Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the September 18th, 2025 meeting of the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners. I want to start with a couple of housekeeping items today. Commissioner Flowers is currently on county business at the Florida Association of County Meetings, and Commissioner Peters is tending to an ongoing family emergency. So, pursuant to our virtual meeting participation, I would like to entertain a motion to approve their virtual attendance, including waiving the requirement for Commissioner Peters to be on camera. Okay, we have a motion from Commissioner Wicke, second from Commissioner Weber. All in favor? Aye. Okay, passed unanimously. Thank you very much. Today, I want to start by thanking our deputies Thornton, Atkinson, and Manley for keeping us all safe today. Thank you, gentlemen. We really appreciate you being here today, and I think this would be an appropriate time to just, let's just please take a moment of silence to recognize the three York County police officers that were killed in the line of duty yesterday. I also want to thank Dave Connor and his team in communications for doing an outstanding job. Two weeks ago at our last meeting and public hearing, we had an incredible amount of public speakers, and they managed it extremely professionally, extremely well. So, hats off to you guys. Great job. And I also want to just thank everybody for coming out and expressing themselves. And whether we have different point of views or not during a commission meeting, this is the people's house, and we appreciate you all coming out and being engaged. So, at this time, I would like to ask everyone to rise, and for Reverend David Scheller from the First Presbyterian Church of Dunedin to come to the podium for the invocation, and please remain standing for Commissioner Scheer to join us in the play. Good afternoon. And please invite you to join me in prayer. Holy God, Jesus said that the truth sets us free. The Quran teaches us not to mix the truth with lies. Buddha said that like the sun and the moon, the truth cannot be hidden for long. Hebrew scriptures tell us that you delight in those who are truthful. And we desperately need the truth. No leader can adequately lead for long if they refuse to address the world as it actually is, if they refuse the truth. And yet we struggle to seek the truth. Too often we prefer to protect our own egos, we preserve our own opinions by using them to shape the information we accept, rather than subjecting our opinions to the truth. We would rather pursue our own power than pursue your truth. So bless then, these commissioners and all who will speak and participate in this meeting today, help them, help us all be pursuers of your own heart for the truth. Help us to understand that your truth is larger than any one of us, that instead of any one individual holding all truth, we each hold swatches and scraps of truth that must be sought, discerned, and quilted together. Help us to slow down and be honestly curious to discover the truth that someone else possesses, especially from those whose voices we too often ignore, overlook, or disregard. Free us from personal attacks. Free us from falsely misrepresenting others' statements because we don't like what they say. Teach us the truth of your peace, that violence in all of its forms only leads to suffering. Help us to value the hard truths of research and science, of budgets and balance sheets for their part of your loving gifts to us, but also help us value as well those life-giving truths of beauty, of hope and joy, of love, especially for our enemies, of justice for the vulnerable, and peace in ourselves and for all creation. And in the name of God, of all truth, we pray. Amen. Amen. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, Republic, and the visible. Thank you, Reverend. That was well said. At this time, I would like to invite staff members from Congresswoman Luna's office, Olivia Carson and Sam Wilson, to please join me at the podium to accept the Charlie Kirk Remembrance Proclamation. So I know that Congresswoman Luna got her start in politics with Turning Point USA. And she was very close with Charlie, and Charlie actually encouraged her to run for office. So while we all feel this sense of tremendous loss, I know it's very, very personal for her. Charlie Kirk was a passionate advocate, author, and commentator whose work influenced millions of people across the nation. He dedicated his life to encouraging civic engagement, fostering dialogue, and inspiring young people to take part in the democratic process. Charlie maintained a residence in Florida, building connection to our state and its communities through his time spent here. His commitment to his principles, as well as his tireless energy, and championed causes important to him, left an indelible mark on public discourse. Today, we remember and honor the life and legacy of Charlie Kirk, acknowledging his impact on the lives of many, and the enduring influence of his work. Now, therefore, it be proclaimed by the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners that September 10, 2025, be recognized as a day of remembrance for Charlie Kirk. In Pinellas County, we encourage residents to reflect on his contributions, celebrate his legacy, and continue the important work of strengthening our communities through civic engagement. So please join me in a moment of reflection for Charlie. Thank you. Okay. Now we'll move on to citizens to be heard. And we have about a half a dozen cards here. First one is David Lee. Good afternoon, David. Hey, Chairman Scott. David Lee. I live in Lillman. Can you turn the projector on? I heard that late night tax discussion you guys had a couple weeks ago, and I just want to tell you that, you know, people where I live really appreciate all those ideas on the best way to reduce taxes and lower expenses. There was one thing I heard in that discussion that I don't agree with, and that is that you need to wait until next year to lower taxes again. And I wanted to tell you about this in case you don't know. Can you see it on the projector? Can you turn that on? So, we have a 25% tax on our water in Lillman, and it is, so the city of St. Petersburg, they have really high and crazy... Can we get the folks in the back turning on the projector? Is it coming up? Yeah, just give us... There we go. Okay. So this is from my bill yesterday, and essentially, so we have the crazy rates that the city of St. Pete charges us, and then those rates are about to go up in two weeks, and then on top of that, they charge 25% on top of that to us, some of the county's poorest residents. And I've been asking about this water tax. It's starting to add up. It's about $10 a household per month. I've been asking about it for 10 years, and the answer I get consistently is pretty much that Pinellas County just made a bad deal. And it's on that point where I have a lot of hope now, because I look around here, and I'm seeing a lot of dealmakers. And I think it's a great time to look at this. You know, Chairman Scott, you're a great negotiator. We have Commissioner Shearer. You might not know. He's famous in the private sector for making good deals. We have the county administrator, one of the most powerful county administrators in modern history. I know when he gets behind something, it happens. But this is really starting to add up. This is a budget-neutral thing that you can do. You don't have to wait until next budget year to do it. You can start on Monday. But it's about $10 a month, and we'd really appreciate it if you would make it a priority and maybe look at getting us a better price, just a fair price on water. Deal? All right. Thanks, guys. Okay, next we have Lois Enel. Chris, that's your false study issue. Is Lois here? Oh, there he is. Come on, Lois. Come on up. Yeah. Okay. Good afternoon, Commissioners and staff. I'm Lois Enel, Director of Eastlake Community Library. I did not break that. I didn't touch it. I'm here to thank you. As you know, the Eastlake Community Library is one of four entities under Palm Harbor Community Services Agency. And we are a county building on county property, but we are not county employees. We are responsible for the maintenance of our entities for the building and the grounds. And for many years, we have paid for our property insurance through the private sector, as well as all of the contents, liability insurance, and so on. However, the fact that it was a county building has always been an issue that we have tried to address with the county. I want to thank you, because as of June of this year, the county has now taken over the property insurance for the four entities, so that taxpayer dollars can be used elsewhere. Our library alone has saved close to $20,000 a year. And because of that, I was able to offer more e-resources to our residents, as well as to increase some merit raises for my staff, because the most important asset of my building is my staff. And I want to keep the best that we possibly can to help the residents of Eastlake. So I want to come and thank you. I'm not asked for anything else today. Just, I appreciate all the support that we get from the county. It's a wonderful, collaborative effort, and we are very grateful. So thank you. Thank you, Lois. Good to see you. Okay, next we have Anne-Marie Nurnberger. Come on up, Anne-Marie. Hey. Hello. Good afternoon. Hello, commissioners. Good afternoon. So my name is Anne-Marie Nurnberger, and I'm the assistant director. I'm Lois's assistant at Eastlake Community Library. She got to give the thanks, and I get to do the ask. I just wanted to thank you for all your support in the past. Eastlake Community Library would not be there without your support. So we thank you for that. I just wanted to make you aware that we are applying. As you know, we're entering a construction phase starting October, and we are applying for a state grant, the public library construction grant. It doesn't come around so often, and it just popped up, and we've been rushing to apply for it. It's for half a million dollars, and we'll greatly add to the quality of the building that we're going to construct. It's a very short window, and the county staff have been working with us. Chris Rose has been working with us, BJ Gavin, everyone at OMD has just been falling over themselves to get this on the docker for you guys. So you'll be seeing it at a future meeting, a proclamation, and we would very much ask for your support. We're really just looking forward to expanding Eastlake and providing more for the citizens of North Pinellas County, Pinellas County in general. So just asking for your support and offering our thanks today. Thank you. Next, we have David Traylor. Good afternoon, David. Here we go. Thank you for allowing me to speak. I'm here on behalf of the residents of Ridgemore, a community up in Eastlake, and Tarpon Woods and Coventry. We've got thousands and thousands of residents. I have no idea exactly how many. And the bridge that provides access to Ridgemore, it's a two-lane bridge, is old and apparently not terribly safe. So the plan is to replace it by cutting the bridge in half, keeping one lane open. But the bridge reconstruction, teardown and reconstruction is supposed to last a full two years. During that time, we'll have a traffic light that allows traffic to go both ways with time in between. So it's going to provide Tarpon Woods, the only other way in, comes out to a lane on Eastlake Road, both of these, Ridgemore Boulevard and Tarpon Woods Boulevard, come out on Eastlake Road at traffic lights. But Tarpon Woods is a 30-mile-an-hour road with a four-way stop in the middle of it. It's very slow going at best. And we're worried about the fact that traffic backs up during heavy periods, even now. And with Ridgemore Boulevard, which is the main, it probably carries at least two-thirds of the traffic between the two lights. If it's closed down because maybe the bridge, they're talking about it, they can't guarantee that the bridge is going to survive for even one-lane traffic because it's somewhat undermined by Brooker Creek, which has kind of, I guess, swept away a lot of the dirt and all that supports the bridge. And tearing it in half may make it unstable. There's also one other thing going on. The golf course that is back there, I can't recall the name of it, right off the bat. But they're going to be, I understand it's been sold, they're going to be taking the top couple of feet off of that whole golf course. And this is going to occur during the same time that the bridge is, you know, shut down and being worked on, or at least half open. That'll add a whole lot more traffic and possibly road damage to at least Tarpon Woods and perhaps also the bridge if they take the dirt out through Ridgemore Boulevard on that bridge. We're concerned about that. Okay. We also, we're worried about emergency vehicles. David, your time's up. Thank you, though. We appreciate the comments. Next, we have David Ballard-Gettis, Jr. Hi, good morning, or good afternoon, Chairman. David Ballard-Gettis, Jr. I live on Georgia Avenue in Palm Harbor. In the early 1970s, around the time of Watergate, developers descended on the area and some of the most unbridled development in the history of the world has and is taking place right now. All of the homes were equipped with sprinkler systems that automatically turned themselves on. Our cypress wetlands were harvested for lawn mulch, eviscerating our wetlands in its process as we watered the perfidiousness of nothing that put food on the table, further contaminating our water supply with lawn fertilizers and pesticides, slowly destroying, driving us out of water, eating us out of our subsistence as declared, contaminating the water supply, reducing our cypress wetlands to thistles, using water as a Second Amendment weapon of choice, legislatively as a Power of the Earth, as written in the Declaration of Independence. So we went from Watergate to giving rise to water districts to further birthing water jurisdictions as a ship of war, as it sailed from Article 1, Section 10, where our water supply today is not a right of supply, but has been reduced to a privilege, a privilege to access the opportunity of availability fee to gain access to our essential water in Pinellas County Resolution 95286, Section 3F, holding our utilities supply hostage to pay a bond dividend to a third-party facility based on Statute 15311, as financed via Statute 218.415, Section 16F. Florida Supreme Court Case 96332 ratifying the reclaimed water bonds in reference to Statute 403.064 states that reclaimed water is for indoor use in Section 7, and that reclaimed water is to be electronically metered in Section 15 to include potable reuse of reclaimed water in Section 17 of that same statute, Statute 403.064. As falsely stated in the case, reclaimed water was never intended for lawn watering. That was just a setup, a latching, intending to place us in bondage, further undermining our water supply, slowly taking our liberty, property, and our life in a long train of usurpations as written in the Declaration of Independence based on the 14th Amendment. Thank you, sir. Thank you, David. Next, we have Ronald Walker. Ron Walker, 7100 Olmerton Road, Largo. I've been doing some checking, guys, and you guys have been having a bad run. You failed to expeditiously vote for the bonds to build the stadium, and St. Pete has lost the ball team. And recently, you voted to defund, take a small grant away from the artsies down in St. Pete. Of course, they're weak, and you're good at attacking the weak. Then I discovered that Milwaukee voted to injure his own people down there in St. Pete. I further discovered that you guys are the highest-paid commissioners in the state. You guys make, all of you make $100,000 a year. That's more than Dade County commissioners make. And for $100,000 a year, the people expect to be protected. How can we be protected? We can be protected with a false claims ordinance. Now, for those here in the room who are unfamiliar with the nomenclature false claims ordinance, it's an ordinance that will protect whistleblowers from losing their jobs. We have fraud in this county. Now, in a democracy, when the elected officials fail to protect the people, the people have remedy. And two of you are going to face that remedy in 2026. So I suggest you go back to the place where you're hiding from reality, get comfortable, and have a good day. Thank you, Mr. Walker. And then finally, we have Greg Pound. Greg Pound, Largo, Florida. This comes out of Deuteronomy chapter 22, and it says, The woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment. For all that do so are abomination unto Yahweh thy God. You know, it's real sad to see what we've done in our society. Do you know there's federal grants up to $30 billion coming in the state of Florida called cooperative agreement contracts in order to destroy our families? It's coming in the DCF and the sheriff's department to come in and destroy the family. The biggest scam we've had in this state was this domestic violence scam. And did you see who it was run by? I went up to Tallahassee and sat through the trials and to see the people that was running it. They were a bunch of lesbian women, and their goal was to destroy the family and separate the children from their fathers. And now we have a whole generation of fatherless children. The exact same thing you did to the black people. You go to Margaret Singer and you read what she said, how to destroy the black race when they were doing, I mean, they were thriving. I mean, they didn't have all this violence, all this crime. They had their children under control. But the minute you got the women outside the home working like the men and got the men out of the home, then the children went to the state and went into the sane living that we're living now in our society. So if we don't go back to the way things used to be and what this Bible says, you're not going to fix it. It's easier to be a woman than it is a man. You tell our young people, listen, if they don't have a father and they're not brought up and having that father's influence, they're going to have a hard time making it in a man's world. They just ain't going to make it. You see the men wearing dresses, long hair, earrings. They don't want to work. I mean, it's just we're in trouble. And then what happens is that, you know, it's a real such situation. So if we don't repent as a nation, go back. I mean, look at all the stuff that I brought to you guys. I mean, to put us in a Planned Parenthood class here in Pinales County at 1301 Seminole Boulevard in a class where we're told we have to teach our children how to masturbate at five and six years old. I mean, this stuff is insane. And just because I kicked against that stuff, they thought they're going to break me. That's what they did. They come in, destroy my family, do everything they can to try to destroy me. And it hasn't happened. And it's not going to happen. The truth, the Bible says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 8. There is nothing anyone can do against the truth but only for the truth. Everything you do, whether it's crime, lying, whatever you do, it's going to produce truth. The worst things, as things get worse, people are going to want the truth even more. We can't live by lies. I mean, how would you like to have the person you're married to lying to you all the time or have people you're associated to, people you trust, lying to you? This is what we've got today in our society is a system built on lies. And it's not working. Thank you. Okay. That concludes citizens to be heard. So now we're on to consent. Would anybody, any commissioner, like to pull anything from consent? Okay. We have a motion from Commissioner Eggers, a second from Commissioner Nowicki. All in favor? Aye. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. Commissioner Peters, are you here? I'm a yes. Okay. Thank you. All right. Pass it unanimously. Now we move on to item number eight. Item number eight is the second amendment to the St. Pete Clearwater International Airport Operating and Use Agreement. This, we have an operating agreement that expires September 30th. The Legion and PIE are negotiating the next five-year agreement. This gives us time in which to negotiate that agreement. It also affects the Sun Country Airlines operating agreement. So this is a master document for both. Thoughts, questions? Okay. Motion by Commissioner Scheer, second by Commissioner Wicke. Is there any further discussion? What's the extension that we're asking for? I'm sorry, I missed that. To negotiate? One year? Yeah. There are inactive discussions with them. I understand. But it's for a year, but it'll likely be less. Okay. Thank you. Okay. There's no further discussion. If we could pull up voting, please. By the way, Mark is here in the audience as our new interim director. Hey, Mark. How's it going? My vote is yes, even though I don't have a button to push. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers and Peters. All right. Pass unanimously. Moving on to item number nine. This is the first amendment to interlocal multimodal impact fees. There was a change in state law. This aligns it and fixes it with the six interlocal agreements we have with communities. Lots of questions? Actions? Okay. Motion by Commissioner Eggers. Second by Commissioner Scheer. Okay. Any further discussion? Hearing none. If we could pull up a voting, please. My vote is a yes. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. I'm a yes as well. Thank you, Commissioner Peters. Pass unanimously. Moving on to item number 10. This resolution is relating to waiving the double the normal building permit fees and flood plain permit fees for storm reconstruction and repair. So, as we know, when the storm impacted so many communities, a lot of people went out and got a permit. Other people did work without a permit. They were trying to get back in their homes. Well, you know, in accordance with the flood plain, we have to enforce the flood plain ordinance or we would lose our certification. So, we need people to come into compliance, but we don't want to penalize them by collecting the double impact fee. So, this is asking that we waive that so they pull a normal permit, pay that normal permit, and come into compliance. So, this is working with our residents in light of the unusual circumstances of the storms, and this will enable us to do that in a, you know, more friendly manner. Mr. Eggers? Maybe you can speak a little bit to the communication that we're going to be using to continue to let our residents know about this path and why it's important to them. Yes. Not why it's important to us, but why it's important to them. Hopefully, it's some of the same reasons, but. Correct. And I've asked Kevin to come up. You know, obviously, he's on the front line of this. As you know, he's worked with our residents as best he can, but he can answer those and address how we're going to implement this. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. Your question is Kevin McAndrew, Director of BDRS. One of the first pieces that would follow the adoption of this fee waiver would be the mailing of, what I'm going to represent is an educational letter to approximately 2,300 property owners that we have preliminarily identified that their properties were in an area that were impacted by water inundation and likely sustained damages. So within this letter that would go out likely first thing next week, we point out the importance of compliance. First and foremost is safety. We want to make sure that a homeowner knows that if they had electrical work performed, if they had mechanical work and that work was done, that it's compliant with the Florida Building Code and they're safe. We also want them to know that a prerequisite of potentially pursuing funding from CDBGDR money is going to be in compliant. So without having had a permit, without being compliant, they would not be eligible. There's other considerations. You know, if someone doesn't pursue compliance, they're likely to get hung up at some point in the future if they go to sell their home and there's a flag on their property. We're asking residents to also to take into consideration. You're helping everybody in the county to help us stay compliant that that facilitates the 40 percent discount on flood insurance. So this is the first piece that's a critical piece to help incentivize and educate homeowners to come in communications. Our communication team is going to play a significant role. There's going to be a press release. This is going to be front and center on our website. And this is just the first phase of that track. Other questions? I got a quick question, Kevin. So I'm a homeowner. I did work. Didn't get a permit. So I come down, get the permit. And so then, but the work's done. So now the county's going to come out and inspect that work to make sure it's been done properly. And then if it hasn't been done properly, then they've got to get it up to code or whatever they have to do to make it pass. Just make sure I understand the process. Yes, absolutely. That's correct. And thank you for that. So that can be cumbersome. I mean, it means that they may have to open some walls up or whatever just to make sure that some of the work gets done. So they may be thinking, is it worth coming in to do that? Any thoughts about that? Yeah, two things. How they might be able to avoid that. First, as far as getting the permit, we're going to be as accommodating as we can be. We're ready to deploy a version of the permit support hub. If we're fortunate to get that kind of traction and we get walking, we're going to make every effort to be able to review and issue these permits on the spot. We want to try to make this as simple and efficient as possible. With regard to inspections, there are going to be some circumstances where work was performed and is now behind concealed drywall. To Commissioner Egger's point, we'll have the flexibility of accepting a letter from a professional engineer that will certify that work in lieu of potentially opening up that wall. There may be a homeowner that chooses to say, I'm okay opening up a portion of the wall to allow you to perform the necessary inspection. So, we're going to exercise whatever flexibility we can to accommodate those situations. Thank you. Thanks, Kevin. All right. Do we already have a motion second? I don't know. Move approval. Mr. Chair, I have my hand up. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Commissioner Flowers. That's okay. I know it's hard to manage all of that with us being distant. And I just wanted to add kind of what I did during the workshop, liking this for the community at large, liking this to an after-the-fact type of permit. And so, you know, it's really going to be up to the person who's, if it's a professional, it's going to be up to them as to whether or not they're going to sign off on that permit. Because they, you know, if the wall's not opened up or if they don't have the ability to inspect the work, and if they do provide that letter, which some may, if it's a nominal repair, but if it's something major like complete electrical or whatnot, they may be hesitant. Just saying to the residents, don't be upset. You know, just try to work with those individuals because they're trying to get you to the finish line to make sure that, you know, all of your work is appropriately permitted. So I just wanted to share that again for the public so that, you know, if they come across someone who may not be willing to sign up on the work, that they can, you know, ask reasons why, but just be patient because it just may take a few extra steps in order to get to that point. That's a good point. And also just to mention publicly here that this waiver expires December 31st. So we've only got a couple of months. And, you know, commissioners, we have to enforce this through the floodplain ordinance. You know, Lee County's dealing with FEMA coming in and reviewing them and saying, you're not enforcing your ordinance, and they're going property by property. And so, you know, it's coming upon us to do this early and get it right. But, you know, for us, it's not a choice. We have to be compliant, you know, as for HUD. And I'd like to reinforce Barry's comment there that this is also a Florida building code. You know, work without a permit is a violation. So it's both from a compliance standpoint. All right. So I think we had a motion from Commissioner Rankers. Did we have a second? Second from Commissioner Wicke. Any further discussion? Okay. If we could open up the voting, please. And I'm a yes. Thank you, Commissioner Peters. Are you a yes? Commissioner Flowers? This is Renee. I vote yes. Please forgive me. I'm sorry. Oh, no problem. Okay. That passed unanimously. Thank you. All right. Moving on to number 11. Okay. Item number 11 on METS. Oh, he's already on his way up. This agreement is with Horn for the requirements for our Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program. Obviously, we received $813 million. We went through an extensive review process. We put together a professional team made up of Kevin Andrews, Kathy Perkins, Bruce Bussey, people over in our grants department to do a vetting and review and unanimously recommended Horn as the provider. Since this is such a significant contract, I've asked Matt to put together a presentation and walk you through so we can answer any of your questions. Okay. Afternoon, Matt. Afternoon, board. Matt Spohr, Assistant County Administrator. Here we stand roughly one year from Hurricane Helene and Milton, and I'm excited to kick off the next phase, which is the implementation phase of the CDBGDR grant. It's a culmination of about 10 months' worth of work. We first submitted the request to HUD in December of 2024 for $750 million. We found out quickly after that in January that we received $813 million, and we've been moving ever since. On this first slide, if you're following along at home, you can still sign up for text or email updates at recover.pinellas.gov. These numbers are slightly off because we get daily, and these numbers are ours a couple days ago, but 764-plus residents have signed up for email updates. 2,500 have subscribed for text updates. And we have 1,500 applications that are county properties not funded by Elevate Florida, and we have that contact information as well. So as you can see, now some of those could be double counted, but as you can see, we have nearly 5,000 contact information for individuals that are waiting for this assistance and ready to get started. I'm going to start by a thank you. This has been a county-wide approach since last January. All of these departments have been impacted one way or the other by offering assistance, review. We've done the action plan, the public outreach, the procurement, the office space build-out, hiring of new grant-funded employees, system of record review, HUD system reporting requirements, budget development, and invoice and payment processing. So there's not a – I don't think there's a single county department that hasn't helped in some way. And I failed to put HUD on here, but HUD has been an active participant as well since last January. We meet with them monthly or as needed, and they help walk us through. So here's a high-level overview of the – of what we're requesting today. I'm going to go – I'm going to spend the most time on this slide just to kind of give you some background. So since day one, our strategy was clear. It was to deliver recovery resources to residents as quickly as possible while staying fully compliant with all federal and state requirements. To achieve this, the board made a deliberate decision to cap administrative costs at 3 percent instead of the typical 5 percent, meaning that we had more funding going directly to the community. How we're doing this. We're consolidating grant management and implementation under one proven vendor. We're hiring a lean county team focused on oversight and accountability. We are staffing up with five FTEs right now, maybe a sixth. For some comparisons, Sarasota County has 12 FTEs, and they received $200 million. And the City of St. Pete is still working on theirs, but they will be at 12 or greater by the time they're done. And we're at five right now. We're asking you for your approval and execution of the contract with Horn LLP to serve as our disaster recovery and housing program manager. Why Horn? We ran a thorough and competitive procurement beginning last spring once the action plan was approved by the BCC. To reinforce the integrity of the process, we hired a third-party vendor for the RFP development and research. We learned directly from peers in Lee County, Bay County, Orange County, Sarasota County, as well as Florida Commerce and South Carolina on best practices for housing programs. Our staffing assessment and plan were built with the intent of using a single-implementation vendor approach for our housing programs, where the vendor procures and manages general contractors. This model has proven to save both time and resources, specifically county resources, while ensuring speed, scale, and strong construction quality control. It's recognized by HUD as a national practice, and it was first pioneered by South Carolina several years ago. It's been successful in deployments throughout the state of Florida, and closer to home, the city of St. Petersburg, Hillsborough County, and Pasco County are all using this same housing recovery management, construction management. A breakdown on the bottom there, the budget is a not-to-a-seat amount, so NTEs. The vendor implementation costs, $25.6 million. The vendor housing program management costs, $61.2 million. So the total of those two is $86.8 million. And then beneficiary pass-through funds, $478 million. So the total contract is $565 million, 85% of which is pass-through beneficiary. So 85% of this total dollar amount are funds that will go directly to applicants or residents of Pinellas County. You've seen this slide before. I wanted to put some milestones up there. So, again, we started in January of 2025. It's been a rather speedy ride, but here we are. We developed the action plan launch in the spring. We were the first in the state of Florida under the new allocation to both submit our action plan on May 29th and receive approval on June 30th. So we were the first in both categories. We received our grant agreement on July 30th, and we're looking to launch public-facing programs October 25th. October 2020, 2025. Here is a breakdown of what's called activity delivery cost by program. So the backbone of our recovery strategy is the people-first programs. They will be in the blue section at the top that say housing, $598 million, and the last section, which says public services, at $32 million. Those will be the first programs that we embark on this October. The breakdown shows the not-to-exceed contract amount by activity. When we came to you last with the action plan, we used 11% to 16%, which is HUD's rule of thumb, for ADC costs. The contracts not-to-exceed cost is 10.79% for housing programs. It's 10.4% for the entire contract. So we're below that 11% to 16% that HUD has for activity delivery costs. But I want to add that we, the county, will have some activity delivery costs, too. So that total number will be closer to 11% or 12% by the time we're done. But the contract that you're looking at today is 10.4% activity delivery costs. That's the amount that Horn's going to get for their services? It's a budget, and it's a not-to-exceed. So if all the funds are expensed and all the services are provided, the answer is yes. Talk about what that means. I mean, talk about setting up centers and individual assistance. I mean, this is not admin. Yeah, in the back of the contract, there's actually spreadsheets, but it includes everything from call centers. There's a slide here in a minute that talks about some of these things that have already been staged up. Two in-person walk-in centers for applications, the inspections that have to occur, the case management that has to occur. All of that is included. And then in each line item, in each one of these line items, those are these project, and there'll be task orders that funnel up to that amount. So work will occur via task orders per each program. Again, we're only starting with the housing and public services right off the bat. I get calls probably weekly from cities and others about the mitigation and infrastructure. That and the economic development one, we're going to worry about in 2026, but we're going to stage the people-first ones. And I have those in a slide here in a minute. You talked about St. Pete and Sarasota using more than double the FTEs. Are they providing the delivery of these funds themselves, or are they using an outside consultant on top of the fact that they're using more FTEs? They're using outside consultants and FTEs, but I don't think any two action plans are the same. So I think St. Pete is going to have more sub-recipients than we're planning on having, so that takes more oversight. Yeah. So we're trying to streamline the process. And then one last comment. You said that we are electing to reimburse Pinellas County 3% instead of up to the 5% that is allowed. Could you just focus on that just a minute? Yeah. So HUD allows for up to 5% for administrative costs, okay? Administrative costs for the county that's involved. That's right. That's correct. For us to administer the grant, and we've capped it in our action plan at 3%. So the BCC already made that decision. So our action plan that was submitted is a 3% for admin costs for us. Now, that's different than activity delivery costs. They're two different things. And that does not include the 5 FTEs. 5 FTEs are part of the delivery. It will. That'll include the 5 FTEs. That 3% that we're talking about? Yes. Will cover the 5 FTEs? Oh, yes. Yeah. Plus office space, plus computers, like everything. Okay. All right. So it's all in on ours. We could have hired more staff. We're trying to keep it tight, obviously. And, you know, and that's like a person down in, you know, Ken Burke's shop, you know, for audit. And, you know, so it's not just in our shop. It's collectively at the county. But the actual delivery, these call centers, the assistance that people are going to need. I mean, that's one of the things we talked about early on is to help people apply. I mean, it's federal funds. It's not as easy as, you know, as one might think, right? And so having those hands-on assistance for people to be able to get through this process quickly is critical. And that's a lot of that activity cost that you're seeing within that, along with the oversight, too, of this entire grant. Okay. So the amount, the 3 versus 5, I thought was important to talk about. But it's also important that this is actual product, so to speak, that's being provided, tangible things that are being provided in that administrative reimbursement thing. So it's not just going to go back into the general fund reserve or something. We're talking about actual substantive pieces of it. We're charging off only costs that we have associated with delivery of this. We're not taking 5% because we can take 5%. We're charging actual cost of implementation. I think that's reimbursable. We continue to drive home about getting more money to our residents and less money. You guys have made that clear from the very beginning. Get money into people's pockets and do it quickly. Sarasota County was two years before they had money out the door. We got this in March, and we're talking about money out the door this fall. Commissioner Flowers, and then we'll go to Commissioner Latbella. Thank you, Mr. Chair. First, I do want to say that while I understand and recognize some of the hesitation relative to the things that were brought forward regarding Horn, and I do appreciate that conversation that we had on last week, I am, number one, glad that Kim Burke and his staff did a very thorough auditing, if you will, of the documentation that was before them and provided strong material concepts that we can follow to work to make sure that none of those things occur as they work through our process. Number two, I'm hoping that the staff that we hire, that Horn hires, or however that's going to happen, that it's a very strong, committed staff that's focused on the work. I just get a little leery, and again, I don't think that they can't do the work. I just get a little leery, but when any contract that we have has so many clients, and Horn has almost all of the clients in Pinellas County, so I just get a little leery about that because sometimes the more you have, the more prevalent a mistake could be made, but that's just me. Number three, thank you so very much for really pushing to get these dollars out of the door as quickly as possible by, let's say, fall, because I'm sure every other commissioner up here, as well as staff, continue to get the emails and the concerns and requests from our residents about being able to access these dollars, use them for what they are intended for, and to try to make our residents as whole as we possibly can. So I'm hopeful that this will go forward on tonight so we can go ahead and get this money out of the door. I believe that we have adequate processes in place that will serve to be an oversight part, if you will, to make sure that the dollars are spent quickly, but that things are being done as they should. The only thing I would ask Matt and Barry, if possible, if you have not already thought about this, is perhaps for us to get some type of update that shows us, you know, maybe two months in kind of where we are, you know, what we've spent, how many people we've been able to assist, you know, in the various categories, if there are any hiccups, you know, things like that, just so we can be aware of what's going on rather than, you know, maybe waiting until six months or so and, or hearing concerns from the community before we hear them from staff. So those are my only comments. We absolutely commit to that. That's very important. I know the commissioners want us to see this regular updates as we implement this. Okay. Well, thank you all for the work that you're doing. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. Commissioner LaBelle. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Matt. I shared some of my concerns last week, and I won't rehash all of those. But on the topic of the FTEs, I don't support bloated bureaucracy by any means. But when you mentioned that some of the other municipalities and other folks have double our FTEs, what are they doing that we are not? Have you looked into why they have so many more? Yeah. Well, in Sarasota County, they're not doing it the way we're doing it. And so in Sarasota County, it's more that they're having to do more of the management of the contracts for the GCs and the inspections and all that. And St. Pete, I believe, and they're right behind us, but I believe St. Pete's is more of that they're going to do some programs in-house and not hire. So they're doing the housing where they're having a vendor for the housing, but the other programs they're going to do, they're going to do with very little vendor oversight. So there's different approaches. But when we did our staffing plan and we did our action plan, it was let's limit the county staff needed just for grant oversight and then hire an implementation vendor to help us. Commissioner, if I can add to that, like Matt's saying, each program is a little bit different. You're actually going to get an update at our Tri-County meeting coming up here on how Pasco and Hillsboro are doing their program. I was just on with the county administrators. And so, like, they may have a housing piece, but they're going to do a lot of infrastructure. Well, the infrastructure, they're not going to have somebody else implement. They're actually going to do that work themselves because it's part of their public works program or stuff like that. So sometimes they've broken it apart. Ours is so focused around giving money in people's pockets and housing that that's all, you know, kind of in essence outsourced by that. But some of them, they're breaking it apart in the types of things that they're doing. And I think you'll see that in both Hillsboro and Pasco. They're doing some housing but a lot more with infrastructure and stuff, and they're managing that internally. Right, because I don't want us to do anything that forfeits our oversight. We're not, and Ken Berkshop's been actively involved in making sure we have the proper accountability. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, he's not cutting a check unless, you know, everything's in line. Right. Well, that's why he's one of the best clerks in the state. And we know that, that he's not going to cut the check. So we've got to have that in line. And all that HUD paperwork, that's the reason it's so important to have those assistance centers because, you know, if you don't document it and it didn't get done, you can't get reimbursed. You know, we can't cut a check. So speaking of Ken Berkshop, of the six FTEs, are one of them going to be like an auditor in his shop? So we have five FTEs that we're hiring to manage the grant. We have some funding available for Ken as well as in other areas to help offset the general fund. So they might not hire someone new, but they may use it and use half an FTE to work towards this. And then we can charge that to the grant and it offsets the general fund. So we do have that in the plan. But the five FTEs are, that's their job. These five individuals, that's what they will be doing for the next six years or however long it takes. So that money won't come out of the general fund, that could all be part of it? We have several departments, OMB, Housing Community Development, Communications, IG, Clerk, I think I got them all, where we have put in some FTEs, just not a full-time individual, but we've put in some FTEs to help with budgeting from that administrative cost, yes. And we've been in constant communication with the clerk's office through this entire process. Okay. And to Commissioner Flower's point, and I don't want to besmirch the horned folks or anything like that, but say there are hiccups and, you know, the worst thing happens, and this is on the front page of the paper in six months or in a year. Is there a way for us to get out of this and move on to somebody else? We can cancel for convenience. And I'll put Ryan's home address on, you know, our website, since he's a Pinellas County resident. All righty. Thank you. Oh, my Lord. All right. Commissioner Newicki. Thank you, Chair. Good to hear from you, Mr. Spohr. I guess there's been some talk of, like, other municipalities, and you mentioned City of St. Pete. I guess, can you explain why the City of St. Pete is going forward with Horn and ICF and how that's different from us just going forward with Horn? It's my understanding that they're using ICF to help them with some internal assistance, grant assistance, and Horn for the housing programs. Okay. And I guess, you know, there's some talk of, you know, the best clerk in the world, Ken Burke, and, you know, the audit that he did or something of an audit. Was there an audit done of BDO? Excuse me? Was there an audit done of BDO? No. Okay. Will there be an audit done of BDO if Horn is sold between now and doing our contract? I don't know what the answer to that question is. Okay. We don't do audits unless there's a reason to do an audit. I mean, I don't even know what the question's relating to. I mean, if they're not a current contractor, they wouldn't be. Oh, correct. Yeah. There's usually something that triggers an audit. Well, if they're acquired by another company. Well, if they're acquired by another company, it doesn't matter. The contract oversight is with us and we'll continue to monitor, and if there's anything wrong, then we would audit based upon the outcome. So we have contract oversight. Like, we're not giving that up just because it's a company performing the service. Right. I just, you know, think that, you know, if we're saying, like, oh, you know, one company is, like, really good, but if they're acquired by another company that's not, we know nothing about, I'm just saying that's a concern I've heard. And that we don't know nothing about. We have companies changing names all the time. We don't audit just because of that. We audit based on the performance, you know, there. And, you know, frankly, you know, I'd have bigger concerns if the two people sitting over there left, you know, because it's really the program managers that drive those programs. And so, you know, we're going to have complete oversight of this contract, and that was what drives the oversight or, you know, any of those issues. So if the case managers leave, we'd cancel the contract? No. We would look at, well, we have insight into it. I said I have bigger concerns. Okay. Listen, the oversight of the contract is still with us. So these dollars are going to be fully accounted for and vetted by us and our team, including Ken Burke. And so the company is going to be held to that performance. And, you know, if something changes, well, then, you know, we'll act accordingly. Okay. I wasn't able to sit in on the ranking procurement meeting. You know, it seemed like it was out of 1,000 points and Horn scored 940. What was the subtraction of 60 points? Does that ring a bell or? No. I, yeah. I mean, I know it was seven individuals scoring. I know purchasing handles that process and the scores are what they are. Did it ever come up about, like, Horn having HUD claw, like, $42 million back from COVID relief money in 2022? Because it seemed like in the procurement, there was, like, the five-year, like, past performance, like, was a category. And so, you know, there was $42 million called back from Horn by HUD after they completed their contract in Alabama and were paid $9 million. So I just didn't know if that came up at all in that scoring. No. Okay. That's all I have. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I just had a few questions, Kevin. The contract documents that are used for this, are these, like, is this a standard HUD contract format? Who put the contract? Is it a standard Horn contract? No, it's, no. It's a standard purchasing and legal for the county, working with a lot of different individuals, put that contract together. So these are our contracts? Correct. There is an exception. Because this is a federal grant, it has to follow the 2 CFR 200. And so that is listed on page one, and it's also listed as an attachment. So everything we do for this grant has to follow that federal guideline. Good. You know, I read the Commissioner's, the wiki's guardrails, and I just, in the, do we have a performance bond in the, is that part of the, I'm just, there were some specific ideas on this contract. And I just want to know, is there a performance bond? There's not, and there was not one request in the RFP. Again, this is not a construction contract, so we wouldn't have a performance bond. But we do have, we do have section, or page 41 and 42 and page 98, where we talk about the 2 CFR 200.326, and that requires bonding for any construction contractors per federal law. And do we, is there anything in our agreements that prevents the self-dealing between hiring your own subcontractor that, related entities? I'm going over some of the ideas that Commissioner Wickie had, and usually standarded in contractor agreements, and especially on a cost plus project. So I just didn't know if there was anything with, that dealt with self-dealing in our contract, to make sure the contractors that they, subcontractors that they hired, that they'll actually own. Yeah, which, which, which one is that? I have notes. That was, like, two point something. Hard rail number two. All right, so there's language on page 15, section E, and language on page 37, section A, subsection 3.B, and that would cover bullet points one and three. You don't have to be. I just, I just want to know. We've looked at, yeah. Commissioner, we've looked at all of those issues, and the majority of that can be addressed or addressed within the contract. Okay. That's kind of what I want to know. Yeah. So I appreciate that. Thank you. But you said it addresses one and three, not two. Yeah, it addresses one and three, not two. It doesn't, it doesn't address the bullet point that says add an explicit prohibition on subcontracting to any Horn affiliate, subsidiary, joint venture, or related entity without a separate board vote. It does not, it does not include that, no. And that was not part of what, the way in which we constructed the contract, or the RFP. So I do have a couple more slides. I don't know if you want me to hit them, or if the presentation's over. Are we, any other questions at the moment? All right, continue. Okay, so this is really for those watching at home. These are the first five programs, so I'll go through these quickly. This is the homeowner rehab and reconstruction. So there's 490 million. We're hoping to help around 1,100 homes. And this program is designed to address the most significant and unmet housing needs. The second one is homeowner repair and reimbursement. This is a bridge program for those who acted quickly after the storm and made their own repairs. So this goes up to 120% AMI. So there's, the threshold's greater. And it's up to $50,000 in reimbursement. And we hope to help about 350 households. The homeowner assistance program. This program supports long-term recovery by stabilizing home ownership in Pinellas and opening up naturally occurring affordable rental units, about 210 units, up to $80,000 down payment assistance. There's two more. The local landlord rental rehabilitation. This ensures small landlords are able to participate in the recovery in affordable rental stock. And it remains available even after the recovery. Commissioners, on this, you know, we just got a whole presentation on some of the short-term rentals that have not been able to recover. This is a way for them to recover and repair. Now, they've got to come into our program, but it's a way out financially if they didn't have the capital to rebuild. And then probably the most popular one, at least as soon as we launch, will be this one, which is disaster relief payments. So it's up to $15,000 for six months of rent, mortgage, or utilities lost as a result of the storm. We hope that this will help about 2,000 residents. And this is for the LMI population. So we would anticipate that these are probably some of the first checks that would get written later this fall. Real quick, what does the application workflow look like? Residents can apply online or in person. Case managers can assist the applicants. Eligibility and damage will be verified. And then the funding flows directly to the beneficiaries or contractors to perform the work. So there's no wrong front door. So as applicants come to us, case managers will identify the best program for each applicant and then push them through the process. Here's a list of some work that the consultant, Horn, has taken on to date at their own risk. Including preparing and getting ready for two intake centers, hiring nearly 20. They're up to 20 now. I'm sorry. They're up to 40 hired as of 10-13. Individuals to help with case management, the call center, things of that nature. The operation infrastructure is being staged before we launch to the public in the second half of October. And I'm happy to report that we have offered both the program manager and program compliance manager positions, and they've accepted. So we'll have two individuals starting with us here in the next couple weeks that will be on our team that have experience with CDBG DR program management, including compliance. And then we also hired a case manager. So of those five I talked about earlier, three individuals have been offered an accepted job. So we're ready to hit the ground running. And two of them literally worked in a DR program in a different county. Commissioner, I just wanted to point out, it took me a minute to find it, but I thought that there might be something in the contract, because these are subject to two CFR 200 and all the requirements there under the federal regulations themselves, which are incorporated in here, I believe it's paragraph 57, refers to CFR 200.318 through 200.327, which require transparent and ethical procurement processes, including enforcing conflict of interest policies and transparency, requiring competitive bidding and justification for vendor selection. So that is within the contract. That was going to be the question I had, because I've heard competing things. And if appropriate, I was even going to ask Corn about that. I don't know if that would be appropriate to do, because I don't want to just haul them out of the audience. Well, they haven't been awarded the bid, so can we talk to them? We can bring them up if you want. I have two more slides. Yeah, let's kind of get, let's get through the slides. Okay. All right, so next steps. Today is September 18th. We're looking for your approval of the implementation vendor contract. And then October will be a very busy month. We're hoping applications to go live by October 20th. And it's not on here, but we are scheduled to be in front of you on October 2nd to have a policy discussion regarding those five programs I just talked about. And that's my last slide. Just a thank you. And we hope to move forward on implementation. Any questions? Before he sits down, I mean, Matt and the entire organization work really hard to bring all of this to you in record time. And, you know, he said it, but I just want to, you know, also say it, that everybody came together. And they did it for the right reason. They did it, tried to get a program together to get money out the door to help people. And that really was their focus. And so I just can't thank them all enough for everybody involved in making this program work. We've gotten this done in record time compared to a lot of other counties and municipalities. Mr. Eggers? About group, you know, having a group with experience, helping our folks on the ground that got hurt the most and doing it fast was really important. And I don't think anybody up here has any qualms with that at all. I think some of the questions have been, you know, follow-up, you know, making sure that things are being done right. I know Commissioner Latvala, Commissioner Flowers both mentioned the, you know, the thing about being flexible during the process, getting updates as we go so that we're looking at those percentages out the door. So at any point in time, we see $9 out of every 10 are going to folks for assistance. And we don't start seeing SKUs, that we start seeing what's going on here. You know, we're seeing more going out the door for fees and stuff. So I just, that's going to be important to just see as we go. You talked about, I want to make sure manufactured homes, we're talking about mobile homes, right? Every time I say manufactured homes, it says it's mobile homes because those are the folks that have obviously been affected. You also said something about cancellation by convenience. So we, at any point, I mean, to the point about somebody purchasing the group that we've investigated, the group that has the experience, the group that's been doing the work, if we find out things along the way about a new group that doesn't sit well or there's a change in anything, we can cancel at any time. That's correct. For any reason at all. And so I think we've mentioned, you know, our clerk and how careful he is with our taxpayer money and these kinds of monies. I feel good about that. And I think it's going to be an important part of this whole process. So I think we're comfortable with how we're doing it, where we're going. We just want to make sure that those dollars are going where they're supposed to be going at all times. They are, Commissioner. And we're going to be back before you. Just like Matt just showed, we're going to be back here in October. I mean, we're not even waiting a couple months. We're going to be talking about the actual programs. And they're going to be bringing in policy guidelines. So we've got to set the guidance on and the shaping of each program. They've already been working on that, again, at their own risk, because there's no guarantee you're going to vote yes. But they took on that work to where they could hit the ground running, and they've drafted those policies to where they can bring back them to you in October. We'll be talking about that. And then we'll put that on as a standing item on the agenda to where you see it. Yeah, and then the last thing I was going to say was, and as we go and these programs start to be, you know, unfurled or just delivered, make sure that we're flexible enough that if the programs, some programs are doing really well and well-received that we can flip to programs that need more of the funding. I 100% agree. What Matt put up there is going to be 100% wrong, okay? Because it says $1,100, well, it's going to be $1,050, and we're going to shift money over to this program, or we're going to see this one's working well in this program. If you go back to COVID and the dollars, we began some programs, and we eliminated the program because it wasn't working well and shifted the money over to a different program. So flexibility is going to be key, and we're going to learn as we implement. I just wrote the part down that Matt's going to be completely wrong. I heard that, and he's right. It's a budget. But I know what the point you're trying to make is no matter what we estimate, it's not going to be. It's how many people apply, you know, and so we're estimating how many people are going to apply, but that's going to be different than what we budget for, and we'll be back before you saying we recommend we close this program down and move money over here or however. But we've also left room at the end. So, you know, we have that flexibility too. The entire amount was not in that budget, and so we can make choices in. I think there's a lot of money, and we're telling them let's go fast. So that always makes you go, okay, let's make sure we're doing it carefully. Ken has told me before, okay, fast but not careless, right? Right. Okay, and so, you know, we have a team that's making sure that we go at the right speed and we do it right with recognizing that people need money in their hands now to live, and so we're trying to do both. Thank you. So I've got a couple comments and then maybe a question that perhaps Horn could answer. So I read through the documentation that Ken Burke sent over to us, and I was satisfied with that, and Matt and I had a good chat last night, and I feel we've got a good set of checks and balances in place to make sure that the money is going where it needs to go. And I figured if Ken Burke had any real problems with this that he would have called me and said, hey, you really probably shouldn't do this or maybe take a real hard look at it. But I decided to call him anyways and just ask him, and he's confident that we've got a good set of checks and balances in place, and I know that he's going to be working very, very closely with you, and I am very comfortable with that. But with that said, in reading through the material that Ken had sent over, in Horn's canopies, there was one qualified opinion, and that was in their canopy system, which is their main platform for managing documentation and applications tied to federally funded disaster recovery programs, the audit found that two out of the 25 system changes weren't tested before going live. So I just, for my own comfort level, I would just like to hear from Horn what they've done to address that just to make sure that we have an effective, compliant system going forward, and that there may be some other folks that have questions. Jenna Abbey's here, and she can tell you everything you want to learn or know about the canopy system. Good afternoon. How are you? Probably a lot of things you don't want to learn or know. I was thinking that. Yeah, I'll keep it short. Thank you for raising that question. So that concern has been addressed, or that qualified opinion has been addressed through our internal ticketing system. We use a software called JIRA to track and manage all updates and adjustments to our system of record. Additional controls have been instituted there to require testing, screenshots, and sign-off before any change to the system is promoted to production. Pinellas County would have access to our QA environment, our test environment, so that you all could take it for a test drive before we promote anything to the production environment as well. All right. That's great. I appreciate that. Thank you. Are there any other questions for Warren while we have them? Mr. Chair, I raised my hand. Okay. I'll get you just a second, Commissioner Flower. Sorry about that. Okay. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you all have done with our staff to get this up and running. As was mentioned, we only have one chance at this to get it right, and I do support getting money in our residence as quickly as possible, as long as it is done right, and I do not want to end up in the newspaper. You know, I equate the job that you all have as like that of an offensive lineman, and I'm probably the only one that looks like an offensive lineman in the room. You know, and it's a job that you don't really want to have, especially if you play for the Bucs because you'll get hurt. But you don't want to, you don't, if you're an offensive lineman, you don't want to have your name mentioned because if it is, it's because you had a penalty, and the best ones are never mentioned. And so with that said, a couple concerns that I've mentioned before is basically the power that you all have in picking vendors and in picking all the subs and all that kind of stuff. And we had some clarification from Don, but would y'all have the ability or do y'all own any companies that you would be picking from? Like any subcontractors or any vendors, does Horn or the other company that has bought Horn, this BDO, do they own any other companies that do disaster work, that does construction? Do y'all have any affiliated companies, any subsidiaries or anything like that? Thank you for the question. So those of you who saw our proposal saw that there were some teaming partners, some subcontractors that were already presented to the county as part of our team. I assume you are referring to the procurement of general contractors or builders who are going to deliver these services. The answer to that is no. So Horn is not a builder. We are not a general contractor. We do not own any companies who do general contracting work, nor does BDO. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Flowers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. For the hiring of the individuals that will be working on this particular process, are the requirements the same as if they were being hired directly by the county for any of our other departments? As far as background checks and references and all of that stuff? Yeah. As part of our hiring process, Commissioner Flowers, every candidate undergoes a background check before being screened. I do not consider myself an expert in the county's background checks or what you all require, but all of our employees do undergo a background check before hire. Okay, so the employees are employees of Horn and not employees of the county. I'm sorry. Commissioner Flowers, are you talking about the five FTEs or are you talking about the 40 that I mentioned that they're hiring? I'm talking about the five FTEs I think will be ours. That's right. So those are ours. I'm talking about the 40. Okay. The positions that they've already started hiring for, the case managers and consultants. They would work for Horn through Horn's HR policies, correct. Okay. All right. And just FYI for BDO, I've worked with BDO before. Many of you have heard me say this before. I worked over 13 years in the human resource arena. BDO is well known for some of its processes and protocols to make things more efficient and effective, but also sticking to all of the requirements, whether it be federal, local, or state requirements. So I do feel somewhat comfortable with that arena, knowing the partnership and or relationship. I do feel comfortable with that. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. All right. Any more questions? Yeah. Thank you, Chair. I guess just one last question for Matt or Don. So to be 100% certain, the Board of County Commissioners is selecting any and all subcontractors under this current agreement, not staff or any other level, a director of procurement. If there's any subcontracting done under this agreement, is that done at the board approval, or is that done at a different level? Are you talking about GC contractors? Any contractors. Okay. The ones that are, Horn will have the RFP process, and Horn will manage the general contractors. That will not be a board decision. That will not, no. So Horn will be in charge of picking the contractor. And managing an oversight and inspections and everything that does. Not a board decision. That's correct. Thank you. I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I did have one other question. Okay. For data mining. For data mining. Will we be able to maintain, not maintain, will we be able to have all of that data once this is over? Does all of that revert to us? We own it on day one, Commissioner. Okay. All right. We own it on day one. It's all ours. We'll have access to all the documents. And when we're done with this, Horn has no use for it anyway, so they don't want it. You got to say it to me like that. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for letting me jump in real quick. I'm sorry. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. All right. What is the will of the board? I move approval, Commissioner Flowers. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. And we have a second from Commissioner Shearer. Okay. Any further discussion? All right. Hearing none, if we can open up the voting. I vote yes. Thank you. Commissioner Peters. Okay. Not hearing from Commissioner Peters, but passes five to one. Okay. Thank you. Moving on to item number 12. Item number 12 is an MSTU for the Keep Tierra Verde Beautiful Media Enhancement Program. These are within these three roads up in Tierra Verde. We are working on a long-term solution. This provides funding to be able to continue to provide enhancements along those corridors while we try to stand up a nonprofit. And there's also been some change. Now there's actually discussions about whether the TVCA wants to re-engage and have those discussions. So this is a stop-the-gap measure, and we'll see where it goes. Well, good thinking. This was good with staff to come up with this. Motion by Commissioner Nowicki and second by Commissioner Shearer. Any discussion? All right. If we can pull up the voting, please. And I'm a yes, Mr. Chair. Oh, thank you, Commissioner Peters. And I assume Commissioner Flowers, are you a yes? Yes. I'm a yes with a little lordy. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Okay, item number 13. It's a local government verification of contribution form for the 25 housing credit finance applications for the Grand Oaks affordable housing development project. Any questions? Approval. Second. Motion by Commissioner Nowicki, second by Commissioner Flowers. Any further discussion? All right. If we can open up the voting. And I'm a yes on that. Thank you, Commissioner Peters. Commissioner Flowers. Yes, sir. It's me. Okay. I vote yes. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Item number 14. It's the first renewals and amendments for Tarpon Springs Hospital, Advent, BayCare, and Orlando Health. This provides partial reimbursement for ambulatory and inpatient services for our clients enrolled in our health care program. Motion by Commissioner Nowicki. Second. Second by Commissioner Flowers. Do we have any discussion? Hearing none, if we could open up the voting, please. I vote yes. Okay. That was a yes by Commissioner Peters. Commissioner Flowers. Passes unanimously. Item number 15. This is funding agreements for the PEMS Crisis Stabilization Unit and the Pinellas Integrated Care Team. Move approval. Commissioner Flowers. Okay. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Nowicki. Do we have any questions or discussion on this? No? Okay. We can open up the voting. I'm a yes. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Item number 16. This is the budget amendment number one. This is for two items. One, it's $2.5 million from the health care contingency for unanticipated medical claims and aligning $500,000 for reserves for the transition between UnitedHealthcare and Cigna. Discussion questions? Motion by Commissioner Eggers. Second by Commissioner Nowicki. Any discussion? Okay. If we can open up the voting. I'm a yes. I'm a yes. This is Renee. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Item number 17. This is a word of bid to Hubbard for pavement preservation package number four. The roads are listed within your packet. An additional $5.1 million of pavement management program going out the door. Motion by Commissioner Eggers. Oh. Can you give me a second there, Commissioner Flowers? Yes, I can. Okay. Any discussion? All right. If we can open up the voting. I'm a yes. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Item number 18. This amendment number two is an agreement with Florida Department of Environmental Protection. This gets us more money for the Pinellas County Shore Protection Project in Paso Grill. Move approval. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Eggers. Any discussion? Hearing none, if we can open up the voting. I'm a yes. I'm a yes. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Item number 19. This is a second amendment to an agreement with our door group and a first amendment with CDM Smith for engineering consulting services out in utilities. And this is targeted around the utility relocations on U.S. 19 and then CDM Smith for the Dunn Pond liner replacement project. Motion by Commissioner Eggers. Second by Commissioner Newinke. Any discussion? If we could open up the voting, please. I'm a yes. I'm a yes. Okay. Passes unanimously. Item number 20. Purchase authorization with Hewitt Packard for on-premise data storage solutions. This will allow BTS to phase out on-premise infrastructure, reduce maintenance costs, and shift budget dollars to a hybrid model to save approximately $750,000 annually over the term of the agreement. I'm a yes. We need a motion first. I thought the motion had been made. I'll make a motion. All right. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Latvala. Were you a second, Chris? I'm a second. Okay. All right. Any discussion? All right. If we could open up voting, please. Now I'm a yes. I'm a yes. All right. Passes unanimously. Item number 21. It's interlocal agreements with the municipalities listed for the modifications to the county multimodal impact fee ordinance. Okay. Will the board? Move approval. Yes. This is Commissioner Flowers. Okay. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Shearer. Any discussion? Okay. If we can open up the voting. I'm a yes. Okay. Commissioner Peters, you a yes as well? Yes, I am. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Item number 22. This is the fiscal year 2026 Lelman Community Redevelopment Area Work Plan. Move approval. Okay. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Shearer, I think that was. Okay. Any discussion? Okay. Hearing none. If we could open up the voting. I'm a yes. I'm a yes. All right. Passes unanimously. On to item 23. And that was the work plan, and this is the 2026 Community Redevelopment Trust Budget. Okay. Move approval. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Shearer. Did you have a question, Dave? Yeah, just one quick question. Okay. Just a comment from somebody who knows the land acquisition is going from 500,000, I guess it wasn't used this year, to 2 million. So maybe we could just have somebody speak to that real quickly, what the anticipated. No, yes. Amy's on her way up. She can speak to it. Obviously, they want the flexibility to be able to do it. It's a, it would go, if it's unused, it stays within their funds, so. Amy Davis, Community Coordinator for the Lowman area. And we didn't spend the $500,000 this year. This is a new 2, 2 million. I wouldn't call it a rollover. It's just a 2 million, because a commercial property, they're 1.7, 1.8 often, so I wanted to have that flexibility, whether it's a residential, commercial property. But we don't have anything in mind, per se. It's just, it's for when opportunities come up. All right. But that's the anticipated amount. What was that? Do you think the 2 million would cover the anticipated? For the average commercial property, yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, she's really wanting it to be in the budget, where she can act quickly, I understand, if a property, if an opportunity presents itself. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. All right. Any other questions? Okay. If you can open up the voting, please. I'm in yes. Okay. And Commissioner Peters, I think, has a step away for a little bit, so passes unanimously. Okay. Now on to item 24, county attorney. Good afternoon. Item 24 is, we're seeking a resolution to approve the early extension of the 2025 tax rules. This is something we ask for each year when the value adjustment board has not completed the steps it needs to, and it authorizes, it asks the property appraiser to certify the role early to the tax collector so that tax bills can timely go out. Any of the actions of the VAB that subsequently happen can be done administratively without any other further problem. Okay. Motion by Commissioner Eggers. Second by Commissioner Scheer. Any discussion? Okay. We can open up the voting. I'm in yes. Okay. Thank you. All right. Passes unanimously. Any county attorney reports? No, sir. Thank you. County administrator reports. I have three items. One first is each year, all the other subentities are looking to set their calendar. Well, they first look for the county commission to establish their calendar to where we don't have conflicts with all the different boards and commissions and things that you appoint. What we have historically done is we worked with the vice chair, because typically that has become the chair. But, you know, again, that vote is not done until November, and then it's too late because they don't have time to react. So we worked with the vice chair, as in the past. We've established a calendar for next year, and so I want to distribute that. Unless you object, we can't do calendars by group. You know, it never works that way. So if you're okay, I'm going to establish the calendar based upon the input from the vice chair, and we'll distribute that, and we'll distribute that to all the other entities. Unless there's objection here, that's what I intend to do. Okay. Yes? Next, you approve the contract with Johnson and Stewart. Anita Berry will be our primary contact there. Okay. She was part of that team, so you saw her. That will be our primary contact. But Anita Berry. Okay. Now, what I want you to start thinking about is Matt's going to send out to you at the end of this meeting or sometime close thereafter, Sam, what are your legislative items that you want to see in next year's program? Next year is going to be election year, so asking for them to do things, well, we've got to be smart about that. But we're going to need that information back. So we're going to send out an email to you. I'm just asking you to think about what those items are to where we can get those quickly. We can staff that. We can get with our legislative firm, lobbying firm, and then bring back to you a package here in October for your adoption. But the timing is going to be quick, obviously. And so just a heads up. Be thinking about that. Any outstanding items we need to discuss with you. And then the final thing is, you know, it came up, it actually came up, you know, with when David Lee brought that up about, you know, what about, well, several times you've raised issues about, well, we need to study this or we need to look into this more. The perfect time to do that with, like, all of Chris's staff and OMB, and we have others, is immediately following the budget. We have time in the fall to do some research, bring back to you ideas on alternatives based upon that. So if you start thinking about what those items are, what are those things, you know, we said we really need to start, that way we're talking about them in January and February, not next June. And so to the extent we can do that, we're going to send out an email to you. Chris is going to send an email to you and say, think about that, get those to us. Commissioner Newick, you brought up a couple of items a few meetings ago. So we have those on. We'll look at those, bring those back to you, and that way we don't miss something. So if you'd be thinking about that, we'll send an email out, respond to it, and then we'll put it on the list, and we'll bring it in at a work session and say, okay, here's kind of our, here's kind of what we see as our fall work program. And that'll better prepare us for next year. Yeah, I think this is extremely important, I think, so that all of us can stay in really good contact with each other the way we're supposed to, right? And so we identify those things. But they could come up in three months. I mean, Commissioner Latvala may have something he didn't have at the beginning of the year that we'll tack on during the year, and so that we can get that staffing done. And then we can take, you know, we can have exceptions with what the staff's put together. That's what the conversation's going to, that's what the conversation will be about. And that way we can get on top of these things earlier rather than later and do them justice. And I really think that's going to be important. And we want to do this on the commission side. We do this on the staff side because we go through the budget, and we don't have enough information to make it just like we do with our budget. We have the same thing on the staff side. Okay, we don't have time to do it. We're in the middle of budget season, but let's get on this October 2nd, you know, and that way we're talking about that in December, you know, not in April or May, you know. First thing on mine is going to be that analogy that Commissioner Latvala was talking about, the offensive linemen and who resembled the offensive linemen. But anyway, I look forward to those conversations. On that note, I'm going to put FIXA on my list to look at. To really drill down to that one, brother. That concludes my report. So I just want to say on that note with budget that I thought this year that our strategic planning discussions and as we got into budget were really, really good. I mean, a lot of really good ideas came out of them, and they were at a far more granular level than what I've seen since I've been on this board. So I'm looking forward to having those early discussions next year. And I don't know, and there's areas I think maybe we should even look at maybe dividing the budget up a little bit. If there's areas that we're really passionate about are you take a couple, you take these two departments and you take this and I'll take that and take a deep dive into it. And then as we have work sessions, bring back your thoughts and ideas and give staff an opportunity to really answer questions. So I think we've got the time, the talent, and the desire to really kind of dig in and see where we can go and try to find more efficiency. So I don't know how hard it is to get a line item budget for all the departments, but if we could and have that distributed, I say we'd look at that and divide it up and just kind of drill down into what we're passionate about and bring back some thoughts and ideas. No, I think. Put it on the list. All right, put it on the list. Okay. All right, is that the end of your report, Barry? That's it. All right, sir. Thank you. All right, so now we have number 27, appointment to the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative. We have two positions. Is this going to be a ballot vote or a? We can do a voice vote, Mr. Chair, because there's two positions and there's two applicants. Okay. Move approval. All right. Motion by Commissioner Eggers, second by Commissioner Latvalo. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Passed unanimously. Item number 28, appointments to the Suncoast, reappointment to the Suncoast Transit Authority of Kathleen Commission Peters and Commissioner Latvalo. Move approval. Well, that was great. And that was with authority and enthusiasm. Yes. I know they're excited to stay. All right. So we have- What, like six months? You served what, say? No, I've served years on that. All right. Motion by Commissioner Eggers, second by Commissioner Shearer. Thank you, Commissioner Shearer. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Pass unanimously. Thank you. All right. On the County Commission, new business. Since we seem to have more County Commissioners on this side of the thing over here today, we'll start with Commissioner Shearer. Sure. Thank you, Chair. On September the 5th, I toured the City Hall of Dunedin. It was beautiful. And I met with Mayor Moe and had lunch. And we discussed city-county coordination efforts, the status of their docs, and hopefully PSTA will be docking up there very soon. So that was great. On September the 6th, my legislative aide ran off to Italy to get married and left me alone to fit for myself for almost 10 days. So that's why it was hard to get a hold of and not always so organized. On September the 8th, I chaired the Public Safety Coordinating Council meeting. And we talked about the population at our local jail and revisited it. You know, we just talked about a lot of good stuff. On September the 9th, I was met with State Representative Linda Channing. We discussed state and county coordination. I wanted to know more about how that works because I'm looking forward to maybe participating in some of the upcoming legislative session. We also talked about emergency containment ponds and the need for those in Pinellas County and stormwater issues. On September the 15th, I attended the SEGIS meeting, and then I got to spend a little time with Chief Judge Crane and learn more about his drug programs, trying to keep people from being in and out of the system all the time and keep them on the straight and narrow. And I learned more about how our judicial system works with Kinberg's office to get judgments and decisions by the court to the sheriff as fast as possible so we can be able out of our jails as quickly as possible. So that was very interesting. And then also Sarah Molo wanted me to tell everybody she appreciates the fact that the county commission approved an additional employee at the BTS that aids her department because she's really helping her out a lot with her caseload. So she wanted me to say thank you. Okay. So on the 16th, I attended the Pinellas Historical Society barbecue luncheon. That was awesome. Yeah. To see a whole room full of volunteers because right now it's hard to get volunteers. People are a little nervous about being volunteers. And then yesterday I met Ken Kirby at the HCA Northside. He's with the HCA. I toured the hospital. I learned a lot about their stroke care and what a great job they do. And I know they do a good job there because they saved my father-in-law's life. And so I was really happy to visit and learn more about what they need. And what they really need is I believe many of our hospitals need water towers because their water was shut off for a time during the storm. So I'm hoping – he thought that was an interesting idea, and I hope that they go forward with that. And then yesterday I attended a grand opening for the Waldorf Astoria sales down in St. Petersburg. I don't know if you know that the Waldorf Astoria is coming to St. Petersburg. That's not just a big deal for St. Pete. It's a big deal for, I think, for the whole county. So which unit did you buy? Not the $27 million one on the top. So I'm still looking for it. But anyway, that was a good deal. So anyway, it's an interesting one. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Wicke? Thank you, Chair. Last weekend I attended the Art Walk at the Warehouse Arts District, and it was great to see sculptors and builders make unique art in the Warehouse Arts District. Also, last week I attended the Ducks Unlimited Dinner at Ruth Eckert Hall. Ducks Unlimited is a great organization, preserving wetlands throughout the state and the country to really preserve nature and wildlife for today and tomorrow. So just really great organization and great time to see just a lot of community leaders. I also did a panel last week for the Marine Industries Association of Florida with Mayor Bruce Rector and Councilman Ricky Butler. So just kind of talking about, you know, marine and water impacts throughout the county. And so it was great to hear from those leaders in the marine industry and hear the impact that Pinellas County and local communities have for boating. Boating and marine is a huge economic driver for the county. I also met with Feeding Tampa Bay, and they do great work. I didn't know they had a bistro and a cafe so you can get a free meal at Feeding Tampa Bay if you're ever going to Ikea. So head over across the bridge and pay what you can, though. But it's a great organization, Feeding Tampa Bay, and do great work not just in Pinellas County, but like 10, 13 other counties throughout the state where they play a huge impact. And that's my report, Chair. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Eggers. A couple things. I had a chance to tour Pinellas Park with Councilmember Ricky Butler and the city manager and learned a lot about their location with their issues that they have, road issues, stormwater issues, and how they partner with us on a lot of that. So it was very informative. I had a business reach out to me about some issues, about being charged some issues from FDOT on some work, and the secretary set me up with a couple of folks from FDOT. And, again, they went through the details and the explanation as to why that charge was there. I totally disagree with it, and they also reminded the engineer of record for the business that, you know, you can apply for some relief on some of those charges. And so I said, well, you all need to do a little better job of getting that word out, that there's that possibility of getting some help. But what I really wanted to say is I really appreciate the access to the staff at FDOT on two issues now. Again, it's not always pleasant discussions and conversations because I have opinions that might differ from them, but they're very professional. They listen to it, adjust. They did some adjustment on the Alt-19 project that is underway that says eight-month project or whatever. It's going on forever. The grooves were about three to four inches. They shaved them down because some folks were having some issues just driving along the road. They met, they talked, they adjusted. So I really appreciate that relationship. 9-11 ceremony up at Curlough Hills was just fantastic. I appreciated the moving the time back for our meetings so that we could attend that. And the governor was there and really did a great job on his comments, connecting not only with the kids that were there, but also with the folks that were in the audience. And it was not a kind of a rushed speech at all. It was very well delivered. I thought he did a great job, but really appreciated him being there at a Tampa Bay water meeting. I won't get into those details. I think we send out a report summarizing what we did there. I also went to the Heritage Village lunch. That was really good, and despite all the volunteers that they have, which is great, they're down on volunteers, too. So a lot more people doing a lot more work on those volunteer efforts, but just a really, really good time. And I did get over to the honor flight last night, or Tuesday night, but then I found out the plane was going to be landing in an hour and a half late. So I didn't hang out for the whole, what's that? Past your bedtime. Yeah, it was past my bedtime. Exactly. Thank you, Commissioner Lett-Ballon. Did you? Good. Somebody was there. Thank you for that. Yeah, it was just obviously they do a great job. And it was packed. Yeah. What time did they finally get in? 10.15. Yeah. They normally target around 8 or 8.30, you know, so it was a little bit later. The airport always does a great job there, so I wanted to thank them for that. What was that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, when they come back, that's the best part of their day, when they're welcomed home. You tell them about, did you have a great time? Especially when those World War II guys see the bomber girls. They hop up out of their wheelchairs. Yeah. They've never been able to get out. Yeah, so quickly. No, they literally, like, they're asleep and then they see them. But they really do like the welcome home. It's a great, great event. So, anyway, thank you, Mr. Chair. That's all we got. Commissioner Flowers, did you want to give us an update if you still have battery power on your iPad? Yeah, I'm hoping it doesn't die on me. Just real quick, I attended my area agency on aging meeting. We've run into some snags with Pasco County regarding the construction of our senior affordable housing project. The land that was originally provided to us is no longer provided to us. They referred us to another plot of land that would not work because we would have to literally pay for a road to be built for ingress and egress, as well as build another retention pond in the back of the facility. And the funding that we have doesn't accommodate that. So we are on the lookout for another piece of property that would accommodate that project. So that was a really sad thing. Super kudos and shout out to Congressman Bill Arrakis because he was instrumental in getting us funding to accomplish that project. That's the only thing I'm going to speak on now because it's bleaking at me. It's going to die. So I will go plug. I'm going to go plug it in and I'll be ready. I'll be back at six o'clock. All right. We'll see you then. Thank you. All right. Thank you to my colleagues for letting me come on board. You bet. We'll see you at six. Commissioner Laval. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to move approval of the 39 Youth Advisory Committee applicants for the 2025 school year. The list has been provided to commissioners for their review. Okay. I saw that there was 21 from District 4. Yeah. We did make a mistake. I did ask Tyler about that because there was only one from Clearwater High School and, like, five from Largo and a bunch of them from Palm Harbor, East Lake. Yeah, we messed up in that regard. But that shows that we take all comers. Yeah, we do. I appreciate your open-mindedness. We're very much equal opportunity program. But I will point out, and I hope you saw, that 75% of the participants were members last year. And so there were some seniors that can't participate because they're now off to college or whatever. So that shows that I assume that they were very happy with who their sponsor slash commissioner was last year. So they're signing up to participate again this year. So whoever the chair is next year, I would assume that they would want that same successful program to continue. But you know what they say about assuming, right? That is very true. I'm kidding. I would have a certain expectation. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. Pass unanimously. Thank you. Thank you for your support. We also, I attended the JWB re-a-thon and a very moving ceremony at the Florida Holocaust Museum ribbon cutting. The lieutenant governor was there as well as Ken Welch and many others, Mayor Ken Welch, and was really fascinating, and it's always moving and sobering to see as Holocaust survivors and children of Holocaust survivors, and they were there as well. So that was a very special event, and if you haven't been there, I encourage you to go and see Thor, which is a Danish boat that saved some Holocaust survivors. And there were even children of people that rode on Thor back in the Holocaust that were there. So go visit the Holocaust Museum if you haven't. I also met a week or two ago with David Habib, because food is very important to me. He owns Yo Mama Foods in Clearwater, which is one of the fastest-growing companies, not just in Clearwater but also in Pinellas County. I went about a year ago, and I think some of y'all may have been there. And even from that time to this, going this time, it's grown. So he's busting at the seams. We talked about some issues that he has. But whenever I was there, he talked about some things that got me thinking, and the lobbyist that works for him is the same lobbyist that works for us that also works for the city of Clearwater. And that's not really an issue, because I don't really care that our lobbyist works for the city of Clearwater. And I mentioned it at the last meeting that I don't believe that that's a conflict in Tallahassee, because of the way the session works. And our lobbyists that we have, I think, will do a great job, and I have no reason to think any different. But one thing I do want to bring up, though, Barry, is that since they do work for Clearwater, I do think that it could be an issue when we sell our property next year. And so I want you to start thinking about how we would handle that. So I did meet with them, and we talked about conflicts of interest. And the main thing is to sunshine it early, right? And so we're going to have processes set up, because not only do they represent them, they represent hospitals, and the hospitals are going to want to participate in programs and things like that. There's a natural conflict. The key is to identify it and separate it within the firm and identify how we're going to handle it. So we're working on those processes to be very transparent about it. And I have no concerns with the legislature, like I said. And they're a good firm, and all those folks that work there do a great job. I also led another JWB CEO search committee. We're moving right along in that process. Thank you for reappointing myself and Commissioner Peters to the PSCA board. And speaking of the PSCA board, we now have the lowest millage since 2011, back when Commissioner Eggers was a little younger than he is now. And also, I attended the Boy Scouts Mayor's Award Breakfast, because I like to begin and close with food. The Boy Scouts Mayor's Awards Breakfast honored the one and only Frank Chivas, who runs and owns some of the best restaurants in town. So go and enjoy some Bay Star restaurants. My favorite is Islandly Grill. So that is the end of my report. All right. Well, thank you, sir. All right. So let's see. We had, since we met last, we had a Ford Pinellas meeting. We had our first PSCA budget hearing. And, yes, thanks for pointing that out. We do have the lowest two consecutive years in a row of rolling back, lowest millage rate since 2011, which is just fabulous. I mentioned during our TDC meeting last week that we had a very positive call with the Army Corps of Engineers. And there's some significant movement on their part. And we're going back and forth with some dates for them to come down. Have we made any further progress on that, Barry? We don't have any further discussions. But to your point, I think you pointed out this out before, they're going to come in and meet with staff. And they're going to get into the details of, you know, the easement issues and things like that. But I think they're so – I haven't heard any other update, Matt, of you in terms of dates. No. So we'll follow up with them. Okay. Great. Let's see. Had the opportunity to make some comments at the Seminole Rotary Club last Friday, I think it was. Nice group of people there. We had about close to probably 40 people coming out for breakfast at 7 in the morning. So that was pretty good. Held some office hours at the Lelman Exchange and had an opportunity to meet with some community folks there. Along with Commissioner Peters, Commissioner Latvala, we attended a media event for Beach Nourishment last Friday afternoon. And thanks, Kelly Levy, for setting that up. And it's pretty darn impressive. If you go out there and you see the amount of sand that's being pumped on that beach and the dredging equipment offshore and the earth-moving equipment and a, you know, two-foot pipe, you know, pumping slurry down on the beach, and you see the elevation of where it is and where it's going to is dramatic. It is absolutely dramatic. And it puts into perspective, if that sand had been there last year, we would not be dealing with the level of stuff that we're dealing with. That is our main source of protection. It really is. So I'm just so glad that, you know, unfortunately we haven't used our money to do it, but it was the right thing to do to approve those funds and get that done. So it was an honor to offer congratulations to Representative Bernie Jacques this past Monday at the Greater Republican Club of Largo when he was presented with the Lincoln Norcross Award. Joined Commissioner Scheer and Eggers at the Pinellas Historical Society luncheon. Just great to see 120 volunteers volunteer to maintain Heritage Village. And they just do it out of the goodness of their heart because they have pride in their community and they're giving more than they're taking and they're paying it forward. So just my hats off to all those volunteers and Monica Drake out there. They do a great job. And then this morning I did K-9 Commissioner with Stevie. Do we have a picture of Stevie? There we go. All right. So hopefully Stevie gets adopted here very, very soon. Very, very happy dog. Stevie is seven years old and a male and is very, very excited to be out. You can tell that that dog has been in a cage for too long and was very happy to be out today. So I hope Stevie gets adopted very soon. Yep. And then lastly, I just wanted to acknowledge and thank Catherine Frazier for her service to the commission and more importantly to our residents. She is leaving for another position and we wish her the best and all the success in the future. And that concludes my report. Oh, and I also want to just thank clerk staff for being on top of the votes today with two commissioners doing remote. That was scenic. Yeah, that was just like. Dave did a good job on the clock. Yeah, he actually. We only had to remind him a couple of times. He was a little shaky, but we did. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to keep an eye on it for six o'clock then. What's that? We're going to keep an eye on it for six o'clock then. All right. Well, with that then, we are adjourned until six. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. I'd like to call our public hearing to order. And I see that we do have Commissioner Flowers online. Has Commissioner Peters come back in? I see her. I'm here. All right. Great. All right. Well, welcome back, everybody. So our first item for public hearing is number 30. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Agenda item number 30 is a proposed ordinance amending and revising Article 12, Chapter 58 of the Pinellas County Code of Ordinances, entitled Noise Ordinance. The proposed amendment's enhanced definitions bring clarity to existing sections relevant to noise enforcement and provide a streamlined process for complaints of excessive noise when enforcement is not readily available. Additional language in the ordinance also specifically addresses itinerant and transient noise in accordance with governing state statute. The public hearing is properly advertised and an affidavit of publication has been received for filing. Two emails of concern and one email in opposition have been received by the clerk, and it matters probably before the board to be heard. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Okay. I do have one item of public comment on this. That would be Eric Garduno. Come on up, Eric. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Eric Garduno with the Bay Area Apartment Association. Our members include apartment owners, developers, and managers across the Tampa Bay region, including within here, Pinellas County. We had the opportunity to send a letter to the commissioners earlier today regarding one specific provision within the ordinance, and that is paragraph C that is being added to Section 58-449. This is under the construction noise section. You know, having had a chance to review it, paragraph C, while may have some particular positive intent, that ultimately we're very concerned that it will indeed impinge on the ability of property owners to, one, repair their properties, particularly, you know, if some emergency comes up, and two, the ability to do any kind of construction. And specifically, these limitations would occur overnight and on Sundays. That's where we think the problem really relies. So if we have, say, a flood in an apartment community, we're going to have loud fans trying to dry up that flood, right? And that noise could carry over. The way this reads, and specifically, notwithstanding the above, the erection, excavation, demolition, alteration, or repair of any building between the hours of 11 and 7, Monday through Saturday, and all day Sunday constitutes loud and ruckus noise and is prohibited. So there isn't an opportunity for discretion here. The way this language seems to operate, it's automatically loud and ruckus and prohibited. So if we're talking about a repair of a building or even construction on Sundays for a new apartment community, we think this language would generally prohibit that. And there is one clause in here that goes on to say there's an exception in instances of public safety and health. But in addition to that, you also need it to be permitted by the housing official. If it's an emergency overnight, that's not really going to be practical. And so we'd like to see this particular paragraph either removed if this ordinance gets adopted today, or there's an opportunity for the ordinance to be delayed, for us to have an opportunity to come in and have conversations with county staff to sort of work through some of the issues. We'd appreciate that. Thank you, Erica. I do have one more for item number 30, and that is Hillary Simpson. Good evening, Hillary. Hi, good evening. So I had plans today to speak for 10 minutes and to advocate for reducing the decibel threshold during the day from 72 to 65 to align with other municipalities in Pinellas County, which I have presented to, I think, most of you commissioners independently and then also at the previous meeting. I was also going to advocate that our quiet hours for residential community also match the initiation of quiet hours for short-term rentals, which starts at 10 p.m. And then I was also going to advocate for the addition of distance-based clauses for defining excessive noise. I've spoken with, again, many of you and with code enforcement to get some perspective as to why those particular modifications were not included in this proposed revision. And although I still think that they should be looked at and that they are reasonable in nature, I understand the aspects for why they were admitted. And so I'm here today to show support for the revision as it's proposed, to show support for the definitions of loud and ruckus and the modifications to the affidavit requirements. And I do hope that those modifications do help to resolve my specific issue. I do understand that Pinellas County, the unincorporated areas of Pinellas County as a whole, have a lot of unique issues at hand and that those were all taken into consideration when talking about this noise ordinance. So, again, I do hope that these modifications, the changes that were made, help to resolve my specific issue. And if they don't, I hope that we can revisit this again. I still would support reducing the decibel threshold to 65 during the day from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., ideally until 10 p.m. and I still would support a distance-based definition for excessive noise. But I do understand where some of those hesitations lie after speaking with code enforcement officers. And so, again, I truly just want to thank all of you for taking the time to speak with me and for all of the effort that you've put into hearing my concerns. And that's really all I have to say. Thanks, Hillary. Appreciate you being here. Okay, I have one more for item 30. Linda Dentia? Dentia or Pencha? I'm not sure. Hi. Sorry, I'm a little late and a little unorganized. I wasn't able