City Commission Conference Meeting on 2025-03-04 1:30 PM - Mar 04, 2025

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the City Commission Conference Meeting this March 4th, 2025. Thank you all for being here today. We have a lot of exciting things to discuss, and might as well get started. We can begin with communications, but I don't have my computer to know what the communications are. So, I'm sorry? Okay, but I don't know what they were, because I don't have my computer just yet. So, maybe, Mr. Clerk, you can recite to me what the communication is. Okay, so for Charter, number one, are we working towards some sort of deadline that they have in mind as to when our work will be done? And two, would they like all of our work to be presented at one time, or would they like us to present one or more sections in incremental progress reports as we get through? Okay. Well, I'll let everyone on the Commission respond if they want to. But I think the first question clearly is, you know, since these have to be voted on by the public, the next public vote is not going to be until 2026. 2026 for the midterms. So, I think what we need to do, Mayor, is have David figure out working his way backwards with the supervisor for elections when it needs to be to them, and then a couple of months for us to kind of thrash it out and work on it. Right. So, that would probably be the answer. So, but the sooner the better, because making a presentation to the Commission and then having to go back in the community and the back and the forth before we finally agree on final wording and final elements, I think that the first round that was presented to the City Commission last time, there were a number of non-controversial items that we could probably re-offer this time around. There were some cleanup provisions and there were some other provisions regarding parks and so forth that we might be able to agree on without much controversy. And then there were other provisions that I think the Commission during its goal-setting session had indicated that they would like to see the Charter Revision Board consider and then present again back to the Commission. So, again, to Commissioner Herb's point, we can work ourselves backwards, see what the deadline is, and that would be the, we try to get ahead of that number so that we at least have something to put on the next ballot, which would be March of 2026. Mayor, can I offer another suggestion as well? So, one of the problems we ran into last time, as you all probably recall, was we got a fairly large batch of items to review, and it proved to be probably too much for us to digest all at once. So, you know, the old expression about how you eat an elephant, it's one bite at a time. So, my suggestion is we go along with the idea of having the committee bring it to us as they discuss one and come to a consensus on it. When they do their communications to the Commission, they could say, okay, at our last meeting, we thought this one was something that we want to bring forward to you. They can bring it to us, we can discuss it in this format, and say yay, nay, or modify it, or whatever. But I think if we, over the course of the next, you know, 12 months, are looking at these one at a time, it will be an easier conversation for us to have, and I think it would give more direction to charter revision, because I've been talking with, you know, my appointee, Mr. Weiss, about this, and they want to make sure that they are executing on our direction, and don't want to go through all that again to have everything summarily rejected at the end. So, in order for us to keep everybody engaged, I think ongoing feedback on a consistent and regular basis will be more valuable for them. So, do you think that should come in the form of just a communication, or maybe do quarterly workshops, or both? Well, I think, you know, I certainly, I'm always open to both, but I think, as I said, if they have a meeting and they take a vote on something and they want to communicate that to us, that gives us an opportunity to sit down at our next workshop, or I'm sorry, next conference meeting, and simply bring it up for discussion and decide if we want to move forward with it. So, I just think that one bite at a time, it will be easier and a much more effective and efficient process. And I think, and not so much one provision at a time, but maybe like a group of provisions, like a tranche, like maybe a whole section we can discuss at a time, and that way we can respond to the board, and if we decide to make any recommendations, we can do so at that time. So, yeah, taking it in steps might be the best way. Anyone else have any other comments? Good with that. Yeah, that all sounds good. Just one question, and Richard, I see you here. It's my understanding the City Commission shared with the Charter Revision Board some items they'd like the Charter Revision Board to address. Is that right? Great. So, is that on your list to review, Richard? I just want to check to see if you need further guidance from the commission or suggestions, or you've got what you need. Thanks. Good afternoon. First of all, I want to tell you that I'm here because I was requested to be here. I'm not the chairman of the Charter Review Board because we have – Have you been subpoenaed, Richard? I was subpoenaed, yes. I was subpoenaed. So I'm not representing the Charter Review Board because I don't have any direction for them, and I'm not the chairman. Again, the board's been constituted, and we haven't voted on a new chairman, so we'll start there. Well, the first – our plan is to have the new members of the board respectfully look at what we did and look at that packet that we did and see whether – and we've sort of stopped things because we're waiting for the final appointment to be made. Have that – have that – the new members look at what we did previously and say, okay, that sounds fine, or I don't agree with that, or let's change that. And so if that's the case, the first thing that we will have is – and I know that it was a large packet that we presented the first time – but we will have a large group of recommendations, and again, we could do it by section, dealing with the land or dealing with elections or something. We can give it to you that way. So that's the first thing, but we do want – we do have intent to deal with the items that you asked for in addition to we heard your communication regarding, you know, more public input and those kind of things. But, again, this is my own thought, and we haven't had a big discussion about it that answers your question. Great. Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks, Richard. I would like to say that I, too, agree that we should do this in a manner where we are receiving the information suggesting quarterly or – I think I believe more so as it's being brought up that we can look at it in the whole and be able to discuss and see what, as a commission, we would like to see happen with it. So I agree that waiting for a long period of time to have all that information, it is hard to digest and sometimes even hard to get the opportunity to read it all in comparison to what else we have to do. So I'm in agreement where we are bringing the opportunity to have intimates where we can go through the articles and the sessions as they come about. Okay, so while I'm here, I'll take the advantage. So are you okay with us taking the prior work – as a first step, taking the prior work that we did, parceling it, maybe by subject matter, and starting to send that communication to you, you know, let's say section by section? Is that – is that – Why don't you send it to us section by section and then let's set up a meeting where we can, after we've had a chance to review it with our respective constituencies, our district voters, that we can now have an intelligent discussion. We've gotten the feedback. You'll have gotten more feedback. And doing it section by section makes the most sense, one subject matter at a time. Okay, so last question is, at what point do you want us to – because there was a major emphasis on your part, and we understand it – of public input and getting the public involved and reaching out to the community. At what point in this process do you envision us doing that? I believe they should be a part of the process throughout. There should be no window where they're not included. We know that we have – you have your meetings. We ask commission and staff to make sure that the information is given, that this is the date of the meeting, come out and listen and view, give input. But throughout, no point where it's a closed window. There was some feeling last time from what we – that what we were – all of those things we're doing, our meetings are open to the public, our meetings are on your website and all that. I think there was some feeling from the commission that we were not doing enough. I think what you're suggesting is, should you be going to the Council of Civic Associations with a presentation? Should you be going to any other neighborhood groups? Should you connect with our city staff to organize separate, independent, perhaps district-by-district public outreach meetings like we did with the infrastructure task force and the city – in the city hall process? That was what the city commission had indicated. So if – Would that happen before we send things to you or simultaneous with when we send things to you? I'm talking about timing. I think we got – we don't have – believe it or not, we don't have that much time. So I think if we do it simultaneously and then we convene, you bring back your feedback, and we'll have – we'll have dealt with – we have worked with our constituents, and then together we can collectively have a workshop and figure out that particular section, what we should do. And your manager's staff has come to our meeting. There is someone that's sort of in charge of communications, and she had some ideas about how we can sort of open up the process, and I think that that's sort of in the works. So we've already started that. Okay, good. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you. Any other questions of Richard? May I actually – I just had a question for staff. Yeah. Which staff? Well, Susan and Dwayne, I remember we had at least three or four documents. I want to make sure that all of those are in the hands of the entire board there, that they have – I know there was the original list that we had put together all the way back from, you know, Alan's time, and then there was another document I think I saw from Paul Bangal. There was another document I think I saw from Anthony Fajardo. But I remember seeing at least three or four documents that really specified a lot of the priorities and things we wanted folks to take a look at. So are those documents all together and in the hands of all of the Charter Revision Board members? So Anthony Fajardo did take all those different documents, consolidate them into a single form, cross-referenced it to the work they'd already done, and, yeah, the group does have those. Okay, good. I just want to make sure so we weren't reinventing the wheel here and that they were starting at a place where we had already seen so many items that we asked for them to take a look at. Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure. And, Mayor, if I could just – for the public outreach piece, Ashley Dessart did present at their last meeting, talked about, you know, setting up a standalone website, town hall meetings, et cetera. So there's a lot of robust public outreach coming soon. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, moving on to the Exhibit 2. This is with regard to the Beach Business Improvement District Advisory Committee. Is there anyone here from – oh, Ina. Good afternoon. At the bottom. Oh, look at that. I can read. Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners, Ina Lee, I've been a – I'm a member of the Business Improvement District, and I've been empowered to speak for them. Okay? So do you actually – Mr. Mayor, I have the item in front of you now, or do you want me to read it? Well, go ahead. You can summarize it. Okay, so bottom line, at our last meeting, we had the Parks Department with us, and they're going through a reevaluation of how they score different events for application fees. Okay? And what we added to that, we really liked the transparency of that process, was that we felt that there should be a mechanism to receive greater consideration for those events that dramatically increase business on the beach, because that's our mission. And that – particularly those events that happened during the non-peak season. So events like Tortuga, the air show, and also the boat show, because we felt that we needed to give weight to them because of the economic impact. So, by the way, these figures are from Visit Lauderdale. Tortuga, just so you have a sense of it, 56% of the people coming in from Tortuga are out of the area. They are non-locals. The economic impact was $40 million last year, folks. Now, that's in dining. That's in hotels. That's in shopping. That's in everything people do. It's a multi-day event. So when they're here, they spend money. They just don't go to the concert. And 94,000 people came here, and the average daily room night, which is really important to the beach, was up significantly. It's now – it was at $364, and this is during a time when we don't normally get those rates. So it's a very, very important event in terms of driving business here. And then the boat show, 45% non-local, meaning coming from out of the area, $600 million worth of economic impact. And that doesn't include buying boats, okay? So that's a lot of money. So what are you suggesting that the money collected from the bid should be proportionately directed towards those high-impact events that bring in the most money? No, I'm suggesting that when the park redoes their application fees, okay, which is what they're, I guess, presenting to you all at your next meeting or something like that, that what should be taken into account when they're evaluated is the economic impact of those kind of events, okay, in the scoring process. So, for instance, now, I'm not saying, you know, runs on the beach aren't important. They benefit the charities, but they certainly don't improve business on the beach. And yet there's an impact to them because of traffic and all that stuff. So we're just asking that when the evaluation takes place in the scoring of how much they should pay on the application fees, that the events that drive significant business be weighted in some way, shape, or form. Well, my understanding is that these application fees are kind of minimal. I mean, what are we looking at? Or what? Minimal. Minimal. Like an application fee for Tortuga could be just in the hundreds of dollars, not the tens of thousands of dollars. Right. But whatever it is, we just felt that the businesses should be also evaluated in terms of the economic impact overall. That's all we're asking for. Okay. And we like the transparency of the process. We love what's happening now, so it's like, you know, clearly the application fee has to go up. But we just feel that those events that drive business should also, when they're being evaluated for, you know, when you're overall redoing how they are being scored and how much they're actually paying, that the economic impact be weighted in there somehow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Anyone have any questions, Avina? There being none. Thank you. And then finally, Exhibit 3, this has to do with the Sustainability Advisory Board. Is there anyone here present from that board? I'm told David Blatner will be presenting. Okay. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Mayor and Commissioners. I'm David Blatner. I am the chairman of the Sustainability Advisory Board, and we know that you're going to be getting an opportunity to hear the presentation for the net zero plan later in the meeting. So this is kind of backwards. We're asking you to go forward with adopting the net zero plan. The SEB has thoroughly reviewed the city's net zero plan over the last several months, including having multiple presentations and discussions with WSB, SP, to understand their key findings and recommendations. The plan provides a critical framework for shaping policies that will help the city achieve its net zero goals, and we strongly recommend that the commission move forward with adopting the net zero plan by resolution later today. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone have any questions? Mr. Blatner. Okay. Thank you. Okay, moving on to neighbor presentations. Is Michael Ray here? Hello, Michael. Good afternoon. Michael Ray, 6130 Northwest 33rd Terrace. It's been 20 months since the Sun Sentinel wrote a story about how over 1,000 pounds a year of lead are dumped over or near my neighborhood next to the FXE airport. Finally, a study was done on the soil in the neighborhood. What does it show? It shows that the limits are within regulatory limits. However, there is no safe level of lead for children, according to the Center for Disease Control, American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institute of Health, UNICEF, et cetera, et cetera. According to the CDC, even low levels can cause brain, nerve growth, hearing, and speech problems. I have filed a list for you to see that goes into all the authorities and experts that say there is no safe level for children. So, this study shows that it's not a big level, but it could be a level that could be damaging, even killing children. So, what are we going to do about it? Well, in California, another document I have for you is a study done by the Zeron and Keyes Report on the Reed Hillview Airport, where they took 14,000 samples of blood from children under five. And they found that if you lived within a half mile, up to a mile and a half of the airport, your blood level went way up. So, really, the only way to find out if there's a problem with lead in children and others is to do blood testing, which you could do at the Quest Labs for about $50 each. So, you did pass a resolution in July that says, Resolution 24-218, it required that the city manager, quote, shall implement a program that encourages and incentivizes the sale and use of unleaded aviation fuel. And it also ordered the city manager to apply for any and all available grants on behalf of the city of Fort Lauderdale, from the state of Florida or anywhere else. There are no grants that I'm aware of. There is no program to incentivize because there is no program. There hasn't been any. It's just the last report came out a month late, and all it talks about is that there's a new thing at the Port of Everglades where you can put unleaded fuel in. There is no program. There is no plan. It's just conclusory. It's wishful thinking. It's a charade. It's a false promise. It's up to you all to do something to enforce your resolution. It can't just be a meaningless piece of paper that has no force and has nothing to do to eliminate this problem. The only way to stop the problem is to stop selling lead at the airport. I also filed another outline for you to see about all the grants and incentives that are available that the city manager could be using and finding but has not chosen to do. There's EPA pollution prevention grants. In fact, there's source reduction assistance grants. The FAA even gave $750,000 to the state of California to educate airport personnel about the benefits of switching over to unleaded fuel. The city manager in Fort Lauderdale has done none of this. But instead of the report, she attacks the neighbors, saying that we refuse to allow the people to inspect our properties, which she knows is not true. Because when I spoke here before, we objected that these people that are doing the studies wanted us to sign a release of all liability, personal and property damage, even if we died, that we would pay your attorney's fee. So we did not refuse. We just thought it was not appropriate. And they were going to go and study on our right-of-ways instead. So rather than making this a charade, we're talking about children's lives here. And you can't see cancer on your face. They don't hold up a sign, I have brain damage. But if you can't make sure that this is taken care of, then why are we even here? Why are you even sitting there? We elected you to protect us and our interests. And I believe if you look on your website, the motto that you all are supposed to follow is to protect the interests of the public as quickly and efficiently as possible. And it's just not being done here. This is not a case about a traffic ticket or a zoning variance. This is a case about – and I don't know why the city manager is smiling about it. It's really not a very funny issue. We're talking about life and death. And I would hope you do something to make sure that your resolution is put into effect in a meaningful manner and just not some lip service. Thank you. Thank you. Is Rufus James here? Rufus, can you just take a moment and respond to comments that Mr. Ray just made with regard to our proactive efforts in terms of incentivizing the use of unleaded fuel and what measures we have been taking? First of all, let me thank you for undertaking the testing that the community had asked us to do. And thank goodness the results came out the way they did, not as egregious as many feared they would be, considering the use of lead-based fuels that have been part of the practice of that airport. But tell us a little bit, if you can, about what initiatives you've taken in order to try to incentivize the users of our airport to use unleaded gas. Thank you, Mayor. Vice-Mirror Commissioners. Good afternoon. Rufus James, Airport Director at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. Just to start off, while there are discussions on banning leaded fuel, 100 low lead fuel, the FAA and EPA agrees that it won't happen until 2030. So it's finding fuel that's commercially available in order for pilots to be able to use it. Second of all, I know Mr. Ray mentioned an airport in California. Currently there is a court case going on where the municipality wants to ban all low lead fuel and have unleaded fuel available. While they may be able to do that, it doesn't restrict me as a pilot that used low lead from another airport or going to another airport to buy fuel and fly back to that airport. So there's no ban that can be done lawfully until 2030, at which time they will have unleaded fuel as the designated fuel. Now the issue with that also is – That's assuming the current administration doesn't change that. Right. Okay. Yes. Now here's the other concern with this for most aircraft operators is right now there are about a dozen different fuel manufacturers that have unleaded fuel available for aviation aircraft. The unfortunate thing is you cannot intermix that fuel. So I'll use an example of GAMI 100. And if I buy GAMI 100 at FXE and I fly to Naples and they have some other form of unleaded fuel, I can't mix that in my tank. Otherwise, there's some unexpected mishaps that could occur in flight. So that's why this has taken time to make sure that for all the fuel manufacturers who are presenting and producing unleaded fuel for aircraft use, it hasn't been approved yet. So what we have done with our tenants, we conducted a survey to find out when they would get on board with the program. And with their current customers or their operators that they provide fuel to, no one has requested unleaded fuel at that facility. So they can't just go out and buy a fuel truck, fill it with unleaded fuel, and expect folks to start using it. So when they have that demand, they will go ahead and provide that fuel. They're ready to do it when the demand is there. But also it's worth understanding where currently for those operators, they are paying maybe $4 to $6 a gallon for fuel with low lead. Unleaded fuel would be as much as $10 a gallon. So that's part of the delay as well. And again, it's how do we get it to the airport? It's not readily available at Port Everglades. It's getting trucked in, which is why the cost is so high. It's also worth mentioning that we did reach out to DOT to find out if there are any available grants. And they said that is not one of their initiatives that they're covering right now. So we were told no grants are available from DOT. And the FAA, it's pretty much at least our region, the southeast region, they're in the same position of that. They're not providing grant funding for any fuel initiatives and so forth. So we will continue our efforts to encourage our tenants to consider the transition and what their plans are. And as soon as we do have that information presented to us, we'll definitely share it with the commission to at least share what initiatives are taken to transition to unleaded fuel. Okay, great. Thank you so much. Does anyone have any questions of Rufus? I do. Sure, go ahead. Has our advisory board discussed this issue at length? We have presented it to the advisory board. And they understand that there is a transition period. And so they also realized that there are some of our tenants who are in that board meeting. They spoke to the fact also that as soon as there's someone who's interested in using unleaded fuel, that they will prepare a transition plan. And just for reference, I can share with you, so you have a good example, while our fleet mix is about a third with jet traffic, single engine, and twin engines, jet fuel for the year 2024 was approximately about 11 million gallons is what was pumped. The low lead fuel was about 750,000 gallons. So clearly what we're transitioning from is more of the jet activity than the reciprocating engines that use low lead fuel. If you looked at the top 100 airports in the country that emit the most contamination, FXC is not on that list. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? All right, thank you, Rufus. Thank you. I'm sorry. I do have a question. I just thought of something. The question about grants, are there any grants available for the tenants if they incentivize to change over to the equipment that would allow them to be unleaded fuel? Is there any type of grants that we can offer or research and receive? So I know there are no grants because, like I said, I spoke with both DOT and FAA. But what I can share with you is the airports that have converted to providing a fuel truck, they operate the fuel farms. They are the sole FBO fixed-base operator on the airfield. Unlike with us, we have four fixed-base operators. The airport, the city, does not control any of those. So if we were an FBO operator, then, yes, the city could take that initiative to provide a fuel truck and have unleaded fuel available. But, like I said, what I'm hearing from pilots, I may not be able to buy low-lead fuel at my base airport, but I am going to go somewhere else before I get back from my flight and come back to my base airport. So airplanes are still flying overhead, regardless if we say to our residents or to our operators, low-lead fuel is no longer permitted to be sold at the airport. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? All right. Thank you, Rufus. I understand Mr. Reeder is not going to be making a presentation today, correct? Mayor, if I could, yeah, give you an update. Yeah, so he's – but I'd like to speak on that for a moment. Okay, sure. Go ahead. If you don't mind. Thanks. So Sophia Reeder was – is a 17-year-old that on May 20th of 2017 left her home in River Oaks, neighborhood, and disappeared, has not been seen or heard from since, and her father, Patrick Reeder, and there's a picture of Sophia when she disappeared, and what you see there are some age-lapsed photos of what she would look like possibly now. So this has been, as you can imagine, incredibly difficult experience for her father, Patrick, her whole family, her aunt, Kirsten. And today, chief of police and myself and the city manager were able to meet with Kirsten and Patrick to go over Sophie's disappearance to update the family on the investigation. So I want to thank Chief Schultz and Fort Lauderdale Police for their continued work and would like to just ask the public, as you see pictures of Sophie again, May 20th, 2017, in the River Oaks neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, disappeared. So please, if you have any information, if she looks at all familiar, please call us. The phone number is there at the bottom, 954-828-6677. The reward is $25,000 for any information leading to finding out where Sophie is or any information, and we're going to be having more information coming, Mayor, in the next several months as we continue to pursue all leads in trying to find Sophie. So on behalf of the family, I just want to thank the public for thinking about Sophie, looking at the pictures, asking neighbors, and hopefully finding Sophie as we continue to work together. So thank you, Mayor. All right. Thank you, Commissioner. Moving on to the next item on the agenda, CF1, City of Fort Lauderdale Net Zero Plan. And Susan, who will be making that presentation? And there they come. Okay. We have a team. Good afternoon, Mayor, Commissioner. Luis Ramirez, Sustainability Coordinator with Public Works. I am here this afternoon to introduce to you our Net Zero Plan, outlining a roadmap for achieving a sustainable and low-carbon future. With us, we're joined by WSP, who is here to present to you the technical details of this plan. And with that, I'll hand it over to introduce themselves. Good afternoon, Mayor, Commissioners. My name is John Dickinson. I am the project manager for this plan. I've been working as a sustainability consultant and an advisor for about 25 years in this space. So looking forward to presenting to you and hearing any questions you may have. And I'll pass it off to my colleague, Mike. I'm Mike Flood. I've been working for more than 25 years. And I work in the National Sustainability and Resilience Lead for our government sector. So thanks for your time today. Leave it to the woman to make the presentation. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners. My name is Catherine Prince. I lead the climate, resilience, sustainability practice for the firm in the Southeast region in the United States. Before my current role, I was with the city five and a half years ago working with transportation mobility. It's a pleasure to be with you today. I think we're ready to start the presentation now. Again, thank you, Commission, for allowing us to work on this important plan for the city of Fort Lauderdale and share our findings and recommendations with you today. We are here today because in 2021, the city commission set a goal for raise to zero emissions to the mayor's challenge. So today, through the net zero plan, we present to you a roadmap or a blueprint for actions the city can take over the next 25 years. So it's a long-term plan. This plan has been a result of a year-long effort in partnership with the Sustainability Department. We met with the seven departments within the city of Fort Lauderdale. We also worked with communicating and getting feedback from the community through public workshops. And as you heard from the Sustainability Advisory Board, we met with them several times to get their feedback. And you'll hear a little bit more on the rigorous scientific analysis that was done as part of the recommendations. And lastly, we already heard from the SAB. We received an unanimous approval for the plan. The net zero plan, it's a roadmap, as I mentioned, to reduce emissions through our activities. It is a plan for a cleaner future for our community with benefits like clean air, clean water, green jobs to build a future economy. The net zero plan outlines actions in two types. What can cities do through our operations? And two, what can the community do between the residents and the visitors that we get every year? And we recognize that the success towards implementation of this plan requires community efforts aside from the city's investment. So this report, the final report, which is going to be available electronically on the city's website, is built with very digestible language. So we've taken technical information and made it simple to understand for everybody who wants to look at it. The net zero plan aligns with everything the city is already doing. It aligns with the city's strategic plan and also the activities the region is already doing. And it builds on the 2011 sustainability plan the city had put together. From the city's investment, so what are the things we're already doing? The city's already investing into the parks bond to increase trails and access for walking and biking. We have already invested in converting our city lights to LED. We have strengthened our tree preservation initiatives. And in the regional level, through the rail, the regional rail transit investment, also Broward County's waste management, as part of that master plan, there's going to be zero waste strategies built in. So we are already doing a lot of the recommendations proposed. And we are here today because we need your support. At the end of the day, this plan, the net zero plan, is the city's plan, and it's for our community's future. And this commission has always been in the forefront when it comes to resilience and sustainability, not just in southeast Florida, but nationwide. And now is the time for the city to continue to lead through this net zero plan. Okay. This really is an important plan. And I want to lay out the fact that achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions for the city will come with numerous co-benefits across all sectors in the city. And you can see the sectors outlined here. Energy sector, an opportunity to reduce air pollution, save energy costs. So this is for the city government, also for residents and businesses. Water and wastewater treatment, again, energy savings and costs that are associated with that. Importantly, transportation and mobility, opportunity to create those mixed-use neighborhoods and vibrant neighborhoods to ensure that businesses and residents want to live there. Increased opportunities for alternative transportation as well. Equitable transportation choices. And then, of course, solid waste, reducing energy use associated with the management of the solid waste stream, keeping plastics out of the waste stream, critically important as well. So now I want to go through what really is the heart of the plan. And as we look into what we hear, if you take a look here, this plan is really based on rigorous analysis. I know Catherine had mentioned the work that has been done. So I want to break this down a little bit and go through what we're looking at here. If you take a look at the top, it's really anchored on the city's existing greenhouse gas emissions inventories. Up on the left, you see the community greenhouse gas inventory. This is dominated a bit, a bit of a majority coming from the energy sector, so important to recognize how much of a role energy plays as part of that. And then on the right, municipal government operations as well. Also, the breakdown you see, water and wastewater, is a bit of a principal source, so it will come up later as we go through some of the opportunities to address energy use specifically from that. And you can see the breakdown as you walk through it here. The plan, it contains 15 strategies. There are eight strategies associated with community and seven municipal government strategies. On the community side, these strategies include energy efficiency, renewable energy, reduced vehicle miles traveled, electric vehicles, sustainable aviation, waste and water reduction, and also tree canopy enhancement, which has numerous benefits as well. Shifting over to the right, municipal government operations, additional strategies there, the sustainability administration, importantly seeking funding, which will be necessary to implement actions in the plan, also monitoring the plan, making sure that the plan's goals are tracked and reported to the public over time. Again, water and wastewater treatment, and then reduced fleet use and electric vehicles for the city's fleet. And again, energy efficiency in the buildings, water conservation, and waste reduction for municipal operations as well. And so across the bottom, you can see an outlay of the 55 distinct actions that are incorporated in the plan. There's a lot of detail. It's in 168 pages. So thinking across there, these are all important collectively to be able to achieve the reductions that are in the plan. The projected emissions reductions, 97% on the community side, below the 2000 base by 2050, and then municipal government, 96% over that same time. So we modeled out the reduction over time. We'll go into a bit more detail as to how that came about and the results of that. And so I want to first present how we looked at the future, right? This is a 25-year plan. We modeled out two distinct scenarios. The first is what we call a business-as-usual scenario. This is do-nothing, right? It assumes constant energy practices, but it also accounts for increased demand. We have factors including population growth, increase in municipal workforce, increase in vehicle usage, and projected increase in airport activity. Shifting over to the right, take a look here. This is what we call a legislative-adjusted scenario. This is a scenario that leverages the impacts of others, of third-party collaborators working with the city, incorporates the emissions that are already associated with BAU, but really relies on existing third-party commitments, importantly, that of Florida Power and Light, to decarbonize the electric grid. Their real zero plan commits to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. This scenario also takes into account some increases in national highway fuel efficiency standards and some upgrades to the state of Florida building code related to energy conservation. Okay. Now we want to look at the community pathway to net zero and take a look at what we call a wedge chart, and I'll kind of walk through this. Business-as-usual projection rising over time, again, due to the impacts of increased population that I mentioned before, and then the legislative-adjusted projection coming down over time. You can see significant reduction over the period. An increase after 2030, the slope of the line drops a little bit as FPL, in particular, decarbonizes as we go. Everything in the light green, these are all the reductions that are associated with the actions in the plan on the community side. So as you see, we get toward 2050. It's at almost zero. And then in the dark green, you can see that's the emissions that are remaining, what we call residual emissions, still in the city's profile but coming almost down to that zero point. And the white-dotted line is just a straight linear path from 2019 to 2050. And you can see across the bottom the emissions reductions going from 26 percent below 2019 by 2030, and then a big jump of 70 percent by 2040, and then, of course, 97 again by 2050. So look at something similar for municipal emissions across the board. BAU, business as usual, rising over time, and then, again, largely taking advantage of FPL's commitment to decarbonize. You see the legislative-adjusted projection, same thing. These are emissions reductions associated with actions the city government will implement over time. And then you see, again, residual emissions. Now, the city government has set a more ambitious target of a net zero by 2040 goal. Now, I want to be clear in our modeling. We determined that that goal is elusive. To be fair, it's now 2025, so that's only 15 years away. So we did notice that our modeling that to take advantage of the decrease, again, the slope in the line, you can see dropping between 2030 and 2040 and catching up so that city government emissions would be, again, almost at zero by 2050. And, again, the emissions reductions across the bottom. I want to take a look quickly and walk through the process that we took to prioritize each of the 55 actions. We ranked these into order of highest priority and number two and three. And there's a couple of things. This is an excerpt from the plan, so I want to just draw your attention to some of the things we looked at. We looked at the return on investment for the city, recognizing there will be some investment that's necessary and what that initial cost may be. Some qualitative assessments you can see in this example, low, medium, high. For some things that we have, there's a relative level of effort for the city to be able to implement. Again, what that longer-term cost may be, implementation, carrying costs over the lifetime, aligned with existing strategic priorities. I think it's important to recognize, and we've already heard, the actions that the city has taken. This is just a continuation of much of the work that the city has been doing. Importantly, the social impact, the benefit for the community that some of these actions may bring. And then this is a net zero plan, so the greenhouse gas impact up at the top, as we can see from there. And then associated co-benefits that may be achieved as well. So we'll go through some of those in just a minute, as well as the time frame, right? And so qualitative estimate for additional cost to be borne by the community. We wanted to make sure that we recognized costs that the government would have to bear, but also a qualitative assessment that there would be investment necessary from the private sector as well. So reaching this net zero goal is certainly going to require collaboration across public and private sector. It's going to require both community and municipal strategies as a whole. Okay, this just takes a look. We have 55 actions. Importantly, 22 of them are continuing. They're actions that are already underway. And so we can take a look, break that down a little bit as we go. And so this is an example of community action. This slide highlights one in particular, which is reduction in vehicle miles traveled through partnering with developers, agencies, and businesses to incentivize and encourage equitable alternative transportation and public transit use and increase commuter carpooling. And we can see some other examples on this slide, just highlighting some of the actions and the details associated with them as we go. You can see energy efficiency, renewable energy, again, waste reduction and diversion, and then tree canopy enhancement and the associated benefits that come with that. And now I want to shift over and take a look at the municipal-focused strategies as well and some examples of the actions that are associated there. Again, I mentioned sustainability administration, the electric vehicles, energy efficiency, water conservation, and renewable energy all outlined as we go from there. Okay, this is a summary of all of the emissions reductions where you can see, again, I mentioned at the beginning, it's coming from all sectors as outlined, energy, transportation, aviation, waste, water, and then, again, you can see at the bottom some process emissions. I think the important takeaway of this is the rate of reduction over time, a 70% reduction by 2040 across all community emission sources. And just to highlight, because the energy sector is making up a majority of emissions, you can see the detail here across commercial energy use, residential energy use, industrial energy use, over time across each one of those sectors, continued reduction as measured by the 2019 base, achieving 100% across almost all of them with a little bit of residual emissions associated with the industrial sector as we go. We take a similar look as we shift over to municipal emissions here, telling a bit of the same story. Again, large part driven by decarbonization of the electricity grid, meeting FPL's commitment. And you see a reduction by 2040, significant reduction down to just a little shy of 16,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. And you can see, again, so the highlight coming from waste, I'm sorry, from water and wastewater treatment and the significant reductions that occur over time. Okay, I want to make clear that there is going to be some upfront investment, right? This is a critically important plan. We've outlined many of the benefits that are associated with it. However, implementation of these plans to action will yield positive returns and long-term savings for the city. So what we did is we looked at short-term costs. We wanted to be sure just to look at those costs that would be borne by the city over the next five years. And as shown here, none of the community strategies are expected to cost the city more than $3 million. So that is true. There are some that may be over five years, between $1 million to $3 million, and then some that may require a million-dollar investment over the next five years. Can I interrupt you for just a second? These are all very interesting, but they look very textbook-y. Yes. I don't know how they really relate to Fort Lauderdale, because we already have implemented some of these strategies, and I don't know if they're being considered as part of your cost approach to what the city can anticipate looking to spend in the future. For example, water and energy conservation. All right. So the city is already part of state efforts in water conservation, as well as improving our water treatment plant, which is intended to reduce the usage of water. So when you make a presentation, it would be helpful if it was tailored to the specifics of Fort Lauderdale. Okay? Yes. And tree canopy enhancement. You know, we already have a program in which we're Tree City USA. We already have a goal of planting thousands of trees over the next decade. So in the future, you know, it would be helpful if we knew something that was more specific to Fort Lauderdale rather than something that looks a little bit kind of textbook-y here. All right? Yep. All right. Thank you. I appreciate that comment. And I just would offer a response that these strategies and actions were very much tailored for Fort Lauderdale, working closely with the city staff. And the short answer is that the items that you mentioned are intended as a continuation of initiatives that are already in place. So we mentioned there are 22 actions that are already in place. Some of this funding represents a continuation going forward in the issue of energy efficiency, so more energy investment to achieve even more ambitious goals. All right. So, like, sustainable aviation, what does that mean? So that includes working with different advocates to get more sustainable aviation fuel, availability of sustainable aviation fuel into the pipeline as we measure emissions coming from aviation as part of the city's emissions profile. So please, go ahead, Liz. Let me just add some clarity. So our actions, our 55 actions, if you've gone through them, you will see that they do align with our city undergoing projects and programs. The UFMP is one of them. We've included things like LED streetlights, conversion of that. So there is, you know, specific tailored actions that are mentioned in our plan. So, for example, the LED streetlights, to the extent that we own the streetlights, which we don't own all of them, as we know, right? Right. So we're not using LED streetlights right now? We're just expanding that conversion, making sure that we complete all of our streetlights. And so that is the ask in that individual action. Okay. Because I thought that all of our streetlights were LED at this point. They're not. They're not? Yeah, we're not. Okay. There are a lot in our district that are not. That are not. Okay. All right. District 3 still have some as well. Is that right? Okay. Yes. I can just clarify on the streetlights. We have about 14,000 streetlights, about 11,000 that are owned by FPL, but we pay for the maintenance. And almost all of those have been converted to LED. So we're using this. What? That's kind of what I thought. Yes. And then we have another, like, 4,000 or 3,000 to 4,000 that are either under our control or we maintain them on behalf of the state. And those are being converted, too, albeit at a slower rate. Okay. All right. Thank you. Please proceed. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Now we just want to also shift a similar look. We looked at municipal government actions that are going to cost some investment up front. And then you see here, especially continuation of some that are already underway. The city is already converting its fleet to electric vehicles. The city already buys vehicles. These are not emergency vehicles. So we did not include any fire or police emergency response vehicles. But the city's existing vehicle fleet is going to turn over naturally as part of a natural cycle and turning over to new electric vehicles. So some of these costs are already budgeted. We're just recognizing what might be necessary. There's maybe some capital investment for renewable energy on city facilities as well. And then some more modest investment over time, again, over the next five years, as referenced here. So with that, I'm going to pass off to my colleague, Mike. Okay. Thank you so much. Mike. Good afternoon. We'll try to pull it down out of the data in the textbook for you for a little bit and put a little bit more liberal arts maybe into the presentation. That might be helpful. And really kind of focus it more on the city and really why should you and your constituents advocate for the plan? What's the purpose of the plan? And what are the benefits of the plan for the city itself? Well, really, one of the rationales that was identified very early on for the city itself is that the city is seeing conditions that haven't been observed previously. So you had the rainfall in 2023. It was a significant event in the city. It caused some significant damage to homes and really created havoc and chaos in downtown that took a while to recover from. The city is also experiencing some high tides that are also driving chronic flooding in low-lying areas and having an effect on the stormwater system, so therefore increasing localized flooding. So these are obviously significant concerns that you're addressing through your other actions, but also are kind of a foundation for this plan, kind of the recognition that these are significant issues that need to be addressed. As we said, as Catherine noted earlier in her thing, the city has been a national leader in resilience. I don't live or work in the city. As I said, I'm the national lead, and Fort Lauderdale is always in the dialogue on advanced action to address its resilience concerns, taking action, investing in ensuring that the resilience concerns are being addressed. And now this is an opportunity for the city to continue that leadership position and take on this role of addressing the concerns, to take a series of these defined actions that are identified in the plan, tailored to your conditions, to make sure that the city advances in this point as well. It's really a chance for the city, again, to lead. So when we talk about net zero conceptually, it's very kind of difficult to think about how that comes together in a plan. So what we thought about is how is this going to help the city transition into the future? How does it help day-to-day activities by focusing on a net zero plan? So what does a plan like this do? What does it look like in practice? Well, it creates better opportunities for pedestrians and bicyclists out there to create a tree canopy, like you said, continue the focus on the tree canopies, the vegetation, the parks, and the gardens to address not only the conditions to create shade, but also to help deal with some of the stormwater concerns, to invest in that area as well. So to focus more on a robust public transit system, to invest time, to create an equitable, open transit system, to help benefit the city, the city residents, and the city businesses, to focus more of the attention on energy efficiency, as you said, to continue to advance these practices, to focus on the reduced emissions from that, but also the opportunity to save the community residents money, to focus on, as we said, to support FP&L in their transition, to help improve the air quality of residents. These are all basic elements of the plan. And then also to focus, become, find ways to minimize waste, reuse material, and control what goes into the environment through the waste, better planning for the waste. Talk about the opportunity to create green jobs. If the city is going to be transitioning through this program into a more efficient and effective society, then there's opportunities for jobs to support that effort. And then finally to create a resilient green city that's known to tourists, that's known for tourists today into the future, for your residents today into the future, to know that the city is committed to ensuring the resilience and sustainability of the city and really be focused on moving forward and ensuring the viable future of the city. Now, a lot of these things, as we noted, they probably look familiar to you because, as is mentioned twice already, is that of the 55 recommendations, 22 of them are kind of carrying forward. So there's 33 that require specific action, but there are these 22 that are already underway that are a benefit to the city. So, as we said, the city is, as I recognize, is recognized nationwide as a leader, and this implementation plan will keep the city in that position. Others are watching to see what the city will do. The city is definitely an example for many others nationally. Now is your time to lead again. Okay, great. Thank you. Are there any other speakers? I have a question. Please, go ahead. Who did you want to answer? I'm going to place it in, and they can determine who can answer it for me. Okay. Back on page seven, where we talked about FPNL and their phasing out the fossil use, what happens if they slow down and they don't meet the 2045 suggested date? How does that affect the plan that you have given us? So, Commissioner, we did anticipate for that. And what we've researched and spoken to in our sustainability networks is that FPNL's net zero plan is driven purely on economic sense. And for them, the goal is really to meet the 2045 target. Excuse my ignorance here. Is natural gas considered a fossil fuel? Yes. It is. So, FPNL built a natural gas plant right at our port here a few years back. I don't see them rebuilding that power plant again after a significant investment. So, how do you feel the city of Fort Lauderdale could participate in efforts to try to come up with alternative fuel-making sources when we have FPNL, who pretty much drives that agenda? So, I believe the answer here would be that we support FPNL's conversion to be net zero, and we don't really have other… Well, they say they are, but I'm just curious, you know, from your own experience, like, how are they doing it? They're not building a solar farm anywhere near here. They have different… Are you suggesting that perhaps we provide financial incentives to homeowners to put solar panels on their houses? I mean, give me…help me out here. You know, how can we as a city participate in this effort to find alternative fuels that are not fossil fuel-based in order to achieve this net zero result? Mr. Mayor, Glenn Hadwin's sustainability manager, I think that's a great question, and it's a big challenge. Right now, FPNL has a roadmap to zero, or real zero plan is what they call it. It's on their website. They updated it in 2024. Our understanding is they're still committed to it. And as a city, I think we should be adopting plans like this and showing them that this is important to us, too. And then there's also the piece of looking at how do we make our own energy sources more resilient, and that is part of the plan, which is adopting more solar, putting it on our buildings. We already support the Broward Solar Co-op, which promotes solar adoption among our residents, and a number of other financial mechanisms. And what this plan does is it builds on those efforts and says, how can we take this even further? So that's…I mean, there's a number…there's multiple levers we're trying to do at the same time. Does the county provide financial incentives for solar panels on residential properties? Do you know? They…not directly. They support PACE like we do. They support the Broward Solar Co-op. What does that mean by solar? I mean, people want dollars. You know, they want to know that if they put $20,000 with the panels on the roof of their house, that they're going to get some sort of credit. Is any of that sort of available to Fort Lauderdale residents? Do we know? There's a federal tax credit of 30 percent, which is pretty significant. Okay. Yes. So that's important to know. So when you participate in something like the Broward Solar Co-op, everyone who signs up gets a proposal. You're not obligated to participate. And they have a new rebranding of it that's coming out this year, but it'll be very similar. But everyone will get something that shows, if I take the tax credit, you know, my electric bill will be this over time. And by the way, FPL just announced they want another rate hike. Now, if you have solar, your rates will stay flat. And I will also comment that part of their rate hike will fund more solar farms. So they're going to shift to even more solar as per their Real Zero plan. Ben. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. I think this is very important. I think it makes us more sustainable as a city, but also more cost-efficient as a city, more effective. It helps us attract more businesses, residents. People want to be part of a city and municipality that's leading the way in, you know, protecting our environment and being as efficient as possible. So I appreciate it. Susan, you know, there's 55 suggested action items, several of which, many of which I think we're already doing. So my question is, how can we continue to drive these 55 action items forward? How can we hold ourselves accountable? I'd love to see kind of a report card to make sure that we're kind of tracking towards the right direction. And absolutely. We would be bringing something back to you with an adoption, with timelines, follow-up, and the timing is good if we want to incorporate anything into the fiscal 26 budget process. Okay, great. So is that fair that you then, in the next couple months, several months, bring something back to us, and then we can, you know, take a deeper dive into financial impact and what we want to drive towards in timeline? In timelines, absolutely. Okay. Is that financial impact would include what the impact would be to our neighbors as well? I want to know how, you know, we're leading and going into a direction where we're suggesting that our neighbors purchase solar panels. How much does that cost? Is it insurable? I'm hearing stories where you get solar panels and insurance companies do not want to insure them. So we need to give our neighbors true transparency. So if you can include that with our presentation. So we're giving a whole scope of the matter. So our neighbors are fully aware of the direction that's being suggested. Thank you. Any other questions? Commissioner, I'd just like to add to your comment. So the actions that speak to renewable energy on our community, those are incentives. We want to create financial incentives for the community to be able to adopt, whether it's energy efficiency or renewable energy. So we want to just alleviate the burden on the taxpayer. And that's my point. I want to make sure the direction we're going does not cause a burden, but eliminate the burden that we're hearing about. So thank you. Thank you for pointing out. Well, it's a good point because while we think we're doing something positive in order to try to meet these goals, you know, you have an insurance industry that says, oh, we're not going to insure your roof now because you just compromised it by installing solar panels. And so, you know, we can't be working at cross purposes here. Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for your very thorough presentation. We really appreciate it. And we will continue to move forward and try to accomplish as many goals as we can following the different paths that you've outlined. And hopefully we'll be able to achieve some significant reduction in whatever contribution we're making to reduce our carbon footprint. So, Mayor, I've got a couple of comments before we're done here. Yeah, please go ahead. So I wasn't here when the commission adopted this. I will just tell you flat out I don't support it, would not have. I disagree entirely that FPNL is going to continue down this path. They were doing this under pressure. They're not going to. Right now, data centers consume about 3% of all global electricity demand. That's going to grow to about 12%. There's a massive, massive growth in demand for electricity. And we are not going to be able to meet that with renewable. There's a reason that Microsoft is buying nuclear power plants. There's a reason that they are restarting the Three Mile Island plant up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It's because the demand for electricity is going to grow astronomically in the next 20 years. And power plants take about 10 years to build. We're not going to be able to meet this. FPNL is not going to be moving towards net zero. So that's, I think, unrealistic, and I don't think we should be doing anything that signals our support for a plan that's never going to work. Well, you have to admit that the goal is admirable. How we get there is perhaps the goal, the methodologies will change as we discover new imperatives. Like if you're saying the new technologies are causing a greater use of electricity, obviously we have to find new sources of electricity. And I think what staff is saying is that let's see if we can find those new sources outside the realm of fossil fuels. And nuclear energy, of course, is outside the scope of fossil fuels. Of course, it has its own challenges, as we all know. But I don't think a wind turbine is going to be the answer. If you also remember that most of the solar technology comes from China, and we're not exactly on the best terms with China, and we're putting tariffs on China, making all this stuff dramatically more expensive, I don't think that saying that we want to be dependent on China for solar technology to drive our net zero plan is the direction that we're seeing our country moving in. So, no, I disagree entirely, Mayor. Okay. So FPNL's net zero strategies are driven by nuclear as well. So that's something that they're doing. And, unfortunately, my friend's mother is the one who approves all the nuclear power plants that have been built in this country for the last 20 years. You know who just got laid off? Right. There's going to be no nuclear power plants built anytime soon. And, Mayor, just to be clear, if you go through the 55 action items, there's many items that are actually not focused on energy solely. So, you know, just as an example, Action 28 ensure trees and landscaping are designed for rainwater retention and include drought-resistant and low-water-needs vegetation. So a lot of great stuff in here that is going to be good for our community. Thank you, Mayor. Right. And, Mayor, I wanted to echo those sentiments, because this really is a comprehensive commitment that we established in 2021 to deal with all of the causes and impacts of climate change. And so we shouldn't just be willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and we shouldn't be just focusing in on FPNL or electricity. Again, this is much more comprehensive. I'm glad I was a part of the commission that did move this forward in 2021, and I am still very much supportive. And I want to thank the Sustainability Advisory Board for all of its work. I want to thank WSPUSA for its work on this. I think this is very important for us to keep moving forward, so I encourage us to keep moving forward. And as we've already discussed, we're already doing so much of this, and it really is still a matter of chipping away and doing more as we move forward. So I'm very much in support of moving forward with the plan. Thank you. Okay. Anyone else have any comments? Okay, they're being done. Thank you very, very much for your work and for being here today. Okay, moving on to Business One. This is a presentation on the City of Fort Lauderdale business tax study and recommendations. And we welcome Juan Rodriguez to the podium. Before you begin, I just want everyone to understand this is not like we're implementing a business tax. This is just a study that is being done and presented to the commission, correct? On our current business taxes. Okay. So good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Commissioners. My name is Juan Rodriguez, Assistant Director for the Development Services Department. I'm here to introduce HDL companies who are contracted to analyze our business tax revenue and our overall business tax structure. Today, they're going to present their findings on how the City of Fort Lauderdale compares to other cities in the state in terms of our generated gross business tax revenue. Additionally, they'll be providing recommendations on how we can generate additional revenue while remaining competitive with other cities in the state. There will also be an outline proposal on how we can consolidate the number of business tax categories that we currently have in order to streamline the annual business tax renewal process for both businesses and staff. At the conclusion of their presentation, we would like to receive direction on whether to implement these changes in an upcoming ordinance amendment. Without further ado, I want to introduce Eric Myers and his team from HDL Companies in order to present their analysis. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. We will make sure here I can. There we go. Advance our slide. So the City has an existing business tax receipt measure. And as Juan just indicated, today we're going to be reviewing what that existing structure looks like at a very high level. Also then looking at the potential opportunities for both some administrative simplification and potentially some small revenue adjustments. Those are small. I'll just state it up front in large part because the ability to increase any rates is controlled by state law. So there's a very strong limit on what can be done. The five key components of your business tax receipt. Pardon me. I'm sure you're all quite familiar with this, but it helps to put it in a little bit of context. The first is that there's some taxable activity conducting a business in the city. Secondly, there's some measure of the taxable activity that may be inventory. It might be gross receipts. It could be the number of employees, just generally speaking. The rate, which is here in the city, is typically a fixed rate based on the type of business that you are. The classification. What kind of business are you? And then finally, what revenue results from that? That's sort of the purpose of a tax, is to raise revenue for the city's goal. So a few key findings and conclusions that we'll start out with. The business tax rates can be increased up to 5% every other year without going through a more extended process. It's my understanding that the city has not done that in a while. Implementing. We're also recommending that you could implement over a nine-year schedule of increases. Substantially increased revenue. I would actually say I think it's going to be a modest increase in most of the scenarios that we'll present to you today. Current tax revenues are in the middle of the comparison set, meaning as we looked at some of the cities elsewhere in Florida and also here, that we could get good data to compare with the city actually sitting pretty well right in the middle of that comparison set. We're going to present an idea to you of reducing the number of business categories by grouping similar categories together to take you from like 600 to closer to about 300. Right now your staff and your businesses have to wade through 600 different classifications to determine their tax. We think you can simplify that by doing some of these super groupings, and then that covers item number five as well. So current structure analysis and comparisons. The city has averaged approximately a little bit over $3 million per fiscal year. It's actually on a high point right now. This past year that was reported is one of the higher that we've seen during the period of the study. Our study did use this lower amount both to be conservative with some of the projections as well as the 2022-2023 fiscal year was a lower amount overall, and that was the year that we were using in the study. Additionally, we took out anything like penalties and interest that would be typically reported in the financials. We wanted to look at the actual underlying business activity. You've got approximately 21,000 businesses. Most are taxed on a flat fee rate. And then there are 636 current categories, of which 447 actually produce revenue or actually used in any significant way. So here again you can see sort of the trend for collections of business tax receipt revenue over time. Where is that revenue coming from roughly? Mostly, mostly professional services and property related. The city does have quite a few other specialized categories. I've done over 50 of these tax studies and would say that that is the most all other that we typically have. Typically your economy is going to be grouped into some big ones. You have a lot of smaller businesses or other more specialized businesses here. So initial comparison, you can see what we've done is sort of compare with certain jurisdictions. Let's take Hollywood, for example. Similar population size, though smaller. Smaller business size. Similar tax structure, tiered flat rate. $2.4 million in fiscal year 2022-23 revenue. You can see Fort Lauderdale called out in the purple there in terms of productivity. That puts you in the middle to upper middle of the sort of comparisons that we ran for the study. We also took a look at this sort of controlling for the number of businesses and the population. So per capita and revenue per business. As you can see, because we were using the 22-23 numbers, it skews a little bit to the right, to the lower end. With the newest numbers for collection, you'd be right in between, say, on the purple chart, you'd be in between Miami and Hollywood. And you'd be up right about where Hollywood is this year on the revenue per business as well. So, again, and I don't usually get to say this, so I'm going to enjoy saying it. I mean, the city's pretty well structured right in the middle of the comparison class. We did do some work taking some hypothetical businesses. These are entirely made up just to look at, okay, well, if we took some made-up businesses and we compared them across the different jurisdictions, what would the impact be? How would we see the impact be? We see here Fort Lauderdale all the way to the right. What that tells us is that even though those are some typically useful business structures, I don't think they capture Fort Lauderdale very well. And you can go back and you can look at that and see, for example, we've got one dentist office, but you've got a lot of professional services in the city. So I don't think this is terribly, I mean, even though I produced it, I will criticize it and say, it does show what it purports to show, but it's not super helpful. What's more helpful, I think, is taking a look at the rate comparisons for different kinds of businesses here. Fort Lauderdale, excuse me, is in that dark green in these very colorful charts. And you'll see that for the most part across different kinds of businesses, Fort Lauderdale tends to be in the mid-range. It's not the highest rate in most cases and also typically not the lowest rate, although, for example, lawn and gardening services, you do see a much lower rate there. Again, just an extension of this on residential apartments, similar to Hollywood, a little bit lower than Hollywood on warehousing distribution. Generally speaking, again, we see Fort Lauderdale being really competitive and right in the middle of the different rates. All right. So, in general, the tax structure, total tax revenue, again, used for the study. This is a little low for this last year, but total tax revenue, $3 million and some change. That gives us an average tax amount per business of about $146 million. Median tax amount assessed, most common tax amount are both $157.50 for conducting a business. Business tax per capita, then, is roughly $16.58. This year, with the new 2024 numbers, that went up to almost $19 per capita. All right. So, on the revenue recommendations, what we did was take a look at the fact that you've got a 5% increase cap over every two years. So, the most you can increase is 5% over every other year. And we looked at several different scenarios, a 1.5% increase, a 3% increase. On the next page, we'll look at a 5% increase, and model four, which is a blended increase over nine years. So, it steps up throughout the course of it. As you can see, let me go ahead and just, we'll do sort of the low case here. In model one, average tax amount per business right now under year one is $148.39. At the end of the nine years of increase, that would go up, right, a little over $9 there to $157.70. So, that's a pretty mild increase. The results are pretty mild as well. I think it's, we estimated about $300,000 additional revenue off of this model. Model two, again, you got a similar result. It's just a little bit more revenue increase because it's 3% each, every other year for the nine years. Oops, sorry. Excuse me. Model three is the biggest increase. It's 5%. So, it's sort of the max increase that you could have. Even there, we're looking at a little bit over, over the course of nine years, a little bit over about $33 on the average tax amount per business, right, that would be increased. And the revenue increase would be about $900,000, so just shy of a million to go towards the city's strategic goals. It's a general revenue fund measure. The blended model starts out with a higher rate increase the first year, then has a consistent lower rate increase for each of the following biannual periods. So, 5%, 3%, 3%, 3%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%. There, again, the increase over the lifetime, that nine-year period, to the average business is going to be about $15, not quite, $14 and some change. And the revenue estimates are about $400,000, so a little bit shy of half a million in additional revenue. This is just a visual representation of those options here. As sort of forecasts as to what they alone, given no other changes to the economy, what those changes would do revenue-wise, could do revenue-wise. I will say that we're not looking to move the needle a whole lot here. You don't have a lot of room to do that. But I think it is important to note that in this time where there's been some impact of inflation, that can also affect the city and its costs for doing things. And the ability to adjust your business tax that you've already got on the books and you're already using to make sure that you're covering those costs in real dollars could be very valuable to you as well. So, excuse me, so to that point, my understanding is that a tax has to be commensurate with the amount of costs the administration of the enforcement of the laws would necessarily take in order to affect the policies of the city. So, I noticed in one of your previous slides, the year 1953 pops up. Are you saying that the rate has not been changed since 1953? No. So, what is 1953? But 1953 is when the city first implemented a business tax ordinance. So, when was the last time you weren't specific when you started out your presentation? You were not specific. It's the number of years it's been since we last changed the rate. You said it's been several years. Yes, I am not certain that you've changed it since the law was changed, but I'll let Juan speak to that. So, the last major change that gives us your average $157.50 rate for most businesses was in 2004. So, about 20 years ago was the last substantial change. Okay, and that was the rate we established back then? Now, it says that we can only increase it 5% a year. We can't go retroactively. No, it's prospectively. Okay. And so, okay, just wanted to ask those questions. Sorry. No, please. Thank you. So, that speaks to the revenue side. So, are we deficient then in making up the cost recovery in collecting business tax for the cost of administration? Is that part of your analysis? Well, Samir. Yes. Please. So, business tax is a tax, so it doesn't have to show a nexus with – it's not a cost recovery-based mechanism for revenue. So, as a tax, you can levy tax at any rate you want, which is why the state legislature limited the amount that you can actually levy. Okay. And increase. It's not a fee. It's not a fee. Correct. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Correct. Okay. So, on the – maybe before I jump to the classification side and administrative simplification, are there other questions that you had on the revenue side? Or I can hold them to the end if you'd like, Mr. Mayor. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. Business classification consolidation. As I mentioned initially, the city right now has in the neighborhood of about 600 categories that both its staff and the businesses who are applying and renewing have to sort through to figure out where they're classified and what tax they're going to pay. So, one of the things we wanted to do in this report was look at ways we might consolidate some of those categories and make it a little simpler for administration, both for the businesses who need to find the rate that applies to them and to the staff who need to administer that many rates. So, what we did – we didn't want to reclassify anybody, but what we found was that there were groupings of current classifications where the fee or the tax was the same for each of those categories. And we could group them together into a supergroup, make it easier for everybody, and reduce the number of categories that everybody had to take account of in the administration. So, that's what we did. You can see, for example, the professional services supergroup. We were able to take 27 existing categories, bring that into a supergroup. The tax amount is a flat $157.50 for all of that. And we, in our tax study, went through exhaustively all of the categories and how they got moved in the proposal. You can see, again, for example, there's a services supergroup at the bottom of this chart. 99 existing categories brought together in this supergroup, all, again, at $157.50. So, you might ask yourself, well, if they're $157.50, why not group all of the $157.50s together? The way that we were looking at this was we wanted to make it sort of a tradeoff between how easy is it to find where you fit, which if you had everybody who pays $157.50, you'd probably have to have a long, exhaustive list again. So, we wanted to have that kind of tradeoff between ease of finding it and knowing how much you pay. So, this was sort of the tradeoff. We were able to reduce the categories down to roughly, there are 245 categories now. Starting from the 636, we got it down to 245, removing or consolidating 391 of those categories in the proposed structure. So, what determines the rate? I mean, I see ice cream store and I see services supergroup. And, you know, the services supergroup is charged twice the amount of an ice cream store. Who makes that choice? So, historically, that was set when you adopted the rate. I understand that, but how was it set? Do you know? It's by NAICS, the North American Industrial. No, that's not what I'm asking. Okay, please, Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry. I'm saying, are we using receipts as a measure of what to charge, you know, average receipts? Or are, I mean, I'm not sure what standard we're using. Are you saying we're using a national standard? And if we're using a national standard, how are those standards established? Well, we're establishing a classification. What kind of business are you? We're using a national standard to do that. I get that. I get that. So, now, from there, we're looking at the rate that applies to that, right? That's where your question is. That's what you're saying. But I'm saying, why are we using that? What – it seems very arbitrary to say that, you know, an ice cream store on Federal Highway is being charged half as much to open up and get a business tax receipt than a law office. So, Mayor, those are some of the discrepancies that we – that it depends on the business tax category that it is. For example, some business tax categories are, as you were saying, based on the amount of merchandise sold or the number of units that they have. Others are on a flat fee base. So, those were created when the business tax structure was adopted in 1953 at the time or through subsequent changes. Good things happened in 1953, right, Commissioner? Good. Yes. Amazing things happened in 1953, Mayor. Yes. Oh, thank you very much. No comments. Thank you. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Please proceed. I mean, I just think it's very arbitrary. On the contrary, these rates don't – I mean, I can tell you some law offices make less money than ice cream stores, especially young lawyers or any young professional, realtors or whatever they may be. You know, I just want to know what – and we're not talking big numbers here, obviously. We're not talking tens of thousands of dollars. We're talking $100, $150. If you're going into business, these are not big numbers. But I'm just wondering how these categories were established and why those rates were established in those categories and why are we – if it's a practice that was established 70 years ago and if we feel that conditions have changed, are we now in a position to make them more egalitarian? I wish the answer to that was yes, but when the state legislature restricted – was it 94, 95 – it made some adjustments to the law and your authority. It kind of baked into the structure a lot of the things you have here. So it did not give, generally speaking, broad reclassification powers under these business tax procedures. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. I – for example, when I recommend in other cities, we'll often get it down to five categories and we're basing it on the gross receipts. So we're actually taxing the amount of interest, but that's not – I mean, the amount of activity, but that's not really how even your neighbors are structured for the most part either. So if you combine some of these categories like you're recommending, where does – what is the basis for the 5% – on which category is the 5% – should we decide to, you know, increase it by 5% – which category rate are we basing it on, the lower one or the higher one if we're combining categories? Great point. Great point. So let me clarify. We were not able to combine if there were two different rates. So if we're combining a classification, they're all at the current same rate right now because that otherwise would be sort of a backdoor tax increase, and that's – we're not doing that. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome, sir. That concludes our presentation, but I am happy to answer additional questions. Anyone else have any questions from the dais? Yes. I just have one question. So you mentioned that you're pleased to say that we're in the middle of the pack so far. So as the largest city in Bradford County, is that where we should be or where we want to be, or do you have a recommendation where we should be? So what I would say is you have some room because of where you are. If you were to do these increases, you would not be – I'm going to use a term that's a little bit anathema in city government, but you would stay pretty competitive with the rates around you from an economic development perspective. So generally when I talk to cities, they don't want to be at the top, and they don't want to be at the bottom, right, for very good reasons, policy and economic reasons. So you're in the middle. That's a pretty admirable place to be. Do you have room to go up? Yes. If we thought that was going to have a significant negative impact, we would have perhaps recommended something different. But with the cap on increases and the rates that are around you and where you are, you're in a pretty good competitive position, and these increases wouldn't change that drastically. Thank you. It looks like to us. No, thank you. And those dollar amounts seem very insignificant, actually. So, I mean – They are pretty small, particularly given what we've seen inflation-wise. If you think about the amount of inflation, the real dollar value that you're getting from this revenue source has been going down over the last few years. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. They're being done. Thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you. What are next steps? Mayor, we'd like some feedback on the two different items. One, the consolidation of the categories, and second, on if we'd like to bring back a rate increase, and if so, which one? Because we can do the nine-year plan. Well, I think from an administrative point of view, consolidating makes sense, right? There's no – there's no objection to that. And whether or not – is there an appetite on this commission to raise any of these categories by the 5%? Not for me. I'd like to consolidate first, and then before we raise, frankly. Okay. Yes, consolidation, no raise at this time. No raise at this time. All right. There you go. So, we will bring back an ordinance, though, that will do that consolidation. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, moving on to business two. This is the public engagement in the budget process. Hello. Hi there. So, good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Commissioners. Yvette Matthews, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget. So, it's officially budget season again, which means that teams across the city are sharpening their pencils to really determine what resources they're going to need in fiscal year 2020 since. The feedback of our neighbors really plays an integral role in the budget development process. So, we wanted to kick off budget development by sharing with our neighbors the various ways that they can get involved in the process. Our goal isn't just to push out information, but to really fully engage a broad representation of our community to understand their needs, in addition to discussing with them the initiatives that the city has planned for the upcoming year. We also use the information that we receive from our biannual neighbor survey to help drive discussions throughout the budget process. Getting involved in the budget process is really important to our neighbors because it allows them to be part of the challenging choices that come along with creating a balanced budget. Our hope is that our transparent budget process will build trust and confidence in our neighbors, that their tax dollars are being well spent towards their greatest needs. In OMB, we love to say that budgeting is a team sport. It really requires the direction of our policymakers, which are you guys, the input of our community, as well as city staff from across our organization. This is a high-level depiction of the budget process, which started in January when you all did your commission goal-setting meeting, which really gave us our marching orders for how we should allocate resources over the next year. And it ends in September, this year on a Friday, where we'll adopt the budget on September 12th. So, here are a few key dates for the public to get involved. At a very high level, come to our joint meetings between the commission and the budget advisory board. If you really want to get into the details, come to budget advisory board meetings. And then there are some key decision points, which are the public hearings that are listed on the presentation. You've heard me mention the budget advisory board a couple times. And the reason for that is their specific purpose is to provide the taxpayer's perspective on the development of the annual budget. This team also submits a recommendation on the city manager's proposed budget by August 15th of each year. And while they meet year-round, they really dive into budget development starting later this month when they'll be meeting with our department directors for their what keeps you up at night discussion. This is where they begin to hear the operational challenges that directors plan to tackle over the year. In April, they look at our personnel cost projections because those make up 60% of our operating budget. In May, they meet every Wednesday to really dig into each department's budget requests. And then it's really important to know that each of the budget advisory board meetings is open to the public. It's recorded and posted on YouTube the day after the meeting. And if you would like to see a link to these meetings, they're on our public engagement site at fortlauderdale.gov slash budget. The public is also encouraged to hear more about our revenue projections for the year by attending the Revenue Estimating Conference Committee meetings. This is where we really get nitty-gritty in the details of some of our smaller general fund revenues. So for those who prefer to read the information in the comfort of their homes instead of attending one of our many meetings, you can visit fortlauderdale.gov slash budget. Here we have our line item budgets from each department as well as information on replacement plans. So you can see how the city is financially planning to ensure that city staff have the equipment they need to really provide the services that you require. Fun fact, since we were talking about years earlier, we have budget books dating back to 2002, which happens to be the year I graduated from high school. So if you want to see a historical perspective, we have that information on the website. Rub it in. Rub it in. Thank you for your presentation. So for those who want to try budgeting like the city manager, we have a balancing act simulation tool, which allows our neighbors to see real budget data from each of our departments, as well as the enhancement requests that our department directors have asked for. We really encourage people to hit submit when they create their balance budget on this site because it shares the information directly with our department, and we in turn share that information with the commission when they prepare to make their final decision on the adopted budget. So if you miss any of the engagement opportunities that I discussed today, don't worry, they're all available on Fort Lauderdale dot gov slash budget. On this site, we also have a tool for any of the HOAs or civic associations that would like to get a budget presentation this year. And we'll really be pushing that out once the proposed budget is available so that we can get more community engagement. Again, there are many opportunities to get involved in the budget development process. We look forward to the feedback from the community as well as the commission throughout the process. Any questions? We have one person who signed up to speak. Brian? Good afternoon. And two of the people that I wanted to address today are no longer sitting here, so I'll follow up with them individually. I think this was a great presentation. Maybe they left for a reason, Brian. Well, I don't think they knew I signed up, unless you should share it. As your former budget chair, I wanted to take time today to thank the budget department about this important presentation here today. About getting more public input into the process. And so, as a prior chair, I know that the timing is critical for public input. So what I wanted to do today was to suggest to each of you to share with your HOA presidents and your members that time is now. It's not the time to come in August or September, as some previous commissioners had sort of come through and tried to do some line items. Thank you, Commissioner, for rejoining us. I just wanted to share that the time is now. So if there's any HOA presidents, anything that are tickle points within your districts, now is the time to get that to staff and to the budget advisory board. Because when they meet with you on April 15th, they're going to be giving you an overview. And that is the time. Not to do line item things in September, August. It's too late. And HOA presidents used to call me from other districts, none from District 2. They heard the message early from the vice mayor that you need to get involved in March. So this is the time to get it. And if they have any questions, they can approach any of their BAB members. But these men and women spend 14 to 16 meetings a year. It is a very tasking thing. So I'm going to toss out there that through the Council of Civic Association, et cetera, if any of your presidents have questions, they want a little cheat sheet, they want to hear what really goes on and how to look at the different functions, I'm throwing my name out there. Tell them to give me a call. I'd be glad to work with any of your other presidents on helping to understand that. Because this is very critical. It is very complex. And if they are looking for additional things, they have to come up with an idea as to where that's going to come from. Because that's going to be your challenge. I'm very excited to hear, and I've been keeping track of all the things going on with the budget, even though I'm no longer there, the fact that you're going to be doing a bonding for CIP. I think you said that a couple times then. For CIP. I think that $60 million is going to be a great benefit for getting forward with some of the things with CIP that we've done. So thank you for taking the time and listening to your great team. They're doing a great job. So I just want to toss it out. Are you still with the Budget Advisory Board? No, I'm not. Oh, sorry. I am now planning on zoning, so we're doing other things. Emeritus. You're an emeritus. Yes. It's wonderful. But I just want to make sure. Everyone knows now's the time, not August. Well, I think we were instructed that perhaps there would be more neighborhood outreach during the process. And going to homeowners association meetings, certainly if it's requested by an HOA, that would be helpful. It would be hard to go randomly because there are so many neighborhood association meetings. Starting out with the council of civic associations might be the best thing, but you do that anyway. So any opportunity that there is to connect the board with the community, that's a good thing. But keep in mind, the Budget Advisory Board is made up of neighborhood people, right? So it's not like your city staff, you are actually our ears, your eyes and ears of the community. So we depend on each member of the board to be the feedback that we as a commission hope to get. But to go one step farther, that would be helpful as well. I just think that for the current BAB, any reminder from your offices that now is the time to bring up anything would be beneficial to all of them because once they're into all of those meetings which you see on their little sheet, it's a little too little too late. So I just wanted to give you a suggestion to reach out to all your community leaders in each of your districts and get that word out there. Now is the time. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, the last major piece of business we have here is the International Swimming Hall of Fame Phase 2 update. And who will be making that presentation? We'll start with Ben Rogers. Mr. Rogers. We have a number of people who signed up to speak, so get comfortable. I see. Mr. Rogers. Good afternoon, Mayor, Commission. Ben Rogers, Acting Assistant City Manager. So in January, we came to the commission and we provided a brief overview on Phase 1 of the project, which was the seawall improvements in the ocean rescue. At that time, the commission asked for some more insight and some visibility into the Phase 2 planning and programming. We committed to come back in March with an update. And so what you're going to hear from the project team today is what they envisioned the peninsula to look like. We brought a lot of renderings and a lot of different angles so that people can understand the impacts and the sight lines. I know there's been concerns that the mayor has provided about the dive tower in the past, and I think that you'll see the different vantage points of that. The project team will also present on their programming, their vision for the activation, and what they think that the future of this peninsula has. Since the time that we've published, we have received numerous feedback. And, again, I just want to remind everyone that this is the first time the commission is seeing this. These are recently developed documents that haven't been circulated because they're fresh off the press. And so with that, we're still doing outreach. We're gathering feedback. We met with some of the nearby stakeholders last week. We met with some of the swim team members also last week. And so this is just the first step of sharing the vision, taking the feedback, and then moving the project forward. So with that, I'll ask Mario, Rebecca, and Stephanie to present on the item. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Mayor, vice mayor, commissioners, city manager, city staff, and the folks in the audience, I know everybody's very passionate about this project. I want to just start – I'm Stephanie Toothaker. I represent Hall of Fame Partners. I want to just take a minute and just talk about the history of this peninsula, at least as far as this team has been involved. Our entire team is here. We're all happy to answer questions at the end. This started with the city putting out an RFP to redo the pools. Hensel Phelps, which is part of this team, the Hall of Fame Partners team, answered that RFP in 2018. So this journey started in 2018. That's when the pools started. And at that time, we already were starting to talk about the dive tower and what needed to happen on this peninsula. As those of you that have been around for a long time, you know that the buildings that are there today are in very, very poor condition. Actually, I know for a fact the boat show who rents this every year for the boat show has taken it upon themselves to do a large number of roof repairs and other repairs to the buildings that are there because they're failing. And so through that discussion in 2018 with the pools, we started having discussions with the city about what else could be here. And, Mayor, I think you brought up the idea of the dive tower, and the dive tower came to life, and it's there today, and we're very proud to have been part of the team that delivered that dive tower. That was done in 2019. It was started, discussion in 2019. I think it was actually delivered in 2020. And at the time, CRA funds were used for that dive tower. But at that time, and I think this is a really important point to make, at that time during the discussions of the dive tower, that's when the discussion started about the replacement of the east and west buildings. And it was around that time that we started sharing visions of what that might look like. So this has been a multi-phase project. As Ben said, we're here to show you the next phase. But I want to just spend a minute talking about the timeline and how we got here. So, again, started with the pools in 2018. The tower discussion started in 2019. Change order through the CRA was delivered in 2020. The south building, the demo of the south building and the unsolicited proposal for the other projects, that was submitted in 2020. The interim agreement for that was approved by this commission in 2021. I-SHOF phase one, which was the ocean rescue and the seawall improvement, the public improvements, that was part of that interim agreement. And later, the comprehensive agreement, which included all of that, together with all of the buildings that you're seeing now, that was done in 2023. Your staff report actually says that. So in 2023 is when you started seeing all of the vision and the images for both the west building and the east building. We haven't started the DRC process. We're just now getting ready to go to DRC. This will go through a regular site plan process like any other site plan does in Fort Lauderdale. But the interim agreement and the comprehensive agreement, I think, were really important steps in that process that led us to where we are today. So, as I said, I-SHOF phase one was ocean rescue and seawall. I-SHOF phase two is the western building. So that's what we're talking about now. That's the presentation you're going to see. I-SHOF phase three is the eastern building. And phase four will be the public dock and promenade. The closing on the loan for all of these items was done in October of 2024. So I just want to state again, the unsolicited proposal that included this project that you are seeing was done in 2020 and was approved through comprehensive interim agreement in 2021 and comprehensive agreement in 2023. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rebecca to take you through the presentation. We're very happy to answer any questions. Our entire team is here. And I just want to state for all the people in the audience as well, we just met with the Venetian. We are going to be meeting with the CBA. We're happy to meet with any public group that wants to have a meeting with us. We've really just kicked off that public process as well because we're just now getting ready to submit a site plan. So thank you. Before you leave and before we open it to the public, I just want to ask a couple of questions just to get some more clarity on what you just said. So in 2018, the City Commission moved forward and approved the idea of rehabilitating the aquatic center and what we see today. The pools. That was an RFP for the pools. Yes. The pools alone. Yes. And that came after many years of trying to get something done. Originally, it was with a different contractor, different concepts. I was a commissioner at the time. And we sort of waded through a lot of different, pun not intended, but we waded through a lot of designs and controversy at the time to the point when a new commission was elected in 2018. The commission moved forward and we now have those three pools as well as the new locker rooms. And then it was decided that there was a demand in the diving world for something such as a dive tower as we see today. And the commission continued with its effort, participated in the decision-making to create the 27-meter dive tower. But at the same time, there was an understanding that the east and west buildings would be replaced. Yes. Okay. And so today we are trying to discuss what those should look like. The west building has been demolished. The original west building has been demolished. Correct. It was a single-story event space for the most part. It was. And the idea that has been presented to us since before last year even was to try to create more activity for the public as well as to create synergies between the swimming pools, the dive tower, and whatever activity could take place in the west and east buildings in order to make it a complete experience coming to the Fort Lauderdale Beach. Correct? Am I summarizing it correctly? Absolutely correct. Yes. Because that's been my understanding, okay? Yes. The question is now, what should that experience be? And to what extent can this peninsula accommodate some of the vision that has been presented to this commission and to the public going forward? Today we are talking simply about the west building, not the east building. That's correct. Although it's contemplated the east building will come down as well. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. That's correct. Yes. So today we're looking at actually a modified version of what was originally presented. The original site plan, or we'll just say concept design, was a little larger building. You've shrunk the top two floors. You've added more parking. And there are some activities taking place in there that were proposed from the very start. So that's the way I understand it. That's where we are today. And so I'd like, before the commission deliberates, I'd like to be able to hear from the public what their response is to what you've just said, and then let the commission begin its deliberation. Is that fair? Okay. That's great with us, Mayor. Everything you said is accurate. Does Mario want to add anything to your presentation? Well, we have a presentation. I think it would be important. We have shared this with the Venetian, because we had the, Mr. Burns was able to accommodate us, and we did meet with them. But I don't think everybody has seen this. So if we could go through that. Okay. So let's move forward with the continuation of your presentation. Thank you so much, Mayor. Rebecca. Yeah. Mario Caprini. I'm the CEO of Capital Group and the managing partner of All of Fame Partners. So in addition to everybody. Who is that? Was that? Who is that entity? All of Fame Partners is the entity that submitted the development in the proposed P3. And do they own the International Swimming Hall of Fame? No. No. The International Swimming Hall of Fame is our client, as is the city from our perspective. Right. Okay. So the International Swimming Hall of Fame, the chairman is here, Bill Kent, somewhere in the audience right back there. And I'm sure he'll come up and say a few words. Yeah, he will. When it's the right time. Okay. But I want to add a little more commentary to what Stephanie has eloquently said. And this is seen as a mixed-use development. But it's a lot more than that. This is a real big juggling act because we want to turn this into a destination and an economic engine. But one that represents not just the aquatic center, not just the International Swimming Hall of Fame, or not just any other activity. The activity and the planning of this has been designed to become one unit. And in 1965, when iShop was created, iShop has always been pretty much solely dependent on donations. I've been tasked and asked, and I've talked to the various groups, including some of you here in front of me. So the mission for iShop was create us a model that's going to make us money. The city's perspective was create something beautiful that everybody's going to be able to use, and that doesn't cost us anything or close to anything. And then we had to sit down and figure out on this quasi-mission impossible, how do we put this together so that we have the public sector provide the asset, and then we have the private sector pay for it all. So we have come up with the model, and that's why today we're adapting the original plan, because the latest change was a great addition to the project. And one of my friends is here, Rich, to talk about the aquarium. So the aquarium is a must-have on this peninsula. iShop is a must-be-there on this peninsula because of the deed restriction. So those two major components, with the amount of parking and traffic that it's bringing, require the parking count, the square footages that we'll be presenting today. So I'm saying that as a prelude to what Rebecca's going to walk you through, and then we'll be able to answer all of your questions at the end of the presentation. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Rebecca. You're new to the team. I'm new to the team. Same last name as one of the members, though. Rebecca Caprini. I'm the vice president of development for Capital Group. So as you've been introduced already today, I'm going to walk you through kind of a visual representation of phase two, which is the West Building. Try to talk as much as you can into the microphone. See, I'm a walker. I'll try my best. Okay. Okay. Four key topics to go through today. Obviously, we've discussed the West Building updates to programming. And then we're going to walk you through a visual representation of the experience that we want you to feel, whether you're on the water or you're walking through the site. And then we'll go through the actual experience. What are you going to be doing on the peninsula? And we'll finish with the timeline of the overall project and the outreach we've done today. So as we've discussed, we had the original proposed building here on the left and the newly first time being seen proposed West Building on the right. We've discussed the addition of some of the programming, which I'll get to in just a moment. But the key here to note is the overall architecture is very similar to the left original building. However, we've made adjustments because we've heard the feedback loud and clear. The dive tower is an icon on the peninsula, and we really wanted to celebrate that. So we've actually shifted and shrank those top floors so that you can see the view of the dive tower a little bit better. So key changes. I think everybody here has heard the word aquarium. So you can see the first floor of the new proposed building has that aquarium. Because of the addition of this aquarium, we had to update and reprogram some of the use types within the building, adding some parking to accommodate for code, and then keeping the museum, the public cafe, and then the event space above what we are calling the podium. And I want to touch on a key point here, which is the research and due diligence that's gone into this project. From a perspective of aquatics, the overall peninsula, we've met with several consultants over the past, let me do the math, since 2018, we'll call it, when the pool RFP went about. And we understand that this peninsula is an iconic piece of the city of Fort Lauderdale, and we really want to celebrate that. So we've gone through an extensive consultation process, and we continue to do it, as you'll see here. This is just the beginning of our reprogramming for the west building. But we wanted to make sure that the aquatic experience that people have come used to on this peninsula is celebrated and embraced with the addition of the programming, to Mario's point, of trying to bring all of these synergistic uses to the peninsula. So I'm going to walk you through just pretty, I'm going to try to be brief with this presentation, the conceptual renderings of coming to the peninsula from the water, and then I'll take you through the pedestrian and promenade experience. But the real key here, when we started reprogramming the building, was we realized we had the opportunity to really focus on creating a sense of place and entrance, no matter how you got to the site, whether it was from the water, whether it was by car, or you were walking. So you'll see here there's a little map. It's going to shift locations. But we're going to start on the south and work our way north from the intercoastal. So here you are, fully in the intercoastal here, views of the dive tower, kind of west of Bahiamar. Due west of the property by Idlewild, moving northwest here, and then finally due north. So now I'm going to walk you through what is the experience going to be like if you are in the aquatic center. So this is your, at the ticketing gate, and your first experience walking into the center itself. And I do want to make a point here that I think is really important. Technology has been our friend over the past several years, and we've been able to use our Revit model, which is what our construction documents and everything will be based off of, to create this 3D model that is fully to scale. So this would be your perspective as an average height person walking into the aquatic center, as with all of the renderings that you're seeing today. So now we'll take you through this promenade pedestrian experience that we are anticipating to create. We'll start from the north, work our way around to the south side. This is what will be the grand entrance of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and the aquarium, and all of our other tenants that we'll tell you a little bit more about in a second. As we're walking here towards the north side, turning the corner, you're facing south here, and then this next view will be facing north. And we'll touch on this in just a little while, but we're trying to utilize different modes of transportation, right? We understand that the barrier island has traffic concerns, and we think it's a really great opportunity to utilize this peninsula to get here from the water taxi, which has a designated stop for all three of their locations, or all three of their routes, rather. And then, obviously, this pedestrian promenade experience. So as we continue south here, this is kind of the back of house area, where you can see the ramp up to the parking deck itself. And then it'll finish along the south service road, which we will be utilizing, so that you can walk the entirety of the peninsula, whether or not you want to participate in any of the activities on the site. And, sorry, this is a little faded, but if we're looking at just the west building and phase two of this project, it's what is kind of in color here, and you can see the perimeter of this slide is showing the existing fire lane, which is going to remain the minimum width, the required width, at the minimum sizes that you're seeing in here. But the real idea of this whole experience is to make it organic, have it flow, and create a real sense of place that you want to be and walk around. So this moves us into the experience. I think everybody here has probably heard bits and pieces of what you can do on the peninsula, but with all of the experiences with the aquarium that we talked about, the International Swimming Hall of Fame, Alchemy, our event center, and then our temporary attraction, we realized that this peninsula really has an opportunity and a common core of a thread, which is water. And so we've utilized over months and months a great team of John Whitehead, who I'm going to introduce here in just a moment, who's created a branding experience for this peninsula. So I won't even click on the slide. I'll let you have the honors. Thank you, Rebecca. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice-Mayor, Commissioners. My name is John Whitehead with Deep Blue Attractions. My responsibility is the design and build and operation of the joint attractions on the peninsula. And when we first got to the project, one of the things that really stood out to me was the location of the project itself. You've got the aquatic center. You're nestled in between the intercoastal waterway and the Atlantic Ocean. We're building an aquarium. We have the International Swimming Hall of Fame. We kind of had this idea of our world is water. Everything is water. So we came up with an idea of calling this peninsula the water district to give it the identity that it needs. We tried to come up with all these clever names of combining the joint attraction, the International Swimming Hall of Fame, but keeping each one with its own identity was very important. And so we have what we call a joint attraction. It's one destination with two journeys. The aquarium is in the early stages of concept design, so we're working on the floor plan right now. There are eight different galleries. We're on the ground floor, so we have 20,000 square feet on the ground floor. This will be my eighth aquarium build-out. And then from the ground floor, you're going to go up to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. We're not calling it a museum anymore. We're calling it the International Swimming Hall of Fame experience. There are multiple zones which deal with – people don't necessarily understand that the International Swimming Hall of Fame is not full of competitive swimmers. They've got competitive swimmers. You've got Guy Harvey's in there, Jacques Cousteau's in there. There are people who are interested in everything from marine ecology to swim safety and everything in between. So we wanted to celebrate all of that. This isn't just about competitive swimming, but it's obviously celebrating the 60-year history of the International Swimming Hall of Fame. So these are the six galleries that we're working on right now. And recently we've partnered up with a group who have some really, really compelling product, and they're going to be – they've signed an LOI on the seventh floor, the sixth floor, seventh floor. And they're going to be bringing a bunch of very, very exciting new prospects and new opportunities to the project. And finally we have CDEC. We had an opportunity within the comprehensive agreement to create a temporary attraction for the International Swimming Hall of Fame. So when the CDEC is demolished sometime in the next three or four months, underneath the CDEC we're hoping to build what we call the CDEC. And that will basically cover or will contain several different pillars of what we will then represent in the larger opportunity when we build out the joint attraction. So we've been having conversations with multiple groups recently. We just had a very good conversation with Ocean Rescue, with Gio Serrano, talking about the content. We went to Ocean Rescue and we said, if we could get 100,000 people or 200,000 people through this particular attraction, what are the four or five things that you would want them to know? Like identifying the flags when they go on the beach, understanding what a rip current is. So we're creating an exhibit area that we're calling the Little Lifeguard Academy that's going to support Ocean Rescue. So when people come in there, they can have a little bit more of an understanding of what a safe day at the beach looks like. Of CDEC, we just met with NSU and the Guy Harvey Research Institute. Ask them the same question. What are the four or five things that you want people to know? Not just about NSU, but about the work that's going on through them in the community. So that's Conservation Cove. Obviously, we're celebrating the Hall of Fame and the Heroes. And then there'll be some areas where there's going to be some play and it's going to be a gathering area. This is a temporary attraction that's going to be there between sometime towards the end of this year, hopefully. After we go through permitting and then all the way up to the opening of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in the Fort Lauderdale Aquarium. It gives us the opportunity to build momentum in the community so that people understand what we stand for and what we're trying to educate people in. And it gives us that kind of marketing and branding and positioning opportunity for the next several years. And then Apogee events. I'll let Mario kind of talk a little bit about. Before I talk about Apogee, I'd like to pass the microphone to Rich, who's the founder of the Aquarium. Maybe you want to add a few. Mayor, commissioners, Susan, thank you for your time. Everybody from Fort Lauderdale, I appreciate your time. My name is Rich Waltzer. I'm a Broward County commissioner of the Intercoastal Waterway and also a founder and CEO of the Aquarium. Had to have a vision of how can we help our community become something better than what it is now. Had a vision a couple years ago. Fort Lauderdale never had an aquarium. And I thought, what can we do to educate children, families on oceanic conservation? All of this between Mario, Hensel Phelps, John Whitehead, his expertise. It's a vision that's going to help the community, special needs individuals, and we're bringing the Special Olympics to Fort Lauderdale. So all of these things together, I think is going to be a great project. I want to keep this short and sweet, but I'm going to leave this up to Mario and the Hensel Phelps team. Thank you. Thanks, Rich. All right, next slide. So Apogee events. I hope they're not listening because their heads are going to swell a little bit. But these are our rock stars of food and beverage and event management. They are running multiple operations in multiple states. We are in the final stages of LOI operations and all that good stuff. We're trying, the only reason it's not fully signed today is because we're trying to coordinate between all the other tenants so that everybody is fully aligned on how all food and beverage, we didn't want 10 different people doing 10 different things. We'll have one group oversee for everybody and make sure that it's a cohesive operation that is well run. These guys operate a world-class business. Their claim to fame is 100,000 square foot event space in Manhattan. How they operate that in that dense of a location is really part of what convinced me that they could create an operation and the tight squeeze that we have on this peninsula. So we can't wait. We're telling you very little about the tenants yet because we don't want to steal their thunder. When they're ready, they're going to come with their visual and their vision and all that. But those is to confirm that we will have 100% of the building leased out. So now it's a question of tweaking and getting ready for DRC. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Matt from Hensel Phelps. Good afternoon, Mayor, Commissioners. I'm Matt with Hensel Phelps, a partner with Capital Group. So we're looking at, on this slide here, is roughly the overall schedule, right? And obviously right now, we're in the design to get it to the DRC review and approval stage. That would be about 30% of the design complete. And we've got a target of within the next month to get it to that point. And we've left some room on this schedule for that DRC review, knowing how big of a project this is and the interest. So that really puts us into 2026 when you look at that. From that process, we've overlapped the permitting phasing and we've put a lot of time in there. So construction on this, we are taking a lot of the comments that we're hearing from the neighbors and everyone else. We recognize that construction is disruptive to the community. So we're going to take as much as that in. But I think from, you take a look at the size and magnitude of this, right now our duration is about 28 months. We want to streamline that when the design gets a little bit further along. But we are taking into consideration everything from continued access to the pools for as much of that as we can. We're looking at the construction methods of the building, what size cranes and everything else to A, maximize productivity, but also help reduce the overall impact of that duration. And so I'm hoping that this overall duration is very conservative. And as we develop the plans a little bit further with some efficiencies, we can pull this back even further. Okay, thank you. Mario. I think, Mayor, this concludes our presentation. So any questions you may have, we're here to answer. Okay. So we'll leave this now. It's time to open the public hearing. Can I just ask you a quick question? On one of these slides in which you, I think it was the number 13, there's a vision of, there's an image here of glass with what looks like an aquarium. Is the aquarium going to be exposed to the promenade like that? No, because we cannot have sunlight go through it. I didn't think so. We're going to create an illusion of looking at the water without damaging the fish that are inside the things. Okay. I just, I thought that was a little odd. Okay. Yeah. All right. So we have a few people sign up to speak. Don't go away, gentlemen. Have a seat. I want to call your names three at a time. You have a couple minutes to speak. And just to let you know who's on deck. So we have Dr. Bill Kent, followed by, I can't see the first name, but Dooley is the last name, and followed by Debbie Isinger. Well, Bill. Well, Mr. Mayor, commissioners, I'm the chairman of the board of the International Swimming Hall of Fame since 2017. And what we have now is a new life for the Swimming Hall of Fame. It had struggled throughout its whole history as a small not-for-profit. And what's happening now creates a permanent success footprint for this little not-for-profit called the Hall of Fame. We basically have three missions at the Hall of Fame. One is to honor all of the Olympic heroes and other people who have stood out throughout, through their performances. That's the induction ceremonies that we have once a year at the museum. We also have the world's most incredible library of the history of the relationship between water and the human race. And then the third leg of our mission is called Every Child a Swimmer. We have a very active program teaching children from financially disadvantaged families how to swim because child drowning is a major concern for the society in general. So we are very supportive of what's happening here. They have just continued to amaze me personally with the creativity and the thoughts that have gone into this project. I'll stop with that. Okay. Thank you so much. Is this Mike? Is it Mike Dooley? Yeah. You did not get an A in penmanship. I know that. I certainly didn't. I should have been a doctor. That would have explained everything. But Mike Dooley, I'm the secretary at the Hall of Fame. And I just want to affirm what Bill said. And just everyone knows, I mean, it's a 501c3 organization and struggled financially, historically, for many, many years. And this gives us a sustainable future to protect the legacy of the Hall of Fame. So I just wanted to voice my support for that. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. Debbie, followed by John Roth, followed by Mary Pelequin. Well, greetings, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners. And as you can see, we've got some good representation from the swim community here. So as an avid swimmer and an active member of the Swim Fort Lauderdale Masters team, I am here today representing many of our fellow swimmers, many of who couldn't be here today, but they probably will pack the house when we get to the commission meeting for approval. So, and I think at this point you've been receiving some emails from the swim and dive community addressing some of the concerns with the proposed plan. We certainly do want to partner, you know, but partner is, I hear that you were just talking, you had conversations with multiple groups and so forth, and you, nobody has come to the end users, the swimmers and divers, to present this. We actually found this out from the January 18th article in the Sun Sentinel. So needless to say, we knew that there was going to be a Hall of Fame and a museum, but we were totally caught off guard by what it seems is these massive plans now to add an aquarium, a theater, shopping, and office space. Swimmers and divers, as you know, are a very diverse group. We come from all walks of life, various socioeconomic levels, religion, ethnicities, nationalities, age groups, sexual orientation, and skill levels. And the beauty of swimming, which I think they're forgetting about as they're talking about all these wonderful things, is swimming. And the beauty of swimming is it's open to everyone. From the youngest, from the womb to the tomb is a saying. Everyone can learn to swim from the youngest to the very senior people. So last Friday, we did meet. A few of us met with Ben Rogers for a presentation from the ISOF group and the project developers. And from that, you know, we even have some more concerns from what we see on the scope. So I'm going to raise some questions that really need to be addressed because I think, again, you forgot to ask us. Can I ask a few questions here? Go ahead. All right. So first, we were told on Friday that swim and dive professionals have been consulted. And we did ask, can we have the names of those swim and dive professionals that have been consulted and what they signed off on? So we'd like to get that. And we certainly hope that before you vote on this project that you see that because it would be a total tragedy to have invested more than $47 million in building a world-class aquatic facility only to learn that because of this project, it's very possible that it would no longer meet the qualifications to host major national and international competitions. So it's really important. And here's my question. Some of us have asked our coaches who don't get involved because they're employees of the city. But we said, hey, were you consulted? I mean, if you want to ask the experts, these people know swimming and they host the events. But apparently, nobody asked. Anyone. None of you asked any of the swim and dive coaches who are right here at the aquatic facility their thought. And they run the day-to-day operations. So as you're planning this, a few other questions. Was the safety of swimmers and divers even considered? Will these massive glass buildings that we are seeing, and by the way, those renderings are a little misleading because that glass building is covering the 27-meter dive tower. And you're not, it's totally covering it. But anyway, will these massive glass buildings dangerously raise the temperature of the pool and water on the deck? Have you considered, have you even considered the impact of the glass on the water? These large buildings could heat the pool deck to unsafe temperatures. Okay? Do these plans take into consideration requirements of U.S. Center for Safe Sports? Swimmers do need privacy, not strangers looking upon them. Why do you think that spectators actually are not allowed on deck during certain competitions? And why do you think photography is restricted? How are you going to control this with these public glass buildings surrounding the aquatic facility? And I'm going to tell you, it's only going to take one incident of a pedophile posting inappropriate pictures of some swimmers to create some massive negative exposure. Now, here are the aesthetics. We took such great pride in this 27-meter dive tower, and I thank you, Mayor and Commissioners, for doing this. Okay? It's the largest in the Western Hemisphere, and this iconic feature will now be totally overshadowed by just a modern-day building, no different from any other modern-day structures, which are beautiful, but there's only one 27-meter iconic building. So why did we build that? If eventually, you know, the other concern is that you took away the land training for diving and to relocate it to a whole other area because from what I'm hearing from divers, the land training is of great concern, and that's going to impact their ability to train and compete there, so you've got to take that into consideration moving forward. All right? There's also some environmental concerns, and are there studies on possible reduced airflow around the pools and the ability to safely dissipate the chemicals used for training. Also, as we know, increase in traffic, that peninsula is a big concern. I know you're looking at me. There's more things. Don't worry about it. No, no. Can I make a suggestion? Can you commit those questions in writing and submit them to the folks here making the presentation? And I think they all deserve answers because they are very, very important to us to know that they're not going to negatively impact the activity of the swimming and diving world. Thank you so much. And I know it hasn't been raised, and again, I am upset with this team because you really talk about having gone to the community. You didn't go to the end users, all these people who use the facility. All right. I have one last thing, too. So as we talked about that, okay? Now, remember, you're talking about making accommodations, all right? For three years, we were so happy the swim community, from the littlest to the oldest, everybody who uses pools, people who travel worldwide, teams who come here make arrangements to stay here in Fort Lauderdale and certainly feed the economy. They come here to train. For three years, we went elsewhere to small parks and so forth to go ahead and train. Okay? Now, we're looking to this. Are they going to close down the swim facility? Have you given any consideration to all the dust, the debris, the ability to train? We know we're not going to be able to hold competition, so there's going to be loss in revenue there. But what about those collegiate swim teams that come from around the world, not just this country? They're not going to make their plans to come and train here during certain times of the year because they don't know whether the pool's going to be available or not. And that's something that we really need you to consider. And the last thing I'm going to share with you, you know, are there consideration for competitive events that should take place at the aquatic facility after completion of the project? Because there are some 600 to 1,000 athletes plus coaches, officials, vendors, media, and spectators. Okay? Will these shops and even the aquarium and all these other things be able to close for three to ten days to coordinate the logistics of hosting these major national and international events? All these things really need to be thought out as we move forward. And I thank you for your time. You're very welcome. Thank you. Mayor, can I just comment on that, though? Yeah, go right ahead. So with respect to the construction and the logistics and all that, I think we're going to have that regardless of how large this project is. We have to build a new ISHOP. So I think you're going to run into those same problems irrespective of the project scope. So we're going to have to deal with all that no matter what. There's going to be something built there. Correct. So not doing anything is not an option for us. So it's not a matter of saying that this is going to create dust for the swimmers. Yes, building something there is going to create dust for the swimmers, but we're going to build something there. Not building something is not an option. ISHOP needs to be at that location. As we recall, that peninsula is there for ISHOP. It's not there for the pool. I've had this conversation earlier. The whole part of this, the deed from the state is about, I'm very familiar with it, I know. We have to have ISHOP there. Without ISHOP there, we run the risk of having a challenge with the state. So we need to have ISHOP at that location. In order to have ISHOP at that location, they don't have the money to build a museum. In order to build a museum, there has to be another revenue-generating source of funds because the city is not kicking in $200 million to build ISHOP a new museum. I like them. They're great folks. It's a lovely facility, but we're not paying for it. So there has to be a market-generating mechanism to be able to fund the construction of the new museum. So how do we get there? Because I hear what you're saying, and you bring up some great points, but how do we get there? If we don't have something that generates that revenue to pay for the cost of the museum, which we have to have, and yes, we're going to have to deal with the challenges of construction and everything else that you brought up. But knowing that we have to build it, what do we do? So I agree wholeheartedly with you, and we have all been aware. By the way, this whole project, the remodel, began in 2002, actually. There was $27 million allotted towards that, and it took all these years. The deed actually, I don't even think there was an ISOP when this deed was prepared. It was actually a swimming hall of fame. Swimming hall of fame was the original name. So specifically, yes, it is a swimming hall of fame that needs to be there, and we want to partner with them. Just chuff, not ISOP. We definitely want to partner with them, and in 2015, the Masters Club actually wrote a letter to the city. I know no one up here was on the dais at that time saying what I did. Right. Nobody else was either. I was. You were. I was in 2003. Right, right. I remember when we were first discussing this. I've been on the dais since 2006. All right. In 2000. All right, let us move on. But anyway, 2015, I don't think any of you were exactly on that commission back then, but I do want to say that you guys were very, very, you were. Okay, yes, my apologies. But, and Mayor Trantellis, I want to give him a lot of credit because when his predecessor, the former mayor, was still dragging his feet and Commissioner Trantellis, right, asked Mayor Trantellis, right after he became mayor, said, we are going to get this done and did. And I thank all of you. I think Commissioner Glassman, Vice Mayor Glassman, you were up there then too and were very, very helpful. So I thank all of you for the support, but we want to partner in a way that. And I think that's the, I think that's the intent. I don't think there's any intent to exclude anybody. I think your questions and your concerns have a great deal of merit, but just listening to them, I know there are solutions. So let us work, let us give you the opportunity to speak with these folks after the meeting today and let's see if we can work through those efforts, okay? Perfect. One more comment, Mayor, though, and I've had this conversation with some folks before, so I know they've heard me say it. The first presentation on the reimagining of ISHOF in 2006, the first consultant report that we had done, you know what it had in it? Aquarium. Yes, I'm aware of that. So for 20 years, we've been talking about putting an aquarium out on that peninsula. This is not a new idea. This is the final culmination of 20 years' worth of concepts and designs and ideas about how we can make this all viable. So this was part of that original plan for what could invigorate and reinvigorate that entire peninsula because we recognized back in 2006 that we were struggling trying to bring folks into it. I know I went with Bruce Weigo when we walked through the museum and we looked at the static exhibits and we did all that and the idea has always been how do we modernize and how do we bring folks into it and everything has gotten even more digital since then. We really need to create interactive types of activities but this has always been part of that. So I want to just make sure everybody understands that. When we first conceptualized and reimagined this peninsula, this was part of that original vision that we had for it. This is not new. This has been a long time in coming. But let's just work together to make sure that pool doesn't become just a training pool. It remains an iconic feature in this community. And I agree 100% with you on that. Thank you. Very good. Thank you. Mayor, if I may, I just want to, Debbie, just one second. And I really want to thank you and your concerns will be addressed. They need to be addressed. Thank you. But I want to also urge you to coordinate with Bill Brown, the president of the Central Beach Alliance. I personally have attended countless meetings where this project over the last five years or so has been presented. So we need to make sure that your community is on that mailing list and that you are able to attend these meetings, especially because I know that there will be an upcoming meeting of the Central Beach Alliance where this will be fleshed out even more in detail when the developer team is going to be coming. Because there's no reason why you should ever feel that you've been excluded from this. So I just want to make sure that you're coordinating with Bill so that you're able to attend those meetings and have a voice at those meetings. I also want to make sure I know that the commission received a letter today to address one of your concerns about where people consulted with regards to best practices and ensuring that I think it's World Aquatics Disciplines now, formerly FINA. I want to make sure that you get that list of people that we were told were consulted, in fact, to make sure there was no conflict with what is going to be happening in terms of the project and how it affects all of the competitions that we know we want to see come, not just our own community swimmers, but also all of those competitions that we want to know. Because we can't, in other words, it has to be synergy. We all have to be working on this together. We have to ensure that every single piece of the aquatics community has what it needs so that this is successful. But please just coordinate with Bill so you guys all know when these meetings are coming on. Because those are very helpful, very detailed, and I'm sure that everyone would be welcome to attend those. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Mr. Roth. My name is John Roth. I live at 333 Sunset Drive, which is the Four Seasons condominium. And Mayor, just for your information, we have finally relit our sign, the iconic sign for the Four Seasons that was the first high-rise building built in Fort Lauderdale. I've lived here 35 years, almost, and I am very familiar with Swimming Hall of Fame. I got really familiar a couple of years ago when I stuck my foot in the water and tried to jump in and immediately jumped out because the water, if most people don't know unless you're a real swimmer, you know, I'm from up north, but my Lord, I mean, that water is so cold. You're coming out. So there's talk around here. Don't be a wimp, John. Right. Have you been in? Have you been in? It's chilly. It's very chilly. And in fact, they installed a special heating system a couple of years ago to heat the water for people like us that can't use that pool. So it is a public pool in quotation marks. If you're a vigorous swimmer, you want it a little chilly because you're expelling. I'm not a vigorous swimmer, especially at first. So anyway, I've given my cold weather to skiing, the sport of skiing, and hurt myself. Anyway, I've followed this very closely. I've had two roommates at Penn State who were architects, and they showed me visions every night of something that they were drawing. And then you get down, and I'm a quasi-engineer. I'm not a licensed engineer, but for Caterpillar for 44 years, I worked on big, heavy engineering projects of all kinds all over the world. So I know how to look at drawings. I look at visions ahead of time. And I was very pleased when I finally saw, late this week, the 25 or 26 pages, which are just presented here. And instead of getting into the details that I would normally get into from an engineering perspective, I'm going to just say, hmm, what do I like and what do I don't like from the first shot? And I didn't know the details of the politics of what you were going to do for all of these public projects where you get into public-private partnerships. For example, the pickleball courts, the stuff that's going up at Birch State Park, all of these different projects where people are using state's land for really private uses. So what I liked here when I looked at it is you've given some real thought to our number one problem here in Fort Lauderdale, and that is transportation. It took me a half an hour to get here from the bottom of the Las Olas Bridge at 1 o'clock this afternoon. A half an hour. And that's normal traffic. So imagine when we get our big swim meets coming in, it'll be like... Was the bridge up? No. Oh. No, this is just pothole to pothole. Oh. Red cones, red cones, and back of trucks. Dan Rogers, do you hear that? So let me go down here. The main thing that you did there and I spent half of my life on is boats. I strongly applaud the introduction of a real water taxi, large water taxi boats that can load and unload quickly. People can bring their coolers, picnic baskets, all the things that they would do with a proper dock that they can get in and get out. And I timed them in Turkey last year. They get in and unload a couple hundred people in a minute and 45 seconds. And they come in, tie the dock, ramp down, people out, people in, and they're away in a minute and 45 seconds. I have a video of it. So this can be done and we can get a lot of people in and out of there. So I like that. I like up the idea that we've consulted all the best people for the national requirements for swimming events. I like this presentation that just said they're going to have an introductory, temporary exhibits. I think that the lifeguards here do a terrific job and the training for the lifeguards. Hell, excuse me, we could make that into a real business because we have the facility, it's called the ocean, and we have a sea here and we have the people to make that into a business as part of this. You have to be a certified swimmer in order to get a job on the yacht, for example. There's no good place to do that. I don't like page five and six of the drawings of the view from Merle Fogg Park over, you can't tell me that those drawings are anywhere near accurate with the stated height that they say. Excuse me, I walk there and I would propose to do like they do in California. You take a drone and you put it up exactly where the spot is and you get a surveyor to put the angles on and you draw your drawing with that and then you'll see, the public will see, what the real height of the building is. All right, John, can you please conclude your remarks? Yes, sir. Okay, so at the end of all this, with all this commercial activity, it comes down to this. Does the public want a world-class swimming venue which trains world champions? Kids who ride here on their bikes come in, they go to the restaurant or place to eat and they can get a grilled cheese sandwich and a soda or something for a couple of dollars, not a fancy restaurant that somebody's trying to make big money out of. You can do that over in Sarasota, by the way. I think the $1.99 grilled cheese sandwich doesn't exist anymore. Excuse me. Yeah. So do you really want a public venue or you want to have a place that really is for other things? Wedding venues, I keep on hearing wedding venues all the time. Please conclude your remarks because we have to move on. So that's what we have to decide. And I will be, most of the complaints and things I have are on safety issues, fire trucks, water pressures, emergency generators for the aquarium. That's a very expensive thing that nobody's thought about yet because you don't have space on your drawings for that kind of stuff. Anyway, I'm going to get into the weeds of that in the DRC process because they're going to find out that the investment in all this is going to be a lot more than the original idea that they had years ago. And I looked up every major aquarium in the United States and none of the public aquariums are even coming close to breaking even. They have massive fundraising campaigns just to keep them operational. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Mary Pelequin followed by Ken, is it Gowans followed by Karia Albano, Carla, excuse me, Albano. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners, City Team Members. My name is Mary Pelequin. I think a lot of you know me. I'm usually up here talking about other things, but I'm now here as a, what was it, a vigorous swimmer. That's why I'm here. And as you can see, I'm on the Master Swim Team. I am one, a boomer, that swims four probably times a week early, early in the morning at the Aquatic Center. And every time I do, I go, I can't believe I'm so lucky that I get to swim here. I mean, this place is gorgeous and I drive down the beach. When I go there, it's dark. When I leave, it's light out and just, you know, what a beautiful place I get to swim and live in and I really appreciate that. And so, I'm not going to go over, I was going to say a lot of things that Debbie said, but you don't need me to say that again. And I also want to say, were my dear mother alive, she would probably hit me in the back of the head for saying a couple of things I'm going to say about the Swimming Hall of Fame because she was a big supporter of the Swimming Hall of Fame and a major swimmer herself. So, again, what I, what some of my concerns are, besides what Debbie said, is I heard 200,000 people coming through this facility which I wouldn't doubt would happen because there's a lot going on in there and there's like some cool stuff in there. I know a lot about aquariums because I worked at Atlantis in the Bahamas for 10 years. So, or really 22 years. So, my concern is there's only one way in and one way out to that building that's being built. So, if you're going to have 200,000 people come there, now the parking lot of the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Center is a road. There's only one you go in, you park, and you come out the very same way. So, to me, that's a problem. There's also the water taxi. There's also the water taxi, which I love. I don't think it's going to be bringing 200,000 people. No, but 200,000 people means what? How many people a week? How many people a day? I did a little math sitting over there. I would say we're talking about a few hundred people a day. I would say it could be like 150 trips, but I'm not including school buses. I don't care about school buses. That's fine. But I mean, it could be well over more, 100, 150 cars a day driving through there if it's 200,000 people a year. I don't know. It could be. And on the weekends. So I'm just saying that's a very big concern of mine. I think it's a safety issue. That parking lot is full of parents dropping off children. I mean, I don't think there's any parents here of kids that swim because, you know, they can't be. They're probably working. So I mean, there's a lot. It affects a lot of people. Even when I left there this morning at what time I ever left there. I'm always trying to get back over the 8 o'clock sunrise bridge before it goes up. But I would say that parking lot was three-fourths full. And I don't know what happens to it throughout the day, but I know it just gets busy. So now we're going to have people driving through like that. So if there was a better way to manage the traffic, that would be, I would like to see that. The other thing I wonder, and maybe you guys don't know, but how is the construction going to happen? I mean, I've already seen some big trucks come through there. Is it going to be by barge? Or are we going to have just construction vehicles coming through all the time for two and a half years? If that's going to happen, I want to know because I'm going to go find somewhere else to swim. I'm not going to swim there. So those are two things I'm very, very concerned about. The other thing, and you're going to hear this ad nauseum, the dive tower is what, 90 feet tall? And from what I see, from what I understand of these buildings, and I always like to be corrected, they're about 100 feet tall. 120. 120 feet tall. I mean, come on. That dive tower is going to disappear. And that's my biggest concern. But again, I do love going there every day. I can see that I can keep going for the next couple of years, but after that, I'm not so sure. Mary, thanks for your comments. just to tell me to understand because I'm not a swimmer. When you say the dive tower is going to disappear, what does that mean? I think it'll be swallowed by the height of the buildings. Be swallowed by the height of the buildings. I mean, I don't think it'll be visible like it is now. So it won't be visible looking at it from certain aspects. From the water, from the beach, from the road. And then what does that mean? If it's not visible, what does that mean? That means you can't see it. Okay, so you can't see it. Great. I'm sorry, I'm going to make fun of you. I'm sorry, Commissioner. I think the issue is... I'll get there, Mayor. I'll get there. I'm a little slow, so thank y'all. Appreciate it. I'm not as quick as a swimmer. If you want to be a cross-examiner, you have to... So it's not visible from certain places. Okay, so tell me why that's such a big negative. I just don't understand. Because the dive tower itself is so unique. It's... As you've heard, it's the only one in this hemisphere that is like that and is that tall. So it's really an iconic piece of structure, construction. So do you lose the uniqueness if it's not visible from certain... I just don't understand. If it's only visible from the pool deck with the big building behind it and how visible is it, I don't know. It's no longer unique. I can't tell you how that will look. Okay. That you lose that. It's not unique anymore. Yeah, so... Okay, that's... Well, actually, Mary, it will only be blocked from the west because you'll be able to see it from the north, you'll be able to see it from the south, and you'll be able to see it from the east. It's just not going to stand out on its own anymore because it'll have company. Well, what if the eastern side building is 120 feet tall, too? Well, even still, it's going to be so far removed that it won't... It's not going to be up against it. So, I mean, your concerns are valid. I shared the same ones, and I think that's why they downsized it to some extent. They not only downsized it, but they actually... The whole building has sort of been cut out. The top floors have been cut out in a way that you do get the view of that tower a lot more than originally, but to your point and to a lot of the points you're making, which are excellent, all of those details about movement and construction and barges and, you know, all of the weeds there, that's what the DRC process is for. That's when all of the departments in the city will be weighing in and really picking all of this apart piece by piece to make sure that it does satisfy, you know, all of the needs of not just the community but also code itself so that we have to make sure that this is going to be done the right way. But right now, this is all just conceptual. These drawings are conceptual. We don't really know the meat of it until we actually see those plans when they go to DRC, when they go to planning and zoning, and then when it comes back to the city commission and all of those are public meetings. Those are all open for comments and I'm looking forward to all of that because I think that all of the points you're making and Debbie and the swim community, they're all valid but I feel very confident that we are going to be able to come to a meeting of the minds on this. But the tower is much more visible now than if you look at some of the old renderings of that west building that were publicized for several years actually. That was a much wider building. It was not, you know, the top floors were almost, were just as wide as the lower floors. That's all been sort of sculpted now in a way to make that tower much more present and visible from just about all angles really. All right. I do appreciate that and you know, I am aware of the other renderings. I've had kids swim at that facility since 1985 and it was all great but then, you know, it started to disintegrate. Actually, at one point, the Swimming Hall of Fame ran the Aquatic Center if you remember that and it was, that's when we left because it became impossible to swim there when they were running it. So please don't, no offense, please don't ever let them run the Aquatic Center. Okay. Can you just please promise me that? Who? Who? This International Swimming Hall of Fame because they did do that. Okay. Okay, promise me that. Well, the other thing is and to everyone's point, we want to make sure that any new construction or any new building doesn't inhibit the usability of the dive tower. We want to make sure that it's, you know, that it's not just the view, it's the utility of the dive tower that to me is as important as anything. So whatever building we put there, we have to make sure that the divers still find the dive tower to be, you know, the quintessential facility that we intended it to be from the beginning. So. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Ken, followed by Carla, followed by Jody Weske. I promise to be brief. Under two minutes, period. First of all, I just want to second or I guess third, everything that Debbie Eisenberg, Isinger was already pointing out. A lot of her concerns are expressed far more effectively and more detailed than I could have. Thank you. I also share very much Mary's enthusiasm about the facility that we have, the Aquatic Center. Thank you so much, Mary Trantalis, every one of you who was active in making this a reality. I'm new here. I got to Fort Lauderdale five years ago. My wife and I adore the place. For me, it's a highlight of the day to go and train with this amazing team. I am down, I'm not unathletic, but I'm probably about the seventh percentile of this group as I counted out. There's some amazing athletes, but everybody is welcoming and warm and it is a public spirited thing. The one concern that I haven't heard mentioned yet that I just want to put out there that I have is that the private spaces that are being included in this not steal the show from the Aquatic Center itself, that there not be a row of restaurants facing out at the beautiful ocean and tucked back behind there as a pool. I hope that there will be something here that really shows this kind of community that we have and celebrates it. Thank you. Thank you. Carla? Sure. Why don't you give it to the clerk, please? Mayor, commissioners, thank you very much for your time today. I have two areas of concern. The first is a little uncomfortable and that is that I don't quite understand the private-public partnerships here and I don't understand the not-for-profit and the for-profit relationships that exist around this entire project. The first page of the handout shows you SunViz records of corporations that have been formed around this project and you will notice that there's been some not-for-profit corporations formed and for-profit corporations formed and one in particular is the Aishoff Peninsula Partnership, LLC and that particular corporation shall be subordinate in my perception. It will be related to the not-for-profit Aishoff. So they would probably be operating in, well I don't know, I need explanation on this. Are they going to be operating together or one for-profit one not and how is that relationship going to work? Secondly, many speakers have come before you today who are also members of the board of directors of all of those new corporations on the first page of my handout. and two of those are for-profit and they were formed by the developer Mario, formed two for-profit entities right around the time that the LOI was or whatever your memorandum was signed. One is an aquarium, a company that's supposed to run a Fort Lauderdale aquarium and another is an entertainment LLC and as many people know, those are for-profit. So I need to know how does the for-profit entities work with the not-for-profit entities to reach the goal of fortifying the International Swimming Hall of Fame? Who's going to be getting money out of the deal as the money flows through the for-profits to the not-for-profits? They're very good questions. I don't know how to answer those. City Attorney will probably be able to best answer those. So maybe when we break after this meeting I invite you to speak with our city attorney to explain how those interactions- I just have one more can I make one more point please? You said two. No, go ahead. Okay, this is my second point. My second point is that Fort Lauderdale has been negatively portrayed in the public eye when it comes to protecting swimmers. And I don't know if you've seen this book but chapters 9 and 10 are not flattering. And I have a real concern for a safe sport. On Saturday I was at the pool and I looked up at slide 10 which has spectator seats overlooking the diving well and I was standing by the starting blocks and had a very short conversation with a coach whose swimmers were actually bent over getting ready to start, you know, getting ready to dive into the pool and I said, see that that's right where the spectator benches are going to be right there in very close proximity. And if I want anything from this project, I want any access to children or swimmers by the public to be minimized. Please protect these kids. We don't want to be chapter 12 in this book next time it's republished. What's the name of the book? It's called Underwater. It's called A Greed Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe. Two chapters pertain unfortunately to our city. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Jody, followed by John Burns, followed by Peter Weissenberg. Mayor, Vice Commissioner and Commissioners. I'm the chair for the Swimfort Lauderdale Masters Booster Club, which represents about 275 active dues-paying members. Just want to clarify that. And 400 Swimfort Lauderdale members around the world that come to train and compete internationally. Our members are interested in the new pool design. We're excited about having something that's more modern, but we also want to make sure it's swimmer, dive, polo swimmer friendly. I think that's the thing I'm hearing from everything. It's, oh, the citizens are walking, the tourists, this and that, but really the center focus really should be swimmers, divers, polo swimmers, water belay, anybody, kids that want to learn how to swim, like a kid's pool. Um, so, um, we're open to communication. We're not sure why we haven't had any communication. There have been nothing, um, posted in the pool. We'd like to have some renderings posted at the pool so all of the swimmers, including public swimmers, can see it. Um, nobody has come to us and have a meeting, but I will say that we reached out to Ben, um, and he was very open and also, um, yourself. So we appreciate that. We would like to have a meeting at the pool with the swimmers, capture all their questions, and then as you said, we can present them and we can get answers. We might have to change some of the things to adapt to some of these regulations and some of these things that I'm hearing from members. Obviously positive things, some not so positive, but we need to collect all those questions and really think about it before we make a decision. So my ask is that we do the due diligence before we make the, um, the approval to go forward with something that might have a negative impact, um, for all the constituents. Um, okay. So I think that's pretty much it. I mean, we really are interested, um, I would say the pool service is an aesthetic complex, supporting a healthy lifestyle and a social hub. One of my team members mentioned about the social hub. Um, the reason I stay in city of Fort Lauderdale is because of the pool. The cost of city of Fort Lauderdale is going up. It's getting more expensive. We all know that. And I stay here because of the pool. My friends, when I go into the hospital or I have something that happens, they come, they have the group with, they feed, they bring us food. They take me to the doctors. This is stuff that the city doesn't have to support. This is a community. We have to be very careful. I want to just make sure we respect that community. Um, my father always says to me, oh, you're, you know, you got a, you got a family down there. So this is my family. So I think we, we are just open to listening. I definitely think that we need to have more conversation before a decision's made. Okay, great. Thank you. So if I could just jump in there. Um, so yeah, I think the only way we make anything big, uh, work, I think is working together. So I'm sure they'll be happy to, to meet with you. I'm happy to meet with you. So the more, the merrier. So if you're, if you're trying to reach out to someone and someone's not communicating back or you're not getting a response, please let me know. I'm happy to weigh in and make sure that everyone's talking and working together. So we, more brains, the better to, you know, solution. Yeah, that's great. I represent the members. All I want to do is make sure my members are heard. Yeah. And then of course, myself personally, um, I do appreciate some of the things the mayor said about making sure of usability. I've heard that the dive tower, the way this design works will not work for divers. Um, so I'd ask you to dig into that. We have requested a report that talks about who they spoke to on the topics of, um, that it's approved, right? That you say subject matter experts. We'd like to know who they are, when they spoke to them, if they spoke to them before this design was presented, what the changes have been made to make sure that we're all aligned because there are some gaps in that conversation. Yeah. I'm sure they'll help you with that. If you're not getting it, let us know, but yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Thank you. Love the shirt, Jody. Thank you. Did you, who designed that? Actually, we had on our team, um, Sophia who went to school for graphics arts. This is another way we help. She just graduated. Um, and she helped us build it or create it. She's the designer for sale. Uh, we are trying to make them for sale. Okay, good. Would you like one? Yes, I would. All right. He'll take 10. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It'd be Christmas gifts. John Burns for the Venetian. Good afternoon. My name is John Burns. I'm the president of the Venetian condominium and we are supporters of the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Center. We enjoy watching drivers, divers throw their fragile bodies from the platform. We can see it every day. We live it and we enjoy it. We can't hear the splash, but we don't hear the sirens, uh, because they do come up. This all started with saving a 60-year-old building. It was a single story. Now it's a 120-foot-high commercial building perched on the edge of the intercoastal with, quote, bold, immersive attractions that captivate audiences and redefines entertainment with blockbuster destinations to pop-up spectacles. It sounds like an amusement park on a very small piece of a very small parcel of land, and this is just the West building. Have we lost focus on competitive swimming and diving? Are all these amenities really necessary to provide income to support ISOF? Will the taxpayers be on the hook if these amenities fail? This presentation focuses on the West building. The project should not move forward until the details of the size, height, and programming of both the East and West buildings are communicated to the public. What can be moved from the West to the East buildings to reduce the height and bulk or eliminated from the project altogether, including space and height for the blockbusters and pop-up spectacles, which right now were quoted as being on the 6th and 7th floors. We're concerned about rooftop activities and noise. The taxpayers paid for an iconic first-in-the-West kind of dive tower with a crown of 103 feet, which should not be overshadowed or overpowered by a building. You need to see and feel the challenge of the dive tower from a distance, not just from the ticket booth entrance. The developer told us that they included two levels of parking, which is really four slab levels for cars because of city code, and that with alternate forms of transportation and specifically walking and water shuttles, they did not think they needed all the parking. Ask for a variance in parking and reduce the height of the building. What happened to the teaching pool? It's not in phase two. The city demanded a waterfront promenade around the Las Olas Marina and Bihamar. This presentation shows a promenade only around the western end of the property. You have to walk through the existing surface parking lot to get to the promenade. Give us a walkable waterfront promenade around the entire peninsula, not a sidewalk against the existing pool building or the alleyway or existing fire lane. Thank you for your time and attention. We look forward to working with the developer, ISOP, and the city staff to refine this vision for the city of Fort Lauderdale. Okay, great. Thank you so much, John. Peter, followed by Rosie Kurlander, followed by Norma Kroll. Hello, Peter. Hi, my name is Peter Wischenberg and I live in the Venetian. Most of the comments I was going to make were covered already, but if you look at the rendering of the west building, it's about 60% parking, the building height, 125 foot, 120 foot tall building covered by about 60% parking. When we have parking all around the Venetian, we built a whole big parking lot close by and I think some real consideration should be given to reduce the number of required spaces right along the waterfront and the middle of this beautiful swimming hall of fame. and it's basically those are my primary concerns and I think they could be easily addressed if we really wanted to. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. May I just ask a question of Steph? Actually, Peter just reminded me of something. When we talk about the garages, so Susan, whatever happened to the shuttle that we had? Maybe it's a good question for Ben. When the Las Olas garage was constructed, we had a shuttle because we knew that a lot of people were not going to want to take all of their coolers and chairs and everything and schlep up to A1A from that garage. What happened to that shuttle and are we planning on bringing it back because I get to ask that question and I just forget to ask you that. And Ben is coming up and he'll be able to answer it. I'm even thinking it now in terms of if we wanted to do it and eventually in the future get people to the swimming hall of fame, whatever, but if you could just help me with that. Yeah, so Vice Mayor, when we had that shuttle operating, we had low ridership. We had a lot of challenges with the condition of the tram. We had some overheating issues and it didn't become very productive on service delivery. So a few years ago we made the decision to auction off the tram and we utilized funding there for the circuit service. So we supplemented the tram service with bringing circuit out to the beach. So do you envision once Ocean Prime, the main restaurant is going to open soon at the Las Olas Marina, do you ever envision making sure that circuit's there to get people, whether it's from the restaurant, from the garage to the restaurant, to the beach, or anywhere else, do we see that as part of the route? Yeah, when we first started operating circuit on the beach we did a fixed route which started at the garage and then went to the parking destinations on the barrier island. The feedback we got from the community was it needed to be more agile and so we got rid of the fixed route and just did the on-demand but if there's a need to look at bringing it back to a fixed route we can have those considerations. Okay, thanks. We might want to just look at that I think especially when the restaurant's open there and it gets a little bit more busy and the garage gets a little bit more full. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you, Mayor. Rosie Kurlander followed by Norma Kroll and completing the roster is Jackie Price. Hi, good afternoon commissioners. Thank you, Mayor and commissioners for having us. I'm a resident owner actually at the Venetian. I live right across from the dive tower. It is the most spectacular thing I've ever seen. When they're up on that top level they're like this big and they jump down and it's really great entertainment. But I'm sort of looking at this from a perspective of the neighbors and concern around the neighborhood. Our president went over several of the issues that we have that we've talked about at our condominium. But I also want to add one other concern and that is the congestion around getting in and out of this facility because we're going to have a 12-story entertainment center is really what it's going to be on the end of this peninsula. I'm talking about the West Building. The concerns are there's two hotels that have been approved in the same block basically just north. One is the St. Bart's Hotel and the Residence Inn. No construction has started on those yet. Those will be in construction whenever. I'm not exactly sure what that schedule is. Every day we have problems with deliveries to the hotels and the restaurants, Marina Village and this is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, every day. I went out 11 o'clock in the morning the other day. There was three trucks parked in front of the hotel and then passed so everyone had to go to the right and then when we went to the right we had to go back over to the left because there was a big Cisco delivery truck in front of Marina Village. This is a real concern in this area of the barrier island especially if we want to try to go in and out as residents. One of the other problems we have are we have tons of weekends events which are really lots of fun. They're just really awesome and the Loop has their activities. We have the charity walks. We have the market going on and then special events which are concerts, Tortuga, we know that's a special weekend. The Panthers had their Stanley Cup parade and big thing there. So there's always an event going on and with this new facility going up and all the events that are being planned there, is there going to be some kind of effort made to coordinate these events so we don't have everybody going in and out at the same time. Otherwise we're going to have total congestion on the entire really north and south of this area. So I think this needs to be considered in our concerns in planning ahead on this 12 story building that's going to have 308 parking spaces also to include the water taxi and Ubers. I'm sure there's going to be a place for Ubers to come to. So we've got to think of all these different ways that people are going to come in and out and walking, which I think are going to have a lot of walk-in traffic also. So I think these need to be addressed with these concerns because there's one little intersection down there. And I just would like to close with a couple of questions. Do we want a 12-story entertainment complex with 308 parking spaces, which is four whole floors of this building, on this precious waterfront property? This is unbelievable, beautiful property. And do we want the aquatic center and the swimming hall of fame and the iconic dive tower to be crowded out by a 12-story entertainment center? Thank you. Thank you. Norma? I could just ask Chris, because Rosie just brought up a good point. What is the status of those two hotels that we approved years and years and years ago that nothing's ever happened? Are those dead? Can we just check that out? You know what she's talking about, right, though? On 5th Street. Yeah, and one was supposed to be a suites hotel for the aquatics complex, and we love that idea, and you know what I mean, but thank you. Both those hotels, thanks. How are you, Norma? I'm good. How are you? Thank you for letting me speak, commissioners, mayor. So Rosie said a lot of things that were in my notes that I made just while everyone was talking, I want to just quote a couple things that the developers and other presenters have said. They said the size and magnitude of the project on this tight space, okay, and another one said it's a tight squeeze. I don't understand why we should have a tight squeeze over there. It doesn't make any sense. The diving tower is fabulous. We do get a very good view. It's scary almost when the people are diving down. I'm very, you think it's scary for you to watch? Yes, I don't know how they do it. I can't even go five feet. Okay, the other thing is that I'm very in favor of the Swing Hall of Fame. I've been a Fort Lauderdale resident for 30 years. I've watched it go through its downturn and now it's upturn, which is great. I feel that they're trying to make this building like Disneyland. We're not Disneyland. We don't need to be Disneyland. We already are a destination. We don't have to become more of a destination. If you live down there, you see it's almost impossible to cross the street as it is. A1A in Las Olas, whether you're going north or south, you're in danger as a pedestrian. I worry about the way that kids are going to be able to come in to swim. I worry about that the promenade is not wide enough. I think we need to do what the previous thing was about, about sustainability. We need more greenery. We need a nice promenade to walk around. I don't think we need all these other things that are proposed. I find that that is very problematic to me. I'm hoping that somebody can figure out how to do this. The parking, let's have a shuttle. Let's have the water taxi. We don't need four floors of parking in there. We don't need all these event spaces either. Aquarium maybe needs to move to the east side. I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. Is Jackie Price here? No. Okay. Anyone else wish to speak on this matter? Did you sign up? All right. I'm going to let you speak, but you do have to sign up after you speak, all right? But the clerk has to swear you in. But there's no clerk. We have the assistant clerk. Who's the assistant clerk? Okay, here we are. It's fine, Mary. It doesn't need to be swear. Okay, all right. But you can and will be everything you say will can and will be held against you. Well, thank you very much for your time. It's really more of a comment. I thought I was going to be able to just make it from my chair. I heard during your presentation you said to give it the identity that it needs for our aquatic center or for the peninsula. You were speaking in specific. And I just wanted to say it already has an identity and please let all the impassioned speeches, please let all the impassioned speakers that came up to speak today at 1.30 that took time out of their day in the middle of their day. Again, this is only about 20 swimmers out of a 275 active dues paying member program that are the identity of that peninsula. It has a strong identity and just because you guys aren't actively on the pool deck, seeing that identity doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And you had asked about visibility of the dive tower, what importance that is, that's taking our identity away. It's making our identity invisible is more of how it feels. So really just a comment I wanted to say. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Anyone else wish to speak on this matter? There being none. So I'll open this up to consideration with the commissions. Who would like to speak first? District Commissioner, would you like to speak first? Sure. Thank you, Mayor. Well, first of all, I want to thank everyone, as was just said, about taking time out of your day to be here. These are all incredibly valid points. Again, this is not a meeting where we're voting on anything. This is a conference meeting. This is for all discussion and for gathering input from everyone. I know that many of us, especially from the Neighborhood Association, have been very involved in this project for many years. And I know that we're going to get to a point where we're going to satisfy all of the concerns. It's really important. And as I said, Mayor, I know that we're not voting, but I certainly believe that we have to keep moving forward. I look forward to when all of these details get fleshed out, when these meetings happen between the community and the developer team. We have set many of these guidelines already in interim agreements, comprehensive agreements, developer agreements. much of these uses are already in those agreements. So we have to figure out a way to move forward. And I know that we're going to get there. And I look forward to when this does begin the DRC process again. Please, everybody, I know that I've been writing about this project for years and years and years in my emails and my newsletters. If you're not getting it, let us know. We'll be happy to add you to our mailing list. We want to be as transparent as possible so that folks know what's happening. Again, as I told Debbie, it's important to attend the Neighborhood Association meetings where this facility is located because that is the neighborhood association most closely associated with all of the projects that happen on the barrier island. And as I said, I have attended many of those meetings and we've seen presentations over the years. So it's really important to be a part of that process going forward from this point on because we've certainly heard your concerns and we certainly have heard that you felt that you have not been a part of this process. So that has got to change. And again, Mayor, I know that we're not voting on anything but I want to see us move forward. We heard that this is going to go to DRC soon. So I look forward to that process and I want to thank everyone. I know the developer team has made itself very available to anyone that's requested a meeting and I say thank you for that as well. And we all have to just work on this together. We really have no choice but to work on this together. So thank you again for everyone that came and spoke today. It's really, really important. Thank you. Okay. Anyone else wish to add to their comments? I do, Mayor. Yes, go ahead. So a question to Dwayne. So under our comprehensive agreement with the ISHAF folks, I'll use it comprehensively, we've agreed to certain things already, have we not? That's correct. Okay. So what we're really talking about is the design, the DRC process and things like that. But the basic elements of this project, as I understand it, are contractually set at this point. Is that? That's correct. The city commission entered into a comprehensive agreement with the Hall of Fame Partners LLC and pursuant to that, we have a number of items that they need to accomplish and this is a part of the update of what they've done so far pursuant to that agreement. Okay. Thank you. I just wanted that to be clear to everybody that we've already entered into a contractual agreement that binds the city to do essentially what we're talking about doing. It doesn't approve the final design and so forth, but the basic outline and concept of what we're talking about here that's going to happen there has already been agreed to by the city with the development team. That was part of the comprehensive agreement that was approved a while back. So I just want you all to be aware of that when you suggest that we don't have a restaurant or we don't have event space or things like that, that's no longer an option for us. That's already in the agreement that we're going to do certain things. The aquarium is in the agreement. So I just want to make sure everybody understands that we've already kind of moved past that point. Now it's about what the facility is going to look like. Going through DRC is going to have a lot to say and a lot of input and I think that's where you all get to, again, have some input into what it looks like, but the overall aspects of what I think we're going to see in there are going to be relatively similar to what we're being presented with today. That's, again, my understanding of the point. Okay. Anyone else wish to add to their comments? I mean, Mayor, great conversation at education. I think, you know, when I was on the commission when we really worked all together to drive the Swimming Hall of Fame, the Aquatic Center forward, and the fact that you all are feeling so strongly about what it is now is fantastic because that, to me, is a testament to what we do when we work together. So, look forward to more of it. Collaboration, communication, education, and I think we'll get to a really good place. So, thanks. And also, I wasn't going to say anything, but I would like to thank the community for coming out. Your input is valuable, and continue to be the voice, the things that you want us to know and hear and what you're passionate about, it means much. So, thank you for coming out, and that's it for me, Mayor. Okay. I have a couple things. I think that we're moving forward in a positive way. I think that the idea of having a structure on the east and west side of the peninsula, as it was first presented to us, continues to have merit, and now the question is, in what shape or form is that going to take? I think that the idea of the aquarium was meant to provide an income source, as well as the restaurant, in order to be able to have leases in place that would help generate enough money to pay the city back for the, basically, a loan that we're giving in order to build the property. The thing is that I'm wondering, just listening a little bit to what you've sketched out for the east building, I'm just wondering if some of the activities that you have planned for the west building could, in fact, be brought over to the east building. It seems like some of the activities that you have planned for the east building, you know, they're cool and all that, but are they really necessary? And can they be incorporated in some of the, like, if you move the restaurant to the east building, you know, that might lower a floor? Or if you decided to move the International Swimming Hall of Fame museum to the east building, would that not lower a floor? And now as you're lowering floors, you're lowering the height, and you're accommodating the community's interest in trying to expose more of the silhouette of the dive tower. So these are just things to think about as you go through the DRC process. Also, I think the community also should understand that I personally feel that the facility itself is under-programmed. I think that there needs to be more activity in terms of dive competition, more activity in terms of swimming competition, and I think that, and I, I mean, we spent a lot of money there, and I don't think we're using it to its fullest potential. And I think that, and I don't know where, where we go, how we get there, but I do know that we need to either hire, hire people that know how to do this, because I think our staff is sometimes overwhelmed in the amount of demands that we make on them, and, and I think that it might be the time that we talk about trying to program these facilities in a way that they were fully intended. And to some extent, I think the addition of the restaurant and the aquarium were, were intended to help increase the programming of that, of that site, but if we can also look to increase the programming for the very purpose of which those pools and the dive tower intended, that too would help, you know, help make this entire investment much more successful than we've seen it so far. So, so that's really all that I'm looking to contribute to this conversation tonight, but there's certainly considerations in addition to the ones that were presented to the, by the public tonight. I think let's piece all that together, see how we can make it, make something that can help satisfy as many of the concerns that have been expressed tonight, and I too believe that this is going to be a successful venture in the end, and I know that the parties that are part of this, all of them, are intelligent, smart people that have, they've listened to everything tonight, and I think that we can, in the end, make the, the aquatic center the premier venue for swimming and diving competition throughout the world. So, thank you again for being here tonight, thank you folks for your presentation, and we'll just move things forward, okay? Thank you so much. We're going to take a quick break before we do commission reports. Thank you, Rich. Okay, we'll resume the conference meeting. If the members of the commission can return to the dais so we can do our commission reports. Yeah, go right ahead. Commissioner Herbst, I guess we'll start with you. Have nothing. Okay, Commissioner Beasley-Pittman. Oh, I was going to say thank you to my colleague for giving his time to me. He must be peeked over into my notes. I've really been productive the last couple days. You know, I always like to share how I am truly honored to represent my district and the city overall, so whenever I can, I say thank you for that opportunity. On Friday, February 22nd, along with the mayor, Vice Mayor Sorenson and our city interim manager and also our incoming city manager, we had the opportunity to attend the Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Congress 115th Annual Board Meeting, if that's the right word. And luncheon? And luncheon. Oh, yes. I didn't want to talk about the food, but food. It was a great event. And also, we had the privilege of witnessing the new appointee for the chair of the board and executive committee. Her name is Debbie Dinato? Is that how you pronounce it? D-A-N-T-O? Danto. Danto. Oh, okay. They, she had a great vision plan for what she wants to do with the chamber, and we'll witness all those good things that she's going to do. Moving forward to Saturday, February the 22nd, that was Six Trunk Historical Festival Parade and Festival. I started early that day. I had the privilege of being the Grand Marshal for the annual Smitty 5K run. That started at about 6.30, and it was greatly, yeah, it started early. We had to be there at 6.30. There was many participants, and it was a great opportunity. It ran a little longer, which caused me to be a little late for the kickoff for the annual parade, but I was still there being able to greet all the neighbors and everything. It was a wonderful day for the parade and the festival. It was gorgeous. If you would take a little side note from me, it was a perfect day to do a skydive. I was, like, torn in where I should be at the parade or jumping from a plane, so it was a beautiful day. You could have dived into the parade. You know what? That was suggested to me. You know I'm going to try that. I'm going to ask and have that conversation for next year. Okay? And I'm going to ask my colleagues to be a part of that as well. I know we can do it. I'll be there to watch. Yeah, no, come on. You know, you can do this. Once in, you'll be in for life. You're jumping on me. All right. I got a partner. Okay. I'll be there to push you off the plane. Okay, so we're going to make that happen in 2026. Okay, I want to give an acknowledgement and thanks to first responders, police, and FIRE. They were there making sure everything went well. To city staff, they were at the event as well. We utilized this time also to kick off the branding of I am six trunk. And it was well accepted and embraced by the community. I'm going to ask that IT play the video that was prepared through Stratcom. And if you would, please, thank you. I am the heartbeat of Fort Lauderdale. I am a six trunk. I am the spirit of resilience and pride. I am six trunk. I am history woven into every street, every corner. Six trunk is more than just a street name. It's our history, our culture, and our legacy. I am the stories of those who built this place with their heart and hands. Six trunk is the rhythm of our past, the heartbeat of our present, and the melody of our future. I am the struggle, the strength, and the soul of a community that never backs down. I am the place where culture thrives, where roots run deep. I am six trunk. I am the future, ever changing, yet always true to who we are. Six trunk is where we honor our roots while empowering the next generation. We are historic. We are vibrant. We are creative. We are a community rooted in history. Yes, sir. Growing with pride. We are six trunk. Thank you for playing that for me And for us, I, when I first saw it, it made me tear up. I was really excited. The opportunity to sit with Ashley and her staff, hearing what we wanted to see and watching it come to fruition. Thank you so much for doing that. And also, just to share, this is only phase one of what we would like to see with the six trunk. I am six trunk initiative. Overall, this is an opportunity for us as a city and then the neighbors that live in the immediate area to begin to revisit, embrace the value and the pride and the legacy of the area. And looking forward to the growth and everything that we're going to present through the city to make the area thrive once again. So thank you, everyone, regarding to that. Also, I did not attend because I was at the six trunk festival, but I do want to give recognition to the Zeta five beta sorority. They celebrated their 75th anniversary here in Broward County. We, as a city through the mayor's office, did issue a proclamation and acknowledging all that they've done far as far as providing educational opportunities, engaging in community events and volunteerism and developing social opportunities and really being able to place their hands and input on the lives of young ladies in Broward County. And with this particular charter, which is the Delta Ata Zeta chapter, they were actually the first Greek letter organization that was chartered in Fort Lauderdale. So a lot of history there. And they are very active. They do a lot in our city. And it was an honor to be able to give them the proclamation. We did it by video. We did send it to them. And they were very appreciative. So thank you to the commission for agreeing to issue that proclamation on that day. Also wanting to share, let's see. Like I said, I have a lot here. Okay. Did that one already. Oh, okay. I wanted to acknowledge today, this month, as March being recognized as Women's History Month. I want to encourage us all to take some time to say happy Women's Day, Women's History Day to a woman. Let her know that you see her and that what she's doing is impactful. So celebrate the incredible contribution, strength, and her resilience that she is giving and sharing with this society right now. So take a moment and recognize the females in your life. Also, I would like to take a moment to share, we had a trailblazer in District 3, but citywide, Broward County, who's given, had given so much of her time and her life, her journey to our city and our district and our county. Her name is Ms. Gloria Gwendolyn Barr Jackson. She passed away on February 16th. Ms. Jackson was born here in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, 1935. She was actually a graduate and a valedictorian of Dillard High School, the class of 1958. She received her bachelor's degree in education and also her master's degree in guidance and counseling and special education and administration at FAMU University. FAMU. Also, Ms. Gloria Jackson's impact to her community as a political activist. She served as an elective in the elective college for the state of Florida. In fact, Ms. Jackson was the first and only African-American female to serve in that capacity. Also, she was the chairperson of the Democratic Party of Broward County, as well as a deputy register for the Supervisors of Elections Office. Mrs. Jackson served as a delegate for more than seven states of Florida Democrat conventions, served also as Florida's Democratic Party rules. She served under the Affirmative Action Committee. Additionally, she also coordinated many presidential, governor, and local elections. She also served on the boards of OIC, Early Education, the Urban League, Actions Women's Club, the League of Women's Voters, Broward, oh, this is a Broward Federal Savings and Loan. She was on that board when they were in existence. Kids Voting Board and the directors, the YMCA Board of Directors, FAMU's Alumni Association Board. Also, she was a member of the Phi Data Kappa sorority. Also, I would like to say that Ms. Gloria Jackson's footprint, impact, and legacy will continue to inspire generations to come. So, giving her homage for her life and her service that she gave not only to the city of Fort Lauderdale, to Broward, and the state overall. And, Mayor, and I would ask when we have the moment of silence during the commission meeting if we could acknowledge her as well. Okay? And that concludes that. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I knew Gloria. She's very active in the Democratic politics, I know. Vice Mayor? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Wednesday, February 19th, I wanted to thank Chris Cooper, who was our guest speaker at the District 2 Neighborhood Association Presidents Roundtable. Um, it was, as always, a really great meeting, and I know that all of the neighborhoods in the district really appreciated your time. Uh, thank you. Obviously, we got, um, deep into the weeds on the homeless issue. Uh, and again, I thank you for taking the time from your day to be with us. Um, also on February 19th, I had the pleasure of being a speaker, and I want to congratulate, uh, History Fort Lauderdale. Um, I attended and spoke at their grand opening and the ribbon-cutting of Roots of Resilience, which is a brand-new permanent exhibit, uh, which explores the history and enduring impact of Broward's black community. All the way back from 1793 to the present. Uh, it was an honor and a privilege to be part of that ceremony. Uh, so very well attended. Um, and I would urge everyone to make sure that you get to History Fort Lauderdale, uh, to check out. That's a permanent exhibit, so you have plenty of time. Um, grand opening also that evening of timber at West, 15 West Las Olas Boulevard. Uh, it was interesting. It was like one of those old-time openings, uh, right, Mayor and Commissioner, to see people lined up around the block, uh, waiting for something to open. It was kind of interesting. But a beautiful space, uh, and I wish them, uh, much success, uh, on that business. Uh, as Commissioner Beasley-Pittman mentioned, we did attend the annual, uh, Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce, uh, annual meeting and luncheon. Uh, great turnout, as always, uh, highlighting the importance of business, uh, to our community. Um, this past Saturday evening, um, had the pleasure of joining the mayor. Uh, Stonewall Museum and Library, which is connected to Artserve on Sunrise Boulevard in District 2, uh, is one of the largest LGBTQ plus archives in the United States. Uh, and Saturday evening was their annual gala, uh, to bring folks together, hopefully to raise some funds, uh, which have been severely cut for a variety of reasons. These are challenging times for any LGBTQ plus organization. So that was really nice to see that kind of a turnout, uh, for them, uh, this past Saturday evening. Uh, coming up tomorrow, there's a lot going on. I will be attending the Broward Workshop State of the County, uh, breakfast meeting at the Convention Center. Uh, also, I will attend and speak at the ISHAF, uh, board meeting. And then in the evening is the Victoria Park Civic Association meeting, as well as Women Trailblazers. So thank you to History Lauderdale, History Fort Lauderdale for doing that event, uh, as well. Many, uh, and in conjunction with what Commissioner Beasley Pittman said about Women's Month, uh, the month of March. Uh, this is a great event tomorrow evening honoring many people that we are very familiar with in our community, um, as part of the Women Trailblazers event. That will be at the Galleria Mall. Um, Thursday, March 6th, is a grand opening for the entire Pier 66 site. Uh, Friday, March 7th, we have our street striping at Tunnel Top Plaza, uh, for St. Patrick's Day. And then, obviously, this Saturday is the parade. Uh, and that will kick off, I guess, at about 11, 15, 11, 30 a.m. Um, I will be part on March 10th, Monday, March 10th, I will be part of the Chamber of Commerce Real Estate and Construction Council, uh, event. I will sit on a panel, uh, and have those kinds of discussions, uh, with an excellent panel. And I look forward to being with the folks over at the Chamber, um, on that day as well. Uh, Tuesday, March 11th, um, there is a publication that covers parts of District 2 and District 4, uh, Las Olas Isles and Boulevard Magazine has new publishers, uh, and that will be a relaunch under the new publishers, uh, for that magazine. It's an excellent, uh, publication, and I look forward to wishing them success, uh, and attending that event Tuesday evening. Uh, also, uh, we have the Sailboat Bend Civic Association. I believe that's on Wednesday, March 12th. I'll be speaking at that. Uh, and then Saturday, March 15th, at the Marriott Harbor Beach, I will be attending the Human Rights Campaign, the HRC, uh, Gala. So, um, that's about it for me, Mayor. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Commissioner Sorensen. Thank you, Mayor. Um, let's see a couple things from this past couple weeks. Uh, I met with, uh, Barrington Irving. I don't know if y'all have met him. Uh, he was the... Have you, Commissioner? So he was the youngest person to fly solo around the world. Uh, he did in 2007, and he's also the, was the first black person to fly solo around the world. So Barrington Irving, great, great individual. He's, um, has established a kind of technical vocational trade school at Opelaka Airport, um, where he's offering, I forget the term, it's, it's basically like micro-certification so that you can get certified to do tool work or machinist work for avionics and even beyond that. And so he's doing great work, and he's excited about exploring possibilities, uh, in Fort Lauderdale. So that was just great. Um, also went to the Red Cross Logistics Center the other day, which was great, and all the good work the Red Cross is doing, and talked about ways we can keep, uh, growing our partnership between the city and Red Cross. Uh, that was, uh, fantastic. And let's see, um, couple items just want to touch on. Uh, one is, and I think this has been brought up before, maybe we've started to talk about this, but a, uh, at, um, South Andrews and Southeast 7th Street, if you can kind of picture that, there's the county's, uh, building, which used to be a Coca-Cola, uh, manufacturing plant, I think is what it used to be, either Southside School and then the old firehouse. So, um, several of those stakeholders come to me are really interested in forming a small historic district that would basically include just those buildings there, those, those three buildings. Um, and so wanted to, uh, kind of, um, explore that possibility, if that's okay with the, with the commission to kind of further the bottling plant. And what else read the, it's all firehouse. I think this across the street, South of that. Yeah. And then Southside School. So those, um, the property owners, they're interested in, uh, uh, exploring the possible of a historic district. Are those, are any of those or all of those buildings already designated historic in some capacity? Chris, I'll defer to you on, or, and, and if I'm explaining that wrong, please correct me. Thanks. No, I think you're right on. Uh, Chris Cooper, acting assistant city manager. So I know Southside School and the Coca-Cola building are designated. The Coca-Cola building's county-owned. The Southside School's obviously city-owned. Right. Um, I'm not sure about the, uh, the law office, the old fire station, but I know we've looked at this in the past and there is, we believe it would be eligible if we wanted to pursue it as a district. And how about that other law office that came to us at the last meeting? Oh yeah, they're, they're doing more due diligence. Yeah. They got more work to do. I was just told the fire station is, so all three of them are individually designated. Historic. Right. Yeah. I thought they were. For different reasons. So when you look at the district though, you're looking at what ties them together as a cohesive unit. So we, we can do that research. We've done some of that research already. So what would be the, so moving forward and making that a district, what do we accomplish there? Ben? What do we accomplish there? Sure. Yeah. So they. Cause they're already historically designated. Right. So the, the owners would like to, it would allow, and Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, but, um, you know, some, uh, um, uh, further placards, lighting that's consistent. Uh, a couple of benches. It's, it's components like that that make it a cohesive district. Am I saying that right, Chris? Potentially. So if you, if you, like I said, if you take those three buildings and you find that connection between them, that, that constitutes a district, what that theme is, what that significance is to bring them together. If we could then bring back recommendations or the community could bring us back recommendations as to what those aesthetic features may look like that adds and contributes to that feel of that small district. Okay. I think they're all of different eras though, but, um, um, but you know, if they, since they're already designated, they want to make a village there, you know, they'll come out in period costumes. They're waiting for you to do that, actually. I'm sure so. He's good with costumes. He's good with costumes. What we would look for though is consensus from you all to proceed as staff with that application and begin the research and go through the process. Sure. I mean, the, the, it's, we're not, it's not an adverse designation. Each property owner wants it. So it makes sense. We'd have to talk to the County. I mean, that's the only one that I don't have any direct conversation with, but we'll have that conversation. And those are the only three, um, buildings that, that other corner does not have. Right. The other corner is a vacant lot right now. So it wouldn't be included. Yeah. Is there a midden? You know what? Make sure it's not historic. Right. Okay. We'll do some digging. Okay. Great. So that, great. Thank you. Thanks. Chris, is that all you needed for that? Okay. Great. Thanks. Um, next question is city hall. So, uh, just, um, in terms of kind of moving forward with city hall, Susan, I think in terms of site discussions, I think we've talked about a couple of sites. I just want to kind of see where we are and see how we can keep moving forward. Yeah. Absolutely. We, you know, we had sent out an RFP for an owner's rep. Um, this, the evaluation committee met and they've scheduled, I think it's next week interviews with the top two on that selection. Um, on a parallel path, we're working on the, the massing and design criteria package, um, and would be ready to go. Um, you know, probably the first thing that, um, owner's rep would assist with is site selection. I know we've talked about two sites at a previous meeting. We narrowed that down to the existing city hall site. And I believe the, uh, police headquarters site are the two that, that we've gotten direction on from the commission. Okay. So mayor, I'd like to narrow that down further to just the previous city hall site, um, just to keep our efforts focused and monetary expenditures, you know, I agree. Cause I think we have been talking about programming the existing police, the former police station site, uh, in other ways. So I didn't know that was still on the table, but I thought that we had taken it off the last meeting. I think we had gotten the direction for those two. All right. Well, I, I agree with the commissioner that we should just focus on the one site for the record. I don't, I'm sorry. I said for the record, I don't. And the reason I'm saying that is because D Wayne has reminded me if I don't speak up and voice my objections, that not saying anything is viewed as assent. So I'm not assenting. Okay. Okay. All right. So I think we have consensus to move forward with just the one site confirming consensus. Yep. Okay. Okay. Great. Thanks. Um, another topic, and this came up at a past commission meeting. I was just thinking further about it in the downtown rack, not having a height limitation. Um, I'd like to explore, you know, in looking into having a height limitation in our downtown rack. Um, so the, where are the, what are the, uh, boundaries of the downtown rack? Um, Chris, could you, uh, yeah, I don't know off the top of my head. Is it raining out? Wow. It is. So when we talk about the downtown rack in terms of maximum height, we're really talking about the downtown core character area of the downtown rack. So that goes from about Northeast and Northwest North 4th Avenue, South to, I'm sorry, North 4th street, South to the new river out to Avenue of the arts to the West. And I've been federal to the, to the East. So it's that general vicinity. What's the Southern portion of that? The new river. The new river. Yeah. Right. Okay. It doesn't go down. Are you sure? I thought it was Tarpon river. Southeast ninth. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the only height limitation right now in that downtown core is the FAA. If the FAA chooses to have a height limitation, I think you can go to the FAA, ask for, you know, a waiver and so forth. So, yeah. So mayor like to explore, um, you know, so what are you recommending a height limitation within that, those boundaries that he just described? I'm not, I just, I, not yet. I just like to have a little bit of research done on what would, what is, you know, the experts and staff think might be appropriate. And, um, and then I'll just have a discussion about that if that's all right. So, so what would be the next steps there? I guess we do the research and then do a conference presentation to get some feedback. Okay. I think we also need to have a conversation about Bert Harris. If we're going to be talking about doing that. Well, that would be for future owners, not for current owners. It's for anybody that's invested in a property with an expectation of being able to develop it to its maximum current building height. Yeah. That's always been the case. This is, this would be for future owners. Yep. Um, okay. Great. Thank you. That sounds, sounds good. Um, next topic is about, uh, the historic designation. And I know the other day we had a, you know, robust discussion on some historic, uh, possibilities, a suggestion, I think, right. And Chris, maybe let me make sure I'm understanding this, right. So if, um, so in terms of beginning an application for historic designation, I think right now, as I understand it, um, like an, uh, entity with historic, uh, uh, focus can submit a request. Right. So for an individual landmark, um, you can either be the property owner yourself. You can be the city, the HPV, the historic preservation board can also initiate an application and then a, uh, not for profit entity with a demonstrated interest or role in historic preservation. Okay. So I guess, mayor, my, as I was thinking about this and I was talking to Michaela about this too, of, you know, I think it could be, I think a better strategy of maybe it's the, um, the property owner could themselves if they want to, I think that's fine. But then other than that, the city commission, a city commissioner, the mayor, a city commissioner being the one requesting it, because I think sometimes when we have other entities, it just seems at times can be unfair to the property owner. So I was wondering if that's something we could explore. So you mean limited, limited to just the property owner or a member of the commission, property owner, member of the commission, HPB, I think that's those three. Cause I think it should come through a city nexus. Um, so yeah. Well, usually, um, okay. So usually it would come through HPB, uh, and then, I mean, they're the agents of the commission, I guess you can say. Yep. Right. Yep. So, um, and we would always, we would always defer to the HPB to do the research and to just, and to come up with the justification for it. Right. That's what we've done in the past. And we would use Trish to be the sort of the consultant on how to frame the message and frame the narrative that supports the designation. So, but no one other than that is what you're saying. No outside entity. Right. Like, like, okay, like, well, the commission always has final say, right. But I'm saying like, you know, Chris Cooper can't go out and say, Oh, I saw this house. I really like him. I'm going to go apply for historic designation. We got rid of that. That actually, what year was that when we, we actually changed the ordinance. It used to be anyone could file a historic designation application on any property in the city. What year did we change that? We got rid of that. 2019, 2020, I think. But so we said, no, it couldn't be anyone in the city. It had to be an agency that had as its primary mission. It was anybody who owned property within the city, you know, could file or otherwise could file an application. But then we limited it to just organizations that have as their mission, historic preservation or the city. Right. Right. So, I mean, that's the process. So I think what Commissioner Sorensen is referring to is the process to initiate an application. So once an application is initiated by one of those entities or the individual that I described, that starts the process. So once a complete application is received, that application includes a bit of a narrative about the landmark that's recommended as well as the criteria within our code that that applicant believes qualifies it for designation. Staff will then go back, do the research, put together a staff report, and then go to the HPB and eventually the commission for approval. I would just request, I would just, now that you bring that up, I would just ask if I could have some time to talk to these organizations that typically are involved in filing applications because that is their mission. There aren't that many of them actually, right? How many, Chris? Two or three? Well, that was the Pro-Trust for Historic Preservation. It could be the County Historical Commission. It could be our own history, Fort Lauderdale. It could be, that would be about it. Who else has as their mission? Those are the primary ones that we know of. I'm not aware of anybody else. Yeah, I would love just the opportunity to speak to those three organizations and see how they feel about being eliminated from the ability of having to file an application. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, they can go to a commissioner, right, and say, could you request this or, okay, yeah, that's fine. Where in this process is the property owner notified? Because the conversation we had last meeting, it appeared that the property owners weren't necessarily notified, and the process was in place, and all of a sudden someone knows that their property is up for being designated. So where in our process do we indicate that the property owner must be notified? So once a complete application is received, the property owner is notified. There were some questions, I know, with one of the items from the last meeting about notification, but when we went back and looked at the records, notices were provided per what the code requires. Whether or not those notices were received, you know, that's – I think we have to be a little more responsible there. Yeah, we do sign notices too, so signs are placed at the property as well. But we do notice once that complete application is received. Okay, that's part of the ordinance, right? So we're talking about reviewing the ordinance to change opportunities? Because I believe that when someone wants to put the application in, that's when the property owner should be notified, not after the application. So – and perhaps that's a recommendation to consider, is that even if we continue to have it to where one of those organizations are able to file an application, one of the things that we want to see in that application is that they have some – they've notified that property owner in some way that they filed the application or intend to file the application. And we can look into what those – what that proof looks like to bring back a recommendation. That's the recommendation that I'm suggesting because I'm uncomfortable with the process that everything has gone through and all of a sudden someone calls me and say, hey, I'm designating your property. So if we can – I want that recommendation part of the process. Yeah, I agree. That's my concern too. Chris, does it happen often that someone actually starts that process? Because I'm just thinking about this timeline. And I know that we're saying that we want to notify someone as soon as an application is requested. But do people file applications and it doesn't actually happen? Like they just – it falls apart or they don't have enough information? Or does everyone who files an application see it through in your knowledge of – I mean, yeah. In my experience, I mean, you know, here I haven't seen one where it's come in and it's kind of fallen apart through the process. It's always gotten to some level of approval, whether it's HPV or the commission. I haven't seen it where it necessarily falls apart. There may be instances where somebody comes in to have a conversation with staff about the possibility of designating something, and as a result of that conversation, they decide not to pursue the application. But usually once that application is filed, it will go through some of the steps, if not all the steps of the process. And I agree with what I'm hearing. I think it is a good idea that when someone files an application, there has to be some check that they did notify. Yeah, and the commission approved some changes to DRC applications about a year ago to provide pre-notice to civic associations and others for development applications. So I think this is a consistent step. Same, consistent. It's very similar. Yes. Yep. Thank you. Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. Next one. And so I didn't go to the meeting about the one-way pairs, but it sounds like from a transportation standpoint, we're moving away from this idea, which I think is good to move away from this idea of one-way pairs. If you could give us an update on that. Thanks, Miloš. Good evening, Miloš. My story is acting director for Cities Transportation and Mobility Department. So we had a second public meeting for one-way pairs last Monday. There was about two dozen attendees out there, and based on analysis that we have conducted so far and based on the feedback from the public, everyone is in favor of basically looking at alternative four, which would be most likely keeping bidirectional operation along Southeast 3rd and Andrews Avenue and focusing on improving multi-mobility options. So better accommodations for transit vehicles and pedestrians, but most likely not looking at one-way operation anymore. So what was the recommended option? So we would be looking at alternative four. A consultant is working on developing that alternative, but it would be most likely keeping bidirectional operation along both streets. So, you know, the genesis of that one-way pairing concept sprung out of the frustration that this community had with the design and the implementation of the Wave Streetcar. When the Wave Streetcar was presented to the city, and as it evolved through the various meetings and processes, you know, it became more and more apparent that we needed some kind of mass transport circulator in our downtown, but that was not the answer because it required digging up all the streets and putting rails in the ground, and it required an operation that included overhead wires, which we realized in a hurricane-prone environment that didn't make any sense. And it also meant that the streetcar would be in the same lane as the vehicular traffic. So you would never be able to really advance yourself in any, you know, in a quick fashion. This was not rapid transit. This was just you're just stuck in someone else, in a bigger vehicle with other people. So the idea of one-way pairing came about because we were trying to figure out an alternative way to avoid all those pitfalls that the Wave Streetcar presented. So the idea was to create some kind of mobility option that would allow for rubber-tired vehicles, multi-passenger vehicles, and to have a dedicated lane. In order to be able to do that, you had to do a one-way pairing. Now, I heard the feedback from the community. No one wants to do a one-way pairing. It's going to cut back on their businesses. It's going to cut back on their conveniences. It's going to cut back on all these things. And yet we heard today, we heard today from the net zero presenters how we need to come up with alternative means of transportation in order to cut back on vehicular traffic to be able to achieve the net zero goals that we are trying to achieve. So here we are presenting an option, and the community says, yes, we want to reach net zero, but we don't want to be inconvenienced by it. And I get that. But at the same time, there are going to be lifestyle changes that we've got to consider in order to be able to achieve the goals that we've presented to ourselves. So we've spent some money to do some research, and I want to thank city staff, including yourself, especially yourself, for organizing these community outreach efforts. But I just, you know, I take this moment to ask the community, you know, please, we've got to come up with solutions. And the one-way pairing was one of those solutions as an alternative to the wave streetcar in order to be able to accommodate the dense population that continues to grow downtown and those that seek an alternative to transportation other than circuit, other than Uber, other than Lyft, and one that is reliable and available in the downtown setting in order to be able to get from point A to point B. So that was really what it was all about. But if the community decides it's not, you know, they don't have an appetite for it, I totally get it. But we really need to consider other options, and I don't know what those other options are. So I leave it up to you, and I leave it up to the other members of the commission, and I leave it up to the community to come up with what those alternative solutions would be. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And if I may, just as part of developing this alternative four, we'll absolutely be focusing on improving multi-mobility along the corridor. What does that mean? What does multi-mobility mean mean? That means basically that we want to accommodate better every transportation option that is out there, whether it's someone walking, someone riding in transit, or driving their personal vehicle, right? So I know that Broward County is conducting comprehensive operational analysis of their transit system. That analysis should be conducted this year. They'll be publishing, we'll be reviewing and providing our feedback. There's also a premium mobility plan that they're working on. So those are a couple of efforts that are focused on improving transit service. So let me tell you, I'm part of that process. As a member of the MPO, I've been apprised of what those plans are about, and they have nothing to do with our downtown traffic. All they have to do is east-west commuter traffic, as well as a circulator amongst the four terminals at the international airport, and then someday a transportation system between the airport and the seaport and convention center. That's all they're talking about. They're not talking about anything north-south. It's all east-west. So keep that in mind. And if you talk about multi-mobility, I mean, right now you've limited your options to walking, biking, scootering, or taking a car. So to me, there are other options. Other cities have engaged them and are using them successfully. And maybe we're not there yet, but someday we've got to be thinking in that direction. Thank you. Thank you, Milos. Appreciate it. Next topic, Susan, where are we? There's been a couple topics at FXE. One, I think WA Aviation's lease, I think we're having a closed door on that. Are we having a discussion about that at some point? Dwayne, were we scheduling? Was there something pending on that that we were working on? I understand. We're waiting to hear back from counsel for WA Aviation on their negotiations with regards to JM before we schedule, bring back something for the commission to consider. Okay, so counsel of who? Of W? Of W, correct. Is talking to JM? That's my understanding. Okay. And they're going to get back to us on their discussions with the access road and so forth? Is that what you're saying? Okay. Okay. When are we expecting that to kind of come back, Carl? I don't have a timeline on that. Okay. If we can check back with them this week and based on that, we can move forward. Okay. All right, great. So if you can check back and let us know or. Okay. Okay, great. Thanks. Before you proceed, folks, I just want you to be aware that we're still in our conference meeting and we're going to take a 20 to 30 minute break when we conclude it, which will conclude shortly. So if you want to, I was going to say, enjoy your walk outside, but it's raining. So I don't think that's an option, but just want you to be prepared that we're not going to start the evening meeting until 20 to 30 minutes after we conclude this meeting. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. And you may address this in your comments, Mayor, but I want to talk through the letter from Mayor Furr about tunnel. Do you want to talk about that now or when your comments happen? Well, I didn't want to talk about it because that deserves a full-throated discussion. Maybe it should be a conference meeting item. Maybe at the next conference meeting, the commission, the county commission still wants to have a joint meeting with us, but we have a couple of meetings. We have another meeting, a city commission meeting before then. And I think that would be an opportunity for us to really have, like I said, a full-throated discussion as to what the county is presenting to us because it really, it's an in-depth kind of discussion. Okay. So we could do that. Maybe at the next meeting if we could put that on the conference item. Absolutely. So for March 18th? Correct. Okay. And great. That all sounds good to me. I don't, I don't have, I'm not aware of any plans meeting with the county this month. No, they, they want to, they, you're, they want to meet with us. We haven't agreed to any date yet. In my conversations with, great, in my conversations with them, they've said it'd be helpful for us to review this letter and give them feedback, I think, first, right? Yeah, totally understand. I just got the letter. Right, right. Me too. Yeah, yeah. So I don't even have time to read the whole thing yet, so. Great. So we'll review at the 18th, talk about it. Okay. And then respond. Fantastic. That's all I have. Thanks, Mayor. Okay. I'll abbreviate the things that I have to say tonight. I want to take care of a couple of housekeeping measures. The Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce is having, again, its Washington, D.C. summit. And the time that they want to do it is in October. And it will conflict with our October 21st meeting. And I wanted to know if the city commission will agree to move our Tuesday meeting to the Thursday, which would be October 23rd, in order to accommodate the summit. Is that okay? October 23rd. October. Move the, sorry, the 21st to the 23rd. Is that what you're saying? The 21st is the, the, the, the, the, the summit actually begins on the 20th. Yeah. And it goes through the, that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And, uh, usually I, usually I know I, when I go, I come back that Thursday morning. And so if we could have our meeting that Thursday, the 23rd. Yep. That's fine with me. Any problems with that? I'll, I'm, I'm fine. I can do that. Yes. Okay. All right. I'll just have to, there was a Central Beach Alliance meeting that I was supposed to speak at that night, but I'm sure we can just tell them we can't make it. Okay. And I do have a water aerobics class in the afternoon. Um, but I think I'll be able to not attend that as well. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for making the sacrifice. My pleasure. Uh, also, um, our July meeting, uh, that, that first Tuesday, um, I'd like to be able to attend a conference and I'm wondering if instead of meeting that Tuesday, if we can meet the day before, which is a Monday. What? That's Monday, the what? The 30th, June 30th, Monday, June 30th. So it takes us one day earlier rather than waiting another week. Can we do that? Yeah. I got, uh, um, uh, an opinion from, uh, DeWayne. And he said there's, uh, that does not interfere with our charter requirements. Okay. Cause I thought we had to have one in each month, but okay. Correct. So it's, um, based on an interpretation from Harry Stewart with regards to the definition of month in the charter. Uh, his opinion says that a 30 day period constitutes a month for vacation. And we calculate that from the date of the second that is, that is counseled. So a month, a month is whatever we decided to this. Okay. All right. I can provide the opinion for you. Okay. What's that? Monday, June 30th. Yeah. June 30th. So that'd be Monday. My track. And that'd be our last meeting. Yes. Our last meeting before the break. Until August. August 19th. Yeah. Maybe. Right. Did we ever, I know we had a brief discussion once about that August 19th meeting. That, that August meeting is a requirement of ours. I know we had a conversation about that once. Yeah, it is. So the charter requires that you have a meeting twice a month and that you can eliminate one meeting per month for the purposes of vacation. And so what I'm alluding to is a, uh, an opinion that Harry Stewart wrote that talked about how you can eliminate the meeting. And so traditionally what you've done is you've eliminated one meeting in July and one in August. And it meets that 30 day period under his opinion. Actually, I think if we go back further, we used to have the budget presentation on or about the 15th of July. And then we were off until September. We didn't switch over to having August meetings until Lee Feldman got here. That was a Lee initiative when he wanted to institute a commission discussion about the budget before the public hearings in September. So if we go back to like, you know, 2010 pre, pre Lee, we were off the entire month. Uh, we were off half of July and the entire month of August. And then we came back in September for the required public hearings. I would have to do the math on that. See how it fits in the 30 days. Is there, is there, is there a reason why we can't do it in August? Is there? No, it's fine. Okay. All right. Great. Mayor, just a real quick follow-up question. We initially thought the DC summit was going to be in September and we tentatively moved the nine 16 meeting to nine 18. Now that that is not the case, would we like to, and we haven't done the reso yet. Right. Why don't we just move it back to the 16th? The 16th. Right. We should do that. Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. Okay. I forgot. Thank you for bringing that up. Uh, okay. Uh, the bypass road, uh, uh, uh, in district four, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, in district four, um, can we get, um, an opinion as to when the, when the convention center hotel will be allowed to open based on the completion of the bypass road? Is it a CO that we're, we're going, that they need to get or a TCO before they're allowed to operate? And maybe we can get an update then, uh, at our next meeting. You don't have to get up now. We can get an update. Oh, Anthony. Good afternoon, mayor, vice mayor, commission, Anthony for heart of assistant city manager. Um, I happen to have the answer cause I looked it up earlier today. So the condition reads, um, final CO. It does not mention a TCO and it doesn't seem to restrict them from requesting a TCO. I would say that until we have a submission from the County on what it is they would like to TCO, we won't know what that answer it is because the building official would have to look at it and see if that portion of the building is suitable for occupation. Doesn't cause any other conflicts between CM and the audience. Um, between any of the requirements of the, but it says CO, not TCO, right? It says final CO. Okay. That answers my question. Okay. Uh, fire station 13. Um, originally that was supposed to cost $5 million. Now we're up to 17 million. Can we get a report on that at the next conference meeting as to why this is, it's brought us to this point. It's still not done. Um, we can do that, Susan. Okay. We can. And okay. That's it. Uh, again, I want to reiterate, uh, this Saturday, everybody, it's the St. Patrick's Day parade and festival. The, uh, kickoff. First of all, before we do that, um, we do the, uh, the street striping on March 7th. That's at four 30 at the tunnel top Plaza again, March 7th, the street striping for the St. Patrick's day parade at the tunnel top Plaza at four 30. And then of course, the next day is the St. Patrick's day festival and parade. The step off is at noon. There's a, uh, pre-party at 10 o'clock at the, uh, at YOLO. And, uh, also I want to remind folks that the police department promotion ceremony is on March 11th and that's at one 30 at the Lauderdale Yacht Club. And there's a whole bunch of other things happening, but I don't want to keep people waiting any longer. Uh, is there anything further, uh, acting city manager you want to add to your comments? I just have a brief report. We had talked about fleet week a couple of meetings ago, um, city staff are working closely with the fleet week team and Florida Panthers to host an official welcome reception, um, for about 150 sailors. The event is tentatively scheduled for April 23rd from six to eight at ice plex. Um, also the loss of Olas paving is going to be beginning on March 10th through the 28th. Um, and that's from tunnel top up top to the 15th Avenue. And we've worked closely with the stakeholders and the merchants there. Is there any reason why we chose the height of this season to do the loss of Olas paving? Well, it was something that needed to get done. And again, we coordinated very closely with them, with the, with the merchants there. It was after the art festival, um, and, and everyone was, was good with getting that done. Okay. Um, two employee events coming up. We have employee appreciation, um, on March 7th. Um, that's Friday city hall garage, fourth floor, and then our employee family fun day, March 29th, um, at Snyder park. And that concludes my report. Okay. Uh, do you, Wayne, do you have anything, any report? I do not. Any closed door session to announce? No. Okay. Anything further? Can we, how, what are you thinking for a break right now, mayor? Um, like 20 minutes. Can we aim for like 15? Well, 20 minutes. 20 minutes. Okay. All right. Thanks. Thanks.