Well, we're going to go ahead and get started. Good morning. It's amazing with all of the rain that the sun is still shining after last night's victory over the dreaded Yankees. I can't be more excited about that this morning. The pitcher for our team apparently paces in the dugout between innings when he's not pitching, and that's what I was doing. I was pacing, watching the game. Lots of fun. Let's get started with a few things. First, Commissioner Peters will be here this morning. Do I have a motion and a second? Okay, got a motion and a second. All in favor? I didn't even get the motion out of my mouth, but you're able to participate and welcome. So the second thing is, can anybody sing in this room besides Commissioner Flowers? No. All right, the attorney will have to do that for us. She'll lead us in singing happy birthday to Commissioner Flowers. Since she is the singer, she can't be the leader of a song for herself. All right, I'll sing. Whoa, let's go, everybody. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Commissioner Flowers. Happy birthday to you. I don't know how that sounded because I was listening to myself. It sounded good. Okay, good. Thank you, Commissioner Flowers. Yeah, thank you. Today is my birthday. Yeah, thank you. It's always a wonderful day. So thank you. Happy birthday to you. 35 was a rough year. Yeah, 35 was a rough year. It was the sheriff's birthday on Friday? Oh, hey. Sheriff's birthday. We're not going to sing, but happy birthday, Sheriff. Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff. All right. I already said congrats to the Rays. Just really a fun time last night and against a team that I just, you know. Anyway, but I really wanted to take a moment and, first of all, thank our deputies, as we always do. We have Deputy McSweeney, Deputy Manley, and Deputy Atkinson. We always thank them because they're front and center every day out on the streets, but they're also front and center with us. So thank you for what you do. But I also wanted to take the time to, this is a new year. This is the beginning of our fiscal year, and it's not lost on me personally, but I know on this commission to say thank you to our staff since, what was it, 24, we had those two little storms that came. Then we had, and when that storms came, the work started, and whether it's cleaning up, whether it's holding people's hands out on the street, because I saw that every single day, whether it was recovering over the ensuing year to get money to bring back, and I think we brought a little bit of money back. We're still working through some of the kinks on that program, but that took a lot. By our leadership team that's here today, but the people that work for you out there on the streets this morning, because we're flooding in some areas, including County Road 95 up in Palm Harbor, we've got places all over this county that you all take care of and your people take care of every day. So I can't thank you guys enough. We don't do it every day. We don't do it every meeting like we do to the Sheriff's Department. But trust me, we do respect each and every one of you and what you do. And it doesn't get said enough. It's interesting that, you know, sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we all have personal lives too, and you guys are going through stuff. I was at a Moffitt the other day and walking out to my car, and I hear this, hey, Commissioner, and I'm like, Commissioner in Tampa? And it happened to be one of our employees who was there for similar things that I was there for. So I know you all have that too, personal and professional. And I really don't want to be emotional about it, but it doesn't get said enough. So thank you. And I think about that last two years and what the commissioners have gone through too, but it doesn't even, it pales by comparison. And so I want to make sure that we always treat you with respect, kindness, professionalism, the same respect that we ask for in return, we give to you. Um, but we don't say thanks enough. So anyway, thank you all. Appreciate it. Um, with that said, I'm going to turn it over to Barry, uh, give us just a little bit of a snippet storm update, uh, before we move on. Well, um, you know, with that, obviously with the hurricane, the impacts, uh, to the county, we're going to be seeing over the next, you know, few days, we're already seeing it out there with the rain. So, uh, the, uh, the storm strengthened to hurricane overnight. Um, it's moving, you know, towards the Northeast, as you know. Um, it's turned slightly, but the Gulf coast and the panhandle is going to get hit later today. Um, the, you're going to see above normal tides of one to three feet. Um, this is going to be, you know, see, you're going to see water on the roadways and in flooded yards, uh, potential worst case scenarios, three feet, uh, they're expecting it to be more like one or two foot, um, in Pinellas, um, but high tides are expected overnight Friday through Saturday, where you're going to see coastal flooding, um, and some effects. Um, we've seen, uh, two inches of rain in the last 48 hours, um, but higher amounts are possible. Parts of, um, the county will see six to eight inches over the next 24 hours. And so, again, you'll see localized flooding. Um, as you, as you just stated, Booker Creek and, and 95 Public Works is monitoring conditions in Tarpon Woods. I mean, a lot of, you know, if you flooded before, it's likely that you're going to see flooding again. Um, and the, the conditions are right for that. A flood watch is in effect for the county, um, goes without saying, but they, they gave it to me in my notes. So boating wouldn't be real smart, you know, over the next few days, but, um, uh, but our, our staff is activated. Our emergency management staff is monitoring, um, and we'll be coordinating, um, between public works and communications, um, uh, over the weekend. And we'll be putting out notices as we have updates available, um, uh, human services is coordinating with community partners for, uh, our unhoused community and, um, some departments are providing mutual aid, um, and coordinating with neighboring counties. So that gives you a little flavor for kind of, you know, what's, what's going on. Take it seriously. Um, you know, all the, all the traditional stuff that you put out with the communications is, you know, watch for standing water. You know, you, you don't know what you don't see and, um, and be cautious. Yeah. It's amazing when you see the number of hurricanes that historically have come and really that the peak is from the, like the middle of September to the middle of October. Sometimes I, my mind, I think it's October. So we're free and clear. And of course, this is just a gentle room to us, a gentle reminder that we still have a couple more weeks at least to kind of, I know it goes through the end of November, but I'm talking about the height of the season kind of starts to dip off. But I think the complacencies, uh, is real. So you, you tend to think, okay, we're out, we're out of the weather. Well, we're not, you know, and even though it hasn't hit late, it could, you know, and that's the reason they give you that window. But, um, well, again, it just, it's our residents stay tuned and, you know, make sure, don't think we're not expecting any turns or anything else, but you know, these things, mother nature has a funny way of doing its own thing. So stay tuned and, you know, for the public, please sign up for our alerts. That way you get real time information right to your cell phone or however you want it. Do any of the commissioners have any questions for Barry? Okay. Good. I don't see anybody. Thank you, Barry. All right. The last thing for chair's prerogative is I am going to allow Tampa Bay water to do their annual update, uh, first before we get into the rest of the, uh, the meeting. So I'll invite, uh, Chuck up, uh, um, and, uh, I know he's, he'll, he'll do introduce his team that's here and, um, good to have you here this morning, Chuck next. Yeah. Went over. There you go. Keep going. Hey, Chuck. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Perfect. Can you see me now? I'm ready. Well, uh, again, thank you for having me. And, uh, I did want to introduce, uh, Mr. Paul Stanek, who is our chief operating officer at Tampa Bay water. Chuck, Chuck, just, if you could get that microphone there, that's, there you go. So we can hear the wonderful people that you're introducing. Okay. So that was Paul Stanek, our COO, and then, uh, Katrin, uh, Island, who is our strategic assistant. So they're with me today. And, uh, I just want to introduce myself. I am, uh, Chuck Carden. I'm in the general manager of Tampa Bay water, which is your regional water supplier for the, for the Tampa Bay area. Uh, we were formed in 1998 to give you a little history, uh, by the member governments we serve. Uh, and that includes, uh, the three counties, Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas County and the three cities, city of Tampa, city of St. Petersburg and, uh, Newport Ritchie. Uh, commissioner Eggers and commissioner Peters, uh, actually sit on our board, uh, on the behalf of the Pinellas County. And I want to thank them. They make our job very much easier, uh, for their presence on our board. And so every year I come around to all the members and I give kind of a state of the water address, I would say for, for lack of anything else, giving updates on what are we doing here at Tampa Bay water and what are we doing for the, for Pinellas County. And so, uh, we just finished our water year, 2026, uh, September 30th, and we delivered an average daily demand of a little bit more than 200 million gallons a day. And, uh, of that 200 or so million gallons, uh, Pinellas County purchased 47 million gallons a day, uh, the last year, which is, uh, all the water that you will turn and supply to your citizens as well. So pretty much, uh, most of all the water you buy from us goes to, to your citizens. That's, uh, about 25% of the whole system, uh, take from, from the six members. Uh, you can see here, this slide shows our distribution system. Uh, there's 13 well fields. Uh, there's two surface water intakes, uh, a seawater desalination facility and a 15 and a half billion gallon reservoir, which is important. Uh, we've been, uh, working through the drought in the last year and the rain. I know we're talking about the rain and the storms and hopefully not the flooding, but, uh, it's very, uh, it's a happy, happy, happy dance for us because we're putting a lot of water in that reservoir. Uh, it holds, like I said, 15 and a half billion gallons. Uh, it is at nine point, no, it's at 10.4 as of this morning, 10, four, uh, that's 66, 67% full. And just to give you a comparison of where we were, uh, 30 days ago, I looked before it came over 30 days ago, we were at 5.5 billion. So just in 30 days, we close to doubling it. Uh, our goal is still to get to 15 and a half billion gallons. And why I say that is generally it's, uh, generally we don't put water in it at this time. Usually the rains have stopped at this point and we are not storing it. And, um, we managed to get it full usually by the September every year, but with the drought and we were at five and a half a month ago, I didn't think we were going to have a chance. Um, but I do think we do now. I think in the next 30 days, if it keeps flowing as it is, we will be at a full reservoir before the dry season in the spring. How much are you putting in the reservoir now a day? Today was 210, uh, million gallons and that should hold up for the next couple, uh, a week or 10 days. So in a week, you're effectively another billion gallons you're able to, and then why it's so important. We go through our typical dry season over those six months and you get a chance to be the shock absorber if we need that extra water. So having that reservoir filled is really important. It works in the cycle. Uh, if the rainfall cooperates and then it hasn't been the last couple of years, we get all this rain in the summer and we put it in the reservoir and then, and it stops raining in the spring through May and June, we get to use it to keep the water at the same constant, uh, quantity. So we've been starting out with less in the reservoir. So we've had to kind of watch what we're using and, and you see the water restrictions. The district has, uh, got restrictions and now they extend to March 31st. It's one day a week watering and that's helped a lot, but we've had to, to do a lot of different things because of the drought. And so I'm hopeful that that we'll see the end of it real soon. So other than having Paul dancing, rain dancing every week, um, do we have the two surface water intakes to explain to the residents where that, when you say surface water, we're talking two rivers primarily, and, and then talk about how that kind of backs up in terms of water availability to fill that