We'll call to order the February 17, 2026 meeting of the City of Clearwater Community Redevelopment Agency. This time we'll move to item 2.1 on the agenda. Approve the minutes of the January 12, 2026 CRA meeting. Is there a motion to approve the minutes? Second. All those in favor? Opposed? Unanimous. Move to item 3 on the agenda. Are there any citizens here today to be heard on items that are regarding the CRA that are not on today's agenda? Hearing a scene now moved to item 4.1. February 2026 Legacy Business Spotlight, Direct Mail 2.0. Good afternoon, board members, trustees. Jesus Nino, CRA Executive Director for the record. I'm going to introduce Ms. Tasha Hadley to present this particular item. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Tasha Hadley, CRA Specialist, and today I'm honored to recognize Direct Mail 2.0 as February 2026 Business Spotlight winner. This is considered the legacy spotlight because they are a longstanding business that have operated for over 10 years or more in our downtown redevelopment area. So, established in 2015 and headquartered on 600 Cleveland Street, Direct Mail 2.0 has continued to grow while maintaining a commitment to economic activity within our downtown Clearwater district. CEO and co-founder, Brad Kugler, established Direct Mail 2.0 with a clear mission to ensure traditional marketing could adapt and thrive in today's evolving landscape. By blending Direct Mail with modern tracking technology, the company has provided businesses with measurable data-driven insights that strengthen performance and results. Beyond innovation, Direct Mail 2.0 is invested in people, fostering a collaborative workplace and culture supporting educational institutions, charitable organizations, and community food drives. To help share their story, the CRA and Public Communications have collaborated to create a video. This video has been shared across our social media platforms, and a full article can be found on our website at myclearwatercra.com. At this time, we invite you to view the video. Thank you. My name is Brad Kugler. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Direct Mail 2.0, and I've been here since April 2017, so I'm starting my ninth year. Direct Mail 2.0's relevancy is sort of driven by my past. I was in the DVD and CD business for 23 years, and it was completely disrupted by streaming media. I wanted something that I knew I could always innovate on and stay ahead of the technology curve, and Direct Mail 2.0 fit that bill. The services that Direct Mail 2.0 provides is an enhancement to old-school direct mail. Now, your direct mail can be tracked just like a digital campaign. Through QR codes, callback numbers, we've breathed a new life into an old-school marketing industry. The work culture is very family-like. I like seeing the employees. I like to be able to work with them hand-in-hand, walk up to their desks, see how they're doing. So if there's something we can do to make it fun or appreciative to come to work, we do that. We love to support the local community, so it's really important to me to give back. We help local learning institutions, beach cleanups to keep this area vibrant and renewed, and what better place to raise a family and grow a business? Direct Mail 2.0 greatly appreciates this recognition and the acknowledgement of our contributions to this community. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, okay. That will move to item 4.2 on the agenda. Approve the Downtown Community Redevelopment Agency Fiscal Year 2025-2026 First Quarter Budget Amendment and adopt Resolution 26-01. Good afternoon. Anne Lopez, CRA Assistant Director. This item that I have before you is to approve the amendments, the first quarter budget amendments for the downtown CRA. Florida Statute Section 163.387-7, which governs Community Redevelopment Agency trust funds, requires that all unspent funds remaining at the last day of the fiscal year be appropriated to an allowable expense. First quarter budget amendment reflects these required adjustments, and the amendments allocate existing funds as follows. $217,844.79 to continue supporting our engagement activities. $500,000 for downtown commercial grants and the development commitment for the demolition of 115 MLK. $200,000 to support infrastructure improvements within the downtown CRA. These amendments do not introduce any new revenue sources, but they instead reallocate existing funds, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Is anyone here from the public today that desires to speak to this agenda? I'm seeing none. Is there any trustees' discussion? No discussion? Is there a motion? Wait. Before the motion, the resolution? Okay. A resolution of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Clearwater, Florida, adopting the first quarter amendments to the downtown CRA 2025-26 annual operating budget, providing an effective date. Okay. Now is there a motion? Hope to approve agenda item 4.2. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Unanimous. Thank you. Thank you. Agenda item 4.3. Downtown revitalization. And Jesus Nido, CRA Executive Director for the record. This item is your item to discuss any issues you would like to discuss about the downtown. Any questions for the director regarding this agenda item? Kismer Menino. Thank you, Mayor. I don't have any questions. I appreciate this continuing to be on our agenda because there are so many awesome and great things going on in the downtown district. I think there are going to be those moments when it's time to brag about them and tell the stories. The construction's going, cranes are all over the place, and we've all been praying and begging for these opportunities for a long time, and they're upon us. So I think we keep spreading that story. I know the downtown branding and the city branding opportunities are moving forward. We're excited about that, but I hope we all just keep continuing to share that hope and optimism of the direction of our downtown and our city. So thank you for this opportunity. I'd say I attended the Market Marie on Saturday. Great turnout. It seems like that keeps getting more and more momentum. Construction doesn't seem to be dissuading people from coming downtown for that great market. Parking lot was full. I'd wait for a parking spot to get in. So that continues to be a great draw for our downtown, too. So hopefully we can continue to help our businesses, particularly on the street and Cleveland Street, benefit from the activities and events. I know we had a concert Saturday night that seemed to go well, too, that we're continuing to draw more and more people to the park, and hopefully that'll filter out throughout the downtown and help folks succeed. If there's anything else on that, we'll move to item 4.4. Update on Placer AI product. So this is an exciting item for our department, the Community Redevelopment Agency Department. Today we're going to have Parks and Recreation, Mr. Chris Cook, give a presentation, a demonstration on the Placer.AI platform. But before he does that, I did want to give you a little bit of history on how this came about. So the initial purpose of pursuing the Placer.AI platform was to better equip the City Council, the Community Redevelopment Agency trustees, and the DDB Board of Directors to better understand the traffic that's coming into the downtown because of special events, to give you more reliable data on attendance instead of just word of mouth, basically reporting individuals that put together their events, then just kind of guesstimating what kind of attendance that's occurring in the downtown. And also, just because of the Placer.AI tool, it also provides other information and market data that's going to be very valuable for the CRA department, Parks and Recreation, Economic Development and Housing, and other departments. So we're pretty excited. So as far as how it occurred, initially when I first started, I was trying to get this product. I was pushing for it, pushing for it, but then I also found out that Parks and Recreation was also pushing for it. Of course, we got slapped out a little bit, said you have to go through the procurement process to make sure that you make it competitive for other type of entities that do the same type of work that Placer.AI does. So I did go through that process. There was multiple proposals that were submitted, and ultimately Placer.AI did end up getting awarded the contract that was signed by the city manager. So this all occurred basically in late 2025, and then in late 2025, then the agreement was thereafter signed. So just to give you a little bit of breakdown on the cost of it. So it is $50,000, and the cost is being shared by the CRA department, Parks and Recreation, and Economic Development and Housing, with the CRA contributing $25,000, Parks and Recreation, $20,000, and Economic Development and Housing, $5,000, I mean, for a total of $50,000. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you. And also, Placer.AI is providing intensive training for the city staff to learn how to use the product, and a lot of us are already learning how to use it and become pretty proficient in it. So Mr. Chris Cook will give you a demonstration. Good afternoon, everybody. Trustees, board members, Chris Cook, Parks and Recreation, senior manager. I think the idea here is to show you the usability and how simple it can be, so they found a Parks and Recreation person to come and demo some software for you. A couple of the things that I – maybe as you see some of the ways that we drive through here, any questions that you guys have or things that you find might help you in decision-making, make sure we get those answered for you because there's – we're still scratching the surface and having those intensive trainings that Director Jesus had mentioned. So we can find – if we don't know the information, we can certainly find out if it's capable, and they are adjusting and adapting the software all the time, too. So even if they don't do something, it doesn't mean we can't ask them to. So the first thing I'm going to show is, especially related to downtown CRA, they have a district that's been created, right? So it's already mapped, and the nice thing with this is we can just pull open a market report, and I'll just walk you through some of the details that it shows directly in here. And for the purposes of a few minutes in here, I'm just going to add one filter in here, which is a specific date. And the mayor had mentioned the market marie, so we'll pull open a market marie date, and we'll get some data here for the district on that specific date. So just give a moment, and it will pop up. Okay, so as you can see, it's just got some market population metrics. It has – we can show year over year. We can go farther back if we'd like. Okay, this specific model is going to show residents as well as workforce. Oh, we wanted to get a screen working. Oh, here we go. It's on now. Oh, okay. Sure. It's on now. It's