City Commission Joint Workshop with BAB and Conference Meeting on 2026-06-16 1:00 PM - Jun 16, 2026

good afternoon welcome welcome commish come on up welcome that's it for the minute for the minute uh welcome welcome welcome everyone to the june 16th 2026 joint commission workshop with the budget advisory board thank you for being here uh before i ask to the city clerk to call the role of the budget advisory board and the commission just wanted to announce the mayor is away on business and won't be participating in the meeting today so i'm filling in uh for him so thank you for your indulgence as in grace as we uh navigate uh in his absence mr clerk if you'd call the role of the budget advisory board please chair brown vice chair milroy melinda boker olivier culley rich digerolamo aneed metellus thompson david max ortolani samantha perryman jones and jason jeffress here thank you mr clerk if you'd call the role for the commission commissioner herps here commissioner glassman here commissioner beasley pitman here and vice mayor sorensen here thank you very much and now we'll move into the agenda for today's workshop i'll turn the floor over to our city manager raquel williams for some initial comments thank you vice mayor thank you commissioners i want to take this opportunity to highlight our budget advisory board uh this joint workshop couldn't have come together without all the diligence and hard work of each and every board member led by chair bill brown and they will go into a discussion about some of the work that they've been doing and focused on over the past several months then we will dive into a discussion of property taxes as well as the preliminary budget so at this time i'd like to turn it over to chair brown thank you very much city manager chair brown david is this the for the slide okay i have it here but it's good afternoon vice mayor sorensen commissioners uh bill brown chairman of the budget committee committee what we've uh time wise i think our presentation we're going to try to keep to about 15 minutes then allow for about the city manager and her staff to talk about the proposed preliminary budget and then we'll have a some time about 15 minutes hopefully to uh address the property tax referendum issue and the educational and how the budget advisory board working with stratcom can get an engaged so that the we can educate the public and the community and our residents on the pros and cons of of the referendum and keeping mindful of your time since you're starting a half hour early we don't want to run in too late into the conference meeting but in order to do due diligence to cover all that material we're trying to keep it each segment to 15 minutes if uh agreeable so uh let me just give you some highlights since we what we've been doing uh as a board since this budget process back in march we uh looked at all the accomplishments from 2026 fy budget we met with uh all the directors and they came in and talked about their project and the projects that they would like to move forward with in 2027 what initiatives what keeps them up at night some of the challenges and opportunities um that they're faced with we spent uh about three hours that meeting in march had a very good discussion with all department heads uh and they both recognized going in to that meeting that we had some challenges looking at fyi 27 and 28 and 28 and future years out so they were mindful of that and we did have some healthy discussions and then back in may uh starting on may the 6th to uh in the 13th and the 20th is where we bring them all the departments back in individually and they give their budget request presentations to us uh we sit there we ask to have good dialogue about what they want to move forward with in more detail in the 2027 fy budget what their asks are the reasoning why they need that and then we asked uh for performance measures on some of the issues uh response time has always been a big one uh return on investment on some of the departments how how many uh when we get into developmental services you know when we see a decrease in uh permits you know we ask questions what's the trend so it's a very good dialogue of questions back and forth of the of the bat and then uh we asked that uh what are what are some of the enhanced funding that they're going to need and as i mentioned previously they were very mindful going in with their budgets and with clear direction uh working with the city manager and OMB that uh they had to really come in uh very very lean uh looking at not fluff into their budgets and they i'm happy to report as you'll find out later today they have done that another thing that we've talked uh as a board and i've talked uh brought this to the attention of the commission for about the last eight months we we focused on reviewing topics and that would have impacts for fy 27 keeping in mind that we wanted to look at we understand that affordability and cost of living is a big concern for the taxpayers not only for the homeowners but also the renters and the people that live here in our community in a lot of the downtown rental units we looked at we also dove into what ai artificial intelligence can hold for the future in efficiency operation opportunities as you know and commissioner herps we've had some good discussions about the future of ai and yes um it it will affect jobs but there's more efficiency there's a way to handle those job losses through attrition not filling vacancies perhaps buyouts there's other opportunities we move forward but this is the trend in the nation of all municipalities as we move forward incorporating ai and especially the larger municipalities such as ours we also recognize that there's revenue loss but there's also with some revenue losses come opportunities for for additional cost recovery and enhancements which we've looked at and we are putting together a report in more detail that when we come back in august we'll report back on some of our ideas i'm pleased to report though that some of those uh the city manager and omb and department heads have already taken the taking some of those comments and lee and they're leaning forward to start working towards with this commission to try to recapture some of those enhancements and some of those additional revenue sources and then our budget approach is always is to work with within our means and the balanced budget with balancing strategies and then my the military rate and benchmarking on the military as you know we're we went 19 years up to this year with no millage increase we've been fortunate enough to have assessed values increase however when you look historically now uh those assessed values are trending downward we're not in the double digits like we were three and four years ago we're in seven percent eight percent and with the downturn of housing construction market and commercial there's a possibility that for the next two to three years until it makes the industry makes an adjustment we're going to see that downward toward twin trend so the board has taken all these projects and broken it up as team individual members and dove in and we'll come back as i mentioned in august with a more detailed report on that we are facing a turning point in our budget uh the expenses are far exceeding the revenues coming in as you know 61 of our budget is is public safety and salaries and benefits i think 63 percent maybe a little high slightly higher as the rest of all city employees and that's out of the operating budget so we're mindful the fact that you know the pie is only so big and it can only be sliced so many ways and those slices have to meet the goals and objectives set out of the priorities of the city commission and as i mentioned the uh the downturn in the real estate development and then uh with the micro economic uncertainty of the cost of goods we're seeing an increase on projects that we had budgeted for in the cip that are are having to do change orders because of inflation and everything that weren't anticipated when they were designed and planned five years ago so that puts a lot of strain on the budget as well as we move forward in 2027. just some of the insights that i've talked about is on the uh i keep the operating budget and personnel cost currently we understand that the city is in negotiations with public safety unions police and fire for for a contract that's going to have some impact on the fyi 27 budget in future years depending on the length of term if it's a three-year budget so we have to have some budget reform and recalibration of salaries for other departments as well currently there's we've been informed that there's a study being done by hr for salary alignments one of the big concerns that i can tell you that we hear from the residents is there is a perception out there that the city's kind of bloated with the number of employees and our salaries um and so hopefully once we have the salary study done we can take a good look at it dive in with additional information at the same time we have to make sure that we're competitive in the in the workforce market so that we can track attract young bright new employees that can also incorporate out ai but at the same time making affordability for the long-term financial stability of our city as i mentioned the budget uh the millage rate and we have to you know some hopefully not hopefully but if the tax reform homestead pass if the referendum were to pass that will give some relief but then there's as we'll talk about later today there'll be some challenges involved with that as it pertains to our budget and then looking at the new city hall we have not actually had the opportunity to dive in to that uh we're waiting until your july meeting and then you have additional information uh as to the the financial impact um on a new new city hall versus a retrofit building and the finances involved with that whole package we will look forward to your direction on weighing in after that meeting as to what direction the commission goes with and the funding mechanism historically that has been on projects where that's involved bond money that's the point where the uh budget advisory board has has got actively involved working with omb on moving forward those types of projects so in the interest of time we come to you to communicate that we would recommend the following that has to be determined by the of july i think it's july 1st or july 3rd i don't hold me correct to that date but you have to set the maximum millage rate and then establish a fire assessment fee we are recommending support for the fire assessment fee to be raised to 444 that's an increase over last year and then we recommend that we keep the millage rate the same for the 20th consecutive year and with that i'll entertain any questions bill maybe just one question on this slide and then i have others but later uh millage rate that that was a five to two vote as opposed to the seven zero vote what were the arguments uh the negative arguments on that five to two vote uh one of the board members felt they wanted to see a decrease and then one of the board members felt to to help with rental costs he wanted thought the best would be an increase to help offset uh any property tax reform that could be coming okay thank you just to add to what chair brown mentioned i believe the context around the board member maybe wanting a decrease was that perhaps there was a feeling that it was premature to make an evaluation and assessment of the military at this point great thank you thank you chair brown thank you for your work um commissioner herps sure so when we're talking about the fire assessment fee going up to 444 again i haven't seen the study the cost study that supports that so uh assuming when we're looking at this what portion of the new fire stations that are being constructed goes into that increase up to 444. so 444 represents full cost recovery for the fire assessment it will generate about 8.4 million dollars in revenue of which we anticipate needing about 7.8 for the holiday park fire station okay so i just want to make sure that we're not capturing any of the ems cost in that that's all no and the board also felt that by the increase it's more transparent to the taxpayer on the fire assessment and full cost recovery as you know we do it the official studies done every three years but internally they look at full cost recovery every year no understood bill no my only question is just uh to staff making sure that as we're looking at this as you probably are aware we cannot capture the cost of ems in the fire assessment fee we can capture certain costs it has to relate to the value of property and so as we're adding new facilities i want to understand what portion of new facilities is being baked into this or is this strictly operational cost i want to understand is there a capital overhead cost um i want to curious about for example the fire boat you know is that being captured in here because that's really designed to patrol the waterways and protect boats and not property so i just want to understand what we're doing with this yeah and we're fully aware it it has to add value to the delivery of service other than as you mentioned ems ems cannot be a component of the delivery of service of this assessment fee but it's not even just delivery of service it has to relate to real property a house correct so so good afternoon laura reese director of office of management and budget good afternoon laura and so stantec consulting is our partner on the fire assessment fee they did the full cost allocation last year and then we updated the fee we have index codes that are broken up in certain ways based on that analysis so both operating and capital costs that are included are allowable um and it includes the operational costs and for each fire new fire station the capital costs over a three-year period we recover those um but the fire boat um since it was hold on back back up you recover the cost of a fire station in three years yes that does not sound realistic to me we have a 40-year lifespan on a fire station you're recovering the cost in three years because the city chose to cash fund them versus um financing them through debt that's the mechanism that we have through the fire assessment to recover i don't believe that's realistic you have a weighted average cost of capital that you have to utilize when you have debt outstanding and you use and if you are using cash funding and you also have outstanding debt funding you have to use a weighted average cost of capital methodology for determining that mr auditor have you looked at this study and are you comfortable with this because i'm not i do not look at the specifics of that would you please do so because i'm not comfortable with this okay i i do not believe this is gap accounting so so um this is the same study that we brought forward last year it's just updated um with new information perhaps i should have looked at it a little bit more closely last year as it related to capital financing yes we're happy to share it with the auditor thank you appreciate it commissioner beasley pittman good afternoon everyone um to this board thank you for what you have done the time that you have put into this um for us i'm always amazed with the time and how you do your due diligence you all really go in hard and and i appreciate it because um some of this is um i don't want to use the word greek but yeah it's kind of greek to me at times but i do follow dollars so i understand that part of it um but what one of the questions i have is about um the conversation about the military we we have this conversation from the diocese um throughout the year not just at this time um yes we've had that um consistency of not changing the military but i would like to even have a conversation among us to see about changing it um elevating it to see what it would do um also because when i look at it overall even though our military is staying intact the other items that are coming alongside it are being increased and how do we make a balance out of this because what we do know um the increase overall affects everyone in the city so are we really balancing this are we just kind of holding a placeholder and are we able to do this where there is a increase that helps also offset what we're looking at i i hear we hear you uh you know it's a delicate balance uh especially for some of your constituents when we raise the military right and you know the the other thing is depending on the outcome of the property tax reform you know the perception if you raise the millage going into next year with that looming in the november election what's the perception of that uh however i think everyone would support we are as i mentioned we are at a turning point and that turning point is our expenses are far exceeding our revenues and you're going to hear about that later i'm sure in the in the stand tech report so with that keeping in mind you know rather than to get hit a year or two years down the road with a larger percentage sometimes it's an it's a softer gentler approach to the taxpayers to do it in literally at small amounts versus one big percentage fee whatever the challenge here is for you as commissioners is you have to set if i stand corrected please but that has to be set the maximum millage rate by july 2nd which is vastly approaching so whatever decision the commission makes it has to be done before july 2nd right understood and and with that you know being responsible commissioners also i just always when i think about these items that come before us i always operate in the realm that how i survive in my home because i'm i'm i'm from that class where i've worked all my life my family's worked we had to adjust to whatever is going on so how i stretch those dollars how i have to sit down and say you know what this has been nice for the last five years but for me to survive the next five years i need to cut back there's some things that i need to approach and maybe eliminate or maybe shave back some and i'm believing as a commission that's something that we need to also consider so that's where this thought is coming from um because that delicate delicate balance i believe will make whatever we need to do moving forward um a little more softer to embrace correct and as a growth um i've always kept and i think some of the fellow board members when you look at the increase in assessed values irregardless of what that percentage is be it seven percent eight percent the first five percent every year in assessed value roughly covers salaries and benefits if you give a three percent raise then you have health insurance costs you have increase in pension plans and everything so that's why as a rule of thumb use about five percent so that just covers five five percent of any assessed value is just for salaries and benefits going for future years thank you thank you again thank you to the board thank you uh commissioner glassman and i shared initially if you uh no i i'm good i also want to say thank you very much for the work and i look forward to you know further discussions on this so thanks so much appreciate it thank you great um i have some comments but city manager did you have anything you wanted to share at this point or i'll reserve my time uh for when we talk about the preliminary budget proposal okay great um thank you and city manager i have some questions about some of what um chair brown mentioned in terms of salaries and staffing should i wait till we go into the the budget proposal for that right time at your discretion okay i'll wait till till then so thank you um for just for clarity around the fire assessment fee so it sounds like commissioner herps would like some further information which is sound sounds good makes sense so um city manager i'm just thinking from a timing perspective when we have to make that decision that's also july 2nd is that our aim for fire assessment fee as well we can have that information provided to the auditor and do any follow-up necessary before or or on the july 2nd date okay commissioner do you think that's okay he's saying as quickly as quickly as possible yes expeditiously great okay so we'll engage in that conversation then as as a body at least and and we'll all be provided that information fantastic for the military um conversation again we have to make that decision by july 2nd commissioner would you like us as a body to talk about that a little bit more now as a body um yes that'd be good that's what's going to be my question um by july 2nd that means that they need to know before we meet that we can make that decision on july 2nd oh we can but okay i think to your point i think it'd be healthy for us to start that conversation now if you're yes i would love to for us to have that conversation okay great commissioner hearts do you want to sure um so last year i advocated for a military decrease i would advocate for a military decrease again this year um holding it steady is acceptable but not as preferable to me a military increase would not be acceptable to me and i'll tell you why we're moving forward with a referendum that is designed to reduce property tax burden on our residents it seems to me that it flies in the face of that referendum to go ahead then and increase our millage rate to offset what the taxpayers are trying to accomplish assuming that that passes so i i would not be in favor of it for that reason thank you thank you go commissioner um commissioner if you could um we can have this conversation in the direction of decrease um what amount and what would that balance explain a little bit more for me so i can understand how the decrease would also get us to that point for a balance of keeping that a soft acceptance so what i would like to see is is an attempt for us to reduce our millage rate um even if it's just a nominal amount again to show the taxpayers taxpayers that we understand the economic stress that they're under uh again this was done by the county last year it should have been done by the city i believe we didn't do it i think we missed an opportunity to show that that we recognize the stress that our residents are under i would like to see us do that i think we can i think we can debate what that number ought to be and what the impact of that might be again i've always said i think there's i think there's rooms for reductions in our city budget and i i still believe that's the case i i'd be happy to go through the budget line by line i've done it for you know the better part of 20 years and point out where i think those reductions should be but i i really think that's the responsibility of the city manager not the city commission to micromanage the budget i certainly don't want to do it from the dais commissioner harps when you think about possible millage decreases what what number percentage what comes to mind for you i think we can get away with at least a a 0.1 decrease in the village again i'm not looking to slash and burn but i think we can make a step in the right direction that again shows the taxpayers that we take the financial distress that they're experiencing seriously oil prices have battered our economy rising insurance rates have battered our homeowners and i think moving in a direction of trying to reduce the impact of taxes on our residents just shows that we are empathetic and recognize the challenges that they're experiencing thank you city manager what could could we have a sense if just as we're contemplating possibilities a 0.1 decrease what what impact is that on the on the budget thank you your budget director coming forward we just quickly flip to the page in the budget so um six around six million dollars based on the 2026 budget so a little bit higher than that for 27. so 0.1 would be 7 million a little north of six yeah i don't know north of six but no more than seven for a decrease in in revenue correct okay thank you commissioner glassman yes thanks um i don't think this is the right year to look at a millage rate decrease so i'm not in favor of that at all i think we have enough challenges that we need to face head-on uh without also adding to those challenges uh 19 years at 41193 i think we can hit 20 years i'm also not in favor of an increase uh to the millage but i i think we should leave it alone and focus on how we can make cuts and how we could do things in a leaner way i'm looking forward to that discussion uh we have a lot of things on our plate right now so i i just think this is the wrong year we had other years where we might have looked at a millage rate decrease and we did not uh but i just think i am i'm very much opposed to a millage rate decrease heading into the next fiscal year i don't think it makes any sense with everything else that we're facing everything else that we need to do um i would have it was my preference i think the state legislature should have not deflected with this bill i think they should have taken the real challenges head-on like property insurance premiums things like that auto insurance premiums there are ways that people could have saved money uh without this drastic approach to what it will do uh to cities and counties so i again uh i just wanted to basically tell you that i i don't think this is a good year to look at a millage rate decrease thank you great thank you um i am uh i definitely at at minimum want to keep the millage rate exactly where it is uh it's my view i'm open to the idea of of a decrease so i think a city manager maybe for our next meeting could that be that point one possibility be laid out a little bit for us uh with greater maybe a little bit greater um um kind of depth to it yes we can do that vice mayor would the commission also want to see some variation to that reduction some other um points where we could look at some savings sure commissioner of easy payment i turn it over to you if that's um yes i'm in agreement with that i'm i'm pondering um what i'm hearing also um understanding that the majority is um leaning in the way of um either staying or a decrease um even though we've at that place can we also look at what that one point increase would look like for the conversation for the increase are we okay with that sure yeah because again what i'm thinking of is even you know i know we don't want to see increases but if it gets us to a point where we're a little bit more balanced that's the whole goal if it's decrease or increase wherever it is that we're being at the best um responsibility for our neighbors i think we should look at both sides of it we can provide that information thank you great so in other words if i'm hearing the commission right it's looking at point one increase staying the same point one decrease that yeah great thank you the fire assessment fee will further that conversation with the additional detail provided um at our prior to our next meeting but we'll have a discussion at the next meeting sure yes could um commissioner could you um uh redefine what you specifically you were looking for the the calculation or how we were so so so so two things one um i would like you just to look over their methodology and and just opine as to whether you're comfortable with it um and then more specifically uh the idea of recouping the costs of new facilities in three years so typically we look at a 30-year useful life of a building and we would apportion that cost over the 30 years the thing i'm trying to devoid avoid here is the issue of you know intergenerational equity where we're basically having the taxpayers of today pay for a structure that's going to benefit people for the next 30 years i mean we're passing the cost along and that's unfair it's inherently unfair to do that and the idea that we're paying for it for cash and we're not bonding it is irrelevance it is irrelevant from a financing perspective so cash is fungible whether we use cash on hand or whether we use debt is irrelevant to the question of how we apportion costs from an equitable perspective especially when you have existing debt so when you look at for example how you capitalize the cost of a building under gap if you pay cash for it you still have to impute the value of interest if you have any outstanding debt so that's that's that's gap accounting right so it's the same concept you can't ignore the cost of financing just because you happen to have cash on hand if you have any outstanding debt which we already do so same concept applies thank you thank you great thank you commissioner herbs um if you're here for the 1 p.m city conference meeting we're just in the budget advisory board joint workshop so apologize for the delay to the start to the 1 p.m but obviously our budget is a critical discussion point so thank you for bearing with us okay uh thank you chair brown i'd now like to give an opportunity for individual members of the budget advisory board want to give you a chance if you'd like to share uh feedback ideas any any individual commentary you might have want to make sure you have the chance to do that yeah please go ahead come come on up yeah you hear me yes vice mayor commissioners um i bought a house 18 years ago moved in with my husband i'm invested in this city uh we've been community leaders and working with the rest of the community i joined the bab to make a difference and in mind uh the interest of the resident the voice of the residents and i think it should be part of our focus at bab so i did a deep dive that i shared with some of you uh in terms of analytics and the diagnostic in which we are um the the key is among some board members there are different views and as a single board member i'd like to um come from my analytics uh background uh professional and also what i did um going back to three years behind and seeing the projection from stantec is that we're in a critical situation and i think the idea that cost saving optimization could lead according to an approach that i shared and champion with my colleagues for the past six months could lead to 60 million dollar savings and i have the receipt for that it can be disputed that it would be 50 or 30 but that would probably allow the city to contemplate not generally uh lots of budget uh cuts that are drastic maybe coming back to a level of general fund that we had in fiscal year 2025 um what do we do with those savings we don't go ahead and spend it again because we continue feeding the beast and we don't have the revenue to justify that anymore we we're at 11 a few years ago um of uh growth um and in real estate development at valorem it's slowing down um like the chairman shared and there's more to it 68 out of every hundred dollars that we generate in revenue go to salaries and fridge benefits and it's going to get worse and worse so i was trying to have a the dynamic picture of what's happening what has happened in the past three years those numbers are all uh um i just you know excel doesn't make mistakes only people but just looking at the dynamic picture i think it's time to empower your city manager to do the dirty job that proudly had who should have been done a few years ago um and stop the bloating and the growth of our city government make an effort the city manager can do that she has the talent she's a lead uh a transformation a transformation agent she's not here to justify what's been in the past i would actually empower her to say let's be serious as the heads of department let's do real budget cuts uh without reducing service level too significantly and and being aware of that and then with that let's consider not what i heard 10 minutes ago a decrease of 0.1 and i've got uh the receipt for that too if you uh look at my presentation let's take a look at what the valorem um loss is going to be for the next two years about 44 million dollars let's take a look at what city hall new or um existing refit would cost and let's make a a holistic decision as to what uh millage rate uh change we should consider and according to my calculations and i'm sure omb city manager staff will do that much better than i i did you can then make an informed decision and not do a knee-jerk reaction about oh let's do 0.1 relief because you might need another 0.3 raise in three years and we'll hear from stantex soon so let's do something that's sustainable that leads to real uh savings and budget cut and optimization let's get on a diet and let's provide a reasonable possibly um relief for the residents even symbolic remember the school board the broad county school board uh miami-dade and broad county have all considered that in the past two uh fiscal years so if they can do it and other municipalities in broad county uh that are smaller than us have done it too let's take a hard look