Board of County Commissioners on 2026-11-12 9:00 AM - Work Session/Agenda Briefing - Nov 12, 2026

And that's what I said. He sent me the timeline, and I cleaned it up before I sent it back to him and took out the four-letter word and everything. No, this is not acceptable. You didn't have to clean it up, but you responded three separate times in about a half hour. I understood. I said it. Then I stood on it. I said it again. Then I stood on it. I got it. Let's emphasize that this idea that's going to get done. Oh, no. But you know what. But that's what it is. Here, what happens is we're going to have a couple of people, and if you don't get ahead of them, then the chief will influence them, and then we're trying to do a report professionally, and they've already decided an outcome that they've heard from people. And, well, we've been trying to get an R&P obstacle, right? And get started with our 9 o'clock meeting, which is really about our county administrator's review. So we will start with just an opening comment. Normally, we do the review, we have the discussion as a kind of a basis for looking at compensation for the coming year. And I know Barry's talked to some of you, but we had a discussion about it, and he has, because of Amendment 3, has said for this calendar year, he will keep the same salary that he had last year. There will be no increase on his salary, just as a point of reference and point of discussion when we get to that part, which is generally after we've gone through the review. So, I think everybody got the packet of information. I just wanted to make sure everybody had the survey that we had completed. Really appreciate that work. And it was kind of a mini-review of some of the counties, comparable types, and just comparative. I just wanted to put some out there so that people could see. And then we had, obviously, the contract for him. And then the survey itself filled out. Summary sheet was there encapsulating the summary of all of our folks, all of your input. And any comments you had? I think Commissioner Shearer said he wanted to reserve his comments for today, and that's totally acceptable. So, having said that, we just open it up for conversation and see if anybody would like to start the discussion this morning. And I'll just say from my perspective. I have worked with countless city managers and a county administrator. And the long and short of it is I think we're very fortunate to have Barry here. He's done an excellent job at curtailing the growth of government, developing talent here, working closely with commissioners, getting feedback, leadership, brings a lot of experience. And he's brought all of that through the events that we had a couple of years ago to last year, trying to implement those things that we were trying to recover from. And so, I am generally happy with Barry's review. You can see my summary in there as well. So, I'm looking forward to continuing developing talent. I think it's always important to get some of our young folks moving along and getting some exposure to opportunities that might come along, but also to develop their skill sets for, you know, for five, ten years down the road. We need that continued leadership. So, I am happy with him, and I am glad that he's here. I have people that oftentimes we've heard questioning his salary level, and you can see that he's in line with some of the other counties. We always put Broward in there because it's always the biggest county just for overall perspective. But you can see that he's in line with other salaries also. And remember, you have folks that we look to recruit to come here as assistant county administrators, directors, and even a county administrator. So, how we treat our people matters because people watch and people listen and people learn about how a commission works closely with administration. Having said that, those are my comments. I'm extremely happy with Barry and would, under normal circumstances, have the same salary increase as the staff did. But this year, I think that is wise that we not look at that. We've got a lot of work ahead looking to those next two budgets. So, with that said, I'll open it up for any conversation. That would be great. Anything? Anybody? Go ahead. So, good morning, everyone. First of all, thank you so much, Barry, for your leadership. Since I've been on the commission, I think you came on shortly before I got here, not much longer. So, you were still learning, and I know I certainly had a lot to learn and still have a lot to learn. I do appreciate your flexibility when there are additional questions and or concerns about specific items. I appreciate your flexibility. In some instances where you will pull the item until you can bring back more information or respond to the questions that have been presented by commissioners so that there is clarity as it relates to what it is that we're voting on. I appreciate your interest in a statewide strategy as well as a county strategy when it comes to government policy, things that are going on in Tallahassee and how we respond or how Pinellas County kind of fits into the theme of things. I believe that you being a part of the county administrators coalition allows you to hear and see different perspectives throughout the county, which also allows us to be better prepared when we are going to Tallahassee or now it's Tristan sending Tristan to Tallahassee or even here locally when we have our legislative delegation meetings to talk about what's important, not just at Pinellas County, not just at Pinellas County, not just at Pinellas County, but the state and how we all fit in that together because it is clear that it's about regionalism and what we do as a region and that determines how we will grow, what types of jobs we can attract, what we can do even in areas that aren't under our specific purview, like education. That's not under our purview, but it still is a part of who we are in Pinellas County. I appreciate the support you give to us individually. Some of us around this have circle, have had some personal health challenges or family challenges. You reach out, you stay in touch, you keep us informed about what's going on. That's a quality of life thing, but that also, for me, shows that you're interested in us in a manner that's greater than the elected official. You're interested in us in our lives as people. And I think that speaks to the work ethic and work product that we are able to present. I appreciate some of the pushback you give when it comes to the budget. Your job is to work with staff and present the budget to us, and then we go through it and peel it back or whatever. But I appreciate even your flexibility in hearing what our concerns are, hearing what it is that the constituents desire, knowing what is needed at a bare minimum for the county to operate, and then moving forward on that. The last few years I've been here, every year has been a budget challenge in some shape, form, or fashion. And I think that your desire to try to get ahead of what's going on around us so that we are properly positioned to continue to provide quality service to our residents is a task within itself. So, the only area I would like to see a little bit, and sometimes I understand that it may not always, you may not always be able to do so. But sometimes when we have items that come before us that are challenging or questionable, if we could maybe do a better job at, if there is a contractor or developer or whatever that is a part of that, to make sure that they're in the room and have them speak for themselves rather than have staff try to speak for them. And in that way, there will be, I think, better clarity in questions from commissioners. That can't happen always, because sometimes you don't know until we get here that someone has that question. But if it's something that's been a concern or something that we've talked about in the past where it's like, commissioners may want a little bit more on that, let me make sure I get those individuals here in the room so that we don't have to come back and revisit it. But that's the only comment that I have or only thing that I would like to see going forward. Again, that's not a knock. It's just, you know, growth and development. Because for me, I need to do a better job of expressing my questions and or concerns so that perhaps they are answered prior to us getting here on the floor. The final thing I want to say is I am thankful that you have the relationship with the Constitutionals that you have. Because, you know, if we're going to take a hit at the BOCC administrative side, you don't mind having that conversation with them, letting them know that they're going to have to look at some adjustments as well. And so I appreciate that. Sorry for taking too long, but I'm going to say this so they can't have it on the record. But I appreciate your willingness to do that and then to come back to us and and try to find a middle ground because it's all about us working together. It's not about us, you know, working in silos for all the rest. I made my I made a comment in the comment section on the evaluation. So you read that and then I scored accordingly. So I just wanted to share those things publicly, because sometimes when you don't have public comment, the community thinks that it's just, you know, an action piece of work with no thought process into it. And I wanted to make sure that the public knew that I had put some thought into my responses where your evaluation is concerned. It's been a pleasure working with you and I look forward to working with you continuously. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for allowing me the time. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. Commissioner Nowicki. Thank you, Chairman. First, you know, just on the terms of like the compensation that was sent out based on the other, you know, county administrators. I mean, if you I mean, it's fair to look at that. But I think you also have to look at the employee counts. I mean, a lot of those counties have double the employee counts than Pinellas. So if you really look at like the average employee and what the administrators paid per an employee, Pinellas County's administrator would be close to getting a salary of $210,000. A year would be their base salary based on the employees. So I think that's an important point to look at. And then, you know, furthermore, you know, Barry, you know, Barry has, you know, done a lot of years of service to Pinellas County. But I believe it's a time for a change in leadership. The passage of Amendment 3 reflects a fundamental disconnect between the direction voters want and the taxing and spending approach the administration has recommended. The administration has been responsible for developing our budgets and bringing those recommendations to this board. And the board is accountable for its votes, but the administrator is accountable for the financial direction. We have consistently been recommended when the response to budget pressure includes cutting county support for places like Whedon Island, cutting support for health care, cutting support for libraries and essential services. And that's the administration's priorities reflect those residents. So before putting valued public resources on the chopping block, we should be challenging administrative overhead, organizational structure and spending that has become accepted simply because it was approved in previous years. And when the administrator will say, well, I can make the necessary cuts with the passage of Amendment 3, then how come those reductions weren't already brought to us? How come they weren't presented to us earlier? If we could operate more efficiently and spend less, taxpayer deserved those options before voters had to force the issue through a constitutional amendment. To me, this is a fundamental philosophical difference about the role, size and cost of county government. I believe this administration has become out of touch with the taxpayers who expect us to control spending and live within their means. We've had multiple times where our administrator said he would retire early if Amendment 3 passed. He said it in meetings, one-on-ones, to other city managers have told me. It's been told multiple times that if Amendment 3 passed, our county administrator would retire. I believe it is time to establish the county administrator's retirement timeline and allow this board to select new leadership. I appreciate our administrator's service, but I do not believe in continuing with the same leadership and the same financial philosophy is the right direction for Pinellas County, and it's time to move on. Commissioner Latvalla. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Overall, I am happy with Barry's performance, but there are some things I do want to discuss, one being his salary. I mean, it has gone up. One of the things I do not understand, and I have talked to the administrator about this, is the idea that, and overall, I am supportive of our county employees. They work hard, and I appreciate them very much. But the idea that, you know, they get raises every year. Our state employees do not get raises every year. They get raises sporadically, but, like, the FHP doesn't get raises every year. The prison deputies don't get raises every year, and so forth. And so the idea that every year we have to give raises to our employees, and as such, okay, so then the, you know, administrator has to get a raise to go along with that. I think, you know, that should be something that we look at in the future. And I know this year we're not giving the administrator a raise, and I appreciate that. I do think that if and when we look at a new administrator, we're not going to be able to find a very good one for $150,000 a year. They're going to want to be paid comparable to what county administrators get paid. One thing that I know it's been mentioned before, but one thing that we should look at is how much our nonprofit CEOs make in Pinellas County. And I've mentioned it before. There are nonprofit CEOs that have the fraction of the budget with the fraction of employees that we have that make more than Barry Burton make. And I could name some, but I don't want to put them on the spot. But they make an obscene amount of money, and we fund some of them. And so, you know, that, you know, if you really want to look at a boondoggle, look at some of our nonprofits in Pinellas County. And some of them, we have, their CEOs have appeared here very recently, and Karen Yacham has had to deal with them. And so, and when they retire, we pat them on the back and praise them and whatnot. And so, you know, I think that the number of employees that Barry deal with and the complexity of that job, you know, getting paid his salary, yeah, it's a lot. But go find somebody specialized that can do that. Last year, I think it was either, or maybe the year before, I brought up the idea to have a county-wide mayor because I believe philosophically that the person that makes the day-to-day decisions should be elected and not a government bureaucrat. When I brought it up, only one of my colleagues wanted to even advance it for a discussion. That was Commissioner Nowicki. And, you know, I said at the time that it, you know, wasn't, you know, anything to do with Barry. But, and I still believe that, you know, somebody that in the size of the county of Pinellas County, that somebody that makes the day-to-day decisions should be elected and not, you know, not a government bureaucrat. One thing I will say critically of Barry is that I do believe that he treats one commissioner differently than the six of us. I don't believe I need to say who that is, but, you know, I do have an expectation that you will treat Commissioner Nowicki differently going forward and that you will treat him the same as the rest of us. And that if you give the six of us information, that you'll give him that same information. I think that's only fair to him. But on a personal level, you know, I'm appreciative of, you know, your performance. Renee, or I'm sorry, Commissioner Flowers mentioned, you know, commissioners that dealt with health issues last year. I was one of them. And I remember when I was in the hospital, I told my wife, you know, hey, don't ask Barry for anything because I'm his boss. And I remember after the fact, I said, hey, if my wife asks you for anything, I apologize. I, you know, I have no idea what she did. You know, she's a frantic wife. And, but I do remember you telling me that, because I was literally just languishing in a hospital bed waiting for, to get into a rehab in Gainesville. And it was a very annoying experience because I just wanted to go home. But you had told me that you called the, our insurance company yourself. And your response was, you know, I would have done that for any of our employees. And, and, and you said, because it was literally costing us money, you being in the hospital when you didn't need to be, you know, because that, and, you know, that kind of showed me that, you know, that's how you, you know, treat not just those folks, but that's how you treat any public works employee or, or, or any of, any of the thousands of folks, you know, under your, your watch. And, you know, and, and I appreciate that as somebody that was in that spot. Um, and so, but, but, but the one thing I do ask of you is that, um, you know, in the, in your interactions with commissioner and a wiki that you, um, realize that he's, he's the boss. And that when, when you give him, um, you know, you give him the same information that you give the rest of us. So thank you, Mr. Chair, commissioner share. Yeah. Thank you, chair. Um, yeah, I, I, I withheld my comments cause I wanted to think about them a lot and I needed a little more time. But, uh, as I talked, talked to Barry and I wanted you to Barry to know, I, I think you're a gifted manager, how you, how you pull all this together and keep this County running seamlessly. It's impresses, it impresses me. My, my problem has been that you're resistant to change. Uh, and I have made repeated attempts to, and, and, and suggestions on downsizing that really haven't gone anywhere. And so that has frustrated, frustrated me, but this is a, I want to talk about the future because, you know, the, the people of Pinellas County have spoken loudly and clearly with amendment three. They, they are demanding a smaller government, they are demanding a less costly government, and they're definitely demanding the less intrusive government. Now, amendment three is going to require substantial change. It's going to require structural changes, the size, the function of our government. It's going to require a lot of serious change, uh, and the implementation, implementation of that change is going to require a new mindset, new direction, unique management skills that very unique, somebody that knows how to downsize. And I think eventually it's going to lead to, we're going to need new leadership. Now, like I said, I think you're a gifted manager, but, um, and you have, you've done well under pressure. You've shown it throughout the, uh, the pandemic, you showed it, you showed it during, uh, the, uh, our environmental disasters that hit us back to back. I mean, it's, you've done a great job, but unfortunately sometimes circumstances are what make decisions, uh, imperative. And for me, you, I have heard you discuss retirement before and I have, and you know, I would be too, if I were you, I'd be thinking about it too. I don't know, like the pressure on you is going to be a lot. So I just think downsizing is not your strongest skillset that I have seen. That's not a knock. It's just, it, it's not. And I think for us as a commission, it is time to try to get together and develop a transition plan to a new administration sometime in 2027. Uh, you know, I don't, I, unceremoniously said, Terry, go leak, you're out the door. No, I don't want to do that. And I was hoping that you might want to be willing to work with us towards a new transition and that we could bring somebody in with a skillset that knows how to downsize. Maybe, uh, strong mayor somewhere that has, has done it in the past, but I really think that we should work on that together, uh, and, and work on a transition plan because we're going to need one sooner or later anyway, because he can walk out. You could, you could leave in 60, 60 day notice if I read my contract, right? So it wouldn't be a bad idea for us to have this plan in place and start working on it. Uh, maybe, uh, we could start meeting about it, uh, on a regular basis, like once every other week or something like that to talk about how we could get a transition in place. But I do think we need one. Uh, and so I just wanted to leave it at that. I, I think you, you've served the county well, I'm not knocking on you. I just think that the circumstances of amendment three are going to call for a change. So that's, that's all I want to decide on that. Thank you. Yes. I got a couple of responses to what's been said. So, um, when you're comparing staff, Palm Beach County is our sister county. It's the county that is most like Pinellas County. And I guarantee you that if you look at their budget, their budget isn't even close to ours. And their staff probably is significantly more than ours because that county runs up very differently. And I am certain that there is much more staff. I mean, Miami-Dade, each commissioner has their own security and deputy and vehicle driver and stuff like that. So when you say that we don't downsize or we haven't been conservative enough, you haven't looked at many counties, uh, especially in Southeast Florida. So I don't think you can compare staff if you're not comparing budgets. And if you look at a sister county that is probably most resemblance of ours, Palm Beach County would be the one. And I, I would, I promise you there's not going to be big changes there, but I would challenge you also to find a county that at this point is at the 1989 millage rate. I can tell you right now, you're not going to find a city in Pinellas County. There's not a city in Pinellas County that was rolling back the millage rate for the last five out of six years like we did. So to, to think that we have not been fiscally responsible, I think is not an accurate statement. Um, and we can look just in our own County. The cities did not do it. They have not been looking out and rolling back their millage rate when the taxes went up 13% and 17%. They weren't rolling it back. We were, um, and, and I will tell you that wasn't always the case. And I'm going to say this and I was going to say this at the end, but I'm going to say it now, um, based on what has been said, especially by some of our new commissioners. And I can give you my experience when I was new, it's not that different than yours. Um, but what I learned, because when I came on board, I wanted things, there's things I wanted and I didn't get them from Barry. And the reason is because, and it took me a while to get it through my thick head because I wanted what I wanted. I wanted the budget lowered. I wanted more mental health services. I, I wanted a lot of things that the same, that you all want the same thing, but we had a different majority then. And Barry's job is to take direction from the majority of this board. We are his boss. And if six of us or five of us or four of us is the majority tells him, no, I don't want to lower the, I don't want to lower the millage rate. Then he's got to do what the majority of his bosses say, not