Save Our Indian River Lagoon on 2026-02-20 8:30 AM - Feb 20, 2026

and the roads are designed to become rivers and all the homes are designed to have a flow between them. The large ponds. Budgelesius is first. Vice, Mark Shrope, Nipper, Bruce Larson, present. Kimberly Newton, Deborah Harmon, Lee Thompson, Nicholas Sanzone, present. Richard Bankhead, Aaron Adams, Kurt Smith, Fred. Yeah, they're on, they're on. I'm sorry. Fred. Can you not hear me? Yes, we can. Fred Goldstein. He's on also. I'm here. Yes, we can hear you. Barbara Wall Scanlon. I'm here. Eric Maness. Here. John Windsor. Here. Charles Venuto. Here. Sure. We have a quorum. Thank you. We have a new person taking notes, so, you know, let's make sure that she gets everybody during the voting and everything else that she knows who is giving the motion and who is seconding that motion. God, I get that wrong every time. Thanks for helping me. Approval of the agenda. Has everybody reviewed the agenda? Do I have a motion? So moved. That was Barbara. Second. That was Richard. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. And the minutes from last meeting, do I have a motion? Yes. Do I have a stick back head? I second. Bruce? He's a second. Okay. Yep. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thanks. Monthly report. Okay. I know I usually report from over there. I'll move back to my seat in a second, but I just wanted to explain what's going on over here. Jackie doesn't like attention, but she is retiring, and so that's what's going on. So, I'm here. She has never missed a COC meeting. She's been the most dependable person I could possibly have working alongside of me. So, thank you very much, Jackie, and we wish you the best retirement. And then we want to immediately welcome Jeannie Rich. Jeannie has been helping with our beaches program a number of times now, and so we're going to be borrowing her for COC meetings for a while until we figure out what we're doing. So, welcome, Jeannie. Thank you. Thank you. So, before I get into the report, I just wanted to reflect back. It's been a bit of a wild month, and so we saw this forecast coming with cold snaps, and this reported 2026 was going to be a La Nina year, a lot like 2010, perhaps more extreme than 2010. And so, we saw the cold weather coming. I pulled up the 2010 cold snaps that occurred. That's on the table on the right. And so, there were a lot of similarities between this and what we had in 2010. In 2010, we had thousands of sea turtles that were cold stunned, thousands of fish, you know, giant snook and carbon floating. And the macro algaes died. It's released loads of nutrients that are part of the explanation for probably what kicked off the 2011 super bloom and everything that followed. And so, we were very nervous that we could expect something like what kicked off a decade of downward spiral in the lagoon. And so, we were watching this very closely. We have an emergency contract with Keep Brevard Beautiful to coordinate with fishermen to go clean up dead fish if that occurs. And so, we had them on notice. And then, in the midst of the cold snap, well, first of all, this is, these are water temperature data. The left graph is from the water management district's continuous monitoring stations. And the right-hand graph are from the Forca-Kilroy continuous monitoring stations. And so, you see things were getting colder and colder. They got warmer for a couple days, but they were still cold. And then, that cold snap of February 1st, 2nd, 3rd happened and the waters dipped into a temperature range that is problematic for all sorts of creatures in the Indian River Lagoon. So, we had three brave souls who went out there from our office and looked for cold stunned turtles and helped rescue a few boatloads of them, coordinated with other agencies that were also out there on the water in below freezing conditions that rescued nearly 200 sea turtles, green sea turtles, which had been warmed up and released if they were healthy or treated if they needed care. And so, I wanted to give a shout out to Abby and Alex and Cole. Oh, and yeah, so that's it for this. We have tilapia by the hundreds and thousands that are dead on St. John's. Yeah, I just, I just got pictures of the St. John's fish kills, which were delayed. I don't understand that. We did have about 27 fish kills reported in the Indian River Lagoon from north of Hallover all the way to Sebastian Inlet area, but they were fairly limited scope and so we did not trigger our cleanup events. We did coordinate with Aaron Adams on some sampling of tarpon for a genetic study that he's working on, so trying to make the best of a bad situation, but it could have been much, much worse. But the past freezes were multiple weeks of freezes, and that's, that's, that was the difference keeping it low for a period of time. That was for a longer period of time. Right, multiple, multiple iterations of below freezing, whereas this was, it was three days, but then it, we had nice sunny days in between the cold evenings too, so. I truly don't know how the manatees make it because I'm out there in a wetsuit and I'm freezing to death, you know. Very chilly. Yeah. All right, so for the monthly progress report, again, this is quarterly report month, so I will not step on Terry's toes, skip around to the things that she's not going to cover. So first of all, the committee's recommended 2026 plan update was adopted by the county commission on February 10th, so we're proceeding with implementation of that plan. You have a video that you'll see later today on the Wickham Road stormwater pond retrofits, and Beb was able to remove three more derelict vessels this month, and he's got a lineup ready to go as soon as the contractor can get back to our, our next batch of boats. And then on the back side, we had a number of presentations this month, Brandon and Sparktide, our outreach contractor, Melanie, Anthony, Joel, and then what's not listed here is Terry presented at the Science and Nature conference. Yesterday, I'm sure a number of you were at the Indian River Lagoon Symposium. I got chained to my desk in the sorted meeting, so I didn't get to go, but I've heard it was a great, great event. I look forward to hearing more about that. In upcoming volunteer opportunities, I just wanted to highlight the cleanup, the various cleanup events, and we are going to be working with Waterway Warriors and Gator Dredging on an extra cleanup in the O'Galley Dredge template area to get out any large, weird objects ahead of the dredging, and so we're looking forward to the folks volunteering for that and see if that, that helps keep our dredging equipment safe and remove, you know, weird stuff from the lagoon that doesn't belong there. Jumping down to future topics for special presentations, I know last month your chair talked about extra assignments, extra, extra reports from committee members, and so various people are reporting in on when they might be ready, and so I understand that for next month Kurt and Fred are ready to go with theirs, and Kimberly and Deb are ready to go with theirs, so I think that's the pace that we will try to do is about two per month, so anybody that wants to volunteer for April, let me know, but we've got March covered, and that's my report. Thank you. Could I ask a quick question? On the plan approval by the commission, I noticed the vote was four to one, but I listened to the meeting, I didn't get any feedback from the meeting because there was no discussion of the plan. Is there any sense of, that's probably a political thing, I don't know, but does anybody know why it was not unanimous or with objection? The District 1 commissioner, as you can imagine, has been bombarded by homeowners that got flooded during an unusual rain event that happened in October, and so she is, you know, she's got a lot of pressure on her from a lot of understandably upset citizens, and so she would like to see more emphasis on stormwater and flooding in the soil plan. That's my theory. Okay. I don't know that to be fact total, but I'm pretty sure that's what it has to do with. She would like to see more. In the new plan, she definitely would like to see more work on flooding and freshwater control. Thank you. Thank you. Following up on that, I guess we all got that email on the subject about being that wanted to be there next week during the meeting. We did, I got, and I noticed on that email, it did the same thing. It emphasized the flooding and not the dredging, for instance, what I got out of it. Is that the same thing? It's actually along the same lines. Similar, yeah. Yeah, along the same lines. I heard freshwater control and infrastructure. Okay. More emphasis on infrastructure. Any prediction on that subject? No. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Good answer. Lori, go ahead. And we have the two guys in finance that are on, so you guys are listening, right? Yes. All right. Good morning. Good morning. We have received $3.9 million for November collections. Total revenue from conception is $504 million. And for the monthly financial statement of the anticipated $571 million in revenue by the end of the fiscal year, the actuals received so far are 7.4. And for the expenditures for this fiscal year, total sign is $98 million, and we have spent $8.7 million. And then I'm going to scroll through our first table is our financial table because it is a quarterly. Right. Just while she scrolls through that, the monthly revenues, we are currently $1.2 million below projections, which is not where we've ever been before. No. So these sales tax changes are really impacting our revenues. Mm-hmm. I did take a glance at the discretionary quarterly one. We are up from the last quarterly one. So we're just waiting on the sales tax for... December. December to be posted, yeah. We hope people were shopping for Christmas. Mm-hmm. And let's see, that's the end. And now we're going into the grant tables. We did receive one of our grants, reimbursements of the $171,000. And so that is showing on the grant table for revenue we received from a reimbursement. Okay. Does anyone have any questions or anything? Oh, just one. To Virginia's point, do we have an estimated percentage of impact from the sales tax receipt underrun? And do you expect that to continue for the rest of the year? Or, I mean, last time you... Right. It's just been so dynamic. So, you know, November was low again. I compared our percent reduction to... There's another half-cent sales tax that is returned to counties. And their percent reduction wasn't the same as ours, which theirs was less. And like Lori said, the quarterly discretionary was a little high. So I don't know if some money doesn't get counted in one month and gets reported in the next month or why it's... So do you have some sort of prediction on what an annualized reduction these changes are going to make? So we estimated a 2.3 million reduction in the 2026 plan. It may be a couple million more than that. And what's that in percentage? I don't have that off the top of my head. What's the annual? So I would say if we had a 4 million underrun divided by just under 70 million, 69 million. So that's almost 6%. Yeah. Disproportionate to what you think it's a small change of a tax holiday makes real impact. Right. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. And it's not just the holidays. It's the full year exemptions of some new items. Yep. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you. Okay. I'm going to do the quarterly presentation. So you have the table in your plan. And just as a reminder, the yellow means progress from the previous quarter. The pinkish color represents, um, no progress made since the last quarter. And then the red means withdrawn. And then, um, also this is for reporting period October 1 through December 21 or 31, um, 2025. So this is based, these numbers are based off of the 25 plan update, not the most recently approved 26 plan update. Um, so here we have our public education. I'm not going to go too deep into this because Brandon's going to do his, um, Lagoon Loyal and, uh, education update and right after me. Um, but the Restore Our Shores project is now 75% complete. Um, and I wanted to highlight this picture here that they submitted. It's their shoal grass, um, from one of their nurseries. And, uh, March 1st is going to be World Seagrass Day. So just to put that on everybody's radars, here's an update on our pond watch program. This is the Country Walk, um, Homeowners Association. Last quarter they installed the geobags. And this quarter they installed the buffered shoreline there. For wastewater treatment facility upgrades, um, we have four completed projects. Um, the West Melbourne Ray Bullard facility began construction on November 7th. And they began mobilization, um, soft digs to locate existing pipes and utilities. Melbourne Grant Street, uh, has, is planning to rebid their project next month. Um, the South Brevard facility has the deep injection well permits under review with DEP. And the consumptive use permit application is underway. Um, here's our ribs and spray fields. We completed Long Point, uh, back in 2017. And we have not began working on Sterling House Condo. Waiting on the, um, INRB results before proceeding with that. For package plant connections, we have completed Oak Point in the Port St. John area. And we have Willow Lakes, um, finishing up design and engineering right now. Their final permits are under review and are expecting to bid in the next, um, couple of months. For sewer laterals, we had 14 more project repairs completed this quarter for a total of 1,165 of 1,209. Um, and then I wanted to highlight this, uh, old pipe here, this old cast iron pipe and how leaky that was. And now we have the new PVC pipe installed there. For septic removal, we have 44 projects in the plan. Five are now completed. Fifteen are in construction. Um, this quarter, South Beach's O and P contracts were executed. And we held a pre-construction meeting on January 28th. The MICCO project is working on the final as-built. Sykes Creek Zone T is installing the valve pits and constructing the pump station. Lake Ashley and Dundee Circle, uh, mobilized September 2nd. And that's a picture there of Lake Ashley. Um, they've been working on the manholes, sewer lines, and laterals. And they have been installed. We have Merritt Island Zone C and Zone F, South Banana B and South Central A in the bidding phase. And then we have 13 projects in the design phase. We have four that are uncontracted, but we do have the, um, City of Palm Bay Zone A scope under review. For septic upgrades, um, we had an additional 182 applications this past quarter. So, Joel has been very busy. Um, we completed, uh, 67 more. Um, and then we also executed the Palm Bay Sank 2, the Sewer Available Not Connected Phase 2 project. So, that added 551 more septic tanks to be removed. Um, that's why that number is really high this quarter. And then we completed eight more connections. For stormwater projects, we completed two more this quarter. The city of Titusville completed the Tennessee Street Baffle Box. So, here's where the water's flowing into, but up on the grass is where the actual baffle box is installed. And then, uh, Brevard County Stormwater completed the Basin 960 Pioneer Road denitrification project. And so, there's BAM installed along the side banks of this ditch here. Um, under construction, we have the 1280B Flamingo Road denitrification project. That's what this photo is here. So, the BAM material will be installed on top of here and in the ditch. And then the water will flow and then be treated before, um, infiltrating into the groundwater. Um, Cocoa Beach has Ramp Road under construction. Melbourne's still working on the Apollo Baffle Box. And then Titusville, I believe, has already completed the Coleman Pond and Osprey Pond circulators. But those were quick construction projects there. Um, and then Babcock, uh, completed its design along with the Espanola Baffle Box. So, um, we do have nine projects in the design phase. The Huntington Pond, um, existing conditions models complete. And the drainage report is also complete. Angel Lab completed the technical report. And Elliott has design at 60%. Sand Dollar Engineering is complete. And waiting on the Army Corps permit. Richland and Spring Creek Baffle Box are in design and engineering. And we contracted with St. John's River Water Management District for the C-10 project. And they are working on procuring, um, design engineers for that. We have eight stormwater projects that are uncontracted right now, but are planned to be underway. Um, we have, uh, ten vegetation projects in the plan. And all ten have now been completed. Um, this quarter, the Basin 958 Pioneer Road vegetation harvesting project was completed. This is a skimmer system you can see here that's collecting vegetation as it flows down the ditch. And then it, uh, pushes up onto the concrete pad on the, right underneath the picture here. Here's our muck and interstitial projects. Uh, we completed the Grand Canal project. So there, that removed five, this is a big number, 547,562 cubic yards of material was dredged out of, um, the Grand Canal for this project. And then we are, um, the O'Galley contract was executed and the contractor has started mobilization. The Sykes Creek Phase I, um, um, that portion has been completed and removed 76,500 cubic yards of material. For Phase II, the landowner RFP closed January 6th with two viable options that will be included in the upcoming bid documents. So the engineering firm is working on revising those drawings and specifications. And they should be done by the end of this month. And the final bid package going to be advertised in late March or early May. And then we are working to transfer the Cocoa Beach golf muck project from the city of Cocoa Beach to the county. Um, here's our oyster bars. We have 26 in the plan. 15 are now complete. This quarter, the zoo finished up the contract for CIRL Oyster 2, CIRL Tributary, and CIRL Oyster 3. And I wanted to highlight this picture, um, from the, uh, Space Coast MLS. Highlighting, this is the Rum Cove area and you can see all the reefs that were installed right in front of there. Do those help with wave? Do those help with wave attenuation also and help keep the shoreline from getting so battered? Yes. Thank you. That's impressive. Um. Certainly to some extent