COMMISSION WORKSHOP - Sep 02, 2025

morning. Welcome to the September 2nd, 2025 City Commissioner Workshop. We're going to call the meeting to order. We're going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance by Jen, our City Attorney. Okay, we do not have any presentations today, so we're going to go to citizen input. Does anyone in the audience wish to speak on a topic that is not on the agenda? Okay, seeing no one, we're going to push through, and we're going to go to our workshop items, and the first one is 2025 City of the Needham Business Survey results, and I will turn it over to Nicole. Good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners. Nicole Delfino, Strategy and Sustainability Manager here with Dr. Neely, who is joining us by Zoom to present the 2025 Business Survey. So I'm going to take you through the first few slides here. We'll talk a little bit about logistics, our communication plan, our survey results, and then recommendations. I saw his name pop up. There he is. Of course, you all are familiar by now with Dr. Neely, a renowned survey researcher that will be presenting the results here today on the business survey. He also conducted both our employee survey and our citizen survey. As far as logistics goes, the survey was opened on April 21st. It stayed open until May 8th. It had about 30 seven questions and six demographic questions. Again, there was some duplicative language from years past so that we had a good comparison year over year. And then as far as our response rate goes, we did see quite an increase from 2023 to 25 up to 279 responses. And then for the communication plan, this was handled internally with staff. It included graphics like the graphic you see here and rack cards and flyers, a direct email campaign, not only through the Dunedin news, but also to our business tax receipt distribution list. We also had social media posting. And then I'm calling boots on the ground, we'll talk about in one moment. Here's just a look at some of our social media posting. It was also shared by the chamber as well as made the Dunedin beacon. As far as boots on the ground goes, those rack cards or those postcards that you saw, I engaged staff to walk around many areas of our city to directly hand out postcards to businesses. So we went along Broadway. The stars indicate all the plazas and the businesses that we hit all along 580, the Walmart Plaza, the Lake Haven Plaza, the Winn-Dixie Plaza, the Publix Plaza, along Patricia, all the areas across from the bowling alley and then adjacent the bowling alley, along Douglas, of course, the causeway, also along Bayshore, north of MLK. We went into the industrial areas there to get their feedback and then also Pinehurst. And then of course, we recruited Trevor Davis to hand them all out in downtown. So Dr. Neely, are you there? I am. Perfect. So I don't know if you want to give any introduction or you'll want me to just jump right into the first slide, which is on the key themes. So on cue, I'd like to give a couple of caveats as we get started, but if I could, this is a unique project for me. I always, always love the opportunity to work with Dunedin, appreciate how, how seriously you take your survey, your community and business surveys. This was a unique one for me. It's a little different than what we've done together in the past. And so it took a little time to adjust to the nature of the survey, the number of open-ended comments that are available. So you'll see some of how we address that in the report and hopefully should have a list of all the open-ended responses. But I want to note that, you know, with that 279 responses, it's a nice jump in growth. Nicole and her team did a lot of work to get that growth. But I want to, I want to make sure I emphasize that not all 279 respondents completed the entire survey. As a, from a research perspective, once you get into asking people for a lot of open-ended feedback, there are some ethical concerns then with cutting their responses if they don't answer every question. Because they did provide, you know, personal feedback in a way that goes beyond answering a couple multiple choices and then quitting. So there's varying levels of completeness to the responses. And I just want to emphasize that because you're going to see in the report at some places that instead of listing a percentage, I listed the number who gave an answer. I wanted to give you a kind of proportionate representation of the responses without, um, without implying that all 279 people intended to answer the question. I hope that makes sense. If there are questions on that, please let me know. Um, I also want to emphasize, I know we're going to talk about a bunch of numbers and sometimes these presentations, we throw a whole bunch of numbers at you and it can be dizzying. So what I'd like to do is tell you the big story up front, and then we can talk about some of the numbers that support that story. Um, the big story is that much like your citizen survey, your business community loves Dunedin. And what they love about Dunedin is that it's Dunedin, um, the uniqueness of the community, the charm, the walkability and charm of the downtown, the festivals and events, the sense of safety and belonging they have there. Those are the things that stand out. Um, I see a business community here that is not opposed to growth, but wary of the impacts that growth will have on those things that make Dunedin unique. And what I see them asking for a lot in the comments is, um, not to, not to not, not for the city, not to grow, but for the city to grow intentionally in a way that is geared toward maintaining those things that make Dunedin unique and special. Um, I think that I've done a lot of surveys for Gulf Coast communities. I think Dunedin stands out in the sense that it's not, not by any stretch that your, that your residents and your business community don't value the natural setting. They do, but it's less what defines the town and the town is more defined by the actual unique character and charm of the town, if that makes sense. Um, so there's a little more sense of community identity attached to being in Dunedin than there might be to some other communities on the Gulf Coast. And that really stands out as something that makes the town special, something that makes businesses want to be there. Residents want to be there. And so I think their concerns as they arise in the, in the coming slides really center around protecting and maintaining that. Um, so I just want to give you that kind of big picture takeaway. Um, I do want to emphasize that we got a nice, a nice mix of responses from different areas. Some of the responses I'll share with you real, especially when it comes to things like a parking garage really do vary based on the areas of where the respondents are. Um, we do have a nice mix of respondents based on the amount of time in business. That's pretty well dispersed across the sample. We have a nice mix of responses based on industry, but I want to put an asterisk beside that and say that in order to tell you if there is over or under representation of specific industries or kind of niche markets, I would need to know more about the breakdown of those in the community. Um, I don't know, for instance, what percentage of businesses there are service versus manufacturing, hospitality, et cetera. So in order to tell you for certain whether there was good representation there, I would need a little info on that. All right. And last caveat is it's an allergy morning here in Florida. So, um, forgive my, my, um, my voice and my pauses to sniffle. Any questions on that before I get started? Any questions on that? Or do we, shall we move on? I think we move on. Okay, perfect. Um, Nicole, I lost the visual of the power. Oh, there it is. Nevermind. Thank you. Um, so we can, we can just kind of gloss over this for the time being. Again, we have a ton of data here, ton of information. And so I tried to organize it around some questions that I thought the city wanted answered based on the conversations I had with staff. So this just kind of gives you a list of some of the questions we asked and then use the survey data to try to answer in the report. Um, but we can jump ahead and talk about some of these individually. Um, so why businesses choose Dunedin. I already kind of touched on this. Um, it's the, it's really boiling down to the things that make Dunedin unique and special, the image of the city, the low crime rate, um, the tourism, which it comes up over and over in the comments is being really attached to a lot of the events and unique kind of gatherings that the city puts on. It's less, you can see that as we kind of get up into some of the things that might be traditionally thought of as business drivers, your business community seems a little less concerned with some of those. Um, it's not that they don't care about a skilled workforce, but it doesn't register at the same rate as the unique attributes of the city. Same with taxation, same with, um, airports and things of that nature. Um, the, the synergistic business community, again, less than, or just about 50% are saying that that's a big factor. So what's bringing businesses to, to Dunedin again is Dunedin. That doesn't mean there aren't some levers you can pull here and there to improve the community. Um, the, I should say to, to improve the economic environment, the business environment, but it's not what businesses are kind of clamoring for, if that makes sense. The, if we jump ahead, um, the next slide is kind of asking the same thing, but in a different way. Like what is it, what is, what is it that you Dunedin uniquely offers your business that you can't get elsewhere? And you see all those same kind of ideas at the top safety, small town field, um, the charming walkable downtown. Let's, let's be fair and note that there's a lot of positives about the walkability of downtown and the, the navigability of downtown. Um, we do see concerns raised in other areas outside of the downtown corridor about walkability and the safety of getting around, you know, without an automobile necessarily. So that is something that stands out, um, as one of those distinctions, it really depends on where you are. Um, but when it comes to the downtown area in particular, that those are the things that really stand out. We see tourism in the Pinellas trail at the, you know, near the top of that list, just things that make Dunedin unique business synergy, partnerships, um, chamber of commerce, location in a metropolitan area, the things that often drive businesses in, in some communities, they're standing out less in Dunedin than the things that make, again, make Dunedin, it's, you know, uniquely itself. And, um, again, please interrupt me if you have any questions as I'm going, but otherwise we can, we can jump ahead. I think the next couple of slides really just kind of reinforce a lot of what we talked about previously with your citizen survey, excellent perceptions of the community. Um, those drop a little bit when it turns to things like new development. Um, but the overall view of the community, the overall image, the quality of life, the feeling of safety, these are all very high. Now, if you look at these and say, yes, but they're lower than previous years, that is true in a couple of cases, but I want to emphasize that that's true all up and down the Gulf coast right now, where those numbers have taken a bit of a hit after we literally took a couple of hits in the last few years from storms, that there's nothing there that's inconsistent with what we've seen in other communities. This is not indicative of a drop in perception necessarily as it is of what residents and businesses are, you know, experiencing due to getting back to normal after a couple of major storms. So I wouldn't read too heavily into that, but I would pay close attention to it next time, um, to make sure that it, it kind of levels back out to where it had been in prior years. Any questions on that? Does that make sense? Any questions? I can keep going. Okay. Um, city attributes and city services, as with the, um, as with the resident survey, we see similar patterns. Um, we have a lot of satisfaction with business opportunities, with, um, availability of quality, affordable housing. In retrospect, after going through this survey, I think that's a, um, a bit of a problematic question. I'm going to recommend asking that differently in the future. Quality and affordable could be interpreted differently by different residents. So I think that there's, um, a conversation to be had about trying to clean up that language in future surveys. And I just, I just want to add really quickly, obviously this graph looks a little different than the, than prior ones. We don't have, uh, we didn't ask all of the same questions. And so we did kind of modify some of those questions, which is why in some cases we don't have a comparison to show. So it's just reflecting this year's data. Great. And I'm assuming we're going to listen to the whole presentation and ask questions at the end. So if somebody really has a burning question, I'm going to slide jump in, but other than that. Okay. Go ahead, Dr. Nellie. Okay. You do see a bit of a dip in walkability. I'm going to, I'm going to speculate that that can be attributed to the efforts of the city staff to get out to some of the, um, more outlying areas outside of downtown. And again, that's come up a few times where great walkability ratings for downtown businesses, not so much for some in the other corridors makes a lot of sense. Um, the city can, can do with that information, what it sees fit in terms of planning for those areas. But, uh, there was a, um, there was an increase or a decrease in walkability ratings. There was a dramatic improvement in traffic ratings. Again, same dynamic. I think you're getting outside of the downtown area a little bit where there might be a little less congestion, getting some more responses from those areas. And that's causing a little, you know, some shifts in those data. Um, I wouldn't argue that you're, that you're, you know, traffic has gotten 50% better than it was two years ago. If anything, it's probably, you know, due to growth gotten more challenging, but I think you're getting more businesses from outside of the downtown corridor responding due to the staff's efforts, which is a great thing, but you want to kind of read those in that context. The, um, the business opportunities jump, I have no explanation for you on. Um, and that's just an honest assessment of someone who doesn't live or run a business in the community. Um, this could be a jump due to that. This could be due in part to that kind of expanded base of respondents, but it's something that the city might have a little bit more information on, um, or a little better understanding of why we see such a big jump in that response in terms of the, um, dissatisfaction that we see. And you can see these kinds of graphics that I put into the report. Um, but I, um, again, have provided all the responses to the city. So hopefully you, we can go through those and, and read those at your leisure, um, to, to kind of get a better grasp of what these are addressing. Um, affordable housing. This is again, where we got a little confusing because we see some really positive ratings on housing in the multiple choice question, but then it keeps popping up in about a third of the comments as an area of concern. And so I think that we may have created a little confusion with that language around affordable and quality housing and should separate that language and maybe even try to better understand in the future, in the open-ended comments, what is, uh, what is raising concerns for, for people. But I think that this really, the comments boiled down to affordability and the rising costs. This has obviously been going on all over Florida, um, especially in communities that are desirable and growing. Um, same with traffic and construction. And again, these walkability comments are almost all coming from outside of the downtown corridor. That's about one in five comments. And they're, they're almost all coming from businesses outside of the downtown corridor. So, um, those stand out as some of the major areas of dissatisfaction, um, city services, it's, you know, it's kind of a, the same story we tell over and over, um, poor code enforcement, uh, poor, poor permitting. Um, they're always obviously going to be on the receiving end of criticisms. Um, this is common across all local governments, um, especially in the wake of two major hurricanes. And that showed up in the comments a lot as well. We'll talk, I think, in one of the later slides about hurricanes. Um, but outside of that, your core services received very positive ratings from businesses as they did from residents as well. No areas that there's nothing here that stands out as a contradiction to what we see in the resident survey. Obviously, businesses interact more with some of the business facing offices. Um, so you might get some more comments on those throughout the survey, but, um, this is, this is pretty, pretty standard, pretty consistent with what we see in other communities and in terms of the pattern and in terms of the high ratings, um, for fire, police, public works, and so forth. Um, that's consistent with your resident survey. Business support though, of course, is not asked about in the resident survey. This is a little bit of a different set of data for you. Um, the things that really stand out as positive are things related to aesthetic and cleanliness and that sense of appeal and safety that we talked about. Um, things that struggle are things related to infrastructure, road conditions, traffic, um, parking, um, maybe not in this one, but some of the other, um, spaces parking stands out as an area of concern. So again, I think this lends itself nicely to the story that we kind of told up front. Um, residents are really happy with the things that make Dunedin unique. They're a little concerned about the challenges that are coming with growth. And that kind of sticks out in some of the, um, responses that we're seeing here. There are some comments throughout that place an emphasis on retaining businesses. Um, but that, uh, and that has actually dropped a little bit in satisfaction from prior years. But again, I think in part, that's going to be influenced by hurricane related issues. And in part that's influenced by the rising costs of living associated with the Gulf coast in general, in Dunedin in specific. So, um, moving ahead though, to the things that would be most beneficial, not that are, we talked about the things that bring companies here that are unique benefits to them. But the thing that would be most beneficial, again, we see that concern about retaining businesses over, um, you know, over and above concerns about attracting new businesses. When we talked about attracting tourists to the city, um, a lot of the comments there and the question wording was geared toward the off season. And a lot of that involved, again, just kind of an emphasis on the events and the festivals and the unique kind of gatherings that Dunedin, um, brings, increasing those or amplifying, um, communication around those to attract more people stood out. Um, increasing parking and reducing traffic were kind of around in the middle of the pack there. Um, again, these were often very specific to where they were responding from. If they were responding from downtown, they were more likely to say traffic and parking. If they weren't then that they were, um, they were more likely to lean into other things. If you look at the top line, 109 respondents identifying, retaining existing businesses. And then you look down to the bottom of the middle, um, 47 saying attracting new businesses. So more than twice as many responses, emphasizing that idea of maintain what makes Dunedin, Dunedin, maintain what makes it unique. It doesn't mean they're opposed to growth, but they want to see the, they want to see growth that prioritizes maintaining what makes the city special. Um, and I think that's another place where that stands out in the responses. If we look at the top concerns that, um, regarding infrastructure, no surprise again, parking shortages and congestion. I know the marina issue, I believe is tied to one of the recent storms, flooding and drainage also tied to recent storms. So a lot of the things we would expect to see again, I'm, I sound like I'm beating a drum here, but there is some big difference in where those parking and traffic congestion responses are coming from geographically. Um, the storm related concerns were a little more broadly dispersed. And, um, I think that we're going to see later that most businesses say, yeah, we're, we're well and recovered and moved on from, from Helene and Milton. But when I look at the comments in other places, I think there's still some, there's still some trauma there for lack of a better word, um, as well as, as would be expected with storms of that nature. Um, there's still some kind of lingering feeling of the impacts, even among businesses that say, yeah, we've, we've recovered and moved on. And so that shows itself in a lot of the responses in some places. Um, again, I know it can be dizzy and dumping all this data on you. So, um, just, uh, we can circle back to anything we need to in terms of attracting customers. I mentioned this earlier, um, expanding events and festivals, marketing those better, adding some entertainment activities, maybe not the scale of a full on festival, but some things that are bringing people to the downtown corridor. Um, those were all kind of the things that stood out. I think that would all be pretty much what you would expect for responses to that question. I don't think there are any surprises there transportation impacts. This was a very interesting, um, topic because there were some things that a decent number of respondents said they have a positive impact. The Pinellas trail, golf carts, um, bike racks, things of that nature. People reported a lot of positive impacts. We don't have historical data on the freebie loop question. Um, so we're kind of starting at a baseline there, but the key I want to emphasize is that the most common other responses were not negative. They were no impact. That tells me either