Board of County Commissioners - Work Session on 2025-08-28 9:30 AM - Work Session/Agenda Briefing - Aug 28, 2025

Well, good morning, everybody. I'd like to call to order our work session for Thursday, August 28th, 2025. And good morning, Ken. Always nice to see you. How are you doing today? Good morning, Chair. It's good to see you. Yeah. All right. So we're first up is our enterprise resource planning system update. And we're missing two colleagues. That's fine, but we'll get started anyway. All right. Good deal. First of all, it's good to be with you all here today and to talk about our ERP system. And in preparing for this, I just said, I guess we should give a definition of what an ERP system is. First of all, it stands for enterprise resource planning. And the definition on the Internet, it's a type of software that organizations use to manage and integrate their core business processes. It automates various business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management, supply chain operations, drawing on a central database that collects inputs from different departments. This integration enables efficient management and real-time data access for informed decision making. And I think it's important to have that definition in front of us as we talk about the new ERP system because that's what we're trying to do is to make the system more efficient and more effective. And really, the ERP system, I equated this from a biology standpoint, and I never was very good with biology, is it's the spine. You're a numbers guy. Yeah. Numbers guy. But it's the spine. And if we didn't have a spine, none of our other organs in our body would be able to work. And so it's an important part of the whole system here as far as our technology, as our operations of government, is to have that spine, to have the ERP system, so that all other entities within county government can work. The ERP process, when we looked at this, and we had a lot of conversation, as we do in government, about how we should approach this. And we said it's important that leadership at the very top of our organizations be committed to this process. So good morning, Commissioner Latval. Good to see you. I'm not calling you out. It's good to see you. So there was a commitment made with Mary Burton on the executive team of the ERP system. Wade Childress, our – I gave you the official title of Chief Human Resource Officer, because I think that's what the industry standard calls for, as part of the executive team. And, of course, Jeff Roars, Executive Director of BTS. So we wanted to make sure that there was commitment from all aspects of the leadership in the county to push this thing through. Also, after having a hit and miss, we had a hit and a home run and, I guess, almost a grand slam when we selected a project director. And it's a new Syrin. And he works out of Miami. He comes up here. But he has great experience in putting these systems, implementing them into counties, and serving as the overall project director. And this is a system which is very invasive, pervasive throughout the county. It's going to involve almost everyone in the county. It's big. And while this project's been on our strategic horizon for years in conceptual form, it's really now that we're putting it into reality. So let's go. Let me see if I – there we go. And why are we doing this? Well, first of all, our current ERP system is no longer sustainable. And since citizens are watching some of these presentations, I want to point out that the decision that we made 20 years ago to Oracle was not the wrong decision. It was made 20 years ago, and I think all of you realize technology has changed in the past 20 years. Now, we made that decision 20 years ago, and it's the – but it was 15 years ago that we actually went live with all aspects of Oracle. Okay? So it's been in place for 15 years, and that's good. That served us well. I know when Mr. Burton was county administrator up in Lake County in Illinois, he implemented the same system. It was considered the state-of-the-art system at the time. But it no longer is that state-of-the-art system, and it's clunky in many ways because it has manual processes that need to be automated. And so that's what we're looking at is how do we make things better. And just some examples in our HR system, candidates, recruitment, onboarding, and payroll. There must be manually inputted on our procedure to pay. And, of course, we do, you know, tens of thousands of invoices each year. There's agreements, purchase orders, and payments. It's not – they're not seamlessly integrated currently. And even our recent example with the Doge visit, it took some server folks in the BTS to take a clunky system and to get the reports that was being requested by Doge. So on those types of examples, it could be done a lot more effectively. So there's redundant processes, manual processes, and these have resulted in less than effective operations currently. Again, when the system was implemented, it was state-of-the-art, but we're past that time. And also, you know, the system is a server-based system, and I certainly am not qualified to talk about the technology aspects. That's why Jeff's part of this. But the new systems we're looking at are cloud-based systems, and cloud-based systems, by their very nature, are more effective and more efficient. We don't have the servers down here, and it involves less employees to run those systems. This chart should make your head spin a little, but it shows you all the various aspects that involved in the ERP system. And when we put together the group to look at this, first of all, the RFP process was tremendously complex to decide what we need. We had lots of sessions just to depict, decide on what our RFP should state so that we get the right vendors to submit proposals to us. A limited number of vendors, because there's not that many people out here in this field who can submit bids. And they did, and then we narrowed it down to three. And then it was an eight-day process. And, Jeff, how many people were in the room for each of those meetings? So we had lots and lots of folks participating in this for a reason. As Jeff mentioned, there were eight voting members representing the different segments of the county, okay? And each of them looked at a different perspective. From Wade's angle, he's looking at it mainly from an HR angle. To see, does this system, is this the best system from an HR viewpoint? From Nicole and Jeanette and Bill's angle, they were looking at it from the financial angle. What's the best system out of the three that were looking at it? Jeff and his folks are looking at what makes the technology sense, which is a good model that we can do the proper integrations and serve us well. And, of course, OMB and Chris looked at it from the budget angle. So you would think when looking at it and when you have these different people looking at it, and although they're looking at what's good for the whole system, they're focused on what their business is. So you would think maybe, gosh, this system over here is probably the best at HR, this system over here may be best at finance. Well, it didn't work that way. All eight people and the people they consulted with, because they didn't make the decision alone, voted on Workday unanimously as the best choice. So that meant that it had the best HR, the best finance, the best budget, and the best technology, because everyone looked at it from that angle, but they all came to the same conclusion. So I think that's very, very powerful that it was a unanimous choice. And I saw the scoring sheet after it was done, and there was a big gap between the first-place vote and the second-place vote by every single entity that voted. So I think that you should feel a sense of comfort that this is coming to you, highly recommended. These are the various goals that we looked at, and they're not in any priority order. I want to emphasize that. All of them are important to us, and we purposely did not prioritize them. We just numbered them. And you could see these. I'm not going to go through each of these, but the one I want to focus on, because I know you all have expressed interest before, is on the use of AI. And that was an important component here to make sure that we're using the latest technology to help us. And AI is one of those terms that is, and Rakesh over there will tell you, it's probably one of the most overused terms right now in the technology field. I mean, so how do you define AI? It's machine learning. It's predictive analytics. It's automated workflows. That's how we're defining it for here in what we're looking at in Pinellas County and how to make us more effective there. So the goal of increasing effectiveness and efficiency and going with a system that we can sustain for a while was very important in all these goals here that are mentioned. We also, and again, if you have questions on this slide, Jeff would be the person to answer these. But these are the different systems that we currently have in Pinellas County that are all going to be eliminated and go into the workday. The Oracles being the biggest one, the Splash BI, we have the Questica and the budgeting, the learning management system up there, Toledo, open government. And so we're taking a whole bunch of different softwares and putting them as part of our ERP system. So that's an important component here, too. And you'll see when I get to the return on investment why this is important. And I'm sure I know not, you know, y'all are, and you should be, y'all are advocates for our taxpayers here in Pinellas County. To make sure what we're doing is effective, efficient, and wise use of taxpayers' money, we estimate that this is, and this is a very conservative estimate because we didn't want to overpromise here. But we, and working with our finance division and working with Chris and budget, have determined this is the cost savings. Now, let me tell you part of the complication here with the ERP system. This is not a, when you put in a new ERP system, it's not one day you have the old ERP system and you turn off the switch, and then the new ERP system, we plug it in and it starts working. That's not how it works. You have to phase out the old system over a period of time, and you have two concurrent systems running in some times on different aspects of it, and then you phase the one out as you're going into the new system. Jeff, did I kind of get that right? And Jeff, again, could tell you more about that. So you see a cost up there for the legacy system because the legacy system, which is an expensive system, has to be maintained during the process and is phased out in different aspects as we adopt different modules or different aspects of the ERP system. We do have a savings, which we put 11 FTEs. We think that's fairly conservative, too, and that's spread out among different agencies, but all ones you fund. So, okay, so it's coming out of the funding pocket that y'all are responsible for. And I want to emphasize, because I know employees may be listening, that doesn't mean we're going to eliminate or lay off people. This is going to be, it will be a phase out as people retire and positions become vacant. They won't be filled. So I don't want to create any panic around the county there. But it's through the procurement, OMB, the clerk's office, HR, and BTS that those positions will be saved. The most is in the clerk's office, actually, as far as we said we would be efficient and still eliminating processes. Yes? Do we have the staff now, or is this new folks that we'd be bringing in? These are current staff that are working now that won't be, because of the efficiencies, those positions will not be needed. Okay. And they're not defined as, like, this person's position. This means by being more effective, instead of having 12 people do the work, we could have 10 people do the work. That's more, it's not like this one person that says, oh, you're doing that work and it's no longer needed. It doesn't work that way. It makes that process more effective. Barry? And what makes this hard is trying to, we haven't gone through that transition yet. We haven't done the implementation. So this is using our project manager to try to identify and like project implementations where they've been able to find those efficiencies. So we're going to learn as we go through. There's going to be a whole change management process as part of this. And that's the workflow of taking new processes under Workday and converting, you know, what we do now into what they have. And so they tried their best to identify a estimate. But that'll be different, probably even more. But again, it's hard to do that until you go through and see the processes that they're going to implement with this new software modernization process. Yeah. And Ken, my question was more to like, well, if we don't have the alternative of outsourcing that service, those FTEs. But we already have these folks on staff that will be. And there's another number up there, which is the backfill. So we're actually going to ramp up to do the implementation because we're going to have to implement this. And that's going to, it's going to, this is going to be an all hands on deck for this implementation. And then those, so those are temporary fills and they're actually based in the project, paid out of the project because it'll go away on that backfill. And then, and then you'll ramp down with the implementation. And again, he'll go through that, but that's in a phased implementation period. And that brings us very timely comment to the next slide, which talks about the timeliness of this project, when things are going to occur, and when money needs to be spent. Obviously, this is important as far as from a funding angle, when is money needed? And this, now you'll see this doesn't add up exactly to the figures in the other chart, but they do parallel. Well, we can go, go more into that if you wish, but this kind of gives a spending plan for, for the project. And really that's my last slide. I would invite if Wade and Jeff, y'all have any comments, you want to come up here and mention anything. You're certainly welcome to about the project. Wade? You're asking questions, I think. Hello. Dr. Flowers, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you? Well, thank you. So I truly understand doing a phase-in, starting with sometimes the largest department, and then you have an opportunity to see where some of the bugs are, so you can work that out as you're moving forward. I fully support keeping the legacy system in place, because you, from time to time, will have to probably, I call it archiving, but going back to that archive system to pull stuff up. So I see where we're going to keep that in place, but will that also, could that remain in place for maybe a time, a little bit longer? Because when you're transferring data, you know this, when you're transferring data, sometimes systems aren't talking to each other the way that they should. And so are we going to, with the legacy data, are we going to archive that somewhere so that we could just pull from it, not to say we're going to continue to run the system, but it's there so we could pull historical data from it if there's a need. Because there are a lot of programs that will flow into this system. You all know how I feel about Oracle. It's way outdated, and I'm glad we're moving into something that works. But just that question. I support what's going on here, of course, but just that question. Great question. Thank you. You guys know Jeff Rollers with Business Technology Services. So our number one strategy in a new system is to actually do data conversion for all data that's needed and not end up having a legacy system that hangs around for a while for folks to then use as, like, an archival or reporting system. So we would really highly encourage that through this project we do all of the data conversion to the new system that we need. And then if there is some data that, you know, we decide is not necessarily needed, we then use, like, a BI or a business intelligence strategy to allow us to report on that data. But we don't want to keep the legacy system around any longer than we need to. And so the data conversion will be done by phase. And you can see HR payroll is first. So we would be doing all of that data conversion and moving that in. And then we would no longer use that functionality in the legacy system. But we'd be using other functionality. So hopefully that answered it. Yeah, that, yes, sir, you did. I just, I always just have that hesitancy because we do our very best to make sure that the data you've poured it over, that all of it does. Because sometimes it moves around. You just have to kind of shift a little bit. But inevitably, because it's technology and because it's, we're telling a program to do something, sometimes things just kind of get a little, and it, you know, again, it's just a little inconvenience, you know, but sometimes, especially when you're looking at payroll, it could be a big inconvenience when something falls off. So I'm good with what you presented. I just wanted to ask that question so that if there's a need or desire, we have some information somewhere where we don't, where it's not, it's not gone, if you will, because once we phase out the legacy system, that's a wrap. And Dr. Flowers, you make excellent points. And I know you know this stuff. And I know you enjoyed serving on the BTS board. We're going to be very diligent on this. And we have to make business decisions. It's how much historical data we need to retain. Obviously, there's retention schedules that the state requires us, but we're not supposed to keep information beyond that point, too. So we're going to make sure that we're observing all those considerations and that the data integrity is there. I can tell you we have a strong commitment to that. Thank you. Thank you. I want to frame this a little bit of why we're talking about this today. I think we kind of started into the ERP system. The reason that we're here today is we wanted to make this presentation ahead of the budget. Because we were out for a bid, we had no cost estimates to work into the budget for this year. So here we've gone through that. They've been able to work out the contracts literally within the last, what, couple weeks regarding the cost of workday. And so you're seeing this in real time. The cost estimates won't, that'll impact us, but on a capital side, it'll be one-time money. So it will affect our reserve levels, but we've planned for that. And so that's where we're going to come back to you with a specific financing plan. But these are not built into the budget that you're, that's, you know, before you, because we simply couldn't until we went through that RFP process, negotiated contracts, and did some of these projections. Fair, anything to add on that, Chris? So we'll be bringing that to you shortly. But we wanted to have this presentation and conversation ahead of the budget you adopt. So, you know, it's no surprise when we come back to you. That'll be a cost to the general fund? It'll be a cost to the general fund, but it'll be out of one-time money. So even like we're going to ramp up, we're going to need people to help implement. So, you know, for instance, you can't do financials without, you know, a lot of the finance team. And then they're going to have somebody that's going to have to fill their job while they're focused on this, this implementation. It's a massive implementation. And so there'll be costs like that, but we're going to charge it off to the project. So we can take one-time money because that cost goes away with the project. And so that's how we're kind of targeting, paying for that. Will it be added to the BTS budget? No, we'll charge this off to the project budget. And so we'll keep that and we'll set aside reserve monies towards that out of our current reserve levels. This is a capital project, right? It's like a capital project. It's not really capital, but it's one-time. Commissioner Sherriss, I think you would want it that way, to have a project budget, so you know how we're doing and there's comparables. We didn't want to argue. Some other budget. We didn't want to argue three years from now for base operating budgets and what we remember from three years ago. So if we tie it back to the temporary cost, then it's easy because it goes away with the project. Ken. Yes, sir. The two comparisons there, obviously the modern-day ERP, that's the – and that was the – That's the workday. That was the best choice of the ones that were out there. Yes, sir. And you're comparing it in cost savings to the legacy system that we consider almost outdated. So what's the purpose of that to kind of – Just to show you, we wanted to make sure – and obviously your county administrator asked for the ROI. How much are we saving on this? If we continued on with the legacy system, it would cost us $26 million. If we go to the new system, it's going to cost us $22 million. So we want to show that there is a cost savings. Pure cost, not necessarily on the qualitative side of the improvements that you're bringing. Okay. Because that would be an additional – A lot, yes. But part of that's built in because we say the efficiency that's being created in positions. Okay. There's also other efficiencies, obviously, you know, just in operations. If for some reason I would hope for that because, I mean, even though that is a nice savings, it would seem to be – Yes. There would be potential for more. There is. Especially if you go out. You're absolutely right. But we didn't want to – we want to make sure we can quantify things. Okay. And that's why we – They focused on the ROI, but you're exactly right. The financials right now. It takes Chris's team manual processes to get me updated financials. It takes them weeks to prepare reports. That it should be by a push of a button. Commissioner Peters has railed on our HR system, you know, forever because it is a highly outdated system or lack – completely lack of modern HR systems. So there's just a number of things where, in addition to the cost savings, you're going to see improved data, improved accountability, improved access to county government. So, again, in the budget, there's not nothing in there because that would have been taking place. Yes, sir. So there's not nothing. There's going to be – All of our current ongoing cost is still in the budget. We then will bring back to you how to fund up the 26 cost as one-time cost that we'll bring back to you at a later date. Look forward to that. Any other questions? And, Commissioner Eggers, you asked a very good question because it is hard to quantify. Let's say your assistant, if you go to the NACO conference, and making this process a little bit more efficient for the reimbursement and the expenditure report, the travel voucher, and so forth, making that a little easier, it's hard to quantify whether we – you know, how we save personnel there. It makes the process easier so that your aid can do other work that's more important. And that's for all of us. I'm just giving that as an example. Anything else, sir? Commissioners? Great presentation, Ken. Chair Scott, I would like to conclude with saying I want to pay tribute to the county staff, the clerk staff, the BTS staff, the HR staff. It is so impressive just how diligent everyone is in this whole process. No one's taken this casually. Everyone's working together to advocate for their different points of views on these different things. It's been a very rich experience. And the seriousness, though, that everyone takes it, in the eight days of just going through the RFPs and analyzing them, it is impressive of how dedicated the staff is of all of our Pinellas County government different entities working together to end up with a product that's going to serve us well. So on behalf of y'all and clerk, I just want to say thank you to everyone and any employees who are listening to this, who have been involved with the process, we are very, very grateful for your work. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ken. Appreciate it very much. All right. We will move on to workforce policy update. Okay. Amanda's on our way up. So, commissioners, during the budget process, you asked for a couple of updates and largely for informational purposes as part of our budget. But also, I think it was kind of highlighted that you've really never been updated on, one, workforce relations and what they do, but also on the policies that we've implemented around our workforce over the last, you know, five, you know, six years. And so we've spent a lot of time working for years to align our career paths with skill sets and training and things that put value back into us being able to retain people, but compensating people for skill sets that they do. That creates pathways for people, it creates long-term stability for the county, and there's a real value for our residents in the services that they provide. So, I've asked Amanda to come up to talk about our different policies and what we've done around career paths and ladders. I had one question during the process, well, you also have steps. We don't have steps. And you'll see that in the way in which we compensate our employees. And then also, she'll also cover our remote work policy that was a question about. So, with that, I'll turn it over to Amanda and let her go over those. That was slide two and three, so thank you. Morning, Amanda. Just kidding. Just kidding. Good morning, commissioners. I appreciate your time today. My name is Amanda Smith, and I'm the director of workforce relations. As Barry stated, I'm here today to talk about career paths and ladders and the remote work policy, and, of course, to answer any questions you might have. So, I wanted to start out by asking if everybody knows the difference between a career path and a career ladder. You do? You don't? You do. Good. Everybody else does? Okay. I wouldn't think so. I just wanted to say career path is an in-grade training program that the department creates to elevate their employees' skills, certifications, licensure. However, on the completion of a career path, they are still in the same classification. They're just going to do better at the classification. Career ladders, same thing. It's a set training program, but at the end of a career ladder, you are either going to automatically promote, or you're going to be the most eligible person to promote. So, Pinellas County offers structured career paths and career ladders to enhance recruitment, enhance retention, reduce turnover, provide a succession pipeline. The program supports employee growth and skill development for select positions under the county administrator. The benefits to us is we use them to enhance recruitment, positively impact retention, provide a succession pipeline, like I said. And honestly, most people won't stay in a position very long if they don't have growth opportunities in that position. So, it's how we keep them in their positions, doing their job well. Some demographics about our county. There are approximately 2,031 employees under the county administrator. There's 414 different types of classifications. A little over 1,000 of those positions meet the criteria for a structured career path, and about 50 of them meet the criteria for an actual career ladder. Program eligibility, classified, classified, excluded, and exempt positions E26 and under can qualify for a career path, but the department has to be able to demonstrate meaningful criteria for growth and development. Exempt positions E27 and above do not have career paths or career ladders. And actually, exempt positions do not have career ladders at all. Classified and classified, excluded positions can qualify for a career ladder if the department can demonstrate a need for the higher level of work, and they have to create clear requirements for a promotion. So, career paths or how are they created and monitored? Templates for creation are provided by Workforce Relations. Departments identify, based on the policy positions, that they would like to create a path or ladder for. The department creates the criteria and send it to Workforce Relations for approval. Workforce Relations approves career paths. Career ladders are viewed by Workforce Relations, and then they have to be approved by Human Resources. Once the path or ladder is created and approved for use, supervisors enter employees into the system that is monitored by Workforce Relations. A single path or ladder requires approval from the employee's supervisor, the department director, OMB, Workforce Relations, and HR before it is determined to be completed. All documentation proving completion of training and a recent performance evaluation must be attached to the career path or ladder in the system, and any salary changes associated with the completion of a career path or career ladder entered after completion is confirmed by the supervisor into OPUS. Question. Yes. Yes. So, one of the things we've looked at over the years that has been drastically improved is the number of open positions that we have in our organization, and we try to minimize those numbers if they're not strategically important for that budget year. How do we account for these ongoing changes to their salary levels or wherever they are as they get more skill sets and they, you know, in the ladder? How do we account for that in a budget process and the changing element that occurs? When we reset the budget, then it goes back to actual salaries. So, the next year, if, you know, if somebody retired and we brought somebody in a lower amount, then it's budgeted the following year at the lower amount. So, the salaries, you know, are kind of baked into that each and every year. We also try, we never budgeted 100% of payroll to account for vacancies and turnover and things like that. So, one department may have, just by its nature of work, have a high turnover rate. We may budget them at 92% of payroll. Another department, let's say it's a smaller department that doesn't typically have a lot, we may budget at 98%. So, OMB tries to look at that in between the two factors. It kind of resets on an ongoing basis. And that includes that process of the career ladders and what that change occurs to each employee during that next year? They actually, they have to, they actually, during the budget process, have to identify, you know, potential upgrades. So, we try to account for that in the budget of where somebody's going to get career ladders and stuff. And then, let's say somebody leaves, then, you know, you bring somebody in at a lower salary, then that's kind of reset next year into the base budget. Processing. So, we actually do require them to enter career paths and career ladders into the system immediately when they enter them. Each career path and career ladder takes about four to five years on average to complete in its entirety. OMB is part of the process so that the budget analyst can project what the budget's going to be for the year that the individual is actually going to complete it and receive an increase. How do we, how do we do on that? Do we do pretty well in terms of anticipating those jumps each year? Are we, I mean. Yes, we do. Yeah. Chris says yes. Okay. No, I'm just trying to, it's nice. Well, it's hard. There's, I mean, I think they do, and they require that as part of the budget process. So, it requires them to look at their employees and look at the training and kind of anticipate what they're doing. That way they can budget appropriately. That's what our budget analysts do as part of that budget process. I know you have another slide. There you go. I know. So, I wanted to kind of give you an example of what the actual process looks like. This is an example of an entry-level position. It is one of the lowest classifications that we have in the county. This position in particular is a utilities maintenance specialist. An individual would enter this position at a pay grade 14. That is usually between 18, well, the minimum of that is 1872. The maximum of that is 25, 26 an hour or 38,000 and 52,000. The minimum requirements for someone to enter this position is completion of a ninth grade education, and we like for them to have one year of public utility, ground line, pipe, or meter experience. Usually, that means that they've dunked some ditches, and then we'll pick them up. They do have a career path for this position. This is what it looks like. These are the three different levels of a career path. So, that's entry-level, intermediate-level, and advanced-level. An individual has to be in the position for at least a minimum of the year, meaning they have to be out of their probationary period in order to complete the entry level, but there is no 2% increase associated with completion of the entry level. Once they're out of that, they've completed all the education and credential requirements for that, then they go into the intermediate level of the career path, and it takes another one year. They have to be in the intermediate level for a minimum of a year, create all the credential requirements, the training requirements, they have to complete them all, and then they get their first 2% increase. Same thing with the advanced level. If an individual just does their career path for their position, and they never promote to a higher-level position, they will only get to 2% increases. So, there's no paths past the advanced-level completion. Just to highlight, so let's, that grade that they're in, I forget what you said it was, grade? Utilities maintenance workers are in C14. So, if they're in a C14, that range, if they go through all the criteria, all the training criteria that was outlined, they can get two 2% increases for the completion of all of that training if they stay in there two years or 20 years, okay, as long as they're in that grade. And that's the difference between a ladder, which she's going to talk about. Yes. So, the earliest that you can actually complete an entire career path is three years minimum, but most people, on average, it's about four to five years. So, career ladders, much like career paths, they have requirements that have to be met. They're a little bit higher, larger than a career path, meaning you're going to have to get licensure. In some cases, it's a CDL license. In some cases, it's a water license. In the case of the UMW, or the Utilities Maintenance Worker, they actually have to get a high school diploma and a water license, a high school diploma, because that is required to get a water license. So, in order to move up into the next position, which is a Utilities Operations Specialist I, they would have to get their high school diploma, their water license, as well as meet the other criteria for moving up in that career ladder. There is a difference in our career ladders. We do have competitive and non-competitive. Competitive career ladders, obviously, an individual would be finishing their career ladder, which would position them to be the best candidate to apply for and compete for a position. Non-competitive, which only exists in the first two levels or three levels of a job family, is where they complete their career ladder and they're automatically moved up to the next career ladder or the next position in their job family. That exists in some of the lower-level positions that require licensure to do the full job. Sure. An example for Utilities. It is. An example for our public utilities? Is this... We have these... These are examples, but we have them in almost every area. Whether it's forestry, public works, utilities, in a variety of areas. Career and all that. Correct. And did you create these... The career paths and what? The career paths and all that, and your staff worked to put this together for the Utilities Department? We manage and we own the system. We manage and we own the templates. However, we're not experts in all of their positions. So, we work with the departments to create meaningful criteria. So, if all they're putting on there is this person has to walk into the building and check a box, that's not meaningful criteria and we would return it to them. So, it does require them... We work with them, but they're the experts on what would be valuable for that type of work and position. I'm just asking, for the budgeting reasons, the work she does for the Enterprise Department. Does your department get reimbursed by those Enterprise Funds for the work she puts in to develop their program? They do. Through the indirect cost plan, all the enterprise agencies, the work that, whether it's Ken Burke staff or whether it's workforce or whatever, for any of the enterprise agencies, they pay back through the indirect cost plan for the cost associated with the centralized services. Is it one of those contra things? It's not a contra, but it's like a contra. Like you would do, that's for a capital project, but it's like a contra where we charge back based upon a rate and that indirect cost rate is applied back to their budget each and every year. And it's done through our actuarial analysis that we do on a rotating basis. So it's two years behind, I believe, but they get reimbursed based upon their actuals, based upon the formula that we use. I'll just ask you because it looks like a lot of work for a lot of departments that are enterprise. The enterprise funds do pay for that, and there's different methodologies, and you actually have to have a certified indirect cost plan because of all grants and things like that that we use. But, yeah, we use a methodology that's approvable under the feds for grants, but we apply that back for all of our centralized services. Thanks, I think you know why I was asking. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Just using your example, I'm just trying to, you know, if you had a person that came in at the $18.72 an hour with regular raises, just assuming it's a 3% each year, they'd get up to about $19.86 in their third year. With the 2% bump, if they got through the three levels of programs in the three years, they'd get you up to about $20.66. So you've got about an $0.80 per hour. How does an employee travel through that range that you have in here from $18.72 to $25? Is that just by the annual increases? That's correct. Okay. So there's no... Other than these two 2% increases that they can get with their career path, it's just the annual increases or the general increases. And if they're highlighted as a really good employee, there could be another position that they could, another level, pay level, that they could be bumped to. Yes. Okay. They would be better qualified to move up on one of those classifications. And does each of those classifications have their own career path? So once they get into the next... That's right. If they get that next job, does that one also have a career path? Yes. Many of them do. Not every single one of our positions do. But in most cases, our trades positions, which is what these are, they usually do have a career path. So this is an example of career ladder criteria for that same exact position. These are the you must-haves and complete all the followings. As you can see, this one requires them to have a Class A license with a tanker endorsement. They have to have satisfactory reviews, possess a high school diploma, because their next career ladder is going to require them to have a water license. They have to take multiple classes on how to be tech savvy and how to write e-mails and how to, you know, interact with other people and talk to folks. Because at some point, they're going to be interacting with the public. Another part of their career ladders is a requirement for them to complete on-the-job training with various different tools and technologies. And they have a minimum hour requirement that they have to do in order to actually reach their career ladder level. There is not an actual time requirement for career ladders. But the vast majority of them take approximately four to five years. They do have to be out of their probationary period. So I guess at least one year. But for the vast majority of them, it's four to five years. I have a quick question. Okay. So would the new ERP system, like this training thing, looks kind of manual. Would it automate a lot of this for you? I'm hoping so. So the actual system itself that we currently use to track all of the career paths and career ladders is SharePoint. It is a bit of a beast. It's a little bit clunky. And so, yes, we are working collaboratively with HR to try and find a solution for that. And then a final question for me. When did we implement these paths and ladders? Have we had them in place for a long period of time? That I know of. They were created approximately four or five years ago. Boom. We actually, the first level, I think, was with Evergreen. Was that during Evergreen? They implemented the different tiers. I think it was a follow-on to Evergreen that we really began that. And so we were trying to compensate people for skill sets. And that really goes to turnover, you know, and recognizing our employees that want to upgrade their skills and compensate them for that. And so we've, you know, that's what's, this has been a work in progress for many years now. This not only exists, we've outlined for the departments a report to me, but this also exists in constitutional officers and in other places also. So we've used this model throughout all the appointing authorities to be able for certain positions that have natural career paths to them. I think that these are very, very valuable, and we use similar things in my own company, particularly in our maintenance department. Because a mechanic is far more valuable and versatile if they have a CDL, for instance. Or if they have, they get certain ASC certifications and they can do, and they can do more work at a higher level. So I think this is, this is great stuff. And the reason for my previous question, I'm just curious, do we have any, since we've implemented this, do we have any statistics to show that our turnover was reduced by X percent? Or, you know, to just sort of measure the success of it and to see if we need to, you know, is it being effective? Do we need to make changes? Is there an evaluation process of that? Yes. We look at turnover rates every year, and then we also perform what we call exit interview process, where we ask people, why are you leaving? And then what's really valuable is watching the answer to that question shift. Why are you leaving? Because I found a job outside of the county. For a while, before we implemented career paths, or they really caught on to everybody, some of that was because of the lack of growth and development in the county. We don't see that very much anymore. And on that front, we, and I don't remember when we shifted from, you know, the raises each year, and not these issues, but the raise was over the midpoint of the range. I don't remember when. Now it's over your own salary, wherever you're at. For this year, yes. Okay. I was just trying to make sure, because that was a, if you're starting, that was a way to accelerate a little bit faster. And then when you got past that midpoint, it was a way to slow things down just a little bit. So it was just, I didn't know how that. We've, well, we've done compensation differently over the last several years. We've, you know, and we've talked about that. How we put, you know, an amount to adjust for the hyperinflation rent and things like that. We've tried to help our employees out a little bit. We've shifted back this year. It's something we constantly talk about with the appointed authorities, all the appointed authorities, about how do we have a good compensation system. So I'm sure it's more of a work in progress, and we'll continue to talk about the best way to do that. All right. Thanks, Amanda. Appreciate it. You're ready to move on to remote work? Okay. I'm just going to go over some general processes and procedures and our actual remote work policy attached to this one. So we do have an established remote work policy. A couple of things to mention. We have a two-day maximum for positions that qualify. They have to be registered for remote work through the Workforce Relations SharePoint site. The supervisor must be able to demonstrate the work is being done. They can do this in a variety of different ways, city work orders, project plans. For all of our call takers, we can track how many phone calls they're receiving, how quickly they're answering them, things of that nature. But their supervisor does have to be able to demonstrate it. And they must be registered for a VPN with BTS so that we can ensure that when they're working remotely, their computer is secure. The position requirements. So obviously not every position can work remote. You can't turn a wrench remotely. Most of the positions or all of the positions really that work remote are going to be in the IT field. They're going to be in finance. They're going to be administrative positions. The requirement is that in-person interaction is minimal in order for them to be effective at their job. They also have to be available. And then for an employee to meet the requirements, they have to occupy one of the eligible positions. They have to be performing satisfactorily. They cannot have any open disciplinary action. And they must be able to demonstrate that they have a workplace and Internet connectivity. Some of the things that are worth mentioning is remote work cannot be used for child care. So if someone says, I can't find a babysitter for my child, can I work remotely? The answer is absolutely no. Same thing with illness or any other tasks that are not assigned for the benefit of our organization. It is subject to supervisor, department director, workforce relations, assistant county administrator, and county administrator approval. Everybody has to say yes before you're allowed to do it. And it can be revoked at any time for any reason at all. I did provide a couple of links. The links are to our actual remote work policy and our remote work form, what they have to fill out in order to register for remote work. And then, of course, the county and municipality policy repository. So it's just a look at the other remote work policies that exist around us. And that's it. Easy peasy. Any questions? Yeah. So, yeah, this remote policy, you know, it's like I would be terrible at working at home. So I'm like, yes. They'd probably ding me right away. So as it relates to industry standards, and again, I just think about from a, you know, retention standpoint, the two-day max, do any of our departments bump into that market that we're struggling with on that policy, that two-day policy versus market? Yes. What would that be? So around us all, most finance and IT positions are full-time remote. Full-time remote. That's correct. And that's a private organization, of course, but that's who we're competing with. So we do see it a lot when people are exiting the county that they wanted more remote work. So specifically for our finance, IT, and administrative positions, so computer work. What about as it relates to other government, county, city governments in the area? How do we, is that two-day policy, or, yeah, does that, how does that stack up? Honestly, we're right around where everybody else is, and in many cases, they wait to see what we put out to adopt it. So we set the standard. You'll see the link there about what other area local governments have, and I think that is consistent. You can see some that may go a little bit more, whatever. We've drawn the line at two days. And, you know, again, it's all over the place. And, you know, and it may be the companies are, you know, over here, they're going to come back or not, you know, so it's really hard to track. I think it's all kind of a work in progress, but there's many areas where, you know, this is critical, you know, and it's not just for the departments who report to me. You know, Ken Burke said, you know, for court reporters, he'd never be able to get a court reporter if, you know, they have to obviously be in there, but they do all their work back at home, you know, for where they do the transcriptions and all that type of stuff. For us, Jeremy has a hard time with engineers, and so he contracts out engineers. And so when he contracts out with a company, they're on site, but they work remote. And so they're only on site when they need to be, but yet when they come to work for us, then we've got, they've got to be in three days a week. And, you know, and so we're actually having the work performed in a more remote setting than what we authorize under our policy. But again, we have to draw a line somewhere. So we've set that and we've held to that. And so, you know, we've, as an organization, we've tried to keep a consistent policy. So is this the folks that work under you or not the constitutionals have their own policy on this? Or is this everybody? They've adopted, for the most part, our policies, haven't they? With the exception of a couple, they've adopted our policy. They don't have to. They could have their own policies. But we actually, this goes back to, you know, coming out of COVID. And so we actually spent time, actually brought in a consultant to help us design policies. And they were using what industries were using and everybody else. So we tried, and we've tweaked it and tightened it and modified it based upon kind of the changing conditions. But we tried to get a thoughtful approach to how to make those determinations, because everybody wanted to be remote, obviously. And also how to make sure that we can manage it. And, you know, I mean, I talked to departments and, you know, Kelly's here. I mean, I pick on here where, you know, she's pulled people in and said, no, that doesn't work. It needs to be that it can be performed, and it's to our benefit, you know, not just an employee benefit. So it needs to work for both. And I think that our employees appreciate it. I think they work harder as a result. But it has to be managed. And we have to constantly remind, you know, our supervisors, and that's something that's going to be on us, to make sure, you know, it's being effective, that they're effective at their work. I'd just like to, you know, obviously keep track of that number that we're losing on turnover based on that issue on certain positions. I hate to be so stubborn and old-fashioned, as Commissioner Latvalo would remind me, that we don't change and keep more stability in certain positions. I mean, and again, it's not widespread positions. I'll be honest, though, it's hard. It's really hard because I do get those requests to be more lenient on this policy. I'm not even thinking lenient is the right word. It's more about adapting to the market so that we don't lose our talent. I don't know what the numbers are, so it's hard for me. Do we have a big problem? Do we have a little problem? Do we have, you know? It's hard to know that. Safety and emergency services, you know, let's take an area out in Jim's shop. Jim's wanted us with a lot of his billing people, you know, that he does for all of his ambulance billing and stuff. That's a position that if we put it out and had private companies do it, they probably would have more remote policies on that. But we've set our policies. And so if we allow it in one area, does it creep into another area? Do we have a different standard here because of the way private industry does it? You know, it's really hard to manage. We get those requests every single day. Again, I think it's something you guys monitor, but I just, as long as you're flexible to the changing times within reason. Probably more. Really? You train all these folks up or you get them to a point where they're very valuable to the county because they have to work two days versus three days or four days. And for me, it would be like, well, that's not a very high criteria. But in today's world, that's a very high criteria where you're working, right? For me, well, I don't, if you don't, if that's your highest criteria, then maybe you shouldn't be working here. But that's a different perspective than today's world. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Amanda. All right, Chris. All right. Moving on to budget presentation, budget update. Wait a minute. Did you have a question? I did. I just said, I'm sorry, Chair. I did. And I apologize if I missed it. Do we have a total number of remote work? And do we have it by division? Do you have a total number for the work remote? Can we do it by division, too, or by department? She'll break it out, and we'll send it to you. Okay. I'd appreciate it. Just to look at it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, Chris. Good morning, Commissioners. Chris Rose, Office of Management and Budget. We're looking at a workshop today, and we're looking for thoughts and consensus on three areas today. So surface water assessment rate, Seminole Fire District, and the changes to the proposed budget that we have put forward for next week's Thursday budget meeting. That's six o'clock. State law requires us, of course, to have them in the evening. So next Thursday. Looking forward to it. So first we'll look at the surface water assessment rate. Director Levy gave us an update in April of this year, and we generally had consensus around a 5% increase, 5% year after year going forward. In 25, around that same time, and actually she alluded to it during the BIS meeting, the state announced some new inspection and maintenance requirements as part of the permit that they give us every year. So it really ups the game on what her team has to do. So canals and channels moving from every five years to every year, ditches and swales every 10 years to every five years, and then non-major outfalls. And we've got a lot of those going from no requirement to every five years. So in reaction to that, we put an extra 2% on, so $2.49 on for a 7% increase, and we would like to put that in front of you and see what you have to talk about and think about it. To be very blunt, this is another unfunded mandate that we have to do, and there's no way to do it without paying for that additional inspection requirement. Whether we do it in-house or contract it. Well, and we contract this out, a lot of it hybrid. And so, yeah, if we're doing a channel every five years and now we have to do it every year, that's manpower, whether it's internal or external, that has to be paid for. What's the state's angle on that? Is it to judge them more often, or, I mean, what are we looking for? More clean outs of the outfalls, and it's a new requirement of the NPDES permit that we have to do every year. So we cannot not have the permit, so we're going to have to meet these requirements. But this is new. It was developing in June when we actually had the BIS. Yeah. So I've, poor Kelly's heard me complain about some of the ditches and swales not being done often enough, so now we're being told we have to do it more often. You know, to me, some of them out there are just in pathetic condition, and, you know, we need to be upping our game anyway. Okay. Does this relate to ponds as well, or it's just canals, channels? You know, we have a lot of ponds that are part of our surface water process. It's on our way up. I used to be a deputy director in a public works department, and so we dealt with this as well. Well, it, well, I'll let you do it rather than the clearance. I think I know the answer. Yeah. So they, the new maintenance requirements, I think ponds are about the same on that side of it. But the state's new stormwater rule went into effect this year as well, and now requires us to go from a three-year recertification requirement to a two-year recertification requirement. It's one year difference. So we're going to have, we have somewhere between 700 and 800 facilities that we maintain, pond facilities that we maintain. So we're going to have to up our inspection requirement and get it recertified sooner than we, than we have in the past. And that's a different rule. It's not in our permit, but it's something we have to comply with. And then, you know, the, the additional maintenance here is, is, is mostly associated with the actual conveyance system. So, so again, you know, just some things we've bumped into, this is obviously for us and the surface water fund, but I think about private entities that also are, are a part of our system. The problem, thinking of a golf course in North County, for instance, that, you know, doesn't do it every two years or what is it to, can they do it as least often as they have to, but now are they under the same kind of thing? Yes, they will all be getting letters and the requirement to inspect and maintain more frequently is, is, is, is private and public. So anybody who has an environmental resource permit for their stormwater facility, their maintenance and inspection requirements will be. And you were just talking about the 800 or whatever number of ponds that we have to take care of or inspect for ourselves. But are these ponds that are private within the HOAs that we've talked about before, are they subject to the same thing? And who monitors whether they're doing it? The Southwest Florida Water Management District. Okay. So if they haven't, if their subdivision or their business was permitted under the state's environmental resource permit program, then, then SwiftMUD will do it. However, we do just because of how old a lot of our development is, it predates a lot of that. And so they don't have a SwiftMUD permit. And that's kind of, you know, part of what we've been doing. I mentioned the two staff that do this and they go out and, you know, when a pond is failing, if we have a site plan on site, we do the inspection. And then we notify them of the deficiencies that we've recognized and try to work with them on a plan to get that cleaned up because it affects them most. You know, so that's, that's, you know, the one that I showed you the picture of. So, so we have two people that are doing all of this. And I, you know, if we have these mandates that come down, how, how stringent are they? Number one, number two, how far behind are we with two people? I mean, I don't know the, the, the size of the work, the job here. This, you know, these, these maintenance requirements right here are our stormwater operations team. So these are the folks that are our heavy equipment operators, our, you know, our vector truck operators. So. It's not the, it's not the two people. The two people are for your pond. Yeah, those two people do, they, they do pond inspections, private pond inspections. So this is where, you know, we are, you know, really looking at, we've been really looking at our operations to say, okay, how can we, how can we do more with what we have? And we have restructured some things in our inspection area already. We've, we've just recently within the last month, you know, reconfigured some jobs and are moving some folks into some other areas to help, to see if we can get more bang for the buck out of what we currently have. But we are not going to be able to jump from not inspecting 6,000 non-major outfalls to doing it once every five years with who we have. So that's where we're going to start looking at contracts and, and seeing how we can, I mean, we already have contractual services for this, but we're just going to have to see how we can ramp it up and see what it's going to take to get from, from where we are to where we need to be. We've done an analysis based on our asset management data from CityWorks, and that's where the $2.5 million estimate came from, because we know how much it costs us to do it on the schedule we have. And so if we push that out and we look at a more frequent work effort, we know, we estimated that that's how, that's what the cost would be. It doesn't mean that we have to do it with more county people. It can be contract people if we can get them, but we have to find a way to meet this. And right now, in the permit language, and this is what we're asking if there's going to be any flexibility on it, is it's, as soon as the permit is effective, these requirements are effective. And the idea that we would have to go from zero to 60 that quickly, that ramp up is next to impossible. That's very hard for a large community to do. Small cities that have small, what we call municipal separate stormwater systems, MS4s, they probably can do it. But when you're talking about the big counties that have tens of thousands of structures and thousands of miles of pipe, there is no way for us to get there in a year. So we're trying to see if there's any latitude on that, but we do have to report every single year. And so if we're out of compliance, then we get put under consent order. Yeah, I think the idea is whether, one, whether there should be an improvement or not. And I think this will definitely be an improvement, but nothing seems to ever come out like incremental, so that it's like, now it's everything. And so you say, well, I don't disagree with the premise, just the implementation makes it really tough. Correct. I mean, I think, you know, if you use the analogy of how often you maintain your car, if, you know, if you didn't change your oil, you know, every, you know, 8 or 10,000 miles when the manufacturer says you should and you waited until 20,000, your engine block is probably going to be sitting on the road. So we know that preventative maintenance is the right thing to do, and we're doing everything we can with the funding that we have to accomplish all this. And right now, with the permit we have today, we are achieving what we're required to achieve. This is a new benchmark. We are not achieving this right now. We know that. And so we're looking, again, we're looking at all of our processes and procedures and saying, how do we, how can we reconfigure our work to see if we can get more this way? But then also, we're going to have to add some contractual services and build this up. But we are asking the state the question, is there a way to phase this in? Because I just don't see how we can do it in 12 months. And then the last question, the incremental part, I think definitely, regardless of which one you're talking about, but it'd be nice to understand, just from my perspective, like the first one, the second one, the third requirements, they're really going way, like when we got into the Tampa Bay water, this four parts per trillion versus 70. We've gone from 70 parts per trillion all the way down to four parts per trillion. Whether that's a good thing or not, that's for the experts to decide. So are these reasonable in terms of what they're asking, not how fast they're asking us to do it, but are they reasonable requests? I think what, I mean, when we asked the state how they, like on a canal and channel, like, I mean, we have a lot of that. And to go from five years to every year, you know, what is the foundation for that? And kind of the response we got back was that Florida is actually very behind the other states. And that's where the other states are. And the state of Florida is a delegated authority from EPA. And, you know, this is, you know, this is the, you know, the EPA's, you know, Clean Water Act is what this is. So there are states of delegation, and then they run the program. So it's, I think it's a combination of things. It's, you know, it's, you know, that the Florida's a little bit behind, and Georgia and the other states are already operating at this level. And so they're moving us forward. I will say every single five-year cycle, and I've been part of Silver Room now, every five years we get new requirements like this. This was just a big jump. Oh, Chris, I'm sorry. Kelly. Kelly might have come back. Sorry about that. Swift Mudd has a compliance division, and they inspect permits and stuff like that. Do they give you a list of their inspections or their inspections and permits that are not in compliance? Do you communicate with them regularly? Oh, yes, yes. So is it possible that many of these things that we need to inspect have already been inspected by Swift Mudd, and can you use their inspection? Unfortunately, their manpower is stretched. I mean, because they're, when you look at the Water Management District, that's, I think, a 12-county area. I actually did a presentation on this at a conference about this inspection program, and I think one of the examples I gave was where a Swift Mudd permitted facility was re-inspected by an engineer, and they submit that through a portal, it's all electronic, nobody goes out in the field and verifies it. It was filled in and asphalted over and made into a parking lot. And I said, so how effective is this program? Can't use any of their information. So we do turn things into Swift Mudd when we see it, but like us, it's a process. It takes time. We had the Water Management District at our public works, quarterly public works directors meeting last Friday to talk about the new requirements. And they said, you know, one of the cities said, you know, we're having all these private pond problems. I mean, how can you help us? And they said, well, you submit it, and we'll go through our process, but it's going to take years. Okay, so they can't help us with any of that. And then the other question for Chris on that was the work that the public works does on this, is it going to be contrary back to this fund? So this is already in this fund, so it hits directly in it. Yes, sir. Okay, so the work that they do. Yes. All right. Any other questions? So, Chris, if I understood you right, you're kind of looking for some nods ahead, some consensus on which way to go here. Yes, sir. If there's consensus, we'll build this into the budget, that'll be presented at the public hearings. I don't really know that we've got much choice. So just to, if I did the math right, so instead of a $6.25 annual increase, it's going to be $8.74. Yes, sir. That's exactly the number. All right. I can still add. That's wonderful. And that is per year. It's gone up from 5% per year to 7% per year. This next year, it would be a 7%, which is exactly. And if you recall, a year ago when we were in here and we were talking about that, we needed to do a big jump. You asked us to spread that out over several years. And so that's what we're doing. And then in addition to spreading it out, we got hit with another unfunded mandate. Everybody kind of in agreement on that? Okay. All right. Thank you, commissioners. Next topic is the Seminole Fire Rescue District. So this is the only millage that we are recommending to go up out of the 23 that we have. So we have a current millage of 1.5675, and we are recommending that it go up to 1.8. This is to fund a new fire truck, personnel increases in costs of personnel, and a new fire station. It does require a simple majority vote. This district, out of all the different fire districts, this one is 70.8% unincorporated. So the city is providing the service in the unincorporated area. That's what we're paying for here. We did lower the millage rate three out of the last four years, and I have an incorrect number there. It's not 22%. It's 20% over those four years. And so the 1.8 mils is still below that higher rate four years ago that we had. So we're bumping it up, but not near where it was. Not near what it was. And we've also looked at, like, their salaries and, you know, salaries went up, but it's that competitive. It's absolutely competitive. They're one of the lower cost of service in the area. So we don't think anything's out of line in that. You mentioned something about the district, our area, 70% of that. And what did you say about Seminole, the city of Seminole, doing their part of the increase? No, they just run this district. So it's a city of Seminole fire department that serves 70% of that is unincorporated, which is typically – which is different than most of the other areas. Most of the other areas, it's, you know, a city, and then you have a small area of unincorporated. This is just kind of reversed, and it's the way it was set up. So this millage would affect unincorporated and city residents? That's correct. Not quite. So this is the millage in our unincorporated area. They have their own – Oh, okay. I'm sorry. – inside the city. Oh, so this is just the unincorporated? Piece that we pay for. Oh, okay. But theirs is – but their cost is based upon – It is based upon the same cost. Same cost inside the city and outside the city. It's just their levy inside the city. So theirs – is theirs going up as well? I don't know. I can look into that, but I don't know. Well, again, I think we're – I would hope so, but, I mean, so if we could just find – They're charging the same amount inside the city and outside, but we'll look at that. Okay. But we have looked, and, I mean, again, the rate being provided, if it was any other district, it would be that or higher. I just wanted to make sure that we're both doing our parts. Yes. That we're not doing their part through our big interest. No, that's – I know that's not the case. We will confirm that, though. Thank you. That would be good to know. Chris. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know that there's some extenuating circumstances with Seminole, such as they bought a fire truck a year or two early, and there's some issues with the fire station and things like that. And we've – thanks to your leadership and, you know, the board's direction, we have really, like, been hammering fire districts on their budgets. Is there any concern that if we make this one special exception that next year there will be two, three, four, five fire districts that decide to do things early and say, oh, you know, you made this, you know, you gave Seminole special treatment, now it's our turn? So we look at it every year, and that possibility exists. But the SES group, Jim Fogarty's group, is meeting regularly on these topics, so we often see it coming. This one kind of got a little sped up on us, frankly. I'll also say their tax roll went down in the storms as well, so that has also affected how they're charging. But all that said, the possibility exists, but we watch it every year and have those discussions every year. In particular, SES does. And then I challenge SES after that. I mean, to Commissioner's point, yeah, that's – if you've seen a trend of other departments having lowered their millage rates because they didn't need the money at that time, for them to come back and ask for an increase next year for capital might be warranted on its own. You don't – you just have to see each year on its own. But if they're kind of doing this or a little bit increase, and then all of a sudden they want to do that on top of that, because these folks have done a drop for three straight years, and we're not even back to the level that they were at. So I just – I think that's also important. So to setting precedents, we want to be very careful. And they – I mean, we probably shouldn't have lowered the millage amount. We should have been looking at those rates because we know they're in union contracts and negotiations, and you know what the other area agencies are paying. That should have been built in. You know, and we should – both us and I think the fire chief, there was some communication. But our staff, you know, should have looked at that, and we should have caught some of that. But, again, there were several – it wasn't just one factor. There were several. But we – you know, we do – they do look at that, and they try to project out. I mean, out of all that we've lowered over the past – I mean, you see them every single year, and you have for the last five years. This is the only one that – where we've had to go back and increase it. So it actually has worked, and we've lowered so many rates over the past several years. Chris, are those personnel costs because of the new station, or is the new station just replacing an old station? So not yet. There is a request in for additional positions for the new station, but those are not baked into these numbers at the moment. But what are the personnel costs? What are we talking about personnel costs? The contracts, the union contracts that the administrator was referring to, have increased more than we thought they were going to. That's bothersome, that piece of it. Were they below what the other fire departments were paying? They were. They were. They're picking up to others now. Okay. Maybe it's not as bothersome then. No, they're certainly not out of range from area fire agencies. Okay. No, not at all. All right. Are you looking for nods of heads on that one too? Okay. Love it, sir. All right. We all – okay. All right. You got it. And then the third topic of the morning is the recommendations that we have put forward. They're attached in the items that Joe sent out earlier. I believe it was Tuesday around noon. You've got those. So they are all the things we talked about already. So reducing the – these are the ones in the general fund, by the way. We have talked about these. Reducing the reserves that we talked about, the state-required match for juvenile detention, and eliminating that one reserve for lapsed savings. So – and then we have added in the one position that we talked about at the last meeting. And so that is also in there. All of that totals up to $4.9 million, and we have reduced the millage accordingly to that. So that is all baked into what you will see next Thursday. We also have some recommendations. Oh, forgive me. There's my slide saying it, $4.9. I covered it. Of course, what the administrator had said at the last meeting, that's just over $100 million over what we would have been charging had we used the current role with the old millage. Then we have a couple of non-general fund recommendations we're making. We're reducing the airport user fee increase so that we can have a little more time to negotiate with Allegiant. We are increasing the fund balance in Star Center. That next one, the third bullet, really is $10. We did not leave the million off of it. We realized we were $10 out of balance, so we'd like to fix that. Come on, Chris. You're getting better now. Missed it. Okay. And then the final one is utilities, a couple of capital changes that don't really change. We're just moving around between projects. And those are the changes we're recommending. That's it. Okay. Commissioner Wicke, question? Thank you, Chair. Thanks, Chris. For the airport user fee, is that reducing it what was in the proposed budget? So is it still an actual increase or is it an actual reduce from what it's being charged now? So the charges to Allegiant are coming back to what they were charged already. There are a couple of other things, fuel this and that, that are still increasing slightly. But anything associated with Allegiant, we're holding firm. So you've received some complaints, obviously, from Allegiant. And so as Blaine has been meeting with them and hearing their concerns, we're just putting those on pause to where we can work with them and then have a discussion with you regarding what came out of those discussions. So we're just taking them out of the budget, and that way we can just hit a reset and come back and have a more meaningful discussion. What is the rollback, full rollback rate? What would that be? I did anticipate that question. So the countywide general fund is, it would be 4.4151 mils, which would still be around $20 million that we would need to get to to get to a full rollback. Additional, on top of the four, almost $5 million? Yes, sir. So another $20? Yes, sir. Okay, so we, so you're saying it's a 20% reduction, 20% of the rollback rate is what we're reducing? Yes, that's exactly right. I'll get to that, Chair. Well, I'm sorry. Well, I mean, you should, I guess, probably call on the other, Chris, because my question or comments were going to be related to the email that Commissioner Scheer sent us. Okay. This week, I had some ideas. Got it. So before we go to that, because that was a pretty robust email, I just wanted to go and see if there were any other comments, and then we'll go to that email there. I do just have one quick, you know, thing before the robust email, which I'm sure everyone has thoughts on. But after our BIS meetings, it seemed like there was some general support for a concept of a one-time grant program to help hospitals for a resiliency grant. So I wanted to, you know, give credit to our county administrator who had the solution because it was kind of how we would fund that grant. And so, you know, our administrator had the idea that, you know, we could use potential leftover CDBGRDR funds to establish a hospital resiliency grant that staff could create competitive guidelines for to include in our 26 budget. If the board, you know, if the board, you know, if the board, you know, decided that they, you know, wanted to move forward with that, and I guess kind of the policy question, you know, for my colleagues, you know, if they wanted to move forward with that, is whether the eligibility should be open to all hospitals, like HCA, or if it should just be nonprofit hospitals. So on the state, you know, they have it open for all hospitals, but Pinellas isn't included in that because we're getting our own funds. Any thoughts on that? I know Largo had to spend a fortune because they flooded so badly, and I think it was $60 million, upward of $60 million they had to spend not only on repair but getting flood protection. So I don't think it should be nonprofit only. I think it should be open to everybody. Barry, you got any thoughts on that? So, yeah, so what the commissioner is discussing is how do we help hospitals? And obviously the concern that we've talked about is we said, you know, Pinellas first and helping our residents. The hard part is we don't know how many people are going to apply for the current funds. And so the commissioner said, well, what about after we've gone through that at the end of the process, we have remaining funds. And that's a good use of the funds to help our hospitals in terms of recovery at the end. And in the same manner we've talked about having cities that want to upgrade their sewer system or water system or things like that, but at the end, after we've helped our residents that have, you know, been out of pocket. So that's the concept that we've discussed. And, again, it's just it's hard to put that in place because we don't know what's going to occur over the next application period, the next year or so. And I guess the reality is we don't even know what year that might even occur because we're going to be going through this money probably in the next five years. Correct. Is that, I mean, I think it's a great concept. Is it something we've got to do now or? You don't need to, you don't necessarily have to do it now. I mean, if the direction is that you support the concept, we can work on it as we roll out the DR program and bring back to you some guidelines. Yeah, well, because you've got to create a grant program. I mean, it's kind of up to you if that's something you're interested in, then we can take that direction and incorporate it into the DR program. I mean, it really is a tough discussion to have right now. If you think about infrastructure needs in the cities out there that we said we could, that's a lot of money. And so if you narrow it down to hospitals total, that's less money probably, although depending on how much you ask for. And then the nonprofits are even probably obviously smaller pool. But I think we ought to have that discussion at some point. I mean, I just don't know if right now it seems like we're way out ahead of ourselves here. Yeah, it's kind of hard to really. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I like the concept, but we don't know what other needs there might be, too. Well, I think to our administrator's point, you know, maybe as, you know, we're rolling out funds, you know, we could just kind of stay in contact. And, you know, there could be, you know, potential guidelines written because I think in my, you know, I only said two and a half million. So that was like a small amount compared to everything that we're getting. So maybe, you know, as the programs are rolling out, you know, we can kind of just keep an eye on it and develop some framework. When we start talking about cities, if you want us to bring back ideas and thoughts and include hospitals as part of that discussion, we can just take that direction and then incorporate that into our future discussions and design programs around for your consideration. All right. Any other budget thoughts, questions before we kind of get to the robust email? Oh, no? No? Right? Good? Good. Okay. Dave, anything? No? Kathleen? You good? Chris? All right. All right. Commissioner Scheer, you're up. Well, thank you, Chair. You know, my robust email was a list of recommendations that I thought could help get us to a full rollback, which is my goal. You know, I'm not married to any one of them in particular, but I thought we could at least talk about some departments, downsizing some departments, maybe phasing out some departments. I'm not looking to eliminate employees that are working. I'm looking to downsize empty positions in departments and then offering them an opportunity to transfer to another department or another job within the county that is fully funded. So I'm not looking to chop. I'm looking to reorganize a little bit over the next year. I laid these out for you if you see them. They totaled $26 million. Second, the easiest ones, I think, for everyone to maybe agree to would be the overfunding on the reserves for our health insurance. We're already at two times our projected costs. I don't know why we'd need to have such a large reserve and a simple 25% reduction would get us $17 million. That would get us pretty close to our $20 million we need for a full rollback. There are departments that I don't think, if you'd like, the Office of Human Rights. I think we've all seen the emails from Jewel that that department. Yes. I can't hear you. I'm sorry. My bad. Sorry about that. So my question as we go through this, I'd just like to make sure I understand because reserves that we talked about eliminating that's in the proposal for what we have now are ongoing reserve contributions that we're getting, we're reducing. This, is this going to be an ongoing thing that we do every year? Or is this just a one-time that we're talking about? Yeah, it's one-time. So if you're talking about, for instance, I don't know, what was the reduction? $17 million. $17 million. So, again, if you say, I don't know what it takes to be considered a, is it five years, is it 10 years, right, to make it almost a recurring cost. But let's just say it's 10 years. You're talking about $1.8 million a year and then do that gradually. You can't commit future commissions, but at least you can say that that was the, the attitude was that we wanted to reduce it overall, but we didn't do it all at once because it is a one-time, you know, we wanted to make it recurring kind of thing. I mean. I'm assuming you want me to answer. Oh, yeah, maybe. Yeah. You're looking at me, but I don't want to jump in. You don't, you know. Here's the thing. This is one-time money, okay? So $17 million is one-time money, which means if you take out $17 million and you apply it to your ongoing, operating costs, next year you start your base, $17 million in the red. Right. So you reset your base. So you're automatically $17 million in the whole. Because I got ongoing costs that are being filled by a reserve level that is a one-time reserve level. Okay. So the point is, why do we have to rebuild it if it's going to stay at $112 million, which is two times, 1.7 times? Also. You don't have to refill it, but that's one-time money that you're using for ongoing costs. So if our expenses are, pick a number, $100 million, okay, and you're using $17 million to cover your revenue for that $100 million of expenses, the next year you're automatically reset at $83 million. And so you're automatically $17 million in the whole because you've got an ongoing cost of $100 million. Which is why I was talking about spreading it out over 10 years. And now you can take out $1.7 million next year's budget. And then at next year's budget, you can say, well, we had this 10-year plan to reduce the reserves. Do you want to do that next second year, third year, fourth year? That's correct. You could have as a plan drawdown of reserves. Now, we've talked about using this, and I raised this during the BIS meetings, that this is, to Commissioner's point, that it's too high in the Health Reserve Fund. Not all of that is general fund money. So airport, utilities, they all contribute to that reserve. But there is a significant portion that's a general fund, so you could do that. And we've talked about using that for the new building and using that as a funding source to bridge before when we have to do bonding. We've also, you know, looked at it as our current campus. We're going to sell that, but there's going to be a gap between when we need the money for the new campus and that. So, again, you could do exactly what you said, Commissioner, and draw it down in a percentage basis, because then it would be an ongoing drawdown over multiple years. That's sufficient, but you couldn't do the $17 million. And then if we did that, then we'd have to look at if we reserve that amount, we couldn't use that for our other discussions on reserve levels. We had that argument a couple years ago on reserves. What is that? How much are we overfunded in that? And how much did we kind of at least envision at this point to put towards a new campus if that's what we chose to use that? Yeah, well, I think Commissioner's right. I mean, I think $17 million is probably conservative. We, you know, we have, there's no reason to have the reserve levels that we have. We haven't determined an amount we need. We use it as a shock absorber for health care increases. That way it doesn't spike in any one year. And so we've, you know, we've been effective at doing that. But at a certain level, you're exactly right, it's too overfunded. But we've tried to look at that. We've been planning for this campus for a long time, so we've seen that as kind of a target on helping us with the funding of the new campus. I didn't come in with a recommendation on what that target reserve level should be, so we'd have to look at that. But you're not off on that. It's at least the $17 million. I mean, it kind of comes down to choices. I mean, we could do, as Commissioner Edgar suggested, and do a long drawdown and then finance more of the county campus, right, and spread that more generationally. Right? So, I mean, that's something that we could look at. I mean, it really just comes down to choices. And if we do that, then in the long run we pay more interest. But it's spread out over a longer period of time, and it's not all on taxpayers today. Well, the good part, too, is if you have a fiscally robust year, you can always pay more towards your debt. And, you know, there's no penalty for paying additional for whatever it is in that year, if you have a real good robust financial year. And the downside to that is if you don't have a real good robust fiscal year, and we still don't know what's going to go or what's going to happen with what's going on in Tallahassee regarding the restructuring of property tax. Right. And so we don't know what's going on with that, and we would need to look for funds to stand up departments that are necessary for the residents and for the day-to-day operations of the county. I'm just giving all sides that I've, you know, thought about. Yeah, I kind of view this part of our discussion as sort of trying to anticipate what is going to come down the line. I mean, we know the governor is setting a specific tone on property tax, and how do we prepare ourselves for that going down the road, understanding that, you know, we're trying to, you know, the call for property tax release has never been as loud as it is today. And with those just being here a couple of weeks ago, and with the governor setting a clear tone of where he wants to go with property taxes, I think it's incumbent upon us to try to find as many cuts as we can, but also be ready for the fact that we don't know what the future is going to be. We have no idea what we may have to try to fund up in the future. Thank you, Chair. There was a second part of the savings of your email about, like, elective surgeries and things like that. I mean, is there a cost that if we eliminate those things that it would bring costs down? There's been no expenditures in those areas. I've confirmed that with you. And let's just, you know, get clear on that particular piece. It's under affirming care. Well, but there's nothing on our health care plan that provides for that. It's all based on medical necessity, and you have to do that with, we would have to look at that legally because it's the way in which it's set up for medical necessity. So there's nothing that specifically provides for that. It's covered under the plan. I didn't even want to bring it up because it's a budget meeting, but it's covered in the plan. I don't think it should be covered in the plan because it's elective. It's not specifically called out. It only provides that where medically necessity, and you've got, Joel, what does the specific sections that provide for that? Well, I don't know that, but I was just prepared to say that I did get some information from my attorney that works with human resources. There is case law out there currently. There's U.S. Supreme Court case law that states that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status is protected under the Civil Rights Act. There is currently a case in the 11th Circuit, which is our federal circuit, which has, based upon that case, held that it was unlawful employment discrimination for the employee-sponsored health plan to exclude gender-affirming treatment. Now, the 11th Circuit, which is our appellate district in the court, recently vacated that opinion and is sending it back to be heard in Bonk, which means the entire court will hear it. So you still have to follow the precedent that's in place right now until a decision is made? Well, the precedent of the Supreme Court says that sexual orientation and transgender status is protected under the Civil Rights Act. The 11th Circuit case extended that to gender-affirming treatment. So it's arguable. It's arguable at this point whether the gender-affirming treatment would specifically be covered, but we could anticipate some cases all coming out, not before your budget hearings. And I guess ours would follow that. There's nothing that specifically calls out that allows for that. When the question was asked, it would be under medical necessity that that determination would be made. Again, from a budgetary standpoint, there's nothing that changes in the budget because there's been no cost. It was just a side note, something I wanted to let you know. It could be a cost. It could be a good cost. And we'll follow the court cases on this. And certainly any ruling from the 11th Circuit or the Florida Supreme Court or the Supreme Court, we would need to then adjust. And we would accordingly, as well as any insurance industry, insurance company would have to adjust to any of those changes in statute. So if we did, I'm just throwing this out on your first point. If we did the 10-year amortization of that money, if we think, and again, I think this is the only other discussion, if we think that the 1.75 times versus the two that you're suggesting, I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm saying if that is a good number, then we're talking about going a rollback rate of 20% of the rollback, almost up to 26% of the rollback with that 1.7 million. So the question is twofold. Well, one is the 1.75 number, you know, is that a good number? The 112 million, is that a good reserve level? It's not as high as 130 million, but what's excessive, right? And how do we draw it down? And do we want to do that? I think that's the bigger question. We can figure out the amount. Remember, we're also doing $4.6 million of smoothing with the sheriff's office. And the projection that that is going to smooth out over the next year. So we have a risk there that if it doesn't smooth out, then we've got a cost in the sheriff that's either got to come out of the property rate or out of this fund through these reserve levels to smooth that out over several years. So you've got another exposure out there that we're trying to project with. That's been, you know, that's been the good part. And, again, I'm not trying to, if you want to do that over several years and smooth that out, you can with property tax. But it's been a very successful fund, and I completely agree that it's too high, but it's been a very successful fund to be able to smooth out these blurbs. We had an actuarial come in a couple of years ago and said they were going to increase our rate by 30%. That would have hit our general fund. And we said, you know, we've got a reserve level here to where we think that's a blurb. And so we did not increase our rates. We increased our rates 10% rather than 30%, and we turned out we were right. It came in at 12%. But we were able to take that risk because we had that reserve level that we could have smoothed that out over several years and build it into our rate had we been wrong. But this $1.7 million, as an example, is just one year. Now we have it lined up going forward. That's why we're basing it on. So I'm saying, you know, if in a year from now or two years from now the sheriff's isn't smoothing like it is, this doesn't have to continue. It wouldn't, but then we would have to build that back into the property tax rate. I understand. You can't have it both ways. I'm just saying. No, you've got it. You're exactly right. You know, we're going to check ourselves for every risk associated. We find ourselves with, like, you know. So I just wanted to. I reserve. You're right. Yeah. No. You've got it. Yeah. Okay. Just one more thought about that. You know, you say it's a one-time, but going backwards, we've been overcharging taxpayers every year to increase this fund. So I don't have a problem with the one-time, you know, here's your refund, so to speak, on your taxes. That's why. And 1.75, I think, is very conservative. I mean, you would have to, if you had a 30% hit, that would only be, you know, what's 30% of 60 million? 18 million? That would, a 30% rake hike would be 18 million. It wouldn't even be close to 112 million. So I just think it's there, and we should, we need tax relief and get it back to, get us back to a rollback. Also, just, I understand that some people want to maybe use it for a building fund, but if we want to have a building fund, there should be a line item in our budget so the people and the taxpayer know that we have a building fund and we're adding to it every year. To do it this way, it just seems like a little bit of a smoke and mirrors is not transparent. That we have, we're counting to use this fund that we've been building, building, building, and then we're going to use it for something else. And I don't, I don't, I don't like the sound of that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are certainly things in here that I like. One of the, and I have some comments and, and questions. Um, I always thought that until recently that we had the Office of Human Rights because we, we had to, based on federal law, turns out that that's not the case. Um, there are parts under Human, Office of Human Rights that we certainly need to keep, um, the ability for, um, an employee to make a, a sexual harassment complaint, for instance. I think we should find somewhere for that to go, um, you know, another department, uh, for instance. A, a very important aspect that they do that I think is vital is wage theft, um, which is very important in Pinellas County, um, with our service industry and also the component, um, with human trafficking, uh, that is associated with wage theft. So that is very important, I think, to keep. And so maybe we, if you want to rename it and make it a county department, which we would have the power to do, I would be supportive of that. Um, the, some of the cutting of positions I don't understand, though, uh, especially like in BDRS, uh, because that was vital after the hurricanes. Uh, code enforcement I don't understand because of what we're dealing with, with our short-term rental, uh, issue in Pinellas County. Um, and, Chris, I know that, uh, Chris Rose, I know that, um, the last, I guess, like, for the last five years, um, the millage has been cut. My understanding is during that time, there's also been positions that have been cut. Is that right? Yes, sir. Uh, can you go over some of that? So, um, you know, I don't want our residents to think that we're dealing with, you know, a heavily bloated, uh, budget, that they're, in recent years, there have been, uh, you know, cuts to it. So, um, I'll be honest, they're not coming to mind, but I'll tell you the process, at least, is, um, every year in the budget process, we look at each of the positions that are out there. And, um, um, I always challenge the departments first, Barry challenges them second. Um, there are often, um, I'll say the departments and I disagree sometimes, uh, and we go through it. And ultimately, it's a decision based on the need, how long the position has been vacant, and what that position will be used for in the future. So, um, I apologize, I can't think of a specific, but, but there have been instances. We cut positions every single year, Commissioner, and we go through and look at all of those positions. And if you just look holistically, you mentioned over four of the last five years, um, we've, there's areas where we've contracted and we've reduced over in human services, several different positions, um, and in, in different departments. We've also increased in certain areas. I mentioned this in one area is in parks. So we still have a smaller workforce than we had five years ago, um, yet we've increased in positions. For instance, uh, we brought to you, uh, a, a plan talking about parks where we didn't have maintenance people, um, dedicated down to Fort DeSoto Park. So we're, so we're, we're sending them out and, and they're dispatched down there and, and the level of, of, of, of care of the, like, you know, electrical and, and, um, carpentry and specialty areas, um, was insufficient. And so we've actually increased there because of the need. Um, we didn't have dedicated, uh, park employees at all of the parks. So we had a senior lost in Wheaton Island, um, and there was nobody there. Okay. And so the sheriff's office, who's unfamiliar with the parks, trying to find someone and the sun's going down and we had to dispatch somebody from Fort DeSoto to come up and assist in that search to be able to find this person before dark. Um, so we saw a need for, from a safety and a, and a security and from a park standpoint to make sure there was a person in every park. Um, and so, so we've actually increased in targeted areas and reduced in others, but overall we have a smaller workforce today than what we had five years ago. So one of the things, um, that I was most surprised of coming from the legislature to county government and, um, commissioner Peters, I don't know if you were, if it was like this for you, but. I did not know when I got here that during the state, uh, during a state of emergency that we weren't in charge. I always assumed during state emergency, the, um, commissioners, you know, had regular meetings and dictated, you know, to the sheriff and dictated to Barry what, what was going on. Um, and I remember, you probably remember this, Barry, we had a, one of our first one-on-ones we were having in my office. I said, you know, so when a hurricane comes, like, do I go put on a raincoat and go down to the EOC and hang out? And he said, I'm really glad that you asked that. We hold a meeting, you declare a state of emergency, and then you go home and you phone in, you know, periodically through the day. And, um, but I do appreciate, um, this past year, I think it was right before, uh, Hurricane Aline, you invited, uh, I believe you invited all of us, uh, down to the EOC at different times. And when I was there, I saw, um, our county employees, um, like, you know, at different workstations and doing different things. And when I was there, um, I saw a lot of them in, like, regular civilian attire and, uh, like, in hats and whatever, because they were going to go, their assignment, uh, that afternoon was to go to one of the local mobile home parks to try to get them to evacuate. But they weren't, um, they didn't want people there to know that they were working for the government because I think there was some sort of antagonistic relationship. Um, can you explain, um, what the process is? Because my understanding from talking with you during that process is during a state of emergency, um, some county employees have different jobs. And, and, and, like, their jobs will vary, like, before a storm, during a storm, and after the storm. And they become, like, hybrid roles. Can you explain how you determine that and how that works? Yes. And I'm glad you brought that up, Commissioner, because during a hurricane, it's all hands on deck. And our employees, um, do amazing work in really different situations. Um, we ask for volunteers, um, from other agencies and even from municipalities to assist us with shelters. But it's largely our employees. Um, and so you may be a clerk one day, but you're checking in people and assisting people, um, um, at a shelter during, during a hurricane. Um, we've got site managers. Um, you, you, uh, remember Harrison was one of our interns. He became a site manager during the hurricane. And they go through training ahead of the hurricane to prepare for that. Um, but it's far more than just the sites. We have the sites, but you also saw a couple hundred people maining stations in that emergency operations center 24-7 over extended period of time where human services staff now are helping with nonprofits, food, um, distribution, um, and all kinds of different roles. And I, I would have to go down through each and every department, CBB, okay. Our visitors at Clearwater St. Pete, they're in there working with hoteliers on the impact of that. So it really is an all hands on deck and it's our employees that step forward and do that. And it's the BCC departments that largely fill that role. Um, and, you know, and if you go out into the field, obviously you, you see our, our, uh, public work staff that is down on Gulf Boulevard moving sand that is not even a county road. Why? Because that's what was needed. Um, you know, and our employees trying to get people's water and sewer and everything else up and running. And so it really is an all hands on deck and it's our employees that take off a hat and put on a different hat to make that happen. On that point. And again, I just wanted to, the, the, the comments that have been made here by Commissioner Scheer. Um, and first of all, I appreciate your looking at all of it. I mean, I think it's great. I mean, and we all do that at different levels. Yeah. And, um, but there's, there's, they've referenced in a couple of places, unstaffed positions. So the question would be on those, how long have they been, been unstaffed? How, how important are they if we have been function without them? And is that created an undue stress to the department? And we really are trying, but we don't have the salary level to attract or, or whatever. So just, it's all of the above. We, we go through position by position and Chris's staff, they go through position by position to determine that. One of the areas, and again, Commissioner, I'm not trying to pick it at all. Um, one of the areas is, uh, it, cause we saw this during Doge too. You know, they said, um, you know, overtime. Well, I looked into one of the overtime areas and you rightfully pointed that out. You've got a lot of overtime in this area. It's because it's H one of the areas is HVAC technicians over in the jail. And we have a lot of problems over in our, our court system with HVAC. And so you've got some people that run in massive amounts of overtime because we can't find higher certified techs in order to be able to do that. So they're working their butt off and it's legitimate. And, and we're trying to get that down because we don't want to lose the person from burning them out. We had that same issue, you know, a couple of years ago in nine moment. And we work very, very hard, both with salary and also management on the way we manage the facility and, uh, and, and our employees to be able to bring that down because, you know, um, uh, overtime works at a paycheck. But if you'd never get to spend it or spend time with your family, it