according to the, according to the water height at any one time. Right. Right. But the other thing is that as, right, the oysters will continue to grow on top of each other and, um, they appear to be able to keep up with the pace of sea level rise. So that wave attenuation will increase as sea level increases. Wonderful. All right. The zoo also worked on their CIRL 4 contract and that now has a total of 3,511 square feet installed. Um. They have five under InDesign and then there's four that are currently uncontracted. For our planted shorelines, we have, um, ten projects in the plan. Nine are completed, um, and we are continuing to monitor the Titusville Causeway Living Shoreline project that's shown here. For our clam aquaculture, um, we, your paper, the paper says 17 of 18 farmers have been contracted, but last week we just contracted with our last one. So, um, all of that has been allocated. And we had a reimbursement request from Ed Mangano who presented, I think back in July to you. And he said, um, I wanted to quote him. So, so far this year, this great program has really sparked increased interest in shellfish farming in Brevard County, from young new farmers starting out in the business to veteran farmers from here and around the state. It's really a win-win for the Indian River Lagoon and the local economy at the same time. So good to hear from him. Um, and then the clam, IRL clam project has their, uh, grant, there's two projects there. So the grant one has, uh, released 3 million clams of the 15 million in November and then another 2.5 were released in January. And the Titusville project is, um, they're finalizing the, where that project's going to be taking place. But here, the picture on the right, you can see the buckets. That's how they're measuring their, uh, disbursement there. So, all right. And as an overview, we now have, um, just under 179,000 pounds of annual TN reduction and 143,000 pounds of one-time reductions equaling three, over 322,000 pounds. TP's at almost 16,000 pounds for annual and 6,000 pounds for one-time TP reduction. We received, um, 225 scopes of work and we have now completed 125 projects. So here that those numbers are on a little bit easier to see scale. Um, and then when we look at everything from the inception of Sorrel and our completed projects and the pounds per year, we are about, uh, just over 1.1 million pounds with 2025 alone. And then here we are with the, um, financials. We've spent a total of 103.6 million. We have 115 million in additional grant funds. Um, we have most of that, uh, in progress and allocated. We've collected 504 of the 586 based on the 25 plan. Any questions? Yeah. I have a couple. I have a few. Um, and one is, um, it's a lot of, of stormwater projects. Are, uh, are the commissioners aware of how many stormwater projects have been done within the plan and, and, you know, just the, the, just the sheer number of them. And that we are really, and, and then we voted to, to emphasize stormwater by upping the, the value for nitrogen, uh, of stormwater. So, and the other, the other end of that question would be, um, uh, how, how much can we effectively influence in, in North County, um, any stormwater, uh, there? Because it's, the, the watershed is actually very, very narrow in that area. So that's, those are, those are questions. I don't know, I don't know if you have an answer, but if you don't, that's okay. Yeah. Uh, we have talked about how many project, how many stormwater projects are in the plan, how many are completed and how many are left to go. Uh, we provided a map to district one of the priority basins, uh, in her district that, where funding is allocated in the plan for water quality projects. We've talked about the ability to use that swirl funding for water quality as, um, uh, local match to go get state funds, resilience or other stormwater funds to work on the flooding aspect of those same communities. Um, we have mapped our projects with the public works databases of flooding areas. And so, you know, that's a, it's an ongoing, um, project to, to try to align the different funding and coordinate, collaborate with the different departments and, and try to get as much as we can from the resources that are available. Good. Thank you so much. I, I, continuing on, uh, when the, uh, galley muck dredging begins, can, can we have maybe a group visit to the, to the disposal site, um, to see, to see the disposal site or individual visits or? Yeah. There, there's, there are problems with doing that and safety issues and advertising. We can't, we can't have all of you there potentially discussing a project without advertising it for the public. And. Okay. So to have, you know, open access on a construction site would be a safety challenge. Okay. And I have one more question. If it's something you could visit individually, like if it were something, I mean, I personally don't see a need for me to go, but like if there were members that wanted to see something on site, is it possible to coordinate that? Where's Jean? Well, I think we're going to have to check our agreement, um, on St. John's to see about public access to the site. So we'll have to get back to you on that one. I didn't hear any of that. Yeah. Well, so they're, they're permitting concerns and the, you know, the drudge material management area is the Florida inland navigation site. Right. The disposal area is a St. John's site. So we would have to review all those agreements to see what we are and aren't allowed to do. Maybe on an individual basis we could go or. Or coordinate with the, the contractor, the con, you know, the contractor doesn't need us slowing him down multiple times. So. On an individual basis maybe we can go or something like that. If, if people are very interested you can let us know and we can see what we can do. But it's, it's not an easy thing to coordinate. And we'll likely be doing a video on it too so everybody can see it that way. Okay. It's not, it's not like being there though. Okay. One, I have one more question. Um, on the clam restoration, do we have monitoring, monitoring set up for that? Um. For the IRL. Yeah. Independent monitoring set up for that? Yes. Okay. Thank you. UCF. That's, that's all. Laura Lee, you can go ahead. Okay. So number one, you're right. The, the, the IRL drainage basin is very narrow in the north part of the county, but there's, the problem is, is that we have this large wetland system on the west side of town that used to drain into the St. Johns River, but then they built I-95 and the culverts aren't being maintained. The ditches aren't being maintained. Those wetlands are draining very little into the, um, St. Johns River basin now, or, or floodplain. Many, many years ago, decades ago, back in the 1930s, 1940s, they cut a ditch through the coastal ridge to drain the wetlands to use the, for vegetable farming. And that ditch has been draining those wetlands into the Indian River Lagoon for decades now. Well, now we're getting more rainfall, um, the groundwater tables coming up. And so the wetlands are holding more water than they used to. And the underground, um, infrastructure that moves the water from the wetlands that's supposed to be going to the St. Johns, that, that underground infrastructure can no longer move the amount of water that's coming at it. So it backs up. And it's backing up the water throughout the whole big wetland system. And so the neighborhoods that were built in the 1960s around the edges of that wetland, that's where the flooding is occurring. And then there's, um, neighborhoods further to the north that were built on the northern side of, of a smaller wetland that the city uses as a gigantic stormwater area. So you've got all these neighborhoods draining into the wetland and the water levels coming up and then it's flooding the, the lower neighborhoods around it. So the city of Titusville was able to get a half million dollar grant from DEP, DEP to do a feasibility study, um, to look at that wetland system and try to figure out, number one, how do we stop the billions of gallons of fresh water that's going into the Indian River every year out of that wetland? How do we move that water westward again, the way it should be going? So if we can figure that out, it's going to, it's going to benefit the Indian River, um, because we will get rid of a major source of fresh water and then it will benefit the, um, water starved St. John's River by pushing that water west instead of, instead of into the lagoon. So that's a real quick analysis of what, what's happening up there. Yeah. So, thank you. Okay. Um, I have a question. You mentioned two different projects that the BAM was along the side of the ditch. Um, is that a new practice? Is that something that's just been engineered into projects? I don't recall ever seeing like the side BAM mitigation. Um, is that, is that just I've overlooked it in previous projects or is that new? Or do you know? I can follow up with an engineer later. We've been doing, uh, along the bottom of the ditch, the sides of the ditch, the sides of the ponds, um, off, uh, offline treatment. So we have lots of variations on where, where we put the BAM depending on. I do recall we've seen presentations about different ditch studies with different compounds of BAM and the materials that we use on that and everything. But that just seems like such a low hanging fruit to implement in other areas that need that like second layer. So I'll just follow up on that. I wanted to also mention, you said sea level rise. We don't talk about that here. Um, and so it is a really big deal and I think that's a great introduction to keep that more present in our conversation sometimes with mitigation on projects. Um, but just that I was already kind of looking at that graphic, uh, curious if that was a computer inlay because those were so symmetrical and perfectly aligned. The oyster reefs in the one slide that you showed us. Um, or the clam, I don't know which ones they were. Or some oyster. But that's, uh, you mentioned the clam growth, oyster growth is comparable to the, the groundwater rise. Is that something that there's data that I could review at some point in time? Just out of curiosity. We have not collected that data, but the, the, it's all throughout the literature projects, you know, all around the world studying oyster growth. No, I mean just, so that's an international spec or is that a local to us? Like someone is measuring the ground water rise with sea level versus the oyster growth rate. That's why I said we have not made those specific measurements here. We haven't tried to document that here, but it is throughout literature on oyster, you know, I think that's natural and man-made oyster reefs around the world. And that's fabulous and actually could open up a whole new segment of grant opportunities for building oysters here, um, with us. So I'll definitely follow up with that as well. Yeah. Brandon. Okay. I just had a couple of messaging thoughts, I guess. Um, as it pertains to people getting specific value out of, out of the tax and, uh, thinking they, that they need more projects and that sort of thing, which of course that's what we're here to do is provide more projects. Um, do we think we could maybe consolidate some numbers that show, uh, each city, region, how much they put in to the taxes versus what they have received in benefit? Um, just to sort of let people know. City by city. Yeah. Or something like that. So they're, they're aware of how much benefit they've gotten. Yeah, we can absolutely do that. Um, it also depends on how much they ask for. So there are some, especially, uh, uh, very small municipalities that, uh, don't have the, the resources to, um, implement the projects. And so they're not applying. And so, you know, the, they will benefit from water quality improvements all around them due to everybody else's efforts. But there, there are a few cities that aren't getting projects in their jurisdiction. Hmm. Okay. Okay. And then the other thought was, um, is, is it quantifiable to, I guess, get, uh, sort of a review of all the projects that we've done and, and shown impact over time before and after pictures that, or, you know, like water quality measurement changes that can be attributed to those projects easily, easily. I'm looking at, at Don who did his, you know, massive analysis of water quality trends and. Yeah. There's really the, the type of, of water quality instrumentation we have out there. There's two types, you know, the discreet and the, and the continuous. And, and there was problems with, uh, with both of them because the discreet's only collected periodically and, uh, and the continuous, you know, they, they, they, they just get fouled after a time. So you're, there's constant work on those two. Um, but, um, there's just, isn't, it isn't collected in a way that really shows a plus and minus. I mean, shows trends certainly, but not, but not plus and minus for individual projects and things like that. A little bit, a little bit. Right. So it's really hard, you know, you mend one cut at a time to show the whole body getting better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We, we have, we have, um, better results with the dredging projects because they're so large. And so we have seen the turbidity reductions, the algal bloom reductions, and, um, we've seen seagrass recovery adjacent to the, the Sykes Creek dredging project. We've been studying the, um, benthic recovery, but those aren't easy to photograph to, I think what you're trying to show is, you know, easily visible things for the public. We can measure it scientifically, but it's hard to get a good visual. But we've had fewer, fewer algal, large algal blooms like we had and, and things, you know, the trends are there. Certainly the trends are there. Uh, just on an individual project basis, it's, it's difficult. I had one follow-up to that tied in. Um, during the presentation, uh, one of the earlier slides, it showed the full total amounts for the whole project since inception. Is there any, um, quantified numbers that we have? I know they exist somewhere in somebody's something, but that show how much pollution has gone in. So we've taken out X amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in that same time period. Is there, is there any data that we have compiled or we have access to that someone else has done that shows how much has gone in and specific to what he said, how much has been prevented from going in? So not just what we removed, but like my soapbox is the mechanical harvesting. And I, I declare that it's much greater than what the numbers show as the reduction. Um, is there just, uh, just to tell you what's happening here is, uh, is that the data was really not started until 1997. And, and that was started because we identified the waters as impaired. Uh-huh. So we were already dealing with impaired waters at that time. Uh-huh. And so we don't have any, any data before then to, to go back in time to look at, at unimpaired waters. Uh-huh. So it's very, very, again, it's a very, very difficult thing except to look at trends. Yes. And not, not quantities. You can look at trends and, and we can, we can speculate on where we should, where we want to be. We can speculate on that and that's about it. But I'm, I didn't, uh, I wasn't referring to a time period prior to that. I was referring to just where our stats started for that slide. And so. So the best number I can give you is that the, uh, collective work of St. John's River Water Management District, DEP and EPA estimate that the annual nitrogen loading is around 3 million pounds in the, in Brevard's portion of the Indian River Lagoon. Okay. So, um, you know, we've reduced a little over a million. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, you know, Don's work, the, the nitrogen concentration was about 1.6 milligrams per liter in 2016. It's about 1.1 milligrams per liter now. Yeah. That's significant. So, Brandy can turn that into a magic slide for. Yeah. Can I jump on what Arapa's saying? Uh, the, maybe a GIS layered heat map of that, those trends over time is something that could be visually created to represent that? Is that something that is, is more possible instead of the pictures and the visuals? There's the data that could be layered to create that, those trends? Not fair. Would that be user friendly, though, for the general public to engage? I mean, those GIS maps, the story maps are pretty user friendly these days. Maybe I'm biased because I know how to use them. I was going to say, are you volunteering to create that map? I know. I know. That's what I'm thinking, too. I mean, go for it, man. Yeah. If I find some free time. Okay. We did that for the harmful algal blooms. Mm-hmm. We created heat maps of, you know, where the blooms have been getting worse, where they've been diminishing, and where they're so variable that there's no trend. So we, we can send you that report. Okay. I'm just thinking, because since I was thinking of those maps, to show the positive impacts in that same kind of way might be especially beneficial for communicating with the community, kind of dipping into our homework a little bit that we've been working on, the idea of communicating with not just, you know, our residents, but also the visitors. Right. There's an enormous amount of variability from one year to the next. And so to be able to say that this is definitely a statistical trend towards improvement takes years of it's better than, you know, years of when it was worse. Mm-hmm. And so I'll send you that report, and you can take a look at it and see whether you think there's a way to convey that to the public, whether there's a message there. Thanks. Yeah. The other thing is, the lagoon in this area is such a strange beast, you know, because it doesn't, you know, the retention times are just, just really, really high. And that just makes it very, very difficult to attribute anything to any one place in the lagoon because it just hangs around a lot in some areas. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We're ready for Brandon. Yes. All right. Go for it. So our website is, you know, performing as we'd hope. We had a little bump up in the beginning of this quarter. And our new visitors to the site, you know, is the orange line there. So kind of keeps in line with the total numbers. So we have some coming back and a lot of new people coming in. And Lagoon Loyal, we kind of saw a dip this last quarter, but that's attributed to the previous quarter, we were running several of those campaigns, both the community challenge campaign and then an individual challenge for people to report actions. And so that was driving a lot more traffic to the site. The other thing that accounts for that drop is they have scaled back on the advertising dollars that they've been spending to drive people to that site. Since they're working on a brand new site, they're saving some of that for once we launch that new site. They will be ramping up and spending more than they would on average to try to promote that new Lagoon Loyal site. So we're expecting, we're working on reviewing that currently and we're hoping to have a launch by an update to you by the next quarterly report. And while the website traffic itself was down, we did have an increase in sign-ups for the Lagoon Loyal program. And we attribute that to the fall months is when a lot of the festivals and things are that people were going out to hearing about Lagoon Loyal and encouraging them to sign up. And then the actions, since we discontinued that action program, the actual point system program, we disabled that area where they can report actions. So that'll be flatline until we get the new site on and they can report actions again. In social media, we had a large spike towards the end of the year. We had a couple of controversial topics, including muck and sewer covered in the months of October and November. So that helps to, that appears on that graph there with those spikes. A lot more people getting engaged with our site. The top posts with the most attention this last quarter was, we had the Blue Origin post in December and a lot of public interest in that, as we all know. And then we, our other top post was on the lateral lines from your home and talking about our grant program with that. So it's good to get attention to our grant programs. The Lagoon Loyal Facebook, you'll see, you know, continues to perform, you know, as we'd expect. Nothing strange there. Though you will notice that there's kind of a flat line for the pale blue that is advertising. We've just a few spikes. We've had some issues since transitioning over to the new agency and our, the advertising they're trying to do for us. And Facebook's also changed some of the way they operate their platform, which ties into this. The advertising they're doing gets flagged as political messaging and gets pulled. And then we're banned from advertising for a little while. And then they have to try to sort all that out. And then we try running it again and it keeps happening. So they're trying to work with Meta, unfortunately, to get to a real person there is next to impossible. And they've... And the chatbot doesn't understand. No. And they paid for professional consultations. So you have to pay to actually talk to someone now. And they hadn't been able to figure out what was causing this issue either. So, yeah, it's been a challenge there with the paid advertising on there. But they're still getting a lot of, you know, just general interest in getting people there from other avenues. And their posts, they had one on, you know, if you're hosting family for the holidays, you know, how to not stress your systems like septic systems and other things at home and help the lagoon as well. So different ways they can reduce the pollution caused by family visiting and using more water and other things. And then they've started doing some business spotlights. So this is the second one. They were spotlighting two of the landscaping groups. The first one was for the landscaping groups that did the Titusville garden planting when we did the competition. And this is the one that did the one in Rockledge. So they highlighted those companies there. And we're reaching out to other companies that are lagoon loyal businesses to find out what they're doing to help the lagoon and try to spotlight those actions and encourage other businesses to get on board with doing actions to help the lagoon. The Instagram, just a reminder, if you don't remember from last time, the interactions, for some reason, they are not reporting those before July. We, you know, had the data in the past, but now when we pull that data up from the meta site, it's a flat line on both Lagoon Loyal and Sorrel. So we don't have that in the graphs that they provide us anymore. But we also had Blue Origin as the top post on our Instagram page as well as one of our muck posts got a lot of attention there. And Lagoon Loyal Instagram, you know, same thing. No, you know, outward trends that we really pinpoint is pretty much performing as we'd expect. And their posts there, again, another one on so that holiday hosting and then a post on how to have a little greener holiday decorations and use some environmental things to help with that. As far as our newsletter goes, we continue to get people signing up and an interest in that. And we're still performing above the national average for the open rate. So that's good. And same with our harmful algal bloom newsletters. So the spikes you see there, that's just because we had an extra week in those months. So we report the cumulative number of times we send it out to people. And that is it for the communications report. Go ahead. Brandon, I just want to say 60% is really impressive. Usually it's, I mean, I don't know if everyone knows that, but 30 is really good. But 60 is really, really great. So congratulations on that. I had a question about your annual growth for followers. Do you have any data on that over the year of, like, annual growth for the, like, number of the followers on some of those pages? I wasn't sure. So I didn't graph out the number of new followers. It's just, it's kind of stayed sort of a consistent growth in there. So, yeah. I was doing some research and I was finding, like, 5.5% growth annually is kind of standard on some of the social media pages. So I was just kind of wondering where we fell. Yeah. So, you know, we report the new followers for the quarter. And they've, you know, pretty much seem to stay consistent each quarter. There's, you know, sometimes we'll see little jumps, but. It's great. You're doing a good job out there. Any other questions? Thank you, Brandon. But, John, you're up. Am I? And we're looking forward to listening to you. I need to keep my hat on to keep my head warm, but I was told it's impolite to wear your hat when you're. You can do whatever you want every day. Can I? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That helps keep you warm. You know him. Obviously. Don gave me this assignment of going back to our meeting from a year ago and kind of condensing it down a bit and trying to focus in our message. And I think he's trying to get us refocused, re-energized, re-excited. He's given us all assignments to do. And this is a good way to start. You may recall that a year ago we had this meeting. And I encourage you all to go back and take a look at the meeting. It was over. The discussion in the meeting was over two hours long. It came about as a result of change in county ordinances that limited the service of committee members on committees to eight years. And two years before last February, we started recognizing the transition was going to be rather traumatic at the end of the term. And we were trying to figure out ways for several years of how can we make this a better transition, an easier transition? How can we avoid a loss in momentum? How can we help the new guys coming in? And at the same time, we started looking forward to, well, what's beyond the first eight years of the program? Is there a phase two of all this? And are there things we missed the first time around and we should be going in the second time? So a lot of discussions happened over a long period of time. And that culminated in this meeting that Vinnie Toronto, our outgoing chair, put together. And Vinnie's a communications expert. And you can tell by the way he does things. Maybe it's his skills in getting his messages across. But Vinnie polled all the members of the group. He asked questions about the structure, the plan, the COC. Those results from the members all went back to staff and staff assembled those, gave them to Vinnie, and he put a presentation together for us. That presentation was 18 slides, 61 bullets, and we discussed it for two hours. And let me tell you, there was not a single bullet that came up during that meeting that should have been kicked off or ignored. Everything was really important. So it's hard to go back and figure out what's really, really important. And so I don't want you to come away with that message. I think there's still an awful lot of good stuff that came out of that meeting a couple of years ago. At that meeting, our outgoing folks were Lorraine Koss, Vinnie Toronto, Stephanie Ely, Todd Swingle, Terry Kasto. And Charlie Venuto and I were off going with these new positions of old people on the committee were created. And also at that committee meeting, we had a number of the new members and I went back and looked and Deb Harman was there, Bruce Larson was there, Dick Bankhead was there, Fred Goldstein was there, Mark Schroep was there, Rick Knipper was there. In fact, nearly everybody from the old COC and the new COC was at that meeting. So I said to myself, well, should I just stop here and say, everybody go back and look at the meeting two years ago, and then I can go on and just say, that's it, I did it all in one slide. You can't. I could do that. I could just stop. But people know that I have a slide changer here. And, you know, in putting the slides together for probably for the last 25 years, I worked with students and other people in doing effective presentations and I've tried all sorts of graphics, videos, all sorts of stuff. I decided to go very, very old school. There's no graphics, there's nothing special, no special animations or anything, no pictures, just words, just a few words. And I tried to get it down, I've got three slides after this one with 15 bullets. And so I want to go through those, not real slow, but just enough so we can focus on it just for a bit to refocus our efforts on getting toward where we're going to go next with these discussions. Okay, so my clicker, ah, perfect. Well, I was sitting in the parking lot this morning outside, I always come early, and I sit there and I breathe for a bit. I think for a bit. I think for a bit. And I also do my New York Times connections puzzle. And one of the first words I saw this morning was silver bullet. It's in the, it's in the, I said, it's a sign. And then this car pulls up next to me in the parking lot. And the car, a very nice lady with a great smile hops out of her car. And I thought she was coming to our meeting. And she came over and tapped on my window and opened the door. She handed me a little business card and said, here, go to this app. We all need some help from time to time. And this is a Bible lab for you. And you can go and go online and do your Bible studies. And she said, you know, and you can learn to pray for things. And I, oh, wow. This is, it's a lot of weird things happening to me in a parking lot this morning. So I said, let's just go with what I thought about talking about, which was there's no silver bullet. And then, you know, I grew up as a, as a child in the, in the forties and fifties. And I, everybody knew that the silver bullet was for killing the vampire. That was really important back in the fifties. We were all concerned about vampires. So we all had silver bullets that we could carry around with us. We also who were, those of us who were big fans of the Lone Ranger knew that the Lone Ranger was in town and he left a silver bullet behind. You were in trouble. You better watch out. But we recognized as we matured and grew older that the, the, the very complex systems require more difficult problems. Apparently some computer engineer came up with the idea of there is no silver bullet quite a while ago in trying to solve problems. And the Indian River Lagoon, we all recognize, is a very complex system that required a multipronged approach. So there was no single cure that was going to fix the system. And I think that was an important lesson going into the plan. And it's an important lesson to continue on. Adaptive management is very important. Again, it was assumed going into the plan we would adopt an adaptive management strategy. But we have to be always in that adaptive management strategy bullying to consider alternatives, changes. And I think we've done that pretty effectively so far. I think probably when we first started this plan that maybe reuse water hadn't received as much attention as it does now. Even at a state regulatory level, the changes in, in, in, in reuse water. And so early on we, we, we, we started looking at reuse water and some of the data that was coming from some of, some preliminary studies that were, that were not funded by Sorrel, they were funded by other projects, led us to this idea of helping some of the facilities that were doing reuse water reduce their releases of nitrogen and phosphorus. Um, interstitial water treatment was something that we had not set up initially, uh, but as a result of, again, some research studies that went on, not funded by Sorrel, uh, but were going on at the time Sorrel started, led us to these, the focus on treatment of interstitial water. And, um, I might even mention the, the, the, the vegetation, uh, uh, uh, harvesting that we, we, we, we implemented in, in, in the past, uh, that wasn't part of the initial plan. That was something that came on lately. And, and, and certainly capping of, uh, muck, muck deposits is another change we're making in direction. So, I think there's some really great examples, but we need to continue those things on as we move forward. Focus on priority areas to restore the whole lagoon. We just had a little bit of that discussion a, a, a, a minute ago, but, uh, there, there's, there's this perception, I guess, sometimes, that, um, we have to spend equally throughout all areas to make sure that things are done right. And one of the things, before the plan was adopted, before it went to vote, that I had talked to county commissioners about, um, who were in, in favor of this, uh, plan, is that we, we, we could not do this thing, um, um, uh, based on political, uh, uh, uh, distribution of the money. It had to be done focused on trying to fix the problems. And at that time, all the commissioners were, uh, at least saying in public that that's what they wanted to do. Um, we need to focus on, uh, some of the priority areas, though, to make sure that we address the whole system as a whole. Realistic goals for 10 years. Restore to what? Was a question people used to ask before the plan was adopted. Over time, um, I can ask people probably in the room here to raise their hands, but I'm not gonna do that. I'll just say, how many of you remember 2010, 1990 in the lagoon, 1970 in the lagoon, 1950 in the lagoon? And I'll bet you all have a different perception of what a, a pristine condition is, or an ideal condition is. And, uh, you know, um, we have millions of new people coming to Florida. Last night, I looked up the stats again. Where there was one person in Florida in 1950, there's now six. So think about that. Every little space, instead of, maybe this committee would have been a lot smaller in 1950. Probably two people, right? Something like that. Um, but those new populations all have different perceptions. They all have new baselines and new realities. And those are all going to have to come into play in trying to address changes as we move forward. One of the big discussions that led to the meeting, um, last February was the new member education. But that, in my mind, morphed quickly into member education. Not just the new members. The new members had, every new member has a task to deal with when they get started. But the ongoing education is important. We're provided information every month. And, uh, in all sorts of areas. Scientific areas, business areas, finance areas. And, uh, we need to keep up with those. We need to be aware of those. Um, but that is critical for the success of our mission. And, without a doubt, the staff is one of the most outstanding staffs you could ever hope to have. Um, under Virginia's leadership, her group is just awesome. They do a great job all the time. And any time I've ever asked them for anything, they gave it to me really, really fast. Um, it, it, they're really good people. They're thoughtful people. They're careful people. They've stopped me a few times from making a total fool of myself by raising hell about one thing or another. But, uh, uh, they're, they're really good. I want to thank them a lot. Okay. The unfunded projects list. One of my favorites. Um, I think people look at the list and say, wow, look at all these opportunities out there that we can add to for our projects for the future. But have you ever thought about where that list came from and how much thought has gone into it, how much work people have dedicated to generate that unfunded list? They don't just sit in the corner of a room someplace and say, oh, let's make up some projects today. This will be fun. I'll bet you there are people who think that's what happens. It's not what happens. It's what thoughtful people have come up with for ideas to help fix systems that need repair. It can be a daunting task to look over that list. It can be a little bit scary, but it's really important to consider that list and to say that, you know, um, we couldn't use more money. We couldn't use more resources and we couldn't use more staff. We couldn't use more people working on these projects. Is everybody familiar with that unfunded list and where it's, where it occurs? I forgot. What appendix is it in? Does anybody remember? Appendix D. D? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that unfunded projects list, outstanding. Thanks for that question. That was good. Nitrogen removal is important, but it's not the only benefit. This is one of those places where I might have wandered off into a, you know, a whole series of slides. But remember, we have a number of project types. And real quickly, I write notes down because I knew I'd forget some of these things. Wastewater treatment facility upgrades, septic to sewer conversion, septic upgrades, stormwater projects, vegetation harvesting, muck removal, and surface water remediation. So there's one, there's seven project types there. Those project types are all measured by us based on how much nitrogen they remove. So we know they remove nitrogen. But how many of you consider the fact that they remove phosphorus, some of them, some of them remove bacteria, viruses, chemicals of emerging concerns, pesticides, herbicides, metals, oil, litter, pharmaceuticals, biochemical oxygen demand, sediments, organic matter, turbidity, and algal biotoxins. So the projects, you know, it's only a nitrogen removal project. I get so sick of hearing that. It's not a nitrogen removal. We're measuring it, we're measuring the success of the projects, and we're funding them based on nitrogen removal, because we decided that was a very high priority item to go after a long time ago. But the benefits that come along with doing that are not being recorded effectively. They're not being measured like the nitrogen removal is. And I would suggest to you that every time a, every time one of these projects comes in, there's a little comment line on there, do they help with anything else? I don't know if any of you ever bothered to look at those project proposals that come in every year and look at that line. It's buried way down in the text. They have some really important benefits from these projects. And it's summarized in our plan in the table. And, again, I forgot the table. Table 4-2 or something like that. I think it's in Section 4. Anyway, it's in the plan. Okay, what's next? Is there danger in success? That was a comment that was brought up in our meeting last February. And, of course, the issue of concern there is people get complacent with something falling, conditions improving after some project's been done. And they're saying, well, we don't need to do it anymore because it's back. So don't get complacent. There is danger in success. There's also danger in success in that there's a new baseline associated with new residents. They don't really, I think there are people who are coming here today, go out and look at the lagoon and say, wow, this is beautiful. This is fantastic. This is pristine. They just came from Philadelphia. They just came from New York City. They don't understand the background and the history here. Are we fixing problems that policy has not yet addressed? This was a big discussion. Todd Swingle and others pointed out to us there are things that we probably shouldn't be doing because there are already mandates for people to do those kinds of fixes. One of them was typically repairing sewage treatment facilities that aren't meeting FDEP standards. They're required to do that. We shouldn't be funding those kinds of things. We should be funding things that they can't fund, things that go beyond what the requirements are in the regulations. I think probably the discussion we had just before the presentations here with Laura Lee and some of the others discussing stormwater issues in the North County, this is one of these things now that we're trying to fix problems that stormwater management in a larger scale really hasn't addressed very effectively yet. I just saw in the county commission meeting, I guess it was Tuesday night, that there are some of the stormwater maps that are relied upon or on the order of 30 years old, and the models need to be updated to be able to effectively predict. So if we're using 30-year-old models for developments that are going in now, it's an issue that needs to be fixed before we go any farther. The state has really gone and jumped ahead and done some things with stormwater management that's going to strengthen that, but there is also some time lags there for when those will be implemented. So we see that time lag with every large project, you know, with every sewage treatment plant upgrade, with every… Everything. Yeah, so we see that time lag of five to seven years, you know, and people want it done now, you know. So it's difficult. Yes. Okay, and Todd also pointed out developers are not the bad guys, and I think that's really an important key here. It sometimes sounds like we're complaining about development, but it's probably more the policies surrounding development than the developers. Because as Todd points out, developers follow the requirements, and as long as you give them plenty of advance notice. They want to live in nice communities. They want to sell nice homes. They want, you know, good communities developed here that people can be proud of, and I think that's an important point to take forward too. That's part of your shifting baseline also. Yes. The rules and regulations and everything. Okay. I'm going to my last slide. I got written at the top of my cheat sheet. Last slide. COC should strengthen community engagement. And I think, again, our chair right now is just re-energizing the COC and getting us heading in that direction. These last four bullets are probably the four that I came away with as perhaps the most significant from our meeting. Not that the others aren't important. I think you've already heard how important all those bullets are. But these are the four that I came away with as being most important. During our discussions, not just a year ago, but over the last and the entire program, engagement is often used synonymously in this room and other places with words like outreach, participation, collaboration, involvement, commitment, and all under this broad category of education. And so when somebody says, oh, we need an education program, and Vinny pointed out to us a year ago, putting a little slip of paper in a mailer with your water bill is not education. He said education programs have focuses, they have objectives, they have measurables, they have deliverables, they have an evaluation of whether their objectives have been achieved or not. That's real communication. I mean, that's real education. And I think that's important to point out. It's important to keep stressing how important education is. Education, outreach, participation, collaboration, involvement, and commitment. But whenever I say education, I mean all the others too. Thank you. Okay. What can be done and what should be done. I'm going to blame that on Todd again because he not only brought this up a year ago. I think almost every meeting we had at least once a year or twice a year, Todd would bring up this issue of, you know, the issues we bring up here in this group we're interested in and we're excited about. We think maybe some investigation or some restoration should take place with that particular topic. But maybe it's not this Soros group responsibility to do that. Maybe it's not the Soros group charter to do that. And so what can be done and what should be done started me thinking about, well, maybe early on people wanted us to rebuild their sewage treatment plants for them. And I think some people did. But Todd pointed out they're already mandated to upgrade to meet new requirements. So they have to do some of these things. More recently and away from the sewage issue, I thought about a project that I think maybe should be done, but maybe should not be done by this group. And that project had to do with manatees. It had to do with glyphosate. We've heard a lot about glyphosate. We've heard a lot about manatees. And during the discussions of the manatees and the glyphosates, there was some suggestion that manatees ingesting glyphosates change their body chemistry. And there was a suggestion, wow, we should be looking into the body chemistry changes in manatees as a result of ingesting glyphosate. I said, wow, what an interesting idea that is to study. What's it based on in my mind? There are some studies out there about ingestions of all sorts of things by large mammals, very few studies. They're very underfunded. And I would make the argument they're important to do, but maybe it's not this group that should be paying for that. It's not what we do. It's not our charter to do investigations in why manatees are dying in the lagoon. We all have great empathy for manatees. We all love manatees. We all are very excited about manatees. We want to see them succeed and be happy. We want herbicides to stop. But we can't fund a project like that because that's something that we can't do. But maybe it's something we should do. Not we as a committee, but we as the state of Florida, the EPA, the U.S. EPA, somebody else. I'll tell you, John, Todd's always on my shoulder. Whispering in my ear. Is it got wings or horns? I don't know. Okay. Either or. Okay. Go back to the 1950s cartoons. There was always a winged and a horned version. Yeah. Okay. Do not ignore history. Okay. I've made this pitch on more than one occasion. We are now dealing with the rapid growth of population in Brevard County of the 1950s. The rapid growth are on the Space Coast. And that rapid growth that we're still dealing with now, we still haven't fixed all the problems that were generated back then. And I concern myself with, we're repeating the same pattern right now. We have rapid growth. We think we're doing what's best for the growth. Yet, I have this concern that we're creating conditions that people will be dealing with 50 and 100 years from now. And asking the question, what were those fools thinking about in 2025, letting all this growth go on in Brevard County? Okay. With that being said, remember, we have all these new residents coming in. They all have new histories. They need to have some understanding of the history. And that needs to go on through education, outreach, and involvement programs of some sort. And probably the, and I decided this to be the concluding comment, conservation biology requires a long-term commitment. When I first started graduate school, there were studies going on in the Chesapeake Bay that were five-year studies that were almost automatically renewed by the state legislature every year because they involved things that were of concern, fisheries and some very important commercial products. The researchers who got money to study those trends in populations, they worked hard on their research. They weren't spending six months of every year trying to worry about the next year's funding. They worried five years about what's going to be for the next five years, but it wasn't a significant issue. So long-term, we understood, I mean, if you want to know something about straight bass research, go to Chesapeake Bay. I mean, they got a ton of straight bass data for years and years and decades because they funded. And some of the best ichthyologists in the world came out of the VIMS program because they were on five-year programs to study fisheries. Okay, I think one of the things that maybe it was our chair said, I'm not sure if it was last year or not. I think it was last year. Get the water quality right and the biology will follow. I think that was in response to somebody's question, maybe more recently. So Sorrel is a water quality improvement program. We have to recognize that's what it is exactly. And Sorrel is not the only source to address environmental issues. And I'll leave you with natural resources management has a few other programs going on besides Sorrel. There are quite a few. FDEP, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Brevard County Department of Health, US EPA, are just a few of the organizations who are responsible for pursuing some of the concerns about conservation biology in our state and throughout the US. So I'll call it quits there. And these are the things I came away with from that meeting. And I hope that they focus your attention. If there's something I missed terribly or you need some clarification on, I'm available. Thank you, John. That's really thoughtful. And I can tell you. Thanks for letting me keep my hat on. Very, very thoughtful. And I can tell you that I worked on Everglades Restoration. I was charged with investigating the other programs like Puget Sound, Chesapeake, all of them. And funding was the main issue, continuous funding and assurance of those funding coming in. And it related to their success. Yeah. In my research experience, I started off in programs where in some of the research I was doing in environmental chemistry, the typical program was a three-year NSF program. And you generated some results. And you, in the middle of the second year to the beginning of the third year, you started turning in a proposal for something going on. And it was more or less a continuation or a branch off. But once you got the track going and you were doing good work, you were funded for long periods of time. The model we have now throughout the country is all really short-term stuff. But, I mean, the whole reason for Sorrel being developed was management issues can't be done with on a year-to-year basis. Research issues can't be done with year-to-year funding either. You have to do things in a more thoughtful, long-term fashion. You have to commit to it and then stick to it. Yes. Stop there. Stop preaching. Thanks. Any other comments, questions? Yeah, just real quick. When John and I were talking and he was developing the slides and he said he wanted to go old school, I did caution him not to use an overhead projector. Not to be too far back. But I did want to. The last comment, the last main bullet, really is an important device or point to make aware of the public. You know, this is a long-term commitment. And this is a long-term goal because we know it's going to take a long time to get out of this mess. So we really need to hammer that issue and share that with the citizens of Brevard. Thank you. Yes. So one of the things I took away, obviously, thank you for the pre-read as well. It's a long process that has to be sustained. To do that, we need sustained funding. That funding vehicle is, in this county, our half-penny sales tax. The critical thing to get that done is voters. And so I would argue that where you started the discussion with outreach is all the more important in this next series of handful of months leading up to the next election cycle. And with that outreach, usually a consumer in the modern era thinks about things as, why do I need something? So I think that we have those compelling stories. Appendix E is a current backlog of unfunded challenges that we would take on if we had more money, et cetera. But I think it needs to be very simple and straightforward to the voter. And now is the time for us to be thinking in that manner of how do we articulate the need and the demand, really, and what's different than 10 years ago. We won't be able, we may not be able to show it graphically now because it takes time for these changes to happen. But we need to think about what that story is. And I think that Don's discussion of, and several people's, on the Chesapeake Bay is a classic one. They were reluctant and they went into it and they did it. And now, I was just talking to somebody who came from the Chesapeake and Maryland area. And they're like, we're so proud of everywhere we've come in 40 years or 50 years. 50 years ago, it wasn't even a thing and 40 years worth of effort. And we're really, we're doubling down. That's really where I think our long-term goal needs to be focused now is how do we get to be a 40-year story. It's Appendix D, by the way. Appendix D. Oh, D, I'm sorry. Yes. I heard D. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? We're going to move back to Virginia and her. I was excited by this list in that many of the comments related to outreach and getting the message out there. And that's in reference, and that's also considering the fact that they didn't want that in the beginning of the program. And now it's many of these bullets that are in here that are related to getting the message out. So, unlike Dr. Windsor and consolidating bullets, there are going to be over 80 bullets. So, yeah, tighten your seatbelts. But the goal here was that the county commission approved two workshops to hear from the public and what they wanted to contribute towards the concept of renewing the half-cent sales tax. And it was so important to the board that they hear from the public that they went to Titusville to get comments there. They went to Palm Bay to get comments there. And they're relying on people to come to either the COC meeting or regular board meetings in Vieira for the central part of the county. So, I wanted to make sure that the committee really had the opportunity to make sure we captured all of those public comments from the workshops and make sure that we're not missing anything. And so, thank you to everyone who worked on the draft list that I started. I will note that Deb Harmon takes incredibly wonderful notes. And you will see that there's a lot of similarity in some of these bullets. I did not consolidate because, you know, if they were worded slightly differently, I wanted to capture all of that. And so, this is going to be the long version. So, what I wanted, what I did do, and Dawn started this, was sorting these comments into several different categories. So, just general comments that support what we're doing now, what the Saver Lagoon program is doing now. I wanted to make sure that we're not missing any comments that are adaptations to what we're doing now, adjustments, additions, but, you know, building on what we're doing now versus ones that would be sort of completely new concepts, new programs, new projects, new ideas. Obviously, we're not going to discuss every bullet in detail within the limits of this meeting. So, I think what would be useful is to make sure that we're not missing anything. I have some blank slides at the end to add if we are missing anything, or you can send me notes separately. But for today, if there's anything there that jumps out at you as something that we should be particularly excited about, make sure that we jump on, or anything that you're strongly opposed to, that's the kind of feedback that I'm looking for this morning. So, the next steps, the county commission will, again, on this coming Tuesday, consider whether they want to consider with their previous legislative intent for pursuing renewal of the half-cent sales tax for the program as is, or similar to the current program, but with more emphasis on infrastructure projects, or whether they want to change it to a full penny and take on transportation needs or other facility, infrastructure facility challenges of the county. And