the delay in getting started let vala had me doing something over here um all right we're going to go ahead and get started right away with the 220 2026 post-session legislative update uh barry you got got us get us started here yep so tristan's on his way up and um so we're gonna uh they're gonna do a little bit of a tag team but tristan's gonna take the lead on that and so i'll turn it over to tristan to well 26 slides seems like a piece of cake after kelly's 53 last week so we'll run through these quickly so no worries um commissioners good morning i'm tristan summer the intergovernmental liaison with pinellas county and we do have anita as well starting with the timeline before you this presentation provides a brief summary of everything that happened this past regular legislative session we will also roadmap some topics the county can plan for moving forward but looking at these dates specifically and i'll go over my right shoulder here to use the laser um january 13th was the first day of this regular session um everything adjourned on march 13th and i do want to emphasize regular session because as we all know we still don't have a budget agreed to yet so the legislature will have to come back to agree on a budget for a special session which will have to happen before july 1 this date was revised last night around 7 p.m so that special session for mid-decade congressional reapportionment was pushed back one week starting april 27th they also added two policy areas one of which being vaccine mandates and the second one being the ai bill of rights both of which passed the senate this past year but did not move in the house um we don't have a special session called for property taxes i know that's another elephant in the room so the two outstanding special sessions that everyone's expecting property taxes and the budget um and then like i said july 1 the state's fiscal year november 12th is the projected date for our legislative program presentation for the 2027 2027 legislative program because march 2nd is the first day of regular session in 2027 and although i don't have it on the timeline i'll begin having conversations with our departments in early september to determine barriers and operational needs and from there i'll meet with the bcc to learn about your priorities and what you would like to see from the legislative program so next we have our guiding principles this is everything the board supported so i'm not going to go through these but i will note on the front end that we did see fewer bills pass both chambers so fewer bills enrolled this year than two years ago so we had around um 88 fewer bills this year so fewer priorities moving across both chambers moving across the finish line so just a disclaimer on the front end um start looking at policy that falls kind of within our guiding principles um i do have this broken out kind of in columns broken out by the guiding principle at the top end for both um but in the left column i'll spend a little bit of time on this just because it was a little bit of a problematic bill um because that would have preempted all regulation of water resources and wetlands to the state um the policy kind of worked against our guiding principle that highlights the protection of our natural resources and scenic beauty because state regulatory standards serve as a baseline um and the restriction would limit the county's ability to protect our waterways if the state's regulations didn't meet minimum standards needed so we had conversations with the bill sponsors and a number of stakeholders to articulate how water adjacent communities may need to adapt enact additional regulations to preserve water quality and better our water systems but those bills died and on in the right column i'll be brief we had two bills dealing with disaster recovery emergency management and planning house bill 7005 and senate bill 7000 provide indefinite public record exemptions for individuals who use public emergency shelters and then house bill 5503 and senate bill 7004 recreate the emergency preparedness and response fund within the executive office of the governor continuing with our guiding principles i do have an ongoing here um and i'll get into that in a second so basically the electric vehicle charging taxation bills at the first bullet point are still ongoing because the policy was rolled into the proposed senate tax package um that will be resolved whenever we get to budget conference um we did speak early on with the house sponsor to see if he would be willing to consider amendments to create a commercial charging tax structure within his bill but he said the bill was already negotiated with leadership so there was no movement on that front and the bill was never heard in the house anyways the second bill electric vehicle registration fees was mentioned in one of the work sessions that we had when the legislature adjourned but that bill was never heard because it didn't have a house companion but we do plan on having continued conversations with the bill sponsor and the house as well um moving into next year's session to hopefully see some development on that last bill on this list i'm going to highlight senate bill 1220 on that front because that contained language directing fdot to evaluate long-term impacts of alternative fuel vehicles on revenues and identify any policy options to address projected revenue reductions that language was never added to the house bill and the chambers never reconciled their differences so those bills died however i imagine similar ideas will continue to resurface next year or next session especially because fdot presented the need to address stagnant revenue or declining revenue sources in a few different committee presentations this next section we're just looking at the legislative priorities that we had in a support posture so looking at disaster recovery this year was pretty quiet on the policy front given that the state didn't see significant storms making landfall and fingers crossed that we will be spared again this year however there were a few bills filed to fix sb 180 from the 2025 session and i'll highlight those bills here so i won't read all these bullets but in the left column this outlines the current law pertaining to sb 180 and i also do have check marks right here in these two and they signify the most significant operational impacts the right column on the other hand highlights the corrections that were contained in sb 840 from this past year and i will highlight those provisions real quick so sb 840 removed all restrictive and burdensome language narrow the scope of impacted local governments from 150 miles amended the moratorium language to focus on reconstruction after storms which has been kind of the biggest concern with sb 180 removed the lawsuit language allowing individuals to sue local governments and also provided sunset dates with that said unfortunately the bill died but i hear the house is positioned to be more willing to amend the moratorium concerns from sb 180 next session and anita and i continue to work with senator sigley and our legislative delegation to ensure the county's perspective is at the forefront of conversations as bill text starts getting filed draft and circulated like sb 840 senate bill 1218 passed the senate but was never taken up in the house the bill essentially carved out the panhandle from the effects of sb 180 and although it doesn't affect pinellas county this does show that the senate was positioned and had an appetite to revise sb 180 and i imagine this language will also resurface again next year a hot topic at least on the federal side as well has been beach renourishment um so looking at beach renourishment funding dep recommended approximately 43 million dollars for sand the sand key segment of the beach renourishment project however we're still waiting for the state budget to pass um for those appropriated funds to come through i will say senator hooper has been specifically working on this issue to help secure funding so we are very appreciative of his support on this matter also um it is on this slide but beach renourishment funding to date for sand key treasure island and the long key upham um segments is approximately 90 million in total and that's a 45 million dollar county um match for two different like basically we have dep and fdem and that comes out to 45 million dollars in grants as well i think commissioner you had asked a question about what our total um spend was on that and and i was i was surprised that you know when when he outlined that that out of it we ended up not spending 127 million which was the original amount that we we stated um like um trust tristan just said 90.6 million dollars but of that 45 million dollars uh we're receiving back in grants so it's actually a really good news story about 50 percent we're able to get other funding sources for that and uh it's a good news story each renourishment policy now um so these bills were problematic um because that could have set back our conversations with the army corps of engineers um these bills attempted to codify language into state law that the corps was actively working with the county to find some flexibility on i have a list of here but for example the language recognized the erosion control line in the wrong direction so basically to the dunes from the erosion control line instead of to the water basically the water line from the erosion control line also made direct mention of perpetual easements and i think we all know the concern brought up with perpetual easements um on the other side of that coin is the funding component so the bills would have limited resources coming back to pinellas county um so that could have basically limited future funding opportunities and anita and i we met with the bill sponsors as well as our um legislative delegation and our legislation our legislative delegation engaged several members of you know their committees the committee chairs to basically advocate against the bills and ultimately the bill sponsors agreed to look for additional pathways to resolve their specific issues in northeast florida um for example they're reaching out to dep to see if they could be added to the list without the statutory fix um so i'm not sure if there's going to be interest in refiling these bills again next year but of course we will monitor that matter moving forward looking at delayed disclosing of complainants names and addresses for code violation complaints there were no bills or amendments that opened that statute and also whenever we were in tallahassee for tampa bay days we had conversations with our legislative delegation to see if they were aware of any potential pathways or any bills that were coming down the pipeline amendments coming down the pipeline that we could attach policy to but unfortunately all the recommendations were not germane so there was no um no avenue there i think anita can attest to this but this was um the overdose and suicide fatality review committee bill that was fun policy to work on just because it introduced so many different perspectives that had to be delicately managed and those perspectives probably aren't regularly i guess looked at from the county side so um anita and i with that being said worked with a number of stakeholders to get the language into the best possible position with an abridged timeline the bill was filed in the senate but the house companion was ultimately never filed due to administrative bill drafting error near the filing deadline and since the senate bill didn't have a counterpart it was never heard but you know so we had a lot of productive conversations to balance the different sides of the stakeholder spectrum so with the fire and ems service impact study opaga had been executing the study of penelis's fire systems to look at the impacts of adopting a 42-hour work week basically after our joint delegation meeting senator disigley put in the request with the president's office it was approved um that study has been temporarily postponed but we'll continue to advocate for resuming the study whenever the legislature agrees on a budget so animal welfare there were several bills filed this year that deals with the topic of animal welfare i have those descriptions but i'll be brief so the first bullet expands dexter's law from the 2025 session by requiring fdle to post identifying information on its website for individuals convicted of certain animal cruelty offenses the law also establishes new criminal offenses for causing or enticing minors to commit or witness acts of animal cruelty the second bill that has already been signed by the governor and that bill creates distinct felony degrees for individuals who commit sexual acts on animals and requires courts to prohibit offenders from owning animals third bullet expands this was the governor's package for basically um protecting dog i mean like it's looking at dog breeding and protecting um dog welfare specifically but um that bullet expands animal cruelty offender reporting strengthens consumer protections and pet sales and also establishes best practices for dog breeders um and the last bullet didn't pass but those bills prohibited the manufacturing sale and distribution of cosmetics on animal tests and we had one executive priority and i'm not sure if you'd agree but i'd say the e911 fee adjustment has been one of the more nuanced issues that i worked on in my time um just because the legislature and the executive branch are playing a bit of a game of cat and mouse um and kind of what that looks like has been in short dms said they would not recommend a new rule to ratify because the last time they did the legislature didn't pick up the proposal um and the legislature turned around and said they would not propose legislation until dms recommended a new rule to ratify so we're kind of just sitting in this posture um with that said anita and i met with senator disigley and representative cheney to see if they would be willing to help with amendments to senate bill 1586 and house bill 1427 which was the sheriff dispatch bill um to specifically increase the fee within those bills however those bills were never heard so the avenue wasn't really there in in the end um the last thing i'll note is the de santa's administration has been anti-fee bills so dms and the legislature could have just been mirroring that position um but we're already looking working on finding new avenues to move this priority for next session whenever we have a new governor speaker and senate president so three new administrations so this next segment deals with everything on our monitor list and i'll be brief on this slide um all the tdt related bills have died and there currently isn't anything in the tax package that's of tdt concern so we don't need to spend too much time on that segment or short-term rental regulation there were a pair of bills that would have required water safety measures for vacation rentals but those bills died um that middle bullet is ongoing um and that policy basically would establish a regulatory tax structure for vacation rental payments made on or through an advertising platform um and while tax and budget conversations are ongoing it will be kind of noteworthy to see where this lands or how it develops moving forward on the mpo front i know this is a huge regional conversation but the only bills that made mention of metropolitan planning organizations were house bill 543 and bill 1080 those were large transportation packages but they did contain a consolidation feasibility study for charlotte lee and collier counties but um i think more so that just merely shows a statewide appetite to engage in the consolidation conversation moving forward um those the chambers couldn't rectify other policy disagreements so those bills died and this section is ongoing so planning ahead um this is every these are all of our appropriation requests and in short everything's in play we're sitting at about half of the asks for most of these the 31 pump station project this is closer to the full ask ruson senator ruson amended that appropriation request to basically fund one of his other projects to get it in play but we're we're currently in play for all these projects and that's a great position to be in while we're waiting top line allocations anything else you'd like to mention on that um like tristan said this is a really strong position to be in for all of your appropriations projects i would say it's fairly normal to only be funded in one chamber versus the other um the goal is to just get into at least one budget so that you're in play for budget conference um the 50 percent number in the house is also standard house rules require that the projects be funded at at least 50 percent in order to be included in their proposed budget and so they they typically start at that 50 percent for all projects to get as many into play as possible so um you know i think we're we're very happy with where you all are all are now and hopefully we can get to budget conference soon to to begin working on the amounts in the in the other chambers i will say too i mean we we have this dearth of funding in the transportation silo in the senate and that's probably just because the 7.5 million dollar ask was eating a lot of spending capital in in the budget so needless to say i think it's a snapshot of kind of just where we are and the fact that we have everything in play to anita's point is a great posture to be in and this next slide is easy thank you for your time do you have any questions um so on these special sessions that they have uh probably um do they do they take on anything else at all besides the issue that they're having the special session about so it has to be so i'll say in the microphone so whatever the special session is for it has to be called for a specific issue so you can't introduce new themes i mean of course we're looking at high level concepts for example i mean congressional reapportionment ai bill of rights vaccine mandates you can put a lot of policy kind of within those categories underneath but everything has to pertain to those so i guess to the question is you wouldn't see property tax kind of creep in there without it being noticed and out of being called specifically tristan's exactly right they would have to amend the call for the special session um the special session being called by the governor of course in order to include property taxes or another subject so you know i expect right now given the status of where we are on property taxes conversation you know i would be surprised to see it included or amended into the call for for the week of the 28th yes commissioner flowers but it is very interesting because before the session closed out and they uh sinni died the statement was they were going to be meeting for a special session specifically for property tax not for any of the things that they have listed now so not complaining i'm not complaining but i'm just saying it's very interesting anything else i'm hesitant to bring up a topic um but i'm i was so frustrated yesterday that um just you know didn't even know about it found out that um there was some statute that said that we don't have the right to change the name of our own streets or i don't mean change the name but even provide an honorary where did that come from when did that happen where did it come from i've asked a couple of senators to look into it they've gotten the language that we've gotten on this on the uh so none of that if they've because the senator they can't believe that that's even in play um so we're looking at when did that happen do we know anything i'm not sure but hearing that secondhand from kelly i think more so it was just kind of an oversight error right i think just the fact that the word state before transportation facilities wasn't added whenever they were making that change i don't i don't know specifically when that change happened but i think that that was just an