that those businesses are outside of the radius where they would be positively impacted by those things or they're unaware of them. And I do think if we look back to the resident survey, we did see some opportunities to raise awareness around some of these, especially some of the newer, um, kind of more novel and unique communication or communication transportation options. And so I would just, I would just make note of that, that it might be worth digging in a little more to understanding if those no impacts mean we're too far to be impacted by them, in which case maybe there's a conversation to have about expanding radius, or does it mean we're not familiar with these? So we really can't comment. Um, I think that's important information to know. So I'll just put a, put a note there for kind of going forward to dig into that a little further. And then there's a question that I know has been of, of great importance to the community. And that's the question of the parking garage. So I want to make sure I, I address this clearly. Um, about 50% of respondents said that the parking garage has, would have a positive impact on their business. So about half of your respondents say it would have a positive impact, but I don't want to give you the impression that this is a quote unquote divided issue in the community. The plurality of the remaining responses overwhelmingly was that it would have no impact. Very small number, only about one in 20 said that it would have a negative impact. Um, I'm not sure necessarily the rationale for that, um, on their parts. You might need to dig into that a little bit more with some focused discussions in the community about who it would negatively impact and why and how, um, to make sure, you know, negative impacts are mitigated if the city chooses to go forward with that plan. But I wanted to make sure I clarify that when we look at the responses, the overwhelming majority of downtown businesses say positive impact. The majority, large majority of businesses outside of Dunedin, or outside of downtown say no impact. So I want to make sure to just, and I'm sure intuitively you kind of expected that, but I wanted to make sure to clarify that. Sometimes we see that 50% number and we think there's a divided, a divide on the issue. It's less a divide between for and against and more a divide between positive or no impact. Um, and again, we can circle back if you have questions on that. And then pace of development, important question that we ask pretty much every community on the Gulf coast at this point. And, um, you have a little bit of a shift. It's a shift toward a slight increase in people saying too quickly developing too quickly and a decrease in people saying developing at a good pace. So you do have some, some concerns emerging there a little louder than they were in prior years about the pace of development. Again, this is, this is the epidemic issue in Florida right now, every community dealing with it. What stands out uniquely about yours is that people are less concerned about just traffic and, and, and things of that nature and more concerned about whether and how growth is impacting the identity of the community that stands out much more so in Dunedin than I've seen in other, um, communities. And then we did ask about the challenges that come with that growth and there's nothing surprising. It affects traffic, it affects parking, it affects the affordability of housing. Um, it affects that sense of community, um, green space, just all the things that we hear kind of on repeat as concerns, you know, the great challenge is managing growth in a state and a region that people are flocking to because it has so much to offer and yet not losing what it has to offer as that growth comes. Um, so nothing surprising, nothing unique or unexpected in those responses. So again, that is just a whole lot of data and I, um, I know that it can feel a little overwhelming. I don't, I, hopefully everyone's had a chance to kind of read through and process some of the information already. So my, um, my, my door is open electronically via email or phone anytime to answer questions if you need to digest some of this a little more. But I'm sure there are some today as well. So I think I'll, I'll pause at that point and just see what questions you have and how I can help clarify any of the data points. Okay, I'm going to start with Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you very much, Dr. Neely. That was a wonderful presentation. Uh, some of my questions are, or some of the differences that I see here, and you may gave a good clarification on a lot of it, but there's, there seems to me a little bit of contradiction in the, in the surveys. And I wonder if it's just a matter of a breakdown of who completed the survey. Is there a way within taking the survey that in the answers, the way they're presented, that it can be identified? How old are these businesses or quadrants? I know that we did that nice little map and show the stars where all the plazas were and everything, but kind of a deep dive into the breakdown of per question, where was the, where did the cluster of answers come from? Since we've acknowledged there are differences, whether it's downtown or whether it was in one of our periphery businesses, whether it's parking and whether or not, it's no impact or a positive impact. And I think knowing the answers on where they're coming from would be great. And it's a matter of, are we losing our charm? We're concerned about our charm, that small town community feel? Where are those responses coming from? Are they coming from some of our older businesses that are well-established that understand the connectivity with the community and that small town charm? And you don't get those same responses from the new businesses coming in that might not care so much about the small time charm or small town feel. It's more about an opportunity, an economic opportunity for them. Is there a way to distinguish that so we can actually see a shift in responses as new businesses come in? We tend to look at what we call cross tabs, how things differ across different groups of respondents. We tend to focus on that when an issue appears to be kind of divided. When there's a lot of consensus on an issue with, you know, there is a lot of consensus on the, what makes Dunedin appealing being that small town charm, that walkability, that uniqueness. We don't dig into that very deeply. I try not to load the report up with a lot of cross tabs because it would make it just unbearably long and difficult to navigate. But I can always dig into those for you. If someone could kind of give me a list of the specific questions you would want to have checked against those things, I can create, I think the easiest way is just I can create some cross tabs in Excel and send those to you to show you where those differences lie. If I could just ask for a list of the specific issues that you wanted to see, how they differed by age of business, I could easily pull those up for you. Kareem Abdul- Yeah, and we had looked at that with Dr. Neely on some of the questions, and that's part of the reason of asking those demographic questions, right? How long have you been in business? How many employees? You know, location, all of that. So, any of the questions can be broken down by those demographic, you know, responses. But it would be difficult to do the entire survey in that matter. But certainly, you know, looking at those specifics, I've written down, you know, the loss of small town, you know, try to understand that better. But if there's any other ones, you can always let me know. Kareem Abdul- Okay. Okay. Thank you. And also, I know that access to airports is why businesses choose Dunedin was small in the responses, but the difference from prior years was a huge gain. And so, I'm curious as to your opinion on how does that increase in the desire, regardless of how small, that increase in accessibility to the airport play into small town charm, sense of community? Do they care where their customers are coming from? Do they want better access to airports? Kareem Abdul- So, I don't see anything in the comments that are just really hammering home the idea that they're eager for better access to airports. This could be one of two things that we see the increase from. I mean, you're going to have downtown businesses in particular, the more tourist-oriented businesses who say, well, yeah, having airports is critical because it brings us customers, brings us tourists. And then you also could, because we, I think, expanded the responses coming from outside the downtown corridor, there you could be getting into some more businesses that might be bringing people in for business purposes. Those are very different, obviously very different types of need. One is bring us customers, another is facilitate us in doing business. And so I think that there's two different kinds of avenues there. We can dig into how those differ by industry and by location, um, location of the business to try to, to ferret out some more of the details there, if that makes sense. It does. It does. It does. Um, and also they, I, I like the idea that our businesses are very concerned, uh, about affordable housing. Uh, but my question is, is from a business perspective, why do they care? How, how, how does their response to caring about affordable housing relate to their business? I mean, is it tied to that, that charm sense of community? Or is there something financially beneficial to affordable housing? I'm trying to understand the economic argument historically would be that you need your workforce to be able to afford to live within the, in the community within reach of your business. Um, and so if they can't attract employees because they're the employees they would hire can't afford to live there, um, and then they're arriving later, they're dealing with traffic or whatever, that would be historically be the economic argument for that. Um, you do have a lot of sole proprietors in your responses too. And so I think some of it might just be like, can I still afford the housing I want here where I run a business? Um, so it's probably a mix of both of those. Okay. I like your response to that question. Thank you very much. Uh, I didn't write down. Oh, if y'all can tell me where there is in the slide, because here's my question. Uh, the top responses, uh, differ on where they get their, their customers, airport slash tourism versus attitude of local government. Do you know where that is on what slide? I'm sorry. I was writing as I was listening. Eleven. Um, well, I think that's early on in the results. If we can go back to that. I'm on why businesses choose Dunedin. I'm sorry. Oh, there's okay. Right. Yeah. But I don't have pages. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Okay. I'm there now. Uh, yeah, I'm just trying to get an idea of expectation on the businesses on the role local government has. What, what's that relationship look like? Oh, that's a little bit tough for me to answer from the survey data to be honest. Um, we didn't ask anything in the survey that kind of tries to identify what their unique expectations are or what their view on the role of government in the local economy is. So I don't know that I could speak to what respondents are really thinking on that topic. Um, it's certainly something that can be dug into in a later, in a later survey. Um, it would probably need to be a more open-ended question. Um, and to be quite blunt, um, you know, as a political scientist by trade, um, the answers will almost always be contradictory. Okay. And thank you for that answer because it allowed me to also, while listening to you, look at that slide and kind of reminded me of what I was, yeah, there seemed to be, while it was still high, the attitude toward local government towards business, which I'm happy to see, I do see a decrease from prior years. And I'm trying to correlate that decrease in attitude of local government with an increase in access to airports. And, and so, and it goes back to, again, that small town charm, that community, and that strong connection between business and their local government. And I'm wondering if we're starting to see a separation of that relationship. I don't think I could, I could argue that there, that you're seeing that from this one survey. I think you would, you would want to keep a close eye on it. You would maybe want to do some, some focused outreach in the community to make sure, um, that you're understanding that. But I don't think this one survey could prove that you're seeing a fracture in that relationship. Okay. Very good. And I've got some other questions, but I'll let others go. Um, I, Mayor, are we going to have an opportunity for comments at the end as well? Yes, we will. Okay. We will. Thank you. Then that is all. Thank you, Dr. Inley, very much. Thank you. Commissioner Sandberg. Thank you, Mayor. Nicole, was the, was any of this shared with the BRC, the CRA, any of the Dunedin committees or boards? Um, I believe I had it on the BRC in January as a, as a reminder that it would be going out. I'm certainly, again, shared it with the chamber. I know they posted on their own social media. We, I mean, we were blasting it, you know, everywhere that we could to kind of get the, get the responses up. Okay. We'll take, I think that if I make, Commissioner, Mayor, um, we really wanted to, to trot it out in front of all of you first, get your comments, and then we'll create an action plan thereafter. Okay. And I think going back to what, um, Vice Mayor had, had a great question, um, you know, about kind of the overall demographics of some of our business. Is there anything that we could share maybe from the chamber, you know, who our larger employers are, certain types of businesses, manufacturing, just to get a little more cross section of what we really, I mean, you can drive around town and get an idea. Is there anything that we could dig a little deeper on that? I thought that was a good idea. We should be able to get that, um, with economic development as far as how our business breakdown is. Okay. 279 were returned. How many were sent? It was not a, it was not a direct, you know, mail survey as far as sent in the mail. Um, it was sent via email to over 800, like I said, um, 800 business tax receipts. So all those active, um, business tax receipt businesses, um, in the city, it went out in our Dunedin newsletter, which has 13,000 subscribers. Okay. Um, and then again, the other methods, the social media posting, the direct outreach, that sort of thing. And do we retain an email address for all the local businesses? Uh, community development does as far as their business tax receipt, um, uh, you know, account setup goes. So it came from a city of, would have come from a city of Dunedin email or could this, some of this be spam and deleted as a solicitation? I, it certainly, it certainly could. I suppose it depends on what, how people set it up, but it came, yes, it did come from a city of Dunedin email. Okay. Can we go to page eight that you talked about boots on ground? I mean, I recognize where those stars are. Um, it seems like, you know, a lot of work being done to do it. You know, so, so if we look at the, looks like the Publix Plaza, the Winn Dixie, or does someone knock on the, on the, the doors or how was, how was the engagement done? Yes, sir. That would be me and my staff. We, we walked into every business, said, hello, my name is, and we have a business survey. We would love for you to take it. Here's this postcard. Just click on the QR code. Um, and that's, you know, that's kind of how we wanted to, we wanted to, we want to reach folks where they're at. If you're not signed up for the newsletter, if you're not on social media, if you're not, you know, seeing it any other way, this was just a way to kind of increase that engagement. And again, really trying, I think in previous surveys, one of the concerns was that we were getting, you know, we were getting decent response levels, but the concern was that they were mostly from downtown. Okay. Very engaged downtown, you know, obviously wants to partake in the, in the survey responses, but really trying to reach those other corridors and reach a variety of businesses. So, you know, again, those industrial areas. And I appreciate you going door to door. I mean, that, that says a lot about you and your staff. Yeah. Um, can we jump to, let's jump to page 11, an attitude issue we were just talking about. Attitude of local government. Yeah. I mean, sitting up here, it's not real. You know, I hate to see it decrease, but yet at the same time, if you go back and add the tourism, overall image and low crime, those are three very strong areas. And then it gets attitude of the government and it drops down. I, I'm not really sure what to think of that, those bottom four entries. If you got any, anything you can add or highlight, I will defer to Dr. Neely, any feedback on those areas. So I want to, I want to emphasize that one of the things we're doing with this, a survey like this is we're trying to identify areas of strength and weakness. We're not necessarily collecting the level of detail that would be needed to fully understand those until we identify an area of, weakness and then drill down in it in a follow up. And so I think that the, the, um, first of all, the number, I wouldn't consider the number bad. Um, but I would, I think that if you want to understand more, then that would require a breakout in the next survey of three or four questions to kind of say, okay, what is it about the attitude of local government toward business? You know, now, and look, there's a lot of possible explanations for this. And I, I want to avoid, I want to emphasize that they're all speculative until we ask further. Um, you could see a drop in this because honestly, there's just a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of anti-government sentiment right now in the world. Um, and that could, that can trickle into survey responses. Okay. Um, you also just came off of a couple of major storms and let's just be honest, that raises the temperature. People get frustrated, particularly with, you know, permitting processes and, um, inspections and the pace at which things come back online. And so you could just have a little residual kind of, I mean, the overall assessment of the, of the community is that you guys have done a good job of, you know, promoting recovery. There are some comments in there that kind of, um, that kind of address, you know, Oh, our, our area didn't get as quick as other areas. Um, that's, that's going to be common following the storm. But like, there are a lot of possible explanations for, for a little dip there. Um, my, my advice would be to ask the question again in the next survey and add two or three followups to try to better understand if there are specific areas where they feel like the attitude of government toward business is, is lacking or is, is strong or whatever it might be. Um, but yeah, I, I want to emphasize that anything we can kind of say about that one data point is kind of speculating at this point. Okay. I just had two more. If we go to page 14, that was one that had walkability at roughly 30%. Am I reading that right? And 70% are not satisfied with our walkability? Um, that was open ended comments, right? No, this is, um, looking at, this is again, just looking at the very satisfied. So the, the range, the range, you know, I don't have the range in front of me, but you know, very satisfied, satisfied, and then so on and so forth. I think in years past, we had combined, uh, we had, you know, looked at the very satisfied combined with the satisfied and there was concerns over really understanding that group that is very satisfied. And so that's just looking at that one, you know, cross section, the report kind of breaks it down across the board. Um, so you can have a better understanding of, of it. All right. My last one is page 16. This is more of a comment than a question. Um, it's very encouraging that those, um, those bottom four utilities and public works says a lot for our city staff and then Dunedin fire rescue. And then these gentlemen sitting right here, that's very encouraging, uh, you know, as a city that people have noticed, you know, take a notice of that. So proud of you guys. And thank you for what you do. That's all I had, Mayor. Mr. Walker. Thank you, Mayor. Um, yeah, so I want to drill in a little bit more into the discussion we've started on demographics. Um, and actually, I need to characterize this a little bit, um, expand this a little bit more. Um, is what, you know, the chart that showed, um, the stars, can you go to that? I, I think it's good. On page four of the actual report, um, it breaks out the area of the city by percentages that was certain that, uh, responded to the survey. Um, how, how does this compare to years past? Have we tracked this, that particular metric before? Uh, Nicole, I can't really answer that. Yep. Um, I, I, I got you. Uh, yes, we, we have tracked it. We asked very, you know, similar questions as far as, uh, years in business, the type of business, um, how many employees that business has. So all of those sorts of questions, uh, we have those corridor, you know, where is your business, Patricia, uh, Causeway, all of those were, were also included in years past surveys. Would you say that, okay, let's just like, for instance, uh, the 580 corridor, um, would that 18.4% be higher, lower, or about the same? I would have to double check that and get back to you. My feeling is likely that it's probably higher this survey. Uh, we just didn't have the level of engagement. This, you know, this, this time I, you know, always room for improvement every, every time I do something. So, uh, this time I really, again, wanted to reach out into those areas and, and drive some, some engagement. Yeah, I, I think that's really important. And I'd say specifically for this survey, because I, my perception is, is that as I look at some of the, the just, um, differences between what have, what, and continue to be hot button issues for the city, uh, parking, walkability, traffic. Um, can we go to 14 real quick? Yeah. So if you take a look, um, you know, parking availability, and it would indicate that we have a very high satisfaction