Good morning, everybody. I hope everybody's doing well on this fine Thursday morning, August 14th. I'd like to call our work session to order. The first item we have on today's agenda is the National Community Survey. Good morning, Commissioners. So, you know, we do the National Community Survey. We have the 2025 results. Last year, you had asked that we move this up. So Jason's on his way up to present to you the results, and the idea being that you would have those results before we finalize the budget. And so we've moved that up. He's here to present, and I'll turn it over to him.
All right. Morning, Jason. That's great. Good morning. Hello again. Yeah, we moved this up a lot. I was actually here in February when we had our Super Bowl party back again here. So I'm excited to be back. Before I begin, a thank you here to Jim and Matthew, who were a big help in getting this turned around so quickly. They helped with the survey development, the implementation process, the report that you have, and the presentation here. I'd also like to extend a thank you to Brandon Barnett, who was our project manager for this year's effort and last year's effort. You're stuck with me going forward, but Brandon is great, and he's worked on this project with Pinellas for the last few years. All right. So with that, just a little bit of a reminder about who we are once again. Polko is an online community engagement polling platform. We work with hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide for strategic planning, for budgeting, for empowering resident voices. I actually looked on my way here on the airplane. Florida is our third largest client base in the United States. So a lot of the comparisons and work we do is with other communities here in Florida. The National Research Center joined Polko in 2019. We're best known for there are national benchmarking surveys like the NCS, the National Employee Survey, the Community Assessment Survey for Older Adults, among others. Our benchmark database is the largest of its kind, and it's been growing since 1994. You can also see we partner with a couple of key individuals or organizations, I should say, ICMA, the National League of Cities, and dozens and dozens of academic organizations like the Hoover Institute at Stanford, as well as UW-Madison, and most recently the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. We know this from February, but the main ways that we can utilize these results and what we're mainly going to talk about today are the first and the last items here, monitoring trends in resident opinion over time, we'll talk about that, and the ability to benchmark these services against other communities who have asked similar questions as Pinellas County has. The hope here is that as these findings are presented, it's going to spur some ideas on where you might want to dig deeper and allow you to have some comparative data from 2024 through 2025. So with that, the NCS is a standardized five-page comprehensive survey that focuses on the livability of Pinellas County by categorizing these survey questions into the ten main facets of community livability. You can see them on the slide here. These facets have been identified through extensive survey research as those that are most impactful to residents' quality of life. The NCS includes dozens of items underneath each of these ten facets to provide a full picture of how residents feel about the community. And finally, and I think maybe most importantly, these facets tend to align with municipal departments, making it easy for county staff to find the information that's of most importance to them in the final report of results. All right, so without further ado, let's talk about this effort. All households within Pinellas County were eligible to participate in the survey. A list of households using zip codes serving Pinellas County was purchased based on updated listings from the United States Postal Service. And then using your GIS boundary files that you provided, addresses located outside of Pinellas County boundaries were removed from the list of potential households to survey. So from that smaller list, 5,000 addresses were randomly selected to receive the invitation. The 5,000 randomly selected households received mailings beginning on February 27th, and the survey remained open for six weeks. As we said earlier, we conducted this survey as quickly as possible after the delivery of the 2024 report, which happened again right around Super Bowl Sunday, and as a way to gather pre- and post-hurricane season results. We're going to indicate throughout the presentation here areas where we saw significant changes to items related to storm activities. So the first mailing was a postcard that invited residents to take the survey online. The next mailing contained a cover letter with instructions, the five-page survey questionnaire, and a postage-paid return envelope. The online survey was available in both English and Spanish, and all mailing materials included instructions in both languages on how to access the survey in their preferred language. A total of 420 completed surveys were received from these efforts, providing a response rate of 9% and a margin of error around our final numbers of plus or minus 5%. We then compared the demographic profile of that sample to that of the entire county and weighted the final survey results. Now, in addition to this randomly selected probability sample of residents, a link to an online community-wide open participation survey was also publicized by the county. This open participation survey was open to all county residents and became available on March 27th. The survey remained open for two weeks, and 1,904 responses were received from those efforts. Participation by residents in the survey has shown an increase over each of the past three years. We had around 850 total completed surveys in 2023. We had around 925 total completed surveys in 2024, and this most recent effort garnered 2,324 completed surveys in 2025. Now, the presentation and the report are based on the randomly selected 420 responses from the random sample mail-based survey, but the responses to the open participation survey are provided separately in the full report. All right, so one of the major advantages to using Polko and NRC is the ability to benchmark your ratings to ratings of communities from around the nation. As I said before, NRC was the first to identify the need to create benchmarks of local government opinion. You can see there are currently about 500 communities in our national database. Pinellas County received comparisons to the entire national database, which we'll be referring to as national benchmarks, but also opted to receive custom benchmark comparisons to a subset of communities of similar size. We'll describe that here in just a few slides. All right, so with that, we'll turn to some high-level results before we hit on some key findings that our data science and survey research teams pulled together. So in the survey, we have two questions that ask directly about the 10 facets of community livability. The first asks residents to rate the quality of each of these 10 facets, and you can see the result in comparison to the national benchmark here in the shading on the chart. The second question asks about those same facets of livability, but is centered on how important residents think it is for the community to focus on each of these areas in the coming two years. So we ask both about current quality and future importance, and we use those to create this, which is our quality importance gap analysis. We use this chart, which is also included in the report, to help determine which areas are of relatively higher importance and lower quality to residents, those with the largest gaps shown on the screen here. This chart is just one of many ways that we can interpret your data, and it can be helped to identify key findings, and it can help to determine which areas the community may need additional focus or resource allocation and which others are performing well by comparison. So we hinted at national benchmarks. We had 122 survey items for which residents provided evaluative ratings, and in those 122 items, nine items received ratings that were higher than the national benchmark. 101 received similar ratings, and 12 received lower ratings. You can see here, of those 12 ratings, 10 were directly related to utilities, feelings of safety from natural disaster, or mobility concerns, of which only two were also lower in the 2024 results. Ratings are considered to be similar if they're within 10 points of our rolling national average and higher or lower if they are more than 10 points different from that average. In addition to those national benchmarks, Pinellas County also elected to compare their results to a custom subset of communities from our national database. This custom subset included 19 communities of similar population size to Pinellas County. The county ranked 10th in terms of size, placing it right in the middle of this cohort. Of the 122 items, once again, for which residents provided evaluative ratings, 50 received higher ratings when compared to this custom subset of communities, nine of which were much higher, meaning that the ratings were at least 20 points greater than the average. 71 received similar ratings, and only one item, feelings of safety from flood, fire, or other natural disaster, scored below custom comparison communities. And as we discussed last time, this is our... Oh, sure, go ahead.
I'm sorry, just if you could take a minute and try to get through this brain. No problem. Good luck with that. Really, just explain the difference. I think I understood what you talked about when you talked about importance versus the other. The other is... I just want to understand, make sure I understand those.
Sure, the gap analysis? Yeah. Yeah, so the other is going to be current ratings, so it's percent excellent or good for those 10 items. So current ratings for utility infrastructure, current ratings for feelings of safety, current ratings for all 10. Let's take the infrastructure, for example.
Sure.
On the first page, it's 48%. Right, right. That's telling us what?
48% of respondents said excellent or good to the current ratings of utility infrastructure in the county. And if you go to the right, it's something like 92% said that that was an essential or very important area of focus.
So the first one was really rating us?
Correct, the current rating.
Commissioner, these are countywide. Right. And so when you're looking at utilities, and that's not necessarily focused around Pinellas County utilities. It could be any of the city's utilities also.
And we do have all the results broken down by area, sub-area, so we could compare ratings of utilities across the county as well. That's something that we provide in the full report too.
Yeah. It would seem to be, for our purpose, it would seem to be important to understand that distinction.
That would just require further analysis, so we can look at where, like, for instance, our utilities are, and we can dig into that type of data. But yes.
Yeah, exactly. And we can get you the breakdown table for utilities if that's something of interest by area. It's available online, but it can be PDF'd pretty quickly, and it's pretty straightforward to page through. So I can get that for you. Yeah. Just as last time, this is our same custom cohort comparison. So when we're looking and seeing custom comparisons throughout, this is the group that Pinellas County is compared against. So you can see there in the middle, we have large communities here, fellow counties, large cities across the United States within a similar population band, or I should say the top 19 here. So we have comparisons to the nation. We have comparisons to that smaller group. We also have comparisons to yourself, right? We did this back in 2024, and that was the reason we pushed so quickly to get this out in 2025. So compared to the results from the 2024 survey, six received ratings that were significantly higher than the previous survey iteration, 92 received similar ratings, and 24 received lower ratings. Of those, 16, again, are directly related to utilities, feelings of safety from natural disaster, or mobility concerns. We're going to highlight these as we work our way through the key findings.
When you're looking at trends over time, items are considered to have a statistically significant change if the rating is plus or minus 6.7 percentage points from the 2024 survey.
Okay. So with that, we're going to move into a highlight or into some of the highlights of the key findings here. I do want to point out that there is a lot of additional data in the full report. Yes, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, no, that's fine.
Going back to this custom comparison, when I wrote down a note here that said similar sized. Yes. And then I see this page of comparison cohort. Yes. I see New York City.
True. So the largest cohort that we have in our national database here. So it's the top 19 with Pinellas County in the middle. If we wanted to make this a little bit smaller, we certainly could, but we typically say we want to have about 20 communities to compare against. These are the 20 largest that we have in our national data set.
Yes.
Yes.
It's not necessarily similar size to Pinellas County.
It's not similar size. You are the median in this cohort of, it looks like, about 8 million to 500,000 with Pinellas County at 960. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I brought this up in our strategic planning session. I mean, that these were terrible, you know, custom comparable places. I mean, they're all mostly like liberal, Democrat ran, like terrible places to live. New York, Philly, Baltimore. I'm from Baltimore, so I can say that. And so I don't really think it's like an accurate, you know, comparison to Pinellas County. So, I mean, I just, of course, someone's going to say it's better to live here than Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, New York. I mean, I like to see Greenville, South Carolina, Asheville, you know, places where people are migrating to, not migrating away. And, you know, I brought this up in our strategic planning, and so it's a disappointment to see the same list again.
Sure, and this is something that's fluid, right? We can look through our national database, and if there are other communities you'd prefer to be compared against, that's something that can be addressed moving forward. That's no problem. We also have inward migration measures in there, too. So if we wanted to look for areas where we had more inward migration, we could utilize that as our custom cohort as well. This was the list that was selected in 24 and maintained for 25, but I appreciate the commentary, yeah. Okay, so moving here into some key findings. Our first key finding, residents continue to experience a high quality of life in Pinellas County. So over 8 in 10 residents rated Pinellas County as a place to live and the overall quality of life in the county as excellent or good. The latter scored above that custom benchmark comparison. In addition, many of the other quality of life ratings scored above communities in our custom cohort, including the overall image or reputation of the community, would recommend living in Pinellas County if someone asked, the overall sense of community, and the overall sense of civic or community pride. Key finding number two, residents praise the local economy with many items scoring above our national benchmarks. So roughly 9 in 10 residents praised Pinellas County as a place to visit, scoring much higher than our national and custom comparisons. About three quarters gave high marks to the variety of business and service establishments, shopping opportunities, and the vibrancy of downtown or commercial areas, surpassing our national averages. We also can see here that the latter saw a statistically significant increase from 2024. A similar proportion provided positive ratings to the overall quality of business and service establishments and Pinellas County as a place to work, scoring on par with comparison communities. And then you can see on the bottom here, one key area, cost of living, which saw decreasing trends in 2024, rebounded a bit in 2025, returning to the approximate rating that it received back in 2023. This seven-point increase is a statistically significant change, and ratings for cost of living did score higher than that comparison group. Yep, go ahead.
Okay, so I'm getting two different pieces of data that I'm feeling. One is comparing ourselves to ourselves from a previous year, which I find relevant. Right. And then comparing to a national database is a whole different discussion. Right. For me, I really like that comparative to ourselves to see how we have changed or not. Right. To our own people's, our own residents' self-evaluation.
Yes. So in that case, keep an eye on the upward or downward trend indicators. I will say there's actually about four or five ways you could look at any single item. So if we look at cost of living, for example, you can see the trend indicator. That's what you were emphasizing. Right. This means it went up from 2024 for our residents. We have the indicator for custom benchmark comparisons. We have the shading for national benchmark comparisons. But you also have just the raw result, too. Right. It's good to say that the cost of living rating went up by seven points, but it's still only 27 percent saying excellent or good. Right. So there's multiple ways to digest any individual item here. You might say it's good that it's going up, but we could do better, obviously, because 73 percent are saying fair, poor, fair or poor. So when we're looking at this, there's a lot of data that you can digest just from one slide here. But trends are going to be indicated wherever there's positive or negative trends. So you'll see that the rest of the way. Trends with ourselves. Exactly. On that right, the arrows on the. Correct. And it's at least 6.7 percentage points changing. Right. So it's a major move. It's a statistically significant change. Yeah. Yeah.
Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. So for the cost of living. Right. Versus the overall economic health. Yes. Those, in my opinion, overlay each other. Certainly. Did you see any of that in your data? Because I think it reflects exactly what people are feeling, sensing and living. But I'm just really baffled that the overall economic health rated so high at 63% that may be due to the fight for 15, an increase in minimum wage to make it $15, which is more than a federal at $7.25. But then the cost of living here locally, because of a number of factors.
Right. Right.
Did you see any overlays or cross apps or?
So this is pretty typical to see. And they're both in line with national benchmark comparisons. Right. So both of these are within 10 points of what we see around the nation. It's not unusual that we would see overall economic health in the 50s or 60s while seeing cost of living. We also have, we didn't highlight them here, but they're in the report. We have a number of affordability measures throughout the report. Affordability of quality child care, affordability of quality food, quality housing. All of those are found in the report. Not surprising that those trends have been moving downward everywhere. They've stayed pretty flat here in Pinellas County, which is why we didn't show it here. But the ratings are lower than the overall economic health. But I think you're looking for the affordability measures there, and those would be of use, I think. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.
Quick follow-up to that. Is the cost of living, compared to our comparison cities there, or regions, is that increasing there as well in terms of quality on the other ones? I'm sorry. Could you ask? The cost of living, ours is, our favorability there has gone up since we did the last survey. How about across the country? Is it going up?
From 24 to 25, it was actually the exact same. I just looked at these measures before the meeting. Across the country, it has not seen a movement. It's within two percentage points when you average it across the U.S. for cost of living. It has not seen an upward trend like this. No.
We've, by comparison, then, we've done better.
Correct. Yes. Yeah. We're certainly not seeing a statistically significant upward trend in cost of living around the U.S. No. No. And again, this is just returning to 2023 numbers. It's not like this is jumping off the page from past. Yeah.
But it's also, we're not talking about the cost of living increase. We're talking about the people who rated it, our cost of living in this county, as excellent or good. Got it. Exactly. So 27%, which is up from, would you say, 20%? 24. 24%. Oh, I'm sorry, from 20, 24. Yes, from 20% last time. From 20 to 27. So people are saying that very low numbers. But they're saying that it's a better, excellent to good cost of living here has improved. Right. But not, it's still very. It's still very low. To Commissioner Flower's point, it's still not acceptable. Right. Obviously, our residents are hurting on many fronts. Right. But they're also saying the overall economic health is around 6 and 10.
Right. All right. Perfect. Second or third key finding, residents appreciate the arts and cultural opportunities within the county. So residents praised a lot of the educational arts and cultural opportunities in Pinellas County, with all items here actually rating either on par or above our national and custom comparison cohorts. So more than 8 in 10 residents praised the public library services, scoring in line with comparison communities. You can see here roughly three quarters gave high marks to the opportunities to attend special events and festivals, the overall community support of the arts, and opportunities to attend cultural arts and music activities. A similar proportion positively reviewed the overall opportunities for education, culture, and the arts, and the opportunities to participate in social events, rating on par with national benchmarks. But you can see our upward comparisons here to our custom comparison group. One item there in the middle, the opportunities to volunteer, did see a statistically significant increase, up 8 points from 2024. Key finding number 4, residents recognize ease of travel as a potential area of focus. So when asked about the overall quality of the transportation system in Pinellas County, around 4 in 10 residents provided an excellent or good rating. This is a downward trend, a statistically significant decline of 11 points from 2024. Additionally, three items related to vehicular travel scored below national benchmark comparisons, the overall ease of travel by car, the ease of public parking, and traffic flow on major streets. You can see here the ease of travel by car also saw a statistically significant decline. That declined 7 points from the last survey iteration. We also asked about mobility services within the county. Here, all items scored in line with national comparisons. And two items, street cleaning and street repair, saw ratings that were higher than our custom cohort. Street lighting received the highest rating in this group, with around two-thirds giving excellent or good scores, while around 4 in 10 positively evaluated traffic enforcement and sidewalk maintenance, the latter seeing a statistically significant decline in the past year. And then finally, key finding number five, utility infrastructure and emergency preparedness, saw declines from 2024. So many measures related to utility infrastructure saw declines from the 2024 survey, including sewer services, power utilities, and the overall quality of utility infrastructure in the county. A few items, sorry, that might be, someone's trying to join your meeting. Okay, that's okay. I just want to make sure we don't need to let them in. A few items, including drinking water, garbage collection, did receive ratings that were in line with national averages. You can see that there, 8 in 10 and 6 in 10, respectively. When looking, I think you might have to advance me.
So this is one area that I would like to see divided out from county to cities.
We can certainly do that, yes.
Because I think we're going to find there's one or two cities that citizens have significant dissatisfaction with, especially with stormwater. And so I would really be interested to see, is this truly the trend in our county, or is it more city related?
Yes. Jim, we can do that. We can pull that and create a PDF for you as well. It's available in an interactive dashboard, but I think the PDF is easier.