reservoir. Yeah. So these are the two rivers, Hillsborough river that feeds into what we call the Tampa bypass canal. So that's the first source. And we also have the Alify river down in the Southern part of Hillsborough County. You can see on the slide when it's raining, our permits allow us to take excess water over a certain minimum. And so that water is used and we put every drop we can into the, to the, to the bathtub, if we can call the reservoir, the bathtub and we're storing it. And so that we can use it later on. And so those rivers have been flowing very sporadically over the last two years. We haven't been able to put a lot of the water that we wanted to, uh, to get it full. And I'll show you in another slide here, our, our distribution of the, the sources. We use three sources of water, uh, groundwater. We have well fields in the North on that picture. And we also have the surface water system, which I'm describing, uh, those, those waters, uh, from the surface water go to the reservoir, but they also go to a surface water treatment plant, which treats the water and it blends with the groundwater. And we also have a desalination plant down there in Apollo beach that blends as well. So we've got the three sources blending. And, uh, back before 1998, when we got started as an agency, uh, that one of the main reasons was, uh, everything was groundwater, a hundred percent groundwater. And we, we know, I know most of you all know the story about that. And so we went out to diversify our portfolio. And so we have three sources now, which especially during the drought was helpful because we, we can move things around. But our surface water system was the one that kind of suffered through the drought area. And we've been pumping a lot more groundwater. So we were a hundred percent groundwater. We went to 60% groundwater and about 40% of the other water, the surface water and the desal last year, we just completed. We probably were 70% groundwater and 30% of the surface water. And I'll show you a slide. Our budget for next year showing 57% will be groundwater. So getting closer back to our blend ratios. Now that's important. The, the blending is because we do charge a rate to all of those six members, including yourselves wholesale rate of $2 and 66 cents, which is a little more than a quarter of a penny per gallon. So it's, uh, if you think of it like that, it's, it's not a, it's a very good pricing and the blending helps us keep it that way. The desal waters are the most expensive to treat for us. And so, and the groundwater is the least expensive. So the blending is very important to keeping that rate affordable to our members. And here's the chart I was telling you about and a three blends. Um, and this is next year's budget, which we started, uh, eight days ago. Uh, 57% will be groundwater. And then the rest will be either from the rivers or our desalination plant. And I also want to point out, uh, the region is growing. And so we have to keep up with that at Tampa Bay water. We have the unequivocal obligation to provide all the water our members need. And so with the growth, this, this chart showing, uh, water demands, uh, in the blue, I believe are from what we did this year just past. And then green is looking out into the future. I think 2046 is, uh, the green bars and you can see, uh, everybody is, uh, is going up essentially and Hillsborough County and Pasco. If you, if you key on there, that's where the most growth that we're looking at right now. And we're trying to keep, uh, ahead of that, we, for our demands through the year 2028 and 2033 right now. And I'll talk about a little of our planning exercises to get, to get to those, uh, those milestones to make sure we have enough water in those times. So a majority of our, uh, capital improvement program budget is being spent on, uh, expending the surface water treatment plant that I talked about. It is capable, uh, of running at 120 million gallons a day. Uh, if we have the water to put in it, uh, we also have expanded some permits to get more water out of the Alify river going forward. And so we're expanding the plant and it's going to be 145 million gallons a day with that expansion. We'll be able to provide another 12 and a half million gallons to, to our system. So, uh, that plan is scheduled to be completed by the year 2028. And we're in construction right now, uh, very heavy into it. I'll just show you that picture. I talked a little bit about, uh, the expansion. That is a picture of it. It's just down the road from the fairgrounds. It's off of 301 and near Falkenberg. So it's been there since 2002. We started out slowly as a 66 million gallon a day plant, and we've expanded it to 120. And now we're going to go up to 145 is, is where we're building right now. Here's some more pictures of the, the construction. Um, you can see the, the various stages, uh, where we're at. The other project we're doing, another major project we're in construction. We started, uh, earlier this year is a, uh, 26 mile pipeline. That's about 60 inches in diameter. And it's going from our, uh, regional site, which is where the surface water treatment plant near the fairgrounds. It's going to head south. It's 26 miles. And it's going to carry water into the Southern Hillsborough County area, which is a very fast growing area. And it'll be able to deliver water to the Lithia treatment plant, which Hillsborough County will then take it from there and sell it to their customers. And we're also going to take, if you see in the middle, uh, the jog down, there's a blue line going straight down. That's another leg of the pipeline. It will be going to a new facility that Hillsborough County is building. And we're also building a treatment facility down there and a well field, a new well field. Uh, and I will talk about that here in a, in the next few slides. Now that new pipeline, before we move on, I want to let you know, it's not going to add any new water, but it's going to allow us to send water up to 65 million gallons a different way down to the County. So when we build new supplies in the North, we can send that water. South, whereas we can't today. And here's some construction pictures. As you can see, um, Brandon is, uh, busy right now with growth, but also we're out there with pipeline. So you can imagine, uh, there's a lot of work going on and a lot of, a lot of traffic. So I can tell you, we're very busy keeping up with that. And this is the, uh, graphic of the, of the future well field. Uh, it does, uh, I think the last board meeting we had, we approved the designer to start working on, on the project. It can yield up to six to 12 million gallons per day. Uh, it will eventually have eight production wells and, uh, it'll connect to our new treatment plant down South. And so we're building it in phases, uh, because of the way we're permitting the quantities of water to be used. It's in an area that you just can't go out. It's called the Southern water use caution area. So, um, you just can't go out and get new permitted waters right now from that area. But what we have done is we've gone out and started collecting permits from private owners who do not longer, do no longer need the permitted. So we've been purchasing these permits along the way for the last several years. We're up to over 4 million gallons a day in these new permits and where you've got another two to three that we're working on. And so that'll yield up to about six from this, uh, purchasing of groundwater from these private owners. Another six can be had by using, uh, credits that we could purchase from Hillsborough County. They're taking their reclaimed water, treating it, and they're putting it in deep well injections. That's, uh, helping the coast keep from the saltwater intrusion. But the district and us have talked about if we bought these credits for what they're putting down, we can get some of that water as fresh groundwater inland. And we think we can get another six or so from that if we can make an agreement with the county. So this well field can be up to, uh, 12 million gallons a day here by the year 20, 29, 2030 is what our goal is. And so I want to let you know, that's trying to get us through, they will get us through the 20, 28 timeframe, but then the next one, uh, that we're looking at is through 20, 33. That's the next big step up of, of water demand. So this is a list of six projects that we are looking at and we call that the, in the feasibility stage. So we are going to be looking at these. They're, um, probably next November is my goal is to have these projects, uh, brought to the board and, uh, looked at for the next supplies. And so you can see number C is something in the, uh, in Pinellas County. It's south of, uh, Lake Tarkman. We're looking at maybe putting in a small reservoir and a surface water treatment plant that could yield maybe four MGD and water quality. Uh, I wanted to talk about that. I talked last, my last report to you, we were talking about PFOS and the new regulations. So that has been passed. We have till the year 2029 to be in compliance. And we also, uh, were asked by the board to look at total organic carbon. So in April, we brought the board, uh, a recommendation to do some PFOS treatment. There's three sites in Hillsborough and you can see those in the, in the stars in Hillsborough. Those have slightly above PFOS limits of the four parts per trillion. And then there's two stars in the North and that is to reduce the total organic carbon. So the board has approved us to begin the designing of those five projects. And so, um, the one star that you'll be interested in, especially is at Eldridge wild. Uh, we will be looking at reducing the total organic carbon in that well field. And, uh, this is a slide that I'm very proud of because it talks about, uh, coordination and communication and transparency. These are a list of some of the, uh, groups that we have, uh, with all the member governments and we meet regularly. And so you can see the list of all of them. So I like to be very proud of all the collaboration we do and the open dialogue we have with our members, uh, to work together as a team. And, uh, that concludes my, my short presentation and I'm very happy to answer any questions. Uh, thank you, Chuck. Um, we, uh, only care about the water when we turn a tap and it's not on. So sometimes we take it for granted and the conversation is never the most, uh, what am I trying to say? Electrifying, but it's the most one, the most important thing that we deal with, uh, in this region. So Chuck, to you and your team. Thank you. Staff, uh, our staff, good grief. Commissioners, Commissioner Flowers, you have a question. Thank you, uh, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for that presentation. I really appreciate it. I remember when desal was a thought before they actually built the plant. Um, and I know I had a million and one questions relative to how you would remove the salt content so that it could in fact blend equally with other sources of water. I served on city council in St. Pete when we sold you our wells. Yeah. So when we sold the wells, um, my question is, um, and please forgive me if I just don't know, of course in Pasco County and other, uh, Hernando and Hardy, we've had a couple of instances with sinkholes, um, and, um, some are saying it's as a result of pulling so much water. Um, others are saying it's, you know, settling of the ground, um, in those areas. So can you speak to that? Does, um, the pulling of additional gallons of water from, um, the groundwater system contribute to that at all? Yeah. I don't want to just unequivocally say, no, it does not. Everything. There's a lots of forces in play. Um, it's not a significant one, if at all. And we have to, where we site and get permitted for, we have to be very careful where. And so that is one consideration. Um, we go through a lot of extensive, uh, back geological work to make sure that we're not putting it in a feature that is not conducive for the pumping that we're talking about. And then we have to do testing to, to pull up pumping and see what kind of drawdowns, what, what's happening underneath and how the water's reacting. And so generally speaking, it's not a major contributor at all to the, to the sinkhole activity. I do know, uh, there's an uptick at times when there's a, uh, an extended drought. And then after it starts raining, you'll see it. You'll see an uptick in, in, in the sinkhole activities because of the water from the drought, dissipating the water. And then it's a, there's a cavity and then it rains. And then it, then you start seeing some, some of the sinkhole activity, but, but I'd say generally not speaking, the, the groundwater pumping is not the major contributor to that happening. Okay. And then my other question is, um, I saw on the chart where it certainly has a lot of growth and development for Hillsborough County. We