Purchase price $5,242,545, estimated due diligence $80,763, and our total expenditure request, which includes the 10% contingency, is $5,855,639. And these are the staff recommended motions. Chair Prizzi. This is a big one. I mean, it's an exciting one, though, I will say. I mean, getting that, getting this habitat that's so imperiled, protected, especially as we're seeing development encroached in the western side of our county, it's exciting to see this land get protected. I'm assuming that in those pasteurized, more impacted areas, the seed bank is maybe still decent for understory with some burning and planting of the longleaf. We would certainly hope so. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Well, I'm excited about this property. I did just look at the management costs, and all of the restoration costs are going to be under Wild Spaces, Public Places funding, and with just the management being ongoing with general fund, correct? Correct. A portion of our program staff are on general fund, and that would be the recurring cost. It would be a general fund cost of staff salaries. Okay, great. Will I move staff recommendation? Second. Second. Commissioner Wheeler? Yes, Andy, I've got a couple of questions about this property. The, was it a phosphate pit? Was it a pit that has been, has it been reclaimed, restored? It, you can sort of see in these images, it has naturally revegetated, but it hasn't been filled in, and we don't think the landowners took any action. So, yeah, so I think it just happened over time because that was from the 1930s. You know, when we looked at the property of the lakes up the mine that were up there, there was concerns because it had not been reclaimed by the company that there were liability issues that prevented us from buying this property. Are there concerns about liability on this property? I think that's something we'll need to explore if, you know, if and when we close on this property and move towards its inevitable opening to the public. Trail routing and also whether or not there would need to be fencing around that are okay to restrict public access. Because that's the very same conversation that we had. Yeah, but the slopes are much more gradual here, not sheer drop-offs as exist in the property that you're referencing. No, I know there were major differences that way, too, but it kind of breaks my heart, you know, because this is the same kind of thing we were looking at with that property up there and having it tapped down into the aquifer and really, you know, being, you know, an asset that we could protect. The same thing with fencing and with, you know, the same thing, the conversation that we're having here, that's all. Yeah. And, you know, after eight years of trying to get that done, too, I feel bad because that had reclaimed itself as well, you know, except for the fact that there was that deep gouge, you know, that had not been reclaimed. And that the mining operation is still active, the mine had not been closed. Yeah. Right. Or it just had not legally been closed. Yes, right. Correct. No, I understand. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. And how long have we been working on this one? Actually, this property came to us fairly recently. We made an offer at the beginning of the year. It wasn't accepted, but the landowners then came back to us more recently. So this hasn't been a multi-decade project. Okay. Yeah, it's a big one. Great. Okay. Anyone from the public wish to speak to the motion? Okay. Let's bring it back to the board. Any further questions? All right. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion is unanimous. Commissioner Alfred out of the room. Okay. Next one, Andy, is Lake Santa Fe Eagle Shores track. All right. A little bit smaller. Yeah, this is opposite ends of the spectrum. So, again, Andy Christman, Land Conservation Program Manager, presenting for your consideration the Lake Santa Fe Eagle Shores fee simple acquisition. Opposite side of the county, opposite side of the size spectrum. Owned by a single owner, the Eagle Shores Investments Incorporated. This property is already under contract with Alachua Conservation Trust, who stepped in to get it secured under contract with the intent that it would be assigned to Alachua County, should you choose to exercise your right of assignment. It consists of three parcels, which total 19.37 acres in size, and it is within the city limits of Waldo, and it has zoning and land use, which reflects that city center and residential medium density within the city of Waldo. You can see, again, filled in red on this map, the Lake Alto Preserve, county-owned Lake Alto Preserve, is the solid green, and this red portion is on the far western side. It's on the city of Waldo's side, and it also includes a rare thing for the western side of Lake Alto, which is some upland footprint. And I'll get to that a little bit more, but you can see Waldo sort of filled in in gray, and then the state-owned Santa Fe Swamp Conservation Area is that sort of squiggly green color footprint. Looking at the aerial photo, the parcels are outlined in red. The sort of see-through, sort of grayish-blue color is the wetland footprint in this area, and then underlying it, that green, is the