And actually, on the mobility, right? So if we did the same thing on ease of travel by car, ease of public parking, and traffic flow, I think we're going to find the same situation. Because some cities don't manage the lights quite the way we do, and we're getting newer technology that I think will give us better ratings later. Parking in some cities have become non-existent. And so that is another one that I would like to see broken out between county and cities.
We can certainly do that.
Thank you.
You may have to advance me.
So for power, electric, and or gas utility, we don't maintain power poles. We don't maintain gas lines. We don't put in nor remove power poles or gas lines. So even though the service is something that runs through unincorporated parts of the community, the county is not responsible for any of the upkeep maintenance. So I guess my question would be, I wonder if people were thinking more about utility bills for electric and gas because of the increase in those versus because there's been a lot of work for the installation of mast arms, different poles that would be able to sustain greater wind from hurricanes and things like that. And then gas is not as prevalent over here. That's TECO. You know, there are a few gas lines, but it's mostly electric. So I'm just wondering if, well, first of all, I'm going to exclude that one from my mind because we don't control those. I'm wondering if maybe the thought process around those were more related to cost for the service versus the infrastructure of the service. Even though it says infrastructure, that's...
Yeah, it certainly could be. In addition to, like, the area, I know we really want to see these broken down by area, all of the demographic questions that you see on the survey, like income, for example, could provide cross-tabular results here as well. You could see, are our lowest income individuals rating power utilities lower than our highest income individuals?
Okay.
Likely, yes, for some of these, right? So we can provide also the breakdown by income, by age, by race, by children in the home, by seniors in the home, right? All of the questions that are included on the demographic page can be broken down across all of these evaluative items. So I think maybe to get to the heart of that question, we could provide the breakdown by household income potentially would be helpful. We also do length of residency. That could also be helpful. Newer individuals moving to the area might have different opinions. So, yeah.
And, Commissioner, Steph's taking notes because, you know, there's... I mean, the whole idea of getting a survey is to give us some indicators, and so now is what do we do with that data? So when we look at infrastructure, for instance, you're going to look at areas of the city. When you look out on the beach and the barrier islands, there was areas where we have, you know, complete control of the water, but maybe the sewers in the city. So I think we've got to try to drill down into it and try to get the takeaways that we can use. We could even share this with cities, you know, and then, again, it's another bit of information for all of us to use. This is the community's feeling.
Oh, yeah. No, no, no worries. I will say we just... Oh, go ahead.
Sorry. I was going to, you know, kind of make a comment on what Barry just said. I think we can get wrapped up in the idea of what's our responsibility versus what somebody else's responsibility is. I get that. It's important to understand the distinction. But it's also important to understand how our residents feel. And they may have seen, and I'm not going to, let's pick City A out there, mentioning a city, that had some really bad results. Right. And that spills over, no pun intended, into other areas of the county. Like if they heard about a spill, we had an area in Palm Harbor that flooded over because it's in a bowl area. And because of that incident may have gotten, you know, attention, it may affect people's responses. And at the end of the day, people have some critiques about our sewer services. And if we do our own, we know we have some distribution issues. The lines are dated, they're aged, and we're having breaks. So, you know, again, we can say that maybe City A over there is not so wonderful, but at the same time, I think we have a lot of issues. And we have our own problems. And I think, again, I think there's two different things we need to take from it.
And, Commissioner, it gets even more complicated because the reality is that residents just want service, you know? And if we get into, like, stormwater, stormwater runs unincorporated through a city, out to unincorporated through another city. And so, you know, it's the maintenance of all the channels. And for the residents that are impacted by flooding, they don't really care. They want the system to work. And so we have to take a responsibility to that and look at that and what's causing the issues. They're not going to understand the differences or the outcomes. But those, it gets complicated. So the question is, is we've got data now to what do we, you know, how do we use it?
I'm kind of surprised garbage collection didn't see a change one way or the other just with the amount of debris we had to deal with after the storms. You know, yeah, either they were really impressed. Or because we got, you know, our phones blew up with, you know, when are you going to come pick up my stuff? So it seemed like it could never happen fast enough. But, right?
Yes, and I will say sharing the results with other communities I think is a great idea. I'm actually just wrapping up the NCS for St. Petersburg. They just finished theirs. And Clearwater is also a client of ours as well. Their results are all public too. They're done at different times of the year. But you can gain some information from those as well, most likely. So in addition to those overall measures, we also have emergency services that were rated here. Fire services, ambulance, EMS, both received positive evaluations from around 9 and 10 respondents. Fire prevention and education also received good or excellent scores from around three quarters. However, survey questions related more directly to storm damage or emergency preparedness did see some declines. Overall ratings for emergency preparedness fell 11% from 2024. And stormwater management also saw a statistically significant decrease of 24 points. In addition to these service ratings, residents were also asked about overall feelings of safety from fire, flood, or other natural disaster. You can see that rating on the right, around 4 and 10, said they felt very or somewhat safe. Again, unsurprisingly, this rating saw a decrease from 2024 and came in below our national and custom benchmarks. Now, in addition to these standard questions found on the NCS, once again, we included some additional custom questions related to infrastructure and communications around future planning for projects. So these slides will look familiar. In the first question, unique to Pinellas County, residents were asked about the importance of making investments into various items. Stormwater management and water and sewer systems received the highest importance from residents, followed by traffic mitigation, addressing housing affordability and mitigating beach erosion. Around two-thirds also provided essential or very important marks to pedestrian improvements, like expanding the sidewalks and continuing to enhance behavioral health. You can see the comparisons here as well to your results from last year. So two items saw a statistically significant increase in resident support for future investment. That's going to be stormwater management and pedestrian improvements, such as expanding or widening walkways and sidewalks. And then finally, another custom question asked residents, if the county were planning a project near them, how would they prefer to be contacted about said project? You can see here the majority still prefer to have a letter mailed to the home. Roughly three-quarters would prefer an email, while six in ten preferred a text. Hosting an in-person meeting or posting information on social media was preferred by just around half of respondents, and next door was once again our least preferred at around 25%. These are unchanged from 2025, but still another good indicator for sources of information moving forward. All right, so then this is the summary of conclusions pulled out here from the 2025 St. I should say Pinellas County survey. Residents continue to experience a high quality of life. Second, residents praised the local economy. We had a couple of measures scoring above national benchmarks. Cultural and art opportunities continue to be appreciated by residents. Fourth, residents recognized ease of travel as a potential area of focus. And then fifth and finally, utility infrastructure and emergency preparedness saw statistically significant declines from 2024. All right, so with that, I know we kind of had Q&A as we went along, but if there are other questions that you have here about the process, about the report, or about the presentation, I'd be happy to take them now. Thank you for your time.
So thank you for that, for the roll-up of the data. That was very good, and I agree with Commissioner Eggers. It's always nice to know from the ones who respond what they're thinking or what their interpretation is. I did find it very ironic that we didn't get a better score when it came to emergency preparedness, because since I've been here, the amount of work that has gone into our communications department, our EOC center, the information that goes out in a variety of forms, our print materials, know your evacuation zone. You know, you don't necessarily have to go out of town, just get to higher ground. You know, just all of those things that we do, I just would have thought that maybe that would have been much higher, because we saw a greater number of people planning and doing things that they should do in order to be as safe as possible. So I thought that would have been much higher. I wasn't surprised. I'm surprised that my friend over here, Dave Eggers, didn't say anything about the traffic light timing, because I know you've made that a point, which does help traffic to flow, you know, much quicker, so that we don't have some of the backups that we have. And I was also surprised at, can you go back to the slide before this? Certainly can.
Which one would you like?
Go back. The transportation piece, residents recognize ease of travel as a potential area of focus, because a previous slide was ranked pretty low, not real low, but pretty low when it came to traffic mobility or transit mobility, transportation. And I know that several of our commissioners serve on PSTA, and a lot of us are concerned about transportation. And Commissioner Scott and I were at a conference the other day, well, many meeting, the other day at Tampa International that talked about regional transportation issues and whatnot. So I was just also surprised at the correlation or non-correlation between the two. But I appreciate this. It's good information. Thank you so much. I think for the most part it does kind of signal around what we hear, what I hear. I can't speak for us, what we hear and what they want us to work on. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You're welcome. Any other?
All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yes. All right. Okay. So moving on to state government relations services.
So, Commissioners, Matt's on his way up. But, you know, obviously the staff went and did a RFQ. And I'll turn it over to Matt to explain kind of what they've done and the recommendations that are here before you.
Thank you, Barry. Commissioners, Matt Spohr, Assistant County Administrator. I want to thank Jason for that presentation. We worked hard to get that done. But I also don't want anyone to feel sorry for him because his flight back to Wisconsin isn't until tomorrow. So he gets to hang out on Clearwater Beach for the rest of the day. So no one should feel bad for Jason. A committee of myself, Brian Loak, Kelly Hammer-Levy, and Ralph Lair, who is the Intergovernmental Affairs Director of Pasco County, reviewed the six proposals that you received for your RFQ. All six firms met the minimum qualifications that we requested. So all six firms are qualified. Those firms listed in alphabetical order are Capital City Consulting, Gray Robinson, Johnston & Stewart Government Strategies, Shoemaker Advisors Florida, Sunrise Consulting Group, and Allegis Group. The committee met. We discussed all six proposals, reviewed them, and we ranked them. We ranked our top three firms based on qualifications, experience, and responsiveness to Pinellas County. The top three forms, as recommended, are Gray Robinson, Shoemaker Advisors Florida, Sunrise Consulting Group. Each firm brings relevant strengths in legislative access, local government advocacy, and the ability to support the county's appropriations and policy agenda. The proposals were sent to the BCC on August 5th. The goal of your discussion today is to select those firms you wish to present to you in two weeks on August 28th. And it's very important to note that we specifically chose the RFQ process so that you may select the lobbyists that you believe is in the best interest of the county, regardless of the committee's rankings. So the goal today is for you to let us know who you would like to present to you on August 28th. And we've given you our recommended three to present. And I'll answer any questions you may have and then listen to your discussion.
Not a question. Just for my preference, it would be a Gray Robinson, Shoemaker, if that's what you're asking, that we share that.
And if I could, I mean, again, it's, we presented these, I mean, by the very nature, it's, they're lobbying firms. You'll have a lot of experience from your own history. And that's the reason it's presented to you. You can, you can select one, you can select six, and we will set up those interviews to be able to do in-person interviews. And then you can make a decision regarding who you think is best.
Thank you, Chair. Is there a breakdown of what each one costs? Like instead of having to go through like each 40 page, is there like a breakdown of?
I can get that. I can tell you that they were all between $70,000 and $90,000. So they're all within budget.
Vince, I have a list and I certainly can send it to you if you want.
Yeah, yeah, thank you. Or I have it back there. I can read it off to you if you want to write them down so everybody has it. I don't have a pen.
Here you go. Okay. Okay, so Capital City is $270,000.
That's for a three-year contract? That's a three-year total. Okay, so 90, yeah. 90,000. So 90 a year.
90 a year total. I'm just giving you the totals. Yeah, totals. Totals, because it's a three-year contract, right?
Correct.
So $270,000 for Capital City. Legis is $144,000. Gray Robinson is $261,000. Shoemaker is $270,000. Sunrise is $252,000. And Johnson Stewart is $225,000. And did I do that too fast for you?
No, no. I took shorthand.
Yeah.
Legis, $144,000. Legis was $144,000.
And did you have any others?
261 was Gray Robinson.
And different from a RFP process, an RFQ is it's qualification-based selection.
Right.
So you don't have to consider price as part of that. But it's something to consider.
It is something. You can consider whatever factors. And it could be negotiated. You can consider whatever factors you want. But I just wanted to make sure that you understood the difference between RFP and RFQ.
So the vast majority of them were, you know, $225,000 to $270,000. Legis came in really low. They came in really low. And what I can tell you about these firms is I'm friends with almost every one of them on here. So I know them really pretty well. I know Chris, I'm sure, knows them all pretty well. We know the people they represent. You know, we know them all pretty well. So I have my thoughts. I, you know, I was surprised. And I'll go ahead and put my stuff out. I was going to wait until the end. But I was surprised Johnson & Stewart didn't make the top three. They're locally based. I love that. And hang on. If you read their RFP, you could see that they know our issues. And they know our issues because they're locally based. And so they were very concise in their proposal. And they spoke more about the needs that we have than I felt anybody else did. I thought their price point was great. It's not the lowest, but it's not the highest. My experience with them, and I just want to bring them in to have the conversation. I'm not saying that's who I want. I'm just saying I would like to have them included. They loved the process. When I worked with them, I got to see how creative they were. That and Timmons Group, those two groups taught me more about the process and how if you can't get it done through a bill, there are other creative ways to get it done. And those two firms helped me when I was in the process to learn how to do things through Proviso, how to do things at the back end, how to do things. But they taught me more comprehensive ways to get things done creatively. And so, you know, just based on my experience with them, they come high, and I would really like to include them in the interview process. And I know their history. I know they were with another huge firm before. And my problem with Southern is they got so big, and I've said this before, that when they get so big and have so many clients, and the governor says or the speaker says, you can have five. Give me your top five. Are we a big enough client that we're going to make their top five? And Ashley did a really great thing for me and gave me a hyperlink for everybody that's the lead on these so you can look and see who their clients are. And I like that, and if you'd like her to share, she can share. So you can look, because what we also need to know is who their clients are and is there going to be a conflict. You know, if they represent, I don't know, well, if they represent the Phillies and we're going to be voting on the Phillies, great example. Are they going to be going, but that's not a state thing, but it's a great example, okay? That's a great example. But let's say we're looking for something at the state level, but they have a client that would oppose what we want. Is that a problem? You know what I mean? And so I think some of it, there's a lot, it's complicated, and there's a lot to look at. And so, you know, I'm waiting to hear what everybody else has to say about their firms, but I got to know Gray Robinson really well before I went in the process because PSTA used to contract with Gray Robinson back in the day when I was a mayor, and I served on PSTA. And they taught me a lot because I used to lobby with them. They'd have me go to Tallahassee with me. And then for some reason, I'm not sure why, PSTA dropped Gray Robinson and then went with RSA. And I was very disappointed RSA didn't apply because I think RSA is wonderful. So, anyway, so I would like to also include whoever you all are going to recommend, Johnson, Stewart. I think they would be a great one to interview, especially since they're local. And in their proposal, they really identified Pinellas County issues so they know us. So that's my thought.
Mr. Lavelle?
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to echo a lot of what Commissioner Peter said. I think the top three are great. I've worked with all three of them. Shoemaker is local. I think that's important. They're based in Tampa. Sunrise also, they're in Pasco. I know them very well. I've known Sean for many years, back when he was a lot younger than he is now. But, and the Johnson, Stewart folks are great, too. And I have no objection with adding them, if that's the will of where you all want to go. I think we should keep it at four and not, you know, include all six. But I will say that all six of them are very quality firms. There's not anybody on this list that I would say, hey, guys, this is, you know, bad. These folks are bad because there are plenty of those folks in Tallahassee. But I will say one thing that Commissioner Peter said is I've been in the room when, you know, with the speaker when he's looked at lobbyists, you know, top three or top five lists. And that is very true. And, you know, that's true whether it's the, you know, Ballards of the world, the Southerns of the world, or even, you know, some of the middle size or, you know, small firms. And I think, you know, I like the idea of having a middle-sized firm that thinks we're important and is not going to put us on the back burner and is not going to choose another client over us. Because in Tallahassee, there's a lot of that that goes on and a lot of issues. You know, take vacation rentals, for instance, you know, or take other things that FAC, you know, may be supporting or opposed. You know, we want a client that or a lobbyist that's going to value us as a client, not one of their other clients that may pay them, you know, more money and, you know, not really care what we have to say on something.
Well, I'm going to probably defer a lot of my comments until we meet with them. I do like some of the points that you all have brought up. The folks that have worked in Tallahassee and understand that side of it a little better, I think, provide some insight. For some reason, the group that we just, that just left us or, you know, isn't doing us anymore, I had good relationship with them. I talked to them frequently and I didn't have any issues. So apparently we had issues with them and so that's why they're not here and why they didn't even apply. So to your point about the middle-sized firms that, you know, maybe were kind of an important ingredient versus the ability to affect change or, you know, not change, but just understand what's going on up there. Larger firms better at that, smaller firms. And so I just, could you explain a little bit more about that, the two things. One larger that might have better impact, but one smaller that, you know, rates us higher.
And this is just my opinion. I've never been a lobbyist. I have no desire to be a lobbyist. Um, you don't want to have somebody that has like one or two clients because they don't really have those relationships. But you also do not want to have, in my opinion, somebody that has 200 clients because you're going to get lost in the shuffle. And there's going to come a time where there's going to be conflicts. And when that, uh, firm has conflicts, they're not going to pick little old Pinellas County that is paying them $90,000 or $70,000 a year because somebody is going to be paying them $200,000 a year. Um, and they're going to pick them over us. And a lot of times they're not going to tell us, hey, we have a conflict, uh, and we're choosing, um, you know, and, and I'm just using this as an example. Um, like, uh, Google or Amazon or, you know, some of these like really big companies that, you know, have, um, 50 lobbyists in Tallahassee. That will just, um, do you remember the wall, were you there for the wall wars, Walmart and, and, and like, like some of the big companies, yeah, will literally buy up, um, all of the lobbyists that they can just so they can be conflicted out and literally tell those lobbyists, hey, we're going to pay you $25,000 a month to do nothing, to do nothing, uh, just so you're not working for the other side. And, and, and Commissioner Flowers would, has probably seen some of that when she's been up there. Yeah. And, um, and, and I'm not saying that Walmart would do that to us. I mean, Walmart's a good company, but that's like an example where there's like different food fights in Tallahassee that if we have a large, um, firm that has hundreds and hundreds of clients, they're not going to care about little old Pinellas County. And that's probably why some of the largest firms in Tallahassee didn't bother to even apply because $70,000 a year is chump change.
Not worth it.
Yeah.
So, so how do you, um, how do you rate effectiveness? Like, and I, I mean, I don't know how you do that. I mean, I know you just described the middle size and I do understand that. I do appreciate that. What about effectiveness and access for us?