know that Pasco County has the land, so they have the potential for future development. Um, Pinellas County, St. Petersburg kind of leveled out, but it doesn't have It doesn't feel, it doesn't feel like it. It seems like we have many more people moving in, but of course it's because we're building up, not necessarily out. So, um, you all probably have discussed the increased requests for water usage in Pinellas County and or St. Petersburg. And how does that, or will that tremendously affect the amount of gallons that you pull down per day to kind of distribute to all of us? Yes, that's a great question. Um, it didn't get into two minutes of our planning, but we do a, a five-year master water plan in which I show you some, the results of those, those, that's how those projects get on a list. And then we go study them. But every year it's required that the members have to turn in what they think their demands are going to be. Not only for the year that we're about to go into for our budget purposes, but they have to look five years out. Uh, we also look at that and we, we don't just take everything we get. We look at it and we get into a room with them and we talk about it and we get in agreement. And so, um, that, that is a great example is Pasco. We've been doing the, you know, looking at their demands and every five years and then out of nowhere, there's this spike. It's coming up in a couple of years. So we're ahead of it. We're not just catching it after the fact, but it showed something that we weren't show, you know, a couple of years back, we weren't showing that slope like that. And all of a sudden it's shooting up at an Eastern Pasco. So a lot of coordination and discussions about what they think and then what we think when we get together with an answer. And my last question or comment or request is, you know, there was a lot of conversation. I'm not necessarily in favor of toilet to tap, but there's conversation about toilet to tap and that was Hillsborough County. Are you all still looking at that as an integrated source of water or? It's in, in our planning, we have a section called development alternatives and it's in there to be studied, uh, further into the future. So it's, the answer is not a straight on no, we're never going to do that. We're looking at it for the future. I would say, I'm not saying it's, it's ready right now and it's not, but we need to study it and not just turn our, our, our minds to it. The, the thing that I like to point out is that well field that I showed you is the, is using reclaimed water to derive drinking water. And it's in a different way than direct. You're, they're putting it over here to help them with another issue, but it's creating, uh, the water table, the rise inland that we're allowed to now get some water. So using it now, no matter how you use it, it's, it's used. And I really like the, the innovation in that kind of thought. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Thank you. Sorry. I had some. Mr. Shear. That's okay. Thank you. Thank you, chair. Uh, and thank you, Chuck. You know, um, I really appreciate the work you do. I, I actually do remember the water wars and, uh, I remember when, uh, lakes were disappearing in Pasco County and wetlands were dying like crazy. And I know that that doesn't happen anymore because of Tampa Bay water. And, uh, I, I was wondering, I don't serve on the Tampa Bay water board. Is there anything that the Tampa Bay water board can do to prevent large scale water usage by industrial, uh, users like data centers on, especially like the Eastern Hillsboro or Pasco, their water use affects us. So is there any limits that Tampa, excuse me, Tampa Bay water can put on data centers? Uh, not directly. As far as I can tell you, interpreting the interlocal agreement, that's the agreement with all six members. Uh, however, I, I spoke earlier about an unequivocal obligation that we have to our members and we do. And that's where I would say the answer, no, because of that. However, there was a new bill. I think it was four, four 84, four 94 just passed and it put some restrictions on data center, but it also, um, the district put in a new rule about the use of, uh, something I think 50 megawatt or higher users would, uh, have to go through a, a permitting scrutiny that they would not otherwise. So a large industrial user could typically go to one of the counties and say, Hey, I'm going to put this here and we'll say, we'll pick on Hillsborough County and Hillsborough County. He said, Oh, great. We'll do it. And then Hillsborough County, when I was talking to commissioner flowers question about sitting down with us and we sit down with the Hillsborough County being like, Oh, we need another 50 million gallons in two years. So, well, that's not going to happen like that because they have to go through the district and get a permit. And the district will probably will look into our permits and unwind them to see that we don't have enough water. And so we would be in contact with the district and we'd have a say in the permitting of it. And that's where our, our input would be is we don't have the water to supply something like that. Good. Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Chuck. Always good to see you. I miss you guys at Tampa Bay water. I enjoyed the year that I spent on there with you guys. So I recall, uh, there was some talk back then that there was some room where the reservoir is now that there was potentially room for another smaller reservoir of like, I don't know, a couple of billion gallons or something like that. It might've been on your list of projects. Perhaps I just didn't see it, but is there still any discussion about potentially that the current list does not include that there is two reservoirs on that list. One is at the Lake tarp and outfall, and there's another one down in the manatee border with Hillsborough County. What is on that list is to take another six million gallons out of the existing reservoir and build a surface water treatment plant to be able to take that extra water, but using the existing infrastructure to get another six for, for use as a potable water source. And you say, well, what happened? Why you can't do that now? Well, we got our in our permit increase at the Alifaya and that is allowing us to look at that and say, Hey, we can take another six because we have another treatment plant that can treat the six. And so it's not a new reservoir, but it's going to have the same effect by putting a surface water treatment plant down there. That makes sense. Okay. And then my last question on, uh, on the PFAS, I remember when I was on the board, there was two or three wells at the time that were slightly above, above the limit. But if I recall, it was like four parts per trillion was like one drop of PFAS and like 20 Olympic size swimming pools or something about that. But, but it, but by the time it gets blended with other sources, nobody's getting that. It was, it was well, well below, below the limit. Uh, but what is that, uh, what does that treatment look like? It's starting in, in 2029. How are you actually going to be, be treating that water to remove the PFAS? And there's, there's a couple of different treatments. Ion exchange is one and then granular activated carbon is another. And so those are generally the two treatments that, that folks look at, um, the city of Tampa has a similar, uh, surface water treatment plant. They run it and operate it. And it's almost the exact same process. And they use pretty much the same water. They're using something slightly different. It's called suspended ion exchange. And so they're looking at it. They're not only looking at it, they looked at it and they are doing it. And we're watching them to see what they're doing, um, because the three sites that I, that you're talking about, there's the, the surface water treatment plant, um, that is taking water from the Hillsborough river and the Alify river, as I described earlier. And so there's going to be probably there's more than, I know there's going to be treatment there for that, for us. The other two are smaller wells in Brandon and they're, they're over and we, they blend. But it's a future risk that you're taking that you're hoping that the blends stay the same. We are actually, we had a meeting internally looking at, um, can we do something different than, than, than a conventional treatment at those two sites and not have to spend the capital. So we're looking at that and it looks, it looks encouraging. There may be an alternative, but we want to at least design. The thing is you got a deadline of 2029. We know we got these three sites and we want to get the design done. And if we don't go to construction on them because of something else that we can do, that's our preference, not to spend the big dollars, but be ready. Cause if we have to react quickly, we'll have to build to be in compliance with those deadlines. But we're hopeful that maybe we don't have to do as much as we think we might have to do at those two wells. That would be good. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Scott. Anybody else? Yeah. I just had a couple of comments, Chuck. First of all, um, you know, there's, there's politics in water as we know, um, and working with swift mud and working with the, our, our team, we were able to get that additional water off of the Alifaya river. Polk County was not liking the idea. I think just more for negotiating purposes than anything else, but that goes on at Tampa Bay water. So thank you for that. And you do it in the most non-political way that you possibly can. And I really, I really appreciate that because at the end of the day, Pope needs their water. We need our water. So, um, I appreciate the work that you do also that we talk about additional water and making sure we have enough. So right now we have a 2028 plan and that's our expanded water plant bringing us more water. We're studying the 2033 plan. I get them confused. The 2033 plan is the next one. And then there's one after that. So you're always decade out from a planning standpoint to make sure that we deliver. It's, it's a complicated system. Obviously the construction is complicated and whatever, but, um, so, and it leads me to just a plug for our water system because the distribution that you have, ours is just crazy all over this County. And, and Jeremy Waugh and his team are amazing at what they do. The condition of our roads, we've always been concerned about with, with our property tax situation, but we don't even know sometimes the, the actual condition of all of those underground pipes. So commend you for the work that you do to keep those going in a, in a safe manner, but also just to give our residents a perspective that those dollars that are involved in the, in, in fixing our own system or expanding our own system come from grants. They come from our, our water, uh, our utility rate system. They come from our general fund system. They come from our penny. They come from a lot of different sources and those need to be fully funded to make sure that we're delivering water to our residents. And it's a hidden thing because it's below the ground, but it's important. So I just wanted to make that plug. Um, and then the final thing, I think commissioner flowers talked on the environmental stuff that you do. There is no lake issue. Now there was, and I think somebody mentioned, uh, commissioner Shear mentioned the, the droughts in the 20 or the night, late 1900s, 1990, 1998, when we were having lakes decimated, people's homes were affected, et cetera. That's not even the case. That's all been brought back to natural States. And we watched that carefully. Um, and the PFAS and the TOC that you do is over the top, that research, you put it in perspective, commissioner Scott, it's so minimal. We are already at the new number at the new number, which is extremely, it's a, it's a brand new number. We're there in our system delivery. We just have a couple of places that we're going to work at so that even it becomes even less observant. So I appreciate all that you guys do on so many fronts. Um, and it's just a, it's a complicated thing, but we just keep moving it forward. So, and I appreciate those nice comments. And if I recall, you've been a board member since 2014, so I want to thank you as well for your dedication. And it's really, it's really one of my favorite boards, um, because it really does get to the essence of what we need, which is infrastructure delivery for our residents. And that's just a, it's just a, a great system and it allows us to talk to other counties. I mean, at the end of the day, you didn't make it political. I was chomping at the bit to really go after them, but we did it the right way. So I really commend you and your team for that nice, even keel approach to, uh, to making sure that water problems are taken care of. Okay. Finally, any other