at that so i would say um empower your city manager to look uh into that holistically uh with those uh three parameters structural uncertain unsustainability of our budget that we were here uh last year um already with uh second the ad valorem uh loss and third city hall whatever its impact is existing or uh new that's all i have great thank you very much olivier by the way i just want to thank you so i uh i did some light reading over the weekend thank you for sending out on a friday it's generally what the city does so why not no i i i i i appreciate it so uh but no it it was it was incredibly valuable information i want to i want to just thank you it was incredibly detailed and and and i did i did get a lot of value out of it is there anything in particular out of that presentation that you would like to highlight or bring to our attention i think it was a lot of dense information in there i think i gave you the overall thinking no i'm thinking more for the audience is there anything out of that that you want to bring to the you know that you would like to highlight from the idea is that our city government needs to be considerate of affordability for our residents i think we all experience i live in district one um i'm fortunate um but i know neighbors who are actually uh are considering to sell their house because they can't afford it anymore not because only uh of the millage rate constant uh by the way the millage rate is constant but we tax uh people on fire assessment uh increase that's been uh 30 percent in the past two years not you know this recent increase only and the setting sanitation and storm water so if you look at holistically the taxation from our city it adds 1.43 to the 4193 and by the way the 4193 has been constant while we increase the taxable value uh 245 uh percent uh since uh 2007 120 since 2015-16 so uh we get more and more revenue we feed the beast and i think we need to reverse that logic for the sake of residents we need our residents to continue to be able to raise their children um and and grandchildren and still own their house affording their their mortgage or affording everything i think the uh tax property reform can give some relief it doesn't mean that we can't show as a city that we can do that a little bit too uh and the taxation doesn't work the same way uh the tax valorem uh relief will go to the the more modest uh people for whom the tax value 250k lots of people 46 percent i think uh in our um county i think uh of the properties are about that level 250k it's a huge relief for them so considering that relief and keep our city affordable is key and i think should be central to the bab that's our core mission but also to the city commission with all due respect thank you great thank you any other question um city manager any comments or questions on on his feedback or suggestions the feedback is appreciated it reflects some of the conversations that the budget advisory board has had over the past several months so nothing that was shared is surprising to me or to the office of management and budget i do think that there are opportunities for additional strategic reductions and i'd like to float those concepts to the commission uh today and in advance of me bringing forward a proposed budget great and if i may vice mayor so i'm going to touch once more on ai i'm an evangelist for this so i have consulting clients that i work with i just finished up a project that would normally have taken me about three months and produced a 38 page document mckenzie level work product and i got it done in a week this would have taken months to do and i got it done in a week using a combination of copilot and claude and chat that is the level of productivity that you can get through the utilization of llms so if we're not incorporating this into everything that we're doing we're missing a huge opportunity i keep telling everybody i talk to in five years your job is going to be taken over not by ai but by somebody that uses it so every single department in this city has to find ways to incorporate these various llms into everything you do all day every day just just saying it the the productivity gains are astronomical yep thank you i agree i think ai is amazing tool so um and city manager i'm i'm assuming that how are you implementing that as commissioner herbs mentioned into what staff members do day in and day out thank you vice mayor and commissioner herbs so in last year's budget with the support of this commission we incorporated resources to have training with copilot in a pilot phase and then we rolled it out to most of our employees what we're going through right now is identifying specific use cases for ai in different departments so it's not enough to just say we are using copilot or chat gpt but how does that equate to efficiency or cost savings so for each department we're looking at what can ai be used for that is actually going to turn into savings for the taxpayers residents stakeholders savings of time and effort so while we know ai in general will allow increased productivity it doesn't always equate to a financial gain or savings so for example in our development services department we're looking at how to incorporate ai into our plan review process so that we can turn over those plans faster for our customers in human resources we're starting to utilize ai for screening for employees who are those wanting to become an employee within our city so every department is going to be a little bit different not every department is going to see a significant savings by the utilization of ai but i think we have to approach it more strategically while we're also looking at the broad and general view of how we apply ai across the organization could i flip that script the best way you're going to do this is not a top-down approach it's to give everybody the tool and tell them to go play in the sandbox okay the the ingenuity of the staff is going to be a lot more productive than having managers say do this i'm telling you trust your staff and let it bubble up from the ground um top down never works when it comes to doing stuff like this again it's a sandbox tell people to go play they'll find out things that you never even imagined they could do i have a question with um ai how does that lie with um the security of things that we're trying to do privacy um areas um i'm trying to think back when i went to um national legal city there was a conversation about ai and there were some points you know that positive negative and how to balance it um but how do we approach um research and um reports that we're putting out and still have that level of security that we would need in our agency so so copilot is part of our ms365 platform so it's an internal one if you're if you're using claude or if you're using grok or if you're using chat that's external so it depends on on what you're doing so when i'm doing something for a client i'm working usually on copilot because that's within their platform or we have our own in-house agents that we utilize so all of our data is fenced in so we're not putting it out there if you're using chat and you're taking personal information you're essentially making it available to to everybody so but if we're using copilot which is what we have here it's tied into our ms365 platform so it's essentially fenced off so it kind of resolves that to a certain extent and commissioner we have ron mckenzie our i.t director he was actually instrumental in developing our ai policy and so i'll turn it over to him at this time good afternoon commission uh ron mckenzie chief information office i.t director uh much of what you're saying about the learning language modules that we have are important as we learn but we have to do it safe as you're also saying uh commissioner vizie pitman um we definitely have to do it safe as we roll things out copilot as he said it's both internal and external as we're looking as we were rolling it out through the pilot we learned some lessons to make sure that things are safeguarded we're in the process now of reviewing how we're going to roll it out to pd to make sure that things are safe and to make sure that people do not have access to things that they should not have access to so as we talk about ai it's important and it is a very very very important tool but what's important even more so is that it can reach out it has wings to reach out and to grow and we have to make sure that as it reaches out it reaches out very safely each tool that we have we are rolling out to make sure that it's safe some of the things that we have as well that'll be presented to you is our ai platforms and some of those things are voice ai we wanted to be able to that when you call the city of fort lauderdale you say hi uh welcome to fort lauderdale and says okay when is the next commission meeting it tells you that information and it tells you okay listen the next thing is uh i'd like to make a um i want to permit what type of permit would you like so we have various tools that we're looking to but we're looking to make it efficient and effective so to make sure each and every person that's using it in each and every department has that tool and they're able to do what they do better not as much as a reduction in staff but to make sure the staff that we have are using it better and i think that's how it makes a better fort lauderdale because each way that we're able to do it we provide a better asset to each one of the residents the businesses etc that's the way that we're trying to roll it out but but there's other things let me give you a really good example right so on today's agenda we've got a discussion about the federal uh courthouse one of the questions that has come up in some of our conversations is about what's the gsa's requirements for consideration of historic properties as it relates to the disposal disposal of properties within their portfolio i don't need to worry about whether that's private confidential or privileged information i can go into chat or claude and say pull up the cfr code of federal regulations and tell me what gsa's requirements are for historic properties i could even list a specific property and that is research that would have taken a staff member at least a day if not more to put together and it's back in 10 seconds and then i take that one and i drop it in the chat and i say chat please verify what claude just told me and then i take that and i drop it at the grok and i say grok i don't trust either one of these two take a look at it and tell me what you think and within five minutes i have a complete analysis again that's a consultant level review of everything that has to do with the historical requirements for gsa to dispose of property and i and i got it done and that would have been at least a day's worth of research for somebody to put together and type up a memo for distribution to the commission if not a week and i can do that in five minutes and i could even tell it by style of i want you to write this as a city commissioner to my colleagues or to staff or something else and it knows my voice and it writes it in in that format so these are the kinds of time-saving things that you can do that that don't get into the security issues that you're talking about you are correct commissioner uh one of the other things that we do as it relates to that you're right and that's why we teach copilot as we're rolling out copilot we are telling them to do that to roll it out to make things better and copilot you can literally say i want a 10-page powerpoint on this particular subject matter and we'll do and it will produce it one of the things that i want to make people safe and sure about also is that hallucination aspect to make sure that even though that document is produced that we check that document over to make sure that it's right before we send it out so i again ai is a very important tool you can increase efficiency and effectiveness but we have to do it properly so safety must always be the first thing that we do because once you put it out with your name on it it is yours and so we own it and we're responsible for it well that's why i tell claude watch out because chat lies yeah you don't start the war there's a they go back and forth and by the way if you ever use grok it is profane so i don't want to tell you what crock what grok has to say there's a you you probably heard this ron the the term ai slop uh it's one of the one of the challenges we have to navigate and use these effectively uh so yeah i think all great points city otter yeah yeah i just wanted to say that you know we used to co-pilot all the time that it's it the efficiency of things you could do that take you like uh commissioner herb said would take a lot more time to do is really good but i think uh like as you say playing in the sandbox i think the most important thing is to really for everyone out there is to is the prompt um getting the prompt right that is like the key to getting the best information that you want and i just you know wanted to reiterate that point yep agreed thank you thank you ron appreciate it olivier thank you for your comments thank you for what you've emailed us very helpful i completely agree about the pushing for efficiencies being aware of what's coming down the road so thank you very much chair brown go ahead in regards to the report that you received this past weekend uh the consensus was the bab not to release that just yet but it was we will be coming back with a report from the bab at the august meeting because there are some discrepancies in that information that you received and we wanted to make sure you had adequate information okay thank you great that sounds good and correct thank you um other members of the budget advisory board anyone else like to speak okay great so at this point here's what i'd like to do and commissioners if this is all right we have more to do in the budget advisory board because the city manager is going to present uh does that have that right um but we also going into our conference meeting we have many elected officials that have come here to share with us a legislative update that many of them are just some very tight deadlines where we can only have them just for a little bit so commission what i'd like to do if it's okay and okay with you all bad is just pause our our bad meeting uh allow that portion of our conference meeting to partake for our legislative update and then we'll reconvene with the bad meeting is that that okay how much more do we have to do with the bad meeting today we city manager no there's a discussion of the preliminary budget as well as property taxes yeah so it's a it's a healthy yeah city manager's this might be a strange question why did we change the conference meeting to one o'clock and schedule the bab at 12 30 and think that everyone was going to be here and on time and that we were going to be efficient so we moved the conference meetings to one o'clock going forward so that was starting the resolution right that doesn't answer the question though i'm why did we think that that was going to work today and scheduling bab at 12 30 sure then we were supposed to start at one we have everyone here i i'm just wondering why we did that today i'm just curious it's just a maybe it's a rhetorical question okay thanks we'll start i think when we have a joint workshop i think it's a good point i think the joint workshop maybe now we start you know 11 11 30 yeah i think 11 or 11 30 we should start early so yeah i think it's i think earlier the better we got to do a better job with that so great um thank you so um is that okay bad members if we just if if you have to leave i understand please um but would love to continue our conversation so city clerk what i'd like to do now is recess if that's the appropriate word uh recess the bad meeting and we'll uh begin the city conference meeting the 1 p.m meeting and let me just see daphne sandville just want to make sure daphne is that do you have everyone here to to begin the legislative update or is that you're good okay great so let's so now if you're following along at home or in person we're going to go to the 1 p.m city commission conference meeting we're going to uh skip to cf1 cf1 which is a 2026 end of session report uh city manager's office city manager thank you thank you and you've already teed it up so if daphne sandville our division manager for intergovernmental affairs will come forward and i know various members of our legislative delegation are here as well as our contract lobbyists uh so definitely a team effort thank you all right it's on you can hear me good afternoon um mayor uh commissioners uh and city manager executive team this is the 2026 end of session report with the presentation i have our contract lobbyists as well as our members of the legislature senator rosalyn osgood representatives campbell representatives cassell representative chip lamarca representative rosenwald and representative dunkley so as they make their way up to the front i will just briefly recap what happened in the 2026 um legislative session so at a glance the session adjourned without a state budget and therefore there was a special session there was actually three special sessions the first to address congressional redistricting the second to address the state budget in which they passed a 114.5 billion dollar budget and the third session was to address the property tax amendment in our city appropriations we secured 3.7 million dollars and i would like to you know give a special thank you to our members of the legislature for working hard with the governor's office to do that in particular the galt mile street safety improvement project was fully funded at our requested amount of 1.25 million fire rescue fire boat replacement was fully funded at 643 thousand substance abuse and mental health housing treatment program was also fully funded at the requested amount 250 000 we also received partial funding for the law solace mobility project at 500 000 and our aviation technical training program at 500 000 as well as our roadway resurfacing project at 425 000 unfortunately we lost three projects but we will look towards next session as to how to strategize to get those into the budget the next topic which is our exciting topic right property tax um there was the special session to special session f for property tax uh sixty percent of the voters on november 3rd would have to vote whether or not to adopt this constitutional amendment in essence what it does is it's very small but it would raise the non-school homestead exemption to 150 000 in the first year and subsequently in the second year raise it to 250 000 the new florida residents as of january 1st 2027 would qualify for or be eligible for the 50 000 normal exemption after five years of residency they can increase that that the exemption to 250 000 it lowers the assessment cap on non-homestead resident residential and other non-homestead property from 10 percent to five percent it restricts the county and municipal ad valorem revenue to specific uh uses which is public safety education infrastructure natural resources debt services retirement benefits and core operations it also allows local governments to increase the exemption further by general law up to all remaining assessed value and finally what it does is it has a working waterfront properties assessed at current use and our save our homes uh portability is also maintained the city impact for fiscal year 2028 is estimated to be 17 million and for fiscal year 20 29 is estimated to be 27.3 million and the path to the ballot what we are considering doing is having a robust education and communications plan in which the city will communicate with residents what property tax does for the residents all the way to the november 3rd election day on january 1st if the constitutional amendment does pass it would be effective and then we would look towards the fiscal year 2028 budget and making any type of modifications and confirming with the property appraiser's office as to what we need to do moving forward there were some key enacted bills that affect the city out of the 250 that we followed this year there were about 1800 bills that were filed so it was a significant amount that we worked on the first being the local government dei ban in which cities are are barred from funding or promoting dei initiatives the second is uh the land use development regulations bill it ties development fee for actual costs and requires objective compilability standards the third are building permits and inspection inspections where there's uniform uniform state application inspection fees tied to actual costs next is the local government finance which is the fiscal transparency act this is something that we already have implemented and are already doing where it mandates expanded online posting of budgets quarterly compensation reports and annual budget reductions uh workshops and where there are impact fee changes next is the electronic payments for local governments where it requires cities to accept credit card debit eft and online payments and the last one is micro mobility devices so that's the e-bikes legislation had passed this year which caps e-bikes at 10 miles per hour near pedestrians on sidewalks and shared pathways it also creates a task force for future recommendations using the data next is vertiports it authorizes 80 percent of fdot funding for public vertiport projects and up to 100 percent if there's no federal funds available the sovereign immunity bill after many years of coming through finally passed where it raises tort claim caps from 200 000 to 300 000 per person and 350 350 000 to 500 000 per incidents uh it prohibits uh it prohibits the next bill would prohibit net zero governmental policies so bars governments from adopting and enforcing net zero policies or funding house bill 1451 is the utility services where any outside city customers eliminates the 25 outside city surcharge and caps outside rates at less than or equal to 25 above the city rates and it is tied to bond covenants and finally what we were looking at that passed are the local government cyber security protection programs this piggybacks on the grant program that the florida digital services and cyber security or cyber florida agencies are are promoting there are some bills that failed uh post-disaster land use which is the sb 180 fix it would have softened the regulations in 2025 that limits local um mortatoria i always have trouble with that word um and post-storm regulations and the restrictions remain the local government enforcement actions would have created an exclusive exclusive judicial mechanism to challenge city code enforcement prohibited use of public funds would have barred most city funding for florida nonprofits hoa reform the florida starter homes act also failed the drinking strong stir preemption bill failed as well as the public records exemption for city managers so looking ahead we are hoping um that we the well the governor has not yet signed the budget into law so that three point seven the three point five seven million that we did get for our six city projects still remains in limbo until he signs the budget uh we look we're looking at the constitutional amendment what we're doing as we move forward it's the largest revenue risk home rule has been narrowed with the dei ban and other net zero prohibitions there are further preemption bills that were filed however they failed and then there's some compliance work with uldr updates e-payments budget transparency and utility rate changes and we're just going to watch for next session what to do and with that i would like to welcome our members of the delegation beginning with senator osgood thank you daphne appreciate it senator osgood thank you good evening commissioners vice mayor to my commissioner commissioner pam beasley pitman certainly want to say good day to our amazing city manager and all of you it's good to be here today so thank you uh daphne for all the work that you continue to do i'm going to talk about a couple of things that were not per se city of fort lotterdale but i think that are important to this county the one budget we did pass during the regular legislative session is we were able to get 30 million dollars gap funding for the adap program that's the age drug assisted program i'm going to ask all the legislators to stand all the members of the house of represent if you could just stand thank you so much for your work in tallahassee you may be seated we can't do anything with them on the senate on the senate side without them on the house side and we work in a very bipartisan way to represent you very well in tallahassee so we were able to backfill the gap with the adap funding to make sure that people that are hiv positive continue to get help for their medication that's very critical to us all throughout broward county and in the budget that went to the governor that program is funded all except for managed care assistance which we should be able to manage i'm very very proud of that i also want to say that the budget also contains 20 million dollars to start the initial phase of tearing down the horrible horrible detention center that we keep our youth in that it's right here off broward and 595 so i'm very excited about that program and moving forward with tearing that facility down and bringing two facilities together to give us efficiencies and finally um the homeless safe parking program which is taking place at mount olivet church on 15th avenue homeless families are able to go there and park overnight with security so that they are safe we were able to get three hundred thousand dollars in the budget for that program and that's something that we need to pay close attention to i was happy this legislative session that i ended up with about 32 million dollars of budget appropriations so it was a legislative session and six special sessions it was a lot of back and forth a lot of work but you know what i believe the residents of broward county are worth it so i am happy to be here today i'm not going to go into detail i'm going to kind of pull rank and let my house members do the heavy lifting today but thank you guys for giving us this opportunity thank you senator thank you for your work daphne do you want or do you want me to introduce i have representative cassell great thank you representative cassell hello mr mayor commissioners uh all city staff thank you so much for having me so i always like to start with statistics i think something that often gets lost in times is really how often we are working together in tallahassee so this year in particular we had about um 300 bills that passed let me just get it specifically we had 381 bills that actually passed this legislative session 236 of those passed unanimously um with support of all members of the florida house and overall 84 percent of the bills passed with bipartisan support so more often than not we are all working together for the betterment of florida to make sure that we are passing legislation that is beneficial to floridians um so what you often hear sometimes in the news really isn't accurate you know how often do they dedicate to local to state politics so they're going to highlight the things that make it seem um more divisive than it is but 84 of the legislation that passed this year passed with um bipartisan support so i always think that's something great to highlight for members of the community to have a better understanding that we really are working together in tallahassee for you um i think my job as a legislator i have two main functions first and foremost it is providing constituent services making sure that i'm there answering calls and being there for my community and second i think it's bringing home money because at the end of the day so many of our cities and programs that are offered here specifically in broward county need the help of the state so i am honored and humbled to um state that i secured 48 million dollars in this year's budget 30 million dollars will go directly to house district 101 and uh various projects in broward county from stormwater management infrastructure expanding broward college uh providing veterans assistance so i am so pleased with that because at the end of the day that's really what matters to be able to impact my community the most by bringing back dollars that are going to continue to help the help the community grow whether it be from a city perspective or helping organizations that are in need that provide direct resources to the community um obviously we had six special sessions so a lot of things occurred i as i walked in you guys were talking about ai i am the only person to pass any legislation related to ai unfortunately it won't make it to the governor's desk it did die in the senate but it's an ai bill that um was to port is to protect consumers um from the use of ai in denying insurance claims we know that um there are some pending civil action lawsuits where allegations have been raised that 90 percent of claim denials uh where ai is used had a 90 percent error rate so those of you that know me know insurance um is is really my passion and really one of the things that i fight primarily for in tallahassee so i was proud that the house saw the significance and the need of that legislation um and i hope to bring it back next year from another policy standpoint i passed a bill that is going to allow our micro schools to have more of an opportunity to use our commercial mixed use space obviously we know since covid our businesses our brick and mortar businesses are failing we have all of these opportunities and we have this need for micro schools schools that help children on the spectrum children with disabilities um parents who want to place their children's in more stem-based programs as we as we increase our uh uh our ability to invite the tech space into the state of florida which is i know something that we want to grow here so creating that bill and passing that the governor did sign that mental health is also a priority of mine in anticipation of the future speaker of the house uh sam garrison mental health is a huge priority of his i've had the honor of right of running two pieces of legislation that really focus on making sure that the dollars we're spending in the mental health space are actually getting people better so last legislative session not this past one when the before we focused on our schools we've spent almost a million dollar a billion dollars since the tragedy at marjory stoneman douglas and we aren't actually tracking the metrics to make sure our students are getting healthier we passed that two years ago this year we followed up with that and expanded it and are focusing on our community courts our drug court our um juvenile courts and um our court system to make sure that the programs that we have in place are actually getting people the health they need so that is my legislative update i think it overall it was a successful session and it's always an honor and privilege to be here great thank you very much thank you for being here daphne representative chip lamarca great representative lamarca thank you commissioners vice mayor city manager city attorney everybody else that's here um i would say welcome to district 100 but it starts at the train bridge over there so we're in i believe we're in daryl campbell's district great district 99 uh i too want to share a few things i think as you went through some of the the daphne went through some of the bills that did not pass i do believe the broward delegation was all on the same side of one of those bills that we got a lot of emails uh from not just the commission but members of the community here in fort lauderdale uh on the the process that you've heard i don't want to uh be repetitious but uh there was there were six special sessions and sometimes those were within when we were already up there just kind of diverted our normal week's work and then sometimes they weren't because we had to go back up to the budget and property tax work but uh none of that could be could have been uh possible without our staff and i want to thank justin sosarczyk who is somewhere here in the room raise your hand there he's right there and i want to thank uh commissioner glassman's new uh aid kiara coleman who was in our office during that entire time and uh took all the phone calls from our uh eager constituents on specific issues they had concerns with moving on uh with respect to the process there your lobby corps your lobby team your contract lobbyists uh were in the halls very frequently helping with a lot of these projects and getting some of these across the finish line i do want to take a moment to kind of talk about two of them that were very important to me and uh i know that uh i know that uh one of our favorite constituents rich walter is listening so i want to make sure he knows that over the last six years we've brought in 8.3 million dollars for the city of fort lauderdale alone so when he holds up his as long as he get those through the finish line when he when he holds up his next check i'll be right next to him but look at all benefits of city fort lauderdale constituents uh in this year's budget were were the final dollars of the galt mile street improvement project safety project for 1.25 million dollars which would close that project out as the state is a partner of the city which is very important and something that was very important i know the senator didn't mention it but she and i partner on a lot of projects uh over the years uh one that holds a very special place in my heart was the uh boys and girls club project in uh the townhomes that we just opened up bbi village and this year it was the reserve fire boat that i know that uh chief golan's going to be very happy uh to see and i was able to see him in the airport last week before i was heading off to a trade mission to canada and we talked a bit about that but uh truly this process in tallahassee is um it's about working together it's about working together across different political parties different neighborhoods people that you've worked with over the years and finding out what's important and certainly we had uh community activists in tallahassee this year on the adept funding uh it was a team effort it was talking to the health and human services appropriations chair who sits next to me on the floor it was talking to the governor's office and things like that so things like that that aren't necessarily on your radar when you fly up there to take your you know do your uh first swearing in or you know start in the next legislative session uh are the things that we end up working on quite a bit and and some of these things are also stopping bad ideas if you will and uh don't believe for a second that something might seem partisan one way or the other that we don't get together and try to work on those issues together because that's what we did on a couple things this year uh as you know this will be my uh last legislative update here i do believe i'll miss you too i do believe uh i will have a big check here to bring here in a little bit after the governor signs the budget um i told them that these two projects here in fort lauderdorf are my top priorities and but i want to thank the folks that worked with us on those throughout the the time i was there and uh stay tuned for anything in the future but certainly uh being here in fort lauderdorf full-time now has been a blessing and look forward to working with you all in whatever capacity that is thank you very much daphne chip just on behalf of district one i just want to say in the gulf we we really appreciate everything you've done for the gulf you've been an incredible friend to to all of us up there and thank you so much for what you've been able to do thank you and i appreciate the ai lesson i learned on the way in listening to the youtube anytime you wanted to stop by we we do private lessons as well representative lisa dunkley representative dunkley thank you i have to do a whole setup good afternoon everyone to the commission mayor and commission and the team here at the city of fort lauderdale it is a pleasure to stand before you today just to give my version of update um to what senator says we do have to work across the aisle try to adjust because i feel like i'm taller today i don't know why we do have to work across the aisle to get anything done and this legislative session not to belabor um how we've had to do a various special sessions that i sometimes felt was quite taxing to be honest but it is always my pleasure to serve this community and i just want to report this session i was able to secure approximately 2.7 million dollars in the budget a lot of my project was with our senator um also outside of that i carried a project that is very dear and i know senator is also championing a long way for that aviation project for fort lauderdale it was a tremendous effort by both us and our lobby partners in order to feed us to the finish line and so grateful for that along with another project that uh bill that we carried together with senator myself and senator osgood is a home hardening uh bill that the bill died but ended up in the tax package so we were able to get that to the tune of over 49 million dollars to my correct if i'm correct over the next three years that we're going to be able to see through that bill um in the tax package also another of my bill that i have been championing for a few years through picking up from where our previous representative umfroy did in uterine fibroids for women because women's health is important um we did pass the bill for your uterine fibroids to d i d identifying bill continuing from piece of legislation that she carried but what was also special was i was able to get a 994 000 in the budget for the research and data for that particular bill so those i'm just going to be brief um just to share those were some of the highlights for me in the staff session i know my representative behind me will give you another deeper dive but i just wanted to share that and thank you again so much for always the support that you give to me and for us carrying the load in tallahassee thank you thank you very much representative rosenwald representative rosenwald thank you good afternoon vice mayor and commission great to see you all and daphne you stole our all our thunder but uh mitch rosenwald everyone it's a pleasure to represent you all it's you're so large large city of five of us in the house and two in the senate um but happy to be here for my second year and to carry uh once again the second piece of the las olas safety appropriation so i know we have 500 uh with the governor right now so we'll just continue to carry that forward um want to just talk about a couple bills that i passed that um do i think have relevance to all of us not just in fort lauderdale but the state and then some other items so um i was able to get um just signed by governor de santis last week i think or a few days ago whenever it was a housing for veterans um pilot program one thing that i know there's great bipartisan support on obviously in the house and the senate some of you i know uh rap dunkley is a veteran and many of us i'm a grandson of a veteran there's so many connections to veterans they're one group that they're um hard to house there's a shortage of landlords and what i've discovered and what i'd like to continue in the florida legislature is landlord incentive programs to house various populations and we'll start with veterans so what this is is it would be we're going to do the fiscal next year but this is the policy framework to provide incentives to landlords to hold their rental units for up to 45 days the state would pay them the prorated rent the person gets discharged from the military or they've been out for 20 years they come and they and they rent so it's held for them paid by the state and then when they're when they leave as i say discharge when they leave what have you even evicted or just leave on their own um if there's damages you know the security deposit is kept but if there's damages up to another 2000 with receipts with receipts the state would pay so this is a way to just address the landlord um shortage for veterans um and so it's a pilot program including of course broward county or the best county around uh another uh bill that uh governor that uh passed uh unanimously with the governor's signature the other week or month is a very simple idea called the callback act and we're starting with unemployment and this is going to be an agenda i continue for the next my time in the legislature just like when we call american airlines or comcast cable for a service issue we're not wanting to be on on hold for an hour they say do you want to provide your phone number we might opt in we put our phone number in we wait 30 minutes they call us back that's great the state doesn't have that but now it does at least for unemployment claims so starting um starting very soon for unemployment people not just in fort lauderdale but around the state when they're calling about an unemployment claim they can put their phone number and how novel and the state will call them back i really want to get this expanded to department of children and families for snap benefits veteran benefits etc so just two items there um i wanted to just again um follow up on what uh senator osgood and rep marcus said with the adap program and michael rainier who's a community activist who while lives in wilton manors is sort of known and i think throughout broward county he and senator osgood and senator smith and actually a bipartisan group of senators as well as a bipartisan trumbull and um and and others as well as in the house a bipartisan group um we got together because the surgeon generals cut adap out very quickly and this is what replica market was saying how we can pivot none of us thought about adap in january or december but we were able to pivot so um i think that's the nimbleness that you that i appreciate in my colleagues um you know across the aisle and obviously in the senate as well as in the house so we're able to restore a good amount of funding there's it's not perfect but we were able to get 75 million for next year um two items that we did not get to pass that were co-sponsored because affordability is an important issue for all of us whether we're red blue or purple is affordability one of the bills i co-sponsored that was not passed was about property insurance i'll leave property taxes alone because you're all going to discuss that i think later this afternoon and there's a lot of conversation on that but we we didn't have any meaningful legislation passed on property insurance one bill that i didn't sponsor but co-sponsored rep skidmore sponsored it was a bill to have florida join a national risk pool there's already a number of states in this so the more people that join across the states we have we have um obviously hurricanes but kentucky has tornadoes and california has earthquakes so if we can join a national risk pool we spread the risk i know property taxes are certainly a concern for folks but but a lot of us what i hear certainly is that property insurance is even more of a an affordability issue um so i'll just keep that brief for today you've heard from uh all of us i'll give let rep campbell finish us uh carry the the end today but i continue to be um appreciative to serve everybody here in fort lauderdale um brian sievet is my district aide can you and joey ebolit is my new legislative aide so um my office is right in oakland park but of course we'll come and meet you wherever you are thank you commission thank you thank you very much daphne to round out our legislative members i have representative campbell thank you representative thank you thank you vice mayor commission um so let me go ahead and start out with my report um first in starting out when we started this process of appropriations we were able to get one we applied for 1.1 million dollars in for the budget on behalf of the city of fort lauderdale um overall i was able to bring uh for the city alone six oops sorry let's try six hundred seventy five thousand dollars uh for the city of fort lauderdale um where those appropriations would focused on uh our substance abuse housing we got home we got two hundred fifty thousand dollars towards that uh for anybody who uh who knows anything or has people that are dealing with substance abuse issues this is um uh strategically important for our community because uh you know mental health is is is is is is a is a thing and substance abuse is a thing and uh we want to make sure that we have the the dollars in place to to continue to support those who may be suffering uh with substance use um as well as substance um as well as mental health issues and this focuses on challenges challenges to getting housing um in their right and so uh this was frankly important to me in uh looking at that the other the other uh amount of money that we got in the appropriation was uh four hundred twenty five thousand dollars for the fort lauderdale roadway research resurfacing and this fund uh helps for pre-existing uh roadway projects that we have here since my time in the legislature uh it has been something that we have uh been working on um um and been filing uh year in and year out and so i'm happy to have continued that that fight and getting that appropriation in um as as we as you heard my colleagues share you know this process is an interesting process um you know we we talk about the bipartisism um that we that we work against we work with to ensure that we get our our stuff done and definitely that is something that we do um day in and day out you know that's the moment that i was elected um i served to help serve with another uh the other 119 members in the house but i stand here before you today uh frustrated at the process that we are in uh today uh it's the second year that we passed the budget after the 60 days uh for those who may not know our main objective is to pass a balanced budget that's all that we are set up to do all the bills all the infighting those are extra extra things we're we're there to ensure that we are passing a balanced budget and the fact that we for a second year in a row haven't been able to complete that within the days that we're allowed um in a part-time legislature is a waste to tax people's money uh and i say that because we talk about affordability everything that we we hear folks say in tallahassee is about affordability how are we helping floridians how is that looking for floridians and so i can't see here with a straight face with you right now and tell you that i feel that the state is looking at things in an affordable way um as you as you saw we went back up for uh redistricting uh we went back up for redistricting and redistricting we that particularly impacts my district um we see that while it is a target along party lines it is also a target to silence uh black voters and i represent a good chunk of those voters and it is frustrating and it is maddening as a representative to have to have to show time and time again the numbers of what how that impacts us as as a city down here and frankly um if i'm to be honest i feel like my cities are being targeted um and so we had that bill we had an election bill that that we put through um to make elections even more harder to vote for people that may be apathetic or have the ability to vote but they're uncertain of where they stand um you know we got we got anti-dei bill that impacts you all sitting here before us there are certain things that you cannot even do now that help provide support we are a diversity melting pot here in in fort lauderdale there is i love to see that i have white black caribbean haitian all all the different diversities here in our community and the fact that we're putting a bill through and people are supporting this type of bill it's it's it's shameful to say um you know and so we talk about anti-dei and how that impacts what you're able to do in supporting a lot of the the events that go on in our beautiful city here um you know property taxes you all did such an amazing job in warning us about how this would affect us before we got there while we were there when we came back home they warned us you i i can i can honestly say this is the hardest working issue that you guys worked on in making sure that we stayed up to date on how this would impact us and yet we still go up there and we know what this bill is going to do we know the impact that is going to that is going to make and then we say we're going to let the voters make the decision well how do you let the voters make a decision when you're informed yourself and so this is the frustration that i feel today standing up here and speaking out for my community because now my my district my community is at a loss because they think property taxes is going to be ended they think they're going to be saving well i'm sorry that sorry to let the voters know like you will not be saving with this bill you're going to be paying more this is not a property tax cut this is a property tax shift and so um you know it's it's it's it's frustrating um you know it's also it's also something that i try to let people know recognize that when you hear that eighty percent of us are voting on bills that we all agree upon that's that's by no surprise of course we're going to agree on certain bills but recognize who's at who's who's pulling the levers here to make sure that certain bills get hurt uh when you talk about when we talk about certain bills we pass the bill for gold like when have you ever used gold to pay for anything like tell me so it's it's it's frustrating but i i'm still hopeful i'm still prideful uh the people elected me and they reelected me again to go ahead and speak out on their behalf and i look forward to continuing to work with you here at the city commission i look forward working to with my colleagues and all parties stakeholders involved to ensure that we are continuing as a as a as a collective body representing our community in the in the means and the the ways to ensure that it's affordable living here and not just affordable for some thank you thank you representative campbell appreciate it daphne i would like to say thank you to the members of our fort lauderdale legislative delegation again for their hard work this session in fighting for the policies and appropriations that we put forward and to finish the presentation i'd like our lobby team to stand up so they could be recognized for their hard work uh when we couldn't be in tallahassee they were in tallahassee fighting the good fight so thank you to um eric's consultants candace erics can't be here but we have lauren jockson from ruben turnbull we have sharonda wright placide from capital city consulting we have jared rosenstein and from ron book lpa we have ronna ronna brown and ron book and in the essence of time we will have one spokesperson to you know get the perspective from our lobby team and that will be mr book thank you mayor commissioners nice to see you all um let me first of all start by thanking daphne for all the leadership and driving the team because the team as a whole is nowhere without a director and you were that director so thank you and to the manager and the entire staff the level of responsiveness this session was significant and substantial i i i'm here to answer questions daphne asked me to to make sure that if there were questions we answered but i want to follow up on the obvious elephant in the room and that's the agro-war and property tax uh constitutional amendment on the ballot in november i would simply say that and i heard several of the lawmakers speak uh sometimes folks do things just because they can and while we started with an amendment six weeks into the regular session that would have repealed all agro-war and property taxes for residents which did not get picked up by the senate uh then the special session with the 150 250 cpi five-year residency to qualify i think the damage is clear to all of us and i think that if we don't begin to get creative at how you spend on parks how you spend on libraries the things that you can if you will fold into the things that are prohibited from being spent on from an agro-war perspective we have to just get creative um i'm one of those who believes that it's a long way between now and november and i think the taxpayers are smarter than a lot of people may think they are with that uh madam manager thank you for your leadership and for making certain that things we needed along the way were done but i'm happy to take questions great thank you ron thank you for your work up there um let's see questions from the commission wrong great thank you very much thank you thank you daphne right seeing that there were no questions that means this presentation was amazing yes it was and with that i close the end of session report great thank you very much daphne um i'd just like to thank all of you thank you elected representatives for the work you're doing in tallahassee thank you for bringing home amazing projects initiatives across the board also just thank you for what also did not happen this session which was continuing to fight to protect home rule we appreciate that whether it's vacation rental or otherwise that matters so we think we can do a good job here in the city of fort lauderdale uh leading as we our residents uh encourage us to lead and so empowering us to do that really means a lot so so thank you very much um i also wanted to just recognize all of your staff members legislative could they stand up for a moment um and just us give you give you a hand for the whole legislative team that's up there thank you to you all and then representatives if the representatives electeds would stand so we can just thank you one more time elected thank you very much for what you're doing thank you and then daphne i know you're talking right now but thank you daphne for your work and your leadership you give daphne a hand thank you thank you all keep it up thank you excellent if no other comments from city commission then we'll close that item if that's all right so we'll close that item we're going to recess the city conference meeting we're going to now go back to the budget advisory board meeting at this point city manager you are going to present uh your your presentation in the budget advisory board meeting thank you vice mayor i think we should start with the preliminary budget uh that has been shared i know we talked a lot about property taxes and we can go into that but i think we've covered a lot of the uh the facts on property tax reform i want to remind the commission that we started off this budget year uh with a mindset that our environment may be changing significantly and at our february budget kickoff with staff i shared with them some ideas as to how we should approach this budget development process for this year i asked the team to think of fiscal prudence resourcefulness and innovation i asked the team to think about investing rather than spending how can we think about plans for the future how can we set the tone for uh what we believe may be a challenging uh outlook and although the team heard what i shared i think shifting the mindset is probably something that we're a little bit challenged with and so even this year with that guidance our staff our departments came in with requests to the tune of 22.8 million dollars and 92 new positions thankfully thankfully i am presenting a preliminary budget with a net of one new position we have looked at strategic reductions the budget advisory board has supported us over the past year with some revenue enhancements so various projects throughout the year we've shared with the budget advisory board and that is going to yield us about 3.2 million dollars we've cut positions uh six to be exact we are now budgeting for attrition across various departments that have some challenges with vacancies and we're really looking at the bigger picture in terms of how we invest this preliminary budget reflects prioritization and a focus on public safety infrastructure and capital projects and technology we think these are the primary areas where investments need to be made not just for fiscal year 2027 but beyond we have a global conflict that is impacting inflation and the cost of goods and services we have property tax reform we have property tax reform that will be decided by the voters we have union negotiations with police and fire our two largest personnel groups we also have a city hall project that the commission is contemplating so all these factors have weighed into our approach in what we're recommending for this year's budget as discussed earlier we have shared that maintaining the millage rate is something that is viable for the fiscal year 2027 we've also shared a recommendation which has been fully supported by the bab to go to full cost recovery for the fire assessment we have also allocated some resources for the parks bond program that has been a topic of discussion amongst our team and the commission and residents for several years and months and we're taking the approach of identifying gap funding in a pot for parks bond projects that may not have enough funding based on the timing of the project and the progress on the overall bond program i want to highlight the office of management and budget they have been diligent in their efforts this year as in other years but this year was a little bit different because of our reorganization in fiscal year 2026 we do have more departments that the omb team has to meet with and to do a deep dive on in every meeting that i've participated in our focus has not only been on the dollars but also on the outcomes the programs what are we doing are we being intentional what are the deliverables and how can we improve that so along with looking at expenditures revenues how does our work add meaning and value to our community and we've looked at every single department from that lens and perspective this year's increase to taxable values is modest as chairman brown mentioned before we're not looking at double digits like we saw in 2022 and 2023 so our expectation from this point forward is that growth will continue to be modest although there are some things highlighted in terms of revenue expenditures and strategic reductions there are some additional opportunities that we can take this year to start to become more lean as a government and to also anticipate future one-time expenditures that the commission may see fit to move forward with so we have about 6.2 million dollars in concepts that we'd like to share with you and laura will go through that toward the end of her presentation but the commission could give us some feedback that would give us that guidance if there is a desire to do more strategic reductions in preparation for what we anticipate could be our new reality in fiscal year 2028 if we want to get more accustomed to having that level of decrease fiscal year 2027 certainly provides us with that opportunity so i'm going to turn it over at this point to laura reese our director of omb we also have parth patel assistant director and event matthews as well is available and she has been championing this group from the city manager's office oh thank you thank you city manager and could the entire budget team just stand up and let us give you a hand thank you budget team very nice thank you for your work thank you thank you laura go ahead thank you manager williams thank you vice mayor commissioners laura reese director of office of management and budget um i'd also like to acknowledge the budget advisory board for their partnership and i always share that their heart the hardest working board in the city um they met with us i believe they're planning to meet with us 15 times this year it's usually 14 times this year we had one extra special meeting so they're really hard working and put in a lot of time um we spend time together every wednesday night in may so we um lots of together time recently so thank you so much for your partnership so um as manager williams mentioned um she spent a lot of times a lot of time in budget meetings this year as well with the expanded portfolio of departments i'd like to thank her for all the time um we can't move on with the budget process without that leadership and direction and thanks to evette matthews for all of her direction and leadership um i'll be presenting today with my co-presenter parth patel assistant budget manager for omb um we're going to be talking to you today about taxable value growth fire assessment update rate adjustments on the tax bill and then i'm going to be turning it over to parth who's going to get into the details a little bit with you about key expenditure and revenue changes homelessness response sustainability waterways proactively preparing for the future the cip and replacement plans and then based on the manager's recent request i'll come back and share some additional ideas that we've developed as a management team of additional reductions we may explore between preliminary and proposed um to set us up for success in 2028 and beyond so with that um just as a reminder the reason this city does a preliminary budget most cities do not do this it's because this commission challenged us to provide a lot of detail a lot of information before you set those millage rates in the month of july um the commission goes on a summer recess after your july 2nd meeting and we're required to have to the property tax the property appraiser all of the non-advalorum rates and the millage rate by august 4th so that's the meeting where we make recommendations and you all set those rates and so we were challenged to provide a lot of information before you get the proposed budget with the agenda so this memo was released on june 10th to share all of the information on the general fund preliminary budget ahead of that july 2nd meeting so as of june 1st the property appraiser gives us taxable value growth they shared that the taxable values increased by 4.5 million or 7.16 above the final valuations for fiscal year 2026 in the adopted budget we're going to need to use the july 1st values and then there's a value adjustment board process so the numbers you're seeing for the final 2025 are slightly below what we had adopted in the budget for fiscal year 2026 so the increase in revenue above 2026 is 6.1 percent or 15.2 million dollars based on those values and as we've talked about with the budget advisory board and the manager just shared the preliminary residential rate of 444 is what the full cost recovery for the fire assessment fee is this year and that's a 10.17 percent increase from last year um one thing we'd like to point out and we talk about it every year is that having the diversified revenue base is important to the city particular particularly as we approach property tax reform as if property taxes go down this is one of those revenues that won't be impacted by that reform and it can continue to be used to be dedicated to fire suppression activities in the city and to support those needs so it'll continue to be important over the years and when STANTAC talks to you later about our long-term forecasting models that's something they'll be talking about as well with the fire assessment of full cost recovery for fiscal year 2027 it will generate 70 million dollars in revenue which is around 12 of our general fund budget so with those rate increases and the stormwater assessment that is on the bill and voter approved debt there would be a hundred and eighty dollar increase in a tax based upon a six hundred and forty thousand dollar taxable value so that's the value of a single family home in fiscal year 2026 so the average taxable value of a single family home in fort lauderdale is six hundred and forty thousand dollars and so the total increase for that home would be a hundred and eighty dollars or five point two percent which equates to fifteen dollars per month and with that i'll turn it over to parth patel um thank you laura um afternoon vice mayor and commissioners um now we'll kind of pivot and go over what's changed since the adoption of the fy 2026 budget and before we dive in like the next few sections are data heavy so i will be focusing on the key variances or new initiatives that are being proposed but feel free to stop me at any point if you'd like to dig into something particular all right so starting off with the key general fund expense changes since 2026 we've seen an overall increase of thirty three point nine million dollars with salaries and wages being the largest component at fourteen point six million dollars and a transfer out to support our capital projects at six point nine million dollars now if we shift quickly our focus to the expense changes by function our public safety is our largest governmental function that's seen an increase for about seventeen million dollars for revenues we've seen an increase of thirty eight point eight million dollars from fy 2026 the largest increase being an avalorum revenue at fifteen point two million dollars uh the fire assessment fee at eight point four million dollars that laura spoke about earlier um and the other notable increase that occurred was in franchise fees and utility services taxes at seven point nine million dollars and with that we're seeing approximately four point nine million dollars available funds to support uh key city initiatives for fy 2027. um and and now we'll be transitioning to see the key areas of investment with the first one being in public safety and enforcement at approximately sixteen million dollars um eight hundred fifty thousand dollars uh geared towards new community initiatives uh from neat from the new harm reduction opioid overdose prevention program which primarily uh focuses on narcan placement throughout the city as well as an expanded group violence intervention program which focuses on individuals at the highest risk of gun violence connecting them with targeted services to reduce harm and make neighborhoods safer as well as increasing coverage at schools on a rotating basis through the new public safety a traffic coverage program moving on to personnel we're seeing an increase about one point one million dollars which equates to about six ftes and this ranges from expanding the nighttime code enforcement services to providing additional oversight for beach operations as well as additional resources for for fire prevention services as well as additional administrative support staff for the police department and lastly um i'm going to quickly touch on some of the key notable equipment here uh and we'll talk about the replacement plans uh that are part of this towards the end of the presentation but overall we're seeing a 13.9 million dollar increase 8.4 million dollars for funding for 81 public safety vehicles including three fire pumpers 1.3 million dollars for new marine response vessels in both police and fire rescue as well as an expansion of the license plate reader coverage uh program citywide at 560 thousand dollars the next area of investment is homelessness response at about 14 million dollars a general fund supported side is about 3.7 million dollars with the two with two key notable um additions um one is an expansion of the access uh one's an expansion for the shelter bed access program of an additional 15 shelter beds and the second one is funding for an additional dedicated bus service and partnership with with rotary connection which provides transportation and relocation assistance to those experiencing homelessness the next uh tranche is the grant supported side which is about 10.5 million the bulk of that being hopwa funding or housing for opportunities with persons with aids for facility-based housing rent programs and mortgage assistance and then the other two million dollars really focusing on other grant initiatives through our ship funding home investment partnerships and our community development block grant another area of investment is our sustainability and waterways initiatives at approximately 14 million 3 million dollars in our sustainability initiatives again here like the two key notable ones are the the expansion of the urban forestry program with an additional 200 000 which aims to enhance the tree coverage citywide and achieve 33 canopy coverage by 2040 as well as the administering the subterranean termite and termite treatment program which is a comprehensive uh termite treatment program and forest protection program as well as well the next tranche is the public enjoyment of our waterways at approximately 11 million dollars a few key notable items here are both again the marine vessels for both police and fire as well as the waiver of living seawall permit fees which is a new incentive program to offset permit fees for residents and businesses and then a waterway trash skimmer to enhance canal cleanliness and improve water quality question on this thank you compare the dollar allocation fy 27 versus 26 on this sure overall category back to you on that commissioner that's fine i'm guessing there is a delta there uh in a positive direction just these are i think some of the great initiatives that uh this commission has been driving towards so i just just want to highlight and appreciate that thanks thank you the next a key theme in our budget process as well as the manager's message has been proactively preparing for the future um and below are some of the strategic budget balancing strategies of the manager has already highlighted for us uh 3.2 million dollars in revenue enhancements about 770 000 in reducing six vacancies in the general fund as well as 650 000 in payroll attrition um in the areas that have that have had a history of vacancies uh totaling um about 4.6 million dollars in efficiencies okay next we're going to talk about some of our capital programming that we have in our capital improvement plan uh in 2027 we're slated for about 36 projects uh totaling 23.2 million dollars um the more notable ones being 7.8 million dollars towards the holiday park fire station 3.4 million dollars for the parks bond project for funding gaps and then a little north of uh 500 million dollars for seawall replacements there are no questions we'll kind of move on to what's on the horizon on average there's about 26 million dollars in in in capital investments over the four years of which spans from about 18.3 million dollars um at our lowest in 2028 to 31.7 million dollars uh in 2020-30 and this largely focuses on being uh the the large focus being uh on bridges and sea wall replacements and then followed by mobility and parks projects and then lastly rounding us out is the replacement plans that i was talking about a little bit earlier um at about 26.2 million dollars 21.3 million dollars being for our fleet vehicles 10.6 of that impacting the general fund 1.9 million dollars for our fire rescue equipment 1.7 million dollars for police equipment and then about 1.2 million dollars for all other equipment replacements and if there are no questions i'm going to turn over to laura reese to round us out thank you great so um as manager williams indicated we are continuing continuing to look at additional ways to set ourselves up for success for fiscal year 28 um understanding property tax reform additional costs are coming online um one of the things we're looking at is um we're really focusing on things that don't impact operations to our neighbors but perhaps take advantage of our current funding in different funds and in levers that we have to pull one of the areas we identified was um that our pension obligation bonds um have six years of life left and we currently keep a reserve for that payment because we pay monthly into that fund um from the other funds so by way of example um if the police department owes 10 of that there'll be a budget in their budget that goes into the pension obligation fund 1 12th for cash flow purposes our cash flow is really strong now we believe there's an opportunity to um spend down that reserve and transfer the full payment into the fund as of the beginning of the year to take advantage of the fund balance in that fund and to reduce the city's payment um that could result in 2.1 million dollars in reduced contributions annually to smooth that over the years of life um the next item that we came up with was two million i'm sorry laura can i back you up so you're going to spread that over the remaining years of the outstanding bond issue correct to smooth um to take advantage of the reserve because our cash flow is very strong right now and all of our funds that can support that so that would be something we could do to alleviate the burden on current taxpayers by taking advantage of a positive cash flow in our city funds and in the pension reserve so we're kind of looking at each of the funds and what levers we can pull that would be one of them um the other one is um our cip fund as we've funded more and more cash funded capital um we have additional interest that we continue to earn in that fund um by way of example we got the pfas money and we spent down fund balance to that 25 threshold in the last year that grows our fund balance and interest earnings have been increasing um we believe we can start budgeting for two million dollars in interest to offset our capital costs each year and um we've seen that over the last three years that's been a sustainable trend so as long as market conditions hold uh two million dollars is in a reasonable way so we wouldn't have to tax taxpayers we'll just take advantage of interest that we're now earning due to the higher balances in that fund so that's the second option um the third item is um so we have a health administration fund um the city's felt self-funded for health insurance and so it's funded through employee contributions and city contributions and the unions have negotiated the city's contribution per employee um with we call it a kicker so it's based upon an actuary report and then we add a percent to that because our our health fund was not well funded years ago as that fund is performing better um the city historically has subsidized staff on the back end so if there's by way of example i think it's 1.4 million dollars in operating costs for that fund that the city was subsidizing by charging like the water sewer fund and the general fund and other funds we don't believe that's necessary anymore so the general fund portion of that with keeping rates the same for employees the general fund could contribute 850 000 less into the fund and keep that fund still healthy so that's another lever that we could pull without impacting any services to our community and without impacting employee rates because the fund is in a healthy position uh the next item was um you know parth and keith talked or parth talked a little bit about fleet replacement replacement um we each year um we have an internal service fund that's our fleet service fund and each year if uh by way of example if there's a tahoe in the police department if it has a useful life of six years we're paying into that fund one sixth of the amount we're going to need to replace that in six years and um what we found is that the trade-in value for the vehicles has been coming in higher or the auction value has been coming in higher and the interest earnings have been coming in higher so we believe we can lower that amount to be 90 instead of 95 replacement that we're budgeting for and that would save the city's general fund seven hundred thousand dollars per year um by implementing that strategy and the next just two more options i'm going to throw out there so um before you jump to that so in the past we had lengthened the length of time between replacements um back in the 2010 2014 time frame and then we started replacing them more frequently again any uh any look at that vehicles last a lot longer these days than they used to so are we taking a hard look at the necessity of replacing them on a shortened time frame as we've been doing that that is a great idea that's not one of the proposals that we've looked at now um we do look at um every year when we go to replace vehicles and the actual cash goes out we look at mileage and we look at vehicle use to see if we even need that vehicle and if it needs to be replaced based upon miles but that's another option that we could pull in the fleet fund as well um we'll look at that as well commissioner okay because we've just gotten into a habit of replacing them just on a cycle whether they need it or not and so it's something we should take a look at again we've done this in the past and it was very effective at reducing our costs we don't need things where the wheels are falling off but again vehicles today last a lot longer than they used to the useful life is uh has been greatly extended by virtue of improvements in technology thank you thank you um and so and the next item that we're sharing as fire rescue has really been amazing at controlling overtime um under chief golen's leadership and we think that may be a lever we're also able to pull and you know discussion with the chief we need to discuss that a little more but um we think maybe up to 350 000 in reduction there um based upon the current year trend but you know that'll be a discussion um the next item is 200 000 um that we've identified we budget 250 000 so that our departments can partner with technical experts when grant opportunities come up um but what we've found is that in the past year we have only really used about 50 000 of that so we think we could reduce that budget by 200 000 as the final solution we're going to share today and all of those are strategic ways of looking at the city's finances and how we maybe do things a little bit different um without impacting our community and that totals 6.2 million dollars great thank you i think those are all great ideas to pursue to continue to operate more efficiently i i definitely support that direction is that commission any feedback on those six okay great i do want to add vice mayor that our recommendation would be to take those savings and look at one time capital expenditures or put it into our capital fund as a set aside for any major project that we could anticipate for a future year so that's the recommendation as to what we do with those savings at this time yeah i think that makes sense and and that's basically reinvestment in our infrastructure as i understand you articulating is that right infrastructure capital projects any major initiative of the commission that requires a significant revenue source excellent i think that makes sense thank you commissioner good in agreement yes great okay thank you laura appreciate it city manager so if you still would like to we can go into the property tax reform portion of the presentation i think the only major new element is to talk about uh how we communicate with the community i think uh mayor trantales asked that we include that as part of this discussion with the bab so that staff can have direction as to any outreach that we need to do uh going forward great so i think we're pretty well versed on the property tax and possible impact but i think the communication could be helpful is that commission okay we we just talk about communication commissioner visa um yes the communication piece um as we move into that direction um when i was at our meeting for the broward league of cities there was a conversation about um in a sense a restriction as to what we as city commissioners or electives are allowed to say in regards to this conversation so if you would also be able to include those limitations what that looks like so we are not written off from this commission that may be for the city attorney thank you ma'am um yes commissioner with regard to communication the uh city and and city representatives of all kinds including yourselves need to be very careful not to advocate a position we may educate we may lay out facts we can do that in detail but we need to be very careful not to advocate a position either way vice mayor we have kevin palito director of strategic communications for any questions on our communications plan yeah thank you and and before we get to kevin uh city attorney just to kind of give us even more specific guidelines if someone asks us at a neighborhood meeting what do you think commissioner vice mayor mayor of the property tax reform what are we able to share there again i think you need to be very careful when you're speaking in your in your official capacity okay acknowledging that you need to realize that you're you're speaking when you're out and about in the community as the vice mayor and you need to be very circumspect about how you talk about your opinion in your position okay that's helpful thank you kevin good afternoon kevin palito uh director of strategic communications uh vice mayor and city commissioners so we're going to quickly go over our property tax public education campaign uh the purpose of this is to educate our residents on the different services that are funded through property tax revenues so that our residents uh throughout our community understand uh what is currently funded where are the levels we are today um this is a flyer uh that is going to be distributed uh distributed excuse me uh through city facilities uh as well as email social media through our websites newsletters we'll be happy to share with each of your offices uh if you would like to have it as well um on the back side of that um there is also going to be different diagrams for people to understand uh where their dollar goes um the idea is to have uh flyers at city facilities uh we're going to have our next issue of ftl connect coming soon uh in there as well uh we're going to have some information on what property tax is what does it fund where it is today um and then we're also going to have um some self-identification language uh just for people to understand that when they're looking at their favorite program uh it is funded and partially part by our property taxes um so the idea is for all the communication to really be transparent um and to try to use all of the different means that the city has available to just educate on what your property tax is what does it fund so with that excellent thank you kevin questions comments from the commission on communication feel good about this any okay great thank you kevin city manager that's all we will begin to do the outreach if at any point the commission or any individual commissioner has any feedback as to how the outreach is being rolled out please let us know as soon as possible so that we can make any modifications necessary okay fantastic we will do that um so uh mr chair anything else from a budget advisory board standpoint just that we would look for some clarification and guidance as we work through this with strategic communications on the public outreach of the property tax uh is there any desire to hold webinars that people can call in other than just doing the the mailings and the hands out so that the budget advisory board could facilitate some of that discussion with the with the community and to get some feedback on on questions that they might have it's kind of hard once you hand out a flyer if you can't get questions answered sure i know for myself and then i'll turn it over to you all i know i'm going to be doing this on my agenda review meetings and neighborhood meetings and so forth so i'm going to be doing a lot of this but commissioner beasley pittman any thoughts there yes um i am concerned about the um restrictions that's been placed through um the love of the government from that governor um i too can do this but i believe it really has placed us in a position where we are at a a stronghold where we cannot express just feeling reserved i'll say that way um i would appreciate if we could also include if it's through a webinar a um a recorded message that will give the facts as well that could also maybe even dive a little deeper since i cannot what you said advocate is that the word you use i can only educate so but in those conversations we all know those conversations begin to go deep and our neighbors want questions and i don't feel comfortable where i'm sitting before my neighbors and i have to say well i can't answer that because but if we had a little bit more substance something to back us up that could say it for us if i can't say it can the board say it if that's my question the board can't say it either okay whatever we can do that's within those guidelines um if we could also be um a product that's produced through our strat com okay that's what i'm asking for yeah great city manager is that so we can develop multiple types of collateral some that are more high level some that do the deep dive and then based on the the medium maybe we can determine hey which audience is this appropriate for maybe we hand out something at events and maybe we have something different that's on our website so i think we can approach this from multiple angles and have the level of depth that it sounds like you're requesting commissioner but not necessarily have that throughout every type of collateral that we might want to use but let me let me just comment on this and so to the city attorney just for clarification and i i think this is to what commissioner beasley pitman is asking i believe that there is an exception in state law where an elected official is allowed to give their personal opinion pro or com so if if asked the question do i support this i have a first amendment right to say yes i do or no i don't there's a difference between expressing my personal opinion and advocacy so i i think if i if i hear you correctly you want to be able to express your opinion that you think this is a good idea or a bad idea that's not necessarily the same as advocacy that is correct but one needs to be careful in what capacity they're saying this right okay thank you great because i know my opinion yes and i think and vice mayor yes if i could just add i think in the pros and cons of the education piece you know what what departments are going to be most affected if they have to make some strategic cuts you know one i one thought i come and i don't have the answer but we're spending 200 million dollars to the parks bond revenue but where's the sustainability to maintain that those new improvements in the 200 200 million for the next several years these are all things that we have to inform the public on that could be impacted thank you yeah thank you thank you sure um now i just want to open it up to the public for any comment in the budget advisory board if anyone you don't we don't have comment cards in the budget advisory board so if you'd like to comment you can please come up to the podium and stand in line at the podium and then introduce yourself city manager while they're doing that can i just ask you a question so bill just brought up a point about you know the cuts and how we're going to look at cuts so anywhere in our educational campaign are we going to be laying out as we go along what we what we believe might actually be those cuts so folks know what it is we're actually looking at cutting uh in terms of uh and if they do vote for property tax reform are we we allowed to do that are we permitted to do that are we out are we going to share as we go along what we're looking to cut so people know what we're thinking about i would hesitate to do that without having that full discussion with the city commission and identifying those opportunities for strategic reductions or cuts but that's something that we could certainly do maybe at the august meeting if if the commission saw fit and then we could update our collateral to show hey these are the thoughts in terms of what could be cut if this gets approved i mean i think it's worth thinking about i think it's worth maybe going through that as an exercise because but we'll we'll be dealing with the budget by september right we'll be done but we'll certainly be having extensive conversations at the august meeting and then this will come before the voters in november so there is time to at least say you know this is how we're preparing at least let people know what it is we're going to be thinking about doing in terms of how we're going to cut and how that might impact services how that might impact quality of life issues how that might impact you know basically things that people take for granted at this point in time just thinking about what we might do i agree 100 percent i would love the benefit of having the city hall discussion with the commission one of the elements that we intend to bring forward in that discussion is a budget approach as was requested and we've shared that we've been developing that so i think once we have some feedback on that we can fine-tune our approach as it relates to property tax reform okay good because i think i'm already getting questions in terms of well what are the thoughts about cuts how's that going to impact our parks so we have to pay every time we go to a park how does it impact our libraries we have to pay every time we go to a library in other words the county is saying that the average savings will be about two thousand something dollars on the property tax cut if this passes but you might make that up and fees and services of maybe having to go to some of these places and pay or but i just i really want to have an all-encompassing picture i'm not believe me i think that we can cut and i think we can find efficiencies but i still want to make sure that we're communicating with the public um you know what that level of cuts and efficiencies is and what how we might have to go deeper uh if we're finding it to be an issue that's all i want us to be very transparent in what we're thinking about i want to make sure that the public knows as we go through this little journey uh everything that we're thinking about and also how it might impact their everyday life that's all if you'd like commissioner we can have a full list of opportunities for reductions at the july 2nd meeting as you're contemplating the millage rate and the city hall project we can share with use some of our preliminary thoughts and ideas as it concerns both property tax reform and city hall and then i think that will help equip the commission with giving us direction that would be very helpful i know that my office gets lots of calls and communications for instance if there is a water break uh a line breaks or whatever our staff has been so amazing public works utilities getting out there like as soon as possible fixing things so if we make cuts to departments like that will that impact will people have to know hey you know if there's a if there's an issue we might just not be able to get there as quickly as we can i just want us to be honest with people so that they know that there might be an impact in in terms of service that's all thanks yeah i agree i think that's a great idea i think having that on july 2nd is fantastic that way we can make decisions holistically and then as much of that information as we can get as soon as possible to share with others i think it'd be fantastic thank you great excellent all right so now if and if you'd come up and if you just state your name uh sir you have two minutes to speak go right ahead test it uh paul reneisen district 1311 northeast 57 the court um just following on the commission's recommendations there that you just heard i'd like to know and i think the city manager can get this question this answer prepared for in the future how many employees will be furloughed and how quickly will that furlough occur once that referendum if it does pass takes effect so it's it's important to know that the it's going to be a dramatic cut for this city so i'd like to know the numbers and specific numbers and how quickly those furloughs will occur because that will affect services throughout our city especially in district one thank you for your time yeah thank you very much great all right if you come on up and state your name you have two minutes all right douglas me district one i wasn't planning on speaking but i just want to respond to this that most citizens don't know the difference you all know what a general fund is or this is all we know is we pay taxes okay and we know everything that comes out of the city comes from money we pay so sitting a big thing saying 60.4 percent is almost fear-mongering and what we should be sending out to the people is yes it's going to be this you know at whatever percent we think it's going to reduce it means this amount of money and maybe we can put it in relation to what's the budget for stratcom or what's the budget for the mayor's office or put it in context somewhere not just throw out our budget and say well look at this we pay for and we're going to have no parks and have no this because that's what people think so i think we should be you know tempering down people's fear not you know acting it for a reason that we want you you know you're you're fear-mongering with this particular thing but what i really want to say is as a citizen you want to believe that the commission is always looking out for the city in the future and sometimes you learn something that's a little disheartening that with the whole city hall project which i know has been discussed ad nauseam over and over again and it's always been a question on why we can't get a developer to do a real p3 that puts up a huge building it's profit making to them with apartments we get free office space and you know why would someone say no to that if we made the right deal only to find out a couple weeks ago that that question's ever been asked so i think before we go ahead i know we spent money but sometimes you just need to you know backtrack and start again for a good path forward and we can save 200 to 700 million dollars whatever the number is i think we should at least investigate that because i have a hard time believing the developer will not say hey this is a great piece of land and with the right deal i can put up 25 or 30 stories of apartments give you 10 stories for office space and we can do something that doesn't cost the future of the city a lot of money great thank you yeah thank you good thinking thank you next up if you state your name you have two minutes um i'm barbie and i just wanted to uh go as far as what uh commissioner glassman had said um let the impact statement you know besides what's right here make a general impact statement of how this is going to affect the taxpayers um in more defined terms but a general newsletter to go out as well as this um and then the other thing i was thinking is um the league of women voters is they always give both sides to the issue is there something that that could be um as an informational type thing that could be brought up beforehand before november before the election so those are just some thoughts i was thinking of thank you thank you very much appreciate it yes sir come on up if you state your name you have two minutes district three um ray jordan of dillard park hormone association president um i just wanted to know um the process of uh the new property tax and um in general the education of how this is going to work work and you know we have a lot of things going on in the community and it takes a lot of time to get things done over the last 30 years i see how long it takes things to get done so i'm wondering if they cut the property tax how will we get these things done if it takes so long to get them done now if you cut it out then how are we going to get things done so i i feel i don't know how it's going to work so i would like to know the education of how this is going to impact the community not only the community but the city in a whole you know if they cut back this cut back that i just want to know you know i i know if you give me the email me what's going to happen or you can sit down and we have a talk about this what's going to happen how you're going and how it's going to come out and and what's going how it's going to impact us as a whole and that and in district three as well because we have you know we have a hard time now getting things done it's like so if you cut the money out then where are we going to get the money from we don't pay the property tax that's all yeah thank you i think very good questions and and spot on and so that'll be part of what we'll be working together on your commissioner all of us and education and if you have questions that you feel are not getting answered just please let your commissioner let us know and we'll work to the solution because you may have questions that we haven't even thought about right so great great points thank you anyone else here to speak on budget advisory board okay great well budget advisory board members thank you so much for your time and your energy and um really look forward to continued conversations um just want to give you all a hand if i could again thank you for what you've done and anything else commissioners for the budget advisory board okay great the budget advisory board is now concluded thank you very much that was a long one now i'll reconvene our city commission conference meeting and commissioners in the interest of time we have one item that some of the participants have just a limitation due to travel so it's okay with the commission i'd like to move to business two which is a presentation of the i am cis drunk cis drunk talk series if that's okay and want to turn it over to our community service department and vice mayor commissioners city manager i'm um civola frazier i'm the economic recovery corps fellow uh place here in the city of um for lauderdale economic development division and i spent the last two and a half years embedded in the system corridor um in this district and today i want to share just what was accomplished in this time and what we've learned and what was built and what i believe is an opportunity for the city's next and so um the fellowship was designed to to bring in about 65 fellows across the united states so the city of fort lauderdale had an opportunity to be a part of a nationwide um initiative where we had over 65 fellows that were selected out of 1500 applications across the united states and over 600 projects across the nation which is significant to show that the city of fort lauderdale was was selected so inside the government support of this initiative was really around economic development and i was placed here specifically in the system corridor northwest quadrant of the city of fort lauderdale my role was really initially to look at how the gaps can be closed between uh what the city is doing and what the community is actually seeing have access to and connected to um and that mandate really shaped what you all are about to hear so the charge here that we see was you know looking at some key things that before i came into this work this particular area was a disinvested disinvested area of the core of the city of fort lauderdale we had cra funding um that was coming forward it was actually approaching to be sunset and it was extended in 2025 december to 2035 but we also recognized that there was some needs for a stronger system within the corridor and unification between residents and business owners and so the assignment was to listen first to build community voice a strategy to strengthen the ecosystem overall and to evaluate what works and then to bring that back here to present to commission and so what we built started in as we said it's been a two and a half year journey i started out in around february march of 2024 uh with our listening tour going to key stakeholders across the corridor um and what began to develop during that time was this need for community identification which is where the imc trunk planning session started where we met with the homeowners association and businesses and continued to push forward an initiative that will resonate with the community itself the idea here was to really center this work around community voice as you can see there were several initiatives that took place we hosted a survey where we went out into the community as well as a summit and a series of community talks to hear from the community to advance this work overall and so here's what the community told us we got over 10 000 data points from the community and touch points over 3 000 touch points and heard from over 900 um community responses we had six different events the summit the talks two surveys one done internally with myself in the economic development division as well as an external survey that had been done for 2024 2025 through a consulting agency dickie's consulting agency within the corridor and in that in that at the end of these talks we had uh the community say their likelihood to further their participation um went from a 2.5 to a 4.5 out of 5 which is significant and some of the key things that were raised was that we needed to understand how to navigate programs within the city the that there was a disconnect with how to navigate them obviously access to capital is always going to be a number one concern with businesses and it's no different in this particular corridor also trust and follow through how information is communicated and then what happened next and how is that communicated increasing the visibility of district 3 and helping people to understand that there's value there and then workforce alignment as well as cultural identity which i think you'll know that we started addressing with the i am cis trunk campaign itself and so now i have here a party from the national league of cities to talk about this from a national perspective they were our national one of our national partners we actually had six national partners as a part of this work and we have uh tamika lee here from the national league of cities and i'll give her an opportunity thanks everyone i'm really excited to be here to support the i am cis trunk project um like servola mentioned i uh serve as one of the national well the national league of cities serves as one of the national partners that supports um this so over the last two and a half years we've been really excited and proud to support the city of fort lauderdale um we approach well i work for the entrepreneurship and economic development team um for the city for the center of municipal strategies and programs and the way we approach our work is looking at quality of life and what we've seen now is that economic development is evolving so before it was how many jobs can you bring to your city but now it's more about housing it's about workforce and also all of that leads in infrastructure to quality of life so with this project what we've seen is just the transformation the outcomes the community outreach we've seen there's been a shift from top down to community up so really connecting with the communities to make sure that we're identifying and creating solutions that are relevant to our residents through this work we were able to award the city of fort lauderdale with an economic mobility rapid grant because we saw just how well they were doing we are of course sad to see that the program is sunsetting but we want to continue our work with fort lauderdale with this project we've utilized servola and the city for several things she served as a program expert during our city summit conference and then also recently she served as an informal program expert to really get city leaders to think about how they are shifting the narrative for economic development and focusing on their residents so super excited i wish i could stay longer um but really excited to support her in this happy to answer any questions thank you very much thank you for your work and your support i really appreciate it also if i could say i i really appreciate everything that's been done um we we never had the opportunity to meet but i'm commissioner um commissioner beasley pittman district three and this is um the heartbeat of what we're desiring to see in the district as well you know it starts here and it spreads out so thank you for everything and shavola you know i'm just so excited for what we have seen um as an output so thank you and overall i'm sorry but i just couldn't let the moment pass thank you thank you and just to share the strategy that we use here um within this particular corridor was community first um and we call this the align framework so it's advancing local local impact through growing neighborhoods um and so we looked at community first and then based upon that community's voice we then developed strategy which provided us vision priorities as well as planning and then turned that into programming initiatives and activations that we then utilize to create outcomes and impacts and so this particular strategy helps us to have this in a sense downward um uh reaction from the city's perspective so in in essence the community is involved all the way through and everything that you do within this type of an impact in economic development ensures that the community is always at the center of the work that you do and so off of this particular piece the community generated a some key things that they wanted to see come forward where we generated a road map of some key strategic things in the near term midterm and long term that they wanted to see to continue to stabilize as well as revitalize the cis trunk corridor and these things were not necessarily things that i pushed these were actually came organically out of the community voice the community talks and the community summit that we actually pushed forward and these were also anchored by the community and you'll notice that we do have owners um assigned to every single action that has been established and these partners have also agreed to take ownership of this work and moving it forward so i want to just commend those partners um in this space um invest fort lauderdale um the cra the urban league uh the um black um business uh i'm sorry the black business chamber and so on we've had a lot of partners throughout this work supporting um this initiative and then finally the recommendation to the commission as we look at actions authorizing the the implementation of the phase advancement of this road map within itself to ensure sustainability across the cis trunk corridor and revitalization efforts implementing the aligned framework as a community centered economic development approach for economically stagnant and emerging corridors um as well as directing staff to evaluate city-wide activation or application form by um upcoming studies and so we've seen nationally that there are examples across north carolina riley um there's also examples in california and other examples across our united states that help to anchor what we've done here in the city of fort lauderdale but they are continuing to lead the way um in this effort so thank you all so much for your time any questions excellent thank you commissioner i do thank you and first of all thank you for your work it's really important and congratulations on what you've achieved here my question is actually for city attorney and city manager so when we see the proposed uh tax uh bill that folks are going to be voting on in november correct me if i'm wrong but the state has said that there are just very specific categories where you could spend ad valorem taxes so my question to you is will programs like this or what we do as our next step will they be impacted by what might be passed in november when you look at those very specific categories of how you can spend ad valorem tax dollars so yes there are specific categories or eligibility buckets for how we spend those dollars but we do have other revenue sources that support other programs and services in our city and so we would definitely weigh the priorities and get that feedback from the commission and so i would consider that every existing or potential new program will be evaluated against the priorities of the commission and i think that goes back to my conversation earlier about how i want to be as transparent as possible with our residents about possible impacts because i personally when i look at the buckets that the state is telling us in this legislation that folks are going to be voting on it's very specific and so as you said we might have to go back and look at other priorities that we've had or maybe we can't even make room for a priority like this i'm just concerned that's all i'm saying but i want to make sure that when we educate the public not advocate but when we educate we do such a good job of educating that people must understand what might happen to programs like this when we've already established a whole line of priorities that have been waiting now for years for us to plan but i just want us to be able to explain this and make sure that people understand the consequences of how we might have to shift priorities or how we might not be able to do the necessary help that we see recommended here that's all um to add to this conversation um with this yes this is a um initiative that started within district three but the overall goal is to expand it citywide um with that aspect of it does that put us in a position where it would fall under a category where we would not be able to fund it it's just for the whole city it's not specifically only for um the six trunk quarter which is um historically known to be a community of people of color so would that would be my question with the way we promote this and move it forward would that eliminate the opportunity where this would have to be stifled or defunded um that's the question i think one of the benefits that we've seen from this program is the knowledge and the expertise that mrs frazier has shared with our existing economic development team so there could be opportunities to implement some of these initiatives through staff members we would definitely want to gauge any expansion of this framework throughout the city we have lots of commercial corridors and i think we would need to identify maybe what's the next appropriate area for a potential expansion before we talk about having a city-wide type of rollout so i think that there are opportunities for us to leverage what has been gleaned and developed through the align framework and then we're always looking for grants which is how we got here and so maybe there's an opportunity for external funding that could help support this initiative and with this this um we do have a brand new director for this department hey maggie how you doing i'm looking forward to our conversation and i'm sure as um the commission that's here um to be able to move this forward and figure out a framework to make this possible so i have a lot of confidence in the direction that we're moving and i'm i am very hopeful that this will grow and not fall into a crack where we can't move forward and um again thank you servola the entire team i see von back there some of the others yes um thank you my dear as um um y'all know i get a lot with names i'm sorry but you amber there we go you know exactly who i'm speaking to um everyone who knows me now i'm not the best with names but i'm the best hugger i know who you are so thank you for that um however again i want us to be able city manager to hold on to this move it forward there is true evidence that this is feasible it will work and we need to do what we can to make sure it moves forward and it will again be a beneficial be beneficial to um the city overall overall so thank you thank you thank you commissioner thank you all um and commissioner quite a question for you commissioner i think this is maybe best for you but maybe city manager can chime in too what's the in that vein of working together and realizing this is this is important for the entirety of city how can we on the commission best support you or support this effort i don't know what that is but just want to open that up and you don't have to tell us right now but as this unfolds how can we continue to support this maybe it's i don't know if it's being at events or if it's you know so whatever is appropriate um that that's a uh you said it being involved being also um a part of this because so many times what the interpretation is um events initiatives programs that are in a sense scoped around district three it becomes a silo for only district three and one of the things we must keep in in mind everything that we do it encompasses the whole city so what benefits district three also benefits the other districts and if we stand together in a whole we can make it happen there's things that can be brought in for different purviews that um that the tunnel vision we may have could also be brought into the conversation to make it heightened to another level great okay that sounds great thank you excellent city manager good on that one i think that was perfect yep okay fantastic that was excellent so commission if you don't mind let's just continue in this progression going next to business three and then we'll come back to commissioner comments business one because we have some folks that are signed up for um let me just make sure i cover everyone that signed up for business two then i'm going to go um we have folks signed up for some of the next items so this isn't you let me just make sure i i you were included here tamika lee you good okay great uh jim james harris did you want to speak for business two which we were just talking about okay come on up if you'd like to come up jim and then bernadette norris weeks is bernadette here oh there you are in the back okay fantastic you'll go after jim if you like fantastic jim thank you for being here you have two minutes go right ahead good afternoon vice mayor and commissioners for the record i'm james karis i've been recently appointed as the interim executive director of invest fort lauderdale inc and i'm here to support of the 2026 cis trunk empowerment roadmap first i want to recognize the focus and diligent work of the city's economic development department and the economic recovery fellow as well as the support of the national league of cities this roadmap reflects months of careful listening and and planning and it shows it sets out a clear achievable ecosystem path one that it ties housing small business and community capacity building into a single court-ordinated strategy rather than treating them as separate efforts we're proud invest fort lauderdale is proud to be recognized as a partner in implementing those housing small business and community capacity building goals and objectives we're particularly interested in issues that were mentioned earlier about capital access as you know the greater fort lauderdale chamber of commerce had a capital access summit last fall and there's a very specific road map in terms of uh uh more equitable capital access in our community we belong we long believe that access to capital is the foundation that everything is built on for housing and small business the road map gives us a framework to address that directly and invest fort lauderdale is ready to put it to work quickly today invest fort lauderdale is ready and prepared to play that role uh since we last came before you we've made real progress we were recently with our development partner uh at the ribbon cutting for the sys trunk apartments we've seated a new independent board 11 member boards drawn directly from the neighborhoods this work uh affects and in closing all of this is we've also created a strategic plan and we expect to have our 501c3 within the next 30 to 60 days uh we're ready to be a partner uh and uh the board is enthusiastic and asked me to be here to to share that with you thank you jim really appreciate it thank you for your role uh yeah give me feel free to give jim a hand uh for those of you might not know jim is just an amazing guru around affordable workforce housing and a host of other issues and invest invest invest has has languished a little bit i think to say the least and so glad you're at the helm helping drive it forward thank you vice mayor thank you yeah bernadette nors weeks thank you vice mayor yes um city commissioners um first i'll rise today in support of i am sys trunk and the initiatives that were um that were gone over uh with you all by staff the economic development department let me first say as a long time business owner in the area a long time resident of the city of fort lauderdale a former homeowners association president for more than a decade a former chair of the greater fort lauderdale chamber of commerce this speaks to me and um and one of the things that commissioner beasley beasley pitman said a little bit earlier with when when the city one part of the city rises we all rise and and i see that happening right now um mr karras is correct in his representation to you that we are humming we have a fully um seated board now for the first time we've uh we've adopted a strategic plan we recently took a tour of the area where it was really beneficial um we recently um we had a meeting just yesterday um pretty much all of our meet our members were there we're very very engaged and thanks to you all for seating um the people that you appointed in addition to the folks that we were able to um get on board they're all very engaged people in the community and i am here to tell you that we're prepared in any way that we can be a great partner to you all um to make sure that the recommendations are achieved um we're here we're all we're all here for it and so thank you all for the support that you've been giving invest fort lauderdale we have some other requests that will be coming um to you uh before you soon um and um and let's let's get this going thank you excellent thank you bernadette thank you for your service excellent no one else has signed up for business two now we'll move on to business three proposed film permitting fee structure and public property use fee community services department we have josh cardin chief cultural affairs officer great thank you city manager josh thank you city manager good afternoon vice mayor and city commission thank you for having me joshua cardin the cultural affairs officer for the city i'm here today to present some information about our current film permitting in the city of fort lauderdale so the city's film permitting process plays a critical role in attracting high value productions that support local employment enhances the city's national and international image and drives economic growth across multiple sectors from hospital hospitality to transportation this presentation will provide a comprehensive overview of the county and city's current permitting process highlight key achievements summarize direct local economic impact and present a proposal to introduce a modest film licensing fee aligned with national and state best practices so the city of fort lauderdale collaborates closely with broward county's film commission through film lauderdale to support and facilitate film television and commercial productions in the city film lauderdale serves as the official film commission of broward county and offers production companies location scouting permitting assistance logistical support and they help to liaise with services and local agencies while this has been a long-standing relationship the city of fort lauderdale and the county's film commission entered into an official interlocal agreement in 2025 this allows the city commission and city of fort lauderdale to apply for film permit applications for productions through a newly launched user-friendly film app system powered by apply for the city of fort lauderdale continues to oversee the permits within its jurisdiction and collaborates with the film commission to facilitate the productions we have the right to approve or reject applications for any reason and the fees and cost of city services associated with film permits such as off-duty police officers transportation and mobility for road closures and mot parks and recreation for facility rentals and the fire department for off-duty fire services or required inspections productions are responsible for paying all of these departments directly however there is currently no film permit fee or film licensing fee excuse me so some of our key achievements i've been overseeing our film permitting program for about three and a half years now i believe uh fort lauderdale this year was named the number two best place to live and work as a filmmaker by movie maker magazine and movie maker magazine touts fort lauderdale is a booming film and tv scene with diverse and dynamic location strong local support and a thriving creative community that makes fort lauderdale a major hub for storytellers we are also by far the most utilized municipality in broward county when it comes to films um this slide gives you our achievements by the numbers over the last few years but the main takeaway is just what an incredible economic engine the film production um film productions are for the city of fort lauderdale every year we have anywhere between 120 to 136 film permits issued so about 10 or 15 per month which also underscores tens of millions of dollars in direct local expenditures and every year it supports thousands of local workers and so josh and just on that it looks like we're projected to possibly have more this year than any other year prior is that right am i looking at that right it has been an incredibly busy year for film yeah um the reason some of the permits issued is lower in numbers is that the new apply force system allows us to consolidate some permits whereas before we would need to have a permit for each location of shooting now we're able to roll them all into one permit so even though it's you know at 67 in reality based on those other numbers it's probably closer to about 100 right now okay great thanks um these are just some examples of the productions that we do attract in the city of fort lauderdale everything from reality television series uh to major sports brand commercials and photo shoots we've also had several celebrity athletic campaigns shot here uh fifa just finished shooting a fifa commercial for the world cup uh with lionel messi we also have had many documentaries as well as accessibility focused productions mini series for television as well as film hey josh just a point on that last slide if you look at that last category i will tell you i hear it from a lot of people um that rj decker series on abc and hulu has so many really nice images of fort lauderdale uh you know in between scenes before and after even some of the locations that one i i would love to know like how much that one had in terms of an economic impact because i do hear from a lot of people that um they really enjoyed just seeing that series just for the way fort lauderdale was portrayed yeah it really it was really nice it did a good job thank you yeah i agree there's some gorgeous beauty shots of fort lauderdale throughout the entire series they were on site here for over a month yeah they worked with everyone from local homeowners that received funding or were paid to rent their properties um through mods that was paid to use uh their facilities for equipment storage so they really did impact the city on a very large scale i believe the direct uh local spend for that was four million um but i will get back to you on the actual no thanks no they did a good job it was really it was really nice to nice to see uh throughout that series it was great thanks thank you all right and of course uh productions it's the direct local expenditure is not just what is actually used by the film it's the employment of local casting crew it's the lodging that that requires so that they can be close to their base camp for filming it's also the catering and dining um these productions spend thousands of dollars a day through local caterers or coffee shops or restaurants they also try to rent as much equipment and vehicles here as possible to cut down on any sort of shipping costs they also pay restaurants and facilities and all sorts of venues including schools parks stores private residences and office spaces to use their facilities for filming and to generate revenue for them closing for the duration of the production city services and permitting productions also pay for off-duty police officers mot services metered parking reservations and facility rentals which provides direct revenue to multiple departments in the city and then of course the marketing and long-term tourism impact that comes along with our city being in major movies and television shows so the current permitting framework um they're coordinated through the cultural affairs division in collaboration with film lauderdale so depending on the intensity of one of these productions it will travel the permit itself will travel through cultural affairs risk management transportation mobility parks and recreation the police department and strategic communications the three that are non-negotiable for every production are cultural affairs risk management and the police department so as i mentioned earlier we do not currently charge a fee for film permits but productions are responsible for all associated city costs they must provide a certificate of insurance naming the city as additionally insured um in most municipalities permits our production companies are required to get at least five days notice for a film permit one of the things that is made for lauderdale so film friendly is our rapid turnaround time we typically are able to turn them around for production starting the next day we oftentimes even have productions requesting permits on the same day and that's just the nature of the film industry i've come to find um we also occasionally have to coordinate with some of our external partners at the florida department of transportation uh the fdbc um if a production is within a residential area we do always get approval from the hoa president so that their residents are notified ahead of time we've also started uh notifying code compliance as well as parking enforcement just so that they're aware that there is a production going on within that area josh i need to know your contacts if you can get in touch with those people in one day you said most of it is a one day turnaround yes i need to know the secret okay i really do um these are some comparisons uh for film permitting or licensing fees by municipalities throughout the state of florida um we would um if given directions today be the only municipality in broward county that would charge a licensing fee for our film permitting um you can see in miami-dade county they charge a 150 permit fee but that permit is valid for 28 days so they could shoot for 28 days straight for 150 dollars they of course charge for all city services but then they also implemented park fees so i would say probably at least half of the productions that shoot here in fort lauderdale do utilize one of our parks or our beach and in miami-dade county they would charge a fee of 300 for every single one of those assets that the production would like to utilize overall fees are pretty nominal statewide anywhere from 2500 all the way up to the town of oakland in central florida which is 500 a day to film i will say that is an outlier and typically these are what most municipalities would charge the city of hollywood is probably the most comparable to the city of fort lauderdale's film permitting program they do not charge for a permit but they do have hourly charges for any uh public asset used by production so anywhere from you know thirty dollars an hour to rent a gazebo to a hundred dollars an hour for a gymnasium all the way up to i think three thousand dollars an hour to rent their amphitheater so today we have a film permitting fee consideration for you all we are presenting a tiered licensing fee of five hundred to three hundred dollars per production this fee would help to offset staff time spent reviewing applications coordinating interdepartmental approvals and ensuring public safety the estimated annual revenue based on the historic permit activity would be fifteen thousand to twenty one thousand annually and we would also like to propose allowing waivers or discounts for non-profits or student productions we do have lots of those as well as charitable charitable psas or tourism promoting shoots during the off season again city staff will also develop a fee structure based on site attributes including location local significance interruption to use by the public and the amount of time requested to be used for production so while we do charge for some of our parks and gymnasiums and the aquatic center and things now there are some parks and city properties that we do not currently charge anything for productions to utilize this is just a closer look at this tiered system i would say probably 75 percent of the productions in the city of fort lauderdale fall into tier two or tier three so that would be a one to two hundred dollar administrative fee for the licensing to shoot in fort lauderdale we probably only have a handful of tier one and four productions every single year so it would you know average out to be about 150 dollars per production and this was a way to scale some of the staff time based on the production needs if it's a tier one it could be as easy as a family's christmas shoot they still require permits for their photography sessions tier four we again probably only have about two or three a year major productions that require major mot plans and road closures and i'm happy to answer any questions you may have great thank you josh commissioners commissioner glassman yes thank you vice mayor so josh thank you for your work on this um those fees though they seem considering budgets of a lot of these productions i mean is it just mean those administrative fees seem really low i mean i don't know i it just seems low to me considering the budgets that that these productions have i don't know what are your thoughts on that something we were very cautious of um in working with film lauderdale is that we want to remain film friendly we don't want to put productions off and have them go to hollywood because there just is no permit fee one of the first questions that productions ask or location scouts ask is is there a permit fee for your city and if there is a lot of times i think that kind of just puts the thought into their mind that it's not as film friendly and we may not be willing to work with them as much to get across the finish line okay well that's fair enough but maybe you could just quickly say there is but it's only fifty dollars yeah it depends how quickly you give the rest of the information and that's why we're proposing a licensing fee instead of a permitting fee yeah um so this will allow us to still um market as broward county having no film permitting fees it's really just an administrative fee um tacked on to staff or to offset staff i i understand what you're saying it just seems a little low but that's just my opinion thanks thank you josh if you could for tier one um still photography small production is could you elaborate a little bit more because you know i my family we like to go out and take pictures in front of that big oak tree do i have to pay fifty dollars for a minute no it's really only if you've hired a professional photographer um again this is not i wouldn't say that anyone's going to enforce a christmas photo shoot with your family um if you don't have a photo or a permit but we do get a lot of small productions um even for large companies like puma that shot at the basketball courts on the beach um they might still only have you know a model to wear the shoes and a photographer so those um do require a certificate of insurance as well as a permit can we can we separate that from commercial versus non-commercial so a wedding has you know a professional photographer out there and all kinds of lights and videography and it's a major planned production but it's not a commercial shoot right so i i wouldn't i wouldn't encourage us to get a permit for a wedding or a bar mitzvah or a birthday or much of anything else so can we separate that yeah absolutely and weddings bar mitzvahs birthdays as long as they're in you know in spaces that are not utilizing uh public property that they don't require permits it's really only they typically like to do them in public property like parks where trees are there you know that's a that's a very common location is some place in nature um is where you're typically going to see people want to take their wedding photographs and that's going to be most likely in a park yes um so i think i think i would separate this from commercial versus non-commercial absolutely um i agree most of the productions that come to us are for commercial or marketing purposes very very rarely do we have someone coming for their own private use seeking a film permit i i want to raise an issue though i have one of my constituents who lambasted the city quite extensively because he was woken up by a film production that took place adjacent to his house very early very loud very consistent blocked the street you may have heard about it he was pretty pretty vocal and and and let everybody know uh we had film crews smoking weed all up and down the street they were blasting music there was all kinds of of obnoxious behavior taking place as a result of this uh suggestion was that they may or may not have been filming pornographic material there don't know don't want to know i'll leave that up to other people what's our what's our control over the invasiveness of this into communities because they were told you know call the cops sorry i can't do anything and that's an unacceptable answer so when they're blocking the street parking all over the swales parking in front of people's driveways impeding access fire trucks and garbage trucks can't get down the street they're out there banging up around seven o'clock in the morning we need better protections for our neighborhoods our residential neighborhoods than that because if that's what film is to fort lauderdale i don't want it i don't want it in district one you may want it in the rest of the city i don't want it in my neighborhoods i agree um i'm very familiar with that situation as well um i will say film and productions do have to abide by all city noise ordinances um based upon that complaint we've also started um informing code compliance as well as parking enforcement when we have productions in residential areas we have also asked if that neighborhood in particular would just like to not have any production at all and we just don't film or we don't permit anything to be in that uh area so how are we doing that how are we going out to a neighborhood and asking if they want film production in that neighborhood or not because i've never i've never heard of my neighborhoods being approached and saying do you want this or not so what's what's our process or mechanism for doing that so we do reach out to the hoa president uh with the full permit package and ask if it is approved if they have any issues with it and they do oftentimes come back and say yes but please add you know no parking on the street or cannot block driveways or you know various things are they soliciting the neighbors immediately adjacent to where the production is so if we're going to go out to the hoa presidents i want it more than just an hoa president says okay yeah we think film production is good i'd like them to go and talk to the neighbor immediately adjacent who may or may not be a member of the hoa right right so we have a lot of non we got a lot of folks who don't feel like paying dues and so who may or may not be a member of an hoa i encourage everybody to join hoas because it's a way to get your voice heard so it's a good mechanism for communication but not everybody does it for a variety of reasons so is there let me rephrase this not is there there should be a requirement that the hoa talk to the impacted adjacent property owners not just that it is the hoa president or hoa board's opinion that filming in the neighborhood is a good thing absolutely and so productions that are within residential areas they are required to notify all homes within 500 feet okay um for feedback at least i believe it's 72 hours prior so they do have their buy-in we've never had a resident have an issue with it as long as they're informed um again most of these productions i would say all of the productions in residential areas do we do require an off-duty police officer to be on site so there is someone there to enforce the actual rules that police officer is also empowered at any point in time to shut down production if these production companies are not complying with local city regulations or ordinances so it's well within the right to fully remove their permit so we know that didn't happen last time we know we had rampant drug consumption we know we had violations of noise ordinances we know that the police officer on there did not shut anything down so where did that break down did that break down that the officer didn't know he had the authority to shut that down did he think that that the city's permit overrode his authority to shut it down help me understand yeah i could not speak for the police officer on duty that day i do know that uh pd did look into it um and they were going to review for further training for their off-duty police officers that are on site at productions okay again we just we can't have this be a burden on our neighborhoods i agree i i'm you know just the the neighborhood comes first okay thank you josh could you go back to the last slide before that thanks so the final bullet there you're going to be coming back to us then to talk about things like the park fees like you mentioned earlier that is that coming down the pike for us yes sir i'll work with uh the parks department as well as other city staff to facilitate uh public property use fees for all of our facilities okay when do you anticipate something like that maybe coming back when would you like it well no when when can you do it um i think the commission break would be a good opportunity for us to start exploring it i won't promise august but shortly thereafter okay because i do hear sometimes not that it ever really has risen to an issue um but we do get a lot of production in district two along the beach absolutely and in some of our parks so i'm just curious about that one that's all thank you great thank you thank you josh so my view is i like the permit application fee construct i like the tiered licensing i agree the focus on commercial so my understanding is there is this component of it and then the additional secondary component if you go to the next one which is in addition to the application fee that second component is that am i understanding that right yes perfect fantastic so i think we have consensus of desire to move forward city manager i just want to add that this is part of our approach in terms of cost recovery identifying opportunities for revenue and just making sure that we aren't leaving anything on the table that doesn't need to be left on the table so thank you yeah appreciate it i think it's the right right approach to take okay fantastic thank you josh thank you for your work thank you all right now we'll go on to business four business four is consideration of the future use of the united states post office located 400 northwest 7th avenue city manager we have to present today chris cooper deputy city manager good afternoon vice mayor and commission so this presentation today will seek to provide some information about the state of the current post office at 400 northwest 7th avenue also known as avenue of the arts the post office is planned to relocate from that site and then seek the commission's input and feedback on what the future of that site may look like so i'll go into a little bit of the history of the post office because it's important for the context of what your feedback and what your direction may be in terms of how to use that site going forward the post office itself was part of a larger redevelopment project in the area from 1994 to 1997 what i found interesting the post office itself was named after sylvia h allridge uh miss allridge was a very notable figure in fort lauderdale and in the northwest area in particular she actually founded the first broward employment agency a uniform company and a taxi service she owned many rental apartments was a landowner who donated land for provident hospital and saint john's church and she was the first president of dillard high school pta and donated all the original band instruments to the school so very important person very worthwhile to name this site after miss allridge the city actually funded the property acquisition and development of the post office using cdbg funds in the mid 90s and then lease the postal service lease the facility to the postal service for 160 000 a year for a 30-year term and that lease amount stayed consistent from the start all the way through to when that expires next year later in the presentation i'll share how that use of cdbg funds may affect the decisions we make in terms of the future use of the site another notable feature of the site for you history buffs is that the site includes a memorial to john h hill ii mr hill was also very notable in fort lauderdale's history in the northwest neighborhood he's considered the first black millionaire and one of the largest property owners in the northwest area he owned a number of businesses including hills grocery a hotel the windsor club several funeral homes and several housing developments we intend as we move forward and consider redevelopment of the site to preserve and protect his monument which is at the northwest corner northeast corner i'm sorry of avenue of the arts and northwest fourth so a little bit more about the site development in the history of the site again it was part of a larger northwest area redevelopment effort it includes the city view townhomes regal trace apartments the shops of avenue of the arts the broward health facility and the cis drunk entryway park the postal service lease expires on december 11th 2027 and that gives us the opportunity again to think about how we reuse and redevelop this site the reason for the relocation and conversations with the postal service were their desire to downsize this facility is not just a retail facility it also includes mail distribution services so their intent was to downsize into really just a retail facility we did have conversations with the postal service early on about the potential for redevelopment of the site and the potential inclusion of that smaller retail facility within the development but per letter we received from the postal service their intent is to relocate somewhere within a i think it's a two mile radius of the existing site looking at the potential redevelopment of the site as we consider how to move forward the site's about three acres and for context that's roughly about the same size and shape of the adderly development which is at the corner of cis drunk boulevard and avenue of the arts it's also about the same size as the adjacent shopping center that includes the kimchi supermarket so just for an idea of what could be done on this site two different developments but both similar to what could be done and what could be redeveloped on the site should the commission choose to go that route the zoning is northwest rack mixed use east that allows for a variety of development including single use residential or commercial as well as mixed use development it's very permissive there's no density cap it's really just based on the form and overall dimensions of the building and what can fit on the site and it can go up to 110 feet in height we did recently appraise the site in may of 2026 and it appraised for about 13 and a half million dollars so what for the commission today what we want to focus on are the potential paths forward for the site again we have until december of 2027 when the postal service moves out to really have an opportunity to redevelop it but this is a good time for us to start thinking about what that path looks like so we can put those things into action most of the paths forward require us to follow the city charter with the exception of retaining the property for city use a couple of items to note when you're looking at these options are all the options require a needed identified public purpose except for the option to surplus and sell to a private entity if the commission decides to surplus and sell the property based on the current appraised value of 13 and a half million the proceeds should at least be 10 million based on the 75 percent of assessed value requirement in our charter at least 15 percent of that per policy would go into the affordable housing trust fund and the rest would be available for whatever use the city determines lease for sale is also something to consider to do a land lease to redevelop the site that could potentially be a reoccurring revenue a sale of the site is really a one-time revenue source and then going back to the hud funds that were used to purchase and develop the site there may be some restrictions on how that's used moving forward or there may be requirements for the city to repay the cdbg program at least a portion of the value to comply with federal regulations we don't know that answer yet that's something that we're still pursuing with hud but it is something that we should consider as we redevelop the site one option would be to redevelop the site within a national objective of cdbg which includes um affordable housing removal of slum and blight and it's something that benefits low or moderate income populations another thing to note is with the charter amendments that the city placed on the upcoming ballot should the commission's decision extend past those charter amendments and if those amendments pass the vote thresholds for some of these options may come into play whereas now they're a majority potentially could be a super majority vote requirement um past november so lastly these are some key considerations to help the commission in their decision making on what to do with the site from a revenue perspective you know lease is a reoccurring revenue source potentially sales a one-time payment whatever the commission's desired use may be whether it's residential market rate affordable workforce uh commercial mixed use the site can accommodate all of those types of uses uh one pathway is the city could transfer the property to the cra the cra could issue an rfp per the city commission's direction for a use that's consistent with the cr northwest progresso cra redevelopment plan and again the federal compliance with cdbg could become a factor we don't know that answer today but we can certainly factor that into any decision the commission makes today great thank you chris appreciate it um commission we have three people signed up to speak if it's all right maybe hear from them and then we can talk further so jim karis you're signed up bernadette norris weeks and dodie keith so come on up jim if you want to come up first you have two minutes good afternoon again vice mayor sorensen city commissioners thank you for allowing me to speak on this item uh as i indicated before i'm now the interim executive director of invest fort waterdale uh this is a critical site needless to say as was evidenced by the presentation just now uh there are a number of approaches and uh alternatives i have to say the priority approach has to be based on uh the community and what the community uh believes that should be there the the site was purchased was community development block grant funds those are the community's funds cdbg as you all know is isolated to communities of low moderate income and these funds were uh expended to help redevelop the sistron community and we could argue about the impact that the post office has had positive negative neutral uh and i'm not necessarily want to look backward but i think this opportunity is not to focus on the appraised value of this land which is quite enticing in these days of budget constraints um what we ought to be looking at is a robust community engagement process before any of these decisions are made or even considered so i would argue that invest fort lauderdale in conjunction with the cra could play a very active role in conducting a robust community engagement charrette process where we engage the community very similar to what we heard earlier in business too in terms of the pathway forward for sistrug is bring the community in from the beginning let them decide or make a recommendation to you in terms of the reuse of this property in terms of affordable housing wealth building small businesses arts and culture this is a community property that should be uh uh guided by the community itself invest wall waterdale is ready to play an active role to do so thank you great thank you jim appreciate it bernadette norris weeks vice mayor commissioners i am speaking today in my personal capacity as a long time business owner my office is actually located just across the street from this site and i can throw a rock at it literally um for those familiar with the movie green book this site represents much more than a current post office it occupies land associated with a period in american history when african americans were often prohibited from staying in many hotels and um and so this site really represents um quite a significant although not designated historical presence um this is more than just a um a site it's actually a visible gateway into the sistrug community and i um am not standing here um supporting any one thing other than saying that this should be an rfp process it should be something that is um goes out for bid and that the community has has a has a has a chance to voice um what they believe they'd like to see in this community and and a project i understand that there have been long term discussions that have been going on i'm glad that this has been put in the public um domain so that folks like me can come over and comment and let you know that we what we'd like to see i've spoken with several business owners in the nearby area and i think we are all of the same belief that this should be something that um is aesthetically pleasing is um speaks to our community in a way that there is involvement i do like what mr karras said a little while ago with there being a charrette or something that will engage the community and allow us to come out and and uh and tell you what we'd like to see and so with that thank you for your time today thank you very much dodie keith good afternoon commission dodie keith i'm actually here um representing broward partnership today i am the co-chair um along with debbie orshefsky who couldn't be here today of our real estate development committee uh for our partnership and jerry gutierrez was here earlier as our president and chair of our association and long time fort lauderdale our engagement a lot of you know what what we do there and but but the the affordable housing aspects of what's needed in this community and that low to moderate um income level is so important to create opportunities for people to live that have jobs and that are they just want to stay here and work in our city and and be great great assets to us and i think what's so important when you look at this what we what we'd like to challenge and i'm sorry debbie's not here so i'm going to play attorney a little bit is we believe there's another process and i was at your cra advisory board meeting recently a number of months back where they did vote to go ahead and move this forward and move it to the cra and begin that process of taking it um looking at it for redevelopment and we believe that there's a process that would shorten the rfp process when you're dealing with with this low to moderate income you definitely need community output you need all that we've shown to do that as our partnership here in the city of fort lauderdale and in the city of pompano beach where we're doing another project and it's really important you have community buy-in but it's also important to try to figure out a way to do these projects real efficiently and save dollars so there is a process through the florida redevelopment act chapter 163 um which debbie has put forward which has an element in there that allows for disposition of real property through your cra and it allows it it's still an open procurement process it's somewhat similar to like an unsolicited bid process but it allows for a project like this to move forward simply not extended lengthy rfp process so we would really encourage yes they should move to your cra it needs to do go quickly the opportunities here where they talk about leasing it one of the challenges we found oh my goodness is when you have that um the 50 year lease does not allow you for financing so that option doesn't work for a lot of developers but we really encourage you to move forward with what you've got thank you very much we appreciate it excellent um let's see let's uh talk more about it commissioner glassman your district yes it is thank you uh first of all thank you to all the folks that spoke um i i've been i've been talking to a lot of people about this for a while now um and there's always been a lot of interest on this site my preference would be that we actually choose the cra pathway and i like the i like the state statute that gives us that opportunity to go about it perhaps in an expedited fashion but i really believe i actually think those hud restrictions will come into play uh if we were going to try and sell this property um but i don't think that's the best thing for us to do for the for the for basically for the corridor uh and for the city as a whole um so i'm agreeing with what i've heard from the speakers um i think that we should move to transfer this to the cra uh let the cra dispose of it uh obviously with all of that public input um do do that um you know do that rfp um and get moving on it but i i think by far that is that is the best path uh when we look at all of our options here thank you great thank you commissioner glassman commissioner herps any further feedback i i would concur i i support anything that brings more workforce and affordable housing to the city thank you commissioner bz pittman um with this um direction that we're going i want us to remember also the history part that was given um added to the conversation about the legacy of the land um what was going on in the area who um even the post office was named after um i believe even in this process we do need to include the neighbors um in these in the area so they could be a part of the process have a conversation to add input um we do know um we are in desperate need of housing but also whatever we do there we want to make sure the neighbors on district two district three we're all in harmony and what what is coming um so we cannot alleviate that part of the conversation so with that including opportunity for the surrounding associations neighborhoods to be in a space to share their comments as well great can we do those parallel paths i think we can yeah okay i think we can do both commissioner glassman is that reason right i didn't hear what you said if we can do have the public engagement um participative process of this while we're exploring moving it to the cra sure i i see no reason why i think that makes perfect sense and plus we'll have the cra board doing and those are all public meetings as well right so sure no problem and and also if we can add to that you know um the transparency of everything we're doing this is the reason why um i had shared that just conversation of i have had with neighbors from district three um not knowing exactly what's going on um chris did address the fact that because conversation i had was that we the city was refusing to renew the contract with the post office post office and that's not true correct but that is the conversation um in the community so when we begin to hear things like that we do need to address them um bring the facts to the table so um we do not feel like um things are being done behind our backs so um with the education with that let's make sure we're being um transparent in every area so everyone is comfortable with the decisions that are being made without a doubt it's hard to believe that there's misinformation being spread um just it's hard to be hard hard to believe i but we'll we're going to address that head on yes thank you thanks just for clarity uh there's consensus to do a conveyance to the cra and then have an rfp process via the cra to also have a public engagement or outreach component on a parallel path yes but the rfp will be done also with input from the commission yes i i would i would certainly think that would be required yes it would be input through you as the cra board because when it transfers over to the cra we would bring that back to the advisory board but also to you to have that conversation um and we're lucky because we're doing this very early again the post office isn't scheduled to move out until december of 2027 so we do have time to do all the things you've asked for in in parallel and bring that back in a timely manner and chris are you familiar with the statute that dodie had mentioned in terms of a possible path for us um yes uh debbie orschewski brought that up to us before so we'll work with the cra and see if that's the right path that the commission or the cra board would like us to follow once that property is transferred to the cra have you had a chance to look at that i haven't recently okay i'd like to spend some more time with that okay thank you i can give you a little bit of a high level overview of that so with a disposal process uh essentially the cra could say hey this property is available and it wouldn't necessarily have any specific requirements as to what the cra board may want to see included in the redevelopment of that property uh it's as dodie mentioned it's a very simplified sort of um process and it can move rather quickly and so i i think trying to find a balance between what i heard that's why i wanted to get some clarification as to what the steps would be to incorporate the feedback do a process but also expedite it i think i think we would need to maybe come back to the commission via a letter to the commission just explaining what that provision is in chapter 163 part three and how that might influence the the avenue in the approach i was going to ask i was going to ask this miss we could come back to the podium and um because i know you've been speaking with many of the business owners and even some of the neighbors in that area if there was anything additional you wanted to respond to that was said i appreciate that commissioner thank you and our position is or at least my position is and that of other business owners and i believe mr karris expressed something similar is that we should take the time that's needed in order to ensure that the community is heard so when we talk about having an expedited process that does not achieve that goal and so that would be inconsistent with what what i've said it will be inconsistent and i'm sure miss keith you know it's further along um than a lot of us but we're just coming many of us are just coming to the table this is a huge piece of land for this area it is one that um had previously been in your district uh quite frankly and i think that it is one that um we should take the time needed in order to make sure that we're heard and it is respectful of the community thank you thank you sure yeah dodie come come on come on and i apologize commission when we talk about an expedited process i'm we never would do anything that would alleviate the community outreach and the community input and one thing's great is is bernadette and i just got together on friday i didn't even realize that there was any concern in the community at all and that's one of the things that for our partnership i think you know from our 25 years here in the city of fort lauderdale we highly proud the the years we've had four homers associations surrounding our seven on seven projects that are fully supportive of us we would never short change that process but we would certainly ask you for the rfp process is a very extensive procurement process where this statute as debbie has pointed out and provided the information to staff a number last year actually that it's a process that simplifies the process but it does not alleviate the project from providing everything you need in it the historic aspects the avenue of the arts everything about this and if you look at seven on seventh which we were one of the first buildings now all the new affordable housing projects are coming seven on seven was the first one on avenue the arts to come out of the ground and our board spent hours countless hours to come up with what should the murals look like what should the exterior and how do how do our residents engage with the communities so we are very very engaged in that process with those associations with those businesses and we would just look forward to be able to have the opportunity for staff to look into it a little farther that statute before you just lay out there it's going to be an rfp because it really helps us as a non-profit be able to not go through that extensive process but follow the process and include everything you want in it and everything the neighborhood wants because we need to be good neighbors because we live there too thank you thank you dody good commissioner commissioner glassman as much as we can um let's work together to ensure that the neighbors are heard the process is i'm going to say respected where if we pace it in a way that voices are heard and that everyone's um input is considered um i did get when i heard expedited it did kind of give me a little alarm um with that but we do want to be able to pace this where everyone has an opportunity to sit to the table and have the conversation without a doubt and we have the time um we know that that lease is till december 2027 although in government speak that can that can easily go to december 2027 before you know it uh we tend to as a commission love to explore all options so sometimes we we're just going forever but no i agree i think we have the time and i'm more than happy to work with you on this thank you all right thank you great thank you so city manager i think the direction is moving it to the cra which i also fully support and then once in the cra then exploring options through the new statute through it may be through rfp but at least looking at the options we have and then coming back with recommendations for us absolutely we can do that the conveyance will require action by the commission anyway so we could bring the additional information on the disposition route and and maybe the commission would give us that direction at that point excellent i think that sounds good and the as commissioner vizie pittman and commissioner glassman um burned that there will be good public engagement outreach and so forth so the more you all can partner with us uh to do that absolutely i think is the right thing and if i could just add one other suggestion is city manager or commission as we just think about this i think having a memorial of sylvia allridge and john hill in the building if this does become a building so some significance in the building or next i mean something that really honors would be my suggestion just that goes without saying okay don't think about it but thank you it's good to have it within the records as well because as we heard the history the um the opportunity that was has taken place what they have contributed to the city um i'm sure this was the first time introduction to a lot of us here in the room but miss aldridge is a a definitely a um inspiration for me thinking about a the time period the area era that she was living in being a woman being a woman of color and was able to execute what she did not only for the the community she lived in but it went also for the city so i am excited that we will be able to continue her legacy and let it be known for um generations to come perpetuity is the word right yeah exactly um thank you completely agree there may be even be a naming component of whatever this becomes in her honor but we'll we can talk more about that later excellent anything else on business four fantastic okay business five holiday park parking update city manager thank you vice mayor we will have ben rogers assistant city manager as well as quentin pew assistant city manager and we have outside council available as well yes and so i the commission authorized negotiations of an interim agreement and we wanted to share some feedback as to where we've arrived in our negotiation process to date the term sheet that will be discussed today as well as the overall project parameters reflect where we intend to land with the interim agreement subject to feedback from the commission and any guidance that might allow us to update the interim agreement before we bring it back to the city commission for approval so this process has been one that is inclusive of various members of our team and we want to update you not only on the terms that we've negotiated to date but also the thoughtful approach that we've taken as it relates to this project so i'm going to turn it over to quentin pew at this time thank you manager good afternoon vice mayor commissioners quentin pew assistant city manager the following presentation is an update on the holiday park parking project and the proposed interim agreement term sheet the intent today is to brief the commission receive feedback and incorporate that direction before any binding agreement comes before you this project began a little over a year ago in march 2025 when a city received an unsolicited proposal a few months later the city opened the required 45 day solicitation window which resulted in three proposals by the end of august the city then engaged outside council to assist with the process followed by proposer presentations in december of last year in january 2026 the city commission ranked the proposals and authorized negotiations with the highest ranked proposer holiday park parking partners since the project kickoff meeting in february the developer its team and city staff have held regular implementation meetings to advance the project staff has also met with representatives from the parker and the panthers and has coordinated future future outreach with the ymca flagler village and victoria park civic associations holiday park is a unique community destination and the project would anchor the anchor the park with several major components including a an approximately 1 000 space parking garage a embedded fire rescue station and a vertiport on the rooftop the initial project vision for the surface parking lot featured 300 spaces but as the design advanced to 60 percent in refinements were made the surface lot was reduced to 292 parking spaces as of january 2026 as shown on the next slide the developers project team is shown on the left and includes a strong bench of experienced firms the vertiport has no capital cost to the city and a proposed total project estimate shown on the right is approximately 41.9 million that price reflects the developer's proposal it is not a final or locked in a price the final cost will be refined during the interim agreement process as the design matures and the scope becomes more clear additionally the figures shown are construction estimates only and exclude financing costs and city overhead such as project management fees and inspection services several work streams have been moving forward concurrently to get this project to this point the city manager's office city attorney's office and the core construction team have been negotiating the business terms in parallel city departments and the developers team have been meeting regularly to pressure test this project that includes looking closely at the real site conditions confirming what each department needs to operate effectively reviewing parking demand advancing the design and making sure the work scope and project deliverables are clearly defined the surface parking lot is nearly designed and in permitting both of which we expect to finish by the end of the year right now the parking lot count is tracking let me make sure i'm clear on that one right now the surface parking lot count is tracking between approximately 275 and 285 spaces depending on final design requirements a few items are still being worked through including accessible parking and landscaping updates stormwater approvals and inclusion of a partition wall to separate the parking area from nearby residential properties to the west a parking study has been completed for the garage and that study suggests that the garage width should have no fewer than 1 000 spaces based on the work completed to date the scale and complexity of the garage may trigger a level 4 drc review which would influence the overall timeline for this project the vertiport component of the project is still being developed and remains depending on pending faa guidelines regulatory direction and required approvals additionally the fire station layout will be finalized after the site survey and geotechnical work confirm the boundaries access and soil conditions we are estimating approximately 12 months from the execution of the interim agreement to complete the design and negotiate the comprehensive agreement but that timeline will ultimately depend on the final vertiport direction garage programming site survey and geotechnical findings as well as permitting a senior ben rogers will discuss the proposed ia business terms and what they actually commit the city to thank you quentin good afternoon vice mayor commissioners ben rogers assistant city manager so as we look towards the framework for this interim agreement we really broke it up into two phases the first phase as quentin said is a surface slot and what we're looking to do there is define it uh as we've worked through this process the cities own the design process and so what we'll be doing is delivering design plans to the development team they will then provide the cost estimates the backup to support for that and then we'd move forward uh with the construction of the surface parking lot and we envision that that would be funded through a cash payment from the parking fund the second phase would be uh through a the pre-development efforts for the parking garage the vertiport and the fire ems station and we kind of separated the the vertiport conversation uh for you today just because there are some nuances and uniqueness in the business terms for the vertiport so as i said as quentin indicated the parking lot uh is looking to be towards 275 parking spaces at this point uh based off of the enhancements that he referenced with landscaping pedestrian facilities upgraded drainage and so on one thing to note that the process for the construction of the surface lot is expected to be nine months but that is from the completion of the notice to proceed that is not tied to the execution of the interim agreement it would be nine months from when the city provides the final plans and the permits for the project as for the parking garage a thousand spaces and this would be 12 months as quentin said for the design efforts the negotiations to bring forward back a comprehensive agreement for city commission consideration that 12-month period we would refine the design work through all the elements that uh would be embedded or included inside of these uh structures and then have that not to exceed cost for city commission consideration the vertiport is part of phase two but again we pulled it out for conversation for the city commission because there are a lot of moving parts with the vertiport not having federal regulation clear at this point or state approvals we want to really make sure that we understand the what ifs uh and the vertiport uh what if the project's ready to move forward but the vertiport doesn't have uh the approval to move forward um and so we've structured the vertiport in a way that the city has the ultimate determination that if the vertiport would be included in it and it our intention to have the vertiport in it um that the development team would provide all of the plans the financing the potential long-term arrangements between the parties uh to the city and the city would have 30 days to make a determination if it wants to incorporate the vertiport or not the next steps uh today we're here to get city commission feedback we'll take that feedback and we'll work to interim agreement once the interim agreement is approved then we can start the construction efforts for phase one once the design the permitting is completed and then start the pre-development work on the phase two components uh and ultimately bring back a comprehensive agreement uh for city commission consideration excellent thank you very much ben appreciate it uh city commission discussion go ahead commissioner glassman first of all excellent excellent work thank you thank you ben uh city manager development team um i had a chance to go through it uh i have a question ben for you though what do you see as that last ring how far till roughly the comprehensive agreement would get actually executed what do you see as the timeline between the ia and the ca so as uh ac and pew reference right now we need to go through the permitting process uh to to understand that timeline and so i think that it's probably 10 to 12 months out before we bring back a comprehensive agreement because we want to have that guaranteed maximum price the fixed price for the city commission that would be all encompassing within the comprehensive agreement great and based on if we move forward with the term sheet today next step would be interim agreement and then you would have that nine to 12 months between interim agreement and comprehensive agreement to get into the weeds and work out all those details that that is the uh process that we're putting forth correct all right good i i like what you had to say uh about the vertiport the vertiport i do believe is a very important component but there are there are some ifs we we're relying on others it's not under our control uh but i i like what i hear out there i like what i hear in terms of the funding from fdot uh for this project uh i like what i hear uh in terms of how people are excited about this technology uh this new form of mobility i know in speaking with flagler village civic association and also victoria park civic association uh those neighborhoods are very excited about that possibility on top of the garage but that should not in any way shape or form uh get in the way of us still moving forward with the garage i mean after all the vertiport's on the roof right so we still need that ams station we still need the spaces i'm also very concerned because i think we're really far behind in providing those surface parking spaces i hear from the broward center where we're located right now all the time about the parking that we were supposed to deliver a while ago uh that surface lot of roughly 300 spots is really important we've got to get going with that so i'm very eager to move forward with this term sheet get on to the next phase and and get going with the surface lots and then also coming back and hopefully by july 2nd looking at an interim agreement and then having 9 10 11 12 months to get to the comprehensive agreement but i think you guys did a really good job everybody who worked on the term sheet uh it reads well to me so i just want to say thank you that's it for me excellent man thank you commissioner uh anyone else yeah just want to iterate great work let's keep going you know as expeditiously as as possible i think is is the right right mode and completely agree so thank you great commissioner bc pittman yes thank you again for this presentation giving us some more clarity regarding us moving forward um in regards to the vertiport um that is the developer's responsibility overall correct so if something changes with funding or any i'm not going to name anything but anything changes it has no bearing on what we're doing moving forward with the garage itself that's correct that's correct okay all right thank you just to add a little more color there the developer would be responsible for the financing construction operations and maintenance of the vertiport element of the project great thank you thank you commissioner commissioner herps anything good okay great thank you fantastic thank you ben thank you all right that concludes business five now we're going to move back to the start of the city commission conference meeting so that's going to bring us to business one so business one is presentation of the city of fort laurel's fiscal year 2027 2036 long-term financial plan office of management and budget i see our consultant from the stantec made it to the podium ahead of our director he's nimble he's he's very familiar at that podium so um as laura makes her way i'll give kyle a quick introduction um so stantec has worked with the city for many years they're very familiar with our processes and what they do is they do a look at our revenues and our expenditures to make sure that we're really positioned for financial sustainability over the long term so kyle will be here to talk about some of our major funds and we'll also provide some information on some of our other funds such as the parking funds and airport fund so with that i'll turn it over to kyle perfect thank you so much yvette good afternoon vice mayor commissioners and city administration uh as yvette mentioned kyle stevens with stantec consulting and what i'd like to do today is go through this update it's been another year so we're here to talk about the updated financial outlook with this first slide i always talk about the value that this process adds and so first and foremost why do we conduct this analysis we conduct this analysis to get the latest and greatest data from the city under the umbrella of financial sustainability so not only thinking about the budget process that you're thoroughly talking through right now but then also the implications of that budget process in the next five and ten years and thinking about the structure of the financial structural component of that that will show up over years and we want to be able to anticipate that so that we can plan for that in the future importantly down on the bottom of this slide as well as the process that we go through so this process starts back in the april and may time period and we work at the level of the business managers and directors with the various funds and the utility at the city in order to get an understanding of on the ground what's happening within those utilities not only today but anticipate what's going to happen in the future the office of management and budget does overall run the project and then additionally toward the end of the project we interface with city administration the city manager's office specifically so some of those data sources that we'll be looking at today that are included within the analysis so the source data is the fy 2025 unaudited actuals fy 26 amended budget and then the fy 27 draft budget as of june 8 2026 and we've included also in there the decision packages with regards to the cap uh the capital improvement plan uh we have included fiscal year 2027 and through fiscal year 31 so the latest and greatest data with regards to investments planned in the future a key assumption will be across all funds today would be the new city hall so right now the assumptions within the models is 15.8 million dollars of annual expenditures for the next 30 years uh starting in 2028 this will of course be updated as as new numbers are available but that is what's currently in the analysis and then of course within the general fund and utilities there will be subsequent rent reductions across most of the funds uh for lease space uh beginning in fiscal year 2029 uh so with that i'll jump through the next few slides i've put over here the eight funds that we'll cover today starting with the general fund and within the general fund i've got two slides of assumptions that we've got to go through real quick before i get to the updated outlook the first slide here is talking about the revenues and so quickly on the revenue side fire assessment we've talked about that quite a few times today within the analysis we uh have included full cost recovery in fiscal year 2027 that's 70 million dollars of revenue uh to be updated uh as part of the study we did last year it's an update of the study with it the full study for the fire assessment we did last year and then importantly we're including future true ups to the fire assessment as well so a 12 percent uh increase in 2028 and then a 10 percent increase placeholder for 2029 32 and 2035 is that to achieve full cost recovery in each of those years that's the thought so in the near term we've seen a bit more cost pressure and so we've seen those annual updates would be needed but then we've gone in the further out future years to the cycle that we've had in the past where it's been every three year uh trips got it and then for the taxable value from the property appraiser we have included a 7.16 increase over the 2026 amended budget for those ad valorem revenues we have updated accordingly current year and near-term assumptions for that and then back down here on the bottom we've got the las olas marina revenue that is an additional revenue sharing of 300 000 that starts in fiscal year 2028 and then bamr annual revenue uh so in the near term that's a 900 000 revenue reduction that's from fiscal year 2028 through fiscal year 31 and then as we get to fiscal year 32 through 36 you would see revenues in the range from 17 million up to 24 million and let's just pause there for a moment the when you say first of all the las olas marina revenue additional revenue what do you just mean 300 you mean addition into what's already estimated what give me context that's exactly correct commissioner from what we've shared in the past in the analysis so that's the update this year would be a 300 uh thousand dollar increase which gets to what of a total for fy 28 don't know if i have that number right off the top of my head i'm sure if that can no rush of that but just okay great and then the behemar near-term revenue reduction just for the public to understand that more why are we making that adjustment and that might be a vet question too so don't want to spot there thanks good afternoon vice mary vet matthews assistant city manager so we're making the behemar revenue adjustment based on what we've heard from the developer so part of that nine hundred thousand dollars was an anticipation that the hotel would come offline and what they've shared with us is they're delaying the timeline in which that hotel will come offline so we'll continue to mean online well offline so we currently have a hotel at that site existing will come offline right in build a new one that will come on now tracking yep um and so once that hotel is no longer active um then we will no longer receive revenue associated with it makes sense and then our fy that just to explain to the public the fy 32 through 36 why does that then become 17 million just so yes so that is the anticipated condo sales associated with that property um at that time as part of our agreement we received a certain percentage of those sales we push that timeline out because part of how those condo sales were occurring was the demolition of the existing hotel and then they would build a new facility there um so we still need to update those revenue projections those are from our initial um projections which the real estate market has changed significantly since that time and the developer may be making some changes to their plans so we'll continue to update and refine those numbers but we wanted to make sure at minimum we push them out to be reflective of the timeline that we're aware of right now understood and laura reese has just shared that la solace is 1.9 million 1.9 for 2028 2027 sorry great and then it'll get to 2.2 for 28 sir okay i'm tracking great thank you kyle absolutely uh and then on the other side of the ledger the expenditures and so a couple notable expenditures to go through the city's annual required pension contribution that is 600 000 annually for police and fire pension which will reach the seven percent target rate of assume in fiscal year 2028 we also have the annual gers cola contribution that's 2.2 million for seven years which started in 2025 and then of course in the model we also as we look over time we're including uh service enhancements related to growth with the idea as the city grows there would be some additional costs right now we have 0.12 percent of salaries and wages and fringe benefits so that comes out to about a half a million dollars in fiscal year 2029 which will then escalate by 2036 to 4.9 million for the swimming hall of fame we have 300 000 which begins in 2030 and going forward and then for the police headquarters and infrastructure special obligation debt service that is 3.2 million in fiscal year 26 but it will increase to 6.4 million in FY 2027 and ongoing thereafter and then finally down the bottom we've got just notable ongoing cost increases these are typical items that decisions were made in the in the past that now have come up in the future which will be included in our analysis and so the notable increases here total 20 million we've got 6.4 million from the safer grant expiration that includes the payment for 28 firefighters 3.1 million for the las solas downtown garage the heron lot fire rescue staffing 2.1 million for the cops hiring grant which is six police officers and 11.1 million for the new city hall that's the general funds portion of the overall 15.8 million cost i mentioned a second ago and also related to city halls we do have some rent offsets there so that's 3.7 million in rent reductions beginning in fiscal year 2029 and going forward with this next slide now that we've gotten through all the assumptions we can look at the dashboard output of the current general fund model so this is our baseline or diagnostic run of the model in this particular case i'm going to walk through some key elements of the analysis first and foremost on the very top of your screen you'll see the millage rate assumption by year so the 4.1193 mills in this particular scenario is maintained throughout the period and then next if you go down you'll see a box that is the cashless surplus or deficit i've highlighted that a couple key dynamics there um so first in in 2026 immediately to the left of the box you'll see 42.8 million dollars in deficit spending what that represents i just want to provide context there that is the pre-funding of some capital in 2026 as well as the pfas spending there so that's why that looks so negative it's just because of the financials in 26 and in prepaying that capital the real value of this analysis however comes to my mind as we look forward from 27 to 28 29 as it sits in the projection right now we're showing that deficits would evolve in a manner by which in 28 we would expect 8.9 million growing to 16.9 million in this baseline and then continuing out in the forecast period to grow the growth year is driven fundamentally again by inflation and then also those assumptions that i just went through of future costs that will impact uh the city negatively going forward um the other item that i didn't mention i just wanted to note in this uh the property tax value assumption so while the millage is flat we have assumed in this base uh run of 6.5 percent overall taxable value growth going forward uh what this will mean is on the first graph to the left the end of fun year balance uh if the the city continues on this path here uh what we would see is that fund balance stays above the minimum target within the general fund through fiscal year 2028 and into fiscal year 29 you'll be right there but we would expect going forward due to the deficits it would go below the target here um as we always update this we tend to see this evolve over time right these deficits from spending the real value i see here is because the city goes through this annual budgeting process like you've been discussing today it's really the magnitude that we see here that 8.9 million going to 16.9 million going forward in these next few slides i want to show you a couple other scenarios so this next one is a structurally balanced scenario for the general fund what this shows here is looking at a millage increase and what i'm trying to calculate specifically is the magnitude that would offset those forecasted deficits that i just showed you in the models update this year what we're forecasting is an offset against those deficits would be a 0.25 millage increase in 2028 followed by one in 2031 of the same magnitude would provide structural balance over this period and what you'll see now is on the end of your fund balance in each and every year we are above our minimum targets in these next scenarios what we've done is a tax reform scenario so a good amount of discussion as i've been sitting in in the audience today about the tax refund that comes up on the for the boat this fall in this particular scenario we've integrated those reductions in ad valorem revenue that the city would see if that referendum passes and what that would mean is in fiscal year 2028 we would add an additional 17 million dollars to the deficit followed by 10.3 million in 29 as that's fully implemented that would move the deficits in those years to 25.3 and 44.8 respectively so it would significantly grow the deficits in those years and i would also point on the end of fund year balance now you'll notice in 2029 we're below the fund balance and then each year going forward we would be actually at below zero going forward here so what i've done in just this next run is calculated again the magnitude of the offset in millage in order to offset those deficits we just talked through and what that would be is effectively a doubling of the analysis i just showed you so instead of 0.25 mils it would be 0.5 mils in 2028 in fiscal year 2031 to fully offset that deficit of course the commission has has been discussed early has a number of decisions whether that's in revenue enhancements or expense reductions as you go forward this is just presented to show you that rep full revenue offset to the losses that are expected this last slide here on the general fund is a survey we update each year that just tracks within broward county the millage that is levied for the municipalities within the county we've tracked this over 20 years in this particular slide and there's a couple key things that i'll point out here so first and foremost down at the very bottom we've got the average millage rate what's important there that i see over time is just the growth so from 2027 through 2026 with the updated information we're seeing the the average millage rate within the county has grown 36 percent over that time period another key item that i've noticed from the update this year is in fiscal year 26 we had a number of reductions as well so you'll see those arrows point to millages increasing or reducing there were eight reductions in 2026 and the average millage rate actually dropped a little bit in 2026 so with that i'll move on to the water and sewer fund if there's no questions yeah kyle thank you for sure this is great so commissioners i just want to check in with you all but kyle's you know a lot of good information in here i'm sure we've all reviewed it just in interest of time are there do you want to just get catch some quick highlights do you have any questions in particular i just want to get a sense of of of of timing do you want kyle to continue to go through the entirety um it's a desire of the commission we keep going keep going through the just at this pace okay great go ahead thank you kyle absolutely so the next utility we'll cover is water and sewer and a couple key observations and considerations within this utility fund the city targets three months of operating reserves as a minimum in each year some of the key changes to expenditures for the prospect lake water treatment plant as that comes online we've been anticipating this over time but now we've arrived at the year next year in fiscal year 27 we anticipate 15.6 million dollars of additional costs for chemicals electricity and personnel and then in addition we have subordinate debt and availability payments of 29 million in fiscal year 27 that will increase over time to 41 million by fiscal year 2036 capital investments excluding prospect lake we're targeting within this fund roughly 40 million dollars of cash funded capital annually from 2027 through 31 and then in addition to that has been the practice of the city over time to use debt as well and so there's 100 million dollars in fiscal year 2027 expected 100 million in 2029 and then 230 million in fiscal year uh 2033 and that's all in current day dollars uh additionally the city's currently undertaking the implementation of the advanced metering infrastructure project or ami there's 1.1 million dollars in contractual savings for fiscal year 28 going forward within the analysis and then additionally as you replace older meters um what you'll typically see is an increase in the build consumption and we've included that in the analysis of 1.75 percent in both 2027 and 28 as those meters are rolled out citywide what this next slide shows is the updated financial dashboard for the water and sewer forecast i've highlighted at the very top for fiscal year 27 that's the last of the three-year adopted schedule of increases that the commission adopted it was a nine percent and five percent that was adopted for water and sewer respectively and what we're showing going forward is annual increases of five percent per year will provide a sustainable financial future for the water and sewer fund so effectively we've gotten through that period of higher increases for both water and sewer and we'll be moving back to what i would categorize as more inflationary levels of increases and inflation in the water and sewer industry tends to be a little bit higher than uh inflation as we measure it say by the consumer price index just due to the infrastructure heavy nature of it and college um city manager the what's remind me of our projected date of completion and integration for ami we're targeting summer of 2027 and doing everything we can to try to advance that okay great thank you thanks kyle go ahead absolutely and so the important charts down here on the bottom the revenues versus expenditures uh the definition of financial sustainability is seeing those two lines on top of one another the expenditures coming out and the cash coming in we will see that with this five percent plan as we project it and then secondarily off to the the right is the end of your fund balances and what you'll see there is we have a plan with those five percent increases um to build reserves back to the target level the three three months of o m over this period and maintain it throughout this entire period and additionally as i mentioned a second ago this will also preserve access to capital markets and the ability uh to fund debt service going forward a couple slides on just the surveys for water rates that we typically include with this presentation i've got three of these and so what we're doing is essentially looking at the current rate schedule as it sits in fiscal year 2026 and looking at other peer municipalities and how it compares you'll notice that this particular slide this is a low volume user of 3 000 gallons per month fort lauderdale is right in the middle to slightly below average at 66 dollars and two cents for that 3 000 gallons monthly usage however as usage increases due to the inclining block rates that are in place the more you use the more you pay you'll notice that the position on the survey will change so this is 5 000 gallons of usage and at 5 000 gallons of usage the bill jumps up to 116.79 which will put you in the top 25 percent of peers here and then finally at a high volume so this is 8 000 gallons of usage that bill goes to 192.87 which on this survey will put us in the in the second position here only behind wilton manors and next i'll move on to the stormwater fund a couple key observations on the stormwater fund and so this fund is probably as driven primarily by the needed capital investments that have been discussed over many years and what we have included within the analysis right now is 230 million dollars for the completion of phase one projects that's a new bond in in fiscal year 26 here and then in addition to that 230 100 million dollars that's going toward the planning is design and and some construction for phase two projects and then as placeholders in fiscal year 29 32 and 35 we have 350 million dollars for future projects to continue to address the needs that were outlined in the master plan operations and maintenance costs so those new investments will lead to increased operations and maintenance cost over time we in our analysis put placeholders to anticipate those changes over time so we have 1.1 million in 2027 and 1.6 million in fiscal year 2030 as placeholders that will be trued up over time as those investments are made and then in additional outside of the large bonded projects we do have recurring capital investments and so the watershed asset management plan has 3 million dollars in fiscal year 2028 3.75 million in 2029 through 2030. we are targeting additionally overall in the fund 12.6 million dollars in cash funded projects on those mainly address more the neighborhood level projects and then those will be funded by utilizing available fund balance or annual revenues to cover those costs and so this dashboard now shows the updated model and analysis with those assumptions included for stormwater importantly the plan of increases up there that i've highlighted with the orange box shows the continued need for a 20 percent increase in fiscal year 27 of the revenues that are generated by the assessment and in 2028 it then drops down to 15 percent through 2032 and then we see 10 after that that is the exact same plan that i showed one year ago when we updated this analysis so we're showing a very similar level of increases going forward and with that level of increases the real key part here is that this utility will be able to support those new debt issuances so as we borrow that money over time the revenues are adjusting to make sure that that we can pay back the principal and interest on those bonds throughout the entire forecasted period here uh including in here just an updated survey again of peer municipalities that have stormwater services and have a fee associated with that um currently for a single family home in 2026 in fort lauderdale the annual assessment is 375 dollars and 75 cents and you'll notice across here a number of different uh dollar values for the peer municipalities however what i'll note is i go along and and do these presentations for a number of these communities that are on this list we continue to see a lot of pressure on these rates so it's not just fort lauderdale seeing double digit increases on stormer many of these other communities are seeing that and we've even added a few that are higher than fort lauderdale this year as folks have increased uh well above just um you know 2030 versus some of these have done 50 or 100 percent increases over the last few years to try to get ahead of the needs on this particular utility uh for the sanitation fund uh this particular fund has a reserve target of 1.5 months um of operating costs a target level of three months overall uh for the maximum uh notable updates uh from the recent contracts and service changes uh contract costs we're assuming to inflate so that's the single largest cost here in the utility assuming to increase four percent per year and disposal costs we've assumed a five percent increase per year additionally as part of uh commercial service within the city from private haulers the city receives uh franchise fees and so 13.8 million of those are transferred in fiscal year 27 as projected in this analysis to this utility and then we're escalating that by four percent each year this uh dashboard right here shows the updated analysis uh what we're showing is a continued need uh for five percent increases for the sanitation fund over time and what that will do again as we've talked about here today provide ongoing sustainability so we'll match our cash in and cash out and be in alignment with keeping reserve targets above the minimum throughout the entire forecast period we've created a peer survey here that's been updated this year for the annual or the monthly sanitation bill uh fort lauderdale's is currently 52 49 in fiscal year 2026 and i've included a number of other peer municipalities here fort lauderdale tends to be on the higher one on this survey however i'll always note that in this particular utility and all utilities there's big levels of service changes between different peer municipalities which can often change or dictate the overall level of the monthly bill uh just a couple other funds to get through as we've gotten through the major utilities um parking observations and consideration so we just talked through and you just had a presentation on the holiday park uh garage we have included that within our financial modeling in fiscal year 2028 so we have 35 million dollars of capital costs to be funded uh that would begin in 28 but debt service would actually begin in fiscal year 28 the third quarter of that year and then 200 000 of additional expenses that we just have a placeholder for that cost in fiscal year 2028 and importantly on holiday park no additional revenues at this point forecasted uh for the federal courthouse we have garage operations beginning in fiscal year 2028 with that seven million dollars of capital cost to be funded uh was funded in 2026 and in this particular case we have net revenues after expenses based on a three dollar per hour rate that would be projected currently at 409 uh dollars which starts in 2028 and goes forward and then in the las olas downtown garage the heron lot uh we have that one operational in fiscal year 2029 that adds an additional 475 dollars of of revenue uh it's a net change above the h lot that it replaces with regards to the parking fund uh the forecast here on the dashboard shows a couple dynamics that i'll highlight so for the annual increases right now we have a projection for three percent in fiscal year 2028 and three percent in 2029 that is necessitated by that additional debt service that i just talked about that's it would be issued in 2027 with the debt service starting in 2028 as well as the additional cash-funded capital that occurs during that time period and again a highlight that doesn't include any additional revenue for holiday park and then as we go through to the next fund to talk over observations and considerations this is the building fund so the building fund has a few different limitations on it florida statute limits how much fund balance can be retained in each year so we can't carry any more than the average operating budget for the previous four years and we include that within our analysis additionally additional building permit revenue so as we update this model we have a good conversation with uh building services staff to understand the projects that are in the pipeline and what's going to occur over time and we include those within the model so behind our annual revenue we've included a 4.4 million in fiscal year 2029 through fiscal year 2034 and then we have additionally other anticipated permitting revenue of 3.6 million in 2028 1.8 in 29 2.7 in 2030 and 1.8 in 2031 so that represents a number of other projects that were identified as part of the analysis and additional revenue that would come in in those years what we're recommending here as i get to the updated dashboard is a continuation of the annual inflation adjustments that are currently in the city's ordinance and tied to the consumer price index what this currently looks like in this fund is you'll see the 3.3 increase starting in 27 going forward that's the annual assumed inflationary increases and then what you'll see here is the fundamental goal is to manage between the orange line which is the statutory maximum that i just discussed and the reserve target in black in the minimum and it's very often in this fund as you'll notice as it goes forward um we see activity trail off and it's you see deficit deficit spending that in this particular fund is not necessarily alarming to me that's really fundamentally the idea that we have a really good idea of the projects that are happening in the near term but as we get on the back side of a 10-year forecast we don't yet have visibility into what projects may be occurring then and as we go forward um and this gets updated we'd likely see projects come in and fill that gap over time Kyle question on this and and part of your modality throughout is as you're for example here projecting increases over FYI over FY right is that in your process do you say to yourself okay here's what we need to do to stay where i think we need to be do you are you working with city staff to say hey i think we should increase this percentage city staff what do you think is it a collaborative what does that look like yeah absolutely so each fund's a little bit different uh if you're speaking to this one specifically uh right now the city has a practice of doing inflation it's set by ordinance right so i think this one's a little bit different in the sense that we probably have an overall idea where we're headed and then we see the results of that and that's what we're showing today when we get to the other funds though it's much more of a collaborative effort to make sure that we've got all of the assumptions correct and they're right um typically the way that that i like to run the analysis we we put what we showed you last year in we say we presented and we updated the funds and we had a forecast of what we thought we needed to do we update all the assumptions to see where we're at and if deficits occur of the financial forecast looks like it's no longer going to be sustainable we look at what the additional increases would need to be and the particular timing of those increases to get back to sustainability so it's absolutely a discussion but it's really fundamentally driven by this update process okay great thank you and in the central sewer fund so the city has set aside an additional enterprise fund that just covers the central regional fund and its large users that are participants in that given their agreements with the city the city of fort lauderdale however is the largest user and that's their 84 84 of the current flows to the regional fund from a wastewater flow standpoint the other users included here are oakland park wilton manors tamarack and davie which make up the remaining 16 percent some additional assumptions in the near term there will be some additional debt issuance within this fund 127 million dollars in fiscal year 2026 and 60 million dollars is currently a placeholder in fiscal year 2033 one of the main drivers over time that as we update this fund we're watching is the renewal and replacement expense growth and i've included a table below that shows how that's increased from 9.4 million in fiscal year 2018 all the way to the anticipated fiscal year 2027 amount of 24.3 million this is said uh formulaically within the agreements with the large users it looks at the 20-year replacement needs out of the plant and determines the deposit that needs to be made annually in order to support those needs and of course as we know that plant's been aging over time and so we've seen uh aging and the replacement cost has gone up which leads to an increase in the annual deposit this forecast here uh shows the dashboard for the updated regional fund what we see here is near-term pressure and so in fiscal year 2027 you'll notice i've got an increase in there right now of 16.15 and so those increases uh from the replacement needs as well as operational cost increases uh do show a near-term need uh and then in 2028 we again forecast uh an increase of 5.77 this will ultimately get set per the contracts and get updated over time so the way to think about this as you look at it is more directionally than the actual rate that we're calculating here this gets calculated per the large user contract however once we get through this period in the near term we anticipate that this will be more stable over time as we get uh the revenues up to a level of support the full cost of the utility and then finally today just the airport fund to cover so the airport fund is a little bit different than the city's other utilities in the sense that it has a very stable base of recent of leases air air um aviation leases and non-aviation leases uh that support the utility over time new leases uh in changes in leasing activity are really the fundamental drivers of additional revenue over time and so as we update this we look at all the current outstanding leases and have discussions about properties that are coming up in the near term and what those new leases may be additionally on the expenditure side of the equation is really fundamentally the capital and the funding sources for capital and so while there's a an amount of capital that needs to occur out there related to airport activities a good portion of the funding comes from either florida department of transportation fdot or faa grants which offset some of that cost going forward uh as we show this particular one uh we see in the future here for the airport um continued continued financial sustainability um there will be positive cash flows going forward and reserve balances we expect to grow over time for the airport um i think the key key item here is this gives the city a lot of flexibility so if grants uh do uh get cut potentially in the future for any reason um the city would have cash reserves and a buffer available to continue to uh engage and deliver on the capital projects out there at the airport on with that so the final slide but happy to go back to any of the slides today and answer any questions that may have come up great thank you kyle thank you for this presentation kyle how long have you been working with us uh my first year with city fort lauderdale it was 2013 okay wow all right so kyle can we blame you for everything right just part of it all are okay do you mind do you mind i will take the bullet sure okay thank you i appreciate it well that'll be in our next newsletter right yeah we'll disseminate thank you uh thank you kyle and thank you for your work and and in my neighborhood meetings these your presentation is very helpful so it's very helpful captures an effective way helps focus on their folks understand where we are where we might be so as i appreciate it um and appreciate your ability to kind of go through and analyze and working with staff so this is i think a very helpful planning process for us i'm assuming it's a helpful one for staff as they work with you event i'm seeing event nod that it is okay great um so city commissioners want to turn it over to you for questions commissioner herps anything on this great great commission peasy pitman no i'm good glassman great thank you for your work yeah thank you kyle appreciate it city manager i had some budgetary specific questions around staffing and some other pieces um i can ask you that now or i don't know if you have anything else you're sharing in the context of this presentation nothing further from me okay fantastic so kyle let you go thank you very much thank you so much for your time and and keep up the good work all right um city manager so a few questions i wanted to run through from budgetary perspective uh for your proposal um okay staffing so when there's various kind of data points i just want to walk through so one of the things is i see is a 14 million dollar increase in staffing in fy 27 i think is that sounding right and salaries and wages yep and so and so what so i hear that and then i also hear the just adding one new position in fy 27 right and then the reduction of six vacant positions so just help kind of how can all those things be true at once and what does that what does that all mean uh would be helpful understood vice mayor so in terms of salaries and wages we typically have growth in that area year over year based on either contractual agreements or the cost of benefits merit increases cost of living allowances so that is pretty typical that we would see an increase in that area if we maintain the same level of staffing uh there has been recommendation thus far uh to add some new positions as well as to eliminate certain vacant positions that we have resulting in a net increase of one position that would be impacting the general fund and that is in the clerk's office okay fantastic so the how many total new positions have been added to the city during your tenure well that that would be difficult uh i think the net increase to the general fund last year was six six new last year yvette is nodding yep yes net of six net of six okay great um the just a couple of the budgetary highlights i just want to emphasize my appreciation for um expansion of the psa programs at schools to help with traffic mitigation just across the city love it thank you um very happy about that expansion of the code compliance officers to cover times and days when we don't have current staffing is again across the city i think is very positive that would take us from four days to six days of staffing with a focus on the vacation rentals great excellent i think that's that's much needed uh i'm also excited about the lpr uh program and and expanding that to i think it's a 175 or so lprs across the city by 2027 i'm a big believer in lprs and this growing the program i think is great so just wanted to appreciate that one of the concerns i have is adding additional police district so we have been talking about a new police district district four in downtown which would cover parts of at least a couple city commission districts and we've been talking about that we were moving forward with that and then all of a sudden i i'm not clear what why we're not moving forward with that so um can you help me understand what's happening thank you for that and you know we shared a little bit of information uh in the backup as it relates to the creation of the fourth police district which was discussed at the january 13th commission prioritization workshop uh at that time the approach was to realign existing personnel resources as identified by the police department to assist with the creation of that fourth police district to focus on the downtown area based on um calls for service and the need uh since then the police department has done some additional uh due diligence and evaluated this option and at this time it's not being recommended to go forward because it is anticipated that there would be a significant uh increase to personnel in order to facilitate that fourth police district it should be noted that the police department did put forward a request for roughly 45 employees uh on top of their existing personnel complement uh those employees were not focused on the creation of a fourth police district and so they had identified some other opportunities as priorities and i'm fully supportive of the new direction to not explore the fourth police district at this time based on uh their current recommendation okay it's just different than as we had been talking about this including in january we'd been talking about and what i was hearing but maybe please correct me if i'm wrong i was hearing this is not going to be a revenue increase requirement this is not going to be a cost increased requirement that this will be budget neutral by creating a police district for to allocate just readjust is what i was hearing uh staff members and so forth to one of the areas in our downtown where we have some of the greatest need so i'm just trying to understand what changed from that analysis that was happening which seemed logical and rational and i'm assuming police were have done their analysis to now so deputy chief london is here acting on behalf of chief schultz who is out of the country sure yes deputy chief victor london thanks yeah you're good thanks vice mayor uh once we did the analysis of the calls for service volumes as well as the citywide view of what would be required to do a fourth district we knew we would have to change the boundaries in more than just one district so when we looked at that process and the number of personnel that we had to stay at not increasing the needed uh full-time sworn officers to effectively staff a fourth district we realized this wasn't the time to do it we need more time to do the analysis and ensure that the city manager can support the personnel in order to do a fourth district okay so it sounds like we didn't do any of that analysis before we started talking about this possibility we did we did the analysis initial yes we did the initial analysis we actually did a staffing change we went from um one staffing model to the current one we thought would allow us to have more yeah officers available to make it happen okay and once the reality of calls for service and then trying to figure out the boundaries it wasn't feasible okay okay vice mayor if i if i may add thanks i just want to look at the overall context of it as well you know as we are considering um the impacts of property tax reform you know i also did not feel that it would be appropriate to push for that increase in staffing based on the current evaluation that um has been brought forward so i just want to share that that that was part of the consideration also okay all right thank you chief that helps me understand a little bit more of the context so city manager this would just i think be helpful as much as possible and i know things change but whether it's police district four or the regional training facility um safety facility we have great ideas and we start communicating out to the public and i start working with and i'm sure many of us start working with other elected officials on other bodies to help line up and and support these initiatives and then we do a deeper analysis and realize oh you know district four police district is is not a good option or the regional safety training facility at seagull is not a good option okay i get it and things change and we allow grace for for change and so forth but as much as possible before we start um advocating for positions as much research and uh confidence would be helpful so fair on both of those and i'm i'm looking forward i think it's later but i'm looking forward to hearing what changed about seagull because this was again something we've been i've been working on in the community for a while and working with other elected officials and other boards very fair and well received we endeavor to bring forward information that is as accurate and reflective of the existing environment and the existing needs as possible and you know i agree that we could uh communicate more effectively and perhaps do a little bit more due diligence before socializing some of the ideas and so we will strive to do better at that very great and then when there are adjustments as much as possible if we can just have that you know kind of in real i'd love to have like real-time intelligence just real-time okay um you know this department's coming back with some changes uh here's the immediate feedback or if they can get me that immediate feedback we just did analysis here's the immediate results we're analyzing further but here's what we're looking at just things like that so i can start to process would be great okay thank you very much so that is i think all for budget that i have great we're good on that business one thank you fantastic all right now moving on in the city conference meeting we are now going we've done cf1 so we did it as end of session report now we're going communications to the city commission um and the first one as we progress here is great so the first communication is from the affordable housing advisory committee and uh correct me if i'm wrong city manager what i have is the motion made by chair condon who's here thank you very or was here there he is there you are i knew you were still here i was like um to gain approval from city commission allow for the creation of three subcommittees under the affordable housing advisory committee uh three subcommittees are zoning ordinance and accessory dwelling units then finance and developer incentives and then ami standards and affordability accountability uh these would be staffed by current members of the affordable housing advisory committee and that is the suggestion did i am capturing that right chair thank you for your time thank you for being here this long we appreciate your work um fantastic so city manager want to get your feedback and city attorney of the appropriateness and so forth for this staff has no concerns with this request okay fantastic makes sense to me city commissioners i i just have a question so i'm just wondering as opposed to having to set up three separate subcommittees why isn't this able just to happen in terms of the work that the committee does ongoing ask people to just tackle these things report back i'm just i'm i guess i'm missing the need to actually restructure when i can't figure out why it just can't be part of an agenda part of their discussion people on the board or committee work on those topics i'm just missing something here i'm just yeah sure i think the the charter for that this board might require commission approval for a a subcommittee which then has sunshine requirements so i get that part i get that part yeah my my question is why isn't this just being able to be handled as part of an agenda part of their work part of just when they convene why isn't this an agenda item those topics why why aren't people just working on that without having the need to have us restructure it with three new subcommittees i'm just looking at it from a structural standpoint i'm just trying to figure out the need as opposed to again like every board and committee has uh agenda items people work on different things on boards and agenda uh committees i'm just wondering why it needs the uh restructuring just a question sure and who's that directed to anyone who can answer city manager or uh bill chair condon you want to tackle that one thank you thank you city commission bill condon i am the chair of the affordable housing advisory committee for the city of fort lauderdale um currently right now we meet once a month for two hours and uh we have a lot of things that go on that agenda one is the requirement that we have in the state to create the incentive advisory report every year so a lot of our discussions on that two-hour meeting go into every month we have certain things and milestones we have to meet to get that report ready every september um and there's just not enough time in that two hours to tackle the things that we really want to try to bring one of the things that we're really trying to do with the advisory committee is to bring very solid recommendations to the commission on an annual basis when we have our working group meetings to be able to bring some ideas and some recommendations from the advisory committee to the commission um and those three items that we just talked about accessory dwelling units obviously being a very hot topic right now but also taking a look at the amis and and some of those kind of other things there's just not enough time in those two-hour meetings once a month to really tackle all these things we just run out of time so the idea here is that we could create subcommittees based upon the people that are already on the advisory committee to be able to tackle other things in between those monthly meetings that's great no thank you for that explanation it makes makes perfect sense and i appreciate your work thank you and also if i can add i was i didn't want to speak before our chair i am a member of that board and as has been stated um we the board overall is a great group of volunteers who are really engaged and they really um want to be um you know a part of the process and they're eager so this opportunity to be worker bees i think is a good good opportunity to take advantage of and um i hope we can support this overall because it will be beneficial to what we're doing overall in the city thank you commissioner and thank you for your service on that bill thank you for for what you do um so i think i think this makes sense i think we're all uh aligned here so city manager rachel williams she's taking notes on this and we'll make sure to implement put it forward all right chair thank you thank you for your great work um who who uh formats the minutes of the is it the liaison for each board who does the minutes of each board city clerk or outside vendor outside vendor okay so just a suggestion so if you look city clerk at the let's see the motion um where it's seeking approval from the city commission on these minutes okay so take a look at that and then what i want to share is if i can get there i want i'm going to go to the minutes of the next communication we got which is from fire rescue advisory committee you see what they did there the the fire rescue advisory committee there's a box around it for the communication to the city commission and you see how it's called out a little bit more i think that's a great practice okay so if that could be if we could do that for all the minutes if that's possible yep great okay thank you excellent uh fantastic mr chair do you do you want to share this communication bill brown chairman of the fire advisory committee called the frac i'll be very brief uh this communication was is being sent to ask that you always remain open for the need for public safety fire training academy uh we know seagull has fallen possibly fallen through we also understand that the stars have to align correctly in order to have the funding the opportunity the location and and given the challenges that we're faced with with the the city budget uh timing perhaps is not right but in future years could be so we ask that you always remain mindful of that as we move forward thank you okay great thank you appreciate it and i think uh you know again asking that we can continue to be open exploring public safety training facilities what's the next step there with with that city manager so i've asked the fire and police departments to develop a plan and a needs assessment and i shared via letter to the commission uh very recently maybe a few days ago now uh a preliminary outline of what's actually needed and what the purpose would be uh there's still a little bit more uh due diligence that would need to be done there is another school board site that both departments are interested in it was the site that we were originally looking at but for the school board sort of redirecting us to another opportunity that would become more readily available uh so at this time there is no immediate next step uh for the commission but what i have asked staff to do is uh to do a deeper dive into what the requirements would be uh what the the funding would look like would this generate any revenue how would this uh fill any gaps that we may have and so there is something that was shared with you but i still think that that's very high level and i think we can do more homework on this okay great sounds good thank you very much so that is the communication to the uh commission so now we move to city commissioner reports but in the interest of time it's 5 25 so what i'd suggest commission is we stop here uh so that we can eat um and then we reconvene 6 p.m and we'll include the city commissioner report city managers board these other components uh once we reconvene so does that sound all right just in interest of time okay so we're going to recess the city conference meeting for now we will begin the city commission meeting 6 p.m on the dot thank you you