January. Thank you. So it's got general population numbers. I think we've mentioned at the last about how the data is given. So this would be unique people we're looking at. So even as you see over the course of some hours that I'll show a little bit later, this would be a unique populace. So the same person is in pinging and showing up over the course of several hours if they're at an event or a location. So because I picked one date, we don't have another date to show it for. But it will show us some of the top visited places that people that picked up in this model on this date, locations that they've been to frequently, and then it gives kind of that hourly breakdown that I mentioned. So this was during our duck season, we'll call it. So we did see a higher traffic at different times of the day. But as you can see, Mark and Marie, there's clearly a bump in that, a tendency you can see between 10 and 2. As we keep going down a little bit further, there are demographics that are broken down, brings up education out of market visitors, income variables, demographic breakdowns, that they have some ways that they've packaged some different demographics together that I think is interesting and just gives us a good idea on who's attending which events. And part of our role in Parks and Recreation is to have events that speak to a wide audience. So this is a good tool that will help us make sure that we're providing entertainment and things for all sorts of different audiences. So what I'll show here real quick, too, is we'll just use that same date, but a little bit of a more drilled-in area. So what we can do is create kind of our own map. We can do this anywhere in the city. So if we want beach information, we want softball information like we just had, we can do that. If we want to drive up Cleveland Street, we can create our own map. And then now it's going to festival one I like for this model because it has out-of-town visitors specifically or out-of-area specifically in here. It'll take just a second to populate. So this would be in that hand-drawn map that I showed you specific to that. That's the fastest, sorry about that. But as you can see, we can drill through data pretty quickly and do custom reports. So, again, as we see, so this is showing 12,000 visitors on that date, on that Saturday, Market Marie date from January. The average time that they were there was 73 minutes. Again, it doesn't have any, we can do trending data. So this can help us look at what last year on this date without an event compared to this year. So that's where the visit trends would be helpful. And then here's just some additional info that we get from the going and drilling down into event details. We can see, you know, where people are coming from. And specifically with some of our tourism markets, I already did a quick one on the softball tournament from last weekend. You can really see the red pockets from where those teams are located, where those colleges are. So for an event like the Market Marie, not surprising that we're drawing so heavily from within the Clearwater market. The, again, it's got audience overviews that do a comparative to Florida. You can change that to nationwide, to different states. You can use it against the census information. But it's got good comparative details there as well as different ways to look at charts. The, this one I like from an event perspective because it tells you within 15 miles of other events that are taking place on the same date and time. So we can make sure as we're, we're planning things that we're, we're doing so keeping in mind what other, what else is going on in the community and how we rank against those. So on a Saturday in January, the, the Market Marie, that time that we put in was the number one festival in the area, according to this data. So, again, some of these things that we'll change, we'll update as a staff is some of the addresses that are in the Placer software are, are repetitive, right? So we have Winter's Dolphin Tale Adventure, it's an old listing. But we can clean up some of these locations so that, that just gives us even better data. This shows us where they're coming from before and going after. So a lot of people came from home and went home after for this event, and it's interesting to see on the data where they will come from and where they will go. And then some of the, the routes in which they have to get there. So traffic engineering can benefit from this. We can see where, where traffic flow is going, specifically we think of 4th of July and how we make, you know, traffic patterns with, with closures. This will be really helpful. I've already shared with some of the traffic engineering folks some of the software already. And then here's the, the data that we showed with numbers at, during, um, during that event specifically. We can dive in and see how many times individual users have visited either, uh, similar event, same event, different events. Um, and again, as Jesus had brought up at the beginning, we, we want to provide you when looking at funding, um, sources and making funding decisions, the information that helps you know the kind of impact that these events are having. So if there's any specific pieces of info, either that weren't covered here, uh, or things that, that we can have, uh, to present to you before an event comes for a funding request, or even in the post-event request, we'll be happy to, to get your information and field it and put it