Lake Alto Preserve. Immediately adjacent to the red-outlined parcels that are the subject parcels today is the DIN acquisition. So you recall that we acquired that a couple years ago, and that was a multi-decade project that took quite a while to get to this point. You also will note that the leftmost parcel outlined in red has frontage on Highway 301, and it also is immediately south of ACFR Station 40. And shares a boundary with that fire station. You can see that the four parcels here are separated. That is because this is part of a historic plat. So those are paper roads that create that separation in the four different sort of boxes that you see on this map. A portion of one and all of another have been constructed on the ground. So northeast 147th Terrace runs north-south. That's fully constructed. And then a portion of northeast 148th Terrace that's sort of in the upper right of those red-outlined boxes. That's been constructed and then terminates at a point. And the other ones where you don't see a line drawn. There is no road constructed in that paper road footprint. Our intent would be to work with the city of Waldo to get those vacated. But that would be something that is under the purview of the city of Waldo. I also want to call out on this map, again, as I mentioned, a rare aspect of this property is the upland footprint. One of the things that we've not been able within the county land conservation program to provide for the city of Waldo in this area is recreational access to this portion of Lake Alto Preserve, the portion that's right by their community. You may recall at the joint meeting with the city of Waldo, that's something that was brought up as an identified need by some of their staff. In this case, the parcel that we see being maybe most critical to that happening is the one immediately to the sort of right of the fire station 40 that touches northeast 144th Avenue. Our initial assessment is that the parcel that's immediately south of fire station 40, which is also the parcel that has frontage on 301, could have other uses explored for it. And that's something that is included, I just noticed, is included in the published agenda motions, but has fallen off of the PowerPoint motions. So when I get to the PowerPoint motions, I'd like to read what was included in the published agenda, which is motion three, authorizing staff to investigate with the city of Waldo, with community support services or others, potential alternate uses for that parcel, which would involve reimbursement to the land conservation portion of the wild spaces funding, if there is a desire on the part of a partner to utilize that particular parcel for an alternate use. That's item three on your agenda, Commissioner. Yeah, so apologies for that oversight. For being within the city limits of the city of Waldo, it still has a surprising amount of species diversity on those parcels. Mesic flatwoods, some mesic hammock, and there are some areas that are successional hardwood forests. It's adjacent, as I said, to Lake Alto Preserve. It's adjacent to the Lake Alto Swamp Strategic Ecosystem, and it's within one mile of the Santa Fe River Outstanding Florida Waters. And, again, we see this as really probably the key acquisition for that public access for the citizens, primarily of Waldo and visitors as well. There are some images from the site. Here you can see the frontage on Highway 301. If you've driven through Waldo recently, there's a for sale sign on that parcel that you might have queued in on. The leftmost image, that's the north boundary of the parcel, Northeast 144th Avenue. The upper right image, that is the paper road that's fully constructed, Northeast 147th Terrace. And in the bottom right image, you can see the back of the bays of Fire Station 40, the building that's kind of in the background there. Who owns Northeast 147th Terrace? Is that Waldo, or is that us? It's Waldo. City run. So, as I mentioned, your action today would be related to the assignment contract. The property is currently under contract with the Lachua Conservation Trust. They would be assigning it to us. You would choose to accept that assignment for a fee simple acquisition with the county as the lead manager, incorporation into Lake Alto Preserve. Because, you note this date that says May 19th, that is when ACT got the property under contract. So, that's why it doesn't match today's date. So, the closing target would be in August. Though, we are likely going to need to request an extension because the city of Waldo has some infrastructure that's on the parcels that we need to get easements established for. What kind of infrastructure? So, there's a hydrant on 301 that is just a little bit onto the one parcel that fronts 301. There's an underground water line that's also, like, a little bit – they're just all slightly off. So, yeah. Little town stuff. Yeah. Although, additionally, there's also a Florida power and light power line that also needs an easement. That's why this list has number 10, number 11, and 12 all listed as added. Those are all things that have been found in the initial survey work that ACT has undergone on our behalf on this property. I have a quick question just about management. You were talking about this is