oversight error just not specifically focusing for state-owned transportation facilities is that correct kelly from the yeah so they didn't mean for the local owned streets that's my understanding at this time but i'll get additional information i'll yeah it would be kind of nice to know given the fact that we're moving on a on that kind of effort this commission has given the nod we're going to bring it forward in may at the memorial day commission meeting so it's really important um and and nobody seems to understand it yeah so that was kind of why i was asking can anything be done in these special sessions that come up where they made an obvious error mistake it's not their prop not their roads and if they want to do something on our roads they ask our permission as well and we want to do something on their roads we get their permission but us wanting to do something on our road is also in play apparently so absolutely yeah so we'll look i just haven't seen the statute yet so i'll look at that statute we'll have conversations with the with the senators um who you're reaching out to as well just to get a better understanding as to what their perspective has been and then we'll look for pathways for immediate resolve if there are opportunities there yeah i'd like to see what those that pathway is for a month from now what we can do what we up to can do and then when it'll be fixed so that we can finish off the uh the charge um because again we if i remember correctly just renamed a bridge um so i didn't think there was an issue in play so anyway all right thank you mr chairman thanks indeed and tristan um do we have any sense of um maybe we have to wait till the budget's done but as far as unfunded mandates do we have any sense of we're gonna have to um eat anything this year we have a general understanding of the enroll bills that are unfunded mandates or that are going to have operational concerns um i was speaking on the the building side i mean there are basically four building or housing related bills that will have operational impacts um from the fiscal side also in terms of amending ordinances i know staff's currently reviewing um obviously kind of what those mechanisms look like with state law now and what that's going to mean for pinellas county specifically um we do have i mean so like the sovereign immunity bill i mean raising those caps that's going to have a fiscal impact across the board for every county i mean the the league and the association of counties were actively working on those bills of course with all the other things going on as well um so that was one bill that passed i know there was the um the local government finance bills i mean although it's going to i think change timelines and i don't mean to speak on behalf of chris but although it's going to change timelines and perspective that doesn't really have significant operational impacts so to answer your question yeah we i have a list of enrolled bills that are going to have operational impacts i know the association of counties has kind of put together a statutory list of what all those look like and it's ongoing and i don't think they're going to revise that probably until anything's signed into law so as of right now we're probably sitting in a holding pattern as to know what those isolated issues are going to look like is there anything else you wanted to say to that you know i would just say that you know tristan and i had a lot of conversations uh throughout session as these bills were moving on what was going to have you know significant impact to the county and you know what we needed to actively engage on versus you know either letting the association engage on or or kind of monitoring and you know i do think um we were able to to mitigate any significant impacts to the county um i think generally this was uh maybe a better year for local governments as far as those unfunded mandates than than usual we had some um strong members in the senate who really kind of stood stood ground on a lot of those issues um i will say that some of those backbones in the senate will be leaving um come november and so you know next session um we might have some considerable work to do okay so on that on that issue um all of that's in play when they have a budget session right right i mean so things come up during the budget session that to answer your question so i guess what i would say is like i'll isolate in two ways like we know the bills that have passed that are unfunded mandates and which will probably be signed by the governor on the budget side policy can be introduced in the budget i don't think it's necessarily from history right so from the past few sessions and last session specifically i don't think there's going to be policy that's specifically geared towards local government unfunded mandates um ultimately things can be to answer your question though things can be removed i know like the eoc uh web funding last year that was taken out of the budget so that had an operational concern so things can be removed things can be added to reduce um budgetary concerns but for the most part you won't see like a property tax bill land in the tax package i mean that will be an isolated i was thinking more of you know some other things that we've seen along the way that we had a couple years ago regarding the uh retirement packages and that kind of stuff yeah and we're looking at the retirement package um i know i've been updating chris and jim in terms of what the changes to the retirement package have looked like i mean as of right now we're kind of in a holding pattern we have a snapshot of what the proposals are and the house and senate have been different kind of across the board um but to your point as the tax package the retirement package and the budget end up being amended you know in terms of passes back and forth between the chambers i i'll update staff and obviously trying to figure out where those um concerns are but you know to to that point there is an impact okay well on the public safety side um and um but it's not as bad as you know when they were going to do the three percent cola and things like that so if it's going to have a small impact we're we'll have to get you what those numbers are as part of the budget obviously with our budget workshops next month it'd be nice to have most of that correct understood they do understand we have to pass budgets in september right they do okay i just meant just make sure that that that's on the sorry um it's just frustrating that you know not only are they even talking about it but they're bringing it up so i mean it's pushing even later you know so um anyway yes commissioner thank you mr chair um to uh the chair's point about the issue with the road renaming um i have heard that there are all sorts of things that you can put in the budget including policy things like improviso and so i i never participated in such activities i just heard that you could do that um and we have some powerful um legislator powerful senators and legislators in our delegation um could we uh talk to them about uh doing that uh for this uh if we can't rename uh this road that we want in north county uh can we talk to them about uh putting some proviso language uh in there that would allow us and i believe if i remember that proviso language is only good for one year but that would at least get us to next year's regular session to be able to make this change and and just so commissioners yeah proviso is basically like attaching policy items to the back of the budget so you're directing departments to kind of um handle certain policy issues so yes and um vice chair whenever we get done here i plan or i'll speak with anita we plan to speak with senator disigley senator hooper i'll get the statute reference we can also look at the um transportation implementing or conforming bill that that's those are two other options as well if not proviso specifically so in terms of the abridged timeline trying to get resolution within the next month um hopefully of course we have a budget agreed to by then but we'll at least have the dialogue to figure out if those are um options that the senators would be willing to engage on so to answer your question that thank you commissioner appreciate that um yeah that would be great you know if it's a mistake then they want to fix it it's you know like the temporary fix so we can move forward on something that i'm sure they would i know they support um so okay thank you i got another thing yes while we're renaming things there's a roundabout in palm harbor that we can rename after chair eggers that would be quite popular there's no second on that one so if we if we have the votes we can bring that up as well we can we can put that in the uh state budget as well that is a state road yeah you're right um anything else of serious nature yeah just yes to close it out um you know you saw from the presentation we've got a very engaged legislative program and i think you know tristan's been a great addition um you know and it was easy to you know uh up the game from matt but you know we he under he understands i mean he under he understands i mean the way you know tallahassee works and working with anita and their firm you know has has really brought a lot we've already kind of done a where do we go from here how can we up our game for next year uh this was the first year out he's but he's really done a good job with engaging with fact and the others along with our legislators and committee chairs and things like that so uh we're going to get out and like he said he's going to engage with the commissioners and start thinking about you know how do we prepare for next year the other thing we have him doing is going out and working in departments so i can understand operationally uh especially public works utilities uh safety and emergency services some of those where we have opportunities i think you know and and and see the operational side so he's going to spend some time working out in the departments this summer um but again you know it's uh this was one year in you know for kind of a revised uh refresh of our legislative program so you know i think we're in a good position to continue to build on it the legislative programs that we approve at the end um do each of those points have a i don't want to call it a white paper but do they have an attachment that explains what we're trying to get done or are they just bullet points in our in our plan that we present to our legislature certain things do have white papers depends on what it is okay you know some of them are policy guidance because you're reacting remember you know most of your time when you're dealing with legislation is is trying to kill bad bills that hurt us you know and and along with the trying to advance a few things that we have but just like you just mentioned something that occurred i think without thought um of how it affected down at local government was you know written for some other reason and trying to catch those and intercede on those you know it's a lot of just hands-on work um and that's where tristan has spent a lot more time in tallahassee um than than we have traditionally done and and so he can work with anita and finding those types of things out and interceding early and getting to the right people to be able to impact those um that that's a piece that we really haven't had before you know that where where we've been engaged in that process and and i think it puts us in a much better position it's not perfect like you just said stuff slips through um you know but but it's uh but it's i think i think it's a we're on a pretty good path yeah i think a lot better and i think the more that we're known for bringing substantive and good white papers so to speak that get into issues i think is better it's a good thing i mean i think our our legislative delegation knows that they can count on us for research and help if they need it so that's that's a good thing um anyway anything else before we move on anything else from you guys all set i guess i would say um for yeah when we met with our delegation or anyone else in tallahassee for our tampa bay days too we did have those white papers or one pagers that we would drop offer more so just the legislative priorities i mean we had a loft breakout which was captured under our guiding principles so we left those leave behinds with our delegation and the i mean governor's office of policy and budget so we wanted to make sure obviously that they had something to look at from the county's perspective to your point and on substantive issues they have a little bit more to look at than just a bullet point so thank you all great job appreciate the update um all right we're going to move on to number two transportation update very kelly's on her way up so kelly and tom are going to come up uh what we're trying to do is kind of building on getting ready for our budget and so as you can see we're going to do two big lifts this morning which is our transportation and our water and sewer system so um first up is kelly talking about transportation where we're at good morning uh kelly hammer levy public works director and i have with me tom washburn our transportation division director um we're going to start just you're going to see these icons throughout the presentation so i wanted to explain it a little bit that we really were focused on here is tying the work that we're doing to your strategic plan and then tying performance metrics and outcomes so that we're being very transparent about the work that we're doing we're going to talk about the level of service enhancement updates tom is going to come up in and talk about the atms program updates and then some of our capital projects that we've recently completed so back in 2023 and 2024 uh the board allocated dedicated millage to various transportation infrastructure programs to address level of service deficiencies with an overarching goal to improve the quality of our transportation infrastructure with those priorities aligned to your strategic plan and community expectations and each quarter we email you a copy of our outcome um for that quarter and and you'll be receiving a report here as we've just closed out quarter two of the fiscal year but you can see where we where we've been here in the um before column and and then where we are today and that is directly because of the of the funds that have been infused into these program areas so with regard to our bridges and box culverts um overall both of these are our transportation a box culvert is essentially a smaller bridge type structure over a waterway to allow for transportation um some bridges are what we call you know they're they're part of the state program in the state they perform inspections and then they give us reports that identify maintenance things that we need to accomplish the box culverts however many of them are not part of the state program which means they're not inspected on a regular basis or they were not before this program and because of this program we now have them on a routine uh inspection cycle and then we perform the exact same type of inspection that the state does and then we take those inspection reports and we program in improvements previously all of our program work in this area was was 100 percent reactive and now we're able to get ahead of things before they become very costly problems we are also um and have enhanced maintenance of our curb and ender drain and i know these are not necessarily exciting items but when curb is not maintained properly it affects our drainage system and when the under drain system is not maintained properly it's not drawing down the groundwater away from the base of the roads which ultimately results in the road degrading so these complementary systems are are all work together and so we have to maintain them as a system and not individual components our roadway resurfacing program has been probably the backbone of this the majority of the funding has gone into the resurfacing of our local roads those are our neighborhoods our communities um prior to this program you know somewhere around 20 to less than 25 percent of our roads were in what we would call a fair condition and today i'm happy to report that 91 percent of our residential roads meet a level of service of fair or better 91 percent directly because of this funding we maintain this resurfacing program dashboard um i believe this is one that you all have access to so you can keep an eye on our progress um this was again a snapshot in times as we're about 57.5 resurfacing miles into the program year but we will be uh completing i think we're at uh where are we 2006 200 and almost 210 lane miles that we're planning this year our sidewalk program was also a key component of this and it started with the infusion of funds and resources to address almost a 14 mile backlog of sidewalk requests service requests and because of that we developed a program goal of zero backlogged service requests and what that means is that a sidewalk request that comes in and is validated does not sit in the queue for longer than a year and again with the funding that's been allocated to that we have typically been able to maintain that um currently the the dashboard shows we have a few in backlog status it's a live dashboard it changes daily so anytime a a sidewalk request comes in and it's in the system every single morning come in it may be different and so i know right now the sidewalk this picture shows zero but if you go into it today there's a few there because it is live and those dates move and and the um the how they shift into status moves so if you see it a little different that's why it is a live dashboard and it changes every time we make an improvement every time we we do a project yes sir um commissioner wiki has a question and then i have one following thank you chair real brief kelly um thank you so far is this just sidewalk repair or new sidewalks this is sidewalk repair in maintenance um but that's that's a very good question um since 2023 we have added an additional 11 miles of sidewalk to our network so i know not everybody was here when we put this program in place but when we did it was something i mentioned is that you know as we start to increase our network so does the replacement costs and the maintenance costs and those types of things so it's something that i keep a very um tight eye on because i want to make sure that we're resourcing the program properly in order to continue to achieve the goal so we have added 11 miles of sidewalks since 2023 through our capital program just as a follow-up on that um so when we started this program it took us what 635 days i believe or something to fix a sidewalk once we were it was identified that we had a problem that's how long it took for for us to finish it and the resources the commission gave us uh now you're seeing the results of that the the other piece that i wanted to mention we have a whole list of gap sidewalk gaps okay and and they fall in a variety a variety of buckets a lot of times there's utilities underneath so it's not as simple as putting down a sidewalk it has you know it's sewer relocates or utility relocates or things like that but we have a whole list of those to prioritize and that's the piece that kelly's looking at that they've been working down that list dependent upon the the individual situation um but that's a huge piece that they would love to close um but just in case you know you get a complaint or something we we have that list and they work that they work from that priority list on those um yeah that was one of my questions about new versus you know the repair how are the trip and fall claims today in this past say year versus how how they were i mean how how are we doing on that front to me that's an indicator of so i'm gonna ask jewel to step in here but i mean i will say i spend a lot less time with the attorney's office on trip and fall so it feels