so, once we know from the county commission, whether we're sticking with the program as is, or with more emphasis on whatever they specify, or a major change taking on other infrastructure needs of the county, this information will help us put meat to those bones. After the board direction, we will, staff will be reaching out to the cities. I'm already working on getting on the agenda for the public managers monthly meeting to get with all the city managers. We want to hear from the cities what they would want in a renewal plan. We are also on the schedule to meet with the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program's STEM Committee, their science technology committee, to get their scientific expertise on where we should be going, right? So, we want to take all these ideas, all this public input, within the context of what our marching orders are from the board. You know, are we limited to the previous ballot language and previous ordinance language, or is it broader than that, right? And then, which of these ideas are consistent with whatever that big overall direction is. Then we'll work with the county attorney's office on, you know, what meets that consistency, if that's what we have to do. And we will be developing new ordinance and ballot language to bring back to the county commission in the spring. And then, you know, all of that will be available for public review and comment for months before a November ballot, if that's where we're headed. And so, I really appreciate where Dr. Windsor ended in his bullets. You know, some of these ideas, while they are absolutely relevant to the health of the lagoon, the future of our community, they are not Save Our Lagoon project plan. They are not projects. They are programs. They are regulatory. They are things that the county commission has authority for. They are things that even natural resources may have authority for, but they may not be within the mission of the Save Our Lagoon project plan and this oversight committee. So, I've tried to identify those in italics in these bullets. There are more of those towards the end when we get into the new ideas, categories. So, that's what italics means. And so, I think with that, I'll get started. So, this first slide was just general comments. Very, very positive and supportive of what we have been doing so far. And, you know, I'll just stop me if there's anything on here that you want to get excited about or say, no, we should not. Yes. Do some of these comments come from, like, a single person? Or are there lots of people that are saying the same thing? Or did you get me... Because it sounds like, you know, one or two of them I'm seeing, it sounds like it's from one person. But, you know, I... I have my notes that are person by person. I did not try to keep track of that in this. So, all these are from a single person? I mean, each one is from... It's a single comment made by one person. Each one is a single comment. Some people made multiple comments. I've heard... Yeah. Yes. And there... In taking the notes that each of you provided for additional items, I tried to keep it a single bullet when I could. But when that bullet included multiple types of projects, I tried to group things, right? So, if there was a wastewater comment and a stormwater comment all in one bullet, I've got a slide about wastewater. I've got a slide about stormwater. And so, some of the things that you submitted have been split. If that helps. Perfect. Okay. All right. So, starting with keep doing what we've been doing, we have a number of items here, you know, related to our current project types. Then, we go into a whole lot of expansion. So, yes, there was a lot of public input about communication, engagement, outreach, the role of the COC in terms of that outreach and transparency, things that we talk about month after month after month. And opportunities to partner to, you know, get to additional audiences. Lots of input about wastewater, whether that is capacity of the current sewer system or treatment level of the current wastewater system, the condition of the current wastewater system, adding to that wastewater system in order to reduce the amount of septic. You've got to connect it to sewer. Does sewer have the capacity to take on that additional load? The timing of these projects, getting them done, trying to help homeowners comply with the relatively recent state mandate for everybody to do better by 2030. You know, increasing the pace of making these things happen, doing whatever we can to reduce red tape and streamline processes for homeowners. Yeah, and Bruce, if you and Rick keep these in mind as you're reviewing those plans, that would help out a lot. Yeah, we are. Yeah, thank you. All right, moving on to stormwater. All right, a number of comments about more stormwater infrastructure, making those visible, doing things as quickly as possible. And then, you know, we heard a number of comments about addressing the freshwater impacts to salinity and the rapid change, the shocks to salinity of the drainage system as it currently exists. By the way, I worked on a structure south of Vero Airport, down on the main canal in Vero Beach, and removed vegetation from the control structure and moved it up into a conveyor belt and into a dumpster, and they could actually record how much was being removed. I haven't seen that much collecting at structures in this area, but, you know, it's something to consider if it really is a problem. Right. It's, you know, that's a fantastic project that they have there. One of the challenges that we have is we have very few giant canals like that where that much expenditure on infrastructure is cost-effective. We've got a zillion, you know, 30-inch, 36-inch pipes outfall. Well, not a zillion, 1,772, I think is the number. And so, you know, but we do have a couple of large tributary canals that that sort of project might be feasible for. Then you also have to have the land adjacent to be able to do a project like that. And somebody to move the dumpster every once in a while. Right, right, yes. And so there is a vegetation boom across the C1 canal to try to capture vegetation before it makes it into Turkey Creek. And the Melbourne-Tillman Water Control District has placed a second boom, and it's at a diagonal so that the vegetation sort of, you know, comes downstream and then ends up in this corner so they can scoop it out into the dumpster. So it's sort of a low-tech version of the Indian River County project. Yes. All right. Muck management, this I titled change instead of expand because the comments were sort of, you know, from do more to do less to don't do any at all. We continue to hear that breadth of comments on muck removal. And then, you know, surprisingly, there were few comments on restoration, but the comments that we did here were about continuing and increasing those restoration projects. All right. And then we have a handful of miscellaneous projects that would be expansions of things that we're doing now. So a few good ideas in there that we can work on as long as they are consistent with whatever legislative intent we get from the county commission. The last bullet there, improve biosolids disposal to reduce pollution in the lagoon. We have no biosolids disposal in the Indian River Lagoon watershed in Brevard County. And so I don't know if this comment came from someone who was not aware that that ceased years ago or someone who's aware that that is an issue in other parts of the lagoon south of us, but it is not an issue here. All right. Moving on to new programs. And so you see the italics start to show up, things that would be regulatory and perhaps outside the authority of the Save Our Lagoon program and the oversight committee, but a number of additional things that could be done to address wastewater impacts in the lagoon. And we have a number of stormwater program ideas of additional things to do. There were a lot of comments about incorporating green infrastructure and low-impact design into projects that would address both the water quality and water quantity aspects of stormwater. A number of comments on lawn and landscape practices. I tried to, yeah, differentiate things that were educational and incentive-based that we might be able to do versus regulatory things. And some of the regulatory suggestions are actions that are preempted from local government authority and would have to be done at the state level. And then miscellaneous new program ideas. All sorts of great ways that we could also help the lagoon if it was within the authority of the program, right? So here are my blank slides. If anybody has additional bullets to add to either renewal suggestions that are expansions of existing programs or additional programs that, yes. And I told you I was going to get this to you, and I failed to. I feel like a hamster on a wheel that just goes around and around and around and doesn't stop. But anyway, I would like to see us include or consider including the use of sorrel funding for acquisition of land or properties, and this would be for stormwater. Because, you know, if you're in a neighborhood and you need a stormwater pond, you may have to buy three or four houses and take them down. Or, you know, if there's land that's available that you can put a stormwater pond on. You know, we've got a lot of support for doing more with stormwater, but you're going to have to have a place to put stormwater facilities, too. So land acquisition and property acquisition might need to be included, too. So land acquisition is included in the plan now, and we do acquire land as needed. We are currently working on an acquisition that would allow us to provide treatment from three of our priority basins on Merritt Island. It's just usually, in order to find those most cost-effective projects, we're doing things like BAM in the existing right-of-way of the ditch because land acquisition is so expensive. But land acquisition is allowed, and it's in the ordinance language, it's in the plan, so that is definitely something that we could do. Thank you. Anything else? Virginia. Yes. Do we have time to email these ideas to you, you know, within a window, I imagine? Yes. So, like I said, we will be reaching out, set up meetings with cities right away, you know, over the next month or two, and we will be working with the county attorney's office on ordinance language and ballot language over the next couple months. So, that's the time frame. The sooner we have your input, the better. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I have some rough ideas, you know, just sitting here. I know Laura and I have been working on our homework, and some of that actually kind of, I think, aligns maybe with some of these potential bullets, but some of the few that just jumped to mind, again, unrefined. Welcome bags. Is there any funding for, like, when people move to the area, they get a kit, they get a bag with the information on the sorrel, the program. We talked about that a little bit, right? Right. And we have some brochures of things. And we give them out, but not consistently. I have to tell you, we've been working on ours, too. Working with the real estate agency. I'm in real deficit in education and knowledge about the septics and the lagoon itself. You move to the area here. Or if you come to visit, you visit a welcome center. So something along those lines, I think. Right. We've worked with realtors. We've also worked with the title agents. This is Fred. Oh, hi, Fred. Go ahead, Fred. A quick comment one. Yeah, on the realtors idea, I think that's a very good one. I know last year we were doing something with maybe a video that included in a new welcome for individuals coming to the county who move in. And we had talked to some of the realtors about that. I think that's a good one. And I'd also just say this as we look at the points. I would look at this survey as having some severe selection bias. And we probably need to figure out a way to get some information from a variety of individuals who are in there. Our individuals, we know that without getting slammed on that. We slammed the media, something around the media, help Dan. Eric, go for it. Well, I'll jump off of what Fred said. You know, if there was something, if you were to visit the area, because we talk a lot about tourism from our side of things, but also for residents alike. And John, kind of jumping off of your slip in the water bill comment from earlier, you get that little survey at the beginning of your residency or your visit. And then maybe digitally fill it out and turn it back in and maybe we can fund some kind of thing where they get, I don't know. I don't know what they could get at the end of it, but something tangible that says, hey, I visited the area where I live in the area. And at the end of the year, I learned this and I've changed my behavior so that now I put a rainbow on my property or built a swale or did some living shoreline or what it might be. And I could tangibly show that my education from the soil program has resulted in this change in behavior, which has then resulted in this change in the environment. And I don't know if it's quantifiable, but, you know, is there some way to incentivize that through some educational reciprocation of a survey or something? I don't know. And then additionally, we talked a little bit about it at the meeting in Palm Bay. I think it was one of the commissioners who brought up the idea of the living shorelines being incentivized through funding to actually vegetate or what have you on your property through some sort of a grant-funded sorrel program for individuals. If the, you know, application was I have this property and I want to reduce my impact, that then they could do X, Y, and Z on a checklist of things, whether it's rain barrels to reduce the flow or rain gardens and bioswales and things of that nature. You know, is there, you know, is there money like we did for the clam folks that then could go to residents to apply to reduce their impact that way? You know, that could include oysters and mangroves and all kinds of great things that, you know, there's a lot of technology being created daily that allows for the regular person, average homeowner, to do a little bit at home. Because I know, John, there's no silver bullet, but sometimes I feel like we are the bullets in the gun as the residents of the area, that everything that we do can hopefully make a change. So there's just some ideas that, you know, percolating at the top. And how do you get that into a bullet? Very carefully. Send her the bullet. Any others? I was just looking, there was a comment in here about programs, loan programs to homeowners to do projects. It was in here somewhere, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, low interest loan program. Yes. To help do programs that help the lagoon. I mean, I think of the city of Melbourne's rain barrel rebate program. I mean, it's pretty simple, but it does work. You know, you buy the rain barrel, you get reimbursed to reduce your impact on freshwater runoff, on those big storm events. So there's some programs that maybe we can model after, too. Yeah. Okay. Any others? We do, oh, I'm no longer in presentation mode. Go back to presentation mode. So we have, there were also suggestions that committee members sent that were not from the workshop, sort of like what you just provided. So these are just a handful. So maybe that's where these were, yeah, that Don's remembering. So, yeah, incentives for swales and bioswales. Virginia, can I jump in one more time? Don, sorry. Last night we had our BMAC meeting, and that was talking about all the different things that they're doing. And one of our big discussions is the liveaboard vessels and the amount that that contributes to the lagoon in a negative way when not maintained properly. Some of the issues that the enforcement has with those, how do you, you know, manage that derelict boat vessel or the people, the liveaboard's contributing to the lagoon's lack of health. Is there anything that the soil program could do to help with some of that? I know it's a really sticky situation, but it is a contributing factor to the health of the lagoon in a way that I don't know if it's been quantified, but it's definitely a hot spot sometimes. You know, I'm thinking of, like, O'Galley area, and I know the DEP can qualify it as a hot spot, I think, is one of the things we were talking about, if they get enough calls. So maybe empowering people to know the mechanism to report when there's something like that happening. Do you have a number about how many people in our Vard Lagoon live on board? Oh, no, no, that would be a good data to have. And it's transit. It's actually a regulatory issue, too, that really you're not allowed a direct pump out. You know, it's illegal to have a direct pump out. So it's the same as an RV. I mean, you can't just dump in the RV park. I think we should extend the Clean Marine Program, too. There is that program where they check the marinas, and they get designated Clean Marine. And they assist them with coming up to standard. That would be a good thing to enhance. I agree. Well, the last time I checked in COCO, we had four different groups trying to get rid of the boats and do that. And you all had a presentation that I saw from a couple of years ago back. So there's lots and lots of effort already going on that one. I'm not saying it's successful, but there's a huge effort. Yeah. Isn't it FWC that regulates the derelict vessel program? Yes. And they presented here previously. But that would be a different number. I mean, obviously, daily when you cross the causeways, you know, you see there's additional derelicts. I mean, all of a sudden, oh, look, that one is sinking. And, you know, that one's gone. And then you see the tip of the sail pull later. But the liveaboard number I'm really interested in, actually, especially with, like, the marina issue up in the Cape and them closing that. And, like, I was surprised to see how many people lived aboard in that particular marina that's closing that were being directly affected. So it's just a number I've never thought of before. But if you get that number, please share. All right. I volunteered you again. There's just two more slides of prepared bullets. So additional ideas that were outside of the workshops. Here's the low-interest loan program idea. And then a