Yeah, I mean, I, I don't think that there is, um, like just taking, for instance, um, the top three. When you say top three, the three that she listed? No, no, the three that Matt listed. Gray Robinson, Sunshine, and Shoemaker. Shoemaker. Alan Susky is the head of Shoemaker Advisors in Tallahassee. He has multiple clients in the Tampa Bay area, but also around the state. And so like somebody like that would have access to, and I knew this firsthand, I literally introduced, because I've known Alan for 20 years. I remember introducing him to Chris Sprouse a long time ago, and I still try to take credit for that. Um, and, um, like he would know the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, but also different committee chairs and, and so on and so forth. Uh, Gray Robinson has a, um, large presence in Orlando. Uh, Chris Camardi, Robert Stewart, um, and those folks. I was a graduate of, proud graduate of UCF, best university in Florida. They, I believe, uh, don't quote me on this, I believe they represent UCF. So when I was the education chairman, I tried to do a lot of stuff with UCF. I met with Gray Robinson, um, a lot. Um, Sunrise, um, I believe has a lot of education clients that, as I remember, because I met with Sean and, and his folks a lot. Um, but like each one of those, um, whether it's Sean Foster, whether it's Robert Stewart, or whether it's Alan Susky or Missy Timmons, would have the, uh, whoever the Speaker of the House or the President of the Senate cell phone number. And would be able to say, hey, you know, there's this issue, can I, um, come talk to you about? And, and probably the other, you know, probably all six of them would.
Um, I, all six of them would have access. I, I, the access isn't, I don't, I don't think the access is really on the table here. I think every one of these people have access.
How about our access to them?
Um, I, I, I believe that everyone that's listed as a lead on all of these firms, we would have great access to them. And they're going to assign, they're, they showed us who they're going to assign. And there's one firm that they said the lead on there, that person now has a Washington office. And I don't know that we would, that he would actually be the lead, even though he's listed as the lead. He's kind of the lead in that company, but I don't think he'd be the lead for us. Um, and I think he's going to be pulled in D.C. way too much. So I, I, I don't know that of the ones they listed, he would be the one. Um, but I think they're all really, really good. Now, I think if you've got somebody who has, and, and I may be wrong on this, I may be absolutely wrong on this. But if you have somebody who has, um, 50 or 60 cities and counties, that sounds like it would be great because they get us. And most cities and counties will probably have the same issue. But I would hate to have them go, let's say Palm Beach and I, and us, they have Palm Beach and they have us. And we're similar counties, um, demographically and everything. But let's say, uh, Palm Beach was really in favor of one thing and we weren't. Would there be a conflict? Would they, would they be going to the speaker with our issue or with Palm Beach's issue? Um, and so sometimes it could be if you have too many counties and cities, maybe there's a conflict, but maybe not. Maybe we would be aligned so much it wouldn't matter and there would be strength in that. I don't know. Um, that's something that we would have to debate. No, and who knows? I don't, I don't have an answer to that. Um, but I think any firm that's here, every one of them has access. Any firm that's listed all have great knowledge and, and, and, um, and, and can be creative. The ones that I know that, you know, personally I experienced with how they got creative was again, Tim, Timmons, her, she's Missy. She's partnering with another, with Shoemaker. Um, she and, and, and her colleagues took me under their wing and, and, and really mentored me and taught me so much. And Johnson Stewart, the same thing. They taught me, Jeff and Amanda taught me so much. And, and I know, um, just experience Ashley's had being in the, in the appropriations office for transportation. A lot of lobbyists don't know how to write an appropriation, and she had one firm come in and just gave her a packet with all their appropriations without, and just said, this is what we want, and threw it on her desk. And she's like, really, you're not going to talk to the senator or talk to me about it? You're just going to hand me a packet? And, well, that packet just went in here. So what we need to know is that we're not going to have a firm that's just going to type up a list and throw it on the, on the staffer's desk and say, this is what we want. We want to make sure we have somebody that's going to go in and speak to that senator and, and their staff and make sure that you can see it all the way through. And, and one of the people that did that was on one of these firms. And so, so I'm not going to say which one. I think we ought to interview them and ask the questions and vet it. But, um, you know, those are the kind of things that we want to hope never happens, that they don't just throw a document on a desk and never actually speak to the senator.
So, and on access, a good example would be during budget conference, which is supposed to be a two week process. Yeah. This year it was like a hundred day process, um, which is like right at the end of session and very informal process. And literally like maybe 20 people in the legislature decide, you know, the budget, like the budget chairs and the presiding officers and things like that. And you have very informal meetings on, you know, nights, weekends, um, you know, so forth. And you are passing out, uh, spreadsheets back and forth with the Senate and the meetings are very short, but all the decisions are made beforehand. You know, like, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna offer the Senate, um, you know, the jewel white park in exchange for the Eggers ball field. Um, you know, um, you know, or Eggers ball field is going to go by the wayside because they're going to get jewel white park. And, um, but the, really the lobbyists shine during that time because right after the budget meeting, a good lobbyist will text you and say, line 1,242, uh, jewel white park, please be at a hundred thousand dollars. And please hold firm on that position. And the extraordinary lobbyist will text your aid at the same time because you're literally getting 50 texts, you know, from other lobbyists saying, you know, line so forth, project this, please hold firm, yada, yada, yada. The really good lobbyists will have your aid cell phone and give them the very same message. And so what we would want out of our, you know, lobbyists would be to, for them to text Daryl Roussan, who's the vice chair of appropriations, detects Ed Hooper, who's the chair of appropriations in the Senate. And then also, you know, the Kim Burfields, the Adam Andersons, you know, and all the house people saying, Hey, this project is very important to Pinellas County. Please hold firm or please try to get us a hundred thousand dollars more and so forth.
Ideal part, which I love, I've, I've worked with a number of firms over the years. And the ideal part also is when they are looking for testimony on certain things to be present, to give the specifics on you. You can change a lot of minds at that time. Sometimes not, but there have been times when you change a lot of minds. When you asked about knowing what their history is and their success, I guess is what you said, you can garner that information to see what municipal or county things they've been successful on shepherding through. And not, I'm not talking about something like all counties, but maybe something specific that we had in, and have they been able to do that for someone else? So they have those, the different firms have that list. I'm sure they have their own. Yeah, so you can, so when we're interviewing them, they could share, yeah, they could share examples of their success stories. But I agree with everything that Commissioner Lockvall and Commissioner Peters has said, because it, it's a gentle dance and it's who has the strongest relationships and who's going to last until midnight when everybody else is gone, except the people who are walking and working those hallways when everybody else is gone. Because that's what Senator Roussand does, everybody goes home, he's still there, you know, because that's kind of when the sausage is made at the last minute. So, yeah.
So, if, you got another comment? No, no, I was just going to say, so if we have four that we're kind of targeting to present. I think somebody mentioned three locals, Shoemaker, Sunrise, and Johnson. Did I hear that right? They're all, certainly those three that I mentioned were, they're local, they're Pasco or Pinellas.
Yes, or, right, Shoemaker and Johnson and Stewart are Pinellas, Sunrise, and Pasco.
I mean, I don't, they don't.
Right. So, what I heard was we would like to hear from Gray Robinson, Shoemaker, Johnson and Stewart, and Sunrise. Is that all right?
Okay, Commissioner, if we can.
Can I comment on just one thing, too? I know I sent you all an email last week regarding lobbying in relation to the lobbying contract. I've gotten a couple questions, so I just wanted to, you know, clarify. Related to this matter, you cannot be lobbied by anybody. We thought it was very important to send that out because lobbyists by nature, lobby.
Lobbyist.
Let me be clear, too. This is really for their protection because they can be disqualified if they violate the lobbying prohibition that is currently in your purchasing code. This is not the general lobbying ordinance. This is the one that's specific to the procurement that's occurring. The prohibition is against lobbying on this matter. There is also a provision in there that talks about trying to engender the goodwill of the commission. You can speak with them about matters unrelated to this, but I really throw a message of caution out there. This is a competitive procurement. There is the possibility of a disqualification. And, again, I just want to say and emphasize, I send these precautionary emails really for their protection more than anything. So I just – if you have questions, please call me. But, again, no lobbying in relation to this matter. They can speak with you on other matters, but just a word of caution in that regard.
And the firms – then the firms are so advised as part of the procurement process. I was just saying it was a request in from Shoemaker for something.
I didn't even respond to that.
Even though it had nothing to do with this, I didn't want anyone to think or get the idea. So I was like, I'm sorry. And that's part of the caution I throw out there because, you know, it wouldn't necessarily be us, you know, bringing any kind of action.
But, you know, bid protests are out there.
Is it likely? I don't know. Probably not. But still, cautionary is what it is. And, again, for their protection.
And we do advise them as part of the process.
There are some issues that are pressing that are coming up that I know one firm really wants to speak with us about because it's timely. It has nothing to do with this, but it's another subject that's timely. And so that doesn't mean you can't meet with them. You certainly can meet with them and talk about something else. And that – it really is beholden on you to make sure you don't have a conversation about this. But don't forget there is other business going on. And you can't just put other business going on hold when it's moving forward. And so don't be so quick to cancel or not meet in case it's timely.
Yeah, this was a party event, not a – Right.
But I do think it is to be careful. I mean, and those of you who have perhaps more experience with that know what minefields you can walk into or that they can walk into because they're really just talking about another issue at the same time, you know, giving you comfort and solace in picking them if you – Even though we're not talking about it, you know. So I think you need to be careful. Look in the mirror.
Make sure you're, you know, whatever. So, I got it. So, commissioners, we do have several items on the – other items on the 28th. We have sheriff that will be here, right? And so you have a couple other items on the agenda. If you want, we can set this up to do it, like, first thing after lunch, and we can provide lunch. Or we could do it as working lunch. I wanted to get your temperature on how you want these staged. Obviously, you're interviewing for it. That will take time. We can set them up for, like, 45 minutes each if you want. You tell me. Or you want an hour. Do we need that much? I only take more. I'm 30. You tell me the amount of time, and we'll advise them.
What?
I say 30 myself. 30? Okay, so – Depends on how many questions Eckers has.
Well, that's the reason I ask. And that all depends on how much wisdom you bring to the table, because I really am going to be looking at folks that have dealt with a lot of the lobbyists up in Tallahassee.
I mean, honestly – Well, we'll tell them – based on that, we'll tell them 30 minutes. And if you go over, then they'll just be waiting out there, right? Okay, but we'll bring in lunch, and maybe we can get started, you know, immediately after the meeting, and we can begin that process. We'll set them up for 30 minutes each.
Are they going to present first, and then we have questions?
Yes.
Because, you know, if they're going to present first, that may take 5, 10 minutes.
We can tell them to be concise. Because I was thinking maybe on the safe side do 40. We'll tell them no more than 10 minutes.
Okay.
Okay, if you – I'm just suggesting, you tell me. But I would suggest that they get 10 minutes, they're opening, introduce themselves, tell them about their experience. And if they're a good lobbyist, they should be able to do that in 10 minutes.
Yeah, they can.
And then you can follow up questions from that. Oh, yeah. Or they'll take the entire 30 minutes.
Okay. All right. I was thinking 40, but 30 is fine. Because if it goes over, they'll just – If it goes over, we'll just – Okay.
The others will be waiting in the hall. Right. Okay. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to, you know, piggyback off what the county attorney was saying. You know, for, you know, me, who's only been here seven months, obviously, I don't have relationships that, you know, former state legislators or, you know, some of you all have. And so that's, you know, what I brought up about a month ago looking at our lobbying ordinance. You know, like Hillsborough, if something goes out for bid, you can talk to a lobbyist for the first five days, and then it goes into a cone of silence. And so when I brought up, you know, looking at our lobbying ordinance, you know, I think that specifically, not, you know, getting into, like, logging of the meetings, is that, you know, would give, like, somebody like myself an opportunity or, you know, everybody else to at least have, you know, conversations with people that are applying to get, you know, full spectrum of information versus just one-sided. For a range of all issues, you know, so I think that's something that, you know, we still need to look at of our lobbying ordinance to have it kind of open for a few days, like Hillsborough County, and then go into that cone of silence. So just for the board to digest that.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right. All right. We'll set them up.
All right. Thank you very much.
All right. Now we're up to, oh, boy, our favorite hurricane season update. Wow. What a welcome.
I heard I'm the favorite. Or the topic is.
Good morning, Kathy. How are you?
Good morning, Commissioner. Good morning, Chair Scott. Kathy Perkins, Director of Emergency Management. The good news is we don't have any storms in our near periphery. The system that is near the Yucatan is moving into Mexico and Texas. We'll continue to monitor Tropical Storm Aaron. Right now it's continuing to move to the west. Models do show it moving to the north. Potential impacts in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico this weekend. And we'll continue to monitor. Right now they are talking about maybe some east coast impacts. But just we'll keep an eye on it. But I do want to remind everybody that we are headed into the peak of hurricane season. And we need everybody to make sure that they understand their risk, that they make a plan, and that they stay informed. And I'll be talking about these very things today. The state did pass some new legislature for tax-free items in August, but also year-round preparedness items. And that can be found on the website. They have a tip sheet for that. So that can help people prepare as well. So I would encourage people to take advantage of that as they're going through and looking at their preparedness kits. I do want to remind people that if we do call for evacuations, they should consider staying with friends or family first in non-evacuation areas.
Because that really is the most comfortable option.