comments or questions that went a little bit longer than I thought, but it was really good and I appreciate the update and I know the commissioners do as well. Yeah. I thank you all. And I'll see you if not earlier next year again. Okay. Sounds good. Keep up the good work, Chuck. Okay. Uh, that went just a little bit longer. Sheriff, I apologize, but we're going to go to number two on the list, which is our e-bikes update. Excuse me. I apologize. You're, you're doing it right. And he knew that. So he was ignoring me because he knew that I was wrong. An overview of our automated license plate recognition deployment. We're going to do that first. People understand it as flock system, but there's other manufacturers that do that. And the sheriff's, uh, uh, gracious enough to be here to have this, uh, policy discussion that we have, uh, then we'll do, uh, e-bikes after that. So sheriff, uh, welcome again. Thank you for your patience and waiting, uh, to come on. Okay. Good morning, everybody. Um, good to be with you and glad to be here for this discussion. Um, first thing, just to kind of introduce the topic, um, uh, and the topic we're going to talk about is ALPR or automated license plate recognition technology. Um, this is not about flock. Uh, flock has become a four letter word and adjective, but flock is it's Coke or Pepsi. Spriter seven up. It's a brand. It's a flavor. And there are many, many different ALPR manufacturers and providers out there, uh, including plate smart flock, Axon, Motorola, Gentek, Axis, Neology, and a whole host of others. So I'm going to refer to this by its right name and the way I think we should refer to it unless we're being pejorative and call it ALPR because it's not about one particular brand. Um, overall, there are, uh, many, many uses for ALPR technology. And we're going to talk about them. I'm going to give you a lot of examples of them. Uh, they're very, very useful in solving crime. They're also very useful in helping people and for general public safety. And you'll see here in a minute in a video I'm going to play for people who have Alzheimer's, uh, people with dementia, uh, people who are missing and returning loved ones to their family members. So there's a whole host of uses for ALPR, uh, technology. Um, I think it's also important that facts matter, uh, accuracy matters, truth matters, and that whatever we do in this space, like I think at all space, is to be driven by fact and not by media hype, social media hype, or political hype. And I'll give you one example, and I'm going to talk about it more as we talk about the political hype with this and some people, a lot of people have, uh, conveyed that the state of Florida has removed ALPR from state right-of-ways. That's political hype. It's not true at all. What the state of Florida did is to say to police departments and sheriff's offices that their permits were being revoked. So police departments and sheriff's offices can't put ALPR cameras on state right-of-ways. But as I checked this morning in the system, state law enforcement agencies have 355 ALP cameras on state right-of-ways in Florida, including here in Pinellas County. So to say that the state has removed ALPR is false. Not true. Not true whatsoever. That's political hype. Let's not do that. Let's talk about fact. Let's talk about what it really is. And if we want to have some disagreement, that's great. Everybody's entitled to that. But let's base it on fact. Let's not base it on social media and hype. I have the privilege of being the president of the Major County Sheriffs of America, which is the hundred largest sheriff's offices in the country, from Los Angeles to Detroit to Houston, all over the country. And to set the stage and the tone for this and the background is I want to play a video for you that I have played across the country, in Washington and meetings, different places. And I think it is good background information. And it was produced in my capacity as the president of the Major County Sheriffs of America. So if you would, go ahead and play the video. A photograph of a pickup taken by a roadside camera, a routine, unremarkable image that meant the world to one very worried wife. Relief. It was relief. In that photo was Patty here's husband, Tom, behind the wheel of his Chevy Silverado. I came home, it was probably about 12, 1230, and realized that the truck was gone. And so was Tom. Tom has Alzheimer's. He left their home in Encinitas, a suburb of San Diego, and just started driving. Patty searched, but couldn't find him. Panic set in. She called the sheriff's office, and within minutes, the search began. Deputy Chris Grimes was on duty that day. He had a description of Tom's truck. He had the plate number. And he had an invaluable technology. Automated license plate recognition. A-L-P-R, or L-P-R for short. So my partner put in, put his information into the missing person system, but she was able also to put in the license plate and the truck information into that ALPR system, and that was able to give us alerts. The cameras could not track Tom's every move. They don't work that way. But they could show moments in time. His truck alerted in Spring Valley, 36 miles from home, and in the suburb of El Cajon, and in the remote foothill town of Ramona. I knew he was okay. I knew that he was alive. He was still driving. An ALPR camera back in Encinitas provided the final and welcome alert. Deputy Grimes followed the lead, found Tom's truck, and conducted a traffic stop. He was a little disoriented, but he seemed in good health. He was, he loved seeing us. Tom was found in just seven hours. It could have taken days or longer, if not, for ALPR technology. We were very thrilled that he made it home okay. Patty and Tom's story is one of countless success stories, coast to coast, thanks to ALPR technology. All in here on NBC6, a six-year-old little girl fought back against the man who tried to kidnap her while she was playing outside in her home in Miami. This is Aliric, seen here back in 2023, shortly after a man, stalking around her Miami apartment complex, tried to kidnap her. Now, 10 years old, Aliric and her mother... I mean, it was scary. It was scary. ...still remember that day. So, he picked me up, and he, he was running, and I bit him, and then he slapped me, and then he threw me on the floor. And then I got up, and he ran to the car, and I ran inside the house. After Aliric got away, private security cameras captured the suspect running away. Another security camera caught his car leaving the scene. That's about all investigators had to go on, until the suspect drove past a nearby ALPR camera. At the time, there was no tag information, but we had a physical description from the images of the vehicle. Detective Daniel Espinosa, with the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office, was able to use the ALPR images to find a matching car and license plate. We checked the registered owners, and looking at that, one of the registered owners actually bared resemblance to the subject in the images. Provided that information to that local agency, and they, in turn, followed through with their investigation, and had a positive outcome in arresting that subject. In three days, Leonardo Venegas was arrested. He got 30 years. I feel good because in jail, and it could be more people around, and do stuff like that, but I'm good. I'm okay. To the north, in Orlando, ALPR technology provided valuable leads to Orange County Sheriff's Office Detective Kyle Cole, when he worked at the Sex Crimes Unit. You know, we want to try and keep as many people safe as we can, and so that's why it's important that we have technology like LPRs. Detective Cole says ALPR played a key role in capturing Nelson Odige. Investigators say Odige was targeted. Also known as the Pine Hill bus stop rapist. It was tense. The first victim happened at the beginning of the year, 2023. Odige was preying on women in the Haitian community. There were five victims. It ended soon after investigators found security camera video of a possible suspect vehicle. I was able to get a car description, which we gave to our AIM unit that handles the LPRs, and they were able to obtain the actual car that ended up being registered to the defendant, Nelson Odige, for that case. Without ALPR, Detective Cole says it may have taken days to get this dangerous predator off the streets. That's what ALPR does. It prevents crime, it solves crime, and it's one of the best public safety tools that we have. Sheriff Bob Gualtari is president of Major County Sheriffs of America. Good afternoon, everybody. He's working to educate the public about ALPR and dispel myths, including that ALPR is always recording and continuously tracking people and vehicles. What an ALPR does is simply take a photograph of a tag. It doesn't videotape. It doesn't run continuously. It doesn't do so many of the things that are erroneously reported by media and by social media. Among the many myths, ALPR is new and untested technology. It's been around for more than 20 years. Myth. People are stopped and arrested based solely on an ALPR alert. In fact, it takes a deputy, an officer, or investigators to review data and gather more evidence. It doesn't establish guilt. It doesn't do anything. It's an investigative lead. Now, it's an important investigative lead, but that's all it's doing is taking a photograph of a tag. Myth. Historical ALPR data has little investigative value. Fact. Serious crimes may not be reported immediately. A relevant vehicle may not be identified for days, weeks, or months after a crime. Myth. ALPR violates individuals' Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy. Yet courts across the country have ruled ordinary use of ALPR in public spaces does not violate the Constitution. Another myth, that law enforcement sells ALPR information for commercial gain, or that the data belongs to the manufacturers. Also important is that all of these companies and their contracts with us, it's our data, it's not their data. So, they can't sell it, they can't do anything with it, because it's ours and not theirs. Law enforcement agrees that strict regulation should be in place, including strong penalties for misuse. ALPR queries should be linked to a case file, routine auditing to ensure proper usage, strong confidentiality protocols, and other safeguards. Every agency has to be very clear as to what it can be used for, what the expectations are, how you use it, training of law enforcement officers. So, those are just a few things that we absolutely embrace and think are important. So, there's room for regulation here, and we don't have any problem with that, and we support regulation to make it the best tool that we can possibly have. For law enforcement, ALPR is an essential tool that the public can't afford to lose, and for people like Patty and Tom here, it means so much more. A lifesaver. An absolute lifesaver. So, as you heard in the video, this technology is not new. We've used it in the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office since 2006, for 20 years. One of the things, you know, over the last few months that I've heard people say, and I, again, because it's hype, is, oh my God, what would have happened if they had LPRs during COVID? They would have tracked us to the grocery store. Well, guess what? We did have them, and no, we didn't track you to the grocery store, okay? We've had them for 20 years. So, that's the stuff that's going on out there that is unhelpful. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office uses ALPRs from three different manufacturers, Motorola, Axon, and Flock. One of the things that is also important is don't confuse the technologies from the different manufacturers. Flock has a lot of different products. They have cameras that videotape. They have traffic systems that are used by departments of transportation for traffic counts and different things. They have a whole array of products. People are mixing and matching these products as they're expressing concern or criticism over what they are and what they do. And so, it's really important that we don't misattribute what one thing does to another. And ALPR is a very discreet product. So, what I want to talk about first, and again, we set the stage for a little bit this in the video, is what does ALPR do and what does it, importantly, not do? So, an ALPR camera is a camera that is in a public place. Most commonly, people think about them on the side of a road. But we deploy them in three different ways. On a post on the side of the road, on trailers that are mobile that we can move around, and they're also in dashboard cameras of cruisers. The ones that we're primarily talking about today and the one that people are most concerned about are the ones that are on posts on the side of a road. Those ALPR cameras only take a still photograph. They do not videotape. Those cameras don't pan, tilt, zoom. Those cameras are motion activated. Those cameras are asleep until a vehicle passes by. And what it does is take a photograph, a still photograph, of the license plate that's on the back of a car and the car, the back of the car, and it records the date and time that that car, that license plate, passed that camera at that location. That's it. It doesn't tell you who's in the car. It doesn't tell you who's driving the car. It has nothing to do with an individual person. If I were to go out here on Fort Harrison right now with my cell phone and stand on the street corner and take 10 photographs with my cell phone of cars on Fort Harrison and the tags on those cars, that's no different than what an ALPR camera does. If I were to then take that phone and bring it in here and hook it up to a printer and print them off and take those 10 photos and put them on a folder on this table, that's what ALPR does. It's simply taking a photograph of a license plate on the back of a car and the car itself. It doesn't take photographs. If somebody's hanging out the back of the car, then collaterally it would take a photograph of the person because they're hanging out in the back of the car. But it's not designed to take photographs of people. It doesn't take video. It's not watching people as they're going down the street. It's not tracking people. One of the things that law enforcement has done for the last, I don't know, 40 years, since we've had computers in cars, every single day is I'm going down the street and there are cars in front of me. I run those tags on the computer. If I'm stopping at a traffic light, I run the tag in the computer. Because I want to know if that car in front of me or on the side of me is stolen. Does the registered owner have a warrant for their arrest? Does the registered owner have a suspended driver's license? If I'm near a park, is the registered owner a sexual predator who shouldn't be near that park? So when we run those tags in the computer system, it runs against NCIC, which is the National Crime Information Center, FCIC, which is the Florida Crime Information Center, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, and these databases and these hot files would come back and tell us whether the car is stolen, the person has a warrant, et cetera, of the registered owner. ALPR does the same thing. So as these cameras are on the side of a road or in the dashboard of a deputy's cruiser, they are doing it in an automated way, a more efficient way, what we do manually every day. And it's no more than that. So again, what ALPR is, is a still photograph of a camera that is at a particular place. And this is not tracking. When we talk about tracking, especially legally talk about tracking, and we talk about some of the important cases that have been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, and some people are familiar with those. Carpenter is a big cell phone tracking case from about eight years ago. And the Supreme Court told us in Carpenter that if we are going to use somebody's cell phone and the transmission of the signals from the cell phone to the cell towers, and we're going to follow somebody around, which is breadcrumb tracking. What I mean by breadcrumb tracking is this, is it follows you wherever you're going. If you go in Publix, you come in this building, you go in your house, you can't escape it. As long as your phone's on, we can follow you and see where you're going. The Supreme Court decided another case this year called Chantry, which has to do with Google data points, which is, again, cell phone transmissions and it's putting people in certain areas. They said that was tracking because it's the same thing, because you can't escape it. And it's going to follow you from here to California or from here across the street. That's what your cell phone does. If you have your cell phone on, people can track you all the time. That's why, as an example, when you walk into a store like Publix or Target or Walmart, why do you start getting ads? Because you've got apps open. Because everybody knows where you are. That's why. That's not this. It's not this. Because this is a camera that's here, and the next camera might be on East Bay Drive. The next camera might be on Gulf to Bay Boulevard. You can drive throughout Pinellas County. You can drive throughout the state of Florida. You can drive throughout the United States. And you can never hit an ALPR camera. You can't do that with your cell phone. And that's what those cases that talk about tracking hole. So, again, that's not what this is. And we're going to talk about this a little bit. I'll get some material in the folder I'm going to point out to you. But every court, every appellate court, and I stand on top of this daily, every appellate court in the United States that's considered this issue has held that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment. It's not a privacy issue or concern. To photograph the tag on the back of a car on a public road. Because think about it. All it's doing is taking a photograph of a tag license plate on the back of a car that you can see, I can see, and everybody can see, that is owned by the state. The license plate's owned by the state. And the state requires you put that on the back of your car and you display it as you're driving down the road. So how can there be an expectation of privacy about a license plate that's on the back of a car that's required to be there by law that you know to drive on that road? You have to have it on the back of your car. And the courts have said, that's not a problem. So the acquisition of the license plate, the photograph of it, and running it is not a problem. Running it in FCIC, NCIC, DHSMV, all the acronyms for these law enforcement databases that will tell you whether the registered owner has a warrant, suspended driver's license, sexual predator, car, all that stuff, that's not a problem either. And I'm going to give you some examples. But I'm going to give you one in particular. Chick-fil-A, Golf DeBay, and US-19. Guy goes in and robs Chick-fil-A, comes out, driving a red Toyota. It's all they got, red Toyota. Goes west on Golf DeBay. What law enforcement knows is there's an ALPR camera on Belcher Road north of Golf DeBay. So within this five-minute window, let's search in the ALPR system. Are there any red Toyotas that hit that camera on Belcher Road north of Golf DeBay? Well, guess what? There was. And we got the tag, identified who it was, and we were able to arrest the person for the robbery at the Chick-fil-A. That's a one-time query, one-time query of the ALPR system based on the robbery, based on the person going west, and the camera being in the area. That's not tracking. It's not tracking. Where the courts are having the current discussion and debate, and I'll get into this now, just because I'm here with it, is there was a case in people, and again, misinformation. There's a whole lot of people swirling around out there in the last few days been talking about, oh, my God, this federal judge out in Oklahoma said that ALPRs are unconstitutional. No, she didn't. Go read the opinion. I've read it like three times. She has no issues with everything that I'm talking about right now. If you look, it's a 36-page opinion, and look at the last few pages of it. What her concern was, and she's right, it was how it was used in that particular case, because a woman traveled from Missouri to California. She picked up meth in California, and she drove back east, and she was driving back to Missouri. She got stopped in Oklahoma. And the deputy who stopped her on the side of the road checked the ALPR system, and he checked it over a 30-day period, including that four-day window, and was determined every place she had been, and they had over 50 hits. And the judge in that case said, you know what? That looks more like Carpenter. That looks more like Chattray. That looks more like tracking. I have concern about it, but she also realized that every other judge in that district, and every other judge in the 10th Circuit, which is the federal appellate court that covers that area, has held opposite to what she held. So it'll wind its way through the system. But it has nothing to do, and we ought to be clear with this, it has nothing to do with acquisition. It has nothing to do with photographing. It has nothing to do with a single query. It has nothing to do with running it in those systems. It has to do with the mosaic effect in that particular case. That's it. So that needs to get flushed out. So when we're talking about ALPR as it is ordinarily used, how we use it, recap, it's a camera, a still photograph, a date and time that the car passed that. It's not on all the time. It's not videotaping. It's not taking photographs of people unless they're hanging out in the back window of the car. It's not doing any of that stuff, and it's running against the databases. A lot's been made about the sharing of ALPR data and the access to these historical records. The premise that we, law enforcement, or our providers here in Florida share this information, disclose this information, sell this information, again, is completely erroneous. Under current Florida law, and it's Florida statute 316.0777, all law enforcement gathered, captured, ALPR data is confidential under Florida law. And for anybody that is familiar with Florida public records law, there's two pathways under that. One is confidential, which means you can't disclose it. The other is it's exempt, which means if you want to disclose it, you can. That's not this. The legislature has said it's confidential, and that applies to us, and it applies to Flock and Motorola and Axon and all those vendors as well under the law. So this information has never been sold. It's not being disclosed. If you have somebody that's your next-door neighbor that wants to go in and snoop or you have a spouse or an ex-spouse or an ex-boyfriend, oh, let me go do a public records request. You can't get it. It can't happen. So all of that notion that's out there that this information is accessible and it's going to be exploited, no, it's not, because it's confidential under Florida. There's nothing that the legislature or anybody else can do to make it more privileged than to keep it confidential and saying it can't be disclosed. Now, there's also an important, I think it is an important part of Florida law, it says that if you as a citizen want to know if your tag has been captured by the ALPR camera, you can go in and ask, and we'll give that to you as long as you're not the subject of a current investigation. And that's fine. That's fair. Nothing wrong with that. Because it's your tag. It's really not your tag. It's a state tag that you're required to put on the back of your car if you want to drive your car on the street, and everybody knows it's out there and everybody can see it. It's not on private property. It's not in your driveway. It's not in your garage. It's not any place that you have any expectation of privacy that's been captured. But if you want to know if it's been photographed by an ALPR system, then you can ask. The contracts between us and all these providers, of course, also mandate that it be confidential. And you think about it, too, all this whole notion about this stuff being sold. There's a lot of stuff that people are selling about me and you. All those apps on your phone that you have open, they're selling all kinds of stuff about you. Make no mistake about it. Now, I'll give you plenty of examples, but it isn't this, because why would somebody want to buy a photograph of a license plate on the back of a car? What value is it? Because, oh, let me pay $100,000 to get the plethora of data of license plates on the back of it. What am I going to do with it? You're not going to tell me anything. What are you going to do, wallpaper the wall with it? So it doesn't make any sense. All this stuff about it being sold is just, one, it can't. It's confidential. And, two, it has no value. It's a picture of a Toyota with a license plate. As far as the storage is concerned and people talking about the storage being compromised, it's required that all law enforcement, ALPR-acquired data be stored in what's called a CGIS, which is the criminal justice information system compliant cloud, a government cloud. It's encrypted. When people are talking about situations that have happened where there might have been some breach of a system, it's not ours. Those are the private systems that are out there. Those are not the government systems. Everything that we acquire is required by law to be CGIS compliant, criminal justice information system compliant that comes from the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. And we're inspected on it, we're inspected on it, we're audited on it, they come in and they view, it's 100% encrypted and secure, and there's been no breaches of