one individual commissioner. And so I was no different than the two newer commissioners on this board. I wanted, I, I mean, it was a lot of six, one votes the first two years that I was on this board. Um, and then when it, when the board changed and the majority changed, well, then we got to roll our military back because the direction he was getting from the majority of this board was then that. So to me, he has done his job by listening to the seven bosses he has. Now, I will tell you, I was bent out of shape. I felt he wasn't treating me the same. I felt he wasn't communicating to me the same. I felt very similar to how you guys are saying exactly what you're saying. Um, but as time changed and things flipped and I realized there are seven bosses and not one of us dictate to him what he does. It's the majority of us that dictate to him what he does. And so I just feel like that had to be said because I think sometimes you don't realize that you're not just the only boss. I will also say that respect comes is earned, respect is earned. Um, and in the beginning when I came, he and I did not get along. I didn't even like having one-on-one meetings with him. Um, and, and because I was frustrated and I felt like he didn't respect me, but I will tell you as time went on, I realized that some of my behavior wasn't exactly the best. I could have been more diplomatic. I could have recognized that, yes, I'm new on the board and I'm in the minority and I'm not going to get my way. And, you know, when I was in the legislature, I was never in the minority ever before. So I didn't have to get humbled that way. Um, not to be political, but it is what it is. And so, you know, I had very much the same feelings that I'm hearing from Commissioner Nowicki and Commissioner Scheer. But, you know, and then I have this wonderful staff that reminds me, you are not his only boss. He has to do what the majority says. And if the majority says, I don't want that to be done, then he has to go with the majority of us, not the minority of us. So that said, um, raises and I get the raises, right? But to compare them to the state, I think is a mistake. When I was in the legislature, I saw firsthand what the state pays was. I toured prisons. I went to 13 prisons. And what I learned out of going to 13 prisons is that we paid our guards and our officers so little that we spent a year training them. They were on duty for maybe six months and then the sheriffs all pillaged and we had to keep hiring and they kept leaving because we weren't paying them enough. And then the guards in the prisons were getting paid by the prisoners to allow sneaking in cell phones, allowing drugs to come in. There were more drugs available in the prison than there were on the street. And it's because they didn't pay their guards and the officers enough money. And if you want to get into DCF and those case managers that they refuse to pay and they have cases of 30 to 40 cases when they shouldn't have more than 15, but you can't keep a case manager because they won't pay them. So that to me is not a comparison. It's not apples to apples. And if you look at how the state pays, it's a bad business practice. Our constituents want services. They want services. And they are not going to want us. And we've already heard this. They don't want us mowing those medians six times a year. They want us mowing those medians every two weeks. And if we want to serve what the constituents want, we're not going to be taking the model of the state's business model. It's not going to work. They're not going to be okay. So I get what you're saying in that it seems different. But when you look at it, it's apples to apples. It's not. Those are apples to oranges. And I would never want to pay our staff. And we already saw this with police and fire. We saw it with EMS. We had to give EMS more money because they couldn't hire any EMTs. They couldn't hire paramedics. They couldn't hire EMTs. And we had to give them a big salary increase because they're going to go somewhere else. And we can't not have firefighters. And we can't not have EMTs. And we cannot not have deputies. And we don't pay the most. The sheriff doesn't pay his deputies the most. He's in the middle of the road. Some cities pay more. Some pay less. But we aren't paying the maximum. And I'm sure if we did a study and we've done a salary study before, we are not paying the maximum with our staff. We're not paying the lowest. But we're not paying the most. And so if you want to do another salary study and see if, in fact, we're overpaying our staff, then that's something that's worth doing. But I certainly wouldn't compare this to the state and put us in a situation like they do with DCF and like they've done with the prison guards and the police. Absolutely. I wouldn't support that because we wouldn't have police officers or firefighters or EMTs or even public works people to do the job. And so that would be my concern over that. We absolutely have no control over what CEO salaries are at nonprofits. That's up to their boards. Their boards have to make those decisions. We don't make those decisions. So I think it's important that we stay in our lane. You want to criticize them for them. That is your right. And we've all got that, you know, right to free speech. And that's fine. But we have no control over that. The other thing I would say is in the eight years that I've been on this board, I got two years where, you know, I had my own frustration and then we had the pandemic. And that pandemic lasted better than two years. And so all the strategic planning we made kind of had to go out the window because all of a sudden everything was diverted to this emergency. And we had changed staff's role and emergency management was doing things they had never done before. And so that took us several years out of doing our strategic plan because of what happened. We get through that. We're rebuilding. We're getting on our strategic plan again. We're rolling again. And then we get two hurricanes in 13 days. And there we are in emergency management mode, losing track of our strategic plan, not losing it. It's still there. But now you've got all the staff diverted. The building department is doing so much. And, oh, my God, have they done amazing things. Can you imagine if we didn't pay them enough and we didn't have enough staff and the permitting situations that we would have? It would have been horrible. And I'm sorry I'm on a soapbox, but I am. And so that was a two-year process. Again, we wanted to do things, but now we've got a two-year crisis again. And we're still focused on strategic plan. We haven't gotten done some of the things that I had put in that strategic plan. But I also have to recognize that we have had two huge crises that really consumed two years of our time that took away from some of the stuff we wanted to do. But what I have learned from both of those crises is that we have incredible staff. We have incredible staff. And I wrote this in my comments. And I've had my own business. I've had several of my own businesses. And what is always true in business is you're only as good as your worst employee. You can go into a restaurant, and if you have a horrible server, it doesn't matter how good the food is. If the service was horrible, you're not going to go back, likely. So the best that you could be is you are only as good as your worst employee. And I have to say we have great employees, and that comes from leadership. And that's leadership from Barry. It's leadership from all of the people that are sitting across from us over there. Now, there were some people that I didn't think were great. Barry tried to give him a lot of training to bring him up to speed. I think he should have cut the cord a little sooner than he did, but he did. And he always gave him the benefit of the doubt, always gave him more training to bring them up, lift them up. And if they didn't, then he let them go. And that was my only criticism is there were a couple I think he should have let go sooner. And then when we had that conversation afterwards, he's like, yeah, I probably should have done that, but I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. So that, and I'm not even going to get started on the elected administrator, I believe, take Tampa along. Tampa wants to change their strong mayor because they're unhappy with some of the outcomes. And there is a strong county mayor that I don't believe is that effective and good. And, yes, you can be accountable at election time, but when you have a manager, a professional manager that you hire, you can fire them right away. But if you have a bad elected, you have to wait four years where if you have a bad manager, you can get rid of them immediately. And we've had a history of some bad managers. And I'm not going to name names, but, boy, there's two of them on the top of my list that I would, that were very bad managers. And so I don't support that. I would never support that. But what I would recommend, and Brian Scott suggested it, is I think other than the seven of us evaluating Barry, I think because in every one of those emergency systems, he had to work with the constitutionals. He has to work with the constitutionals on every budget issue. And if he can't work with them, then that's bad management skills. So I think it's a very good idea to have Mr. Childress come up with an evaluation tool that's appropriate for the constitutionals and have the constitutionals also do an evaluation of Barry because they have to directly work with him on the budget. They have to directly work with him when we're in a crisis. And I think that their input would be very valuable because they may disagree with me completely and say, I've had horrible budget experiences, and I think it's worth having their opinion for us on an evaluation for whoever, if it's Barry or anybody else. A succession plan is always good. Jewel had an outstanding succession plan. It was a weakness before she became our attorney. They didn't have a good succession plan. She created a great succession plan, and she did that. I think a succession plan is important. Whenever it is he decides to go or we let him go, there should be a succession plan. And he may already have one, but we've never had the conversation. So those are long-winded points, but based on your thoughts, those are my thoughts. And I think Barry, you know, nobody's perfect, but I think he has done an outstanding job. And the two crises that we have gotten through it demonstrates where his strengths come and how he's able to bring the strength out in his staff. And that's how I judge it. And he's done an outstanding, outstanding job, and our staff are incredible. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I really appreciate all the thoughts around the table. I tried to keep mine a little bit more general, but I'm going to comment on a couple of the comments that have been made as well. We have, I think the idea of getting constitutional input for our review is good. I mean, it's obviously up to the seven of us. It's not like how we do the county administrator. It'll be up to us, hire, fire, manage day-to-day and all of that. But getting their input, I do think there are five really good leaders in their own right. So getting their thoughts, I thought was a great idea from Commissioner Scott. And so that would be something else. And as to the elected county administrator, we had in our charter review committee a lot of conversation about it, frankly. And it was a pretty split feeling between the members of that charter review. The strong thoughts and opinions each way. You're not going to save money at all because you elect somebody like, I don't know, pick somebody around this table, Commissioner Flowers, to be your county elected county administrator. You're going to have to hire somebody with Barry's background to run it day-to-day. That's just the way it works. So you're not going to, you're not saving money. You take away from around this table and our constituents, our abilities to be a stronger form of government, resting with the people and how we're, how we're set up. The count, the city of, city of St. Petersburg is a classic case. You know, the council's different there than we are here. Um, arguments both ways. I'm just saying, I, I kind of like the way it is now. Uh, but there was a lot of discussion at the charter review on that, on that point. Um, you know, you look at Palm Beach and Hillsborough and they're both about one and a half million. There's about 1200 employee differences there. And I'm not really going to judge Palm Beach as a poor administration, because I don't know how their county is, how their county operates compared, compared to Hillsborough on almost exactly the same number of people. Each county has its own. We've got 24 cities here, uh, partnerships that we have there, partnerships that we have around the region. Um, I mean, this is a tight little area. Um, and so I, I just think that, you know, comparing one to another is difficult to do. Um, and, uh, we can certainly talk about, uh, we're going to be talking about that whole management of our, our organization here in the next year. That will be our charge this year. And I challenge you to go find people in this state that have experience cutting, like we're going to be having to cut expenses. You're not going to find them. Uh, you may have to go out and get somebody in the business sector that's downsized a company, but they're not going to come here for the salary we're paying our people. Um, people leave here to go to the private sector to make money. You don't come here to make money. I'm not saying Barry's not paid. Well, I'm just, I'm making a point business. We, we lose people to the business. We lose good people to the business community from time to time. Uh, you look at our attorney's office and the attorneys that we have and going, comparing to the private sector night and day. I mean, you can go down through our staff that way. Um, uh, you know, when we do that study and I don't, I don't know, uh, Wade, how often do we do employee salary comparisons? Is it every, yeah, come on up here, please. I just want to, that was a point that, I mean, I, you know, we always want to make sure that we're at least in line with what others are doing. So how often do we do that? Yeah. Hi, Wade, Wade Childress, Chief Human Resources Officer. Um, we don't do a global study, but we do small studies continuously. So trying to do a global study is a very challenging effort. It can take a year, year and a half in time. So instead what we do is we do a little piecemeal studies and we're just continuously doing those. We never stop. Okay. So, but, but being able to assess kind of where we're at at any point in time, we certainly can do that. Like we, in the last two years, we've reviewed 45% of our departments. I don't, I don't have those numbers exactly, but we could pull those up, but yeah, certainly we're doing them continually. And, you know, we're looking at, uh, areas where we might have high turnover, right. To see if, if compensation is one of the issues, we're looking at areas where it's very difficult to recruit people, um, because we're not able to, uh, pay the salaries based upon the salary ages. Those are the ones that we're primarily looking at to see, okay, is there a problem out here? Is it a compensation issue or is it a different issue? Yeah. And that's generally what we're doing the salary service for. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Um, you know, the other thing I wanted to touch on just briefly, um, and we, we're dived into the numbers or diving into, um, changes and that kind of thing. But for me, I'm, I went to have a tour of, of Hammerhag Steel as a company over, yeah, over in, uh, Pinellas Park or Largo. Uh, actually they're in Pinellas Park now, but they're building a brand new facility in Largo. Um, yeah, yeah. And they're a good people, um, really, um, it was interesting to hear the development of that company over the last 10 years. Um, interesting to hear the main competition is China's tariff system has worked well for them so that they're on even playing ground. But when I met with him, he had nothing but great things to say about our departments and working with them, including, uh, code enforcement, which is always on him to make sure that his right of ways cleaned up. But he had, he had a lot of positive things to say about all aspects of it, including the, you know, the discussion about, um, economic development and how, how good they've worked with him, our building department. It doesn't mean there aren't issues that come up from time to time. But he had a lot of positive things. And, you know, I found that when I've, I've met with some of the business owners and economic development, bringing more companies here with higher salaries is one of our major goals. So we can afford to have people living here and not having to trends, you know, to go live in Pasco County and come down here. So having that ability and having the ability to develop a strong economic development department, reaching out, uh, along with tourism and partnership, when we go to other countries that are looking at this, this great country of ours as a land of opportunity to bring their businesses here, we try to get them to focus in on this Tampa Bay region. We don't say just Pinellas County. We don't say just Hillsborough. We don't, we talk about the region. When you talk to the universities, they talk about region. They talk about this could be one of the most powerful regions in the country if we work together and Barry's developed that relationship with the other County administrators. It doesn't just happen. Trust me, because before Barry was here, I worked with a County administrator. We didn't talk too much to other folks and we kind of did our own thing. Um, and so it's, it doesn't just happen. Um, it takes a lot of, a lot of work. We have County to County to County commission regional meetings because this County administrator bought into that concept when we were talking about hiring him, I asked him about that. I asked him about talking to his folks over there, his directors. And he says, just don't give them direction, but you're welcome to talk to the directors. That's, you know, I don't have issues with that. These are, these are things that don't just happen. Not every administrator comes equipped with that. I wanted to meet with a director with a previous County administrator, and I couldn't, unless he was in the room with us, I talked about confidence in his people, confidence in the way he manages. It doesn't mean Barry's perfect. Barry's got issues too, like all of us do, but I have found working with Barry, um, really good. I mean, again, we feed off of each other. We get into some heated conversations sometimes. Um, but at the end of the day, it's not personal. It really becomes about what's best for this County. We have tried to listen to our residents over the years. We try to invite people to come to our workshops and listen in, come to our budget hearings and, and give us feedback. Uh, we have two different budget hearings to get solid feedback. We try to make sure we're listening to what the residents want. Things change over time. Um, and, um, you know, I was asked, you know, about amendment three and I said, it was, you know, an amendment that had no plan, no plan was developed at all. That was what I had the problem with, not necessarily the idea of smaller government, but the idea that now it's up to us to develop the plan and there's going to be 24 plans in this County. They're each going to develop their own plan. And so it, we got a lot of work ahead of us and we're going to do our best to try to be reflective of what our residents want. Um, and we've talked, talked to some city managers and some input from their residents and their priorities, and we're going to be working on all of that. Um, and I would suggest that Barry is a good task master. His folks work really well. I mean, we got the most professional staff that I, that I have bumped into, uh, again, working in, in, in government. Um, and it doesn't just happen overnight. So you develop talent, you develop an approach to challenge your employees. You look at, uh, the growth of our government at his, at, in his department alone over the last five or six years is almost flat, almost flat. And we've had a couple of departments because of the nature of their, of their, that have gone up significantly. And we're going to have to talk to those, those folks as part of the solution coming forward. So we've got a lot of challenges ahead of us. Um, I'm confident that Barry can, I mean, we're all listening, right? I mean, I said that to folks, I, we, you want a smaller government, you vote for this, we'll deliver a smaller government. Nobody around this table has had that experience in government downsizing. So, um, okay, you were not, well, yeah, I did that too in Dunedin. So, yeah. So, but, but for the most part, we don't have the, we don't bump into those situations, um, very often. Um, so anyway, I, again, I'm not, I'm not going to go on and on. I, I, I feel confident in Barry's ability to continue doing the job and the job that we are responsible for. So you're wrong about that. We're responsible for the budget. And if we don't like what he brings us, we challenge him to change it. So that's what we're going to do. Now we have somebody else that's told us we have to do it. And so we'll do it. But we were trying to be reflective of what our residents wanted all along. And, and if they didn't want that, we, you know, we didn't hear from them during workshops, during budget hearings. We heard them individually and they'd say, well, you want a little bit more, but you start talking to folks. And we did that a little bit with the discussion about weed and nylon, you know, there was a group of people said, don't touch. And if you go to another, another area, they'll, people will say, please don't touch. Everybody has their place that they want to protect while we downsize. And that's going to be the challenge was we define those areas that we want to approach our residents about. And so anyway, we're, you know, I, I don't, this is really circling back to Barry and I have confidence in Barry's ability to do what we tell him, the direction that we give him. And it is up to the majority of this commission to give him that direction. I think our residents have spoken and I'm on board with bringing them smaller government. Um, and I, and I think Barry, um, uh, has earned the right to continue working here. So I'm not, I have no interest in looking at any, any changes from my perspective. Commissioner Flowers. Um, this is not necessarily at any one individual, but for any of the viewing audience, I just don't want some things to be confused. It may, uh, may not be confusing to some, but I believe for others, it may. The first thing I want to share is amendment three was not directed at the County Administrator. Amendment three was a property tax amendment and the residents had an opportunity to vote yes or no. And if they voted yes, this is what it meant. Seven specific areas where we could spend dollars that were property tax dollars. And then if you voted no, it was because you didn't support that. I agree with what you are sharing, uh, commissioner, uh, Dave Eggers, because there are people who voted yes for amendment three, but they still want libraries. They still want the quality of life pieces, but they voted because