with parking availability. And that is contrary to what, you know, has been our experience in years past. Um, I, I wonder, and this, the question on this is, is your thoughts on this, but I'm, I'm, I'm wondering if that data is reflecting more of a response from the downtown, I'm sorry, from the corridors. Um, and we can certainly look at that and, and look at it based on demographics and understand how the percentage of satisfaction changes removing those businesses outside of downtown and only looking at, uh, downtown for instance. Okay. Yeah. We did look at that a little bit, Nicole. So this is one of the items that, um, Nicole and Jennifer and I pulled up and kind of talked through and, um, there is a big difference. It is the higher parking satisfaction is coming from outside of downtown. And the fact that you have more respondents from outside of downtown this time is one of the reasons you see such a bump in parking availability. Yeah. Well, that's, and I'm, I'm glad that that level of analysis went into this because, um, you know, if there were, you know, the hot button issues that we continuously are getting back from our citizen survey and our business has been parking is a major problem. And I look at this and I'm thinking, hmm, how, you know, so I guess it's, it's, it's, it's all in the interpretation of this. And so the other things on that list would include, uh, the walkability and traffic metric, uh, as well. And, you know, I think that in the, the, I, I'd have to go back and look and I don't, I can't recall if it was a citizen survey or the last business survey, I believe the citizen survey, but we asked those, you know, questions. When is parking a problem? And overwhelmingly it's, you know, in the evenings on the weekends. Um, so we kind of drilled down, you know, again, taking the opportunity to learn something, you know, and then being able to ask some deeper questions in the next, you know, the next round, so to speak. Okay. Now, now, what is the, you know, what is the actual issue and where, and where is it, um, is kind of what we're trying to be able to provide you all with that information. Okay. So, Nicole, may I ask a question? Actually, I know that I'm like this, I'm going backwards here. I'm not supposed to ask the questions, but this would be helpful for me for helping you. Um, we have in the area of the city, um, questions, we have downtown Main Street, downtown off of Main Street, and then a handful of others, the causeway, the 580 corridor, um, Alt 19. So, for comparison purposes, if I combined the outside of downtown completely items into basically an outside of downtown category, would you want that compared with downtown as a whole, or would you want that compared against the, with the two downtown sections broken out? You'll understand the parking and traffic dynamics a little better than me. So, when I give you some comparisons, should I keep downtown Main Street and off Main Street separate? Yes, to some extent, because I think if you're answering the, if the business is answering the survey as on Main Street, then we're talking about areas, you know, on Broadway and on, you know, off of Skinner that are Main Street adjacent, but don't necessarily, you know, qualify as being Main Street, but obviously, again, more of the downtown core is, uh, is how that would be separated. So, would it then be helpful for you if I did comparisons of downtown Main Street, downtown off Main Street, and basically everything else as a, as a third category? Yes. Okay. Thank you. That helps. And if I may, Mayor. Rob, that, that was my, my intent when I was asking for quadrants, to be able to break that out and get a better understanding. Yeah. No, I, I, that would be very helpful. I mean, you know, obviously, you know, we, we need to approach this holistically, because at the end of the day, collectively, we are Dunedin. And, uh, but I, I think it's important to understand the, to break some of those issues out. Um, the next question I had, the one that, uh, concerned me, and I'm wondering if this is also being driven by the, the, the same trend is, is the, um, reduction or the, the decrease in, uh, perception of the partnership with the city. Um, any thoughts on that? I, I, I will, again, I'll defer to Dr. Neely. I do want to point out, I'm not sure what, what slide that was on, um, that, you know, the, the decrease is, is fairly minor. I mean, I, it, I, I know the bar is showing it, but we're talking about between, about a 5% change. Um, so it's not, we're not dropping or gaining where in other areas you can see, you know, a 10 or 15% change. Um, we're talking about a 5% change. And I think what Dr. Neely had talked about as far as in response to Commissioner Sandberg and as, you know, speculative, uh, as to why that is the case, I think we'd have to ask additional questions. No, I, thank you, Nicole. I, I love, I love the concern though. This is why I love working with Dunedin because it's immediately, you know, great. What's going on there? How can we do better? Um, that's what the data should be used for, but I would offer the same caution of, of why, um, or anything we say could be speculative, speculative at this point, why there may or may not be a change there would require a couple of additional questions next time. Um, you can always, you can always try a pop-up survey. You can always try a, you know, a 10 question, you know, kind of blasted out through the same channels, just a real quick three minute survey to try to gather some deeper information on that. You can say, Hey, we did this survey. We noticed this trend. We just want to follow up. Um, I mean, the truth is that when you do that, you, you want to do something like that sparingly because you don't want to create survey fatigue among your, your business community. Um, you know, I think I've mentioned this before. I personally receive probably five requests to take surveys a week from, you know, different organizations and business or academia or whatever it is. And most of them go straight into the, into the delete folder, especially if they are someone who emails all the time. So you don't want to get into that. You don't want to over survey your, your business community, but it might not be the worst idea. If it's an area of concern that you want to better understand to just, you know, craft a 10 question pop up, you know, survey on, um, that specific issue of relations between government and the business community, look for areas of strength, weakness, and opportunity. Um, so it's just, just a thought of something you might consider doing. Um, it's, it's, uh, I would say wait six months from the last time you surveyed them, at least before doing that though. Yeah. Um, last, uh, last question. Um, and I, I, can we go to the transportation impact chart? Yeah. Um, yeah, this one, this one also is at least kind of somewhat counterintuitive. Um, because I look, you know, I look at what's ranking the highest and golf carts being one of those and the trail being another one. Um, you know, those are predominantly features or attributes within the downtown core for the most part. We have businesses long trail, but you know, you can't, you can't get to the corridor businesses by golf cart unless your golf cart is street legal. Um, most of those downtown core businesses are not on the trail. Um, so anyway, I guess, guess the point is, and subject to your thoughts is, um, well, okay, the question would be is, is this, this has also got to get included in that data as well. Um, you know, and then the other thing is, and I, since I sit on the PSTA board, I need to understand why the PSTA bus services aren't more predominantly, impactful here. Um, anyway, that's, that's, that's all the questions I have. Okay. Um, if I, if I could offer just a reminder too, because again, we always try to put these on the charts, but then we throw so much data at you that it can be a little, a little dizzying. So if you notice, uh, um, this says transportation impacts, colon, very positive. That is the percentage of people who said these things have a very positive impact on their business. Um, some might have given a lesser, but not negative response. Um, but again, the predominant, the, the response that we predominantly received other than very positive was no impact. Um, it's not necessarily saying it's negative. It's just saying it doesn't affect me. So we have about 40 some percent saying very positive for the, uh, or just under 40% saying very positive for the Pinellas trail and golf carts. And 46% of your responses come from downtown. So that's kind of lining up with, with that breakdown again of downtown versus non-town, downtown businesses, giving those answers. Um, so I don't know if that's helpful clarification, but, uh, if we, uh, if you add any of those you want to the, to an email, I can, I can get those, uh, cross tabs for you. No, I appreciate that. That would be good. Mayor, if I could. Okay. Mayor. Oh, sure. Um, I might suggest maybe with respect to the downtown impacts that, you know, the, the Delta from 2023 to 2025 might also be impacted by the fact that we were at the Skinner construction project underway and that might impact some of the responses. That's a good. Great point. Great point. Um, okay. I'm going to go to commissioner to guard for questions. Thank you, mayor. Um, I must confess I'm struggling a little bit with the survey because I can't see the actual questions and what were choices were. For instance, on city attributes, I'm looking at very satisfied. I don't know exactly how the question was formed and I don't know what the choices were with very satisfied, whether the ordinals were only five or three or what. So would you help me with that understanding? Um, yes, you're not going to see that in the presentation. You're going to see that in the actual report. Um, so if you go to page 16 of the report, you'll see that table four city attributes, very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, very dissatisfied and unsure. And you'll have, excuse me, the percentage across the rows for each of those, um, items. But yeah, for the sake of the presentation, um, we didn't put that much detail and we just tried to highlight key points. Okay. And additionally, I, I can send you the actual survey itself. I think we reviewed it, um, prior to sending it out in, uh, with commission. Um, it may have been a city manager update that was shared in that way just to actually see the, the survey instrument itself. Just not knowing anything but the very satisfied. I can't tell if it's a barbell answer with is very satisfied. And then on the other end there, the only other response was very dissatisfied. I can't see any of that. So I can't measure by looking at this what the responses were, but I can see that we've got some substantial differences from one year to the next. And by the way, I wish to compliment staff for actually beating on doors. That was, that's impressive. But the number of respondents is so different than the prior year. We're probably going to see some variations, both from a standpoint of the quantity as well as the geographics of the respondents because of our hard work. I'm not even sure if this is more of a standalone survey than, uh, one that's comparative to prior years. Um, so when I look at these, I, I kind of need to get that kind of awareness before I can do much analysis with it. And yes, that, that would be very helpful to have the actual questions with the possible ordinals of response that we had with it. Um, so that, that's my first, that's, I guess that's more of a comment than a question, but nonetheless, it formed. If I may just, uh, just clarify too, um, the, in the report, when you look at any table in the report, you will see the ordinal scale in columns. Yep. And then in the very left hand column, I provide the, in italics, the question wording, and then the list of items we asked underneath it. So we can send you the actual survey instrument, of course, but all of the question wording and response options are laid out in the tables of the report. Um, it just, as you can see, when you look at them, it would be way too much data to throw into a PowerPoint slide. There are no major, um, what you're calling barbell items though. Um, if there are, we would, we would definitely point those out if there's areas of, of strong dissatisfaction. Um, the only area where you see a little bit of dissatisfaction is, in that attributes is efforts to plan for the future. You've got about one in four respondents raising some concerns there. And again, that all comes back to that growth issue. Thank you. Um, what trends do you see that struck you professor? I don't see a necessarily trends that, uh, for the reason you said, um, anytime you change the methodology of a survey, you want to be cautious about interpreting trends. Um, so I don't see any trends there that I would be willing to say are a big deal without at least one more year of data to kind of confirm them. Um, that being said, I think again, what stands out to me? The overall trend or story, if you want to say it, that is that, you know, you run a business survey in a community. If you come, if you come over here across the Bay, um, and you go to Tampa or inland and you, and you run a survey like this, you're going to see a heavy emphasis on business services. We were here, we choose it because of tax breaks, or we choose it because of workforce availability or things of that nature. Um, in Dunedin, we're seeing much more of, we choose it because Dunedin is a special place essentially. Um, and, and so their concerns aren't, we need better tax breaks. We need better, um, business services from the city, this and that. Their concern is we want to stay. What makes, what makes customers come here? We want to keep that. Um, because, you know, Dunedin for someone who lives across the Bay, Dunedin is like getting over there for the day is a special day. It's a, it's a charming place. There's a lot of great things to do. Um, they want to, they, they recognize that as a driver of their business and frankly of why they like living there. And so that, those, that stands out to me more than anything, um, as a distinction from what I would see against other business surveys. Thank you. Uh, we have two issues coming before us in the near future that this data may help us, um, address. Uh, we have a parking garage issue and we also have the continuation of the freebie project. Can this data give us any guidance on those two questions? Um, I, I, I want to say, uh, I, I want to try to avoid, um, inserting myself into your politics or your, or your debates. Um, so yes, I think the data can help you. I would encourage, I would encourage the city to review those closely. Um, and we can give you any more breakout of detail you want on those questions of where they're coming from and, and where the responses are coming from. But in terms of, you know, decision making, I would, I would suggest that hopefully the data kind of speak for themselves on those matters. Um, I noted with the parking garage that, you know, it's not a, it's not a divided issue among the public where half is saying don't do it and half is saying do it. Half is saying it's, it would be very valuable to us and the other half is kind of just saying it would have no impact on us. Um, we can't necessarily interpret no impact as opposition or support. Um, and so I think that, um, hopefully the data are valuable for, for you in making those decisions, but I wouldn't want to insert myself anymore into that. Thank you. That's all I have. So Dr. Neely, are you saying we should do a parking garage? Just kidding. Just kidding. I'm sorry. You cut out there. All right. Got it. Um, okay. So, um, Nicole, I guess this is for you. Does the chamber do a survey for the businesses? Not that I am aware of. Okay. So then this is really important to them as well. I mean. Yes. And I share, I shared the survey with them ahead of it going out, um, for their feedback, um, which I had done the, the previous year as well. Um, obviously asked them to communicate it out to their businesses and, and that sort of thing. And I believe the last survey that we did, I did attend, um, one of their meetings and kind of presented the, the findings, so to speak, or, or an overview of the findings. Okay. Great. Um, um, so I guess, um, Dr. Neely is for you just as overall, uh, I think you kind of touched on it, but I'm just want to be clear. So when you look at the other surveys that you do for cities and how they support their businesses, how do you feel we've done here? Well, I want to be clear that, um, I'm talking more about city, if things I would have read, this is my first time really doing a business oriented survey like this, um, because it kind of ties in off of your resident survey. Um, and so I, um, it's more of what I've looked at and read. I would say overall, um, it's a very positive sentiment. Um, it's a very positive sentiment and it's, it's coming in an, in an era again, where government is often kind of this, you know, the, the first go-to source of blame. Um, and so I think in that regard, it's very positive. I do think that, um, I think there's an undercurrent of concern about growth and development and about whether growth and development is being done in a manner or being approached in a manner that will preserve the small town field and the, you know, tourist attraction, the things that make done even unique. But again, I would emphasize also that I think that is a little split between downtown and non-downtown businesses. So I think in a lot of ways, and I obviously agree with the comment that, that, you know, you're all done eating, but in a lot of ways, you really do have two stakeholder audiences when it comes to your business community. Um, you, you have, um, not that they are, not that they are at odds with one another, the downtown and, and non-downtown businesses, not that there's a lot of contention between their responses. Um, but they do definitely have very unique concerns and needs. Um, so that, that's probably, I don't know if that's answering your question, but that stands out to me. No, that's good. Um, you know, the only other thing that I, and I don't even know if you could do this, but you know, there's probably some natural things that are going to be differentials between a citizen survey and the business survey. Obviously they have, you know, two different interests. Um, some can be, you know, same, some very different in terms of their feelings about say a parking garage. Um, and so, um, I don't know, like, is that something that you even do look at the, the citizen survey versus business and say, yeah, here's some points that really differentiate themselves. Um, it's certainly something that we can, that we can take a look at. We, we would want to be careful because they are different audiences, but I think that my, my overall take was that there was a lot of alignment between them. Um, but quite frankly, what I would do with, with, with your blessing, um, I can read through them again and look at them, but what I'd really love to do is load them both into three or four different, um, different AI engines and ask it to give me a breakdown of consensus and, and differentiation, because I think that, um, might look at it from, we, we come to look at these from a very unique perspective. I gave you a narrative up front of what I see in the survey and, um, you know, it's easy to get locked into that, but sometimes when you have that kind of really impartial look at it without giving it any of those prompts, it might take a different approach. So, um, I'd be willing to take a look at, take a glance back through them both, see if there's anything that stands out to me, and then if you were okay with it running through that and see if anything else pops. Yeah, that, that'd be great. It'd be great. So, no, I, and I appreciate, and I appreciate your gut feeling that a lot of it's aligned, which is great, but yeah, that would be interesting to see if you, what you see pop out. So, um, um, I don't have any other questions. I think most of the questions have been asked. Um, so, so I guess I'm going to open it up to public input. Is there anybody in the audience wishes to come forward and speak on this item? I've seen a few yawns over here, so I don't think you guys are jumping up, right? Just get this over with, right? Um, okay. I didn't want to hear that part. So, um, okay, I will close public input, seeing none, and I will go to commission comments, and I guess we'll start over here with Commissioner Walker. Thank you, Mayor. Uh, yeah, first of all, thank you for this, uh, in-depth presentation and the analysis that went into this. Um, you know, those, these surveys are critical to our ability to make effective and timely decisions. So, um, that, that's, that's an important part of this. Um, you know, with regards to the Dunedin business community, you know, our goal should be to strive to be consistently high in satisfaction across the board. Uh, the reality of it is, is that, and I think we've, uh, we've, we've mentioned this several times in this, is that, um, you know, whether it's, whether it's a demographic, whether it's a location of the business, what have you, um, the reality is, is that each of the businesses are unique, and their challenges are unique. Um, so I think that, you know, it's, it's important that we know where those data elements are, are coming from. Um, the bad news is, is that, you know, I'm struggling with this only because of the fact that I don't know at this point, you know, what decisional value that we, we can pull out of this. But the good news is, is, is I think by virtue of this discussion and this analysis, we've realized that, okay, well, we, we need to do a deeper dive in terms of what, you know, where, where the, where the challenges are, where these, where the data's coming from, so that we can more effectively understand that, you know, the, the business communities, depending on their location, you know, they've got unique challenges. And, you know, our goal should be to try to solve those for them. Um, and, uh, those are, those are really my comments. Um, you know, again, I, and I'm glad the, the characterization was made between this, the business survey and the citizen survey, because my first, uh, my first cut on this was, is I was thinking, well, this, this is also somewhat diametrically opposed, opposed. But, Mayor, you brought up a great point and about the distinction. And yes, the, the interests, the challenges, the goals of the citizens are, are different than the business community. And so, anyway, but I would say, keep up the good work. We need this data. And, uh, thank you. Great. Uh, Commissioner Dugard. Thank you, Mayor. I, I kind of look at this survey as a value, but it's a tale of two cities. I think that because of the extra effort and the additional response rate that we got, you can't really use your trends on this particular survey. The trends, you don't know if those are the trends of the state of mind of the same people we surveyed or a whole new state of mind because of the new people that became engaged. So we have to do some kind of deconstruction to see if we can build some value in the trend lines. Um, I think the questions are on, are spot on, but I would like to, and I'm going to have to do this myself, dig into the data a little bit more and see the responses by question and ordinals to, before I begin to make any final conclusions on my own. Um, but, uh, compliments, kudos to the staff for getting out there. You messed it up. I mean, it's a whole different survey in many ways because of your hard efforts, but I think it's going to be a great baseline. Um, and I think if we change any of the future variables, I'd like to suspend that for a couple of years just so that we can work with the same, base set of data, uh, as respondents go. Um, comparative surveys are always tough because the universe is spinning and things change. But what we really want to see is if the state of mind of those that live in Dunedin as businesses operate here, great, create their living here, um, where their state of mind is moving. And that's what we're trying to find out. Um, I do find, um, some comfort in the fact that, um, there wasn't a negative feel toward the garage. Um, but it certainly shows you something that you should be concerned about, about when the responses change so much with the additional data set. That's all I have, Mayor. Thank you. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. And again, thank you, Dr. Dealey, for this presentation. Nicole, thank you and staff, uh, for herculean effort and not going out and knocking on doors, expanding the data and the input. It's, it's a nice problem to have when you start expanding your data and not need to interpret it. So it's wonderful. Uh, and I loved the concern on, on behalf of the commission over that drop in attitude towards local government. It, I think, I think if anything, that's what businesses want to see if there's a drop in that, that that becomes a concern for the commission. So it was nice to hear the conversation, uh, around that issue. But it was nice to see, uh, that drop in attitude towards government countered with the high praise they have in the utility and law enforcement, things of that nature, which ironically is government. So, uh, it is, it is nice to see that. And maybe that's, they may not, their, their attitude towards me might be different, but they like the services that I help provide through my position. So that's, that's fine with me. I'm wondering if there isn't an opportunity here, because I do understand that with the additional data, it becomes mucky and hard to see, which, uh, was nice to see the conversations around. Can we interpret this better through a breakdown of quadrants or age of businesses, et cetera, which might give us better information. Uh, trying to take this data and go, okay, how can we turn this information into a, uh, a business initiative, right? That, that becomes hard. What are the next steps as a result of this, but I'm sure that'll come through different conversations. Uh, but I wonder if there isn't room for, we have found our citizen academy. We're wearing t-shirts, and tonight is the first night of our citizen's academy. Uh, uh, if there isn't an opportunity, and the benefits that have come from that, if there isn't an opportunity for a business academy, so that we can talk to some of our businesses and give them an introduction and, and a kind of a deep dive into how government operates. And through that, not only educating them, but also strengthening and deepening that communication and connection and relationship so that they might provide us with more, better information on that attitude towards local government and what we can, what we can do better. Uh, but other than that, thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for the businesses. As I'm interpreting this and I'm seeing rises or declines in trends, I'm also thinking, what was the emotional state of that individual business person taking the survey at the time? And because I do that about myself, and right, I'm sure they didn't take out last year's or the last time they did a survey and compare, and compare their own data and do that. It was like, I don't know what I did last year. And is it very positive? Is it positive? I don't know. And so you can see rises and falls just by, uh, the inability, right? What is the atmosphere? You heard Dr. Dealey talk about, um, uh, the trends nationally towards, towards government and that might play into this. Um, what's going on, uh, with, uh, the, the parking garage? Is it, they still feel they, they, they need one and it's hurting their business? Or do they like the idea that at least we're talking about it, and there's a potential for one on the horizon. So that, that itself is swaying the survey. Uh, Skinner Boulevard, is that hurting their business? Or are they excited about the, the future of what, uh, Skinner Boulevard can do to their business? So how is that playing into? So anytime you're taking the survey, you've got all kinds of elements that are impacting that. I believe at the time they took the survey, there was, uh, social media buzz at the time about something incredibly negative with city government. And you wonder if social media didn't play a role in that, some sort of bias. Uh, so there's all kinds of things that impact the survey, but overall, um, thank you everybody for your, your efforts in doing this. It plays an incredible role for the, uh, challenges we might have in this survey. It's better than not having the survey at all. So thank you. Okay. Commissioner Sandbergen. Without question, my favorite part of this job is to be out in the community. I spend a lot of time in the community. Two weeks ago, I was asked to speak at a round table and I went around the, around the table and I said, I want to hear the worst thing from all of you entrepreneurs about the city of Dunedin. One guy raised his hand and he says, I do have a problem, traffic and parking. And I said, I looked at the other people sitting at the table. I said, what this guy just said was we are so successful in our mercantile, our shops, our restaurants, our bars, that the guy comes to town and can't find a place to park. I said, it sounds like we're doing a lot of things right here. He was a little miffed, but everybody else kind of enjoyed my answer. I think one thing that we learned from this, let's, you know, I'm not, you know, I did. Uh, one thing is, uh, you know, we, all of us need to, uh, kind of get our focus out of the downtown, the downtown core. You know, I, it came up about, you know, we have manufacturing businesses. We have a lot of service businesses that aren't down here. You know, I live downtown and I work downtown. So it's easy for me to get stuck in that bubble. I think all of us from the city commission to the city staff, I know that you guys spend a lot more time worrying about those folks outside of downtown. Um, I think this survey, I think the survey was wonderful. I mean, what I read, the little points that we're up here picking at are really, I think very minor in the whole scope of it. One thing that was brought out one of those pages was the, uh, emptying of trash cans on a Sunday morning at eight o'clock, you can go downtown and there's like, I think the guy's name is Tom. One of these days, I'm going to stop him and shake his hand because that's one of the city employees I've never met. But by God, that Sunday morning, that guy's down there cleaning up the mess from Saturday night. Says a lot about us. And I'm glad it was pointed out on this survey. Thank you, Nicole to you and your staff and did a good job. Thank you. Great. Um, well, all my final comments, just two things. I mean, uh, you kind of touched a little bit, but, uh, I think it's page 24 of the document, which basically says 63% of our businesses are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied in the city's efforts to support business growth and development. So it's, it's, it's a great number, but definitely one we can strive to make even greater. Um, and then the other one, of course, is the, um, overall satisfied. Are you with the level of service that you receive from the city? And, um, 85.1% are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with that. So, so that's a great number. And, um, again, I, you know, we can always improve and I agree. It's a, it's a good survey, but it, there's a lot of devil in the detail. I will say the other thing jumps out at me is though, is that the draw for businesses is Dunedin, who Dunedin is. And as we face our budget challenges, um, I think that's, we always have to keep that in mind that we're a quality of life community and people want to be here because of that. So that makes our challenges in the budget even more difficult because it's really balancing who we are and not getting crazy with the affordability stance. So, and that's not easily resolved, but right here, right in our business community, it shows how important it is that we get that balance, right. Um, and I, I just, uh, I, I, the safety issue always, not that it should shock me all always about the safety piece about how people feel safe here, but it was the piece, even when I was walking houses during my election, where I was, you just think about charm. It's always about charm, but guess what? I mean, so many times it would come up. I feel safe here. I feel safe here. It came up in our strategic planning. I feel safe here. And now it comes up in here as a big dominant factor. I feel safe here. And so you can never underestimate that importance. And so I know this was long for you to hear, but you had a, you have a very important role in, um, in how satisfied our businesses are. So thank you. And I'm speaking to the sheriff for those of you watching me talking and not knowing their city waiting for their item. Um, and the other thing I just appreciate is the impacts on the storm. And I don't doubt at all that, you know, that impact and how you view government, you know, probably had some mixed things going on in there. So, but I appreciate all the hard work, Dr. Neely. Great job, Nicole, and a great job. And, um, uh, we're going to take a five minute break and, and then get started with the sheriff's department. And thank you for waiting, gentlemen. Normally we wouldn't do this, but we put off Dr. Neely from last time and he had to wait the whole time. So, so we're here. Mayor, if I may. Yes. Jennifer wanted me to make sure to, uh, convey that, you know, following today's presentation and the commission's input, that then we would incorporate that and come up with an action plan. Great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Okay. Take short break. Okay. We'll bring the meeting back and we have, um, Pinellas trail safety in Dunedin presentation. We've got Teresa and we have a captain Harvey and we have Lieutenant Scarpatti. Is it that right? Okay, good. So, um, okay. So I'll turn it over to you all. Uh, good morning, mayor, vice mayor, commission, Teresa Smalling, director of HR and risk management for the city, as well as the city's liaison to the Pinellas County Sheriff's office, uh, in response to commission requests, um, for more information about the Pinellas trail and, um, the sheriff's office role. Um, we have invited Captain Harvey as well as Captain, as well as Lieutenant Scarpatti to give a presentation and take any questions that the commission may have. At this time, I'd like to, um, present Captain Harvey to say a few words and then we'll move on. Good morning, mayor, vice mayor, commissioners. Um, as you know, I'm Captain Brandon Harvey of the North District Station. This morning, I brought with me Lieutenant A.J. Scarpatti. He is the administrative lieutenant for North District Station. So one of his many duties is being in charge of the community policing unit. Uh, and overseeing the community policing deputies that are assigned here in the city of Dunedin. So, uh, one of the numerous projects he works on is, uh, the initiatives that we do here on the, on the trail. Uh, so that's why I brought him here this morning, uh, to give this presentation. So with that, I'll turn it over to Lieutenant Scarpatti. Great. And, and again, I apologize. You guys waiting that long normally, that would never be the case. We'd get you on early on, but. I appreciate that, but it was an informative presentation. Okay, good. All right. Do you want to, do you want to rank the questions and comments by each commissioner? All right. Um, okay. Lieutenant. Good morning, everyone. Uh, thank you for allowing me to come in and speak with you all for some time this morning and go over the trail safety and talk about some initiatives and stuff that we've done at the Pinellas County Sheriff's office. So in the presentation, kind of the overview, we're going to talk about what is a bicycle? What is an e-bike? Uh, there's a lot of different electronic and motorized vehicles that are out there. So we're going to kind of dive into that. We're going to talk about the Pinellas trail itself, uh, locations and statistics as well. Um, big things. What are rules? What versus what are county ordinance and laws? What is enforceable? What is not enforceable on the Pinellas County trail? Um, as well as some of the different committees associated with the trail. And then finally, some of the trail initiatives that we've been working on. So like I said, we're going to talk about and define what's the difference between a bicycle, an e-bike, any dirt bike, um, along with motorized scooters. So by Florida statute, a bicycle is defined as every vehicle propelled solely by human power, uh, having two tandem wheels and including any device generally recognized as a bicycle through though equipped with two front or two rear wheels. The term does not include a scooter or similar device. And then the statute also goes on to talk about what a bicycle must have. Uh, if you are under the age of 16, you have to have a helmet. Uh, also required to have a seat, uh, brakes on the bicycle, uh, require you to be able to stop within 25 feet at a speed of 10 miles an hour. Um, and you're also required to have lamps, a white headlight and rear, uh, lights from the rear for nighttime riding. So an e-bike, what is an e-bike? Legally, they're the same as a bicycle, but there are three different classes. But to sum them up, uh, an e-bike has an electric motor with a maximum watt allowed per statute of 750 watts, um, and a top speed of 28 miles an hour. Uh, but essentially e-bikes can operate wherever a regular bicycle could go, uh, including the Pinellas Trail. There's no restrictions on e-bikes as far as age. So here's our big one, the e-dirt bike. Uh, e-dirt bikes are different from e-bicycles. Uh, essentially they don't have pedals. That's one of the biggest things. There's no pedals on them. Um, and the speed at which the e-bikes or excuse me, the e-dirt bikes can travel is up to 70 miles an hour. Some of the models, um, it is illegal to ride them on the roadways, the trails, sidewalks, anything of that nature. Um, it's considered an unregistered motor vehicle and you're subject to, uh, an arrest potentially if you're caught riding that. We have motorized scooters. Um, motorized scooters, a two or three wheel device basically with handlebars with a maximum speed of 20 miles an hour. Um, there's different types of scooters. We have segways, hoverboards, um, basically self-balancing. They don't require a driver's license to operate or registration. Um, and they can be operated on the roadways, uh, bike lanes, trails, sidewalks, unless it's prohibited by a local ordinance. Uh, some of the other items that are out there, electric skateboards, uh, electric unicycles, um, gas powered scooters are also out there, but they're prohibited on the Pinellas County Trail. Um, and then in general, they're vehicles that don't exceed 20 miles an hour. So the Pinellas Trail, uh, the Pinellas County Parks and Conservation Resources oversees the trail in totality over maintenance and operating costs. Um, as everyone I'm sure knows, the trail extends from upper Pinellas County, Tarpon Springs, all the way down to St. Petersburg. And it connects, uh, several other trails to the main Pinellas County Trail. And there's an average of 160,000 users a month on the Pinellas County Trail. And more specifically to the city of Dunedin, uh, the trail, as we know, starts just north of, uh, on alternate 19, uh, just north of Curlew where the overpass is and goes all the way down to Union Street. Um, in the year 2024, the trail saw over 400,000 users in the city of Dunedin alone. Um, so it's an average of almost $1,200 or excuse me, 1200 bicyclists and then almost 800 pedestrians. In the trail itself, uh, emergencies on the trail. If you have an emergency, every two to 300 feet, there's emergency markers on the trail. They're have a unique number on them. So if you were to call 911 and, Hey, I'm having an emergency on the trail, they're going to look for that unique identifier. So that way we can locate you very quickly and get emergency responders to you. So now we're going to kind of jump into what are rules versus what are laws or county ordinances that are enforceable or not enforceable. There's a lot of signage out there on the trail and keep right, being aware of your surroundings, don't stop or stand in the middle of the trail, uh, speed limit of 20 miles an hour. Those are all rules of the trail. They are not enforceable by law enforcement. Um, there's one thing towards the, uh, and they're on the right hand side, which we listed as the, uh, the wheelies or some folks have heard the wheelie boys. Um, a wheelie and of itself is not a violation of state statute or law. It's dependent on what else is going on. Are you popping a wheelie and then riding towards a crowd of 20 people to scare them? Then we're moving into a different category of potentially reckless or reckless driving or causing a disturbance, some of those different things. So just popping the wheelie of alone is not, it's not a violation. It's what else is going on, a totality of circumstances. And then as far as what rules are actually enforceable. So the Pinnell's trail is considered it's, it's a county park, which the operating hours are daylight to sunset. Uh, alcoholic beverages are prohibited. Uh, motorized vehicles are prohibited on the trail. Again, it's not that unregistered motor vehicle, uh, on the trail. There are exemptions for law enforcement and county maintenance and some of those different things, but, and then users must obey all the traffic control devices, the stop signs, uh, traffic control signals, um, anything that's got an F dot sticker based on the back of the stop sign, essentially. And then the trail has several different committees and organizations associated with it. We've got the friends of the Pinellas County trail. Um, and then from there, you have the Pinellas trail security task force, which is hosted by Ford Pinellas or Pinellas has several different subcommittees off of it, deal with the trail, but the, uh, security task force is compromised or comprised of several law enforcement agencies that come together along with folks from forward Pinellas and discuss trail, um, safety and those things. Additionally, there's a bicycle pedestrian advisory committee. Um, and then any concerns, comments, suggestions, improvements, any of that kind of items for the trail goes through forward Pinellas, and then it gets pushed over to the county and ultimately, I believe it's a BOCC who are going to make any decisions on any changes to the trail itself, anything big impactful. So our agencies, uh, trail safety initiatives. So, um, we have our community policing deputies who, um, through various means, we have our bicycles. Now we have the Polaris, uh, UTVs or side-by-side vehicles that we can use on the Pinellas trail, um, along with our, our Tahoes as well. Um, daytime, nighttime enforcement, again, looking for, you know, if it's the e-dirt bikes, they're easy to pick out, no pedals. And then that moves us into that unregistered motor vehicle category. Or if it's nighttime, we're looking for lights on their bicycles and pedestrian safety and those kinds of things. Um, and then we also have our patrol deputies that work the city of Dunedin. They conduct directed patrols of the trail as well, looking for, you know, again, any of those violations. Um, again, it goes to the overall feeling of the community, that sense of safety and security. Um, during a, uh, the earlier part of this year, during a five-month stint, um, kind of a screenshot of our trail safety initiative, uh, the CPOs would, they'd be out there patrolling, looking for, um, the folks on the e-bikes who, um, potentially violate any laws or any of those things, the juveniles on them. And if we had, you know, probable cause or an occasion to stop them or chat with them, uh, this went along with a flyer that we had developed. And really we, it's about education with the kids. Hey, listen, slow down, be courteous, be mindful to others. But we'd also contact their parents and follow up with the parents as well and talk with them about, you know, common, you know, uh, common decency rules of the trail, some of those different things. Um, and if we catch the, the juveniles, maybe on the e-dirt bike, we'd talk with the parents as well. Hey, this is an unregistered motor vehicle. Um, we had a couple of those. And unfortunately, a lot of times, you know, or I, even myself, uh, I'd hear, well, I just spent thousands of