that. There can't be. So this whole, again, concern about how is it being stored, where is it being stored, it's in the cloud, it's in a government cloud, it's encrypted, and it's all CGIS compliant. The law in Florida today, as far as storage is concerned, is that we can store ALPR-acquired data for up to three years. Now, that's probably going to change in the next legislative session, it's going to come down. That's fine. That's what the legislature decided a few years ago, that's the number they set. But it's probably going to come down. What's the right number? I don't know. It's not hours, it's not a couple days, it's a period of time, because we need access to that historical information to solve crime. One of the things we know, unfortunately, people who are victims of some pretty serious crime, especially people who are victims of sexual batteries, they delay their reporting of those crimes. Homicides are delayed and being reported and found out sometimes. So we need time with that information. What's the right number? I don't know. The Florida legislature will look at it, they'll listen to us, they'll listen to others, and they'll come up with a number. But right now, the law in Florida is we can keep it for up to three years. If you look in that folder that I gave you, if you would look in the left side of it, I want to point out to you just a few, and there's a plethora. I gave you 22 success stories of ALPR use here in Pinellas County. And there's 22 here. I'm going to point out four of them for you, and I'm not going to obviously read them all to you. You can look at them if you want to. The first one on there was from earlier this year. A guy arrived at a business in Pinellas Park, went into the business, we saw it on video, he shot the guy in the head, executed him, and killed him. The guy left on a motorcycle. That's all we got. We got nothing else. The only reason why that guy is sitting in the Pinellas County Jail today on first-degree murder charges is there was an ALPR camera down the street from the business that captured the tag and were able to arrest him. If you go to the third one that's on there, the victim and a suspect were engaged in a verbal argument. The suspect pointed a firearm at the victim's face and threatened to kill her. He left. We were able, through ALPR, to put a hot file in the system. So in this pregnant female's face, he put this gun and threatened to kill her. He left. We were able to take his tag, put it in the ALPR system as a hot file. And as you can see there, the Tampa Police Department, a short time later, got a hit over in Tampa. They stopped him and were able to arrest him for aggravated battery on the pregnant female. Here's another one. The next one. Two male subjects committed an armed robbery wearing ski masks. This was at Almerton Road in U.S. 19. They went into this guy's business, and he's getting ready to open. And he stuck a gun in his face right between his eyes, right here, and threatened to kill him if he didn't give him the money. He gave him the money, and they left. It was a black car. That's all we had. We searched the ALPR cameras. We were able to identify the tag. We were able to put it in the system. An officer found the car, stopped it, arrested the guys, and found AR-15s in the car. We wouldn't have had any of that but for ALPR. Here's one that you all will probably be interested in if you go down to the second one up from the bottom. We were getting just absolutely killed with burglaries down at Fort DeSoto. The suspects were targeting Hondas. Through the cameras, we identified a suspect vehicle and a license plate. They were from out of the area. We put the hot file in place with that tag. And as soon as they went back into Fort DeSoto, and I don't disclose where we have ALPR cameras, but we do have one at the entrance to Fort DeSoto. So as soon as that car came back into Fort DeSoto and they'd been there four times previously, got the car in there. Detectives went down there and caught these guys in progress committing car burglaries in Fort DeSoto and cleared these and a whole bunch throughout the state. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't have been able to accomplish it. So anyway, there's on here, there's 22. I give you 222. But those are some examples of the successes with ALPR. If you hear people say that ALPR violates people's rights, it doesn't. It actually protects people's rights. So use our, because it exculpates and keeps people from having, in some cases, unpleasant contact with law enforcement as much as it does help us solve crime or find people with Alzheimer's and dementia who are missing, et cetera. Think about that example of that Chick-fil-A robbery I gave you a second ago, Gulf to Bay at 19. So let's say the car comes out and it's a, this time, let's say it's a green Toyota and they just did a robbery and they came out and they went westbound. But we don't have any ALPR cameras. They don't exist. We put out a alert to all the law enforcement agencies in the area. There was a robbery, an armed robbery with a gun at the Chick-fil-A at Gulf to Bay in 19. Look for a green Toyota. I guarantee you that every single green Toyota at about a 10-mile radius of that Chick-fil-A is getting stopped. Guarantee it. And also, sadly, would suggest that the experience that the drivers have with the cops may not be the best experience they ever had with law enforcement. Because we're stopping a green Toyota within three minutes near an armed robbery with a gun and something matches. They're probably going to get taken out at gunpoint. But if you have an ALPR camera like we did in that case, where within a couple of minutes we have the tag number of the car, we knew which one it was. We knew what all those red Toyos were not. So it can protect people and protect rights as much as it does anything else. If you look in your folder there on the right side, the first handout you have, it says automated license plate recognition technology, judicial rejection of Fourth Amendment challenges. There's 42 cases from federal appellate, federal trial, state appellate, and state trial courts across the country that have considered the ALPR issue. I told you about the one that came out last Friday and the reason why that came out the way that it did. But that's about tracking. It's not about acquisition. It's not about photographing. It's not about querying. That's a very unique set of circumstances. There are two cases that are pending right now in the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the federal appellate court that has jurisdiction over Florida. There's one that oral argument was last week in the Fifth Circuit, which is in New Orleans, covers Texas and that area. There's one up in the Fourth Circuit. So there's cases that are out there that are pending. Only one of those cases is like the Tenth Circuit that has tracking involved. The two in the Eleventh Circuit don't have tracking involved. And there isn't one appellate court that is considered ALPR the way I've described to you how we use it that has said that there is any Fourth Amendment implication, there's an invasion of privacy, or has any issues whatsoever, including that judge out in Oklahoma whose decision came out last week, because she acknowledged that the acquisition isn't the problem, the querying's not the problem. It was the tracking aspect of that. So while we're here in that handout I have for you in there, there's also a handout in there about facts versus myths that's in there, and another one that goes with the video that's in there as well. So we've got some handout material, some reading material on all of this. I want to talk about misuse. It absolutely takes a holistic approach to catch misuse. There isn't any one thing that is going to catch it. And audits are not foolproof. And last week is the classic example. We arrested two deputies last week. One of them had nothing to do with ALPR, nothing to do with it at all. It was a deputy that was, again, not in a legal sense, and I said this last week, but in the practical sense, stalking this poor 17-year-old girl. And he was running her driver's license, her mother's driver's license, her sister's driver's license, their tags, in the Florida Crime Information Center computer, the National Crime Information Center computer, what we call DAVID, which is the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles database system. Those systems are the most tightly controlled, the most tightly audited, the most tightly regulated systems out there. And they didn't catch it. The state comes in and audits us. We audit ourselves. We have these tight controls because there's no foolproof system. The other one, the other deputy, he was using those same systems with those tight controls. Didn't catch that. But he was also using the ALPR system. The reason why our audits didn't catch, we are auditing. The reason why the audits didn't catch it is because he was lying. Where it was requiring a legitimate investigative reason, he was lying. Where it was requiring other information, he was lying in there. So there is room to do more and do better on audits. Some of it is we're waiting on the manufacturers to enhance their algorithms and their use of AI and algorithms to try and catch anomalies. And they're in the process of doing that. So, but I'm telling you that there is no more tightly audited system and regulated system than the ones that Stanton violated with a 17-year-old girl, with all those FCIC, NCIC, David, all those things. So, we need audits. We need accountability. There's no question about it. And we will do more with the ALPRs as far as audits are concerned as the manufacturers are in the process of enhancing the audit tools. And we'll do that. But we can have all those enhanced audit tools. You can't say for certain it's not going to happen again. We've had problems with data. We had child protection. I arrested deputies and child protection investigators because when we had child protection and it was the FISFIN system, which is the system that DCF uses, we had people improperly accessing that system back then when we did child protection and we arrested them. So, unfortunately, sadly, it's a people problem to what it is, and we need to hold them accountable, and we do. No audit system is going to catch everything. So, give you the landscape in Pinellas, and this is what I know from the manufacturers that I know about, but there's a lot of manufacturers out there, as I said, that I don't know about. I'm going to tell you what I know, that right now in Pinellas, there are 276 stationary ALPR cameras in the county. That doesn't include the states. Now, remember, as I told you before, they're on state right-of-way. They're on the interstates. They didn't take them down. What I'm telling you about is the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office cameras and the ones by the city police departments, not the state ones, and private ones. So, there are 276 stationary cameras. 79 belong to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office under a contract. 