Regular Meeting @ 11:30 a.m. - Oct 14, 2025

i'd like to call to order the board of county commissioners for alachua county florida for october the 14th 2025 at 11 31 a.m mr clerk mr chair we'll start the morning off with the invocation we have senior pastor dr carl anderson from upper room ministries here to provide that invocation it'll be followed by the pledge of allegiance so if everybody please stand and remain standing for the pledge as well good morning it's truly an honor to be here to each of you and your families and we appreciate your service to our community i stand here representing upper room ministries the department of chaplaincy for alachua county juvenile detention center and also the president of alachua county christian pastor association which this month is uh national clergy appreciation month i'd like to dedicate this prayer to our to my brothers and sisters who serve the community well heavenly father god we thank you we thank you for being who you are we thank you for all you've done all you're doing and all you're going to do god we acknowledge you god for being the head and the leader of our life and our community god i pray god that you would continue to bless us bless alachua county god i pray god you'll bless all families uh that reside in our county god i pray god that you would bless each of us god to love one another respect one another god i pray god for our youth i pray god for protection over our schools of our neighborhoods over our playgrounds god i pray god for those who've been struggling with addiction god being that this is uh international breast cancer awareness month i pray god for uh i pray god for those who are still in the fight those who's battling god we pray and we decree healing in your name and god i pray god that this meeting will go smooth that everyone will be on one accord and be for the benefit of our community and we ask these blessings in your name we pray amen amen god bless you chair next is any adjustments to the agenda if the manager has any announcements yeah i have a couple of things the first is um the um sorry let me just pull it up is is budget and fiscal item a unanticipated revenue for sheriff forfeiture funds i just wanted to know if tommy could tell me does that just go back into general fund do we know is that money just we'll get that answer for you okay um i guess i to my colleagues i just wanted to talk about the idea that if we're getting back forfeiture money from the sheriff's office it seems like a good set of funds to set aside for re-entry programs and other programming opportunities at the jail and programming for um our incarcerated individuals as well as those that are returning home so i just wanted to flag that as an opportunity potentially once we find out that information and then the others um if we could um pull the um number four for a quick discussion it shouldn't take too long but i just have a few things to discuss with you particularly about um animal the animal welfare board i would i would move the uh agenda pulling item four uh from consent thank you motion is a second any further discussion to the motion are there any public comments to the motion back to the board those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye those opposed same sign motion carries chair that takes us in announcements and communications director mark sexton's here to present those okay thank you real quick and then and i won't forget that answer we can deal with that a commission comment if it's different good morning mr chair mark sexton communications director mr chair we have several announcements this morning we're going to start off with a quick look at an event that i know many of you participated in but for the benefit of our residents we wanted to give them a view of what happened when the florida association of counties descended upon alachua county alachua county normally has five commissioners but earlier this month commissioners from dozens of florida counties converged on alachua county as it hosted the florida association of counties annual innovation conference for more than 85 years fact has championed the diverse interests of florida's 67 counties bringing together county commissioners and their staff to create a unified voice that can advocate for counties at the state level attendees included commissioners managers and others from across the state the innovation conference focuses on cutting edge county initiatives engaging policy discussions and hands-on leadership development the conference's focus on innovation makes alachua county a perfect host the conference began with a welcome speech by alachua county commission chair chuck chestnut the fourth but before the important policy discussions attendees were taken on a day-long tour of alachua county the tour covered some of the county's most important locations and showed off how nature culture and innovation thrive in alachua county at each stop visitors heard from alachua county officials about the importance of each location to the county's long-term goals while traveling between locations attendees heard presentations from county staff about some of alachua county's most important initiatives these included the affordable housing trust fund the newly formed economic development department and discover 200 our year-long celebration of alachua county's 200th anniversary with rolling hills and winding trails west end community park gave attendees an impressive first look at alachua county's green spaces visitors learned about the preparations the county made at the site for the 2025 world masters athletic championships including hammer throw javelin discus pits and a cross country course they also heard about the county's community engagement process to determine how the park will evolve in the future the next stop on the tour was the alachua county agricultural and equestrian center they heard about the long process of finding a new fairgrounds and some of the amazing events that have been held since the center opened in 2021 including the annual 4-h fair attendees also heard about the many benefits and services that uf ifis provides to every county in the state next attendees were taken on a tour of the sports and event center a 130 000 square foot state-of-the-art facility which offers 90 000 square feet of event space and an additional 18 000 square feet of multi-functional space including meeting rooms for expos conventions and concerts they heard about the county's management of the center and were given a tour of the facility including a chance to put the athletic equipment through its paces firsthand during lunch at ben hill griffin stadium attendees heard from local law enforcement about what it takes to manage a stadium full of 90 000 fans on game day after lunch attendees got to see the other side of game day with a tour of the stadium a visit to the hallowed gator locker rooms and an incredible group photo on the field the final stop of the day was at the famous uf bat houses and the field and fork campus food program's gardens there they were given an overview of the field and fork program and its mission to provide everyone with fresh food the visit included a tour of the gardens and how field and fork works together with local charities to get food grown in the gardens onto the tables of those county residents who need it the most the next day members of alachua county fire rescue presented a deep dive into the operation of neuro one and the mobile stroke treatment unit this innovative collaboration between acfr and uf health quite literally brings the hospital to the patient decreasing the time it takes to make an accurate stroke diagnosis and administer time sensitive stroke therapies earlier saving time and improving patient outcomes throughout the conference attendees saw how shared resources and coordinated initiatives have enabled alachua county to become one of florida's best examples of innovation and the perfect host for facts innovation conference wonderful thank you to josh masri who put the video together and alan for his great voiceover um mr chair we also want to let the community know that our forward focus project is in full swing and we're going to be putting out a major push for folks to fill out the forward focus questionnaire that we have up on our website um also we want to let people know that the one year summit is coming up on october 25th this is the culmination of a lot of individual community meetings that have taken place in that area and it is going to be held at kuskabula nature and retreat center on october 25th from 9 a.m to 2 p.m there will be a continental breakfast and a lunch served at that meeting and you you can now register for that um we also want to let you know that the um gainesville sun's best of list recently came out and i'm delighted to inform you that kuskabula was awarded the best summer camp in the community choice award awards so congratulations to to jason mauer and jamie bass and ed and all the folks involved there um mr chair you know that there's been a great deal of discussion about the budget recently um we recently replied to a uh uh ascertain a suggestion that uh perhaps one of our budget items needed explaining and we had a very good explanation for that that was very well received but it's a good time for us to do a deep dive into our budget for our residents so we've come up with a campaign that we um are working hard to make sure people notice it and of course the best way to do that is to use an image from a 16th century novelist and uh when you're going through our social media page we hope this will catch your attention um our sense and sensibility campaign alachua county's budget in eight chapters uh we'll be releasing later this afternoon the first chapter is um entitled how you shape the county budget and this chapter is all about public engagement um it's about how you can get involved it's about the importance of getting involved it's about how residents successfully get involved in shaping how you make your budget decisions so we're we're extremely excited about this and we will be doing chapters new chapter releases every tuesday and friday for the next four weeks the next topic is a deep dive in how the general fund works we have other chapters including a billion dollar budget does not mean a billion dollars spent so the the budget can be tricky stuff but we are working at it and as the manager said in a quote that we borrowed understanding your local government finances shouldn't require a finance degree so we are working real hard to put this in very plain language that everyone can understand and um finally um at great personal risk our manager does not like me bragging about her at my announcements but i'm going to shamelessly ignore that directive and let you know that uh michelle lieberman was recently credentialed by icma the international county management association and commissioners that is the gold standard for county managers there are only about 1300 people worldwide right now that hold this accreditation so it is a great honor and testament to her hard work to her longevity in working in local governments and uh we're putting out a release today that will detail her accomplishments and her involvement not only in icma but in um you know other uh organizations like fact like naco like uh the florida association of county managers so uh she is very accomplished in this a credit or this credential uh award is well deserved and i want to give her a hand i have commissioner alfred and yes commissioner cornell want to make comments oh uh first uh congratulations michelle i i know that credentialing isn't a um you know just uh uh formality it's a really big deal so congratulations on that and and second um on the forward focus questionnaire are we um doing any community outreach on that considering a lot of folks in the east you know a lot of county don't have good internet access and things like that there there is all kinds of uh outreach happening i know at the um growth management level the folks that are running this sean and missy um they have um put together an extensive email list of people that have reached out who have been participating so i know that they are doing other efforts from communications efforts we're going to be geo targeting with paid advertisement on our digital advertising but yes they are doing some non-social media work through growth management yeah i was hoping maybe churches or things like that we could maybe reach out and and and because we are okay okay it's just such an important endeavor i want to make sure we get as wide an audience as possible yeah um mr chair yes we are we have um we have an incredible intern cole i don't remember if he's been in the meeting yet if y'all met him but you've probably seen him at the meetings he he does a lot of our flyers and things like that and he's created one that has the links and everything people can use their phone to take the survey we have those out in the communities hard copies okay around and we've had all the city managers are also pushing it at their meetings and in their libraries and post office and things like that so we're trying to hit it from all sides yeah i was hoping that perhaps we had some folks that might help people fill out the survey and things like that maybe a few events i don't know if that's necessary if you've found that in any of your forward focus meetings if there was a need for that somebody might be sight limited or you know have um language issues or something like that we haven't but we will take that back okay all right thank you thank you so much thank you mr chair um great announcements uh again just reiterating the fact conference um staff did an amazing job a highlight from many commissioners that i heard was that so congratulations anna on that mark i really think this is a good series sense and sensibility uh you know i think explaining our budget to um to the folks and with everything going on with doge as i've said and we've all said it gives us a chance to tell our story so i i'm really glad you're doing that and michelle i remember when you became the interim you said uh you and ginger at fact really at the same time started to lead the organization and she started to lead facts organization coming out of the county attorney's office and coming out of facts attorney's office um and you said that um i value education and i'm going to go get my icma so that was a long time ago congratulations uh and it's it's well deserved and i know how much you value our staff getting additional credentials and so leading by examples is a good is a good thing so thank you for doing that thank you okay thank you mr chair thank you mr clerk mr chair that takes us to the approval of the recognitions move approval of the recognitions second got a motion and a second any further discussion to the motion those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed same time motion carries mr chair are we are we skipping the employment length of service quarter no that's just the first item we're just approving all of them okay got it okay thank you okay mr chair that takes us the item number one under the approval of recognitions it's the employee length of service fourth quarter recognitions i didn't realize that was all connected yes still learning there's no language in that one seven years and i'm still learning good morning heather aquan assistant county manager for justice and workforce strategies and it is my pleasure to present um our length of service for our fourth quarter for your most valuable resource your employees just so you know we do allow people to submit new pictures if they want to but remember their youth um if we have any of the employees here with us can you come forward and we can take a picture with um the commissioners you can come right over here if the commissioners of the county manager okay let's hear about shawn and jeff why don't we put the commissioners on the end so you guys can squeeze them there commissioners commissioners stay here um so and we also have two thank you everyone we also have two special recognitions for 25 year employees and we have a plaque for them so first we will bring up alan gator and missy daniel while everyone's heading out just thank you so much for your service we appreciate you all so much and to all of you who use your like recruitment photos and those it tricked me for a minute i was like these people don't look old enough to have worked for the county for 20 years and then i realized oh these were the pictures when they started with the county 20 years ago that's 25 years me mr chair that takes item number two which is the presentation of a proclamation recognizing october as community planning month in alachia county florida all right we have a bunch of planning staff here awesome yeah come on down interestingly i took some planning classes when i got my engineering degree so so this is a good fit all right thanks all of y'all for being here and i'd like to um read this proclamation alachia county florida a proclamation declaring october is community planning month in alachia county florida whereas changes in economic development and population growth affect all florida cities towns suburbs counties rural areas and other places whereas community planning and plans help manage these changes in a way that improves the well-being of our community impacting how people work live and play and whereas community planning provides an opportunity for all alachia county residents to be meaningfully involved in making choices providing input and creating visions that improve our housing transportation and land use solutions for our community and whereas the full benefits of community planning come through our public officials and residents who understand support and demand excellence and comprehensive data-driven planning and implementation which leads towards safer resilient equitable and prosperous communities and whereas the month of october is designated as national community planning month by the american planning association to highlight how sound planning is essential to every community and whereas national community planning month is an opportunity to recognize and thank the board of county commissioners the alachia county growth management department the planning commission our advisory boards and committees local professional and other citizen planners whose efforts participation and dedication improve the lives of all alachia county residents and now therefore through the authority vested in me by the board of county commissioners of alachia county florida i do hereby proclaim october as community planning month in alachia county florida duly proclaimed this 14th day of october a.d 2025 is signed by our chair chuck chestnut and attested to by our clerk jess irby oh thank you thank you mr chair commissioner alford and commissioners um before you you see many of your planning staff um luckily you get to see them quite frequently at most of your meetings some of some of them more often than others um but we just wanted to say that it's a pleasure uh to work for this board and in this county many of us have worked in other jurisdictions and the respect and support for planning that this board this manager and this attorney have for planning it's a great honor to work here and a privilege and we appreciate it and um you know i won't repeat what was in the proclamation we all know uh how impactful it can be to to plan for the future and and more and more that's becoming the case and becoming evidence so thank you very much and appreciate it just a quick moment to say thank you to all of you you are definitely the best planning department in the state if not in the country we love having you to help guide us and really create the strategic vision for what our community looks like long after we're gone so thank you all so much for your work and for everything you do for the county mr cornell yeah thank you mr chair ditto to what um commissioner prizio said you have a reputation from around the state you know the alatra county's comp plan is the community's business plan it is literally the plan that was written by the the commissioners before us whose shoulders we stand on and and who will carry on after us and this staff are the protectors of that plan and we really appreciate all the work that you do thank you thank you chair it's now noon so that'll take us to public comment where we offer three minutes to citizens to speak about anything on the topic on the agenda and three minutes anything not on the agenda is there anybody present that wishes to provide comments morning my name is xavier white and i am the ceo of early learning coalition of alachua and i just came to give thanks to you guys for supporting us we received 35 527 dollars through the cap program currently we're serving over 2 000 children here in alachua county we currently have about 700 on our wait list and i just wanted to introduce myself and say thank you for your support yes thank you xavier's been extremely helpful in the um in our work towards doing the 24-hour child care yep and i will tell you that i was with her up in tallahassee and she can speak for the kids like no other excellent any further public comments once going twice okay mark mr chair we have one caller today okay um caller ending in nine two six seven if you will state your name you'll have three minutes and you may have to there you go this is kathleen rupert hello commissioners and chair i have a couple questions so one is can an advisory committee vote to not follow the guidelines that are in your resolution uh under the consent agenda number four today and the other question i have is is there a way to since county employers can now serve on advisory committees are they precluded from being one of the officers or at least the president or vice president and the third thing i'd have on my agenda for today is to find out what the status is of properties for the animal resource and care facility like as university of florida is still involved and i understand in the june meeting all voted five zero to look at other properties and what that status is i appreciate your response thank you mr chair that was the last caller okay thank you we'll go back to the presentation for proclamation recognizing october as the national pharmacist month can i respond to okay um i just want to respond to kathleen's question quick from from my understanding well i pulled the advisory committee thing for discussion oh we did pull it for discussion but i actually i sent her an email i don't know if she got it earlier but um uh my understanding is as well advisory board could vote to make that decision they um the advisory board serve at the pleasure of the commission the commission has provided guidelines and if they're not following those guidelines then we can change the advisory board and so you know that's how that all works we have those provisions in there that don't make the rules be stringently followed because if somebody you know has a 30 minute public comment and the chair only allows 29 minutes of public comment you don't want to be sued for not you know following the the letters of the law so to speak so it's a guideline but it's a guideline that we enforce so it makes total sense to me but i think that um i think that uh um in terms of uh the other questions we can all address those during the other ones but i i just felt like that question needed to get answered good point mr garst yes welcome back welcome back i had to be here you all get more valuable every day i'm going to read this proclamation very slowly because i think the words on it are probably important even more important now than they have been in the past from what we're seeing happening in our country regarding health care alachua county florida a proclamation declaring october is american pharmacist month in alachua county florida whereas pharmacists are the most accessible health care providers delivering critical services to patients and contributing to the health and well-being of all people and whereas pharmacists are best positioned to be the health care provider that ensures optimal medication therapy outcomes and helps ensure patients are adherent to their medications and whereas with a community pharmacy located within five miles of nearly all americans pharmacists and pharmacy personnel are best suited to work collaboratively with other health care providers and are making an impact helping patients overcome illness and live healthier lives through chronic disease management and the full effective use of their medicines and whereas today there are over 300 000 licensed pharmacists over 400 000 pharmacy technicians and 44 000 pharmacists providing care and serving as patient advocates for ensuring access to the best and safest therapy to the patients they serve and whereas the american pharmacist association the florida pharmacy association and the alachua county area association of pharmacists have declared october 2025 is american pharmacist month and therefore through the authority vested in me by the board of county commissioners of alachua county florida i do hereby proclaim october as american pharmacist month in alachua county florida duly proclaimed this 14th day of october a.d 2025 and signed by our chair charles chestnut chuck as we know him and attested to by jess irby and i just want to say thank you on behalf of me and my family who use our pharmacists regularly for advice since i don't have a mom and grandmother alive anymore to ask for help we go to our pharmacists so i want to present this to you and if you would introduce your absolutely absolutely well thank you thank you very much uh mr chair vice chair commissioners staff and my fellow guests here with us today um um we have with me today uh kirk ellison he is with the palms he's the director of pharmacy at the palms medical group in uh high springs so he's and also too he's not going to speak but uh kyler burke kyler burke he is the director of marketing with the palms medical group so anyway anyway first of all i always like to thank you for you and your staff for the service that you give to our our community uh the value that you add to it is just immense and also i want to thank you for the recognition of the of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to the health of our community uh you've probably heard me say it before but i guess i'll say it again we have the visible and we have the invisible the visible pharmacists are the ones in the community pharmacy the ones in the the retail pharmacies that provide the drug management and the advice and counseling but also too that we have pharmacists that work in nursing homes and they review the chart of of every nursing home patient once a month and give advice on compatibilities and make sure everything is documented properly we also have pharmacists that work in hospitals and health care systems and they review every order of every routine order that's administered at a in a in a hospital for appropriateness and then we have clinical pharmacy specialists that work in oncology work in cardiovascular work in infectious disease and anyway those are the invisible ones the ones we don't think about and the ones we don't see that often but anyway i want to thank you for this recognition and if you allow mr ellis dr ellison to make a few comments yes thank you commissioners my name is kurt ellison i'm the pharmacist and pharmacy director of palms medical group we operate several pharmacies and medical offices here in a lateral county and also the surrounding counties we work every day to make medications accessible accessible to our patients and also high quality medical care accessible to our patients also it's a privilege to be here today as you recognize october is american pharmacist month and we thank you for your continued support of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians that work every day to serve your citizens thank you i just want to say too i'm really glad you are in high springs we tried to buy that compound out there but you all are the you all are the perfect fit so thank you all for being out there and taking a risk on that place thank you okay commissioner alfred and commissioner prissett okay while they're while they're taking a picture i just wanted to point out a couple of things you know i i worked in pharmacy for um it was one of the invisible pharmacy uh folks at shans for five years but myself through school and i learned a lot about how how all the different roles a pharmacist can have in your life so if you don't have a relationship with a pharmacist i encourage you to do that it can right now with with people seeing huge increases in the cost of some of their medications a pharmacist can look at the medications that you're on and can advise your doctor on what might be a less expensive choice or if you aren't necessarily taking you might be taking two medications together that kind of cancel each other out sometimes there's a lot of things that a pharmacist can tell you and since many of us shop around and might get our drugs at two or three different stores it's really important to talk to a pharmacist so they see all the things you are taking including supplements and that they can they can really help make your medications work the best for you so i'm sorry to get on my stump just a little bit but i thought that was an important point to make if you don't mind just remind everybody that you're if you or any of your loved ones have a major list of medications to keep that current because you never can tell when you might have to show it at a hospital or emergency room and coming from the health care systems like i did with the va and university of florida we have people coming in all the time and what are you taking i don't know i got a little white pills a little green pills and things like that and so we it gets to be a challenge to get the medication list but anyway uh we appreciate it and thank you very much oh some people just take pictures of their prescription bottles and keep it on their that's what i've that's what i've uh advocated yeah yeah yeah all right thank you very much okay mr clerk chair the next item is a presentation of a proclamation recognizing october 23rd 2025 as lights on after school day in alachua county florida welcome marsha okay so it's certainly my pleasure to declare october 23rd as lights on after school day in alachua county florida whereas the children's trust of alachua county stands firmly committed to investing in quality after school programs because they provide safe and engaging learning experiences that help children develop social emotional physical and academic skills and whereas after school programs provide critical support for the academic growth and well-being of children and youth and offer new experiences and opportunities that help young people learn and thrive after school programs provide innovative hands-on activities for children to engage in learning and building stronger communities by involving students parents businesses and whereas volunteers in the lives of young people today after and whereas volunteers in the lives of young people today after school programs address key issues in our state such as school absenteeism learning loss recovery and workforce development after school provides a solid return on investment every one dollar invested in after school program saves at least three dollars by increasing kids earning potential improving kids performance at school and reducing crime and juvenile delinquency whereas the children's trust of alachua county has provided significant leadership in the education and well-being of the children and youth quality after school programs are key to helping our children become successful adults and whereas lights on after school the national celebration of after school programs held this year on october 23rd 2025 promotes the importance of quality after school programs for our children families and communities and whereas many after school programs across the county are facing funding shortfalls and they are they are being forced to close their doors and turn off their lights the children's trust of alachua county is committed to investing in after school programs to ensure every child has access to safe and engaging places where they can learn and grow while helping them develop the skills essential for successful success in life and work now therefore through the the authority vested in me by the board of county commissioners of alachua county florida do hereby proclaim october 23rd 2025 as lights on after school day in alachua county florida duly proclaim this 14th day of october it's signed by our illustrious chair charles chestnut the fourth and attested to by jk jess irby and before i ask marcia to come up and speak briefly you'll inform us of the event next week i want to let our board know that yesterday at our board meeting we actually had a year-end analysis of the seven after-school programs that are funded by the children's trust they were all evaluated and the metrics that we measure i think nine out of ten were far exceeded i will tell you that the average age of the of the over 300 kids that were funded through those seven programs was nine and that 64 percent of those individuals were african-american kids and we spoke about the urgency that this board and our whole community has taken when it comes to literacy and they are as actually um programs are actually benefiting now from including a piece of literacy in their after-school programs there are also some town halls on literacy are you going to talk about that yeah well i'll just mention i'll just mention it uh since since i have the microphone and then i'll give it to marcia um october 29th from 5 to 5 30 to 7 30 uh 5 30 to 7 in east side high school it will be a town hall and then the following day october 30th from 5 30 to 7 at the santa fe auditorium on the western side of the county we will be having a town hall where which will be led by the leaders in that movement the children's church will be there and we are encouraging everyone to attend those this is all hands on deck from the library governing board to the school board of elapsburg county from the city to the county santa fe the university of florida everyone is involved in this efforts largely due to the efforts that this board has taken and finally each of you were given by marcia this parenting playbook it's a great guide for us to be passing out throughout our community i know frank gold media helped put it together along with all of the staff at the children's trust and marcia unveiled it yesterday along with so many things that we did at the board so i'll stop talking and i'll invite your executive director uh for the children's trust marcia kiner thank you chair cornell thank you commissioners for always supporting the children's trust and uh literally every effort that we bring before you um i echo what uh commissioner cornell just talked about in terms of of literacy um i have not had the opportunity to come before you uh since you all made the decision uh to um commit 250 000 so let me say thank you um with your 250 000 and our 550 000 we will make an impact on the literacy of the children here in our community we will do so not because of the dollars but because of the commitment of our leaders so thank you thank you thank you i want to invite you and i want to invite our community to join us at our lights on after school event next week we will be partnering with the gainesville circus center and if you have not had an opportunity to see the gainesville circus center in action please come out and witness it it is fun the children are delightful um they are swinging from the rafters you name it they do it um and it is one of our as uh commissioner cornell mentioned one of our seven after school programs uh this is just an opportunity for us to say one thank you to our providers here in the community whether they are being funded by the children's trust or not they are impacting our children they are pouring into our children they are helping them academically as well as socially right uh find themselves uh as they uh are in safe environments after school so we want to celebrate after school programs we want to have a little fun we're going to feed them we're going to do some face painting all all the things next thursday at the gainesville circus center with me today who's she's standing over here patiently uh i wanted to introduce our community engagement coordinator miss emily mccully you will see her all throughout alachua county at events uh tabling she may even be up speaking on behalf of the trust if i am not available emily is a great resource to any organization in the county who is interested in finding out more about the trust hearing what we do um so emily say hello and thank you all thank you commissioner while they're taking the picture just a big a big thank you to the children's trust for all the work that they're doing both to champion the literacy initiative that is county-wide um really excited for those open houses and hoping maybe we can get the info and we can get it out through our press channels as well um and get it on our calendar so we can make sure we share it with all of our groups and this is great i was flipping through it a little bit while you were talking although i was listening and it's beautiful it's really really nice it's got a lot of great resources so i hope people will take advantage of this and we'll certainly make sure we get it in the hands of the groups that work with children and parents thank you sure that takes us to the board committee items the first one is the alachia county health care advisory board appointments we have five nominees there's cynthia white aaron jarvis shannon dixon erica barnard and katherine ray i'm not sure if anybody's here that wish to speak towards their application mr chair shannon dixon has notified us that she has withdrawn her application sorry i was unaware of that nope that's that's why i was letting y'all know is there anybody here that wish to speak to support their application not i guess we'll choose between we only have one area we need to vote on so i'll ask for your one nominee between cynthia white and aaron jarvis and if i could start with commissioner alford your nominee please aaron jervis commissioner cornell your nominee please aaron jarvis commissioner presia your nominee commissioner wither your nominee please cynthia white and commissioner chestnut your nominee cynthia white aaron jarvis has three of your votes so i would move the appointment of aaron jarvis as a full member position for non-profit health care provider representative for the term ending april 30th 2027 erica barnard for the department of health representative for the term ending april 30 2027 and katherine ray for the agency serving primary low-income patients for the term ending april 30th 2020 second second second and a motion in a second are there any further discussion to the motion those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye opposed same time motion carries chair that'll take us to the rural concerns advisory committee appointments we have three nominees rodney closure sarah luther and richard wilson i'm not sure if any of those are here any of those individuals are here to speak towards our application we have one if you'd like to present any comments to support your application please feel free good afternoon my name is richard wilson pretty much known as rick to all those know me i'm a 18-month resident of alachua county now moved from jacksonville my wife and i sold our big suburban home and bought a piece of property in cross creek that had never been lived on or built on so we're kind of going through a number of they're not issues at all but learning as far as how you take a heavily forested piece of property that has no infrastructure and build a home on top of that our property being heavily forested the oak trees magnolia trees uh gum trees uh gum trees cedar cypress are all two three hundred years old um and so my background uh professionally i'm a professional photographer for over 40 years that kind of uh by default makes me a professional in observation and as far as a position on the advisory board uh for a rural residents um i'd like to do my best for our rural citizens uh kind of representing uh