an access area, but there's no real trails in those systems. Whenever we do our trail, we put the trail head cost, the kiosk cost, like parking cost. We never put, like, trail development costs associated with – or at least I don't notice that we put that. Is that because it's just built into staff time to sort of manage whatever existing hunting trails or whatever are on the property? Both of what you just said, basically. Okay. So, Mr. Chair, we often will – we always will survey a property. We often try and co-locate any new public trails onto existing disturbance footprints that might include hunting trails or, you know, some sort of former access trail. And those costs typically are contained. They're mostly staff work and existing equipment work that the county owns. So, we don't typically call those out. Gotcha. Thank you. I move staff recommendation. Do you want me to read that third? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead and read the third one. Sorry. But it's included in the motion. Yeah. I didn't even get the cost. Do you want me to read the cost? We have one. We got it. Okay. Okay. All right. So, the missing motion that's in the published agenda but not shown on the PowerPoint is number three. It is authorized staff to investigate future options for parcel 17243-000-000, including but not limited to buy, protect, sell strategy, or a public-private partnership, possibly including a temporary land lease for the purposes of ecotourism business development. Okay. So, we've got a motion. Did I hear a second? Yep. A couple of seconds. Any further discussion? Anyone from the public? Back to the board. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion is unanimous. Thank you. Great. Thanks very much. Andy, thank you for your work on this. Yeah. That moves us into our public hearings. Yes, sir. Up next is the adoption of the amendments to the ULDC and Administrative Code Access Management. Recommended action is to hear the presentation. Once we hear it, we will then convene as the Land Development Regulation Commission and find that the ULDC and Administrative Plan amendments are consistent with the Alaska County Comprehensive Plan, then reconvene as the Board of County Commissioners and approve the ordinance and authorize the Chair's signature on the ordinance. Are these all the amendments that we already – these are the movements we already heard and transmitted or just – Yes. So, these were heard on June 6th for a request to advertise and I gave a fairly lengthy presentation. I have a shorter version today if that's acceptable, Mr. Chair. Commissioners, what's the will of the Commission? Yeah, I mean, are there any substantive changes from – No changes have been made. I can just skip right ahead to the recommendation. Let's do that. All right. Anybody object for that? No, they don't. Yep, let's go right to the recommendation. The only change was that this was – legal notice was made on July 1st on our website, so to have that on the record. All right, so let's go ahead and convene as the Land Development Regulation Commission and I'll look for a motion. Move to approve. Second. They are consistent with the Alaska County Comprehensive Plan. Do I have a motion and a second? Any discussion? Any public discussion? Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. We'll reconvene as the Board of County Commissioners and I'll look for a motion to approve the ordinance and authorize the Chair's signature for the ordinance. So moved. Second. I have a motion. Two seconds on that one. That's good. Any discussion? Any public discussion? Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. Okay. You did a great job. Much better than Todd. He's not here so we can talk about him. And now we'll move to Ms. Barish. Hi. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. Christine Barish. I have the second one is? Special Neighborhood Development and Transit Oriented Development. And again, we have, I don't know if there's any, we gave them some feedback on these so I don't know if there's any changes but. There it is because it's not under my name. I'm standing in for Jacob today and saying this was here for you for request to advertise on June 6th. I can go forward with a little bit summarized version if you'd like. We didn't really have any substantial changes either. I can move forward to the recommendation. I can. That'd be great. Great. All right. So let's go ahead and reconvene as the Land Development Regulation Commission. And I'll look for a motion. So move. Second. Move to approve and find it consistent with our ULDC. Okay. I got a motion and a second. Any discussion? Any public discussion? Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. We'll reconvene now as the Board of County Commissioners. Move staff recommendation. Second. Motion to approve the ordinance. Authorize chair signature on the ordinance. Any discussion? Anyone from the public? We should discuss this one. They say no. Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. That motion is unanimous. Thank you. I thought all those consultants and developers that gave us all that feedback would be here to celebrate, but no. You're reaching out to them. Let him know. Thank you. All right. That moves us, Mr. Clerk, to the fiscal year 26 budget amendment. Sir. And we're going to go ahead and conduct a public hearing to adopt the resolution and approve the budget amendment. We've got Mo at the podium. Mo, you are recognized. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. This is primarily due to accounting. Three activities are occurring. The first is for the sports events center. We have created its own super fund. So we're just moving from- Super fund. Super fund. My super powers with my super fund. We're just moving revenues and expenses from one to the other. The second is the hospital assessment that we do. Last year, when the big, beautiful bill came out, they didn't want us to recognize any revenue at that time. Now that that has shaken out a bit and we've got an ordinance that they're looking to update, they've asked Todd to put the appropriation in so that we can pay the balance. of what we have in the fund itself. Separating that into the fund. Okay. And then the third was a request from F&A. We have some arbitrage that we needed to pay. So we're recognizing interest in that fund in order to pay that $16,000. And those are the three items. Commissioner, any questions? We're still showing the land development regulation. So the tourism revenue is- That's the wrong. That's different. That's the wrong thing. So there's a tourism adjustment as well as that related? Fund 155 Sports Event Center comes from tourist development funds. So we're moving it from one to its own super fund. Oh, I get it. Okay, okay, okay. Mark, do you want to get that off? The solid waste was for the repair that we made because of the fire? Yes, the equipment. Okay. Sorry, I forgot about that. Moves for the budget amendment. Second. I got a motion and a second to approve the budget amendment. Adopt the resolution and approve the budget amendment. Adopt the resolution and approve the budget amendment. Any discussion? Any public discussion? Back to the board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Motion is unanimous. Thank you very much. Okay, Mo, thank you. All right, commissioners, we've got a number of public hearings tonight. Let's go ahead and jump through real quick. Is there any county attorney comments? Not today, Mr. Chair. All right, Annie, thank you. That's P2, P3. Any county manager comments? Just one. So the manager, you should have received your budget book on the desk last Tuesday. If you didn't, I apologize. Should have let you know a little earlier. Hopefully you've had to look at it. It's also on the webpage so you can look at it. The manager will deliver her budget message tonight to kind of kick this off tonight, which is a little different timing-wise. She's going to start with her budget message tonight before we take up the votes. So bring your books tonight, commissioners, and we'll have the budget message. Thank you. Is that it? Yes, sir. Okay, we're going to do commission comments. Let's, Mary Helen, you got it? They would like their books back. They are here to wait for their books back right now. All right. I was going to put them in the commission office for when people come with their children. Oh, they won't be. You don't need that many. They just showed us, Steve. All right. Oh, wait. I could have asked this one in between. We thank you all for saying for that. Chuck, do you have anything? And Mary Helen, do you have anything? I don't have anything. No. Nothing, Chuck? Do you have anything? I do. I do. I do. I didn't. I guess we had gotten an email about park safety challenges at Post Springs. I don't know how many of you saw that. I do. But I guess I was just interested in how staff were addressing our – it's a park that's going to be super popular in the summer, and I think it gets overpopulated a bit. I don't know what we have in place that helps to ensure – what's the right word? Occupancy or, like, total number of cars and people allowed in and ensuring sort of safety at the Spring Head, if anything. I just kind of wanted to flag that for our Parks and Rec staff and our management. Yeah, can we ask Jason to get us an email back on that response to that email? We do have a lot of those elections, but it turns to Jacksonville was important. Okay. Is that okay? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Second is I wanted to find out what the process is with regards to how Extension – and yes, I do work with IFAS, I recognize I probably could have just asked them directly – but does for hiring the new Extension Director for Alachua County and what, if any, role we play in having a say in who that person is, and so that's a question if we could get an answer and maybe ask Extension if we could have some role, if there isn't a role in sort of weighing in on the new director that will be coming in? Yeah. Isn't that a Ms. Lieberman? We're 50-50. Right. So that's Ms. Lieberman and Extension will be doing that? I don't know. With UF. So we are a part of that process. Having gone through this in another county, there's a committee, I know that they do a typical hiring process, but I will get you more detail so you refine exactly what our role is versus UF's role and how they interact. Okay, great. And then the last is, I know we already have moved forward with the aides, and