gets old after a while. And so we do manage those, but we do look at those positions each and every year. I'm, you know, with all the vacancies, I can't sit here and certify that we get a hundred percent correct, but we challenge the department. We have reduced in almost every area, um, over time. And we, and we try to get that right to make sure that if it's a vacancy that we can absorb, that we do that. And that, and that number has gone dramatically down since you've gotten here because that number used to be a lot higher. The unstaffed positions that would have been empty for a number of years baked into a budget. Well, that's what I was referring to. Yeah, yeah. But that, that number has gone way down. I mean, again, since. In the hundred million dollars that we talk about, that if we would have kept the rate the same over the last and not done the four reductions, it's actually 150 million because we diverted 50 million almost over to, um, roads and bridges. Um, that's come out of the 17% or 19% of the general fund, um, of, of your employees. Um, the, the other, the other 81% of the general fund has other, you know, constitutionals and other, uh, other things. Um, so we, we, we've squeezed that each and every year and we'll continue to do that because that's what you've challenged us to do. I mean, this, you, you said we want to provide property tax relief and we, we try to do that. And the easiest way to do that is when you have a vacancy, right? And that way it doesn't impact people's jobs and, uh, their livelihood. And, and, and we're, we do try to do that. And to, and to your point, Commissioner, let follow that. We're like the BDRS, uh, and the code enforcement, which are the, all under the same umbrella there. I wasn't suggesting that we eliminate active personnel, but, uh, the most current information I had was as June 10th, where there was a 11 un-staffed positions. I was like, Hey, that's 10%. We can, if we, if we don't have to have them, maybe we, this is a good time to downsize code enforcement one little. If we get rid of the tree permit requirements on houses, maybe we need less inspectors. So, and then I'm all for that deal, but he had a very good discussion with Kevin on this. So, uh, you know, just, I'm just looking for ways if we don't, if we're, we're on, we don't have staff that we have to, uh, that we don't have to reassign. And we're looking for ways to save money so we can freeze our hiring in these departments. I'd just like to hear the comments before next Thursdays, uh, on those, those 20 positions or whatever they are, just to review them one more time to see the ones that aren't staffed right now, just take another look at them. Because I, I mean, I'm, I just, they've been on, if they've been empty for, you know. I will tell you, code enforcement, I mean, you can't implement the programs you have without those positions. I understand, but these, are we having difficulty hiring these positions or are these positions, I'm just trying to get an understanding of why we've had, we have 11 unstaffed positions. What's the driver? If we could just take a look at that. We, we can absolutely look at it, but I will, I mean, we, we can absolutely look at it. Whether it's, uh, having difficulty hiring or, or not, the work is impacted. And I think that's the point on, you know, like, uh, workforce relations. I can't do what we talk, I can't keep our employees and create these programs without those positions being able to manage over 2,000 positions. Can't do it. Um, you know, and, and so. If they've been empty for three years, you've been doing it. But if they've been empty for two months, we don't know. So that's. None of them have been empty for three years. That's why I'm asking. You know, and, and we do look at, and we, and, and, and there's, you know, data is an important thing. And, um, because rightfully so, it's been pointed out, this position's been, you know, empty since, you know, 2017 or whatever. It's an HR, uh, issue. Um, uh, it's an old system. It's bad data. Um, and, and that's part of the problem. You know, so what you're seeing on that is not necessarily current information. All right. Got some other comments to, to get to. So go to, um, Mr. Peters. I just want to thank you. I love that you did so much work and dug into this and, uh, brought some things to my attention I didn't know about. So great job. Great job. So, um, so, Barry, if you talk about what we're doing with human services, I believe you're hiring a consultant to look at all of human services. To see what the programs we're doing, if they're still effective, do we still need them? Are they, you know, are they up to date? Are they, you know, tell me about that, what you're doing with human services. Well, again, that came out of our discussions earlier this year. Um, we constantly look at human services. And by the way, a lot of the positions in human services have grant funding to them and things like that. So just because you see an identified position doesn't necessarily mean it's a general fund. In fact, a lot of the positions that were identified, I mean, they're not general fund. And it's hard to know that. I mean, without, with a, you know, 2,000 employees and, uh, you know, multi-billion dollar budget, you know, it's hard to separate all that out. Um, but in, in human services, we've reduced positions over, over time. You know, Karen, I mean, she's, she's just all over that. But, um, what you've asked us to do is to look and kind of, um, look at the way we provide services with the health department, with, with that. And, and so we're, we're bringing on a consultant to be able to do that type of review, trying to get them in place to where, when the budget is approved, we can start that process. That way we're talking about it in January, February, not, you know, in June when we're trying to set the budget, um, and see if there's alternative ways of doing service delivery. Um, it's, it's a, it's a great point. It hasn't been looked at in a number of years. And so we're beginning that process now. Um, and, and so we'll, we'll, we'll have hopefully a report that we can discuss with you soon. So, I, the reason I'm bringing it up is I think that is a great strategy to look at these things with data. So they're thoughtfully thought out and, and really looking at it with data and, and, and really digging into it. And so I just, I think that's a good strategy. Um, and I, I just, I don't know if that's a strategy we can use with other departments. We, and we do that. You know, we have a performance management group, um, that, that, you mean the charts that, that Kelly provides and others that, that data and that information is what we use to evaluate department performance. Um, and so that's how we've been able to get to the hundred, you know, million dollar number, right? Is to constantly use data to inform that decision-making. So, um, we're, we're constantly trying to refine that and trying to look at other business practices. You know, the chairman earlier this year said, how are we doing with AI? Again, an overused term, right? Um, and, and I said, well, we're, we're doing it as sporadically as we see opportunities. It's the easy example is, you know, Kelly and lights. And they say, okay, now you can interconnect lights and, you know, behind the scenes that can monitor traffic and, and improve the flow, right? Rather than somebody manually adjusting lights based upon their, their knowledge. Um, but if there's so many more areas throughout county government, we have opportunities for, you heard the biggest one this morning. Um, those 11 positions, uh, that we're talking about is through efficiency. Uh, we were at an economic development forum in the McKenzie company right here, local, um, Pinellas County company. They, they, they help companies all over the world, um, with trying to adopt AI, uh, incorporate AI into their practices. One of the biggest ones is, is in their call center operations and being able to get information to where they can make decisions and have that information. We absolutely need that in all of our call center operations. Jeremy and their team, they're doing, they're doing a great job. No, they're not doing a great job. They're doing the best job they can with the data that they have, but they recognize that they're trying to help their customers, but they've got to go through five screens of information to be able to get the background and the history to be able to help the customer with what they have. New systems will be, enable that to where it populates that to where a person can help them quicker, better, you know, more effective that McKenzie's talked about how they're, they're, they're, they're using, um, and in medical fields with doctors to where, again, a doctor talks to you and it, and it gives you that history in a, in a summary format to where they can. And it even gives you options, but it's still not taken away from the decision maker, but it's, it's helping them be more efficient in the way they do their work. I think there's a lot of opportunities that I'm actually meeting with McKenzie and company, um, to pick their brain and talk about that. We're forming an internal team to really have a more global look at how do we incorporate that. This is going to be a work in progress, same way it is for any company, but we're trying to be forward looking to say, we've been able to find deficiencies through kind of our normal business practices. What does the future look like and how do we strategically, um, align ourselves and to be able to advance as a, as a county. And again, we're a county with 26, 28 unique business practices, um, and be able to advance for that. I think that's where the next efficiencies come from. Some will be through reduced staff, um, you know, and being more efficient. Some will just be in having better customer service, you know, and, and, and so that's, I think the next wave that you'll, you'll see as we kind of prepare for the future. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And I wanted to echo what, uh, Commissioner, uh, Peter said. Um, I do very much appreciate, uh, having specific, um, ideas and not just general directives, uh, to Barry and Chris. So I appreciate that very much, uh, cause I would have been severely irritated if you would have just asked them to do, you know, find $20 million of the budget and, and all that. So I, um, I, and I do believe that, uh, there will be, uh, cost savings because of the work that you put in, uh, to this. So kudos to you for that. Um, and I brought up, and the reason why I brought up those two instances, uh, in BDRS and, um, code enforcement is cause one is an area that we brought up before, uh, as a significant need. And that's code in, uh, the short term rentals. And the other one is, uh, having to do with, uh, hurricane recovery and disaster recovery. Um, a question that I have for you, Barry, and you're going to get irritated, uh, with this, but you can get over it. Um, and, and I may have asked this before, and I usually preface my questions to Jewel is, are we allowed to by TDC? And, and this one, I actually know the answer to, um, another cost savings area that we can have, uh, is by spending TDC funds for lifeguards in our county parks. Is that a place that you have looked at doing and? Well, at the last meeting, um, I had proposed that we look at eliminating the Sankey lifeguards. Um, and so for everybody that's written letters, um, at the direction of the commission, we took that off. Okay. And so that is not built into the current proposal. What you asked us to do is come back and have a bigger discussion regarding lifeguards. Um, and so we're planning to do that at a later time. Um, this fall, um, the, the answer is under state law. I believe you can, um, look at lifeguards, um, but those are countywide funds. So others then could make that same request. And so we'd have to look at that and consider that. And I think work with the TDC to consider any policy changes around that. Yeah. So, and so, and, and really my question is, you know, it might be, and, and I believe that that law was changed this year. And it was effective, um, very recently. And so it is probably too late in the game this year, but it is something that we can look at in the future as potential cost savings. Well, I wouldn't, yes, it could, it could be, um, we, we could, those are, are charges that we could consider. I think we need to work with the TDC on some of those policies because the law actually changed even, broaden it even more. And so there's other things that would be allowed under that modification to state law that some have questioned. And so I've asked Brian to look at those, begin to have that discussion with TDC members, and then we'll bring it and have a discussion with the commission. That's also something that we could discuss on the changes to the laws when we have our joint meeting with the TDC coming up here. Okay. Thank you. Commissioner Flowers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, I'm sorry, Mr. Co-Chair. Mr. Chair stepped away. Um, so I will go down, um, and just share my opinions on each individual, um, request. Um, but I'll preface all of that to say that, um, I have never supported going to a rollback rate. Um, I've been in government for a number of years and just like our home purse, if you have a set amount of dollars and you don't plan for any, um, increases, um, in costs of, let's say, ways to manage your house. Um, and you get like what I just got, a little notice telling me my Duke Energy bill was $394. So if I don't have a little something there to cover, I'm in a quandary as it relates to how I'm going to take care of that. That is how I look at government. We have had to go back and amend contracts because there's been an increase for the cost of either the services or the goods, I'm sorry, that we have to purchase the supplies or manpower. We've, um, had things that we've needed repairing that we've had to go back and amend our budget because there was an increase in the cost. Nothing negative on anyone. That's just where we are right now. Um, so, uh, I remember Bill Foster used to be big on wanting to do a, uh, go all the way back to a rollback rate. He even toyed with zero base budget and, um, I had to do a little, you know, educating myself on all of those areas when I first got into it. But those are the reasons why I will never support going back to a rollback rate, which simply means the, the dollar amount that we functioned on the year before is the dollar amount that we will function on going forward. When, in fact, our costs increase. Um, and again, that's just the cost of doing business. So I wanted to preface my comments by saying that, um, for, uh, and I'm going to mix human resources, um, and, um, human, uh, services. And the Unified Personnel Board, I'm going to kind of pull, pull those together. The Unified Personnel Board, I believe, was constructed by state statute around 1977. I don't like it. I said that to Barry when I first came on board. I do not like it because it takes away any ability that administration would have to rectify a situation. Individuals go before the Unified Personnel Board and whatever comes out of that is what comes out of that. Um, and sometimes they have not gotten it right. And it is, but the, the plank didn't land back with the Unified Personnel Board. The plank landed with the commission. And all the stories that were written were written about the county commission. So I don't, I don't support that. However, that's what's here. So for human resources, um, those positions have a very different function than what the Unified Personnel Board does. Um, I believe when we are looking at positions that are currently vacant, I completely agree with everything that's been said thus far. However, we have people who retire, so now we have a vacant position. We have people who get promoted, so now we have a vacant position. We have individuals who leave for better opportunities, can't fault them for that. So now we have a vacant position. I don't know of any entity that has always had a 100% field employee rate in any given department at any given time because things happen. There's attrition, there's retirement, things just happen. Um, I, I, I, I support what, uh, Commissioner Edgar's requested and Barrett has already agreed to look at certain positions and see where we are on those. Um, but each department has or will have its ebb and flows when it comes to hiring, um, and efficiencies. Um, many of us have, uh, looked at the, uh, Facebook postings that have, uh, been presented through the Property Appraisal's Office and Tax Collector's Office. They have a real creative way about talking about the positions that are vacant, um, in their departments and trying to hire. Um, and I know that I'm always reaching out for individuals, uh, within our structure to attend different job fairs and whatnot so that people will know what's available. My other concern is, um, just because you may have or have a desire to do away with the department and say they can just apply for another position in another department, they may not be qualified for the positions that are open and available. So while you can say that, and I'm sure it was, it is done with the hope that they would be absorbed into another department, that is not always a guarantee. And I'm not talking about whether or not a person wants to go to another department. I'm talking about whether or not they're actually qualified for the open positions in those departments. And if you reduce the positions, as it's kind of alluded to here, if you reduce positions in all of the departments that have been represented, there would be nowhere for anybody to go because you have now said you want to, uh, reduce or eliminate those positions. So, um, it, it's, uh, um, it is a delicate balance and a delicate dance, but I don't think it's the answer, um, to what it is that's, uh, being requested. For the office of resiliency and asset management, um, we continue to be able to apply for, uh, resiliency and sustainability grants that assist the county as well as other entities when it comes to providing services to, um, our residents. And so I believe the position is, is, is very much needed. I would, I would like to see, uh, I would have to see something that says that position is not needed, nor is it functional in order for me to support anything there. Asset management, that is huge that, um, we are a big county and we have a lot of property. We have a lot of, um, tools. We have a lot of vehicles. We, we just have a lot of things, um, so to ask someone else or another department to take that on, you would then probably need to hire additional staff in that department, or you're going to be asking people to expand their work product within a department. So, you know, is that something that individuals would want to do? Because that's not, that's not what they, um, have been hired for. So you've got to kind of look at that, I think. Um, for BDRS, self-explanatory, we've already talked about that. For animal services, um, we get so many emails and so many concerns related to the care and upkeep of animals. And we have put so many things in place as a commission and the previous commissions, um, to make sure that we are providing for the services there. So I'm not supportive of, um, a reduction or a hiring freeze in that department. For parks and conservation resources, um, we just, even though that wasn't park related, we just had a unfunded mandate that was provided to us today. Um, that says we needed to, uh, increase our, um, inspection of, uh, of things, um, in order to be in line with what it is that the state has said. So to eliminate or delay parks, sewer inspection and mapping projects, um, while it's not a priority, it's still a needed service. For dues and subscriptions, Barry, maybe you could take a look at that. I support dues for memberships for different organizations. The subscriptions that we get allow our employees, I believe, to function and to be, um, on top of all of the different changes that are going on. Um, I don't see where we could reduce this anymore. I, I believe over time since I've been here, you've kind of taken a look at that, um, and you've done what it is that we've asked you to do. But I, I, I don't see where we will be able to make any further reductions there. Because those things are needed for, uh, persons to remain fluent, um, and well-educated and well-rounded and versed in the areas that they are employed. So I say the last one for the best, I guess, for me, I will never support getting rid of the Office of Human Rights. While it is true that, um, that office was created under a court order, and while it is true that the office, um, that the court order no longer is, uh, functional, this department does far more than, um, what I believe some people think that the department does. And while it is true that persons can go to the EEOC to maybe file a grievance or they could go to HUD, that is the reason why HUD pays the Office of Human Rights to do its investigatory processes for, um, issues and concerns regarding discriminatory practices in the area of housing. Um, um, I don't believe, um, I don't believe, and, and, you know, somebody tell me if I'm wrong, but I've never known the Board of Realtors, um, to take up a housing discrimination case for a person. Um, and that's, and I'm just using that because that was one of the purported entities that could possibly be referred to for a person to go there. I've never known them to do that, and that's not why they exist, um, I believe, and, and Commissioner Latvala, thank you for recognizing the wage theft ordinance, because I know that that was a lot of work that, um, a number of people were involved in, in creating that because people were not being fairly paid, nor were they being paid for the overtime that they're working. Um, there was a, and I, and I, and I believe you all received it, but there was a document that was sent that just kind of highlights the number of cases that have come through, the number of cases that have been cleared, um, or rectified, I guess I should say. And I believe all of that shows that this department is a needed department, not to be absorbed into another department. It is a needed department that can stand alone on its own. Um, so I'm, I would never support getting rid of that department, nor any others of the, any other department that is, um, that has been noted here that perhaps we could eliminate or do away with. Um, the Office of Human Rights receives revenue from HUD at the tune of $599,000 and change, and from EEOC, $192,975, with some additional grants that come along from time to time. Um, in addition to the funding that is received by, um, that they get from the county, uh, general fund. Um, um, the inquiries regarding fair housing, that's going to continue to rise because unfortunately we have an affordability issue here, and we're going to have that for quite some time. Um, employment inquiries, um, so that persons feel like their case will be fairly researched. Um, we have those numbers. If you haven't received the highlights, I'll send them to you. Um, public accommodations for persons who are disabled. This is a place where they can go. We have 42 inquiries, and out of the 42, we closed 38 cases that were closed successfully, um, in favor of the person who made the complaint. And then internally, we've had 63 cases filed with only 15 violations filed. Um, so I think that speaks to the work that we do to try to comply with and to be supportive of, um, our employees. For wage theft, we've had 436 cases. We've been able to recover $239,458 and reclaim $907,000. We would not be able to do this, I think, effectively and efficiently if it was not for this department. And it's not like this is a, a 300-person department. This is a few individuals who do a yeoman's job, who do a lot of work. Um, and also, Jill, thank you for the, um, attorney that's assigned to this department, because she does a wonderful job of, uh, researching, um, prior to her making any presentation before the board, um, and any presentation as it relates to what our next step should be to keep us out of court. So I appreciate that. Um, they also, um, manage the language line service, that's 16,625 calls. That is simply for individuals who may not speak English as their first language, but they are residents, they are taxpayers, and they need help. Um, so I would never, you know, that's just me. I'm never going to support doing away with that department. I'm not going to support merging that department. Um, what I do think is if there is a, a strong desire to look at, um, departments and how they're staffed and whatnot, certainly taking it up with Barry, but if you want to, um, consult on the functionality of the departments and whether or not they are staffed properly, understaffed, overstaffed, maybe look at doing something like that in the future. But I think, um, for me at this point, um, I, I can't support, uh, any of that. Um, the last thing I'll say is, um, I know it is up to us to make the final decisions relative to the budget. The county administrator constructs the budget, prepares it, presents it to us, and then we have our six days of, of reviewing the budget and then making our determinations and then certainly taking into account what it is that the constituents say. Um, over the public hearing, um, days and then making the final decision and the final decision lays with, uh, lies with us. But I also want to remind y'all that the employees of the county are also our constituents. And so I know that for any that may be listening now, they are probably sitting on the edge of their seats and pulling out their eyelashes to hear conversations that there is a desire to perhaps cut and or eliminate departments that they work in. Um, so I would hope that maybe going forward this deep dive is done so that it could be communicated when we're going through our days of workshop and perhaps as those individuals are standing there, they could then reflect on, if you do this, this is how it's going to affect my department. Um, they don't have the benefit of doing that because they're not here today to, to, to be able to share that. Um, and, and maybe that's just me because I come from a background that works in human resources and that, that worked in human resources, um, and corporate training, um, and have had the opportunity to sit on both sides of the meter. Uh, when we're having these types of discussions, it's never an easy discussion and commissioner share, I'm not, uh, uh, downsizing or, you know, being negative. I hope you think towards your email, because I did read it intently and went through each of the various departments, um, and your recommendations. Huh? Uh, yeah, I went through and read through, but, um, I, I just really couldn't support some of these things at this time. What I can support is, um, we all talked about decision packages and, and whether or not we would support decision packages. And we wanted to adhere to what Barry requested was to keep things flat with exception of giving the 3%. So when it comes to decision packages, other than the ones that I have already shared, I support particularly with BDS for the technology systems and things like that. I could see, um, not supporting those because we made that clear and there's no guarantee ever that a decision package would in fact be funded. So I could support, um, the elimination of that, um, but for the other reduction expenses or requests for elimination or downsizing. I could, um, thank you for allowing me. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. He sounds like, whoop. Well, uh, Chris, you've caused a lot of discussion today. Um, which is good. Which is good. That was a very deep dive email. So we, we, no, we don't. So we have a lot yet to get to, uh, today. And, and unfortunately, I have to leave at 2.15. So I may have to hand the gavel over here to Commissioner Eggers. Um, but in, to, to, to land this plane so we can kind of move on. And other, other pieces here. And, um, I'm glad you sat down. Chris, I'm sure you're getting tired of standing there for a while. So to just try to encapsulate, encapsulate our thoughts here. So, um, we talked a lot about health insurance reserves. Is there any appetite to do anything with that in terms of moving any of that money, whether it's a structured 10 year drawdown or whatever towards, um, a millage rate reduction this year? Is there any? Yes. Yes. It's, I would have the, um, I would have the, uh, I would be fine with doing a 10 year amortization and taking a look at it each year and what it references. Because as we go through time and that, that number goes up, then we're going to have to fund it. If it goes down, we're not going to have to fund it. And so I just want to make sure that we're looking at this every year and you do it 10 years and we knock off a little bit each year. And each year we do a check in on it. And if all we have to do is fund up that little bit that we've taken out that then it's, I think it's doable. And I think it's, it's a responsible way of responding to our reserve levels without, you know, going too far. I mean, that's one of the things we've said about the state sometimes. We like the things that they're doing, but maybe more incremental. And so that's what we would be doing in this case. So I wouldn't support that one. Um, but anyway, that's your question. So, okay. Um, yes. Yes. Barry, um, I think, and I want to make sure I heard your comments correct. You said that you, you could conceivably see supporting the amortization of that over 10 years. Yes or no? I said you can do that. Okay, that's why I said, listen, that's, that's, it's always good to ask for clarification. And that's what I'm doing. Well, this is a policy level discussion. I don't think, um, you know, I, I mean, really, I think you understand, I think you get the concepts of, um, of how one time money works. And so I said that that is a supportable position that the commissioner took in terms of that 10 year drawdown, understanding the ramifications of those decisions. I still like it as a reserve, um, because I want to look at it in the overall reserves. But it's absolutely, what you proposed is something that we could incorporate if that's your direction. All right, Chris, I think we have consensus on that one. Okay. All right. Um, as far as there's a lot of discussion about vacant positions, I'm just going to ask, uh, Chris and Barry to take another pass at that and let us know what, you know, what you can come up with on that. Okay. Um, office of human rights, a lot of discussion about that is what is, what are the people thinking about that? I, I completely understand where you're coming from on that one. I wasn't going to say anything yet. All right. So, um, but I just want to, you know, get clarity on, you know, what we want to do with that, if we want to do anything on that. So I think it's important to look at like the core functions of government and county government. And so when you already have those duplicating layers of other agencies, now, if there are specific like wage theft, I think those are things you have to protect. Um, but if there aren't things that aren't core function of county government, um, I think those could be eliminated from that office. Right. And I had a, a, a very nice meeting, uh, with the director, uh, yesterday, Bettina, and I know she's here with a, with a, with a, with a lot of her staff today. Um, and they also, they're also, we also have a gas station ordinance, uh, for, um, for folks with disabilities, which I didn't even know. So there's probably two components here. Jill, see you. And since we're on the topic, let me just throw a couple of things out there. Um, there's, there's a lot of talk about the consent decree from, I think, back in the seventies. It is true. It was dissolved. I think right around 2016, when the county commission at that time, uh, passed an ordinance that kind of retooled the department, but more importantly, the board. Um, so it's, it's the board of human rights. Now it was previously named something different. So back when that consent decree was dissolved, the county commission at that time sort of refocused the department on a lot of the stuff that you've talked about here today, wage theft and, and other, um, issues. But I will say the director reports to the, that board, not this board. Right. Um, so there is a board created by county ordinance that is the office of human rights. Commissioner flowers is the current chair. Your constitutional officers are on there, not the sheriff, um, and some other entities. So just to throw that out there, county commission funds, the office, the office actually reports to a separate board that you all created by county ordinance. Um, but again, I just wanted to throw it out there. I think that sometimes we overly focus on that consent decree, the consent decree went away. So therefore they're not necessary. They were, they were, their focus was shifted after that consent decree went away for all things, priorities that a board of county commissioners, um, established in the past. And, you know, some of the, um, some of the, the directives have been very successful, like the wage theft I would throw out there, but I just kind of wanted to clarify just those couple of things. So everybody is on the same page. All right. Thank you, Joel. So, um, so what are we, what are we thinking on that? Do we, do we, do we think it's a duplication? I, is it, do we? I mean, I, I, I don't have an issue with taking a look at the organization, the department. I, I, I don't want to do anything on the fly on that department. So for me, this is on the fly. It doesn't mean it's wrong. Uh, so I just rather have more time to take a look at the various functions that belong to that department. That's number one. Number two is that it is, there is, there is symbolism in some degrees to having an office of human rights. And I just want to make sure that I'm comfortable with that, that, the process of looking at that department, um, and take more time on it. So that's all I'm saying for me. Okay. And, and a little more history on that is, is, is we are the, our office of human rights is the only one in the county. The city of St. Petersburg had one, which went away in 1999, which became basically absorbed into, into the counties. Um, my aide Colleen did a lot of research to see what other, how many other counties have these. And there's about, um, I want to say there was maybe a dozen other, 10 or 12 other counties, something like that, that have. I believe it's 16. Is it 16? Yeah. Okay. Maybe it was 10, you know, I think it was 10%. So I think you're right. I think you're right. Um, that have something like this. And there's some cities that also have them. The city of Tampa has their own Hillsborough County has their own. I think the difference between there