better to me but we can get you some updated numbers on that we haven't taken a look at it for a while i know that when we put this program into place at first i think we slowly started to see some drop in numbers but we can take a look at that and get you some info yeah i mean in you know that to me that's that's a real indicator why we're doing this i mean it's for a lot of reasons but clearly that's that's one of them um and then um chris christie has just sent me a message saying that trip and fall claims have been significantly reduced significant but we can get the specifics okay um thank you christie so um kelly back on that slide five and we don't have to go back to it but it was really talking about um what we've done with this additional millage which i think is is is admirable do we have a feel for the dollar amounts that we lose out on each year without having the gas tax indexing we have a sense of that i like because i've always thought to myself that you know they've always asked us to reduce millages the state doge and everything else we reduce millages like which a good idea we get rid of this millage if we had indexing is there is there a comparable as a number that we can look at to see like we we have a report i can i can send it over to you um and it did look at if um if the local option fuel taxes were indexed the way the one state gas tax fuel taxes indexed what the difference in revenue is it's it's it's quite significant yeah just trying to get us a feel for that because that's you know we can get we can get you that number again something that again they might want to know about maybe they don't but um okay go ahead go ahead hold on commissioner flower um so if i recall right we used opera dollars to try to catch ourselves up on sidewalk repairs and whatnot some when we okay so these the ones that are categorized here are ones that we weren't able to do because of some of the reasons that you are sharing we use some arpa dollars especially in targeted communities because we had a lot of flexibility there um but these are the additional three increments that that you decided to transfer from general fund over to the transportation trust fund that's how that's how this is funded if you recall back we we did an initial ramp up on the sidewalks and then and then a maintenance amount you know after that and so that was to get us caught up and then to be able to maintain that additional crews and things like that um so it was a combination of all of those different funding sources um one thing she didn't have on her slide and she'll correct me on the exact numbers but when we started this program you started doing these increments targeting these local streets we had what kelly like 1200 miles of of local streets in failed condition um it's probably about right and and now it's less than 300 um you know and and so it's uh they've made they've made a huge um you know targeted function it's and and it's not just streets streets are the the best but she had the other slides of all carbons the bridges and all that other infrastructure that we simply wouldn't weren't putting money in because there wasn't enough you know to be able to do it so and especially with the increased cost over the last you know decade so um they've made a lot of progress a lot of progress on our infrastructure which saves money in the long run you know to be able to maintain something is a lot cheaper than replacing it so um i just wanted to highlight that because i know they're moving on to the atms system after this slide but a lot of progress has been made uh maintaining and getting bringing our infrastructure up to a good state of repair and these and these these um three millages if you will um and our regular operating budget goes towards that maintenance and repair all dedicated to that so and that's all you know local taxpayers take up the brunt you know most of that of course that's residents commercial whatever short-term rentals and everything else and i'm just going to say it because it's a time to throw it out there but we use a lot of our penny money that are paid for by our visitors a lot of not all but of course um to help augment our infrastructure above the ground so i keep saying that to help our residents with utility rates that's something that we need to look at maybe we don't go down that path we know that the utilities rates and all of that are kind of their own enterprise fund but you know it's all it's all our taxpayers dollars and you know the big deal today is affordability whether it's food or gas or taxes or insurance or so if we can help and again i'm not talking to i know you're going to do this with your money on that i know i'm kidding i'm teasing it's not my money it's i know you're yeah you guys set the priorities the penny money is what i'm talking about so and every time i i know it's it's it's something that we haven't done but i just think it's something we need to know about and understand because the utility folks of the underground stuff it's it's really we can see the above ground stuff we can't see the below ground stuff that's scary what how far behind we are on that area as well so they're they're they're gonna you're gonna have a lot of discussion on that next year as you guys directed us and we're gonna get in strategic planning later next next year's when we're putting together the 20 uh you know 28 um referendum you know to renew to renew the penny and so you create the plan um and how you decide to do that will be the policy infrastructure baby well that's right i mean but how do you want to do that we'll have those discussions at that time and based upon your guidance is the way we're going to frame that next penny discussion commissioner thank you chair just one quick clarifying question on barry or um kelly so it was three dedicated mills just towards the sidewalk repair and road no that's all all it's sidewalks um and um the road repairs and the bridges and everything okay it's it these are three increments that go to the transportation trust fund gotcha okay not just for okay yeah there's also a component of that that we call the stabilization fund stabilization because there's the you know very base level of service for maintenance of our transportation infrastructure and then there's how much the tax the gas tax brings in to the county and there's a significant gap um between you know that revenue and how much it costs to provide basics the basic services that we were providing before the enhancement so we do have that first millage is what we call fund stabilization commissioner scott yeah just a point of reference thank you mr chair for fiscal year 2026 those three level of services millages amounted to 43 million and for point of reference we only needed 25 million for a full rollback yeah so it's it's it's significant it's i mean we're we're getting we're putting those dollars to work we're getting great results from it but it's you know i made that point our legislative delegation personally to all of them that you know the ability to index our fuel tax is significant having that ability would be great agreed okay all right with that i'm going to turn it over to tom for our atms update morning tom good morning commissioners it's good to be here today so with for our atms program updates i'll start with where we ended last year when we were here given our presentation so we are in year three of the year three of three of the level of service enhancement the eight million dollars that you authorized to improve and reduce congestion on the roadways that program is focused primarily on corridor retiming and the implementation of intersection video analytics and i've got some updates on those here in just a second and then our pure atms projects uh this is what we reported on last year we've completed the state road 60 project that was a grant from fdot the atcmtd project is is a federal uh project grant projects we will complete that project june 1st of this year and then we've got a final report due to the fhwa at the end of this year and then we've got our pure atms projects along state road 580 crew the road alderman road and i'll provide an update on status of those in just a second we have completed phase one of the emergency vehicle preemption that was the coordinated project with jim fogerty and his team to upgrade our signals with new preemption equipment vehicles with with new preemption equipment where was that phase one primarily is that it was county wide it did covered about half of the the county signals about 214 215 total signals and then we've completed the gis fiber mapping project this was an arpa project in coordination with bts so an update on our intersection video analytics project year three we've implemented about half of the intersections we're on pace to implement the rest of those we've moved into coordination we're starting to collect a lot data with the intersections that we have outfitted a lot of data that's coming in a lot of coordination with law enforcement and if we could move to the overhead for just a second just want to show you this is something that we're really excited about that's possible so working with our asset management team and our operations center we've been able to take all of the intersections and group them onto a single platform i know this may be a little bit hard to see but this is what we are coordinating with the sheriff's office on this is specifically red light violations that's being picked up at the intersections but this allows us to go to a single platform look at a single intersection look at day of the week time of day over a range of time take a look at the number of violations look at the heat maps and share this with the sheriff's office and help them with their directed patrols so this is something that we've been working with them on they're excited about it we're excited about being able to combine all of this data on a single platform instead of having to look at it intersection by intersection well done tom uh commissioner scott thank you mr chairman thank you tom a quick question so the on the video analytics the intersections with video analytics that is they're retiming the lights in real time based on traffic flow yeah the the equipment actually does a number of things it's is our detection system so it provides us all the the vehicle detection at the intersection it does monitor the timing we do have the ability to turn it over to adaptive timing at isolated intersections and i talked about what we did last year at gulf boulevard and bel air beach for events but it also provides us a lot of safety analytics in terms of red light violations wrong way violations speeding violations uh conflicts between motorists and and vulnerable road users like bicyclists and pedestrians so this is a it's it's a very powerful uh piece of equipment that we're using and then that information that you know speeding or red light issues we're not we're not enforcing that we're just handing it to the sheriff and then they they decide what their directed patrols are going to look like i mean they're not red light cameras right correct correct yeah let me let me correct that these are not really back down that just the violations that the system is picking up and we're providing this to the sheriff uh and his team to to be able to target their enforcement activities all right okay thank you well those yellow flashing lights which i thought when they first happened i thought what are we doing and it's the best thing ever you know those left turn yellows you don't have to sit there for a whole cycle he's heard from me on a number of them but um yeah they're they're they're amazing um the more we obviously the more every intersection is unique i guess and you have to look at them that way but well they're they're amazing thank you go ahead all right we can go back hold on i'm sorry commissioner shear did you yeah yes uh thank you tom uh thank you chair um the analytics that's basically your traffic study that you're putting together to determine how to re-time is that what i'm getting it's it's some of it's re-timing some of it's safety issues that are occurring at the intersection that without this we wouldn't know about unless somebody reported it or unless we happen to see it ourselves and then i don't know if i don't think you've been to the slide yet but you're you you're you're studying do you have this system at keen and 60 right now is it was on one of your 20 projects for 26 we have i'll have to confirm i think we have it along keen and i think we have it along several of the intersections on 60 i've always been confused about state road 60 i don't know who do you control the traffic signals at 60 years at state or do you work at state road 60 is a state uh state corridor so the state owns the signals we maintain the signals for the state we coordinate with the city of clearwater uh for the maintenance as well but we have the ability through our agreement with dot to modify the timings for traffic flow well if you could look at belcher as well when you're over that direction belcher in 60 is tough well it's it's terrible i'd really like to see one of your cameras up in that that and um that keen keen in 60 you don't turn right don't turn left you go straight and then you have people making u-turns back through the gas station right and then one other thing i was going to ask you tom um i i asked the psta to give me a uh a street map of us 60 and locate each show me where all their bus stop signs are so we know where buses are stopping apparently we don't really have one that gives accurate detail do you have when you're doing that can you see the buses and in the and their interaction some some of them really close on 60 to the intersection before you get there and i just what's that it drives me crazy and then like specifically keen you know they got one really close to the enters if you're heading uh east on 60 heading heading towards belcher there's like one right there where the wawa is it's like people are in a mad dash to get around and they flying through that intersection because they just hit the accelerator get around the bus it's very i didn't know if you had were able to provide uh recordings of those intersections during like five o'clock when the buses are going through and everybody's trying to get home we don't record any video by policy we do have the ability to to watch and monitor in real time the video analytics if they notice conflicts we will see a a 15 second clip of the conflict so we can see exactly what what's going on and and what movements were occurring but by policy we don't record in any video is it because it's not a good idea or is it used is it possible to do it when we implemented the system 20 years ago the the thought was if we recorded all of our video we would continuously be in uh requested for public records request to provide that video so the decision at the time was to let's keep it real time and it's uh uh it's a that's the response that we provide there's a lot of privacy issues and and everything involved in that that's part it's pretty common practice for these cameras um but the other thing i wanted to add just so you know so uh belcher and 60 there's a major study going on for that and so tom could could give you the background on that there's that's had like nine lives on that study um so and all kinds of different intersection configurations for improvements so if you want to hear more about that he'd be happy to share that well actually i don't want to hold up to me to dump but what i really like to do is try and see if we could get maybe a 30 minute clips of that intersection during peak hours to see how the buses are affecting traffic at these a couple intersections you know just leave the recorder on for a little longer but i don't want to get us in trouble with requests and present they can they can review they can't record well you know and we've been at it i've brought it up several times that certain intersections maybe a half a dozen would even be a big improvement just to get the buses off the road yeah you know just make a little in you know where there's where there's right of way to do it i mean you can't do all of them obviously but the key ones that on major roads that just create such havoc and especially at the rush hours that you're talking about it's like like even the one at countryside where it's a major bus stop they're half off the road right they're not all the way off the road it's like it would just make things so much better uh and say i'm working on that and safer so it'd be nice to have the video so i could show it to people but i'm not allowed to have it so tom go ahead sorry tom thanks we can go back to the uh presentation now so uh again coordination with law enforcement's been significant since we've implemented this program we've also had a lot of good coordination with the schools mapping out our school zones and reduced speed through the school zones and that gets mapped onto any of the uh travel time platforms like ways or or google maps we've shared the data now with fdot and forward pinellas and so they're using the information as well for their own safety analytics i always like to share recent success stories with you guys when i'm when i'm here so last the first year that we implemented this we talked about state road 60 and old coachmen and what we were seeing in relation to pedestrian crossings related to spring training last year i talked about the intersection of bel air and golf and what we were doing with events after hours from the sound and in downtown clearwater this year i want to talk about belcher in nebraska this was the first location that we had our flashing yellow arrow operations um after we implemented that we had several left turn crashes and so one of the benefits of the fya operation is you can modify the time periods during which you allow that to operate and so we really cut back the hours and only allowed permissive left turns during the overnight hours basically from 10 o'clock at night till about five in the morning we've had a lot of requests to consider changing that we recently installed the iva equipment at the intersection we monitored for a couple weeks just to see what sort of conflicts we were having with the left turns we did modify the timings we were expecting to see a lot more conflicts once we modified and allowed more time for the for the permissive left turns actually counterintuitive we actually are seeing like almost a 64 reduction in those left turn conflicts so it was interesting to to go through the analysis we think that was because motors that are familiar with that intersection they knew if they didn't make the left turn arrow that they were going to have to sit through a whole cycle so they were probably taking chances that they shouldn't have taken so hopefully we've made the intersection a little bit safer thank you that's that's a big improvement up there huge the other part of of the 18 million dollar is our signal retiming and so i've included here what we've done in fy25 so we retimed 10 corridors total of 105 intersections these corridors included throughout the county but it was sections of state road 580 sections of us 19 gulf boulevard park boulevard all the way down to 113th street to the south this year we are reporting the county-wide benefits so for all of this re-timing that we did for these 105 intersections total cost was 1.4 million dollars the benefit was almost 134 million dollars uh that's a benefit cost of 94 to one most significantly to the public is the reduced travel time so on a weekly basis on these corridors we've reduced the travel time by over 5 000 hours uh pretty significant uh we do have individual sheets for each of our corridors there's one pagers that we'll provide as part of our quarterly summaries coming up so you have the results like pre and post on like i'm just picked like olmerton road um i got the overall