the issues that they partake for example last evening i attended our uh cross creek volunteer fire department uh board meeting found out that we have a nine thousand dollar shortfall for the budget year just because new uh minimum wage requirements went into effect and so now the fire department will be scrambling how to recover those funds to keep the fire department running um so anyways my application might not you know on paper look like oh this guy's you know uh an expert in agriculture but growing up on my grandparents dairy farm in ohio uh which as far as the farming and agriculture community uh you're not just a farmer you have to be a welder an electrician uh mechanic um so i have experience in all those things um anybody has questions for me i have a question um mr olsen are you actively involved in silviculture agriculture at this time as we are developing our property we have plans to start a silver culture business we have limitations as far as our property being located in the cross creek special assessment area which basically protects the forest right um but as far as cutting down all the trees and harvesting the trees have no plans to do that we want to as far as being involved in silviculture start an old growth nursery so these trees that are on our property uh the two and three hundred year old oak and magnolia trees there are saplings growing right next to these mature trees so instead of cutting down all the mature trees it's like we can harvest the saplings which actually helps uh keep the health of the forest by thinning rather than burning um and besides actively pursuing opening the silviculture business we are also going to be partaking in a wood crafting business um so again like on paper me just being a new resident for 18 months now it might not say oh wow wham bam like this guy but i do have experience in many things thank you thank you very much mr chair i have a quick um i have prissy and then you commissioner yeah i mean my comment was just that was i i really excited you're you want to serve i think we need diverse ideas on our rural it's a rural concerns advisory board and there are concerns beyond ag for sure in our rural areas and so excited but this position is member actively involved in agriculture or silviculture so i just i'm not sure if you qualify at this time since you don't i don't i guess we need like i guess it sounds like you have to actively have a business like filed and active right now um so i'm not sure that you fit the qualifications of this particular position but i'm excited that you want to serve oh yes i understand i spoke at great lengths with mr ken mcmurray and he um through our conversations emails a phone conversation he's the one that suggested that i apply for the position but gotcha so thank you thank you thank you mr chair okay i mean i'm sorry i i just wanted to recommend maybe a tree house if you've got that many old trees up there maybe you could build a tree house rather than you know worry about something on the ground we there's water issues over there too yes ma'am there's a company called nelson tree house it's a national company that builds tree houses um besides um basically our our first home is a structure to be a garage and living area that we're going to eventually turn into an office when we build a larger home but yes the tree houses there's the thing about that is tree sway as far as our hurricanes that we have here so there's a lot of wash away yes there's a lot of um logistic and engineering plans for that well welcome to alachua county is really what i want to say to you and thank you you bring skills here that we could really use and there are a lot of boards that are open yes ma'am right now that you would qualify for so keep your eyes out i've been to pretty much every fast forward uh meeting that we've had and all kinds of we'll find a spot for you don't worry we'll find a spot for you if you're willing thank you very much all right mr i'll call on each uh commissioner for the one nominee between sarah luther and richard wilson commissioner wheeler your nominee please sarah luther commissioner prissey your nominee commissioner cornell your nominee uh luther commissioner alther sarah luther and commissioner chestnut your nominee luther move rodney clauser as the ifes the move sarah luther as the ag and silver culture second and uh mr wilson i would say thank you for applying you can also attend these meetings you don't have to be a member and provide input and it's a good way to get involved those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed same sign motion carries third jerry that takes item number three which is the alacho county affordable housing advisory committee annual work plan and accomplishments okay mr chair uh ralston rudica community support services so for the presentation on the annual um affordable housing advisory committee work plan and accomplishments we have the chair of the committee um rd bonahan so i'll turn it over to him okay figure it out uh thank you ralston and uh thank you mr chair and commission uh it has become my tradition as our chair to come and visit you for this purpose once a year and uh this year of course is no exception as soon as i figure out there it is um so just a little bit of our background on the committee for more the public's good since i know many of us are familiar and we speak about these things regularly the affordable housing advisory committee was established in may 2008 because of some statutes surrounding the allocation and expenditure of ship dollars we incorporated our work when the cdbg citizens advisory task force was disbanded and so now many of those issues come to this committee for discussion as well uh and then especially in recent years uh there's there's been some direction from the commission to to consider that almost any and all housing related issues would come to this uh advisory committee for review uh and to to give us an opportunity to gather the experts that we've compiled for this committee to uh review those things prior to uh coming to you here at the commission and so on the screen uh you'll see our membership we have 11 members right now and we are regularly meeting our quorum which is almost an accomplishment in and of itself getting that many people in the same room on the same day this is probably a good opportunity for me to publicly apologize to the housing finance authority board who meet right after our meeting in which we often run into their time so our apologies we have a very engaged board and a lot of lively discussion happening and i i never want to slow down the conversation which sometimes runs into issues when other boards have to meet in our in our same room so um i'm gonna go ahead i think and move forward to talking about the the major things we want to talk about today are our accomplishments and then some of our goals for the upcoming year so we are an advisory board which means most of our accomplishments are reviewing housing related plans material things that come to us and then providing recommendations to this board and so most of of these items deal with us doing exactly that we've reviewed in the past year the housing trust plan the number of applications for the county living spaces and thriving places programs just about every year we review the incentives and recommendations report helping this year we actually did a bit of a deep dive into some of those things and we've been reviewing what what each of those recommendations entail and we've been kind of taking bite sizes this year discussing just a couple of them at each meeting so we can do more of a deeper dive to see what's working and what's not to make recommendations again to this board ongoing as well the conveyance of surplus land plan really just trying to figure out if there are ways that surplus lands can be used for affordable housing and if so kind of promoting that idea that we do that we've reviewed let's see a couple of specific projects that have come to us under the living spaces and thriving places we've reviewed the housing development program projects submitted to the housing finance authority and we've made some recommendations to that entity we have reviewed community engagement with relation to housing projects that's very ongoing we it comes up just about every meeting we're talking about community engagement and how we do that and making sure that the public has an opportunity to to weigh in on these things we make we made funding recommendations in support of community resource centers as part of the housing trust plan we've done input on the comprehensive plan specifically in our area of expertise in housing we've heard presentations from outside entities a lot of them are listed here and it's that that's with the idea that our recommendations come from a place where our own board gains knowledge on the issues before we make those recommendations so we bring in outside sources including other housing programs and non-profits there's a few listed in here that we've heard from this year um let's see uh we one of our most fun meetings we we were able to brainstorm names of some developments that came to us and that was not something i thought we had any authority over but it was a fun thought exercise and of course it comes here after um and then we do the things that we're sort of statutorily required to do so we we review the the ship housing uh assistance plan uh the and and other related plans in the future we plan to do a lot of a lot of similar things in kind of the next stages so we want to keep an active board and officer structure that engages our members and the community to make sure that we've got people showing up to do the work serving as a liaison between the community at large and the county we try to do that by of course the representation that we have but also we've had a number of uh of public uh comments during our meetings uh this last year and we hope that the public will continue to feel inspired to come out to our meetings and offer their input in real time again we're going to review plans priorities and policies with the intention to create preserve and retain affordable and workforce housing including the annual housing trust plan we are working to meet with the city's affordable housing committee a bit more regularly and so our next meeting i believe is scheduled and will be happening here very soon and we plan to do that on um we had been doing that about annually and we're trying to do it more often than that in the upcoming year and then we're going to focus on community engagement again uh ongoing processes right we want to we want to keep the things the the topics that are hot topics that that make sense to continue the conversation on we want to keep the door open to those conversations we've invited some other housing providers to make presentations in the upcoming year we'll be promoting our housing activities including some online and social media presence we'll be reviewing applications again through the living spaces and thriving places program we'll be reviewing our incentives and recommendations report and our ship annual report we'll continue to collaborate with governmental and quasi-governmental entities private and public developers lenders real estate and banking institutions just really from a public outreach standpoint making sure all the people who should be at the table are at the table and then do some advocacy for housing legislations at all levels federal state and local government exploring opportunities these these last few are some some pretty recent conversations that are a little exciting but we're talking about just getting some more research done to find out what opportunities might exist within the tourist development tax specifically related to workforce housing and in within the housing conversation and find out if there's any possibility of using those resources in that way and then of course the ongoing another ongoing conversation inclusionary zoning policies we're working with growth management to just make sure that our board really understands that so that when things come to us in the future we'll know what we're talking about and we'll be able to make good decisions in terms of making recommendations to this board and of course we want to support housing and strategic development with that oh i should have should have gone a little faster with these slides this is where i am now that might be it um if there are any questions i'd be glad to make an attempt and i would also just like to say on on behalf of the board it's it's a pleasure to serve you here at the county there's a lot of exciting housing things going on and uh it's it's fun to hear about them a little bit ahead of time in order to kind of weigh in and really deeply think about some of these things and we appreciate the opportunity to serve and this commission's commitment to housing okay i have commissioner prisia alfred and wheeler i just want to say thank you for letting me serve on this board i really enjoy it and you know it is a testament both to arty's leadership and to staff's work um that we now have a full board you know i don't when i started on this commission i was put on this board and we couldn't make quorum a single meeting we every time we would have a meeting we would have like two or three people show up it was usually me and kali and one other and then and it was just like this constant round robin of not being able to get quorum and not being able to make decisions and i think this board's commitment to housing and the conversation around affordable housing becoming so central to workforce development to community development in general and also the hard work of a lot of our community organizations focusing on this area has really brought shown a light on it and brought a lot more interest and so we have a full board now and we have really robust conversations every time we meet um and so i just wanted to say thank you for letting me serve on it and thank you to the board for being consistently there to ask the hard questions and make sure that we're delivering the best possible product thank you commissioner alfred um already you are um uh you wear a lot of hats in supportive housing and in general and i want to thank you for all the hats you wear and all the ways that you advocate for um you know affordable respectable um uh how you know the kind of housing that that we need here and we need a lot more of so thank you for that i sit on a couple of different housing boards in in town that are um kind of think tanky kind of things and one thing that has come up in a couple of our discussions are um uh communities that are taking land on the periphery of schools and and using that land for um affordable housing to support teachers as well as students in the schools is that a model that you guys have had time to look at or um consider i'm just curious if that's um because it's it's a you know it's a partnership kind of thing that that the county could do with the school board at some point in time if it if it's my job to respond uh it's not something that we've explicitly talked about but it's kind of an exciting idea and i would be more than happy to get it on an upcoming agenda so that we can think through it and uh ask ask the folks that the other amazing thing about our committee is the way that they represent the different subsets of of the community at large i'm sure there are at least a few of the members of our committee who would would be able to make a couple of calls to other people that they know uh to to learn more about this and and find out what the possibilities are yeah and i you know and i i don't know but you know the lay it's it's kind of like a land trust where the school board like maintains the land and somebody else is in charge of the housing it's an interesting model especially in areas where property is expensive and schools often have uh you know land on the outside edges of their property that isn't being fully utilized so it's a it's just something i thought i'd bring up as a possibility for discussion because i'd love to get y'all's take on that i'm writing it down so that it gets on the agenda well of course the school board has to be on board as well but you know i think having having the right having the right proposal and having the right background and presentation to make to them makes a lot of difference you know so okay commissioner william and commissioner cornell thank you for that commissioner alford because you're exactly right there is a lot of land on these school and also churches a lot of these churches also have big properties that might be enticed to put housing there for maybe some of their elder the members of their churches or you know that sort of thing too so thank you for that um thank and thank you for being on that board i came on when i first came on this commission and it was pretty sparse we didn't have a lot of folks on that board but it built up and when the last meeting that i had with you all when i was representing the commission um you had a meeting a joint meeting with the city and you're saying that that and they were really anxious for that they were have you all been able to continue that i mean i see that as you know as part of your goals but i know they were really anxious because there were so many robust ideas and so much energy coming out of our group that they needed some of that wind and uh so have you all continued that that has continued uh and our next meeting is scheduled we we have to sort of toot our own horn we have had uh better attendance than the city has at those joint meetings and i don't know if that's because uh of the time or or the place or or why that might be but it's uh it the momentum i believe has continued in in the way that you're describing and uh we've we've been um part of the of the back and forth to make sure that those meetings are are getting more regularly scheduled as well and it it is good to to to have those uh collaborations well it's exciting to to be a part of the the problem solving and and to be more creative and you guys can you know really go at it and i know you are and so it's exciting to see what's coming out of that group so go for it yeah our meetings are generally not boring i'm sure that's right thank you mr chair okay commissioner cornell thank you mr chair rd to you and your entire board thanks for i mean this is a very active board and you all are doing a lot of work anna thanks for the time commitment it's a big one i recognize it um and really thank you for working with our staff you know our staff has been tasked with something that i don't believe any other staffs for this commission have been tasked with which is we have provided over 50 million in infrastructure sales tax funding that we want to deploy and so how do we best do that and i appreciate the input that you and your board give to our staff the chamber of commerce the most conservative of the state of florida the most conservative organization has consistently said affordable housing is the number one issue in the state of florida and i'm glad to see that our advisory board this commission and really this community has taken it seriously and are attempting to do something that is new i mean let's just be let's just be honest about what we are attempting to do housing has never been something that local governments have been great at doing at scale and your board has a number of really qualified active and caring community members you know if you're not housed you're probably not serving on boards if you're having trouble with housing you're probably not serving on boards we have a housing first policy and we have a group of folks on this board that i wanted to publicly recognize that are that are really helping us move the dial uh and something that uh has been needed to be done for decades and decades so thank you okay thank you thank you very much do we need to move to accept it did we already do it no a move that we accept the annual accomplishments of 25 and goals for 26. second got a motion there's a second are there any further discussion to the motion are there any citizen comments to the motion that's on the floor seeing none back to the the board those in favor of motion vote by the sound of aye aye aye those same motion carries Mr. Clark up next design number four is approval of a chair letter to the city of archer for infrastructure surtax update good afternoon Gina Peables assistant county manager chief of staff as you may recall earlier this year i brought to the board's attention the undisputed facts that the city of archer had commingled their infrastructure surtax funds they have since requested the oversight board for an additional extension on their quarterly reports so at our last meeting the oversight board has requested a chair letter to the city of Archer requesting a status update so that we know their progress being made towards repaying the funds and what measures that they've implemented to ensure that these incidences do not continue moving forward motion in a second any discussion to the motion that's on the floor Commissioner Cornell not to this motion but I have something I wanted to bring up or just ask Gina we also asked the oversight board to opine on the use of wild spaces money for the road for the Black Creek Trailhead and I understand that they approved that as a expenditure but we need the board to so yes the oversight board did indicate that it was an appropriate eligible expense out of either bucket so either infrastructure or wild spaces however it is a policy decision of this board whether you would like to invest your conservation land funding in a road improvement so I would I asked the attorney to draft up a motion for me which I'm prepared to read we can dispose of this first motion and talk about that okay all right manager okay so we're disposed of the motion for are there any citizen comments to the motion that's on the floor okay back to the board those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed same sign motion carries yeah so um well I'll let the manager talk and then I'll read the motion that the manager that the attorney dropped it wrong button um mr. chair I just wanted to point out to the board there may be a shift and I had mentioned this to Commissioner Cornell I think he's going to address that in his motion but FDOT is doing a left turn lane to the other side instead of this road to the other side of the property and so there may be a an opportunity for the county to do a trailhead on the other side whether that means two potentially or just the one we don't even know if we would move the trailhead at this point but it is a possibility and if the board is going to be looking at Commissioner Cornell's motion favorably there are some findings that I will put in the record okay so thank you madam chair madam manager so that that road before 225 is actually 221 I'm not sure it has the same need and so I would ask that if the trailhead is moved and that's the road that we bring that back to the board because we may want to change our direction so I've added some warning to the motion so I would move that the board accept the determination of the infrastructure surtax oversight board authorize the use of the half cent wild spaces public places allocation for the county's local government infrastructure sales surtax to improve that portion of 222nd Street Northeast 22nd Street from State Road 26 to the trailhead of Black Lake Preserve it's about 670 feet and in support thereof of the board find that the said road improvements are necessary to provide public access to Black Lake Preserve trailhead part two would be if the trailhead is moved from 225th Street Northeast 225th Street to Northeast 221st Street that this direction is brought back to the board prior to expending any funds thank you can I guess I just feel like this is premature first of all I will say I'm never in favor of spending conservation funds on roads I unless it's like absolutely absolutely necessary and so like and I guess I feel like if we can move the trailhead then it's not necessary so I'd rather us move staff explore the alternative trailhead first and bring that those two options back to us or whichever option is best back to us so that we could make a determination of what's happening because I don't even know like I don't even know that we've seen the trailhead plans for that park or where they're gonna go at this stage yeah miss chair typically that's not something that would necessarily come back for your approval of where the trailhead would go so I think that was part of the motion to bring that back if we're changing plans yeah I will tell you on 225th Street they have clear they're doing the tree the tree harvesting right now and they've cleared out two major portions on Totem Pole Road 224th Street on both sides of the 225th Street there's going to be trails on the western side of 225th Street up to 221st Street and there's going to be I believe about twice the number of trails on the eastern side of 225th Street that leads actually to Black Lake that's the side of the street that Black Lake is on and so I think there's probably going to even if a trailhead is moved to 221st there's going to be multiple trailheads it's certainly for parking but if in fact that is moved the primary the 221st then this motion would bring that back to us if it's not then they would have the authority to proceed I guess I'm just not in favor of spending conservation dollars on roads I would if we have infrastructure dollars I'm happy for us to spend infrastructure dollars on roads but I feel like it sets a really bad precedent start spending conservation dollars on road improvements because we have lots of others that are on pretty bad roads as well and I don't want us to get into this like cascade effect so that's that's but I but I am in favor of doing it with infrastructure dollars we have some savings from other projects we could carve out and do it and I'm totally in favor of us doing it so that the road is improved so that the residents don't have to have the impact of dust and things like that from people coming and going but not using the conservation funds I'll leave that the staff we mr. chair we would need to know that because the ordinance specifically defines two separate pots of money so we need to it's not as if it's one pot and you all by policy or appropriation have made that determination there the ordinance actually splits it in two I just wanted to say I I feel like one of the big I get I've been getting more people complaining to me about how much money we're spending on conservation land which makes it extremely sad it makes me very sad to hear that because it's such an important goal for our county but I guess you know given the fact that with the with the scrutiny our budget is getting it it's it's just something that I'm I'm hearing more more words about so I I you know while I hear you on not spending money conservation land money on roads I feel like a road that helps you access conservation land that helps you access a park that brings people to the places that we want to promote that we want people to visit that we want people to appreciate so they understand the importance of conservation land I'm kind of you know I'm having a little bit of a hard time here because I feel like I need to support this because there's stretching those infrastructure dollars when we have so many infrastructure challenges it's hard right now so yeah I just that's that's why I seconded the motion well I'll tell you I'm I'm in support of conservation lands I don't want to dip in a pot to do roads I mean because I just don't our citizens asked us to do this for conservation lands and now we're going to dip in it to do a road so we're setting presidents at this point if we do that and what's next what road is next and I just don't want to do that you know I get where you're coming from Kim but I just don't I I don't want to set that presidents at this point when I'm gone anybody can do whatever they want to do but not on my watch so that's how I feel personally so I would change the motion to replace while spaces public places with infrastructure allocation so that's good okay so that's good mr. Wheeler what's that yeah just same exact motion just changing it from the conservation allocation to the road infrastructure sales tax that and that impacts the plan the roads plan yeah so be it mr. chair I don't think it's I don't think it's gonna be a material number I think it's gonna be pretty small commissioner Cornell I'm trying to catch up here has we talked about this on the dice before and I'm just missing yeah so I I had brought it up the to refer to the oversight board and the issue was where does the money's come from does it come from conservation lands or does it come from the roadside and because we have the plan for the roadside Public Works had requested that we see if conservation lands would do it so we sent that to the oversight board they said they think you would qualify but they left that to us I just heard one two and a half say I'd rather use road money and so I know how to count the three and I can't get the three out of five with two and a half so I changed the motion to roads my concern is I'm not really good about road numbers where are we taught is this a pro what project are we talking about what what roads be from your state road 26 where is okay that's University University Avenue yeah to the trailhead of Black Lake okay in Black Lake is Melrose yeah so it's a it's about a 670 foot stretch of road 225th and so obviously we'll have to get a quote on how working on that road now they're working on that road right now right and DOT yesterday yeah and DOT is working on that road because it's a state road okay one of the things we had asked DOT was to put a turn lane to turn off of 221st which is right before Totem Road we also asked them to put a turn lane on 225th there wasn't enough traffic for them to add that turn lane but they are adding a turn lane to 221 okay Totem Pole Road is 225th so it's four blocks to the east okay thank you but this giving me landmarks helps me yeah and so staff based on that turn lane is now looking at the original trailhead was off of 225 Totem Pole Road and they are now looking at changing that to off of 221 okay thank you that thank you I was just and this motion is gonna basically ask Public Works to find the money okay so mr. chair where we're looking to pull up a map so you can see what what we're talking about but I just want to make sure that for the board and the public the ability under the conservation penny it does state to finance plan construct and purchase infrastructure for conservation lands parks and recreational facilities I didn't want to leave the impression that it's not permitted it is permitted but it is up to the board that's why this is a policy decision to choose which pot of money it comes from and sometimes we do use it where it's necessary for example by permit you know to it to achieve the permit we have to do road improvements for example in some cases but this is a policy decision as to which pot that this comes from this on the agenda it's okay well this is what I was trying to I'm just that's why I'm feeling so lost so thank you for that red line there that's 225th and if you look at the road to the west to the left that's 221st that's where the turn lanes going to that road because that road goes back to neighborhood it's actually about the same number of people believe it or not but that actually yeah it's a different road and and then totem pole road is where they have cleared out parking a lot I believe on both sides of 225th right now and I guess they're looking at extending that clearing all the way to 221 there will be the majority of the trails as you can see on that map are going to be on the Black Lake side but there's going to be parking on I think on both of those roads but the current clearings if I could mr. chair are basically loading ramps there are staging areas for the logs to be loaded on the trucks because they're doing logging in there at the moment of the parking lot clearing maybe for the purpose of what they're logging now but I can't I don't know how that relates to the exact location of where the trailhead will go that's for them to you know harvest the timber that was agreed to okay this is helpful thank you I'm just just was confused but the motion is if they end up putting the trailhead there and the roadway to do it because they don't do it or to improve that section of road not necessarily pave but improve it in some way yep okay the motion in a second second got a motion in a second are there any public comments to the motion that's on the floor okay back to the board those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed same side motion carries that takes us to item number five which is Alachia County Bicentennial moments a local history presentation by the Alachia County Historical Commission apparently it's just me so I'm going to read Gerald Cheeseburger's history he's unable to be here and I'm very pleased to be able to do this because I have been involved with preserving black history through Pleasant Street Historic Society since 1984 when I helped found it so I do know something about what he's written today this the topic is Resolence and Education the stories of Union Academy Mubain and Lincoln High Union Academy A.L. Mubain High School and Lincoln High School stand as pillars of black education in Alachua County Florida these institutions emerged during an era of systemic segregation offering African American students opportunities to learn grow and thrive despite the harsh realities of racial discrimination founded in 1867 with support from the Freedmen's Bureau Union Academy became the first public school for African Americans in Gainesville the school was established in a modest building constructed by black carpenters demonstrating the commitment to the local black community to education at Union Academy Herod E. Barnes was among the early educators who laid the foundation for academic excellence Barnes a New England teacher faced an uphill battle by providing education to formerly enslaved children in Alachua County and training black teachers and I do want to mention the New England women that came down here to teach black kids were very much harassed by the population because they didn't really want to see the enslaved people getting ahead step despite facing constant underfunding and racial discrimination the school thrived due to the dedication of its staff and community serving as a cradle of academic excellence and community pride in 1923 Lincoln High School was established under the leadership of A Quinn Jones Jones was a Florida A&M University graduate who emphasized academic rigor and character development under his guidance Lincoln High became one of a few accredited black high schools in Florida and I'm just going to throw in another aside that the first one was in Palatka who would think that in 1924 and Lincoln High was the second one in 1926 so that's something to be very proud of Lincoln offered a diverse curriculum that included Latin music and industrial arts providing students with a well-rounded education a Alma Bain high school opened in 1956 in the town of Alachua extending educational opportunities to black students in rural areas named after principal Albert Leonidas Mbain the school became a hub for academic and extracurricular activities the faculty at Mbain often went above and beyond to mentor students serving as role models and community leaders the school hosted annual sports events and talent shows creating a vibrant school culture despite the limitations of segregation the federal mandate for desegregation in 1970 brought profound changes Lincoln High School was closed and its students were sent to the newly integrate to newly integrated schools across Gainesville Mbain high school was converted to a middle school ending its role as a high school the closures were met with sadness and frustration by many in the black community Lincoln students held a protest March mourning the loss of a school that had been more than just a place of learning it had been a center of unity for the minority community the legacies of these schools live on through the efforts of alumni associations reunions and community projects to debate today the names Union Academy a Alma Bain and Lincoln High resonate as symbols of resilience and a commitment to black education in Alachua County that's the end of his presentation he has a lengthy bibliography if you probably got that in your packet so that's all I have to say about black history black education if there's anything else you want to ask me I'm happy to discuss it was the um was the band at Lincoln the band that moved to Eastside high school do you know I I remember some of this from way back well you said wasn't built to much later it wasn't built to much later but well it was their connection there well I think there was a connection because of the students yeah well yeah with the students I just I just remember from I mean I was I was a kid but okay I remember there being discussions about the the the music of the band so carried on the Lincoln tradition yeah yeah all right thank you okay thank you yeah thank you it's clerk sure I believe we're still waiting on the jail program update for the staff to arrive is that correct one I believe they said 1 30 I do see a couple of them here now but you still need to wait till 1 30 okay okay so we move to the next one the next is the fresh food pathways food hub market research report okay and then we can jump right back to that one because that should be time for them to sounds good all right hi good afternoon my name is Bailey McClellan agricultural economic development coordinator I am here this afternoon to bring an update on the fresh food pathways food hub feasibility study that's been ongoing since November of 2024 and they just wrapped up their first deliverable of this project which was the market analysis report which involved intensive community a an intensive community engagement piece which included surveying focus groups and interviews with the community and I am joined by our exhume call with our project lead on the food system consultants who have been contracted to run this feasibility study the project lead with NVA which is new venture advisors is joined by the zoom call his name is Avi Mallinger and he'll be giving us a rundown from the market analysis report including what the community engagement piece consisted of and the key takeaways from what we've learned in this analysis report thank you so much Bailey and a pleasure to be here is can everyone hear me by the way okay good I heard some nodding well Bailey is going to be sharing just a quick summary of at least visuals of our presentation that is a supplement to the report that we shared with with Bailey and Sean and that team and I think is available to all of you at the county as well we are hoping to do a just a quick overview of the first phase of this project and share a little more about where the project is headed and also leave some time for Q&A which can give a little more update knowing that this report was quite robust and we're not going to cover every aspect and facet of that so maybe we'll do skip ahead to the next next page the fresh food pathways project and this market research report is conducted in partnership with new venture advisors which I represent and also led in part in collaboration with grace grows they are based in Gainesville Florida and do a lot of community advocacy work specific in in food access predominantly as well and they have been our partners throughout and sometimes we refer to this partnership as the good food partners and together we have done a lot of the work specific to the market research component and help build this report next page and a slide up let's go one back real quick thanks and just a quick overview of what we'll discuss today I'll give a kind of a brief project overview we'll discuss a little bit of our secondary research we'll go into some of the work we did regarding interviews focus groups and also the survey we we performed over the summer and then we'll discuss kind of conclusions and next steps and where we're taking this project right next page so just to quickly go over this project because