is, is Tampa's I believe is, is rec is federally recognized. So then EEOC and HUD, uh, has them do investigations on, on their behalf. Whereas the other ones that are not recognized like Hillsborough County, um, they don't do those things. They just do what, whatever their local ordinances are. So, um, I am, I'm kind of a little bit on the, on, on the fence of this one. This one kind of came up sort of quick. Um, I would probably be okay with taking a little more time to just sort of understand and make sure we're not doing a knee jerk reaction on anything here. So, Chris, I mean, I think, you know, to your point that if we eliminate that office, it's important that we shift those responsibilities elsewhere in the County or create another office. Um, you know, and, and, um, you know, one, one of the things I mentioned is that we could create the office under our purview. Um, and so if we don't like the staffing levels, if we don't like the budget, you know, that's on us. Um, but I think it's very important that we keep a lot of those protections in place, um, you know, because there's, you know, a purpose there. The, the, uh, wage theft, if we could keep that within the County, uh, you need to keep that, keep that department. I don't know how many are involved in that. That would be fine. I think it's a good thing that we do, uh, uh, on the housing discrimination, uh, REC does suspend people's and so does the DBPR. You can have your broker's license or your realtor's license suspended and they do regulate housing. So, uh, I, with the, you know, Florida Department of Education, National Association of Realtors with, uh, Florida Department of, uh, Labor Relations Board and HUD. I just think it's a lot of duplication of government and we don't, we don't need it. And so I, I, I just. The realtors, for example, they police their own. Yes, they do. They don't police others. Exactly. So just making sure you understand the difference. I mean, I'm a, I'm a, not a realtor now, but I certainly go by their, their principles. So they, and they watch us closely, not, they don't watch, they don't watch the general public. And independent developers or anybody else that's involved. So just, just, and I think, you know, I think this department, maybe we just take a look at it. But I, I think there's a lot of good that's going on in that department. And I think we need that chance to highlight that before we unravel it. And maybe it does best fit right where it is. And maybe it fits best to your point in another department. But I just, I'm uncomfortable doing something today, uh, or this budget. That's all. I think, uh, a workshop maybe seems like it's. Yeah, I think, I mean, I, I agree. I think there, I, you know, I've looked at this and I think that there is a lot of duplication. I really do. Um, but, um, you know, and, and quite honestly, we're kind of doing work on behalf of the state of Florida and they send us unfunded mandates all the time and we're kind of doing their work. So this would be a way of pushing, pushing something back to them and, and this, and, and the same with, um, you know, even with, with HUD and EOC, even though they, they pay us some money to do investigations, I don't know that it fully covers our costs. It probably doesn't. Um, but at the same time, I'm, I'm kind of on the fence with it. So, um, I would probably be okay if we just paused it now and did a workshop on it and kind of took a little deeper dive into seeing what we were really want to do with it in the future. So we all good with that? Consensus. Okay. All right. Okay. Moving on with that. Then I've got one thing that I want to bring up, um, which is, uh, creative, uh, Pinellas. So creative Pinellas is, is not a county department, even though it has Pinellas and it's in its name. Um, it is a, it is a registered not-for-profit, um, that was created in 2011. It was the county's cultural affairs department and it was basically kind of spun off to be its own not-for-profit, uh, with a one-time payment from the county of $300,000 and an ongoing, uh, money from the, you know, the, the arts license plate tags. There was a certain amount of money that came back to the county, uh, for that. And they were charged with basically being the local arts agency in, in, in Pinellas County. We have an ordinance that designates them as the local arts agency in Pinellas County. And they were supposed to be out there on their own, raising money and supporting, and supporting the arts. We've been funding them ever since with a direct appropriation to the tune of about $1.2 million. And they had a decision package this, this year for another $1.1 million to create a grant program, um, for arts tourism. And I reviewed the, um, the cultural plan and I was pretty underwhelmed by it. And, and quite honestly, I have struggled since I've become a commissioner to understand what they're really bringing to the table. And honestly, I don't really think they're bringing a lot to the table other than having grant programs that they're giving, you know, money for artists to buy easels and cameras and things like that. And it's not going to tourism at all. And this year's budget requests for Creative Pinellas includes $861,150 in TDT funds, $156,000 from the general fund, and $36,000 from the transportation fund. They've got a staff of roughly about, about 10 people. About half of that money they pay their staff with. And the other half of it, they really just kind of give away as, as, as grants. They get 90% of their money from us. And I don't really see that there's a lot of return on that investment. I really don't. So, uh, I think, and I've talked to, uh, Brian Lowak, who is at St. Pete Clearwater, pretty extensively about this. I've talked to Barry about it pretty extensively. What I think we should do is Brian and his team create a competitive grant program specifically for arts tourism. And I've talked to Brian, if he could do this with existing staff, he said it would be a lift, but he could get it, but he could get it done. So I say that we don't fund creative panelists going forward. We take a half a million dollars of that, uh, original TDT fund of $861,150, set it aside for a grant program for Brian and his team to develop a competitive grant program similar to what we do to elite, to elite events. And then that would allow us to return $361,150 back to tourist development, $156,000 back to the general fund, which could go back for, for the rollback. And $36,000 back to the transportation trust fund. What do y'all think about that? Ready? Okay. Okay. Again, my mouth shut. Um, yeah, I, listen, I'm not, you know, the work that's being done around this table right now, I think is really good. I just wish it weren't being done the last week of August. Right. I mean, cause these are some big deals that we're talking about. I mean, we conscientiously just established this, this group, and I've gotten not one lick of art in me, I mean, in terms of ability. So this is not for the persons like me, but it is for our community. It is for the young, uh, uh, rising artists. It is for, uh, programs that we have all over this County. Um, and again, uh, trying to bring the different art communities. And if you look at our recent, the recent survey, it talks about the things that people liked about this County where the arts and culture availabilities. And I'm sure it's a lot of it to do with the museums. It's a lot to do with our artwork. We've got the city of Dunedin has an art, not the city, but they have an art center there. They have art centers in different places that, that bring that, um, I don't know what it is. It's kind of an ambiance of, of the, of this, this talent to our County. And again, it's part of what makes, again, the tapestry of Pinellas County so special. Um, and again, I'm sitting here talking on behalf of artists for crying out loud. They, they need a better spokesperson than me, but, um, I, I, I get a little nervous when we start to unravel things that have become, um, relevant, uh, to the different aspects without having folks here in the room. Well, we're talking about a pretty significant, it's not monumental, but it is significant change. And I think it's something that we want to talk about. I don't have a problem going to a workshop, having the art folks come out and talk about it and, and, and, and argue against it or argue for it. Maybe they would agree with some of it. Um, I just, again, a little bit concerned on the fly to do it. That's all, uh, not disagreeing with the concept of looking at it in a workshop at all. So that's why I didn't go thumbs up. Understood. All right. I have just to give you a little comfort. I have really done a deep dive on that. And, um, and we're not talking about County employees. It's, it's, it's, it is a, it is a not for profit and the money that we would set aside, uh, for Brian and his team to create a competitive grant program directly tied to tourism would produce way better results than what we're getting right now. Again, as it relates to tourism, I wouldn't disagree with you. And if that's the only aspect of this program, then I would, I'm not saying I disagree. Um, so I think that's something that, again, if you've been doing a deep dive and having communications out there, I've heard one peep from anybody in that community. And I'm sure I would have heard something, not because I'm the art representative, but because they would reach out to their elected officials on this change. That's all. So I haven't heard a peep from anybody. So I don't know. You will by next week. Well, well, or that just shows you that it's not really all that. I mean, if, if they have heard and they're not responding, I would agree with that, which you're where you're going, but I'm not sure that's the case. So Mr. Chair. Yes. Um, on that topic, I received one, only one phone call. Um, but it was from someone, a part of, uh, the organization. Um, I haven't received any other emails. That's not to say that they won't now, but, um, I remember when we kind of created this, as you said, Commissioner Eggers, when I first came on board, um, and I had reservations then because not that I have anything against creative clay, my nephew who was hit by a car when he was three years old and has no peripheral vision and some other issues that he will always need to be under the care of someone. But him going to creative clay is what kind of pulled him out and pulled him through. And now he sells his art pieces all over. He, uh, represents them when they go to Tallahassee. He, um, goes and speaks on behalf of what art does, um, for persons, um, who need that additional outlet. But my concern back then, and even my concern now is, is that you could be an artist, but just maybe not be so familiar with, um, creative clay as the entity. And so when they are creative clay or Penelas, I'm sorry, creative Penelas, please forgive me. So when they, I need something to eat. So when they, so when they are, um, when they are presenting opportunities for you, if you're not in that hub or bubble, you may miss the opportunity to, um, be a part or have your artwork done. And so that was just my concern and my questions back then when we in fact moved to this piece where they kind of took the lead and, and others kind of submitted underneath them or whatever. Um, but I'm all for, uh, you know, looking at it. Thank you so much for, for your deep dive in it. I'm all for looking at it to see how it could be most effective for the artists because now our community is not only known for beaches, it's known for its museum and its art. Thank you for correcting me. I do need to eat. Well, well, on that note, um, so that's direction. Yep. Okay. Um, one just small correction. So part of that, that $36,000 transportation trust funds, XR anti graffiti program. So we'll need to come up with some way of, of, um, taking that piece and applying that. So we'll bring back ideas. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. So, um, I think we're done with that piece of it. Um, so are we ready to break for lunch or what? Okay. So we've been corporate. So we're, so we're going to just to clarify, so I'm, I'm clear, um, changing the TDC. We're going to look at the vacancies over in those, um, two departments, uh, no change at the office of human rights. Um, and we're going to look at a $1.7 million 10 year drawdown of the, um, employee health care fund. Um, and that's, those are the, uh, changes that we'll incorporate to the budget hearing that will occur next Thursday, September 4th. Okay. A Thursday, September 4th, not a Tuesday, a little bit different. Um, okay. And it'll be an evening meeting. So, okay. Gary, just one last question. Uh, do we have any CRA income coming in this, that where CRAs are going out this year? Not, not falling off. Is there, is there, there's one CRA falling off? Say again? Let us get back to you, commissioner on that. Um, I, I don't recall that, but they may correct me. So, um, but we'll, we'll do that before the end of this meeting. Okay. And so again, to the rollback principle, when we're starting to get these additional incomes coming in, those are significant over the next five to 10 years. So I just, you saw that there and it is, but most of those occur like in year five, not, not in year one and two. So I'm not saying this, it's pertinent to this budget, but it's a big deal. No, I understand. It's coming. Okay. We'll incorporate that. If you want to take commissioner, um, yeah, why don't we take, um, why don't we take, come back at, uh, what do you think? 1245. I don't know. And, uh, you have sandwiches. We're at, oh, she's going to go get, she's got sandwiches for you. She'll send them out up here. Yes. Recorded, but we're not on TV. So you're the way you go. Okay. All right. Well then let's start with Gray Robinson. Are you going to bring the different firms in right here? There. All right. Here we go. Good job, Matt. All right. Good night. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Chris Dawson with Gray Robinson. Uh, assuming we're ready to begin. Fantastic. Thank you. Chris Dawson with Gray Robinson. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today. Uh, we are very excited to present our unique skills and expertise that we think is a real powerhouse approach for Pinellas County and state government relations. We're going to start with team introductions and I'm going to go last. So I'm going to hand it over to Chris to come introduce himself. Good afternoon, everyone. Uh, Chris Carmody with Gray Robinson, uh, lawyer, lobbyist, shareholder with the firm, been here 20 years. Uh, like everyone you're going to hear from, uh, we spend during the committee weeks and session, all of our time in Tallahassee. Um, and we've got a dearth of experience in local government, um, special districts, counties, cities, you name it, and have had all kinds of fun working on the many issues that go in that, whether it's TDT, land use, live local, everything in between. And I'm going to hand it off to Carlisha. Hi, Carlisha Collins. I've been with Gray Robinson for five years. Next month, uh, worked in a house and sit in at all factors of that, uh, world and happy to be here today. Thank you guys so much. Good afternoon. My name is Kristen Gray. I'm an associate at Gray Robinson. I currently serve as the city attorney for the city of South Pasadena, Florida, and I'm a Pinellas County resident. So I'm happy to be here today. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Robert Stewart. Uh, I'm out of the, uh, Orlando and Tallahassee offices of Gray Robinson, been with the firm about 19 years prior to that served as a legislative aid, uh, in the state house. And so got my start in the process and then have been a part of the Gray Robinson team since 2006. Super excited to be here, uh, in beautiful Pinellas County, uh, and for the chance to, to share a little bit about our firm. Additionally, we have, uh, Nikki Day on the team. She couldn't join us today, but she is a Pinellas County resident and has a rich history as a local government attorney, board certified, and has provided services to both the county and municipalities throughout the county. So a deep local touch there with Nikki and lastly, Chris Dawson, I am the proposed team lead for the Gray Robinson team. I'm based out of the Tampa office and have been over in this market for several years, uh, started with the firm, uh, right out of law school. So I am an attorney as well. I'm going into my 14th legislative session and I also have a background in civil engineering. So I draw upon that technical expertise and helping to build resilient and, uh, communities of the future is really what I've been passionate about for my career. I'm very excited to be able to do that where law and politics coincide. Robert's going to come up and touch a little bit on the unique qualifications of the firm. Thank you, Chris. And, um, we are really excited to be here for a number of reasons, but, uh, mostly that we are, uh, uh, we are deeply rooted in this community. Um, we've been in the Tampa Bay area for about 25 years, uh, with offices in downtown Tampa, but always with, uh, representation of, uh, our lawyers, uh, our clients in the Pinellas County, uh, area, uh, Chris, uh, offices out of Tampa, uh, and has a full-time presence here along with, uh, the others on the team that you've heard from. Um, and we've been practicing in government relations, uh, representing local governments for all of our 55 years of existence. When Charlie Gray established our firm in 1970, he was the city solicitor at the time for the city of Orlando. So representing local governments has sort of always been in our DNA, uh, and we take great pride in that, um, whether it's serving as city or county attorneys at various places around the state or representing them in Tallahassee, it's something that we take, uh, very seriously. And then you see there just a little bit of the, uh, of the, uh, Pinellas County and Tampa Bay area expertise and, and experience that we have. Um, uh, Nikki is a trusted county attorney, uh, for the, for the county on various matters. Um, we have, uh, several members of our team, both in Tallahassee and, uh, in, um, uh, uh, our Tampa office with deep ties in this community. Uh, we, uh, represent Port Tampa Bay. Uh, we previously represented PSTA. So we've had a lot of, uh, experience, uh, and, uh, and relationships in this community that we look forward to bringing to bear for you. In addition to those relationships that we have, uh, in Tallahassee. Thank you guys again for having me. I'm a little shorter. Um, and these are just a quick, like blurb of some of the clips and highlights that you see from publications that Gray Robinson has been featured in. Just to say that we're one of the top firms from DC to the Keys. Uh, we have a breadth of knowledge and, and, and experience here. And then some of the concierge services, um, our clients benefit from the reach and, and connectivity that Gray Robinson has. We have the best, uh, best combination of connectivity and subject matter expertise. And it really is a benefit to not only us, but our clients, because we have, um, services throughout the state that are going to benefit you guys. For an example, a little bit about my background is I worked in the speaker's office. I worked in the president's office for many terms and in the, uh, for an appropriations chairman, which we really beneficial for you guys. So I have that inside knowledge of the, the capital, how Tallahassee works and really benefit the County, um, to help us win for you guys with the knowledge that we have, we all have. And one last thing I'd like to say is that we like to say that Gray Robinson is a big firm, small firm fill because the lobby firm within the firm will help you guys. And so you have the benefit of having lawyers on our team that we can connect with and have tons of resources that way. So we're really excited to help you guys out in the future. And Chris Carmi's next. Yeah. Dovetail off. Carlisha said about our, our large firm with concierge services. Uh, and you'll see it in our experience slide. When we get there in a second, uh, you know, we take a lot of pride in that, right? We have over 300 professionals in our firm here in the state of Florida and Washington, DC. And we put those to work on your behalf, especially in local government space. The issues are never easy. I use an example. Uh, Robert and I worked on many moons ago in the, in the, at the end of the great recession, some of our city clients were having issues on land use, air rights. Remember everyone was buying up condos and air rights. And one of our clients could not get their redevelopment going because some of the properties that they needed to go work with were stuck in air rights, you know, territory, right? Um, I'll admit, even though I'm trained lawyer, some of that stuff was a little beyond my reach as far as knowledge and technicalities, but we have a very robust land use and real estate, um, group and no extra charge to the client. We were able to bring those attorneys in to work with Robert and I to craft a solution at the legislative level. And then Robert and I took that solution, worked through the landmines of the Florida Bar Reptile Association, all the other special interests in there to get a solution in place to, that allowed the city to move forward with some of this development, not harm anyone's rights, but do it in a fair way, which without those, those big resources, we would have never been able to do. So that's the kind of stuff we talk about with that concierge service there. As you see in this slide, transparency, our commitment to the County, um, you know, when we take this approach, when we lobby for, for anyone, uh, but especially we'll, as we'll lay it out here for you today is all cards on the table from day one, right? We want to better understand what's important to you and we'll give you the landmines and give you all the good and bad of that particular issue. As it relates to Tallahassee, we'll obviously fight for whatever it is you want to fight for, but we're not going to hide the ball on you and say, Oh, that's going to be easy. Let's go get it. We'll tell you exactly who's going to be opposed to it, why they'll be opposed, how we can work around that. Maybe the amendatory process, maybe this way, maybe wait for a big omnibus bill. That's what we kind of do in constant, constant updates, right? When we're up there on the last day of conference negotiation this year, what was it? The 99th, 100th day when some of that, those, uh, implementing bill languages were pops. I feel sorry for some of our local government clients because the texts were flying in, Hey, this just popped. I need a quick response. We need to understand what we can do with this. So that's the kind of approach we have. You're probably going to hear from us more than you'd like, but you tell us if we're texting or calling or emailing too much. Obviously there's a lot of issues that the County has to deal with here. You got a large landmass coastal. And so we tried to best, um, capture that on this slide and we can obviously answer questions later. Um, but you can see those there and obviously beach renourishment. Um, the County has obviously taken on a massive project and the renourishing of your beaches, largely funded through TDT. We obviously have a lot of experience in that, as you can see on the slide, both on the TD side and on the state grant side and how to approach that road funding. We're very familiar and had many projects in this most recent budget go through resilient Florida. We have a lot of experience working with DEP and the legislature, whether it's on the grants and the appropriations are combined and then disaster recovery. Hopefully that's not a subject that you have to worry about for a couple of years, uh, on going forward. But obviously if it does come up, we have a lot of experience and we can help you with your ongoing issues in that regard. Um, I think I am handing it off to Dawson here to wrap us up and talk a little bit about relationships. Absolutely. And as we close out our presentation portion, I hope you see the experience in depth that we bring to the table. We had that subject matter expertise and having the backing of a full service law firm really helps us understand the issues, understand the legal implications. And again, we have lawyers on the team here, including myself, but really this is a relationship business and when we talk about Tallahassee in particular, there's 160 decision makers from all over the state and really it's the reach that becomes most important. Um, great relationships with the Pinellas delegation, but when we have speakers in the pipeline, as you can see here, our upcoming leadership from Jacksonville, Lakeland and Miami, you need that statewide reach and we've got it with 15 offices across Florida. We're not only have reached in Tallahassee, but we are actual constituents to most members of the legislature through our brick and mortar footprint. And then I mentioned your delegation, but having those deep relationships here with our members of the Florida house and our members of the Florida Senate are critical. We have exceptional relationships with the Pinellas delegation and work with them day in and day out on priorities. However, I think a unique opportunity for us is that we, we aren't constantly asking them for Pinellas priorities. Uh, we have a strong reach across the state. We're working with them on statewide issues for other clients. But when it comes to what are going to be our top priorities, working with your delegation, the County would be absolutely number one. And that is something that we think is a unique aspect of our team, given our statewide reach with that. We appreciate the opportunity to present to you. And now we'd love the opportunity to answer any of your questions. Mr. Flowers. Good afternoon, everybody. I think I spoke to most of you as I was rolling in, just saying hello. Um, on one of your slides, you had that we would be many of you. Uh, we would be one of your top tier clients if, um, the decision were made to go with your organization. How many, um, clients do you have in your top tier? Uh, the, so as a large firm, we do represent a number of clients across the state. Um, it doesn't necessarily come down to a list, uh, you know, one through whatever the bottom number client is. It's more of the attention that we pay to each client and the way we structure our teams is that you have number one, a dedicated lead. That would be me. And so it's my priority for Pinellas to be a top priority of the firm, because I'm there to bird dog that and make sure that it's happening. Being local in the market as well, that gives me that, that boots on the ground support. Um, again, I think the unique nature of having statewide reach, but exceptional relationships with your delegation and not necessarily representing a lot of municipalities in your delegation is a strength because we're going to have the opportunity to go to the Senate, you know, Senator Hooper, Senator DeSiglie and say, Hey, these, this is a top priority of the County. It's the top issue we're working on with your delegation for the firm. And I think that alignment will, will really boost the County up to a top tier client, uh, from our attention standpoint. So, um, some of the, uh, counties that you listed there that you, I have done some business with, um, I'm the president elect for Florida association of counties. And so I know that there have been some issues where Pinellas County, uh, has a different opine than some of those, uh, that you've represented. How would you handle that when our, when, and, or if our positions are contrary to, um, other clients that you're representing as well? Absolutely. And as Carmody mentioned, we, we view our role as putting all the cards on the table up front. So if there were to be a difference of opinion on an issue that affects all counties, and obviously we're very actively engaged with FAC as well, and we work with FAC and their legislative team, but first it's just getting everyone to the table before session, before you're even arguing over a bill that may be moving or some type of budget issue that may be coming up. It's trying to find that common ground that really benefits all counties, uh, and finding out where there could be opportunities for there to be collaboration rather than there being just two different sides of that issue. Um, but you know, if there is an opportunity where there is a direct conflict, uh, we would be open with you. We would bring that to the table and we would discuss, you know, opportunities to either find that common ground, or if that's an issue that we have to sit out, for example, it's something that we would work with you to, uh, ramp up representation through FAC and other opportunities to make sure the county's voice is heard. But truly we don't see many areas like that where there is a direct conflict on an issue between local governments, because as you all I'm sure can appreciate, most of the time it's trying to preserve that home rule authority and making sure that we're not getting unfunded mandates coming down out of Tallahassee that really brings everyone on to the same side of the team, because we've been seeing a lot of that activity, you know, going on in the legislature, but it's about being conversational upfront and being honest. And I think my last, I think my last question, Mr. Chair is going to be, um, are you able to provide us with a percentage of successes from the last legislative session? For example, if you had, um, 20, um, proposed bills that you were working, um, out of that 20, were you 75% successful? Were you 15%, 100%, 90%? If you maybe have it. I'm going to let Chris jump in on that one, if that's okay. Oh, whomever, yes. Two Chris's, it can keep confusing sometimes, and we have one over here too. Um, the, uh, I will admit, I have not run those particular numbers on policy bills. On appropriations, I can tell you, because we do run these numbers more, somewhat out of curiosity and also to know where we stand, uh, no firm had a higher amount of appropriations this last two sessions than ours, um, and that's not, that's on a per project, like per capita and a total, um, and, you know, part of that is, and it goes back to your original question, what does that mean to be top tier, right? And I think what Chris ended our formal presentation on is probably the most important thing is in the Pinellas County and really the Tampa Bay area, you're it, right? We have a couple other areas that we focus, but as far as like leading forward on appropriations and policy, you're going to be the one that we start with. Um, and that's not a, that's not something we're saying for fun. That's a promise. That's a guarantee. Put it in the contract if you'd like. Um, and why that matters, and I'm looking at the two of the former legislators that sit with you, um, when we go meet with your local delegation, right? If we've got 18 clients or 10 clients or even five clients, we're making asks of those members, probably multiple members and similar asks of each member, right? But then it gets to the crunch time of appropriations. What's important to you? It's not a fun conversation. We've all been in some of those conversations, right? Where if I'm going to, let's pick on Ed Hooper, we're going to, we're going to see him later today. You know, what's your priority here when we're talking about local issues? Well, if we've got five clients, we're picking our favorite kid. When we've got number one priority, you, it's a simple question. Yes, it's Pinellas County. We need to get this done. Here's why we've already spoken to the reps. They're going to work on this. We've already got the plan of action. So that's the way we approach it, but we have a high success rate on appropriations. If I can, we can try to get you that percentage on policy bills. It's a little different, right? There's the amendatory route. There's, there's just a straight narrow bill. There's the stuff you kill. You know, we had a great kill rate this last session, right? You probably remember the CRA bill. We were at the tip of the spear, us and some of our teammates in Tallahassee working on those bills and really going after, we called it loving it to death, right? Amendment here, amendment here, amendment there. And by the end, they didn't like their own bill. And fortunately it died. Um, but as far as policy passing bills, there's a few, we've gotten down to a few that we, we were going straight through non-amendatory that we were able to get through last session. But a lot of our approach to is through the amendment process, unless it's something where the County had a policy issue that you wanted to raise up, meaning not just for the policy of passing it, but to put it on everyone's radar. That's maybe when you go that route, but there's so many land use bills, as we all well know, there's, there's one that's going to get legally challenged by a lot of folks here. There's, there's so many other regulation bills that with the right relationships, and we, we pride ourselves on that. You can go directly to the chair of whatever, whether it's commerce or whether it's education or whatever it is that is of importance here, um, or state affairs, which is probably more likely for the County and say, here's our issue. Here's what's going on. We can do a standalone, but do you have any projects and do you have any stuff in the pipeline that we can work with you on to get it in there where you have a way higher success rate of passing, right? Because those become priorities of not just you and the chair, but they become priorities of the leader and most times the governor. So that's how we kind of approach that. I don't have an exact percentage, but we do pretty well. Um, and we, and that part of it is because as Chris said, and everyone set up here, we live and breathe it. We don't stop until it's finished. We don't give up if, even if a bill is kind of getting shaky on a committee, we'll go look for 15 different amendment possibilities to go get it done. Um, and we, and to Chris's point, and I said it too, the cards will be on the table with you on that. We'll talk about all the options with you and your leadership team of here's what we can do. Here's how we can do it. Are you comfortable with this approach? Okay. Let's go get it done. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Uh, thanks for the presentation. Uh, just a couple of questions. One, uh, thank you for your questions. Cause I had a couple of those on there. Um, private sector clients have them, um, and who are they? What are the three largest ones you might have? We, we certainly do have public and private sector clients, um, you know, from large, you know, usually like, like a target is a client. Um, but we're on a team for target. So when you get to big corporations like that, usually they have lobbyist teams. Um, but you know, the other top. Yeah. I mean, the other ones that immediately come to mind are, are the Walt Disney company, JP Morgan chase. Um, uh, there's, there's several kind of in that fortune 100, fortune 500 sphere, uh, that we play a role on. Um, but our, our practice is fairly diversified between all the different sectors of state government. Some from, from private sector to public sector, from small cities to nonprofits to big counties. We, we sort of try to, we have a pretty deep and, and, and broad swath of clients that we represent. Any, uh, areas that you have concerns about with conflicts with, uh, county? None that I see. Um, and, and, uh, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, if that, if that ever were to arise, transparency is our first rule on matters of conflict. We're going to tell you if we see something and we hope you'll do the same. Um, yeah, well, I just wanted to see where you were today. So that was the first question. Um, and so, um, as it relates to those, those businesses, um, um, you have a sense, you have a sense of that balance between the private and the government as far as your business model goes. Are we about 50, 50 were, um, just a rough idea. I'm just trying to, I think, I think, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off commissioner. I think we're probably 60, 40 public. Um, one that we don't represent at the state level and really not all focus on state level is home building groups. Right. Um, and that's frankly, cause even if they approached us, there's a lot of friction between local governments and home building and the associations lately. So that wouldn't work out. So we don't work with any of those groups, um, utilities as well. We don't work with any of the private utilities, um, um, members of our team work with the municipal electric groups. So we're very familiar with those issues and can work on those, but we don't work on the private side. But it, and because as, as Chris said, it started, or Robert, I think said it started with Charlie Gray, our founding partner, um, city solicitor, you know, local government's been in our DNA and roots from day one. And so we tend to trend more public than private. Okay. And so no construction, no home, I mean, home building construction, no utility insurance. Uh, a little bit of insurance. It's most, uh, Brown and Brown is a client of the firm. Um, they do property casually, their broker across the state. Um, but yeah, no home builder. We do work with some commercial construction groups. Um, but tip in our experience, they haven't entangled much with the cities and counties as much as home builders, right? Every once in a while, there's something that pops up, but generally there is. Are, are more about regulations on the state level, as far as the building commission and such. Any, any nonprofit utilities, uh, like the Tampa Bay water types, uh, and the, so, yeah. And then the last question, I have, uh, tell me, I've got McMullen booth road that needs money. What's the general approach that you all would take to getting that on the table and getting more consideration out of Ed Hooper? Some of us are going to see him later. Uh, so I'll ask him, but the, uh, and ask, tell him where it came from. Yeah, if I get sent to the principal's office, I'll know why. Uh, so no, I mean, look, and I'm going to let some of my teammates to jump in here. The appropriations process is a interesting one. Um, and, and it's, it changes year to year, right? This session, uh, and not to steal the thunder of any of the other folks presenting or what you ever heard, 105 days to wrap up the budget. That's not common, right? Um, we've had a couple over the years that they went into overtime and this and that, but the 105 days with an extended session, that's very unusual, nothing any of us have ever seen, right? So, but you have a sitting budget chair here in your community. You have one more session left with him in that role. Obviously he's got two more years left in the Senate and can be very influential. Our approach on any of your projects, whether it be a road or something else is early and often working with him, helping him understand if he doesn't already how much of a priority it is, right? And first thing I always ask of a client, I know I could speak for all my teammates is I need rankings here. I need to know what your one, two, three, four, five. And it's okay if you tell me it's one A, one B, but that helps guide us, right? Because if we know this is the one we've got to come home with, that's where we're going to put a lot of our efforts. And we'll obviously work on the others because you can get multiple appropriations. Most of our government clients, we usually get multiple appropriations for even in this crazy wild session that we just had. That said, we would work with him early and often say, look, we get it. You're the budget chair. So we're leaning on you a lot, but we also recognize that you're not the only, that Pinellas County is not the only local constituent group that you are working with. Help us help you. How do we get this to the finish line? Do we need to go have, you know, chair to Sigley or have Roussan work on this more or have it come from the house? Again, that goes to the strategy, right? And getting it teed up because unfortunately there's politics in all this too, right? If the house knows it's one of his priorities, that more than likely, we like our friends in the house, they'll hold that hostage. And they'll use that as part of negotiation knowing that's something important to him. We saw that happen with the Senate president and his major rural renaissance bill. That's where they put that CRA language that none of us liked on that bill. And to the president's credit, he let that bill die. But the point is, is that's the kind of politics that goes on. It's never personal. It's just, this is how they get things done. I hope that answered your question. We would get with him early. We would try to figure out the best way to approach it. Make sure he's comfortable with the ask, right? Say, can you live with this ask? Push back now. Don't wait till day 60 to tell us it was too much. And then we work through that. And so you see infrastructures being an important part of the next year's efforts up there in Tallahassee as far as priorities? Yes. And I'll bring up Chris or Robert also who work and Carly should work on the budget. As you know, there was a great cutting in this budget. And when the governor was done with it, it was less than the previous years. The good news of that is that we don't expect there to be more cutting in this next cycle for a couple of reasons, that the revenues continue to grow, right? And the expenses are going to grow with it a little bit too. But they've got almost $11 billion in unspent and reserves. The other thing is it's an election year. You can't take the politics out of politics. You've heard me say a couple of times, they want to go home during an election cycle and have a couple of victories, right? So they're going to be a little more motivated, even if they're not on the ballot. They just don't want to come home in that environment and not have wins for them. So we think infrastructure is always important because they're usually non-recurring, usually one-time expenses from the state. And that's important to them. They don't want to do a recurring. And this governor and this legislature has proven over the last couple of years that they'd like to invest in those particular projects. Last question. The last question would be just on indexing of gas tax. We have been a big proponent of that here, just trying to make sure that we keep up our values of our dollars and not losing it every year because of inflation. That seemed to have been an appetite for that. Any other efforts in your clients that have that as a priority? And how would you bring that to bear? It's a great question. And we do have clients that have in the past toyed around with the idea, it sounds like, similar to how you have, you know, the reality in Tallahassee is new taxes or anything that is viewed by the legislature as being approving of a new tax or a raised tax is very, very difficult, to say the least. So in indexing, I think there is an appetite for a conversation around what do we need to do to ensure that we have the means around the state to build the roads and sustain the infrastructure that's already there. So without further due diligence, I can't tell you specifically what the chances are of that for this coming year. But just as a general rule, increase in taxes is frowned upon. And I understand that. I mean, we're just at the end of the day trying to get, you know, the infrastructure taken care of. And the state indexes their tax, their gas tax for a reason and keep maintaining their value. We've had to implement two or three minor millage rates to offset that loss in funds. So it's critical. One way or another, it's got to get done. That's why when we talk about it. Yeah, I think it's absolutely worth another conversation for sure. Thank you. Appreciate it, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good to see you all. And I won't put you on the spot, because I saw the good senator recently, and he told me where he was going to be tonight. And I assume you all still represent the largest university in Florida, the best university. And there were regular attenders in my office because of that. One of the questions I have, because I saw it from the House side, and I remember, and I've known really all of them or several of them for a while. I knew Carlicia when she was an aide, and she was a fantastic aide in a few years when she was a lobbyist. But I remember very vividly, Robert and Chris texting me during budget conference, like a good lobbyist does, literally 10 minutes after a budget conference meeting, a watch line so-and-so, we need to hold firm here. So my question is, so we have Hooper in the Senate. Where would an important Pinellas project rank when we're dealing, or when y'all are dealing with, like, the House leadership? And, you know, in, like, your top five or your top ten appropriations, when you're weighing, you know, your, you know, other clients that you have, and you're, you know, working with somebody, and I'm not sure if we have any local people on the House leadership team, but, you know, as you're, you're working through the House process during budget. Yeah, I'll start with that, and then open it up to the team as well. As Carmody mentioned, number one, from, from a firm standpoint, and particularly, you know, public sector and infrastructure, the slot for number one Pinellas asked for us is open, and we think that's a pretty big key point that we can drive very significant results for the county with a firm of our size. As you know, Representative, or Councilman, as a former member, it's, it's not just the firm's list. It's working with the delegation on making sure that the delegation is pushing for the list, that the member that sponsored the project has it in their top list as well. So that's really coordination that we start now from the get-go and making sure that that priority is pushed forward. I serve on the appropriations team for the firm that helps play air traffic control as we're meeting with budget chairmen and subcommittee chairs, and we go in two or three times before the proposed chair's budget. We go in right before conference. We go in after every round of conference. And so it's that constant repetition. Not only are we, as you've experienced, texting you, we're texting the sponsor to text you and say, make sure that you're continuing to push this forward as a priority because it's really that dogged, you know, 11th hour being in the Capitol during budget conference that makes all the difference. And that's something that we pride ourselves in doing. We did pull up the number on appropriations wins. We were at 80% this year in a very tough appropriation cycle. And that's because, number one, we specialize in appropriations. And number two, we look for any way to get it done. And we put in that time and effort to make sure it gets done. And the last thing I'll touch on appropriations, too, is it's very easy for a lobbyist to get one track minded and think, I've got to get a legislative appropriation. But there are a myriad of grant programs out there. There's working with DOT to get things worked up in the work program. So there are many different ways to approach a project. And we do all of the above. Appropriations is a year-round practice for us, whether it's working with the Resilient Florida Grant Program. Those applications are due September 1st. Whether it's working through the Jobs Growth Grant Program on something that may be a major economic driver, or we've certainly seen the governor go into transportation funding through Jobs Growth Grant Funds, we're turning over the couch cushions to find whatever resources we can for the priorities you identify as your top priorities. You mentioned the 80% number. Does that count going through the veto process and after the veto process? That is after vetoes. That's very impressive. It's really great to see you all. Most of my questions have been asked one way or another, so you kind of answered them. But you guys listed that you have 50 cities and counties in your proposal, right? 50 cities and counties. And that's not just your team. That's the whole organization, right? So, and you kind of talked about Pinellas number one and stuff, but when you've got that many local governments and a legislative body that's been kind of anti-local government, don't see that going away, especially with our CFO right now. When you have that many local governments in the organization and you've got that kind of a mindset, not with everybody, you know, not with everybody, but there's some people in leadership that are very anti-local government. And so how do you, when you have 50 cities and counties, how do you prioritize then which ones you're going to really bubble up? Because if you're going to the same guy, you know, and that one guy isn't a senator anymore, but if you're going to that guy and you've got 50 cities and counties, how do you impress upon them and how are you choosing which one's going to be the one that you're going to bubble up with? An excellent question. And first, the 50 to 60 counties and cities, that is a representation of the firm. So some of those would be legal clients. Some of those are small cities, one appropriation type item. So we don't have a specific number in there, but it's, I don't want you to think it's 50 or 60 full service lobbying, municipal or county clients. Good clarification. But also to your point, I think, again, it's, you know, it's us keeping that contact with the subcommittee chairman, with the appropriations chairman and with leadership. It's us motivating our sponsors to keep that contact up and with leadership. And it's really, you know, staying on the process 24 hours a day, as long as the legislature is in session, whether it's 60 days, whether it's 105 days, like it was this year. And again, we view it as a yearlong process. So if the chairman is just hearing after the first round of budget conference that a Pinellas project is a top priority, we're eight or nine months too late. And you wouldn't get that from our team. We are ready to hit the ground running today, sharing what the priorities are going to be for a budget conference that's probably going to take place the second or third week of February. Okay, so here's a question you probably weren't expecting. So as an attorney, could you tell us the implications might be of us hiring you as a lobby firm and waiving a conflict in a lawsuit that you have against us? So there are specific Florida bar rules that govern practice between a lobbying government affairs practice at a firm and a legal practice at a firm. We follow the Florida bar rules when it comes to conflicts. And so I'm not aware of any litigation that we have. We ran a conflict check before applying. I'm not aware of any conflicts that we have from a legal perspective before the county. But again, it would be, you know, bringing those issues forward. The Florida bar does state that lobbying activity is not a legal activity for conflicts purposes. And so, you know, we would work to address that conflict. If there were to be a legal conflict completely unrelated to lobbying and government relations, we would look to work with the county's counsel and see if there could be a waiver. And if there can't, obviously, we couldn't take that representation. That's what the bar rules would state. Okay, so our attorneys informed us that there is a lawsuit. There is active litigation that Gray Robinson has in an adversarial position to Pinellas County. It is current and active. Okay. So you may not have expected that question, but sorry. If we're fortunate enough to be selected by y'all, we'll obviously work with you, county attorney and leadership here to figure that out. I will say just anecdotally, we have a fairly large eminent domain practice across the state. And that is probably where we most frequently find ourselves getting legally sideways with our local government clients. And what the practice we've had, again, Florida Bar is clear that they're separate, and technically you can have both, meaning you can be suing the county and representing them, lobbying. We adopt the Florida Bar in the sense we're not going to lose our bar licenses. We're going to follow the rules. But we have always taken the approach of we ask for waivers. So, and there's a couple, especially in central Florida, I'm based out of Tallahassee, Orlando. There's a lot of eminent domain. You've seen all the roads. When moving Florida forward was happening, a lot of that was happening there. And we go through the process and get a waiver. Eminent domain is usually pretty simple. Not always, but most counties or cities get it. And that's sort of the city or county has come to this property owner, and they need someone to represent them. And we'd like to think our attorneys are fair and nice to work with. Other matters, potentially employment, but we usually represent employers. It's almost always eminent domain. There could be some other things, and maybe I'm going to be surprised to her in a minute when I'm told what it is. But we always seek a waiver because we just, more than anything politically, we just don't want to have the issues and the, we don't want you to lose confidence in the firm representing you if these ongoing matters there, unless it's all on the table as a theme you're hearing and we've all agreed upon, okay, here's the marching orders. We'll put up the ethics wall. We won't talk to those attorneys, assuming you provide the waiver, and we'll stay over here. The only other thing I would say on the appropriation thing, and Chris was getting at it, is I was going to say, how do we get it to bubble up? A lot of coffee and a lot of sleepless nights. And you know how that goes, but we take a lot of pride in just finding out the right, I always kind of say it's like circuitry, right? It's not A to B. You have to figure out the right way to get to that B. And I'll give an example from this past session. I won't say which chamber, so it's not to get in trouble. But there was a chair who wasn't really taking meetings with anyone. We thought maybe it was us. We got in doghouse or something. We talked to other lobbyists, and no one was getting meetings with this particular chair. This was a sub-approach chair, right? This is pretty important if you're going to get your projects through. So we started working through and trying to find different angles, and it ultimately landed on working with the staff director and keeping in loop with the budget chair and this particular person to make sure. And all of our projects were fine. So again, you have to start early. You have to get working through it. And you never take no for the answer, right? You have to keep persistent and trying to get things going. And the beauty of those multiple clients on the local government space is we're able to activate many different delegations on these local government issues, right? When it's something, chances are if it's important to you, it's important to the other 66 counties, not always. And we can activate these other delegations and saying, hey, just so you know, city of whatever, this county, they're really counting on you to come through on this. Can you go check on this? Because as you two know, I hate to pick on you two throughout this presentation, member to member is some of the best form of advocacy, way better than any of us or any of the other folks that are going to present after us. Member to member is your most effective form. And we try to build those advocates and champions here locally and keep them engaged. So when it gets to day 58 and my techs and the rest of the teams and all those folks out there's techs aren't getting responded to quite quickly from leadership, we know the members are going to get responded to, and we make sure that they're engaged in the process as well. Thanks. I had one question, but it was relative to legal and lobbying conflict, but Commissioner Peters asked that one. So if there's nothing else, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks. It's great to see you all. And then next we have Johnson and Stewart, right? Oh, okay. Got it. Good to know. So they're doing their homework. All right. And Chair, I have to leave in 30 minutes just so. Okay. So, Barry, what I think would be best is, since we're going to start losing people, is we don't make this decision on this until Thursday. Yeah, Thursday. Yeah, we'll discuss it next. Give us some time to think about it as well. And if we're not, yeah, here we can go back and watch it. So good afternoon. Good afternoon. Are you ready? Yeah, go for it. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for inviting us here today. I want to start just by very briefly introducing each of us. I'm Amanda Stewart, Jeff Johnston, Anita Berry, and Lauren Ling. We are the advocacy team at our firm. So if selected by the county, we would be the four that you would be working with every day. And we understand, certainly, that you are hearing from several firms today, all of which we have had the opportunity to work with, have known for a long time, and have a great deal of respect for. And you will likely hear a lot of the same things from each of our firms in the presentations. For example, we will all tell you that we have great relationships and access. And we can all talk about our experience with local governments. And we can talk about the policy and the appropriations that we have worked on for those local governments. And we all have longevity in this process. And we all know how a bill becomes a law. And we all know how the process works. So instead of going over those points, and with the understanding that you have read our RFP, and there's a lot of details in that RFP, we would like to take our 10 minutes to tell you what sets our firm apart, what makes us different from everyone else. So I'm going to turn over to Jeff Johnston. He's going to tell you a little bit about our approach. Thank you. And thank you for having us. We don't get to bid on RFPs that are kind of in our home territory and places where we live. So we are overjoyed and honored to be here and very excited. You'll hear from Anita. Anita lives here. I live in Tampa. I also have a place here in Clearwater. So we are here. We're paying taxes. We work here. We live here. So this is very exciting. A couple of points that I want to talk about that separates our firm, I believe, and why we think we would be a great fit for you is, number one, our team approach. When you engage with our firm, you get our entire firm. And the reason why that's important is because no knock on other firms. Everybody does it differently. But you may be dealing with one person in that firm, and everybody has their individual contracts, and that's how they work. We work on every single client. So you get our entire office working on your issues on a daily basis. The other thing I think that is very important in this industry and something to talk about is conflict of interest. We take this very seriously. If you do become one of our clients and we are approached by another person to represent them that would touch your area, we would bring that opportunity to you. And we do this with all of our clients. If it is a conflict or we deal that it could be a conflict in the future, and you tell us, hey, I don't think this is going to work, we will not take that client. We will not accept that client. So we do take that extremely, extremely serious, and we think that's good. Also, our firm is a lobbying firm only. We do not have a law practice in our firm. Therefore, we're not going to have to worry about our law practice representing clients that could be on the opposite side of your interests. So I think that's another important point. Other than that, I think I'm going to turn it over to Anita right now. Hi, everyone. So you'll see on the screen we have just a high-level sampling of some of the county's priorities, and we feel like we have a better understanding of your priorities than any other firm because, like Jeff and Amanda explained, we're residents of Pinellas County. Some of us were raised here, Jeff and Amanda in Pasco, Lauren in Hillsboro, and we've chosen to live here and to raise our families here. I've been a resident of Pinellas for almost 15 years, raising my 16-month-old daughter here, you know, born in a Pinellas hospital. We'll go to school here. And so the interests of this county are very important to us. We spend our weekends at Treasure Island or Indian Rocks Beach. We go to baseball games at the Razor, the Phillies, in the evenings. We know the difference between North and South County and the challenges of the transportation between each one as well as between your 24 municipalities and from the beaches over to Tampa. We drive those drives every single day. Like I said, we're raising our families here, and it's really important to us and to our friends and our neighbors that we can all afford to continue to live here. We saw firsthand the impact of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. You know, my house flooded just like many of yours, and we recognize the vital need for the county to invest, the county and the state to invest in infrastructure improvements and emergency preparedness to make sure that we can mitigate against future impacts. We truly feel like we have the home team advantage when it comes to representing your interests. Your delegation members are our delegation members, and those relationships and that bond, it's just simply different for our firm than it is for others. When we come to them with a client ask, and we have, you know, several clients in this area, we're coming to them as a friend, as a neighbor, and we all have the same vested interest in doing what's best for Pinellas County. It's just a different level of conversation when you're talking friend to friend. It's our goal that as we're progressing on achieving your agenda that we're in constant communication with the county at all times. There shouldn't be a day that goes by when you're not having some type of communication from us. It should be a call or a text on some type of political intel or to explain, you know, a legislative action that just happened. You should be receiving emails of amendments that are filed or if a bill of interest is put on an agenda. Weekly reports that are tailored to your interests that include every committee action that happened on a bill that you all care about. You all should be receiving those every week. We live right here. Like I said, we're just a short drive away, so we can always be here to attend board meetings, staff meetings, your delegation meetings. Those are things that we already do attend and that we're happy to continue to do on your behalf. Once the hectic season of session winds down, a lot of lobby firms, they go away, they go on vacation, but we find it's the best time to really connect with our clients, connect with the legislators, and start planning for the next session. We travel the state. We meet with legislators. You know, being headquartered here makes it so that every legislator is really within just a few hours drive. It's easy for us to get to them and to help to build those relationships. Our goal is that your voice should rise over every other local government. There's a lot of ways to get things done in Tallahassee, and we don't want to just be adding to the echo of every other local government. It's why we limit the local governments that we represent, because we want your voice to be the priority. We're not just going to simply oppose bills. We're going to look for alternative solutions. Maybe that's an amendment that we can negotiate or finding some other sort of creative pathway to get stuff done. You can do a lot in the budget policy-wise, proviso, back-of-the-bill language, implementing and conforming bills that go along with the budget. So it's always our goal that we are going to turn over every single stone we can to make sure that your interests are protected. You know, we have a great example just to briefly share. I think several of you are familiar with Yomamas, headquartered over in Clearwater, and they've had this five-year journey of trying to obtain a state property that's located across the street from them in the North Greenwood CRA. They joined with us in February, and we are so thrilled that we had language put into the back of the bill of the budget that transferred that state land over to the city, and then that transfer will be going over to Yomamas. And I think it's just a great example of another way to get things done. They ran into so many roadblocks, but we're always looking for creative solutions. Now I'm going to turn this over to Lauren on our team to discuss another item that we feel like sets us apart, and that's our strengths in the executive branch. Good afternoon. My name is Lauren. I've been at Johnson & Stewart just a little over a year now, and prior to that, I spent a number of years in state government, most recently four years in the governor's office. And that experience really deeply shaped how I look at public service, advocacy, policy. And what sets our firm apart is that we do the work the right way. And for me, that starts with understanding how government works, how it truly works, because I've lived it. I was in the meetings. I understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of all of these legislative policy proposals, balancing competing priorities, and ultimately making decisions that are really impacting in those in the communities that we serve. I've helped shape the policy, and I know how things really get done, and I've had the pleasure of being able to work really closely with a lot of state agencies. And that experience really gives our firm a clear-eyed view of what public officials and staff need to be making these decisions, what they're balancing, how to work with them effectively, ethically, and just how important it is for the people on the outside that are coming in trying to influence those decisions to make sure that they're showing up with integrity. And honestly, that's why I chose this firm, is that we focus on doing the work the right way and with integrity. And you've heard and seen in our RFP that no one's going to outwork us, but that's true, and I knew that from my time in government, and I see it even more so now working on this team. The diligence, the attention to detail, the knowledge, the advocacy, is really just superior to a lot of the other firms that I've come into contact with. And I knew when I was in government, if Johnson & Stewart was coming through that door, that they did their homework and that they were going to get way deeper into the weeds on whatever that they were advocating for. You know, we take the time to understand what our clients are up against. We build relationships honestly, and we understand that trust is earned and not just assumed. While others may cut corners for short-term gain, our firm is really focused on long-term credibility. And just as importantly, we know how to tailor our approach. The conversation that we have to advocate with a legislator is going to look really different than a conversation we need to have with an executive branch staffer. And we know our audience, and we know how to meet them where they are without losing sight of the priorities that you guys hold. For counties especially, the stakes are high, and the resources are often stretched. And you need advocates who get it. You can't afford not to. We know how to communicate your priorities clearly, and we are going to operate in a way that always reflects well on you and the people that you guys are serving. You know, all of you have priorities from your constituents that are going to touch almost every single silo of state government, whether that be an environment issue, a transportation issue. And, you know, our work spans way past session, way past the legislative branch. We're constantly working with the executive branch and agencies on creative ways, and I think that really sets our firm apart. How do we work proactively and identify opportunities that not every firm is looking at? That perspective really matters, and for me as a former staffer, it was really easy for me to tell which firms got it, which firms were going to be flexible and really committed to making a change, you know, for their client. And at the end of the day, this really isn't about access. It's about trust. And I'm really proud to be a part of a team where the public officials trust us to show up prepared. They trust us to act ethically. They trust us to advocate for the right reasons and who ultimately can successfully navigate the complexities of every area of state government. Okay, so again, you have seen in RRFP, we really detail a lot of our accomplishments. I would say that we're probably most proud in 2025 of securing over $690 million for our clients. There was not an appropriations project that we had introduced and worked on this year that we did not get funded legislatively. So we're really proud of that. But as you all know, this was, how many times have you heard the word unprecedented? It was that kind of session. We say it a lot and it really was. Sometimes they all are in some ways, but in this case, it was every way. But we still were able to get a lot done for our clients. You know, we worked offensively, defensively. None of our clients walked away without a win of some sort. It could have been appropriations. It could have been policy, either through a bill passing or through the mandatory process. But there was not a client of ours that did not have success. So we're really proud of that, and especially in a year like that. So