numbers are pretty amazing um stats there i mean you're just trying to translate it to you know to our residents so that because they still say oh it's still you know that but what was it and what is it to do we have any of that kind of yeah absolutely on all of our re-timing corridors we do a before and after to so we can show the level of improvement it'd be nice to see a sheet that kind of generalizes that improvement we do have one page summaries uh for for that will include as part of our quarterly reports and it's for the public and for yourselves i did want to talk specifically about 113th street this this one was the most challenging of our fy25 plans we still showed a good benefit cost of five to one but um right now we don't have any fiber optic cable we don't have any cctv cameras except at the intersection of park boulevard so you know this was a pure re-timing project and we've got a camera at park boulevard where we can see the two adjacent corridors north and south but those close signals also make it a little bit challenging to maintain coordination through that intersection so we're continuing to work on this next year when i have have our update we should have we should be in construction for the atms project along 113th street that'll add fiber optic cable cctv cameras and dms signs along the entire corridor and we'll have our iva equipment at all the intersections as well but of the corridors that we retimed last year this was the most challenging this is our fy26 retiming plan so 12 corridors total 129 intersections and once we complete this fiscal year's worth of retiming we will have come retimed 350 355 of our 400 traffic signals over the past three years so a pretty significant improvement over where we were three years ago and some of these timings are actually being implemented as we speak this is how far along we are with the program this year getting into our pure atms projects i mentioned 113th street so that's currently in design right about 90 percent we do have several projects up north that are should be going to construction here within the next six months alderman road state road 580 and curlew all of these segments are from us 19 to alternate 19 but that will include fiber optic cable cctv cameras at all the intersections and some dms signs i mentioned the emergency vehicle preemption project so we have started phase two with emergency services so this will equip the remaining 214 intersections it'll also equip another 64 emergency vehicles and then we have a couple pilot projects that we're working on uh again focused on helping with traffic flow and getting real-time information to the public the one network is a single platform mapping that ties in with ways in google maps but allows us to report any lane closures so anything related to a construction project any emergency repairs that we have that has to shut down a lane allows a single platform in real time right now we're doing it with information that our control center receives and then we're putting that information out so we're excited about this it's something that fdot has been using and city of tampa have been using so we're excited to see how it works for us and then flow labs is a adaptive timing platform so i've talked the past couple years about our challenges with adaptive timings and what we've tried and what hasn't worked we're finding right now we're very successful at isolated intersections we're testing it right now it's a three-month pilot out on seminal boulevard on a segment that we've already retimed but this creates a digital twin and it lets us know where traffic patterns may be changing that that we may not be picking up and gives us recommendations all the way down to a particular intersections a particular movement at an intersection our control center last year when when i was here we were just getting ready to go from a 24 7 operation to modified times so we actually implemented that june 1st of last year so now we're open seven days a week from 5 30 in the morning until seven o'clock at night we still have we're still meeting all our performance measures so we still track that with our operators this has actually allowed us to take one of our tmc operators and and shift them into more of a intersection video analytic operator and allow them to really focus on all the data that's coming in and help us track safety issues and that's just a shot of the dashboard that we use to track that performance do you want to highlight the partnerships that we've had what we're doing with the atms project doesn't happen in a vacuum a lot of coordination with our partners in st pete and clearwater with their signal systems a lot of internal coordination with safety and emergency services and bts and forward pinellas significant coordination with the sheriff's office and i did want to highlight cutter if you're not familiar with cutter it's the center for urban transportation research they're housed at usf we use them for any of our federal grants where we have to report the before and after performance of of our projects so they've been a great partner as well any questions on a two minutes before i move on or i think we're good okay so this year i did want to highlight some of our recently completed projects throughout the county the old coachman bridge project this is in clear water this runs right along the west side of bay care park so this was a bridge upgrade we've had that bridge closed for just about 24 months it reopened this past summer actually it reopened just after the holidays i'm sorry in in january just before spring training but the phillies did lose two years worth of spring training because of this bridge replacement project so we we got to know them very well uh worked closely with the city of clearwater to help out with the uh the spring training events but that is has been completed this one actually won a couple of apwa awards and that's why i wanted to bring it to your attention so project of the year both at the local level and the state level for structures so very proud of what was the original time schedule for that bridge i think we had it set for 18 months and we met that schedule yeah that's nice and it's nice when we have a bridge project that is planned schedule read constructed and kind of done on a timely basis um that's the clear water difference oh you know i knew that was waiting there right um but yeah that's great um so hopefully hopefully that that new one up there in uh ridge more a ridge ridge more yeah that bridge will be similar it will yeah okay thanks ellie promises all right uh pinel's trail south gap phase one uh this gets us one step closer to completing that 75 mile loop so we've got the south gap phase two left that's currently in design right now but we did complete this one this is uh from 126 avenue down to omerton road uh so a relatively short segment but again highlighting it because it gets us that much closer to completing that uh that trail loop throughout the county 22nd avenue south this is a project that's been around for quite a while i've been with county for 20 years so we've been working on this in some form or fashion for about 15 this is uh down south it overlaps cities of gulfport and cities of saint pete so we're very happy to get this part of it done this section here is from 49th street to 34 so this is a saint pete section but we were able to add some capacity improvements added a left turn into third good marshall middle school to help with school arrival and dismissal times uh we were able to upgrade the trail crossing there at the skyway trail and add sidewalks on on both sides and upgrade the road and upgrade all the drainage features we've currently moved into the west part of the project in the city of gulfport and we're currently upgrading similar upgrades and upgrading all of their signals from master or from span wires to master i'd like to personally say thank you for that um for years um there were no sidewalks along the side because you have homes on the south side of the street um you have homes and some businesses on the north side of the street so even when the children walked to school they were walking in someone's yard um this area is prone for unfortunately accidents because there was no light prior to the post office coming there there was no light from 34 to 49 so it was a perfect strip to see how fast you could go down there um but it looks much better um traffic isn't as congested as it used to be because you've opened up those lanes um so just want to say thank you good project thank you and then tristan mentioned east lake road during his presentation you approved a grant application about a month ago and you had some questions for the east lake road corridor so i want to include a slide here just to summarize everything we're doing on that east lake road project so uh the pdne study that goes from trinity to curlew the various bridge projects that we have that will be upgraded um prior to any overall widening the intersection work that we're doing at east lake and tarpon woods that should be underway here in the next couple months prior to the bridge construction starting on ridgemore and then we are just about done with design on on an interim improvement at east lake and keystone which is in coordination with the fire station up there and we'll add a left turn lane for the softball fields along old keystone road as well so uh this will also add triple left turns eastbound and northbound from keystone actually this is our most congested intersection i know somebody said belcher at 60 but i would argue that this is this is our most challenging intersection you waited till i left the room to bring up east lake you want me to go back no no no i'm good i'll look at it and i'll come back later go ahead i will tell you we we had a good meeting with secretary hall um yesterday or the day before um and they're they're committed to working even on this section with us and so it was it was real productive so more to come on that but they had some ideas about other grinding opportunities and things that that they could do even on in this quarter so we'll see i think i think the light the light the light timing and the intersection improvements will make a huge difference um you know without even you know the white the road widening piece because that's a that's another hemisphere of cost of course we're hoping as well we're hoping to see some improvement with with these can you talk about that left turn lane at um at um keystone yeah for east lake at keystone so we're at about 90 that in addition to providing the left turn lane for the softball fields east of the intersection by the fire station this will also add triple left turn lanes at the intersection eastbound to northbound what is that the one on the west side as well yeah okay and that's design you're talking about right in design we're we're close to 90 complete three lanes is it going to lengthen it as well or the queue or no yeah we're taking it as far we're taking taking it back to the first meeting opening so maximizing the available capacity out there thanks to did want to provide a grants update the projects that i highlighted all of them had the grant funding associated with it so we are aggressive about applying for grants we appreciate the commission support when we bring those to you um most of what we do um you know we we target our grants and we've been pretty successful at at obtaining the grants i did want to highlight what we have going on in transportation specifically here coming up so the ipad you approved about a month ago executed that contract with fhwa um the patty and pass we i want to highlight these because pass is on your agenda for next week patty will be coming up in sometime in may or june but we were able to take the 18 million dollars that you authorized and in 2024 applied for these grants through fhwa in 2024 got awarded in 2024 just now getting to execution but that took that 18 million dollars and turned it into close to 25 million dollars for similar type improvements that we're using to to address the congestion um and then i did want to highlight the fema grants that that we currently have underway um we've been successful with our span wire to mast arm upgrades so we've put in another package for those um but we've also with the storms that we had with helene and milton and what we experienced in transportation out on gulf boulevard with the flooded cabinets we have put in a pretty significant grant for cabinet elevation and have some some innovative ideas if we get awarded that for how we can address those type of storms in the future and protect our infrastructure and then finally almost done here i did want to highlight our move safe group we haven't talked about them in the past but i think you've probably seen them out at events throughout the community so this is our public outreach group specifically for transportation they focus on pedestrian and bicycle safety scooter safety so they'll go out to schools they'll go to events they'll do helmet fittings and provide helmets to anybody any children that need them we also partner with pinellas hope and the sheriff's office and go do safety presentations for adults whose primary means of transportation is either as a pedestrian or a bicyclist and provide high visibility uh safety devices for them we talk about the the need to make sure that you're seen when you're out there make sure you're visible make sure you've got your head on a swivel and you're not relying on somebody else to see you so i did want to to highlight this group the uh the heads up phones down uh sticker there in the middle i've got stickers for all of you this is a series of seven that they've developed and it's really geared towards kids when we go out to meet with them but it really focuses on if you're a pedestrian or bicycle or on a scooter you know put your devices down take your earbuds out keep your head up make sure that you're seen and can be seen so like i said um did want to highlight this group um they try to meet the people where they are that picture down in the center uh is was an overnight operation coordinated with the pinellas county sheriff's office out on armerton road uh very close to where we're building our new campus but we've had a series of of fatalities uh related to pedestrians and bicycles so we partnered with the sheriff's office to go out there um outfit bikes if they're willing to talk to us and provide devices to the people right where they were if you happen to see them out at any event uh please say hi to them they're friendly i promise and then just in summary uh again uh we're maintaining our program goals we've aligned we've shown you during the presentation how we align with the the county's strategic plan uh the new technologies implementation is still on track um and we've shown you the performance metrics and anytime we come up with something we've got performance metrics that tie back to the strategic plan uh that we're either monitoring ourselves or we're reporting to you or we're sharing with the public and uh i would like to thank matt spore for his his assistance on that so we like you matt with that i'll happy to answer happy to answer any additional questions you have thank you for your time it was a big deal um so down in clearwater um like off of myrtle down down in that uh area just south of the the two one-way roads that you know cross to the beaches and stuff there's an area down there where there's um the trail does not have a stop sign okay and i was wondering how that how that how that's i'm assuming that's kind of like a little pilot area because there's i don't know of any other place on the trail system that doesn't have them stopping at the intersection i was wondering how that does how it's doing do we have more encounters more problems more accidents uh less yeah i'd have to check into that commissioner um i'm sorry it's just a small area it's not a large area but it is a several crossings through there that it says the crossing does not stop you know the trail crossing does not stop um and the reason i ask about it is because it seems like wherever we have stop signs they don't they're not adhered to anyway um so it almost makes you think that we should just make sure that we have the cars stopping and let them do what they do anyway um which whether it's bikes mostly bikes um e-bikes or whatever else we have uh going on there and again i'm not trying to be overly critical of that i'm just saying if it's not they're not doing it anyway some do some yeah this this has been a topic um with ford pinellas and their bicycle pedestrian advisory committee um and we've we've been asked to take a look at specifically some of our locations to see if we would be uh in support of changing the traffic control uh we've got a concern of going from something that's more restrictive to less restrictive so we do take a little more critical eye before we'd recommend a change like that um but we i understand your point we we see that we're we're the um yeah and obviously the e-bite things really it's been heating up and it still is and i think most of that's just going to be education in school systems um so one of my little pet peeves that it always goes on deaf ears so that's okay i'm going to say it again anyway um several years ago we changed the way our trail traffic uh traverses the trail in other words we've made it more like roads right so everybody stays to the right regardless of whether you're a person in a wheelchair whether you're an e-bike whether you're a bicyclist you're you're always to the right so they're intermingling well we always complain about bicycle paths on the main roads being close to cars and the speed differences are are significant and then we go ahead and do that on our own trails so on our trails we've got i mean i have so many people that have complained about that change and i i'm just wondering uh how that's going um in in the perspective of of why are we doing it that way versus going back to the old way of doing it which kept the slower folks to the one side back and forth and the faster and we're having a greater and greater difference in that in that speed god bless you bless you bless you um so just you know just a thought on on your part yeah and i was part of a lot of those discussions and and collectively we made the decision to go to the keep right philosophy um i think a lot of it was based on what we were seeing at the time with with trail activity and for the most part people were keeping to the right as if there was a center line out there um and just the peds and bikes were mixing i know we had sections of the trail where we concentrated the peds and bikes or the pedestrians to the center the bikes were on the outside um we got a lot of complaints about that as well and so um just in the interest of again going back to the point people are going to do what they're going to do we thought it was best to let's treat this you know as as if you're in a car as if you're part of the transportation system and the thought is always to keep right i figured it had to be some transportation person behind that uh effort because every you know we just stick to the right baby stick to the right anyway um i just think i think it was a uh you know for whatever it's worth a major mistake you know again we haven't even we don't even get calls or you know from people who get nicked by bikes you know riding by somebody that's walking or somebody that might even be in a wheelchair for crying out loud um they're on the same place where the e-bikes are going over there's 20 miles an hour um it's just you know again i i know each there's no perfect scenario because we only have so much width on the on the trail and then of course you have the crossing when you have the walk areas only and you have then you're crossing over because you're going from the right only over anyway um so i just throw that into the old category of