I'm not sure how you know I know a few of you are familiar with this we spoke to some of you but not everyone in this meeting might be fully aware of this project the project plan is to create a successful food hub that benefits the community and local farmers and we have four main goals with this project that's to transform the local food economy support direct relationships between consumers farmers and entrepreneurs address the root causes of issues and also inequities in the food system and do so that increases community engagement for the first part of this project it's a four-part project for the first part our core objectives were to evaluate existing programs and resources do research into the food system that is existing in Alachua and throughout Northeast Florida understand and assess the market need and interest in a potential food hub identify resources of support funding locations other programs and then also start to identify and meet with potential organizations who might be interested in partnering to either lead such a project collaborate on such project or or be potential partners in some capacity next slide please so you know for a food hub can take a number it can shape shape in a number of ways and so for us we are starting from a really open space about trying to understand what that means some components of a food hub that are in existence today throughout the country might include aspects of aggregation and the storage of food supporting small farmers or any kind of farmer to aggregate into a new space and create a kind of minute mitigate that barrier to entering kind of like a wholesale supply chain related to that is aspects of distribution and logistics support so the transportation and getting food from that hub to those either end consumers retailers food service providers institutional and also like restaurants and so forth some food hubs also might offer production or processing support so that might be you know pre-cuts light processing of food and of produce and of kind of raw ingredients all the way through having kind of shared kitchens and individual kitchens for food entrepreneurs to create value-added products consumer brands or be production space for food service companies whether they're caterers or they're they're kind of food trucks or mobile food businesses or a kind of a business that's starting from scratch and trying to prove out their model other things might include aspects of retail infrastructure so creating a retail storefront having a space that people can go in at any time and buy food or maybe that's a retail component that's related to a farmers market or something similar like that or facilitating more aspects of retail purchasing having CSA boxes for example some other things a food hub might have is a community office space so for those organizations to be a hub for different food systems organizations so they can collaborate more effectively and host workshops and classes similarly it can be a place for for hosting and and programming workforce education programs you know related to either supporting farmers creating more resiliency how can they market themselves and scale or from downstream supporting people to develop value-added products how does that business work or creating a you know more resilient better food companies next slide please so just to give a quick overview of our secondary research we did some preliminary research first in the first few months of this project did a literature review reviewed over 50 documents that had already been published related to Alachua County and then we also did try to do our own research to understand kind of the general landscape for us it was important to think of the Alachua County food system is more than just the county and think of the region but also have parameters around that region we were shared the food shed mapping tool that's been developed by the county and we decided to use those parameters which were all counties within 50 miles of Alachua County's borders which kind of if we think about those full borders are almost a hundred miles it gets us a little further south of Ocala through Alachua County all the way kind of on the far reaches you have areas like of Jacksonville for example that total population expands that reach about tenfold to over 2.6 million people when looking at the food insecurity rate at Alachua is somewhere in the middle I'm kind of on par with Florida overall at 13.6 percent in terms of food insecurity but has a poverty rate kind of on the higher end at almost 20 percent likely due to aspects of being a population with a large kind of college population and people who might not have full employment one interesting thing when we map this as well is we see kind of a higher proportion of people with food insecurity towards towards the west side of this region next slide please when looking at farmland usage it's it's interesting to see how Alachua County has over 1,700 farms in the county alone when we parse out commodity crops and and livestock and we just look at fruit nut and also produce we see that Alachua County has over 300 farms more than any other county in the region and then you know as a proportion to that total farm it also is one of the highest as well so it has 17 percent of those farms of those 300 farms you know that that 300 is about 17 percent of the total amount of farms we see in the region which is almost as much as Duval but Duval has much less total farms overall some of the produce that's being you know in the largest kind of produce being grown is peanuts vegetables corn watermelon and other fruits they also have a strong in the region there's strong livestock being raised including chicken cattle calves and and also eggs next slide please this is important to look at kind of farm sales so where is that money going in Alachua County there's about 104 of just under 150 million dollars of total sales being made from those kind of farming operations when you take into account commodity crops and livestock overall of that in regionally of that 15 percent of that of those sales come from produce and four percent from fruits to about 19 percent overall one thing that interesting is that in Alachua County 34 percent of the the sales are come from fruit and produce which is more than any of the other counties in this chart you see the green is livestock and the blue is kind of commodity crops the the light blue is commodity crops and the dark blue is produce and the orange is kind of fruit and nut sales Alachua County has you know somewhere in the middle in terms of total sales but compared when you remove livestock it has some of the strongest kind of produce growing sales in the region and also something to note that I just wanted to highlight and it kind of relates to the fact that there are a lot of small farms the total amount of farms suggests that there's a lot of the farms tend to be on average smaller than other farms in the region you have a slightly higher than average percentage of farms that are selling to direct to to consumers or through retail channels which also highlights the desire and need for something like a food hub to reach more people next slide please another thing we really we thought it was really important to look at is kind of understanding the consumer food demand what are people buying and and is their demand for food we saw that overall in the region there's over 6.9 billion dollars being spent on on fresh food or grocery food compared to food away from home food bought in kind of the grocery retail setting is about 60 percent regionally which is actually flipped with what the trends we're seeing more nationally where people are actually overall are spending more on food away from home than food at home so high demand for grocery spend overall when looking at just fruit and vegetables specifically we see about 1.3 billion dollars being spent then breaking it down into alachua county where there's food sales of over 1.2 billion dollars 745 million of that is with regards to grocery spent and then broke that down even further we see about 145 million dollars being spent on fruit and produce sales specifically so if you think about you know what the potential is for a food hub to offset that to bring in local food and and and support even just 10 percent you know you're talking about 14.5 million dollars in in potential sales just within alachua county next slide please the next phase of this market uh research report and project um what was our primary research so that included interviews focus groups and the dissemination of the survey specific to interviews and focus groups we held preliminary interviews to start to understand the landscape and build out our kind of contact list and outreach list we reached out to over 140 subjects overall conducted uh over actually we conducted closer to 50 interviews overall um which you know took over 23 hours we held three focus groups and of those focus groups there was about 20 focus groups 20 20 participants in those focus groups we held those in august of 2025 and the interviews were held um throughout kind of late spring into the summer next slide please and again just because we're kind of uh jumping through this relatively fast there's more background on that on those interviews and what we heard from people but someone i'll just touch upon like six or seven of the highlights what we were hearing overall from those interviews we're seeing that farmers especially small farmers who we spoke to a lot are having challenges entering traditional wholesale networks and wholesale distribution networks some farmers are have communicated challenges with cold cold chain infrastructure and storage in particular because of the heat in the region and the need to extend shelf life we've also heard from farmers that there's opportunities to harvest kind of um unspent produce and potentially use that for food access initiatives there are some food hubs that uh integrate these models or refer to them as gleaning initiatives and we heard that there might be interest in farmers to participate in something like that if it was formalized from the buyer perspective we also hear that while there is large institutions and institutional demand for local food there's also pricing constraints um uh for for that local food and so that can sometimes be a challenge also those institutional buyers specifically but also even other retail writers need a more consistent supply of certain kinds of products so they might have specific skews or specific product types that they're interested in and um might need those at certain days or times of the year and sometimes working with smaller farmers can be a challenge to get those at the right time and the right size and the right quantity perhaps a food hub as an aggregator can uh mitigate those challenges by having multiple growers who might support uh certain kinds of produce we also heard from these people they they just kind of validated that there is desire for kind of an aggregation and distribution network we also heard from these folks specific to farmers but we also heard this from from also food businesses as well that there's a desire and a need for more entrepreneurship training workforce and other kinds of mentorship programs one thing we heard time and time again is a desire for more marketing support so for people to either have a better either web presence or be able to to have better online sales channels or just more marketing overall that's up to date and relevant to today's kind of consumer and also we heard that uh with the kind of um new strategy refresh from the organization working food they might be decommissioning or de-emphasizing their shared kitchen which will leave an opportunity for more incubator kitchen infrastructure into the future specifically as as uh that organization already has a wait list for that kind of infrastructure to support those ready-to-eat makers food service providers and also consumer brands next slide please the second part of that that research phase was a survey we built out a survey in the spring uh of this year and we disseminated it from july 9th to august 8th just five weeks we were pleased by the support we got to complete it we had great outreach from community partners like yourselves the food system coalition university of florida ifas um gainesville chamber of commerce and some others as well that led us to have over 378 response which we were quite happy with considering that it was summertime and we know that we're hearing that organizations have a little bit of a let's say survey fatigue it was also quite a robust survey considering that it was trying to tap into understand the needs of many different types of constituents including food businesses as well as end consumers and also community support organizations we were happy to see that there was over 77 completion rate and it it took people despite the fact that it took people about 10 minutes to complete or 11 minutes to complete um while there was a an overwhelming amount of end consumers who completed that survey we also had a good amount of farmers food service professionals and on a few grocery store operators and a few cpg makers again just giving you a quick summary here of what we heard from that survey as well we heard some validation from kind of our interviews um but just understanding the makeup first um one thing is while 80 of those um respondents were consumers we still had 75 other people in the food system who work in the food system who responded to that survey which actually exceeded our expectations overall all from when we set out of our goal of really having 100 respondents for that survey um also we noticed that uh 20 of the respondents uh highlighted they face food insecurity which kind of mirrors um food insecurity and also kind of poverty rates within the county as well um while many people have highlighted in the survey the uh how much they appreciate existing farmers markets they also highlighted that there was a need for more access to local food through retail channels we also heard from community uh partners and community organizations that there would be they would like to see more collaboration between organizations and perhaps a more effective food distribution center that can connect the needs of different organizations and their priorities as noted earlier we heard from buyers that there could be pricing challenges um at the same time we heard from consumers that they have they might be a little more elastic in their uh in their ability to purchase local food at a slightly higher price point and um you know one thing that we also tapped into a little bit earlier is that um having product consistent product volume and distribution pathways is a little bit challenging for those smaller growers next slide please so taking all these kind of points um and there's a few more points here reiterated um our conclusions for where we see kind of key components and needs for a food hub lie in kind of four main areas as primary needs so that includes aggregation and validation for need for aggregation and distribution support um we recognize that there is a need to integrate aspects of business development and different workforce training programs as well to help these smaller farmers specifically um become more resilient and and grow their business finding potentially new channels channels or new new business opportunities for them as well as other kinds of smaller and emerging food food service and consumer brands there's a desire to have more retail um opportunities for local food one thing we didn't touch upon here and we noticed in our research was that there are a good amount of areas throughout the county where um full service grocery stores are not accessible by um by foot or by a ten minute walk or by uh by um you know uh uh even a five minute drive so there's gaps for many people within the county specific to east uh the eastern portion of gainesville to access local food some of the more moderate components of a food hub that we saw still interest but maybe secondary but still can easily um integrate potentially into a model where aspects of supporting a supply chain so maybe that's um more um intermediate storage infrastructure maybe that is aspects of refrigerated uh transportation to support maybe that's integrated with a distribution uh a system or or outside of that also as noted earlier um gleaning infrastructure to to take kind of unspent produce or b-grade produce off farms either process it or donate it or partner with a food access organization to get it to people in need and also um to support uh food as medicine initiatives um that can be also getting kind of almost like csa style boxes uh and and having it um get to and consumers through alternative initiatives uh to support better nutrition and health next slide please so obviously very important to this conversation is how a project like this can be funded and we're still at the early stage so we haven't really developed a full model yet but some of these funding tools can be um there's many funding many ways these these kind of uh food hubs are funded they can be there can be some funding mechanisms that are supported through partners and through um you know the county for example uh through different kinds of bonds or or certain tax incentives uh maybe at the state level um organizations or developers can also um develop a certain kind of loans to help uh with working capital or also bridge kind of the the development and there's also grants that can be um you know applied for both on the federal level or through um other non-profits and foundations we'll be diving more into that as we solidify the concept model um and just uh in terms of kind of our next steps i don't think we included it on this presentation here but this funding these kind of recommendations for funding will kind of come to light as we develop this model so our next steps include kind of refining this concept model sharing some case studies where we see kind of comparable food hubs and what's kind of happening either in the region or or widely throughout the country um that might relate to this project and then taking those learnings having a community concept workshop um either next month in november or december and start mapping out potential pilot projects with um organizations and leaders who want to demonstrate a potential component to a food hub to test out its market uh viability and doing something like an mvp can help um understand whether or not this can actually fit into um a food hub and to kind of better ensure that when that food hub comes to light it's more viable and has a better business case um and then from there by next year we'll start refining that that operating model and put in some financials into that and then build a full business plan to to cap it off when the project kind of completes in the next couple of years um with that i want to just kind of open it up for just some brief q a or if there's anything else that um bailey um that maybe you want to to tap into that we might have left out but i appreciate it thanks for everyone okay commissioner alfred uh thank you thank you very much um i had a few comments and questions the the first i was i thought it was interesting that you looked at the number of farms versus the percent of land and agricultural production um was there um what was what was your thought process behind that in terms we also looked at uh i'm sorry this is a condit sorry this is a condensed view we also looked at land usage as well i don't have that in front of me right now but that is something um that is in the report yeah i saw it in the report i just thought it was interesting you didn't include it in the presentation that's all sorry yeah you know um it was it was it was not what's important uh not what's not important everything is is important and um you know we just kind of felt in terms of being pressed for time um that we had to leave a few things out yeah that's fine um and my next thought uh you know i remember probably 20 years ago or so when um public's produce managers stopped buying local produce from farmers because my dad was one of the people that sold you know never a lot of money but it was you know um helpful to to sell to locally to public's and they said that they were buying from distribution centers so my question is would this kind of food hub um be uh an institution that would make those relationships with a uh with large large grocery chains like public's no i mean that would be that would be a a great case um there are food hubs out there i was just speaking with someone from a from a food hub and they made they have made sure to get those levels of kind of have that level of food safety documentation and become a certain preferred vendor that is something that is increasingly more and more difficult especially from local food uh um purveyors uh with the kind of conglomerate the kind of the retail conglomerates of the of the public's um you know whole foods and uh and kroger's that are out there um that being said that you know that is still possible and also there's ways in which um food hubs can also distribute because they have this bigger higher purchasing power can also look to distribute into traditional distribution channels as well okay thank you and then my last question um i had a conversation with someone from pottenham county that um was looking for at something else in our agenda and then saw this and got very excited about it and they had a very interesting point um has in terms of looking at financing have is is one of your thoughts to perhaps look at partnering with any of our surrounding counties uh they thought they were a good one to partner with because of uh 301 and hawthorne being on the periphery and um but their their reasoning for that is that um you know uh putnam county is a lot more fiscally challenged than alachua county and would be um uh qualified for a lot more grant funding so a partnership could open up additional funding so i i didn't know if that was something you had seen in any of the models that you'd looked at were um counties partnering together or if that was something you considered or if there would be drawbacks to that um we have not look pertaining to this project we have not looked at that uh specifically um and i can check in with our team as this conversation evolves um we have someone who focuses specifically on on funding mechanisms and developing funding plans and so um we can touch base about that and explore if that's something that's a possibility you know one thing that has um been brought up are you know could there and this is just a hypothetical at this point is you know a food hub is generally a hub it's one singular place um at the same time could there be a kind of a hub and spoke model that could be conceived of where there's different things that can reach people more easily or maybe in one area you know you have some component that's more central to kind of where growers might be yeah accessing versus a retail component that be more accessible to people who need of retail right that's exactly what i was thinking yeah that has its that obviously has its own kind of logistic challenges and needs for management space infrastructure and so forth but i think that lends itself to you know could there be multiple um locations we have spoken to one uh farm aggregator for example who's in a different county i think just outside the study region but when we spoke to them they said oh you know we could imagine expanding further south um to that new market so i do think that you know there could be potential if there's a need to you know have multiple different locations it's something worth looking at uh thank you thank you for responses okay commissioner prisio thank you uh first thank you so much for all the hard work i know this was many many months of gathering data and information it's exciting to see how many people participated and and where we are where we're headed um as you all know this is definitely my baby something i've worked really hard on at long before i was on this commission and probably long after i'm on this commission um but hopefully not hopefully we'll get there um i guess there's a few things i want to say some questions i have too i guess the first thing i want to say is um i really appreciated the um information in here it's sort of embedded in the um report more than the presentation but you did say it about the the need for business support i think what's different what i what i guess i want to highlight for my colleagues what makes a food hub different right because it talks a lot about aggregation and distribution and cold storage and dry storage and processing and those are things that a lot of businesses do right benny keith does that and cisco does that and fresh point does that but what makes a food hub different is that it provides the serve the business support services for our small farms to access the markets that typically are only available to those large mainstream distributors that are buying from giant industrial farms right and so be what they do how they do that is a couple of things one they often provide like umbrella insurance policies for all of the farms to meet their liability requirements they often provide umbrella food safety certifications where they'll go out and they'll do these food safety inspections and they may even subsidize the cost of those food safety inspections so they can meet the requirements that like a public's or a or even maybe awards would have in order to be able to put food on their shelves they may also be providing incubation services to his point for small businesses or farms that want to scale up and help them actually with the development of the business plan and the crop planning necessary for them to be able to scale up so it really is about as much about business development in some ways as it is about the actual like operations of the business and in many instances in some food hub situations like in new england for example where they have a really robust farm infrastructure and they have a state that's literally committed to ag as their primary economic development sector like vermont or even north carolina where the state is committed to buying 10 local at the state level for all institutions they they have so much more economic drive towards it that the the the food hubs that have come in have had to provide a little less of that support because there's other money flowing and other sort of incentives flowing to be able to make those things happen but um i just i really appreciated that that came through in the surveys and in the conversations that you had because i think much like we're doing the heavy industrial mechanics like investment in training and developing those people for these kinds of careers this this food hub is as much an investment in business development and in skills development and in support for that business expansion as it is about the actual like business of doing it um i wanted to also say i i appreciated that you had a lot in there about the diversified markets and it seems like there wasn't a clear target you know a lot of the work that i've done in my past has been around institutional markets like getting uf to buy local getting our jail to buy local getting our um you know getting our school district to buy local i wrote the first farm to school grant um but those institutions do have limited buying power right they have they're very constrained by the amount of money that they have per meal or you know whereas our restaurants and our farmers markets and our retail have more flexibility and so having a diversified revenue stream for that food hub is really critical they have lots of different markets that they're selling to and that they're not putting all their eggs in like the uf basket for example and so i really appreciate that that came through um and i wondered if the conversations with the institutions i i hear that they're constrained by price um i would argue that uf is a lot less constrained by price than say the school district but i wondered if their interest extended into willingness to participate in the pilots because i i do think that as we move into the pilot phases having our support as a county and our um in getting their commitment to being part of the pilots and testing these ideas is going to be really critical and i'm wondering if you had any of those conversations and what their their comments were um well as we shape the pilots there's still we still have to kind of finalize what those pilots will look like and and then seek out the interested parties who will then lead those pilots but i think overall something that we you're really pleased to to hear and and some of my colleagues who have been working on some of these projects for years and years with new venture advisors have kind of reiterated the same thing is that how pleased we were to see and again this this is uh credit to a lot of the work you've done commission presia um is that how supportive not just university of florida is but the how how strong the kind of the alachua farm to school uh network is to to to and actually they're actually doing the work to purchase locally um and and even when we spoke to um sorry even when we spoke to what i believe um trinity food service who who does food service for the jails while they are price constrained they were generally very supportive of the idea of finding ways if they can if they can be it could be feasible it could be more easy if there is a centralized place that can make it easy for them and at the right price price they would be happy to buy local and and abide by these kind of the growing good fruit good food purchasing program guidelines so a lot of great work being done on the policy um front a lot of great work being done from the institutions as well um and the more and there's fantastic non-profit organizations mission driven organizations um there could probably be more need for kind of coordination and a centralized place for for these folks to be working together or more organizations that kind of um have a maybe a pretend perhaps a slight larger scope and reach um that food hub could support thank you um i guess i also noticed in your report a couple of times you did reference working food i know working food came and presented to us and they you know they in essence acted as a pilot for a really long time for an incubator kitchen you know they did a use case and and and proved the the need for that and i think their waiting list of 100 people and um the demand for that space um has been kind of shown out already um you know and so for me that's kind of a pilot that's now coming to a conclusion and you know i it wasn't something that i necessarily put together with a food hub but i i mean they they can fit hand in hand i know there's other food hubs that have those two hand in hand and in some instances that allows for some of that business development like uf always serves a fruit crumble and they make a crumble base and that is made of a fruit and it changes seasonally with the fruit that's in season here so it's persimmons and then it's blueberries and then it's strawberry so that it moves with the season and then the crumble topping is always the same and it's made by an entrepreneur in the food hub that has a baking business or something like that so i could see how the two could work together really well have you had conversations or are is there a plan to have conversations with working food and others about what the next steps are or other partners but what the next steps are for their kitchen incubator given that it's shuttering and there isn't a plan or is that going to be in the next phase of piloting as well yeah we've had early conversations with them right i think it was around the time that they were making certain decisions and coming out publicly um with their announcement over the summer so we haven't had too many conversations since on like what next steps would be um from what i understand they are trying to give it as much notice as possible to those food makers um and and that being said i at the same time i don't believe our project will be completed by the time um that uh based on that timeline that that that kitchen um shutters so there's it's unlikely that that there will be like a kind of a smooth off-ramp if there was a kind of a a shared kitchen facility integrated into this project um even if so i don't think that time would necessarily align but um i do think there's more conversations to be had to understand what's next for those those um those food makers it's really important that they they do find a new home um even if it's uh somewhat fractured in in the short term um if they can find partnered with um other shared use kitchens um or excess um infrastructure throughout the the county and mr chair i wanted to jump in just regarding the working food thankfully this project also has an an advisory committee so i believe there's um 13 or so individuals throughout the food system network who participate in the advisory committee shelby dixon who is the executive director of working food is on the advisory committee as well and so she'll be tuned in and she's been kept up to speed as we start developing the pilot projects and what those look like coming forward and the advisory committee will have um some feedback sessions later this month so we're this month of october we're at the point of developing what these pilot projects look like with avi and his team and we will throughout this month be talking about it and then later this october later this month the advisory committee can learn a little bit of what we're discussing internally and have some feedback to share with us shall be included and they'll be along with all individuals throughout the county will be notified of solicitation for proposals once it gets to that point so we're hoping shelby and working food potentially submit a proposal for pilots as well and on our advisory committee we meant or you mentioned uh mr chair the public school program and the uf purchasing team and both figures from those organizations are on our advisory committee as well so they're able to provide some updates and some feedback for us as we move into the next deliverable of this project awesome i my only other question was i didn't notice um in the report a lot of the one thing that i i felt like was missing was sort of the best practices around the country like what food hubs are doing what other food hubs are doing how the food hub network on the east coast is working um and how sort of other places are doing it um i'm guessing maybe that's coming as you think about more of the funding mechanisms or the final recommendations i guess i would just ask more of a request than a question i would just ask that um if you could bring forward some of those you know best practices and examples and sort of existing networks that this food hub could become a part of and um how the food hub business has sort of evolved over time um that would be great to have i think as we're stepping into this as a as a new endeavor um and then the last thing i just want to say to my colleagues is that partnership idea is a great one i mean i think in putnam county they actually looked at doing a food hub um well in hastings they looked at doing a food hub is that putnam county i think it's just on the edge of putnam no that's the other way yeah okay yeah so right there at the corner there's a farmer's market that's owned by fdax and fdax yeah fdax divested of their farmers markets many many years ago and they they essentially like lease them out to private holders and and a lot of them are either sitting empty or really underutilized and there was a plan by a number of different farmers in that area to create a kind of a cooperative food hub um some of that business planning documentation is available i'm happy to share it with the consultants i can get it for you um but you know and they were wanting to kind of aggregate more like cabbage and the things that they grow um and maybe make some specialty products to sell to the school district same kind of concepts right um and so i do think that partnering with those surrounding counties is a really great idea um also you know um i think my hope is to go and have some conversations with our department of agriculture here in the state of florida because i think a regional approach to this concept could be really good investment for the state um and there's money coming down from the feds even though money has kind of shifted in the way that it's coming from the federal government the federal government still remains pretty committed to making sure that our farming sector remains strong and that people have access to healthy and nutritious food and so my hope is that through the maha budgets and some of the other like components of the new budgets that are coming through usda and um as well as through like health and human services and things like that like through the food is medicine platform actually that they mentioned there will be federal funding available for some of this as well rather that's infrastructure dollars or rather it's more just like contracts to be able to provide food um hopefully we can find the funding to make this possible once we get the business plan all set in stone but thank you all for your work i really appreciate it i'm excited about the pilot phases and i will only say time is of the essence because our farmers are planning their crops now for the spring so if we want successful spring pilots we need to get on the radars asap commissioner cornell commissioner wheeler appreciate you i i i was just going to ask a quick question but um if you don't mind me jumping in i you know i've i've been to restaurants in um like albuquerque or austin or even new orleans where there's a big board and it tells you where all the food come well not all the food but a lot of the food comes from you know our our tomatoes are coming from farmers or seafood's coming from oyster catcher shellfish or whatever you know and i've oh you know you see a little tiny bit of that in gainsville but you don't see nearly as much as i would think you would see given the amount of local food production we have and when i've asked restaurants about that they say because it's so hard to do so this is i just want to make the point this is how we make that happen right this is how we make it easy for restaurants to locally supply and and communicate where they're getting their stuff from not as easy as ordering from cisco but easier than trying to deal with 15 different vendors individually yes absolutely that's correct and it also makes it yes it that is 100 correct this makes it easier for everyone to source from their local farms and potentially on the retail side as well i mean i think that's another potential partnership you know we've set aside three million dollars in the cra for a grocery store in east gainsville that's yet to materialize but this food hub could have a retail component that would allow people to access that food more directly and at reasonable prices especially if it was coals and seconds um you know so there's lots of opportunities there but yes you're absolutely correct wholesale option correct the other great yes and the other great thing is that the the wholesale markets that exist currently part of the reason that they don't do that is because our distribution channels have no interest in the they have transparency around food safety for like where the food comes from but on the purchasing side there's no transparency on the farms that they're buying from and it's really almost impossible to get because i tried for 10 years like to get that on the receipts and things so that we could do exactly what you're saying and it's just not it's just not that easy but food hubs have that's part of their mission is to be transparent about where the food's coming from and to get the more of the money in the hands of the farmer so shortening those supply chains because right now farmers make on average 19 cents on the dollar and that's on a good day um in wholesale food chains because so much of the money goes into marketing and distribution and by shortening those supply chains and lowering those marketing costs um you can actually increase the amount of money that makes it to the farmer for that