lot on lawn care. Any other comments? I just want to say one more thing. Sure. I saw this thing on work-based industry, and I just read a recent article that I hadn't thought of. For the first time, they measured, you know, one of the spacecrafts coming back through the atmosphere and the release of lithium and other metals into the point with something down through that. In the plan, actually, the federal lands and a lot of the federal programs are shifted off to the side just because we don't have influence on them. And so, you know, it would take a large effort to have influence on federal programs and federal lands in general. I don't think I don't know that we could... All right. Can I jump in there? I just read an article yesterday about spacecraft reentering the atmosphere. And globally, it's not – this is not a local phenomenon. It's globally. The estimates are, in this research paper, we've increased the amount of some rare metals and trace metals into the atmosphere by a factor of 10. So spacecraft coming in now, they're calling it ablation as it comes in and they start, you know, burning up in the atmosphere. That rain out of natural stuff has already exceeded what the natural abundance of those metals have been over time. And it's something that has not been on the radar of a lot of folks. But there's going to be more attention paid to that in the future, I'm sure. Yes. I'm sorry. I just wanted to thank you, Virginia, and your staff for putting all this together for us. This is – this sheet right here is incredibly helpful. And thank John for his presentation because all of that is just – it's really going to help us in the future move forward. This is fabulous work. Well, thank you. So, yeah, Don did the first sort into three columns. And so page one is from the workshops. The backside is extraneous to the workshops. But it's good to have it all in, you know, one consolidated. And I'm really glad to hear that you guys are pulling things together from your – from, you know, pulling ideas from your homework. That's really, really – that's fantastic. I mean – I like it very credit. You're seeing – Yeah. Yeah. It could happen. I got one more, Virginia, and maybe it's already in there. Have we talked about invasive species and displacement of native species as a factor in health? I mean, when you have Brazilian pepper and Australian pine pushing out mangroves in the fringe that is the habitat. And living in the freeze and mangroves dying. Yeah. That's a kind of concern that I thought of from the last week we've seen the impact of that. Yes. Thank you. All right. That was great. Could I make a request that – I don't need any answers today. But when the county commission meets again and the lawyers and the county commissioners start talking about the amendment and the changes to the ordinance that would go on the ballot, the ballot language and that sort of thing, you know, that was a very confusing discussion at the last meeting. I came away with – I have no idea about whether the half-cent sales tax can stay the same exactly as it is now but not require any special circumstances, special, you know, additional work to be done versus taking the half-cent sales tax and changing some of our focus, and that would require something else. And then adding one to that, the infrastructure tax and how that would change things, that was an incredibly confusing conversation. And if they want the public to follow, they need to explain to us how that works. That was – and it's their job, I think. Thank you. Yeah. So if you go to the county's website and download the agenda for Tuesday's meeting, we tried to parse that out a little bit better. For the board to try to understand where – what they mean by that direction. Thank you. You know, do you mean 1B or do you mean 2C or – yeah. Yeah, yeah. So hopefully we'll get a better – more clarification on that Tuesday. Thank you. This is the meeting coming up on Tuesday morning. Yes. Yes. Okay, thank you. All right, thank you. Thank you. We have a video coming up. Thank you. All right. So our video – this is a project that was done in a few different stormwater ponds along Wickham Road. So these are retrofitting existing ponds that the incoming water to the pond was a little close to the outfall of the pond. So it wasn't getting as much treatment as we had hoped. And so this project is working to keep that water in the pond a little longer and add some additional treatment to it. So check it out. We are at the Longleaf Elementary Pond where we are installing the Martin Floating Wetland Treatment Systems paired with turbidity curtains. These ponds currently have what we call short-circuiting. Basically, that means our inflow is really close to our outfall structure, so we're not getting the full potential of our pond. So the idea is to extend the flow path of the pond using the Martin Wetland Treatment System and the turbidity curtain paired together to ultimately extend the flow path of the pond and get the full volumetric optimization of the pond. And this is one of the three sites that we are implementing this design. A floating treatment wetland is a constructed wetland that's used to improve water quality in stormwater ponds. The plants, through a process of phytoremediation, cretion, and the biofilm that's developed within the plant takes up the nutrients, and it is harvested later through the leaves when they're removed. The islands are attached together. They're made of 100% PET recycled water bottles. They have a 20-year guarantee on them. They're buoyant. You can walk on them for maintenance purposes. This project is also using turbidity curtains to direct the flows. These are about 10 feet deep with a chain on the bottom, so the water will come in off Wickham and then be directed around and through the island and the plant system to be cleaned. Stormwater ponds are used throughout the county to treat the rainwater that goes down the storm drains. When the water enters in, it helps remove some of the excess nitrogen and phosphorus pollution to prevent it from getting into the Indian River Lagoon. Some of the older stormwater ponds were able to retrofit with newer technologies like this to further increase the amount of pollution that they can remove. If you happen to live along a stormwater pond, there's things you can do to help reduce the amount of nutrient pollution going into the pond itself. Things like leaving a no-mow zone close to the edge to keep grass clippings out or even planting native plants to create a buffer zone both along the shore and in the water. Additionally, if you do fertilize, you should keep at least a 10 to 15 foot buffer without any fertilizer near the edge of the water. Even if you don't live along a stormwater pond, you can help them to be more efficient. Things like grass clippings that get into the streets and roadways wash down into the storm drains and enter these ponds. So by blowing them back into your yard, you're going to keep them from getting into the pond and becoming muck and nutrient pollution. If you want to learn more ways that you can join all of us in helping to get to a healthier lagoon faster, visit us at lagoonloyal.com. Interesting. Thank you. Where exactly in Wickham is that? So the site we were filming at is right in front of Longleaf Elementary, but there's a few other ponds within a few miles of that area that were also retrofitted with that same technology. Are there signs there? There, yeah, that's on the, you know, fence. They have the signs also like the drive-through line for the pickup for the kids, so. Oh, that's great. That's a great spot. That's a really, really great spot. That could maybe be duplicated into where people are sitting and staring for extended periods of time and very community-centric. So that's a great. They rent that fence area for, the schools rent their fence area for communication purposes. Oh, okay. We got contracted for that space. So that's actually, the county has to pay to post? Okay. That's interesting. Has that been a hindrance in the past, or is it fine and all good to go, simple enough? I mean, it's just, we have to consider the cost. Absolutely. I didn't, I would have never even thought that that would be a factor in doing something like that. So this, this is project signage. Yeah. It's separate, but the fencing is available, and we have contracted for it in the past. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, so they have one associated with the project that was, you know, part of that project contract. And then, as she's saying, if we want additional, we've done signage before. Okay. Yeah. Done? Sure. Great job, as always, Brandon. Fantastic. The grasses that were in there, was there a diversity of them? Did they mention the species at all? Was it all Spartina? I think they had a mix of a few, but I don't remember what exactly, what they were using. I know for the country walk, it was Thrasallus, what were the other two, Melanie? Oh, I think I don't remember. Mm-hmm. Because it's... Right. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I don't know what was on the mats. Yeah, I don't remember what... We're flying without our stormwater guide to it. Yeah. Okay. And then there's a maintenance schedule for harvesting and... Yeah, similar to the other floating vegetative islands. They can remove those, you know, trim down the plants. And these ones, they can go out, you know, since they can walk on them, they can actually go out and trim them without even having to remove the whole thing. Cool. Is that relatively rare to have the mats that connect all the way to the shoreline that are accessible just to walk on like that? Is that a new... That's what God brought up. That is new. Yeah, so our mat projects we've done before have sort of been floating islands out in the middle. The reason these are connected to the shore is because of those curtains, the turbidity curtains on the bottom, and that way we can direct the flow of the water through there. So it has to connect to the shore to make that pathway, that mazeway. Oh, that makes sense. And you said it's 10 feet down the curtain? You know, whatever the pond depth is, yeah. So it goes all the way to the... Yeah, it goes all the way to the bottom. So that pond that we were working in was about 10 feet in depth. And what is that material? What is that connection that directs that flow? Like, is that... A standard turbidity curtain, which is probably a... I don't know if it's PVC or something, but yeah, it just has chains on the bottom. And is that part of the maintenance as well? Does that have a lifespan? Is that identified? He didn't... We didn't have it in the video. He talked a little bit about it when we were talking with him, but, you know, he said there'll probably be a biofilm that grows on that curtain, which then can also have further, you know, treatment of the water as it goes through. So you really don't want to remove the curtain unless there's an issue with it, but they should, you know, last just as long as those mats would. I don't know what that lifespan... Yeah, 15 or 20 years. He said it in video. He did. Any other questions? Comments? Thank you, Brandon. Any old business? So we go on to new business. And Charlie, you're up. I want to really thank you for taking this on and moving it forward. Yeah, so we were tasked with looking into a novel idea that was proposed by Bob Pickard, who's in the audience today. Bob's a employee of Wakefield Company, but he was really representing his cell. But just a little background on what biochar is, and it's a product of pyrolysis of woody or other organic matter. So maybe you think activated carbon, maybe you can associate it with that sort of. But it is something that's, you know, widely available. You can purchase it at most big box stores or garden centers. It's essentially carbon, and carbon provides a great surface area for absorbing, that's what the D, absorbing substances. And it can sequest carbon. You can gain carbon credits. And then if charged with nutrients, because it doesn't really contain nutrients from the pyrolysis, you can use it as a fertilizer. So Bob's been at our last couple meetings, as well as I think some of the workshops, and suggesting that we look at biochar and adding muck to it to be used as a fertilizer, and that perhaps the sale of this muck fertilizer could be an enhancement to revenue for sorrel, or at least a supplement, if not a total, you know, provider of funds. It would be, you know, applied to lawns and gardens. And what was asked of us, if we could assess the feasibility of the concept, Bob had submitted a grant to FDEP for the project. It was unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, but the cost estimate was calculated at a quarter million dollars to complete a viability study. A little background, and I know we've talked a little bit about what the constituents, you know, what the nature of muck is, so I put that chart together. It's based on four samples that were obtained and the analysis of those samples from the Grand Canal, so, you know, there's probably some variability within the muck as we go throughout the lagoon, but just to give you an idea, in general, muck does not have a lot of nitrogen or phosphorus. It's just not part of the nature of it, and it has some carbon in there. The conductivity is a little bit high, but that shouldn't be a surprise. Mass conductivity is a relationship of salinity, and that, you know, it comes from an estuary that has salt. And then we've also found, you know, some heavy metals within the muck, chromium, arsenic, but they're not at what we'd call RCRA, Resource Conservation Recovery Act levels, which would make it a hazardous waste, which is a whole different test, and I don't get off into that. But I've had a lot of assistance with the staff. I've asked questions and been able to get a lot of quick and good answers, kind of going back to the theme about leaning on the staff and having them assist. So maybe, again, the results don't represent the entire IRL, but there's, according to Dr. Fox from FIT, muck, organic muck matter varies from 10 to 30 percent. Some were typically 10 to 15 percent range. And muck is, the organic matter of muck is tied up, too, with silt and clay. So it's somewhat of a complex material. Another professor at FIT used muck to try to germinate seeds. A lot of seeds was not successful with that. And just from a historical standpoint, we've managed over 800,000 cubic yards of muck, since under sorrel, at least. And it's been deposited at specific areas and applied in uplands and some other approved sites. It's usually, at these sites, it's mixed with soil and tilled into the soil. And the contractors who have that project are not, it's not available to sell it. It's prohibited. So some of the undetermined issues as we went through the process, and again, pertaining to the use of biochar muck product is, you know, what conductivity levels would be acceptable for use as a fertilizer? What would be the materials that would charge the biochar and the muck to make nutrient available as a fertilizer? You know, and what might those ratios be? And then maybe a bigger question is, you know, is there a market analysis to assess the viability or the desirability of a product like this? And then there's a number of regulatory concerns. And again, appreciate the assistance I got for the deep dive that was done by staff. By adding phosphorus to muck and selling it as a fertilizer might make it unavailable for sale in Brevard County because basically you can only use a phosphorus-based fertilizer. If it's determined there's a phosphorus, lack of phosphorus in the soil where you're going to apply the fertilizer. So if there's a deficiency, then you can apply phosphorus-containing. But typically, you know, that's, so it's typically we do not want to add more phosphorus to our watershed. So there's certain specific and general conditions that all the permits would go with dredging. And as I understand, you know, mixing biochar with muck is not authorized per the permit. We couldn't use that as a, to make this product. There's always a pathway to do a modification process. But our staff here believes that DEP would not authorize a proposed use, basically because the conditions and the permit, again, prohibit that. And you can see there there's three bullets. But essentially, you know, they have to go to the designated site. It's very specific. There's a lot of work that goes into determining what disposal sites can be used and where they're located. And an interesting part of this is the sovereignty of submerged lands. The state of Florida owns the lands that are underwater. And so even muck, as it's removed, is still considered sovereign land under the state. So, you know, it's one of those arcane things. If you've worked in regulatory like I have for most of my life, you just accept that and go on. So it's sometimes hard to get that into people's heads. But so it would have to be, to make that available, it would have to be approved by the State Board of Trustees. And I'm not even sure who that board is. And again, the permanent activities using sovereignty submerged lands must not be revenue generating. So again, those are our requirements. Those are at a state level. So, you know, when we look at projects that are come under our purview and recommendation for the county commissioners, you know, we've talked about this already a lot at the meeting, it's really nutrient-driven and specifically nitrogen-driven. So what nitrogen reduction would we receive or could we see as a result of using a biochar muck fertilizer and selling it to people within the Indian River Lagoon watershed. You know, there's several, Bob shared several scientific peer-reviewed articles about the benefits of biochar. So that's been, you know, identified, again, as an agent to serve areas perhaps as a slow-release fertilizer or adding carbon, which, of course, is very important to gardens and lawns and forest. But again, from what I could, my conclusion was that muck would be more of a filler if you added it to biochar as a fertilizer and we're also shifting some of our muck management projects into a capping. So the amount of muck that we will be dredging and managing will be reduced based on the fact that we're going to be capping, which, of course, is a much less expensive project, which might expand our reach