with that said, these are a couple of our recognitions. We're proud of all of them. These are, you know, voted on by our peers. That makes us very proud. We like to say we're small but mighty, so you see a lot of boutique lobbying in front of the year up there. But with that, all of that being said, we'd like to turn it over to all of you for any questions you have. We have the same question of all of them. Hi, how are you guys? I see you all the time. So one question that I have, and I've asked this, I'm going to ask this of everybody, so it'll be equal. If you were to have a position or an appropriation request from us, and it conflicted with another municipality or city, county, that you were also representing, particularly for different bills and things like that. Sure. How would you handle that? Well, let me say, have you come across that, and how would you handle that? Because typically small counties sometimes differentiate from what it is that we're looking for as a larger urban community. Sure. And great question. And I can speak to it both from an appropriation standpoint and from a policy perspective. And certainly you all jump in. So from an appropriations perspective, Jeff mentioned, we don't have a lot of municipality clients. And so those that we do, they're very specific projects. We feel we're selective about who we take because there's only so much funding to go around, right? Finite amount of dollars. And it's important for us to make sure that all of our clients' priorities are priorities. So it doesn't matter who the client is. It's 100% of our effort, 100% of our advocacy. So we have not yet run into an issue either, especially when it comes across our municipal clients. That has been, you know, one, let's say, city didn't get something because another city did. That has not happened for us. We do a lot of appropriations work for our municipalities. And so that has never been a concern. From a policy standpoint, we've also not had any issues. Certainly when it comes to municipal interest, I think across the board from a general standpoint, everyone has sort of always been on the same page. And then the specific ones to our municipal clients have been really specific. So advancing that has not been to the detriment of another. Does that answer that? Yes. Okay. I'll just answer the same question that I asked, or I'll ask the same question I asked before. Although I kind of dealt with it firsthand because they are somewhat persistent. And I won't single out the one that I was aides with 20 years ago back when Commissioner Eggers was younger than he is now. But, you know, all firms have their top five priorities and top five projects that they give presiding officers, you know, members of leadership teams, so forth during budget conference. or, you know, respective, you know, budget chairs and committee chairs, whatever. You know, and we have Senator Hooper and the, or Chair Hooper in the Senate. How would y'all go about prioritizing our priority, budget priorities with the current House leadership? Do you want to, do you have to take this one? Thank you, Commissioner. And I just want to go back and reiterate the fact that we are extremely choosy, especially on municipal clients. You can probably see in our RFP, we have probably less than a handful. I don't see that really changing ever. And the reason why is because of this question. You only have so many asks in Tallahassee, especially municipal county or city asks. So the first thing that we do is we try to make sure that that number is very manageable and that we can reach all of those priorities. So we're never put in a position where somebody's asking for our top five and we have 25 cities to try to fill. So I think we haven't been put in that position, especially with municipal counties. And I think Amanda alluded to this year, we went 100% on all of our appropriations asks. We didn't have to give any lists. Now to individual chairs, they may ask for your top priorities and that kind of stuff. But we just try to stay lean so we can be successful. And I think it's more of an offensive thing so we're not in those positions. Yeah, just so you all have private companies that you represent as well that you lobby for. Any that you see of conflict with us, any industries per se, or more specifically customers or clients that might be of conflict or current have any conflicted legal cases with our county? Yes, before we even put in for an RFP, we try to do all that vetting. We did not see anything that we've had even in the past or anything that we could see in the future. Obviously, if something came up totally unforeseen, we would bring it to your attention immediately. We believe in transparency and being up front. But we just don't see that being an issue. And like I said, going forward, if we were to be selected, you would have first right of refusal if somebody approached us to hire us. So no utility clients that we need to be concerned about? We do have a utility client that is TECO. I don't know. We have never been asked to work on anything. At least our firm, we get specific asks. It's a very large team that would have conflicted with Pinellas County. It seems to be a bay apart or something like that. I'm sorry? A bay apart between TECO represents and what we are. So, okay. All right. And I just asked this one question. I'd ask the other group, too. So we have the number one priority in the county. I'm kidding. It's my number one priority in my district, which is McMullen Booth Road. So that's a large infrastructure project. What's your take on next year's session as it relates to those kinds of projects? Again, just for the argument's sake, say it is like one of our top projects. Yeah. I don't want to get too lengthy with this answer, but I will tell you that I know Appropriation Share just met just within the last week. The outlook, at least for the state, the three-year outlook, it's definitely looking a little tough. And you probably saw that they did some, tried to cut a little bit last year. You may see some of that this year if they're being proactive. Otherwise, in two sessions from now, there's going to be some big cuts being made. So the outlook is definitely on the decline as far as the budget outlook for the state. With that said, I do think that the state needs to start looking at some proposals that have been put in front of them, especially when you're talking about infrastructure. I know Chair Hooper's been a big proponent of EV, trying to capture those dollars because, you know, our gas tax pays for our roads. EV vehicles right now are not really paying into that system, and I know that's something that he's really wanted to tackle. I think you're going to start seeing some proposals re-brought, especially this year, knowing what the outlook is like to try to get creative so they can continue to fund those projects. So I'm saying that with, even with a bleak outlook, I think there's opportunity. Everybody is pretty focused on infrastructure and roads throughout the state, so I think that's where we have to create opportunity so we can make sure that those projects are being taken care of. Fair enough. Thank you. Well, I hope you're right on the EV. As much of a warpath the governor is on right now on DEI, anything new green deal-ish, not charging EVs any kind of an impact fee or fuel tax or whatever seems very new deal-ish to me. So just clarifying, I think I already know the answer to this question, but you're just a government relations firm, you're not a legal firm, correct? That is correct, sir. Any other questions? All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, take care. Good afternoon, Alan. Hey, Commissioner, how are you? How are you doing? Doing great. Oh, my gosh. You ready? All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody. First of all, thank you for having us. We're honored to be here and honored to have this conversation with you today. I thought we'd start off with intros. I think everybody on the dais probably knows the three of us, but we'll touch on the highlights. So my name is Alan Susky. I'm the Executive Vice President at Shoemaker Advisors. I manage the Tallahassee office for the firm and all our state legislative practice. I grew up in Florida. I'm an eighth generation Floridian. I started working in Pinellas politics in 2006, so almost 20 years. My last two years on active duty with the U.S. Army, I had the honor of serving in Congressman Bill Young's office, mostly focused on district projects in the defense industry for him while I was, since I was on active duty, it kind of made sense. And so I started coming down here with him during those two years. And then in 2008, when my time in service ended, I moved to Pinellas County and started working here in politics. And so I have enjoyed doing that for almost 20 years. While I was here, I served on the board of the Peer Aquarium, the Pinellas County Science Center, served on the St. Pete Chambers Policy Committee, and volunteered in several other political and community roles. Missy? Good afternoon. It's an honor to be here today. My name is Missy Timmons. I am the managing partner for Timmons Consulting, which is a boutique lobbying firm. I actually started my government career in Pinellas County in 1995. I hate giving that number out when I worked as a legislative aide for a gentleman by the name of Senator Jack Latvala. So I have lived in Tarpon Springs. I have lived in Gulfport. I spent seven sessions with Senator Latvala. I then moved to Tallahassee, began lobbying in 2001, and opened my own firm in 2005. I am currently working on various clients over 13 years and have done a lot in local government, environment, and health care. I am a kidney advocate for the Renal Association and for More Transplants, More Life, which is based out of Tampa. So we're here a lot, and I look forward to working with you. I know we're short on time, so I'm going to cut over. Good afternoon. J.D. White with Shoemaker Advisors. I'm a principal at Shoemaker. My practice is local, state, and federal lobbying, a little bit of communications and political campaign fundraising mixed in. I've been in and out of government for coming up on 30 years now, three congressional offices, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and most recently, chief of staff to a member of Congress here in Pinellas County. I think a lot of the firms are going to have great experience. I think what sets us apart, and I think Alan will probably talk about, is living and working here, our passion for Pinellas. When I was in the congressional office, it was very important to make sure that all of our policies, all of our funding requests, all of our constituent service was top-notch in serving the citizens and the elected officials here in Pinellas County. So great to be here with you. All right. Well, for those of you on the dais who do know me, this probably won't surprise you, but I'm going to go a little off script. You know, I would, to J.D.'s point, I think he makes a great point. You know, as I think about this process that you all are going through and the four firms that you selected to interview today, you know, I don't think there's a bad firm among them. I think there are great people. I think everyone here is qualified to accomplish the work that you have, that you're going to ask that eventual lobbyist to do for you. We all know the appropriations process. We all know Chair Hooper. We all know Chair DeSigley. We all know, you know, Vice Chair Roussan and Representative Burfield and down the line. We work with them every day. We all know the Florida Association of Counties and the policy issues and home rule issues that you all face. We know how to do things in the back of the bill and all the tricks of the trade, if you will, in the lobbying world. That's not really, I think, the decision that you all have to make. I think the decision you have to make is who's going to best represent Pinellas County in Tallahassee. And I would say that I, you know, certainly a little biased, but I think that's our team. And I think we've been doing, again, we've been doing this for 20 plus years, 30 plus for Missy being involved in Pinellas County. We know, you know, we know the unique character of this community. The beach community is different than the downtown core of St. Petersburg and it's different than Clearwater. Olmerton Road can sometimes be a dividing line between the north and south side of the county. I myself would make jokes about that. You know, going to have lunch with somebody and say, well, you've got to come south of Olmerton or north of Olmerton. We know that. We understand that dynamic. And I think we are equipped, you know, the members of your delegation that we're going to work with every day aren't just people that, you know, we worked with to get elected and work with in Tallahassee. These are decade-long friendships, not just professional relationships. You know, Nick DiSigli and I have been friends and worked together for almost 20 years. Same with Senator Hooper and Senator Roussan and everybody else. And so, I just wanted to point that out. I'm sure you all know that, but I don't think there's a qualification issue with any of the four firms. I really think it comes down to, you know, who's going to best represent Pinellas County and make it a priority in Tallahassee. And again, I think that's our firm. And that goes a little bit to this slide. As far as I understand, I think we're the only firm that actually has an office in Pinellas County. You know, Shoemaker, Lupin, Kendrick is a large law firm across the bridge in Tampa. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, Shoemaker made the decision to start a St. Pete office because we knew we wanted to have, you know, not just say we did things in Pinellas, but actually have an office here and operate out of it. And we have lawyers and advisors who work out of that office every single day. We're here in the community every single day. You know, Missy and JD, myself all, when the hurricanes happened, you know, we were calling, we were down here. Jim Taylor, who works on our team, was at the beach communities, you know, a couple of times a week helping out where he could. This Pinellas County is something that matters to us. It's something that's important to us. So who we are, you know, there's three of us standing here today, but the people backing us up between our teams are, you know, it's a wide and varied group. It's 110 years of public service and you can see former mayors, members of Congress, former members of the state legislature. We have a lot of people that might not be on the day-to-day list for you all to contact, but people we can lean on if we need help with something. Jim Taylor on our team was the Hillsborough County Intergovernmental Affairs Director for years over there. If there's an issue that we might not be familiar with, we can pick up the phone and call Jim and he's on the team. It isn't like we have to go prep him and figure something out. He is a part of this team just because he's not here today doesn't mean that we don't have him at our disposal. Former county commissioners who also are on our team who have the experience sitting where you're sitting now, we can reach out to and talk to and figure out how to come up with innovative solutions to solve your problems. Our connectivity, like I said earlier, I think you're not going to find a firm that you're interviewing today who doesn't have the relationships with these nine individuals. I happen to think that ours are a little more rooted and a little more historic, but all four firms are going to have these same connections. Obviously, Senator Hooper has got at least one more year as the Senate Appropriations Chairman. That is going to be extremely important to the county going into this session. Senator Sigley also serving as the Ted Chair in the Senate, extremely important. But the other members and Vice Chair Roussan obviously holds a lot of sway in the Senate as well, is well respected and I think is someone that the county can lean on to accomplish some major projects and at least, you know, if we only end up having one more year of him as chair, we will, you know, we'll be able to do that. Proven successes. I am not going to read through all of these. I will save you the time of doing that, but I think there are a couple that are important to point out. You know, if you look at the City of Pensacola, one that's also not on here is the Sarasota Airport. I know the county runs and maintains the Clearwater Airport pie. There are obviously always infrastructure projects and expansion that could be going on there. We worked with Sarasota to get $23.5 million to expand a new terminal that they needed to increase traffic there. That was not, getting $23 million in a member project is not an easy task. I can tell you we worked with FDOT, we worked with the local DOT and others to make sure that they understood why we needed that money and then we were able to work with the legislature and build champions there that understood the impact to that community and so I think those are the type of things that we're able to do. Large, large accomplishments that we've been able to have that we could also bring to Pinellas County to help you all accomplish the issues that you all are facing from an infrastructure standpoint. Missy has worked a lot with Bay County on tourist development tax issues, beach renourishment, all the same things that you all face here, hurricane recovery, things that happened in Pinellas County. She is extremely experienced with those issues, CDBGDR grants, things like that. I work with the Department of Commerce as does JD. Probably two or three times a week we're on the phone with a secretary or a member of the senior staff working on CDBGDR or some other CDBG grant as well as job growth grants and other things that come out of Commerce. DEP is the exact same thing. Commitment to the community. Again, I think this is something that's important for you all to look at. Not only do we have an office here, not only do we represent folks in the community, not only are we involved, but the firm itself is giving back to the community all the time. This is just a small list of the things that we've sponsored in the community and these aren't political issues. These aren't things that are going to help us on the business side. These are things that we care about and things that, Leadership St. Pete being one of them, I've sponsored. Leadership St. Pete's trip to Tallahassee every year. I've been the sponsor when I had my own firm before Shoemaker and Shoemaker chose to carry that on. I think going on 12 or 13 years now, it might be longer, I've been the title sponsor of that event and I think it's something important to bring business leaders, young business leaders as well, up from St. Pete, up from Pinellas County to learn more about what their government does for them in Tallahassee. I know Missy's very involved with Leadership Pinellas and you can see some of the other things that we have paid money and sponsored. Conflict check. I know this is always a question everybody has of a firm and so I think there's some interesting benefits to this team in particular to your other teams. One, we don't have any conflicts that we've currently identified. Obviously, we would be very transparent about those if we did. We don't see anything. As a part of a large law firm, we go through a very rigorous conflict review and that includes on the law side. So when I run a conflict check for Pinellas County or a lawyer runs a conflict check for a business, that conflict check also runs through the advisor side. So even though you might not be a law client, you're a lobbying client, the lawyers still have to abide by those conflict rules. That is an internal policy of the firm and we deal with it quite often. And from there, if we do identify a conflict, we would work with you all to see if it's, you know, is this really a conflict? Is this something that happened 10 years ago and, you know, you don't really care about it anymore or is it a current issue that would block either the law firm from doing legal business or from us doing something on the lobbying side? So it's not just about the advisors and the lobbying. It's also about the legal professionals that we have in Tampa and St. Pete and Sarasota. If a conflict does arise, I think transparency and communication are the two things that matter the most. If we tell you about it and we're transparent about it and we don't try to hide it or, you know, make some, you know, create some loophole that we can, you know, then later on tell you, well, we didn't know. Like, that's not the way to treat those. The way to treat it is to reach out immediately, be transparent, and have a conversation about whether or not it really is a conflict and is there some way that we can be helpful to both teams and if it is a conflict, then we're conflicted out and we don't work on that issue for either side. That's the way we handle it. If that does become the case, I think one benefit that we have that no other firm you're interviewing today has is we're two firms. So if Shoemaker has a conflict of something that I'm not involved in but Missy doesn't have that conflict, Missy can still work on it on your behalf. I might not be able to or someone else might not be able to on our team but Missy still could. And the same thing with Missy. If Bay County has an issue that you all are adverse on, we could still work on that and Missy would just step back from that one issue and continue to work on all your other things. So I think, again, transparency and communication and having two teams is something that we can bring to the table that nobody else that's interviewing today is bringing. So why us? You know, I kind of started with that I think a little bit so I'm going to I'll talk a little bit about it but, you know, we are a mid-sized firm. You know, we're not a small boutique shop. We're not a large, you know, firm with hundreds of clients. We are and we like being in that middle road. It makes us effective. It allows us to work across the state. You know, we're going to have a great year this year with Ed Hooper as the chairman and Chair Roussan as the vice chair and Lawrence McClure in the house being from Tampa Bay as well but in two years none of those leadership positions, none of those people may be from Tampa Bay. They may be from Miami. They may be from Jacksonville. You know, they may be from the panhandle and our work and the size of our firm allows us to build relationships across the state with people who are going to be leaders outside of our region to make sure that this county is represented in front of them even if they're not from here and don't know anything about it and so I think that's one of the values that we bring. We are no strangers to hard work, you know, especially during budget conference, being there at all hours of the night. You know, there is a certain speaker from Pinellas County who would sometimes call me at 3 a.m. just to see if I would answer the phone and I would answer the phone and he would say, okay, just checking and he'd hang up or he would say, hey, I need this from you. Can you get this to me first thing in the morning? And so we're used to that. We know that's how this process works and we're committed to doing that on behalf of the county and we've shown that with the results that you all saw in the proposal and what we showed on the slides. That's it. So who wants to call them at 3 a.m.? Question? All right. Well, you covered it when you stated when you put up your conflict piece. So let me ask you this. Have you ever run into an okay, I'm sorry, Renee Flowers, how you doing? Good, Commissioner. Have you ever run into a situation where, in fact, Shoemaker has a conflict and the client that a client that she may be representing also would pose a conflict with another client? I have not personally run into that issue. I'm not going to say it's impossible for it to happen. I think the likelihood, I think, again, one of the values is the likelihood of that happening is much lower than the likelihood of just one firm being conflicted out. If you have just one firm, then they're much more likely to be conflicted out than if we can actually look at it as two different firms with two different sets of clients. So I think our chances of having that happen are very, very minimal, especially compared to our counterparts. I'll give you an example. Through the Florida Association of Counties, we were supporting small cities, especially when they were looking at broadband because we know rural communities really needed that support because mostly farming communities, and so you would lose the ability to access technology. So you had a number of small communities, small counties, who were really gun-ho and pushing for broadband services. And even going down to Key West, in Key Deer, Key Largo, you'd be losing connectivity. But when you went to some of the other farming communities going north up towards Tallahassee, if you're taking 10, they didn't have that issue. Here in Pinellas County, we kind of really don't have that issue except when the weather's bad and everybody has an issue. So you could have conceivably had Bay County, I know Bay County, you could have conceivably had Bay County that was in total opposition of what it is that maybe Pinellas County was interested in. So I just use that as an example. I'm not saying that that happened, you know, or would happen, but I just want to know where we would fall or how you would handle that because sometimes small counties and large counties and even mid-sized counties, based on what's being proposed, we are in opposition to each other. Trust me, at Legislative Day, the Legislative Conference for FAC, there has been some catclawing coming out with this type of thing. Yeah, Commissioner, I think the big, you know, I would go back to what I said earlier. I think that transparency and communication solve 99% of our problems. Once we identify that conflict, if we sit down with the county staff and with the leadership here on the board and say, here's the issue, how do you all want to approach this? I've also had instances where, just me personally, where two clients have said, you can't work on either side of this. You have to step out of this completely and that's on the corporate side, not the municipal side and we navigate that but I think as long as we're honest with each other when there is a conflict and we're open about it and we talk about it, then I think we can always come to some sort of solution and figure out some sort of path forward. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Scherr. I've received the, well and I don't want to talk about 3 o'clock a.m. stories but I have received those texts from both of y'all, actually probably all three of y'all during budget conference of, you know, this is my top five priorities or top three or whatever. Sometimes whenever I, you know, say I can't do this, y'all would walk down the hallway and talk to the speaker and it didn't really matter what I said but so, you know, we have Chair Hooper in the Senate. What would be your plan of getting our top priority or top two priorities in Pinellas County passed in the House this year? Yeah, so I think that we are blessed in Pinellas County with a nine-member delegation. So I think when nine members, if you can get nine members to come together on something and agree that it's a good idea and it's of value, then that is going to help Chair Hooper make that a higher, not that he wouldn't make it a priority already, but it makes it a higher priority. It's going to make it a higher priority for his leadership and in the House the same way. If it's something that has a regional impact, I think that's going to help Chair McClure make it a higher priority even though he's not from Pinellas County. So I think first of all, the first thing we would do is coordinate with the entire delegation, not just, you know, I think you all know you get a member to file a form and that's kind of how the process starts. But I don't think for a county of Pinellas County's size and the priorities that you have that it's about that one member and that one champion. I think we have to work and make sure that all members of the delegation are a champion and they might not have their name on the form, but that they all have it on their list and they're all pushing for it because the goal would be, as always, and would be to get it done early. You know, if we're sitting around on the last day or two of budget conference when the supplemental lists are going to come out and we haven't gotten our projects fully funded, then we're all a little nervous about what's going to happen. You know, my preference would be to have these things, especially your top one and two priorities, be delegation-wide priorities and working with everyone so that we can try to close them out early and, you know, at least one of them out early and have the second one almost fully funded so that the ask of the supplemental funding list at the end from the presiding officers and the appropriators is a minimal ask and I think that's how we do that. I don't think we do that, you know, just because someone is from here and represents the county. I think the way we do that is by making everyone row in the same direction and talk about this as either a regional priority or a delegation-wide priority and I think we can make that happen. You mentioned during the presentation the Bay County experience and particularly, and I always butcher this, but CBDR, which is something that we're going through actually right now, can you talk a little bit more about y'all's experience with that? Sure, yeah, and I'll let Missy talk a little bit about Bay County but I can tell you specifically CDBG and then there's DR, there's all sorts of other, you know, kind of the last two letters that follow on. There's several different buckets of CDBG grants that flow down from the federal government to the state government and most recently to local communities. I think you all have gotten some money directly from that as well and so we work with the Department of Commerce to prioritize those projects, work with the secretary and his staff to make sure they understand the impact on the community that those are going to make and so, you know, there's obviously only a certain amount of money they can spend and so we want to make sure that your list is prioritized and we do that, again, by working with the whole delegation to make sure it's a delegation priority but also to bring you and your staff in early to meet with the department, to meet with Secretary Kelly and the other folks who handle those issues so that, you know, they don't just get an application. If they get an application, you know, the email or website application, that's one thing but to come in and actually have a conversation and be able to ask thoughtful questions and get thoughtful answers from your staff who are the experts in these issues I think is how you move your way up that list. It's being ranked 10th on that list is very different than being ranked second and I think those in-person meetings with some preparation are the way that we move that up. That's my personal experience but I'll let I'll let Missy talk. Thank you, Commissioner. As I've represented Bay County, they brought us on after Hurricane Michael in 2018 which was a Category 5 storm. We are still in the process of recovery from that storm so to manage expectations, I was making phone calls last week following up with emergency management, still working with consultants, trying to get things pushed through. So it goes on and on and on but one of the things we had in Bay County is we have one senator and we have one state representative so our recovery has still it's still ongoing in seven years. I believe if I could make a suggestion we're talking a lot about appropriations which are important when it comes to rebuilding. You're going to look at water, you're going to look at transportation and infrastructure but I also caution you that you also want to think about policy and the influx of how your communities might change. That's one of the things we're going through now with a cap five is the growth that comes after a storm. So as you're going through and we can talk about money and money is important and we definitely make that a priority to bring it home but we also need to start having the tough policy questions amongst yourself as a county commission of what you want your growth to look like and we need to be part of those conversations. What we do from a Bay County perspective as we're approaching policy and we're approaching the appropriations still recovering like I said seven years later and I will say consultants are part of this and not on our side but the hurricane recovery consultants. We're seeing certain communities come back faster than others depending on some of that and we're happy to be the go-between to help with that as well. But the policy is also a very important part whether it be the Association of Counties, whether it be Pinellas County and what you need from a growth perspective. I would look at infrastructure. I would look at your water. I would look at those things and we need to be part of that conversation with you as you're also defining your priorities whether it be appropriations or policy going forward. We would want to sit with you and work through those to give you suggestions of what might be doable during session and what might be a hot button. So that's one of the things and one that we were successful this year with Bay County bringing $10 million home in transportation and water projects which we think is huge because we're having to build out because of the growth that's coming after the storm. I don't know if that answered your question. It's great to see you. It's so great to be here. This I think is and I think this one's more for Alan though. So you know I was going through your proposal and you have six cities in Pinellas County that you represent and I'm going to assume that you're going to get all those renewed. So that makes this one's that question and it's tax on to Renee's question right how do you prioritize but when you have six cities and you've done a great job I mean you listed how much you got for them and I've actually called the cities you know you had Oldsmar as a reference and after I called Oldsmar for the reference I thought I would call the other cities and so my question is when you've got six other cities that you represent in Pinellas County and then you represent the county how do you manage that when it's either a policy or an appropriation mostly appropriation when it's the little cities especially with the recovery because the cities are asking for a lot how do you how do you prioritize that when you've got silos in the same place and it's six of the same