food even if the price point is the same right and i think it's a cascading effect right once people see those lists of of suppliers in a restaurant or whatever then they're more likely to look for that in other places so i think there's a real so thank you thank you for letting me jump in sorry again thank you mr chair yeah just i really just want to focus in on what commissioner prisio kind of ended with which is best practices around the state and or the country where where this has worked well i think that's where i'm kind of focused of the 962 000 budgeted you know the market analysis piece has been spent but the majority of those monies come into now the operating model and the pilot projects and i'd really like us this group to focus in on locally is it a farmer co-op model that works best i think it's got to be a regional approach obviously you know commissioner alford's point of the each of those blue counties you know are above average food insecure that's columbia union putnam and levy those are our partners if they have access to grant monies that we don't have access we may have access to other infrastructure that they don't have access to so i'd love us to explore that and i'm interested in seeing what pilot projects kind of come out of this next phase i think that's what this year is the deliverable to operating model and pilot projects and then is there a food hub design from another area of the country or state that works with kind of our demographics that we can implement i'm really happy that the money we were going to spend um which was vetoed is being spent here i think this is in line with uh what what what our community says there's obviously a need for and i appreciate your leadership commissioner uh prisya on this effort so i look forward to seeing what potential models and pilot programs we can access thank you mr chair commissioner commissioner i'll if it makes sense for me to just respond to to that we will be sharing some some initial um case studies as part of this next phase um there's so many um examples throughout the country but we'll be sharing just a few of them that might have a application and can be maybe serve as an inspiration um and if i could speak to that just really briefly commissioner prisya mentioned you know the state of north carolina is all in i i think aligning with where the state of florida has a similar type of goal and having a latchford county as a north central florida hub of that lining up with those interests would be really helpful as we get into kind of our legislative ass thank you mr chair okay yes sir i have a question um the pilot project sub awards um to me that's real exciting about what we can actually do to get things stimulated i at one point and only saw at one time that there was a food truck that went into a neighborhood and they were selling fresh vegetables off the food truck along with pickles and jams and jellies and that sort of thing and i thought it was a great idea to go into a neighborhood so people could walk there especially if they knew a certain day that that truck was going to be there so you know i would like to see that looked at a little bit and also i know that um this might be a chance to plug the perryman's grocery over by the cotton club that they're getting ready to renovate was an old grocery store there that i've had my eyes on since i came knew about it yes sir since i knew about no it's it's the pair the old one right there on cotton club you know it's a little neighborhood grocery oh way back yes sir way back and they're getting ready to try to raise money to renovate that place in which would not be another opportunity to make it a a working museum you know uh where food could actually be sold there on site certain days of the week or whatever but um it'd be a great place to get milk and eggs when you needed it in a hurry because it's right there in the neighborhood so and i know that swallowtail farms has put together the the abandoned building there on the hawthorne road you know to sell so i would really like to see us find some of these smaller buildings that have been left there in neighborhoods that we could actually use as an extension of what all of these i know no no money money but but at the same time you know if we're talking about uh pilot projects sub awards you know then they that's at least startup funds or some of those things that the farmers in those local areas could work as a mini co-op to actually get food out into the community out in the county because you know it's great to have a centralized place for this to happen but not everybody can get the transportation they need to get these things so i love the idea of having the groceries come to the community on wheels thank you i don't know if that's something that's in your you know in your field of vision or not but uh as you all are looking across the country see if there's something similar to this that we could uh capitalize on thank you mr chair yeah i'll just i'll just quickly respond to a couple thoughts there um yeah um i didn't mention this in the presentation but swallowtail farm frog song farm and and one farm outside of the region traders hill it's a who's a little bigger are all doing kind of have examples of kind of aggregation where they're working with other local farmers doing aggregation and maybe integrating some consumer brands consumer products like um whether it's honey but maybe maybe jams or maybe more more um you know complex uh consumer products and doing either a mix of uh consumer supported agriculture csas or um or having kind of a storefront um as it with regards to kind of creative um retail models yeah mobile storefront mobile markets are interesting um this plays sometimes into the growing kind of food as medicine initiatives we're seeing that um how food is medicine initiative might might play out as like a mobile market to get that product to those to those end users um there's also models out there where um and we're seeing more and more of this um it's still still not too many but we're seeing we're seeing a growth of this where um uh people are using corner store and there's kind of corner store initiatives using kind of traditional markets that don't have much fresh produce integrating uh and finding partnership and integrating kind of uh fresh produce into those spaces where uh there might be a more accessible um you know pathway to to access those in places that don't have uh traditional um you know fresh produce growth three stores dollar general dollar is the dollar family dollar some of those that are doing it they're not now i think the examples of of that are probably more independent corner stores um but i know the dollars i just i just know that there have been fresh vegetables in the dollar store in the small communities in rural kentucky um you know that they've been managed to put that's why i threw that one out thank you mr chair okay commissioner uh alfred and commissioner i i already went sorry okay yeah okay yeah i want to just respond to a few things one can i love it i'm totally in for a legislative ask to go for 10 percent local at the state level let's do it i'm down i'm in let's put it on next year's legislative agenda um i bet we could get a lot of our count our counties in the region on board with that idea and i think it could be really powerful and we could look at north carolina as a model um the truck so two things on that one we used to have a truck like that you're right um it was actually part of a uf grant and that was in partnership with um a person who runs the the melrose um like community center now um and he he ran that truck and um the reason it ended is because it requires a lot of subsidy like it was underwritten with a lot of money on a grant like they just they aren't very unless they go to really affluent areas that will spend a lot of money on their food and go to food insecure areas um and they take snap and they have double bucks and lots of other things it's really hard to make those things viable um just the cost of the driver and the gas and all the things it ends up being pretty expensive however um there are models to his point that are starting to work with buddha's medicine and uf um got a truck that they have um they have partnered with uh the one community family resource center in east gainesville to run and that's going to be going to the east side clinics and providing food as medicine and providing groceries to east side clinic areas including cornerstone east side and one other clinic and my hope is that they would be able to participate in a pilot to buy from local farmers so instead of it just being stuff that's coming from bread of the money that's donated from grocery stores we would see them investing money hopefully pilot money to buy that food and show that's options and the sustainable funding source might be insurance billing medicare medicaid or insurance for preventative health care initiatives that are keeping people out of having to use glp ones and insulin and heart you know statins and other other food related medicine medicines so cool fingers crossed but there is so there is a truck and i wanted to mention porter's garden because it's right near perryman's not that far from perryman's grocery um and it might be a great partnership to look at how porter's garden could provide to perryman's and like connect yeah so um but i did want to say i i love the idea of corner stores and we did actually explore corner stores that was one of the things that we explored early on in this conversation and one of the things we found is that most of those corner stores aren't independently owned they're owned by large conglomerates that aren't in our communities so getting them to make the decisions to do this kind of thing is hard number one and number two most of the money ends up leaking back out of our community as is true with dollar stores and and the big any of those big businesses and so while yes i'm all for us partnering with whoever we can partner with to get more access to fresh nutritious local food in our communities i think the more we can do that with our locally owned and independent businesses and prop those up and expand those rather than you know necessarily negotiating with the giant conglomerates that are exploiting a lot of our communities and extracting money from them the more into it i am so i i love the idea of corner stores if we can find those that are independently owned or we could drum them up ourselves by building up something like perryman's thank you and thank you for all your work i'm excited to see the pilots get going thank you all for all your support um it's fantastic to work on this project thank you avi all right thank you mr chair we appreciate it okay thank you great presentation yeah great presentation our next item mr that takes us to the jail program updates i believe yes okay either way we're comfortable mr chair uh members of the board good afternoon um i'm under sheriff joshua cruz lots of county sheriff's office i think most of you know me sheriff scott could not be here he is dealing with a family emergency right now and just expresses his heartfelt gratitude for the collaboration with this board as we work through so many different projects over the first 10 months of of the administration we're very proud of of what we've accomplished so far we're excited about the future um and we got uh some folks here that are going to share about programming at the jail and some of the stuff that we got going on out there so without further ado i'll introduce to you captain ray swallows he'll come up and walk us through the the presentation so thanks under sheriff well good afternoon um captain ray swallows support services division at the jail um i supervise a number of bureaus one of which is the classification unit which ultimately encompasses the programs unit and uh while classification and programs is not my primary bailiwick it's not where i grew up i've been doing this job for about 30 years so i've had quite a bit of involvement in it um and you know at the end of the day i think we all have the same goal and that's to you know as adequately as we possibly can uh prepare these individuals that are incarcerated out at the jail for reintroduction to the community and uh and giving it everything we have to get them there uh and you know as time evolves and and our projects change uh we come up with new ideas and look at different things and uh not the least of which is you know many of the programs that the uh classification unit and programs unit comes up with uh most recently you know we have a brand new one which we'll get to in a few slides but it's called the change program presentation up oh yeah i guess that what is it titled um dog okay sorry about that that's okay you can use these arrows to go forward there we go the uh programs unit is led by the inmate support bureau chief fatina perry who is right here and uh programs manager to kevia mcneil jenkins between the two of them they uh you know they're supported by a litany of other staff at the jail and they do a phenomenal job and are very passionate about what they do the programs unit you know it organizes it manages and facilitates a wide range of all of the classes that are going on at the jail at any given time including volunteer services all the programs and activities the program unit uh networks with the community and develops working relationships to you know maximize the resources programs and services that are offered to the inmate population in addition to any community partnerships they're augmented with volunteers who play a really critical role in the programs and services that are offered to the inmates at the jail uh currently the programs and services at the jail are supported by 60 volunteers um 30 of which are from chaplaincy and another 30 are in addition to those that that run the various programs uh in addition to our employees um you know our volunteers have been uh incredibly helpful and they're committed to not only providing their service while the inmates are in our care uh but they're you know continuing that afterward uh in a lot of ways um beyond just you know talking they're helping they're providing resources they're they're guiding people and they recognize the importance of the the ongoing support to you know keep those relationships going and try to help these people be as successful as they possibly can so volunteers on the horizon uh additional to the volunteers that are allowed unescorted access into our building uh we're in the final stages of bringing on a new policy that gives the ability for those that have been justice impacted with certain prior felony convictions or adjudications that were withheld an opportunity to be able to serve as as escorted volunteers within the jail meaning they won't have unfettered access but but one of our sworn employees will be with them at any given time they're in the building to be considered for approval as an escorted volunteer in the jail applicants got to successfully pass an administrative review process the newly implemented policy reflects the continued commitment to supporting those currently incarcerated fostering opportunities for engagement and personal growth and helping to create support environment that promotes rehabilitation with the goal of reducing recidivism if anybody's interested in being a volunteer i highly encourage you to apply through the aso website um and or the the link below which is governmentjobs.com any direct questions can be referred to our human resources bureau at 367-4040 you know we always encourage individuals that have a passion for service to apply to be a volunteer at the jail uh and i know you know many of you have been in and out of jail uh you know looking at it not living there and uh and you know i recognize it's not your average volunteer job um it can be very fulfilling and eye-opening though and a lot of the people that come in there they they don't know what to expect when they walk into a jail and and i think a lot of the times people are very um happily surprised at what they encounter when they come to ours um there's a certain fulfillment that comes with being able to help these folks um when they may not be able to get a hand otherwise and uh and i get that so we have a a whole bunch of community partners um you know these these folks recognize that the um the importance of providing these ongoing services and support while they're incarcerated and even beyond their release uh to name them you know a few of them career source alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous anonymous uh local catholic charities gainesville community ministries women working with women anew peaceful paths community springs holy trinity veterans honor center the library partnership and released re-entry so typically anybody that's housed at the jail will have an opportunity to attend programs if they're medium minimum or medium custody inmates who aren't permitted to participate due to their custody level charges status or institutional behavior can ask their case worker or a member of the program staff for assistance programs vary in location based on the need of the program programs unit uses the chapel we have two classrooms and a library where they facilitate these programs most of the classes meet on a daily or weekly basis and there are some that are in a monthly seminar format so i'll give you some stats real quick on on our current in-house programs right now about 42 percent of our population is eligible to participate in the various programs we offer in 2024 we had 1396 inmates that participated in classes at the jail 253 inmates received certificates of completion for classes that provided a certificate at the conclusion of the class and in order to receive a certificate they had to attend at least 10 of the classes that were offered 10 of the sessions if you will and those classes were life skills anger management parenting and living your best life and just as a reminder and i think probably most people know this but all of the programs at the jail are 100 voluntary we cannot compel anybody to participate in the program so those 1396 individuals chose to be a part of these programs and and you know 253 of them completed it now that doesn't mean that the rest of them didn't want to it just means that probably there could have been a institutional situation they could have gotten out of jail and just not had an opportunity to finish so we'll list out the various programs we've got going on right now and for our in-house programs the inmate transition program it focuses on helping inmates develop new thinking patterns program is designed in a quarterly format and every participant completes the set curriculum which includes thinking for a change there's a cognitive behavioral evidence-based class that addresses thinking thought patterns develop social skills and improve problem solving skills getting ahead while getting out focuses on building a plan to address the 72-hour window when an individual is most likely to reoffend you know after release and case management services and referrals to community services resources to assist in successful transition back into the community so stats for this year so far the in-house transition program 26 inmates have participated in the program 25 has successfully completed the program 23 of those 25 have not been rearrested since since 2020 there's been a total of 11 educational cycles for the program with 165 participants 124 successfully completed the program 69 of those have not been a rearrested 55 percent so this is our new program the change program change is an acronym for community housing academics nutrition groups and employment the ultimate goal of this group is to prepare inmates that are currently sentenced to at least 45 days left to serve with you know successful re-entry into the community by addressing those needs and that's being accomplished by providing individual counseling academic support housing resources employment assistance and nutritional resources by connecting the inmates with the community-based services and fostering the development the program seeks to equip participants with the tools necessary to lead productive lives upon release while the transition program provides cognitive tools and support and preparation of release the change program's major emphasis is on resources and filling in critical gaps the change program started early september as of today 42 inmates have been screened 26 have accepted services six of them received assistance with securing a job four have referred been referred for job placement six are receiving assistance with securing housing four referred for food assistance and six were given miscellaneous services additional to that there's been referrals for social security transportation assistance and assistance assistance with job applications and ged and educational referrals the religious services you know i'm sure most know the jail has a chaplain offers spiritual services for pretty much all denominations and if if it's not something that you know the chaplain normally does they they have many other chaplains and other religious resources there are 30 additional volunteers who offer those religious services bible studies and worship service opportunities um the alatra county sheriff's office chaplain uh is is the primary facilitator uh you know in addition to the volunteers and varying other community partners another program is the domestic violence program it's weekly group sessions with peaceful peaceful paths victim advocate the goal is to educate inmates who are victims of domestic violence about safety planning intervention and available community resources um library services the jail library is a branch of the alachua county library district uh which offers reading materials and resources for inmates to include a legal section for law referencing a career section for future employment the library also provides literacy programs to include book talks poetry and biography writing and i don't know if you guys are aware of this or not but the alachua county jail is one of two jails in the state of florida that has a branch library district or a branch library within the jail monroe county is the only other one that currently has a district library the book club book club is facilitated by a jail library specialist mh read select the book of the week and as a group reflect and share the ideas facilitated by the library district alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous weekly meetings for inmates who suffer from alcohol or drug addictions and desire to achieve and maintain sobriety that's facilitated by local aa and na members anger management weekly courses that are taught by released re-entry staff for inmates who struggle with managing their anger this course helps inmates to learn like techniques to identify their triggers manage stress and effectively resolve conflict again is facilitated by released re-entry adult and juvenile education through a collaborative effort with the school board the program enables inmates to improve their reading math and language skills if the mate becomes proficient while in custody the image is allowed to take the ged test during incarceration some short stats that go with that in 2024 we had 22 inmates that tested uh three past language arts section two past social studies and one past math uh january of 25 through october 25 nine have tested two past language three past social studies um however uh you know since 2007 there have been 354 inmates who have earned their ged the life skills program is a weekly class that concentrates on social skills money management resume writing job search life planning and goal setting it's facilitated by sarah sutherland a professor at santa fe college living your best life a weekly group session that helps women focus on their worth planning goal setting and social support facilitating partner is belinda smith founder of women working with women parenting class uh weekly group sessions that provide instruction support on child development and strengthening the parent and child bond also facilitated by sarah sutherland of santa fe college uh yoga weekly group sessions focusing on breathing techniques and controlling the mind and body facilitated by dr theresa drake resources for substance recovery uh bi-weekly seminar hosted by released re-entry staff that assists and educates inmates about addiction and the mental health challenges that need to be navigated they provide education on managing addiction preventing overdoses and guiding to local resources in an effort to also assist with and and help provide the necessary tools the electric county sheriff's office installed a narcan dispenser that is located in our jail lobby it's available for both released inmates and visitors they have to pass by when they walk out the front door so if they need it it is there substance abuse intervention a weekly group aimed at educating managing and overcoming addiction facilitated by william wall meridian peer specialist veteran justice outreach program designed to assist with educating and connecting veteran inmates with services such as veterans court and veterans community programs facilitated by reva scipio va outreach outreach specialist and here we have uh transitioning from programs into in-house seminars probation and parole um monthly comes out and has any many attendees learn about what probation is how important it is for them to communicate with their assigned probation officer and the types of resources that an inmate is eligible for and other valuable information to help inmates understand the probation process and how they can successfully complete it that's facilitated by employment specialist karen black and senior officer mary farrell of probation and parole santa fe freedom to learn this seminar informs inmates about the various college programs and services that are offered by santa fe college the freedom to learn provides one-on-one support and coaching to assist those who are justice impacted by to become successful through their academic journey at santa fe facilitated by shelby mickelson specialist at santa fe college the jail resource fair so the re we take a drink of water the resource fair showcases local community resources to the inmates uh leaving the jail within the next 90 days the fair allows inmates the opportunity to gather information that can help facilitate their successful re-entry into the community and make valuable connections prior to release the last resource fair was september 23rd it showcased 10 community resource agencies the next fair is scheduled for october 21st starting at nine o'clock and we'll focus on employment resources post-release services and resources include again career source alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous catholic charities gainesville community ministries women working with women a new peaceful past community springs holy trinity veterans honor center library partnership and released re-entry the goal here is to connect inmates to the resources that are going to help them with reconnecting you know into the community upon release in order to do that we're leveraging the partnerships with these groups that we just talked about while in our care and they recognize the importance of providing the ongoing support to inmates beyond their release collaboration with released re-entry they are facilitating several classes for our population which include anger management once a week substance use education twice a month and re-entry 101 once a week additionally release re-entry provides a resource workshop within the jail library twice a month and has a staff member conducting professional visits to complete program intakes and assess goals in the near future release re-entry is going to begin conducting housing screenings for the continuum of care to ensure inmates are aware of these services flyers have been posted in all of the pods with the increased presence a shared office space space has been provided to release re-entry staff to assist with their needs this office space is located inside the chapel which is near w pod inside the jail upon release welcome home kits and bus passes are made available to inmates through their program the change program officers also refer and connect inmates to released re-entry for continued support and services beyond release as far as future plans go you know we have a lot of really good programs that are doing good things currently and we're continuing to look for ways to get additional resources and opportunities that are going to assist in making our inmates successful in the near future we're looking to implement a partnership with the gainesville fire rescue community resource paramedicine program that's going to assist with health care resources continuing collaboration with the road to success program to assist inmates with reinstating their driver's license currently in the process of vetting tablets for our juvenile curriculum with the intent of expanding further in the future i believe we're actually ready to go with the tablets reinstate the pause on parole program which allows inmates to develop essential skills while providing obedience training to rescue animals so they can be adopted to a forever home that touches me really closely i have adopted two dogs from the pause on parole program i was over it when it first started and i loved it and i truly do miss it and i would love to see it come back um under sheriff did you want me to continue thank you for your time i'll turn it over under sheriff cruzan great job so uh next we're going to give you a little bit of a staffing update with the jail um when we took office uh sheriff scott inherited uh 68 uh vacancies when it come to certified sworn detention officers um that's a huge number um the prior administration basically set on status quo uh for over a year at 68 vacancies um i would say that a large um accolade goes to you guys working with us on the pay raises in the mid-year uh taking us to 55 000 as a base and then working with us again in october has been the key we have found a ton of momentum especially of late uh we we have as you see from the numbers here um we have 23 uh sworn and certified that we've been able to hire train and retain um that cuts our total vacancies on the floor to 45 detention officers however we have 12 detention officer recruits currently in the corrections academy um with 11 on uh 11 graduating on november 24th and one graduating on november the or december the 9th six detention officer recruits currently in background and nine already certified detention officers currently in background um right now when you put all those numbers together we're targeting a vacancy low of under 20 by the first of the year which would be pretty amazing when you think about what we've done in a year um this crew behind me and and uh our staff and human resources has really done a lot but um a lot of these programs and a lot of what we can or cannot accomplish does fall back on on staffing so uh credit you definitely uh are part of that that uh that growth so recently we passed our unannounced fmjs inspection on october the 8th 125 which obviously is a true testament to the hard work that all of our our staff does out there we actually got an email from the president of the fmjs um farlo model jill standards um so they do uh an announced inspection and then they do just one unannounced they did the announced at the beginning of the year and then they showed up here on the 8th and did their unannounced and they had uh really nothing of note was what they used um they they gave us uh one minor uh recommendation on a facility maintenance issue and i think mr parker's already working on getting that corrected so um went really well they were very impressed the very nice email by the way so at this point you guys have any questions for us yeah comments i have quite a few here uh commissioner alfred presia wheeler and cornell uh thank you uh chair um and thank you for the presentation i appreciate it a lot of people know jail's been something i've i focused on a bit um it's it's near and dear to my heart and it brings to mind a point that that i think is important to make we have we're really a small community take away uf transient folks and and gainesville's not a very big town and so everybody knows somebody that's been to jail almost right i i don't think i know anybody that doesn't know anybody that hasn't been passed through our jail system and so so many families are are affected by what we do in our jail you know and when i talk to families of of um folks that are currently incarcerated um they have always have so many questions and programming is one of the things they have questions about so they have you know a big one has been access to alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous and it's like do i know that my dad's going to be able to go to that every every week can i count on the fact that my dad is going to be in that class every week because that's really important for us to know that he's had that support so that when he gets out and things are going to be really hard for him you know he's part of it he's got a system of of going to that support he can transition to the daily meetings that are typically part of um you know a lot of folks that are in in that program so i'm so that i have a whole list of things so that's one of the first ones is like you know how do we let families know about what programming is out there and how do we communicate to those families you know the services that that their family members are getting and yeah of course they can tell them but you know i think that there's this relationship building that the jail could have within our community and and the role that they play um i appreciate the amount of experience that a lot of the jail employees bring you know i i know that um um you know a lot of folks have been there 20 and 30 years but in 20 and 30 years a lot has changed in how we think about jails right so we think about jails now as being less like punishment the punishment is being removed from society not being able to choose what you have for breakfast not not having an awful breakfast right it's a different thought process in how we think about jails now and and our goal has moved from um it being a uh you know a punishment to being a you know as you're programming a test to being a an opportunity for rehabilitation to teach the life skills that somebody might have missed from being in a you know in a maybe a foster child or some other kind of program where they they just didn't get access to anger management skills or or other things that you know can help them to not go back to jail again and so i really appreciate the role of programs and i think it's so desperately important that we do it so um that's that's one point and then but my second thing is is that you know while i appreciate the the the numbers um you know 42 inmates have been screened for changes that's we've got about a thousand folks in jail right now that's 4.2 percent you know that's that's not a great big number and i know it's a new program and y'all just getting started but you know can i address that yeah yeah please please you're you're 42 percent or 4.2 percent of the inmates that are going to get out in the next 45 days oh well no i mean i'm talking in general and i don't know how many people are getting in mind too like uh i think it was right at 70 percent of our jail or 60 something percent of our jail hasn't even been sentenced yet right um so we're we're looking at we don't know when they'll get out so they can't even really move into that space and be screened until they're within those 45 days well and i and i understand that to some extent but um in terms of the let's see um what was the other program that i was looking at that you provided data on what's that yeah the transitions program also so you know in my mind re-entry starts the day somebody gets into the jail whether they are sentenced for a year or sentenced for three months or you know move on to the state penitentiary it's all skills that you know i think are important so i i i i'm curious about that um and then in terms of um you know the changes program i know that you've you know you've recruited some very dedicated folks to run that program and that they're you know very excited about the the work that they're doing and i'm hoping that y'all are providing them with the training and the background that they need in order to do that job well you know and i really appreciate the emphasis that you've given to the release re-entry and and the partnership that you guys are developing because i think that's so important another thing i think that might be really important is looking at the data that released re-entry is tracking and maybe doing a mirror or tracking that same data so that we can like see the efficacy of the programs that that we're instituting and i would i would love to actually you know get like quarterly updates on on how all that is going because it is so important for our community you know on in on so many levels you're sheriff's deputy you know that you know how important it is to to um to keep people out of jail to from the very beginning so um you know that might be something that you know if we come up with a motion out of this that i would like to see is is regular updates on on on collecting data that that we can compare that we can look at that we can see what the you know that it's working because we know we we believe it's going to right but i think until we can communicate that those those wins you know have some key performance indicators and track those i think that's great for everybody i think it's great for employees to be able to point at some say hey you know we won that battle look at how well we did and so i i just want to i just want to see some really good data tracking and then um i'm so pleased that y'all are allowing in folks that have some lived experience into the jail because i think that's really important for inmates to be able to talk to folks that have also been inmates in the past i think that's an important thing like i've talked to some people that wanted to volunteer in the jail and they couldn't because they they had been a jail inmate in the past well the fact that you're allowing that now i think is awesome i think that's really good so thank you thank you for that um i'm really glad that you posted the information about volunteering i think that i've had a lot of people ask me about volunteering at the jail i don't know how onerous it is to go through the process hopefully it's not too bad but um i think that uh you know some of the programs that you have would probably be benefited by having some extra folks in there to you know to help whether it's teaching or whether it's providing um especially well let me back up a little bit i believe you have nine juveniles right now or seven seven juveniles six six juveniles okay i'd heard it was seven yesterday so i'm glad it's only six today um the yeah major dorian keith the jail director thank you one of those juveniles belonged to columbia county and he was at the court so okay good that's why the number is oh that's why the number is okay that's fine um thank you for that and thank you for being here major keith i appreciate it um so um i understand that with the tablet program each in the each of those juveniles has to have somebody a volunteer to sit with them while they're doing their work is that correct hi the programs manager because the school board is short per se uh to provide us with a teacher or even a paraprofessional i have been tapped to sit with the juveniles during their study sessions on the tablets um their teacher who does come in from djj she does come in at least once or twice a week she was there this morning with them but ultimately she is really pushing on the school board to at least give us a paraprofessional that would be great but is this something that volunteers could do um i mean if they go through a background check with the jail and a background check with the school ward i i cannot speak speak to that outside of my uh chief probably speaking to that but in my opinion i i would per se it would need to be probably a staff member or even a retired teacher well right somebody with some creds