But I want to assure people that we do have public shelters that are available. Anybody is welcome to come. We have general population, pet-friendly, and special needs. And if there's anybody out there that needs transportation assistance or has special needs or may need assistance with activities of daily living or have medical needs, they can sign up for our special needs registry. And you can find that and more information at our website at disaster.pinellis.gov. I do want to give you an update, too. We had our final coordination call with FEMA for their direct housing program last Friday. And that is the group that works on the installation of travel trailers, mobile homes, and placing people in apartment rentals. They've helped to place 277 families in direct housing. 39 of those families have been able to move on to permanent solutions. And the remaining 238 families, they'll continue to follow up with them every 30 days doing case management to assess their needs and to help them transition, hopefully, into permanent housing. And that direct housing program will run through September of 2026. So it's a longer-term program to be able to help people. We'll have a meeting next week to discuss the opportunity for people that are in the travel trailers or mobile homes provided by FEMA with the opportunity for them to purchase those units. So we're going to continue to work on last year's hurricane season as we are headed into the height of this hurricane season. Commissioner Flowers, I want to say thank you for calling out all the repairness information that we do. You know, it's hard to see in the NCS that people feel preparedness is less, but I think a lot of that has to do that their feeling for not being prepared is now they understand the reality of their risk. We haven't had the impacts like we had last year, probably since the 1921 storm, and there weren't too many people in Pinellas here for that. And so people get to see firsthand what seven feet of storm surge looks like, what 20 inches of rain looks like, and to really understand their risk. So that's why I cannot stress enough that it is important that people evaluate the risk of where they live and the type of structure that they live in or whatever their special family needs may be. For this fiscal year, we have done 184 events. If you think about that, we're out there almost for an entire six months doing presentations every day. We've reached over 20,750 people this year. That is double the number of people that we reached last year. So we are seeing the community come out to get preparedness information. We held our fourth annual Deaf Fest this past weekend, and Commissioner Scherer was out there. It was great to see him. We were out at the Lealman Exchange. We had about 215 people come out, and this is part of our continued support and commitment to working with our at-risk communities. This was done in collaboration with the Family Center of Deafness, who has just moved their new location into Lealman Exchange. So very excited as we continue to work with them. We've partnered with an amazing group called Seniors in Service, and they've been going out to our mobile home parks. They've gone out to 15 mobile home parks to take out preparedness information, help people understand their risks and what services are available. This year, we held our first-ever Hispanic outreach event, making sure that we had all of our information available in Spanish for those in our community that may not speak English. And we had over 450 attendees at that location. For the first time, we held two mitigation expos, one in Tarpon Springs and one in St. Pete Beach. And this was an opportunity to have vendors come out and demonstrate mitigation tools for flooding, or there were mold remediation companies out there. So a lot of things, just so the community can come out and see what resources are available to them. And we had about 350 people attend between those two events. We completed a boater safety video. So as you know, we are the second-highest registration of vessels in the state of Florida, only after Miami-Dade. So the National Safe Boating Council partnered with us this year to put together a preparedness video to help people to understand how to secure their boats. Again, we want to tell people that if you live aboard a boat, please, please, please do not try to ride out a storm on that boat. We publish over 125,000 English guides, and an additional 20,000 guides go out to all of the middle schoolers through our Tampa Bay Times partnership with the Newspapers and Education. And this year, we actually ran low on guides. We just had to purchase another 10,000 of them. So people are coming out, they are getting the information, and I hope they will continue to be aware of the risks that we have. For our special needs populations, we continued with our call-down. We mailed out a mailer to all of our current registrants, which included a letter that tells them exactly what will happen if we order an evacuation, what type of shelter they're assigned to, what type of transportation we currently have them registered for. And we also send them an information sheet on all of the things that they need to bring with them. And we've been doing a lot of work with our partner agencies to ensure that as these special needs folks are picked up, that they have their necessary medications and medical equipment with them. We've continued to work on our plans for our county information center, our emergency operations center's branches and sections. I'm working with our WebEOC system to help keep in touch with partners and make resource requests. We've done a lot of information and data integration. We're currently working with Duke Energy to better determine the power outages and getting their data layers, how that impacts our critical facilities, even like for traffic signals. So Kelly can, as she's looking at her boards, it's a determination, is that traffic light out because it's a power issue? Or if there's power there and that traffic light is out, then it's probably due to damages. So we continue to try to drill down to get better information on those boards. We've done an integration with utility water and wastewater layers, working with all of the utility providers across the county, again, to better understand the areas that are impacted and the critical facilities are impacted when those systems go down, including our hospitals and our nursing homes. We are looking actively at the water gauges that we have around the county. The state is also doing a dashboard to look at water gauges real time, so we can understand what are the impacts where, you know, the heavy rains are coming in. We're also looking at having a dashboard that will show us the status and systems quickly. And Public Works has done a great job where the gauges that they have, where they have action stages pre-identified. And we're looking at how can we integrate more things into that automatically to help with that notification to those communities and helping to inform the community of their flood risk. For our training front, we developed a shelter task force this year to really look at what happened within the shelters and how can we help better improve our training and incorporate best practices. We've done 12 shelter training sessions with over 445 people in attendance, including supervisors, staff, and different partners. We have 34 staff members that are assigned just as the shelter managers for the teams. We created a just-in-time training video to be able to give that as a refresher for people before they go into a shelter if we activate that. And we held a joint meeting with principals from each of all shelter locations. It was an opportunity for them to meet the county shelter managers and key staff from emergency management, human services, and the Department of Health, key partners that coordinate these activities. We also allowed them to schedule walkthroughs of the sites to continue to build that collaborative relationship. We are working to try to recruit municipal support, and thank you to the county administrator. We continue to work with city managers on that front. We have a training for municipal partners scheduled in August, and Clearwater has already identified personnel to help with these efforts. We've done logistics training for over 140 people. As you'll recall, we did over 4,200 resource requests last year between the three storms. The state has provided a resource guide to the county to help streamline resource requests, and we continue to look at how we can make our systems better and be able to make sure that we're staying on top of all of those resources that are coming in from all of our jurisdictions and partner agencies. In terms of contracts, procurement has opened up an ITQ for vendors for emergency disaster response. It's quite a list of different opportunities for vendors to come in. It's a great way for us to be able to pre-identify who in our community can provide different services. We've entered into a new feeding contract for the emergency operations center and other command centers. That contract is in place with multiple vendors, and those vendors have come out to our locations. In terms of the CDBGDR, so staff is recruiting five positions to stage up the People First Pinellas Department, and they're in the final purchasing stage of negotiating and implementing a contract with the RFP for the top-ranked firm, Warren. They anticipate to bring to the BCC in early September for your consideration, and the goal is to have several People First program applications ready to go in October. And just in terms of Senate Bill 180, there were a lot of things that were peppered into that bill. We are working on the requested updates for websites with the communications department, and we are awaiting further guidance from Florida Division of Emergency Management in terms of training requirements that would also include elected officials, municipalities, public works folks, and other key people involved in emergency response. And we're also waiting on the template for the municipalities for them to create comprehensive emergency management plans. Still not mandated for them, but if they have an emergency management program, they do need to develop that. And other departments are also reviewing the things that fall under their purview to ensure that we are in compliance. One of the other things that I just wanted to bring to your attention, so every four years we have to do an update for the comprehensive emergency management plan, so we're in the process of updating that now, and this is a great opportunity, especially in light of all of the things that occurred last year. This allows us to really integrate a lot of best practices and lessons learned. We plan to have a draft for the BCC for review by August 22nd, and then we'll also be sending out to our partners, cities, to review and provide their input. We have to provide that to the state around October 6th, and then they have 60 days to review it, and then right now we tentatively believe that we'll be coming back to present it to you for BCC adoption in January, February 26th time frame. One of the other things that I did just want to talk a little bit about are the weather alerts. We have had quite a crazy, severe weather season this summer. We had a tornado end of June, and last week we had a term that I've never heard before, but the National Weather Service called it a gustnado that kind of swirled up in the Pinellas Park area, didn't cause a lot of damage, and dissipated pretty quickly, and we certainly have seen a lot of lightning strikes, some that have resulted in house fires. And I just want to give people an idea. So the National Weather Service will send out alerts to a geographic area for flash flood warnings, tornado warnings, hurricane, extreme wind, and storm surge warnings. So for those life-threatening events, the National Weather Service sends it out to the cell phone towers in the area where those events could occur. And then through our Ready Pinellas, which is an alert Pinellas, you can add additional options for notifications for weather. And I highly encourage people to sign up for Alert Pinellas. Last year we sent out 171 public notifications through our Alert Pinellas platform, and that's not just about the severe weather, but it's also about when we order evacuation orders, when the shelters are opening, what resources were available to people post-storm. And then we can also, through our Ready Pinellas app, we send text notifications out through that. And then people can also get a weather radio if they want that will give them alerts. Some of those weather radios are not programmable, and I will caution people that the heat advisories, as some of you may have seen, and some of the marine advisories that come out, come out between like 1 and 3 a.m. in the morning. So you may want to make sure you get a programmable weather radio if you don't want to be woken up for those particular advisories. And any time we enter into a weather situation where there is a marginal risk to any of our communities in Pinellas County, emergency management sends out additional information. We communicate with the communications department to develop social media messages. We use the billboard emergency alert system, and we elevate our status to enhanced monitoring so we can continue to keep an eye on the weather as those systems evolve. And you can find all the information on Alert Pinellas, how to sign up. You can also download our Ready Pinellas app. Our hurricane guide is all, you can find all this information and more at our website at disaster.pinellas.gov. So with that, I will open it up if you have any questions for me.
Not a question, but a comment. Have people just keep that alert system on. I don't want it to happen. What happened in Texas where people turned it off.
And Commissioner Flowers, unfortunately, sometimes when we have a lot of back-to-back severe weather events and people are getting a lot of notifications, they will actually call into our office and ask to be removed from those alerts. People turn their phones off at night, right? You know, and I think especially in places where, you know, you've got a lot of people, a lot of communal people, making sure that you've got some type of somebody that's monitoring, having that weather radio. I know a lot of our departmental offices have weather radios in them, and they go off. But the other thing with that is people need to understand, what do you need to do when that alert goes off? You know, we've heard a lot of people ask about sirens. There's tornado sirens in the Midwest for tornadoes and everything. The challenge of some of those sirens is it's just a blaring noise. It doesn't give people direction. So sometimes there's a lot of confusion as to what people need to do. And that's the beauty of having alert Pinellas and ready Pinellas. We can give additional direction to people on what actions they should do.
Other questions, comments?
With that, I'll turn it over to...
All right. Thanks, Kathy. Morning, Kelly.
Good morning. Kelly Hammerlevy, Public Works Director. And we're just going to provide an update on the debris management process and things that we've learned and changed since last year. But, I mean, obviously with three hurricanes in 24, each one of those storms created different challenges. And Milton, you know, was, you know, a very big storm, but it was compounded by what we call compound flooding, the fact that we were already saturated before it ever hit. And so that created some unique challenges, you know, operationally, but it also caused additional flooding that might have been different had we been in a drier state. So some of the lessons we learned is, you know, the contractors' expectations and working across 24 jurisdictions with as many storms and as much debris as we had, there is never enough debris management sites, and that was very clear. Communication with a lot of our partners. I mean, the larger cities have very well-established processes and procedures for their debris management. Some of the smaller communities, there were challenges. And then how we communicate with our residents. I mean, when they're in the midst of dealing with a flooded home, trying to talk with them about debris piles is very challenging. They've got so many emotions going on, so many different things they're trying to deal with, and telling them how to sort piles is the last thing on their minds. And so we've got to do that sooner. And so, you know, that's what we've been doing now. So we currently, our contracts that we have in place are the ones that we put in place back in 2023, and we have five debris contractors available on that contract. And that contract does allow for a 5% increase based on CPI or the cost to do business. We also put in place back last year an emergency contract. When the state came in and did their debris management efforts, their contract costs were significantly higher. You may remember Barry talking about that. And so we needed to match those rates in order to get labor in here to do the work. We have a new contract that was just out for RFP. And one of the reasons why, even though we have, you know, contract in place through 2028, we learned a lot. There were services that we could have taken advantage of if they were in our contract, and they weren't. So we've added, we've expanded the types of things that we might need to take advantage of in those contracts or services that we might need to have available. And that was one of the reasons why we decided to put out a new contract. And then we've updated our municipal interlocal agreement. So the cities enter into the interlocal agreement to utilize the county's contract for this purpose. It ensures their FEMA compliance. But we added some additional details and things that came up last year that we learned.
Just a clarification. They're utilizing the county's bid. It's a contract, though, between that contractor and the municipality.
Correct. Yeah, they enter into essentially a purchase order with that contractor. But the contract provisions stand.
Kelly, on that front, it seemed like last year, again, you know, you kind of all kind of start to blend together. There's conflicts a little bit between the cities and the county or contractors. So I'm assuming that a lot of the work that we've done is to try to minimize that conflict.
What we've been talking with the cities about is trying to consolidate contractors in specific areas. That was one of the bigger challenges is we'll have multiple contractors essentially working in the same area. So, you know, for example, if you just use North County, the county had one contractor. City of Tarbon Springs had another. Oldsmar had theirs. And Clearwater had a completely different one. So we literally had, I think, four different contractors working in North County.
And I think the municipal contract or conflict existed because municipalities had a beach parking lot designated as their debris site. And it filled up in about 10 minutes, you know, looked good on paper. And it worked for 20 years by having that plan. But then they like, OK, well, we need to go somewhere else. And then that became somehow a county responsibility. And we don't have a bunch of sites sitting there. That's all pre-planning. And she's going to talk about that, how they work. They work with municipalities to improve upon that. But it wasn't a conflict. It was really them trying to traverse and deal with a situation that they really hadn't prepared for. Because the contract was in place, and it was between them and the contractor. They could have chosen to go out on their own. They don't have to jump onto a county contract. We bid it as a service for them, you know. And that way we were able to get pricing by having volume. But we've also talked about, you know, communities working together amongst them, like communities, to be able to have one contractor to be able to get the volume to where a contractor wants to come and stay. That's the problem we've had. And this, you know, this is not unique. I mean, this happened back in Irma, where contractors didn't show up because, you know, they went to Lee County or wherever because there was more work. And they, you know, they wanted to consolidate and make as much money as they could.
Yeah, I get all of that, and I understand what you're saying. I mean, I'm just saying that our residents, you know, we are 24, we are 25 cities in this county. And so they're going to count on, you know, cities will rise up. I mean, people within the cities will expect us to be the flight coordinator.
And that's what she's going to talk about. We've been, she's worked really hard to work with them. And the municipalities have worked really hard to try to improve upon what occurred last year. You're right. They expect us to be the control tower. Yeah, that's 100%.
And, like, for example, you know, one of the groups that came together were the Reddingtons. They decided amongst the three of them to use one contractor and one monitoring firm. And that really helped streamline efforts right in that little area. Well, that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to look at how do we, you know, just on the contractor side of things, one, it's more advantageous for the contractor to not be driving all over the place and servicing different areas. But if we can get to an agreement where contractor A will be here and B will be here and C will be here and we can agree to use those contractors so we keep them busy and we keep, it's all about volume and turnover. However, the bottom line is, you know, if you're having to drive debris from East Lake down to South County, you're not going to get the vendors, you're not going to get the contractors. These are out-of-state contractors. They need turnaround, quick turnaround. So we need to be able to do this in a way that not only consolidates their work area in an efficient space but also has debris management sites that are located proximally to their work. Very important. So with regard to debris management, you know, this has been a huge focus area. You know, we have more debris management locations now than we had just a year ago. We now have 51, I think, a year ago. We didn't even have half that. But the other area where we've expanded is citizen drop-offs. You know, we had two last year, one up at Keystone and one at the ICOT. The ICOT is still available this year, and if, knock on wood, we need to use that, we will use that this year for a drop-off. But we've also added four new locations, four citizen drop-off locations. And so if they don't want to wait for us to come around and get to their community, we're going to have these open, these sites open to accept debris from our residents.
And the ICOT's our property?
Correct. It's where your new campus will be.
And the school board site in Palm Harbor, where is that?
Sorry.
I'll have to get you a map of where that one is.
Is that on Manning Road, off of Manning Road?
I can see the map, but I can't see my head. So, yeah, I can show you. I can send that out. We have a document with each one of these on there. Wall Springs is just an area of the park. It's wholly on their parking lot. So it's a nice big parking lot. That's good for that. You know, we do want to make sure there are a lot of requirements to managing a debris management site. You know, not just, you know, from, you know, the debris management perspective of sorting things in FEMA and all that, but there are environmental requirements that are also required by the state. So we have to make sure our sites comply. And then, of course, you know, Kathy mentioned SB 180, which does require all local jurisdictions to have an identified debris management site and to have an interlocal agreement with the site owner if it's not owned by your jurisdiction. And so we've been working with the cities to document all of that in one place so that we have a record of each location and they're making sure no one is left out and everyone has a space assigned to them and they have that agreement in place. We've also been working to, on our in-house side of things, I mean, we had to get our teams out there doing a lot of debris management work. One of our challenges really was we're not well-equipped to do this in a mass scale. The equipment isn't there, but there are contracts where we can rent equipment, and so we've been getting those things in place instead of sometimes we put in missions, we requested additional grapple trucks and those things, but they just, they weren't, everybody needed them. So they just weren't accessible. So we are putting the systems in place so that we can get access to those things sooner. And then our closeout and verification process, just, you know, implementing some new processes and procedures to make sure that folks know when we are fully done and how we're verifying that. We have been building out new systems on our debris routing, putting in place some new technology and some route forecasting and tracking dashboards that will help in the future. So as, you know, you get the calls, we get the calls, when are you going to be in my neighborhood? Are we always going to be able to know that? No, unfortunately we're not, because every situation is unique. When you're dealing with an area that home's flooded, you're dealing with white goods, you're dealing with appliances, you're dealing with construction debris, you're dealing with vegetation, you're dealing with a lot of different types of debris and some of the narrower roads. It takes a really long time to get in there and get that material out, clean up along a, you know, a much bigger road where you're dealing with just vegetation. It's much faster. So a lot of those different things impact how quickly we can get in and out of an area. And then communications. Again, you know, Barry mentioned it, and we've been meeting religiously with our cities and Duke Energy, the Department of Transportation, the sheriff, we've developed a traffic priority response plan for traffic signals. I know not debris related, but it definitely was a topic that came up, and we started that very early on. We also developed a new inverter system because the sheriffs have switched vehicles since we initially implemented our inverters, and so now their new vehicles didn't work with the old inverters. So we've now got new inverters, and we've built, I think, 130 of those at least. So we've been building those in-house so that we have them ready to deploy.
Did you also work with the municipalities on inverters?
We work with the local police, the Clearwater-Largo, because what we had to do is come up with a list of intersections that everybody could agree are the priority. Because we maintain a lot of the intersections out there for, with the exception of portions of Clearwater and St. Petersburg, we do the majority of the traffic systems.
That's the reason I say that. It was important they worked with the area of municipal. I mean, you know, Almerton Road, where we were, I mean, that's, you know, right, the Talargo, and the cops were sitting there, but we couldn't get the lights to work. And so that's, they did a lot of planning beyond just the sheriff with local municipalities, too.
Yeah, the local police departments, we had, we wanted to get consensus on this list because we can't be everywhere all the time.
We're trying to, like I said, get inverters developed so that that's an interim solution. The generators, they work, but you have to have a fueling plan, and then you've got people just running around fueling. And those inverters can, they pop in, and you just plug them in, and they can work a lot faster if there's no component damage. If it's simply we don't have power, and that's why the intersection's not working, then you can plug that inverter into the vehicle, into the traffic control box, and you're back up. So, again, mentioned pre-planning with contractors, internal planning. We've long up, we've updated our response plans. It was kind of an active process, actually, why we were even during the storms last year, you know, just learning. We've already done three different mock storm events in public works, preparing in case we have the need to be ready, and then, you know, testing our communications out and process improvement. So we've been, you know, this has been an ongoing thing pretty much all year. And then just, again, enhancing our outreach. Kathy mentioned the hurricane expos, and we've done some new storm debris outreach materials that we're trying to get out to people in advance. You, again, mentioned not, you know, it's too late to go to somebody's house when they're emptying things out and dumping it in their front yard. We want, you know, we want to get that information out to them in advance so that if they do have to deal with the situation, you know, they remember. Some of our challenges, you know, people would call and say, you haven't come picked up our debris yet. And, you know, they had an area where it would have been good, but they placed it underneath a low-hanging power line, and then we had to wait for Duke. And so we can't get in there with a grapple. And, or we had to come in with a skid steer, and then they were upset because we tore up the front yard. So it's just, you know, there are ways to do it well. In some places, they just don't have any good area. But we want to try to get that information out as quickly as we can. Kathy mentioned the real-time flood monitoring and forecasting, and we've been working really hard on this one. We have a lot of good information. We're deploying some additional gauging. I think we have eight new gauges that we've been installing this year. We'll be adding five more, and fortunately we lost five with some cuts to the USGS. So we'll be trying to pick those up, and we're rapidly working to get those online. And then it looks like we're also, the Water Management District, I think we've made it into their funding list for a real-time flood forecasting for North County that's Brooker Creek, Lake Tarpon, and that area. They're very interested in that project. We've had two pre-storm sandbag events, again, trying to encourage preparedness, you know, get ahead of things, not waiting, you know, to get your sandbags. Fortunately, these two events were not well attended. But, again, we did take the opportunity to distribute information while people were picking up sandbags who did participate.
The sandbag events last year, before the storms, were they the same way that they weren't very well attended?
The pre-storm events, yeah. It's not something, unfortunately, that folks are really thinking about. We just, I mean, we had the site at solid waste. Unfortunately, I think a lot of those were the same people coming over and over again, and they were picking up a lot more than what we were requesting people take. But, yeah, all in all, it's one of those things that people do when, unfortunately, we're in the cone. And that's what we're trying to discourage. It's like, you know, there's nothing wrong with having these sandbags, you know, at your home, in your garage, ready to deploy. And then you can use that sand in your yard or garden, you know, later, or you can dispose of them. But folks just tend to want to come right before the storm. And the challenge there is, you know, sometimes we have six to eight hours worth of line of people waiting to get sandbags. And there are so many other things that need to be done than sitting in a line for sandbags. And that goes for our staff, too. They need to be out there getting our infrastructure ready and finishing up those things and buttoning down their own homes.