I guess I just wanted – I also wanted information on how we would be going about those interviews, what role the commissioners would have in weighing in on those interviews. I'd like for us to have the opportunity to interview those candidates and put in our feedback and also be able to be a part of the annual review for those staff. I know there was a need potentially to do some updating to a resolution or something if we were going to have input into annual reviews for anybody other than the manager and the attorney. So I don't know if that's just to have input in their annual reviews or if that's – if they're reporting to us, but I just want to flag that now for a conversation as we move forward. I will defer that conversation to Ms. Dockfond, and she'll come back and have that discussion with you. And we'll do that also during the – probably a good time to do that will be during the budget discussion of administration. Okay, great. And then last but not least, I just – we heard about 234. We keep hearing about 234. I understand we have several roads like 234. We probably have like three or four of them left, but I really do feel like most of them are in our 10-year plan. But 234 is one that's not – I don't know if the one you mentioned in Archer is one that's not. I really think we need to address this road. I brought it up before. We had a whole conversation about it, and we decided not to address it. But I'm just here to give it one more shot. I feel like we should ask Ramon of all of the roads that are not in the TIP, what are the – The really bad ones. Yeah, the really, really bad ones that we recognize we're going to need to renew the infrastructure sales tax to ultimately address. What, you know, what are the top two or three, and how much would that be if they were included so that we can have either a bonding discussion or we can say if we collect more surtax, we will be adding it to the program. But I feel like instead of doing just one, I know 34 is on there, have him kind of tell us here's the four, here's the three, here's the two that are constantly on a weekly basis hitting our email boxes. I'm starting to agree with the residents that it doesn't seem like it's the best use of our resources to send crews out there weekly to continue to refill potholes in areas that are – And we are having to pay out some claims. Yeah, and so if he could make that argument for us that, hey, Commissioner, it's not in the TIP, but when you look at how we've reallocated pothole repair costs and staff, and when you look at kind of what we're projecting and our bonding capacity, I don't know, but I feel like that's something that – And I'm going to say potential liability. Yeah. Because some of these potholes are getting really bad before we can get to them. Yeah, so could we maybe refer that to Robert? Sure. Yeah, if we could ask – I would move that we ask the Public Works Department to put together a presentation of the top roads with complaints and issues regarding maintenance that are not in our current 10-year CIP. Second. With costs associated with doing a repaving project for those. Second. Second. Motion to second. And Mr. Crosby, I'm thinking that that's something that we can hopefully get to by the end of the budget cycle. So, Mr. Chair – This is how he tells us no. We have a – This is very – We have – We've already planned to bring back up the five-year capital plan through the budget cycle, because if you'll remember, there were quite a few kind of to-be-determined stuff in other areas. Yeah. But I want to be frank with the challenge at hand. I think the amount of allocated funding for the TCIP program is quite extensive, and it becomes the ranking of the priorities that has been the biggest challenge of – my question, quite frankly, has been how does a road like this not rank higher in the distribution of funds. So, I guess, other than saying how can we do it outside of the plan, which is a financial concern, is just to clarify that the ranking process is how the board wants to address it. You know, what – is it ridership? Is it long-term cost of repair? Is it liability exposure? All of those things go into that program, and to just then off to the side say, well, this didn't make it into the program, but now we're going to find a different set of funding sources for these type roads becomes very challenging from a long-term budget perspective. And then because some people that are on the plan in year 10 are like, wait a minute. They just jumped me, you know, because I'm in the plan and they didn't get in the plan. So, there are a lot of variables. I don't disagree. Commissioner Alford's concern is on point. We've had many discussions in risk management because we are paying out a lot of claims, not just at 234, but we have across town, out by High Springs. I mean, those – so, I don't normally drive those roads, but I have had an occasion lately to go through the woods from my house over to High Springs and Alachua. And I'm like, oh, this is no joke. You know, it's – so, I just want to be cautious before we start identifying those two or three roads that weren't in the plan and all of a sudden they just jumped the roads that are in year 7, 8, and 9. Well, maybe they don't jump. Well, I didn't