they wanted to see their property tax reduced. It was not a challenge at Barry's ability to lead, manage, or govern the County. So I just want to make sure that the community understands that no one knew if it was going to pass. No one knew if it was going to fail. Now Barry and us have a responsibility to look at our budgets going forward as it relates to how we will operate within those reduction. So I don't want persons to think that because amendment three was voted on, and this is just my opinion, that that automatically meant our leadership was out of step, step with the community. That's two different things. Um, the other thing I want to say is if you want friends, you have to first show yourself friendly. The word says that. So when you are talking or communicating with someone, you should do it in the way that you would like to be communicated to Barry has allowed us to have direct communication with staff, but we should not be going to departments because I've gotten calls. We should not be going to departments because we got a complaint from a resident and then we're going after and we're challenging the director or whatever. We should go to Barry and say, I got an email about this particular department. Can you follow up on this? Da da da da da da da. I wasn't present. I'm just telling you, I've gotten calls about that. So even when I operated under the strong mayor form of government in the city of St. Pete, when it changed from mayor Fisher to mayor Baker, mayor Baker gave us permission as council members to go to the different departments. As long as it wasn't like a whole big project was going to take all this time and money, but to go and communicate. And I found that a good way of work for me because I wasn't trying to get on the mayor's calendar to discuss, you know, in a particular item, I could go to that director. And then if it needed to be further, then I brought it, which is what I do here. If it's something that can be done quickly, I call Kelly Levy. I call Tom Amante. He's probably going to block me from his phone. I called Tristan the other day, wherever he's at back there. I called them and they give me the response. And then if it's something bigger, I call Barry because I don't want to be accused of not saying y'all would, but I don't want to be accused of like, I'm trying to intimidate, you know, staff or whatever. So I just take it in that vein. Um, um, I also, um, believe that people have the ability and the right to change their mind. So if Barry was thinking about retiring, but now he doesn't want to retire, that is up to him. I'm not going to use that as a, um, a measure as to, it relates to the evaluation that we were requested to do on him. That evaluation had very specific questions. You gave your ranking and then you had your, your turn to put comments down at the bottom. So I, I, I don't like that we're doing this publicly. I really don't. I don't. I have worked in the human resource field for over 30 years. I have never done this with a president, CEO and county government is a business. I've never done this with the president and CEO, the board. I've served, I serve on a number of boards outside of what I do here. We've never done this. So I just, I, I got angst about this, but this is the process that was voted on. So, Hey, I'm a team player. I'm going to go along with it. But I just, this process just really gives me angst. Now filling out the form, providing it to you. Yeah. Um, I agree with that. And it's either yay or nay, but not where it's so public. And now an article may be written. And no offense to you sitting back there in the room, but you know, an article to be written and, and, and I'm talking about the reporter. I know. And then, you know, it's new. So they're going to write about it. Right. And then they won't write. They're not going to put in the whole conversation. It's going to be pieces. So now it seems like, you know, we're going to have half of a third of the community talking about they won't bear it gone. Another third time out, they won't bear it. That's going to be the conversation. It's not going to be about where we go next with property insurance. What are we doing to alleviate some of the issues that people say they're having? What are we doing as it relates to healthcare or transportation or attracting businesses or all the stuff that we all have been kind of working towards keeping our county going? That's not even going to be the conversation. The conversation is going to be all of this stuff that was around here that shouldn't be. So I appreciate all of your comments. I really appreciate your comments, Commissioner Lockvall, your thought process about, you know, leadership and looking at leadership. I appreciate your comments because you've been a, Commissioner Peters, you've been a mayor over in Pasadena and all of that. Commissioner Eggers, you've been a mayor of Dunedin. And I know when I served on city council, you were the mayor, if I'm not mistaken. And I've had a chance to interact with you guys on those levels. But I just don't want the public to get the impression that Amendment 3 dictates that there should be a change in leadership because that's not the direction we were going. The direction and the budget that was presented to us was based on where we were at that time. Amendment 3 was voted on after that. And so Barry's making the adjustments and the changes. The last thing I want to say is the state of Florida should have been taking care of Wheaton Island all along, not us. Prior to Barry coming, we were paying for it. Barry got here. We're paying for it. We asked for areas to roll back spending. He gave us several. That was one of them. It was up to us to decide if we accepted that call or not. The vote, majority vote, was that we continue to maintain while working with state legislators to say, hey, if you want us to maintain it, can you at least fund us to do it? So that wasn't, you know, something that he just picked out of the air. He came back with what we asked, which was areas where he could cut. I see wheels are churning because people just got to box back, box back, and that's fine. But I don't want the public to think that Amendment 3 determined that the county was going in the wrong direction. People voted for Amendment 3 because they wanted a reduction in their property tax, not that they want a reduction in services. So I'm just going to say that, and I'm not going to say it. All right. Well, I'm going to ask. I'm going to make sure we're all done. Yeah. No, well, I think we've all had our opportunities, but I just want to make sure that. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, you said I was wrong, Chair, so I just wanted to clarify what you said I was wrong about. Go ahead. No, I'm asking you. You said I was wrong. You pointed to me. No, I said our responsibility is to prove the budget. That's what I'm talking about. Right. His job to present a budget, we're the ones that approve it. So it's our responsibility. Right. I thought you had said it was his responsibility. He recommends the budget. No, but we approve it. Right. That's what I'm saying. But when you got, yeah, he recommends the budget. You're correct. He's the CFO. He recommends the budget. You're the CFO? No. No. No. Okay. No, I'm not the CFO. He's a county administrator. Oh, okay. Because that's where the charter says you're in charge of the budget. Well, that is part of my responsibility. I'm not the CFO. Oh, okay. You're in charge of the budget. But what I thought you said was it was his responsibility for the budget that he's bringing. Yeah, the recommendation. So you're right on that. Correct. But what I thought you were saying was it's his responsibility. The budget's his. It's our responsibility. Right. And I voted against that, the budget. And then, you know, I don't work for the people of Palm Beach. Part of it you did. Part of it you did. I don't work for the people of Palm Beach or Hillsborough County or Orange County. I work for the people of Pinellas County. So I don't think it's relevant to, you know, I wasn't the one that first brought up the survey of other counties. So when people want to say that, I think it's important we don't work for the people of Palm Beach County, Broward County, Orange County, Hillsborough County. I work for the people of Pinellas County. And so I'll happily defend the people of Pinellas County because a third of the community are already talking about how they want to change an administrator. So, you know, I appreciate Commissioner Flowers bringing that up, but they're already talking about it. So, you know, I work for the people of, okay, well, we represent different thirds of the community. Don't, I didn't interrupt you. So if you could not interrupt me. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that, Commissioner. So, yeah, I just wanted to say I work for the people of Pinellas County, not Palm Beach or any other county. I thought I heard you making the comparative comment. So that's why I brought that up. About, about, you, you made some comment to compare and I, what's that? He was staff. He was comparing staff, how many staff they have. So that's, that's, that was, that was all. Well, yeah, I mean, so it's like Hillsborough, if we want to talk about it. I mean, Hillsborough has 600,000 more people than Pinellas. What I was comparing was, it was Hillsborough to West Palm Beach since they're right at 1.5 million each. Right. That's 600,000 more people than Pinellas. They have over 2,000 more employees and the county administrator in Hillsborough makes $40,000 more. So, I mean, is it fair? Do we want to say, yes, it's fair that someone that manages 2,000 more people for a population of 600,000 more people, a third of our population makes $40,000 more than our administrator. Is that fair? I don't, I don't think that's fair when you look at it like that. But you're not the professional HR person that gives us those recommendations and looking at what other people are paying. So when we come to, when we. No, so thank you for diminishing me again by saying I'm not, you know, chair, you've interrupted me lots of times over the last year and I haven't said anything. And you diminish me multiple times over the year by saying I'm not a professional. Diminish you. Yeah, by saying I'm not a professional, I'm not this. And you've interrupted me multiple times over this last year when you were chair and didn't interrupt other colleagues. So I would appreciate it not interrupting me. You go right ahead then. Well, I'm done now. So thank you. So any other comments? Okay. Barry, did you have anything you want to respond to? Wow. Well, I set a new record because I haven't said anything for an hour here, you know, and, but I want to, I do want to, you know, first thank the broad support of the commission. As you can see here, very strong support for both my position and that really reflects upon our employees. Our employees work extremely hard and the change that we're going to go through as was discussed here. We got started talking about my evaluation and that that rose into amendment three and where we're going, which is really two separate issues. Okay. This is an evaluation of my past performance during this past year. The accomplishments report is a report card on all that our employees have accomplished at your direction and in alignment with your strategic plan. And going forward, you know, and I probably have spoke too much and that's how the whole issue of rumor rumors get out. But I want to clarify that, you know, when we talk about experience among about downsizing, I have lived through it. I've lived through it in 2008, nine and 10, cutting hundreds of employees that are just trying to do their job and put food on the table for their family. So when I talk about retirements, because I don't look forward to that, it doesn't mean that I won't do my job. Obviously, the people have spoken, they've passed amendment three, and we as a team, which includes this commission and the administration, have to come up with a plan to best reflect the priorities with limited resources. So I have been through that before. When I talk and I probably speak too much about the idea of retirement, it's because that isn't fun. And if it's fun, then you don't have a heart, okay, because we're going to talk about services that people use. And so we're going to have to set priorities. And what I need from this commission is engagement, ongoing feedback, setting the priorities as we go forward. We're going to need to meet more, not less. We're going to need to be able to bounce ideas, get your feedback. But as we just saw here today, I get multiple feedback from different commissioners that have that are extremely diverse in their views. And and I have to somehow cobble that together to a direction. And so it is extremely hard from my position when you work for seven different bosses. And, you know, as Commissioner Peters said, you know, we even the approach and we can certainly do a better job. I know I can do a better job of that engagement, trying to force that discussion back here versus individual conversations. We'll continue to do that. I read all the comments. A couple of you have spoken to me directly about things. And we take that feedback seriously. We will. We've already for Amendment 3, we've already implemented a hiring freeze. I've already talked to Dr. Cho, the sheriff, Kevin Hendricks at the schools and our departments about getting ready for setting those priorities, giving you information and feedback on programs and deciding what those priorities are going to be going forward in this next year. We've already put those things into motion. I'll be working a short time with the Chair Eggers and then whoever you vote on. I'm assuming Commissioner Latvala is the chair. But on how we go forward in getting ready for next year because some of those decisions really need to be made in January, February, not May, June, and July as we transition to a different structure of county government as a result of Amendment 3. So the staff is prepared. They're prepared to step forward, lean forward, as Kathy Perkins always says, and be able to make those hard decisions. There's a lot of work to do. I am extremely grateful for our staff. There are some of them. And I will tell you this, too. And for our constitutional officers, next year will be my 40th year in county government, and I've never worked with more professional people in my life. I'm extremely fortunate to have them on our team and partnerships out in the community with the people that I just talked about and our constitutionals. Everybody works as a team. Everybody keeps that in mind. And everybody heard the voters, and they're prepared to step forward and talk about those changes and bring those changes and ideas to you to where you can set the priorities going forward. So anyway, I look forward to continuing to work with everyone. I look forward to working with this commission and working on the tasks we have ahead. So with that, I appreciate the broad support from this commission, and I'm finished. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Barry. Again, last chances for conversation. I just want to say for the record, for those who may not know, Commissioner Scott did forward a very detailed construct of his evaluation. I'm just saying it's for the public. So while he's not present here, he did forward his responses to the evaluation as well as his comments, and we could not respond to him. But I just want to make sure the public knows that he did participate in that process. Okay. Thank you. All right. We'll go ahead and jump right into some other things, unless we want to take a short five-minute break. Everybody want to go ahead and keep going? All right. We'll keep going. And we're going to start with Pinellas County Construction Licensing Board proposed changes. Barry? All right. So who's on his way up? Yeah. I was looking around for Kevin and starting to shake because we're not doing that without him and Andrew. So, commissioners, I'll kind of tee this up as they're coming in. And we lost a couple of commissioners. Oh, okay. I don't see you, but I hear you. Okay. And Commissioner Lovell. So there's been a lot of changes, as you know, over the last several years with construction licensing, and specifically with the types of licensing that we can do. As a result, it really has changed because of changes made by the state. We've had ongoing discussions for the last several years. We've made tweaks to this, trying to find the best way forward. Kevin's here to really talk about restructuring the way we do construction licensing here in Pinellas County. So with that, I'll turn it over to him. Thank you, Barry. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, commissioners. Kevin McAndrew, Building and Development Review Services Director. So the PCCLB, as a dependent special agency of this board, has a dedicated fund, the fiscal model of that fund being one that is self-sustainable. As Barry mentioned, consecutive state legislative bills from 2021, let me just advance this slide, from 2021 through 2024, specifically House Bill 735, Senate Bill 1142, culminating in the new special act, which was House Bill 1483. Cumulatively, these bills had a cascading adverse impact on the annual revenue coming into this fund. House Bill 735, which rolled into Senate Bill 1142, that state legislation preempted the ability for local licensing, occupational, and contracting, other than licenses at the local level that had a corresponding category. At the state that resulted in approximately 13 or so trades that were eliminated as a result of these bills with a fiscal impact of about $230,000 a year. The new special act, as it's referred to, which came online in June of 2024, had a compounding impact while restructuring the PCCLB. It included a provision that prohibited the PCCLB from having state-registered contractors also register at the county for $35 a year, which had been the most significant portion of the licensing revenue for decades for this entity. That resulted in, again, about another hit of $300,000, so cumulatively over $500,000 associated with licensing through the course of this legislation. The two other revenue streams for PCCLB citations were also impacted by the legislation. And the third source, which we referred to as administrative fines, the pursuit of expired building permits, that opportunity has effectively been frozen since COVID. Under a state of emergency, it's fairly typical that there's a tolling period that extends the duration of a building permit. That was the case following COVID. That effectively almost rolled right into the tolling periods on building permits following Helene and Milton. In total, about $900,000 over the past consecutive years have been taken out of the PCCLB revenue stream. At each step of these bills coming online, there were efforts made to try to keep pace in the reduction of operational expenses. Probably the largest of that was actually eliminating contractor licensing as a standalone department, merging it into BDIS to realize significant savings. From 2021 to today, the FTE count was reduced from 11 to 5.5, a 50 percent reduction. And even with those measures taken and looking at every last line item under operational expenses, there still has been a shortfall year after year in which this fund has needed to have a subsidy from the general fund. We had projected FY26 having a deficit as much as close to a half a million dollars. Checking on this yesterday, with the books pretty much closed down for FY26, the number was actually close to $285,000. Still an unsustainable fiscal model moving forward. So Andrew Nielsen, who is deputy director in BDRS, and since we recruited him from Lee County a little bit over a year ago, has served in the role of interim executive director. He's going to take you through the broad scaling back of the PCCLB that we're bringing to you this morning. Thank you. Good morning. Andrew Nielsen, deputy director of BDRS and interim executive director of PCCLB. When evaluating PCCLB, we found that it really fell into three separate categories. Contractor licensing, enforcement, and the administration of the Florida Building Code and the Fire Code. I'm going to jump into the next slide for the sake of time, and I'll go more into detail of these three categories. In licensing, we have the proposed restructuring to where the county license only and the county license state registered contractors would be pushed to the state DVPR for licensing. For journeymen, we will be maintaining administratively through a certificate of competency program outside of the PCCLB. This is something similar to what Hillsborough County currently does, and we will be eliminating select county licenses. For enforcement, we will be shifting the duties to the Pinellas County Code Enforcement, and it will be limited to unincorporated county only. For the administration side of the Florida Building Code and the Fire Code, we will have a scaled-back limited duties for the board. Currently, we have five boards in place, and we will be reducing that to one board, which will be known as the Compliance Review Board. Just go back to the other slide. So, at a high level, Andrew walked you through the three areas of responsibility. We're looking, going forward, to completely take out licensing and enforcement from any future role within the PCCLB, scaling that down to only just that limited administrative role associated with local technical amendments that serve all municipalities within the county, and also appeals to both the Florida Building Code, the Fire Code, and the regulation of the Coastal Construction Code. So, a completely diminished role associated with this board moving forward. Thank you. As Kevin had mentioned, we will be getting rid of all licensing and pushing it to the state, with the exception of the journeymen. For the journeymen, we will maintain administratively outside of the PCCLB with a Certificate of Competency Program. The state statutes provide for this to occur in all counties with reciprocity, promotes technical training, and qualified workspace. For the county-licensed state-registered, there is a grandfathering clause within the DBPR that will allow them to transition to the state. We will provide an 18-month license extension in the Special Act update so that they can ease into their state license. It will result in a minimal licensing transition. For the county-licensed only, it requires a full DBPR licensing process. They will also have an 18-month license extension through the Special Act update so that they can transition to a state license. There are the compatible license categories within the state already, so everyone does have a home that they can go to as far as the license. For the county-only specialty licenses, such as a veneer and fence, we will be eliminating those license categories. On the enforcement side, we will be removing the county-wide enforcement language from the Special Act and limit the enforcement to unincorporated county only. We will transfer to code enforcement using Chapter 22, and we will scale down approximately one to two investigators. The Florida Building Code and the Fire Code Administration, there is not much changing here. We will maintain the existing process under the Special Act. We will serve all municipalities county-wide, and each municipality can continue to submit their respective local technical amendments through the PCCLV. So, as far as the local technical amendment process, it will remain the same. For the appeals to the Florida Building Code, it's the same where we'll be maintaining the existing process, and we'll serve all municipalities. The Coastal Construction Code will be the same under the existing interlocal agreements with DEP and the municipalities, in which we serve all municipalities. So, the mechanism to move forward with these changes would be an update to the Special Act. You'll hear from Tristan, I believe, in his update following this agenda item that we've begun to coordinate what that would look like. Again, in summary, the interlocal agreements that are in place with the 24 municipalities will remain unchanged, and one of the biggest considerations with this update is having an appropriate off-ramp and transition for the 1,400 plus or minus contractors that today only hold the local county licenses and will have the adequate time to transition to the state license. And this is reflected, those steps, those implementation steps are reflected here on this slide. Last Friday, actually, we presented a similar update to all of the city managers, and part of the, again, the appropriate transition, we will be commencing with outreach to the contractor community. We've had some degree of outreach coming here today with this, but we'll really accelerate that with communications going forward so that everyone has that adequate time to smoothly transition. If this moves forward, as potentially projected, this would move through the legislative process, this session, upcoming session, and be in place with a bill that would be signed in June or July with an effective date pushed 18 months out, which, again, would give that transition time that you've heard now multiple times. Questions for gentlemen. How does it look as far as personnel goes, our personnel? So, as I mentioned, we've reduced down from 11 to 5.5. We're literally down to a skeleton crew. Of that 5.5, three of those are investigators. As we transition out of this, as we do with any time we have a contraction, we'll look to find where we can a home for that limited personnel to shift into another code officer position if that occurs through attrition. So, we're trying to soften that blow to the limited number of staff that play a role with this. And what about in our other departments where these are kind of pretty much no effects anywhere else? No effects. Again, the limited role that's left we can absorb within our existing operations. Okay. Thank you. Any questions? Yeah, Commissioner Flowers. I'm sure you all are probably thinking about this, but as we move through that process, I hope that there is a parallel plan for communicating to the public so that if things may not move as quickly as previously, you know, that they understand why. It's a great point. You know, PCCLB was in place two decades before DBPR, multiple decades before the Florida Building Code, and plays an important consumer protection role. So, that will be part of our messaging. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Moving on to number three, which is 2027 State Legislative Program. Good morning, Commissioners. Tristan Sommer, Intergovernmental Liaison for Pinellas County. Before you, I have one-pagers of our state and federal legislative programs. These are the issues that contain the overlap between departmental operational requests and BCC prioritization, essentially. Starting with the 2027 State Legislative Program, I also have Anita Berry of Johnson & Stewart, our state contract lobby team, in case we have any procedural questions that I need to phone a friend for. So, starting with some important dates. As we recall, November 3rd was Election Day, and you'll see for most of these, I have in brackets, Senate, because the Senate released their official calendar. The House is going to pretty much follow in line with most of the Senate committee blocks, but I just wanted to put that out there because the Senate officially released theirs. But next week will be the Senate Training Week, Organizational Session. November 30th is when Interim Committee meetings officially begin in the Senate, and the House will mirror that. Talking about the delegation meetings for a second, our legislative delegation has two meetings, the second one being for the final approval of local bills, the first delegation meeting predominantly being to hear from the public, but to present concepts for local bills, and then the joint delegation meeting between the Board of County Commissioners, the Constitutional Officers, and the legislative delegation would be separate from those. So, essentially three delegation meetings, two legislative, one joint. The final interim committee week is February 15th through 18th, session commences on March 2nd, and sine die is April 30th. Hopefully, fingers crossed that we don't get into any extended sessions. So, guiding principles, most of these are going to be rinse and repeat from last year's program, moving over into this year's program. So, I'm going to go into greater detail for the newer concepts that are also paired with our federal program. Starting with number one, which is the simplification of state grant applications and compliance processes to increase efficiency, reduce delays, minimize costs, and expand equitable access to local government funding opportunities. Number two is our principle for affordable housing. Three is our principle for funding and policies to support beach management programs. Four is our principle for resilient Florida grant program funding. Five is a new concept, and that's to increase funding for the Florida Department of Commerce's job growth grant fund to promote economic development and redevelopment. Six is pretty substantial, and this was kind of included in most of the programs, but I wanted to broaden the scope and really focus on emergency management procedures, and that's the modernization of state emergency management procedures to improve planning, advance intergovernmental coordination, support post-disaster response, clarify preparedness responsibilities, streamline compliance processes, and expand funding for shelter mitigation initiatives. Moving forward, seven is our principle for protecting water quality, natural resources. Eight is continued policies and funding strategies for safeguarding those natural resources. Nine is a new concept, which is greater flexibility for the financial flexibility for local public construction projects. Ten is our principle for funding for critical local and regional infrastructure projects. Eleven is policy and funding to address declining transportation revenues. Included in that is the indexing of loft, EV registration fees, EV taxation. And 12 is an issue that was on our monitor list last year, that being of enhancing animal well-being. I did broaden that scope because I think that there was still interest in keeping that as a guiding principle, and I expanded that to community welfare and public safety. I will add, I recommend putting a 13th guiding principle on there. I drafted this prior to the passage of Amendment 3, so I would recommend putting language to advocate for relief from unfunded mandates, if that's an opportunity the board would want to take up. That would be number one. Yeah, and that will give Anita and I a little bit more flexibility to have poignant conversations with our legislative delegation in Tallahassee. Yeah, because I'm certain our delegation doesn't even realize that we have just under $200 million in unfunded mandates. So, yes, and it should be number one. Okay, so seeing consensus on that. Moving forward, I have this broken off into three different priority gaps, if that makes sense. Starting with the sponsored issues, these are the issues Pinellas County will need to take the lead on because these are typically too centric for any other local government, municipality, county to want to advance. And you'll see that whenever I move in through these slides. Starting with Kevin and Andrew's presentation on the PCCLB licensing board, I won't go into the summary because I think they did a better job than I will ever do on that. But expanding on their strategy, Anita and I will work to identify a House sponsor, provide bill language, and help move that legislation through the process. And through that process, we would be ensuring all senators and municipal partners are okay with the proposal moving forward. Looking at recent efforts now, in 2024, House Bill 1483 substantially amended and repealed various provisions of the special act as it was to date, and that original bill draft sought to completely eliminate the PCCLB. So rather than completely eliminating the PCCLB and retaining the interlocal agreement portion, this is the, I think, the best step to move towards that while retaining the direction that we need to have. Considerations here. Let's talk about local bill procedural hurdles for a second because we have a few other special act provisions that are going to move forward. So in the bill drafting manual with the Florida House of Representatives on local bills specifically, there are a few key concepts that I think we should highlight on. One, the proposals typically shouldn't be controversial. That's in the language of the manual. Two, the requester of a local bill has to provide the bill language, so we can't necessarily go to bill drafting services and say, this is a concept that we want. We have to initiate that from our own side. And three, and this is tied to Senate rules, we would have to, any singular senator of an impacted delegation can basically pull a local bill out of consideration. So essentially, they have a single veto if they would like, for lack of a better term. Also, within our delegation rules, like I noted earlier, the concept has to be presented at the first delegation meeting, which is scheduled to be December 8th. Senator DeSigley just announced that this week. And then the bill language would have to be finally voted on in the second delegation meeting, which hasn't been confirmed yet, but they're looking at mid to late January. This issue came up during our budget season, and that's the request for establishing a recurring funding source to support county maintenance and security operations of state-owned lands at Wheaton Island Preserve and Shell Key Preserve. Our strategy there would be to work with House and Senate legislators, budget chairs, budget chiefs, to establish recurring funding sources through the state budget. The main consideration there is, if we look back to the last two legislative sessions, the Speaker Perez administration was actively trying to cut recurring funding streams, right? So in there, walking into this upcoming session, I think it's just important to note, recurring funding is difficult to establish, and we don't know what the new priorities of the presiding officers, nor our next governor, are going to be within this budget space. Next, another issue that's been kind of moving forward over the last, I would say, several months, but at a high level for the last couple years, and that's the consolidated regional MPO apportionment. From my conversations with various commissioners, there's been an interest in basically adding provisions to Chapter 339 that encourages counties served by a consolidated regional MPO to adopt a voting structure, providing each county with equitable representation. The general theme that I've seen from my conversations is taking the framework of Tampa Bay water and that voting structure and kind of applying it to the regional MPO apportionment. Our strategy there would be to work with our Pinellas County legislative delegation just to ensure the county's perspective is considered when efforts are made to consolidate a regional MPO. So I'll pause there for a second because I'm sure we saw Adam Anderson's letter that he sent to the, essentially from the legislative delegation to Ford Pinellas, saying that he ultimately supports a merge and would like to work further on this with the impacted communities in Tallahassee. Representative Mike Owen of Hillsborough County said that he was going to file something this upcoming session if consensus wasn't reached in the Tampa Bay area and former representative Danny Alvarez put another letter out there saying that he wanted dedicated seats for Port Tampa and then the Tampa airport too. Pasco County to the north also provided a letter saying that they support the Tampa Bay water model. So that's kind of a general theme that I'm seeing for most of the tri-county area, but I just wanted to put that out there in the considerations too, that Hillsborough and Pasco may have a different stance on kind of what that general structure looks like. So I'll move forward. So this next block of concepts or priorities are issues that are typically a little too large for one county to take the lead on, Pinellas County specifically to take the lead on, but these are issues where we have a unique perspective where I think that we should be at the table because we would bring value to the conversation. Aside from this first one, which is Pinellas County-centric, and that's an issue for Pinellas is taking the lead on, and that's amending the PPC special act. That direction was provided by Ford Pinellas' special act review subcommittee that Commissioner Scheer and Peters sits on. And while the NPO merger was the initial impetus for amending the special act, the board did adopt several streamlined provisions that gives local governments more autonomy and better focuses kind of the core functions of Ford Pinellas' countywide importance. Specifically, though, we would be supporting the effort to amend the PPC special act to prepare for a future regional consolidated NPO, revise membership structure, streamline regulatory processes consistent with countywide planning authority, and clarify PPC responsibilities. Next is a repeat issue from last year. Quick reminder, we're currently operating under that era of a moratorium because of hurricanes Helene and Milton, so our request with the SB-180 revisor bill would be to amend those provisions within SB-180. SB-180 was a larger package that didn't just deal with the moratorium, but whenever the lobby corps is talking about SB-180 and whenever FAG and the league are referring to SB-180, they're referring to that moratorium language specifically. Our strategy would be to continue to work with Senator DeSiglie and identify House sponsors who may be interested in advancing this policy through the chamber. I'm not sure if Senator DeSiglie is going to want to pick on this issue. He may want to prioritize other policy, but we would like to start our conversations there because he did pass SB-840 through the Senate unanimously. I did CCU on an email sent to Representative Cheney where we did provide SB-840's red line just to provide some comments from Pinellas County, so that's kind of a general status update as to where we are right now. I know the league, in fact, are currently working on this issue as they work to adopt their legislative priorities moving into this upcoming session. An issue that came from some of our work session conversations, so this is direction provided by the board on e-bikes, and the themes that I heard from the board would be to support reintroduction of SB-382, which was the e-bike bill from last year, to strengthen specifically to strengthen speed and yielding requirements to address the behavioral challenges that we heard from Sheriff Gualtieri, require law enforcement agencies to track and report crashes involving e-bikes, and create a statewide task force to provide further recommendations for improvements on regulations. Our strategy would be to partner with FACT, the League of Cities, and law enforcement agencies to advance this policy proposal now that we have a new governor, and so our consideration there is Governor DeSantis vetoed last year's bill that passed with express concerns on the speed detection component, surveillance devices, like more broadly speaking, the lack of sunset date for the task force, and no clear limitations for the duration in which the task force could provide policy recommendations. Next, another issue that came up from our work session conversations, and that's the issue of flat cameras or ALPR devices more broadly. Based on the feedback from the board and from the presentations by the sheriff, the consensus I got was to support creating uniform statewide standards on ALPR technology to advance security controls, require regularly scheduled audits, improve data storage transparency standards, limit access of query data to authorized individuals, strengthen inter-jurisdictional data sharing agreements, and limit how data can be collected, shared, stored, and retained by private companies. Strategically speaking, we partner with Sheriff Gualtieri and criminal justice agencies to prioritize legislative recommendations when the legislature ultimately files a bill. We have heard from legislative leaders there is an interest in filing something. Sheriff Gualtieri also feels confident that something will be filed, so we feel as though we should be at the table just based on the board direction at this time. Another consideration, like I said, legislative leaders and also governor-elect Donalds has already expressed interest in and concerns really in the technology, so filing legislation to balance those tools of law enforcement and with the balanced privacy rights of citizens. Also, in an article this week, Flock Safety, the company, specifically said that they're encouraging states to adopt measures in consensus with what we see in the summary there. I'll go back for one second. In preliminary high-level conversations the league's been having, they are hearing legislative leaders may just file a bill to outright ban the technology. So once again, as a snapshot, that's where the conversation is at this time from at least the league's perspective. This issue was on our monitor list last year, and it was elevated just based on the level of importance that I've heard from staff as well as the commission, and that's regulating short-term rentals. In this sense, we'd be supporting regulatory authority that manages the density and intensity for short-term rental activity, require quarterly reporting for rental addresses and unit counts, and provide flexibility for local enforcement and clarify regulatory distinctions between short-term versus vacation rental properties, looking at the preservation of neighborhood character. Our strategy there would be to support legislative efforts and advocacy by faculty and other associations to promote this initiative. And when SB 280 from 2024 was vetoed by the governor, in his letter he expressed concerns about creating bureaucratic red tape, preventing all local regulation, but he did encourage the legislature to work with key stakeholders and come back to find an approach that was essentially not a one-size-fits-all model, so a little bit more comprehensive view of it. At this time, the legislature has not come back to do so. And in the summary portion, the enforcement provisions would kind of pertain to parking, quiet hours, max guests. That's just what I wanted to make a note of there. I won't spend too much time on this one. This was a repeat from last year. That's the E911 fee. Just as a quick reminder, though, statutorily the fee is allowed to be 50 cents. That was lowered to 40 cents by DMS. DMS issued a rule ratification to bump it back up to 50 cents, which was never ratified by the legislature. So we'd be working with the new gubernatorial administration to determine appetite and interest in having those conversations with DMS to make another rule ratification request to the legislature. And in turn, when that happens, work with legislative partners to move that ratified rule proposal through the process. And I'll just point out the recent efforts. We had prolonged conversations with DMS and the legislature about this last year, and everyone was pointing to everyone else saying, well, they have to ratify the rule, and they have to request the rule. So we'll start that conversation again with new leadership at DMS. So the third bucket are the issues that we would be monitoring. So from conversations with the board and our departments, these aren't issues we would need to take a stance on, whether supporting or opposing. These are issues you would like to be updated on, essentially whenever things are moving in Tallahassee. Starting with growth management. This is also on the tri-county legislative program, the draft program that we have, but we'd be monitoring changes to the Growth Management Act and any parallel statutes, specifically to assess potential impacts on local planning authority, development processes, and regional coordination. So the considerations within this last session, former Senate President Pasodomo, she called upon the Senate to essentially introduce a comprehensive growth management package rather than continuously passing piecemeal land use growth management policy bills, right? So the Senate has heeded that and essentially wants to take on that baton and move forward to pass said comprehensive package. Next, we have an issue that was on our program last year on the monitor list, which is that of TDT expansion. I'm not going to go into the summary because we're well aware of that. I did add kind of another tag on, which is to ensure that any expansion maintains current local option funding percentages. A consideration we should be aware of is our new governor expressed interest in expanding the allowable uses of TDT over the summer, and although the incoming presiding officers have not publicly indicated any interest in allowing said allowable uses to be kind of a legislative priority, they haven't said that that's not a priority. And with the passage of Amendment 3, I imagine that that conversation will be renewed in Tallahassee. As of last year, there were six bills filed alone in the 2026 session to expand the allowable uses of TDT, all of which were from members in Orlando. Next, appropriation requests. So talking money for a second, we had a number of projects that were submitted. These four projects, I think, will fit comprehensively whatever our next governor and the legislature will want to prioritize in the budget because we don't really know what the incoming presiding officers nor the next administration will want to prioritize within the budget process. But these four projects, two with public works, two with utilities. The first one is Brooker Creek Bridge widening, which is along these road corridor, Beckett Bridge replacement up in Tarpon Springs, and then for utilities we have the Gulf Beach Water Booster Station and the North Booster Pump Station Hardening. Now I have a question. Question, Commissioner Peterson. So I had somebody reach out for me from the Seminole Recreation because we've in the past had Seminole Recreation on there, I think the Crest Bayou or one of those, and that's not on there this year. And my question is, is it not on there because we're staying focused on core function of government, or is that something they should be on their own trying to get even though it's? So the immediate answer to the first one is yes, right? So I drafted this prior to Amendment 3's passage. I felt like the legislature was going to have a higher bar for what types of funds they were trying to appropriate anyways. So based on kind of the call of the legislature and the outgoing DeSantis administration to focus local government