dollars on this and the box says it's legal. Well, there's a lot of things that say they're legal on it, but that doesn't really mean that they're legal. So, uh, but it was a lot of educational enforcement and to really cut down on any, you know, we didn't see a lot of, um, for what we could measure repeat offenders per se. Um, when we talked with the parents, they, a lot of times would do the parenting and, and address their kids and take care of it. So, um, but during a five month, uh, a window per se, uh, we stopped seven different, um, occasions related to e-bikes, uh, five of which were specifically e-bikes. One were, one was an e-dirt bike and one of them were, um, wheelie, doing wheelies. Um, and the other big thing to note during that five period, five month period, you know, we hear a lot of complaints about the trail. It's not safe or, or the e-bikes, the e-bike speeding, speeding, constantly with the speeding. During that five month window, we only received seven phone calls from citizens to make complaints about e-bikes on the trail. So, you know, again, I hear lots of, it's a problem. It's a problem from time to time, but no one's calling us, you know, seven times in a five month window. So in addition to that, we also, uh, push social media, uh, last week, uh, we were filming more social media videos that they're working on, um, from our agency. Example one. So I don't know what happened to the sound, but it's more of the, it's like a video game sound really pointing out that, yeah. Hey, stop sign. You gotta stop. So with that, any questions or comments? Okay. I'm going to turn to, uh, Commissioner Walker. Questions. Thank you, Mayor. Um, can you, um, explain the difference between dedicated patrols and directive patrols? Does that, yep. Sorry. Go ahead. You. No, it's okay. So, um, I don't normally, we do a directive patrol. I, I guess a dedicated patrol would be deputies dedicated to the city of Dunedin, for instance. Like there's patrol deputies that, um, contract through the city. They're dedicated to the city. A directed patrol are, while they're working their shift, there may be parking issues. Maybe schools kick back up, right? We just had schools start back up. So we set directed patrols in school zones for extra attention in those during time frames, if that makes sense. So it might be in the evening time, hey, let's do directed patrols on the trail, specifically looking for bicycle lights and, and those kind of things. Yeah. Okay. No, that's, that's great. Um, and then, you know, in terms of, um, the deployment of deputies on the trail, whether it be by bike or UTV or whatever, I mean, how often do you guys do that? I mean, we have people that are touching the trail one way or another every day. Um, sometimes the CPOs, it might be a, a weekly, once a week initiative where they get on the, the UTVs and the players and get on the bicycles and kind of deal with that. It also kind of depends on the year or some right now it's, it's a little warm out. So we're a little more towards the UTVs versus bicycle patrol. Um, one of the things that, um, I did not mention was, uh, here in a couple weeks, few months, we'll have, um, e-bikes ourselves. So we're able to patrol the trail very effectively with the Polaris and the UTVs. Um, but we'll also have e-bikes coming here in the near future too. Yeah. No, I appreciate that too. Um, and just, you guys, you know, you, you do an awesome job and, uh, I, I know that this is probably one of your bigger challenges in terms of just manpower and resources. Um, the other question, um, and this is, this was, this is more related to an example. We were downtown, you know, several weeks ago and kids were riding their e-motor bike, e-dirt bike up and down the sidewalks and, you know, sidewalks were pretty crowded. Um, and, uh, I, I'm just, I think what we need to do is just make sure we get the word out of who to call. Because I had the, I had the non-emergency number for the, for your office. And, uh, that was the number I called and it was, there was a rapid response to that. But, uh, you know, I, I think in terms of it, I'm sure you're doing this somewhere, but this, I want to just emphasize the fact that, um, you know, that the ability to get in contact, you know, quickly is, is of importance. So, um, last question, just in terms of, you know, the enforcement part of this, um, because I, you know, the, to me, and again, as I look at the differences between the, the non-enforceable and the enforceable, you know, to me, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's these gray areas in between. I'm just kind of curious as to, you know, how rapidly or, you know, responsibly are you able to make a determination on that, the difference there and, and fix the problem? So, hey, let me just summarize. I, you know, if we get the complaints, essentially, uh, e-bikes, it's a big one, e-bike speeding on the trail, right? The speed limit of 20 miles an hour on the trail is not enforceable. Like, we can't shoot radar or laser and enforce a 20 mile an hour speed limit. However, depending on the, you know, there's other things. If we're getting complaints from citizens about, someone calls us, hey, this e-bike is speeding, right? We're able to catch up to the e-bike. There may be other violations of the law that are going on. Maybe they run a stop sign or they're not riding within a bicycle. I mean, some of those different things, or they're under, they look under the age of 16. We can stop more than not wearing a helmet. Some of those things, we can stop and address those immediately. Yeah, that's good. You, you more articulately answered the question that I inarticulately asked. No, I greatly, greatly, greatly appreciate you guys. And those are all the questions I have. Commissioner Dugard. Thank you, Mayor. It's my turn to be inarticulate. Do you have any data on citations on the trail for donating? I do not. At hand, I don't. Okay. That's something, we can pull all kinds of statistics and data. That's something we can look at. I think, I think that's something we need. As we look at what seems to be an insolvable problem relative to enforceability. And I get that. We just need some data. And I'm looking for some help from you guys. I sit here and I understand the conundrum we're facing. Not even sure how to ask an intelligent question without the data. And one of the questions I have is, what do you guys need to make our trails safer? What is it that we can do as a commission to create support for you so that, and by the way, we may be dealing with a perception here. Safety is always a perceptive issue. But what we want to know is what do we do to help you get to a place of greater safety? So I'll give you a data, a data set. So, as I mentioned earlier in the year, for a five-month period, we did the directed patrols and everything focused on the trail related to e-bikes. And during that five-month period, we only issued, made seven stops related to e-bikes. And they were all issued in warnings because we're trying to do education, enforcement through education. And we were successful with going back, presenting, we have a little pamphlet that we've put together that explains an e-bike what they are, and e-dirt bikes, which essentially I think they're the bigger issue because they go, you know, quite a bit, quite fast. But, and working with parents to solve that issue. So, as far as what do we need? You know, I think that, yes, commissioners, you know, I think we have a lot of tools that we need to be successful. And, but again, yes, I think it's a perception issue. And or if folks see an issue, it's to see something, say something. If you see something, you got to call us and let us know. If you don't let us know, we don't know that it's going on. Earlier this year, Sergeant Green and I met with some folks from Friends of the Pinellas Trail. Big, big thing on their, their trail on the social media, speeding, speeding, speeding. And I went back to him, I said, okay, I'm looking at a set of data for the Pinellas Trail here. The amount of times that people have actually called us is so limited. It's so far and few between. It doesn't pop up on our radar as an issue, looking at statistics and call logs and such. It's just the word of mouth. So, really, we need people, if it's an issue and they see it going on, they've got to call us. If we don't know about it, we can't do anything when it's going on. So, you know, I go back to, they've got to call us. There's quite a few deputies that work this area, especially in the city of Dunedin. We can get to a lot of places pretty quickly and find things and catch things, but they got to call us. No more questions. Thank you. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. So, what do you do? I think part of the perception from the residents is that if they see something, by the time they call you and by the time you respond, there's nothing we can do because we have no idea where they are. We don't, so what, and then they yell at us because craziness is on the trail. So, how do you respond to that? Because I think that's also part of the issue is that they realize by the time anybody does anything, it's not there. So, I, you know, I can think of a time two, two, three weeks ago, someone called us about an e-bike issue on the trail, and we had deputies in the area and were able to catch up with the e-bike and address the issue. You know, that was just two, three weeks ago. There's been several times over the, since I've come into my position in February where we've gotten phone calls from citizens and we've had a deputy there quick enough to address the e-bike issue. So, you know, it's a hard one. They just got to be timely in calling us. We're pretty good at catching bad guys. Okay. You know, bad guys, not everyone's a bad guy, but bicyclists, you know, whatever the issue is, whatever the issue is, we're pretty good at getting there quickly and solving the problem. Bicep, that's our, bicep, that's our bad guys. They're just misunderstood. Do you see a difference between the way the trail is used in Dunedin versus other parts of the trail? And do those differences justify treating the trail differently than other parts of the trail? So, I mean, the biggest difference, Dunedin's got the most heavily, heavy use of the trail from all the cities. You know, what was it? 440,000 trail usages in 2024. That's a lot. You know, the biggest thing I go back to is common courtesy from folks. Like if you're on a bicycle and there's in a densely populated area, have some common courtesy, slow down, or just get off the bike and walk it until you get through that heavy, you know, foot traffic area, whatever it is that's going on, and then continue on your way. It's so, you know, as far as the differences, you guys, it's busy here. It is busy on the trail, especially on the weekends and in the evening time. You got a lot of people that access the trail, but really it goes back to common courtesy and, you know, being courteous the others and just, hey, let me slow down or move over for you. Right. Okay. And common courtesy is also all in perspective as well. This is true. Right. The number of complaints we get about the speeding and according to that pedestrian, those bicyclists were going 50 miles an hour, yet the average speed on the trail tells a different story. And, right, I love there's a Facebook post about a car passing a bicyclist on a road and where they pass is an acknowledgement on that car driver is a bicyclist because he gives them the largest gap versus they know somebody who's a bicyclist versus somebody who doesn't bicycle at all and how close they are to the bicyclist, not giving them that courtesy. And the same can be said about how closely a bicycle passes a pedestrian, right? And it's what's the skill level of that bicyclist and their ability. When it comes to e-bikes and the maximum motor being 750 watts by statute, do you see a difference on what's being sold in our local bike shops? So I can't tell you in our local bike shops, but I can give you just off online, they're they're making them well in excess of the 750 watts. They have the capability of going over 28 miles an hour, but they have a, you know, they're governed, they have a governor on them. But, you know, a YouTube video here or there and people can figure out how to sort of remove that feature. Right. Okay. And in your definitions between e-bikes and e-dirt bikes, by picture you show a completely, a great distinction between the two. But do you all, do you find that the case in real life or are there e-dirt bikes that actually look very much like a regular bike or is it just those are e-bikes that exceed the 750? So the e-bikes, excuse me, the e-dirt bikes for us, they're easy to pick out because they don't have the pedals. Now there are some folks who, maybe not necessarily to the city of Dunedin, but just out there and looking at different social media things that we look at, who go, oh, well, I can see the difference are the pedals. So they're put pedals on their e-dirt bike. They try to slide by, but we can still, we can pick them out and identify the e-dirt bikes and take care of them. And I'm sorry, what was the rest? Just the distinction between the two, because I know that, right, I would have used the term pedal assist, right? So if the pedal assist, it's probably got a maximum speed of 20 miles an hour or something in that vicinity. But there are e-bikes, e-bikes that are not pedal assist. So they're out of the box, dirt bike ready, although they may not look like a dirt bike. So by the, there's three different classes of an e-bike. And in some of those classes, it's pedal assisted and some it's the throttle, right? So just that alone does not make it an e-dirt bike. It's the lack of pedals. It is not having a governor set at 28 miles an hour so they can exceed that speed on the e-dirt bikes, along with the wattage on a lot of the e-dirt bikes are much higher than 750 watts. Okay. Now, when it comes to the security task force, which sounds like it is made up of law enforcement and forward Pinellas. And so I don't know if you specifically or anybody from the North Indian district is in that room. But what is the conversation in those monthly meetings? So one of your CPOs, Deputy Skypack, is, CPO Skypack is, sits on that. And a lot of times it's, again, as the e-bikes have ticked up more recently, there's a lot of discussion about the e-dirt bikes and e-bicycles and some of the different rules pertaining to them. But outside of that, I can't give you a whole lot more because I just, I don't sit in on them. Right. Because what we hear from the residents and versus our own experiences here is that whether it's perception or not, there are issues out on the trail that we feel like our hands are tied. It's a county trail. They're, they're over it. And they seem to be unresponsive to anything the residents want. They took lines away that the residents thought was a great distinction that separated pedestrians from bicyclists. So they've almost made it a wild west out there. And they don't seem to be listening to what the residents want in Dunedin or elsewhere along the trail. And so that's part of the frustration that, and they perceive, even though it's county property, it's a county trail, that the city of Dunedin, what do you mean there's nothing you can do about it? And so, and they, and it's not that they don't believe us, but they're just very frustrated that nothing can, nothing can be done. And they're screaming into the, into the rain and nobody's listening. And so I don't know how to respond to the residents in Dunedin who have these concerns. I mean, the best I can tell you is that ultimately it's the board of county commissioners, right? They're over the county and that's where they ultimately take their complaint to forward Pinellas and then move forward to the county. Could you repeat that please? Take the complaint to the county. You're right. It's ultimately, it's a, it's a county park. It's a county trail. The county is responsible for it. So if they have issues or concerns, they need to go to forward Pinellas and then that'll get moved forward to the county. Just because the residents need, need, need to hear that. Because we tell them that and the response at least I get is I'm just getting, I'm giving them the brush off. And it's not, that is, that is what you need to do. Correct. And for those times when they, because I think we're also in a, when you only got seven calls or made seven responses and nobody's calling you. Because I think a lot of people, they just, they think the answer is on social media. So we get it with our own residents about city stuff. They complain about whatever. It's like, why didn't you email me? Why didn't you email me to get from our businesses complaints about the city that I need? And they'd rather throw it out on Facebook. And so that's what we get about the trail as well. They just complain on Facebook. And so there's also far beyond our ability and your ability. There just needs to be this, that's not the appropriate channel to log your complaint. Correct. It depends on your algorithm. I may not even see that complaint. But I just, it's something, and thank you to Commissioner Dugard for bringing this up, because I think we've all felt it. And in that room that you're not part of, as far as the safety, are there any discussions on, because we're also frustrated, because we're also the city that really makes the entire trail popular. Everybody's on the trail, right? Since day one, we have exceeded anybody else. And so we're the only city that really uses it, we think, beyond, and not that we use it, our residents, our businesses have developed this, that it's more than just a trail. And especially with e-bikes, it is a transportation corridor. And so in that concept, are there differences in the rules and laws that govern different aspects, as different as you would a street, an avenue, a boulevard, a highway, that the rules change because of the type of road that it is, the type of trail that it is, and how it's used, can those rules be governed? Can you see where, if we advocated for and got, would it be challenging for law enforcement if the rules in Dunnean on the trail were different than the rules in other parts of the trail? So I guess I would kind of compare that to Florida Department of Transportation, right? On your local city streets, the speed limit in most places in the neighborhood is 30 miles an hour, versus the interstate is 70 miles an hour, because it's a different type of area, and you're dealing with a different type of traffic flow. That's ultimately something for the county would have to make that decision, or the county commissioners would vote potentially by ordinance in changing rules for the Pinellas County Trail. Okay, all right. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Commissioner Sandbergen, questions? If you stop someone for blowing through the stop sign, do they get a citation or a ticket? Initially, it is education, traffic enforcement through education, right? And can I make, can I educate that person through which means? Do they need a citation? Can I educate them through a warning? There may be a conversation. A lot of times, initially, it is a warning. If it's a juvenile, it's a phone call, or a, hey, let's ride over to your house and go have a chat with your parents. Okay. It's interesting he brought up working with the vendors. I sort of thought that same thing, but I mean, you get out on Amazon or on the internet, it's not like you're, we never down to two or three bicycle shops and say, you know, here's some of the rules. How are you guys handling solicitation and panhandling, loitering on the trail? We see it downtown here. So if we get a, if we get a specific call for it, then the deputy will respond and address it, just as they would any of the noise ordinance, you know, to get out the sound meter and take measurements. I don't, I don't know that it's, you know, when the deputies are out, the CPOs especially are out on the bicycles or the Polaris out on the trail. Yes, their main thing, you know, a lot of times they're looking for right now, because the big thing is the e-bikes, but they're also looking for those different quality of life issues and if they need to address them. Whether it might be, hey, you know, it's time to move along or go as far as issuing a citation. All right, because I'm, you know, I'm really not into aggressive panhandling, grabbing pedestrians and bicyclists, you know, not literally grabbing them, but stopping them, stepping out on the trail to sell or get you to sign whatever, whatever they're after. And again, that's not something, you know, because I look at a lot of the reports and the nightlies and everything that, you know, the shift commanders passed down. Right. That's not something specifically that I've noted or seen a lot of. Okay. So I would, my guess is like the e-bike speeding issue. If that's going on, they're probably folks not are not calling us to address it. How about, yeah, I live close to the trail. I've been using the trail since the day it opened. You still any, do we get any complaints about people hopping on it with a golf cart? Nothing. It might be here and there, but not again, folks aren't calling us about that. Okay. It's not a big complaint. Okay. Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but we talked about the hours of the trail and I was in the understanding from Skinner to Scotland because it's lit that the trail was open 24 hours. Am I wrong on that? So from, and deputy Skypack who sits on some of these committees and stuff has helped me research this. From my understanding, there's nothing in writing that we've been able to find that allows the extended hours of the trail beyond daylight to sunset. You know, because we promote people come to Dunedin, walk, be safe with, you know, obviously that section of the trail connects a lot of the fun here in Dunedin. And geez, that's something that we probably should have a clear definition of because for all these years I've been using it at night and I thought, you know, nobody's ever stopped and said, you know, you need to walk on the sidewalk and not the trail. But, um, and then lastly, is there a, where the, where the posts are to get on the trail? Is there one that's always removable so you can get your Tahos out or EMS vehicles can go on the trail? Is it one of them plastic? So I believe there's, should be a movable on them, right? So we can get emergency vehicles onto the trail if there's not enough space to get around on the side. Okay. That's all I had for questions. I think, thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Um, so my first question, um, the definition of bicycle. So everybody, every vehicle propelled solely by human power. So I guess that's, you know, that's just something that always bugged me. Like solely by human power doesn't mean e-bike. So is it just defined somewhere in the statute that e-bike equal bike? Because e-bikes are not done solely by human power. Right. So it talks about e-bikes and it defines them by three separate classes. And in those classes, essentially it's the 750 watt maximum, uh, 28 mile an hour maximum speed. And then whether it's pedal assisted or a throttle, uh, to accelerate the bicycle. Okay. Um, okay. Um, so, you know, one of the things I'm going to continue the inarticulate way of trying to, you know, get to this issue. Um, you know, one of the things that we get to is like, um, and I don't know that you guys ever get brought into this stuff, but on Edgewater Park, the, the, in the linear park where the John Hubbard linear park, where we don't, it would be nice to have a wider sidewalk because we have a lot of conflict between bikes and, you know, and, uh, strollers and, and walkers. And, um, and so sometimes, and I think that some people who would normally have gone on the trail are afraid to go on the trail. So they go there and then there's a lot of conflicts there. I mean, do you guys see any of that? I mean, do you get a lot of the sidewalk bike pedestrian conflict issues that you get brought into? The majority of, of what we've gotten complaints on are, uh, e-bikes and excessive speed, not specific to sidewalks or versus trail. Okay. Just in general. Um, so is there, um, anything in your opinion as you see this that if you could write the law today that you would do that would actually help the situation? Hmm. That's, uh, that's a tough one. You know, really initially, you know, I think it needs to take some research. A lot of folks look at a car going down the road. They're, you know, I've had this conversation with my wife, that car speeding down my street. Right. And I'm like, no, no, honey, it's not like to the point of where I'm close to, you know, bring home a radar gun to show, right. Cause cars, they look like they're going a lot faster. And I think some of that is similar with the e-bikes. Yes. I think that there are e-bikes out there speeding, but I would, I think a majority of them are probably under that 28 miles an hour, uh, maximum speed limit. But when you're riding a bicycle at 28 miles an hour next to a pedestrian, it's pretty fast and it can look faster. So, you know, first, I think you've really got to dissect and probably take some different type of speed measurement devices and some of those things and really look at the e-bikes. Are they, you know, what speeds are they really going out there? Are they going over the 28 miles an hour, which is allowed by the law on roadways, right? Or are they going over the 20 miles an hour that is a rule for the Pinellas County trail? Or is it more of, you know, they might be under the 20 miles an hour rule, but they're so close to the people that it makes it seem faster and really need to dissect some of that and come up with a solution, you know, a game plan and how to address that. I think first and foremost, before just, hey, let's make this a law rule. Yeah. I mean, I do think what you're saying makes sense too, because I had an incident where these 28 e-bikes, my friend and I were walking and they, they just come out of nowhere, seemingly. And you're probably right. They weren't speeding. They're just, but we're walking and out of nowhere, like all of a sudden, they fly by and they're close. So it shakes you up and it doesn't feel safe. And you feel like, this isn't gonna, there's been an accident here someday. Yes. Um, so when, you know, when you walk on a roadway, you're told, walk on the side opposite traffic, like with traffic coming at you, but is, do we do the trail like that? Because it seems like it's like stay to the right or stay to the left, but not what we actually do when we walk on a roadway, what we're told to do safely for that. I mean, am I right about that or am I? So some of the signage and everything, um, and it, I think it's gone back and forth and it's been a few weeks since I've been out on the trail, but then depending on where you are, um, I believe it stayed to the right. But then there are some parts of the trail where there's a, like a grass median that separates kind of a, a more of a walking. We have a lot of that. Versus the, right. Versus the bicycle area. Which I think people just kind of use their common sense then, although it's not necessarily what is being taught by the county. Common sense is not so common these days. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, um, okay. So I'll ask you this question. Forget about legalities. If you were designing the trail and could make a physical change that you think would be better understood in terms of how people go, what, is there anything you would do differently? Do I have an unlimited budget? I really, it'd be separating the pedestrians from the bicycles and then the directionality of the bicycles. So, you know, you know, each direction going an own separate area essentially. Right. Well, if we had an unlimited budget, I'd have a golf cart lane, a bike lane, you know, pedestrian lane, yeah, stroller lane. But you're right about that. Um, okay. Um, okay. Uh, question for a city manager and that is, I know that like in particular for our area, um, what's the status of the Ford Pinellas, um, trying to work on an area that maybe in our busiest spot downtown, there's some, maybe some traffic calming measures that we can do or whatever. So we have been, um, uh, discussing that as you know, with Ford Pinellas, uh, for quite some time. And, and the last time I spoke with them, they were going to submit on our behalf for a grant to study in particular downtown, which would be from, from, uh, Skinner through Scotland, um, as far as, is, uh, our ability to separate the bicycles from the pedestrians. So they're looking for a grant, a planning grant for that. Okay. Well, I mean, you or me, one of us need to try to remember to ask them exactly what that timeline looks like. Oh, we're just in this week. That'd be great. Okay. And I think I actually have a call next week with Witt, but, um, okay. Well, that's all the questions that I have. So, um, I'm going to open it up for public input. Does anyone in the audience wish to come and speak to this issue? Seeing no one, we'll close public input and I'm going to go to commission comments and I will start with Vice Mayor. Thank you for being here this morning. It's a wonderful discussion that needs to take place here. And I mean, I, I do want to mention a, uh, uh, a Facebook post that I saw. And actually, it was more of a group conversation, uh, that involved a lot of the workers at work downtown and the conversation, most of them bicycle to work or a lot of them bicycle to work. And, and the discussion was around how do they get home at night? And it was, do I take the trail, which they know is closed? Uh, or do they ride in the streets where they really do not feel safe? And so it was just a really an interesting discussion that was taking place in the, and the sincerity that was behind it. It was a real discussion on what they do, not bitching complaining. It was, what do we do about this? And the decisions that some of them make, this is what I do. And this is because, and if it's against law, it's against law, that's what I have to do because I need to feel safe. Uh, so I just thought I'd at least share that with you. So if you do pull anybody over that's on the trail at night, be polite and nice and know it's coming from a good place. I know you've got to follow the law, but they're just trying to get home safely so they can get back to work safely. Um, but thank you. I think discussions need to take place. Um, I don't know whether the next step might be in addition, uh, city manager to what you're discussing with Ford Pinellas, but maybe we invite, uh, the appropriate people from the security task force to come and talk to us and somehow to create that dialogue and that conversation on what really does, because whether they're perceived or not, and I don't want to respond to just to perceived, it needs to be data. Uh, but certainly I think there's a difference between a trail and a transportation corridor and, and how they're managed, how they're enforced, the laws around those. What those are, I don't know. But, but the more we can address those issues, I think the more we'll use the trail. There are a number of people that don't use the trail because they don't feel safe and we want everybody to feel safe and to use it in the appropriate manner. But thank you all for being here. Thank you, Mayor. Commissioner Sandberg and final comments. Yeah. Thank you for what you guys do. You know, a couple of times I've heard about it and, you know, seven o'clock on Friday night, I know you guys got a whole lot more in the city than sit down and sit downtown and watch those bikes speed. Uh, we spent a lot of time today talking about e-bikes, but you know, I'm also concerned about, you see that young family with a stroller and the little one with their training wheels, you know, and then that, that e-bike goes flying by them. And if there ever was an accident, it's, it's going to be bad. The other thing I saw recently was, uh, somebody downtown had their dog on one of those tethered leashes. She was on the right side and the dog was sniffing grass on the other side. And man, you get one of those e-bikes coming through there 25 miles an hour. That's not going to be good for anybody and especially the little dog. Uh, I appreciate everything that you guys do. Um, you know, it's come to the point where if when you pull up to the, to the stop signs at the trail and the streets, you might as well, it's a car, you might as well stop because it's almost like they got carte blanche. They're going in whether you, you know, you want it or not, they're going. Um, I don't know if there's are any businesses that are renting e-bikes, but maybe drop in and make sure that they understand that, you know, you got to be safe. You got to obey that. It's like driving your car. You know, you can't bar hop from Tarpon to Dunedin. You know, there's rules and regulations and, uh, I, I appreciate what you guys do. And, uh, that Pinellas trail is, it's like the, it's like the blood and that's like the main vein, you know, bloodline into our city. That's like us 19 to a lot of Pinellas County. And I, I see it. I use it. And, uh, I appreciate you guys trying to keep us safe out there. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Um, commissioner Walker. Thank you, mayor. Yes. Uh, thank you for all you do. Thank you for your service. You guys are awesome. Um, I will say that the one thing and you, I, I think, I think we all recognize that you have a very tough job with regards to your, your enforcement and your monitoring of the trails. And I firmly believe that, you know, we have a responsibility to support you in that mission. Um, just want to get a couple of confirmation. Is it the non-emergency number that people need to call in the event that they see something? They, they, they can call either. At the end of the day, it's going to go to the same place. Call, what was that? They, they can call either the emergency number or the non-emergency. Oh, okay. Not, okay. Gotcha. Um, and because I, I think the, the message here is, uh, if you see something, say something. That's it. And the, it does, it does bother me. It concerns me that, you know, you, you, you've heard, you know, on whatever day you were using as an example, I mean, you, you've gotten seven calls basically. And, uh, you know, just based on some of the comments, well, not some of the comments, a lot of the comments that we've received, uh, via social media or email or, or whatever, um, um, you know, I, I know there's more than seven people out there that are seeing something. And that, so we, we have a responsibility in that and making sure that, you know, that line of communication is open to y'all. And anyway, but thank you again for all you do. Thank you. Commissioner Dugard. Thank you, Mayor. I want to thank the manager for helping us bring you today and you for your presentation. However, I must say it is terribly unsatisfying. I am a personal, uh, I have a personal experience on the trail where a person tried to hit me in an e, on an e-bike, tried to get ahold of you guys, no response. I traveled with him for two miles just to see if I could get his attention. There was an exchange of some very, um, profound words as I did this, but he was aiming at people on his e-bike. Last year, I conducted a survey for my campaign. Inside that survey, there was a question about things concerning our city. On that survey, one of the options was safety, um, safer biking and walking trails. Of the possible responses, that was the highest. 42% of the citizens responding to it said they want safer white walking and biking trails. I had no idea I was going to get that kind of response. In fact, I put that in that survey only because my wife told me she doesn't walk the trail anymore because she doesn't consider it safe. That's why I find this so unsatisfying. It's not your fault. It's a set of circumstances. It starts with our legislature who's defined, defined a bike as something other than a bike that is peddled by human power. They've decided that electric motors can go on bikes and there's still a bike. That's one of the problems. Then we have jurisdictional issues with we don't have jurisdiction of the trail. It is county jurisdiction and your comments on how we should do something more there. We will do something more there because I know what's going to happen and I suspect so do you. There's going to be a day where we have a fatality on the trail in Dunedin because an e-bike. Well, let me just give you a little bit of math. Math times velocity squared. A 100 pound item going at 28 miles an hour creates 7 million pounds of energy on impact. That'll kill somebody. Simple math. So no, I'm not happy with what I'm hearing. Not your fault. I don't mean for you to be the receiver of this, but I'm frustrated and I'm not going to rest on this one. I'm not going to go, oh, there's nothing we can do. I'm going to bang some doors. Because if I don't and then somebody does die, I'm going to say I was negligent. So I've got to do that. And any help from you would be so welcomed. That's all I have, Mayor. Oh, great comments. And thank you also for pushing this forward to have this today. I think it's obviously it is a huge discussion, as you guys know out there. As I was listening to you, Commissioner Dugard, I thought to myself, you know, when you look at it, it's no different than our roads, right? I mean, we continue to explode with how we want to use them. We continue to put cars and bikes and golf cars together on the road. And we know that's a concern of our constituents. And on the trail, it's a different kind of explosion of usage. And we're, you know, dancing with things that don't necessarily really go together. And where's that line going to get across and somebody's going to get hurt? Happens on our roads with bikes and cars. It's going to happen on our trail with pedestrians, bikes, or e-bikes. I was never a fan of e-bikes being done on the trail, because I don't think they're a bike. They're the first start of the evolution to a motor. But I also have learned a lot from you, Vice Mayor, about the reason that push and explosion happens too is because people need economically and safe ways to get to work. And so you do have a lot of people on there using e-bikes to just get to work. And that, I mean, that's fair. That's fair. And so it's a really tough issue. And it's all of our issue, because we have all pushed the envelope on what we're putting together in terms of transportation. And so when we had the little discussion, Lieutenant, if we just had unlimited money, but we're in a built-out county, that we don't have, first of all, we don't have unlimited money. And we absolutely do not have unlimited right away to make us part of our problem on Edgewater Linear Park. We don't have the ability to widen the sidewalk. So these things continue to clash together in a way that is absolutely, invariably, going to cause incidents. And hopefully not the big one, but probably will occur. So, but, I mean, I think we just kind of, we have to keep trying to plug to the goal. I agree with you. We can't give up on the goal, because we know it's a huge concern of our constituents. And so, but I do want to thank the captain. Lieutenant did great, really appreciate this. And Deputy Skypack, who I know, he's always at Ford Pinellas, and he sits on all this. And I know, appreciate you guys are getting e-bikes, because I think that's, you know, having the same type of vehicle is important. I almost think it's kind of funny that e-bikes' maximum speed is actually greater than the golf cart's actual limited speed, which, I mean, there's just inconsistencies in so many places. And I do want to say, too, because I got beat up a little bit last time about even on the trail, like for some seniors, they wouldn't even be on bikes if they couldn't do some kind of combination of pedal assist. So, so it's a tough issue, but all about pushing all kinds of different vehicles into areas that are, that need to be bigger, need to be more spread out. So I guess that's all I have. I think we'll just keep trying to work towards solutions. I'm going to look forward to Ford Pinellas, at least trying to get our clogged area, since we have the most usage of, maybe that's going to help the situation. But I just think we have to keep working towards it. But I appreciate all the great conversation. Again, thank you, Commissioner Degard, for pushing this forward. And anything, City Manager, you want to add to this? Okay. Well, thanks for all you do. We really appreciate what service you do for our citizens. Thank you. Mayor, if I couldn't just add, it doesn't involve them, but it does. One of the missing factors we didn't talk is just respect of individuals towards other individuals, and just common courtesy. And everybody feels that everybody's attacking everybody else. And just the way the human mentality is, especially in the United States. You know, I even saw a YouTube video the other day of the way people in Japan get on and off a subway versus the people in New York City that get on and off. And there is so much more courtesy and respect in Japan style versus America. And just, I'm getting on that bus, or I'm getting on that bus, I'm getting on that subway, I'm getting on whatever, get out of my way. And the number of car drivers that hate a bicyclist, regardless of where they are. So, bicyclists, they're hated on the trail by pedestrians. They're hated in the road by car drivers. And we forget that every one of those bicyclists are also pedestrians. They're human. They're also pedestrians. They're also car drivers. And so the idea that bicyclists stand alone with some sort of elitist attitude, and the rules don't abide in them, yet the next thing you know, they're getting in their cars. And they're probably the same car drivers. They're causing problems in our cars as well, on our roadways. I appreciate that. And I will say, when it comes to courtesy, did you ever see, I'll just say Catholics, because I'm a Catholic. Did you ever see the Catholics trying to get out of the parking lot after church? You know, there's just some things along the way. And that is probably true in any kind of church. So anyway, yes, go ahead. Yeah. And I, you know, this is in addition to the pressing forward with Ford Pinellas. You know, it concerns me that we get a, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that there's a perception that the county has not been, been as responsible as they could be in terms of addressing some of these issues. So yeah, as the, our local government legislative body up here, there, there has to be some pressure exerted, not pressure, but just continued persistence with regards to getting this addressed at the county level. But I would also add, as we transition into our legislative priorities, I think we have an opportunity here in one of our pillars, transportation and infrastructure to press the state on this particular issue. Because Pinellas Trail, I mean, it's, it is a regional artery. It's a regional gem. And you know, we just, we need to make sure it gets the focus it should. So, sorry. Thank you. And I'm going to just, because we've all kind of talked a second time. Is Commissioner Sandberg or Commissioner Degard? Okay. All right. We're going to close the conversation. Thank you very much again. Thank you, Teresa. And thank you. And thank you for spending your morning with us. We should have lunch for you, right? Okay. We are going to go to, unless somebody needs a five minute break, we're going to continue on. You're looking at me like, oh, okay. We're going to take a five minute break. Okay. We're going to reopen the meeting with some very exciting, very exciting item, fats, oils, and grease, fog presentation. And I do want to say sometimes when people think, wow, you know, like we just forget about the messiness of life, right? And yet you guys have to deal with the messiness of life and try to train us to be mindful of what clogs stuff up and causes us headaches. And then we want to blame everybody. But really, it comes back to our own personal responsibility. So on that note, we have a whole clan here. So who's actually the start of the... Okay. I'll let you kind of run through the team and then take it, Clay. Good. All right. Good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Commissioners. Clayton Watkins, Utilities and Engineering. With me today, we have Nan Bennett, our Utilities and Operations Manager, Rodney Rainey, our Collections Manager, and