They did focus a lot on the expos to the extent we can get people to go to expos. But if you're in a repetitive flood area, there's, you know, bladders and things that you can purchase. And you fill them, and then you roll them back up and put them away in the garage. And then, you know, rather than going in the hassle of getting sandbags and things like that. And they also talk about when sandbags work and when they don't work, you know. And so that was also an effort to try to focus people rather than trying to feel good to throw in four or five sandbags in front of your front door. You know, is it worth it or not? And so that's part of the education piece in those expos that they were doing.
Yeah, so on the debris homes, you know, when folks were having their issues at homes and, you know, they just wanted to take control of their life somehow and start to clear out their house. So it's not only about where they place it, but how they were lumped together. We had some areas where people just kind of threw everything together. So we addressed that piece as well and how those piles need to be kind of – I mean, it's a big deal when it comes right down to getting stuff picked up on a timely basis.
Yes, and we did – FEMA and the state did have very robust inspection of our cities and us as well. They were out there auditing us and making sure that we were picking things up properly. We're not allowed – if we want to get reimbursed, we can't pick up mixed piles. We have to pick up veg. We have to pick up white goods. We have to pick up C&D. And, you know, so we did our best to make sure that we were picking things up the way we were supposed to so that when it comes time to be audited for our reimbursement, we've dotted our I's, crossed our T's, and we get that money back.
Obviously, it's important that our residents know that too.
Yes.
Because I know we had to wait on several residents because they were just so much stuff that we actually ended up taking it and then trying to sort through some of it, which was a very expensive process. But, again, part of that's on us not getting that word out that if you're going to start right away, just make sure you start separating stuff that's like kind.
Yeah, so that's all part of the, you know, the hurricane guide now and getting that information out and making sure folks, you know, keep a copy of that handy. We've been handing out those flyers that we created. We've got, you know, signs and stuff that we've been distributing at the expos. And so hopefully, you know, again, this is not something we have to deal with in the near future, but the idea is we want to get that material out of there as quickly as we can. And it's you and I, you and us working together to do that.
I just want to kind of pivot just a little bit into another area that's your responsibility as well. So it has to do with our stormwater systems that we have out there. And one of the things that we noticed in that one area in Palm Harbor that had that bowl effect that we had a system set up that was, it's kind of interdependent on others doing their jobs. So we're trying to minimize those kind of things going forward because at the end of the day, our residents are getting hurt. So on, we talk about partners a lot. And so, again, it's not necessarily for today, but just kind of a self-evaluation on where we are with stormwater processing, the canals, if you will, the channels that are used to get water out of neighborhoods. And we've talked about a couple up in Landsbrook area where it's interdependent with a golf course, for crying out loud. And whether that's the ideal system that we're having to depend on, private partners or not, there are neighbors that are neighborhoods up there that have just, they've gotten flooded before. And that's the last thing they want to see again. And where the county may be doing their part, and I'm not saying that we are, because we have to do that self-assessment, obviously. Are we, do we have enough in place to make sure that our partners are doing what they're supposed to be doing? Do we need, is there any other action that needs to be taken? And do we need more help to get the county's part done? Do we need to subcontract some stuff out to get these places cleared? Because it's a lot of work. So I just want to, those are important pieces.
I think we still have somewhere in the round of, like, 1,700 work orders in the system. That means work that needs to be done. We do, we have subcontracted out. We have three in-house Vector crews. So those are those big trucks that go out and clean out the storm drains. We have three. We've contracted with a private provider to double that, you know, to double our throughput. But we did put out a contract well over a year ago, I mean, way before the storms, for contracted channel and ditch maintenance, unfortunately. It's just, it's a niche. We had a contractor who was kind of supplementary to our services for 10 years, and they were a family-owned business, and they retired, and nobody bought the business. So we literally have a small SBE. He does great work, but we have him so busy. I mean, he has one crew. So that's a challenge. It's just a niche area where a lot of folks don't do that type of work. We do have multiple contractors who are doing pipe cleaning and pipe repair that we've contracted with. So we are bringing in as many vendors as we can to supplement our team to get this work done. We're triaging. You know, those things that are the most problematic get the first attention and, you know, to the end where, you know, it's a routine maintenance issue. You know, Commissioner Scott's office sent over, you know, an issue came over yesterday. And, you know, we went out, and we had already been there. We re-inspected, double-checked, triple-checked the stormwater pipes going into the community's retention pond are completely clear and open. The pond probably has never been maintained in its entire history of existence, and it's privately owned by, like, 10 people. So, unfortunately, that's going to be a challenging conversation with that community is, you know, you're flooding. Your roads are flooding because your pond is full of sediment. So, to your point, it's the public systems only work as well as the private systems do, and it all has to work together. And right now, we, you know, we have our own challenges, and we have our own backlog of work that was generated out of the storms, and we're doing everything we can to clear it. But when we're challenged with having these conversations with residents of, okay, we've done our part, now we need you to do your part, it's expensive when they realize how much it's going to cost to clean out their pond.
Commissioner, they're also having that conversation with municipalities, too. In other words, Kelly has looked, and she has experience. She gave me a white paper. I forget from when.
Oh, it goes, well, I think it was a couple months ago I sent it to you, but it covers from 1970 to present.
You gave me the whole history because we asked this, and because, to your point, residents don't really care whose responsibility it is. They want it cleaned so they don't flood, right? And, unfortunately, it's private systems. It's also municipality and the county, and, you know, it all works as a system. So we have tried to look at it regionally and not look at it as jurisdictional and what can be done, but finding those solutions, you know, is taking some time. But they're putting a lot of effort into this, and I know municipalities are also, but we've got to do more. And we may have some things to come back. We've got some meetings coming up here talking about this exact topic. We may come back to you with some ideas and thoughts and funding that's going to be needed, but those are ongoing conversations.
Yeah.
Well, 1,700, did you say 1,700 backorder or service requests?
Mm-hmm, that we're working through, yep.
And so when we talk about our backlog of roads that needed paving, we did something to make sure they got done. I just think these are critical things. And I think after last year, the two kind of storms that we had really shone a light, shone a light right on all of it, and where they may have just said stormwater, oh, that's just a fee we have to pay every month. What else do we get from it? They started to realize, people started to realize how important that was. And, again, I don't think, you know, again, we look at the global county, we look at private versus public, we're not there yet. We've got to do a better job. And I'm not, again, pointing at the department. I'm just saying, what do we need to get this job done? It is a massive job, but it's so interdependent. Like you just said, that example you just gave, we got the pipes clean.
It doesn't matter if the pond's not taken care of.
And so do those ten property owners know that they have that responsibility? I don't know. I don't know if they do or not.
That's not a unique situation. We've got another one, I remember, that had four property owners. It's owned by four, and the entire neighborhood, you know, flows into it, and nobody else wants to pay. And so the four are like, really? But that's how it was set up. And so undoing that or trying to fix that or coming up with a solution that's challenging.
Our old land development processes, a lot of the stormwater ponds were, it's like a pie. If it's round, it's like a pie, and everybody, all the people that live around it own a piece of the pie. Well, it makes management of that system very difficult. Modern now, you know, you see a subdivision come in. The HOA owns the pond. And so there's one person to coordinate with. But on, you know, the one that I just mentioned, we're going to be reaching out to all those property owners to talk with them about the condition of that facility and how, what needs to happen in order. I mean, the pictures that they sent the other day were horrific. They're terrible.
And I'm assuming those property owners that are on that pond, when they go to buy the property, they probably have no idea. So that's a problem. They don't even know they have the problem. And I'm sure they believe it's a homeowner's association responsibility. That's a big deal.
Or the county.
Or the county's responsibility.
Right. Well, they just believe it's a government responsibility, regardless, whether it's a city or county or whatever. So, again, education, communication, enforcement, I don't know all of that.
Otherwise, the system doesn't work.
And then we have homes getting flooded.
Two or three years, I think three years ago now, we had a situation and two property owners own the pond for the entire subdivision. And it was completely flooding the whole neighborhood. And those two property owners agreed to be assessed. And the county came in, and we cleaned out their pond. And now they have an assessment on their tax bill for the next 10 years. So, you know, that's.
And they're doing a community service by doing that. And yet they get no credit from their HOA for that at all. So it's very difficult. It's a very difficult, difficult process. But, I mean, clearly it's a problem. Kelly, do you remember what that cost was to dredge that pond?
I want to say it was 30.
Is there a way to know, like, if you go to a pond and you see a pond and you, is there a way to assess the capacity of that pond if it's taken care of versus, I mean, you've got a pond and people are like, well, it looks fine to me. And you look below the surface and it's like half full.
Yeah.
So is there a way to make that assessment and let people know you have an F-rated pond?
Well, that's that's that we have a team of two. And this is what I'm asking. This is their job is to go in and they inspect these facilities. A lot of it is, again, there's two of them. There are, I can't even remember, at some point in time we had an assessment of how many private facilities there are and it was somewhat, I think, it's thousands, isn't it? It's many thousands. Many thousands. So, you know, they go in and a lot of it is reactionary. So in this case, you know, it started with, you know, the residents contacting legislators who contracted, you know, the chair's office who got it to me. And we sent our team out there. They looked at it and they're like, Kelly, it's in the whole pond's completely filled. It's as if it doesn't exist anymore. We find that. I mean, it's like people, they may have bought the house and it didn't even realize there was a lake back there because it just has always been vegetated. But it's really supposed to be a pond. So, yep, so that's what we're going through that process now and that's the steps we take is first we start, we get the site plan and we see what was supposed to be there. And then we meet with the property owners and notify them of, okay, this is why the community just had this major flooding a week ago. The pipes are clear, but there's nowhere for it to go because this is a pond and here's your site plan. And we start those conversations. We've done this, you know, in a community over in Unincorporated Largo. Actually, if you remember Al Ruchel from Bay News 9, he is the HOA president and he led the effort, even though it's kind of a segmented pond like that, their pond had filled in. And they were having that problem and he championed the, brought everybody together. They worked together, brought a contractor in, they did the work, and it was, he just said the results were amazing. So sometimes it happens that way and hopefully, you know, in this case, they will come together and realize, okay, we're the owners, we need to figure this out. If not, then we have to go down that code route because it is affecting the broader community.
So we have thousands of ponds and two people and we're behind on raiding our ponds. Is that what we're saying? I mean, proactively raiding our ponds.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we were, we're reactive, we're reactive in that, in that areas.
And, I mean, if we're going to be honest with ourselves in terms of our, and again, I'm not saying it falls on us to do it, but it falls on us to educate, to, to be able to provide reaction and response and education and all of that.
And I, you know, I mean, I will say I'm very proud of this program. It was something that we put in place when the stormwater fee was adopted as this is something that needs to happen because it is so integral to the drainage system. You know, some of our cities are now looking at what we're doing and trying to emulate that and saying, we're going to put together a program to do the same thing because it's, it's a challenge everywhere.
Thank you.
Thanks, Kelly. All right. So now we're going to move on to budget update. All right. So, commissioners, the next item is obviously budget. So we've kind of, we've kind of teed this up and we're really kind of looking for direction where you want to go, you know, with having discussion about the budget. We presented the budget, you know, back in June as a budget recommendation in July, I guess. And, and so now, you know, it's kind of before you. So we're going to go through just kind of some summary topics. These are things that you brought up and then at the end, it's going to be more open about, you know, kind of where you want to go with the budget. So we have a brief presentation and then we'll take it at the flow in the direction that you, you wish.
Good morning, commissioners. Chris Rose, office of management and budget. We do have three topics today, reserves, the board of county commissioners budget. And by that mean, I mean this board right here, not the big budget, but the office budget and the decision packages that we saw earlier in the process. So there are two thoughts on, on reserves that are up on the screen right now. Now, one is what the Government Finance Officers Association recommends for local governments. Each local government should maintain no less than two months of their regular general fund operating revenues. You can see it up there. And then what we've got, our current reserve policy is 20.8, which is two and a half months of contingency reserves that we put forward. And that's what we've got in our ordinances right now. The reserves that we have are, first of all, I want to point out that with the three storms that came last year, we used $78.4 million of those reserves in the current fiscal year to respond to those storms. And so the unrestricted reserve level currently in an amended budget, after we took that 78 out, is $111.1 million, or about 12% of total revenues. That's what we're looking at today. Next year's budget is put together with $168.5 million of reserves in the general fund, and that's 17.9%, which you'll note is somewhere in between those two numbers. It's higher than the two-month, a little bit, and lower than the two and a half months. So that's kind of where we're falling this year. It is based on an assumption, an anticipation, I don't know what word to use, an expectation that FEMA will reimburse us $19.8 million during fiscal year 26. We received a little more than that in the current year, and it's based on what we have seen historically and what FEMA's telling us right now. So we got a little more than $20 million this year. We're expecting $19.8 million next year, but that $19.8 million is what gets us to the 17.9%. If we don't get that $19.8 million from FEMA, we would have 16.1% without the FEMA reimbursement. So I just want to be clear what our budgetary assumptions are going into 26. So I emailed out to you all a spreadsheet that has each fund on there, and I can get it up on the screen if you'd like. But one of the thoughts on that spreadsheet is there are two funds that have reserve requirements. One is the general fund that we just talked about, and that's the 20.8%, two and a half months. The other one is the emergency medical services, and that's 25% also in ordinance. And it is 25% on the final year, on the fifth or sixth. I think it's the sixth year of that. So you're kind of looking a little forward on that one. So those are the only two. All of our other funds don't have an exact requirement on them. We tend to default around that same two, two and a half months in those. But there is no hard and fast requirement on them.
You say that was emergency medical services? Yes, EMS. So it's at 25% is our policy, and it's showing 47%? Yes, sir.
And that is planned. That is anticipated because it's in the sixth year that you need that 25%. So there are some expenditures and things that we are expecting to get to that 25% coming out there. And a lot of it is revenue assumptions, too.
So one of the things you wanted, Commissioner, is to put in one place all of the different reserves. You know, and that was really part of this exercise because we have a lot of, I mean, it's a big budget. And we have a lot of different funds, a lot of different restricted funds and things like that. And each one, like you'll see in some areas, you know, with airport, well, we know that's a planned expenditure of capital, right? And so there's a reason for kind of that ramp up. Same thing over in some other areas of utilities and sewer, over in our sewer area and solid waste, for instance. So each one has a little bit different story. But part of this exercise was you had asked for a discussion about all the different reserves. So we tried to consolidate it down. But to Chris's point, we can go through each and every one or any that you wish and talk about what it is and why. A lot of them are enterprise funds. Some of them are like force accounts we have, like over in certain areas. Risk, you know, we have liabilities, planned liabilities and claims. And the health fund, you know, it's like I'll just pick on it because we've talked about it, where, you know, it is too high. It's not all general fund, though. Which one? The health fund.
The health fund.
The very last one. You know, the very last one. On page two.
But we've talked about that.
And we had a discussion, I don't know, a year or so ago or more, where, you know, we know we want to draw it down. We have to look at the amount that's actually general fund related because a lot of them, the enterprise funds pay into it and things like that. But we were looking at that as part of a financing plan for when we do the new campus. You know, and so we'll factor that in and have that discussion at the time. Because, again, it's one-time money. So if we draw it down, it has to be used for one-time purposes. So each one has a little bit different of a story. But, again, we can go into any and each one or all that you wish.
So if we have interest in talking to our residents with, you know, with the right messaging. Well, I won't say the right messaging, but with messaging that says we're trying to be careful, really careful. Trust us, we're being careful. What really speaks to them is what we've done the past three years, which is lowering our millage rate. And so, you know, we have our millage rate now. We have what a full rollback would be. And then we have all the stuff in between. So just trying to get senses of, like, a full rollback is $45 million. I'm just – I don't know what it is. And 25 is a full rollback. So then, depending on what we want to do, if you wanted to – then we have – we're going towards that number. And so just trying to, again, think out loud here. If, for instance, the $19 million for FEMA – I'm just picking this one because you brought it up right now. If we didn't put that in – if we took that money and didn't put it into the reserve number to get up to 17.9, which is still below our policy, I get that. And it was redirected for our budget. How does – I mean, I know it's a one-time. It's a one-time. So I'm just trying to make sure I get – I'm trying to make sure I know what we can play with here
and trying to get some of the things that we're talking about.
So your policy states that you don't use one-time money for ongoing costs. So in your operating budget, for instance, we project so much revenue. If we say we want to bring in more revenue so we can lower the tax rate, well, then if it's one-time money that makes up that difference, it's not going to be there the following year. So therefore, you are operating in a deficit. So you've created a hole for the following year.
I understand that.
So, like, when we did the sidewalks, for instance, we took one-time money and we gave it to capital because it didn't necessarily recur. It was to create – it was to fill a backlog of sidewalk repairs. And so we were able to do that because it was one-time money going for a one-time purpose.
How many years does it take to become not one-time money again? So if we apply $20 million over 10 years, $2 million a year, is that considered one-time money still? It is, but you could do that.
I mean, I'm not saying that you can't do it. I understand. I totally get the gap that you're talking about, or the hole.
I'm just saying, you know, we're trying to come up with some solutions here. There aren't many. You talk about stepped pay increases for our employees. So if you – We don't have steps. What's that? We don't have steps. I know we don't. What I'm saying is there are areas, there are places in this country that have utilized different salary levels, get different percentage increases in pay. Yeah. So if you're less than $100,000 – I'm just, again, making this up – then you get 3%. If 100 and above, you get 1.5% or as a way to – again, trying to be as creative as we can. And maybe when it all sticks on the wall, it doesn't stick. But I just – I think at this point, we are a salary-based organization. So when it comes right down to it, that seems to be the only place that we have to try and reserve, to your point, we don't want to do this – just create a hole for one year. Right. That's not what we're trying to do either. So I'm just trying to come up with some things that we can have discussion about because there are little pieces here and there that just aren't going to amount to anything. We can do it. We can make – and by the way, if you do over $100,000, that includes commissioners too. So just FYI. That's all I'm saying. Just some comments and thoughts before we get too much into the –
We started off with reserves. We could have put that at the end, you know, however, you know, you want because it – like you said, it all goes together in terms of strategy and where the commission wants to go with the budget. We've got it kind of all – you know, they're all laid out. This is the first time that I've been here. I think we've done that. So you kind of get to see that. But they each have a – you know, they each have a story, I don't think.