127 are contracted by the cities, and 70 of them are private. That's some of the big box stores, convenience stores, gas stations, homeowners associations, all of the above. And this is a fluid number that changes because things are being moved around. But, best I can tell right now, 96 of them are on city right-of-way. 63 are on county right-of-way. 52 were on F-dot right-of-way. But now, they're either down, awaiting movement to someplace else, or they've already been moved to someplace else. 63 cameras are on private property. So, again, but that isn't all the state cameras that are out there because they're still up and running. And in addition to those 355, the states are using them at all the toll pauses or using them on the toll roads. They're all over the place. In addition to the stationary cameras, we have dash cameras in 560 of our patrol cars. Every single one of those patrol cars has an ALPR camera that's in that dash camera on the dashboard. The city police departments and state law enforcement agencies have them as well. Those 560 are just the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. So, you've asked for FLOC, what are we paying FLOC? Our annual cost for FLOC is $287,000. That's what we're paying. One of the things I want to talk about is just briefly and clarify a couple things. In the report that you all received from the county on cameras throughout the county and ALPR throughout the county, I want to clarify something that is on page 5. It talks about on the negative side, it says, on the negative side, ALPR cameras infringe on privacy rights and can misread plates which lead to wrongful arrests. That's just not true. They don't infringe on privacy rates. Forty-two courts have said they don't and can misread plates which lead to wrongful arrests. No, if there's something that's done that's not right, that's a people problem, a cop problem, an incompetence problem. ALPR cameras don't put people in jail. This is the same thing with facial recognition. We've used facial recognition for 30 years. When a cop doesn't use facial recognition right and use it as an indicator and then do an investigation and establish probable cause, and you get a photo array that shows up on a computer and the number one spot is X person, and they go out and arrest X person when that person was in Guam when the crime happened, yeah, that's a problem. Don't do that. It's wrong. It's incompetence. If somebody gets a hit, I'm going down the road, and I get a stolen vehicle hit, the very first thing I've got to make sure, because the tag is ABC123, that it's Florida ABC123 and not Alaska ABC123, because ALPR doesn't tell you what state it's from. It can't. So you have to verify it. So when you run into problems, it's because either people weren't trained properly or they didn't act competently. ALPR does not make mistakes. People make mistakes. So to attribute it to ALPR is wrong. It also says in here about the county's systems, and it makes a statement in here that the county doesn't use ALPR. Well, yeah, you do. The airport parking management system, park attendance systems, park and conservation resources. When you go to the back here, it actually has in here airport parking, the vendor name is SirVision LPR. So, yeah, you do. In here, it says parks and conservation resources, 20 handout LPR, five mobile mounted. It says it doesn't have any video or recording that's retained. Well, either do we. We don't do that. So I will stop there, and whatever questions you all have, I'm happy to answer them. I hope it gives you an overview of, and I guess just to recap what it does, it's a photograph. There's no selling. There's no distribution. It's confidential. The storage is encrypted. It's CJIS compliant. We do have audits in place for misuse. We will continue to enhance that. In fact, I wholeheartedly support regulation in the legislature and in Congress to make sure that everybody's doing it right. And sadly, unfortunately, not every agency in the state or in the country is doing it right. There are some agencies that don't have policies. You have to have a policy. You have to train. You have to have audits. There are certain basic things. You know, there's 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States and about a million cops. There's no perfect. But we need to put guardrails in place, and we need to put framework in place to make sure people are doing this as perfectly as they can. And this is where the legislature comes in, and this is where Congress comes in, and we need to tighten this up and make sure that everybody is doing it within that framework. So I wholeheartedly support that. So I'm happy to answer any questions. Oh, first of all, Sheriff, thank you for being here. Thank you for the presentation. I think the important thing is to separate out fact from fiction, hype from non-hype, and the effort that you do, well, as leader of the Sheriff's Association, congratulations on that as well. I'm proud of the fact that you do that. We have philosophical differences. And guess what? The cost benefit, the cost could be all of these things that the courts have upheld. It's not me and you doing it. The courts are doing it. The situation out in Oklahoma, checking our system all the time is a good thing, and you said it. It did turn out that particular case, they may be right on that one. That's a different thing than what we're talking about doing. And there's so many notes here, I don't want to go through all of it right now. I want to open it up to the commissioners. Commissioner Vala, we'll start with you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Sheriff, for being here. You answered a lot of the questions that I was going to have. One thing that I wanted, or a couple of things I wanted to talk about, first being, like any profession, where there's a large number of people, there's going to be bad actors. There's politicians are no different, and over 99% of your men and women are there for the right reasons. But like you said, there's been a couple of bad instances. When there are bad instances, you know, I know that there's ways to look at improving those and monitoring, you know, what happened and how to improve on those. When you talk to the vendors and you said that you're waiting for them to develop, I guess, better software, better ways to improve, would AI be a way that for you all to look at how the deputies are accessing the LPR systems? If they're looking at, like, an X or if they're looking at, you know, like somebody in the community or if they're looking at the same person over and over? Yeah, most definitely, and that is in the works. So to give you an example, one of the things which will be built into at least one of their accountability tools that will use AI for this is that if you have a particular deputy officer who is querying a tag, and they are the only one who has queried that tag within a short window, then why? A whole lot of other things that AI would detect that are anomalies from what is learned ordinary use. And so they're going to put those things in place, and what it would do is flag it for a system administrator. There might be a legitimate reason, but there might not. And so it depends upon what it is, it might immediately freeze that person out of the system until somebody can go in and look at it and make sure that what they're doing is proper. So absolutely, it's all in the works. I would expect, from what I can tell, that all that will be in place by the first of the year, so within the next couple of months. Some of it's already coming online now and being trickled out, but they're actively working on it. And all of that will help us to be better. It will help us to do the audits more effectively, more efficiently, and to detect any misuse and any anomalies. So, yeah. And just for my colleagues' interest, I've probably been on six or so ride-alongs throughout the years with the Pinellas Sheriff's Office, Clearwater, or Largo. And at every stoplight I've ever been at with any of those agencies, the deputies or officers are always on their computers typing in the license plates because they're checking. As the sheriff mentioned, they're checking to see if the car in front or the car beside us has stolen or has a warrant or whatever. And I remember the first one that I went on, I was asking them what they were doing, and they explained to me, you know, this is part of their job. And so, and I always thought that that was interesting. So, like the sheriff said. I'll go for a ride-along, I'll do it with you. Yeah. I do it every day. It's what we do. You just run them all the time. When I leave here and go back to the office, I'll run tags. Right. I knew they were doing that. You mentioned legislative changes, and I know you're very involved with the Florida Sheriff's Association. Do you anticipate this coming session there being legislative changes? I don't think there's any doubt about it, and there should be, and we will advocate for it and absolutely want to be part of the process and figure out a way to put the right guardrails in place so it is consistent. I, of course, don't speak for the legislature, but I see no, no scenario where there isn't a bill that's passed that doesn't address this issue and put some good changes in place and put some of those good guardrails in places they should be. Because, again, I know, and I don't like saying it, but it is what it is. I know some agencies in Florida that are using ALPR systems that don't have a policy, that aren't doing audits. That's not right. So we need to make sure that everybody is. And I support it. I know we as an association support it. And I don't see any scenario where the legislature isn't going to do something. You said something at the end that was a bit concerning to me, and that is facial recognition and the fact that it's been around for 30 years. And there's a lot of places that I believe that have facial recognition that people are not aware of. I think a lot of major, like, sports stadiums, a lot of big public places have facial recognition, not just government places. And that literally can follow people, not just take a picture of your license plate as you're moving on. Without getting into law enforcement type stuff, what kind of places have facial recognition that people wouldn't necessarily be aware of? And is there any kind of thing that government can do with that? Or is that a lot of just private businesses? Well, it's both. I mean, it is all over the place, facial recognition is. We don't use it in public space. We did. Going back now probably over 15 years ago, we used to have facial recognition cameras at the St. Pete Clearwater Airport. Everybody that went into the airport was captured on facial recognition cameras. It was compared against the database. They were checking to see if people were wanted, et cetera, and storing it. And we used to do it at the courthouse. And I looked at it and said, that's two big brothers for me. That isn't going to work. No. The only thing that we do now is we capture photographs. And the Penelope County Sheriff's Office actually is the largest local database for facial recognition probably in the country. But it's all jail images. And so the only thing that we have enrolled in there are when people are booked into the jails. And those are the contributors. And so when we get that bank robbery or we get whatever that crime is, and we have a photograph of somebody, you have no idea who they are, we compare them to what are called enrolled images in the facial rec system. But all those images that we're comparing them to are people that have been booked into a jail that have been charged with a crime. So we're not capturing random images. But I'm telling you that there are a lot, a lot of things for me, for you, everybody in this room and anybody watching, there's a lot of things for you to be concerned about. ALPR is not one of them. That's at the bottom of your list. I'm telling you. And with what people are doing, the data they're selling about you and your phone and the apps and what you do on computers and, you know, think about tracking. You know, you don't talk about people say, oh, ALPR, you're being tracked. Do you not think that when you're walking around a whole lot of places and there's a whole lot of cameras that they aren't following you every place you go? They are. That's tracking. That's tracking people. Remember, the Fourth Amendment applies to people. Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to things. It doesn't apply to a license plate. So, yeah, there's a whole lot of that with facial rec and a whole lot of places and a whole lot of camera systems that are out there that have facial rec. ALPR is not doing that. It's a still photograph. It's not facial rec. So speaking of that, and this might be outside your purview, but I've had conversations on the phone before about, like, you know, Walmart or whatever, and then get an ad from Walmart on my phone. How does that happen? Well, I'm not sure about that one. I don't know his answer to that one. But I do know that when you are querying things on your phone, whether it's an app, Google, et cetera, that all of that's being captured and all of that's being sold. And that's that Chattery case that I mentioned, the Google Data Points case. Because you have apps that are open on your phone is that those apps, if you have apps open on your phone right now, as everybody's going in and closing all the apps on their phone, is that they can see that you're here. And then when you go 10 miles down the road, it would show that you're there, et cetera, and it's going to put you at different places and show where you are and also the things that you query off of those apps. I go on to an airline app, and I check a flight. The next thing you know is I'm getting an email for fares to the place that I queried on the app. Really? Like I said, there's stuff to worry about. ALPR is at the bottom of your list. I'm good. Thank you. Just one quick, following up on something. You talked about our House, Senate maybe taking up some things. Are the penalties for misuse strong enough? I mean, I know it's your opinion, but I'm just asking. Because to me, that's an area that we could bolster. So it's not, I mean, I'm not saying it would stop people from doing things, but I would deter people maybe from. So there's been some discussion about it, but, you know, Commissioner, I'd say this, is that those guys that we arrest, those deputies we arrested last week, one of them got charged with five felonies. Okay. The other one got charged with two felonies. People have talked about it. I would support it, is that also if you're a law enforcement officer and you