behind their name of course but i think that um i think there are people in the community that would be interested in helping out and i was trying to figure out how to help help connect them up with that kind of uh well and also because they are juveniles and um florida law requires them not to be with outside people who are not staff as well oh that's that's sad to hear yeah okay so they have to be employed by the school board which is you know they have their own staffing issues too correct but so far we're making it work you're making it work okay um well thank you for that i'm sorry to hear that we can't get volunteers for that particular particular thing um and we'll look into that just to confirm that the information we believe we understand if there's a possibility to be able to use volunteers for that we can work the school board and collaborate on the effort of what that background would look like and what kind of credentials they would need so yeah i would really like to see those kids be able to get you know we'll look into everything they can whether they've got a 40-year sentence or you know much less than that it's all still a matter of like you know personal growth and and change so so thank you for that um let's see uh did i have anything else special education behavior disorders mm-hmm would that work i couldn't hear you i said special education with behavior disorders would that work i i have no idea she's talking about her own i'm looking for a job next year i understand and and we'll have you apply within okay okay okay um okay this my last question is um are we still releasing people in the early morning hours or are we um is that because if they're getting packages from release re-entry to help them with bus passes and things how are you coordinating that in the middle of so all of our staff can can issue the uh the take-home packages so whatever time they decide that they want to get out they can still get issued that package from our staff release really re-entry has allowed us to do that they generally notify us of someone who's expressed interest in the package and then we provided them and basically sign off on that we did it so um if every in is it does every inmate that is released have an opportunity to speak with release re-entry to to say that they're interested in a package you know what i'm saying or if so patina perry sorry um inmate support bureau chief so they do release and re-entry comes out and they go to the pods and they screen different individuals additionally inmates have the ability to kind of do referrals for themselves they'll call um release re-entry and they'll come out and speak specifically to the people who has expressed interest themselves or we refer people over to release re-entry and so they'll come speak to those people directly but then they they're in the jail library um and they go do visits to get other individuals so not every single person is going to have access like while they're exiting but they do a lot of them have access to yeah i would just you know it seems like you might just give it to everybody so i was just curious you know just a vibe well everybody does have the opportunity some don't want it well so it's it's posted in every pod we advertise it on the program the program schedule is posted in every pod so they see it whether they want to take advantage of it or not again like we said before it is voluntary right some folks you know are getting there and bonding out within a few days and they're going right back to their job they don't need the resources um and so keep in mind not everybody that leaves needs release re-entry oh absolutely not so exactly correct we don't overload them i just wanted to make sure that the people that do need it get it because i and we're trying that's the big thing the change unit is trying to do is to fill in the gaps where maybe release re-entry it doesn't reach someone and then we these are correctional officers so they're a little different they're certified correctional officers that can go everywhere in the jail and so they may find someone that hasn't been exposed to it and then they refer them to release re-entry or the appropriate program whatever that might be so um that's that that we're really not wanting to be uh redundant in program services we want to fill in the gaps of our program services that's what we're trying to accomplish with change and i like that's why i wanted to get see the same sort of statistics sort of mirrored so that we could compare you know how how everything's working and know that we're you know getting results from programs so thank you for that thank you for your for your um for your comments thanks for everybody's help um but i i do i really want to um i think it's really important i sit on you know uh state and national um uh policy boards that deal with uh jail stuff and so for me i'm being selfish and really wanting this data because i want to be able to take it to those places and be able to talk about what we do here in alachua county so having that good data is is not just us being like um you know uh responsible in our in in how we're operating and how we're communicating to the rest of the citizens but it's also an opportunity for us to show how well alachua county is doing compared to other folks around the country so i appreciate that a lot um thank you mr chair i'll try to not say any more commissioner dan wheeler and then cornell okay thank you i really appreciate it i got to hear some of this when i visited um and i really appreciate it i'm was really excited to hear about so many of the things change unit is so exciting i love that you all are building that i think it's going to be a real game changer and i think the more they can coordinate with with released and maybe even do some case management where they just sit down and you know talk about cases and think about the ways in which they can coordinate data information flow of exchange i know we got off to a bumpy start maybe but i i really do think that the two those two units together can really be a seamless opportunity that'll create a lot of change um so very exciting there um thank you all for working on that um i did have a question you said they they were doing counseling do they have a certified counselor or with their team or does that counseling come from well path or we facilitate connections with counseling though we do not have a on on the team on staff okay counselor okay great um that okay that got that um and i love the fire rescue partnership i'm glad to see some of our resources with community paramedics are making it out there and beginning to make those connections so that was exciting i'm also glad to hear ged is back up and running i heard that was kind of not running that much under the previous sheriff there wasn't a lot going on so i'm excited to see that's back up and running um and kudos for the staffing i mean that's i know that that just in and of itself is a monumental lift and we were happy to help where we could but i know that doing that work just recruit doing the recruitment and um retention even more so is a big deal so thank you all so much um and thank you to all those who are applying and staying with the alatcha county sheriff's office we hope you hear how much programming and recidivism is important to us and if you have good ideas if your team has good ideas on it we want to hear them um and the narcan yay and the justice impacted individuals yay it's really exciting that i know that that was facilitated a lot because of release re-entry but i know that cjmsag and the pats had a grant that couldn't get people in to do peer support and um and visits and things like that so i'm excited that we now have a process for that i think it's going to make a big difference yes ma'am um i do have a few questions um they're questions that kind of came up for me more so since we met and then but some of this jogged my memory um one is how do we solicit programming proposals and vet them like in terms do we have a set of standards for them or um like yeah how do we solicit them what's our process for determining priorities program needs so a lot of times a lot of them are standard like substance abuse life skills anger management but then additionally we sometimes get people from the community who reach out they want to apply they have an idea and so they'll reach out to us and kind of let us know what class they'll give us their their curriculum um and we'll see how we can fit it into our master program schedule okay so do you have a process for vetting those like are they evidence-based are they good quality curriculum or is it just like if someone wants to do it they and they have time they're in like is there a a lot of that's probably go back to accreditation fmjs standards um standard practices so a lot of it's going to be vetted through uh national and state standards but okay okay um and do you all have a like a volunteer handbook we could get a volunteer handbook or like that we could do you all have that we have a volunteer orientation manual okay yeah do you mind sending that to us and the screening tool that you were going to send me the change screening tool if we could get a copy of that that would be awesome um i saw one thing i asked for and it was it's data related was um we got the list of the programming but i i was really interested in understanding really how many individual inmates have been through those programs like i guess it's data tracking and maybe you have it but like how many individual inmates are attending regularly each program like they're offered weekly are their inmates repeating those classes is it the same 10 inmates is it a different inmate every time like you know how many inmates are regularly attending those like understanding sort of how that flow is happening and how often the programs are being attended by people and um i think would help us prioritize programming if we were helping to recruit volunteers like i know it's some it's come to my attention from several family members actually as well that na and aa like there's not enough of them like they can't get like there's just not enough i know we have it weekly but i think we can only have like a couple inmates in each one because of safety and security reasons so maybe we can recruit additional na or aa people that might be willing to come and host other ones um but knowing those priorities like which ones are full and which ones are in high to high demand would help us to be able to support you all in recruiting more um i guess my only other question um is oh and does the nana for men and women yes and because it is in high demand um so one week they'll come out and they'll see a particular group of male inmates and then the next week for males it'll rotate to a different set so they kind of bounce off back and forth so they don't get because they're it is in really high demand they don't get every week consistently they might go every other okay so we really need to work on nana okay thank you um and then the other question i had was um that you said there was 50 volunteers currently and then there was 30 religious volunteers are those 50 in that 30 in that 50 60 and there's 30 of each 30 of each okay and so the other volunteers are just like the people running like released re-entry would be considered a volunteer okay so not some of them are affiliated with organizations and some of them are just individual volunteers correct and they get paired with an agency to help with a certain program or they come in and volunteer in other ways in the jail so a lot of we some organizations have multiple people so it's not even though it's one program they might have three or four different people that come in from their program to help with the classes so okay it's not 30 different organizations it okay yeah yeah i think i get it now okay for example released re-entry has five right okay i get it okay well i think i think we've said it a lot but data data like more information just on the programs which ones are good which ones are working which ones are the most needed and which ones are the most in demand and being utilized the most and understanding that would help us to support you all um and the only other thing i guess i wanted to say which isn't related to this but since i have the floor i want to say it i want to ask a favor in 2020 it was asked of the sheriff's department and gainsborough police department to stop using mugshots and names in media press releases for people who have been arrested and have not been charged and it seems to become and it was gone for a while it was committed sadie darnell committed to it and then it's it's like slowly crept back in and i'm just going to ask if we can you know formally like you know or not formally just i'm asking but i'd love for my board to ask normally because we asked in the past and it was honored and now it's back um that we not do that because i think it it it kind of creates a culture of not innocent until proven guilty when your mug shot and your name is out there before you've even been formally charged and so i just would ask that we not use that practice um of using like shots and names that's something i'd love to hear if you guys have a thought on it or or if you have a comment on it or if it's just a matter of making the request but it really is a i think it's creates a negative culture in our community for those individuals that haven't even been charged with a crime yet so yeah and uh we can look into it and obviously i'll speak to the sheriff about it we don't publish every arrest in social media we only publish very heinous violent crimes or crimes uh against children uh or uh severe drug related crimes that are killing our community um and so uh and most of the time what you see when we post are folks that have re-offended um committing uh crimes that again cause significant uh damage to our community so we we don't post um i would say actually very few that we actually post but normally when we do post it is uh it's pretty severe well and i haven't kept track of what their crimes were i just noticed that since sheriff darnel it's like crept back in and i've seen a lot more of it so i just wanted to bring it up again because i remember that being something that was we we sort of eliminated as a practice for a while and it seems like we can we can look into it thank you but anyway thank you again for all the hard work we really appreciate the collaboration we're excited to keep working with you commissioner willow thank you thank you um i just have a few questions and i i mean a few um the teachers that come in or who you're trying to get are they online is it on a computer is it a computer class that these people are are are so it's through canvas right now the teachers that are coming in you're talking about for a juvenile education whichever however you're using teachers yes okay so no all of them are in person okay they are in person yes okay with with papers and books and things are they using a computer are they using a tablet so no not yet okay just so it is pencil and paper the tablets okay so the juvenile right now the juveniles are going to be using the tablets they have the canvas oh okay board and so they'll be you utilizing canvas to do some of their okay okay florida virtual school if you're having trouble getting a teacher in you might be able to when you get those computers in there you know use florida virtual school because they have teachers that interact directly through the computer but they are interacting it's not just you know left up to the individual to complete the tasks and pass the test they're guided with a teacher and it's not somebody that the school board would have to prove you know provide it would be someone you would have to you know contract with but just just saying and is there a shortened time for people who do these if they're online doing or finishing classes or taking these certificate classes is there a shortened time period so there are some classes that do allow for program gain time okay yes so they can earn up to three days for completion of a class off their sentence and if someone is unsentenced then and they're taking these classes if they go to court does that work in their favor as well it can yes so inmates can we provide certificates and so they can also when at court let the judge know that they're participating in these classes but if they do get sentenced to the jail but they've already completed a class we do go back and honor the fact that they completed the class and we can award them the gain time for that yeah and and the anger of the domestic violence counseling is there for the women but um i've lived with a man for 36 years who does domestic violence in men's groups and you know people that are court ordered so i know that anger is not the same as domestic anger management is not the same as domestic violence and i didn't know if there was an opportunity in the for that to be addressed alongside and you know a contrasting anger to power and control which is domestic violence so we can look into it if you have a contact we definitely dr paul wheeler he's he's been working with peaceful past for a long time but he's also uh he's still running men's groups you know court ordered folks so you know it might be something so that at least the contrast is made yes between anger and domestic violence and control um central florida community action agency add to your list you know i am chair of that board and we serve a lot of community members who need assistance you know with with with all kinds of things so you know put us on your list and the other um pause and control i'm so excited about that um it's the best blood pressure medicine ever for inmates as well as corrections officers you know and of course it helps us at the animal shelter yeah so please you know keep that going it's an amazing program and it helps everybody one last question about the kids the juveniles that are kept in they're kept in our jail okay what is the difference in what's happening with the program the the juvenile program that we have out by the airport and and our kids our kids are just waiting for sentencing is that it whereas the other kids have already been sentenced the ones at our facility are being tried as adults and the ones at the detention center are still oh my goodness okay okay that's why the number is so low i see okay have they already have they already been sentenced then they know they're they're not they're just going to be tried as adults and then if they would be sent then if they are found guilty they would be sent to okay and also how they perform in the jail perhaps so is that something that could be in you know part of their carrot you know as they are working in the jail with you all so well yes of course um anything that they complete so they work on their ged or they work on a program and they complete the program while they're in the jail they provide that to their attorney and i'm sure that would be evaluated by a judge but not something we necessarily get involved with so i would i would say and i would hope and and and i wasn't being facetious you know about my ability to work with kids like that because those are the kids i have generally worked with but seems to me that a lot of special attention needs to be focused on that group while you got them right there and anything you can do to you know put the fear of god in them while you got them would be worth the time and money spent on that that group thank you thank you mr chair okay well that's an expression that's all sorry i'm i'm a southern kentucky girl i you know i don't know what you mean by that oh you don't it well it just means it's an it's um it's just an expression where you just you know the good and the bad of things you know that's all where are you from virginia oh they don't say things like that in virginia not the directional officers we we don't put the fear of god on anybody care custody and control okay okay that's left to the parents but evidently you know you all are in a parental role and we all are you know as as a community thank you thank you mr chair um so under sheriff i guess i've got a handful of comments and a handful of questions not a lot here first of all i wanted to say uh thank you uh the collaborative nature of this dialogue back and forth is um not common in every 67 counties in the state of florida it's not lost on me that when i go to fac and i go to naco and i talk about the relationship that this board has with this sheriff which is the largest budget item in every county commission um i don't say they're jealous but i do am proud of the relationship that you your staff the sheriff the jail their staff have with this county commission collectively and individually the fact that my colleague to the left of me was asking are there six or seven juveniles and that that there's that dialogue directly with the major is um special and i and i appreciate that congratulations on 60 volunteers you've heard this board say let us help you get to 90 and i think that's a real commitment we would love to help with that um question uh captain swallow said of the in-house programs 42 were eligible to participate that's 1396 chose to do that um 253 actually completed 10 sessions that's a lot and that's that's great especially knowing that a large number of those probably were either released or for whatever reason weren't there long enough to complete 10 sessions when i divide 1396 by 42 does that mean we've had annually about 3323 folks is that the number of individual folks well i take that number and divide it by 0.42 percent no as i understood it from the stats that were provided to me that was how many actually participated 42 percent and fatina if you don't mind that over so so 42 percent of our total population throughout that year were eligible based on classification to participate in programs so does that mean if you take that number divided by 42 percent we had just over 3 000 folks go through the no sir i believe everybody that they provided you in that number participated in the program the way i understood that is correct everybody that you have in that number the 42 percent would have to be basically of all inmates that came in and out of the jail through the 2024 year which is really hard to figure out okay so thank you um yeah i mean i think the the more data we know the better than um okay 69 on the in-house transition program stats 69 of those inmates have not been rearrested that's 55 how does that compare with just normal general recidivism rates does anybody know that because it seems like that's really good 55 right so uh i i recently did some data analytics um and leading up to uh this year our recidivism rate is right at 69 percent um and that's baronine it is based on the totality of all bookings at the alachua county jail so that could mean that this person was arrested this year and they happen to have also been arrested in 2002. i don't have it for a three or five year period i just have it for the whole um and so that said 69 to 73 percent is is where it ran from 2019 through 2024. so those folks that participated in this um that's down to 45 that is correct so that's so that's i think good information commissioners for us to kind of think through baseline continue to work on improving how how kpi to track yeah how has um since this board has funded the release re-entry over the last year how has that just as a sense how has that worked in the jail how how has the culture how has the the the goal of really trying to help folks re-enter society have you noticed any any change i yes uh they're they're really just getting that ball rolling um it's still so new we don't we don't have a lot of stats to go with it within the jail within the jail yes correct um so what i'm hoping for for is that within the next three months we will be able to take the data from change compare it to what emily and her group is producing put it all together and have some real stats to be able to come back with i think at the 90 day mark we should be able to have some really good answers as to the impact it's having on the change program and as a whole i think between our two groups we should be able to provide enough information to tell you how good it's working that's really great and i and i want to kind of echo commissioner prison alfred's kind of thank you for doing the change program and and having both of those programs together you can't do too much of a good thing so i appreciate that staffing update just really want to give you some praise if you are able to get to 20 or less vacancies by the end of the year it'll be one of those things that i can say i don't remember when and i've been here only 11 and a half 11 plus years so that's kudos to um sure the money helps but it's really a culture of hiring and more importantly retaining uh folks and that speaks volumes to your leadership uh to major to your leadership at the jail um and congratulations on the on the fmjs inspection you know that's a that's a bigger deal than you made and and i appreciate it i mean i think what you've heard today is you have an engaged and empathetic board of county commissioners they value reducing recidivism and and community re-entry efforts and i want to thank you and your staff for really sharing these goals and priorities they don't happen just because it's important to us they can't happen if it's not important to you all and so i want to recognize that um again the the collaboration between you all and the open line of communication at all the different levels i mean i have can say that um i have called the sheriff and he's picked up and i have called the undersheriff and he's picked up and i've called the major and she's picked up and that's um really something that isn't common around the state and i just want to tell you that um and to the commissioner previous point i too would be in favor of limiting any mug shots for non-violent first-time offenders you know if they're they're violent and you know they're violent and you're trying to communicate something to the community great you know yeah if it's a if it's a child they made a mistake or they're obviously a non-violent it's a first-time offender um having to commissioner alford's point we all know someone that's gone through that process um both personally and and uh friends it is a a step of them having to rebuild their lives and it starts with that mugshot and so to the extent you can eliminate that for non-violent first-time offenders or juveniles that would be something that i would support and i'll i'll rely on you and and the sheriff to and the major obviously and your staff to really talk that through and say okay is that is that something else we could do i know every time y'all come here you get five or six or seven or eight or nine or ten requests and you start to put them into your processes and i and i i appreciate your um you know you listening to us and you and you responding to us it means a lot to this commissioner and i think to this board well well if you don't mind if i could interject i know you have another question but um and i know you're familiar with what i'm about to say um we uh are maxed out uh jail population count is nine no no no no are maxed out about 11 59 and about 60 days ago we were one 1017 um major keith uh put together an email collaborated with uh chief judge davis um our public defender stacy scott and brian kramer with the state attorney's office and we brought uh court services and a marriott of other stakeholders together in a meeting and we discussed how important it was that we had to get this this population down um we have worked together uh that that group of folks still emails weekly um we've even had probably a half dozen um compassionate releases uh working with the state attorney's office and they've every everyone that i've sent over to them uh with uh severe medical issues um they've worked with us on um giving us answers sometimes over the weekend all right the last one was uh uh we had an inmate that um was uh gonna go into hospice care and we needed to get him released and uh they did it on on a saturday or sunday morning at first appearance so um they have uh that group is um basically proved to be invaluable um collaborating together to get that those numbers down i mean we reduced those numbers substantially um in just about probably less than two months so um we're 942 so pretty good stuff thank you thank you i'm not gonna ask any more questions but i i guess i just want to say two things one is 942 is still insanely high and so and i know that it is going to take an everybody collaboration you know and i think that these conversations around programming around support systems that give people the structure they need to get back to the life that they want to lead i think ideally rather than the life they've chosen to lead that led them to prison to begin or jail to begin with um so i think and i do think that if there's things i know we've asked a lot about data and um i think that if there's if there's a system or there's something that's an investment need you know know that that's something i for one would support and i think it sounds like we all would you know we want to be able to track this information better and be able to share information in real time so that we can make better decisions and i think that takes better information which takes better data so if there are resources on that front that are necessary in order for us to do that please let us know um i would love to hear about it and that because me hearing that you it's hard for us to even know how many inmates we've had in a year is like what you know that to me is really surprising so i think being able to be track our information better is really important to me um and i just want to say thank you for starting that collaboration with the judges with the public defender with the state attorney because we need it we need it badly um and ideally someday our jails will be empty okay i have a question um if a person is arrested today how long before they learn about your programs in the jail is it 45 days 30 days how do they participate well the the all of our correctional officers are pretty um knowledgeable of our programs uh programs are advertised they're correct they're advertised within the dorm um and they could participate as soon as they've been classified and they meet that medium custody requirement in order to participate um so it just depends on on those factors but um yeah as far as an exact timeline it depends on when they are arrested when they can get classified um but generally speaking within 24 hours oh excellent excellent well i i want to thank you for the programs that you're you're offering if this was offered 30 years ago we'd be a whole lot better today i really do believe that but the problem uh that i hear is that when you have youth bragging about going to jail that's not a good sign to me but it's out there and they're bragging about it and so it makes younger folks want to get arrested to brag about being arrested and being in jail and how it was to be in jail you know i think something is really wrong in our society when we think that that's the norm now that that is really really really bad to me and but i just want to thank you for the programs you guys are offering to help those individuals and with the re-entry thing i think that that's going to be awesome uh in in in the future so those are just my comments and i just want to say again thank you and commissioner alfred yeah just have your light yeah just one more quick thing um i know some time ago you had a number of folks that were supposed to be in a state facility but they didn't have capacity or are we still housing folks that are our state prisoners we're always housing state prisoners um but house them for a short time but sometimes you have them for but major keith has uh facilitated so generally speaking they won't pick up more than about 10 and uh she's gotten them twice to do 20 okay good um and that was basically during those last 60 days where she was really putting some pressure on them and they they work with us they're they're good partners um so but right now senate's teammates do you have a count we have 38 that are sentenced ready to go to to doc but generally speaking they're going to come and pick up 10 at a time okay so if there's a whole glut it sometimes takes a while to get over the glut i see yeah i gotcha okay um i if you guys don't mind i'd like to make a a quick motion i don't think we can make a motion to direct another constitutional officer but i can make a motion asking our staff to ask the jail to schedule an update every three months every quarter um to see how we're see how things are going six months yeah all right we can do six months okay six months okay uh just to you know to try to see how the data collection's going and see how things are going and see how things are improving and i just feel like we're in a position of change right now so that's why i was thinking three but um i think i think and commissioner just to be clear some of the data you're requesting i believe probably should come out of court services but as far as the data uh requested around programs we'll work on putting programs is the big thing that that i'm interested in you know in line with this presentation i think and to be clear i'm okay with quarterly reporting i just don't think i don't want them to have to come here every quarter like this is a lot of oh oh no no yo i totally agree but but to ask staff to to get that quarterly report it's it's fine it doesn't have to be you guys coming in and taking half your day because i know we're we're a lot sometimes well i will tell you under sheriff and a person that's with commissioner alfred state and nationally she is once dated to brag that's really that's really uh i hear that a lot at the state level and and obviously that's you know to the extent we can baseline stuff and then show improvement i think it's really good of course okay we got a motion and a second on the floor are there any further discussions to that motion are there any citizen comments to the motion that's on the floor uh yeah yes please sure it's a motion i'm a larry mcdaniel and uh citizen and i just believe that things are headed in the right direction but there are some things that really need some good work and one of them is in the past we've had sieges and see them sag and all of those things work together one of the clear roles in reducing that jail population is to have the chair of this committee be involved in that process the chair of this committee the chief judge all of those folks meeting in consistency to look at ways that you can change it and what programs come out of court services what programs come out of they got to be combined and you've got to have best practices involved in that when you start looking at things like recidivism rates and all of those other things and how you measure programs when these grants are written then what should that data should be stipulated up front and the commission should be able to run with it uh and i just believe that's critical uh typically speaking if that population is over 700 or thereabouts or 750 there's a problem there's an issue and it's not just it's not the jail's issue it's the community's issue and that issue has to come here to start with has to go to chief judge public defender state attorney all of those folks on a consistent basis and that's my belief and i just wanted to throw that up front and out and don't you know it's hard to say okay we've been in business for 30 or 60 days and we had 35 people come in and our our recidivism rate is x you can't measure it over that time what is the criteria that you're using to measure your recidivism rate and and that's not a that's not a knock but it's the reality of the situation uh and it's going to take all and everyone to fix this and it's an ongoing problem and you guys are doing a good job of starting that so thank you again thank you any further citizen comments back to the board those in favor of the motion will by the sign of aye aye those opposed same sign motion carry thank you under sheriff for your presentation very very informative thank you thank you thank you board okay mr clerk mr chair that takes us to the facilities management master plan quarterly update would it make you feel better if i said santa claus is watching you said say the same thing santa claus is watching you yeah good afternoon mr chair commission travis parker facilities director i am here today to present the master space plan which is phase one this is a quarterly progress update and again this is to provide you information at the end provide any answers to the questions that you have also providing an update on additional projects that we have so i know this started as the do-si-do plan where we talked about just the master plan but i've added in kind of some of those other larger projects that we have to give you an update i wanted to start with kind of something that we've been monitoring on our side i'm kind of seeing what construction costs are looking like kind of where they've been over the course of the last five years and these two these two images kind of depict kind of what everybody has already known costs have been rising some of them a little less than what i kind of anticipated it to be you know you can kind of see each one of these sources turnery and rlb they both take data points from specific places to kind of get their their numbers one might be you know steel concrete etc and they use that you know over the course of you know the last five years to to see what that rate of increase is so but what we're kind of seeing is somewhere between 25 percent you know from the last five years and another 25 between 25 and 30. so something just to consider as we as we move along so the first and the largest phase of the master plan is civil court complex you guys are pretty familiar with you know what we're doing out there cep parking garage civil courthouse itself that will include court services relocation of fire rescue headquarters and emergency operations from existing fire rescue headquarters to the armory animal resource shelter and then relocation of epd and growth management so we'll start with civil courthouse to kind of give you a timeline i've been here about a year now and i've stood up here a couple times said hey we're going to be getting started soon and i feel like we have run into several roadblocks at roadblocks as we've gone along but we are starting to get to the point where i can safely say hey we're we're really getting close so this timeline specifically states the actions that are needed to do the site work which is the driver of the entire project we cannot start until we get the site work completed so if you've been over there recently you know we've fenced it off gru has come in and they have started relocating some utilities we are still working with them to to get some of the overhead lines those type things relocated but everything is driven by the site work and as i was sitting back there today i saw the permit go in to the city of gainesville for the right of way we have made some changes to the site plan i think the last time i was here i talked about some of the issues with the plume that was underneath we made the adjustments needed so that we didn't impact that to the stormwater so we're good to go there we're working through the finalization of that process and then also we previously had planned to alter the structure that was in main street for the stormwater and that was going to be a large large piece of the project we're going to shut down two lanes all those things over the course of the last month and a half we have altered that so we no longer have to touch main street we're going to do everything on our site which one will not impact the community because that was going to be a big issue and then the other thing is that also there's a cost savings there i also added these images um mainly so you have them in your backup doc so you can kind of go back for reference but i want to go through each phase because as we are now getting to the point where you're going to start seeing construction i want to kind of depict what we're going to be doing so first phase is going to be the stormwater infrastructure plan and that is the largest