Well, and to your point, Dave, you know, I was looking at all of the reserves as well and the understanding that government is the most risk-averse entity ever created by man. I did ask Barry and staff to kind of take a look at this and really see, you know, do we need all of the reserves and all these various funds? Is this, you know, a lot of belt and suspenders or is there some areas to tighten up on this? So they have actually come back with some thoughts on that. So when we're ready to, you know, have that discussion, they're prepared for it. So we can do it now if you guys want to do it.
I'll do that now because it goes to your point, Commissioner, and I'm glad, you know, Commissioner Scott kind of challenged us on that because, you know, we go back and we use actuarial analysis for everything. So they come in and they look at our risk fund. They look at our health fund. They look at – and we use the recommendations, the professional recommendations to do that. But when they're doing that, you can look at something very conservatively or, you know, very aggressively in terms of setting those funding levels. A few areas that we went back, you know, at that direction and looked at hard was in our risk fund. So here we have a risk fund where – and this – we do payouts, okay? So we're self-insured, so we pay out claims as they come in, et cetera, and stuff. But we're – but they look at all of the claims, the potential for claims, and then they set that based upon, you know, at a competence level that you fund it up at this level, you'll have enough money to be able to pay out the claims, et cetera, and stuff. But they always carry a reserve there. Well, again, that's an additional reserve above the regular reserve you have, and yet we're – you know, it's our exposure. So we went back and looked at that, and we were funding it up based upon their actual analysis, but we've never paid out at that claim level. And so as staff went back and looked at that, we have a recommendation to reduce that by a little over $2.1 million. We can do that, and that would be at the funding amount that our payouts have been. And so we still have the reserve. We're just not increasing the reserve because of what the actuarial said. We think it's safe, and we think that that's something we can do. And that's a real cut. That's an ongoing savings that then can be rolled into the operating budget.
And that – I'm sorry. And so this particular risk fund is only for county administration. It has nothing to do with insurance relative to any of the constitutional office.
No. This is our risk. No. So if that's our risk fund, it includes sheriff and everybody, right? It does include – okay.
Because this particular fund has workers' comp, key man insurance, and property and casualty. So property and casualty is county-wide, every facility we own.
And so we have a third-party administrator on our workers' comp. That does include the sheriff. But, again, we've looked at that. And, again, from the actuarial analysis, it made sense. But, again, we're continuing to grow the amount of that reserve, and we've never paid out of that. And so we looked at that hard, and we're comfortable bringing that down by $2.1 million.
So we have a low workers' comp risk level thus far. It has been – it goes up and down, I guess, is the right answer. So what they have told us, though, is if you set it at this level, you'll be okay. And then we've looked at what reserves we have on hand and decided that it's probably safe, as long as we have the big reserve in the county-wide, to take this individual reserve and know that we've got a backstop on it if we need it. But it's still in a range that will keep us safe.
So we're trying to get more aggressive at those, knowing that, again, that overall reserve is for, you know, catastrophic events. And this is not something that we've had to tap above the amount we're recommending for funding in the last five years.
So this is an ongoing thing that we do every year. Correct. And we're just saying lowering the amount that we do every year.
That's correct. We're going to reduce the amount that we're funding to that. It still keeps the reserve level in that fund for those potential claims. But it doesn't continue to grow that, which we've grown it each and every year the last five years. We've seen the reserve level grow based upon their actual analysis. But yet the claims haven't kept pace with the amount of the increase. So by lowering that down, we're still comfortable. If we have a higher claims experience, we can always tap the overall reserve and use that as that backstop. But, again, our experience is we haven't had to do that. So it's a real ongoing savings. That was my concern, because all you need is one. This is an ongoing savings back to the general fund, and that can come right off your property tax rate. Okay. A second area we looked at is in our fleet reserve. So we do a reserve for fleet. So we pay into a fleet replacement fund each year. And so that goes in, and then as cars come due or trucks, mostly trucks and heavy equipment, things like that, then that funding is there to be able to do that replacement. Well, we've been trying to shrink our fleet and have people be more efficient with their fleet. And so we also, that's another area where we fully funded it up, but yet we've not paid out at the level we've been funding it. So we looked at that hard, and we agreed that we can reduce that down by another million dollars of what we're paying into that. And that's an ongoing savings that is sustainable, you know, through multiple years. Simultaneously to that, we got our final numbers out of the state. It's our state match money for juvenile detention. And that came down by almost $715,000. And so we budgeted it at an amount. When we presented the budget, we were looking at what we didn't know what the state number we were guessing. That came in a lot lower. And so we also can reduce down that amount because, again, it's an ongoing cost. You said $750,000. $714,490. We also looked at, we don't, you know, and this is just for departments that report to you. We don't do this for constitutionals. But we don't budget them 100% of payroll because we know there's turnover. So there's unfilled positions. There will always be unfilled positions. You have that turnover. And so we might, depending upon the department and the turnover rate, you know, because it will be different by departments, we budget maybe at 95% of payroll, knowing that then, because otherwise they would have lapsed savings. Now, some areas, you have, when you have a vacant position, you backfill that with overtime. If you're in 911, somebody's working overtime because the phone has to be answered. Same thing out in utilities. Same thing out in certain areas of public works where people were on call to be able to respond and do their job, right? But in a lot of areas, then that becomes lapsed savings. So we started budgeting departments tighter several years ago on that lapsed savings, trying to pull that out. Sometimes you're successful, you know, and we were conservative, and we tried to tighten it down a little bit. But we also then put a payroll reserve to be able to cover if we miss, you know, and they keep it 100% or something. Well, we've never tapped that payroll reserve in the five years that we've been doing that. So we looked at that and said, again, that's another reserve level that we can eliminate. That's $980,000. And so we've tried to, going off of this reserve, how can we tighten these down, knowing that we have the overall reserve levels? And thank God, last year we were able to use those to respond to the hurricane, but, and still be very safe and that we've prepared a budget that is comfortable. So that totals, you know, a little over, or right at $4.9 million. We also had another discussion last year.
And Barry, what's the $4.9 million?
It's almost $4.9 million. The total of four things? Yes. $2.1, $1 million, $7.14, $9.80.
I almost got six. That's why I was looking at $0.98, $3.1, $1, and $0.7. What's $3.1? Oh, I thought that was. Oh, I'm sorry. That was the combination of two. Oh, okay. I was like, what was that? Sorry. Whoa. 2.1 and 1 and 1 and 0.7. I want his calculator.
Let's give these back and make sure the calculator works. Sorry to excite everybody so much there. We also wanted to add another area, and this may be a little more, you know, controversial. You know, we talked about lifeguards before, and we went with, we were going to eliminate the lifeguards at Fred Howard, but not at Sand Key. You know, that is an opportunity if we want to do that. That's $151, $52,000. We absolutely have to keep them at Fort DeSoto because of the distance to a MS station. I thought state law was just changed for that. No. It said that you could pay for lifeguards out of TDC funds. Right. It's a little bit different. So that's a bigger discussion. So we could use TDC funds for the lifeguards. I think it's a bigger discussion you need to have with the TDC because if we open it up, well, then others that provide lifeguards are going to want that reimbursed out of TDC. So I think you should have that bigger discussion.
I mean, just for like, if we wanted to do it at the three big county parks.
Right. But once we do it, then Clearwater is going to want us to go there.
I mean, Clearwater is different. Clearwater is different. That's a big tourist. That's the best beach in America. That's different. That's like not Madeira. I wouldn't want to expand that to people that want us to pay for lifeguards at pools.
Well, I mean, you couldn't do it at pools. You couldn't do it at pools. But you have had many requests for other communities that would like to add lifeguards that currently don't have them, you know, in other areas of the county. So it is a bigger policy discussion you need to have. But that is an area that we could. So if we did all those, it's just over $5 million. And that's significant, you know, in terms of, and that could come right off your property tax rate. So this could be the fourth of five years that you reduce the property tax rate here in Pinellas County.
First off, thank you, Chairman, for instructing staff to do that. I'm really appreciative. Thanks, staff, for doing that. Well, and that was going to be my second, was thank you to staff for doing that. I would think that this puts us like right at the top of Tampa Bay in terms of cuts in like the past five or six years. I've only been elected for like four years. So where do we stack in terms of our Tampa Bay peers as well as some of other counties in Florida? Do we know?
Yeah, we would be, if there are five that's proposed lowering it again, that have lowered it in the past, how many, it's like four or five that have lowered it four out of the past five years, if they currently have seven. So we'd be seven counties, there are seven counties statewide that would fall into lowering the rate four out of the last five years. I don't know about local counties, neighboring counties.
Who's trying to grab you?
That's when I'll put seven, four, not get up to three. I purposely didn't say that. Because I'm just reading the room, I think they're going to at least go to this. So, I mean, so it does put us at the top. The, you know, and I think comparisons are hard because like in Pasco, for instance, they've got huge growth issues. And so they haven't lowered the rate because they're shifting. But that's, you know, that's their choice. But we certainly rank at the top in terms of that. If you think about it, think about this. If we, if you take that recommendation and move forward with it, with the millages that we've reduced over the past years, we've eliminated with this over a hundred million dollars annually that we would be taking in right now in property taxes that are not taking in because of these reductions.
It has a compounding effect. It has a compounding effect.
So these, these four reductions are saving our taxpayers over a hundred million dollars annually. But, but let's even take it onto that. You saw one of the biggest ranked items is transportation and having roads. You also, on top of that hundred million, you diverted money that would go for ongoing general government. You diverted an additional 43.9 million that we now have to dedicated transportation millages. So when you have these funding packages for our local roads, Kelly had over a thousand miles, like 1100 miles of roads and failed conditions. We're down under 300 miles now and working down that list. And, and she probably is going to update me and tell me that number is different. Am I in the right ballpark? I'm going off memory here. There's no notes. Um, but we're down under 300 miles. We've done an amazing job of eliminating that backlog in just a few years. So it's not going to general government. It's going to infrastructure. And, and, and more importantly, when we get caught up on that infrastructure, it's more cost effective to maintain because reconstructing a road is nine times greater than if you would have just taken care of it as it went along. So getting, getting caught up on that backlog. So in addition to the hundred million dollars, another $43 million in dedicated, I think that's a, that's a good story to tell.
And that 43 million, that's, that's significant. I mean, it really is. And I mean, me personally, my number one legislative priority next year is indexing our loft, right? I mean, because if that was, we wouldn't have to be doing this if our transportation trust fund wasn't running in a deficit.
That that's a hundred percent correct. If we, if we would have had the loft over the last 20 years, we would not need those dedicated millages and it'd be 150 million. We'd be able to save our taxpayer.
Well, I'm sure the state with their interest in us watching our costs, which I totally think it's great. I'm sure they'll look at their own loft and get rid of it to watch their costs. Because I don't think the federal government does a loft and we don't do one. Right. So it's the state is the only one that has that indexing indexes. So in their, in their effort, but I do think, you know, again, this, this looking at ways to find, you know, and I keep, I keep going back to that five to 10 year look out there where we're talking about CRA monies coming back. Yeah. Our, you know, our penny, the next penny. And again, I'm not saying we're not doing a lot on infrastructure, but doing more on infrastructure maybe allows us to get rid of that, those three little millages, those three that we've added in for transportation. I mean, there's ways to, if we look out at that five to 10 year window to start looking at really profound ways to cut our cost. And it includes our 54% or 54 average age when it gets down to about 44 over the next 10 years, five to 10 years. And I don't know what that's going to look like, but there's a, certainly there's a movement of salaries that are at the most expensive level that will be replaced with what, so there's other factors that are coming in that will be helping us slow the growth. And we try to squeeze those each and every year. Slow the growth of government. And I think that's what we're trying to do. We've been trying to do that for a while.
I think it, you know, in our response to the state, I think it shows the department's report to you. Remember, they're only 19% of the general fund, you know, and you've heard the sheriff when you went through his salaries, I mean, he's a people-based organization, he has to compete for talent. But in those five years, the departments will report to you, over five years, has went up 16% in our operating costs. So we've tried to hold the line, and we've absorbed those increases because we challenge our departments that you need to find ways of being more efficient each and every year. And we've been doing that. And they've cut down on the number of positions, they've cut down on how to absorb those cost increases, and still do their job, you know. And I think our staff has done an amazing job. And, you know, we saw it last year with the care that they did. You saw them out with the hurricane and how they, you know, work to help our residents. And that's, you know, sewers.
With a sense of pride. Water.
It's our sewer. It's our water. It's our call centers. And taking calls and helping people and navigating that.
And it's, you know, and if I went on, I'd have to go on through every single department because they all do a great job. But they've done that while trying to be more efficient, you know. It's not trying to grow government. It's trying to, and we've got areas, don't get me wrong, that we have areas we need to improve on. But I know they're working on it. Where can we improve on? Say again? Where can we improve on?
Well, hold on. If you know the areas.
Commissioner Lovella has had his hand up for a while.
So I think, you know, when you mentioned Pasco, you know, and the growth in Pasco, I think part of the story that is pretty remarkable this year is the fact that we have 3.7% growth, which I'm not an economist or a budget guru like Chris is. But I would suspect that that is not a whole lot much more than inflation. Am I correct? So it's less than inflation. And I'm never going to publicly complain about unfunded mandates because I voted for a lot of that. And I think that. We'll complain for it. Yeah. And I think by and large, counties need to figure it out. And I think, you know, there's a lot of attitude in Tallahassee that they don't understand a lot of what counties and cities deal with and counties and cities, you know, go up to Tallahassee and complain and whatnot. And, you know, there's a lot of preemption that Tallahassee does that's good. And I still agree with it. Um, but I think it's remarkable that given that we had 3.7% growth, we still quote unquote, figured it out. And we still are going to be able to give, I suspect our residents some relief, uh, less than a year after we got, um, devastated. I mean, that's remarkable, uh, and that shows, uh, the talent, uh, that we have, uh, not only with our administrator, but, uh, with our budget, uh, chief Chris Rose and with all those fine folks, uh, sitting over there and, and really with our, uh, county, um, employees overall. I mean, they, they do a remarkable job. They did a remarkable job last year during the hurricane and they do a remarkable job day in and day out. And, um, you know, but, but this budget I think is, uh, even if we do a $5 million decrease, um, right after we got blasted by two hurricanes and we had 3.7% growth, which one of our neighboring counties had, I believe over 6%, the other neighboring county had over 9% and we're less than 4% and we can, uh, give our residents some relief, I think is remarkable. And that's something that I am darn proud of and, and hats off to you, Chairman and hats off to you, uh, Administrator Burton and, and as well to you, uh, Mr. Rose.
Uh, well said, uh, Commissioner Lett-Val. I think this is, this is a year that, uh, that's posed a lot of challenges in so many ways. Um, and I, I, you know, I think some of these efforts, at least one of my biggest concerns was that we weren't going to be able to do a millage cut at all. I think we're finding a path that we can at least tell our residents that all of this is going on. I did want to just bring one thing up and that is we've heard in the last week, we heard this morning talking to Kelly about this backlog of, of lakes or ponds that need to be checked out so that our residents are ultimately protected. We had a gentleman come in here at our last commission meeting talking about our sidewalks where the vegetative growth is gone over top of our road, our, and we don't have enough folks to respond to that. So, um, I just want to make sure that as we are contracting and, and I think that's a good thing, I'm all for it, that we just keep an eye on those particular areas that we really need to be doing things to help our residents not get flooded in their homes, right? That we're, that we can look at them in their eyes and say, uh, we had a backlog of ponds. Well, why did you have a backlog? Well, we didn't have enough people because we're trying to, so it, we have to be careful on, on some of those very selective fronts. I just want to make sure that we have that thought through. Um, and, uh, 5 million is a, is a, is a, is a good amount of money. Um, I don't know, again, we had three millage rates that we've added because of the penny because, uh, or excuse me, because of the, um, lack of indexing on our gas tax fund. So is there, is there something here of this 5 million? Is there, is there some monies that we can set aside for these particular things that we're talking about that I think go directly to our residents' safety in their home and their, in their property safety? Um, the issue with the, the issue with the ponds and it's, it's a larger issue with drainage. Um, we don't have a solution for it this time. And so we're, we're having that discussion.
Um, and like, and I, and I, we put all the reserve levels on because like we said, you know, there, you know, could you cut down another one? And these are ones that are ongoing, other ones are one time money. And so, like for instance, in the health fund, there's no question we, you know, we could, whatever we take, I, I don't have a number yet, but we took 10 million from that, um, it's safe. The question is, do we want to, do we want to use that and not borrow as much money for the new campus or use that to, um, as to leverage the amount of money we'll need because we're going to sell the, the property down here to late some years later, you know, there's going to be, um, a gap there. And so we, we were trying to look at some of those because they're one time money as part of a larger strategy, but if you wanted to say, okay, we'll take on more debt with that
and, um, use that to fund up, you know, doing some additional storm drainage or something, we could do that. And so we're meeting on it, but I don't have necessarily a solution for you at this time.
Um, but we're going to come back to you with some ideas.
Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, the other piece of all this, uh, you know, I struggle with trying to figure it out is how many years does it make for an ongoing versus a capital? When I think of our bonding of our new government center, clearly, there's going to be intergenerate intergenerational week. That's why it's bonded. You spread that out over 30 years and it shouldn't be born by today. On the same hand, if we're, we're coming up with some savings today in our, in our, and I'm not talking about the ongoing ones. I'm taking talking about the one timers that you can spread out over
10 year future. It just, um, I'm just saying it becomes, it becomes a risk. You're exactly right. That's the reason we put them all on here. Like it does. We've got several things that we're going to need to address. We're going to come back to you at the end of the month. We're going to talk about our ERP replacement, um, huge, you know, system replacement. We don't have a choice, but to look at that. Um, we're into it. We're getting ready to go forward. We briefed you on it a couple of times. This is our, our financial systems. It's got everything, you know, all that component. We're going to be briefing you on that. We have, like you said, the storm water. So there's still a lot of other, you know, issues out there that we're going to need to deal with. So, and, and so we kind of look at this as collectively, um, but we're trying to separate out the one time. I think this is a, we've tightened it up in areas that we're comfortable with. Um, but there may be other opportunities in the future and we can have a discussion about any of them that you want. We, just like the EMS fund, you know, we've, you've seen us reduce that, um, several times. We've reduced fire districts down. I mean, how many, how many levies did we reduce this this year's budget? Six or seven? Yeah, like six. There were six other levies that, that we reduced, you know, and then we kind of got one wrong, you know, with Seminole, um, in terms of the different factors you're trying to project out multiple years, um, and, you know, trying to project what wages are going to be when, and there you had union contracts. You also had fire trucks and things, and, and when they have to do those replacements. So it's an art, not a science, but we're, we're trying to tighten those down because if you're conservative in every single area, then you have a lot of reserves, and it's, and, and then we're not able to give property tax breaks. So we're trying to,
we're trying to cut that back. I just have one, one last thing. Okay. I mean, again, I brought it up in the beginning and it's a very, it's always a very uncomfortable conversation. And that's the whole idea of increases in pay. And so I'm just trying to make sure I fully understand, um, the idea of a, a, a, and I'm not talking about steps. I'm talking about a, um, a different level of increase based on versus salary level that they current, that folks currently have. Um, so that, um, again, I'm just trying to get a relative sense. I mean, I, I tried to get some numbers off of our, off of our database that showed how many people make more than a hundred thousand dollars. I'm just using that as a round number, but you know, whatever the number is, what kind of numbers are we talking about? Um, is it done? Uh, is it, is this like, you know, something that just doesn't make any sense at all? Um, are we talking about the folks that have gotten such accelerated salaries that when they retire, we're going to have lower salaries. So maybe a, a lowered increase might be in line. Uh, I just want to make sure that piece I understand.
That's all. So, so with our employees and you, you, you can pick, we, a cup for a couple of years, we saw hyperinflation, especially with the rental market. Okay. And if you look, if you remember back several years, we did a salary increase and then a one-time money to their base. And so that helped out somebody that's paying rent and their rent's going up. It gives them proportion, if they're on the lower salary level, a bigger percentage, you know, and we, but our recommendation is to eliminate that and go back to regular salary increases because that market has stabilized. Um, but if you look at the people that are most competitive, you know, in terms of in the market are your managers that are making a hundred thousand dollars. So we, we have to compete for them too. And, um, our, I, our employees are not overpaid. They're not. And, and, and, and we, and we constantly in certain areas struggle, you know, to compete. And, and so, you know, our, if you look at the 3% that we've recommended, we're the lowest in the region in terms of, uh, what municipalities and area cities and counties are, are providing there in the three and a half, four, and a lot of them we do, and we're going to have a conversation on the 28th. Amanda's going to brief you on how people can move up for, for instance, if there's certain criteria, it's, it's, it's, it's a skill-based criteria. When you get your wastewater, you know, license, you get a, an increase. When you get your CDL, you get an increase because otherwise he would steal them from us. Um, right. You know, and you get your ASC certifications, I might steal them too. Bingo. I mean, it's, and so we're trying to compensate people for, for doing their job, getting those skills because it's a more value to us. You know, we can use them and, and, and matter ways they, they can go out alone rather than riding in a truck. Right. And so, but it's a skill-based thing. So we're going to present that, but those, those are being able to keep those markets competitive. The 3% in terms of that is, um, I think, I think it's very, very competitive. Well,
I'm not worrying about the 3% being competitive around. It is, it's probably lower than a lot. Right. But to the point that you brought up and which was my last question is how, how far along are we on our salary comparative updates? You know how we do by, by our, by our classifications and that kind of thing. Because to your point about, are we under paying people? Are we over? So those market studies.
Yeah. I, I don't want to do a market study because that it will cost money, um, every single time. You will keep people where they're at if they're competitive and the ones that are under, you're gonna, you're gonna make those market adjustments. Well, then the discussion that we're having doesn't
make a lot of sense, Barry, as far as the raise that I'm talking about. Well, no, because we were,
you said we're gonna lose them if we don't do it. So it means it based on salary levels that they could get elsewhere. Well, but we're, we're giving, we're giving 3% to everyone. Okay. That keeps us competitive, you know, relatively competitive with the others. We still have skill-based, um, incentives that they can do if they get the certifications and things like that. And they, and they do that. So there's some incentive there and we're trying to compensate that. At, at a certain point, we probably do need to do another evergreen. Yeah. Evergreen is for those that haven't been here a long time. It's a, it's a big word, but kind of a four letter word for our group because it was implemented horribly. Um, but it, it wasn't the system. It was the way it was implemented that, and that occurred right before I got here. Um, so we, we do need to look at that. We've tried to make adjustments and they do make all kinds of adjustments. So people can appeal and say, my job is out of line with the market and they, and they'll do a job audit and then they'll make adjustments. So there are things that occur throughout the year as a normal process within HR. So it's not like we can't make adjustments and they're only getting the 3%, but it requires a formalized process that we review to determine if it needs to go to a higher classification or change or things like that. And to me, those,
that's important. We want to pay our folks. Right. What, what they're worth. So, you know.
And, and so we do have those in line. Amanda will be here on the 28th to go through. You can ask her any of those questions and stuff too directly, and she can give you the, the real life examples.
Appreciate it. Thank you for the, for indulging me. It's not, it's not a comfortable topic and it really, it goes contra to what our folks have been doing this whole year, you know, since the storms and beyond. I mean, they're always on top of things, but the amount of work they've done above and beyond the norm has been amazing. So again, I'm just trying to understand the, the, what we're talking about in terms of relative numbers, because we are a salary based organization. There's not, there are operating costs that are not salary, but you know, it's 60, 70 percent of its salary base. So
thank you. Appreciate it. Okay. All right. Um, I got a couple of, uh, quick items in this meeting is getting a little long, long winded, so I'll, I'll keep it, I'll keep it quick. Um, but on the subject of, of salaries and, and budgets, et cetera, um, I had Colleen this morning, hand out a revised, uh, work analysis for the, uh, fifth floor specialist position. And that's an area where I think the fifth floor can, can tighten up on. I mean, we're, we're asking staff to really be tight with their budgets this year. And I think we need to do the same thing. And that position is extremely underutilized. It really is only being used about 15 hours a week. And it, I'm really, really struggling justifying keeping that position into the, into the next fiscal year and, and beyond. So I, I am, uh, going to propose that, um, that that position go away. And if we came to consensus on that, that would give the person in that occupying that space now, uh, plenty of time to look for another opportunity within the county. Um, and I would propose at this point that, you know, we've tried to do some, some refinements and workflow efficiencies this year. Um, the, the proclamations, uh, we've, having the slate of proclamations has made that a lot easier. Uh, going forward, I would propose that, uh, we assign that duty to the, to the vice chair's, uh, office. Um, the, the phone calls that, that come in, there's not a lot of them that come in. Um, but we could, uh, eliminate the, uh, BCC general phone number, um, and just use the, the county's information number and transfer all those to, to the vice chair's office. Um, CATS items, uh, we could assign that to the media, uh, past chair's office. Public records requests. We could handle that individually would be what I would propose. And then for miscellaneous walk-ins, et cetera, for the very, very, very few that we actually get, I would suggest that we just kind of rotate that between the other, between the other aides, occupy that, that, um, space up there, uh, during those days of the week. So that's kind of my, my thought on, on that position, which would save us a little bit of money in our, in our, uh, fifth floor budget as well, uh, going forward. So I just like to see what y'all think about that.
So you had, well, I was just going to say, there's an information desk downstairs for walk-ins that if they go to the information desk, they can call up to anybody's office and say, someone's here, they can direct them up or however you want to do it. But, um, if they have to be buzzed in, that's the thing, you need somebody there. But, um, that's, I was just thinking, we don't, we don't utilize that information desk down on the first floor, but you certainly could.
Right. So I don't know if you would support this, but for public records requests, um, since usually when we get one, it's like several people, you know, it's not like just one person, would it be more appropriate that all of those just be referred to legal? Because it is the compilation of. Yeah. You like that, Julie? Well, well, legal, let me say this legal in BTS, because usually when they're asking for emails and stuff, BTS goes in the system and they extract whatever.
It usually occurs to me. So there.
And then, um, just to make sure that the public records request meets the legal standard threshold and that we are responding timely, effectively, and efficiently, because that'll get you in trouble as well. So, um, because at any point in time, let's say somebody retires or their aid leaves, you got a new aid or whatever, they may not be as cognizant of that process or whatnot. And it would not be intentional for them to miss a step or anything like that. But that's a huge responsibility that could come back to bite someone simply because it was just a miscommunication or whatever. So that's the only reason why I'm bringing that out right now. We, we all have, but I think just between BTS and legal that way, we're covered. I'm, I'm, I'm being serious now, though, being covered because that's the area that could get anyone in a lot of trouble, you know, by just simply not responding timely or making sure that what they're required. Yeah. So, but again, like I said, I don't know how Jewel feels about that. I don't know how Jeff would feel about that, but I know it goes to I, um, to IT or BTS and they extract the stuff or whatever and package it
together. And what we always recommend with public records is that the custodian of the records be in charge. We can't direct your staff what to do. We certainly can't direct you all what to do. And, and it's the same with various departments in the cause. It's the same with everybody. I will tell you across the board, 100% of the employees within the unified personnel system would prefer for the county attorney's office to handle public records requests. I can't do that with my staff. Um, the custodian of the records is really the proper entity authority person, you know, to, to handle it. And it's not always just emails. Oftentimes it's your text messages that they're after and things that we can work with you and we can answer questions. Um, I would just say gathering documents is not a legal issue, but we're here to answer questions and help, you know, shepherd things along. Um, I, when I've seen records requests that encounter all seven of you, um, what I have found easier. And again, my office does, you know, get involved to say, this is legal. This is not legal. No, you don't have to create records. That's not required. You know, no, they can't ask for records that you haven't even made yet that might occur a week from now. We will, we help you answer all those questions. What we have found makes things easier when it applies to all of you is for a single person on your floor to, um, help kind of gather things up and, and treat things so that, that everybody's kind of, you know, being treated the same and that we're gathering the records. We do provide a lot of support when that happens. No, make no mistake. We provide a lot of support, um, to your office, to your assistance when that's happening. Um, but again, not, not just related to you all, I would always say the proper, the proper people to be handling records requests are the actual records custodians. I mean, again, when it's been suggested, and I'll just pick on Barry for a minute, you know, when it's one of his departments that said, well, why don't you guys handle this? It's like, well, I'm not your boss. I can't tell you to give me those records. Someone that's in charge of you that can, you know, confirm that the request is being responded
to is really the appropriate party. And the public record stuff. I mean, it's also, um, but you know, on us to relevant information that needs to be redacted, it's on us to make sure it's redacted. Right. And, and if it's our staff that's doing it for us, they're always looking out for our best interest as they should be. Um, but I can tell you, Ashley's been working on just one public records request that was so huge. It's been months, months that she's been organizing and pulling this together. And, and it is also on all of us to respond timely to whoever asked for them because she shouldn't be chasing your staff down, trying to get this information, right? Because we are responsible to do it timely. And if your staff aren't providing it timely, then it falls badly on the county and then we can end up with lawsuits. But, um, but you know, just a thought, you don't have to take it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a thought, but it's, it's a very complex. We've had more this year, I think than we've ever had ever. And, um, they have just been so cumbersome, um, and complex that it would be great if we had one person that was in charge. But, um, but really it is upon us to make sure that we provide from our cell phones and, and we make sure that information that's supposed to be protected is protected. And, and so I'm kind of with jewel on that one.
And if I could jump in, we, we do have, um, we just did training, I think a week or so ago, the county has a policy. It's been on, it's been in place for quite a while that, um, governs how the county responds to public records requests. So it obviously recognizes Florida law. We follow Florida law, obviously in responding. Um, we've had this policy in place for quite some time. And the reason why it was originally implemented was back under the prior county attorney. Um, but oftentimes, uh, when we just get a general records request that comes into the county, it will cross multiple departments. And so what we did was because of course, everybody kind of throws that hot potato to the next department, because I, you know, I can tell you one of people's least favorite things to do is to handle public records requests. Um, but the way our policy reads now is every department has a single public records liaison. And so public works, a big department of Kelly is still in here, giant department, you know, utilities is a very big department, but they have one person that will handle that records request. Um, the other thing that the policy has put out there is, which is nice is if it covers multiple departments, the department that's going to have the heavier list lift will be, um, the lead department. And then they gather up all the other departments through that single person. I'm boring you with this process to just kind of emphasize again, it's very helpful for you all to have that single person. And in the past, there has been a single BCC aid that was designated as the fifth floors public records liaison. Um, that's a very helpful process. Again, we provide a lot of support because usually when, you know, usually when it's the, you know, stuff that's that you all have as records, we double check to make sure that we're providing public records, that there's nothing in there that is exempt or confidential. We do provide a lot of support. Um, but again, that policy we have, I really do think it makes it and we've probably been using it for 10 plus years now. It has made things a lot easier. That single point of contact really does make things easier.
That's a good point. All right. Um, I think, well, I think commissioner would you have something.
Okay. To, uh, commissioner flowers point. Um, my understanding is there are law firms and lawyers in Florida that specialize in public records for the sole purpose of suing the like city, county, whatever that they're, um, requesting them from. I would assume that we would know who those people are. Is that like, would your people know if we were to get a, um, uh, public records request from somebody who's notorious for suing cities or counties for public records? Would you, if you, your office saw like the public records ahead of time and, and then you could go to each commissioner's office saying, Hey, just so you know, this person will just try gonna try to sue us. So please make sure that you do this by the book ASAP or something like that. Yeah, there are some,
some names out there that we would certainly recognize. Um, just, I'll just say empirically. I haven't seen quite as much of it recently as maybe a few years ago. Doesn't mean it's not still happening. Maybe just not as frequently here in Pinellas County, but yes, there are definitely some particular names that we would recognize and we, it's not just you all. We would tell any county department, Hey, we recognize this name. Always do it properly, but like, let's pay close attention this time. Um, but absolutely there's some firm names out there and lawyer names and even just some general citizens that we know that have, you know, done this across the state. We absolutely, anytime we see those names, we definitely advise whoever it is that may be gathering the records.
I think, I think right now it's, it's, um, Commissioner Peters and, um, in Commissioner Scheer's office that are leading public records. I guess we can kind of talk internally about how we, how we want that to handle, but I guess more broadly, I just kind of looking to see if, if we have consensus for that or not. I think Commissioner Eggers has a point
you want to make. Um, yeah, just again, um, I would hope that to your point about the current person that we have on the floor, that this would be affecting directly, that we do what we can to find a spot for them. Yeah. I think that's a responsibility that we have. Um, which is kind of why I, I want to
kind of get, if we want to do this, I want to get consensus on it so we can give her time for that. I understand. Um, but I just want to put in perspective and I don't have the numbers here,
but, um, our floor has a certain budget and that includes all of our salaries, all of our aids, all of our everything. And this person represents, this position represents a percentage of that budget. Okay. So just for perspective, that's all I'm saying. It's not, it's not very high. Um, we have continued to along the last three years, probably move responsibilities from our floor to the, to the sixth floor. Doesn't mean that the, the, the work that we were doing isn't being picked up by somebody else. So it's, it's kind of like, it's still there. We're spending money, whether it's off of our floor or off of the sixth floor. Um, just, it doesn't go away just because we take it away from us. I mean, I assume that people are doing boards and committees. Uh, it's a certain amount of time that somebody is doing. So again, just, um, and, and I guess what I, uh, there's this piece and then, you know, to Commissioner Latvala's, uh, comments about me being the old person in the group, there's a certain tradition or there's a certain, um, system about having somebody on our floor that welcomes a resident a month. It used to be more, uh, uh, there used to be no wall there either. And people had a lot more freedom to come and go and interact with their, their commissioners. Uh, there was no COVID that came along that made people less, you know, coming out. Uh, we're gonna have a new building. That's going to have a different, a whole different setup. There's a part about whether if the press comes up to talk to somebody on the floor, um, is there a commissioner here? Is there an aid here that we can talk to? Um, are we going to get back into rotating to make sure that one of our aids is on the floor at all time? Um, these things are going to happen. I mean, we, we got to figure out those little pieces along the way. I'm not saying that this is the single most, you know, productive use of funds. I just wanted to put it in perspective about what we have on the floor as far as expenses go. And if that person goes away, we are going to be backfilling with somebody. Some of the things that happened there, whether the amount of time that that person spends, it's going to be spent by somebody, one of our aides you mentioned, and I don't have the list here. I don't think you included all of the responsibilities that would now be going to different, like the past chair, the vice chair. So maybe you could send that around so that we could take a look at that. Um, because at the end of the day, you know, again, I'm not just singling out, you know, my office, but my office has about 50% of the unincorporated residents. We get a lot of calls, um, just for that, just handling those. Um, and so, you know, again, you, you know, have more responsibilities. I just think there's perspective here. And that's all I was trying to bring to the conversation that again, um, it doesn't go away. The jobs that we do on this floor for the last five years that have slowly, but surely got less and less have gone somewhere and we're going to have to pick, pick it up here too. So again, that's all. Thank you. Okay.