Alex Winterstein, who is our environmental specialist, too, who has helped here to help us unfold our program and get us through it. As we mentioned today, we are here to... Whoa, excuse me. We are here today to present on a... and discuss an important, often overlooked issue that affects our city's infrastructure, public health, environmental quality, and that is fats, oils, and grease, commonly referred to as fog. So in the fiscal year 2025 budget, wastewater services proposed a new position. And we proposed this position, and it was approved, this environmental specialist, to lead the fats, oils, and grease program. And with that, our program will help educate the community, inventory our food service providers, assist in creating an ordinance, and perform inspections. In April, we brought on Alex Winterstein. And since April, he has been working on background information and data collection to start the program, shadowing employees from other cities who have a fog program, and starting the draft ordinance. So at this time, I'll let Alex continue with our presentation. Hi, Alex. Hi, guys. Thank you. We're going to go over fats, oils, and grease management as a whole, and what we're doing here in the city. So some presentation topics. What is fats, oils, and grease? Fog. That's going to be used interchangeably. How does it affect our homes and businesses? Interceptors and inspections of food service establishments, and sanitary sewer overflows, fog prevention as a whole. So what is fog? Fats, oils, and grease consists of fatty acids, triglycerides, soaps. They're all hydrophobic and insoluble in water. It's derived from vegetables, plants, meat products. Just to give you some idea of what that looks like, food scraps, cooking oils, shortening, lard, butter, margarine, gravies, dairy products, some foods that you wouldn't think of, salsa, pizza dough, icing, nut butters. All that stuff is considered fats, oils, and grease. So first, we're going to just touch upon fog prevention at home, and then we're going to get into the business side of what that looks like. So here in the city, we have the scrape it up, can it, and soak it up method. Exactly what it sounds like. Scraping it off the pan that you're using it or the plate, canning it, and tossing it, or just soaking it up with like a dish towel or whatever. And then obviously you don't want to pour any of that down sinks, toilets, anything like that. Backups inside homes occur because of fog accumulating in drains, as well as conditioners, and soaps, and shampoos, and shower drains, excuse me. That's often a big problem as well. As it solidifies and cools, that's when you throw it away in the trash bin. So commercial, now back into the commercial side. So commercial fog removal strategies. The bigger the fog production, the bigger the solution. So on the left-hand side, you're going to see this is the hydro-mechanical grease interceptor, also known as like a grease trap. That's what most people think of when they see one in the kitchen. And then on the right, for more like, for bigger business and for obviously more fog production, you have the gravity grease interceptor, which does exactly what it sounds like. It uses gravity to take from the one side to the next side and actually move down into the interceptor itself. So you can see, so on the left side of the gravity grease interceptor, there's the fat oil and grease on the top there, that yellow portion. And then in the middle is all water. That's all the aqueous barrier. That's what we call that. And then the bottom is sludge. So the idea is to get all that water onto the other side of the tank. So two-thirds of the tank for a gravity grease interceptor is the inlet side. The outlet side is the other third. And that's supposed to be mainly 80 percent of it is clean. So you have water in there and a little bit of fat, a little bit of grease, and a little bit of solids. And that goes out to the wastewater collection system. So a properly working gravity grease interceptor does about 80 percent, as I said. So you could see that it's it's really beneficial to have one in a restaurant or any business that serves food. So we're going to go over some program recommendations. So we would like to propose annual inspections and permitting for every food service establishment. Right now I'm just doing data collection, just to give you some sort of an idea. I'm just going to every business that has one of these gravity grease interceptors or interceptors in general, and just seeing what they have and if it's actually serviceable for what they're using it for. So I'd like to propose annual inspections and permitting for every food service establishment in the city. Since fog accumulates quickly, a license permitter, grease hauler, should be pumping out on average of every three months. This is interchangeable. Sometimes it's every month, depending on how much grease they're actually accumulating. But three months is usually the end timeline for most businesses. A preferred list of grease haulers will be introduced is what we're proposing. So what that looks like, basically what we're trying to think of is that the city keep a higher level level of standards and competencies from the hauling companies themselves. So we'd like the customers, the people who are the FSCs, the businesses themselves, from these hauling companies to get the most out of their grease hauling. This is an expensive asset, what the grease haulers do. It can be from $300 to $1,000. So we want to make sure that they're getting everything that they're paying for, for these grease haulers to take out of that money. So at one time, they can pump out like 4,000 gallons from a tank collectively. Usually the most common number is like 100 gallons. For the small ones, 50 gallons. And then gravity grease interceptors can be up to 1250. So usually what a hauling company will do is they'll take from individual places and take it all and then go to a place where they can dump it. So this is what pumping out a grease interceptor looks like. So the one on the left was the grease trap that we first spoke about. So they're actively doing that. They're pumping out the solids, the liquid, like the aqueous barrier, the water barrier, and then actually the fat soles and grease on top. So they're supposed to do a complete pump out when they do this. So you could see the bottom of the tank. And then the same thing goes on the other side. They use a vacuum truck to do this too. So they take like a giant vacuum and they put it in there and they vac it out all together at one time. And the same process for both sides. The one is in the kitchen on the left there. On the right, that's in like a private space from the business itself. Usually it's always on the business's property. So what an interceptor looks like when it's not cleaned. This is pretty self-explanatory. So you could see, I'm just going to focus on the photo on the left. So that blue hook looking thing there, that's a manhole hook. That's what we take to open up the manhole itself. So there's so much grease compiled in that interceptor that it's gotten pushed up by the water and the fat and the grease that's getting accumulated as it happens. And it's solidified like it would in a glass jar and has created a cap almost. So the hauler, and that's where these photos are from, actually stuck his manhole hook in the grease itself to give you an idea of how bad it really was. And then the other ones are just basically same thing going on in the second photo on the right. That's a broken T. That's common for the inlet T into the tank. They often break from opening the tank and shoving a vacuum into it. So what is fog buildup and how does it look like in our sewer systems, both public and private? Fog gets impacted and hardens over time. Blockages restrict the flow of wastewater and can cause sewer backups and sanitary sewer overflows, which I'll touch upon in the next slide. But to give you an idea, the photo to the left, I guess you would say, on the right side of the page, the photo to the left, that is a four-inch pipe that is completely impacted by fats, oils, and grease. And you could see that this would be a huge issue for any homeowner or for any business that would get so impacted that the only thing that you could do is call the wastewater department or a certified hauler to mitigate that issue. On the right, that's a main pipe there. So you could see the actual the fat oils and grease all over the pipe itself, on top, on the sides, underneath even. And that's a huge cause for concern, especially when you're talking about sanitary sewer overflows as a whole. The best way to mitigate damage caused by fog is to not let it get into the sewers. I mean, that's the best way to allow it from not happening. And interceptors and interceptor management is how we do that. So how a fog management program drastically dwindles is the amount of sanitary sewer overflows. First, what is a sanitary sewer overflow? A sanitary sewer overflow or an SSO is a condition in which untreated sewage is discharged from a sanitary sewer into the environment before reaching the sewage treatment plant wastewater collection system, or the wastewater plant, I should say. Fats oils and grease contributes to 47% of all SSOs. So the other 53%, I have it here in my notes, I'm sorry. It's basically environmental conditions can cause them construction and engineering issues within the pipe itself. A fog management program's sole purpose is to prevent SSOs and harmful foreign substances from discharging into the environment. So that's what a sanitary sewer overflow looks like when it's coming out of a manhole. The photo on the left is actually the manhole itself. It's about 85 pounds. So the force of the water is pushing upward and pushing it out of the actual manhole because there's a blockage a little further downstream of that manhole. So it's so blocked up that that wastewater has nowhere to go except up because that's the least path of resistance. So the photo on the left is the continuation of the photo on the right. So you can kind of see how quickly it can immerse itself in the environment and go right into the environment and how detrimental that can be, not just on, you know, the residents or the people who own the business, but the actual environment itself, overall. So in a given year, actually, excuse me, SSOs and the Clean Water Act, in 1977, an amendment to the Clean Water Act prohibits discharge into nation's waters unless a permit is obtained. In 1995, Bill Clinton turned and asked the EPA to turn its attention to SSOs and the occurrence and how much they happen every year. It was pretty crazy at that time. There was probably 40,000 to 50,000, 60,000 that they knew of. There was more that was not reported. Now the estimates are around 23,000 to 75,000 that occur nationally. And again, those are the ones that are reported. Sometimes they don't get reported as they should be. But here in the city, we are very diligent about doing so. That does not include the inclusion of backups into buildings. The city has experienced 11 SSOs in 2024. This year to date, we have three SSOs. So you could see that those numbers are dropping, which is great. And then in Pinellas County, they've experienced over 162 SSOs in 2023 and 2024. And again, these numbers are from hurricanes. They're from fat soils in Greece. They're from issues in the actual wastewater system itself. So in summary, fat soils in Greece affects everyone in this community. A small amount of effort by each and every one of us can help reduce the likelihood of communities experiencing the consequences of fog in the collection system, you know, with backups included and SSOs. So thank you. Thank you, Alex. I'm going to turn to for questions and we'll start with Vice Mayor this time. No questions, Mayor. Okay. Commissioner Sandbergen. So we do have some type of a monitoring system in force today? This, yeah, this is it right now. This is me. So besides restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals? Yep, yep. Anywhere that has food distributed in any kind, that would be what we're trying to track. So businesses like restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals, schools. Like I was just at the schools last week. It was a really great experience. They're really great people. So it makes it easy when that is the case. No exposure with any city-owned properties? Yeah, the community center, I believe I went to. That was, I think that's it on my list. So I have about 170 businesses as of right now that I'm going to. So that's all. Thank you, Mayor. Oh, excuse me. Let me expound on that question. We do not have a formalized program. It is against our ordinance to discharge, but we do not have a formalized fats, oils, and grease program on the books to date. That's what we're proposing is an ordinance change that will formalize a fats, oils, and grease program and allow for regular maintenance of those devices. The devices are out there in the community and are being maintained on an honors system, if you will. Yeah. And we're trying to formalize that so that everybody's doing the same thing and that we can document how it's being done. Because right now I'm just basically doing data collection, just seeing who has what, you know, because it's never been regulated here. In a lot of cities that it is, you know, like Tampa, the city of Tampa, Largo, Oldsmar, Pinellas County as a whole has their own program. So regulating is a huge factor. And what was that number? You said how many potential exposures? 107. So there's 168 businesses that we monitor here. Okay. And SSOs, sanitary sewer overflows, last year was 11. So that's what primarily caused it. Other than hurricanes, they can do it as well. Okay. So. Thank you. Okay. Commissioner Walker. Thank you, Mayor. So how, okay, I heard that basically what we've got in place right now is an honor system. Correct. What does that entail from a process standpoint? So basically what goes on is the hauler has to document into a database that they're picking up said grease. Prior to our database, there was nothing. It was just that the hauler scheduled to pick up and that was it. And hopefully they did it. That was the, that was the honor system. I mean, that's kind of what we have right now. I'm just going out and doing, you know, so-called inspections, making sure that they are doing what they're supposed to be doing. But again, without an, without it being in the ordinance, it's kind of difficult to enforce that. Yeah. And so when the businesses produce this, what do they typically do? I'm assuming that they probably don't have these, um, commercial fog removal strategies. I think basically somebody comes by and collects it and then they take it to whatever. No, so they do. So each business has one of these commercial, most of them. There's a few that offhand that do not. Um, but yeah, most of them do and, uh, have a hauler set up or they can do it themselves too. And they can dump it at the city collection system too. Um, but yes, most of them do. Okay. Um, and I know that, you know, we're in the, the objective here is to codify this. Uh, but my question just from your data collection, what does a permit look like in terms of costs? Um, let's see. I have it written down. What we were looking at to charge for a cost. I think what now we were talking about would be $120 a year. Yep. And most, uh, most cities do it by, they just tack it onto the water bill. So it's like 10 bucks a month. So it's not as harsh as, you know, say $120 right up front. And that's, that $120, that's a, that's a cost burden to the business. Correct. Okay. Um, just to give you some idea too, um, other cities that have these programs, uh, Largo's is about 150, you know, and change, um, for their permit. Um, Oldsmar is around 250. And then, uh, Pinellas County is, um, 115 for those that are smaller than 50 gallons and 140 for more than 50 gallons. Okay. Yeah, I would, uh, yeah. So since I've been on the commission, I've had two separate instances where this, this was not done properly. Um, so I think, uh, I think bringing this to the, our attention is, is timely and good. Um, let's see. Um, just, and just one other question on these commercial solutions. Um, are they below ground? Um, they can be. So usually the, um, the bigger, uh, option of the two, the, the gravity grease interceptor is below ground. Um, they're usually made out of concrete or plastic. And, uh, the concrete ones that are, you know, large construction. So, you know, they gotta, um, blow a hole out of the middle of the ground on their property and put one in. If they wanted to put in a, um, hydro-mechanical one, that can be, or the grease trap, that can be just connected directly onto their existing plumbing. Or, or it can be in the ground inside the kitchen too. It just depends on their preference. Okay. Mayor, if I may. Sure. Go ahead. Sure. Uh, Jorge, Jorge Quintas, Deputy City Manager. Um, to elaborate on, on Nan's comment and, and some of the questions that, that you've had, Commissioner Walker as well as, uh, Commissioner Stambergen. So, in addition to what Alex is explaining, we've also had, um, and this, this proposed ordinance would allow us to then have that enforcement capability. What we've had in the past, in addition to just, um, restaurants that are doing what they should be doing and having their grease traps pumped out. Um, we've also had situations where we've had illicit dumping into our sanitary sewer system. You've had, uh, basically an undocumented hauler that comes into town in the middle of the night, pops one of our manholes, dumps what they've pumped out of, um, a grease trap throughout the day because they don't want to go pay what they have to pay to then legally dump it at a wastewater treatment plant. So then we've had those kind of issues and right now we don't have an enforcement capability. So this would allow us to do, take care of that as well. And that was that documented list of approved haulers that then we could put additional criteria on to protect our city. Yeah, thanks. That, I was trying to remember the instance of one of them and that was exactly it. Um, so anyway, no, appreciate it. Uh, I have no further questions. Great. Thank you. And, uh, Commissioner DeGuard. Thank you, Mayor. Um, let's talk economics here. Sure. We had 11 last year. What did that cost us? Any feel? I mean, do we have data on that? Tens of hundreds of thousands. I don't want to talk about the hurricane ones because there's back truck running nonstop, but you take a normal one, you have a back truck, you can't rent a back truck for less than $500 for three hours. You have two guys, you'll need two other guys, bag of lime. I mean, you got a couple thousand bucks lined up right there. Okay. So if we had 11, unless they, so we'd be talking $22,000 if we use that benchmark as a possibility for 11. Don't forget, now you got to turn that spill in and we're going to get charged for that spill when it's lined up fine at the end of the year. Okay. What's that look like? What is it, $1,000 a gallon? I believe it's $1,000 a gallon. Don't quote me on that. I'll get you the exact number. So now we're talking real money. Yes. Okay. Just wanted to get a feel for what we're talking economically. Excuse me, sir. Sorry. And Rodney, if you can also expand on what you spend a couple of days a month on like Main Street just doing cleanup. We have a trouble spot list. Sorry, I didn't bring everybody a copy. And this is, these are mainly, these are not from roots, drop joints. That's another one. I have a root control list, which we try to root control that once a year. But this it's, it's, it's normally every six months or three months or time dated when we go back out there and we hit them just to keep them clean. Top of my mind. There's a right there tire kingdom on Main Street where it goes back to the, the apartments in the back, back there, that's a trouble spot. Right. Uh, I got it right by me. You don't need to get specifics. Okay. There's many places and that's time of the truck. So if we could loosen some of this up, that's less mileage and time on a truck. It could just be cleaning new areas instead of old areas because we have to clean 10% of the city every year. So I have to get there. So if they keep going back to places we've already done, it counts. Got it. We need to get to new places. That's very helpful. Thank you. Um, let's talk about the success of this process where it's been employed elsewhere. Do you have any feel for how successful it's been? Yeah, actually, this is the most successful area in the United States. Um, the Southwest coast. Um, so there's, I believe there's probably 20 or 30 programs that are currently going on in this area. Um, and overall it's a 90% success rate as far as fog accumulation is concerned. Um, so yeah, there's, it's, it's a huge success here specifically. Um, and the people and the cities that are, um, involved have been in contact with me because, um, it's kind of a rare thing to not have a program like this already set up. So it's been really beneficial to have them and, um, to have their insight as we create this. Okay. Let's talk about resistance from those that would be paying this fee. Sure. What have we, what are we seeing from other communities there? Are they cooperative, resistant? What do you see? Um, in those other communities they've, it's just kind of status quo. It's what, it's what it is there. Um, you have, that's the pay to get in, you know, to have a business there. Um, originally here too, I found that there was a lot of pushback, you know, cause this is a new thing. There are more money to be spending, you know, it's already hard to run a restaurant, um, let alone have to pay for another thing, even if it's, even if it's $10 a month. Yep. Um, but I think over time as I've been doing these inspections as, as I've been going out into the community, I've really focused on education and what I can do for them and how this is going to affect them. Um, getting rid of those backups, getting rid of those, um, those issues, having someone to be here to monitor those grease haulers and make sure they're, they're actually doing their job. Because when it's underground, how do you know they're even doing it? You know, you don't have somebody who can open it up. You don't