um you know uh maybe we ought to talk more about it um but anyway happy yes commissioner scott thank you mr chairman so you know i use the trail pretty pretty regularly a couple times a week and um so you know i've got a lot of experience with the old system and the way it is now it works i mean there's pluses and minuses too it's kind of a bit of a balloon squeeze either way you go with it but you know the the flow of traffic just seems to find its own natural rhythm the real dis disruptor in this whole thing has been has been the e-bikes and the scooters and that's really been when you just had you know bicycles and pedestrians and and runners it wasn't really that big of a deal probably whichever system you had but the real disruptor has really been the e-bikes and um and that continues to be you know continues to be an issue i mean i know the sheriff's been paying a little more attention that some of the local police department's been paying a little bit more attention to uh to trail safety um and rules of the road it would be interesting though and and if we had any uh any of this atms system on the trail at some point where we can monitor where some of those conflict points are i don't know if that's envisioned at some point in the future or not or what that or what the price tag for that would even be but um that might help us make some smarter decisions in the future about how we manage that trail traffic in the future and and there was there was a bill in tallahassee this past legislative session to regulate e-bikes that did pass but it got greatly watered down it's really it's not really all that probably going to be all that effective so that may be some discussion that we you know want to have here at the local level to see if there's something that we that we want to do locally um because the one in tallahassee is not really going to do anything so that's a good point yeah and you know again we've been talking about either or and to your point either or has pluses and minuses to it and um it seems like there are some areas where maybe it should be the or versus the either you know it should be like in very heavy trafficked areas which are pretty much maybe half a dozen of those spots around the the uh the trail system maybe it needs to be thought of a little differently where you can have a little different system that does keep because you're trying to really slow traffic down through there not even like out on some of those areas there's no you only you look right and left you see nobody but there's some areas that it's just jam-packed but anyway okay enough of that any anybody else have any questions for tom before we wrap up tom how's the atms system paid for please it is paid through the uh the ninth cents so that is um gas tax funding but there's the ninth cent and it's dedicated specifically to the atms the atms system thank you we just i think we just took care of that recently too so yes thank you thank you appreciate it okay now from above ground to below ground yeah he does he does have both but we got to talk meters don't let me forget meters now two meters on a system that up in palm harbor i keep hearing about it go ahead good morning jeremy wall director of utilities um first thing i need to do is i increase my slide deck because apparently we can get more um that's what i thought but so i when i put this uh presentation together i really uh wanted to make sure i gave enough depth to kind of give you full context of things but keep it high enough so that you really uh the intent this morning is just to give you a broad overview certainly i could talk for hours about individual projects or or specific uh parts of our system the plants the pipes etc so feel free to dig in if you want but i'm really going to try and keep it high level um in preparation for like very uh teed us up that this is in preparation to going into what i'm going to present in the budgets in a couple months so we're going to go through uh i wanted to give you a a state of the assets uh where we where are we at um then how we're planning to address our cip program and deficiencies in our assets as well as a very broad high level picture of our overall financial and then just to kind of close it out with what we're doing on the customer service front because it's definitely a topic on our minds so really uh i've broken this into two different sections here a water section and a sewer section and through the benefits of the asset management program which i know robert mills came and presented on that a couple weeks ago we have really been able to get a better picture of where we stand with our assets so what you have here is our business risk exposure scores for our sewer system and i've broken it out there kind of with the the plants the sewer plants our sewer pump stations and our sewer pipes and overall we are in a good spot with our sewer infrastructure you see some red on there um we call that failing but that's failing our expectation of the asset that doesn't mean the asset is broken or the building is falling over but it's not performing to the level we want it to perform so we've called it failed for us and that puts it into our cip um you see the kind of the orange or things that are on our radar and the yellow things we're monitoring um and also to point out here uh the red portions are not all all these things that we have to fund we carry insurance to to mitigate that risk so we can continually balance you know mitigating the risk first passing the risk off to the insurance company so overall from our sewer assets uh we're in a very uh pretty good stance so how do we develop the business risk exposure so we went through and looked at the age of every single asset we have in our sewer system and what you'll see here even though this looks bad um the next slide will show you that even though the things are old does it mean that they're falling apart so the age is one part of the story and that goes into the the risk score as well as the condition so you can see that the conditions of our sewer assets are overall better than the industry for the age of our system we've done a good job as an as a utility in the last 30 years of making sure our things are maintained that we're doing rehabilitation projects on time and on schedule so they don't get past the point of being able to rehabilitate doing liners and different things so those two factors kind of work together the remaining useful life and the condition also a point on the remaining useful life the for the sewer system from the day you put an asset a sewer asset in the ground it is getting worse and it is getting worse on a curve right so it's not a linear degradation sewer assets fail because of the toxic environment that they're in so we've been migrating towards better materials like plastic materials degrade less than metal materials lining concrete structures because concrete is highly susceptible to the gases in the sewer environment so we've been modernizing how we've maintained these assets over the last 20 years in a similar story for the water assets you will see a much higher risk exposure for our water system and that is not because of the condition or the life of the pipes but our sewer our water assets are more important to us so we assign arbitrarily a higher risk value to a large water main because it's a life and safety issue not only a convenience of having potable water but you won't have fire water you don't have sanitation type things so we assign a higher importance value to the wire water system than we do to the sewer system sewer you can always go and pump away from people water you have to provide to them so we're using these risk in the water system to really monitor so if there's a project in or in or around a high risk pipe so a large force main a force main to the beaches seawall construction uh near our water pipes we take it we scrutinize those projects to a higher degree uh because it's a it's a riskier pipe from our standpoint are all water lines pressurized are they all all water lines are pressurized not all sewer lines are pressurized um from a remaining useful life uh this is a better curve better curve than our sewer assets for a couple issues when i i talked about the pipe degradation um but also um water assets have typically been built with better materials so a metal pipe in the water system can last 50 70 100 years um i just did a preparing for this presentation tomorrow i just said what's the oldest water pipe in the united states and it's pre-civil war cast iron pipe in philadelphia it's pretty routine in boston philadelphia new york that you would find wooden water pipes so literally a pipe made out of a tree trunk they just hollowed out the tree trunk and they built miles of pipe that way um so they are still around we still find them not here in panellas county but we still find them in america so water assets last a long time um and overall the condition of our water assets are in fairly good shape so we had in the early 2000s a galvanized pipe replacement that got rid of a lot of the galvanized and metal pipes and a lot of the neighborhoods we continually have water pipe replacement projects that are go on uh every time a road is improved we end up having to move the water mains and so it gets a brand new material as part of that and that's currently ongoing right now on us19 we're getting brand new water pipe up the quarter of us19 that'll be a 70 80 year pipe that's going in the ground and then i added just for reference the reclaimed water assets i know i i present on the reclaimed water a couple weeks ago but just so you can see it in common language with the water and the sewer assets much better shape on the reclaim side much newer system so then i wanted to to give you guys some insight into how we use that information and are building our cip plan we currently plan for a six year cip although we have 10 years of projects built out back back in our minds um but we don't just consider the asset risk so that risk core is a key factor but it is not the only factor we continually monitor customer service um obligations complaints areas of water discoloration or pressure issues we're we build in the customer level of service arguments uh we also are trying to modernize and make our our plants our pump stations our electrical equipment our computer systems more efficient and more modern uh and of course we have lots of regulatory concerns in the water and sewer industry and every year feds or the state come out with a new rule and then we have to go and address that um resiliency past hurricanes have shown us that we are fairly resilient we did have a couple outages but overall compared to the impact of the storm we had the water and sewer system held up pretty well but we did identify several key facilities and pipes pump stations especially on the beaches you saw funding requests 31 pump stations that we need to uh make more resilient and more able to withstand the high winds and the waves and the last bullet there just capacity and future demand uh one thing if if you take away with anything from today um unlike some of our neighbors hillsborough county pasco county sarasota county manatee county we are not in a growth mode horizontally most of our growth is infill and in vertical which adds some demand but not nearly the type of demand on a water and sewer system that our neighboring counties are experiencing so overall we're comfortable that we have adequate capacity for our future demand for the next foreseeable future that doesn't mean we're not planning for things we're not evaluating if we had to expand a treatment plant what would we do how would we do it so we're we're looking at a 50-year view uh but in the 10-year 20-year view we're not we don't have capacity um a breakdown of our cip so this is our current proposed cip that you'll see presented with the budget i just wanted to give you guys a flavor of what we're spending the money on when we come and bring this to you you can see a majority of our projects are in asset renewal so those are those things that are those red and yellow and orange on the risk curves that we do need to replace and renew some of those are rehabilitation projects some of those replacing kind like projects a few of them are pipe upsizing and upgrades another thing to point out there is you see the relocation projects 12 million that is just fiscal year 27 of relocating pipes for other people's projects so as a utility that's underground every time there's a roadway project public works dot or any of the cities we have to move our stuff out of the way just like spectrum and wow and every all the cable everyone has to move out of the way of the stormwater pipes because the roadway is as big as it can be and we have to get our stuff out of the way for them so we have to allocate a significant portion of our cip budget every year to address these relocation projects um and it's not chump change you know i would love to spend that on other projects because sometimes those are very good pipes that we're moving five feet over you're taking a perfectly good pipe in a perfectly good condition and i got to move it five feet to get out of the way of a storm structure or traffic signal or lots of other things that go on with the roadway projects another thing to point out here uh of our 82 total projects um in fiscal 27 67 million dollars will be for projects that are in construction so out of the total 92 million dollar budget 30 million towards the design and feasibility type stuff um and then 20 67 million of that will go strictly to the construction of the new project so we are moving the cip forward we are producing out the projects another view um of the the same kind of information uh both for fiscal 27 and for our six-year cip that you'll see proposed um and a breakdown by which type of assets so a majority are in the pipelines but our sewer plants and pump stations are are fairly equal importance to us and you can see what the remaining balance is just 10 or 15 percent and that's pretty steady between just next year and the six-year plan so it's not like we have to address all of our pipelines this year and then we'll be good for 10 years it's a pretty uh consistent breakdown of the pie over every year um so so i'm thinking about like the you know backlog if you will of projects to kind of get us to a normal stage whatever that is i don't know if you do that in in the utility area i mean if you i feel like it's almost like a bubble right so that we can get it compressed down to a more manageable normal level every year and and again i'm not i don't know about bonding versus that kind of thing but um is it a availability of construction work to get accelerated is it a cost that's the it's creating you know the backlog because it's the expense that we're talking about is it people that can do the work or so it's probably a combination of all those things one thing um i'll talk pump stations here so you see pump stations are roughly a third of the pie or 20 of the pie we renew out of our 300 pump stations 10 of those a year i got that number right so we do 30 stations a year every year for 30 years and then we start over again right so they're always being renewed it's not i could do them all tomorrow and then we'd be good for 30 years there's always a cycle of these assets are decaying over time at a parabolic rate or you know exponential so that being the case they're they're kind of steady it's a steady amount of that would not be a candidate for bonding because we're bonding to me transfers ownership to future generations and they're going to have their own correct every things that are probably more um and i would i i would say pipelines are a similar boat to that right so pipelines are continual renewal type projects that you have to just keep up and maintain like the oil in your car you got to keep changing the oil in your car or one day it will stop the pipelines are a similar boat things that are more generational are sewer plants so when we build a new clarifier a new tank for the reclaim system a new pump system at the the water treatment plant those are 15 20 30 year assets that need to last that long because you're basing all of your other investment decisions around that specific asset operating the way it's supposed to um so we have identified different types of projects that would be more you know generational type projects versus ones that are more cyclic routine replacement um i'm not going to call it maintenance because it's definitely cip you're definitely doing something new but we we've kind of separated out what's a good candidate for for bonding and and you're going to have that as part of your rate study yes so there there is a bonding component when we come up on rates okay okay thank you but but jeremy talk about capacity issues i mean like just take you know your you know seminal that that that area down there if you're looking at that the capacity big capacity projects that we've talked about how to you know how do you have kind of an example of of what the issues are to get us to resolution for sso's in a particular area because you have four different programs going on down there that was targeted to reduce the sso's so it's and that's a that's a good example um because it's a multi-pronged problem right so right now our our sewer plant uh is built i'm going to look at my staff but 35 permitted 35 mgd 33 mgd million gallons a day is what the plan is is permitted for to treat sewage water and in the peak of the storms we got 70 right in a day right our plant is sized to accommodate 70 but all of that is from an ini so you can continue to build capacity of the plant right which we have strategies around doing some of those things um but also you could stop that ini from coming into the system so those are the projects that barry mentioned so i may not have to build bigger pipes if i can stop the extra water from coming in right both of those are capital funds both of those are sewer projects it's a different approach to solving the same problem and so we're balancing all of those to make sure in areas where we need a stretch of capacity so i need to upsize this pipe from a 10 inch to a 12 inch i'll do that but i'll also go work in a neighborhood and and go in line all the pipes in a neighborhood or go look at a lot of replacement programs to stop the water from even getting to the pipe that's constrained from a 10 inch to a 12 inch so it's a multi-pronged solution and both of those solutions keep the water from getting to the plant which now i don't have to go build another treatment train another clarifier plant project because the water is not physically getting there all that all that intrusion then is really in the non-pressurized system do we get intrusion into the pressurized system too no i mean i'm talking about the sewer side not directly the way you're phrasing it so although all the water that gets into the gravity system ends up at a pump station and that pump station pumps through the pressurized pipes so we do have pressurized pipes that are over capacity because of because the gravity system is collecting too much water but there's not water coming into the pressurized pipe right good question except for when they well even then if water goes out of the pressurized pipe it doesn't go in as we know i'm talking fast you know slow me down or stop me if you need to so i'm the next couple slides are as we sit today and we had to base our ocip program on as we sit today knowing that we're about to embark on a rate study and when we do the rate study we're going to think we're going to talk about overall rates overall costs our total cip program potential borrowing potential funding from feds from the state from grants all those different things will come into play when we do the rate study starting this spring so none of these numbers are meant to alarm but it's just as we sit today when i open my bank account i have my