together. With that, any, any questions? I will do my best to answer questions. I'm not the expert on this, but I'd be happy to track. So, um, I'm on the website. I just went to placer.ai. Um, how do you bring up specific, like Clearwater? Do we have to log in for that, or? Yeah. So as a city, we have a number of logins that came with that, that investment that was made. And so we'll have, uh, as long as, is, you're an active, uh, user for the city, you have access to these kinds of reports that the general public wouldn't have. Okay. That's more mini-no, mini-no. You done? You done, sir? Yeah. Thank you. Um, thanks for the presentation. Uh, awesome. Um, moving us forward, uh, with technology, um, is vitally important, obviously, to us and our departments. Uh, capturing data is important. I think what makes us different as a municipality will be how we capitalize on that data we collect. Um, sometimes people can get lost in data. I think our, our team will be successful in navigating that. I just had two quick questions for you. Um, is there a monthly or yearly subscription that comes along with this software? To, to my knowledge, yes, it's, it's, we have a, a year-long agreement. It might be, be longer than that because of the procurement process we went through. Okay. But there is a, there is a subscription process that we went through. And that'll be broken down, CRA, Parks and Rec, and Housing and Economic Development, I assume, or? That's, that's who helped fund the project. But as I, I shared earlier, if, if traffic engineering is looking for information, I mean, we're happy to do this across all lines to, to make the city better. Absolutely. And then the last one, help me just better understand, define out-of-market visitors. Is that out of that district or the map you create or? Yeah, thank you. And just so I don't take up more of your time driving through this, um, there is, uh, some click downs. You can, uh, you can, uh, include residents. You can include, uh, businesses. Wow. Um, so that your, your numbers will, will grow if you want to see the overall market report and how many people are there. Um, but that specific one through festivals that I, I chose, I like that one because it is, uh, from people who live outside of a 15 mile, uh, or do not spend enough time where it shows that they work within that 15 mile. Very cool. Thank you so much. And thanks for demonstrating it. I, I want to say a couple of things. One is that, uh, for me, this information is really important. I know visit St. Pete Clearwater is using similar technology, maybe even placer, uh, and they are really learning a lot about how many out of town folks visit events that they sponsor. Some, they've been surprised that a heavier number of out of town residents have participated in an event, uh, than, than they thought. And then there's been others where, um, they've been sponsoring events that they've been told, hey, it draws folks from all over and it turns out their data isn't showing that at all. It's mainly local folks. So for the TDC, that's really important because the whole point of the bed tax is to draw a tourist in. And I think that helps us kind of define for us at CRA and the downtown development board, you know, you know, what, what can we use our funds to maybe supplement or to, you know, use for local, attract locals, uh, where maybe the bed tax money, the TDC money isn't going to be there for that event in the future. So that's very helpful. And I think the other thing I see too, is, you know, we've always talked about, you know, what role could the beach and, and visitors on the beach play in the revitalizing downtown? Are there things that we could offer to attract that large population that comes and goes? It was absolutely packed this past weekend. The beach was hard to find a room, couldn't get a dinner reservation, particularly on a, I don't know why on the 14th of February, you couldn't get a dinner reservation. Um, even if you're the mayor, but, um, I think that this, you know, could help us kind of learn more about what kinds of things are happening downtown that do attract those folks to come in off the beach. And maybe that's, you know, something we can use for further success. So for me, this is really, really helpful for all kinds of departments, not just parks and rec. And as you pointed out, police department has to control traffic and all these other departments that can really learn a lot from this. And, and provide better service to our citizens. So I think it's a good thing. Okay. Thank you. That's moved. I have a 5.1. And, hey, Susan Nino, CRA Executive Director for the record. Uh, going back to the placer.ai item, I did want to thank the IT department. They were critical in helping us select the proper platform to use for the foot trafficking data collection. That the platform does provide us, especially Dave Pearson and Mr. Dan Mayer. So enough of that, but, um, just wanted to put that out in the record. So this is the February, 2026 Director's Report. So the items we'll go through is, like every month, is the downtown activity and the North Greenwood CRA activity. We do want to start highlighting more and more, and we're starting to get help from other departments. And now that we do have Mr. Christopher Edwards here with Economic Development and Housing, the new director. So I'm not sure if I'm the first one to introduce you to him, but he's the man back there. But this department and other departments, they're going to be