say the jump of them. I said that are not a jumping road. You're talking about doing them separately outside of the plan. And that is a concern, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah. The plan is the plan. So, we will address it. Be happy to bring it up during those conversations. And I want to make sure Ramona's adequately prepared to understand we have that conversation about those roads that are in definite disrepair. Why aren't they in year 1, 2, and 3 of the plan? Because they should be. I guess if I can, I guess I would say what I'm asking is what are the roads that would have been in the plan if we'd had more money. Right. But they're still going to be at the back end of the plan or they would have been right. I agree. But they're not even right. But they're not even right. They're not even going to be in the short-term resolution. Another – I agree. Another 10 years of some of these roads, I can't imagine what that looks like other than patching, patching, patching. Yeah. From my perspective, it's we did the analysis in 2022 and a lot of things have gotten a lot worse and a lot quicker than what I think we anticipated. And he knows them better than us. Yes, sir. Like his crews know them better than us. And from a liability standpoint, there could be a financial argument made for certain roads. And instead of us making that decision based on who stands up in front of us and based on the emails we've received, I want to defer to his expertise. I was really happy that he took the initiative and, you know, added two crews to the potholes. But I know that that's a short-term fix, not a long-term fix. Yes, sir. Commissioner Alford and Commissioner Wheeler. Yeah. I basically wanted to reiterate the same thing. I feel like we need to not abandon the plan, but if we could figure out a way to fund more roads, then I think that we need to just add to the plan. That's what I'm – I think that's a better way of presenting it to the public and doing it because I think that, for instance, they discovered under 346 that when the state built that road, they actually buried trees underneath the road. And so, you know, these potholes are reappearing so quickly and so bad because there's trees rotting under the road. And, yeah, super interesting. That's the only road that we're actually planning on repaving from start to finish because of that reason. And so, you know, that's just new information. So we have new information on other roads as well. So I think that that kind of stuff, you know, does behoove us to think about how we're going to go forward. Chair, I think something to remind us outside of our control is just the capacity of the industry to do the work. So while it's – if we had the money and we added the roads, there still is a capacity to get the work done that is no fault of anyone's. I think that this board and staff have been very diligent to try to get funding and been working on this since I've come to work here. You know, the surtax finally passed, but all the efforts before that using bonding gas tax funds, et cetera, sometimes it becomes a capacity just of the industry. So I will have Ramon address that as well because I think that's an important component. It's easy to – we found some more money, we're going to do some more roads, and no, we're not because it takes so long to get to that point. And it's something the public does not understand. Yeah, Commissioner Alford just said, and I heard Commissioner Prizia kind of say it in a different way when Todd was here, but we're actually talking about expanding even more funding to a $250 million, you know, program. And if that's what we're talking about, then that's a completely different discussion. And, you know, now we're talking about bonding and we're talking about seeing how November goes. But we're talking about now ahead of that – Commissioner Wheeler? Yeah, that just kind of took the wind out of what I was going to say because I was thinking about sitting out in the audience when the report was made about our finances and that we're under budget and that we have these monies in reserves, you know, we could pull, you know, coming from out there, coming up to the podium, and I would say to this board, well, why don't you take some of that money out of the reserves to put towards the road as is? No, but I'm just – no, I'm just saying that generally speaking – It's paid $105 million. If we're coming – you know, if we've got that much money under budget, then that would be a question that would come from the community. That's all I'm saying. But because we can't get the crews that we need to do it, that's not even an issue at this point. Even if we had the money to tow at it, we still wouldn't be able to get the personnel out there to do the work. So, you know, just trying to cut that off before it might come, you know, anybody like me who would be listening to that report saying, we've got all this money that we didn't spend, you know, throw it at the roads. But it's not that easy. I understand that. So everybody else needs to understand that too. Thank you, Commissioner. Do you have a fifth item or you conclude? I guess I just – I wanted to know if we'd had a conversation about the mobile – the mobile – you know, I brought up that our mobile – both of our mobile units, the women's OBGYN and the – and the mobile outreach clinic are – don't have enough funding because of the federal cuts that have come. And they're a primary source of healthcare for under and uninsured people in Alachua County. And so I just – I just – I wanted to make sure that was on staff's radar in terms of our budget conversations. Because I do want to make sure that we're helping them because they really are our frontline out there for healthcare. And with the cuts that are happening with Medicare and Medicaid, they're going to become even more so our frontline. And I just – that's it. I'm done. Okay, thank you. Keep it on the radar. Mr. Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. I'm forward on the motion to refer the roads report to staff. Thank you. So we've got a motion and a second to refer the roads to staff that we just talked about. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion's unanimous. Okay, Commissioner Alfred, do you have anything? I do. I have a couple of things. We had our meeting, the convening with the School Board of the City and the Children's Trust over housing. And I wanted to report that that meeting went a lot better. We did – when working with looking at potential solutions, one of the things that we're moving – look like some of the groups are going to move forward with is actually renting houses and putting families in bedrooms. So we might have four families sharing a house that way. There's a model for that already, but it's one of the ways we can make the limited funds that we have right now go further and at least get families off the street. So the city is also working towards creating, working with churches and possibly even working to create one themselves, a safe parking designated area, which would need to have showers and bathrooms, but would be a place where families would have a safe place to park where they could do that. They could be connected to services and maybe even have meals provided while they're trying to find another place to live. It's really sad that we're at this point that we are considering just a parking lot for families to sleep in cars, but that's where we're at. That's the first thing I have. Second thing I have was I was contacted by a resident near Bivens Arm who has a neighbor with multiple trees that have been affected by pine bark beetles, and the trees are more than dead. I drove by there and looked at them. They're right on the edge of the property and are threatening to not only knock down power lines, but very likely impact between one and three houses. So this has been brought to code enforcement's attention. There's been the owner of that property has been asked to appear before the magistrate for various legitimate reasons. They have not and probably will not appear before the magistrate and so that's not going to be taken care of by that property owner. So what after talking to staff what appears we need to do is we have a fund right now to address property cleanups like the one that we saw over near the Hawthorne Trailhead. But we do not have a fund to deal with issues like this one where we need to take care of trees. Is it in the county right away? No, it's on private property. It's on private property. We would do the work. So after talking to staff this is just one option I just wanted to have a motion to ask staff to look into because this is apparently the only piece of property where this looks like it might be an issue. So I was going to ask that we ask staff to look into some solutions for us to be able to deal with these things in a more what's the word I want timely way because we're in hurricanes and now we've had some several very violent storms coming through here. And the lady that called me was really really frightened because her house is literally right there. So. Okay, so you want to refer this one to staff? I do. Yeah. Any objection commissioners? Yeah. To create another. Well, that might be that might be that's what one staff member wants to do. I figured Sylvia needs to look at it. Jeff needs to look at it. Miss needs to look at it. But I want to I want to have a solution for things like this so it doesn't become a you know circle of who could do what kind of stuff. So we have a plan when a when we have property that's got junk on it. You know, we have a set of things that we do to make that fix. Yeah. So I want to have that same, you know, plan for situations like this. Okay, we'll refer that to staff. Any objection? Yeah. I'll have them look at it. Okay, anything else? That's it. Okay, my only two things is I guess, again, I want to thank staff for adding the three full time equivalent positions to animal resources, the animal care technician and the two FTEs for the veterinary technician. I also want to thank GRU 11B on the consent, working with Public Works and GRU on the extension of that easement to save those trees on Parker on the north end of Parker Road. I think that's good work for staff from something that we talked about many, many meetings ago. And with that, it's 405. We'll go ahead and reconvene here at 501 and give communications plenty of time for our hearings tonight. Okay, we stand adjourned. Turn adjourned. Okay.