portion of getting started on this you can kind of see there's that little square portion that's underneath the parking garage that is the storm trap that is going to be our on-site you know storage then you can kind of see all these green lines that is going to be all site work we're relocating what's existing we're removing we're adding all of those type things so that is going to be a large portion of the project phase two we are going to be working with the folks from the parking garage finfrock and then the cep the energy plant and you will see they will take ownership of this site in that portion of the of the project again we've made a lot of these changes and it kind of seemed like hey why didn't you guys do that in the first place because they were all individual projects at some point and now it got to the point where hey there's no reason to add a temporary stormwater you know system here when we need to just do permanent we're at that point now so finfrock and the folks building the cep they're going to share this site in phase two and again this is once stormwater has been completed phase three you'll kind of see that everybody's going to be on the site um cep will be mostly constructed the crane will be out of the way kind of the same with the the parking garage once they get the exterior up they move onto the inside of their structure and they work from inside out so they won't be taking up much of the site and that's when the folks from ajax will come in and we'll start the the process of the actual courthouse itself you can kind of see we've got some more um a few lines storm lines and water lines that have to be adjusted during that third phase that can't be done in the first phase and then fourth phase um parking garage cep will be completely finished and the the courthouse will be being constructed um that's our longest project and then final final phase of the the site you can kind of see parking garage energy center and then there's that little yellow portion that's to the south that is just green space that will be future use if needed so quick update on the energy plant everything we have everything that we need to build it we just need to get the site work done so that we can get started we expect that building pad to be ready by march 26. i think that is a pretty firm date we we have permitting through we have a lot of discussions with city of gainesville so i feel comfortable using that as the we expect to get started then that means coming in building walls delivering the package unit the storage tanks that we currently store at the warehouse parking garage the same thing we are ready to roll precast is completed we're just waiting for the pad to be ready we also as part of the parking garage we have um a space in there that is for the civil sheriff we have designed that space already um it is ready to go to bid um so we want to coordinate it though so that as we get to the point um that we can construct in there we want to put it out to bid so that when you know contractors go out and they put their bids out you know they're the subs are able to hold those numbers so we're kind of waiting until we feel it's the right time to put that out so again pad ready that is when we expect that construction to start and that's april 26. now that includes um their precast is already done so we're not waiting on anything there i i did complete this presentation before we got to this point so i see here that the early release package um gap from ajax for um we're going to release some of the hvac equipment um switch gears those type things um mentioned october 28th um we're planning for that on the november 4th board meeting so you guys will see that design's been completed um ajax is uh working on um a lot of rfis we're working through i guess what i would say is you know you know as we've kind of you know kind of slow walk this project it feels like at this point we have covered a lot of the things that we would see changes on later because we're asking all those questions ajax is asking all those questions on the design documents you know what about this what about that things that we would see as field changes um you know if it was a rush project we're kind of covering some of those things now no change orders no change orders we're working really really hard to prevent those and we expect construction to begin may 26. fire rescue headquarters eoc update we are halfway through the armory we were hoping to be at substantial completion early part of october we did run in to asbestos those type things so we had to do abatement some of that held us up critical path putting walls up that type stuff so we are looking at a new date of substantial completion december 1 but it is it is moving along pretty well they just put the mezzanine in and they are working on the shaft elevator shaft a lot of the walls are framed those type things so we hope to do the punch list um and be complete by the end of december um and and start moving folks in january can i ask a question sure about that um on the exterior it was recently painted it was the day before we purchased it i believe oh it was before you purchased it i've had some complaints yeah so that we we have part of the project um to include painting it okay yeah all right good yeah we're working with fire rescue on uh what that's going to look like we're also going to do landscaping those type things yeah a couple of neighbors are like that's not what it's going to look like is it i was like i don't think so but i'll double check i can't get the buttons right on the landscaping side not to be too it it's right adjacent to the city's park and the there's a community garden and stuff there i know that the former owner worked pretty closely with them to like make all that happen so if we can be considerate in thinking about how our landscaping and work integrates in with what's going on over there that would be important like we don't plant a giant oak tree right next to where the community garden is growing vegetables etc just things like that that would be awesome thank you understood will do um just some images of kind of the stuff that's been going on we've been installing fire lines there's again these are kind of old there's been a lot more progress since then but walls are closing in you can kind of see the mezzanine elevator shaft will be going in there so a lot of construction going on in there relocations epd and growth management so we did walk um my staff and um epd walked the existing fire rescue headquarters last week so they're starting to get acquainted with the facility so we can kind of see what it's going to take to get them moved in and as soon as fire rescue vacates to the armory we can start that process we're kind of jumping ahead a little bit to kind of see what we can get started before kind of speed that up growth to the existing facilities building we received 100 documents a few weeks ago we're going to start that process in-house construction so yeah we're going to start demoing walls building walls those type things i think yeah i think for what we have in our budget i mean that's we're gonna get the most bang for the buck there um going back to that original first slide i showed you um construction costs so i think we can do it in-house and uh achieve the goal now i'm going to jump out of the master plan and kind of get into some of the other projects um east tumbling creek um great construction get great construction is doing a great job um a lot of work going on out there if you guys haven't been by you know and you kind of see a lot of activity um you know we we did have a change order for for the umford scenes we expect december end of december to be a substantial completion for the budget end um and then another 30 days sometime maybe end of january early february we hope to reach final completion on the budget end they just replaced some of the roofs they're doing exciting now once they get it closed in they'll start doing the interior they haven't touched that much but fire lines in water line a lot a lot of work going on there i showed some of these images kind of kind of see what we were dealing with um yeah uh some of the things not funny no well it's it's some of it i mean most of it's to be expected um an old building um wood frame so that's kind of some of the drivers of that change order but a lot of work again um these are dated um by a few weeks so they're um there's a lot of progress siding is in all right so jumping into scottish inn um or forest edge um that is uh closer than budget in for sure um we are working through the punch list um it obviously didn't have a lot of wood frames so it's it didn't experience the same kind of level of problems but kind of some of the images there you kind of see um you know one of the sewer pipes completely clogged up um you had a lot of flooding into the um to the washer dryer area laundry room but some of this stuff that's looking good now um a lot of construction is going on there so you're gonna see tile going up walls are textured painted you can see soffits in some new lighting those type things so they're getting close to wrapping up container homes um we got civil site drawings 100 complete um started digging into them gru is um i was hoping they'd have the transformer installed by the time i got to this time to tell you this but i think it is going in today so um and that is feeding both the uh the the container homes and eventually the the scottish inn itself for forest edge um silt fence tree barricades are already installed out there for that next phase of the project so as we're wrapping up you know construction there we're going to start construction next door um getting all the infrastructure in for the container homes we hope to get that through uh open gov um next few weeks get it out there on the street so that we can um get some bids back just a quick question we were doing the pilot unit did we enter did we like say yes on that pilot unit and we're moving forward with the 27 or however 19 or however many it is or is this just the pilot yeah right now though speaking directly to just the infrastructure um when i say 100 site drawings like nothing to do with the actual container themselves um i think we're still yeah just the site uh we are still going to have to put the containers themselves out to bid um and that means scope of work what we're looking for um in those units you know so we probably need to make you know decisions on all of those minor details before we get that out yeah i had a question about that too ten of them right ten the number of units that we'll be able to add is going to be dependent on the cost of the site work and the um infrastructure then we'll know how many and um yeah but we're excited but we're creating the site such that we could have the maximum number well we are we are going to prepare the site for maximum number and that will be how many then we would buy however many we can afford right now and then we could have more potentially if we budget additional in the future 29 29 okay yeah because i thought i'd been telling people just short of 30 so yeah 29 so we're preparing as if we're getting 29 now what we can actually build will be determined on what does the site work come in cost wise and i think key to that whole bid for those container buildings is going to be that list of specifications because that is going to definitely decide on how durable and long lasting the the final product is so it's that careful list of specifications so thank you for paying attention to that all right we'll move on sunrise um we just got the 100 construction documents um end of september um started digging into those um those documents um we're not doing a ton of renovation as far as changing the floors the floor plans and we're going to go in and just remodel replace and remodel so renovate um we hope to do eight rooms at a time um and i'm i'm certain that we can do that based on our discussion with the housing authority um because when we go out to bid you know they're going to have to continue to mobilize as you know and we have occupants there so right now we're developing what our scope of work looks like as it relates to you know it's not just renovation of the rooms we want to do other things you know um staircasing coming up um walking past all of those type things um painting exterior all of that stuff is going to happen in some phase so maybe phase one includes eight units and it might include the stairwells on building b you know so we're developing what that scope looks like because a we don't want to impact the residents you know to to a crazy degree but we want to be able to do enough for each phase that we're not spending a ton of money because they have to keep mobilizing back and forth back and forth so we're working on that right now and we hope to have that in open gov next few weeks hopefully next project land conservation that has been through the permitting um you know i could go over the details i think you guys all know those um we got the 100 construction documents um we are working through those right now they are ready to go into open gov for procurement we are just going through the last bit of it again what commissioner alford said change orders want to make sure that we are rolling through those making sure we're not missing anything um that is a large project um that includes all the site work um the buildings um all the outbuildings you know the the bars and that type stuff so it's a large project so and just to kind of familiarize yourself where it is you know 43rd street and 441 station 64 um we are near completion on that um lack just a couple minor details fire suppression um fire alarm panel site works complete apparatus bay is in there we installed a new well dot turn lane and the median has been completed i think i have some pictures yeah so anything in in red you see that we have done um green is future face so these pictures kind of depict you can see the turn lane uh median apparatus bay and the infrastructure around it about that is or should be complete pretty much by the time we're done talking i hope and that concludes my presentation happy to answer any questions commissioner presia no okay okay commissioner alfred um yeah uh farmers market is are you involved with that at all i am to some degree yeah it's uh i saw the announcement that it's moving out to tech city is that a permanent move or is that just a temporary move i i do believe that's permanent um i've gotten i've gotten some citizen complaints about that location because because of the owner of the facility and i just you know was curious about where he's been recently in the news that's why and i think that's why people were upset yep um something to do with him funding um uh in investigations into voter fraud so it's a big there's a big huge article in the in the um main street news about it but anyway i just was curious they asked me because they had just started instituting a um a uh farmer's market in downtown alachua and they were like why couldn't it be there instead and i was like well i'm not charging any of that but i'll ask the question so um um but yeah i mean i just wanted to respond i mean i think that the correct response is that farmers market is operated by a non-profit board and the non-profit board made the decision to move the market we were very clear with that with the farmers market like i spoke with chief i spoke with michelle and i spoke with um travis and this board and then i went to their board and i let them know that we were doing the fire training facility but that it wasn't even in design and engineering yet and that they definitely had next full year next year to be operating that they could sign their contracts in good faith because they contract april through april um but that they would also be able to operate until next season was over which is like aug you know july time frame usually for at least for vegetable growers and um and i was very clear about that and then i i had a meeting with their at their member meeting with their board for any member that was there and said that and then i had a separate meeting again with their board to clarify it and say it again they kept asking me like when are we doing our new and i said we haven't made a commitment to build a new farmers market we haven't made a commitment on what we're going to do with investments in farmers markets we're waiting on this business plan and feasibility studies that's pretty cool and so we're we're in the process of having those conversations but and we're going to be talking to all the farmers markets about needs before we make that call so it's not like we're building your farmers board a farmers market we're thinking about farmers markets needs broadly and um and they said okay and i said i you know if i was you i would be thinking about alternative locations for your farmers markets but you have a full year we're giving you this information now so you have at least a year to look and think about where it belongs and they just recently made the decision to sign an agreement to move to santa fe tech city okay and i think starting in january yeah that's my understanding yeah it's a long way out there so that's their plan and i did let folks that are organizing the alacha county farmers market know or at least through surya who reached out to me to know that they were moving there and that it might not really work to have two farmers markets so close together because farmers just really especially at the same time because farmers really don't have a lot of we don't have that many farmers and farmers don't have a lot of time to sit at market there's already another saturday morning farmers market on the other side of town so i just encourage them to coordinate and try to work together to maybe come up with a solution that would work for everyone well i i tried to tell the person to call you because i knew you would have more information but um but that's all i know i haven't heard any more details about the move okay all right thank you thank you treps um since we're talking about the farmer or since we're talking about tech city i'd include in my presentation but we are working on that station we just approved the sd documents so we're going to start working on design development digging into some of the details remember that is a reuse with some minor facade changes those type things so um that one's going to start picking up steam in the next probably four or five months total millions of dollars we're working on here somewhere between a hundred and one thirty hundred and one thirty how many project managers do we have including yourself uh four including myself the three and you okay thank you thank you all your hard work you're welcome thank you travis pretty it's pretty good mr chair that takes us to the action items the first one is first one is a request to advertise the unified land development code amendments related to the 2025 legislative session good afternoon commissioners this is matey bangatar with the uh elijah county growth management department and today we have a request to advertise for unified land development code uh amendments um the purpose of the request to advertise is in relation to the 2025 florida legislative session and uh two bills that we are looking at to amending the code the first of these relates to farmworker housing senate bill 700 and the second is senate bill 954 related to certified recovery residences so as you may recall we've done a lot uh recently with farmworker farmworker housing and in november of last year we amended the code on farmworker housing but this was with the background of possible changes in the florida legislature and indeed in july this has now come into effect with a new bill that um supersedes the county's code so um the current uh bill says that uh this is allowed on any um for any legally verified farmworkers on um parcels that have ag classification of the property appraiser so this is opening it up quite a bit now um previously a special exception was required now this will be um an administrative approval with the uh consistency that is set forth in the bill um just to go back one other thing i was going to mention is that um there is a reporting requirement too so that we will if there is any farmworker housing that's built then we will be required to report to the state um and the um yes and the uh standards that um are in the bill um will be part of the new uh farmworker housing code section i'll turn over to mr dawson for this section good afternoon mr chair chris dawson principal planner for development services um the next bill that we're um adopting some code to deal with is senate bill 954 this was adopted during the 2025 legislative session and it requires every local government in the state to adopt an ordinance related to certified recovery residences certified recovery residents are places where people who are recovering from mental health or other addictions can live communally they sometimes provide services on site but not usually and they range in size anywhere from basically a single family home to multi-family style residences and we don't currently regulate these in alachua county separately so if someone had a recovery residence certified or not we don't regulate them we consider them to be single family or multi-family homes and as long as you development consistent with our other standards in the code you can do those we don't really have any any concrete knowledge that any of these certified or other exist the certify the certifying agency actually is the florida association of recovery residences they are a state designated non-profit who's responsible for certifying these types of facilities we understand that there may be one operating in alachua county there is a list on their website but we like i said we don't have we don't know exactly where that is we don't have a registry of those we have other um we have all kinds of recovery residences operating registered with this particular organization and we don't we don't know of them because we don't require them to do anything special if you're a house you're a house the main thing that our proposed code would do other than just identifying them as a use and allowing them in our residential zoning districts is to provide a process where they can request reasonable accommodation from our regulations our land development regulations this is really what's required in the statute it's kind of the only thing and there's no clear indication what that would be it's really intended to sort of be consistent with the ada and the fair housing act we've been working with eo on this to sort of make sure that we're implementing it correctly but we're not creating new standards for these certified recovery residences so we're not anticipating that we'd really run into this at all we're doing this because we're required to um mr chair that wraps up our presentation um if you have questions um either matey or i are available to answer those um we would request that you approve the request to advertise um the first of the two public hearings um that would come for you uh in november yeah i i uh i think i've i think i've gotten the answer to this question already but i guess um is any of the work that we did to ensure that there is quality farm worker housing able to be built into the edit of our code mr chair not really um the state didn't just preempt us from regulating them they also established their own regulations um and so really all of the things that we adopted would have been out not all of them a good number of those things would have been outside the scope of what's identified in the statute and so what we've really didn't is to go back to what the statute is look at those things that we're going to want to enforce locally be able to enforce locally those are what we're including in our code um we we don't really even have enforcement authority over it because we're preempted from it so um trying to implement other regulations that are outside of us that i think would put us in some jeopardy well i want to say thank you for all the work you did anyway because i i have to say that it was forward thinking and it was community engaged and it was meaningful in terms of actually making strides on quality housing for workers that we really need in our county and it's disappointing that once again home rule authority is being usurped and our ability to increase farm worker and therefore workforce housing in our community in a quality way that attracts workers is really frustrating but thank you for the work that you did and hang on to it because who knows maybe someday we can bring it back for the benefit of the public is there any kind of summary you can give us as to what the regulations from the state say in terms of the quality of housing and what's required um it's pretty basic mr chair um it allows a range of types of of residences it could be anything from site built to modular there are some standards um from the department of health for that kind of housing um that they would that any sort of installer would be required to accommodate there is some some minimal requirement for some open space but there's not really very much they're there if you will included on the agenda item just so you know we did include that bill um in the agenda item for you so you can take a look through it well that's why i asked for the public yeah no laundry no outdoor space no minimum square footage right no bathrooms like yes bathroom but no like minimum number yeah yeah they can basically build a big room with a bunch of bunk beds and but excuse me well i mean madam chair i mean i or mr chair i'm sorry i guess i one thing is i would say they still have to get a building permit so i mean you you've got to meet the minimum the florida building code so um you know to the extent there are things required in there those those will be oh it doesn't this doesn't fall under agricultural construction mr chair it's not they did not include it as ag-exempt mr chair they they specifically called it out on a separate section so they do have to get building permits they have to meet the minimum there are some minimum room sizes and things there depending on how you interpret the some of the regulations so that's good so the question i have so a builder could can put those things in if they are they want to we just can't require them to can a builder whoever the farmer is who has yes mr chair that's that's right i mean i i think that's if there were somebody who were establishing um you know farm worker housing on their property certainly they can go over and above voluntarily um yes given that we're in this situation oh given that we're in this situation perhaps there's an opportunity for us to keep what we had and maybe we can work on a documented a recommended recommendations for farm worker housing if you're looking for examples or thoughts or i don't know what that looks like i'll think about it more bring it back when it's more formed but to your point if somebody might want you know ideas and thoughts about how to do it well and maybe we can provide that as a proactive opportunity really care about the workers who were there and would do this voluntarily anyway that's what i mean this is from comes from workers i don't know what the workers yeah so it would help them to attract workers commission cornell um i was just going to move approval the request to advertise for the first of two public hearings for the county initiated amendments to the unified land development code as required by the state legislature and part two that uh staff keep the work that they've done for opportunities to recommend best practices second got a motion and a second any further discussion to the motion that's on the floor are there any citizen comments to the motion that's on the floor back to the board those in in favor of the motion vote by a sign of aye aye aye those opposed same sign motion carries mr chair that takes item number two discussion of adoption of the 2025-2026 state and federal legislative agenda uh mr chair i have um both our state and federal lobbyists they are on zoom they have to be let in where they're able to speak um and i do not see mark sitting here so hopefully josh says he's got okay there you go i hear i hear you katie tom are you there hey me yep hello hello yep you're there um the uh legislative agenda is in the backup um i can put it on the uh elmo if you'd like i've got it printed if that would be helpful i can come down there and do that um if you want to we can and we can go through those and they're there to answer questions as well mr chair would you like us to uh just go uh through the guided agenda as it's um or or um the legislative agenda as it's printed and just go in that order what would be the preference of the county of the commission that is fine right well it looks like the way we have structured this um mr chair is we have sort of the state legislative appropriation items uh or legislative items rather for the 2026 year as well as um federal items as well um and if it is all right with you all i'll begin with the state uh items and then uh i'll turn it over to um katie shotler with foley uh in dc for the federal update as well um so um since i'm not on video i think i know everyone uh at least uh that's listening in um tom griffin with the griffin group um pleased to brief the county this year on our upcoming legislative agenda from tallahassee we're in our our second committee week as we speak um have enjoyed representing the county i think for over 10 years now and looking forward to uh what i hope will be a successful session this year we obviously know as just sort of a 30 000 foot view uh just to to open this up that um there will be a tremendous amount of work that will be uh done and looked at regarding ad valorem uh the impacts that that will have on public safety uh and other county services we will of course be watching very closely as a broad sort of item for the year um we have sort of assigned two members of our firm along with tommy and others at the county uh to to just stay very close with the with the various ad valorem proposals that we expect to see um as you all have have likely seen this summer the expectation is uh that the governor will roll out his own uh property tax proposal uh we have already seen some early um concepts being discussed by the florida house and just to make matters even more interesting we expect that the senate will have its own approach to this issue as well but i think one thing is certain based upon what we saw last year and what we have heard this summer we would anticipate um some legitimate uh and and earnest effort to uh to make some changes in this space and so obviously um you know all of that is going to trigger a potential impact to the county uh and we will be watching that very closely as you all know i think everyone on the commission knows um our firm has for many years stayed in very close contact as well with florida association of counties they as you know do a really good job of tracking these global issues so we'll of course um take advantage of those resources as well so more to come on that i don't have any specifics to report as to what's expected other than to say it's going to be a a pretty bumpy session and i expect that this will be uh an item that will cause a lot of friction and obviously you know the county will be very interested so i will um keep you posted on all events as they come in and we'll try to kind of stay on top of this in live time uh moving to budget items that um we'd like to propose to the county this year uh we have as always spent the summer polling various departments individual commissioners and staff uh to determine what the priorities both at a state and federal level would be on the state level level this year what we have come back with are four potential uh legislative items uh the first is a subsequent phase of the noonans lake restoration project as you all know we made some attempts at that last year and when we're unsuccessful as as several of you on the county commission also know uh in years past we have seen successful funding for noonans lake over the last i would say five or six years um so there's precedent for it as far as state approval and we intend to pursue uh some uh additional phases of that of those ongoing restoration efforts item number two is phase two of the archer road widening project um i know several commissioners have taken a very active interest in this project as you might recall two years ago we successfully appropriated i believe 2.7 or 2.5 million for an environmental study sort of the initial phase of uh uh of the process to begin the plan for this uh for this section of uh uh or this widening of this particular section of state road um this year we'll be bringing forward uh i essentially phase two which is uh you know essentially the pd and e study um we'll be working obviously with county staff my understanding is that there's been some modif or some changes or some work that the county has done uh in this last year and so our proposal may look a little bit different um and we'll obviously have a final uh number and a final uh breakdown of what that looks like but we all understand that that is a major priority for commuter traffic coming in from levy county uh and and we need to prioritize um moving along that widening project um third project uh is uh having to do with um alasio county fire and rescue um we are working with chief theus uh senior staff in the county to determine uh and basically break out a budget that would include aspects of the fire training facility uh there's also some vehicle maintenance issues and as well as some funding potentially for a support bus for the um um medical support unit the msu uh we're i'm currently working with chief theus to determine sort of what of those items we would like to seek direct state funding for this year um my understanding is the overall package to this line um totals roughly 10 million dollars worth of projects as many of you know that have done this for a while that's probably a little on the top end of what we could ask from the state for a successful appropriation however um since that is a package of individual items that stand alone i've already seen an itemized list that would suggest we could probably break out any number of those projects um you know um price permitting and you know legislative supports permitting um and then the final piece that i wanted to share is there are some proposed facility updates to the alachua county sports and events center specifically sound system enhancements bleacher renovations and uh a new portable wood uh basketball floor uh i can tell you and i think i believe everyone on the uh county commission uh has been part of the state efforts that we've conducted for you know the the celebration point project but specifically the event center over the last several years um but as a refresher you know we have successfully appropriated state funds for various stages of the event center um for two years in a row um totaling over five million dollars there obviously has been significant county contribution and uh private match as well that program has really been um in in my opinion a success in the legislature in that they've seen an interest in funding portions of this project and then to the credit of the county um you know that project has realized what we anticipated world masters the economic development related to just regional sporting events that you all are housing on an annual basis um truly i think tell a great story which is what we promised to the legislature several years ago i i believe that's a project that the legislature despite there being new delegation members um that weren't as directly involved with um earlier stages of this project i do believe this is a success story for the state and for the county and um anticipate some support for that as well and quickly um just moving forward into one other specific this in this case legislative item some of you may be aware but there are several counties uh across the state that have um passed local bills that would set to cap the medicaid reimbursement rate for inmate medical services and and what we're talking about here obviously are inmates that are in are housed within county jails but require um medical attention at at um nearby hospitals so this um this 110 uh percent cap on the medicaid rate as far as reimbursement would cover ambulatory services and transport as well as hospital services the current state uh in florida absent a local bill is that the counties pay um sort of private rates for all of these services which can have you know significant multipliers uh above and beyond the medicaid uh fee schedule rates um 110 of the medicaid fee schedule is the standard in the state of florida for prison system department of corrections uh inmate medical services and so we are simply asking for parity with the county jails as well um what i can also tell you that could potentially um uh help with this project is there's there's recent precedent there are several counties that have um passed these local bills most recently leon county uh st lucy county martin county and we've heard that a couple of other counties around the state are considering similar legislation this year i've spoken with the uh a few legislators that were responsible for the successful legislation uh in other parts of the state who indicated that not only does this seem to be a trend that's moving around the uh the state but also something that frankly may eventually trigger a general bill that you know captures all uh 67 counties but for now i think alachua county would like to um you know certainly put in its own request this year uh with obviously legislative delegation support and the hope would be that it would be a significant cost savings uh to the county who at the moment is 100 responsible for all of those um inmate medical services um mr chair i have several additional just general monitoring advocacy items i am happy to talk through those now or if you'd like i certainly could pause here with our specific items and take questions as as needed what would you prefer yeah we have uh two commissioners want to ask a question now i guess uh commissioner alford and commissioner cornell and mr chair if i might um two things really quickly um on the compensation for health care services um local bill that tom just brought up um i want to make clear that i have not had an opportunity to sit down with the new ceo of uf health that recently came on board or the new ceo of north florida that recently came on board there was a timing issue here one it's an early legislative session two we just had two or three counties that successfully did this last year that we discovered and it has to go before the delegation in order to even get it on this year so we brought that to you to put it on there there's always the opportunity if we were to get an agreement with those entities to to request that the bill be pulled um but that being said i will also say that agreements can be terminated at a later date um i think this begs for a statewide legislation but we're just not there yet commissioner cornell had worked on that um and then secondly um with the um child care initiative that we've been working on you notice that that's our future request because um staff is now approved to work on it so i don't need board approval to get stuff moving on that it is there for advocacy it's not there for appropriation because the appropriation piece requires us to give them an exact amount and spell out what that money is for and we don't have that as of yet um i think we'll be prepared to have that next year but i think we can continue to advocate for those policies and things that would um support those initiatives moving forward so with that i will leave that to you all right um my question had to do with the sports and events center i i i'm just questioning why we need sound systems bleachers and i can see the portable wood basketball floor but i mean it's a brand new building if i was the state legislature i'd be like what so the sound system it was never set up for things such as concerts and that would enable us and we do know approximately how much that would be the prior manager of the facility operator of the facility had brought in consultants to look