to hear the previous speakers. But we have an STR on the side of us, one directly in back of us, and another in the back corner. Two of the back ones are owned by the same person. About a week ago, this is just one example. There was hours and hours of blasting music, kids screaming, 17 to 20 people at the party, cars lining the circle drive down the street. My neighbor and myself called. The sheriff's department issued complaints on Airbnb, issued complaints on the STR County website. Nothing was done. There was a deputy that was sitting outside in the front of the house. He said he heard loud talking. But by that time, the music was down. Actually, the owner was staying at the house, the other house next door. And my neighbor contacted him directly. And he said, yes, he agrees it was annoying and unacceptable. And he was sorry. A couple hours later, he said he went to the house, asked them to keep it down. And they were very nice. They seemed nice. An hour later, the blasting music went from like 7 to 11 p.m. The officer said that he really couldn't do anything because they had until 11 o'clock. My understanding is that it's until 10 o'clock for the loud noise after 10, 10 to 9. But even so, during the day, it's supposed to be 72 decibels. And then after 10 p.m., it's 54 decibels. Nobody has ever, ever brought a decibel reader out, even though I requested it many times. But I don't think having a decibel reader or not is going to change anything because no one has ever done anything about the loud noise. During July, on the side neighbors, which is very close to our house, and this is all noise we hear from inside our house with the TV on. We're not outside trying to relax. We're in the house and we can hear a noise. There was a family with three kids, extremely loud screaming and yelling, nonstop. We yelled over the fence to ask them to keep it down. It doesn't usually work. Sometimes they retaliate and get louder. This family, I am not exaggerating when I say seven hours on Friday, they were yelling and screaming, and we could hear it all inside the house. Friday, I mean Saturday, it was five hours. Sunday, thank God, it rained all day. There was no one outside. Monday, another five to six hours. This should not be tolerated in our neighborhoods. Nobody I know has ever, we've been there for 27 years, and nobody has ever spent seven hours outside. Thank you. Okay, I'm assuming we're probably going to want to see a staff presentation on this. Kevin. Jude. Before you get started, I was thinking we've got the ordinance that's being proposed. We've talked about other options. At the end of all of it, it really is just general guidance for these folks to be reasonable neighbors, so to speak, even though they're temporary neighbors. What are we going to do on the enforcement side? Because to me, it sounds like that's the gap. You know, whether it's our officers, our code enforcement officers, or the others, the sheriff's department, it's really all about enforcement and trying to make things happen. So, I mean, I know you're going to have a presentation. Hopefully, we can spend a little time on that part, because that's where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. So, thank you. And again, thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Eggers. Good evening, Mr. Chair. Our commissioners, Kevin McAndrew, Director of Building and Development Review Services, with me. Jude Reason, our code enforcement division manager and housing official. And if needed, Jude can take us through the full PowerPoint. I'm going to try to provide a summary that I think is going to hit upon a lot of the issues that have been raised. And if necessary, we can take you through the PowerPoint. The overarching goal with this ordinance update from the outset was to provide expanded tools and options to provide a more meaningful regulation and enforcement of noise, whether it be by our code officers or whether it be by the sheriff's office. The vast majority of noise complaints do start with the sheriff's office. But I think it's important to put a little bit of context to this. When the current ordinance was last updated was 2003, at that time, the noise ordinance wouldn't have contemplated what today is the most prevalent frequency and type of noises emanating from short-term rentals. Airbnb wasn't even established in 2008, five years after this last noise ordinance. And the type of noise that's emanated from vacation rentals, short-term rentals, exactly as the prior resident spoke to, yelling, screaming, loud noises, is referred to as itinerant and transient noise. And the focus of this update ties transient and itinerant noise to irreparable and irreversible, which is what drives then the ability to have greater flexibility with enforcement. And I'll take you through how that occurs. Along the lines of this issue with utilizing the loud and raucous, we wanted this ordinance to be as flexible as possible to reduce dependence. Using the noise meter is fine, but it's not always possible. It's not always efficient. So we wanted to reduce the dependence upon that having to be utilized. We also wanted the enforcement side to go beyond just a violation in the case of a short-term rental to the guest or the tenant. We wanted the enforcement to be able to go further to the property owner because that's what's going to break the repeat pattern. It's one thing to sting, you know, the guest. They get hit with a ticket, but a week later, a new guest comes in and they get hit with a ticket again. But the owner, there's no consequences to the owner of this short-term rental. This ordinance now provides the ability to also provide enforcement to the owners. And we think that's one of the key deliverables that's going to have a much more meaningful impact to the enforcement. We also wanted to simplify what today, again, it was a different time in 2003, what today is too cumbersome of a methodology, getting two separate affidavits to act on a complaint from a resident. This has been simplified down to one complaint from the affected party. This is also going to give a lot more flexibility to our code officers to work off a complaint in conjunction with a ticket or a notice of violation that may be delivered from the sheriff's office to then take that to the special magistrate. So there's a much broader latitude as to how we can address the enforcement side of this ordinance. And the details, of course, are in this ordinance from definitions to expanded clarification of loud and raucous. The previously human-produced noise was not included under loud and raucous. So that's been embedded in there. Again, all of this was fine-tuned in this ordinance as well as how quiet hours work. The issue with regard to construction that was brought up by the first individual that spoke, there's no change to the parameters of construction noise occurring from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and all day Sundays. The only provision that's been added into this ordinance is that it would constitute loud and raucous. But that doesn't mean that an officer has to issue that ticket. They have that flexibility of issuing a ticket. They can arrive at the scene and they can assess what the circumstances are behind it, but it gives greater flexibility. They're not reliant, again, upon a noise meter. They have the ability to exercise that if needed. And that's really been, like I said, the overarching approach to this was to bring flexibility and options to the enforcement. We're confident that this is going to have a meaningful impact on this. And as Ms. Simpson had pointed out and we expressed with all of our ordinances, we're going to track this closely. And if we don't see it being effective in a reasonable period of time, we'll come back to you with an update. I did. Go ahead. Could you, on the enforcement side, because as Commissioner Edgar stated, that's the piece that we've been missing. And I appreciate the updates that are being brought forward on this. I do think it's going to help. But walk us through, Ms. Simpson calls at 10.01 p.m. on a Friday night, and what happens from there to not only the occupants of the short-term rental, but beyond that. Certainly. Good evening, Commissioners. Thank you for having me. Jude Reason, Pinellas County Housing Official. To elaborate on a situation where Ms. Simpson or any other complainant in the county calls in noise after hours, if they call into our new short-term rental hotline, the hotline will document the complaint, which puts it into our system. And our staff can later grab that. We have officers that may be available on nights where there's a high probability of detection. Otherwise, the call goes directly to the sheriff's office, either through the short-term rental hotline or the complainant. We always encourage folks to contact the sheriff's office because they are the quickest to respond. If a deputy arrives on scene and they are able to articulate that there is noise occurring, noise that would be unreasonable, noise that would meet the loud and ruckus standard, they can issue a citation if they'd like to. Typically, they'll typically, they'll make contact with the occupant of the property. They ask them to turn the music down or whatever it may be. Vast majority of the time, this is the corrective measure. That usually happens pretty quick, often within minutes of the phone call. Very little time. If, again, if the officer determines that or the deputy determines that there has noise that has met the threshold of loud and ruckus under the new ordinance, the proposed ordinance, they would have the ability to issue a citation if they believe that it warrants it. That's discretionary to the sheriff's office and the direction of the sheriff. If it does warrant it, they can issue them a citation. The citation is usually in the amount of about $218, and they go to local ordinance violation court. That would be to the tenant. Because it happened to a property that would be considered transient property, where it's an irreparable and irreversible situation, again, based on the new ordinance and its language, that case can then be referred to code enforcement, where we can take that sheriff's report. We can take an affidavit from the complainant that states what the noise was, when it occurred. It would be consistent with the sheriff's report or any other evidence that the complainant may offer. So in a case like Ms. Simpson's, if there were recordings, video, anything like that, anything else to help us substantiate that this violation did occur, we can move that to the special magistrate. Our focus will be with the homeowner. So once we get the homeowner to special magistrate, and this isn't a very quick time that we do have to notify them. We have, there's legal obligation for notifications, and we have to get it on the docket. The homeowner goes before the magistrate. If found guilty, the county can request a fine amount of up to $5,000. And that's for a situation where it is obviously extreme in nature and also persistent. So usually in these cases, what we call them continuing violations, the magistrate can't award that violation. In the event that they, moving forward, they ultimately would have to pay that violation. If they don't, it goes on to the property as a lien, and then that lien can later be collected through other methods with the county. So, what I've heard happen a lot, and what I've experienced, is the deputy shows up, nobody comes to the door, he doesn't have probable cause to do anything, and they leave. Now, that's pre this updated ordinance, but I don't know that there's a strong desire on the part of the sheriff's department to really deal with a lot of this stuff. So, I think that they just have bigger fish to fry. So, they're quick to respond, but when it comes to noise, they don't seem to have a lot of tools at their disposal. Maybe this will be the best tool they've ever had. I don't, we'll have to wait and see, I guess, a little bit on that. But, so, if I heard you right, the only thing where code enforcement is going to come in is on the special magistrate side. Am I missing a piece there? Because there seems to be a big gap between the deputy shows up, can't do anything, and magistrate, which may or may not happen depending on we have evidence, we don't have evidence, we can't substantiate. But, you know, is there a process for repetitive properties? I guess I'm just trying to get a little more arms around that piece of it, because it just, I hope this is the solution, but what we have now does not seem to be hitting the mark. Sure, and there's two parts of that. The answer on the second part is the continuing violation. If it's a repetitive property and we continue to collect information and cases on that repetitive property, we do have the ability to, again, through the magistrate, utilize the process to continuously fine. And those fines, again, can be pretty high dollar. And ultimately, that does lead to even a potential foreclosure on that property to collect those fines. So those should get a homeowner's attention, which is obviously one of the goals, is to have the homeowners hold their tenants accountable. Back to some of the sheriff's office stuff, as some of our citizens have alluded to, the sheriff themselves have said they don't have a lot of these tools. There's been misunderstandings on quiet hours and what quiet hours are as they reflect to SDR, as they reflect to the rest of the county. The purpose of this ordinance, again, is to clean up some of that language where we outline what the quiet hours are, what the expectations of quiet hours are, and that they can apply differently to other areas. So in a matter of a short-term rental, if these amendments are adopted, the sheriff will then have clarity on what those hours are based on the properties that they're going to. The sheriff's office does have access to our database that can inform them that the property next door is a short-term rental. They will probably be more likely than not also informed by the citizen who's calling. The reporting party will likely provide that information. So this does expand the toolbox for them. In my communications with the sheriff's office, through some of our collective efforts in developing this, the responses that I've got is that this does allow them quite a bit more ability to enforce. It takes off some of the requirements of issuing a warning. They can go straight to citations. It also cleans up the language on what is decibel versus loud and ruckus. We define now yelling, screaming, shouting, and other noises consistent with parties or large gatherings as a definition for loud and ruckus, which wasn't there before. And we were running into situations in the courts where the judges were not ruling in our favor for noises that were consistent with basically human-made noises. So we are hopeful that this will correct a lot of that, expand the toolbox for the sheriff's office, expand the toolbox for code enforcement. Our code enforcement officers do have the ability to also arrive on scene if we're available and we can get there quick enough to have the noise still occurring. And our officers can also witness that noise. Our officers can also issue citations to tenants and then, of course, follow up with the owner. So this does expand both for the sheriff's office and us, and we will no longer have the requirement of having to issue a warning in the event that the noise is considered itinerant and irreparable and irreversible. So itinerant, transient, irreparable, and irreversible, they work hand in hand. And short-term rentals meet exactly that definition. And there can be other elements in other properties where we may have a similar situation where both the sheriff and code enforcement can be equally as effective on those properties that are making noise that are more incidental. I appreciate that. Walk me through, how does an affidavit work? Certainly. Typically, an affidavit is the officer usually is communicating with the complainant. A complainant calls in, or we get a complaint where an officer will actually reach back out to the complainant and provide that information on what would be necessary. The affidavit is signed, and it's notarized, and it's a citizen who's attesting to what they heard. And that citizen would be expected to testify before the special magistrate or even LOV court if that was necessary, but most likely it's going to be a special magistrate situation. So the tenant would, of course, have to be there, provide any documentation or any additional evidence that we can use to support that complaint, to substantiate the complaint. Additionally, if a deputy had arrived and a deputy had witnessed it and it's in their report and the deputy's report is consistent with what the complainant has said, that's just additional evidence and an additional witness that we would call to the stand in a special magistrate hearing. So law enforcement does not have to witness that or hear that. It's helpful if they do. Correct. But as long as they have documentation to substantiate the affidavit, then you can move forward. Yes, we could. It would be exceptionally helpful to have, yes, some sort of documentation, recording, evidence that would help substantiate that. The hearsay is a little challenging here and there, but we would, again, take that affidavit. We would work off of it and we would apply it to a case, put it in the system, get it moving to the magistrate, collect as much evidence as possible, and hope for a favorable outcome. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. One of your questions cleared up one of the questions I had, and it was more along the lines of the problem, properties, and the persistent properties. And so I will ask more so along the lines of the special magistrate process, and I fully support due process. But if there is a property that has an issue that goes before the special magistrate, that you all refer to the special magistrate, and the following week there's another issue, and I assume that it may take a month or two, maybe longer to get a hearing, do those cases rack up one right after another, or do they get stacked up and become one case? How does that work? So I can't totally respond based on the sheriff's, because the sheriff is most likely going to respond to these calls individually as they come in. I'm going to guess that there are going to be individual complaints, because there are going to be different tenants, and that's who they're talking with. For us, it's going to be one continuous case. It'll be considered a duplicate. And so when we go to the magistrate, we don't stack charges. We address one issue. If there's multiple issues on the property that are different code sections, we will include all of those code sections. For example, if it's noise, that's one thing, but when our magistrate officers go out to the property, they're also going to identify any other problems that the property may have. They have zoning issues, site plan issues, minimum housing issues. All of those will be combined, and the property in its entirety will go to the magistrate. Those will be charged individually. But if it's several noise, lots of different trash and debris or something like that, it's still going to be one charge. We will, of course, consider the pattern of events, and that will absolutely play into our evidence and what we bring to the magistrate, that it's a continuing and ongoing issue. Again, these situations are itinerant. They're transient in nature. So in those cases, we're going to be asking for the one-time fine. In other code cases, we actually ask for a daily fine until it can be resolved. But as a whole, we take the entire property of the magistrate and we address everything that we can because we don't want to do it individually and later on down the road. So it makes a lot of sense that we get in there, do it one time, and hold the whole property accountable. Commissioner, if I could, I just want to add one thing. I think the answer to your question is repeat violations are treated differently. So if they've been there before, before the magistrate, and you have the same violation, repeat violations fall into a heightened fine strike. So even if there hasn't been a hearing yet on the first case, they still would be treated differently in the subsequent case. So what I would be concerned with is, say, in March when spring break starts, you get rowdy students from Duke that come down and cause a ruckus because of, you know, that's where Commissioner Eggers went to school. And I don't know how he ever got in there, but he did. And they cause an issue, or they cause a complaint. And then the following week, kids from University of Florida come in, raise a cane, and get a complaint. And so you have a couple complaints, and then, like, kids from FSU come in and do the same thing. And so you have three complaints. Well, if the first case goes before the special magistrate, and for some reason he decides, okay, the kids from Duke, which was case number one, you know, they didn't rise to, they didn't meet the level of cause or whatever, so I'm going to throw this out. Can he still go to the other two cases and say, okay, but I'm going to ding you for these two? Is that, would that still be the case, or could he just, because the first one didn't meet the level, he could throw all three of them out? No, each violation will stand on its own. So if the first, if the evidence was lacking, for instance, in the first, and he was to find no violation. The second one, it's a standalone, did they violate or did they not, and they base it on the evidence. Now, the heightened fine is only based on the ones that were found to be appropriate. So if it's found, if the Duke, in your instance, if the Duke students were found not to be in violation, and then I think. Because that's more of a nerdy school. I think if you said Florida next, and the Florida were found to be in violation, and then again, the Florida state were found to be in violation, that Florida state wouldn't be at a heightened fine level, or that would be available as a repeat violation. Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I'm not sure where to go with this Latvala thing, but I'm going to come up with something. So back to the construction issue that was raised, can we, is there language in there that we can say, comma, emergencies accepted, and make that a qualitative decision by whoever comes to the site? Because, I mean, if you say, oh, this is an emergency, and all they're doing is implementing a construction of normal plans under normal times, but they're working on Sunday, that's different than if they've had a broken pipe, and the place is flooded, and they're really trying to respond quickly. You don't want to wait until Monday morning, right? So that would be an emergency accepted, maybe a little bit more protection for the property owner. That language is actually included in there. It takes you through, notwithstanding the above, the erection, excavating, demolition, alteration, or repair of any building between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and all day Sunday, constitutes loud and raucous noise, is prohibited, except in case of urgent necessity in the interest of public health safety, and if permitted by the housing official. Say those again, I'm sorry. Say those three. Deep. Just the last piece. Except in case of urgent necessity in the interest of public health and safety, and if permitted by the housing official. Public health and safety, does that refer to the people that are living there, or does it refer to people that it might affect otherwise? I just want to make sure. It's an extremely broad term that, again, is going to provide for the ability to protect those that might be impacted otherwise, as well as those that are in the building and those that may be adjacent to it. But it's a very broad latitude that, again, provides for that exception to that language. So, again, these are examples that Commissioner Latvala was bringing up about the three successive schools that came there in different weeks. Those are individuals that we're going to find, but are we also going to be registering the complaint by the property owner and going after the property owner as well, right? I mean, so it's going to be double. That's the work that you guys will be doing, mostly. No proactive work on site. If you find, like, repeated areas, because I think when this is all said and done, we're not going to have 90% of the properties in violation. You're probably going to have a smaller doing a lot of the damage. So when we identify those areas, can we do proactive? I mean, on your part, do some proactive, I don't know, patrolling around and seeing what's going on so that we don't, you know, that we can be there on the spot. I mean, it just seems to me a little bit more proactive stuff instead of reacting all the time. Certainly. I appreciate the question, too. We have attempted to do that on a couple of times, on a handful of times, actually, and the sheriff's office as well. They actually have a program where they'll put a deputy vehicle out on the road and try to, you know, see if we can kind of catch these folks doing it in the act. So far, we've been very unsuccessful. The sheriff's office and our office has been unsuccessful. We've yet to arrive to a property or be standing by a stakeout, if you will, and have a violation occur. On a couple of occasions, we've done this with some of the more problematic properties. And you are correct. A good majority of our current complaints are a single set of properties. It's the special magistrate process that is pursuing the property owner that really gets to the root cause and accountability. And this is the mechanism that's going to be most effective because it's the property owner, then, that is going to be fined and not insignificantly if found guilty. But the piece here is that it's the property owner, then, that screens which tenants are allowed to rent that short-term rental. And, you know, this is really going to get to that root cause. I think that will be maybe the mid-term or long-term solution. In the meantime, we can still give tickets or fines to the people that are occupying the premise because I think you're going to have that, too. And then the other question I was going to ask about, you talked about meeting with the sheriff's office and getting their input but also educating up on what loud and raucous means and all of that. So I think that's going to be important. In Dunedin and downtown, they actually have sheriff's department, but they have CPOs, so they're community police officers that are a lot more attuned to the issues that are in that downtown where residents and businesses are commingled, and they're right there. I mean, they may have the decibel meter, too, but they really are on the spot, you know. So they're – as opposed to the sheriff's department that might not really be that tuned in. So I'm just wondering about that education process so that they feel more comfortable, and I think that you addressed that. But is there a way that we can get folks up to speed on that quicker, our deputies? Certainly. The group, in fact, that we had been working with is the CPO unit. Our officers work with CPOs every single day throughout any area in the county. And so, yes, there are CPO officers. They're not always available, not always the responding deputy. And I can't speak completely for the sheriff's office, but what we can do is work together with them to provide, obviously, the updates to this ordinance, if adopted, so that they are aware of what quiet hours actually are, what the loud ruckus now allows. So we certainly will have an educational campaign with that CPO group and ask that it be expanded to all deputies who may respond. I know that that is – it's been kind of a pain point here and there, but a lot of that, I believe, is from the inconsistency of the ordinances not yet all being fully adopted and some of the modifications and amendments that we've had to make over recent months. Yeah. Well, I think both avenues are going to be important. So the lady spoke about having the kids screaming and yelling for seven hours. At least we can try to address that on the spot, and then we're doing that successively. Now we're talking to the owner also. So we're doing both to help out, and I think that's a better thing. Anyway, thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Chair. All right. What is the will on the board? Mr. Chair, do you have a – Thank you, Chair. I'm sorry. Commissioner? Yeah? Good? Well, we have a motion, but if you want to speak, then we can second. If you want to – Go ahead. I just wanted to touch on C one more time because it looks very problematic to me still. Because it says urgent necessity in the interest of public health and safety and if permitted by the housing official, both those conditions must be met. But if it were to say or if permitted by the housing official, then it's one or the other. And I think that slight change would be – I don't know if we're allowed to make that change here. That's a good point. What's that? That's a great point, I think. So – It gives more latitude. Again, you don't have to offer all three. You don't have to have all three. Just one or the other. Yeah. The housing official can do it. Or, obviously, if the deputy or the code enforcement goes out there and sees there's really a problem here, that's one of them. You don't have to go call the housing official. So I think if we just had that one change and make it or instead of and. Let me tell you, yes, you absolutely could change that here, and we can make that on a motion and a second and move that forward. I do want to just also, though, let you know, when a code enforcement officer goes out there in response to a call, they're not forced to write a citation or cite anyone. If they go out there and see a situation that's truly emergent or that kind of thing, they have discretion at that point to do nothing. So I just wanted to make sure that that was clear as well. Yeah. But we don't have to have all three to have that discretion. That's correct. You have the code enforcement officers always have the discretion, you know, to use their judgment with respect to that kind of thing. It's the responding officer is the housing official. I mean, the code enforcement official is a housing official in that particular case, correct? Correct, sir. The officers do act on behalf of the housing official, so their citations, their condemnations, and other violations are on behalf of the housing official, which is our office. I just don't want – I think it was a good point. I don't want to have all – I don't know what the three things were, but it just gives you the – you still have that discretion that you don't have to have all three. It gives a deputy the discretion, too, because he's not a housing official. It's still your discretion. And for clarification, we're comfortable with that change. The intent was to bring the loud and ruckus standards to the ordinance equally throughout every section and also to clean up the ability to get a permit, effectively a waiver, a noise waiver, when you need to actually do construction work in the evenings, after hours. Even our own public works office gives us a call and asks for these waivers if they have to do something that's going to impact a residential community. Now, those are typically not a real emergency situation. Usually they're planned ahead, but we wanted that language to be in there so that, you know, folks knew that they were able to get a waiver to do stuff like emergency repairs, emergency construction work. This stuff is very incidental in the moment, right then and there, to the county attorney's office, to what they're saying there. We do have full discretion to be able to say this is a very reasonable act. What we don't want is, you know, folks who make it kind of a business to be doing their 2 a.m. remodels on their bathrooms or people re-roofing all day on Sunday. It's not, you know, so much of an emergency situation. And the more exemptions that we put in there, the more folks are likely to abuse those exemptions. And we just don't want to run into a situation where we wouldn't have the ability to cite or stop that activity from happening based on wording and not discretion. Commissioner Wicke? Was the gentle commissioner from District 5 willing to amend his motion to include the ward or? I trust our good code enforcement folks to make the correct decisions. Was that a yes or no? Staff said they were open to the exchange. I mean, it was a no, unless y'all are going to vote it down, then it would be a yes. Well, if I could, Commissioner Flowers, did you have any input? Well, now we can see it. We've got two Commissioner Flowers on the screen now. One is frozen in time. My laptop, I'm on the phone now because for whatever reason it said that my Zoom screen froze. And it did. We can confirm it did. Okay. So I'm just on my phone now. And hopefully it won't die on me. Okay. Did you have any input on this or any comments? Nope. No comments. I had responded to a few emails. I understand the concern. I understand the concern related to construction, any type of issues like that, that may be going on and may violate some of the times for the noise ordinance. I do understand, though, that sometimes people are just trying to really get the project done and completed, especially when we have hurricane season. But I also understand how that could be a distraction, certainly, and a disruption to the residents in the area that may have to deal with that. So those are my only comments. And thank you for your patience. Okay. Well, okay. Well, we have a motion. We don't have a second. Does anybody want to second Commissioner Lottbello's motion, which was as it was presented by staff? And maybe I would – I'll second that, but I'd like to just have the distinction between the two. If you're comfortable either way that you have the discretion, I think that's the real point, right, that it's not three things that have to occur to have that discretion ability. We want you to be able to have the discretion, period. Absolutely. Yeah, we're comfortable with either way. Okay. Or the end. That's fine with us. Then I will second. Okay. So we have a motion and a second for as it was presented with the and, not the or. That's what I understand. That is correct. All right. Any further discussion? All right. Well, if we could open up the voting. I mean, yes, Mr. Chair. Okay. Thank you. Well. Okay. So – all right. So who hasn't voted? Okay. All right. It was me. Passes unanimously. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it very much. All right. Now we're on to item number 31. So I'm going to get ready to read a lot, so – as is Barry. So here we go. Good evening. This is the public hearing for the adoption of the FY26 final millages and final budgets. Has any correspondence been received regarding the final millages and final budgets to be heard tonight? Mr. Chair, 12 emails and one voicemail in opposition have been received by the clerk's office, and the Office of Management and Budget has received 63 phone calls. Good evening. Tonight's public hearing is the second and final public millage and budget hearing for the consideration and adoption of the FY26 final millages and final budgets. Before we get started, I'll walk through the sequence of events for tonight. We will accept public comment on the following property tax levies and budgets by the following taxing authority classification. The BCC countywide levy for the Pinellas County General Fund and the county levy supporting the Health Department Fund. The levies for dependent special districts and municipal service taxing units that, going forward, will be referenced as MSTUs. Dependent special districts include the Emergency Medical Services Authority and Pinellas Planning Council, PPC. And MSTUs include the Unincorporated Area MSTU, Public Library Services District MSTU, Palm Harbor Community Services MSTU, Feather Sound Community Services MSTU, East Lake Library Services MSTU, East Lake Recreation Services MSTU, Greater Seminole Area Special Recreation MSTU, and the Special Fire Protection Districts. If you are here to speak regarding the final millages and final budgets, you should have filled out a blue card. If you have not yet filled out a card and wish to speak, please see the staff seated by the entry door, and they will assist you. For all the pre-registered online participants, you will be instructed at the proper time to raise your hand in the virtual meeting. After hearing all public comment, I will ask the board if they recommend any further changes to the final millages and final budgets. If so, I will ask the board for a motion and a vote to adopt any changes. Finally, we will adopt the resolutions setting the final FY26 millage rates and budgets. These resolutions will be adopted in accordance with Florida statutes. The final millage will be adopted first, and then the final budget for each of the taxing authorities. Before we begin the public hearing, if anyone has specific questions or concerns regarding the assessed value of their property, exemptions or classification related to your property, or information on the trim notices, tonight we have with us Alex Luca and Jackie Ware from the Pinellas County Property Appraisers Office. If anyone would like to speak with them, please follow them at this time, and they will answer your questions. For those attending virtually, please contact the Pinellas County Property Appraisers Office at 727-464-3207, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., or email mike, M-I-K-E, at p-c-p-a-o dot org. Florida statutes also provide that a taxing authority may adopt the tax levies and budgets of all its dependent special districts and MSTUs by a single unanimous vote. However, if a member of the general public requests that the tax levy or budget of a dependent special tax district or MSTU be separately discussed and separately adopted, we will then discuss and adopt that district's tax levy and budget separately. At this time, does any member of the general public attending the meeting in person request separate discussion or separate adoption of a tax levy or budget of any dependent special district or MSTU? Okay. Hearing none. Mr. Chair, no individuals have pre-registered to speak by Zoom on the budget. Okay. Thank you. Since we have not heard from anyone requesting separate discussion and separate adoption of the dependent special districts and MSTUs, we will proceed with adoption of the dependent special districts and MSTUs millages and budgets by single unanimous vote. We will now open the second official public hearing on the final FY26 millage rates and budgets. This public hearing is being held in accordance with chapters 129 and 200 of the Florida statutes. The meeting has been duly noticed by the notice of proposed tax increase and the summary of proposed budget legal ads that were published in the September 14, 2025 edition of the Tampa Bay Times. Affidavits stating proof of publication are to be received for filing. Thank you. We, the Board of County Commissioners, as taxing authority for the BCC, countywide, dependent special districts, and MSTUs, as previously referenced, will now proceed with the public hearings. In accordance with Florida statutes, I want to publicly note that the percentage increase in the millage rate for all budgets over the rollback rate based upon the maximum rates on the trim notice to fund the FY26 final budget is a 2.24% increase over the aggregate rollback rate of 6.0265. The primary purposes for these increases in millages over the rollback rate are due to the following. In the general fund, including unincorporated area MSTU, and in the Emergency Medical Services Authority, revenue increases over the rollback rate are required to support personnel and operating expenditure levels that are driven by inflationary factors and Board priorities. In the Pinellas Planning Council, sufficient revenues will exist with a decreased millage to support personnel and operating expenditure levels, as per the request of Forward Pinellas. In the Public Library Services District, MSTU, the Palm Harbor Community Services, MSTU, the Feather Sound Community Services, MSTU, the East Lake Library Services, MSTU, East Lake Recreation Services, MSTU, Greater Seminole Area Special Recreation MSTU, and seven special fire protection districts, Bel Air Bluff Fire District, Dunedin Fire District, High Point Fire District, Pinellas Park Fire District, Seminole Fire District, Tarpon Springs Fire District, and Tierra Verde Fire District, revenue increases are needed to support increased expenditures by the agencies providing services for those districts. In the other five special fire protection districts, Clearwater Fire Protection District, Gandy Fire District, Largo Fire District, Safety Harbor Fire District, and South Pasadena Fire District, sufficient revenues will exist with a decreased millage to support personnel and operating expenditure levels and Board priorities. Thank you, Mr. Burton. We will now continue this public hearing as taxing authority for the BCC Countywide Dependent Special Districts and MSTU levies by taking public comment from citizens who wish to be heard regarding our FY26 budget. Okay, I have four cards for public comment, and we will go to those now. Okay, first we have Doreen Moore. Good evening. Good evening. Good to see you all. Most of you know my role in being the liaison between the Tourist Development Council as an advisory council to the county commission and the liaison with Creative Pinellas, so between TDC and Creative Pinellas. I was one of the founding board members and served in past years as the president, and so I feel that in my role with the Tourist Development Council for many years, I wanted to be here tonight and speak to you somewhat on my own personal comments but also on behalf of Creative Pinellas. And I know that all of you have had the input from residents and the community and the arts community, so I appreciate you listening. I know that as Creative Pinellas, we were extremely disappointed with our supporters as well about the defunding, but life goes on. And so I'd like to say that we heard the input at the prior meetings. I heard your input at the BCC joint meeting with the Tourist Development Council, and we understand that, you know, tonight's not going to be the night to change anyone's minds. And so I think that Creative Pinellas, we're looking forward to working with the county. We appreciate the past financial support that we had and that we are going to welcome, obviously, the opportunity to be able to continue working with you as partners and innovative creative collaborators since we've done since 2011. So it does present us with new challenges. Creative Pinellas is looking forward to remaining focused and committed to our mission, to our arts community, the residents, and the visitors who are going to be impacted by these changes. But we want you all to know that we're looking forward to those continued efforts to uplift art and the artists across Pinellas County and working, of course, with the tourism portion of that. So we're grateful to our supporters who showed up and voiced their opinions. We did not ask for there to be a rallying tonight because we heard your message. And we want you to know that while this is a surprise, what we have already as Creative Pinellas taken steps to have a financial shift, to reduce costs, and we are actively pursuing fundraising efforts in