have a manhole hook. How do you even know if you're, you know, usually these grease haulers come at 5am, 6am. They're not there. They, you know, the restaurant was open until two o'clock in the morning the night before. And the last thing they want to do is get up at five and be there for a pump out. So I think. So there are some benefits to the payer. Yes. Okay. All right. Excuse me. Nan Bennett, Utilities Operations. This is common best practices in the restaurant industry. I mean, it's common best practices in your home if you don't want to have your, in your own plumbing, have problems. And so when it's also part of our code and our development code, they install these devices as part of our development code. This is normal activity for a restaurant to, to be able to trap these things before they cause problems in the piping systems. And so they are for the most part doing the right things. And so that cost is already built in, baked in to how a restaurant is run. The difference will be that the city will be monitoring on both sides, both, both that it is being done on the point of the food service, but we're also going to be monitoring what the haulers are doing and that they are giving the service that the, that the customers are paying for. Business is paying for. That's good. That's good. That's all the questions I have. Thank you. Nan, you just answered one of my questions because I was trying to decide what's the personal benefit to the business. And I think you just answered that by, you know, they can have their own backup, right? Right. Which would potentially shut down their business, cost a lot of money. And they understand the value in having these devices so that they don't cause their own backups, because obviously their plumbing is smaller diameter and upstream of ours. So a lot of times the problems happen right on their own property. It's only the stuff that gets off of their property that then starts to cause maintenance problems for our, our utility staff that have to maintain the rest of the city collection system. And I can only compare it to, you know, I just learned about how hurricanes can cause the backup in your home, you know, collection of whatever the sand and becomes like concrete. And so $2,200 later, that's after the city determined it wasn't on their side. But $2,200 later to a plumber, you know, that was my cost. So, you know, and basically couldn't use half the house for a whole weekend. So, I mean, obviously a business would be, you know, devastated by that. So it's a good thing. So let's see if I, did the, I know you're going to all the different businesses, but involvement of the chamber? Has the chamber kind of been knowledgeable about it, or are they up to date on what we're doing? So our, our next steps after we converse with you will be meetings with the, with the chamber. We'll do sort of the similar presentation and also the, the EQC. So, you know, environmentally they're on the board also. Okay. I mean, then, you know, they're obviously wearing two hats now as the chamber, but also downtown merchants. So, may I? Sure. Go ahead. So we'll have a discussion this afternoon at the department head meeting regarding the communications plan. Once we get all of your your input and consensus direction to move forward. So this is sort of a soft rollout that we've been doing until we come to you with an ordinance. Sure. But I can tell you that one of my first assignments, I think, I think it was within my first month, was to speak to the chamber. And I brought this up at that point. I said, they said, what, what issues, you know, should we be aware of? And I said, I think we really need to be focused on fats, oils, and grease, and what's being discharged into the sanitary sewer. So it's been informal. It hasn't been a formalized discussion. But yes, we have initiated discussion with the chamber and with the and with the food service establishments. Okay. And again, I just make sure we don't have bad actors out there. So somebody that would literally take a manhole up and dump fats, oils, greases in it, what would be their fine? Like if you caught them, what would be the fine? Yeah. So the idea that we currently have, you know, obviously nothing in writing as of yet, but... So right now, there is nothing we could do? Nothing. Oh, okay. Shame on you for doing that. There's nothing. Yeah. So what I'm proposing is $1,000 fine. And as it, as they keep doing it, that only escalates. With no maximum. What that looks like, obviously, we're still in the infancy phases. Okay. But we'll see that. But yes, for sure. Okay. Yeah. Because that is just next level atrocious to me. And it's hard to catch them too, you know, because if they're doing it... In the middle of the night. That's... Yeah. Yeah. And this is, every city has this problem. It's not just here. It's every city in America that has a problem, has this problem. So... Well, that's where I think how you stagger those fees in terms of egregiousness. You know, if you catch them once, you might have missed them 10 times. Then I'd be big, if it's a big dump, you know, so... And the way the program is set up, all of the different programs in the county have a single place that they dispose of. The city set up as a central place to dispose of these fast oils and grease. This is not the yellow grease, the valuable stuff that comes off the top. This is the ugly stuff. Right. And that we all use it. We've all proposed to use the same software program so that even if a hauler picks up a load in tarpon and unincorporated Pinellas in Dunedin, and it hits Clearwater before they go to dump, everybody gets reported back what was collected for them. And so you get a manifest, if you will, of everything that's in that truck. And so if somebody consistently comes up short on their manifest, well, then that means they're stopping somewhere and decanting. And that's not okay to dump into somebody else's sewer system. And so that's one of the tools for catching a hauler that may or may not be following all of the rules. Yeah. And then just to touch upon that too, like Nan said, they have to report it into this database. A lot of cities, they give them five business days to report this. All of their grease, you know, from when they picked it up to five days after. And usually the, so one of the main grease haulers does all of the, takes all of those grease loads at their facility. And they're very communicative. So it makes it easy too. So my last question is, when we talk about a preferred list of haulers, like how do we do that in a way that's fair and has fair criteria? So basically what we'll do is Pinellas County has one today. We will start with that list. And if basically you'll be removed for bad behavior for lack of better terms. So that's basically that we were not really having to put any more effort than needs to. There's a currently list from Pinellas County. We'll start there and remove if necessary. Great. Okay. I'm going to, we've got six minutes left guys. So let's see. I'm going to open it up for public input. Anyone in the audience wish to come forward and speak on this issue? Uh, seeing no one, including Nicole rush forward. We'll begin. Um, and I'm going to close public input. And, um, and again, I obviously I'm city manager. You're looking for a consensus direction on how we feel about this moving forward. Um, and so I will go to final comments. And if you just include it within that, and I think, uh, we'll, we'll start with vice mayor. Thank you. Uh, this is certainly a long time coming. So I'm glad to see this this morning. I guess I kind of have a question that doesn't need answering, but I'm assuming that with the illegal dumping, there's no type of DNA with fog that it can be traced back to. Good question. Right. Um, because when you started talking about if they, if they pick up in Dunedin, and then Tarpon Springs and then Clearwater and then the illegal dump and you were saying it can be reported back, I'm thinking, Oh, how cool is that? Um, but now I get that it's in reference to the manifest and the volume of what's being picked up. But anyway, again, this is just, again, a long time coming. So it's, um, it is best practices and it's something that should be new if at least in concept with anybody who owns a business that uses fats, oils or grease. So they're well aware that this is out there. So I'm glad to see that it's coming to Dunedin. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Commissioner Sandberg and final comments. Yeah. I'm not sure we have any, um, plans for new restaurants coming to town, but I hope it's all addressed in our building codes. So we pick it up from day one. And I think you were very kind when you said, um, maybe a thousand dollar fine, you're welcome to bring something a lot bigger and I'll support you 100%. This is Terry. Yeah, this is important. That's all. Thank you. Okay. Uh, Commissioner Walker. Uh, thank you, Mary. No further comments. Great presentation. Okay. Uh, Commissioner Dugard. I think you build consensus. The only thing they want to do is a larger fine. I've had everything answered I need. Thank you. And I'll disclose by recognizing, uh, you know, Clay and Nan, Rodney, Alex, um, I just think, um, this is the stuff that, you know, nobody pays attention, right? But it's huge. It's huge. It's important. I think this is a way we protect our community against bad actors. And, uh, and it's something best practice anyway. And obviously, you know, there's a lot of communities doing it. Looks like you've thought about that in the fee. Um, I'm just going to do an extra shout out to Rodney because I had a tour by Rodney and he's amazing. And we've got great people, you know, behind this stuff. And that's important. That's important. When we think about, um, you know, how we treat our employees, it's really important. We've got good people. Um, so anyway, 100% support. And I agree with make those fees, fees fit the crime. Um, all on that. And, uh, I think you have your direction, city manager. I do. Let me ask you a question. We have, thank you all, everybody. Uh, we have three minutes, uh, to the end of our meeting. We have legislative priorities. How long do you think that would take? Three minutes. I'm doubtful of that, but are we ready to continue even if it goes a little beyond three, like say five minutes beyond three minutes? Okay. All right. Let's come on down and try to get it in. I just have a hard stop. So mayor, I think actually you've seen all this information before. So it's a touch base as we take off. Uh, we're a little bit ahead with our legislative platform. Typically, we've been behind. Um, so, so we want to touch base one more time here and then, um, and then our lobbyist and Nicole have their marching orders. Yeah. So let me just ask in all seriousness, is everybody good till say 1245? And we'll just stop there. Good. Okay. All right. Go for it. Nicole. I mean, don't make it, you don't have to go. Okay. Good. Let's try to get it done. Good morning, mayor, vice mayor, commissioners, Nicole Delfino, strategy and sustainability manager here to review, uh, legislative priorities and to request some, uh, discussion and direction as far as any revision to those, uh, priorities that we have, um, have created for this last session. Um, I'm going to quickly run through some of these really just looking at getting your feedback on that, on some of those, uh, top priorities and really, you know, over the years, we've really tried to focus in, um, on, on really refining and prioritizing those, um, statements and want to just kind of have, have you think, have that in mind as, as we're going through this again, uh, committee starts in October. Uh, that is one of the reasons why we wanted to get this in today so that going into that, uh, those first committee meetings, we'll already have your, um, your direction. Um, so that will help us have those conversations, uh, with our, uh, delegation. Uh, session starts January 13th. It goes to March 13th. Again, streamlining the priorities. This is the, just a look back at the, uh, 2025 priorities. Um, I had mentioned we are going to take this, we're going to rebrand it to our new branding guidelines. Um, a lot of what's on the front, um, you know, is pretty consistent year over year as far as our, our home rule, um, those big buckets of where, where the priority statements are. Obviously the appropriation requests, uh, will change, uh, somewhat there, um, depending on how, you know, what we want to move forward this year. But really, again, looking at those statements, uh, the home rule, um, I think we've talked several times about home rule. I don't, I don't want to make any assumptions as to where everybody stands on that, but want to get your, you know, thumbs up, thumbs down on, uh, I see a thumbs up on continuing with, you know, making that a priority. Uh, we talk about that quite a bit with every law that is, uh, or every bill that's proposed that could ultimately become a law, how it degrades our, our home rule. Um, as far as environmental and resiliency, um, what we've had in the past is, um, you know, pretty general statements on enhancing community resiliency, alternative energy, um, preserving and protecting our waterways. Um, one of the things that we had talked about that we thought would happen after the storms last season was that there would be some sort of legislative action for, uh, storm recovery, which we did not see. Uh, we saw a bill, uh, but as far as, uh, you know, appropriation and, and recovery funding, we did not see that. Um, so I wanted to just it, uh, however you'd like to do this, if you want to go slide by slide, we'll get through them really quickly and get your feedback on, on how you all feel with, and I think you can go through it. And then we can each have a bite at the apple if we have anything to add or support or that. Perfect. Um, and then as far as transportation infrastructure, uh, we have had this on the list for a while, the critical transportation project being the Dunnean Causeway Bridge, uh, promoting innovative multimodal infrastructure and then prioritizing, uh, sustainable public transportation. Uh, and then as far as municipal administration, we refer back to home rule. Uh, we've talked about our mental health, uh, you know, discussion as far as improving access programs. Um, we've seen a lot of growth, I think, in that area, uh, over the last few years. Uh, the two items I've added there was, uh, a consideration of your position on sovereign immunity and then property tax, which we have been hearing quite a lot about. We'll just keep going right along. Uh, education. We've talked about the funding, the arts and culture. Uh, this was pretty big, uh, two sessions ago when all of that funding was cut. Uh, it was reinstated this year, but I feel like it at any moment is on the chopping block. Uh, uh, the support of workforce training, um, uh, rounds out the education, uh, priorities for economic development and housing. Uh, well, that, that was a successful one, the repair and reopening of honeymoon Island, uh, which was indicated last year, um, enhancing, uh, funding and initiatives for affordable housing. I think that they continue to tweak the live local bill and, and how that, you know, affects municipalities. Um, here last year, we saw a lot of discussion around the CRA. So I wanted to propose if you had any, um, inclination to include any sort of CRA language or position for this next year. And that sums it up. Yeah. It didn't make it in three minutes. No. You did good though. You did good. Um, so let's, unless somebody wants to do differently. I'm thinking, um, I'll go to each commissioner and maybe you can have questions and comments at the same time. And I'll start with commissioner Walker. Does that sound good to everybody? You want to still keep questions separate? I just, yeah, I think a lot of these are still relevant. Um, the one thing I would say is, is yes, I think we should consider CRA language because I think my understanding from y'all is, is that we think this is probably going to come back. And, um, the other part, um, again, and I, I don't know what this would look like. And I, this, I kind of mentioned this on the, on the trail safety, but, um, I, I think probably the state can do more in terms of, uh, I mean, they've, they're, they're the ones that have made the definition via state statute on what the definition of e-bikes are and all that stuff. And, uh, I would say that there's got to be some, there's got to be more teeth in. So the state has put that in your hands at this point. Um, the law that they passed has said that municipalities may regulate the use of bikes, e-bikes, scooters, and the list goes on, um, within their districts. I think the, the issue, obviously one of the bigger issues that, that, that we are facing is that we have, while you can enact an ordinance that regulates those things within our jurisdiction or our, our city boundaries, you have, um, uh, assets that don't belong to Dunedin. So, um, I think really having that conversation with, you know, with the county might be the, you know, a direction that you might want to, uh, consider. Uh, but at this point, the state has said what shockingly that you all can regulate how you want e-bikes, uh, to be regulated within your jurisdiction. Well, I didn't think that we should think about doing that. Um, one last thing on this, I would say, um, you know, I, I think that as, as a commission and as the city of Dunedin, I think we did a remarkable job of delivering the message on Honeymoon Island and Cala DC. And, uh, the only thing I would say is, I, I think as a result of that, um, there was an acceleration in the recovery part. Uh, you know, I still think there's probably more we can do for the two most visited state parks in Florida. And, uh, I don't know quite what that looks like, but if it's funding resources, you know, Tom and I are on the Friends of the Island board and, uh, I think, uh, we can definitely solicit for ideas in terms of how to shape that. So that's all I've got. Thank you. Okay. Uh, Commissioner Dugard. I agree with my colleague, um, Commissioner Walker. I think this is an excellent start. Um, thank you again for how well you, um, wrangled us in Tallahassee. Yeah, I heard it's probably good. Um, and I'm, I still think there's something more that can be done in transportation, particularly, um, the definitions. I think that that's still a problem. I'm not sure if that's something that we do want to carry to the state. If we can't carry it to the state because of that recent act, I think that we need to carry it to our Pinellas County, um, commissioners and talk with them about it, uh, because they are the jurisdictional authority on the, on the trail. And maybe that's our next step as well with forward Pinellas. Um, but thank you for what you do. I appreciate it. Thank you. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Questions and comments? Uh, certainly I would agree with what my colleagues have said so far. And Nicole, thank you for suggesting to us that the state has already kind of given their framework and kind of kicked it back to us. But as we have seen historically, the moment we try and work with it, they take it back from us because they don't like it. Um, so I think it needs to be as a state, at least talking points with them to let them know and let them have them work with us as we take control of this, of this issue. I do believe that because of the makeup of our county in, in height, uh, with density and size, I, I truly believe that Panemis County has an opportunity to transform transportation in the state if we get it right. And, uh, getting it right is, is, is the heavy lift. Uh, but the moment we start going down that road, the state's going to have an issue with it because these seem schizophrenic on the whole idea of home rule. And I'm sorry if that puts us in a bad light or, but, um, but other than that, I love what we've done. Nothing is new here. I do like Commissioner Walker's comments about the CRA. I think there does need to be some language in there. I think that is going to come back. Um, but other than that, it continued. Well done. Mr. Sandbergen. I think last year, I think we did well, but we're going to blow the top off of it this year. We're going to be a lot more prepared, got a lot more experience and, uh, I've already brought it up a couple of times up here. You're going to lead us up there this year and we're going to, we're going to really make it happen. So thank you. Yeah. Great. Um, so, um, no, I think this is great. I do want to clarify, I guess, I look at all the ones that you said, consider storm recovery under environment, consider sovereign immunity and property tax under municipal administration, and consider CRA language. And I agree with all those. I think those would be good. I just want to make sure, is everybody else on board with her coming up with language for those four considerations? Yes. Good. Okay. Um, so I'm good with those changes. Um, and anything that you can garner from what you just heard, I think about the transportation piece, but I think it's good. I think, um, trying to make sure that we're seeing the representatives and senators before, and then also just, I mean, as many of us, again, it can get up there. I think it, I think it definitely makes a difference. So, um, I think we just stay on course, but I appreciate all your home rule hero work that you do. So, um, um, I think that's it. Um, sure. Commissioner guard. Um, I think this addition of consider property tax is, um, perfect right on the mark. Um, there was a ripple through FLC, as you'll recall in Orlando that that's where, uh, the legislative committees are focusing on removing property tax or any portion of property taxes they can. So that's something we'll be facing. Okay. I'm just going to make sure, even though there's no one out here, I'll open it up for public input. Anyone wish to come forward and talk on this issue? Seeing no one, um, I will close public input and, um, okay. I think you have what you need. Okay. Any, anything else for the good of the order? Okay. We'll see you all Thursday night. And you have in your schedule for FLC legislative action days, January 26th to the 28th. Gotcha. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Meeting adjourned. Thank you.