at what that is so we do have those numbers um and it would enable us to better um market for things such as concerts in that venue that right now the sound system just isn't for those of you who came to world masters it's it wasn't good it was not yeah um that should have been a commissioning issue with the first part um it it was really more set up as a sports and event center and we'd like to expand those opportunities with regard to the removable wood floor uh the current basketball flooring is not ncaa compliant and getting um a wood floor would allow us to host ncaa basketball tournaments basketball events we would want it to be removable because the other things we do in there could potentially damage the floor particularly the track and the weight of the track so this would allow us to bring in a level of event we are compliant from a seating perspective but not from a floor perspective and there's a lot of opportunities we could do there with regard to the bleachers that's probably the third down on the list of the bullet point it's not as if we have bleachers but there are some competing facilities which have popped up um in the last year or so that have much more comfortable accommodations when it comes to things such as that and we it is not a capacity issue it's more of making it attractive um to um sites selectors who come and see what we have available but i would say we have seating capacity so that's definitely down at the bottom of the list i would say the top would be the um the sound system followed by the basketball floor okay thank you for that clarification just to expand on that i think too the event center had 12 million of local impact 20 million statewide impact i think it's really a regional facility with the world masters i think we're really it's an economic development ask um that hopefully would pay for itself with international international travelers so i appreciate the question but i think it actually makes sense i really want to speak to my colleagues about the compensation for health care services for m8 in alatra county this is something that i worked on maybe eight nine years ago and we tried to get it passed statewide um back was was on board but we couldn't get a lot of the other counties on board and the fact that we've had some local bills that that were successful last year and then seeing what's happening around the state as that method i think it makes perfect sense for our us to find something that we can work with our local delegation on that really um works to save the taxpayers uh money and and puts a system in place that is uh more fair for the taxpayers of lachua county so hopefully you all will support that one and tom i appreciate your work on that preemptively thank you for us and and chairman if you'd allow me one more piece on that just to offer to the commission um you know i i was familiar that with this issue sort of you know just in the background uh but but hadn't really explored the politics of it or you know the challenges um what seems a bit encouraging while it is probably true that you know trying to do this statewide would really be you know a bigger challenge just because obviously you know the primary opponents could potentially be hospitals and you know if you kind of approach that on statewide you've got you know a larger um system that you're up against um what what does seem to be true however with these local bills is that they are not you know they are bipartisan we're seeing them in both you know republican and democratic uh counties um there seems to be you know pretty strong bipartisan support amongst the legislators that have brought these forward um and and and just and and while i i wouldn't want to necessarily suggest you know this is going to go one way or the other with regard to um manager lieberman's discussion about speaking with the hospital ceos you know what i have been told from you know some of the just work around the capital i've done from legislators that have dealt with this in other counties is that this is a pretty significant um premium that hospitals are able to enjoy with these inmate transfers um but the the the volume of these transfers is not such that the you know the the revenue impacts are are you know overly significant while they would of course love you know the highest you know reimbursement rates possible which is understandable um what i have just heard anecdotally from those that i've spoken to so far is that you know the hospitals may you know have a conversation about it and want to kind of approach the county and talk through it um but in in the the examples that i gave they were able to successfully get everybody to a place of at least acceptance and you know ultimately were successful in passing those those local bills in both democratic and republican counties over the last three years and it does match the state law for department of corrections department of corrections already enjoys that discount for inmates that are state inmates that go to hospitals throughout the state okay commissioner alfred i see oh no that's all but sorry nope we'll wait if if katie's ready to talk about any of the federal okay yes hi everyone uh hope everyone's doing okay um i'm sort of glad you guys can't see my face because it's just full of frustration that we are in day 14 of the shutdown so um things are eerily quiet on capitol hill despite the fact that all sides need to be working uh to bring an end to the shutdown uh there is a bit of a glimmer of hope though uh there is a bipartisan working group in the senate to reach consensus on the aca subsidies uh which is one of the primary reasons uh for the shutdown uh another reason that's not as not talked about as often is uh senate democrats having uh and house democrats having um concerns with president trump and the administration not keeping the promise and basically dishing out congressionally approved federal funds uh and programs so that's something called impoundment that's also uh uh one of the the main issues of the shutdown but um right now we're seeing president trump um offering to uh shuffle around some of the money that was passed in the one big beautiful bill to cover programs and and other such authorities that will lapse such as wick snap funding and things like that um so no real update on the shutdown except uh some talks between members are are happening um not to say that thune and schumer and some of the leadership are talking uh so we're still at a standstill um i believe uh federal workers are going to see uh uh their paychecks or go without their paychecks starting this week probably between today and the 16th and there's been a lot of press attention around troops getting paid but there's also you know workers across the board tsa employees other or other sorts that are going to be working without without a paycheck and of course the issue of back pay so a lot going on uh in dc while also not a lot going on in dc a lot of uh staff at federal agencies have been furloughed the senate is still operating uh like the government is open they are still having hearings and votes while the house has been out of session the speaker has kept the house out of session since the beginning of the shutdown essentially jamming the senate to pass the continuing resolution so that's just an overall update and i'll continue to send updates um being email as well on to the funding so there's a lot of crossover as you'll see uh with federal funding um requests with the state funding i think one thing we also uh i want to flag for everyone is that there is an ongoing significant effort being dedicated to protecting existing funding for programs such as the 988 uh lifeline uh mental health and crisis lifeline uh like i mentioned with one of the issues with the shutdown uh the trump administration uh has not been um providing the authorized and congressionally appropriated funds so a lot of the programs across the board so that's an ongoing issue that we're working on right now um so for a specific request like i said there's a lot of crossover um a lot in the first responders category uh the assistance to firefighter grant that is a a grant that comes up each year during congressional appropriations for a new training tower uh the urban area security initiative uh that's uh to what tom was talking about the medical support unit bus um then there's also an effort uh that's ongoing right now in congress but it's to restore the state homeland security grant program funding that's used for uh local uh state and federal disasters uh that could be very beneficial to you know coupling with what we work with uh from fema also um you know crossover with the noonan's lake restoration funding as well as archer road expansion funding uh while the archer road obviously is the state road um i was doing some digging and there are some federal grant opportunities um as long as the trump administration doesn't cut them uh and with that at the beginning of next year there is something that's called the surface transportation reauthorization bill that happens every five years uh so there's an opportunity to try to ensure that some of these grant opportunities for roads uh like the surface transportation block grant program uh is fully funded and not cut uh so with that that's the the funding um requests uh at the federal level okay commissioner cornell thank you um katie really like the fema support item the child care support one the food systems and the opposition to big trucks and i appreciate your list um with that i would move adoption of our 2026 state and federal legislative agenda a second got a motion in a second and thank you for working so closely together katie and tom yeah and uh commissioner i just want to say we were able to to defeat the big truck uh movement uh last couple of months ago in the reconciliation uh there wasn't a farm bill uh and they're probably not going to be able to reach consensus to to pass another one so uh but you know they're the that lobby the the stakeholders are still trying to push that so uh i just you brought it up and so we were successful round one and we're ready to go around two to fight it back real quick i i will tell you that this board is hyper focused on snap on many of the social services funding that uh we are going to have to deal with at the local level and so um whatever you can do i don't think we are unique in that in that request but um i think that request is being felt in red and blue states across the country so thank you so much for what you do thank you mr president and commissioner i just want i just wanted to echo the social services snap the affordable care act i mean we have a disproportionate number of people in our community that rely on those services and we're going to feel those effects really really acutely come 2026 so anything that we can do to continue to advocate um support of those programs snap wick affordable care fema thank you absolutely yeah i was going to bring up the the rising costs of pharmaceuticals and anything that can be part of any of those managing health care costs that includes that i think is really important i've heard um i've heard from more than one person who can't afford to buy their drugs this month because the cost the cost doubled um so um uh the i had a question about the big trucks does that include is your advocacy on the big trucks include driverless big trucks it hasn't specifically as of now because that's that's becoming that's actually becoming a thing so i just wanted to throw that in there for maybe your consideration after some research to see where it's see if it's still a thing that it was when i uh heard it talked about at um naco driverless big trucks yeah i know right that's scary yeah that's that's a recent thing that i've heard of also primarily it's been focused on the tandem trucks the the longer tandem trucks and where they can travel yeah on on one thing on the aca subsidies you know it's interesting we actually i don't know if you guys saw but last week marjorie taylor green even came out publicly and said listen people in my district you know they they need this they need this and uh and she said that she's willing to work with you guys i'm sure know and georgia the two senators are both democrats and she was saying that she's willing to work with across party line and work to get something done so when you have marjorie taylor green uh offering to to work on the aca subsidies i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but uh there's some sort of action is going to be taken uh a lot of the conversations are strictly behind closed doors right now not even committee staff that work on these issues um are are brought in yet but like i said there is a bipartisan working group in the senate and the senators that are working on on this are are pragmatic i would say level-headed so you know hopefully i have more details to share soon thank you and mr chair i one thing i didn't point out but i wanted to point out um on the state advocacy issues that we added this year we thought it was very important to the conversation on budgets since they are having that conversation at the state level is the item on state responsibilities and advocating to support shifting those responsibilities back to the state um and our budget folks uh tommy and mo they they've got numbers to those that we can tell the delegation how much we pay and things such as medicaid for our residents um djj the county support the state department of juvenile justice as you all know so these are things that the state these are state um that are unfunded mandates to the county so that's on there as well as the concept of payment in lieu of taxes we all know we are one of the counties that has major state infrastructure that we still are required to provide services to and this is just an opportunity for us to point out to the delegation and other members of the legislature what our loss in property tax is that we have to make up for in our property tax rates because we do not enjoy the benefit of being able to tax those properties okay we have a motion and a second on the floor are there any further discussions are there any public comments to the motion that's on back to the board these those in favor of the motion will by the sign of aye aye those opposed same sign motion carries thank you all thank you katie and tom thank you all chair that's all that takes the county commission redistricting discussion okay mr chair thank you uh jeff hayes growth management director so what we have before you is following up on board direction from last week to include a subset of the commissioner district map submittals we received from the public and so what you saw on your backup is the existing commissioner district boundaries and of the maps we received and we did receive 11 submittals from the public map 4 and map 8. one thing i would want to point out on there was one error on this map 8 district 2 the percentage the population is correct but the percentage is a little over 19 percent it's not 22 that's a typo there so other than that staff is prepared to really discussion for the board um and happen to answer any questions if necessary okay commissioner cornell thank you mr chair so um reviewed these you know we are at large so there's not a lot of urgency here but i do think it's an opportunity for us to adjust these um just to clarify for those uh folks that are currently living in the district if we make any adjustments um they would need to live there by the time they are elected meaning that if anyone were were uh any person that's not running for re-election would have until 2028 until they would have to live in their district is that correct so mr chair the constitution says that you have to live in your district by the time you take office which is shortly after you're elected right so for so as i understand that i'm the only one that would have to be in my district if i'm running again which i am whereas if the other folks could we've got people who filed yeah we'll be ready yeah that you don't have to live there until 2028 right okay um so i i liked i don't like map four at all actually i like map eight um i like the fact that it eliminates most of the split precincts um i like the fact that it has two commissioners that run east to west i think i i would have two minor changes i would want to um move precinct 27 into map four and precincts precinct 27 from three to four and i would like to move precinct 17 from four to three um i asked jeff to run those numbers it actually improves the population numbers a little bit and so that's that's what i would propose um after i hear from my colleagues okay commissioner alfred yeah i mean if if you can go to to map four i just wanted to point out i i was initially um liking map eight but i like map four pull up these yeah once you pull it up and i can i'll talk to it to it a little bit more um because it gives a real um strong support to eastern alachua county which i feel like you know that we've done the whole forward focus thing and having that focus on on on eastern alachua county as a whole it it i think it you know i think it's going to give people what they want um in that area of the county but um you know for me it's i'm that it it's not great because i lose mecanopia and that makes me very sad but on the other hand i feel like yeah it does give two commissioners but um i don't know i uh does it split you're saying it splits a community i'm having a hard time reading it when there's no towns that are so they all are going to split some communities so like i think both maps split to some extent are uh high springs and alachua provide uh two commissioners yeah but i mean that all that means is that alachua then has two commissioners that are thinking about them so you know i that that is less of an issue for me then i i guess i liked map four because i felt like it allowed you to still be in your district um and it gave east gainesville voice right that's what i was trying to say it gives these games and um i i do think that if we did that we would need to switch five and i think we should would switch make two five and five two so that we have a city of gainesville commissioner running every cycle instead of just or like somebody that's in the city center here like in the most dense population so it's not like all the dense population running in one cycle and then none running in the other because i think that would create issues with voter turnout and other things like that but i you know but i i i like them both and i i can support map eight as well um i actually looked at it and in the balancing population if i felt like precinct three should move from four to two and precinct 37 should move from two to four but precinct three from what four to two and precinct 37 from two to four i'm actually surprised i see a few people that might be here to speak to this but i i i kind of expected more public to be interested mr chair can i ask just for my notes in the discussion um commissioner presia was that related to map four or map eight um in map eight can you just stay that one more time precinct three from district four to district two on map eight and precinct 37 from just from pre sorry from two district two to district four okay we're just shifting i don't know how that plays with the adjustments you made though i was looking at the population and i yeah and my question is why are we doing this now so close to an election when we're filing why are why are we doing this now somebody please explain we're doing this now because we've gone back and forth with the state on single member districts and right now we're at large but we could be single member districts like if it rules in that and if it rules that way and we need districts that better reflect our community rather than just pie slices it now you and i i think you and i are the only ones that split a city last time right now right currently yeah yeah newberry and did you find that awkward at all no i i find the splitting precincts awkward really it's that's really challenging from a like cutting turf and trying to figure things out like the split precinct situation is the biggest is the bigger issue for me the the splitting the town really i mean because i i i split all the way down newberry road so it's like i mean i have people on either side of the road i had i mean i would i talked to west end more times than i could count during my campaign and i don't technically serve them as a commissioner in the city of newberry when they have events that are going on and we're both there i think that's great you know you do yeah i actually think it's great the more commissioners that they have that are thinking about the issues for their community the better i mean i i actually think this gets them more of what they want where there's more commissioners thinking about their issues you know like i think like having those cities that have larger populations be have two commissioners like alatua and and um newberry is is good but i just i just find that it's it's it's awkward it's with with people that are filing now and the confusion around single member as versus at large that there's enough confusion happening that now seems awkward to me to do this because so you think that in the past we haven't done that no that hasn't been divided like that no is that is that seems to be the concern that we have not divided our districts well enough to represent equal percentages of people in those districts anybody i think well can i can state what how i feel about all of this please uh personally um i'm i can remember my days of single member districts with the city of uh gainesville uh and making sure uh that things met the intent of the law law and i remember we had the university of florida professor uh forget his name at this point uh slips me um he would draw the maps every time there had to be the districts done uh for the city of gainesville but he made sure that it met all of the legal requirements and so i guess the problem i'm having right now first of all i don't know who drew these maps first of all second of all um will they meet the mustard if it was challenged in court so those are the issues i'm having right now because i don't want to vote for something and then it doesn't meet the the intent and then it can't even meet the court's requirements that's the problem i have because i think that uh i believe it will probably be challenged to be honest with you uh so that's that's where i'm at right now uh i'm just having some some difficult times and and then when in doubt i vote no so i'm just going to be honest with you yes the attorney so mr chair the statute says that it needs to be as nearly as practicable in population and those are the numbers you have in front of you when we asked the public for those maps we asked for them to come in in a way and according to precincts and precincts could be aligned with census blocks and then staff could give you the population the the two things that you know you shouldn't consider are where you know where the voters are as far as protected class and the statute says very clearly that it cannot be drawn with intent to favor or disfavor an incumbent and those are not things that we've considered here so population is the one basis in the statute i'm not concerned about this meeting muster in a court i i think that at the end of the day it could be challenged by somebody who's just annoyed that their district has changed but i to me this better represents our community and i think that anybody i mean we've been i mean everyone republican democrat liberal conservatives urban rural have all been asking for better representation and and and districts that better reflect them and i think that these do that they provide a much better you know sort of opportunity for representation in our community and so to me it makes a lot of sense to do it now with the fact that there is a chance the court could rule that we have single member districts so you're saying our current maps right now doesn't do that do we have a copy of that i don't really think so i'm just saying well i feel like this is different because we are we are so if we went to map eight for instance i would become mostly a rural uh commissioner i would have hawthorne and mcnopy and archer and almost none of gainesville right so i would be focused mostly on rural issues and and in in um map four um i i lose mcnopy and i gain a bunch of suburbia and i become you know partially a suburban commissioner with a bedroom community of archer um and you know so it's like you know they're but then then there's a whole commissioner that has like a huge swath of eastern alachua county to focus on and so they can focus on you know east eastern alachua county issues there's another commissioner that gets a whole bunch of east gainesville it's it's like a you know it's um it's interesting to me because it feels like in these maps we are um kind of like taking a we can kind of focus our our efforts as a commissioner to even though we we all obviously you know govern the entire county we can focus our efforts on certain portions of the county that you know that whether it's inner city areas or suburban areas or agricultural areas or you know like in in in uh district four on that map a huge amount of conservation land so it's it's you know it's um it's an interesting um i think it's a real interesting way to think about it other than the pie shape districts that we've had for so long that so many people have complained about on you know from a lot of different perspectives i don't think i'm i'm not questioning you know the need to change for all of that i'm questioning the timing the 2026 election is going to be contentious across the state better now than at a presidential and whatever is going to be whatever is you know whatever we do is going to be questioned whether we stay or whether we go and at least by staying people are familiar with that map people know this map and we're getting you know people are filing right now based on the map that we have well my my map changed considerably the last election and you know i had i had neighborhoods turn in signature forms to me that weren't even in my district anymore because they thought they were in it last time so so you know we we change it pretty frequently i i got it it's just that i think that that this election particularly this election where the whole country is trying to redistrict in a flurry of activity they're doing that now for i mean that's the thing is like this is a non-presidential year this is before the presidential that's why which is a much smaller year the presidential turnout is a much larger turn like the time to do it is now between between elections right before everyone is filed before everyone is qualified and then and in my opinion before a presidential which is a huge turnout of you know usually anyway voter turnout so that people have opportunities to get familiar with the districts and campaign in in the districts that they they know they have so i mean to me it's i mean i could it have been three months ago yeah it could have been but it's not because we just didn't have all the data we needed to be able to to do it then but i think we're still well before qualifying and my opinion i mean i think we should move i'll move that we adopt um map submission number eight with the changes that commissioner uh commissioner cornell and i proposed regarding precincts so mr chair that would be um moving to advertise an ordinance to set for public hearing so what i would like is precinct 27 to move into three i'm sorry to move into four and precinct 17 to move from four to three and i'll second that motion are you good with um both of those yeah i'm okay with that too yeah and then with those four changes so that would be moving um precinct three from four to two two and moving precinct 37 from two to four moving precinct 27 from three to four and moving precinct 17 from four to three second so mr chair i'm not sure we have the population numbers on those moves i don't know if we're prepared to speak to that today i think three and 37 are about the same in population and i think we've already looked at mine um mr chair we we do have the populate the populations of the precincts what i would say is that we can uh we can move forward with preparing an ordinance and obviously when we bring that back we would bring back the final analysis to be able to review with you yeah do you mind adding to your motion that the that legal reviews the map to make sure that it would meet a legal challenge okay so i'll second that with that addition oh sorry i keep forgetting to turn my light off i apologize okay we have a motion and a second are there further discussion to the motion on the floor okay are there any public comments to the motion that's on i'm still here and we're at large but when i filed i was told it was still district two race i just ran for district two so not it at law at large can somebody explain it to me for clarification that it is at large huh okay and if you adopt these maps when would it take effect 2026 so what kind of effect would that have on a person as i that's already filed i really can't see that map from here in other words you'd be running at large instead of my district but you'd still you still let them just too okay all right thank you this is what i'm going to make sure that you're you we just need to know you know where the maps are so that you can check to see if you are still in that district you know this is this is what concerns me is to make sure that folks like you that we've been talking about out high springs um are still in district two you still have to be you still have to be district two you have to live in district two you have to live we usually address questions after everybody's done talking i looked at your address and you'd still be in two okay thank you i'm sorry yeah but this is pretty hot mary this you know and i looked at larry's address he would still be important good afternoon i'm larry mcdaniel afternoon to you commission chair yes um i'm looking at the article that seth johnson wrote and the commission typically updates these lines every 10 years and the last time you did it was 2021 that was four years ago or less uh it appears to me that you know when you raise the question that i don't like either three of these districts because of the impact on incumbents incumbents are not elected for a life term so therefore i'm not really concerned majorly with that and that being a reason that it needs to be moved and i'm sure folks are saying that is not the reason it appears that elected officials are choosing voters not voters choosing the elected officials when you move hawthorne which is one of the groups that has been severely complaining about their representation totally off a map the vast majority of people in hawthorne look like folks that are not sitting at this dais and if you look at their elected body over there you'll see that each each place should reflect the demographics of the county there are no demographics submitted with this presentation why weren't they in the package before and again the question that he asked who put these packages together and for what reason um there are four factors that must be measured proportionality competitiveness compactness and minority representation if you're going off the ballot you have a valid question how is this still matching up with what's been represented for that whole time um all all i believe all of the people in this particular race should run just like you ran should run just like you ran and should run just like you ran because you don't run away from a situation you don't change it because it doesn't fit what you needed to fit it makes no sense and that's what it looks like you can look at the wrap option you look at the east west option i believe we should stay where they are um is the current amount of the district typically drawn to protect incumbents or for a particular party now with us not knowing who wrote this proposal we don't know what is written to protect so when you stand there and say i'm going to vote on this you're standing there and saying i'm changing this because of a situation i don't even know so consequently i believe that we should stay where we are uh past meetings notes full disclosure all of those things have to come out last thing uh tom i'm sorry uh orange county is going through this same process they're moving from six districts to eight but the public disclosure that you can see on that is amazing they've taken it out to the community and other places thank you thank you good afternoon mr chairman and commissioners i'm rodney long i'm here today as president emeritus of the four eight pack for the african-american community i'm a little confused because i'm not sure if we are electing districts for at-large voting or single member district voting the last election in 2024 was single member district voting first i'd like to know what has happened since 2024 that would now allow you to run at large is there some court ruling i need to know about amidst or what has happened my remarks i was going to give today was based upon the maps that were drawn for single member districts not at large districts so i'm confused can someone please tell me and the public how is it now we're discussing that commissioners are going to be running at large when three commissioners just ran in districts what has happened what legal opinion have you all received that says that the legislation passed by the legislature that requires you to run in districts has changed can the attorney enlighten me can somebody enlighten not just me the public because if something has not changed i know the court opinion from the dca unless it came down recently that says single member districts is no longer applicable based upon the state statute from the legislature then i understand you back at large can someone enlighten me in the public of what see these maps don't even matter they're irrelevant because they only apply to residential requirements and that's all has nothing to do with accountability of individuals when it comes to representation of specific geographic regions has nothing to do with that it only makes sure you live in the district that's all it means i've run under those under those districts before i understand that i work so why are we so concerned about where what precincts should be in maps that the only requirement is that they'd be somewhat reasonably a portion in population the attorney just said that that's all it means so why are we discussing that people came here to talk about whether or not your district maps were changing not that you're going to be going back to voting at large so we need to know that i think we have a right to know how what has happened since your election in 2024 with three of you ran at district now how is it the next two can run at large please explain that to all of us that are watching and all of us that are here thank you thank you so mr chair i heard a number of questions um the question being asked today is where the districts are going to be drawn the districts can have a different effect if you're at large than if you're in single member but either way people who are elected have to live in that district it's the residency requirement for the elector the question regarding single member or at large is who votes for those people so in single member then wherever these maps are drawn the person would be elected for only those people within that district if every one of them is at large then they are elected by everyone within the county in 2022 we had a referendum on the ballot regarding single member that referendum passed by a little bit and that is the referendum that impacted the 2024 election on the 2024 ballot there was a question put on by this board that asked do you want at large voting and that was 71 plus percent supported going to at large prior to prior to that election there was a request for an injunction and that injunction would have stopped if they had gotten what they wanted would have stopped that particular referendum from being put on the ballot the circuit court and this is on appeal the circuit court said that we needed to if we wanted to go to out large districts we needed to ask if they wanted single member districts and then if they voted no we would go to at large districts that is on appeal when government appeals on ordinance there's an automatic stay and that automatic stay could be lifted by the circuit court or by the dca neither has been even asked to lift that stay and because that order stayed the referendum from 2024 is the current one before the first dca the it has been fully briefed the issues have been fully briefed we've had oral arguments we had that back in july the first dca could speak tomorrow they could speak in two years we've had the growth management act one for instance it was in front of the first dca for two years before it came back and it's going back to the first dca but in the interim because we are government the order is stayed which means that the at-large districts the at-large voting is the law well it's it's really really uh this is a tough issue guys i i'm not gonna lie this is very very tough for me at least yes please public comments well it's very interesting that those elections came up because on the first day of early voting in august of 2022 a giant billboard appeared on 39th avenue and 15th northwest saying naacp says yes to amendment one there was mailers to my mailbox with your face on it and your face on it said that y'all say yes to that number one and i know that and and out in front of publics somebody handed me literature that said these things these were owed to the packs coming out of tallahassee affiliated with senators perry and representative clements so this was political dirty tricks that got your method of election turned over now it just so happened that the ones who were up for election under that under that tricked in model were good in their district as well as at large and they they they rode through so now going back to the pre-meddled method was the point because i mean you guys have done adequately i mean you you know the beep show there was back in bobby summers day so this this commission is all right uh compared to what they were trying to trick in on us which was to try to install a bunch of arch conservatives republicans the governor's crew so they were trying to trick us into not being a blue dot and that's all that was about all these switches back and forth didn't help it didn't speak to the motion i just want to say i didn't ride anything i knocked over a thousand doors i talked to as many constituents in my district as i could and that's how i won my district not riding anything i survived but okay yes go ahead i'm just concerned because of the confusion this is the kind of confusion leading up to this election that i'm worried about and i just i i feel like that change is right it's not that i'm opposed to changes if you all feel like that this is a better representation of what the county looks like but i just feel like that the election year this year with as much confusion that's happening internationally with our governor's race that's being supported by the federal government right now our governor's race is going to have the interference of the of the federal government so i feel like that anything that's going to interfere with our group right here is going to cause so much confusion that we're going to end up in the same situation we did when um what khali was talking about with the misinformation that's going out there's going to be so much confusion nobody's going to even want to bother to vote to vote can i respond please yeah so um i understand byron's um issue and and so when i was looking at these maps over the weekend i looked up everyone that had filed to make sure that their address was still in the district that they filed and based on if the address on supervisor elections is where you live then you're you're okay his point though was actually the most important point which is this is an at-large election so there actually won't be any confusion these districts are only drawn for the candidates of where they live we all of us now and forever as far except for two years have always represented every citizen in alachua county unless the courts change it unless the courts