funding on core infrastructure, that's one of the reasons why I just felt like focusing on road projects and bridges and utility projects. So that makes perfect sense to me, and I probably would have done the very same thing. But when you look at when cuts come out, what won't get cut is utilities and roads. What will get cut is recreation and parks and kind of the quality of life stuff is what's going to get cut. So I'm just throwing it out there. I get it where you're going. I would have gone the same way. But now that Amendment 3 passed, is that something? Should we be looking at the quality of life stuff that we're likely not going to be able to fund? And even though they have their own millage, they're going to take big hits too. And so I'm not sure the right direction to go because we don't have an idea of what the governor's priorities are going to be. But I'm just throwing it out there because it was there. It's not there. I don't really know. But I'm just throwing it out there because of that. It's just like, well, we have weed and nylon on there as a priority, and it's the very same thing. It's the quality of life thing. It's the parks. It's the same thing. So I'm just kind of throwing that out there. I'm not sure how that's going to land. Because we've got to do our very best to not impact core function, sewer, roads, water, public safety. But it's the other stuff that's quality of life that's still important to our constituents. But as a result of Amendment 3, those are the things that would fall by the wayside. So it's just something I thought. I don't know if anyone else has a thought on that or not, but that's just my thought. And I would also have to work that back through park staff to make sure that that's still operationally feasible. Because if we are talking about limitations of funding, that would also be tied to our match for our appropriation request. And just to clarify, Weedon Island is a state-owned park, correct? Yes. Versus things that we're taking care of or we're owning. Correct. So, Commissioner, item 28 on your agenda is... Is some cross-bite stuff. Yes. And so I'll give it a step to clarify exactly what is funded within the penny. When Christian brought this, that's really what it was about. It's like, don't ask for something that you're not going to get funding for anyway. You know, you've got to align it with where the state priorities are. So we can always navigate from that if there's an opportunity. But really focused around, you know, core services. Thank you. Commissioner Scheer. Oh, thank you, Chair. Yeah, I was just going to reiterate what Commissioner Peters was saying. I don't understand why we would have Weedon Island on here as a legislative priority, but not on our appropriations request. It doesn't make sense to me, but I don't understand. Yeah, and procedurally, I can comment on that for a second. And these appropriation requests are essentially forms we would be filling out and submitting to individual legislators. The Weedon Island request is a little bit more nuanced because we would actually have to work through the budget process, and we would have to identify proviso language opportunities or other opportunities within the budget that wouldn't be the submission of a funding request. Because, to the Chair's point, we are looking at state-owned lands. There was kind of a nuance there that we would have to balance that would separate that conceptually. Anything else? Okay, go ahead. Okay. Next, we have our discussion items. And as I mentioned, everything in front of you on the one-pager, those were items that contained overlap, department need, BCC priority. These are ideas that were introduced by individual commissioners for further consideration and direction by the full board. And I put them all on one slide just to make it easy. The first being fire district consolidation. That discussion would be around establishing a pilot program to look at the benefits and shortfalls of consolidating fire districts across Pinellas County or the greater Tampa Bay region. As a reminder, though, we do have that OPAGA study that was started last year, restarted over the course of the summer. We don't have an additional update or timeline on that, but that is something that's currently ongoing. Number two, we had the discussion of the sale of energy generated by waste. And essentially, that discussion would be to allow local governments to wheel power from the local government utility, so that energy that's created by the waste distribution, and to reroute that to local government buildings and assets using large utility distribution infrastructure. Tristan, back to that number one on the study that you mentioned, what's the primary purpose of that study again, please? Essentially that. So, Commissioner, these are what you guys said. We haven't added these to our priority program, so we're asking for feedback on if there's appetite for these. For those that have tried to work through the legislative process, it's not easy to bring big items and necessarily get broad support, especially when they have statewide impacts. So, the idea with, you know, fire district consolidation, it's, you know, it's do you want to do something different? You've got the OPAGA study. It's encouraging. There's a lot of efforts between individual districts having discussions. That's different than if we want to do something bigger with a pilot study or something like that and force that type of conversation. And so, you have that, that's what the first one is. So, it's really getting your feedback. If you want to do something with it, we put it on here for your consideration because it was brought up by a commissioner. But if there's not an appetite for doing that or just letting the other items play themselves out, that's perfectly fine. But we wanted you to have the opportunity to discuss these items. Yeah. I was talking about the OPAGA study. The OPAGA study. And what is it? It was put on hold and now it's being regenerated. Correct. And its purpose was to? To look at these shortfalls and the benefits of not necessarily consolidation specifically, but kind of ways to navigate efficiencies in Pinellas County specifically. And is that an outside consultant that's doing that study? So, OPAGA at the state level, yes. So, Senator DeSigli requested that through the Senate President's office, the Senate President, and the Speaker. They both have the ability to direct OPAGA to study these issues. So, that's being done at the state level. And they've been working with our SES staff over the course of the study. They've also been working with fire districts to get their input over the course of the study. Okay. All right. That's kind of where I was going. I want to make sure we're getting. The OPAGA study is, yeah, it's on. And that was put on hold. That's the reason it took so long. And then they've regenerated that and started it. Yeah. And the reason it was put on hold, too. I'll just look, quick comment there. Because of, obviously, the complications within the budget process over the course of this past extended session. So, okay. Moving forward. Number three, we have storm shed, watershed, easement access. And that discussion would allow counties to have access abilities to maintain stormwater systems, watersheds, when communities or property owners don't allow those systems essentially to be cleared out or accessed. Four, we have flexibility at Sunshine Law. And that discussion is to allow local governmental officials to discuss certain policy topics without the need for a publicly noticed meeting. Kind of an example of that, over this past session, HB 655 passed. And that provided public record exemptions for Burt Harris claim meetings. So, that's one example. We'd probably want to, obviously, pinpoint specifically what we would be looking at within that space. But that's an example from this past year. And the last one, I think it's self-explanatory by the title, but that's the PSTA board size reduction. And a recent effort was in 2024, 1487. That was a local bill that would have reduced the board size and restructured the PSTA special act, comprehensively speaking. And because of the local bill hurdles, any one singular senator can kill that initiative. So, that's what happened. Senator Roussan, he killed that in 2024. So, those are the discussion items. And, Chair, we can also jump anywhere else you would like. But that's where the end of my presentation is. Okay. Thank you. Commissioner Peters. Could you go back to the... Thank you. So, we could see him. Yep, I can. So, the APAGA study, I'm looking forward to hearing from. And I'm not sure that we need to do anything until we get that back. No, that's... Just to clarify, that's a looking at the consolidation of the workweek only. I mean, that's where they focus their efforts. Oh, the workweek. Oh, that's not the same. Got it. To clarify, it's a little bit different. Okay. It's very different. And so, don't we need legislative act to consolidate some districts? Like, the dependent districts or the independent districts, don't you need a special act to consolidate them? There's a lot of different ways you can do consolidation. If you want to do forced consolidation, well, then, yeah, you would need some type of legislative act. I'm, you know, I'm not sure what the intent of the first item was. I don't either. You know, there's germane conversations that are occurring, as you're well aware. Yeah. And so... So, I think the effort that you're doing now is worth waiting on and maybe not going, making that a high priority. But the sale of power to our own buildings, I think... I know the power companies are going to go against this because once you allow distribution, they don't want distribution, they don't want competition, they love the monopoly they have. But I think if we're generating the power and we want to power our own buildings, we should be able to have the ability to do that. We, you know, that is a huge cost savings. It's a huge cost saving to the taxpayer that our electric bills would then be much less. And so, to me, that one is really worth fighting for. I know there'll be opposition from the power companies, but I think it's worth fighting for. We're not going to sell it to anybody else. We only sell it to our own selves. And once we have our new campus, we don't have so many buildings to power. So, it would be even better because it would really just be going to that building and then the few other buildings we have scattered around. But that would be a huge savings to the taxpayer. And that, I think, is the argument on it because there is a big return on investment that we don't have to pay through property tax if we could do that. So, I think there's real value in that. Now, the storm watershed, that was my idea because we have a problem with culverts that are on private property. And they will not clean those culverts out. If the culverts are collapsing, they don't want to pay to fix it. And as a result, we got floodings in neighborhoods on the other side of those culverts. And we have no access on private land. And, you know, I'm a big lands rights person, so I'm on the fence about it because I don't think we should take away anybody's land rights, right? But it is a problem when we have culverts that are clogged and collapsing, and then those property owners will not allow any clearing. And if we're willing to pay for it, I don't understand why they aren't willing to let us inspect it. I don't know that we are willing to pay for it because it's their private property. Thank you. But, you know, we had a neighborhood flooding, and, you know, we get it all the time with their stormwater lakes. And when the builder put them in, they put it on their private, and they don't want to pay to clean them. And we get this all the time. I'm on the fence about it because I don't want to take away property rights, but it is a big concern for the neighbors that flood as a result of their action. I do not support making more flexibility in the Sunshine Law. You know, something like Burt Harris or something that's a legal thing that's different. But I don't ever want to set a precedent that it looks like we're trying to make deals behind closed doors or anything like that. So that's my opinion on that one. And PSTA, I hate giant boards. I don't like how big forward Pinellas is. I don't like how big they are. But I don't know in this environment if that's a huge priority for us right now, given that, you know, we've got a lot of work to do on our own for, you know, however, that would save their CEO a lot of time, not having so many meetings if they had a smaller board. But if I were going to put energy into something, I would be putting energy into what we already have agreed on. And then that waste of energy, I think, is a big return on investment for us and the residents. I don't see a big return on investment on that one. And so I think out of all of them, the waste of energy is something I think should be put into a not just a discussion but as a priority is my opinion. I don't know about the rest of you, but that's just my opinion. Commissioner Flowers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Tristan. So I just had a meeting with my Florida Association of County committee leaders regarding our pre-legislative meeting. Are you coming? I am. Okay. Regarding our pre-legislative meeting. So eBikes is definitely on the committee agenda as well as SB 180 is on the agenda. And, oh, it was one more. It's one more item that made it that is something that we're doing here. It will come to me in just a minute. I do find it interesting that there is a consideration for issues regarding short-term rentals. That's it, short-term rentals. I do find it very interesting that there's consideration now to say that the decisions should be made by local government on that when they keep taking so many other decisions away from local government. But that certainly remains an issue statewide. And I know Commissioner Scott had his eyes like laser focused on that. So with you being there, you can probably help guide some of that. As it relates to our future discussion topics, I agree with our sale of waste to energy to generate power to ourselves. That's sold back to ourselves. I certainly agree with that. I do agree with the discussion about fire district consolidation. I don't support it 100%, but I do think we need to have that conversation and have those fire district chiefs in on that conversation as well as the public. Because whenever you're consolidating something, you need to make sure that you have adequate equipment so that you can make sure that your response time is within the parameters and guidelines that it should be. I believe it's seven minutes for a truck and three minutes for EMT. For the flexibility of sunshine law, I agree with Commissioner Peters. As a matter of fact, I think the state should follow what we have to follow, which is, you know, whatever you do, it should be in the sunshine. Because, you know, by the time we get things, when I say we, I mean the general public and local elected officials. By the time we get it, it's already been put into action. It's just a matter of taking a floor vote. So I don't support us having flexibility. I think we should be transparent with the residents of our community when it comes to policy, not personnel, policy. I just wanted to make sure because I knew I saw a wheel turning over there. But, yeah, I saw the wheel turning. PSTA board size reduction. I think that there should be representation. If your city is paying into the services of PSTA, I think you should have a voice on that board. And so that's a, I think that takes some more detailed discussion. I know on some other boards, even with the Suncoast League, they have, like, a person that represents the beaches and a person, you know. And then it's that person's responsibility to get back with that group, to update them and let them know what's going on. That doesn't always happen. So I still have a little intrepidation on that one. But the storm shed, watershed, easement access, I agree. You know, if a private developer is building and they have included even retention ponds and things like that, they should be responsible for that maintenance, not us. However, sometimes persons will buy into those communities and not know that those things are their responsibility. I think what should happen is that there is a consistency across the board when it comes to that. And that way it's not ambiguous as it relates to what expectations are. I want to thank you for putting this together for us, as always. I don't know how much of this will take precedence because of, you know, all of the changes, you know, their staff changes is, I know, I don't know if you guys have it. I'll send it to you if you want. But Speaker Garrison has already selected his committee chairman and whatnot. I've gotten that information and I'm just trying to start as the president of fact, just have those, you know, hello, introductory conversations. A lot of things that we have on our list, they also have on theirs. But again, I'm not sure how much FaceTime that will get because of so many other things and so many other moving pieces to the public. And then the change in leadership and change in direction, I'm sure, will take precedence. The one thing I can say is I had a chance to meet with incoming Speaker Garrison prior to me being installed as the president of fact. And we had a really, really good conversation and I got an idea of what it is that he's thinking when it comes to his leadership. And the conversation lent more to collaboration rather than a hard hammer when it comes to talking with local government and states. So I hope that that continues. He seemed pretty sincere about it. So I hope that that continues. I haven't had a chance to speak to the incoming Senate president, but I had a good time, maybe a little over an hour, which is more than you can ever get. But a little over an hour, he came to Orlando. So I do appreciate beginning to start that relationship with him as well. But again, thank you so much for what you've done on the federal side. On the other side, you know, I don't, Lord, I'm going to be in. We'll get to that in a minute. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I'm not going to speak on that other van. I'm going to be in D.C. in February. I've already asked him to set up several meetings. We'll see what happens. Barry, did you. After you got done with the commissioner. I'd like to. I want to wrap it up. Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the sunshine, flexibility is sunshine law. I'm against that. I think it's sunshine law is very good. We need to support it and keep it. And I also am against the legislature having it. I think it's fine for them to conduct business how they have. I think the current system is good because they do need to talk to each other and especially talk across the rotunda, hold bills hostage when they need to, cut deals and all that good stuff. Because sometimes that's how we get projects funded and get some of the stuff that we need to have here. That's how the sausage is made for good or bad. But that's how it's been done for decades up there. And for PSTA, I support the reduction in the board. But I'm also not sure exactly what our purpose on the county commission will be in supporting that. I think that's more of a legislative thing if they take that up. As for the president of FACTS comments, the speaker is a wonderful man. I served with him. And I think he will do a great job as speaker. And I also know some of the members of his leadership team. He has surrounded himself with a great and capable team. And the president of the Senate, I know a little bit from his time in the House. Before he was a big shot senator, he was known as Diamond Jim in the House. So when you meet him, you can remind him of that. He also is a great man just from across the bridge down south. So the Senate, I think, will be in very capable, well, I know they will be in very capable hands with Senator Boyd. And I think the next two years, and with our incoming governor, who also is a former member of the Florida House, who I served with for four years before he went to Washington. And now he's back in the capital city. So I think the future of Florida is in wonderful hands the next few years. And I know that our interests are in very capable hands at FAC and in Pinellas County with you advocating for us. Because I know I do not want to be up there walking the halls in Tallahassee with you. But if you need me there, I will be more than happy to drive you. And you can ride shotgun. Anybody else? Commissioner's here. Thank you, Chair. Chair, Tristan, you had mentioned on the MPO merger that Pasco County had issued a letter of support for the Tampa Bay model. I don't have that. I don't know if you've distributed it, but if you could get it out, that would be. Okay. Otherwise, I'll forget. I'm in favor, definitely, of generating our own power for our buildings. If we can get that done, that would be so awesome. Just to put realization to that, the power companies, they have a closed system. They will fight like nobody's business. We've been after this for decades statewide, but they will fight. But you're exactly right. We're generating power. We're selling it back on the grid at three cents and then paying seven cents to power our wastewater treatment plants. So, you know, it makes a lot of sense. I believe that the Trump administration has issued a directive to try and get states to allow certain users to produce their own power. And so maybe we can piggyback on that initiative. We'd love to see it. We'll take it on. Okay. And then on the stormwater easement, I understand the concerns about property rights. But swift mud permits allow for affected parties to actually step in and enforce. I don't know what that is. Oh, the letter. Okay. Thank you. All right. See, where's your... Great. Anyway, swift mud permits allow you to step in and clean things up if you have to, and you can charge the property owner for it. So, and also, if we've been draining as a county over different pieces of property for years and years and years at a time, we actually already have easements by prescription. So, the idea with the state would just be to codify and strengthen our rights to be able to clean up the messes and then charge people for it. That's what I was thinking on that. And then, so it wouldn't be a new right that we have on someone's property. It would just be enforced, making it stronger. And then on PSTA, yes, I would really like to see a smaller board. We actually have cities, I believe, on PSTA that have voting rights, and they're not even paying, they're not even being charged. They're not members of the system. So, you know, I don't know how that happened, but they shouldn't be. So, anyway, those are my three things. Okay. Yeah, Commissioner Nowicki. Thank you, Chairman. For the sale of the waste to energy power, would we have to have, like, our own infrastructure for that? So, I think it's using the utility infrastructure, right? Yeah. So, if you have, like, an open, so, you know, go back to when you had, you know, phones. You, you, you know, you, when you sold that out, you still paid the infrastructure cost of using their lines. It's the same thing. You'd pay Duke for using the lines to distribute, but then we would buy it, you know, and be ours. So, yes, it can be done. It's done in other states. Ours is a closed system, and that's the reason