financial team tell me where do we sit this is where i set so currently in our six-year cip we have identified 629 million dollars worth of projects we have funded budget of 287 million that's what my bank account funds today so there's a balance need of 342 that doesn't mean i need to go find 342 million we could reshuffle the projects we could reevaluate priorities we could uh look at different options stop ini so i don't have to do capacity type projects but as i sit today that's currently what's in the cip plan i put a gray box there for proposed additional revenue um this could be borrowing right so we could issue bonds we could get bank loans um we could have legislative funding there's lots of ways to to make up that 200 million dollars but that still leaves 119 that we're not sure what we would do with none of that affects my fiscal 27 projects it'll come all of those projects will be budgeted 100 and funded 100 out of our current funds uh but this really affects the long term you know and i have to look at the you know a six ten year window because i'm projecting how rates will generate revenue and then the projects get aligned up for that so this is what we're what we're facing um and i put together three scenarios these are i could have put together 300 scenarios so don't take any put any weight to how these are shaped out but scenario one is essentially if i got borrowing and um some additional revenue rates legislative some other revenue source and i could do all 99 projects that are in the six-year cip or most of them a scenario two would be rates stay the same but i borrow some money up to 200 million dollars ish and then a scenario three would be rates stay the same no borrowing this is what i could be what i could accomplish um and you know don't get stuck on 77 you know 77 projects because depending on which projects we do we could do more smaller ones or less projects and do a big couple big ones but these are the kind of analyses we're going to prepare for you as part of the rate study so you'll be able to see options such as these to help inform your decisions as you're as you're moving forward on what do we want to do with rates or should we approve borrowing should we do we have enough intergenerational projects to warrant a borrow um the answer is yes but we'll prove that to you on that previous page on the previous page um is there a way to know how much of each of those columns you you were talking about the needed the projects how did you phrase it that um um each of those each of those categories um you talked about them being uh like uh plants versus distribution system yes the the ones that are eligible so to speak for consideration for bonding in in your in your terms that we're using today is there like a breakout of that each of those columns it tells me like out of that 629 million we're talking about 500 million is distribution or 500 million is is our plants so to get just to give you a ballpark um this chart tells you you know about 20 percent 25 percent of those projects uh of the plant projects and even some of the pump station projects which would probably be intergenerational bondable projects the pump station but and then the sewer plant the green one yes those are the two areas generally yes i mean some of the building projects right so a building if we build a new facility a new office building a new hurricane emergency building that would also fall in that kind of category and as commissioners as you you know as they they bring these forward and these options available for you to discuss um during the race study you know the internally you know jeremy comes in and says you know i'm going to put out 200 million dollars of projects and our cip team says well you've never produced more than 100 million dollars in projects and so how are you going to to your point how are you going to get there how are you going to actually deliver on that and a lot of things change so it may be kind of an inner solution we don't have to solve this in year one one bonding issue it may be a pattern over years that we look at that and adjust that according to both delivery what happens when we try to get the i and i out versus doing capital and all of those things so it'll be kind of an ongoing work to determine getting them to that 600 million yep so i've been i've mentioned borrowing a couple times um and i thought it would be appropriate just to show you just some context about what that means so currently our borrowing capacity is about 400 million dollars and our rate consultant's going to verify that and we'll get the right experts in here to tell us that um i would not stand here and propose a 400 million dollar budget or borrow um because then you have no excess capacity if something else happens and you needed money right so you'd never use your entire credit line um but maybe we would ask for 200 million 250 million somewhere in that ballpark um just to balance out those projects again we're going to hire an expert to come help us narrow in on that number and then give you guys some options to think about but to give you some context about what borrowing means and i know we talk about we don't want to raise rates because we don't want to affect the customer's bill borrowing also affects the customer's bill so every 50 million dollars that we borrow at a five percent rate adds two to three dollars a month per bill right so that's an impact to the customer even though we're borrowing and if we needed to borrow 225 million dollars um you might see a ten dollar twelve dollar per month increase to the bill just on your debt service payments hold that thought commissioner scott thank you uh mr chair jeremy you said we have roughly 400 million in borrowing capacity who makes that determination so i'm going to look at my finance expert you got to have coverage limits when you borrow so you got to have 1.25 percent as a minimum coverage level you can independent upon if you have 1.5 percent then you get a better rate you know so that's what they're really looking at is your revenue and your ability to borrow against that revenue strength and i guess i'm sure you'll you'll bring us all of these uh different scenarios but if we didn't borrow and just increase the monthly rate two to three dollars a month what does that give us as well yep we would have that analysis and some of the options and um it'll be hard because i don't want to present a hundred options because you can't choose between 100 options but we'll narrow down into you know here here's a rate heavy option here's a borrow heavy option here's a balance option here's a we do nothing option and and i want to make sure i'm clear um we can reshuffle the deck on the projects right so there's also a level of risk tolerance and risk insurance coverage that we may mitigate some of that risk or we may say we're okay god forbid a six inch force main breaks i can't have a 30 inch force main break right and so you rebalance because right now we're under the we're working through a six inch force main break is just as bad as a 30 inch now we know it's the impact will be bigger but from a utility standpoint um we're operating under that kind of concept that's how our cap is built right and so we can rebalance those kind of decisions based on a risk tolerance so what what are we willing to accept as a utility uh at your direction and i and again to barry's point we're going to talk about different things in our penny the penny picture later you can do we we you know every every year there's penny issues right where we we need more dollars to do things you said if you borrow it can increase rates if you don't borrow and you have to you raise that to what commissioner scott said you raise the rates it costs if you use penny money for capital it doesn't raise the cost to the to the because they're already paying for it through your penny the residents are paying for it through the penny one way or another it's just a matter where we want to send our penny right and so we have and again i know philosophically we've always used it for you know public works and we have our own enterprise fund over here i'm just saying if you're looking for money that we're not paying borrowing fees on and we commissioner we can we can certainly do that and we will you know have as part of that conversation it's a little bit different with utilities because they're both retail and wholesale within communities the communities get you know those back and so are we taking it out of you know the county-wide or are we taking it out of the allocation you know so we but we can we can look at that it's easier when we do like roads because roads go through the municipalities and things like that um and our sewer system isn't necessarily you know reaches everyone but to to the other point you can also do a borrowing and we can do a rate study three years from that and do another borrowing and and you can kind of see the success of programs or a combination of all those and then do a second borrowing uh based upon the outcomes that they achieved with the with the first amount but go back to the point you were just you just said something about our money versus county distribution you know so we take 60 off the top and that's for the county and and we largely use that for the road networks and for all the unincorporated that was the argument between about getting 60 percent correct that we were using some on the road system and so it goes there's a there there's even an argument there right about how much and how you do that distribution um when you get into the sewer system it's it's as you know it's a hodgepodge of systems that are married together that create the county system um so we'd have we just need to look at that yeah okay it's ultimately it's your decision um but we'll we'll put those scenarios together and have that discussion um so don't get razzled or or wowed by this graph uh this is just an example of how we're going to present information to you through the rate study so we just picked one random scenario uh this happens to be for the water fund um the bars going up vertically there are the cost for the water so we have to own it maintain it the blue is we purchase water from tampa bay water so we have a retail cost that we pay to buy the water and redistribute and then green would be capital improvements um the green horizontal line would be our anticipated revenues if the rates do not change right that's current today's approved rates hold out through the term you can see the the vertical bars go above what our current rates support again we could reshuffle the deck we could reprioritize maybe tampa bay water will you know we'll be better our conservation efforts and buy less water uh the blue horizontal line represents what a borrow could look like i think that's 200 million dollars um it's what we just used for not for the analysis but what you see there is even if we borrow uh the yellow star our costs with the carrying capacity of the loan or the sort of the debt service payments on the loan still eclipse the line so in this scenario with our current cip portfolio existing rates borrowing doesn't get get there so if we kept rates the same we would just need to reshuffle our deck and understand our costs and and and push different things out and then you see the red star is that's the end of the borrow we've reached the borrowing capacity you've hit a wall there um you have to do something different uh very similar and there's lots of assumptions that go into this right so we you know inflation and what's the cost of tampa bay water is going to inflate or deflate uh our operational costs go up down etc but a very similar story on the sewer fund um except you see that if the rates stayed steady and we borrowed that we actually never the cost never exceed the borrow amount but you still hit a wall out in 2032 at some point you reach the end of your borrow capacity you have to make a different decision so nothing to take away from this chart other than this is how we're going to present information to you when we do the rate study so you'll be able to see how these different options play together how a different balance of options would go together and then we can talk about how to make decisions from there um i did want to spend just a brief moment talking about our customer service because i know this is a topic of high importance to us um we've been tracking our total phone calls for many years and i showed here from 2019 up through uh last year and we currently have 18 service reps that answer phones full-time that's their full-time job is to answer phone calls from customers assist them with their issues on a daily basis and you can see that we were holding at an appropriate level of staffing from fiscal 20 up until the end of 24 and then when the hurricanes came first of all we had the drought then we had rate increases we had ami meter projects and then we had hurricanes so all high customer impact events going on simultaneously or in consecutive order and we've seen our call volumes spike significantly uh i don't have to tell you you guys are aware of the constraints we were under under the call center um wait times hold times people not being able to get through um even with the high wait times our average call time is still six minutes our goal is eight minutes so once we get on the phone with a rep we resolve your issue and we have high satisfaction it's getting to the rep so you've heard me say um many of you have heard me say that i i'm trying diligently to find a way to shave off 30 000 calls a year or if it maintains this level then i need a different scaling model for my staff because i'm not going to be able to sustain 175 000 calls with 18 people it's just it's beyond the work capacity of the people so we are looking diligently on methods to shave off that 70 or 30 000 calls a year we've implemented some ai techniques um just went out in february we turned on a ai chat bot to our web page so now if you go to the panellas county utilities web page and in one month we've had more than a thousand i guess six weeks at this point more than a thousand people interacting with the chat bot answering their questions which you know that's a thousand calls that didn't come into the call center so if you extrapolate that over 12 months maybe that's 12 000 calls that get diverted therefore i'm halfway to my goal of getting rid of 30 000 calls we're also implementing ami technology or ai technologies into our phone system so when you call we can direct your call directly to someone who can help you with that issue even if i have a i need to make a payment i need to pay a bill i need to turn on my service turn off my service having the ai agent ai agents do that for us so you don't even have to deal with the person you can just enter in your account number or better yet the ai knows your phone number knows what account you're talking to you can pay your bill turn on your water turn off your water automatically we're building that technology now it'll go in later this year we've purchased it we're just building the connections to their accounts so we're working hard before i come back to you and propose a staffing change like i got to scale up we're trying these technology solutions and really striving to shave off that the peak there um and maybe since the hurricanes have subsided the ami meter project is complete maybe this will naturally come back down as well jeremy uh commissioner nowicki has a question thank you chair uh thank you so far jeremy i appreciate all the info the call time you said is six minutes does that include hold time no that is once you are picked up on the phone with an agent what's the hold time before you talk to a rep it varies so um lunch hours that is the peak hour mondays and fridays are always the highest or the days after a holiday um there are times when there is zero wait time so it varies on a per day it i've seen it as high as 40 minutes and as low as zero and as low as zero right so you know thank you i guess we understand that you know at lunchtime that's when people you know that's when i take care of my personal business and i call the bank during my lunch and that's when they're taking care of their utility problems during lunch um but i don't have an extra 13 people to stick on the lunch hour all 18 service reps are active during that period yeah i guess i mean it would just be like beneficial to know you know to like staffing right like what the average hold time is because that's really you got a great average call time of six minutes but like the average hold time is you know five in minutes or something we have that data and you have to take that data with a grain of salt because you also have call abandonment so i would have waited on hold for 15 minutes but i got mad after six minutes so i hung up so that counts as a six minute wait time or you would have been on for 10 minutes so we have the data he's got to to commissioner newiki's point we know that the wait times um where people are dropping off are unacceptable i mean to just acknowledge it we have a problem and he's working to try to resolve that problem um because if somebody shouldn't have to wait 40 minutes to get through to an agent okay so we just need to own it and and know that we're trying to work to improve that and you know if jeremy can't through these methods you know then we we've got to figure out how to meet that customer expectation because it's it's not right um and for the people and i say that because i want to acknowledge that for anybody that's called in they're like that's not my experience i see the same things that come to you and people are mad you know and so we've got to fix this we do acknowledge it when um persons call in is there like a prompt sometimes when you call places it will say um your expected hold time is two minutes or is is that something within the system for persons they're calling or just you know places them on hold and plays really nice elevator music it's there um we've gone back and forth with turning the functionality on and off because the times are not always correct so it tells you you're going to wait for six minutes 20 minutes later you're like dude you told me three times six minutes right so then you've created more uh anxiety and problem than just saying you know you'll be taking the next available time um with our current technology and we're working with the our bts controls the whole phone system so we're working on how to improve that but i don't have a i mean if a sunshine and rainbows answer for that one i'm sorry if it worked properly if that system worked the way that it should then it you know puts you in order in rank because i know i've been placed on whole and i've had that system when i've called certain places to conduct business and sometimes i get picked up on even before you know the time that they've designated i've not yet experienced where i was passed the whole time but i could see where that could happen because the client may be uh may need a little bit more assistance or something like that in the rotation for calls but i was just wondering because i know when i hear that that lets me know if i need to if i can stay on hold because i have something else coming up or if it tells me like 10 minutes i'm out of here i'll call back later um and then sometimes some systems will say um what their lower call volume time is trying to encourage you maybe to call during those hours versus like midday more like you're saying lunch period time or whatever where you have a high call volume we evaluate even the types of calls that are coming in so i know if i'm calling about a high bill or a leak or i pay my bill or i turn my water off turn my water on there's a project on my road i want to know about it there's a leak in my neighborhood i need to tell someone about it so we're we're even breaking down the data like that to automatically send people into different buckets so