change it but but they haven't right now and 72 of our population has said they won at large and if the courts change it if i'm still a commissioner i will clarify that wording and i will put it back on the ballot because nothing from my perspective is more important than doing the will of the voters and 72 of our population said they wanted us elected at large we're going to spend a lot of time answering the question whose district am i in oh look it up what who's you just have to look it up i did that last time you do that no no no i'm not talking about candidates i'm talking about voters well no that's what i'm talking about nobody knows what this eliminates all the precincts okay i hope you're right i really do hope you i would love to be wrong on this one y'all i would love to be wrong i'll just say i can just tell you from my election both elections not a single person that i spoke to knew what district they lived in they're like except for maybe a few of the members of the women league of women voters i mean people had no idea sometimes they knew who their commissioner was but not because they're the district just because they knew generally speaking like anna was connected to newberry somehow and ken was connected to hawthorne you know they knew those sorts of things but they didn't know like specifics you know what i mean they they really didn't and they really i i don't think they will and i mean hopefully to ken's point we represent the whole county and this just gives better representation to people living in the areas where we have population centers okay and one more time tell me why we need to do it now somebody try again i didn't get it try a different way of telling me that this is a good year to do it number one it's not a presidential election year that's a main reason number two you don't and it's not an election year this is even that our governor's race isn't a is a presidential election well it's either going to be one or the other every time it's going to be either one or the other and so we're a year more than a year out from the next election you know people that are planning trump probably haven't even filed yet the ones that are you know really on board and have their stuff together they filed right but a lot of folks sometimes don't even file till you know after christmas so it's it's it's going to be you know it's it's going to be interesting for your seat i think there's going to be a lot of interest but um i think that getting this done now is is important plus we have a deadline that we have to meet in order to to qualify for the next election so we we need to address that as well so we're kind of on a timeline here i guess i would also say that we have we have two one commissioner that's definitely retiring in this election and so to me it's really important that we have districts again that represent our community that we have clear you know if for those people that are going to run so that it does if we're going to change it when people are retiring the next election likely we're going to have another retiree i don't know for sure maybe he'll step up one more time no but um but we you know we will this is a time when i think that if we're going to make changes to how our maps look to represent our community that we we do that now when we will have open seats so it gives people clarity on the districts that they're going to be running in before it becomes qualifying and election season and then the presidential which is going to be even bigger like to me that's why now because now or what five years see i think the governor's race is every bit as important at this point to us no doubt but the voters don't think that and this doesn't affect the governor's race this does not affect the voters for the governor's race at all if people don't go to vote because they're confused about what's going on here they won't they won't do it about it just gives us plenty of time okay okay i'm not convinced but you if you all are you all are going to have to live this out and uh so okay four to one okay so we got a second i got a motion and a second uh we've had public comments so those are ready to vote we're going to vote now uh those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye those opposed no aye okay so it passes three two mr clerk three two mr chair that takes us to the uh fiscal year 2025 administrative officials performance evaluation okay heather off on assistant county manager for justice and workforce strategies and i am here to present the summary for the to the board for the administrating officials yearly evaluation in the backup it had each individual commissioner's evaluation and the summary for the county manager is a 4.8 out of five the summary for the average excuse me for the administrating official county attorney is 4.7 just to note that if you look at the backup one of the county manager's individual evaluations was incorrectly calculated at 4.6 it should have been 4.7 so if you're doing the math on your own i didn't change that but i used the real number in the summary and so our recommend date recommended action is to approve the evaluations and recommend a merit increase for the county manager and county attorney as appropriate yes commissioner cornell i'm sorry okay uh thank you mr chair um two of the best in the state i think uh we've got a lot of the best of the state staff many of the which received both um the merit increase so i would move approval of the evaluations recommend the merit increase for both the county manager and county attorney a second but do you have to do we have to put a pound an amount we have to give an amount don't we just the right time this is not the right time to do a merit yeah the highest paid staff so we need to discuss i second it so we can talk about it we got a motion in a second so we can talk about now we have to decide pardon yes i heard you all discussing it and yes if you do recommend it we do need a percentage yes so the standard was four percent and the miracle is an additional three is that right the cola for the county was four percent and for exceeds expectations for staff it was three percent and for sometimes meets expectations was sometimes excuse me sometimes exceeds it's two percent yeah so i would move this so i would move two-part motion one that we accept the evaluations and two that we do this four and three and i did this last night the children's trust and it didn't pass so um i'm happy to listen to a substitute motion i would make a substitute motion that we accept the evaluations and we move forward just cola this year and it's not a reflection um on our staff in terms of their work but i think given the current environment that we're in financially and you know what we're asking all the rest of ours have to do to give the two highest paid um staff a seven percent raise when we're giving everybody else a four percent raise just feels really like it's the wrong time and on it well not everybody but the majority top producers get seven i mean i uh yeah i that's i'm just giving you my point your motion can and i would second that so we can continue but uh chair you had a comment too right seconded the substantive yes sir well you know look with the doge stuff that's going on and all of that stuff do you guys don't think that that's going to make us look kind of strange in the paper that we're giving merit raises and all of that kind of stuff when they they kind of pretty much slammed us publicly and then we go around and you know this year is not the year i think i have supported uh our manager and our attorney uh all along but with the climates right now that we're in i don't think that's going to go well in the public eye i really really don't i i really really don't i mean we we can think about what the city of gainesville in terms of their high salaries over there and got criticized by the governor and all of that i'm not afraid of the governor but but it's the public opinion that's what it counts the public opinion it's not what i think it's the public opinion that we're gouging folks you know and and uh and i think that when we had our budget hearing we had several citizens to come here and to say that uh that their property taxes are too high did we or did we not hear that and then to turn around and do this i think that the manager deserve it i think the county attorney deserve it but is this the right time right now is is the question so that's that's where i'm at right now and so right so i'm just i'm you know and and then i wouldn't want our county manager our county attorney to have that scrutiny uh they got got a big well that's a good memory that's a good point and i i believe that both of them speaking while you all are not even y'all should probably i can't speak for them but i'm just saying well i i think that they would agree i think they would agree with you i i think if push came to shove that you would they would feel that way i know you they would agree yeah because they came and told me yeah yeah no i agree and i just i just but it's nothing against them to me it's just nothing but just the timing is not right right now i just don't think mr chair can i just clarify something the four percent is a cola and that's already been approved so every employee including the county yeah i know that that's i'm talking about the merit okay that's what i'm talking about i'm not talking about that i want to clear that up the four percent is already approved yes yeah they deserve that but i'm talking about the merit i just don't think that that is the right time right now personally i mean you know we can vote the way we want to but i know how i'm voting but anyway so i'll leave it at that we're talking about the substitute motion now which is only for the cola right yeah well we're not approving the cola the coal has been approved well right it's just to accept the recommendations right i support the substitute motion so then we're going to make a really pretty poster that says we love you in spite of the time you're in charge of that yes and it's true and it is true but uh my great grandpa used to say thanks was damn poor to pay so chuck i hear you loud and clear and i and i don't disagree with anything you said it's why i actually brought up doing the rollback rate and why i will support the rollback rate next year as well i also though know the difficulty it is with finding attracting and retaining talent at a very high level and um i i didn't come up with the merit number today i looked at their evaluations and you all along with me all of us evaluated them as exceeding expectations 4.8 4.7 and a half 4.8 not individually but collectively and that's why i support that no different than when they are evaluating their directors and then their directors are evaluating their staff if those evaluations came in as high as theirs did then they would also receive merit it is to me the principle of the thing i hear you loud and clear and i think you're right from the standpoint of the environment but i also believe that we should follow our process and our process shows that they are far exceeding expectations have for years and years and years and um so i i will vote against the substitute but i understand where you're coming from i understand where all of you are coming from i had the same exact conversation at the children's trust marcia got an amazing evaluation and that board and i proposed two percent above and that board voted no and it was a 6-1 vote but i'm going to stick with my thank you i appreciate it mr chair man yes sir i you know the report that we had from the doge committee that came here with those grandiose huge big numbers there's been nothing to really support the numbers to substantiate those numbers and we need to make sure the community knows that and i think if we vote for this merit pay it says to them no we are fiscally conservative we are we are fiscally responsible here we know how to take care of our people and we know how to take care of our community and uh so i'm i i think i would be willing to vote for the merit pay for them the three for these for we have the best in the county we brag i mean in the state we brag all the time about our staff and our crew here being the best in the county of the state sorry the state and uh so i i think we could justify uh financially giving that merit all right i'm through thank you okay the the initial motion which i'm going to call motion number one was plus the merit right right the second motion was i'm assuming just the four percent cola we vote on that one first no it was not it's already approved so so how is how's the motion different yeah what's the motion mine is to accept the value to accept the no additional raise raise right the merit right so that'll be number two right right so we'll be voting on number two first and then number one at the end okay those in favor of motion number two vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed aye aye okay so it's uh passes uh three two okay three two david yeah two three twos and the last two items okay yeah we don't always agree there you go all right mr clerk chair that takes us to um items pulled from consent we had the advisory board committee guidelines i believe okay that was pulled for discussion oh yeah sorry okay so i looked at uh i i got some notes from a few community members regarding some of the policies and procedures overall i feel like they were comments that i feel like largely we've addressed in some way shape or form in previous meetings but the one thing is that i wanted to talk to you about really maybe isn't even this like we could go ahead and pass this but i wanted to make sure i remember to have the conversation and i wanted to have the conversation with you and that is the animal welfare committee so and i've had a conversation with sylvia about this offline and um so she can share with you her perspective on it but i so right now what's been happening is people come here with their animal welfare concerns and we tell them take them to the animal welfare committee there's no forum at the animal welfare for the committee for them to file complaints for them to hear them and then make recommendations to us i'm not looking i don't think that it makes sense for us to have an animal welfare committee that's like a quasi-judicial hearing like that's like the animal i mean like the human rights committee where it's like they're voting on that specific issue and like potential but their advisory committee but i do think that we need a process for them to be able to file complaints that people can heat that can be that have to be agended for discussion for potential policy changes because that's what we've asked the commission committee to do and we we keep referring people who are having issues there and then there's no way other than comment which can be ignored you know or just heard maybe not ignored but just heard and not responded to and i do feel like there is times when people are bringing forward real issues that they have concerns about with regards to animal welfare in our community rather that be animals in our custody or rather that be animals at large that merit conversation amongst that advisory committee which are experts to make recommendations to us to say no yes your policies are fine this was a one-off incident this animal was already injured when they came into your custody was injured when they left your custody whatever you know versus actually we've looked and either you don't have a policy that that addresses this issue and you should have one or your policy is old and needs to be updated or you don't have a policy that addresses this issue in the community and we think you should have one like that's kind of the point of this board and right now there's no process for that and i feel like we need one and i don't think that comment is going to cover it because like i said we don't want i don't think we want to change comment to be something that they have to respond to it has to be agended and because that gets into all kinds of issues with other advisory committees but much like the human rights advisory committee i mean the human rights board thinks about human rights issues this is essentially an animal rights board and i i don't want it to be hearing individual cases and thinking about restitution or those kinds of things but i do think that it does warrant the level of them hearing complaints for potential policy recommendations and so i want to talk to you about that put that in here we don't have to hear it out today it's already 520 but i want to put it in your ears and ask that we agenda up that conversation or maybe staff already have some potential recommendations i know sylvia had some comments on that when we spoke those are my comments on that issue and i have the elmo please gina peebles assistant county manager chief of staff uh commissioner prisia did mention this i believe back in august whenever we had talked about the advisory boarding committee guidelines some type of complaint process and so uh staff has developed this is a draft it's not gone to the animal welfare advisory committee but it would be available online on the animal resources website it's letting folks know that their feedback and opinions are important asking them to complete the form and that it would be reviewed and referred as appropriate to either the animal resources management animal welfare advisory committee or the alachua county board of county commissioners depending on what the issue is but awac animal welfare they would see all of them so that they would know that there was a complaint received and that for example it was a complaint against staff that's management's responsibility to deal with that and so we would let them know we received the complaint but management has addressed the issue and so moving forward so again awac has not seen this this is uh intended for their november agenda for consideration so they're not aware of this at all i mean this this works for me this seems like a really great way it's documented it's on paper it gives awac notice and then it gives the the staff the opportunity to respond and say this is how we're handling it right are you guys good with that and then if awac says actually no we think that there needs to be a policy change so it got dealt with this way they can and if not then they just say great job and we move on right now this totally addresses my concern so if you guys are good with that i would just move the advisory board committee guidelines with the addition of the animal welfare concern submission form as a process for that board i had a quick question about your form um so uh you list cleanliness of the shelter um so there are a lot of like rescue facilities around town i've actually referred two complaints for a specific rescue facility to animal services and so is that only talking about our shelter or is that about any rescue facility or any place where animals are housed that you have a cleanliness concern so there's always confusion um mr chair whenever it comes to whether it's a city or a county function i could see where often maybe somebody had an experience with another animal welfare organization and they sent us the form so again i think that well we would still take those complaints we would absolutely take the complaint and depending on what it is ask our animal enforcement officers or investigators to respond because if it is negatively impacting the welfare of the animals in that facility's control then i think that our officers should respond to that but then animal welfare advisory committee it would be brought to their attention we received a complaint about abc animal facility and that the officers responded and that they gave them a warning or it was corrected on on site or whatever the appropriate outcome is i guess in terms of type of concern i i i would think that there might be other kinds of shelter complaints like um i don't know uh they didn't process my animal or do whatever yeah i just wonder if it should be just shelter complaints rather than just just cleanly because that makes it sound like we have an issue with cleanliness at our shelter and i don't think we do but you know so i i just i just think i would amend that to be just that just shelter operations maybe yeah yeah that's that was the only thing that jumped out at me but otherwise yeah i i support it totally thank you okay we have a motion of a second on the floor mr chair yes can i ask that that motion please be that you uh like the concept and ask us to bring this back with any necessary changes to the board's supporting resolution because not even sure at this moment this is not something that has been reviewed i appreciate miss people's you know coming up with this so you guys can look at this but it has not been reviewed by anybody anybody at this point and so this is in it's in concept for you all um so we would like the opportunity to bring this back if you like the concept okay well then i'll i'll move this the board and advisory guidelines and to bring back the process for animal welfare complaints along with the form to finalize right and that and if we need to amend the resolution for the board we'll bring that at the same time to make sure that they can okay if we could do that before the new year then address that does the secondary agree oh yeah are there any citizen comments back to the board those in favor of motion roll by a sign of aye aye motion carries mr clerk sure we have uh closing public comment comment is about something happening on a global scale but i do want to say i regret there wasn't citizen comment on the administrative evaluation item uh this is from page 960 volume 14 of the second edition of the oxford english dictionary a person belonging to the race of mankind which includes most of the people mentioned in genesis 10 as descended from shem son of noah as the hebrews arabs assyrians and arameans what this means is that being pro-palestinian cannot be anti-semitic because arabs are semites too i just hate people saying stupid things over and over and over and they need to it's just a matter of not knowing that it's a stupid thing now there are some people who will keep saying stupid things as long as enough other people fall for it but i want y'all to know uh in fact when you look at who is in israel today the major group is the ashkenazi who were that group most persecuted and hounded in europe by the third reich these were the people who when driven out by the romans in the first century a.d scattered into far north europe germany western europe western asia and blended in very much assimilated very much because they were doing a fantastic job of also joining the economy so then there was a the second group in size in israel is the sephardic who scattered more around iberia around the mediterranean stayed a little closer to home and assimilated a little less and then the phalasha the smallest group in israel who came up from ethiopia well into the founding of israel fit the fourth century description of the people of that region so i'll quote herodotus from the fourth century bc whom your western history calls the father of history the egyptians the ethiopians the cultures and the nubians have thick clips broad noses woolly hair and they are burnt of skin and culture was what he called judea you know the groups were always renaming things kemet became egypt the sphinx the horamakit became the sphinx so that's their name culture for judea so he traveled he took the land route around the east end of the mediterranean and into north africa and he was only allowed to the first cataract of the now but he met people from further south from sudan from nubia and he in his fourth century bc science he perceived this as one cohesive population all through there that means that the ancestors of the palestinians were coexisting right with the haribu or the hebrew the romans just didn't drive them out because they were a little more they were a little more uh adaptable on this whole religion thing whereas the jews get they had to be driven out because they would not yield so uh we need to know who is who so right now in that place uh amongst the palestinians and the three groups in israel the most closely by bloodline related to the ones who were driven out in the first century are the felicia and that also agrees with your bible feet like burnt brass and hair like lambs wool uh and there's so much history to tell that will not fit in three minutes but people should be aware of who is who so the group that was sponsored by the un to take land from the palestinians who had been there about 5 000 years and uh it just left an unsettled question just like this country left slavery unsettled the founders said oh the slave is going to be a problem and just let it ride for 80 years so it almost broke the country and they said oh parties are going to be a terrible problem and they let it ride and what's fracturing this country now partisanship so these things not settled and founding they always come back and haunt and that's what's happening in israel and palestine and we need to see where justice lies those people who've been there 5 000 years deserve to continue to live where their families have been for 800 generations your late father once stopped his cadillac in front of my house during the run-up to the peri referendum and he told me to keep doing what i was doing sir and i told you that at that time we respected each other sir even though we didn't always agree i thought of you because um as you know i'm very interested in gru and i know you have a study area in cross creek since the 70s gru has installed packaged water and wastewater plants to benefit a mobile home park in cross creek currently they collect 24 000 in revenue and they spend 300 000 which is kind of like your fire hydrants deal just another hemorrhaging of ratepayers funds for an improper purpose gru is trucking the wastewater out of there in 4 000 gallon loads trucking it out of there and they put it up for sale so if anyone wants to buy a failed wastewater plant with 24 000 in revenue and 300 000 in costs that needs major capital improvements this is your opportunity to open this business so it would seem that if you have a special stuff study area that something like this should be on the radar screen and my next question is how many more of these white elephants are out there i believe you have banned package plants in the 90s maybe this was done in the 70s for 50 years everybody has been subsidizing a privately owned mobile home park in cross creek for 50 years i never knew this staff recommended this be sold off in 18 and now it's just coming out and gru doesn't think this is an soa loss well it is and um when the powers that be really look to see if the authority is doing what they were told to do i think they're going to come up short but how how could this be how could someone get free packaged plants 16 miles away from the sewer line to have a mobile home park in and cross creek like how could something like that happen but like your free water hydrants if you have connections at gru you can um have all ratepayers subsidize you thank you sure that takes us to county attorney comment anything mr chair i do not have any today county manager comments i also do not have any today county commission comments starting with commissioner wheeler i just i need the board's approval for me to continue working with the central florida community action agency as their board chair second thank you motion in the second what gratitude any further discussion to the motion are there any public comments to the motion back to the board those in favor of the motion vote by the sign of aye aye aye those opposed same sign motion carries thank you thank you and just one other quick it's not something i need covered today but the asbury cemetery uh we got an email and i'm sorry that the commissioner left um because um byron williams is the one who was you know trying to make sure that we had high springs had this cemetery and i don't know how we can make that transaction or get it in our hands and then give it to them but we'll work on it so okay that's all thank you yeah i just want to bring up with the open carry um i've had a couple of our advisory board members approach me with concerns about their safety in meetings and we currently do not provide deputies for our advisory board um any of our boards um and so i just i i know that may be a budget impact but i would like for us to at least get information on what it would cost for us to be able to provide a deputy for our advisory board meetings given the public safety issues that we're facing and i wanted to see if they're yeah asking for staff to bring back what it would cost for us to be able to provide a deputy for public safety at advisory board and committee meetings second we can apply we can get somebody here maybe easier than we could just just saying just saying if they want that kind of protection they might need to just meet here yeah see what the cost is first i would think no that's horrible thought you start getting people like we start losing quality advisory board members because safety their fear of safety their safety like it just feels wrong so and yeah okay we have a motion on the second um any further discussion are there any public comments to the motion back to the board those in favor of motion vote by the sound of aye aye those opposed same side motion carries mr chair how would you like us to bring that information back because the motion was to investigate what the cost would be and we can get that information do you want that send an email you want it that's fine if you guys want to send an email and then i can bring it up at a future commission meeting okay okay we'll do that okay um and then my only other question was if we had any updates on the animal resources oh good that was one of my questions um so um was in tallahassee last week met with department of ag and with department of um environmental protection we are working through the issues and concerns i think department of ag understands the importance of the deed restriction and where that should be we are meeting the purpose of that deed restriction albeit on a different parcel so we are working to come up with a solution with a solution with that um there has been some back and forth discussion but i don't have anything definitive to bring to you all yet i was hoping to by today but um we're still working through some of those thoughts i do think that we are moving in the right direction on that um as far as the uf parcel um we are working to get that on an agenda to you before the end of the year um i probably will not be able there is no cabinet meeting until sometime in december so we may by that time i will only be able to tell you yes it'll be on a cabinet meeting this is the date and here is the you know and this is the recommendation um but won't be able to tell you the outcome probably by that first meeting in december but we need to keep moving on this so i'm at least going to bring you what the most recent um agreement on the lease part is for that uh before the end of the year the uf parcel the only different issues that we are still talking through those um but at this point we have a um we have both the construction manager and the a and e firm have been on contract waiting for us to move forward um we have the funds there so we need to make some decisions if it's ultimately the board's decision to wait we'll wait um but we do have those professionals who are contracted and ready to go okay thank you so um hopefully i will have an update really soon on getting on the agenda for the cabinet meeting on the on the weisman track parcel okay mr cornell uh no action just to update we had a literacy update at children's trust yesterday um just to update you guys september 17th teresa beachy facilitate a meeting following organizations were there the school board peak literacy kids count girls place gainesville thrives you fly aim ask me no united way you have college of education you have flassenger center and the uh uf anita zuckerberg center um they are having as i said earlier this morning community town hall uh at east side high school on october 29th from 5 30 to 7 and then at santa fe high school auditorium i think i said santa fe college so i apologize for that santa fe high school auditorium october 30th from 5 30 to 7. that's it mr chair thank you okay can you see my outfit uh i have two things first i attended um last week a uh a chamber event that was centered around child care um that was at the blunt center and there was probably i don't know 60 70 people there and the president of the florida chamber was one of the speakers and um there were uh people uh that work in child care leadership from around the state south florida and tallahassee and everywhere that were part of the presentation so i feel like our child care proposal is timely and because our our chamber here in alachua county has um determined that child care is affecting the economic development of alachua county in a big way and so that was the you know it was at the blunt center yeah it was it was it was very nice very very well attended and um very engaged audience and uh uh jessica and sean from alachua county were there as well so but i wanted to share that uh second i was really dismayed to drive down archer road through the city of archer this past week and see a whole row of heritage oak trees cut down by arnold construction in archer and um that you know that's in the city of archer that's under their jurisdiction and so i verified that but when i asked about what um tree ordinances there are in the city of archer they told me that the only tree ordinance the only protections they had were for trees that have been deemed historic and and they had no other tree protections um so i have gotten enough complaints from citizens of archer to ask the question if um have we made our tree ordinance or can we make our tree ordinance available for the cities to adopt is that something that can happen or is that outside of something that we we could offer them so mr chair we are allowed to impose our ordinances in the cities if they agree they can certainly adopt an ordinance just like ours that would parallel ours we did that with human rights at one point we did that with the e-cigs while we could still regulate those um if they would like to adopt ours they certainly can we have had we have added them to our jurisdiction we've added what we have added them to our jurisdiction at times probably the best option here would be for them to adopt their own ordinance because you have to think about whether this is more restrictive and more burdensome um and that would be more restrictive and more burdensome than what they have because they have nothing right so if we were to extend our jurisdiction then it may come back on us if they were to just adopt our ordinance then they would be able to handle that okay so i that's the suggestion that i will make to archer residences that they um look at and adopt our tree or consider adopting our tree ordinance or or whatever parts of it they think are appropriate until senate bill 180 glitch fix happens they can't even do it i mean they're subject to the same bill oh that's true yeah but they could be informed about it prepared for it so that if that bill gets fixed then at the minimum they could develop a tree permitting process that requires people that's not cause it doesn't cost any money but requires people to at least get a permit so you know it's being cut down i mean there's so they gotta do something there's gotta be something anyway yeah i don't know i i just i was just particularly horrified to see them all come down because they were big yeah it was awful wasn't it anyway um but uh thank you for for that feedback i just uh i i was unaware that um there were cities out there that had not done that come and not done that work maybe we should put it on all our joint meetings well i just want to give an an update on the um community remembrance project um they have a bus trip to montgomery scheduled for february of next year of 2006 i'll get the dates to you uh also um there are out there are four outstanding markers still has to uh be done uh but with the the recent uh uh uh i guess the uh what they call it um death row inmates uh in montgomery alabama their work have really increased the eji work has really increased trying to save those individuals lives and stuff like that so they have put a hold pretty much on those four markers uh that's outstanding uh but we're still meeting uh once a month to discuss those things and get updates from eji uh one of the most important thing is that we talked about was that big bronze marker that hangs up in the ceiling so uh they still have not ken they still have not set the criteria for us for eight years right but for us to get it back to our community and so it's it's just been frustrating at this point um and i think that the committee is still hanging in there but i'm just afraid that i'm going to start losing people uh because the patient is getting um really should we send a chair letter um especially while you're still a chair to elj requesting letting them know all the things we've done and requesting the marker which i mean we've done everything pretty much i know i know but i mean should we send a formal chair letter from you to them saying we would like we would like you to consider um sending us the marker even though you may not have done this in any other community here's all the things we've done i think that seems appropriate yeah we can do that oh i would i would move that we um send the chair letter uh to elj requesting the marker again yeah got a motion in a second well thank you because you know we've we've just been like in limbo and we also offered that could we raise the money to get the additional markers we talked to the manager about it i think uh reverend smart uh former yeah deputy county manager smart uh i'm sure has shared with her that and it was still new and i think the letter i think the letter should say you know you suggested in 2017 or whenever that was that communities go through a process and we did let us tell you all the processes we've gone through and we're ready to receive it i think there has been mr chair and you can correct me if i'm wrong some acknowledgement by them that we have done everything a considerable amount there was never a list but we have done a considerable amount in comparison to other communities and so i think that is a great idea because we not for lack of trying on our part yeah yeah you know i don't normally complain about stuff but recently uh eji put on their their web page uh communities who have done the ceremonies and the soil collections and all of that stuff but i think a lot of county has done way more than any other folks uh in different communities about this and one of the things that disturbed me the most that the city of tallahassee uh deputy county manager smart uh met with those folks from tallahassee and talked to them and told them how to go about the process and all of that stuff they get recognized we don't don't we have a video don't don't we yeah we have everything we have a web page we sent all of that to them they have all of that stuff but you know it's just that i i don't know what's going on but it's becoming frustrating to me because we should get acknowledged that's all i'm saying because i think we've done way more and we have set uh the process of how it should be done engagement and all that stuff and we've done everything told us that a few years ago when they came they told us how we were like the guiding light of the whole process process right yeah but not remember that not now so i'm just sharing that with you it's becoming frustrating to me because i think we're going to start losing our community uh because of this keep putting us off keep putting us all i think you need to say that in the letter you know diplomatically yeah thank kens for the letter so so there is a motion in a second uh are there any public comments to the motion i don't see anybody so those in favor of motion vote by the sign of aye aye those opposed same sign and and i'll just leave it at that and i'll give you guys updates as i find out more so i just wanted to share that with you because it's becoming frustrating to me and we are thank you