cities and one of the same counties and Missy it looks like you got the answer to that but that's I've walked that walk there you go I've walked that walk help me with that one we don't have as many cities as Pinellas County but obviously we have multiple cities in Bay County and we've had to you know prioritize one of the things I gave Bay County my word is at through the biggest part of the recovery I didn't represent a city and they asked me not to the one city I do represent is my hometown and I was asked to help them in the appropriations process only one of the things that Shoemaker and I've discussed with regard to Pinellas County is I don't represent any cities in Pinellas County and I've given my word that I won't if we get this contract and go forward so you have my commitment because I do know potentially that can be a conflict as they're ranking and so you have my word and that's one of the beauties of us doing a joint venture is you have my word I will not represent any city governments in Pinellas County yeah I know but when we go to a legislator even the delegation and you got six requests and some might have more than one based on the damage they've had so even when it's coming to appropriations it's like Pinellas County is getting all this I mean I'm used to Miami getting all this because they have so much I got in trouble with Panama City the first year they didn't get any appropriations and we brought nine million home yeah you know a lot of that's up to the legislator and the projects so I mean that's why I think it's important for us to sit down with you first and work with you that's one of the things we do is I'll be in Bay County I'll be at the city of Lynn Haven and I work with my local governments I meet with them ahead of time and my county manager and my assistant county manager and my city clerk and we talk and we try and figure out where we can find synergy as well for instance water feasibility instead of everybody trying to build their own water we're all trying to work together to do feasibility studies to build one plant so that's also a benefit sometimes when you have municipalities and a government where you can find synergy to work together instead of working against each other so it can be a benefit but also we have you know that safety net that if he's got to do the cities you've got me strictly working appropriations for the county thanks missy that was helpful and commissioner I would just add one thing we have represented all those cities for a number of years and I think we've been very successful for them and we have never been in a position with nine members of the delegation with senior leaders coming out of the county where we've had to say pick this city over that city that has never happened and I don't think that would happen with Pinellas County being added to that mix I think that there is strength in numbers I think that we're already working with the delegation I think that we are you know we're spending significant amounts of time with agency staff and with the governor's office talking about Pinellas County I think that is I think the fact that we have so much presence in the county is a benefit to the county frankly and the work that you all are doing but I can only I can't tell you what's going to happen in the future I wish I could I'd be a sports better and we wouldn't have this conversation but I would tell you that I can only look to the past and in the past in representing all of those cities many of which are but each other and are very small beach communities and frankly don't have the level of ask that you all would have we have never once been asked by either a member or a presiding officer or an approach chair hey I can only give you five of the six like who do you want to pick we've gotten we generally try to get as many done early as we can as I mentioned to Commissioner Latval's question earlier if we can get you know five of eight projects six of eight projects done early by the time it gets to that presiding officer level or that appropriator level we're not asking all that stuff's done that's off the plate it doesn't that doesn't impact what the other counties are getting I think Miami-Dade is a great example they get a significant amount of funding for all of their small cities and the county wide and it isn't to the detriment of those small of those small units so I don't I think that there is a significant benefit to the presence that we have in the county I don't think it would ever be an issue but to Missy's point if it ever did become an issue again we would be very transparent about it we're not going to try to hide the ball we're going to sit down and talk about it and if you know if Missy and I going in together to make an ask to an appropriator or to a presiding officer they're you know they tend to I say when when two people from two different firms that they want to work with and enjoy working with and have a relationship with make an ask that is it's easier to take care of that ask than it is for one person at one firm because you're making kind of two people happy and you're you know you all know how that works better than I do having served there so I think that again our presence is a benefit but if it ever became an issue on a small scale anywhere we have a you know we have a backup plan that we would work with the county on I'll leave you be so the last firm we had we had difficult with communication so if the county administrator would email him call him text him no response we never got any kind of updates related to us we had that boilerplate that occasionally they would send out but we never got any communication so you didn't mention communication so I just wanted to throw it out there is that part of the plan regular communication definitely accessible I know I know the three of you so I know it's kind of a redundant question but you didn't broach it so I'm just throwing it out there I appreciate that commissioner I would tell you that I can often I have often been described as an over communicator my wife would say the same thing sometimes I talk too much today might be a good example of that you know I think that you will find that we will not only so every client is different right every city is different every business is different on what kind of updates they want so I think the very first thing we would do on a communications plan and I believe this was in the broader RFP proposal where we laid this out is we would sit down with the board leadership staff however you all direct us to do that to figure out what the battle rhythm is I still use army terms sometimes so you know what's the battle rhythm what does that look like what is helpful for you all on a standing basis is it a call once a month when we're not in session is it every other week during session is it every week what will make you all feel like you're getting the information you need and that's one part of it but there's a more important part and the more important part is the ad hoc messaging that we do I think we have most of the cell phone numbers of the people in this room we would ask for the same thing from the right person on staff to make sure that we have there because you know this better than I do you're sitting in committee and something comes up that you didn't know was going to come up and some comment is made about something that's going to happen I don't want to wait and send you an email when I get back to the office I want to text you I want to text the right person right then and say hey I'll send you more on this later but just heard this we need to talk about it so that we can have something on the calendar go do that what you and staff want but more important to that we are going to be in constant communication about things that are going on in Tallahassee whether it be rumors that we're hearing about chairmanships or whatever all those things are important and so I think you'll find us to be very communicative just had a couple questions really relates back to the conflict question so private private companies that you represent that you represent any conflicts that you see I mean I know you did all the conflict checks ahead of time any industry conflicts that might come our way utility companies construction development anything that you might see as an issue so commissioner none that I know of but again I'm a pretty transparent person I think you'll find that I would tell you that the only one so I do represent a power utility but they don't service Pinellas County it's Florida power and light they're not in this area so that shouldn't be an issue however I also represent AT&T in Tallahassee there have been some occasions where small cell and poll locations and other things can become a challenge with the county I can tell you that that both of those even if there was an FPNL issue that affected the county even though they don't serve issue as a policy issue both of those clients are you know are very sophisticated when it comes to their to their lobbying practice and understand conflicts and have sat down that was actually the example I used earlier where two clients came and said we are opposed on this bill and you can't work on either side and it was a cup of coffee that I had with both of those principals and they said you just have to stand down and do nothing so I don't there aren't any right now but if one of those were to were to come up then we would we would certainly either stand back and let Missy handle that issue or you know we would try to figure out a way that that we could you know make it mutually beneficial that where you all could come to an agreement on something maybe you currently disagree on and then the last question on the conflict is you've given a lot of reasons why having two companies are positive things for us any issues that we should be aware of on the negative side of having two different companies under one contract I don't think so commissioner I mean the only thing that would come to mind is if it was you know somebody I didn't know very well or hadn't worked with in the past but Missy and I have had the fortune of being friends for many many years and we know each other really well and spend a lot of time together in Tallahassee so I don't see that being any issue no tiebreaker issues that we need to I don't think I think we're we are we yeah exactly we both communicate very well I'll just put it that way all right well one infrastructure project McMullen Booth Road important to the county it's also inter-county related it's important to Pasco as well any thoughts on that kind of project going forward and having any kind of legs in the next session infrastructure projects and or inter-county road projects anything like that that might rise up or are we looking at a pretty tough time so I think overall the budget session we saw last year is probably very similar to what we're going to see this year I think you are going to have and I'm not speaking for him this is what he has said publicly I think the speaker wants to continue to see cuts to the budget overall I don't know that that's going to impact infrastructure necessarily I think there's some other areas where he sees some efficiencies in government that he would like to cut I don't think if he's trying to cut road projects and water projects necessarily so I think what you saw last year will be a lot of what you see this year a lot of back and forth on how that works I would tell you I think that you are better off advocating for regional projects like you described than you are individual county projects because our ability to go to a lobbying team in Pasco County let's just use your example right so Pinellas County and Pasco County and say hey this is something that impacts everybody and take that to you know Chair Hooper represents both counties Lawrence McClure is right outside of that window I think going to them and saying hey this isn't just for us and it's not just for them this is something that's going to be good for the entire region and we're joined at the hip on it and we're going to advocate jointly for it and getting two delegations to support it I think makes your chances of success on a higher price but I'm assuming it probably has a higher price tag than than some other projects is probably going to be more likely to be funded and we do that a lot we do a lot of joint projects appreciate it anybody else I have one more and it's just technical which doesn't it's not happening now but what would be the implications might of us hiring you as a lobby firm and waiving a conflict in a lawsuit that you might end up having against us currently they don't right Shoemaker is actually currently representing the county okay so on a matter we just hired them for okay so you're representing us so that that's when you got two arms going because you have two arms going so does Gray Robinson and so let's say next month your firm is against us and suing us how does that how does that work and can you waive that conflict yeah commissioner it wouldn't it wouldn't happen as far as I understand that conflict process that I described earlier so when a lawyer wants to open and I'm not an attorney so if I say this wrong please forgive me for the attorneys in the room but as I but I've seen the process so when a lawyer opens a new matter at Shoemaker it goes through a conflict we have a system that they run that through and it's a name and address or a municipal government entity whatever whatever it is you're going to represent goes into that system and anything in that system that is tagged with a similar name would show up on a conflict report that conflict report goes to either the lawyers or the advisor that is that is attached to that issue so if we represent a Pinellas County and a lawyer was going to be hired to sue the county that would come to me and the managing partner would call me and say hey is this can you call the county and see if this is really if it was something from 10 years ago that you all don't care about maybe it's not really a conflict but if they're going to sue the county now and we represent the county we would obviously say no that's a conflict you can't take that you can't take on that matter and it would go away it is a very it's a very strict process at the law firm just had to be consistent with the two firms that have that exactly thank you very much you talked about mr taylor being a part of this team but not being here and you mentioned some other like former elected officials that are part of shoemaker advisors and you know for instance there's some you know very influential former mayors in Tampa Bay area that are part of shoemaker advisors that aren't part of this lobby contract but would you be able to since they're part of shoemaker advisors if you needed them for something would they be able to like work on our behalf on a special project or anything like that yeah absolutely so I would tell you that every member of our team is on this contract and so although they might not be the everyday POC every single member of the firm is there so mayor Buckhorn in Tampa mayor Kreisman here in Pinellas County former county commissioner Sandy Merman Les Miller in Hillsborough County I can't tell you the number of times that I picked up the phone and called Les Miller and said I have no idea what this is you've been doing this for 40 years can you help me and he says absolutely let's go get a cup of coffee and I'll walk you through the history of this etc the same thing with all the other people that I just mentioned so they are at our you know they're at our disposal as we need them and just like we are for them they're oftentimes they mostly do local work they don't really come to Tallahassee a lot but you know if they have an issue locally and they say hey somebody brought this up and I think there's some legislation about it can you you know can you have lunch with my client and talk them through it and that isn't you know that that's that's not for you know we're not going to charge them a fee for that we just go sit down and have lunch with our friend and help them try to solve their problem for their client and they in return do the same thing for us so our entire you know you know and Ashton Hayward who's the former mayor of Pensacola is on our team and has dealt with a lot of issues up and up in the panhandle and their and their expansion he's another great resource for us so we have all of those resources you know at kind of our beck and call if there's something that we haven't dealt with before any final questions great thank you all appreciate you all have a great day yeah no we still we still have Harry we still have Harry for DC all right good afternoon and welcome good to have you here today good afternoon thank you so much Laura's yours okay I just wanted to be sure thank you chair good afternoon thank you so much for having us this afternoon we really appreciate it I know it's been a really long day save the best for last so I am Danielle Thomas and we are here representing Sunrise Consulting Group we really appreciate the opportunity to be able to present to you this afternoon and talk a little bit about why Sunrise would be the best positioned to represent Pinellas County there we go so just very briefly about the firm as a whole we are a medium-sized firm and spread pretty equally throughout the Tampa Bay area we have some of the staff that lives close to the Tampa Bay area and so would be close by and local for all of you and then the rest of us live up in Tallahassee so have constant work and close relationships and remain in the area throughout both legislative session as well as even in the off season to allow us to continue to work with the different departments and staff and we do predominantly focus on local government and a lot of appropriations work but also have a variety of representation across including school districts and some other areas fun fact we also represent SeaWorld so that's a fun one I am actually the newest member of the Sunrise Consulting Group team this is month two with Sunrise I was previously with the Florida School Boards Association so working quite a bit yes working to I was there in-house lobbyist so I represented the school board members and the association working closely with all of them and while a lot of my background I'm a former fourth and fifth grade ESE teacher which I absolutely loved but a lot of my background is in the K-12 space however there's actually a lot of commonality when it comes to school boards and school districts and especially counties with having individually elected members a lot of the issues that I've worked on policy wise especially in the last four or five years are also issues that our counties face as well so I've represented and worked on the coalition to work on sovereign immunity and the potential changes to sovereign immunity over the years FRS obviously property tax we know is a big topic right now and what that could potentially look like going forward in the future has similar potential implications to counties as it does to school districts as well so with that I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Andrew to introduce himself and talk about the rest of the members and some of our other areas thank you Danielle Mr. chair members of the commission Andrew Collell we call that hazing here at this firm Danielle got to take the opening I want to introduce myself a little bit I've worked in and around state government since I was 18 years old I very much enjoy representing local governments because in some sense I almost find myself to be a small bit of a bureaucrat and when I have the opportunity to represent a county or a city and I make a phone call to DEP I truly at the end of the day feel like I'm still working for the state in some form or fashion I went to Florida State double double double Seminole but something unique about me I have a CPM which any of y'all know what that is a certified public manager program which at the elected commission level probably nobody's been through that but I actually have gone through the CPM program with a whole host of middle management and state government so it's amazing you see these guys around Tallahassee and now I actually have to call some of them sometimes and it's been an interesting way to interact with state government that I think would serve to benefit the county the elephant in the room with our team is Sean Foster who many of you know and is highly unlike our firm to not have Sean here he just had something that he could not move today and sends his hellos as well if you guys have ever interacted with Sean and I want to make it very clear that he would absolutely be 100% part of this team he is not some CEO of the firm that you guys will never see he just could not be here today and so he sends his apologies but when we think about Sean he worked for Gus Bill Rackus he has a great really he has a great understanding of Pinellas County he lives in Newport Ritchie he's 15 20 minutes away from here that's depending on traffic I'm from Hillsborough County and so while I live in Tallahassee now I'm down here frequently and so some of the other firms that have presented today also have local roots and so I think when we kind of talk about what makes us different and that's really what I want to focus on again all of the firms are qualified I actually think we saw some people out there that are great that we get to work with in Tallahassee great firms you have great options before you but and we all have great relationships but I want to take a moment to highlight a few things that that really that really really set us apart one we do represent local governments that is predominantly what we do when we look at our client list we don't have a lot of large companies we have one or two that's predominantly gene in our firm who's up on that screen but when you take a look at who we have it's other counties some counties of similar size some cities and how does that how does that make and how does that make it different for us to represent you the issues we understand when we look at Senate Bill 818 this past year and when you look at potentially some of the other applicants to the solicitation we don't have a charter communications we don't have an AT&T and that was something that we are in the meetings with the Florida Association of Counties every single week if you take a moment to review and think about and talk with the folks at FAC who's in these meetings in Tallahassee it is us it's just because that's what we do we represent all these we represent all these local governments and so we need to be part of that building coalition because at the end of the day when it comes to making a movement in policy it's really coalition how can you work with your other stakeholders when we look at the CRA bill I don't know if anybody on this commission is familiar with the CRA bill that happened this past session that was how can we work with Sarasota County how can we work with the city of Sarasota to get to their delegation to use them as the as the mode of transportation to get there to try to build value and why we need to amend that bill to make it different than when it was filed so we know the issues very well it being representing so many local governments allows us to traffic in information across delegations right because we represent Volusia County we're in front of the senators up there we're in front of the House members up there and it really gives us an interesting aspect of how we're able to interact with different delegations across the state versus a firm that predominantly maybe just as corporations and just interact with the regular regulated industries chairman doesn't have the opportunity to get across the state as much I kind of want to talk about conflicts a little bit we are I want to say a small firm we're not a medium-sized firm we do predominantly represent local governments as I said I did listen to y'all's preparatory meeting for this little bit and I know Commissioner Peters made a couple comments about Palm Beach County I want to let you know we don't represent Palm Beach County but but what I what I what I do what I do want to say is if you separate the fact that we do a lot of local government work which I think kind of puts us on a higher position to understand the issues that you guys work on when you separate that for a moment and if you don't consider that a conflict again we have no no organizations that I think would be adverse to the county the last thing that I think really sets us apart with all of our clients all my local government clients last week I was visiting with a large city and on my list is not just to visit with the elected officials it's not just a visit with the city administrator I've got to go see the utilities director I've got to go see the PIO and so we take the time to really learn the staff of our local governments because I can't tell you how many times during session not that there's a lack of communication I haven't communicated with the electeds the city manager's already said yeah Andrew's already taking care of this he's been talking to the development director he's been gathering information from the development director passing that on to the senator to make sure the senator has it directly from the city from the horse's mouth from the policy expert so we really take the time to get to know the staff and I think that is what will make a difference for you at this county we talk about recovery from storms getting to know who on your team your emergency manager getting to know your FEMA consultant we are happy to integrate with your FEMA consultant because we can be a tool to help push that ball forward when you're talking about recovery so that's really what sets us apart I think our work speaks for ourself speaks for itself I think many of our local governments are happy with us because we just really enjoy the work it's not just another client for us we really enjoy the work and one thing that we talked that y'all you guys talked about in your preparatory meeting was where would Pinellas County be in our sphere of clients we when you look at our client base Pinellas County would actually be pretty much one of the largest clients we have when I reflect on this past session you know we talk about how do you really make an achievement at the end when it comes to an appropriation this past session I know that when we went to the appropriations chairmen's at the 25th hour we had actually one ask this past session so we don't have a lot of clients where we have to come up with a laundry list of asks from various chairmen so that's it could try to keep it short and sweet I know probably folks ready to be done with this so any questions I've asked the same question of everybody how would you handle a conflict if Pinellas County something that we were requesting whether it was an appropriation request or if it was some legislation that we were trying to work through how would you handle that you know where would Pinellas County fall if it was in direct conflict with another one of your clients and then if you could also share did you get the appropriations and she only asked for one let me go ahead and answer that I did but it wasn't the amount that I was looking for well but listen what if you got it wasn't a mouth it wasn't a mouth and that's really a question for Sean because he was the one I had to have go do it at the last minute but yes we did so when you look at our local governments and I don't want to be political in my presentation per se because we are we are not campaigning we are in administering government right now but when you look at our client references we predominantly represent fairly conservative local governments right and so I would consider Pinellas County a fairly the county government a fairly conservative local government therefore many of the policy things we address isn't some kind of they're just almost never in conflict because it's not a partisan type of issue we're working on we're working on dealing with are you guys going to have to inspect all your stormwater laterals and is that going to cost you 40 million dollars well that's right in line with the other five clients that I have so we we we never have a conflict and I'm really trying to rack my brain to think of one there has been a conflict between cities and counties inherently between the two types of entities it had to do with transportation fees like two or three years ago you probably know I remember that I don't even know how to describe how I handled that because every single local government lobbyist was in the exact same position past that I really haven't had a policy issue where I've been in any kind of conflict with any of my other clients but again I only predominantly do local governments I'm not representing somebody who maybe is a stormwater inspection company thank you thank you mr. chair and it's good to see y'all and I will attest that Sean would definitely be here because he's a very hard-working lobbyist I will add he's is not a very good poker player but he's a good lobbyist and Dr. Thomas is good to see you I know that we work together a lot in the education space and I will say that you are right that local government is very similar to children at times or at least K-12 education one question that I've asked and I remember getting this a lot from Sean is you know budget conference time you get the top three top five list and you know locally we have a chair Hooper you know really helping us out and and Pinellas County with the budget how would y'all approach his priorities and knowing what his priorities are for Pinellas County with the house leadership and trying to make sure that the house also keeps our our Pinellas County's priorities so obviously all firms take time over the summertime to continue to build their relationships it's no I think chairman chairman Hooper has a good relationship with probably every firm that you interviewed today so what we would be doing is looking at all the house members that are part of the Pinellas County delegation which you guys have a lot of house members and trying to see who's in leadership there and try to see if we can use them as a medium to communicate with house leadership because look Sean can call the speaker right I think again every firm here can call the speaker I think it's honestly coordinating and orchestrating you are a member you have this much going on in this many hours in the day so using the members right if a lobbyist comes to you versus another member that comes to you you may just inherently kind of pay attention more to the other member that's talking to you that's your peer that's your colleague it's how do we coordinate the other members of the delegation to get to house leadership and how do we stay on top of them to help them achieve that goal of communicating that to house leadership and then maybe Sean follows up once those conversations have been had Mr. Peters do you have anything? No I did I did call some of your references so thank you for providing those and they only had great things to say Volusia and Orange I talked to I guess you've got to have them for a year about each one of them yeah so I don't have questions well is Renee going to ask her usual and she did and no then I'm good thank you thanks and so you address one of my questions on conflicts no no major private companies out there that you envision having issues with Pinellas County no utility companies that I don't mind putting this on the record the only entity that we represent that has anything with we have a a relationship with a vendor of yours that already has a contract with you guys but we don't have any again communications companies no developers or anything like that builders yet that we that we work with and so on just just asking a question on that I've asked the others McMullen Booth Road a major road here that's really kind of an inner-county road with Pasco in here any thoughts as to the receptivity to that kind of project for you know some funding opportunities next session just you know generally when is the last time you had a conversation with the district secretary about McMullen Booth Road I've had a lot of conversations with the district secretary who also had a lot of conversations with that Mr. Hooper okay and I asked that question because how I would answer that that's a large project I have seen in my short time one fifty million dollar road be funded and one fifty million dollar road be vetoed so I bring that up because I think that's a large project and so the way I would approach that is how do you get DOT to move that up on one of their as an agency request and then work with Chair Hooper to try to get that funded I think when the agencies just generally speaking I've dealt with some stuff recently that had to do with FWC when you try to get the agencies if they can right if it's within their purview to put it up on their list there's two ways to request money from the legislature is either directly through a member project or it's through an agency you know legislative budget request a D3A put it move it up on there and then go work with the chair to try to get it funded it also in my experience takes a little bit of the lift off of your delegation to do it like that thank you appreciate it any other questions okay thank you all appreciate it thank you for having us we we all work on on education issues together yes so Chris is very much still involved yes yes all right I guess we're going to quickly jump in and I guess that's a question commissioners if you want me to go through agenda or you can just call me with any questions we have three members here and I could just say one thing I just want to remind you all this has not been decided please continue to not talk to anybody that has submitted a proposal because of the cone of silence and I'll send out an email I recognize that we're down three commissioners but just to remind you still no decision made cone of silence still in effect no I'm saying down three down three down say that oh down yeah okay but no just a reminder just a reminder to everybody we've come this far we don't want anybody to get disqualified the only the only thing it looks like we have the certain TDC to TTT contract coming up other CVB yeah that's that's a big one obviously we move that to the regular agenda well it's already published so you can move it at the beginning okay we'll move it to the regular yeah okay yeah I'm that this is also a staff review I think I just reviewed these rather than us and so we did we missed that one that was a big one okay everybody here okay with just okay calling it every really to call it a day like I just had one okay I guess we are coming to an end officer Atkinson and Manley thank you for being here today really appreciate it we always feel safe with you guys being here and no other comments questions and we are adjourned we are going to do that you