the future because Creative Pinellas will continue, and we want to be an active partner in whatever way you as the commissioners would like us to be. So thank you for your support in the past and look forward to working with you going forward. Thank you, Doreen. Next, we have Holly Noah, followed by Mitzi Gordon. Good evening. Good evening. My name is Holly Noah, and I am a taxpaying homeowner of Pinellas County, specifically St. Petersburg. I'm here to respectfully request that you vote no on the Fiscal 26 budget. Our taxes are increasing in real dollars, yet some county commissioners would have you believe that they've reduced the tax rate four out of the last five years. That's an impressive soundbite, but it's misleading. Let's be clear, the only millage that has been reduced in the countywide taxing district represents less than half of one percent of the countywide millage. Less than half of one percent. The tax rate, for example, for the general fund, which represents almost 84 percent of the countywide property tax revenue from citizens to the county, has not changed, but because taxable value has increased, so too have our taxes. Alas, we come to the one reduction in the BCC section of the property tax table. The millage for the Pinellas Planning Council, also known as Forward Pinellas, last year represented just 0.36 percent of the total countywide millage, and this year we get a teeny reduction to now just 0.32 percent of the countywide millage. That's less than half a percent. So, yes, the truth is that the millage has rolled back, but it's not very impressive. Our taxes in the Pinellas County budget have continued to increase. The fiscal 26 budget is $600 million more than last year and more than a billion dollars over fiscal 24. Wasteful spending is unacceptable. Our county administrator makes two and a half times what the governor makes. There are multiple superfluous and duplicative departments and funded staff openings in the county budget representing millions of tax dollars. Pinellas County employees have benefited beautifully from annual salary increases this fiscal year, 4.5 percent, next fiscal year, 3 percent. Compare that, if you will, to the two and a half percent in Social Security that our most vulnerable population relies on, our seniors. They rely on to live. Then you'll understand. Let me net it out. The blessing of increased property values for homeowners should not mean automatic increase in the budget for this county or the taxes we pay. Honesty and transparency is expected of you. Don't insult our intelligence. The bottom line is this. Tax revenue should be reduced to bring the skyrocketing budget back down to earth. Vote no on the budget. Thank you. Thank you. Mitzi Gordon, followed by Patty Sidote. I'm sorry if I got that wrong. Good evening. Good evening. Mitzi Gordon. I am an artist and resident of St. Petersburg. I'm here representing myself, not any agency, to make comment regarding the defunding of Creative Pinellas. I am a former employee of that local arts agency as well as of the Dali Museum. There are those who will argue that the arts are merely another business. It's true the arts contribute to our economy in exponential ways. And art making today is commodified, as revealed in the analytics you were provided two weeks ago. But culture in the larger sense is a human right. We deserve representatives who respect our rights and value supporting our local arts agency as an investment in the well-being of Pinellas residents. The people Creative Pinellas serves are your constituents. We own homes here. We spend our paychecks here. And we vote here. This dismissal of the expertise, needs, and concerns of your constituents will be remembered. The flood of testimonials you've received already attests to that. And I ask, at whose behest do you serve? I was here two weeks ago, and I was here ten years ago, petitioning for Creative Pinellas. The way this defunding took place is an embarrassment. Squeezing out our well-positioned and responsibly managed local arts agency is an act of diminishment, carried out under the guise of fiscal responsibility as though it were a binary choice, when Commissioner Eggers plainly stated that the money could be found. By leveraging misinformation into a deliberate blow, you make the same mistakes your predecessors made in 2010 when they dismantled Pinellas County cultural affairs. We will all lose more than you yet realize. What becomes of the cultural life of Pinellas communities when priorities are weighted toward tourists instead of residents? When fewer artists can afford to live here because they're not getting the support that they need, or they choose to leave for more supportive environments? We're about to find out. To our advocates, we ask that you fight harder and fight louder, because next time is far too late. Thank you. Thank you. Patty Sidote. And I apologize if I didn't get your last name correct. Sidote. Okay. So I'm not the first. Pardon me? I said I'm not the first to mess it up. No. Good evening, Commissioners. Patty or Patricia Sidote. I am a longtime resident of Pinellas County and a concerned taxpayer. I'm here to express my concern regarding the proposed FY26 Pinellas County budget. The budget has dearly doubled over the past five years from $2.8 billion in fiscal year 20 to a proposed $4.9 billion in fiscal year 26. This represents nearly a 20% increase over last year's budget. Maintaining the current budget growth, despite increasing living costs for residents, places, and additional financial strain on homeowners and taxpayers. Just as families must live within their means, so must or should the county government carefully evaluate spending before turning to taxpayers for additional revenue. County commissioners need to tighten their belts and cut spending before asking taxpayers for more. We can't afford big government, considering the high executive salaries, such as county administrator, who earns nearly $350,000 per year, which, of course, has already been mentioned, which is a two and a half times more than the Florida governor earns. And ballooning budgets are outpacing inflation and homeowners' wages. It's time for leaner government. I believe county leadership can work cooperatively during the budget process to create a plan that benefits all Pinellas taxpayers and the community as a whole. While I appreciate hearing in the last meeting, which I did listen in on, that a review of the budget is planned for next year, as a concerned resident, I was hoping there would be a sense of urgency in addressing fiscal responsibility this year. Kicking the can down the road does not help taxpayers. It's no good. Rising utility costs are adding to the fiscal restraint on residents, making careful budget decisions all the more more important. I look forward to seeing thoughtful solutions that balance the county's needs with the financial realities faced by its residents. Thank you for your time and consideration. I urge that you carefully consider voting no for the proposed fiscal year 26 budget. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any on Zoom? No, Mr. Chair. No individuals are pre-registered. Now that we have heard all public comment from citizens, does any member of the board recommend any changes to these final millage rates or final budgets? Okay. Hearing none. The board must now consider the resolutions to set the final FY26 millage rates and budgets. As stated earlier, we will adopt the final millage rates and final budgets in the following sections. BCC county-wide to include the general fund and health department and dependent special districts and MSTU. The resolutions adopting the millages and budgets for the dependent special districts and MSTUs require a unanimous vote. If a unanimous vote is not received for the dependent special districts and MSTUs, we will need to adopt each separately. I will now ask the county administrator to proceed with the readings and for communication to display Schedule A that will be referenced during the readings and votes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will announce each resolution separately for the board's action. Per Florida statutes, the board will vote on the final millages or the final millage first and then the final budget for each taxing authority. We will start with the consideration of the BCC county-wide millage rates and budgets, which include the Pinellas County General Fund and the county levy for the health department fund. For the Pinellas County General Fund and the county levy for the health department fund, I recommend adoption of the final millages as outlined in Schedule A, which is in your handout and being displayed and as was previously posted to the county website. May I have a motion to adopt the final millages? Move approval from Commissioner Flowers. Thank you. I have a motion from Commissioner Flowers. Do I have a second? Three. Yes, sir. I'll second that. Thank you, Commissioner Peters. Second from Commissioner Peters. Okay. Okay. Have any discussion? If we could open the voting, please. I vote yes. I vote yes. Okay. Okay. Passes unanimously. I recommend adoption for the BCC county-wide budgets, which includes the Pinellas County General Fund and the county levy for the health department fund. Move approval. Okay. Thank you. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Do we have a second to adopt the BCC county-wide final budget? I'll second that. Okay. Second from Commissioner Peters. If we could open up the voting. I vote yes. Okay. Let me yes. Okay. So that passes six to one. We will now consider the millage rates and budgets for dependent special districts and MSTU. I recommend adoption of the final millage rates for the dependent special districts and MSTUs as detailed in Schedule A, which is in your paper handout, being displayed, and as was previously posted to the county website. Don, since that last one was not unanimous, do we? That's okay. It's only applicable to the dependent districts and MSTUs that have to be done as a single unanimous vote. That's not part of that. Okay. All right. I just wanted to double check. Yes, sir. May I have a motion to adopt the final millages? Move approval. Commissioner Flowers. Okay. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Latvala. If we could open up the voting, please. I vote yes. I vote yes. Okay. That passes unanimously. I recommend adoption of the final budgets. Move approval. Okay. Motion from Commissioner Flowers to adopt the final budgets. Do we have a second? Second from Commissioner Scheer. Can we open up the voting, please? I vote yes. Okay. That passes unanimously. Thank you. I recommend the Board adopt the resolution adopting the final FY26 county budget as filed and available for review at https.pinellis.govnews.pinellis.county-total-funds-budget-backslash. And Don Kroll has a minor correction to the text of the resolution that he will read into the record. Yes, commissioners. I recommend that on page two of the resolution in your packet, section two on the second line, that the word attached be removed. It's simply a reference to the document that's not attached. It's what you've adopted up to this point. May I have a motion to adopt the final FY26 county budget? Move approval. As amended. As amended. Okay. Motion by Commissioner Flowers. Second by Commissioner Latvala. If we could open the voting, please. I vote yes. Amendment yes. Okay. Passes unanimously. Thank you. With that, unless the Board members have any further comments, this final public hearing for the FY26 budget is closed. Commissioner Eggers. Just one comment. I think the budget process that we went through this year was good. It was sound. We've had some discussions already about how we're going to take a look at the budget next year a little differently, especially when we have specific interests, specific concerns about the budget and spending. I really appreciated the comments from Holly Miller and Patty Fedoti about the pressures of cost increases, not only in our own budget and our own taxes, but clearly property insurances and utility rates and whether they're ours or the electrical utility company. So we've got more work to do, and I know this commission is excited about putting our arms around that. And to the folks that came forward last week from our arts community, really appreciate the involvement. That's what we look for. We want people to get involved in what we're doing here. And to their surprise, I think that's one of the things we're going to try to avoid as well, that we put some back burner issues that are important to us early in the year so that we can, you know, attack them early and get people involved early and get people interested in making a difference to the final budget process. And so that we actually embrace that process. I think process matters and words matter. Commitment matters. And the process that we've gone through on that particular piece, the defunding of that organization, has been hurtful to some of our employees, but also some of the residents in the community. And I think we owe that to ourselves and to our staff and to the residents of the community to make sure we do it better and better. At the end of the day, the effort that you were trying to get done, I think, might have legs, but I think the process is as important as anything else. So I look forward to those discussions next year and to the work that this board has done and our staff has done getting this budget put together. And thank you for letting me chat a little bit. Thank you. So I was going to go home and watch the football game, but I don't like allowing my buddy to have the last word. So this was my third budget season. And I think by far this one was the best. And by best, it also was the most painful. And I think that was a good thing. You know, looking back to June, in our two-week long meetings, our budget information sessions, we were told, you know, it's going to be a tough year. We were going to have a flat budget. And the mission that you were tasked, both of y'all were tasked with, was go find some relief. And y'all both did it along with your staff. And, you know, positions were cut, including positions that impacted us. And, you know, there was relief that was found. And I thank our citizens that were here tonight. You know, one thing that I do want to stress is that we're not just focusing on next year's budget. We focus on this year's budget, too, just like we do every year. This year's budget wasn't more special than last year's budget or the year before. Every budget is the most important thing going on. And so while we're going to be looking at ideas for next year, that doesn't mean that we, you know, purposefully left things out of this year's budget to cut. And so, you know, I think starting early is important. But, I mean, we started pretty early this year. I think this was the earliest of my three years that I've been here. This was the earliest that I remember us ever starting. And, you know, I know it was a painful exercise, but these are supposed to be painful. Any time that you have the kind of budget that we have, it's not supposed to be a fun exercise. If it's a fun exercise, that means we have too much money. And so I think that's something that we should always be cognizant of. So thank you very much. Mr. Chair, this is Renee. Is it someone else that wants to speak before me? Yes, Commissioner Flowers. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm sorry if I'm fuzzy. I'm not sure what's going on with the camera. But, again, just want to thank you guys for allowing Commissioner Peters and I to join you in this fashion so that we could continue to be a part of the process. I want to thank all of the residents that came out for all of our meetings to share their comments related to the budget and related to the services that they would like to see occur within the county. It's still kind of interesting for me. You know, having served on the city council where some individuals will come to us about budget stuff from cities. But it's always just a learning curve, both for them and for me. And I really appreciate that. I believe that we have. I would agree with you, Commissioner Lottweiler. It was a painful year looking at all of the needs, not just wants, but the needs of our various departments. However, the decision that was made to hold the line and to come in flat with their departments, with the exception of a few items that we approved because they were very necessary. And I think it was three at max and for a county administration, the size of ours, that was commendable. So I want to thank the entire team for all of the hard work that you put into this budget. I want to thank the managers and directors who, you know, there were things that you really wanted, but you weren't able to get this year. But you're going to forward your head, giving 110% from your department. So I appreciate that. Even moving on to the sheriff, the conversations that were had between the sheriff and our county administrator and probably with several of us, if we reached out to him individually, because there were a lot of requests, a lot of wants. But those were pared down and the sheriff made the budget work, along with the other constitutionals, they made the budget work. And so I want to acknowledge them. I don't want this to go off as a negative, but I just don't like leaving some things on the table where persons may get the wrong idea. Barry has been with us for a while. He negotiated his salary with the commission when he came in, and every year, whatever the employees get, that's what Barry gets. With the exception of when we gave those bonuses, not bonuses, we gave the one-time, I believe the payment was $600 during COVID. And those were one-time dollar amounts that would kind of move them up into an area where the general public was for those specific job opportunities within the county. He did not receive that as well as the county commissioners, but every other time he's gotten whatever it is that the employees have gotten. And just an FYI, he's not the highest-paid county administrator in the state of Florida. Joe Abruzzo, who is the county administrator for Palm Beach County, he makes $425,000 a year. And Monica Cipiro, I think I'm saying her name right, of Broward County, she's around $461,000. Are those numbers high? Yes, they are. You look at their population, 1.5 million to almost 3 million. There is a lot of work that's done, and I don't think that person should not be compensated for the work that they do. And so I just wanted to share that as an update. And the other is, yes, some administrators may make more than the governor, but they also want to get some of the other things that the governor gets, like a full security detail, a house to live in, you know, flying or his transportation to wherever he goes. So, and insurance, and retirement. So if you add all of those things in, you know, I think it's relevant to each position that's paid for. The last thing I'm going to say is that we have residents that come to us, and they should. They should come to us and talk about, they want roads repair, they want sidewalks taken care of, they want immediate service when it comes to addressing any storms that we've had and the cleanup after those storms. They want parks and wrecks and libraries. They want nature preserve parks put into place or assisted with. It's just so many things that the residents want, and we have to be able to pay for those things that they want. And there is always, unfortunately, an increase, whether it be for manpower, whether it be for goods and services, but there's always an increase. And we have to also address those increases and be prepared and ready for them. I join my colleagues in addressing the budget next year and seeing what we can do. I don't just think that local government should address the budget. I think that we should carry that on to the state legislature because homeowners insurance is high, and that plays a role in the things that we're paying. The public utilities with the public utilities with the constant increases there, whether it's electric or water, we continue to have to pass costs on to customers in order to pay for those systems. And those of us that are commissioners and employees of the county, we are all taxpayers too. So we are all having to face the same increases that everyone else is. We're not exempt from it. So when I'm making a decision, I'm making that decision with my pocketbook in mind. And so I just wanted to share those things for tonight. This was not an easy budget for me. This was not an easy budget for a lot of people. Thank you to my colleagues for your support for the Office for Human Rights. I know we're going to address that in the fall, I guess, or next year. But I want to thank you for seeing the value to keeping that office open. And I look forward to our conversation and dialogue when we have that workshop. And I think you will continue to see the validity and the necessity of that office that services all people throughout Pinellas County, no matter who you are. So I just wanted to share that, those things. I didn't want some of the items to kind of be left without an additional comment as to why they are the way that they are, nor do I want residents in the community to feel like they can, they shouldn't or couldn't come to our meetings and express themselves or share their concerns, send an email, have a one-on-one conversation. It's always good to hear from them because we are them as well. And I'm sure there are a lot of thoughts that we have that we just don't probably say out loud. So thank you again. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to my colleagues. I yield the floor. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. And with that, we are adjourned. Thank you.