critical on planning and development to help us start identifying these new businesses that are coming down to the downtown. So we'll try to get better and better to report that to you every month. But this month, we do want to highlight Golfside Pizza and Subs. They're located in the corner of 500 Block, 530 Cleveland Street. They've been open now for a few weeks, and so far, just the feedback we get from them that the service that they've been provided by the city departments, it's spectacular. And they, so far, have been successful within those few weeks, and hopefully with us helping them and providing them any kind of resources they'll need, they'll remain successful there. So I know that the direction was that Ms. Councilwoman, we went to share. She would be basically the liaison, so Mr. Battle and myself and other staff members did meet with her. And we'll give you a quick little update here as far as what occurred so far up to date. So today, this is for the Clearwater, the Reimagine Clearwater Main Library Cultural Destination Initiative. The staff is actively targeting organizations, associations, and individuals that are in that industry, either directly or develop it or just provide data. And we have engaged over 147-plus organizations than some of the key partners that, is it not on your screens? I'm sorry. That's okay. It keeps shutting off. Not me, is it? They're trying to get it done. You're good. Just continue. Okay. You're okay. We'll do it afterwards. Don't worry. We are, this is a multi-department team that's starting to engage these organizations, museums, cultural institutions, and just catalytic individuals out there in the market that do this type of work to activate these type of libraries. So we have economic development. We have Amber. She's with some arts and culture. We have public communications. We have parks and recreation. Just multiple departments helping us make that contact. For instance, you know, we've interviewed the creative Pinellas with Edgar Hall, Clearwater Historical Society, Florida Rama, Great Explorations Children's Museum, Zero Empty Spaces, Heatherwick Studios out of London, Fairmont Properties locally here with Mr. Ruttenberg, Museums of Science and Innovation. We have industry up there, but it's actually Museum of Science and Innovation, MAPS Museum. And this is just a few of them. There's many, many more individuals that we've been interviewing. We've been traveling to them, you know, Mr. Economic Development and myself. We've been traveling to St. Pete, to Tampa, and anywhere that makes sense for us to travel fairly quickly. For instance, we just met with the CEO of Mosey, and we're also going to provide him a personal tour of the library to see he can come in and kind of take a look at what we've got and see if he can identify stakeholders and partners that he might be able to identify and bring to the table. So, again, we're doing direct interviews. We're exploring discussions with individuals in the industry. Again, that's with cultural institutions, arts and creative organizations, placemaking developers, regional stakeholders. We're also starting to see if we can do interviews. For instance, we had Councilwoman and the mayor do an interview with 82 Degrees, which is locally. We're also working with Economic Development and Housing to see if we can create some type of publication and industry publications. And, obviously, we have the regular social media that we're exploring, that we're posting items on. Just to give you a little bit of the timeline so far, you know, back and before the end of the calendar year, we did bring this item to you at the end of the year. And, basically, we did get the direction to move forward starting January 1st. So, we've been doing that since January 6th and through April 17th are a bit too fast there. So, in planning phase 1, you know, September 16th to December 1st, that's where we brought it to you to get that direction to move forward. Then, we also had the planning phase from December 1st, again, to January 6th on how to strategize internally and how to market this a little bit better and just kind of learn from lessons learned from the past. Then, January 6th to 2026 to August 17th, 2026, we've been doing pre-marketing. That's where we do this targeted outreach and interviews, monthly reportings, starting to schedule tours of the library and just implement any kind of stakeholder feedback. Then, the final phase would be towards the end of the year where we'll continue to do tours, but we'll also issue a call for development concepts for the library. Or, if there's some type of catalytic project that comes in before that that has an awesome proposal, then we can entertain that with city management and potentially bring that to you early or just advertise it early to open that window up. So, before I move on from that particular slide, I wanted to see if Mr. Brattle had any input because, you know, he was part of some of those interviews. I'm not putting you on the spot or anything, but we are getting a lot of feedback and we're scheduling these tours. So, we're continuing our monthly community outreach meetings at the last meeting. So, at the last meeting, we had the Denunzio group here at the library and they gave a presentation on the downtown project that they're working on. I think the feedback from the community was well received that they will bring in those individuals that are actually doing the construction to them so they can ask