for the dollars in that category so we can address more muck issues. So our recommendations that we came up with is that, you know, we don't have a study to assess the viability of the concept. You know, it's going to require some research or quite a bit of research, and we don't really have a category. All the research that we've done, it's been more to assess how effective a project is as opposed to assessing or evaluating a new model or a new technique. Again, there wouldn't be any reduction on the nitrogen or phosphorus entering the lagoon. You know, I feel that a quarter million dollars is a significant amount of funds, especially for something that doesn't have a lot of background information that shows that it would be positive. And again, you know, what the cost of bringing it to market might be, that's unknown. Again, you know, it's definitely a thinking outside the box idea that was presented, and I think we need to encourage these type of ideas because we don't know everything on this committee or staff, so, you know, where we can make improvements, consider new ideas, because I think that's really valuable. And the grant application that Wakefield had, how to produce it and to come up with a concept project is stated there in that second to last paragraph on the third page. But, you know, even if this did come into fruition as a viable project, again, it would have to go out for, you know, competitive bids if they were going to go forward with this. Again, that's assuming we could sell the muck as well or at least give it away or get the permit altered. So, again, I think this is a project that should be funded with private funds, someone out there at a venture capitalist who can, into marketing and into selling and into making money on projects. They might be better suited for this. You know, again, it would have to go through a laboratory study. It would have to go through, you know, proof of concept. It would have to go through, you know, a larger test areas before we would have enough data to make, see, understand if it would be a product that would be beneficial to the lagoon. And if it does, you know, if there's some testing results that come out that prove that, then that should be brought back to the sorrel committee for consideration. And, you know, again, it may take some change in the rules. And, you know, well, the county cannot sell this and make a profit off it. Perhaps a private company could go ahead and, you know, benefit from that and perhaps benefit from the lagoon. Thank you, John. Questions? That was really good. Our known participant is now exiting. I think that it was excellently prepared and streamlined and the capital interest. I am a huge fan of regenerative agriculture, carbon sequestration. I think this is a great idea, but the variables even in the muck from site to site are so extreme. I think that what you said to send it out there and capital ventures can take some time to invest. I think it would be great. But I just think even on just R&D, that $250 is such a low estimate of what would really need to be invested to get this product to market. So excellent job. I think it's a great idea for the right person, but I don't think it falls, sadly, under our research specification, as you mentioned. But thank you so much. It was a very interesting report. I had a lot of help. I think some of the regulatory issues that you bring up are really significant, particularly in the fact that we've already had to separate the muck into that. It had to go to a regulated landfill versus a regular site out there that could be used as fertilizer or ground, just ground application. So that's a significant part of it, too. Is there much demand that people want to purchase the muck or take the muck from us? Like, is this pretty isolated? I know that I've heard a couple. I see Eaton Farms has a flyer here today. Is there, I mean, is this something you've been approached before to acquire the muck in any capacity? Yeah, we had a student who researched incorporating muck into concrete to make pavers, right? We have recently done an RFP seeking landowners who would be willing to provide a site for disposal. So, you know, countywide requests for proposals, and we received two. So there is, you know, some demand, but limited. That's the first I've heard of that. So would these landowners be interested because they get paid, compensated to use that land? And there's, is that on the websites and where specs for what those incentives would be? It was advertised through the county's procurement process. So all the websites that they standardly use. Okay. I appreciate you thinking I know that better than I do, but I can research it. Thank you. Kimberly, can you talk into your microphone? When you turn your head like that, I think we cannot hear what you're saying. Yes, I will be more conscientious of that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Sure. Thanks. I want to thank Charlie for the presentation. Thank you. And so the owner still owns the bottom of the land. And I specifically had a piece of property in Grant, so I know, and I think you might remember when in the south part of the county, we leased the bottom of the river to people to grow oysters and clams and things. So you might want to check. There wouldn't be a need to have permission from the federal government on some of that. Thank you. If I could jump in there, too. Over the last few months, Charlie, it's been a while now, Charlie and I have been having coffee on a regular basis, and we've been discussing this for a while now, and I thoroughly endorse everything Charlie's recommending. I've read his reports, and I think he's got a really good summary here. Good. Thank you, John. I have another sub-tune. Just a question, Charlie. There's a company, Davey, and they're using biochar in their oyster reefs. Have you looked into that at all? Not aware. I think they're Florida-based. I can send you the information, but combining it in their materials. I think it's important to remember that biochar and biochar plus muck are two different topics. Okay. Okay. Keep that. Because you can go down to the hardware, so you can buy biochar right now. Mm-hmm. You know, just keep in mind that two different ideas. Thanks, John. And that was Charlie's charge, was... Right. Charge. Yeah. Biochar and muck. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Terry, you're up now. Was there any public comments? That'll come in general comments. There's no vote here, so we'll come in... Okay. There's no vote. We'll... Public comments. Is there a requested action on this? No, not at all. I thought there was something on... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if the committee wanted to provide us any direction, this would be the time to... Well... Take public comment and provide any direction. The... We could decide on whether or not we want this to go forward to the county commission for their information purposes. Is it something like that, Virginia? Mm-hmm. So, the requested action provided in the agenda packet was to consider a presentation. By Emeritus Committee member Charles Venuto on the feasibility of generating and marketing muck biochar as a fertilizer or soil amendment, as proposed by Bob Pickert of Wakefield Biochar, and provide staff direction. I would like this, what you prepared to be transferred to the commission, county commission members. We could vote on that, certainly. There is no agenda item on the... At all on the speaker request card. So, I... Okay. That's the other thing. So, any comments on providing this information to the county commissioners? Because they're the ones that listened to the presentation several times. I would make a motion to do that, but I'm not allowed to make motions because I'm retired from this committee. Yes, you are. I'm just a historian, but maybe somebody else would like to make a motion. Duke has angers. What's that? Duke has angers. There you go. I'm sorry. I wasn't looking your way. Well, listening to it, I'd pass. I think you've done a great job. You've laid it out there, and if my ears heard it right and transmitted it right, I'd pass on it, personally. Pass on... Taking it to anybody. This would be just information purposes. Looking at it, you know, from a financial standpoint and looking at it and all the issues with it, I think there are other things to take on. We have, you know, I wouldn't spend the time to go on it. I mean, and so I wouldn't give it to them, ask to them to make a decision. Personal opinion. I'm not mad at him. I thought she did a good job. So, just to be clear, the topic we're discussing is, do we task staff to come back with more information so that we could put it on our project list or not? Is that where we're trying to get to? No, we're only trying to provide information on this topic so that the County Commission is fully informed also. Okay. And that, this was our information, too. We just wanted to be fully informed. So, no further staff time required to do that, to pass it on to a commission? Not to, other than passing it on. A few minutes for an email. Okay. Yes. First of all, I think that Charlie has spent a lot of time doing the research in this, and it has taken staff time. And Mr. Pickert has been very persistent in his request to have it looked at by the County, by us, and by the County Commission. And I think that we owe it to Mr. Pickert and to Charlie to at least have Charlie's report passed along to the County Commissioners. They don't have to do anything with it, but I think it should be at least sent to them so they can read it if they want to. I'll second it. So I hear a motion? Okay. I'll make a motion that this report be passed along to the County Commissioners. I'll second it. That's good. Okay. All in favor? Oh. Okay. Public comment. That you can come up and make your public comments now. Thank you, committee. I'm disappointed in the results, and I will take a copy of a transcript and provide a response so that there's a fair exchange. I've been on a mission to share what I've learned about biochar, an incredible natural resource that absorbs and conserves water and absorbs nutrients to make them bioavailable to plants and non-leachable to groundwater and the lagoon. This mission comes from a love of the IRL. I'm not pushing biochar because I work for a biochar company. I work for a biochar company because of the incredible nature of this material to solve some of our most difficult environmental challenges. I've ended up on a journey to learn what this group, staff, and COC have been doing, and I see how I can help align my mission with yours. I would like to acknowledge the county commission, the National Estuary Program, SOREL staff, and this committee, and the countless engaged citizens for their tremendous progress in the Herculean task of addressing sources of excess nutrient pollutants to the lagoon. You've come a long way, and I'm a big fan. I've addressed this group and the SOREL workshops three minutes at a time on how my mission can help support yours or ours. My most recent comments came in the form of a recommendation to the Speak Up Brevard program for a soil health moonshot to transform Brevard soils into a sustainable living filter. The retail sale of fertilizer and soil amendment to residents would be reserved for the best vintage of the IRL muck, which, by the way, we don't know what that is in the muck from the various... We don't know what's in the muck from the various dredging, dewatering operations, but we would need that information. That could be used as an effective media for stormwater... Well, biochar can be used as an effective media for stormwater treatment in baffle boxes and or drainage swales. That's a powerful tool for other low-impact development. Three minutes goes by fast, so I've focused on how we can transform some of the IRL muck into a fertilizer soil amendment that would support the mission to restore the lagoon. This is just one example of how biochar could be a keystone for soil health in the IRL watershed. Most of what I've seen from SORO on soil health has been focused on providing public information on the fertilizer ban, and I believe in the power of public information and education. But when I go to Lowe's, I see a lot of fertilizer with phosphorus and a limited supply of practical choices for soil health, and I wonder if we shouldn't be doing more. I see the estimates of pollutant sources in Virginia's sorrel workshop briefings with lawn maintenance at 3.8%, and I think this must be low. The miscellaneous base flow at 5.6% and wonder if that shouldn't be part of lawn maintenance after the primary sources of muck flux, septic systems, and stormwater are already accounted for. By the way, biochar can help with those. Estimates from the limited available literature indicates that the amount of fertilizer that leaches from applied fertilizer is less than 10%. I doubt that. The thing that most slow-release fertilizers, polymer-coated urea, is that when the coating degrades sufficiently, it releases its nutrients. Whereas a biochar-based slow-release fertilizer retains the nutrients into a bioavailable form to plants that does not leach to groundwater or the lagoon, and is a permanent part of the soil infrastructure, providing the perfect habitat for healthy soil microbes. How do I know this could be marketed effectively? Scott's Fertilizer, a Wakefield Biochar customer, produces Scott's Soil Builder Spreadable Top Dress for Lawns, a biochar-based fertilizer. I was hoping there would be a little more engagement, Charlie, on this subject, that we could have had more of a collaborative effort on it. I understand you wanted to do an independent review. I'll look at the comments. I will provide my comments, and I will certainly share those with the commission, so they would have gotten Charlie's comments one way or another. If you have the written comments, Virginia and your team, I welcome a copy of the transcript, so I can use that as a way to set the record straight on some of these issues. Thank you for the time, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Oh, I thought you gave me more time. But I really think I had three minutes to make a pitch, and this, you know, going for a grand slam home run with the soil health and transforming some of the muck was kind of like a shiny object, you know, something. But there's so much that could be done with biochar in the lagoon that would be – there's no maintenance required once you put this material in the ground. Thank you. Any other comments from the committee? I have a question. Have you done any research as of now? I don't know if you've even had access to any of the muck to determine what its composition is. You know, that's a big part of the deal is that we need to figure out what's in the muck, right? We've got four samples from the Pineda processing site. I did go there. One of the Sorrel staff members allowed me to meet with the folks over there. I got a bucket of that stuff. You've seen the handout that's floated around here. We're eating worms. I mixed the first rendition of this, which was, you know, the muck and some – a little bit of compost and mostly biochar. And then he put that – he put some ryegrass seed in just the muck, in just the biochar amended muck, and then he put some worm castings in there, and boom, the stuff took off. And I've always said that we need to add microbes and nutrients and other things, and the biochar will hold on to that and make it available over time. But I've heard people say you can't grow anything in the muck, and the raw muck, no, you can't. Dewatered muck, no, it won't grow. But as soon as you amend it with helpful constituents in there, then things take off. And that muck, it provides minerals that also would make a good binding agent for pelletizing this material so that when you distribute it, you know, you want the homeowner to be able to find a way to apply it to their lawn, right? It creates a good binding agent physically, but I think it creates a tremendous galvanizing effect for the materials. If we were to make it available to the public, hey, Indian River Lagoon, slow-release fertilizer, and soil amendment. I mean, I think that's a powerful brand right there. I do. I think it's more of a private capitalist issue, but as far as getting access to the muck and some of the factors that Charlie identified that, you know, are regulations that don't allow that, I think that would be something great to research further. But did you actually test any of the muck that you did have access to for its... No, the only testing I've seen is the four samples from the Pineda, and then just recently for the Indian Harbor Beach, Satellite Beach, canal dredging, there was a table of 10 samples that showed the arsenic just above that residential soil criteria, which is, there's a whole other subject about that I'll talk about. But there was no, there was nothing in the report that said where those samples were taken. I've been an environmental professional for almost 40 years. I've never seen a report that would provide analytical results and not indicate where the samples were taken from. So that was kind of disappointing. So the four samples that you retrieved from Gator on Pineda, did you do any subsequent sampling yourself to see what's in that? I didn't take... The four samples were taken by staff or, no, I think Geosyntec's subcontractor came and took those samples. I did not. I only got the analytical results. I went there to physically get some of the material so that I could play with it. And did you test that? No. You did not. And I did follow... The only testing is what you see in those pictures. And I did follow that whole experiment on social media. I saw it from day one as it played out, and I was very impressed with the amendments and that growth rate. I think it's a great concept. And, again, I'm a big proponent of biochar in general. So I would look forward to seeing in the future when you get more data back that you could share with us, presenting again and seeing where we could couple with this. I appreciate that. But I'm not the one who needs to get the data. The county, I mean, the Sorrel program, just doing analytical work and analyzing what's in the muck is just a natural part of managing the material. I don't know how you can manage the material and not know what's in it. We know that it has some arsenic, some