that if there's a break on the road i don't want to wait 40 minutes for you to talk to a rep to tell me my pipe is leaking i want you to be able to tell me that immediately we need to divert that call to the people that can fix the pipe not to the customer service rep i need my maintenance team to hear the pipe is broken get someone out there now so our current system isn't built like that we're building it now that way thank you yeah commissioner shear yes thank you chair uh jeremy do we do the call-ins do they have an option to push three to get a call back so yeah and if it is i don't have a staff member who's sitting around waiting to call people back it would be a it's part of the system that they don't have to call back it just comes in like a call hey we we've called these people back you're not on the phone we call we do have that um we've gone back again turned it on and off because it's had varying levels of success so you don't want to perform that task and then not fulfill it right so if i say you know put in my number and then i don't get a call back now i'm i'm worse off than if i had just been on hold so we're we're valuing all those solutions we just purchased a new um customer interface software and we're implementing some of those actions exactly like you said commissioners just you know to add a complicating factor jeremy's team they operate in three different systems and or maybe even more more complicated to solve some of the issues have we have we looked at um outsourcing the whole program i'm sorry have you looked at outsourcing the whole program you know giving it to a professional call center we did we we hired uh not to a professional call center we did bring in temporary staff we tried to bring in uh 10 temporary staff to help with the peak of the calls this was last year um that lasted about two weeks because we the temporary staff were giving out wrong information so they were telling people the wrong water information or directing them to the wrong account to pay their bill it's just so part of the overhaul we're doing and barry mentioned it is we're we're reevaluating um a new model of working so that we can scale so what level of task could a temporary staff fulfill right anybody should be able to turn on and off a water right that's clicking a button but the way our system is built that gives you access into all the other stuff so you have to navigate three systems to get to that point we're changing that workflow and that process right now right to make that easier so we can scale in a time of peak i could bring in some people um and do the whole thing um we have not looked at total off off sourcing i don't like this might be the end because i'm i'm stuck i know but tell them if in the back they can advance the slide and in the back can you advance the slide one please maybe i hit the button can i hit the button no anybody in the back well good news you move the slides up one oh yeah uh break you did you mention um earlier in your presentation just because it's aging doesn't mean it's breaking yes just because it's in a high risk red that means that we're it's risky to us it doesn't mean that it's failed so we call it failed because it's failed its level of service that's a interesting uh concept because we needed to we needed to address it before it really fails in real life so it's failed our expectation as an asset is really what that means i mean but the more important thing is just because something's old doesn't mean it's deteriorating be careful how you go with that be careful how you go with that i thought it was coming my way again just because you're old you're not deteriorating thank you go ahead so i mentioned both of these uh items already but we did uh put an ai chatbot um it's getting about a more than a thousand interactions already in the six weeks that it's been live um we are really happy with how this worked out so this is a ai chatbot but it only queries stuff on our website so it doesn't go out and ping google and give you all whatever crazy reddit story that may have come up it's only things that we publish and then it gives accurate information that we control that was an important feature that we added and then lastly um when we rolled out the new ami meter project we purchased and implemented a customer portal um this is an important we're trying to communicate this out for people um what you see in the lower right hand corner of the screen is a real printout from my house so on april 1st i got an email saying penhouse county utilities found a leak at your house and you can see five days later it was still leaking and then last week it came up through my floors so if i could have gone and hired a plumber and got there on the day one that i got the email i would have avoided many thousand dollars of damages to my house and i would have saved all that water off my bill so this system is active and working we're highly encouraging our customers to be engaged with this portal check it set up the notifications text emails i think to date we have 65 ish thousand of our customers on account out of 130 000 so maybe half of them have set up a portal registry and are looking at it now are they just looking at it to pay the bill or are they you know taking advantage of some of these options we don't know that quite yet and we did also last year stand up our customer engagement team where we are actually when we find alerts like this we are actually calling the customer with a person or driving to their house and knocking on the door say by the way you have a really abnormal use at your house you probably have a sprinkler head that's broken or a toilet that's broken or some other catastrophic problem under your foundation like i did so i'll open that up for any oh sorry last one um this was a question that came up uh about payment fees and the different options to pay um this is a common customer question why do we charge fees for credit card payments so the picture on the right is the different ways that you can pay penalis county utilities and two of those ways incur the majority of those fees so if you pay by credit card or an e-check then you pay a fee and that is not a penalis county utilities fee that is by the bank or the credit card company servicing that this is the tune of 700 000 last year and credit card fees um if there wasn't a fee would more people pay by credit cards probably um but then the overall rate payers would have to absorb that 700 000 so currently any transaction fees are paid by the customer directly to the institutions we did not pass them through the utility so there are schools of thought in different utilities cable phone that all the fees just raise your rates and you give people a discount if they pay the credit card and that covers the fee that doesn't seem very transparent but that's what people do you just set up your bank your um check you can do it right out of your bank account yeah it's easy it's easier uh jeremy um i brought this up before on the um you know one size does not fit all kind of theory that we have some people that is we've talked about before that aren't on reclaimed availability and so they're using water for their house and all of that and they're also using it for uh their grass area their yard and all of that so we know we have a 10 000 per gallon per month kind of stopping point on the sewer um but i would like to just see because there's some folks who would really like to get a second meter put in so it actually tells them how much reclaim that they're using or how much yeah how much water is going to into the ground so they don't have to pay sewer on um and yet i know the whole financial model depends on a certain structure so i do think it's you know i mean we're talking customers our residents might want to get an idea what that would cost them to install a second meter and maybe it doesn't you can't apply it everywhere because of the problems that you pointed out before um but where it does where it does make it available where it does make sense um physically structurally to be able to put a second meter in so that we can separate out that water that's going onto the grass they're not getting charged sewer for that they lose their 10 000 gallon limit i don't know what it is but i think we need to take a look at that and i don't know what the number of people that we're talking about that aren't on a reclaimed access line so if we could maybe just just take a look at that and have that kind of conversation um i think we need to i think we need to at least answer the question okay i i and i have talked to that before i mean i if the goal is to reduce the cost of the sewers payment on the water use for irrigation which i think is the overall intent of what people the customers are asking for i think that is equally achieved by just reducing from 10 000 to 8 000 or 6 000 whatever the right the right point is um and that requires zero infrastructure costs so installing new meters oh just get a new meter well there's a payment every month then this people are going to absorb whether it's direct or indirect that's another asset that now i own and maintain including the technical connections the servers the databases the data point um yeah so we would have to develop what the impact would be for that yeah and i you know that may be maybe there's a tiered system there you know because if you have a family of five it's the 10 000 gallon limit is probably pretty nice you know on the sewer but if you've got just a couple and you never get down you never get the benefit so i mean i and maybe that's the answer to it maybe a tiered system as opposed to an infrastructure that they would be paying for and they're not we're paying for it but they have to you know pay to put in so anyway um i just think it's something responsive to our to our residents uh as an alternative and sometimes it doesn't work for everybody the same way so anyway my last little pitch there please anybody else have any questions thank you chair uh thanks again jeremy um sorry to hear you had a water leak and had you know thousands of dollars worth of damage um you know this city of st pete is you know pretty rough with their water bills and i think we do a lot better job but do we have a program where if somebody does have a leak like that and get thousands of dollars with damage they can come to the county and like appeal you know the leak and maybe get a reduction or a little credit on their bill we absolutely do and i actually tested our chat bot on our website to see how i could do this and it guided me right through step by step here's the form here's what you fill out here's the receipts you're going to need and absolutely it's called a leak adjustment we have a similar program for pool fills like so if you have to emerge you know drain your pool and refill it you know we have breaks and some programs to assist people with that awesome thank you okay we're going to uh take a break for uh we'll get back here at 12 15 so take about 20 20 mr chair if you'd like to hear some numbers on trip and falls on sidewalks before we take no let's do it when we get back okay i do have some numbers for you we'll take a break 12 15 we'll get restarted with the strategic planning and the the trip and fall first then strategic planning and and then our agenda thank you i did want to acknowledge our police officers deputy winnick deputy manley and deputy adkison for taking care of us as they always do thank you um and holding you know helping us when we have full loads of stuff coming in the back of the building we appreciate that um and also we i don't know how long we're going to go commissioner flowers needs to leave at 12 45 and if we're still discussing she would like the ability to did we find out whether okay um that she may want to join us virtually just to either ask questions or chime in so i want to make sure we're okay with that motion second all in favor aye any opposed motion carries okay yep okie doke so barry let's go to the strategic planning that's on his way up um so he's going to kind of lead us through um kind of a update to our strategic plan following on our last set our strategic planning session thank you commission matt spore assistant county administrator um i guess i'm batting fourth today so i'm going to see three pitches and i'm either going to hit the first three in or i'm going to strike out but either way it's going to be quick um let's go through your uh how we got to where we are today so your strategic plan has remained the same since it was approved in 2023 i mean if you got here early today and saw the screens you saw and if you look in front of you you have a a summary of that plan and then uh from that plan we began to have work sessions that actually started february of 2025 then you refined what we will talk about in a minute as appendix a appendix a really drives your priorities and projects into the day-to-day operation of what all the departments are completing in their operational plans and then from there you had your october 2025 budget preparation studies and then most recently a work session in february and today we're going to kind of tie it all together so we're going to talk about your your budget preparation studies we're going to see a little quick summary of that we're going to talk about what we heard from your february work session and then we're going to tie it all together with appendix a so in front of you you have the calendar the strategic plan appendix a summary and appendix a edited so at the end of this presentation i'm going to click through three slides that are going to show you the edits to appendix a so that's everything you should have in front of you and also is on backup online so as as i said we'll start with the budget preparation studies so these studies are um scheduled the majority except for the last two which are to be determined they're scheduled for work sessions either this spring or this summer to help inform um help you discuss and inform us on things you'd like to see as we work through the budget process this summer so they're all designed um to occur within the next few months here that is your list that came out of that october discussion and then this is the list of studies or executive summary reports that will be provided to you in advance of the bis meeting dates so that you can have that level of discussion the only note is the opaga study which the state has put on hold so that is that isn't a holding pattern until we hear more from the state so during your february 20 uh 26 strategic planning session these were the major initiatives that we began the discussion with the only thing that's been added to this list since that february date when you all met is the beach nourishment process and cost allocation we've added that one as that's an ongoing process that we're working through and i know you all are well aware of that this is what we heard so this is what we heard out of the bcc strategic session remember we had that exercise the highlighted green that just means it's in alignment with the previous slide that's the only reason those are highlighted green but your your top four on here are employment opportunities penny five priorities ppc alignment and uh public-private partnerships so those are the top four that came out of that session from there we had follow-up and action items that you wanted us to look at moving forward and these are what those action items are the last bullet point i will say if you saw it that has been accomplished the strategic plan in the calendar will be viewed on both of these screens and also out in the lobby before any of your work sessions or bcc meetings in this room so that the general public when they're here can see both the strategic plan and the calendar of the first bullet we talked about that already but we will have the work sessions and the reports to you this spring either in the form of a presentation or a executive summary and then those bullets in between there are new action items that came out of your session in february so how this all ties together so appendix a you have in front of you it was approved by the bcc in 2025 and again it is it is the alignment between your either projects or policy discussions and our work our month-to-month or day-to-day work within the county so it provides transparency visibility and again alignment between what your goals and objectives are with the strategic plan you have the edits in front of you i'm going to walk through them now there's three slides so the first one is in uh strategic priority number two health healthy and safe communities we are proposing to remove the gas station generator compliance we work through that with the state there is a state law on that and we provided some information and there's already enforcement mechanisms in place and there's not a whole lot more we can do on that front so that one we're we're proposing to come off of that list as completed and adding discuss the operational model of of the safety and emergency services department for review by the board so those are the two changes to goal 2.2 of appendix a goal three point uh strategy three goal 3.5 foster business growth and prosperity and opportunity the project that we're adding is to create the downtown clearwater campus activation plan and i know you all have meetings in a few weeks on that and then continued meetings through the spring and and summer this one has a few changes uh this is strategic priority number four smart service delivery you have two two items on there on the bottom that we um we have checked off as completed and when they come off the list they just come off the the ongoing list we still track that they were completed so they don't technically go away but they're just off the list of the two to-do list if you will we've added two bcc strategy items the first one is shift the panels planning council authority to the board of county commissioners and the second one is explore revenue generating county asset opportunities um again you have the document in front of you so those would be the changes there are minor changes which which um since we did it a year ago and created appendix a i think the anticipation is that every year there'll be minor changes to appendix a and uh through your strategic planning session so that's my short uh presentation and we're here for questions or discussions by the board so i was just trying to make sure my mic was on so thank you so much for just a brief summary or overview um i guess i have a question so um for our alignment with our sewer investment programs um would we wait until we get a better clarification on whether or not we would bond for um we i'm sorry whether or not we would request a loan for the projects from the review that jamie just gave us today um or if we're going to just pay outright for taking the 400 million out of the program or so so for your strategic planner like the commission driven initiatives that you want to see those abroad we we then have the strict we take that and work on departmental strategic plans and so like what kelly presented earlier today that's taken how it aligns with your strategic plan but it dives more in detail around that particular department activities and so utilities would have the same thing within the utilities area so those will come back to you but they don't necessarily need to be front and center on your strategic plan unless it let it rises to that level okay and then i guess i would be asking the same when it came to uh when it comes to us determining or renaming opportunities because now we have this possible issue with the state statute about renaming roads that have that they're numbered by the state so i would ask the same question i guess for the last project update here whether or not all of that may change depending on what we can or cannot do well you could put that into our legislative program you know because it's really back changing the state law