Thank you, chair. Um, yeah, I mean, um, you know, I would be in support of, uh, you know, what you're asking for on the, on the condition that, you know, um, this same analysis is applied to all county employees. Um, because I think, you know, not to target one person specifically, um, but I think if you did the same analysis, you could see similar or results for all county employees potentially. Um, so in the spirit of, you know, if you get 3% raises, everyone gets it. Um, if you know, you're looking at eliminating positions or analyzing positions, I think we should analyze all. Um, so, you know, I would be in support of removing this position if we did an analysis of all staff positions. I think that's already been done. I don't think to this detail of how many phone calls they do, if you want to work, if you want to go through and emails,
they do an hour. I'd love to see that. No, if you want to go through and meet with department by department, like we did and go through position by position, like we've done. Okay. With my staff, then, you know, how about it? I mean, we, we go through and look at every position, every position that's vacant, whether it can be eliminated. And we've done that year after year, and we've eliminated positions year after year. Yeah. There's no need. That's the reason. It's a very, I'm just saying, I understand. But I mean, I, I want you to know that we do that type of level of analysis. We challenge the departments. Do we get it right? Do departments say, yeah, we need it. And they, and maybe they could have done without it. I'm sure, you know, somewhere through and they're conserved. They're, they're trying to respond to public needs and things like that. But we do that type of analysis. Chris literally creates a separate list of depart, of, of positions that they target. And they do that because their analysts work with those departments day in and day out, and they identify that. So that becomes a discussion first at their level, with the department, then with Chris, and then with me. And so we literally go through, and we try to do that the best we can. So you, so you have reports for how many phone calls staff takes per an hour and how many emails they do per an hour? I'm sure within the departments, they have those types of data, that type of data and measurement. Can we get that? Again, per, per department, I'm sure we have that type of data. So yes, we can get you whatever type of information. If you have a specific request of a specific department, I'm sure that can be
accommodated. But, but a general request for the entire county is not something we're going to get
to the bottom two. Utilities, public works, budgeting. I mean, there you go.
We, we, we have that. I don't want to do another, you know, I've got to get, you know, 300,000 pages. You just sent it to me. But, but again, we, we do that department by department. We look for efficiencies. That's all I'm trying to, to get at. We, we constantly do that and have done that. And,
you know, and I'm not just asking to share that information if you've done it. I'm asking you to do anything new, so it's not any more work. I'm just, you're saying you've done it, correct? I'm saying departments have that type of ongoing review in certain areas. So then they could share that with me, a commissioner, who's asking you,
the administrator, to share that information. If you have a specific request of what you want for a specific department, please get it to Barry and they will get you the information. But we got a, we still got a gender review. We still got some stuff to do. I mean, I've asked for stuff a lot of times and don't get it. So it's, you know, kind of frustrating. You will get it. We're always responsible. Okay.
And Barry, please correct me. Not all employees get 3%. 3% is what we're saying across board. Their salary increase is based on their performance review. Or are you saying everybody gets 3% irrespective? So someone... That's a whole, you opened up a whole
discussion. So it's, so we've done it a couple of different ways. So years ago, several years ago, we used to do it based on midpoint. And so people that are at the top end of the range would get a little bit less. People at the beginning range would get a little bit more, right? And we eliminated that because we started doing that. But this is a proposal for 3% for everybody. Okay.
Period. So if I am, excuse my language of piss poor employee, I'm still going to get 3%.
3%. No, you, we can, we identify employees that are not deserving of a raise. Okay. And that's the basic point. And that's what I was, that's what I'm trying to get at. So they're there. And then we have provisions to where they can get part of that back if they
improve performance. So they can be put on a performance improvement plan. Correct. So again, not everybody. Yes. But potentially gets 3%. I was getting at, we, we used to have like
a merit system. Okay. And we've continued to discuss about how to recognize, you know, high performers. We continue to have those discussions. And I should not have used that P word that I just
used. I'm sorry. Yeah.
So I apologize. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Um, I really appreciate what Commissioner Nowicki is trying to do with those, uh, efforts and, um, cutting the budget, scrutinizing positions, questioning Barry. I mean, that's his job. Um, and I support him wholeheartedly in that.
That's what he was elected to do. Um, but there's some things that I don't necessarily agree with. Um, and I'm going to take this opportunity to, uh, share those, um, publicly with, uh, my colleagues. Um, one being that my friend, Commissioner Nowicki was the only one who, um, suggested, uh, decision packages that raised, uh, are added to the budget. Uh, I think that somewhat disingenuous. Um, you know, and the other thing, and, and I mean, if he wants to, you know, uh, call a letter that the chairman did, and I quote, a lot of double talk and pointing fingers, that certainly is a priority or prerogative as an elected, uh, commissioner in Pinellas County. And, and, and he can criticize the chairman for that. And that's fine. Um, and, and criticize positions, criticize county employees. But I also know that shortly after Commissioner Nowicki was elected, uh, there was another position that he tried to get in Pinellas County. And, and he actually inquired with staff to become his own aide and, um, and take that salary, um, without hiring an aide and, and not having an aide and, and take that, uh, for himself. Um, and I know a couple months ago, a few months ago, that there is a, uh, city in Pinellas County where he talked to elected officials as well as, uh, community leaders, business leaders, and tried to become their city manager. And, I mean, I have a problem, and, and I would be curious if, in his talks with Doge, if he asked what their opinion was of drawing a paycheck being an aide while being a commissioner, or being a city manager of a city in Pinellas County while serving as a commissioner. I mean, like, I'm with him wholeheartedly on Doge efforts. But bashing Barry, bashing, you know, our chairman, literally weeks or months after trying to become a city manager in a city that we represent, at the same time as he's a county commissioner. I mean, you know, what does Doge think about that? Um, what does Doge think about an elected official trying to be their aide? I mean, that's just, it's mind-boggling. And, and he's my friend, and, and, um, I'm glad that he's a part of us. But, you know, constantly bashing county employees over and over, and wanting to scrutinize positions over and over, just, I mean, it's, it's tiring.
I apologize. I have to go pick up my grandson from schools. That's always why I'm not staying for a gender review. I do apologize.
Have a good weekend. So is that, um, consensus for the fifth floor specialist? I'm good with what has been presented. All right. All right. Thank you. Um, I have a few other things, but I'm going to hold that because we got a lot. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Actually, we've been trying to get rid of that position for,
for three chairmen have brought it to us to try and get rid of that position. And I think every time someone becomes a chair, they go, okay, I get it. So, um, but thank you again. And it's just, I, I, I brought it up twice last year and, and, um, so I'm glad that you brought it up again. I think there's, I think there's a way to make this work without, um, without the, um, staff person there.
I think we can make it work just fine. Yeah. And I, and I really have to, uh, commend Colleen for doing that detailed analysis. So, so I'm sure she's listening. Thank you, Colleen.
I do have one more comment and, um, and it's not on the same level of Commissioner Latvalla, but you know, when I first came on board in 2018, I had no success. And I know a lot of you were watching back then, but I had no success at getting the, the military reduced for a couple of years. Um, and, and then, and, and I had no success during COVID to not have mass and not if businesses shut down. It was a six, one vote, six, one vote on so many things. It was a six, one vote. But what I can tell you is when we got that tide to turn and when it shifted, um, and a lot of that had to have to do with, you know, Brian came on board and some changes came and, and Barry too, he kind of came around. We had a year where we, we did not roll down the millage and we had no line item for that budget and we raised $33 million just for reserves. And I was appalled and I was very public about it. And, and that was the last time that we did anything like that. Um, and, and so, you know, I want to commend really all the staff and Barry, because you know, every year we have come back and Barry has come back with a budget where we could, you know, it might've been incremental, but we were able to roll it back. And this one that you did this year, I think is huge. Um, and, and he has had a mindset for five years now to, to be, you know, even since he came on board to be more efficient, it's always been more efficient, more efficient, more efficient. Um, but in the last five years, it has been, let's roll it back. Let's roll it back. Let's really get, um, you know, slim, let's get, but, but efficient, let's be slim, but let's be efficient. Uh, let's be effective, but let's be efficient. And, and so I think, you know, I, I didn't agree with the, the, um, roads and sidewalks. I voted against it. Um, in hindsight, I, I think I made a bad vote on that one. I think it was brilliant and I'm glad we did it. Um, but I think that your staff and Chris and you have done an outstanding job over the last five years, um, especially with the horrible hurricane season, especially with, you know, I, I'm, I know I voted for some exempt preemptions, but I don't know that I voted for any unfunded mandates, but, um, cause I've just never believed in the unfunded mandates, you know, there might be a couple, but I know, I know I did with some preemptions and on those preemptions, I supported them. Um, uh, and I was not always in unison in the house, like, you know, so, um, but I really do want to come, I, I, you know, Vince, I don't, you know, you haven't been in the digging in the weeds for as long as we've been digging in the weeds. And, and I know there were things that maybe we could have done better over the years to get more efficient and more effective, but I think this year's budget is outstanding and you really have dug. And I think where you found those savings and those reserves, maybe we could have done it sooner, maybe not, but I love that you've got them and you've got them now. And there is no time more than right now that the people have been very public about them not wanting their taxes raised. I mean, before it was like, we really like the service, you guys are doing a really good job, but it has been very clear that the public wants the taxes reduced and you have stepped up and you have done it. And I really appreciate it. I appreciate all the work you've worked on this really diligently hard. And for a long time, I think you've put more into it than I've ever seen you put into it. And, and I really appreciate the effort. And I just wanted that said, I think you're doing a great job. And over the last five years, there's been such a change and a shift from the years prior. Um, it has truly been about effectiveness and efficiency. We have outstanding staff who have had outstanding pressures and stress over the last year and a half. And they have risen to, um, an exemplary level of production. They're incredible. And, um, and I'm proud of this budget and I'm really proud of the work that the county's done. And I'm proud of our staff. So thank you.
Well said. All right. We're going to move on to agenda review. All right. Okay. Um, okay. Um,
agenda review. Yeah. So go over to, I didn't pick up my underlined version. So this is going to be rough. Um, I always underline the version that way I can be efficient with this. So the first item, item number seven is declaring surplus, um, equipment. The items are broken down within your packet. Um, going on to, um, item number nine, this award of bid, uh, for septic tank service. Uh, well, actually it's with several different firms. And so they do use this during emergency response. So they have them under this. This is to reject the bid from Republic service based upon being non-responsive to the bid. Correct. I don't have a underlying version. So I'm going to probably look up at staff a little bit more. Um, okay. So reports receipt for file onto the regular agenda. Um, item 13 is an agreement with, um, BKN creative for marketing services for human services. This specifically is about the cam. When we talked about the cam, we identified funding to do a, um, an effort to get the word out, trying to match. We, we know there's a, or we believe there's a need. Um, but if they don't know where to call and they don't access that, then we're spending a lot for per person. And we know that needs to be cost effective. We want to make this as a marketing effort to see if there, it really is that need. And that people want this service. So, um, the next item is, uh, funding recommendations for social action funding. So this is the amount of money that we bid out, uh, or that we put out. And, um, as you can see, um, we have a $1.7 million. There were $7.3 million of requests. So they have, um, gone through a process to evaluate. They have, they'll have contracts for each one of these and they're recommending 18 community agencies, um, uh, for funding within the different award amounts. Item 15 is annual agreement with the sheriff for our, um, uh, environmental lands deputies. Um, item 16 is natural resource conservation, uh, emergency watershed protection grant program for debris removal in the various channels. So, you know, going back to the other item, well, we just can't go out and do things. We need permits and everything. So this, um, provides grant funding and $5.9 million. And then they, the permits that go along with it to be able to clean some of these channels and a portion of this, this is down in Joe's Creek too, correct? Yeah. And so commissioner Peters has been all over that. This will address some of those longstanding issues. Um, item 17 is a resolution providing authority to use golf carts within the Autumn Woods subdivision in Palm Harbor. And 18 is for Ennswood subdivision in Palm Harbor. Lots of golf carts. Lots of golf carts. And we have criteria that they go through to evaluate that to make these recommendations. Um, item 19 is a resolution supporting the honorary designation of, uh, us 92 state route 60 Gandy Boulevard from Southwest shore Boulevard and Hillsboro to four street north in Pinellas County as the Sebastian, as the best, uh, James, James, James, Sevesta Memorial highway. This was, um, you know, there was legislation signed by the governor. You brought it forward, I believe. Um, and, uh, so it's on our agenda for approval. Cool. Good. All right. And the, and staff's working on the other requests that you had for the bridge. We're going to be bringing that back to you soon. Okay. Um, item 20 is transfer of three emergency medical vehicles to the Pinellas County sheriff. So they use them. So they're going to get them and
maintain them, uh, going forward. Items 21 and 22 are foreclosure actions that we're requesting authority to file. These cases both came out of the special magistrate, uh, code enforcement. And I do not anticipate any reports at this time. Okay. I'll have a report. And then we've got county
commission stuff, um, over to your public hearings. Um, petition of gateway three to vacate a portion of the 34th. Um, so this vacation's an unimproved right away. Um, staff is in support of their recommendation that lies within Pinellas Park. Um, 27th resolution adopting the Joe's Creek industrial park master plan that you previous had a presentation on. Item 28, an ordinance amending the code relating to, uh, driver's education. Um, this, so there was a change in state law, um, that requires, um, um, um, education for anybody that's even going through their learners permit. Um, the superintendent will be here, uh, to address and answer any questions you have, but it requests an increase in the PE to be able to cover, um, that, that, and hasn't been raised in a long time. Okay. Say again. Uh, you have to ask him that. All right. I heard, I heard yes from the audience. Um, and then, um, 29 is Pinellas Park planning interlocal agreement with city of Pinellas Park. So this allows Pinellas Park to include our unincorporated residents within their planning area for conducting their comprehensive plan. Okay. That concludes the agenda. All right.
Thank you, sir. Uh, Commissioner Eckers. Just real quick. I just want to make sure that, um, the things that we brought up today on the savings for the budget, um, I'm assuming that we're translating the recommendation will be to translate that into a millage rate reduction. Yes. We will
translate that to a millage rate reduction. The one thing we have still need to discuss is whether you want to include Sankey. Uh, we'll certainly include the position on this, on the, on the fifth floor. Um, but the question is whether you want to include the Sankey lifeguards, uh, in that or not. And, and, okay. So I, I, I think Sankey, like Fort DeSoto,
I'm not as familiar with Sankey and it's not as complex, complex as Fort DeSoto. Um, but I think if, if we're going to come up with the, and originally I thought we agreed to get rid of Sankey's lifeguards, but maybe we didn't. But, um, I don't know how many, I don't remember how many drownings we had last year. We've already had several this year. Uh, we've had more lightning strikes, I think, than, than drownings this year so far. But, um, but I think if we have that bigger discussion, maybe then we let go of Sankey is my thought. We can, we can bring it into you. There, there's a lot
of response out there, but there's also a fire station that's directly outside the gate. That's true. There is a fire. That's true. There is. And it's, it's kind of the same way as Fred Howard. Um, you know, we worked with them. Obviously the fire department doesn't like that we don't have them out there, but they, they, they accepted it. Okay. Well, I would defer to my
colleagues then, but I'm, I'm very sturdy on the Fort DeSoto one. Absolutely not taking them away there.
Yeah. We're not even presenting that. So I'm a fan of, uh, Sankey since that's the beach I'm forced to go to when I go to the beach. Are there, uh, some of those hotels that have, uh, any kind of like
shared lifeguards or anything like that? There's no, there's no lifeguards from Sankey all the way down the rest of the beaches except Fort DeSoto. So Madeira beach, St. Pete beach. Nobody puts
lifeguards out. Yeah. I would be interested to know how many drownings there were there. I think
we need to look at that whole thing. Okay. So we'll take, so for now we'll talk to TDC about it too. So for now we'll take that off and then I'll calculate the millage and we'll bring that back to
you. Okay. And I would be confident that every city would want lifeguards and TDC to pay for it.
Or there's a, there's no doubt about that. I have costs, um, associated with that and request.
I have no doubt about that. Absolutely. No doubt about that. Yes. Okay.
Okay. No, I just had one other thing. Um, and the other thing was back in item 13, Barry, which we talk about, um, you know, the cam program, which, you know, again, I think is an untapped source that is higher, higher demands than what we've seen. So if you could give me a sense of, you know, again for Tuesday, how much money we've spent on this thing that we're talking about, to me, this seems like a lot of money for one year, 600 grand for one year for a program that costs, I don't even know what the cost is for us. I just want to get some perspective again on that. Okay. And I, I wasn't going to bring that up because we've been here so long, but since you did,
I had a very good conversation all over this, a very good conversation with, uh, with Matt yesterday about this, but, um, I, I haven't decided how I'm going to vote on this yet, yet for Tuesday, but you know, right now a cost per appointment is running about, about 6,400 bucks. And if any one of us called one of our care providers and said, Hey, we need to come in and see you for whatever reason. And they said, well, sure, uh, Mr. Eggers, that'll be, um, $6,400 to hold an appointment for you. We'll take your credit card whenever you're ready. None of us would accept that. Right. Um, so, um, so Matt and I have, have talked about ways to kind of defining what is this, what does success look like? Um, so we can talk more about that on, on Tuesday. Okay. So the, so the, yeah, we'll,
we'll give you an outline on what the 600,000 is going to be used for, but it really is a blitz. It's a, it's a blitz to say, um, how do we connect people? I mean, people know to call 9-1-1, but you don't know what to call this, you know, when you're, when your stressors kick in. And, and so how do we make people have that connection? So there, it needs to be enough to where we can get the word out. But if, if it, if this doesn't work, then, then we do have to, to, to look at our program because we've got to make that connection somehow. So I think they put money in because they want to do a successful job at making that connection. And they have talked about, you know, getting that, that buzzword to where then people can remember, you know? Um, so they, but
they've got to make that connection. Well, every, every person, it's very individual how they connect and how they need to have their hands held through a crisis. So I'm not, I'm not presuming that I know that, but I, have we been doing any of this marketing or is there been zero and now we'll have that for Tuesday and I'll have Karen address it then. How about that? Because I can get, have
Matt get up and he's familiar with it, but Matt and Karen, I think it'd be better addressed right from the people that's been dealing with it. Thank you. Okay. Um, I would like to thank
deputy Manley and Winnick for keeping us safe today. Thank you very much, gentlemen. And, uh, with that, we are adjourned. I wish everybody a great weekend. We'll see you Tuesday.