questions. So, our next meeting we do have is scheduled for February the 24th and that meeting we're going to have our city engineer and public works and other staff kind of start giving an update on the downtown construction and get their feedback. Right now, what we're doing is we do have public works staff and CRS staff. We're doing those one-on-one meetings with the downtown merchants in the community just to kind of get their feedback on certain construction activities or certain plans that public works may have. In addition, it's not on this particular slide, but we do have Mr. Ruttenberg. He's going to, with Fairmount Properties, he's agreed to come in and be one of the guest speakers. He's, I think, summertime, according to staff. Am I correct? So, he's pretty booked, but he's agreed to be able to do that in the summertime to come in and talk to the community about downtown activation and projects he's working on. So, this is for the Cleveland Street District Signers that we just had installed. This is part of the Cleveland Street Activation Project. So, we did have a few signs that are very nice. If you haven't seen them, you know, they're beautiful. They're located in the 400 and 500 block. It says Cleveland Street District. Then, you all see in the construction of the new pavers that are being installed there at the corner of the 500 block in front of the building where you're located. Then, for North Greenwood, we had a lot of activation as far as the grants. Right now, to date, since July of 2024, we have a total of 52. Of those 52, 18 have been completed. 15 are under construction. Then, six of them are under review. Then, 13, we're already engaged with those residents to see how we can help them. As far as the commercial grants, we still have four approved projects and two projects that have been completed for the North Greenwood area. Then, for the North Ward Elementary School, staff continues to advance forward to North Ward Elementary School redevelopment through council coordination, site engagement, and target outreach. I do want to thank Economic Development and Housing and Mr. Battle that have taken the lead on this particular project. But, because it is located within the North Greenwood Sierra area, we continue to give you updates here because it's just easier to do that. From time to time, it will come to you as city council work sessions like in the past. So, after reviewing the shrink wrap options, the orange material will be used to cover the structure. The first site tour was held on January 16th with positive interest. A project brochure and landing page have launched. Then, media release issued with public communications. Developer outreach is underway, focusing on historic preservation experience. And there is articles out there that you can read. In the CAC meeting, the next one we have scheduled is for March the 4th, Wednesday, 5.30 to 6.30 p.m. at the North Greenwood Recreation Center. We'll continue to introduce CAC members to the public, and we'll continue to hear that feedback from the public. And bring anything that bears from those CAC meetings, we'll bring it to you. That concludes the presentation, but I also had one more particular item, and I think I'm going to slide here. See it. So, Ms. Mayling-Termon and Ms. Gloria Campbell wanted me to share this. So, last night, they had a business showcase, basically for businesses that are potentially going to be selected to move into the mini-container village that they're working on. That occurred last night from 6.30 p.m. to about 9.30 p.m. at the Curtis Museum. So, I was part of that panel that heard those small businesses that have potential to move into the mini-container. So, it was pretty well attended meeting by the community, by the businesses, and some of those businesses that are going to move in, they have very interesting concepts. And this is a partnership. So, we have a partnership with St. Pete College. We have a partnership with Pinoza County Small Business Development Center, SCORE, and many other partners, financial institutions that are all at the table to help the mini-container project be successful. That concludes the presentation. Okay. Any questions for the director? Vice Mayor? Not so much questions, but actually commentary. So, I want to first thank our city manager, Jennifer, for allowing me to have that opportunity to have a brainstorming session with our assistant city manager, Mr. Battle, and Jesus. And I really appreciated the opportunity to have a good discussion, share our thoughts, as well as our research. And I brought with me, and I shared with you all some of the research that I had. And I was so pleased that you also shared the same results that I did, two of which were two locations that were international, which to me showed that we are pushing forward and we're thinking big. I think one of them was an AI company for Japan and the other one in London. So, I was very pleased about that. The second thing, which I found a little bit surprising and I'm grateful for, is the idea that Mr. Battle opened up my mind to different opportunities that we should look at. So, I always enjoy and put value to expanding our minds. So, I really wanted to thank you all for that. And I look forward to working together with you all. And like I offered at that meeting, I'm willing to be part of that process, if you guys wish. Thank you. That will move to item six, which is to adjourn the February 17th meeting of the City of Clearwater Community.