low levels of arsenic, but we don't know. There's a lot we don't know. The only thing we know is this small window of parameters that were analyzed for four samples of all the muck that we've generated. That's all we know about it. That's ridiculous. Do you have a schedule of? We need to move on. We have another agenda item. We need to move on. If you do have a schedule of what you would test for that you feel the county fell short on, if you could share that with us, I would love to see where you think that testing could improve. The testing they did wasn't close by something that I gave them, but that was a while ago. I've been thinking about this now in a different way. Do we have any other comment from the public on this? Thank you. Thank you. And any more? Anything else from the committee? We have a motion and a second on it. Are you ready to vote? Who was the second? Barbara was the second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Okay. Yeah, we had one. Dick is opposed. That's why I'm here. Yeah. It passes. And so we can rely upon Virginia to move to the commissioners. Thank you. Thank you all. Terry, this is your opportunity here to comment on the application. There was some comments that there was not enough information on the application, so this is your opportunity. Hopefully you've looked over the application as it is and have your comments ready. Okay. I'm just getting everything set up here. All right. So yes, this is to go over the funding application and guidelines for our RFP process that occurs. And starting, well, so the whole, I'll go over how this all works. So starting in July, the COC votes on the cost share eligibility for each project type. So that will come to you to vote to determine stormwater is going to get 574, septic's getting this. Then we take those numbers, update the website portal, and those applications usually open August 1st. That's our goal. And it's open for about two months, closing. Yeah, we're not getting that. Logan? Sorry? Yeah, we're not getting what's on here up on the screen. It's on mine. There it is. There it is. There you go. Sorry. Thank you. Okay. Let me start over. So in July, you vote on the cost share eligibility for each project type. We incorporate that vote into the values for the calculations for the projects that open in August. And it's open for about two months through the end of September. Staff reviews all of those applications in October. And then it is sent to you in early November and presented at the November COC meeting where the discussion is had on what to include or not include in the next year's plan update. You are given that plan update in December for review, and you vote on it in January, and then the commission votes on it in February as we just went through this process. So once the project is approved, we can start the contracting process. So the applicant completes the statement of work and cost share eligibility table. It's a standard form in our contract. The staff review and drafts the contract. That contract is submitted for review by our purchasing department, the risk department, and the county attorney's office. That contract is then submitted to the board chair to execute for the county and then given to the applicant to fully execute. And in there, I have another slide on this. The entity must post signage, and then there's contract language for other Lagoon projects. And the entity is then required to submit quarterly reports until that project is completed. So here's going on to that contract language with the funding availability. So any funds saved by use of the trust fund dollars shall be reallocated towards projects benefiting the restoration of the Indian River Lagoon. There's also in the statement of work that each project has to include physical signage saying this project has been funded in part by the Save Our Indian River Lagoon half-cent sales tax. So some considerations I wanted to bring up is that partnerships are important to achieving a healthy lagoon. The county manages the trust fund on behalf of the city and county areas. The application purpose is to estimate cost effectiveness. Few municipalities have staff, much less grant writing staff. So we wanted to keep this as a very simple process to get the numbers to deliver projects quickly and efficiently. And municipalities and other entities can use these secured Sorrel grant dollars to leverage other funds to help cover the cost of that project. So real quick, I wanted to, these are the general questions that are for every project type, just the contact information and the different project details. So project name, lagoon segment, if it's a B map, in the B map already, what that number is, a brief project description, the location, and then describe any education and outreach associated with that project that Dr. Windsor mentioned earlier in his presentation. So I'm going to go into the actual portal now. So on the county webpage, if you click Save Our Lagoon, go to Grants, Project Funding Application, we have all the project types right here. So I'm going to pick stormwater to start with. So here's the contact information and project details that I just mentioned. So some project types have slightly different questions based on what it is. So what stormwater BMP are you planning to implement here? So you would describe, is it going to be a floating wetland? Is it going to be ditch denitrification? Whatever else it might be. Then you check where you are with the status. Have you secured the land? Is the design completed? Do you have all the permits? And do you have the construction and bid specs ready? Then you punch in your schedule, when you think you'll get started, when you think you'll be completed. And then here's where you enter your pre and post TN and TP loading, and it will go down here. You do your other lagoon benefits that was mentioned earlier. Have you done any sampling? What parameters were sampled? Put in your cost estimates here. And then once you have all that in, it will give you your eligible tax funding cost share based on that approved dollar amount per pound. And then if you have requested other project money, grant money, you enter that here. Is it in your local budget? And then last but not least, you click yes here, and it will email them a copy of their submission. And then once you hit submit, it will give you the list of, let me go back up to here. It gives you a list of your checklist, what else you need to submit to have a complete application. So, and then each of the project types has more information here on these drop-down menus. Here's what they're eligible for, what's needed. If it's a septic removal, what the ARC inlet models you need to include. This is the middle checklist that we just went over. And then here's how the removal efficiencies are calculated based on DEP guidance. So, I guess the question is, is there other questions or information you would like to see in this packet for future review? Is this, like, for specific questions as I've floated the other uses concept, or is this a more specific project? Like, are you contributing to nitrogen and phosphorus through other management practices? Is this where this question would come into play? Is that even... We're looking at the cost-effectiveness of the project that they are submitting. So, that's our goal here. And is other pollutants considered in that cost-effectiveness, or... No, it's just the whole plan is based on total nitrogen reduction. So, isolated, independent response to that project. So, other projects, other maintenance, anything an entity is doing is, at this time, completely separate from that. It's not a factor. So, I know, again, I've proposed a change to that, at least including in conversation, best management practices for... And part of my homework assignment for alternatives to spraying and biocides, I've met with the EELS director, IFAS, a couple other people, just privately, just privately, to gather as much information as possible for my homework assignment, for my one of three homework assignments, but... Which I love, by the way, that wasn't a dig. I just... Is this what you're asking for now, if we would propose any additional requirements, conversation, questions, data? Was that the nature of your question? Yes. For that project, not other projects, for the project being submitted. Okay. So, I don't know that this is the correct place to put that in, but I would suggest that going forward, we include an accountability component for what are their best management practices in general on their other projects. And I don't think that should just be specific to any kind of herbicides. Even meeting with Michael Knight at the EELS, he was fabulous and very gracious in his time and information and preparation for that meeting. And even in our conversation, he identified one specific site that they don't actually need to spray. So, just in the conversation, they are moving towards making adjustments for better management practices to what they already have, which was fabulous, by the way. You know, it resulted in best management practices actually being implemented. But again, even at that standard with EELS, there was still room for investigation on their practices and then improvement on their management procedure. So, if this is the correct place to include in that, per the gist of your question, I would include that it is considered what their other practices are. Is there room for improvement? Is there room to reduce pollutants, specifically biocides, going into the lagoon? And again, watershed-specific, adjacent, you know, we've got our buffers that have been identified for around storm ponds, yards, you know, the whole state is a watershed. So, I mean, coming from that perspective, obviously I have to yield to... Can you make a specific recommendation or... My specific recommendation? Yes, sir. In one sentence, short. Oh, I'll round it up, but I can't promise you one sentence. Just a minute, Fred. My recommendation would be that anyone applying for funds would be able to show that they're using best management practices specifically in regard to pollutants going into the lagoon. My reference to that, I don't want to hold it to just any type of glycophate or nitrogen-phosphorus biocides being applied, but that would be my recommendation, that we have a measurable problem. Thanks. Fred's got it. Fred's on the line. Can I make a suggestion or comment? This is Fred. Terry, isn't that covered in the actual individual applications under other Indian River Lagoon benefits, biochemical, oxygen demand, reduced risk of overflows in bacteria, et cetera, so it's in the secondary document that's not measuring math? That is a question. Yes, that is a question on the application in regards to that specific project that's being applied for. I believe Kim is referencing other projects that that entity may be doing. Correct. And broader, not specific to one request for funds. Yeah, we're running out of time here, so we've got to make a motion to increase the time if you want to have more time. You know, if we're going to change this, we need to have comments and we need to have a vote. Do you want to just table this and review it? Absolutely. As I said, I'm not even sure if this is the right part of our meeting to introduce this request. I know I've mentioned it repeatedly in past meetings, so if this was my opportunity to do that officially in regard to the application process, I wanted to make certain to put this in at this time. So I'm getting some head nodding that this is the time to address this as requested. We heard your request. That's why we prepared this agenda item. And thank you for that. We're bringing it to the committee for consideration before we start the next year's application process. But you have time to, you know, we could re-agenda this at the future meetings. Or, I mean, I don't know what the committee wants to do. Well, we're running out of time, so we need to either add more time here, and we're losing a quorum. We can pick it up in the future as Virginia would, as reference is a possibility. That's fine. It doesn't have to be resolved today. Just table it, and do you understand more of what they're asking for now? I do, and I have had previous discussion, again, and per my homework assignment, I have investigated what best practices are from other entities that use funds. EELS doesn't actually even fall into that category. They were just a great source for information, but I think the accountability factor, and I can bring, and it is in my homework report, that I can bring more specific measures. So do you want us to put this back on the agenda after, subsequent to your homework report? I think also what she's asking for is what we get as a package on the projects that you get more information that we don't get in that package. And maybe we need more information in the package that we receive. In short forms. Exactly. So I think that's more of what you're asking in addition to what the application is. So I think it's a broader subject that we really need to look at here and go forward with. So if we could just table it. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Terry, you're... In the next meeting. Oh, well, whenever Virginia, Virginia's in charge, so I'm not. I'm just here. What she suggested was after... We've got to do it before. We just have to do it before October. So... Well, we would have to do it before July, actually. Yeah, before July. Yeah, before July. We have to do it before July. I think you probably have to take a vote on tabling it. What's that? I'll move that we table the discussion to alter or add to the questionnaire application as is now for future discussion, if any possible changes that we may want to implement. Second. Second. I think Bruce beat her. So... Do we want any more discussion? Do we want a public discussion on this? So, I think we're, you know, we've beat it. And for Dr. Menzer's encouragement, I will write that question in as close to one sentence, even if it's a bit of a run-on. Excuse me now. And I'll have Virginia send that out so that the committee has a better understanding of what I'm requesting we consider. And that's all I'm doing, is that we consider future implementations of standards that we're not addressing now. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Okay. It was unanimous. With who's left? All right. Any final comments? Thank you, John, is my comment. Thank you, Charlie. Yes. So, we're on item 10 now? Yes. Committee's final comments? Okay. Did you go for public comment? It's all done? Well, yeah. It's all done. All the, there's only one card. So, I just want to say I'm really happy about a couple things that have happened this week. On Tuesday, I was doing an interview about the nanobubble project in the Titusville Marina. And, hmm? It was great. I saw it. Thank you. Okay. So, it just so happened that the technician that's in charge of the system was there. And so, he asked if I wanted to see inside the trailer and see the pumps and stuff, which, of course, I did. And then he says, do you want me to turn it off and restart it so you can see what it does? So, we got to see, you know, when the bubbles are actually coming out, it's like a gigantic jacuzzi outflow, you know, shooting a line of microscopic bubbles down the side of the seawall there at the marina. But when he turned it off, you could actually, I was stunned. The thing had only been running six days at that point in time. There was a six-foot-wide, 20-foot-long swath of white sand bottom next to the seawall where there hasn't been white sand bottom in decades. So, the system already appears to be, it either pushed the muck away through the volume of the stuff coming out of the hose or it actually is dissolving the muck. So, I was really excited about that. Then the second thing that I'm really excited about is the horseshoe crabs that we're having now at the Titusville Causeway on both sides. You know, we've had extensive restoration on the south side with the breakwaters and then 100 dump truck loads of sand that went in and created a whole new beach area. But there was concern that the breakwaters offshore might hinder the horseshoe crab nesting on our new beach because they use wind and waves to get higher up on the beach and the breakwaters are blocking the waves. Well, we had a big wind on Saturday and the horseshoe crabs were spawning all up and down the whole entire length of the causeway. The water level is coming up in the river, too, and that helps. And then a night later, the next day, after the cold front went through and the wind switched around out of the north, now we have horseshoe crabs spawning on the north side of the causeway because the wind's blowing against the north side of the causeway. We don't have as much sand over there, but there is about a 10-foot wide strip of sand, and the horseshoe crabs were used in the entire length of the causeway. Because of the erosion, they haven't been able to use that causeway in four or five years now. And I had the biggest horseshoe crab spawn that I've ever counted on the north side of the causeway. So I'm really, really happy. It was so obvious that shoreline restoration and adding sand to the shoreline is going to be beneficial to the horseshoe crabs. And the flocks of shorebirds were massive. And just the whole thing of what's happening there at the causeway with these restoration projects is phenomenal. Thank you. Any other comments from the committee? Thank you all. That's it. You're relieved. Sorry. Yeah. Just a friendly reminder, again, the Florida Flay Landscaping Seminar is going to be on March 21st at the Melbourne Auditorium. I'll remind you again at our next meeting. But, again, there will be multiple presentations from IRL NEP's Kathy Hill, Cy Scalera, Native Butterfly Flowers, and the Bats and Belfries. And this is an event that's just designed to really communicate to the public and the community the importance of Florida Flay Landscaping. That's something that we talk about as an impact on the lagoon. It's one of those things that everyone can do at home to help and they can learn a little bit about and support the event. And you can replace all your dead plants. Yeah. Everyone's got a few brown sea grapes in their yard, probably. Thank you very much. That's it. You're relieved. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir.