Board of County Commissioners on 2024-04-09 9:00 AM - Apr 09, 2024

for a border county commission meeting uh commissioner campy will be tardy so we'll let him know that when he gets here um we're going to start off with the invocation from pastor aaron mehan uh from higher purpose pentecostal church uh followed by the pledge allegiance uh led by captain wayne hanners from the uh u.s navy veteran thank you again i'm aaron

mehan from higher purpose pentecostal church i appreciate the invitation um before i pray i'd like to just say one quick thing on the way here i was thinking of a principle i learned in church but then learned in business school and that's the idea of a organizational pyramid at the top you've got the leaders at the bottom the base those are the constituents there's different levels of management in between at business school they taught us that you needed to flip that upside down because our perspective is often the leaders are at the top they sit pretty up there but in actuality the organizational pyramid is upside down the leaders are often at the bottom holding everything else up right and so our leaders have great responsibility and a great burden on their shoulders you all have a great responsibility today for your constituents and all the business that's going to be uh taking place today so i'd like to in my prayer pray specifically for you for your role in this also to pray for this group of people that we can do this in order with peace and we are all here for the same purpose and that is to better our local government and our city and our county so if you could let's bow our heads right now and let's pray we thank you for this opportunity to come and better our county we pray that you would bless this council meeting you would bless all of these leaders lord god these commissioners help us lord god to foster an environment of peace in this place let us do lord what is best for our county and our people in the name of jesus i pray amen good morning commissioners

good morning my name is wayne hanners i if you are a veteran by presidential proclamation you are allowed to give a hand salute please join me in a pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible liberty and justice for all you can please stay up and tell us a little bit about yourself my name is wayne hanners i'm retired from the united states navy i served 20 years in the navy from 1971 to 1991 i served on six different naval vessels that's including into the pacific and also to the mediterranean also one time home ported in athens greece for the sixth fleet from there i was i changed my job i was a machinist first in the navy my first 10 years and from there then i went in was selected to go into permanent recruiting duty in a new navy job called navy counselor crew recruiting force from there i served at five navy recruiting districts navy recruiting district miami jacksonville san diego memphis and retired at navy recruiting houston i had my ceremony on the bow of the battleship texas in houston harbor which was a wonderful day it just came out of the shipyards but during my naval career it was an honor to serve i do i was deployed many times like say most of these were six month cruises but from my navy training brought me on into the civilian career and after retiring from the navy i became a private yacht captain in new york new jersey and also here in florida did numerous trips my time in the navy i was able to visit 37 different countries and since then i've been to 57 different countries some pretty world world traveled uh by the grace of god and the fellowship of the alcoholics numbness i'm a recovering alcoholic i had a commanding officer jerked a knot in my butt one day and got my attention and says you got to do something about your problem i was one of those that uh walk like a sailor talk like one and drink like one and i did it pretty well until i was held accountable for my actions but to this day i've got 44 years of sobriety thank you god for that it's a pleasure to serve my country i'm also an active member of the reverence motorcycle group we render honors we do a lot of stuff with congressman mast we do funerals but we are a local motorcycle group that honors strictly 100 veterans and first responders i'm also a member of the treasure coast hospice veterans honors program and that's been a pleasure i go and visit veterans either in ipu at end of life nursing homes or in their own homes and do an honor ceremony with them we give them a blanket knit by some of our church group ladies i give them also some certificates a challenger coin and a flag and thank them so much for their service and that's been a god's grace to be able to do that because these guys have sometimes have never been recognized but i've visited over 80 veterans so far in the last three years and at christmas time it was a real honor to go and deliver christmas cards these gentlemen and in the assisted livings and nursing homes but thank you so

much for allowing me to be here today and thank you thank you thank you okay today we have 505 public comment and then we have a preset um at 10 30 staff presentation of the history of bathtub beach uh 505 public comment additional items um consent 17 u.s sailing center martin county request for special use permit and department 4 uh 2024 legislative session final report uh we have no consent pulse and i will take uh commissioner smith thank you mr chairman good morning uh i'd like to move approval

of the agenda with the additional items of consent item 17 and department 14 as well as no additional

i will second okay we have a motion by commissioner smith seconded by commissioner hetherington all in favor aye all opposed motion passes four to zero with commissioner campy absent and with that we will move to um public comment and we are going to start with wayne hanners and if i've mispronounced your

name um please let me know followed by gary bradzinski before you speak i just want to you're quite all right since we are in election season politicking is prohibited which is defined as advocating the election or defeat of a candidate for public office either partisan or non-partisan this includes words states signs props and or wearing apparel that convey a message of support for a person or group

of persons thank you go ahead good morning commissioners once again and thank you so much for inviting me this morning to do the pledge i want to clear one thing i'm not a navy captain i was retired as a chief petty officer from the united states navy the captain come from private yachts so clarify that um first off i'd like to thank commissioner campy even though he's not here with us here today uh for inviting me to do the pledge this morning and also mr campy for the veteran flags that he placed on map road in palm city and if you haven't had the chance to see them please drive through palm seat and see all the flags my picture's there and i appreciate that things i'd like to bring to the board's uh awareness is that i'm a motorcycle rider and about eight months ago i was traveling eastbound on martin highway and about probably 75 yards in front of me a royal palm frond fell onto the highway thank god i was in a right-hand lane and it didn't hit me but i was able to swerve and avoid it please consider what you plant in these islands that could have been a devastating accident from something most of those royal palms are anywhere from 40 to about 80 pounds in weight and that would be a hazard even to a car coming through a windshield but please give that in consideration to construction on the medians around town and that's not the only place that's got these royal palms another thing that it's come to my attention is the speed on martin highway between map robe and martin downs is at 35 miles an hour a lot of people say that's because of school zone well that's only an hour in the morning an hour in the afternoon i talked my detail easy former commissioner and he said that that was first set because when martin highway was made the neighborhoods like danforth and stuff like that had no light to be able to progress onto martin highway those all neighborhoods now have red lights and everything else and we're also a four lane instead of a two lane um it's kind of crazy to be at that speed when it's 45 on both sides of of that same road on uh going eastbound or westbound from map over the bridge or to towards citrus um i wish this would be changed to 40 i was stopped a couple years ago when it was at 35 by police officer and he says i don't ride anybody um just under 45 miles an hour he said i agree it's kind of crazy at 35 through that zone so please consider in changing that thank you for your time thank you mr bradzinski

he is followed by katherine glover thank you uh i'm speaking again in regards to the request by voyage recovery for accommodation to increase the number of beds in their sober living facility in south martin county i reviewed hundreds of documents in the medical literature with the search words of best practice best number of beds bed density bed number resident density patient number best practice is resident number there's nothing to suggest that more beds are better than fewer beds for the patient in fact the studies that address this were a 2010 study by polson as all that says that we could not directly compare which type of sls was most effective and in the subsequent studies still trying to make a case a 2023 study just last year reported by subran et al found that the number of beds in the slh was not significant as related to abstinence and psychiatric symptoms over time what was observed however and spoken to as a downside were the conflicts that may occur over chores noise levels personal boundaries and some might struggle with coast coexisting with others who may have different lifestyles and personalities end of quote so what is improved i read the industry blogs that insurance revenue is gleaned from urine testing and that's where the money is the more residents the more tests and even this is more disturbing that once the insurance coverage for a particular individual runs out it starts again if that patient relapses so it can go on forever so you're actually not incentivized to help the patient recover you're incentivized financially to make them relapse the insurance that for urine tests is 150 to 200 a shot for point of care testing and if you send it off for confirmatory testing another 1500 to 2000 dollars a shot for a urine test the del rake mayor carrie glickstein said it's a perfect business model it's not a recovery industry it's a relapse business real estate agents are also advertising properties now with reference to how many beds the homes can hold out-of-state inquiries from frantic parents looking for addiction help on helplines are steered to patients who are people who are actually marketers who get a thousand dollars to five thousand dollars ahead for anybody that they've referred to this industry an article researched and reported by the palm beach post concluded that at one billion dollars annually substance abuse is palm beach county's fourth largest industry is that what we want from martin county i refer you to statistics some of which i quote from a 2017 paper by vogel in treatment and recovery magazine in del rey i quote in 2016 first responders went out on 1400 overdose calls about four a day and nearly 95 percent were generated by out-of-state occupants of sober houses and treatment centers 65 ended up in fatalities mayor major martin county chief deputy john budenseek reported in may february 16th that there's an uptick in residential burglies and gated and affluent community sir your time is

up thank you thank you um katherine katherine glovers followed by barbara urich hi there uh dr arnold

merriam he's a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the albert einstein college of medicine has emailed you all with his medical opinion regarding voyager inc's reasonable accommodation application these are dr merriam's and our concerns in voyager's request to grant reasonable accommodation they cite literature from the oxford house model that describes benefits to larger numbers of people in recovery living in any one residence this article this argument is medically invalid the oxford house model is one in which residents voluntarily establish cooperative drug-free residences governing their own homes and sharing expenses it is a non-profit organization with 501 c3 status obviously having a democratically run home and sharing living expenses means the oxford house model benefits from having more than four residents voyages model is the complete opposite it is a for-profit facility used as temporary housing for a treatment program governed by the operators of that program and supervised by its staff rather than providing a group home where people in recovery can help each other voyage advertise this property as a country house to promote its treatment services in jupiter the more residents they can sign up for their programs using this property as a draw the more profits they can make their comparisons are a deceptive misleading and cynical attempt to convince our officials that they need accommodation and have martin county help them make more money than would otherwise be allowed dr merriam's email notes that the medical literature that speaks to any advantage or disadvantage to larger or smaller populated sober houses such as voyage aims to operate is sparse he did reference an article in the journal of substance substance abuse treatment that found that clients living in smaller homes fared no worse than those living in larger ones based on his experience and review of the literature dr merriam's medical opinion is quite contrary to voyage's claims scientific literature does not support any advantage to the health outcomes of addicted clients living in homes greater than four clients voyage has intentionally misled martin county and in its argument to be granted the reasonable accommodation request they bought this property knowing it was zoned for occupancy by four unrelated people and now claim that they can't use it for their intended purpose without housing many times that number there they have distorted the truth to try to obtain special allowances that no other tax paying business or resident whatever be given if they bought an unsuitable property and tried to get around existing zoning this may not be the first case of this happening in martin county but i can assure you that if you run away from this program problem for whatever reason

it won't be the last thank you thank you peter er rich you said barbara oh i'm sorry you're right

good morning my name is barbara urich i'm here today also to speak about the voyage recovery center let's talk about the law in you in 42 us code 3604 the court held that a reasonable combination must be needed and necessary the obligation of the governmental entity requires that the reasonable combination be made only when it is necessary to allow a person with a qualifying disability equal opportunity to use and enjoy the dwelling there's that word necessary again hansen the question number six of the voyager's application says what are the reasons that make this request necessary voyager answers with referencing five studies which i personally looked up each and every one of them some of them 40 somewhat pages long i read every word not one of them concluded that having more clients in this case 12 is better than four is necessary for a client's recovery did martin county staff members look at all these studies if you should and if you're not i'll email them to you because i copied them i'll email them to you did did voyager recover prove that the increase in clients was necessary no they didn't there's not one study that i could find nor all of my other folks here that can show that more is better than less not one furthermore there is a law that provides for an exception for the health safety and property of others per 42 u.s code 3604 f9 the county is not required to approve a reasonable combination request if it would constitute a direct threat to the health or safety of other individuals or those tendencies would result in the substantial physical damage of properties of others we have provided the county with over 230 concerned residents signatures and letters and martin county staff has provided ample evidence that by approving an increase in the clients from 4 to 12 will in fact result in the direct threat and the health and safety of other individuals in the county's request for more information on the application i don't understand why they focused on licenses certifications building codes code violations sewer capacity no permits pool violations all of which are secondary items that if it fixed it still doesn't resolve the issue of the law let's focus on the law the law is is basically there is no need and there is no necessity and there is a direct threat and to the health and the safety of other individuals so for these two reasons on this application should be denied based on the fact that the applicant did not provide any proof of necessity that 12 is better than four and number two based on the fact presented regarding that there is in fact a direct threat to the health and safety of other

individuals thank you peter er rich that's okay followed by pat oh here's a good one um squax

thank you ready all right good morning and thank you again for allowing me to speak to you today my name is peter eric and i am still the president of the mooring safety harbor homeowner association of 162 homes however i am here as a private citizen my neighborhood consists of many seasoned citizens as well as young families with small children i now have more signatures 230 at last count and still more to come from surrounding neighborhoods signed to express deep concern regarding a young man's recovery center located directly on the west and east sides of our neighborhoods the folks on my right are also here in support while i reluctantly accept the business located at 18890 southeast jupiter road and i understand that the ada has federal jurisdiction regarding this business the martin county florida commissioners and supporting staff may influence the headcount of the facility at jupiter road voyage's request to increase headcount from 5 to 10 or possibly 12 uh patients must be denied and what and what could be coming next 10 to 15 15 to 20 and let's not forget that martin county code number 3.75 d reads a recovery facility shall not be located within 10 miles of another such facility voyage runs a home at 18083 southeast federal highway and tequesta only 6.1 miles away via county line road again the homeowners and surrounding neighborhoods of the county house respectfully i'm sorry the country house respectfully request that martin county deny voyage's request for reasonable accommodation as the applicant applicant has not proven need nor is the facility built to accommodate thanks again for your time thank you

um pat swicky and if that's not right please uh clarify that followed by terry cole thank you we

skip a few letters we say swicky okay good morning i'm i'm here to speak in reference to the proposed or the discussed um um uh passenger or rather pedestrian bridge over the bright line tracks when bright line railways was built with the minimally required safety equipment required by law it was built with the minimally required safety equipment since it began operations it has been plagued with overwhelming number of train strikes injuries and death on january 13th 2024 the ntsb announced it was going to do a safety inspection of bright line railroad system in the melbourne area after there were three deaths from train strikes within one week at at the same railroad crossing the three january 13 deaths in melbourne that week marked at least 108 deaths since bright line began operations in july 2017 that's one death for approximately every 38 000 miles of train tracks the worst death rate among the nation's more than 800 railroads sarah taylor sullick of scbnb stated investigators will work to better understand the safety issues at this crossing and will examine opportunities to prevent or mitigate these crashes in the future future on february 124 there was another fatality in vero beach and on february 16th vero beach had a second fatality on march 24 and by early march nine persons had been killed by the brightway rail system in this year alone earning a distinction as a deadliest train system in united states thus sparking further inquiries by the ntsb into the bright light safety standards almost immediately following the ntsb inspection and before the ntsb preliminary report was released bright line announced it will be installing approximately 45 million dollars in safety fencing and other safety enhancements along its track lines in bravard and miami-dade counties currently they were approximately excuse me currently there are almost weekly train strikes with vehicles and pedestrians in martin cant in st lucie counties there were two within the past week alone on thursday one in martin county and on monday one in st lucie county no parts of martin st lucie uh indian river counties have any safety fencing now being installed by bright line such as that in bravard and miami-dade area here in port salerno we have the additional unique distinction of having four railroad crossings with a very short distance when the 30 plus a day trains pass through the already bottleneck dixie highway traffic all traffic comes to its standstill often causing traffic to back up beyond st beyond st lucie boulevard when that occurs emergency vehicles from martin county firehouse cannot get out they are stuck there with lights flashing silence blaring while the bottleneck traffic scrambles to allow passage of the stalled ambulance and fire trucks needing passage over the railroad tracks or north ma'am ma'am your time is up

thank you um terry cole followed by michael circus terry cole i'm actually uh finishing off what pat has just

been going through okay when that occurs emergency vehicles from martin county firehouse cannot get out they are stuck there with lights flashing sirens blaring while the bottleneck traffic scrambles to allow passage of the stalled ambulance or fire trucks needing passage over the railroad tracks or north or south on dixie highway in an industry where seconds count valuable life-saving time is struck in traffic because of bright line right of way there are few and many life-threatening and or life-taking incidents surrounding the bright line train in our area is it any wonder that it has earned the dubious nickname as being the death train the current safety investigations now being conducted on the federal level are a start to helping resolve these issues and hopefully preventing further inquiries injuries and deaths at this time bright line has acknowledged its possibility culpability within the brevard miami-dade area by initiating the installation of fencing along its along its rail rig lines within those areas it is doing so by obtaining state grants and via its own expense for the proposed 45 million safety improvements their needed safety improvements are not being financed by the cities the towns or the counties that bright line travels through the citizens of brevard and miami-dade and other counties are not being called upon to foot the bill for bright line to improve the 100 year old style railroad safety equipment the minimum required by law that were installed by bright line for its privately owned business martin county has been more than accommodating to bright line by selling the martin county residents with its financial burden of paying approximately 60 million plus the dedication of a county owned land to the stewart bright line business for the stewart train station now the county wants to spend untold millions of dollars building three abatross urban style pedestrian bridges over the bright line rail system and dixie highway as its solution to the death trains frequently railroad strikes unlike brevard and miami con bright line is footing the bill and installing its own much needed safety equipment here in martin county where for summaries we have millions of dollars to throw at bright line the taxpayers are being called upon again to foot the bill for bright line bright line has yet to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the lack of adequate safety equipment in martin county saint lucie county and all other counties in which it operates its high-speed privately owned train station it's time that martin county stands up for its residents and demands that bright line start being responsible to pay for its own safety equipment equipment already known to bright line and utilized by other high-speed railroad systems in the u.s but with bright line choose not to install it's time for bright line to install the same railway fencing along the tracks in martin county that they're installing in other areas in florida ma'am your time is up okay mr circus is going to be

followed by amy pritchett good morning michael circus i'm a resident in palm city uh there's no doubt about it martin county residents are among some of the highest tax in the state of florida and later on today we're going to discuss adding another half cent sales tax into our county coffers there just never seems to be enough money for martin county and i believe i know the reason why it's

because we fail to prioritize we really do struggle with this and we give you an example of it

last september we endured just countless hours of arguments over how we're going to divvy up funds and we ended up cutting out of our fixed asset review boards more than a half hour talk about how we're going to stop putting money into a savings account fixed constitutional offices and immediately in the next meeting we pillage our general reserves for four million dollars to buy up

development rights inside a cra you take a look at our capital improvement plan we have four fire stations that need to be built out and replaced 100 unfunded for 22 and a half million dollars these are known services that we have to do but yet three months after we approved the budget we found 45 million dollars for a train station i never thought i'd have to ask the question because i thought i knew the answer which one's more important fire stations or train stations because we're not funding our fire stations but we got money to build a train station now i'll tell you what i don't want to be right about this i do believe that i'm right we can't prioritize but i want to challenge you today to prove me wrong because i want to be wrong i don't want to be right i want my county to stop mortgaging my kids future and everybody's kids future because we're spending money we don't have on objects we don't need and ignoring saving money for stuff we do need in about 90 days you guys are going to produce your fiscal year 25 budget you're going to start discussing that so prove me wrong show me you can live within your means show me that you don't consistently have to go back to the martin county tax cow and start milking us more money we don't have it guys 10 of your community is legally poverty stricken 40 do not make the minimum wage to be in our community the livable wage stop taxing us on all this stuff you got to prioritize your funds this is all in your control but you need to do it not

us thank you amy pritchett is followed by blank blank more blank elaine elaine more okay good morning

commissioners i would like to take a moment to thank um veteran hannins for his wonderful service it was really touching and i think we all are here because of the freedoms he provided for us so thank you i'm here today as a representative of save our salerno uh i shouldn't have to be here asking to save our salerno um i've been here for eight years and i've never seen a more determined dedicated or hard-working group of individuals as the people in salerno who just want a voice i went to an open house several weeks ago where we thought we would be able to give public input into projects that are going on in in port salerno instead and it was very nice i'm not putting anybody down about this but we were asked to provide input to the color of the building and and the little accessorizing that would go on in this park of the mooring field where all we are asking for is to be able to be able to see the view of the water don't take that away from us please don't take the view of the water away from our community that's what we want the color of the building doesn't matter the pretty little accessories don't matter what matters is the life that we're choosing to live living on the water and being able to view it so i hope i hope that you'll listen to the voices and save our salerno and and give us what we're asking for to just be able to live the beautiful and paradise life that we live in martin county and the waters that make our community so attractive why would you take that view away thank you elaine moore followed by jim moyer good morning i would

just like to say that i agree with everything that amy has to say we and salerno are going to no longer be quiet we're tired of being spoon-fed stuff we don't want we want representation for the

local people and we're tired of the way things are happening thank you all right mr moyer is followed

by ellen s aslan good morning commissioners thank you for being here thank you for representing our community i'm here as the union river keeper today i'm also a resident of martin county in rocky point i'm here supporting martin county forever it's a really important idea that its time is now we've done this before we know how to do it but we need to limit ourselves we need to follow the recommendations of the committees that have come before you with a very sensible plan going beyond those is probably going to doom it it's important for you to follow the instructions given to you by the committee that has thought deeply about this and have spoken to you all about doing the right thing this is going to be probably one of our last abilities to get the land that we need to get for the future of martin county and for the future of florida this is not going to be recreational amenities disguised as open space and conservation and and called conservation this is going to be for real conservation and it has to be for real conservation because we're losing that battle we need to protect the wild places in florida for ourselves and for the for our children but also for the for the benefit of the wild places they provide natural services that we cannot afford to provide for ourselves and we need to protect those and we need to do that by investing in our future and by putting that tax capital toward our future and investing in what makes florida special and important for us and makes it possible for us to survive the time is changing and we are going to have many many more impacts than we could imagine right now if we don't preserve that boundary if we don't preserve that space between the wild and us we're going to lose it forever and we need to spend the capital we need to do it soon and we need to do it without further restrictions that will only make it harder to pass as a resolution on the on the ballot and also uh to make it harder for us to control that that development that is probably inevitably going to pressure us in the future i i thank you for your consideration i appreciate your vote i appreciate what you do for our community but please leave it alone let it pass forward and let the voters decide thank you very

much okay ellen which will pronounce her last name properly when she gets here it's followed huh ellen asselin okay it wasn't that hard it's followed by linda albright good morning thank you i'm a member of the

nac in salerno and i've written letters to you before and i'm here to speak again about the manatee park where you plan to build a large facility for the mooring field we would like to save this park because we have used for years it's a beautiful view in a natural setting that you do not find anywhere else in the pocket i have said before how many artists come from all over the country to paint and photograph the views that are enjoyed here they come often the benches and picnic tables are used often by residents and visitors here you can watch not only boats birds dolphins and even wildlife many of the boats that are anchored in the pocket now are located near sansprit park very few are located near your dinghy dock i do not understand why that location was not chosen for the facility you're wanting to build we were given notice of the open house of the mooring field at the civic center in port salerno that invitation at the bottom stated questions we were never given a chance to speak at this event rather to pick a color on the facility on poster boards set up in the easels some had come prepared to speak you can imagine the disappointment that came that evening ever since we were told there was to be a mooring field we never got answers to the questions that went on for years we were told by staff this is not an nac cra project i feel we were never given that chance to even voice our opinions when you plan to take away our park i feel you were more concerned about getting a grant than our residents thank you for allowing me to be heard today linda albright is

followed by casey kniff or niff good morning if it niffin well i'm talking to you because i live right next to where the voyage recovery treatment house is i've been there since 1989 i grew my kids grew up there it's a very private road but publicly maintained i'm sorry it's a public road privately maintained people walk their dogs there i have an 89 year old lady that walks every day there it's a very quiet and peaceful road at the home i do know because i'm right there that they are parking their vehicles in the back of the house why i don't know martin county will have to figure that one out the people currently there at the treatment home they play basketball at night they play pickleball at night which is fine there's only about four there but i'm there around 10 o'clock when my dogs i still hear them but my question is and my major concern is what happens when there's more patients because they're going for reasonable accommodation asking for more people what's going to happen to my peaceful neighborhood when that happens so my question is why should a company come in purchase a four million dollar home that they think they could just move in change my life and the peaceful setting that i've lived there since 1989 i believe it's only about making money i just want to thank

you for letting me speak casey and she's going to pronounce her last name correctly followed by

i can barely read it um something mitchell thank you for the opportunity to speak my name is casey darling niffin i am the conservation policy director with florida wildlife federation i'm also a martin county voter and a river mom um you'll remember last time we had a whole group of kids with us to be here in support of martin county forever this is really for their future um so i want to thank this board for previously approving martin county forever the land conservation program um that we are trying to move forward in martin county for allowing it to be on the november ballot um i am confident that our conservation minded community will vote in favor of that conservation program and i'm confident in that because of the effort that the martin county forever team has put into the ordinance um and the resolution language they've brought diverse stakeholders to the table they have crafted this language so that people can feel assured that this taxpayer money will actually go to conservation and that is really important it's important for me as a voter it's important for organizations like mine that support uh referendums for land conservation um so what i'm asking you today is to remember the energy in the room to keep that ordinance language in the resolution language the way it is to um remember all of the young people that were here and um i want to leave you with a quote from a student and a river kid from last meeting um sophia keith who's 10 years old she was quoted in the tc palm uh in the gallery and she said um i think this really sums up the essence of land conservation true land conservation she said um i'm a giant animal lover and we can't live on this earth without plants you know it's as simple as that the kids understand it we need true conservation in martin county as jim moyer said our time is running out so please um leave the ordinance language and the resolution language as is allow martin county to pass this in november and let's secure our future for ourselves and our

and our children and grandchildren thank you amelia mitchell uh okay uh mark turnessa you might want to pronounce that correctly when you get here followed by mr tom pine turnessa you got it right good

morning my name is mark turnessa i'm a single father with a four-year-old daughter and i've lived in the mornings community for 14 years i am the last house on loxahatchee river road just before the last left turn to access the sober home located at 18890 southeast jupiter road this is a dead-end street which makes all traffic to and from this sober residence passed right by my home this facility that is already up and running is just seven houses down from the double homicide that shook our community a few years ago this double murder was committed by a young man suffering from drug drug and alcohol addiction this trauma has affected our community more than you can imagine just think about these victims john stevens and michelle mishkan who were in their garage one evening and were randomly attacked and stabbed to death at the hands of a man suffering from addiction the mere fact that this facility is allowed to operate in such close proximity to a community already scarred suffering and trying to recover from recent horrific trauma goes against the values and principles of our town even worse we are not even allowed to voice our opinions or objections even though we are the residents most affected by your judgment i'm not even here to request that this facility be shut down as i am aware they have rights to operate where they desire i am here to ask that you please deny their request for a reasonable accommodation to allow even more patients to recover in this home for the past few weeks our community has witnessed the black mercedes sprinter van running patients to and from their other facilities located in the area as if this isn't bad enough as a constant reminder of the new sober home planted in the middle of what used to be a quaint neighborhood they are also requesting the right to have even more patients located at this residence let me make something abundantly clear upholding zoning and safety codes does not in any way deprive disabled residents of their rights under the americans with disabilities act in fact it is quite the opposite by ensuring compliance with these regulations we are not only safeguarding the well-being of all residents but also upholding the principles of fairness and equality that the ada stands for the last point i'd like to make is that the ada is not a free pass to circumvent zoning and safety codes while it does require reasonable accommodations to be made for individuals with disabilities these accommodations must still be consistent with applicable laws and regulations by maintaining this balance we can ensure that the rights of all residents are respected while also

upholding the integrity of our community thank you for your time mr pine will be followed by craig

what appears to be coy good morning commissioners my name is tom pine i've been a resident martin county for over 50 years now today is stamp out hunger day in martin county did this happen by chance was it planned because today is also the day this county commission commissioners are going to adopt an ordinance to add a half-cent sales tax to the november general election for the purpose of buying conservation lands i recently attended a meeting with the hutchinson island preservation initiative where two men from martin county forever spoke about raising the sales tax by half a percent to purchase conservation land at the conclusion i spoke with one of the men he couldn't see the relevant relevance between raising the sales tax and food insecurity i had to leave that's what happens when people doing good things only look at the problem from their side obviously he's never had to go to bed hungry or anyone is for his family for that matter but many martin county residents do go to bed hungry every single night sales tax is a regressive tax and disproportionately affects lower income households with that understanding if you have the money and you support the issue you should participate by supporting private donations and you should also understand why there is opposition to this tax over the past several years at least one county commission stated we cannot use tax dollars to build affordable housing because taxpayers would revolt but it was okay to build the most expensive county-owned golf club at the county golf course in the insider state of florida it was okay now that that was okay now the new fire training facility is starting to open will this also be the most expensive fire training facility in the state of florida too this past saturday i went to a meet and greet in palm city for mr michael's circus unfortunately i had the wrong address and went to the martin county community center i answered the door didn't recognize anybody and left went out front and verified the address it was right that the address was right i returned the lady i believe that was in charge stated loud in a loud voice get out you don't belong here twice i hesitated turned around and walked out this is what a bully looks like who did we our government rent community center to on april 6 2024 around 130 in the afternoon a bully that was what you promote what you permit you promote what you allow you encourage what you condone you own thank you for your time craig coy maybe followed by ann good morning

thank you for my time i uh i had my granddaughter here but she got a little nervous so she's uh decided not to speak but uh she's lived here and she's president of her uh environmental club in her school so she wanted to be here uh i'm part of the martin county forever group and worked with uh many of you and the staff and talking to many people about this and i just want to thank you all for the work that you've done i would remind the uh the last speaker that the sales tax is not uh on groceries uh prescriptions and school supplies so i don't think it would have any impact on on food other than the inflation that we're all seeing otherwise so that's what the sales tax uh would avoid uh this this agenda item would uh have anything to do with the sales tax but i do thank you for your support uh we live here we we like it here and the staff and the team have been terrific thank you for

your time okay anne roland roland followed by katherine lawler do you want to use that wordless mike sure hi my name is anne rolean i am now a resident of florida i spent uh 40 years as a consultant volunteer in the state of illinois sitting on your side of the desk much of the time i represented the community for the mayor and for the governor for over 40 years much to do with alcohol teen drug abuse teen girls empowerment and physical and emotional disabilities including mental health so therefore i have been on both sides i see that there's issues i understand your job is to try and find a balance in looking at a balance i ask you to find what is best for both sides and as part of that lower part that was bringing brings everybody up from the bottom i hope you will see that some of us who now are ada sensitive in my old age and in retirement also have a fear of living where i live now if there's too many people under some of those difficult circumstances it is true that they need a great deal of extra thought and care but as do the residents because now i can be afraid of living where i live i am one third of a mile very walkable for most people and i live in an area where it is gated but it is not fenced there is a small gate that takes a code many of whom have the code and when they come in to our neighborhood or they walk through the yards to our neighborhood or they walk in from the park to our neighborhood we have to be able to see that we are all safe and it is hard for me to go to the yard it is hard for me to become the kind of citizen i was when i consulted with these all these certain people that have certain special needs i too have a special need i know you as commissioners need to balance this all i ask is you think of both sides and you think that this side of the neighborhood where we pay taxes where we've bought where we've moved all have the same kind of rights and i don't believe that the rights of the business to come in and expand because that is a greater profit should be out of balance with what we have as all of you find as we are on the same team so i'm on your team i hope you're on our team and i ask you to

deny this request my last speaker form is christine lawler good morning and thank you for allowing me to

speak my name is katherine lawler and i am strongly against granting any zoning variances to the voyage recovery center or the property located 11 800 southeast jupiter road i spoke at the last meeting about my concern for my safety and my handicapped sister after reviewing the request for accommodation and the voyage recovery website i believe that the business plan for the for-profit corporation that purchased the single-family home always included 10 to 14 residences they knew they needed appropriate accommodations for these young men they could have and should have chosen a more appropriate property a multi-unit building such as an apartment building hotel motel or strip mall that they could have converted and operated their business in fact there is a business on us1 in palm beach county old strip mall they converted and it's working out beautifully yet they chose a single-family home and a single-family home community where not one multi-unit structure exists it's really problematic to me that a for-profit corporation can purchase a single-family home strictly for business purposes then claim they deserve a reasonable accommodation under ada laws for a zoning variation to allow 10 to 14 unrelated young men to live in a single-family home in a single-family community what's worse local residents local government leaders mayors department chairs and county commissioners seem to have no ability to do what is right in their community this needs to change in this case the person applying for the zoning variance is a for-profit business and is not to my knowledge handicapped current zoning laws allow four unrelated people to live in a single-family home i do not believe this law should be changed to accommodate any for-profit business and i urge the request for accommodation be denied this is not the only house they could have purchased there are a lot more suitable properties around for purchase that would have better suited their business plan the fact is that the business purpose needs the zoning accommodation not the owner they need the zoning change to make their bad choice of properties fit their business plan and to increase revenues and profits think about the huge difference in revenue and profits between four residents and 15 residents granting the zoning granting the request and changing the zoning laws would be discriminatory to the individuals league living legally in the surrounding single-family homes in the community i do not believe the ada laws were constructed to protect a profit motive or improve a bad business choice let's be the first case to prove this and deny that request thank you so much thank you and

do we have any other i have no more speaker forms um seeing nobody else we'll go to the commissioners commissioner

smith um miss woods on this last speaker and the speakers relative to the um to the home or i guess go over

here commissioner smith and i'll defer to elise elder my deputy county attorney and we again

lay out the process for the public we have a lot of folks in here who have heard this now a couple times but for those that have not been present in the audience to understand what what is the process that is going to happen and what to what extent do we have say or no say and then if you can get through

that for us then i'll have a few more comments after that of course elise elder deputy county attorney so in accordance with the fair housing act and the american disabilities act the county has an ordinance that enables a citizen or a resident of martin county to ask for a reasonable accommodation from our zoning comprehensive plan or land development regulations any anybody in martin county can utilize

that reasonable accommodation ordinance the county has no control over it so what happens is somebody an application to have a reasonable accommodation from one of our regulations county staff will evaluate that application to make sure the information is complete if the information is not complete they will ask the applicant for additional information which is what happened in voyager so county staff felt like additional information was needed to evaluate the application so they've asked for additional information which i believe we received so also county staff will speak to the different departments within the county to see what the impact is of the accommodation so for example they'll send it to public works to see what the impact is on the roads they'll send it to the fire prevention division to see what the impact is from the fire prevention perspective once the county gathers all the relevant information they'll schedule it for a reasonable accommodation hearing that's kind of the stage where we are right now this hearing goes before an independent hearing officer so the county contracts out with a local attorney who has experience in this area of the law to be the presiding officer over the hearing the board of county commissioners has absolutely no participation in this type of hearing they have no control over the outcome so it's up to the applicant during the hearing to prove to the hearing officer that they are entitled to a reasonable accommodation under the law so the burden is on them it will be a a quasi-judicial hearing where they will present evidence the hearing officer evaluates the evidence presented and then makes a ruling staff doesn't recommend one way or the other whether or not the reasonable accommodation should be granted the board doesn't recommend it's basically staff gathers all the information for the hearing officer to make the decision and then the applicant has the burden to prove whether or not they're entitled to the reasonable accommodation at that hearing and then the hearing officer renders the written opinion most likely after the hearing and that's kind of how the process works okay so another couple other questions um are there interveners allowed there are no interveners in the reasonable accommodation process no it's quasi-judicial yes there's only certain circumstances that we allow interveners and that's when someone has to receive notice pursuant to article 10 the reasonable accommodation there's no interveners because it's it has to do with american disabilities act and disability so it would be

prejudicial to a um an applicant does the public have the right to attend the hearing and uh voice their

concerns opinions so it's a public hearing the public has the right to attend the hearing there is no public comment during that hearing um but they can provide their comment um via email um to the county and the county provides all public comment to the hearing officer at the time of the hearing so if anybody's provided public comment that email will be provided to the hearing officer to consider and so who here in staff should that be funneled to you it can come to me or um daphne schwab who is um from our growth management department is actually the planner in charge i don't have her email address but i can provide you mine and i could forward any emails to her it is e e l d e r at martin dot fl dot us so if you send me an email i'll forward it on to daphne to make sure the uh hearing officer receives it and would it be

advisable for the neighborhood to in writing communicate to their federal uh delegation and their state delegation and copy all of those responses from them to you to be part of the hearing uh yes you could do that as well i'm just sort of trying to siege you with what you can do i guess um if in this case the hearing officer finds in agreement with the applicant what happens next so usually they will

issue an order um that allows them to have that accommodation and what are the rights of our residents post that decision they don't have many rights available to them um is there a legal avenue that

they can file an objection in some form shape or fashion to some court um they can file an objection

with our county administrator um so and there is a process for the county administrator to evaluate it

and if that is like the other processes that go to our county administrator the administrator will

rule on the information in this situation the administrator has the ability to overturn the hearing officer and if that happens then the hearing officer i mean then the applicant will be

able to file a um an action in in circuit court or county court and if that happens i'm just trying to walk through every little detail so everybody kind of knows where we are what happens then so if it is

approved by the hearing officer and overturned by the county administrator and we go to court then we will defend the county in um the court nothing will happen probably until after the court proceeding is over um unless they get some kind of injunction requiring us to you know issue the accommodation and i'm not trying

to seed this with any real negative thoughts other than i believe delray went through this in a major way and lost in a major way it was in the millions and millions of dollars from what i recall yes um i think though that for our residents to exhaust every avenue uh you may want to consider what elise has just shared with you um and that if if we need to exercise every right that we have as a board um then we will do so or at least i will um but i will i'm trying to share with you the idea that this has been fought many times before uh and has not gone very far uh the other suggestion i i i'm thinking about and have thought about in the prior times you all have spoke um in all of your research that you have done about recovery or voyage i'm sorry um has there been any uh uh discovery of who owns and actually who is involved in it okay i mean i mean we can't talk back and forth but i would i would encourage you all in your research efforts to dig as deep as you can dig um and make that known uh to anybody that's willing to listen uh because you might find somewhere deep down in all of this there are people in martin county that are invested in all this and that may not be a happy storyline for someone to be part of as a recommendation or a thought and with that mr chairman i'm done okay

all right commissioner heatherington first i want to uh congratulate honor flight on their 50th flight on saturday um yeah honor flight is a absolutely southeast honor flight is a fabulous organization that accompanies veterans to washington dc i know that several of us have done it and some of us multiple times it's a fabulous organization their next flight is in may i also wanted to update you on some things that we have in my district i mentioned these yesterday at the uh transportation planning meeting but for those members of the board that were not here we had a meeting in my district at south river south river is a neighborhood on canter highway with about 540 some odd members uh they are prioritized on the transportation planning priorities probably at number four on the priority list for um some major traffic safety enhancement which include a traffic light a right-hand turn lane they have since canter has been widened the residents have a very unsafe condition getting in and out of the neighborhood so we've been addressing this for several years the meeting that we held just two weeks ago there were about 250 people in attendance um i thank dot for attending the meeting and presenting what we have as a right-hand turn lane into the neighborhood if anybody's driven down canter highway recently you've seen the quite unappealing delineators in that area those are very temporary in nature the purpose was to make sure that the turning movements in and out of south river made it a safer environment we restricted the left-hand turning movement out of the neighborhood to a right-hand turn only so those delineators were to test that moving and we are very happy the residents of south river are very happy with the way it's working so we're proceeding to put those permanent delineators which will be so much more aesthetically pleasing i promise uh the residents will be voting on the right-hand turn lane some of them were concerned about the sight distance um having that right turn only around the curve so dot did as much educating and presenting as they possibly could for that and that neighborhood is still prioritized for a traffic light and it's much needed if you've driven in and out of there so i'm going to continue to advocate that we keep that on the mpo priority list for that neighborhood and then the final thing i mentioned at yesterday's transportation meeting is we've been waiting for quite some time for some speed feedback signs and when i say quite sometimes about a year that we've been waiting for dot to get these in and there's been some supply chain issues with the posts so i'm hoping that dot can help us expedite that because just having the awareness of the speed you're going has helped in other parts of the district and the residents are very eager to get those speed feedback signs in as well as the sheriff's department i will thank them for their enhanced enforcement in that area and that is the update for south river and that's all i have

good morning i apologize for being late i had the opportunity to address project lift this morning and i wanted to thank them for their efforts this issue with the sober home is in my years of sitting up here one of the most frustrating and challenging that that we've had to consider commissioner smith i thought you did a good job of you know laying out how terribly restricted we are in our decision making first i think that bears repeating is the fact that if it were up to the five of us you would have come here the first time and that's all you would have needed to do it would not have happened i think the residents have been thoughtful and reasonable and they've done research and they've come here and they were always very careful to not criticize people that are having uh addiction issues and they've also said you know we don't want this in our neighborhood it's already there and they are reasonable in their thought process to say we understand that there's four people that can stay here but i agree with what i've heard this morning that you don't buy a four million dollar home to turn it into a sober home when you expect to only have four residents then when you layer on top of that that this street that could have been any one of our streets but this particular street has a catastrophic incident that took place where two of their neighbors were not only murdered they were mutilated and the story made nationwide news and is as horrific as it could possibly be and let's not also forget one of their hero neighbors that went to the eight of these folks was also severely injured then can you imagine several years later that someone decides they're going to put a home of people that are struggling with some of the same addictions and issues that the person the murderer did it's it goes beyond reason so my thinking to our staff and i wanted miss elder to stay is because this whole thing makes no sense it's a public hearing but the residents are not allowed to speak they can't intervene they can you know as commissioner smith said of our staff it's that we don't even really have a a policy to to object after the fact now i am hoping and praying that the the hearing officer the magistrate whatever his title is her title sees it the same way that we do because they're coming forward asking for a reasonable accommodation i think everyone except for maybe them would agree it's not reasonable it's not a reasonable accommodation because they made a poor business decision that cost of that business decision should not be paid for by the residents they were there first there is places you know we all agree that addiction is terrible and you know that it probably falls within the ada guidelines but i don't see how that could just mean that the residents just have to shut their mouths and just deal with whatever comes their way because it is it is an abomination so if as a commissioner i'm not sure i'm allowed to write letters uh to participate but as a citizen i can uh and i don't know if my colleagues are interested and i'm assuming that if you flood um do we have any idea who the magistrate will be um we have not

uh scheduled it yet usually our magistrate is keith davis but we don't know if he's going to do this particular hearing we haven't contacted him we just got the complete the additional information so we're now in the process of trying to schedule the hearing so we haven't figured it out yet but it will

happen very shortly okay um i don't know who that is i know the other person better um do you in your professional legal opinion think that she's a lawyer i'm asking her if you think you shouldn't answer this question do you feel that the more um feedback letters flooding with emails and hearing from different individuals is a useful exercise or is it a waste of time so if there's information that

might impact um the hearing officer's decision making like evidence that would be for or against the reasonable accommodation i think that would be helpful if people are just saying i don't want it i don't know that that's a factor that um is going to be evaluated it has to be public health safety welfare those kind of issues would be helpful i would say good to know and finally um a couple of

meetings ago there was a statistic mentioned that you're not allowed by state statute and i'd like our legal team to review that you can't have a sober home within a certain uh distance of an additional of another sober home and these smart residents have done research to say that it looks like there is a couple of examples of that i on behalf of myself exclusively would ask our legal staff and our growth management staff to look at every single detail and that nothing is left um to the chance or the decision making of the magistrate this is i don't think this is a us or them issue there's plenty of other places that these homes could be built this one is already there with four people to add one single additional person creates another layer of potential uh peril for the residents i think it's as i said in the past i think it's absolutely terrible thank you yeah um chapter four of the

comprehensive plan requires that a residential capacity analysis must be updated every five years and i think that the last uh residential capacity analysis that was conducted was in 2015 so one is overdue um according to chapter four when undeveloped acreage in the primary urban service boundary or the secondary urban service boundary no longer provides capacity for the 15 year planning planned population planning for expansion of residential capacity must commence uh when the primary urban service boundary and the secondary urban service boundary uh provides deficient capacity for 10 years the county must expand capacity um so this residential capacity shall be recalculated every five years we are at least nine years behind in this critical planning tool um this residential capacity analysis provides uh predictable reliable accountable uh expansion and it's a legal requirement and if we don't do this then developers determine where future growth is going to occur in morgan county so it's absolutely essential if we want to control our future growth which we do we put it in the right place um and in the right way that we need to have the residential capacity analysis as soon as possible thank you i completely agree

with that um i actually drove past this home a couple weeks ago and was just amazed at how it's absolutely beautiful home in an absolutely gorgeous neighborhood um why my business mind is just trying to figure out why how that makes sense but anyway i hear what you're saying it's in my district uh my two colleagues have done a wonderful job as usual um stating i think what our position is uh up here which i'm in full support i have um a request of the board to uh authorize me to sign a letter uh the village of tequesta is requesting a support letter to uh governor de santis for improvements of tequesta park tequesta park is a very odd thing it is in martin county and it is owned by the state of florida so um and this letter is to uh for improvements to be funded by the state uh which would include baseball and softball field improvements multi-purpose fields basketball courts and a dog park and some nature walks uh we wrote a letter to um um representative snyder um the request was partially funded so this letter is uh begging the governor not to to uh veto that out of the budget um which i'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot of other uh issues um that are similar to that my pet way water potable water project is is one that was also partially funded and is sitting on his desk and hoping that we don't get vetoed so anyway i just need um uh approval um do i need a motion or it's it was part of your uh um legislative priorities to support that so um ahead and on would be sufficient yes yes take a motion

motion to approve the chairman's signature on a letter to okay second all right we have a motion

by commissioner smith seconded by commissioner hetherington all in favor all opposed motion

passes unanimously thank you i've heard that the governor is in martin county this morning uh right now actually so we could go see him cool i can't say nice all right actually i heard he's at the walgreen on us1 and i'm not kidding that's what i heard he is he's doing a press conference there at

walgreens that's what i heard okay i would recommend that you all get in your yeah no doubt

you won't see him all right i have a few items at the end of the day so if you could pause before you end the meeting so okay and conclude some business all right so what we want to try to do i think before the 10 30 break is do um is do our um sales tax uh public hearing number one we're going to do that after yeah donna is that what you told me to do yes that's a good idea yeah sure all right so uh public hearing to consider adoption of an ordinance calling for the referendum on a 10-year half-cent sales tax for uh conservation lands um miss woods good morning

mr chairman and members of the board sarah woods county attorney for the record um this agenda item brings forward a draft ordinance calling for a referendum on the question of whether to levy a 10-year one-half-cent local government's infrastructure sales tax for the acquisition of conservation lands to be placed on the november 5th 2024 general election ballot um this was discussed most recently on um february 20th of this year we county staff in coordination with the conservation initiative martin county county forever has prepared an ordinance that calls for the referendum the maybe we should put the don if you could put the ballot language up there it is um it will the the title of the ballot will be lands to protect water quality natural areas and wildlife habitat one-half percent sales tax the question is shall martin county protect its water quality and unique character by acquiring critical natural lands in martin county within the indian river lagoon south talmar loxahatchee and saint lucy headwaters and blueways areas and provide municipal infrastructure allowed by law by loving a one-half percent county sales tax for 10 years starting january 1st of 2025 with an annual audit and citizen oversight um i'm not going to go line by line through every bit of the ordinance but section six is probably the most important of the ordinance it limits how the county can can use its share of the proceeds they the county may use it to acquire by fee simple environmentally significant lands for the purposes of preserving conserving and restoring the saint lucie river indian river lagoon palmar and loxahatchee saint lucy river headwaters thereby protecting the water sources preserving natural areas and beaches land acquisition and preservation is limited to the properties that are known or identified in those areas that i had identified at the beginning of this agenda item which is the palmar water control district the natural lands component of the indian river lagoon south project of the comprehensive everglades restoration plan loxahatchee and saint lucy headwaters and blue blueways areas in martin county it uh section b of this subsection b of this ordinance allows the county to acquire perpetual interest in lands through conservation easements in such environmentally significant lands so both by fee simple and by um by conservation easements both of those would be and that's all the the the uh land the um acquisition can be used for the proceeds um uh following the board's input at the february 20th meeting um there was discussion about how to establish a citizens oversight committee who under the ordinance would review and make recommendations to the board about any lands to be acquired or conservation easements um because as well may be uh the fact it could take 20 or 30 years for us to um expend all of these monies it's important for the um land oversight the citizens oversight committee to be described in my legal opinion um and the county administrators in areas of expertise as opposed to a specific group the specific groups can then be implemented by the ordinance uh i mean the resolution in this case the uh current language is that the el eloc which is the environmental lands oversight committee shall be composed of nine martin county registered voters from each of the following categories four members shall be appointed from dedicated environmental organizations with missions focused focused on education research preservation rest restoration and protecting the public's local water quality the natural environment and to enhance and restore local ecosystems three members shall be appointed with one member representing each of the following an organization with the mission focused focused on fiscal oversight of government bundy budgets and spending an organization with mission focused on the real estate industry and finally an organization with a mission focused on responsible business growth and economic development one member shall be appointed from an organization with a mission focused on educating promoting and protecting the interests of agricultural farmers and ranchers and finally one member shall be appointed from an organization with a dedicated mission to preserve protect and secure natural lands in martin county um this as i said before this advisory committee would be established by a resolution of the board once um and would come into existence assuming that this ordinance is

approved ratified on the ballot measure um the draft resolution establishing the environmental oversight committee will be

submitted for uh board of county commissioner consideration at a future board meeting if this ordinance is preserved approved today um just a quick overview of the issues the duration of the tax the amount of the tax uh their section 6 1c places a limit of five percent of the purchase price of any acquired land to be used for exotic removal or restoration of conservation land as an aside this again reiterates that this uh the sales tax proceeds are going to be

used for land acquisition and preservation and for really nothing else a small portion is for for uh restoration of the acquired land um i attached a memo containing the schedule for the november 5th election um again the ordinance if approved won't take effect unless it's approved by a majority of the voters at the november 5th election um this ordinance will also be submitted to the i'm going to the florida um lost it's a it's a florida uh now uh florida um oversight committee with the state of florida that will do a um an analysis of the viability of i apologize i forgot the name of the organization but that's under florida law and will that will come come back to martin county and be publicly available on our website prior to the november 5th election and with that um my recommendation is move that the board approve the draft ordinance if the board would like to place the question of the sales tax on november 5th 2024 consideration by martin voters and i'm happy to take any questions

any questions for staff seeing none this is a public uh mr camping just a reiteration of the fact that this is not the board raising a half a cent sales tax this is the board agreeing to allow the citizens of martin county to go through the summer for and against let their voices be heard whether they like this idea or they don't and that they be given the opportunity to vote and that's how i see it i think the language that miss woods and all of the interested parties that participated in wordsmithing this did an excellent job it eliminates the concern that if you specifically identify a group that three or four or five years from now happens to no longer exist it's a difficult process to remove that specific group um so i am in complete favor of allowing our residents to make their own determination thank you

commissioner hetherington one i would i would just reiterate the conservation easements would apply to things like florida your overall lands and so i'm i'm happy to see that language was in there because i think not only in martin county but if we're going to preserve land in florida as ag is one of our biggest industries that we're going to have to figure out how to keep agricultural industries farming and ranching and things like conservation easements are things that can keep that that those operations viable so um i did have a question on your member board because i don't recall seeing this in the draft there's four members from an environmental agency and on the bottom it says one member from an organization dedicated mission to preserve and protect uh preserving lands that

sounds like the same thing to me well i think the the four members are more looking at education and restoring and the the difference would be the final the one member is someone that is an organization is trying to acquire lands as opposed to advocating for the preservation of lands it there's it's a different mission for some of our organizations i'd like to see that one include because you the key is

going to be finding willing sellers and most of this land other than the blue ways is going to be agriculturally um owned land so the more agricultural interests if you could put another one at the table you have one include in that statement that there is um somebody that is an owner can sit at the table you you need those willing sellers that would be in my opinion i because i think you're going to need as many willing sellers as you can get i've heard a lot from a different amount of residents on this both four and against it um i i agreed to put it out to the voters for their determination but i just didn't understand it looked to me like that last appointee is the same as the first um bullet point

i i think in discussions and mr donaldson or maybe martin forever may want to uh step up i think the idea was an organization whose primary mission is acquisition um as opposed acquiring the property and that would be provide an additional almost a professional skill as the uh as that was done and the the ag was intended for the representative of of someone of a entity that was interested in preserving ag farmers and ranchers i don't think this is what you were saying but a owner someone who would conceivably want to put their property up for acquisition couldn't sit on the acquisition board

they'd have a conflict of interest i'm more interested in the industry itself yes if you want to preserve more land in florida it not only martin county then you've got to keep that land being productive because if ranchers and farmers can't farm their land then they're going to sell it off for development so anything like a conservation easement i just noticed it i want a clarification because it seemed to me i didn't understand it it you made your point but it seemed to me that it fell in that block of the four but i understand what you're saying yes ma'am so we do have somebody that seems to want

to actually comment on your comment so that's part of the group as part of the thank you very much

craig coy again uh i was part of the group that worked with the staff to try to to do some of the drafting of this and it was it was done in obviously good faith to address the concerns the legitimate and proper concerns that uh that were raised and in all candor and all fairness the uh the group that you're talking about would be if you will a uh a non-advocate group in the sense of for a specific area of interest whether it be development real estate business uh preservation and it was candidly uh a group similar to uh martin county forever of trying to be a you know a non-advocate group for a specific area but try to find a common ground and to be the uh the safe keeper of the uh of the

ordinance thank you commissioner smith um it wasn't what i was going to comment on but now that stacy has raised it i i in in many ways i i agree with her thought process um i raised this last time when ag wasn't even in the discussion ag was left completely off of the discussion list and if the largest chunks of land that we want to acquire are ag or we want to have easements on the more representation to get us to where we want to get to i think is imperative i i don't excuse me i'm just thinking about when this board sits and and talks and and and is and and they're going to vote amongst themselves to send us a recommendation you have a and rightfully so you have a very heavy weighted

environmental are we going to do i don't know what we're going to do here we're we're we're

let commissioner smith finishes um thoughts rightfully so we have a very heavy weighted environmental focus on this committee um in many ways i would think that you would want your largest land collective group to be part of this discussion as as well to be advocates for exactly what we're trying to accomplish um i i think that you could blend excuse me the language of one into your four and get what you want by having an advocate if there is such a thing for an organization that wants to maintain the integrity of what this was all about in the first place um there always seems to be this under current of of concern that somehow we are not we the county or or your local government is not going to do what was written in the first place and i that stresses me a lot because i've been involved in probably the last three of these measures and to the extent that i have worked on them i have supported them i have funded them we have accomplished exactly what was set out to be done in the first place and so the fear the underlying concern the marketing tool of saying well the purpose of this is to make sure that it happens the way we wanted it to be i i will tell you i have spent a lot of my private money in the past supporting these measures and they have passed the ones that i could get behind and support and they did exactly what we asked them to do and this is tagging on to thousands and thousands of acres that we have acquired as part of former tax referendums and so i don't i don't share the concern that however the makeup of this committee is formed um that it is somehow there to to protect integrity of the ordinance itself it is a legal binding document that there have been times in the past where there was money sitting there that we considered going back to the voters and asking them to reassign the funding from that former referendum because it couldn't be spent enough on what we wanted to be spent we didn't do it and it took as sarah said it taken 20 years to spend all that money um anyway i i don't disagree with with with commissioner hetherington i i i i would be more happy to see an additional ag representative of some sort and then there's the other issue and i have no doubt that the speakers that got up and spoke this morning they although they weren't looking directly at me um it was certainly my comments to to one of the representatives about something i wished i had brought up in the conversation in our last hearing relative to an additional category of land acquisition and that goes directly to the idea that we would have funding the availability of funding to go to acquisition of land or anything land if the only way to say it next to existing parks um i i think of how many times we would love to have been able to acquire additional parkland and i know that the idea behind this is conservation and that no one will ever step foot on a piece of this property someday but i think about additionally how important it is and some of the speakers spoke this morning to our kids and their future and for those who spoke to your kids in your future our parks i think are as in as important and as integral to our community as any other piece of this is to our community um the representative i spoke to i said look if there aren't three votes from the board to add this component to it fine i'll walk away from it you can all go do your thing and and i hope to god it passes for you um but at the same time i just think and i and i can give you a perfect example we we over in rio we have uh langford park and there's two commercial properties out and langford is pretty much hemmed it not pretty much langford park is hemmed in it is completely surrounded by residential and or commercial 15 years ago a parcel came available we had some money available in our parks funding and we acquired it and we put a skate park in and it's a fantastic asset and it's a wonderful piece of our park there are two commercial properties that if they were ever to become available next to that park if we were to acquire them would really substantially change and alter the character and the ability for langford to be something even better i would love to see that kind of language be added to the blue ways the the palmar property language and so on but again i i am not going to die on the sword of this i know specifically because it was said very specifically by three speakers that got up do not mess with the language we love it the way it is it'll fail if you don't i don't believe it'll fail as a matter of fact i believe that if moms and dads and kids believe that their parks could be expanded someday by the acquisition you might get more voters to come out and actually support it there are not going to be the same people people that would come out and support that language or that component of it are not going to vote against it because it's conservation land they will vote for it because it adds to our park system which we have a incredibly stout super system um i just think it's important and and if it doesn't have support of the board fine go off and do your thing and and have a nice day i mean i don't mean to be that way but it's just i should have brought this up and i didn't think about it until a week afterward i thought you know here's an opportunity to do something special but if it's not supported it's not supported and so be it thank

you commissioner heard yeah i want to thank our staff and and also the uh martin county forever team i think you've done a masterful job of creating ballot language and the supporting ordinance i know that it was an awful lot of compromise there was an awful lot of thought an awful lot of consideration every detail was was uh uh focused on and and i i the results is is uh is is just i is is is is terrific uh i think that you you for the ballot language you selected uh the two really important parts of this referendum one is is is acquiring land in order to restore and protect the rivers and another is protecting ag you know um we find that that um well i i'm a cattle farmer's granddaughter daughter sister and and aunt and i know how how what a struggle and what a gamble cattle ranching is for example you know the market is either really really good to you or it's really really bad and when the market is really really bad sometimes really really good stewards of land are forced to sell some of their property and that's the last thing we want them to do we want them to continue to do to be good stewards of the land so this um takes into consideration both of those really really critical conservation efforts and i think i think you did a terrific job and i i'm in full support of the ordinance and the ballot language thank you okay with that um commissioner

campi thank you sir um some of you are participating with us for the first time in an issue to just reiterate the point that uh in florida the sunshine law means that elected officials or even appointed officials that serve on the same board are not allowed to speak to each other outside of a meeting on something that we're going to vote on so when i hear my colleagues giving their opinions today just like you i'm hearing them for the first time and with that i think that commissioner hetherington's point about the disposition of the players we all agree that agriculture is going to be a very large portion of this for two reasons one without the farms there is no food that sounds like a cliche but it's a cliche because it's absolutely true and the other advantage for us here in martin county is we want the farms because if we are looking at conservation land that is environmentally sensitive we protect it and then it's not developed on because as you've heard me say in the past everyone that owns land whether it's a husband and wife that owns a couple acres or it's a corporation that owns thousands of acres everyone's thinking about what can they do with their land uh including farmers so if we can uh conserve uh environmentally sensitive and valuable lands through this initiative if the public so chooses to do that good for us however some of the land is agricultural land it's not uh pristine you know ecosystems it's it's it's our ecosystem it's what feeds us so to have four members of the board be environmental in a board of nine i think is a pretty fair representation and if that last person which i did hear the speaker say and i did hear from my county attorney that it should be someone i think that position that philosophy could be represented in the four and that if agriculture is truly as important as we believe it to be it can't only be one voice out of nine i think making one additional person be ag related is appropriate considering we're thinking about environmental environmentally sensitive land and agricultural land how is such a big portion of this idea represented by a single person now with someone like uh rick hartman that one person's gonna be perfect but if it can't be rick hartman you need maybe potentially two people representing such an important portion of what we're looking to do here so i would make that change and make that two for ag and take that last person out as my personal opinion in regards to what commissioner smith has said i don't disagree in his philosophy i disagree at this particular time that if we start adding little stones to one side of the scale or the other we're starting to muddy this up and i think yes you do when you layer in additional opportunities bring in a new constituency group but i think you'll lose people that would vote for this that wanted to be very defined and i think the great work that this group has done is to define it very specifically into these very specific categories and then put a community you know citizen oversight board in because some people um don't want to be involved in the participation of these decisions some people don't want the commissioners whether it's us or the next group to be involved in those decisions they want them to be community-based decisions so i wanted to tell our staff that if this is to be voted in by the public and all of the mechanisms that are being carefully considered are put into place to purchase either the conservation easements or the actual property for those dollars that are raised through this initiative that doesn't mean that the county is never going to purchase another piece of property outside of this i still believe that in order to protect the green open space within the communities as we did earlier this year in palm city as commissioner smith used an example about if you have the opportunity to enhance a park commissioner heard did it very successfully with maggie's hammock she was able to buy from a willing seller with money incorporated from her district funds commissioner jenkins just did it in hobe sound with the ham parcel that should not stop the county shouldn't think well we're never going to buy another piece of property this is a separate little opportunity for vast projects so to commissioner smith's point i would still consider that there are opportunities that will present themselves that will enhance the people that live in town and so uh i wouldn't support his decision of adding that into this i think the more we start to you know shape it it's going to get away from us uh but i would agree with commissioner hetherington that we should flip that as my opinion thank you smith yeah commissioner campi is absolutely right

unfortunately because of sunshine um in our state laws we don't i i we don't get to sit down and have that conversation and so the only place i can do that is here and i wished that i had done it three weeks ago when we had our conversation and look i i i i'm perfectly okay if i didn't express my my ideas and thoughts with our board i would forever not forgive myself for not at least having the conversation because if ed said hey you know what we could have used that to buy the piece of property in in palm city and we could have turned it into a park that would have been a good idea the problem with ed's thought process is we don't have a dedicated land acquisition fund in our budget to go buy things and if you all remember what we went through with ed's acquisition out there in palm city it was a hobbling together of all sorts of little pieces parts and components that made it incredibly difficult and incredibly hard to do and so my thought behind this was if there was a way but there's not if there's no support fair enough but if we if we had had the opportunity to have a couple million dollars set aside to do those kinds of things when something popped up it'd be a great opportunity and so um i sense nobody else is jumping on the idea that there's not support for it fine you know if i didn't bring it up here it doesn't get brought up and it doesn't happen and um and that's

it commissioner heard if it's okay with you i'd like to hear from martin county forever about the

the proposed changes is that okay sure and thank you so much for your very thoughtful concerns and we really have worked so hard to try and get this in a position where everybody agrees that it's going to be fair i wanted to uh remind everyone that this is the resolution that we're talking about which is the makeup of the citizens oversight committee so a resolution can be changed um i i again i don't know uh ms woods if you could read out who's on there i mean if i get it that we're all here together if we need to add one more ag person and we can just get this done so that we can move on we have a lot of work ahead of us to try and raise money to try and get this the word out to everyone and my fear is that if we wait another month and we're not really sure it's just so critical that we try to get this on the ballot um commissioner smith i i understand your concerns uh we had looked at the corridor with jonathan dickinson state park to make it a super park so we are concerned there are there is the ability to have other parks added through the acquisition of this land uh we and we're all on volunteers so you know this is just because we feel very strongly about this um if we added land next to current parks our polling indicates that this measure would not pass um again i understand your concern but i from my heart i would really encourage you i believe your concerns will be met um i don't know if there's any questions that we have we'd love to kind of clean it up today uh we've talked amongst ourselves we could add another ag person the problem with that is that it takes it

up to 10 people and now you kind of have a split i'm gonna drop i suspect that i can hear something coming out of here that i suspect here in the next few minutes that we're going to have a motion um because i literally can hear it working um through him i also had a ranch uh you know i also know there's a lot of greening so hopefully we can finish this today yes right now and and there's

the ordinance we're talking about the makeup of the ordinance not yes we're only talking about the

ordinance today the resolution will come back at a later date so that's important um my my only um recommendation is we do need to hear public comment yeah i was going to do that while i was

i was trying to be funny and then i was interrupted my comedy routine very funny while while this this

is going on over here that if we had any additional public comment that we could uh we could take that

at this time is there anybody and when you're you still need to fill out the the form when you're yeah

kim snedeker here before you leave it's not i merely say that we've spent a year and a half on this uh the polling clearly indicated that we're on the right course as it relates to as it's currently constituted uh we would recommend that we proceed uh as it's currently been laid out by attorney woods if it's deemed critical that we add an additional farmer then perhaps we add two farmers because we don't want to have 10 and and and then have a tie break situation so i would recommend that we stay the course that we move it to a vote and then we proceed forward we we have to get going with fundraising otherwise we're quite frankly toast we're starting from from really ground zero right now and we've only been fundraising for the past two weeks and it's going to be very tough getting the money we need in time so i would ask that you please proceed as attorney woods has outlined thank you thank you

commissioner i would move staff recommendation okay commissioner speth i'm going to move a substitute

motion that we modify the the makeup of the categories in the ordinance to reflect um two members uh from the ag community ag interest however you want to word that sarah uh and that that that last position be either blended in language or just add just be um captured within the first four um

environmental categories i would need to for purposes of the legality of the ordinance i would need to make those changes and we'd have to the board would have to be aware of what we were doing for it to be um voted but maybe i should wait to see i don't understand what you're saying are you going to

do it right this minute i can do it i i can do it this minute in the sense that the we have not taken

our yeah 30 break so give me we wanna take a 10 30 break give her 10 minutes too don't roll your eyes at me that was more of a head bob um and then you seem to be flustered so i'm not flustered at all

well i'm but what i'm what i'm seeing is we have a we have a motion the first motion wasn't seconded this one wasn't either and neither has the the second motion so do we so let me reiterate my motion direct direct our county before we go forward would you like me to come up with some alternate language and read it to you i'm just i'm trying to understand what you're asking yes

and i would modify my motion that we ask uh county attorney's office during our 10 minute break to see if that's possible to add language or to correct the language in the ordinance that would the that would effectively bring us to two members in the ag category and leave us at four members

uh in the environmental community to as a point and then to bring it back to us to to to incorporate the the final category into the ag community okay and to come back to us after our

break if that's possible if it's not by the end of the day even absolutely possible commissioner campi

i guess we're gonna have to make our folks wait another 10 minutes i would have preferred that we took the final bullet point that said one member shall be appointed from an organization with dedicated mission to preserve protect and secure natural land in warnton county take that one member put it up on to the one that says one members shall be can you where am i well you i'm looking at it right

here if i might make a suggestion okay take walking the watching the sausages be made you can more minutes good if you can start the fundraising if you would like to you could reduce the four members to three no you still have the one for the acquisition you want the acquisition up in the four

members it's the same effect yeah i think you could have the vote right now i think most of us are thinking take the last bullet point make it an additional ag person leave the four members of environmental just that's it eliminate the last bullet point and make one ag person two end of the

sausage making i i need i need a few minutes to make sure that i can fold in the final one into the

four we are going to take a 10 minute break um you need to talk to these people yes excuse me for a

motion to do that she wants a motion to do that okay would somebody second commissioner motion to

it's good she said she's fine i i could take it as board direction all right 10 after 11 please

look at this oh he doesn't look like george andreasi though thank god welcome back um i guess we'll

turn it back over to miss woods thank you mr chairman members of the board um i've got the language up on your screen it's highlighted in yellow uh this should be a pretty easy fix so the first section that begins with the number four and the second line after third line after the word restoring if you go to the third line we would add the word acquiring right so it will be restoring acquiring and protecting uh now go down to the um the third bullet point that would be changed from one to two the number two the number two in um in parentheses we would uh eliminate the word after the word from so it would be two two members plural shall be appointed from eliminate the word and and it would be from organizations with a dedicated mission to preserve protect i'm sorry organizations with a mission focused on education promoting and protecting the interest of agricultural farmers and ranchers so those are the changes that i believe would reflect the board direction i do also want to add just because i want to make it clear we will if this ordinance passes this will be filed with the florida office of program policy analysis and government accountability who will do a fiscal analysis which then we will post on our website so i just wanted to make that clear if anybody was wondering all right and also your revisions is to remove the last bullet point oh yes and to remove the final bullet point so there would only be three bullet points all right commissioner smith chairman i would move approval of the

uh recommended language and the ballot second okay um mr donaldson did you have something before we

voted then no like uh it was taken care of thank you okay we have a motion by commissioner smith seconded by commissioner um heard all in favor aye all opposed motion carries unanimously thank you all right cool now we're going to go to our 10 30 preset at almost 11 30 good luck out there which is um here's what bathtub beach the history of bathtub beach if i can find it oh department number three staff's presentation on the history of bathtub beach there we go good morning everyone i'm jessica garland

they're excited sharing you i'm jessica garland coastal program manager for public works today i will be giving you a historical review of bathtub beach and then i will turn the presentation over to dr kevin bodge and steve howard from olsen associates who will go over the engineering history of the bathtub beach bathtub beach is a complex system it is isolated from sand flow by a natural warm reef on the east and it is also isolated by the man-made jetty that is on the south of the inlet it is on a barrier island but it is also a valuable reef ecosystem for us on this slide you will see side-by-side aerials from 1958 to 2023 you can see where the reef is in all these aerials by the wave breaks on the eastern side or you can also see the actual hard bottom reef visible in 20 2004 and 2007. there used to be a pier at the north end of sailfish point that is visible in the 1995 aerials and you can also see the dredging that occurred in 1958 the north end of the park is can be seen to be relatively stable in the parking until the parking lot was expanded in 1994 kevin and steve will go into further details to discuss changes that were made to the beach template to assist with stability starting on the right picture you can see how the large beach what how large the beach was and the pavilion and the north crossover are completely surrounded by dune vegetation but after hurricane floyd and irene had passed the dune and crossover were severely impacted by erosion as many of you may remember in 2004 we were severely impacted by both hurricane francis and gene that caused erosion all along macarthur boulevard and hutchson island in the right picture you can see the lifeguard tower that has been completely undermined and the dune vegetation that is now the front face of the beach on the left picture you can actually see the pier in sailfish point that is fully eroded under after the storms there was a large emergency dune project that occurred all along macarthur boulevard to restore the dune this project was able to give stability back to the dune of vegetation and crossovers in 2007 we had several northeasters along with large king tides that caused erosion under the pavilion and lifeguard towers you can even see in the third picture the light pole fell over onto the beach the sidewalks are undermined and we lost parking at the north end this was the beginning of our emergency truck calls in 2010 a dune restoration project was completed to re-establish the vegetation that had been lost previously as you can see modifications were done to the park amenities the north crossover was removed as it had been damaged in the previous years by restoring the dunes we re-established and provided habitat for birds and sea turtles to nest on in 2012 hurricane sandy passed along our shorelines causing severe damage to our shore with her 20-foot waves she never touched our shorelines but we had water going from ocean to river across macarthur boulevard as you can see in these pictures the pavilion was completely undermined and we spent numerous days trying to protect the road in 2016 we went back to the basics and designed a full beach nourishment project to restabilize the area and provide essential habitat for nesting sea turtles and birds in 2016 martin county also received its updated state approved inlet management plan which now required 34 000 cubic yards of material to be bypassed north from the saint lucie inlet and flood shoals you can see in the attached photos where when erosion occurs the pavilion pilings are completely undermined and exposed to the elements in 2018 there were 11 000 loggerheads 250 leatherback hatchlings that emerged from this shoreline after it had been restored 2019 hurricane dorian hung over the bahamas for three days causing large short large waves to hit our shoreline and cause damage in 2021 we did our bypassing project to restore the beaches after hurricane dorian after all the storms nor'easters and king tides staff applied for a hazard mitigation grant to in store shoreline stabilization to protect our infrastructure road and utility lines in 2023 the seawall was installed on the western edge of the dune with a curved refracting cap the wall is designed to be buried under the dune and the protection of last resort the wall was put to the test in december with when it was faced with 12 to 15 foot waves the waves hit the wall refracted back towards the ocean with some sea spray spraying into the parking lot in february we began our current beach nourishment project to restore the beach after the last few storms and to cover the new seawall we are not done yet but construction will be completed by april 30th the biological monitoring before during and after any project is very important to us in 2023 there were 20 000 loggerheads 600 green turtles and 10 leatherbacks that hatched from bathtub beach we have cheryl miller and coastal eco group who have been monitoring the hard bottom reef for over 20 years this permit monitoring requires many additional things such as how much the reef grows what type of fish and other habitat is living on the reef but we have also added in addition to that quarterly or monthly uh drone surveys to see how many inches the reef is growing um each year we also do summer and winter hard bottom edge survey edge mapping to measure the reefs with along with the drone survey and then in inshore we do seagrass surveys to make sure we are not damaging any vital resources in the lagoon now i'm going to hand it over to kevin and steve for their section good morning everyone i'm

steve howard with olson associates uh consulting coastal engineer to the county um i'll just give you kind of a 10 000 foot view of the some of the engineering decisions that went into this project since at least 2016 where it became more common and more more explicitly designed a typical project along this reach extends from about r 34 and a half and and those uh points my with prefix with r are just established survey monuments by the state they're kind of evenly spaced throughout the state along along the eroded shorelines and they help us uh physically monitor things it even points um through history i mean it typically sends about 3400 feet from the north end of batta or batta beach through sailfish point to about the clubhouse there um it is permitted to go a little bit further down to all the way to r 40 past the clubhouse but typically the beach conditions don't warrant fill placement that far south a typical project since 2016 has required about 150 000 cubic yards of sand to be placed onto the shoreline but the most recent one erosion was substantial requires a little more than 250 000 cubic yards and all that sand has been dredged from several bar areas that are permitted within st lucie inlet you see six of them here three of them they're associated with the federal channel an impound basin infrastructure on the selfish point uh navigation channel on the the lee side of the island there and two interior flood show bar areas called a and c and for this 2024 project we're utilizing all six of them in order to get the sand for the for the construction zooming in a little bit now i've rotated everything counterclockwise north is to your left this is the the template of the current 2024 re-nourishment and it extends again from the north point of the park to the to about the pool at the clubhouse and selfish point um you can see the delineation between the bathtub reef beach and and selfish point portions of the shoreline um zooming in even further to just specifically bathtub reach reef park um we i left the uh the toe of fill that's the the seaward most limit of sand placement there in the dash line in the water you can see the extent of the seawall that jessica mentioned just a second ago who's uh intended to serve as kind of the last line of defense for the roadway and the remaining parking lot if we take a a virtual slice through the south end of the park we can get a little bit of better view of exactly what we're constructing um for these projects um to kind of orient you seaward is to your right um landward obviously to the left the project and we this is a slice through all the things shaded in yellow are what we construct that's sand placed um and that's the template is is constructed of three major parts we have a dune that covers about 30 to 40 feet of of linear shoreline out towards the sea a flat berm at plus nine foot elevation that slopes down gradually a couple breaks to the seafloor and that extends the mean high water shoreline it actually pushes the shoreline seaward by about 150 feet on average throughout the the project reach and in order to do that you have to elevate the short the profile between 10 and 15 feet so it's a substantial amount of sand in one section and this is just you know looking along a tiny little slice imagine that all throughout the 3400 feet of beach and that's what we're constructing at present now this is a an aerial view from 2007 from the park and this is the last one i could find where the the parking lot looks the way it used to for for a long time it's very engineered and curvy and pretty um by 2009 the uh emergency dune projects were well underway the parking lot was basically gone at the north end and you can see the little piles of sand there in the central parking lot there in the in the process of placing sand as as this picture was taken um in 2017 was the this is a post-construction photo of the the most recent full re-nourishment of the project and you can see one of the design intents at this time was to keep that northern parking lot open and we contracted with a a master planning firm who helped us design this and try to we really tried to hold the location and keep the full parking lot available and you can see the constructed dunes see where that they're green because they've got a bunch of sea oats planted on them they look nice and pretty well it didn't last long this is 2018 and the ocean's back at the doorstep um all those freshly vegetated dunes are gone um the northern parking lot is once again used to stockpile emergency dune placement and at that point it was it was apparent to everybody that maintaining that northern parking area um it just wasn't going to be tenable um with the current

conditions along the beach can you go back to the previous slide yes sir so as a reference i'm sorry as a reference point where the pavilion is i think if you look at the two pictures you does your cursor work yeah okay um to the south just a little bit where the the bigger that one so if you look at that and you look at the next slide you can appreciate how much we lost or we lose which is which is one

reason why the seawall is where it is at present thank you um so this is a picture a post-construction picture again from 2019 or immediately after another renourishment of the project you can see the north end of the park looks very different the dune is much wider um that north end uh the north entrance to the park has been closed off um we did again contract with our master planning firm to maximize the number of parking spaces that were remaining at the park uh and and reconstruct as big of a dune as we can now how do we arrive at these kind of design decisions um this is a a plot of the cumulative volume change along the entire shoreline not just the project shoreline all the way from the north end of bathhub all the way to the jetty and and as this this is as measured by surveys um and as this plot goes up that means that the entire shoreline has basically gained volume as it goes down that means it's eroding um so you can see and this includes all the effects of beach fills and and one of the main design precepts what we looked at is is you know in order to know where you're going you need to know where you've been um so we went back and looked at the historical beach conditions and we found that in 1982 and around 2002 explicitly the beach represented a fairly healthy condition the shoreline was at a point that appeared to be sustainable and and relatively healthy especially in 2002 you can see that line is is pretty flat from the late mid 90s um so it had been uh relatively stable for for quite some time so we predicated our current design on that healthy beach condition and maintaining it and if you look to the right of the 2016 vertical line you can see for the most part there have been some waves and those are associated with erosion and and sand placement um we've mostly stayed about that zero line we've been pretty successful in holding that shoreline with a lot of variability now this doesn't tell the whole picture as jessica mentioned there's been a lot of sand placed on this beach since since the mid 90s and the blue curve represents um though that sand volume being taken out of the black curve which it tells a completely different picture if you remember i i just said uh when the curve goes down that's erosion um if you take all the beach fills out as of april 2023 um the beach is at about a 1.4 million cubic yard deficit to where it was in 1976 so it's significant and something appears to have changed it if we take this curve again and divide it into three sections by time um something happened around 2002 2003 and and erosion severely increased and what these dash lines are are linear fit lines to all these measured data that made up the black and blue curves that you saw before and if we look at the slope of that line that gives us the erosion rate for the entire shoreline so from 1976 to 2002 it was a relatively stable shoreline slightly erosional you were losing a little over 3600 yards a year on average which is completely manageable and had been completely manageable until about 2002 2003 at which point it took a sharp turn from 2003 to 2023 if we draw that same linear trend line the erosion rate went from 3600 to 59 000 cubic yards a year being lost off that shoreline and if we do that same exercise after 2016 it increased again from 59 000 to 83 700 so it's almost a 25 fold increase over the the pre-2002 erosion rates and that's what we're dealing with today and this project's relatively new so we're still learning about what how it responds and what we can do to change it um and also maybe what's causing it which dr bodge

will talk about so that kind of brings uh to mind the the question of of what explains this increase in erosion along this particular shoreline i'm kevin bodge eric with steve howard olson associates been working on this project for about 10 or 12 years along bathtub sailfish and also additionally in the 1990s um is there i can't actually hear is this mike it's good okay thanks um so in terms of trying to explain what the erosional processes are is like this used to be a stable beach i mean this this thing was just fine right through the 70s and 80s and then the wheels have started to increasingly come off the bus with increasing erosion so what are some of those comp uh causes as jessica and others have mentioned um a lot of thought is given the fact that the effects of hurricane floyd in 1999 and then the sphere hurricanes in 2004 really dramatically changed the shorelines along the east coast of florida particularly in the treasure coast area and probably had some significant long lasting effect on all of our coastal processes but that's 20 some years ago and i'm sure that was part of the issue but what are the other factors well one that we really have to look at carefully is that of contemporary sea level rise on your screen right there is a graph of the the measured average annual mean sea level at uh your tide measuring station nearest to you which is lake worth pier done in palm beach county there's a gap in the data between 1990 and 2010 when the gauge was down but the thing that's pretty clear and evident is that there was a measured increase in the mean annual sea level of eight and a half inches over the last 35 years that's equal to the entire sea level change that occurred over the entire century before that this isn't projected this is actually measured data when you go to another gauge a little further south down virginia key same thing you you see this this increase in the actual measured sea level over the last three or four decades and it's interesting that you get this acceleration average trend rate of about 1.1 foot per century a little bit higher than the prior century up through about 2010 and starting after 2010 and 2012 the rate just really seems to have increased up to a kind of shocking rate of 3.6 feet per century when extrapolated again that's over three times the historical rate over the last 2 000 years so sea level is definitely rising but the and of itself you would intuitively figure well that's going to cause more beach erosion higher sea but here along this project area the presence of the reef accelerates that it magnifies the effect of sea level rise in a very non-uniform way first we know that the reef itself allows wave energy to come through it there's gaps here and there in the reef particularly about the beach you look at some of the wave patterns and you actually see the waves entering in through some small gaps or low points which is shown here by those yellow lines in this photo you see erosion associated with it but but there's more it's not just the gaps in the reef the reef of course extends all the way along this project shoreline from the head about the beach all the way down to the jetty north jetty of st lucie inlet indicated by the yellow dash line in this drawing what you see here is a high resolution bathymetric image as if we've drained all the water out of the atlantic ocean the white areas near shore are actually deeper areas so there's like of a slough or a trough that's a little bit deeper as you go from bathtub on the left to the jetty on the right now this reef extends basically along the entire area of the shoreline except again for a couple of these small little breaks the reef does not penetrate the surface for the most part it allows some wave energy to go through it so a little bit of waves pass over that reef and that passes wave energy into this really narrow area between the reef and the beach and that that wave wave crest they they pump the water up they increase the water level between the reef and the beach now normally that water which is pushed toward the shore it would return back offshore the undertow right that you're always warned of your parents when you were little kids well it can't return back offshore here because the reef is in the way it can only go one direction the water can only drain southward and so it flows from north to south along the entire shoreline until it reaches the inlet now with sea level rise even just a little bit even more wave energy can get over the reef and that further increases the amount of water and energy which is trapped between the reef and the beach which further increases the amount of water that has to drain out of this whole area like a river which is flowing from north to south from bathtub down to the inlet and it does flow like a river constrained between the beach and the reef showing here by this red arrow it only has one place to go and that's the low weir in the rock jetty of which you see scour through that weir a low point in the jetty and depth um and scour uh on the other side of it a little hard to see in this this aerial photograph but all of that flow has got to uh rush along sailfish point and exit out what is now a 300 foot gap in the in the jetty and uh that's actually all scoured out it's gone from about you know nine or ten feet deep to 15 or 16 feet deep in in that particular area and that flow has increased not just from the significant sea level rise over the last 10 or 15 years but also increased by the fact that that whole slot was narrowed it was cut in half of its size from 2009 when the north jetty of the uh inlet was was changed by the corps of engineers so we've taken this this slot increased the amount of water that has to flow past it and also narrowed it down constricting it so we basically got this really impressive river of seawater which is flowing from bathtub southward to uh into saint lucie inlet a lot of causes here it's a complicated beach system as Jessica mentioned but it's just not straight old beach erosion and mother nature that's eaten up this beach it's a combination of man-made factors which are greatly amplified by the ongoing and significant increase in sea level we've seen over the last 10 to 15 years with that Jessica

if you guys have any questions for us we will gladly answer it thank you kevin steve we had a question

that was a great presentation and um thank you for that and i just had a question i feel like that we've talked about this at different conferences and it would it would be nearly impossible to permit some kind of groin structure or something out there to limit to limit that energy is that so i'll take

that one because we're in the middle we have a hazard mitigation grant from fema um to do modeling to see what type of structures would even work out there um so that report should be done later this year to see and tell us what will work um so once that report is done then we would even be able to know if a structure would work to slow down the erosion um and then go talk to the permitting agencies to see

what it would take to permit something it could be possible and then you would go on to the permitting agencies to see if they have the conversation even permit commissioner smith kevin thank you and thank

you and jessica thank you um to say the least bathtub is incredibly dynamic it it is there there are storms where we will lose 75 feet of sand and three days later there will be 75 feet of sand that pushes back in around the yellow house on the corner it's just insane what happens out there um i think to the to the structures analysis and what may or may not come back years and years ago there were some sauna tubes that were placed out off of sailfish that didn't work um some of these things work some of them don't um when we were i think post francis and gene when we we had lost everything out there all those sauna tubes kind of became exposed again and there were these huge ugly nylon things laying out on the beach that you couldn't remove because they still had some sand in them and anyway um i'm i'm happy you all did this i it and and i think if we could spend and not maybe today but if people watch and look if you go back and look at the historical photos from the 70s till today and you look at what has changed at bathtub in terms of dimensions from ocean to river where macarthur boulevard wasn't and is and and how much it has changed over its history um there were trees that were exposed after francis and gene there were huge um stumps that were still out there from decades ago that got unearthed uh if you remember which isn't necessarily pertinent to this but it was part of this up by the house of refuge there was unearthed a huge concrete fortification site that was something military during world war ii that i don't think anybody had seen since world war ii because it had been covered forever um but again it it is just it is incredibly dynamic um and i and i think there's been a lot of conversation in the community about us building this uh underground if you want to call it retaining wall to protect the infrastructure in the parking lot and that really its purpose is to be the last line of defense and if i have that wrong help me if i if i do but instead of when all else fails we lose our infrastructure we lose the road we lose the parking lot we flood macarthur it is intended that or it was intended to stop that from happening um it was a huge change in our philosophical miss of how we dealt with bathtub all these decades um but i think for our residents to see what it is what it can be and how it actually protects what's out there is important uh there's two more components left yet to do with macarthur we have uh the elevation i think it's about 18 inches right of of road from about a little bit south of the wentworth house which is the yellow house on the corner uh to the roundabout that is just about at the entrance way to sailfish uh because if you've ever really looked at it there's quite a bit of elevation change between roundabout and it'll come

up i think to about that level correct and then the the seawall on the west side so there will be an

equal as maybe not exactly the same in design but there will be a a sheet pile retaining wall that will be on the western side of the road eastern side of the river uh there will also be a turn lane that will be configured into that into sailfish that will help with traffic flow in and out of out of sailfish um and and just and for all the public's knowledge of this this is really the first attempt of us i think in a major way to start dealing with how we approach and view with water elevations and and moon tides and everything else that is changing in our world that it is a really good project as a as a starting point um and i've spoke to different agencies about it and spoke about it in dc that i think the challenge for all of us in florida moving forward with what we're seeing relative to our protecting our room structure whether it's st augustine or or miami is the permitting side of all this and the challenges of dealing with billions and billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure that sit on our coastline are built and are valued and used and how do we deal with that and how do we protect that infrastructure moving into the future and i think what i share with everybody is that the the understanding from the federal government and the state government in terms of okay we have all this stuff how do we protect it and and how do we how do we affordably if that's a word how do we affordably do it um to protect our residents and protect our infrastructure so thank you for all the background kevin i thought that was great i i don't know if i've ever seen that part of the presentation where there is the reversed for force of what comes over the reef and then heads back down south but that would fully explain why the impoundment basin gets all of the sand that it gets because it's being carried down south inside the barrier reef or the the the worm reef and that too is part of the explanation that was a huge project for us that when we built that impoundment area it was to capture all that sand and then the management plan was okay how do we redistribute it and and 10 years ago i think was the first time ish somewhere in that timeline where we actually could take sand and move it back north because prior to that it always went south and and went out to either jupiter islands impoundment area offshore or it was pumped down there so it's been a 30-year kind of process if you will to get to where we are today but uh there's some hardening still that we have to do to the south jetty that's coming up next right and then yes i'm

actually going out with the army corps tomorrow to take a look at it and are there any improvements to the northern jetty or just the southern no it's still very stable fantastic thank you all very much

mr donelson yeah i just thought it was important just to point out a couple of things that are on the shoreline and first of all i think the the the wall that was built is similar to the one we did just south the house refuge which is behind the dune and um was necessary after uh hurricane gene which we had uh the the island stripped away there um but i think it's also really important to point out that you know the inlet uh having a navigable inlet in uh in florida it causes a lot of erosion and stopping the drift both north and south and that we were one of the first to get that bypassing to the north recognized and part of that what drives sediment movement is the waves and so when you have a lot of southerly waves which we've had some this year all of that sand that would be normally being pushed north um is not getting there so so that uh i think our inlet management plan is up to what 35 000 i just changed last year to 36 36 000 cubic yards a year so the inlet from our best estimate we know it's doing at least that much of um um of uh preventing sand coming back in into this system um and the other i think really important piece is that uh we we did develop the county with um selfish point as a relationship with this project and so that cost share agreement which benefited them in terms of and and that and and and i think it's also unique is how much we're using the flood shoals that were created by the original inlet opening in the 1800s and uh and then continued to collapse until 1920 or something like that when the north jetty was built so there was a lot of sand that was brought into our estuary over uh decades and decades of work that we're able to return back into the system by a pretty unique management strategy along with the impound basin but i think that agreement with um with the sailfish point is really important to point out that we share that 50 50 in terms of the local share um and that's been very instrumental in our success of maintaining this um beach very economically um for the county citizen standpoint and the last thing was just uh as uh being a a the engineering side is that the the sea level rise is very complicated as uh dr bodge pointed out in terms of where we are there's also cycles where the average can go back down again over over a hundred year period and i'm certainly hoping that this current um increase may level off and the decadal or the hundred year average may be closer to two foot per hundred years instead of three and a half but we we will the good thing is is that we'll know obviously the what you see on the ground is what's what's reality and and using actual data to make our decisions i think is the most important thing that we do here in martin county is we talked about it with uh with john mail the other day so we're we're a data driven um organization on on real science so i think um and that's what we'll continue to provide you thank you mr campy thank you very much

i appreciate the sort of the new explanation if you will i had not heard it that presented that way this has been an issue since all of us have sat up here some of us longer than others i had always used the expression when people asked me about bathtub beach that if you're in a tug of war with mother nature she always wins and i appreciate the decades of research and analysis and study but we're still in the same spot year after year or decade after decade a couple of questions for you one you presented that there's sort of that wash down of water that comes over the reef gets to the dune it's got nowhere to go it can't find its way back out because we have the worm reef so it heads south and like rushes south like you said like a river then when it was narrowed you can imagine that if it's narrowing it's then forcing the water to move even faster so that's washing out a lot in between the reef and the and the dune the beach um i didn't hear a way to necessarily stop that from happening um we did hear about sea level rise so if we've been dealing with these situations for decades and now we have sea level rise in this new situation my question which is a layman's question is what would happen if we stopped doing anything because beyond the amount of sand that we have been pumping onto the beach that's not the only thing we've been pumping tons of money onto the beach and i have i'm sure my colleagues have as well and remember i represent palm city the whole county obviously but my district's palm city so we don't have as many ocean issues in palm city so a lot of people are saying when they read articles or they see things online that the county is continuing its effort to stabilize this very difficult to stabilize situation now i have sat as mr donaldson said i have sat through many meetings with our friends at sailfish point and they write their own checks they they pay their taxes to the county and then on top of that the organization writes their own checks to be our partners and they also allow us to mobilize on their property they've been terrific but they have a very vested interest they live right there so i guess my question to both of you is i want to protect the infrastructure that is the road and i think this new seawall is the first time we've heard of something that really could work and it's substantial it's not just pushing additional sand onto the onto the beach and putting plants because mother nature can be ferocious um what would happen if we didn't do anything

that's good um so if you took the the no action path um we've seen a little bit of of what that would mean the the beach certainly a bathtub would uh for the most part completely erode and pulses would come in now and then over the reef as it actually happens but um that that recreational nesting beach would be gone the wall that was just recently constructed would uh hopefully um be there long enough to stop the flooding although it kind of gets reduced because the beach also absorbs some of the wave energy instead and reduces the amount of waves that are going to crash over that wall um but but the otherwise the improvements at macarthur would would try to hold that road in place the erosion that occurs along bathtub would then very quickly uh cascade and fall down into sailfish and so that erosional wave would extend uh all the way through sailfish past 2001 um in the clubhouse and and then further south sand would still continue to uh to move down the shoreline through the north jetty and into the impound basin and across the navigation channel so certainly all that maintenance dredging would be required in order to pick that sand up uh in places somewhere most of to the south summit to to the north so the bottom line is you would ultimately lose the recreational and uh and natural resource along that entire shoreline sailfish point would then um ultimately end up having to armor all of their shoreline because it really works as a unit it's very difficult for sailfish point to maintain a beach solely along that shoreline certainly one that looks like it has today without joining it to the natural uh north end head which is bathtub beach i think some other um management uh approaches to help mitigate some of the losses in the face of the the rising sea level and the face of what the inlet condition is like right now are possible and as jessica mentioned that those are look being looked at in more detail to see yeah are they a good idea may they work and if

so are they worth pursuing and the one thing kevin kind of did gloss over is the sand still will move south into the inlet and we have a state mandated inlet management plan so we will have to move that sand to the north um so it it still has to go north even though we don't want to maintain the beach 34 36 000 cubic yards still has to go north per the state management plan i guess the most important part

i heard is that if we didn't continue to sort of fight the fight at bathtub beach uh we would severely be impacting our residents in sailfish to the point of infrastructure uh destruction is that what you're

saying yes i i believe so you'd have to armor all of that shoreline and construct some uh pretty substantial groins and whatnot along along the sailfish point shoreline in an attempt to hold even sand there at all but it would not look like it it does today the one thing worth noting too um i'm glad you mentioned that that partnership you have with with sailfish point you know it's it's pretty unique there's only two such beach projects that i'm familiar with in the state of florida actually we're involved with both of them that are that are partnerships between the private sector and the public sector this is one of them here in martin county the other one is in nassau county between amelia island and the state park service and so you really get a lot of leverage out of there i'm glad you mentioned that and then additional to that and jessica and don can speak to this more aptly than i you get the leverage of disaster relief from the federal government so we're getting a lot of money in from the state of florida and and from fema as well so that the the burden is while the county takes the lead and importantly so the fiscal burden on the county is is less than many of the projects

that we work with one final point thank you um i guess more for our staff than for you two gentlemen i think when we are messaging we need to speak more of that the literal infrastructure protection of infrastructure because i appreciate the bathtub beach my family and i took our kids there when they were little and it's interesting because when you talk about how the waves would attenuate in and roll and make that channel there during certain tides you could the families could be out in the shallow water further out and then as you're walking back there's this big trench which is highly dangerous for a five foot tall wife carrying twins go in below her head one of the closest periods in her life where she felt she would die so i get that it was also voted one of the best beaches in around and i get that but i think eventually the residents are going to get to a point that it becomes such an expensive recreational amenity that that alone is not going to carry the day however if it's going to be a protection of vital infrastructure including everything at sailfish that's needs to be the message to the public that's writing these checks year after year because eventually you don't win and so i know that you know man can can triumph over all environmental issues but we've been at this a long time and we put a ton of money more money than sand thank you i don't know who was first oh you

want to go yeah sorry i can't help it um i just the just the comment is that we're in reality we we really haven't been at it this long a time if you look at we didn't really start until after 2005 our first chuck call was 10 if you look at the four mile beach project that started by citizens input in the 70s and we've been doing that since uh since the uh mid 90s and been successful at it what's unique about bathtub is the the natural reef which creates this condition where it erodes episodically and dr bodge has done presentation in the past of how it suddenly releases but uh i did want to say that just a reminder that the inlet itself to have a well flushed estuary and a deep inlet that uh that provides the flushing of our estuary is critical and it is a big component of why this beach erodes roads in its concurrent configuration there's certain other configurations that if you didn't care about sand management the north jetty was completely plugged you would have a huge wedge of sand probably covering a big chunks of of the worm rock and it would be a different dynamic and the south beach would hardly starve so it's it's this balance of trying to manage a natural system with man-made requirements and our man-made requirements require an inlet to have a healthily flushed estuary along with the recreation and economic benefits and they're all tied together and they all happen to intersect at this one spot so i i realize there's a frustration sometimes about what you might spend here but it is inextricably linked to all of those other components of the estuary the flushing the inlet and it's just one small piece that we're paying to keep that whole system managed mr hurt yeah we we need to be data

driven and the data is is uh is trending it's not reversing for the last two uh two decades it's it's uh it's it's reliable and it's telling us that conditions are deteriorating really really quickly and we're not getting any reversal so we need to be aware of that so from from the 70s to 2000 we were seeing the volume change the loss on the beach of 3600 cubic yards per year to now 87 000 cubic yards per year and sea level rise went from 1.1 feet per century to now 3.6 feet per century those trends are not going to reverse so i think we're going to have to get realistic about what portions of the the beach we're going to save and which we're not going to be able to save ultimately we're going to have to make decisions we're going to have to pick and choose winners and losers

commissioner smith thank you mr chairman um a couple follow-ons to all of what everybody has said first and foremost um i would also say this about our sailfish point residents they are the only that i know of kevin and i see you guys at our conferences all the time they're the only residents i think are only community that comes to our shores and beach conferences and supports pays attention listens learns does everything they know how to do to ensure that what we do as a county and what they do as a community is supported um for beach renourishment i it is stand out that they show up every single conference and they participate not only do they do that but they participate as don said in a financial way um and it should not be underestimated the influence that they have on the state of florida's policy direction relative to beach management as a whole that we do uh which is which is fantastic uh jessica mentioned in her comments uh a couple times about the turtle hatchlings and how successful um the environmental side of this whole discussion has been we had a a turtle expert here a couple months back december yeah and she pointed out um how robust our turtle population has maintained and become uh which for anybody that believes that what we're doing out there no matter how much it costs on the environmental side of the benefits at all we have had incredible amounts of turtle hatchlings and and and historical data for that supports that and i mentioned this every time about ross with them had it not been for ross 40 50 years ago doing what he did at the house of refuge and doing his turtle uh releases and whatnot we still get tagged turtles from that time from when he was tagging them um and they're all over south america they come as far up here and go back again it's remarkable what is accomplished um the other thing i would ask you guys to comment on if you have that knowledge or understanding there's also a fair amount of discussion relative to when we do these projects how much damage we're doing uh to the worm reef and and i would argue that our permitting and the requirements of what we do doesn't do that but i don't want to put words in your mouth if you can speak to that if you are knowledgeable about that if not well i know there are experts on our worm reef that that can but i think it would be i think it would be helpful for those listening and those watching all of this to know what is it exactly the relationship from the projects that we do to the health of the worm reef and how we protect it and what are the what are

the impacts if any also i'll start real quick commissioner smith um the so the the fundamental design of the beach nursing project itself is um to protect the existing worm reef that is one of um the the principal covenants of the project we went into design is that we could not bury the reef directly or indirectly with sand and so one reason the project the size as it is is we modeled it after a natural beach system as steve mentioned we took actual um beach profiles that were measured in uh uh like 1982 period time around 2001 2002 um and the design of the profile actually emulates those profiles exactly so basically said look this was a natural system that is what we are going to rebuild nothing more than that to help ensure that the sand is in place and then as jessica mentioned there is a very comprehensive monitoring program that is performed by coastal eco group and i work with a lot of reef systems all around the state of florida and throughout the caribbean and i gotta say it's it's probably the most intensive or robust uh data collection that is done uh on a reef system to examine any changes in that system with respect to uh anthropogenic or man-made activities such as a beach project and

jessica or steve you can explain it better so cheryl miller um and coastal eco group they are out there almost once a month doing um analysis on the reef um we make sure that we have pre project during project after project surveys um sediment analysis to see how how deep the sediment is on on the reef before during and after um to make sure we haven't covered it we have have not put the wrong size sand on the beach um we do sediment analysis of the sand we're placing on the beach because the worms don't like sand that's too small um and i we're not joking it's um it clogs the worm tubes um and it will die so there are specific areas of the beach that we can only put the sand from the sailfish point channel um on the beach it has to be south of the bathtub beach parking lot or the bathtub beach park limits because that sand is too fine to be inside the park limits so

those are the the links we go to to protect the reef so i just want the public to know i mean we we we do go to extraordinary extraordinary links to make sure that reef is healthy that asset um and i see mark perry in the background and mark has come up to us many times over the last 20 years and said make sure we have sign i would venture to guess that the people intrusion on the worm reef is more damaging to the reef because when you step on it it kills it than anything we do with our renourishment

projects yes stepping on it carving your name in it uh leaving your trash on it is more intrusive

than our project and the last thing i would add to to don's comments uh and this is just to the state of florida and the importance of our beaches as a whole uh study from 10 years ago the financial side of this is that for every dollar the state of florida spends on beach renourishment and that includes us is an eight dollar return to the investment or to the stability of the state of florida and maybe that's not enough for some folks but i i venture to guess that there's a lot of things that we do in the state that we don't ever see that kind of return on that kind of investment relative to what we do whether it's a state doing it federal government doing it us doing it it is a huge asset to the state of florida and so is the infrastructure that it all protects and the and and the last piece of that is that that dune and that beach are our second line of defense the coral reef track at least

in south florida is the first line the second line is the dune and the beach and the wave action and and the damage that's done to the beach is one thing but if it is protecting what's behind it that is immeasurable and and so we continue to fight the fight and protect what we have and for our residents and for our visitors that love the iconic reef and bathtub that we have i think it's all well worth what we do so thank you all very much yep thank you appreciate it

jessica thank you very much you have really led the charge uh and grown very well in this position that we've given you and i congratulate you thank you i appreciate it absolutely and with that we are

going to break for lunch and we will see everybody back here at 145. all right we are back um and i guess since donna's got this on our screen this is what we're going to do next is our library

board of trustee appointments donna gordon for administration two people for the library board of trustees mrs pamela peterson daily received one vote dr nelson poll received four votes

and mrs diane tomasik received five votes move approval of dr nelson pope and diane tomasik

hold what did i say hope we have a motion by commissioner illinois drawl lost control already

we have a motion by commissioner hurt seconded by i think commissioner smith uh all in favor all opposed motion carries unanimously okay let's go to public hearing quasi-judicial number one public hearing to consider adoption of an amendment to the martin county zoning atlas to change the zoning district classification for apex pavers incorporated mr brian elam um and i got to do the quasi-judicial thing so is there any intervenors no have you turned in all the appropriate paperwork in your resume okay the agenda in my work history okay ex parte um yes okay does anybody have any ex parte commissioner smith they're filed if any they've been filed if any they've been filed for me commissioner campy

i don't have any and that's been filed okay i don't have any and that's been filed okay

we need to swear on the witnesses okay anybody that is going to um testify in this hearing please stand

up and be sworn in raise your right hands do you swear or affirm the evidence you're about to give it will be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth with that proceed please thank you

chairman commissioners um for the record brian elam principal planner with growth management department this is a request by mccarthy summers wood norman melby and schultz pa on behalf of apex pavers for a proposed amendment to the martin county zoning atlas for a commercial designation consistent with the existing commercial general future land use the proposed amendment is to change the existing zoning district cost classification from a1a agricultural district b1 business district to gc commercial general commercial district or the most appropriate zoning district the approximate 1.7 acres property consists of two parcels located a tenth of a mile east of southeast willoughby boulevard on the south side of southeast monterey at 624 southeast monterey road and stewart access to the property is from southeast monterey road by way of the private street southeast veterans avenue and included with this application is a request for a certificate of public facilities exemption see here that the property consists of two parcels one is this rectangular area here and the second is the remainder the current zoning on the property is a1a agricultural district and b1 business district both are category c zoning districts the a1a is not consistent with the future land use of commercial general the b1 portion of one of the parcels is but since they're both under common ownership the rezoning of the b1 portion in conjunction with the mandatory rezoning of a1a is appropriate future land use commercial general are two standard category a zoning options to implement the commercial general future land use of the comp plan one is cc commercial community commercial district the other is gc general commercial district and pod zoning is also an option these are the development standards for the two category a zoning districts uh the setbacks are identical the only differences is the community commercial has a little bit more uh it's a little more uh restrictive in terms of the building coverage maximum building height and open space requirements this application was heard before the local planning agency on april 4th it was unanimous unanimously decided uh to recommend uh staff's recommendation or support staff's recommendation development review staff have found the apex pavers incorporated rezoning application to comply with all the applicable regulations and comprehensive growth management plan as detailed in the staff report staff recommends approval of the rezoning request by apex pavers incorporated we move that the board receive and file the agenda item and all its attachments including the staff report is exhibit one and move that the board approve the request to rezone from a1a agricultural district b1 business district to gc general commercial district and that concludes the

presentation thank you any questions for staff seeing none does the applicant have a good afternoon i'm

kristin spake from mccarthy summers on behalf of the applicant apex pavers i certainly cannot improve on the presentation of your expert thank you and i won't try to so i'll just say we appreciate the recommendation that the rezoning be approved and we would appreciate your support if you have any

questions we're here to answer them commissioner campy barring any public comment i would be uh be my pleasure to approve this request i think apex pavers i know the company i see them they're everywhere in town everything they do is great they do beautiful work and we're happy that you're looking to expand here in martin county so thank you very much in a minute we got the lawyer once the lease elder deputy

county attorney i just want to confirm for the record that notices were turned in at the lpa for the

um hearing yes ma'am okay cool you made a motion i did there's no public you second it okay great and that there's no public comment and is there any public comment i see no public comment so we have a motion by commissioner campy seconded by commissioner smith all in favor all right all opposed motion carries unanimously congratulations thank you very much okay our next item quasi-judicial public hearing quasi-judicial number two public hearing to consider adoption of an amendment to the martin county county zoning atlas to change the zoning classifications for mr eric brush um john

sanana senate what senate like the state senator senator really okay so if you became a senator you would be senator senator senator i like it you can sit down now

so commissioners the quasi-judicial so okay he knows i'm sorry all right so uh i guess uh so stand and be sworn in no i guess that's that's where you're headed i'm sorry raise your right hands do

you swear or affirm the evidence you're about to give will be the truth the whole truth and nothing but

the truth i do okay do we have any interveners there are no interveners okay have you turned in all the appropriate paperwork including your resume and i'm going to get my work history and a copy of the agenda item to be filed as exhibit one all right do we have any ex parte commissioner smith commissioner hetherington if any they've been filed if any of them been found commissioner campy

i don't have any that's been filed i don't have any and that's been filed all right um i got it all

wow and the proof of public notice mailers was submitted at the lpa hearing perfect i'm john senate senior planner with growth management i'm here to present the rezoning application on property owned by mr eric brush this application is also known as the green ridge ranch rezoning it is a request by cotler and hearing on behalf of the property owner mr eric brush to rezone from the current a2 agricultural district to the ar5a agricultural ranchette district on an approximately 20.1 acre undeveloped site this site is located on the west side of southwest green ridge lane just over half a mile south of the intersection of southwest green ridge lane and southwest 96th street in western palm city the existing green ridge estates subdivision is located to the east of the property across green ridge lane it's currently undeveloped the existing future land use of the property and the surrounding properties is agricultural ranchette both the property and the surrounding properties to the west south and east have the a2 agricultural zoning district designation the a2 district is a category c zoning district the ar5a district is present a short distance to the north of the property because the existing a2 agricultural district is a category c zoning district this application is being processed as a mandatory rezoning to a category a zoning district which implements the policies for the agricultural ranchette future land use designation there are two standard category a zoning district which implement the agricultural ranchette which implement the agricultural ranchette future land use designation those are the ar5a district and the ar10a district the pud zoning is also an additional option however the applicant is requesting the ar5a ag ranchette district these are the development standards for both the ar5a and ar10a category a zoning district the open space and height are similar for both the the only real difference is the minimum lot size and the allowable density the allowable setbacks for the ar5a and ar10a zoning districts 40 feet front side and rear there are certain conditions supporting the applicant's request for the ar5a zoning district that would be the existing future land use designation of agricultural ranchette for the property and the surrounding area there is an existing ar5a zoning district a short distance to the north of the property and the existing green ridge estates residential subdivision is located to the east of the property across green ridge lane the green ridge estates subdivision was platted in the late 1970s and consists of five acre lots this matter was heard before the lpa this past thursday april 4th the lpa moved to approve staff's recommendation four to zero development review staff have found the green ridge ranch rezoning application to comply with all applicable regulations and the comprehensive growth management plan is detailed in our staff report staff recommendation is to approve the applicant's request to rezone to the ar5a zoning district move that the board receive and file the agenda item and its attachments including the staff report as exhibit one move that the board adopt a resolution amending the martin county zoning atlas to change the zoning district designation on the subject site from a2 agricultural district to ar5a agricultural ranchette

district that concludes my presentation any questions for staff seeing none applicant good afternoon george missomer with cotler and hearing here to here today on behalf of the property owner i have been sworn in um i do have a presentation although it's all the same information that john just went over so if you have any questions for me i'd be happy to answer thank you any questions for the applicant do we have any public um comment on the subject i see none back to the board we'll move staff's recommendation for approval okay we have a motion by commissioner heatherington seconded by commissioner smith all in favor all right all opposed motion carries unanimously congratulations thank you thank you

commissioners good job mr senate thank you first time before us you got a unanimous you probably can

expect those all the time yeah you're batting a thousand with that let's go to mrs stephanie murley department number one operate um office of management and budget items which will require

board approval apparently there's three items all right so our first item is a permission to apply for the fiscal year 25 federal environmental infrastructure community funding appropriation this is a requested grant award of approximately 20 million dollars for the water and wastewater infrastructure including stormwater management to improve water quality in the saint lucie river and indian river lagoon it requires a 25 percent cost share for projects that will be programmed within our capital improvement plan to be determined and um i have john mail here if you have any questions regarding that i do know that is a big 20 million dollar ask then no okay the next item is a permission to accept the e911 state grant for the rapid sos premium this is our sheriff's office e91 division is requesting to accept a grant award in the amount of 143 280 and no matches require required and this is to be used for the premium version of the rapid sos platform to enhance current workflow by utilizing local and regional gis data for 911 calls and the last little item is a request for for funds from broadband reserves um while we wait for insurance proceeds um a contractor was performing some underground directional drilling at pomeroy and us-1 which caused damage to the martin county fiber optic and in order to do these repairs we need to take it out of our broadband reserves um in the amount of 22 476 dollars and that is all i have

for you today commissioner heard would like to talk to you about yes on number three a contractor

screwed up and we're paying for it we have to repair it now and we anticipate insurance proceeds on the back end why is you know why or why is insurance covering it why isn't the contractor covering covering it i believe i believe we usually put in a claim i don't have it trico information right this

second jim gordon public works director so um when we have accidents that occur we have to pay for the repair while we seek the insurance um reimbursement and then the funds come back to us after that and it's usually insurance repayment from our insurer or theirs no we would go after whoever caused the damage they caused as long as it was appropriately marked we would go after whoever caused the damage okay thanks thank you i think we all had that same question when i read it i was like why are we paying there's usually a lag of about three months between when we have to fix it and when we

get the money back any any other questions move approval motion by commissioner heard seconded by commissioner smith all in favor aye all opposed motion carries unanimously department number two contracts that meet the threshold for board approval one million dollars or greater mr chris mrs

miss christie brother good afternoon christie brotherton chief procurement officer uh we have two items for your consideration today the first item is the indian riverside park lagoon boardwalk expansion contract staff is recommending that the board award the contract to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder which is custom-built marine construction in the amount of one million one hundred ten thousand two hundred fifty seven dollars and thirty cents and move that the board authorize the county administrator or designee to execute all documents related to this request the next item is a change order request for the golden gate neighborhood resurfacing project the purpose of this change order is for roadway reconstruction of southeast birch avenue and southeast durant avenue that was not included in the original scope of work the office of community development has requested the additional work to improve the roadway connectivity within the golden gate neighborhood and staff is recommending that the board approve change order number three to m&m asphalt maintenance doing business as all county paving in the amount of 228 thousand four hundred seventy seven dollars and 95 cents and move that the board authorize the county administrator or designee to execute any and all documents related to this request and that concludes this item

commissioner heatherington yeah i have a couple questions concerns and interest on this project so this is golden gate it's the resurfacing after the septic to sewer and this change order is is for the roadways that were are privately maintained but will be resurfaced not part of the scope so completely agree this is the the third change order so the first one was in the neighborhood of 29 or so thousand the second one was in the neighborhood of 190 or so thousand for extra material and as we drove and i've driven you know with mr gorton and i continue to go in the neighborhood and talk to you and this comes up frequently at our nac meetings those roads are so very degraded that we're finding that more and more is necessary and that i don't know who did the plans if there's contingency if they did sampling but it almost seems like maybe more sampling is necessary because i'm very concerned that if we just simply resurface that we're going to be right back here in a couple years because the condition of the roadway is so poor do we have do we put

contingencies in these jobs um in the cost estimate it's more of a budgeting thing on behind the scenes

but we don't bid them with contingencies so on private jobs no contingency because we're obviously it it was originally at 2.8 and i think we're about 18 450 000 in change orders and probably 18 and we could definitely expect more change orders and that and i'm i'm going to ask that public works do sampling because i'm again i'm very concerned as are some of the residents and the nac again it comes up that we're just kind of putting lipstick on a pig we're going to resurface it and we're going to be right back in this position in a couple years from now with completely and those those roads are about

40 years old yeah it's jim gordon public works director the change order to address some of those deficiencies what we found was on some of the roadways there was insufficient base underneath the asphalt and before we paved it we wanted to improve the base condition and that's what change order two was was to excavate that material out and and add more really kind of mix in the millings and re-roll it so we get a solid base before we pave it and then we've there probably will be other areas that we'll encounter on the project because it isn't consistently bad it's just spotty where there's spots under the road that have insufficient base underneath it so we do have the ability to core the roads and we have done some of that to try to identify those spots but as we go through the project as it gets milled through if we see those same conditions we will have to address the deficient base material and it isn't we would have cores everywhere to really find them because it's not consistent where we're finding those um um insufficient conditions but we are we are not just putting

asphalt on top of um inadequate base so we're definitely going to sample as we go along sample

and then we also have inspectors who are out there you know entirely watching that project to make sure we get the paving done in the right locations well so we're going to be we're they're very concerned at the

nac as as they should be to make sure that this is a project that is last for you know a good time to come and then the second thing is when we're just bigger picture so if we're 18 over the budget on something like this when we're doing our budgeting process do we not want to put in a contingency or something on some of these jobs because it we're gonna we're gonna be far over our budget well on some of these projects and we're gonna have to move money from somewhere if we're gonna be 20 30 percent

over the budget well the the 230 000 isn't of the current change order that we're talking about now isn't related to unknown conditions it is a request by the cra to pave unpaved roads in the community so it's a way to convert those unpaved privately maintained roads into paved publicly maintained roads typically would do an assessment for those properties but because it's in the cra we have the ability to use those tiff funds to convert those roadways so it was um it's not unforeseen it's just a request that was made why don't we use this contract get it at a cheaper rate because our unit cost on that asphalt is pretty cheap because we already have them paving all the other roads so we can get those paved much cheaper than we would if we had done it as a separate project okay take this one out we then we'd be there's going there's going to be other change orders based on the conditions of

those roadways and i suspect we're going to be significantly over budget that's going to have to be accounted for and somewhere in these capital improvement projects so absolutely but it's i wouldn't

say this is the norm this is the exception we just did gomez and had extensive paving much more paving than this one and didn't have that degree of change order um so this one is is really more unique because of how old those roadways are and and what we're finding in some of those locations a great example is right in front of the park where our bus stop is there's there's some pavement that's breaking up there that uh we've already done a core on and we know that the base isn't sufficient in that location but if you go across the street in the other lane just 10 feet away there's sufficient base i'm actually

glad to hear that thank you jim yep mr donelson just simply say that uh what's important in this conversation is that you support us to continue as they mill out and they find that there is sand in one location and base in the other that we can continue to repair it and that uh you're okay with them coming back with a future change order so that we can build it correctly while we're there the impact that you reference would be in the worst case scenario there may be another project scheduled for next fall that we may have to delay or look at from balance to to catch up so that so we would shuffle the deck to make sure that this one gets done right first and something else in the

future might have to wait that i'm 100 behind and i i just if there's anything we could do on the front end to get these plans or do the sampling on the front end to account for it i would i'm 100 in support of doing this work on them so we can have a better picture whether it be we need to hire an engineer or do the plans differently thank you it's helpful commissioner smith yeah i think the most

important thing for me in the in the overall conversation is the idea that we've had older neighborhoods throughout martin county that have privately maintained or whether they're publicly owned or privately maintained dirt roads or roads that are in somewhat very low condition and that the neighborhood is supportive of us converting them over and getting them taken care of and getting them up to where they should be and we had some in rio similar to that that we worked with the property owners for years and the challenge sometimes you run into is that you have ownership in these older neighborhoods from center line to center line of the lots and there's no right-of-way for us to go in and do drainage work there's no right-of-way to go in and do water and sewer and to get to the point where apparently yours are getting to is is i think is a huge accomplishment so keep on going you know and and if there's change orders that's fine but i i think the brilliance of

of this sort of neighborhood restoration strategy is that we are taking advantage of contracts we are

taking advantage of the the mobilization of equipment in these neighborhoods that hopefully will reduce the cost versus coming in two years now and doing something that wasn't anticipated but the cra says hey we really want to do this well we should have done it two years ago when we

were in there doing the work so i keep on going great stuff mr hurt yeah is this an accessible project

it's not an accessible project it's being paid through the tiff funds from the um golden gate cra

and they're paying for the change orders too yeah they're just change order three yeah the other

change orders are through our neighborhood restoration project it's it's a it was a neighborhood restoration we did um storm water we did septic to sewer conversion and then the third phase is the

paving of the roads after those first two um and none of that was accessible none of that was

accessible our neighborhood restoration project uh program is going into those older neighborhoods and and taking out the um you know older materials oh yeah i'm yeah i'm sorry the public works portions of the project were not accessible the which included the storm water and the paving of the uh sewer of

course was accessible is that the way that it's been in all the neighborhood restoration programs

that's how all of the neighborhood restorations have occurred okay and they're mostly funded out of the fpl franchise fees um and that really was a way to catch up on all that deferred maintenance that we had we had 17 years of deferred maintenance on some of these roadways and this is our means of getting that stuff caught back up and uh um there's there's a lot of project we've made a lot of progress but we have a lot of projects ahead to get caught up thanks did you have anything else no sir that i will

move uh staff's recommendation for approval okay we have a motion by commissioner hetherington

seconded by commissioner smith all in favor aye all opposed motion carries unanimously and now we get to hear from miss sarah powers legislative session final report um so right here uh sarah powers

legislative coordinator um this is going to be pretty brief um since the governor hasn't he's slowly he's signing bills as we as we saw today he's still signing bills budget hasn't been signed yet so everything i say today still could change tomorrow or or um until june so we'll come back in this summer with a more in-depth what happened so uh regular session dates were january 9th to march 8th there were 1900 general bills filed uh 325 of those passed both chambers and as of yesterday 66 bills have been signed but i think he signed like five more this morning so uh right here right at walgreens and uh stewart uh so yes um so this year um some of the budget highlights um 117.46 billion dollars uh it's actually not historic i that's a typo it's just it was larger last year um cnc um some of the general revenue at 49.4 billion uh 10 billion in reserves um everglades restoration and the water man south florida water management district operations were fully funded uh at 702 million uh 528.6 million in florida forever uh visit florida was fully funded again this year at 80 million um the ship and sale programs were also funded and the job growth um florida job growth grant fund was funded at 75 million some of our martin county uh budget accomplishments this year we had six asks and we got four funded um the martin county sheriff's office mental health pod at 500 000 uh 710 realignment um for three and a half million besse creek retrofit at 500 000 and the gomez petway potable water service at 940 000 so a total of just about five and a half million dollars um still could be vetoed it's sitting on his desk but we're actively reaching out to the governor's office with letters and um trying to keep our all of our funding as it is now uh some highlighted legislation that we've been going over um this past session uh sb 1638 um that directs 96 percent of the revenue generated from the seminal tribe compact to fund flood control and water quality improvement infrastructure and continued acquisition acquisition and management of florida's conservation lands uh house bill 105 um that's a public works bill um it just revises the definition of public works projects and to include uh any project paid for by local funds in addition to state appropriated funds uh hb 433 prevents local governments um yeah it's employment market it prevents local governments from adding additional ordinances related to workplace heat exposure and wage requirements higher than the standard uh sb 280 is the vacation rentals bill uh just levels the playing field for um the hotels and vacation rentals in our area um by allowing um the county to collect the bed tax and create a local vacation rental registration program um so again it just takes our a lot of small business hotels in in martin county so just equals them with airbnb um sb 2 or hb 267 changes the time frame that local governments must approve or denied building permit applications uh sb 812 requires that requires counties to curate a process to expedite the issuance of residential building permits can you go back to 267 for a second yes so what exactly ended up happening with that so it passed so there there lays out time frames it just expedited um what was there before i don't have the exact um but it went from like words it gives us a time limit on when we can how long we have to right it went from like like i forget exactly which process but like 30 days to five days 60 days to 20 days um it's all laid out i can just it's a significant change it is a significant change in the in our timeline so um i don't have all the numbers but i can get that i'll probably have that more more as time goes on hold that thought

okay turn in in relation to that uh our challenge will be at times when you are staff um resource short or with uh with the competition for quality um plan reviewers and inspectors that may it will it will we may have to resort to more contractual relationships it'll either be more expensive or the time given to review will be less so in times of a high demand the quality of service may

may be difficult to achieve our normal standards um moving on hb um 479 mobility fees um requires that we work with our um municipalities and only charge one um fee that go on roads that go through our county um sb 7040 uh that ratifies the statewide stormwater bill or uh statewide stormwater rule that was passed in 2020 in the clean waterways act um just makes more stringent standards for stormwater treatment uh hb 1365 that is the um the bill that will ban uh homeless camping in our streets and it'll and it will give the um um counties an opportunity to um create the public sleeping camps we don't have it's not a requirement but uh it gives the county uh guidelines for creating these camps if we so choose um and then sb 328 was a huge bill that passed it's uh made a lot of clarifying and substantial changes to live local um i think that

that was a collaborative act and after yes did it and and i just i didn't follow it as closely as i

probably should have did it eliminate industrial uh yes and some there were some changes i don't think it eliminated industrial completely but i think that it i'd have to go back and just i think relative to

some of the applications we've seen in the last year or so that they're in the hesitancy to deal with industrial because that was a certainly a big talking point during session yeah i just don't know if that's if they eliminated it took it out limited it yeah i have to double check it on if

they completely eliminated industrial but i know um that was one of the the points they were trying to

change commissioner campy thank you miss powers or mr donelson can you have like we had in the past when we discussed uh sb 102 and they live local now that we've had sort of a sort of a redo of it can you have someone come and make an agenda item to have a presentation of what it was and what it is

yes uh and two bills that were following that uh didn't pass were county commissioner term limits and the development permits and orders bill um that it came up and made it through but it didn't pass and

that was one of our big concerns so mission hurt any idea what kind of appropriations are going to be available through the proceeds on sb 1638 um i don't know 100 million 200 million yeah it was 500

million i think it was around 100 million right more sorry over a billion oh really billion okay

how much was received last oh it wasn't it wasn't a law it wasn't a law yes okay good you know what they've

been funding um three or 400 million for the last couple years a billion's better yeah several more

and that is all i have so if you have any questions let me know we'll get uh someone to to talk about live local um soon and anything any questions thank you thank you for all your effort all right we have

reached the end of our agenda time for 505 public comment at 225 we have one form mr

gary mr gary okay do you repeat your name so i can hear it my name is gary earler i'm a resident of port salerno um i wasn't prepared for this at all so i still want to remind you i spoke with you a few months ago um as far as meeting minutes posted uh the last meeting minutes posted online is actually uh 8 8 of 23 uh that was the last one posted uh commission meeting of 8 22 has not been posted we're we're almost eight months since that last meeting um as far as transparency goes and someone looking to research or find out what happened in a in a commission meeting i understand that the the agenda summaries are posted but the meeting minutes list everything so when you're when you're looking to try to find something or see who said something or you know a general consensus of what's going on in in the name of transparency which is what we're all about we're eight months out i think we can do better um i also happen to be looking through uh 2024's budget you've allocated 150 000 to the manatee pocket mooring field um we didn't even know we were having a mooring field we knew we were having a mooring field in jensen we weren't sure where it was going that as you heard earlier from some of the residents that i was watching online um the yellow the yellow signs go up mr campy mr smith this is this will not be your last chance to get before us i'm sorry we were railroaded it was our fault we weren't on top of it goes back again to the transparency nine hundred thousand dollars is allocated fiscal year 2024 for sbs manatee business park restoration under roads we're doing commerce i happen to look at a map the vacant land and the four stories across the street the city of stewart has i'm not sure how far south commerce that is but there's nine hundred thousand dollars for roads i get it septic to sewers in new monrovia number one topic across the county i understand i happen to read an email to you mr jenkins from i believe it was uh across the water sailfish point they're half they're half converted they want to know what they got to do to get the other half salerno's less than that monrovia a tenth of that we want it too there's no money anywhere grants we had 10 million we gave it back thank you thank you

have a good evening thank you all right can i respond or ask a question about the minutes that's the minutes that come through the clerk's office the bocc minutes are through the clerk's office yes now i know they can be watched agenda item by agenda item video wise but is can we find out why it is i mean i don't know why it would be eight months because i had a couple of people question some of my comments in a commission meeting and i said you could watch it online but the actual written minutes is something that people have asked of me as well so if we could find out

why it's so far backlogged yes thank you okay this were commissioner comments commissioner smith mr hetherington i'm all set i'm all set commissioner campy all set are you all set okay yeah the um

we had received uh 18 million dollars in grants from dep for the new monrovia port salerno septic to sewer program and at the community's request we turned that money in hoping to get a bigger appropriation from them and were unsuccessful but it was at the community's request that we made that move um and also the uh mooring field in port salerno was presented to the nac six times before we approved it so there there has been lots of community participation lots of public involvement thank you

okay you have the floor mr yes yes so i'm i saved it for the end of the day so bear with me i have three items to uh to discuss with you um the first one is an important item that uh mr dan mchenry brought to our attention and that's uh congressman brian mast has submitted a bill that would amend uh they call title 3398 of the united states code and this is for our veterans and their ability to extend the deadline for submission of the applications regarding emergency treatment and so um right now they're required to submit uh within 72 hours of going to the emergency room in which case they may actually be in the hospital for some time this allows them to submit the requirement uh it would be 72 hours following discharge so it's it's significant so i'm asking for support for um our chairman to sign a letter to uh in support of brian mass bill to uh congress um go ahead you have a thank you uh i think that's an

excellent idea i see mr mchenry is here if we could ask him to come forward i have a question our most

distinguished veterans administrator that's what my question is going to be about mr mchenry how are

you doing how are you doing uh i heard a terrible rumor that you're retiring yes sir from you actually um when is that going to take place uh april 26th april 26th so before we have another commission meeting correct oh that is correct yes i just wanted to publicly thank you for your service we have had remarkable uh veteran services officers in the past but you set the bar very high you are a gentleman all of the things that we had come up with i know that veterans have come forward and not only commended you personally but your department and that you will be a terrible loss for us so i wish you well in your retirement and thank you for your service and for your service to

us thank you very much thank you back to you yeah so if i could get a uh a motion to authorize the

chairs to uh authorize the chair to write that letter that congressman mast and mr mchenry had

recommended second i'd rather sign it you're gonna write it uh-huh you'll sign it then okay we have a motion by commissioner campy seconded by commissioner hetherington all in favor

aye all opposed motion carries unanimously okay the second a letter i'm asking support for and i'm not sure that it needs a motion but at least a head nod and that is uh um uh our senator president uh kathleen pasodomo's husband passed away recently and i thought a letter from the board in support of her would be appropriate and i know you all shared that so um we can prepare a letter for the chairman to sign on behalf of the board if that's uh okay with you all passed away tragically while hiking in

bryce canyon bryce canyon and in utah just to remind people including my son that hiking is very

dangerous and the last item which is also an important item is that is uh we've had uh some discussions as you know uh and uh regarding providing a water system to evergreen uh community um and in winstone and uh it started some time ago and one of the challenges that staff has had is is is getting the water upgrades to the community and there's looping sections going under canal and under that and in half and as i got more into it more recently one of the things that i have identified is that there are in our septic to sewer program um the facilities that it takes to get to the community the utility upgrades we've been um making up providing those upgrades without being part of the special assessment um and i and i wanted to bring that to your attention because i think it's only fair we do that to the same for communities within the urban service boundary that we allow water service that once the utility upgrades that come either in the ground to make them larger size or to get into that community would be part of our um uh county's obligation and that the uh special assessments are all related to the interior of the community and so i think to be consistent um one i'd like to make sure that one if you support that we would do it for the evergreen community and bring back a policy to the board so that all communities would be treated equally um we already do it for the uh sewer system but to do it for the water and this would again apply to existing properties not new development but existing uh properties within the urban boundary and if you're all accepting to that i'd like to

move forward with that mr speth uh that was on a different topic so i can follow this

commissioner campy um yes i appreciate that mr donelson i know that when we had a couple of community meetings and i'd like to compliment our staff and utilities you know they they have to embrace these neighborhoods one at a time and then all of the idiosyncrasies that come with the project technically and and the politics of the hoa boards and the residents and i know that this one was a little more complicated because it was two adjoining neighborhoods so there was double the hoas and different you know they it wasn't just specifically a neighborhood so the messaging and the information made it a little more challenging i think this is a step in the right direction that the residents should really only be responsible for things once inside the perimeter of their own neighborhoods not leading up to it i think that infrastructure backbone is is truly our responsibility as the government uh as the county and then did you also have some you and i had a conversation about trying to make the dollar amount a little more uniformed is that part of the same conversation that

that that that's what does it so you're basically you're not um chart you know where one community has to we do a a thousand foot extension down the road to get to them and another one uh like we did the golden gate we had to extend and upgrade a size quite a bit that was um you would have completely different assessment values based upon that external but when you do internally um uh it that would level the playing field and get the the ideas that a water system would be um typically if we do that would be under 10 000 per per individual as opposed to higher and we our goal for septic to sewer right now is to keep it under 12 so um it would it would certainly make it uh in the urban boundary um uh more affordable

i think that's a step in the right direction i also think it it lends some consistency because one of the concerns we had heard from residents at our meeting was that you know the neighbors the residents will be tasked with voting on what was at that particular point much more of a range of cost so we're asking you to vote on making a purchase when you we could not really define specifically there was a range it was 12 5 to 14 5 and residents came to the microphone and said well how do you want us to either campaign to have people do this or even vote ourselves if we're not genuinely sure what the the number will be this will allow us to have a much more consistent number it's a step in the right direction to make it less expensive it's a little more uh true and fair to the residents will pay for what they're genuinely getting within their own streets uh not what's happening out on the main road uh and then the most important part is that it's for existing uh well-established neighborhoods not new developments they're responsible for all of that so i appreciate staff putting their heads together to come up with the logical uh fair solution for evergreen and windstone now and potentially all other neighborhoods in

the future thank you i would make a motion to allow that to happen so i think um if you're comfortable you you uh the most i'd want you to do is to make a motion that we do it for windstone and that i bring the policy back to address everybody or you can simply ask us to bring the policy back it's your

i'd make a motion that we accept this new uh policy for windstone and evergreen in palm city and i'll

bring back a policy that addresses the entire county commissioner smith i'm a second thought and then i

have a after this yep uh we have a motion by commissioner campy seconded by commissioner smith all in favor aye all opposed motion carries unanimously and commissioner smith has a comment

yeah just a thought relative to our congressman asking for some support for the va affairs and and bills yeah you're uh you're very quiet your mic isn't really working sorry um just following on with our congressional um member asking for some support for the va language and so on i think it would be i think based upon all of our conversation this morning with our residents relative to the voyage project down in south county that we maybe send some sort of request communication to our federal delegation asking for some shape form of consideration to modifying giving us some flexibility as to how to deal with this in the future i i just i'm sure it has been asked and dealt with a hundred times before but i i think unless we exercise all of our asks uh of our delegation um our residents are still going to feel as if there was more that we could do and we didn't and so i don't know if you all support this idea or not but i think we ought to reach out with some kind of communication explaining what exists i'm sure they know it exists and i know that i've been told before that amending the american disabilities act is like an act of change in the constitution but nonetheless uh not dissimilar to maybe uh sb 102 and and some of the things that needed to be changed in that bill there ought to be some kind of recognition that putting a 15-person bed unit in a residential neighborhood is not appropriate and i don't know how you get there um but that's what they're up there for and i think we ought to communicate that to them agreed agreed agreed so don if you could put your heads together over there that will bring something back to you that might look like and i and i don't i don't have

that box to to look into but and that's it mr thank you okay we have reached the end of the end um our next meeting will be april 30th 2024 and with that we are adjourned