it's regulated by that. And I got to get with staff even on this. Let's be, I understand the Florida statutes, that's the first place. It's also regulated by ACC, and, and, and there's a parallel oversight piece on that, that I'd have to get with Paul Sacco on. And then, I mean, is, so, state law, like, completely makes it illegal. So, like, even if we went to Duke right now and said, hey, could we do this? And they said, yeah, sure, you know, hypothetically speaking, would we still not be allowed to do that? I'm not sure. We have been to Duke, and they emphatically said absolutely not. Yeah, we actually met with the folks their own out of North Carolina, because we, when we did our power purchase agreement for, when it expired a few years ago, we tried to make a trade on that with some of these types of things. And they literally shut down those conversations. And then, I guess, in terms of the, like, culverts and storm shed, I mean, I would just be a little bit careful of that, because, I mean, I put an item into CATS, which I'm sure everybody saw, was about a neighbor who had their culvert that was, you know, county-owned, which was working fine. And I think someone from stormwater management went out there, but it was regraded, and now the water doesn't even drain through the culvert. And so, that was something I put into CATS and, you know, stormwater management address, but it was a working fine culvert until it was regraded, and now it went below the culvert, because they graded too deep, and now the water doesn't drain out. So, I guess, you know, government doesn't always do things, you know, better. So, I guess I would just be careful of that. Yeah, I'm against changing any sunshine law. I support the PSTA board. And then, the only other thing I would say is, you know, I had a phone call last week. I'm on the early learning coalition and the licensing board, on the licensing board for daycares, not construction. And I got a concern from the executive director of the licensing board that they got a public records request for floor plans of all of the daycares, public and private. And state law protects public daycares from having to give the floor plan out, but it doesn't protect private daycares. So, now they're going to have to give the floor plan of 200-plus private daycares of where kids sleep, go to the bathroom, nursing. You know, that's not protected under state law. So, if there's a way and consensus among this board, you know, for us to advocate to maybe include the protection of, you know, daycare facility layouts for private, you know, that would be something I would appreciate support on, because I think that's important to protect children and kids. Was that a security concern for the kids? I mean, some people would know where they are kind of thing? Yeah, for a layout of, you know, their bathrooms, where they sleep, because they have to give a layout in the application that they provide to get licensed by the Department of Health. And state law specifically protects public daycares, but doesn't protect private daycares. So, if that's something we could add to our list, I would appreciate the support on that. I can't, how will they would do one and not the other? But if it makes sense to incorporate that, I think it's a good idea. Yeah. Thank you. Are you, are you? Yeah, I was going to say, Commissioner, do you mind sending me an email with some of that information just so I can have it? Thank you. Thank you. You may find a friend and a house member, Keondra Darling, incoming house member, Keondra Darling on that, and then Bernard Mack on the Senate side, just as it relates to their previous experience with, you know, serving in the area of preschool and daycare. Anybody else wants to comment on that? I just wanted to go through it myself, and I'm always interested in fire district consolidation. I'd like to see that coming from our districts, get some feedback from them. Let me, can I go through this real quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sail waste to energy, obviously very interested in that. I think we have a mountain to climb there, but that would make just tons of sense. So, yeah, I would be interested in that. Is this stormwater watershed easement access issue a little bit like private roads that we have around that, years later, trying to take care of those roads, our private property, that we're kind of treating like public? I mean, is that kind of the same? I believe so. I'm not sure. I wasn't involved in those conversations. But, you know, we have, well, just in this situation, you know, you and I talked about, about some areas and stuff. You know, there's more private drainage ways than there are public in this county. So, you know, and it's, under drainage laws, you can't impede the free flow of water. And so, if it's going through people's yards, you know, that's the reason you have grading permits and, you know, and fill permits and things like that. And so, you do get into issues with private property and drainage issues, whether we have the ability to, I'd have to get with Kelly. I'm kind of looking back to Jill, if she has any comment on that. It's not a bad topic. I just can't answer your question directly. Well, obviously, it's a big deal. What you just said, if there's more private entities, then there should be a corresponding obligation from those private entities, right, to keep them flowing? Yeah, and there's, well, you've seen them. You say, well, the county should fix this. And it's not in our system. It's, you know, and we have the same thing with roads. And, you know, it was built many years ago before we had our land development codes. And it's a private road. You know, homeowners disappear. The homeowners associations disband. And all of a sudden, now you've got an infrastructure piece that doesn't have an owner. You know, and we resist because we can't have the funding to keep our own roads up. So, of adding more to it. And so, these kind of fall into that same category. And, you know, it makes those situations difficult sometimes. And yet, sometimes they have interaction with other areas where we do have responsibility and they conflict. There's no question. The way in which, you know, public infrastructure is cobbled together doesn't necessarily, we have a maintenance responsibility for Seminole Lake. We don't for tarpon, you know. And how that came to be is just based on history. I think that's a big deal. I think, I'm not sure how that would play out. I'm definitely leaving the Sunshine Law alone. PSTA board size reduction. I mean, it's not something I really want to spend a lot of time on. I appreciate those people who are currently on PSTA that have thoughts about that. So, if I, to kind of, you know, wrap it up, I think, I think fire district consolidation, my recommendation to you is you leave it alone for now. You know, everybody's dealing with Amendment 3 now. And every single city, we're dealing, we're dealing with it because with Amendment 3 comes a 27% reduction in the EMS fund. So, we already had an issue. Now, we've got it, and that directly impacts fire. So, we've got enough going on there, I think, to put that on hold. Let the APAGA study play itself out. So, if there's agreement on that, you know, we just put that on hold for right now. That's fine. Okay. I'm fine with that. Go ahead. Speaking of consolidation, this may be opening up a whole new can of worms, but has there been any talk of municipal consolidation of municipalities, or have there been people? I'm not in that business. Well, have there been anyone asking to, like, to annex or anything like that? Not that I'm aware of. Oh, okay. The beach communities have announced that they are healthy, and Amendment 3 is not going to affect them. You know, there was an article on that, and one of the city managers did say that because they're building back. They're building back with at a higher valuation because properties sold as a result of being flooded. They left, and now they're coming back on the full tax roll. So, some of the communities weren't necessarily impacted equally. Some are very much impacted. So, it'll be, it'll have a unique flavor dependent upon the community you're in. And follow up on that, don't we have to have a legislative act to be able to take over a city? So, we would have to do a bill to take over a city. Cities can merge, I think, without legislation. But for the county to take them over, I believe we need legislation. And, you know, I'm very careful about this, too, because, you know, we're going to go through this dealing with Amendment 3 as part of our budget. But you have communities that haven't done a good job maintaining their own infrastructure. And now they may want to disband and turn that over to us. And so that, and where they haven't maintained their infrastructure and expect us to, and then they're going to want those roads paved and infrastructure improved within the existing funding level that's going to be reduced. So, we've got to be really careful with how that plays itself out. I've also, you know, kind of had that conversation with the cities. We've got to be very careful not to try to dump on each other. Them passing costs on to us or us doing the same thing to cities. We're all going to, you know, be facing choices here as we come through this process. I just wanted to go back and get a couple things, a couple questions for you on the MPO consolidation and the move, I guess, by Pasco to use the Tampa Bay water model, which is not a proportionate amount, which is what the MPOs have traditionally required. I just want to make sure I'm clear on that aspect of it. I mean, again, it takes three to tango on this if we're going to consolidate. And you're telling us that there seems to be interest at the state level to do it. Yeah. And what model are they going to be moving under? Are they going to be moving under that national MPO model, which is by population? Or do we have the flexibility and do we just have to have a dance partner to make it happen? Like Hillsborough County. Sure. So I might want Whit to come up here just to talk about some of the nuances because you're absolutely right. There are some general considerations, right, obviously, on the federal side. Having a partner at the state level who would be encouraging the tri-county model of Tampa Bay water has, from my conversations up to this point, been well-received from the legislative delegation, at least the Pinellas County legislative delegation, as well as some of our mere counties. But, Whit, did you want to talk about any complexities besides that? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I just didn't want to leave anything out. Good morning, Commissioners. Whit Blanton with Ford Pinellas. The PASCO letter that I saw actually has them supporting an executive committee like Tampa Bay water, not the full board. So unless there's another letter or other communication, I'm not aware of that. And I distributed that letter at our board meeting on Tuesday. Okay. Then what I've heard is Representative Michael Owen, and I've heard the secondhand, who's a Hillsborough County representative, has promised to file a bill if we don't act locally by March that would basically reinforce the population-based apportionment with the port and the airport on the board. So we have a difference of opinion among them. Okay. Has there been efforts made with those two boards to get representation from PASCO and Pinellas on that board? That is something that is in the PASCO County letter or the MPO's letter urging that, and that is conversations that I've had with several of our delegation members. Yeah. I mean, I just don't see it making headway with the Tampa Bay water model, again, having to have three dance partners on this, and it doesn't mesh with what the national MPO model is, which is proportionally to population. I just want to make sure I'm clear on some of that. And if there had been effort to neutralize the idea that those two boards, Tampa Bay, the airport, and the other board, are they doing their own, you know, I mean, are we going to be able to kind of put somebody on there? I mean, is that something that's possible, and does that neutralize the real advantage or perceived advantage of Hillsborough County? Yeah, that's a question I can't really answer. I do know that we've broached that subject about expanding the voting representation on their boards to include PASCO and Pinellas County. When I say we, at the direction of the three MPOs, we've broached that subject with various members of our delegation, Senator DeSegli, Representative Anderson. I don't know if anybody is taking that issue up specifically, but it is documented as a position in the PASCO letter. So, again, if we don't act and the state acts, what you're hearing is the proportional model? Well, from Representative Owen, not necessarily from Representative Anderson. So, it'll be interesting to see how that gets negotiated. Okay, so that's still kind of a – That's right. I mean, there's a concern there in that I'd still like to see us have representation on those two boards. If there really isn't a favoritism thing there, if there's a reason, I mean, I don't think they're giving – the counties aren't giving money to those entities. So, I'd just like to understand. Okay, thank you, Whit. Any questions for – yeah, Commissioner Nowicki. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Blanton. Was my understanding that if we didn't act before that the governor was going to step in? I thought – you know, I heard stuff – you know, you say that, like, last year or the year before, oh, if we don't act, you know, the governor – Well, historically, the governor has sent letters after each census urging us to consolidate. That hasn't happened after the 2020 census, but it did 1990, 2000, 2010. And the governor-elect or future Governor Donalds, he could still veto the MPO merger? Certainly. This is – in federal law is a deal between the local governments and the governor of the state of Florida. It really doesn't involve the legislature. They don't really have a role. Of course, they can make something easier or harder. But it's between the elected officials representing 75 percent of the population and the largest city. So the city of Tampa would have to be a partner. And then the governor can accept or reject that apportionment plan. The governor approved Ford Penelis' apportionment plan to go to a 19-member board after the 2020 census. And has your team or office maybe reached out to Governor Donalds, or has there been any movement on that yet? Not yet. Okay, great. Well, if you hear anything, I guess – I'm sure you'll let us know. I'll be the first one to let you know if I've heard something. Well, thank you, sir. Okay, thank you. Anybody else? Okay, then I just had two other questions. Not for you, Whit. Thank you, Whit. Thank you, Whit. So the ALPR discussion, and I know we're talking about leaving it up to the state to kind of have a statewide policy on that, and I think that's obviously the way to go. Is there – recently, and I want to make sure I heard it correctly, there was a couple of officers who, I guess, misused the system. Sure. They were subsequently, I guess, fired, and charges were brought against them. And then did I read that those charges were dropped? For one. I think for the – yeah, for one example where it was dropped. For one example. Okay. Because one of the concerns, I mean, among other issues that that whole brings up is the idea that those who misuse the system are brought to justice. Correct. That's a critical piece. I just was curious if that was – there's now three officers, is that – Well, across the state, there are more than – I'm talking about here. Yes. Yeah, I think there's three. Yeah. Three. There was the two and then one additional one that he did through an audit. Okay. All right. The constitutional concerns that keep being raised, you know, it keeps bouncing in the back of my mind as well. Well, on the micro-mobility, I have now seen three accidents almost in front of me, but they happened before I got there, where these micro-bikes are speeding down the sidewalks. And cars might pass them as they're, you know, back a ways, but they're moving out ahead of them. And then they move in and turn into a public lot. This would happen over at Publix right over here, and the bicycle just flying through and not, of course, the whole idea about using bikes in the streets versus bikes on the sidewalk that you manage differently. So I think those – there's a lot of safety issues with it. And so we have that in the category of monitoring. Supporting efforts. Supporting efforts to – So reintroduce Senate Bill 382 from last year. That was the bill that passed the legislature and was vetoed by the governor. All right. So basically starting from that framework and moving forward, partnering with law enforcement agencies. All right. Good. I think that's a good place to be. All right. Anybody else on the state legislation discussion? Okay. Barry, did you have anything else? Okay. No, I think the only clarification is whether you want to take up the PSTA issue or not. If that's – and you want that to be our business or not. I was unclear about – I heard different opinions. I think – given my mistake in the three – the three PSTA representatives all said they were in favor of – did you say that? Yeah. I mean, I'm in – you know, if it comes up, there's a bill, you know, tuck it in somewhere, however they do it. But, you know, I think, like, to Commissioner Peters, there's a lot of other things that we have to focus on. So you don't want that to be part of our – our legislature? You want that to be a monitor or something or – Yeah. If there's an opportunity to stick it in, great, but don't, you know, use – Yeah. I'm kind of that way myself. That's fine. Then I've got clarity then. And I – what I want to know is if you want to take – if you want us to take and make it a priority, we put time, staff time, and lead that, then that's where we need it. We heard that clearly on the power issue. And the sunshine issue. And the sunshine issue. And we're not going to take on the sunshine issue. Correct. So – and then we did hear about the issue on the daycares. So we'll include those in, and away we go. And a little more research on the watershed easement access thing because there's – I want to make sure we completely understand what our rights are, what they aren't. Trish, don't get with Kelly, and we'll research that more. Is that okay with everybody? Okay. Okay. And we do have the one guiding principle on unfunded mandates that we'd be adding as well. Okay. All right. The 13th item is – We'll make it number one. We'll repost everything else. All right. Okay. Great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Anita. All right. Thank you. We're going to move on to the federal legislative program. Go ahead. Okay. Hi, Harry. All right. And as mentioned, we do have our federal legislative program, and we do have Harry Glenn of Van Squick Associates. That's our federal contract lobby firm. I do have 120th Congress here because my goal is to have kind of a program that would span two years, so the entire 120th Congress, just because we would be looking at larger authorization packages that span longer periods of time. With that said, we do have some important dates, just like with the state program. Just to reiterate, November 3rd was Election Day. We know that the House and Senate recondene this week. December 11th is a pretty important date, but predominantly we're looking at the continuing funding resolution expires. So, obviously, new funding resolutions would have to be enacted before then. We'd be looking at the election of the new Speaker of the House and the commencement of the 120th Congress on January 3rd. The president has to deliver his recommendation for the fiscal year 28 budget to Congress on February 1. The NACO Legislative Conference, February 20th to 23rd, and the end of fiscal year 27 will be September 30th, 2027. So, now getting into our guiding principles, since I wasn't really going off of a previous legislative program for the federal side, all of these are new. A lot of these also mirror pretty much the intent of the state legislative program, but I will go into greater detail on these explanations. Number one, we're looking at simplifying federal grant applications and compliance processes to increase efficiency, as with the state program. Number two, we have supported policies and federal funding opportunities to uphold effective local beach management standards through partnerships with the Army Corps of Engineers. Three, we have the expansion of funding for proven affordable housing programs, specifically to strengthen local capacity through technical assistance, flexible federal grants, and to support public-private partnerships. Four is ensuring strong funding opportunities for economic development and redevelopment, similar to the Job Growth Grant program under the Department of Commerce. Five is increasing the Department of Interior's Land and Water Conservation Fund to expand grant awards to safeguard natural areas, water resources, water resources, and cultural heritage, while enhancing recreational space. Six is to strengthen funding to support human service, systems of care, research, collaborative impacts, or collaborative impact efforts. Seven, similar to the state program, is modernizing the federal emergency management procedures, just to help with intergovernmental coordination and to better prepare for emergencies, specifically hurricanes, as we see them. Eight is the pursuit of targeted deliberative processes to reform federal regulations and governance structures, essentially for competitive administrative funding, contracting, or procurement opportunities. That's also on the tri-county program. That was essentially some of the feedback that I got from the tri-county delegation. Number nine is prioritizing federal policy and funding to assist with local or regional infrastructure improvements, just as with the state program. And then number 10, similar to the state program, is continuing policies and funding pathways to protect water resources, recreational lands, and conservation areas. Similar structure here with the legislative and executive priorities. We have our sponsored issues, some issues we'd be supporting efforts for, and then some issues that were on the monitor list. Starting with WERDA codification. The Water Resource Development Act is one tool that Harry and Kelly and I have kind of been looking at to codify the Assistant Secretary of the Army's memo that was directed to the Army Corps of Engineers to look at our beach renourishment issue that we're all well aware of, so I won't go into the history on that. But our ask would be to allow local governments to recognize customary use ordinances, erosion control lines, or similar adopted state boundary lines and non-perpetual easements. Those were the provisions in the ASA's memo to the Corps, specifically for Pinellas County. Our strategy there would be to work with the Corps, T&I committee staff, and our congressional delegation to elevate this proposal in advanced language in the next WERDA authorization package. In consideration there, provisions are typically added to WERDA after the Corps studies the need and the fiscal impact of a given policy proposal. So we're kind of in the era right now where WERDA's two-year authorization is awaiting passage in the Senate, so now is still a good time to have that conversation, even if they defer to a study in the future. Another issue we're well aware of is the CDBGDR supplemental funding. Based on the geocoding error, I think it's, and staff thinks it's a great opportunity to request supplemental funding through the CDBGDR grant program to basically allocate more resources for unmet needs in Pinellas County. specifically associated for Hurricanes Helene and Milton. And our strategy as to this point with the geocoding error would still be to work with HUD, congressional appropriations staff, and our congressional delegation to seek the supplemental funding for our unmet needs, which are $3.97 billion. And a consideration, these funds are just difficult to obtain due to the competitive nature of supplemental disaster funding. But we won't know unless we have the conversation. And like I mentioned, these are the supported efforts. This issue, wireline and wireless infrastructure permitting, looks different in Pinellas County and Florida than the rest of the country. This is an issue NACO has taken up and has effectively worked against. But Florida law is already pretty stringent on how local government wireline permitting can be handled at the local level. But federal efforts would be more problematic due to, as you can see in there, the forced schedules, auto approvals, and the inability to vary costs of permits through those recent initiatives. And I'll just jump down to the recent efforts. That's including the FCC notice of proposed rulemaking and House Resolution 2289 that would have preempted local authority and waived environmental and historic review for cell tower expansion. So our strategy there would be to partner with NACO, FAC, as well as the U.S. Conference of Mayors to elevate our perspective, which is unique because of our dense population and the notion that we are built out. On the monitor list, you can see we're a little shorter than the state program here. But on our monitor list, starting with an important issue for many residents in Pinellas County is the National Flood Insurance Program. We will be monitoring modifications, reauthorizations, and reforms to NFIP, the substantial damage assessment standards, as well as the community rating system. Because of the recent efforts here, too, which have been NFIP programmatic changes, flood map updates, the NFIP policy renewal reauthorization, which is also that December 11 dates that I mentioned earlier, and exploring NFIP modernization through private market participation. And within all that, our consideration should be FEMA has recently pushed to revise FEMA structures and substructures. So at least being able to update the board on this, I think, would be advantageous for the community. This is another issue that came up through rulemaking changes, and that's dealing with homelessness, housing, and supportive services. We would be monitoring changes to HUD's continuum of care program and similar programs that promote community-wide commitments to ending homelessness and optimized self-sufficiency. Our consideration would be, like I mentioned, the recent HUD efforts to increase interest in shifting policies and context and goals. And this past summer, specifically, HUD released the COC program, NOFO, that maintained annual competition format but placed stronger emphasis on transitional housing and also supportive service projects. And you'll see that there's a split between the behavioral health organizations that may oppose or may support, and that's just because there's a mixed viewpoint on whether there is support or a push to require the additional treatment requirements. Another one pertaining to the airport, this is a well-timed issue because the FAA Reauthorization Act will need to be updated by fiscal year 2028. We would be monitoring changes to the FAA's PFC program, which is the passenger facility charge, which is currently at $4.50, and that hasn't changed in over 25 years. So, as you can imagine, PFCs do not pay for as much as they used to due to inflation and other cost-constraining factors. And this increase would allow airports to better plan and budget for future growth. Federal earmarks. I wrote this when the World Series was happening, so I wrote batting cleanup for state legislative appropriations. And all that's the same. There are no changes there. But that's the end of this presentation. Commissioner Flowers. Thank you. Thank you, Tristan, and thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you, Mr. Glenn. For the housing, homelessness, housing, and supportive services, I was appointed by the current president of NACO to the Youth and Homeless and Affordable Housing Task Force. So, we have a white paper that will be coming out as a result of that. Some of that is in line with what we have here. I'd like to share that information with you. But one of the things I would like for us to look at or consider is, and I brought this up at that meeting, while it is nice that we still have residents that qualify for housing assistance, Section 8 certifications, certificates, et cetera, those certificates are not in line with the current day market, so they're not able to use them, and they're turning them back in to the housing authority, because a person who receives a Section 8 certificate, let's say it's a one-bedroom, $1,500. I'm just making something up. No more than 30% of their income can be utilized towards their portion of the rent for that. So, if they can't find something in that dollar value, they can't pay any more than what their 30% is supposed to be, nor can they get assistance from someone to pay the difference. So, they can't use the Section 8 certificate. And several of them are turning them back in. And I've had these conversations with Mr. Lundy from the St. Petersburg Housing Authority and some others. So, what I have proposed to that group and what I have proposed to the CWD committee that I serve on is that we advocate to increase those dollar values for the structure that they use for HUD Section 8 certifications, certificates, and or vouchers. So, looking at what the current market is and allowing a shift in that so that persons would be able to, you know, you go through a lot. There's a lot of paperwork you have to go through to even qualify. And then once you qualify for you to still not even be able to use that certificate has been a concern. And there are more and more persons who we see sleeping in their cars at Walmart or any place that they can, you know, not be bothered, but it's still against the law now in the state of Florida to do that. So, I have proposed that with those two committees. I was a presenter at the request of Brett Mattson from NACO on the committee to talk about the concerns we have here in some of our local cities with that. So, I don't know how my colleagues feel, but I would love for us to look at having those dialogues and conversations and maybe adding that to see if there's any appetite. I think it may be because you look at California, New York, Chicago, Ohio, they're all having the same issue with people not being able to afford to stay, even if they are in programs where they can get that type of assistance. And I don't know if you could help me with that. Commissioner, are you asking for us to monitor and give you information back? Are you wanting us to take on a housing authority issue? I'm asking to monitor and get information back and then to see if we can add to the conversation or add to the dialogue as it relates to why there is a need to address the overall guidelines when it comes to, because it's the federal government that provides those, the funding, which comes down to the state, and then, of course, those vouchers are provided through the different housing authorities throughout the state. Okay, but you're asking it to be a monitor, not a support, or not, okay, got it, okay. That's why I waited until we got to the end. I got one thing. I just want to thank Tristan. You just have elevated this position to such a great, thank you, thank you, thank you for your willingness to come. Great hire, Barry. I agree with your comments, Commissioner. You are just doing a great job, an amazing job, and, I mean, you know, Brian was good at the job, but you were just elevated to a whole new level of professionalism and its knowledge, and you're amazing. Thank you. Thank you. I second that comment. And thank you to our contract lobbyists, too. Can't do it without them. Anybody else? Harry? Anita? Either one of you. I didn't say this to Anita, but either one of you have any comments to make? Especially, are we going to be seeing budget downsizing, or are we going to be seeing that kind of effort? I remember about 15 years ago at a mayor's meeting saying, let's all go back and say we don't want to apply for any kind of funding from the federal government so that we can do our part. It was during that downturn in the economy, and, of course, I got outvoted. I think it was 13 to 2. So we're going to continue asking, so what's the climate, are you feeling the climate for that $40 trillion deficit and how it affects all of the stuff we're talking about? I guess we'll find out soon. They have to extend the debt limit authority here. It expires in February, so at some point between now and next summer, they're going to have to increase the debt limit authority. That'll be a very political conversation, so I guess we'll see more about the debt then. I mean, if you're asking my general comment about what's the – we're only a couple days, four days into the Congress returning after the election, so they're still counting votes in, I think, 10 races in the House and one in the Senate. So we don't even know what the final makeup of the Congress will be. But I mean, kind of what we've been hearing from the first couple days with the new leadership in Congress is, I think the mandate from people was they wanted some change, but they want to see things get done. And so I think there's an early – at least the early attitude is Congress wants to work – find places where they can work together in a bipartisan manner. I saw the chairman of the Transportation Committee yesterday was quoted as saying that he doesn't want to rewrite the surface transportation bills pending before the Congress. He wants to take what's already been approved by the committee and use that as a starting point for next year to try and move things along faster, which to me is an indication they want to work in a bipartisan way on transportation, flood insurance, housing. Some of these issues were bipartisan in the previous – in this Congress will be bipartisan issues in the next Congress. So I think they're going to try and find areas – kind of what Tristan's done here – bucket your areas. You're going to have your areas where they can find bipartisan agreement on things and actually get things done. You'll have – all to the right, you'll have issues that are just not going to happen. There's just too much disagreement. And then you'll have this bucket in the middle, which they'll have to figure out which ones they can do and which ones they can't. So I think there will be an early effort, at least in 2027, before the presidential year starts, to get things done. I think there's a mandate from people to do good work. And I think that applies to your projects here at the county level. I think try and find those places to improve emergency response, public transportation, surface transportation, the airports, figure out the flood insurance. And so I think there's some opportunities here. Sounds good. Any questions for Harry? Thank you. Appreciate it, Harry. Thank you. Thank you. See you in February. Anita, anything on your end? Hi, everyone. So good to see you. I actually don't know that I have anything to add to what Tristan shared with you all. He does such a phenomenal job for the county and is really in touch with everything. Obviously, while we didn't have significant changes or any changes at the statewide level here in Florida, we did have significant changes in the makeup of our legislature with both the House and Senate losing supermajorities. And so certainly I think that that could factor into how we see the legislature really work over the next couple of years, right? Because you are going to have to have a little bit more of a bipartisan effort, especially on some of those more maybe politically motivated policy decisions. So, you know, definitely maybe a change in some of the discussions that we've had over the last several of years. Amendment 3 is going to factor into a lot of both policy and budget discussions. And we're just thankful for another session and opportunity to continue representing Pinellas County. Thank you, Anita. Yeah, a question from Commissioner Flowers. Anita, can we say something about what you called me about? Or is that supposed to be? Oh, please. Okay. That's public. So, I think you reached out to everybody regarding Palms of Pasadena Hospital under the auspices of HCA. I'm keeping its emergency room, which I think is critical for servicing people on that side of town. But have they talked about what's going to happen with the rest of the property? Who's buying it? That is a great question, Commissioner. I know that the HCA has received that question from other both electeds and members of the community. And it is not a question that I know the answer to, but I have relayed it back to their administration. And certainly, as soon as there's something that they're able to share or that I'm able to share, we're happy to do so. Okay. And I'm just curious because it is a place that's prone for flooding. The evacuation out of that area has to occur simply because of where it's located. And I have in my imagination some people who may be very interested in that property because of where it's located. But if you do find out, if you could let me know, please. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Anybody else? Thank you, Anita. Appreciate it. Tristan, are you finished? That's everything for me. Just a quick clarification. So, Commissioner Flowers, also on this monitor list, you'd like to see increase in Section 8 housing, basically dollar values, right? Yes. Okay. Just making sure. Yeah. Understood. And that specifically pertains to the federal guidelines passed through this. Okay. Understood. That's everything. And we've kind of been talking about this. And NACO staff has, you know, had some conversations, not really robust conversations, but they will be coming when we meet. Uh, in February out there. But, um, that would just be, I think, a really good way, should that happen, um, for us to be able to take care of some of the people here who are caught between a rock and a hard place. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Um, we have airport parking garage construction and agenda briefing, and there's lunch. Do we want to go ahead and take a 30-minute break for lunch and then tackle the last two or just go through? Go through? Go through. Go through. All right. Let's go through. Good morning, Mr. Chair and Commissioners. My name is Mark Sprague. I'm the airport director. Today we're going to be reviewing the, uh, the parking garage, um, urban project, uh, solving a parking crisis and including the major components of the, uh, design process and final parking capacity, along with a guaranteed maximum price, project funding sources, and the anticipated construction schedule. This project is an important part of ensuring that the St. Pete Clearwater International Airport can continue to accommodate passengers' demand while improving our traffic circulation, parking availability, and the overall passenger experience while also supporting efforts to attract new service. Just to give you a little bit of background on our major project components. On December 16th, 2025, the board approved the project to move forward with design and pre-constructing services with a 27-month schedule to substantial completion date. The project consists just more of simply constructing a parking garage. It's a comprehensive parking and circulation improvement project as well. The centerpiece is a four-story or four-level pre-cast construction parking garage, originally planned for just 2,000 spaces and 300 surface parking spaces, giving us a total of 2,300. But the project also incorporates several important factors. The frontage road improvements include a new roundabout. We looked at consolidating shuttle operations to improve efficiency and reducing unnecessary drive times. New waiting, finding sideage, not only on airport property, but also on Roosevelt Boulevard, and also looking at the curbside improvements to reduce congestion. The project budget for design and construction was estimated about $60 million. During the design process and outcomes, the airport staff worked collaboratively with FINFROC to maximize parking capacity, control project costs, and maintain a project schedule. Several important factors were incorporating the design. Again, first, we improved the circulation for the new economy parking lot, which will allow the rental cars and employee parking to utilize a dedicated lane from Roosevelt Boulevard onto Fair Trial Drive, and that will reduce the curbside congestion. Also incorporating new wayfinding signage to help passengers identify which parking lots are open and closed on Roosevelt Boulevard, along with real-time information available parking spaces on each garage level. This will allow our passengers to allow our passengers to allow our passengers to identify where parking is available. Another important consolidation was the shuttle drop-off and pickup areas into one location. This will help reduce the shuttle drive times, go into two economy lots, and improve operational efficiencies. We also take a good hard look to preserve the opportunity for future elevated people movers service, providing flexibility for future transportation needs. And the important takeaway is that the collaboration design process allowed us to improve the overall project and deliver additional parking capacity without losing sight of the original project. So one of the most significant outcomes of the design process is the additional parking spaces. The final design not only just includes 2,000, it's actually 2,115 parking garage spaces. We're able to go from 300 surface spaces to 345, with a total spaces of 2,460. That's 160 additional spaces beyond our original plan, which will give us a capacity of 1,682 new net parking spaces. This additional parking capacity is particularly important as we continue to accommodate passenger growth and improve the availability of convenient parking for our traveling public and also to attract new airlines. So what does that look like today and what does it look like after construction? So this slide illustrates the overall impact of the project we'll have on the airport parking inventory. Today, Pai has approximately 3,260 parking spaces across its short-term, long-term, two economy lots, and our overflow parking. Upon completion, our total parking capacity will increase approximately 4,942. As you can see, the existing parking inventory is being reorganized, including conversion of the current economy parking lot into the overflow parking capacity. And the new garage will become a significant component on the airport's parking system, giving us substantial capacity and flexibility to manage passenger demand. Moving forward to the guaranteeing maximum price, this is the financial component. The Phase 2 construction services amount is approximately $51.7 million. In addition, the project includes a $2 million contingency and an estimated $750,000 for owner's representation, bringing the Phase 2 total to approximately $54.5 million. I also want to point out that the garage-only cost, after removing approximately $2.8 million associated with improvements outside the parking garage, the garage-only cost is approximately $48.9 million. Based on the 2,115 parking spaces, that equates to approximately $23,135 per parking space. I compare that to a consultant. It's called WGI's 2026 Parking Structure Cost Outlook for the West Coast at Tampa Bay Region Construction Benchmark is approximately $28,700 per parking space. So, PI's actual garage construction costs are approximately $23,135 per space compares favorably, coming in approximately 19% below that regional benchmark. This should actually say the total project cost. So, when we incorporated Phase 1 of approximately $3.1 million to Phase 2 was $54.5 million. It's approximately $57.6 million. $2.4 million below the $60 million total budget. Our funding sources is provided through three ways. Our airport CFCs, that's our customer facility charges, which we have $24.5 million dedicated to that. The Florida Department of Transportation grant and intermodal funding total approximately $6.3 million and utilized in the airport reserves of $26.8 million. Importantly, the project is being funded without issuing any debt or borrowing money. Looking at the schedule, this slide provides the actual project schedule and key milestones. The pre-construction services was awarded to FINFROC Construction on December 16, 2025, with a notice to proceed on January 16, 2026 for 27 months, with a substantial completion of April 16, 2028. As you look at the schedule, we have completed items 1 through 7. The next major milestone is anticipated in December when I ask the board to consider moving forward with construction. So, rather than simply continue to describe the improvements, I want you to walk through some of the renderings to give you a better visual understanding of what the project will deliver. So, that is our current strawberry lot, our secondary economy lot. This is where the roundabout is, and this is where the dedicated lane will be for our rental car returns, our employee parking lot. And then if you go right around the roundabout, you'll see this is the entrance to the parking garage. We also have a dedicated entrance to our shuttles. This shows we have two entrances into the parking garage and three exits, one being a full customer service. We simplified the decor of the construction as well by just incorporating our branding and then utilizing the palm tree and the pie across the building itself. We auto-utilized all the branding colors of the airport. That's another slide showing the decor with our downlighting. Utilizing the interior, we have three elevators. Two are needed. One is for redundancy and maintenance. Over here to the left is our single bus stop. That's also going to be sheltered from the weather. We incorporated our branding into the roundabout. That's a three-cubed sign that's going to be lit. And this gives you a pictorial of. And as you can see with the final project images, this is a substantial improvement to the airport's infrastructure. And we will provide meaningful benefits to our passengers, our airline partners, and our community. The project positions pie to better accommodate future passenger demand while making the parking experience more efficient and convenient. Mr. Chair, that concludes my overall presentation of the parking garage. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Any questions? Commissioner Nowicki. I just have two quick questions. And I definitely think there's a big need for increased parking at the airport. So huge kudos to you and your team for addressing this need. You know, I like that it's a precast design. You know, that's saving money. So that's a great job. You know, we've had this conversation before, Mark, you and I. You know, there was a recommendation to the airport by a paid consultant that the parking garage not go in the place that staff is recommending it went. And they recommended that it go in front of the terminal. Why was that never why was that recommendation never told to the board before we voted on it? The study itself consisted of that recommendation by only looking at what passengers would rather walk to a terminal versus the taking a shuttle and what's the best you can utilize it for. It also stipulated within that parking study that it did not look at any operational challenges and circumstances. So with that, we took a look at it. We definitely needed a parking structure now. Putting it out front also included that we had to make major improvements to our current surface parking and the economy lot. So it would not have taken advantage of reducing the shuttle drive times. It would not have taken advantage of increasing the capacity that we currently have. And the consultant was just a recommendation. So when we took a look at the study, and it also stipulated that if you want something that's going to be cheaper and you want something now, that the strawberry lot was the key component. And that's where we went with staff. We talked this over with our airlines, Allegiant Airlines, and they want to continue to grow. And with that, that's why we made that recommendation to put it in the strawberry lot. Yeah, and I don't disagree with those points. I guess just for future reference, you know, I would, you know, like the board and myself to see the recommendations by the consultants that we're paying, you know, before we vote on something. And then second, my second question is, you know, there's over 500 commercial airports that make up most of, you know, public commercial air traffic. Do you know how many, can you name three of them that when they build a parking garage, they don't build it next to the terminal or in front of, or can you, can we name three airports that have built a garage away from the terminal? No, I don't have three airports off the top of my head, but what we do say in the industry, when you've been, when you've been to one airport, you've been to one airport. Every airport has its unique challenges. This airport has a parking capacity challenge. Yeah, and thank you for that. And so, yeah, I mean, to the board, you know, my colleagues, you know, obviously I think this solves a great need, but, you know, I'm just not necessarily convinced. And, you know, I've made this case before on deaf ears, but just the location is wrong. It's going to increase carrying costs for the airport long term, and we're not going to be able to charge. I'd love to see the rates and charges on the new parking garage. We're not going to be able to recover the money as quickly because you can't charge more for parking in the back than for the spaces right up front. So it's going to take longer to recoup the money and increase our operating costs long term. So thank you. Yeah, Commissioner Flowers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I like the design. I like the colors. I like the welcoming. Just a question, because the majority of the flights at Pye are like Thursday, Friday, Saturday, returning Sunday, Monday. Is there any reason why it was only two lanes entering into the garage versus three? Because usually you have heavier traffic. I know I've been out there. You have that heavier traffic on those travel dates, which they may change, you know, with the new flights, Bermuda. I see we have an item on our agenda about Bermuda Airlines coming. But is there any reason why it wasn't three lanes on the entry, just to make it a little smoother and get that traffic flowing in? So part of the design, we did a full, complete traffic study on that. And the traffic study stipulated that with the amount of traffic in the lanes leading up, that two was only needed. But three definitely going outbound because it takes a little bit longer. But I believe the traffic study stipulated that it's only about two seconds by the time a car gets in there, gets a ticket, and moves forward. So there wasn't really a demand for three. Okay. And this isn't a question or a concern. It's just a comment. I love when I go to TIA and I get that little piece of paper that I could put in my purse to remind me where I parked. So I don't know if you all are thinking about that long term down the line, but that's a wonderful way just to remind people where they're parking at. The other question is, I spoke with you briefly about it, and I understand that there may not be a concern by the general contractor. Thank you so much to the gentlemen who have come here. But for the subcontractor, Ajax or Central Site, if there's not a concern by the GC with either one of those, just my two cents, this isn't something we're going to be voting on, if I'm not mistaken, on next week. It's this December. It did not go through all the way through contract review, so it had to be moved to the December. Yeah, so that's why I'm saying it in advance. If Central Site is $250,000 less than Ajax, providing all of the same structure standards with the exception of that minority business piece, I would like for some consideration to be given the Central Site. We're taking a look at dollars and cents throughout the entire county, and if they are all other things being equal, with the exception of that one piece, which Central Site certainly could implement that program within their standards, I would like for consideration to be given to Central Site if that's going to save us $250,000. It may not seem like a lot, but based on what we're doing and talking about and facing, and I understand you're like an enterprise zone out there. You're generating dollars, and you're putting those dollars back into the airport, but I'm just sharing that that's something I would like consideration for, especially if Frock has said that they could work with either one. That is correct. And I have nothing against Ajax. We give Ajax a whole lot of business, so nothing against them, but just sharing that. So when this comes up under the agenda in December, we have an entire procurement process, and so we'll outline that, and we'll outline the reasons behind the recommendation. Just putting it out there early. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. And great job, I think. Thank you. Any other? Yeah, I just wanted to thank you. I think you're doing a great job. I went out and visited, and we had a great meeting, and it helped me understand the big plan so much better, and that was definitely worth my time, and I really appreciate you taking time to meet with me. I'm curious about the, you know, when we talked about the land over by the golf course, when is that RFP going to be going out? Most likely it's going to be going out the middle of next year. Or RFN, I think. We're going to do an RFN because there's just so much unknowns in the property, so we're looking at the beginning of the summer of 2027. Oh, so it's not, I thought that was going to be sooner, and maybe, I'm not talking the whole golf course, just that one. The 32, yeah, it's the 32 acres of aeronautical land. Inside the fence. Inside the fence, yep. So I would like to have it done by spring, but, you know, given the opportunity, I got to make sure that it's written correctly and before it goes out. Okay. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Commissioner Nowicki. Thank you, Commissioner Peters, for that. I guess on that, have we seen, like, the Exhibit B, and did we acquire that land using any, like, noise abatement funds? Or I guess you're still in the research of that? That, the whole entire land was airport property. I don't know the history of the air coat, but I can definitely find out, you know, when the property was acquired by the airport. And a portion of that, though, federally-wise, we have to utilize it with both aeronautical and non-aeronautical. The 32 acres, the reason why we know that's definitive is because we've already done an environmental assessment. That came back, and that it's strictly for the 32 acres for aeronautical. Yeah. I just, I think, you know, not the expert, as many of you know, I just think with, if we, I don't know if we bought that land at some point in time or if it's always been a part of the airport. As far as I know, it's been, once Airco was shut down, it was turned over to the airport. That's all I know. But I'll get you more information of the history of that. Yeah, because I think if you use, like, noise abatement funds to purchase land, then it has, like, you can't use it for non-airport services. So I just want to, which I'm sure you're going to do, you and you guys would do the research, but just want to make sure that was on our radar ahead of time. So thank you. Okay. Anybody else? Thank you, Mark. Thank you. All right. Tenda? Let's dive in. All right. Let's go. Lots of reports. Oh, everybody said they wanted to come. Oh, hang on. I think you were not here. Go ahead. Okay. Item 10, adjustment to fixed assets. So this is a bill, they're just trying to clean up what they have, and you can read the report, but they're just cleaning up scrap and junk stuff and trying to get their fixed assets correct. Item 11 is declaring surplus. This is sale and donation of miscellaneous county equipment, as we normally do. Receipt and files for 12 and 13. Item 14 is for the household. It's basically the ship strategies report that we do once a year. Chair, Barry, I mean, for some of the purchasing, maybe, like, you and I could get together. I guess I just had a couple questions on some of the, like, not to exceed and contracts of what we were purchasing. So I don't know, like, you and I could get together or just maybe send out on some, I could maybe send you a list of some of those I have questions on, and you could say what they were for. Yeah, if you send me that, then I'll just send it to staff to answer. You and I were going to follow up on, like, what the authority and when do we do a delegate and stuff like that. And we're still working on establishing that date. But I could just send you the words. If you have specific questions, send those to me, and I'll have staff get it because I won't know. And just simulate it. Yeah, I'll respond to everybody. Thank you. Item 15 is hazard mitigation watershed grant program. You can see we're going after $225,075 match. Item 16 is modification number four. It's an air pollution control grant. The general fund, we front the money and then we're fully reimbursed. Item 17 is ratification. This was a grant that we had a short time frame on, a project to protect grant application for the San Martin Bridge. We applied. This is ratification of my action on that. Item 18 is participation agreement with City of Largo for a road and drainage improvement in our estimated cost. Item 19 is county attorney's receipt and file. 20 and 21 are receipt and file onto the regular agenda. Item 22, airline operating agreement with Bermude Air for a new air service. So this is a, it's two years with no employment fees and then, which just follows their policy. And then they'd pay their normal fees after that. And again, that's consistent with what they've done. But it provides, you can see the nonstop service it provides. Item 23 is first amendment to adopting the MSTU guidelines. As we previously discussed, you can see the last three bullets are new items within those guidelines. Item 24 is interlocal agreement with City of Clearwater for additional time. So we, this, you'll see this on, on the next item also, this goes with the penny and we have committed funding as part of the penny for projects. This doesn't change the amount. It allows them more time to complete their projects for, that's for 24 and 25. Item 26 is a contract with the state of Florida Department of Health for our normal annual operation. So that is for this year. Item 27, this is an award of a contract to Southern Road and Bridge for marine construction work. So we do a lot of different work for boats and ramps and piers. This is kind of like a work order. So we have it on, it's a bid. It's on a unit pricing basis. And that way, as we have projects come up, rather than bidding and everything, we can act quickly. And so it would be paid for out of their existing funds. Item 28 is the design. So it's phase one design for design-built services for the Cross Bayou Athletic Complex. And again, the funding made available from our penny for Pinellas. Item 29 is change order number four with QRC. This is our annual water and reclaimed water repair. So you can see it's a big modification. A lot of it is due to work that's been done out on U.S. 19 up on their overpass. And they've continuously created problems for us. And Jeremy is making sure that they do their work right, which they weren't doing. And so we've expended the funds that we have available in this. And this is replenishing those funds for that and some other projects. Item 30 is renewal certificates for advanced life support providers. You can see that broke down within your packet. Item 31 is issuing one new one to ME2 LLC, provide non-medical wheelchair transport services. It meets our requirements. Item 32 is amendment number two. This is for with advanced life support responders with eight municipalities and three independent fire districts. This is the base amount, does not include enhancements. So as part of the budget, we had approved the base amount. We also had other funding for enhancements as a result of amendment two. We've pulled the enhancements off. We're moving forward this and we're reevaluating everything else. Item 33 is amendments to contract extension with UnitedHealthcare. This is for excess stop-loss insurance policy for high-dollar individuals. Item 34 is proposed settlement agreement. This is basically a reimbursement for an auto accident claim. 35 is the fourth amendment to a lease. This is for the tax collector's gulf debate facility. Under item number 36, this is a ratification of litigation that was filed in the case referenced. It was an animal cruelty case. And under item number 37, there should be a file, looks like it's made it all the way around, on the confidential matter that is on your agenda for settlement. And currently, I'm planning no reports. I will have a report. Item 40 is the state legislative program we just completed. And 41 is a federal. Item 42 is selection of the chair and vice chair. And then county commission new business. Under public hearings, item 44 is a countywide map amendment from residential low, medium, to residential medium, 3.8 acres, just basically brings in and conforms with the longstanding use of the property. Item 45, map amendment, retail and services to residential up in Safety Harbor. And this takes a commercial building that hasn't been used since 2022 as a restaurant and makes it residential. Item 46 is an ordinance amending the countywide plan. This is the first of two public hearings. And so you've had a lot of discussions regarding some of these changes to make it easier to do map amendments. And we do have four panels here if you have questions, but that's the first hearing on that process. We can, as part of Tuesday, we can have a formal presentation. If you want that presentation today, we have staff available and the presentation up. So it's up to you whether you want to do it once or twice. The whole line, oh, go ahead. I do have a question. And I mentioned in the meeting that I didn't really support taking away opportunities for the public to come and speak. And I guess my question is to the attorney, and I don't know if you've looked at all of these, but is this something on land use that, you know, is there a better way to do this versus taking away public comment and putting it on the agenda? And I just don't know if this is the right way to go. And if you have a thought on that or if there's another way we could go, that might be another. And I'm sorry if you all haven't read this yet, but, and it makes sense because it consolidates and it saves on staff time and it does everything else. But I've got concerns about taking away the public's ability to have public comment and have awareness about what's coming up. And so your thoughts, I know I talked to you about it and I know you have some thoughts and that's why I'm leading you there. I do have some concerns about that myself. I know that I think all of you probably received an email from an individual that expressed some concerns about that as well as citizen. I will say many of the comments in that email are not well-founded. He references quasi-judicial proceedings. These are legislative proceedings. They're not quasi-judicial. But I forwarded that email. I think I forwarded it over to Witt because it just came in, I think, Tuesday, late in the day on Tuesday. And I want to, you know, take a look through that and talk with Witt about some of the issues there. But I have some ideas about some things we can do, but it needs to be consistent with the special acts. Special acts as land use changes are done by public hearing. So it is a concern I have to and can probably address it more fully on Tuesday. Because I do want to have an opportunity to speak with Witt and his staff about this. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So we'll do that. You're good. Then we'll have that presentation on Tuesday. They'll go through that in detail. I mean, I read those public comments, and there's a lot of, there's no intent to try. I mean, and that's really what that letter said, that there's intent. If you recall, Commissioner Scheer brought this up about how long as a developer it takes to go through when you're going through at a local level and at a county level. And it's just bureaucracy at its finest. And we talk about refinements. That's the intent of this. And so we'll have that discussion, but just while, for people that are watching, they're trying to link it to some other recent issues. And it's just completely out of, you know, out of left field. It's not correct. I think there probably is many discussions about what we do as far as notification and all of that, which we could probably look at separately. That's different than the number of hearings that we have. So as long as we, we have one hearing, we have two hearings, but we're not, we're not giving out the information to the public to participate, that becomes an issue. And, you know, and, you know, and just while we're on that topic, you know, you all got an email from Commissioner Scott. And, you know, and we haven't had the opportunity since that to discuss some of those changes about better notification. How many, we're, staff's working on that. We heard that in the meetings. We're going to bring back to you some proposed changes. And you may want to go further. That's fine. So we will have that discussion in the near future. And those are, those would be above and beyond what state statute requires. That's exactly right. How, how, what's the right distance? And I heard, well, maybe in a rural area you go further than, you know, I don't know. We'll have that discussion. Staff completely agrees. Okay. Thanks. All right. So that's that. Hold on one second. Commissioner Nowicki. And then it's going to increase density requirements too. For what? The amendments. Additional supportive amendments. This? 46, right? Well, I'm going to have Linda come up and explain this. This was for Pinellas. Thank you, commissioner. There is a provision to increase density standards in the, in target employment centers for mixed use developments that have employment. And the, uh, that was requested by our local government partners. And the intention of that is to, um, be able to better compete with the live local act. Okay. Yeah. Cause I think I'd like to, I don't know, maybe like separate the issues if we're talking about like public hearings and increased density. I mean, you know, maybe it's good to like separate them, um, instead of kind of lumping them together. Uh, this is a fairly, uh, robust ordinance because we were, um, as we looked at the streamlining amendments, um, that triggered a lot of changes throughout the rules. So there was a lot of overlap between the different topics. Uh, if we had split it into separate ordinances, you would have been seeing the same pages in different ordinances, but with different amendments. And that would have been very confusing. So what we did instead is we, uh, presented it as one package, but we split each topic into a different exhibit of the ordinance so that you can take those issues one at a time. And if there's something that, uh, you feel shouldn't be in there, um, then we can, we can remove that content for the final ordinance. Okay, perfect. And that'll be part of our presentation on Tuesday. And remember, this is just the first of the public hearings. I understand. Okay. Um, item 47 is amending the, uh, chapter 87 related to County drug fair. And there's some changes to state law. This will make us compliant with the changes. Item 48 is resolution electing not to exempt property. Under the live local that meets the 80 to 120 threshold. We do that pretty much each year. That doesn't make it automatic that they are eligible. They'd have to come to us. Um, item 49, our budget amendments. Uh, so we have different things that have come in as we do each year is kind of clean up. So this is related to the 26 budget and then item, um, 27 or item 50 are related to some proposed changes to the 27 budget. So if you have any questions about that, please feel free to reach out to me or Chris Rose and we can explain any of those. And that concludes the agenda. Okay. Any questions on those last couple of things? Yeah. Come here. Just one quick thing. I've been getting some like emails and concerns about the spraying of helicopters in St. Pete. So I don't know if you're going to touch on that and the administrator's report or some of the last items. Um, no, well, I think some people, I've sent it to Kelly Levy. Yeah. Um, so, so we, we follow, we follow the department of agriculture guidelines on this. Um, I can have Kelly speak to it under County administrator's report if you want on Tuesday. Um, because I, I, I hear, I see the same, you know, concerns that people have raised and on social media and everything else. Um, you know, and she's going to be the expert to speak to it. I mean, one of the concerns has been that our numbers are relatively low compared to other areas. And yet we're using an approved method, but, but nonetheless is, is it too much? I've gotten some, we've gotten some too. Yeah. So let's have a little conversation about that. So, um, Jill's over conducting class over there, but she knows she'll, she'll have Kelly speak to it on Tuesday, on Tuesday. Okay. Mr. Chair, one of the things, like one of the emails was spring when kids were entering in school, the people that were flying the plane spring were out of Fort Myers. They don't know what time our school is. And so it was like nine, nine 30. Um, and they have to go at a, at a lower level flight path that they have to follow as well. So it is, and they have to do it and they have to, and they have to do it. During, during daytime hours because of antennas and things from a safety standpoint, they have to do it during the daytime. Um, so. All right. Okay. Anything else for the good of the order? Just thanking a deputy Mike Winnick and deputy Kevin McSweeney and deputy Jeff Atkinson for being here as always to take care of us. All right. We are adjourned. Lunch is served. Thanks.