back to where it provides that local authority you know and you know this i wanted to share this when we were talking about that that's very interesting because even though i know it was years ago i don't recall anything changing it that came out where any municipality would say hey wait a minute we don't support that because we want the ability to name you know roads and things like that in st petersburg we've named a number of streets um the young girl that was shot and killed accidentally you know it was another issue going on but the bullet went through the house and killed her we named the street after her and we didn't when was that do you remember uh 2000 and it was a while ago this was a recent change this was a 2025 is that correct tristan yeah oh it has so it's okay but that was 2007 2008 when we that's why i was bringing this up i listened to his presentation i'm not saying anything is wrong you know i'm just saying we show we should be in a whole lot of trouble down there because several streets have been named i think after people with signs so anyway forget all of that i'm sorry i was just bringing that up because that was weird but um anyway i just was wondering if we should maybe kind of put that in yellow instead of reading well now that you brought it up i i i am most curious why this has been in place since the early 2000s how did it get identified her name was paris i the young it just came in the young okay thank you but i'm i'm saying what we haven't had this consideration on anything else that we've done lucky you right i know why why now i don't know the i don't know the answer i'll let kelly or kristen answer that what what what was what was the issue that triggered this scrutiny i mean as i like let sleeping dogs lie well per your previous your discussion about the most recent resolution and and preparing that we we start we went down the pathway and work with your office to develop the resolution and then as we were going through that process we became aware of the statute that preempts local governments from doing that type of road memorial it i to your to the point we have on our conversation with the that you had with the legislators i i i have to believe that it was just an oversight that they did not distinguish between local roads and state roads when that bill was passed and so that's when it popped up i did elevate it to the department of transportation just to see if by chance there was an implementation if we were able you know to have some implementation flexibility um but they they too in in addition to the county attorney's office weighed in that unfortunately the legislature is the only one who can approve that so so that's go ahead tristan i was just going to chime in and so basically yeah that's the direction where the legislature basically wants to be the entity to erect signs that are memorial related and to commissioner flower's points yeah roads can be renamed but in terms of erecting the ceremonial sign that's within the authority of fdot and that could be and i was looking back at the statute and it could be just the definition of transportation facility not dealing with a state transportation facility so that's an avenue that i'm currently looking at but i just wanted to provide that background information let's make that a priority let's uh i mean i know that this you know that the senators were very concerned about it as well and i sent the statutes over to them so yeah hopefully it's working its way through um lat vala's amendment to the process it's good that hasn't come up since the early 2000s so yeah yeah that's why i say if i i said it had to have happened last year or even this year because it never had come up before we did a bridge not too long ago and it was like you know smooth sailing all right a lot of people came to yeah went to them oh yeah nobody said anything that's why i said it's just weird i know i'm gonna just do it i know that's what i was saying let's just do it then somebody told me i couldn't do it okay yeah i agree i agree ask for forgiveness not you know permission okay all right well you see what you brought up i'm i'm kidding i'm teasing all right who any other questions on this item i think we're good thank you appreciate it all right we are moving on to agenda briefing all right um going on to agenda brief um you got neighborly senior care network 60th anniversary proclamation you got national volunteer appreciation week and you got a partner presentation from um mike stevens over tampa international you've got different reports i'm going on to item number 10. this is the first amendment to a joint project agreement with st petersburg for utility work associated with roadway improvements item 11 is ranking affirms this of four firms that they'll you do for various engineering services so we we put them on contract and use them for our capital plans onto the regular agenda item number 15 as a resolution this is designating the county administrator as a designee for the head of public entity and this is so we can be in compliance with web and mobility access and any questions we have to designate an alternate for that as well i'd prefer it to be somebody else period but uh now it's it's so we have a single entity that can be responsible for approval make sure we're in compliance with uh all the accessibility issues you know online we didn't have a policy in place we probably should have um item 16 is the term sheet for the redevelopment of bay care ballpark um and the terms that you discussed the other day and so uh and it's not only on the agenda but i know um mr middleton has asked for a link to where he can uh say a few words and uh thank you he's going to be here he's going to be on we're going to give him a link so he'll come in online okay um the the rest of the organization will be here um item 17 affordable housing program project recommendations for brentwood townhomes eight hundred thousand dollars of penny money uh for 25 uh workforce townhomes eight at 80 percent below five at 120 and 12 mercury excuse me chair can we go there's a previous one i wanted to talk about the the term sheet i just wanted you to know i will not be here for the next meeting if you wanted me to be present for the meeting to vote on if you think it's necessary you come up for the tuesday yes you won't be at the i will not be here i'll be on the london trip visit safety okay oh okay so i i don't think i can vote though i didn't know if you thought you'd need me to vote can you okay yeah we have we approve it you can you can vote okay i know i know i feel bad for myself think about whether you're going to be available and if you are the thing let me know i don't i don't want it to be a problem if it's a close if you think it i need to be here are you going to vote i have whether you're going to let them participate yeah i hear you okay let me know if you're going to if you want to get i'll check out okay thanks anything else chris commissioner okay okay um item 18 is a grant agreement for the department of law enforcement this is for the statewide crime lab laboratory system grant so they use these funds for various improvements at the medical examiner's office item 19 is a service area competition grant um for the u.s health and human services and this is for our health care um for the homeless program and you can see the various funding amounts within your thing but this funds bayside clinic and the mobile medical unit i have a question about this one um did private companies uh compete for this or was this just mainly us this is a grant that we bring in to run our those two programs so it's our bayside clinic and the mobile medical unit um and so it's a grant that we received for those to run those programs we have i don't i don't believe in um matt i doubt matt knows we'd have to we karen will be karen will be here on tuesday but we haven't tried to outsource we're doing a review of the way we do our health care programs both for uh this and for um what what we farm out to the state uh department of um health uh so we we can talk about that as part of that review because we have a consultant doing that conducting that review which is what the the fall studies that you had asked us to do we're in the middle of doing that process then okay thank you okay to um for the mobile unit particularly for the dental piece um a lot of the dental students from usf and whatnot um work this program both here and with evra and that's how they're able to really provide services to many more people because it's their students that are going out that are working they also have you know professionals that are already dentists okay um item 20 is a grant agreement with u.s department of transportation this is for atms uh smart tracks system project um so this provides uh additional grant amounts that's how tom was talking about how he's leveraged the 18 million to receive additional funding to make that program stretch and do a lot more than what was originally designated when you did the 18 million item 21 this is a purchase of a pumper truck um this is um they i forget how old the current one they have is but it's old you know you don't have one okay this isn't this is an expansion this is new um where this is really needed is during hurricanes um and be able to pump down uh certain areas and things like that uh so 311 000 coming out of utilities um item 22 is uh one additional um non-medical structure van transport for medline medical transport item 23's lelman community development redevelopment this is a commercial uh grant program changes that amy briefed you on previously um so this uh these will make the changes to that program and again minor modifications to the program keeping the 50 match requirements under the county attorney items um i just very quickly want to point out back on your consent agenda under item number 12 we normally include a list of cases that have been served in the prior month that we will be defending on the board's behalf we also included this time and will begin including on a go forward basis the appeals that we are handling for you i don't know why we never included those but there's a chart that shows quite a number of appeals that we have pending right now that we wanted to let you all know about many of them are related to substantial damage um assessments and appeals that homeowners have taken on those and some of the others are special magistrate appeals um on the regular agenda under item number 24 this is a request to initiate litigation this is a contractor that created some damage and did not pay for it um this is the first of many that you're going to be seeing we have quite a number of others that we will be bringing forward this particular case had a statute of limitations issue so we're bringing it to you now but you can expect to see a number of additional cases such as this coming forward soon uh under item number 25 we are requesting authority to file suit and the referenced case this is uh uh this will be a foreclosure on a special magistrate lien uh item 26 there should be a file going around uh i encourage all of you if you have any questions on that particular matter to give me a call outside of this meeting um and then i don't anticipate reports but if you're interested in hearing about those trip and fall numbers yes um hold up one second um they have been subtly going down um and kelly or somebody could probably tell me the year that we started um the uh with the the dedicated millage but starting back in 2023 we had 27 claims 24 we had 21 claims and in 25 we had 19 claims so they are steadily going down um and christy that helped i think with keith and some other of various staff get these numbers there has been some tort reform and other issues that could affect this uh but generally speaking the number of claims filed in 24 and 25 are equal to the number of claims filed in 21. so that's a substantial reduction when you're talking about the same number in one year is what we're seeing in two years now so there's there's there's definitely an effect going on there and aside from that i have nothing else to report thank you item 29 are appointments to the um seminal sports association you've got your appointments to the groups and then you have four citizens appointments and you'll have a ballot for that item 31 is a zoning change and loman this will split the lot into two to where a second home can be built item 32 is largo cra um so this is a request you can read that and see the staff recommendation on that and item 23 is with the city of dunedin this doesn't change their cra what does change it allows them to take on debt for a second parking garage it doesn't increase the county's contribution however item 33 yes yeah 33 and the debt is not dependent on the entire cra being renewed after the that's correct it allows the city to to obtain that that debt um on their side so okay it doesn't increase it on our side but it requires our approval for them to be able to issue debt associated with it because if when our when our piece ends in seven years or whatever and we we finish our part they can continue with the cra with their part that's correct okay they can do it through their cra they can do it through their general fund right okay yeah but it's on their side of the ledger but it requires our approval for the second thank you any questions any questions on any of the hearing stuff i'm sorry i was saying the city of largo's request was heard before the for pinellas meeting and passed unanimously yes commissioner scott uh thank you mr chair um it did pass unanimously at for pinellas and i obviously supported it at for pinellas for pinellas manages transportation and land use planning and i think this is a cra is a good plan but i do have some real concerns about um another cra that's going to cost them the county money going forward so i've got some real i've got some real hesitation with that that's something probably a it's a grander scale discussion about right new cras exactly i understand there's a few in the offing and so you know those things just keep coming right we kind of have to say hey at some point it's like when do we just say look enough's enough i mean if it larger wants to say right great i mean i think it's a great plan and they can use their own money for that but i just have concerns with i mean it's going to be estimated cost of the county of over a million dollars a year and that's a budget gap that we're going to have to figure out how to fill just which is a concern i've got really right over 20 years is that the average a million a year it's it was like um because obviously it's zero the first year because this is that's their yeah over 20 over 20 years it was like 23 million dollars or something like that so it's based upon the new increment you're right yeah and so um but so that's a question now we we kept our staff recommendations what 75 percent um yeah we're we're recommending 75 95 you know which is what they asked for um and and we also have it as a 20-year with a 10-year review period um that's under your new policies um so that's a way of measuring it and and you can read you can revisit it at 10 years if you want um but it is a new CRA but it's so and the options are 95 75 and 50 correct those are the three that we have currently available to us that's correct are there predetermined criteria for each level there are and that's how staff arrived at their staff recommendation based upon that criteria okay uh you know again uh we we took a look at CRA several years ago and and we established criteria to try to get our hands around these we also put put in these interim measures to to review whether or not you know you should continue a CRA after a 10-year period look at looking back at some of those that have gone on for a very long time and um and so you know the so we can always revisit the policy but you do have this one you have tarpon springs both that are out there i've heard there there's two others coming yeah um and so you know we'll we'll we'll see um if they if they submit those we'll review them the same way we'll give you the analysis and then it's obviously a policy call um you know the if you i mean you know this area right and and so it is kind of a tired area and so you're trying to say would that add to being able to bring that up to where it increase increases higher values that's really the purpose of a CRA um if it's effective um but we do have those interim periods to where you have another shot at looking and saying has it achieved its goal of creating it and now can the private sector make that investment without public support that's really what we should be taking a hard look at at these interim review periods well it's not yeah i'm hearing you know commissioner scott's comment and i i share some of those concerns now is that you know where do we when and where do we stop this you know the process i mean again i think it's very specific to areas that are that have um issues that are the 95 they're truly blighted right i mean at 75 it's 50 it's more economic right so i i mean i i think that's something we need to look at and see look at our county and see where we really think those things those are still needed um you know anyway it i'm sure well i mean i'm sure i'm sure there's yeah i'm sure there's a lot well that's the other piece of that too so we don't know what's really even going to be coming down the line and you know it's it's my thought is is that it's you know the city needs to make its own tough decisions and i think this kind of puts an onus on us to make our a tough decision on us because we're going to have to fill these these funding gaps as we go forward and that puts the responsibility on us where i really think it should be with the city i mean they can raise their own millage rate if they need funding for there they can they have the they have the dial they can turn and the lever they can pull to do that so yeah i mean obviously when it was first created it was it was like they can invest their dollars and our dollars in an area that will re you know bring more value in the long run high higher taxes going forward i mean you would just you know so um how many of those areas are still out there and you do we want to turn that responsibility over with our dollars i mean right well and you know people are starting to get a little creative with that is you know is is um lack of infrastructure investment in some infrastructure in some municipalities is that considered blight right i mean there's you know to me it's like well let's just go to the county and get a cra and and not make the tough decision you know and and in their own backyard so yeah it just i just think that puts a greater burden on us and for county-wide taxpayers to fill that gap going forward when we've got so many of them out there already it's like at some point when you go all right you know kind of enough enough remember we were talking about this about where's that revenue that we're going to see down the road right coming back when these things start falling off they start falling off right um we'll start seeing some of that back i mean i think city of st petersburg what's that 32 30 yeah i think yeah so we were talking that in the respect and how government growth can start to be slowed a little bit we're gonna have additional revenue we can slow we could offset with more millage stuff you know um but i do think that conversation needs to be had because we need to start sending some signals out that are different than the ones we've had you know i think so yeah you can you can make that call i can tell you the municipalities have heard your signals okay they have they they you know and and and our staff actually says watch some of the meeting discussions where you've had these any other comments no sir they see anything else that i've forgotten good to go okay then we are adjourned have a good weekend and we'll see you on tuesday if not before