misuse it, it isn't just ALPR. It's also all those other systems. Remember, one of these guys didn't even query an ALPR system on that 17-year-old girl. Well, that was all the other stuff. But if you do that and you misuse it because you're violating the public's trust and you're going into systems and looking at driver's license photos and all the personal stuff you shouldn't be looking at for personal reasons, is that you should lose your criminal justice standards and training commission certification so you can't be a cop again. Maybe that's an appropriate sanction in there as well. So there's things, but from a criminal standpoint, it's already a felony. I don't know how much higher in that, but certainly some sanctions against your law enforcement certification, maybe some things along those lines. You know, there's a thing, a law, it's a federal law that deals with driver's licenses. So, like, for these two deputies that improperly accessed these girls' driver's licenses last week, there's a federal law, and it's a Driver's License Privacy Act, that creates a civil, and this wasn't enough of a deterrent, a civil cause of action where any time that anybody, whether it's a cop or anybody, in any of the 50 states, improperly accesses, who has access to it, who improperly accesses your driver's license information, is that every time you do it, they can sue you, and it's $2,500 for every time you do it, plus punitive damages, plus attorney's fees and these other sanctions. That can add up, and that's already out there. So, there's a lot out there already, but I would think probably the certification is something that they should consider. And maybe that educating the public for what their rights are, if somebody is bothering them or harassing them, maybe we can do a better job of that, because they have rights, to your point, we have rights that are being violated by the misuse of that. So, both of those people last week, like in that 17-year-old case, the 17-year-old girl, her sister, and her mother, they could sue that deputy, and every single one of those times he went in, for each one of them, it's $2,500 every time, plus punitive damages. Commissioner Flowers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Sheriff Colterra, for coming in on today and sharing this information with us, and just kind of clearing up some information that's kind of been floating out there for a while, and some of it is grown legs. When I think about how this kind of germinated, there was a gentleman sitting in a lawn chair, standing underneath the, I mean, sitting underneath the flat camera, and at first not being paid attention to a whole lot, and then all of a sudden he started gaining some traction. And so, I think it's really important that we be able to talk about the difference between looking at a license plate or your tag or the make and model of your car versus is this really taking pictures of individuals' faces. And if that had been the case, I probably would have a different outlook. But I have been trying to share with people in the community who've talked about these camera searches. One, you know, when we see on the information boards as we're driving on the interstate that they're looking for a silver Honda Accord, you know, it's a senior that's missing, or when children have been taken, sometimes by the absent parent when they shouldn't have possession of those children, the make and model of the car is put out there, and children have been recovered. I have also shared just recently with the employee from the city of St. Petersburg that was working, and her boyfriend came up while she was working, shot and killed her, allegedly, because he hasn't gone through trial yet, so I'm going to say allegedly. And how he was tracked was by his tag. It wasn't a face, because he was on Alligator Alley. So he was on Alligator Alley, but it was a bolo out, be on the lookout for, the tag, make and model of the car. And that is how they were able to capture him. And I've shared with people, put yourself in the place of a family member where something was done to them, and that is a tool that's used to be able to locate them or locate the perpetrator or whatever. So then there may be a different conversation. It typically is when it involves you. The only thing, and I'm glad I heard you talk about this because I brought this up at our Florida Association Accountants meeting, the only thing I would look at would be to just strengthen some of those access points, so that when an officer is going into the system legitimately, it's legitimate. But if it's 100 hits or, you know, whatever number of hits that are above and beyond, and they are over that period of time, that there kind of be some mechanism that would show an alert, if you will, similar to what you're saying, that allows then maybe the sergeant or officer on duty or whatever to say, hey, these are abnormalities, and like you said, possibly restrict their access until you can clear up why they are accessing the system. It could be a legitimate reason. It could be someone's, you know, on an undercover mission and they can't reveal information, et cetera. So I did suggest that. There were others, you know, of course, because this is a topic that has grown legs throughout the state and throughout the nation, but I did make that as a suggestion, so you may hear about some of that moving forward through our legislative process. But I am glad that you had an opportunity to share with us and provide some of the information, because that, again, helps equip me when I'm talking with people who are calling or emailing or whatever and are concerned or draw attention to one specific case, not the 39 other cases where, and they vary. I mean, I've read some of yours, but, of course, just reading the articles, they vary as it relates to what the issue was for the utilization of those. And then, you know, to draw the distinction, the whole issue has been given the nickname, which is the name of a company. But the whole situation has been given the nickname of Flock Camera. So thank you so much for clarifying that up. And the last thing I will say is, you know, I was in 7-Eleven the other day getting me a Slurpee, and I saw myself on the TV when I walked in. So not only does it take minute-by-minute or second-by-second footage of me as I'm walking in the store, as I'm grabbing whatever I'm grabbing, that data is stored. And that data can be infiltrated if someone wanted to go into their system, which that has occurred before, where people go into the system and they're able to pull that data. And then I know police use it sometimes as well. If a crime has occurred, they'll say, can we look at your home alarm system, your home camera system, or a store system? When we're going into the mall, we're tracked. When we, you know, unfortunately, we have bad actors, bad characters, and that's just a way to be able to find them. Just yesterday, an attempt was thwarted by someone wanting to cause harm to persons in the United States and look back at an international crime that was reported on yesterday. And it was because of the tracking mechanisms that they were able to avert what could have been a mass shooting and a mass killing. So I understand persons' concerns because there's so much going on and the utilization of AI to be used inappropriately. But, again, it's the person, it's not necessarily the tool, it's the person behind the tool that is using it for inappropriate reasons. And that's done, unfortunately, because we have people who just don't want to live right. They want to take a cheat way of getting something done or earning a living or whatever the case may be. So I do thank you for bringing this information. I will continue to share it. I'm glad that we have it in writing. I will continue to share that with people that are coming across. But, again, I understand their concerns, but I see more of a benefit when it comes to public safety and the things that I've mentioned where I know people have been rescued, human trafficking, all types of things, where it's the license plate and the make and model of the car that they've been able to track, not the face of the person, unless you're given a description by people that may be at the scene of a crime. That's a whole other thing. So, again, thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the information. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So on the victim part of this, and I ask this question, obviously rhetorically, think about this. What if there was an ALPR camera down the street from Savannah Guthrie's mother's house? Very different situation. Back in the fall of 2024, at Mar-a-Lago, that guy tried to kill President Trump before he took office, shot at him, tried to kill him. Guy got in a car and left. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office took the tag number, put it in the ALPR system. The reason why that guy was caught is because it hit in Martin County, and the Martin County Sheriff's Office got the ALPR hit and stopped the guy and arrested him. So there are so many success stories. And talk to people, and they say, oh, I don't like it. Well, one, a lot of times, they don't even know what it is they don't like. It's because of what they've heard. But when it's your loved one, when it's your car, when it's the sexual predator that is at the park where your kid is, et cetera, people say, oh, I'm glad you got them. We can, it's not, it doesn't have to be a tradeoff. We can 100%, and we should, respect privacy interests, respect constitutional interests, do it lawfully, do it within the framework of the Constitution and the laws and the court decisions, and still use this very effectively. Yeah, I think the term she brought up again is that cost benefit. But in the cost side, we've got a lot of checks in this system, especially on the Fourth Amendment issue, where we let our courts decide those kinds of things. And I think that's the test that will continue going through. And I think that's the beauty of the system that we have in this country, separating judicial from executive or any other system. So I really appreciate that perspective. Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, Bob, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. This is kind of the genesis of what I brought up back in July, because we started getting a lot. I think all of us did. I've got hundreds of emails about ALPRs. So I'm really glad that we're having this discussion. I kind of wish we'd had the discussion maybe a few years ago, you know, publicly, so people understood what was happening in advance. But here we are today, and I'm glad we're having it. So the concerns that I've heard most often from people is retention of the data, access to the data. It's potential for abuse. And whether future versions of this technology, whether or not this technology is way ahead of privacy protections. So on the retention side, you answered a lot of my questions on that. On the access to the data, you said we share data, apparently, with a lot of other agencies across the country, and some of them may not have any protections in place. I mean, can we limit? To me, that's concerning. Is there a way that we can limit that to only those agencies that share the practices that you have in place? Yes. And we don't share with everybody. We are careful with who we share with. We do share with a lot. But a lot of them do have the same protections in place. So that is something that is worthy of consideration, discussion. There are some who have shut off nationwide sharing. There are some states that don't share outside of their states because they're comfortable within the states that it is encrypted, that it is protected, it is in the right storage systems. So that's something that is under discussion. Nobody wants to have the data compromised, and we want to make sure that people have confidence that it can't be. And so, yes, is the answer to that, and we do need to be careful with that, and those discussions are ongoing. Is that something that you think perhaps the legislature would take up? I think they're going to look at all of it, and I think they should. The problem with it is trying to find the right spot. What's the balanced approach? You want to be careful. You don't want to throw the baby out in the bathwater. You don't want to restrict it so much that you're not able to accomplish what you need to accomplish. So as an example, you've got a guy with Alzheimer's at 3 o'clock in the morning who lives on the Florida-Georgia line, but we don't share with Georgia. So you've got to balance it somewhere in there. The best thing would be is to make sure that all the agencies are following the encryption, and it's all in the government cloud, and that it is secure because it is beneficial to share, and that we identify any who are not, and we don't share with them. So I think we have to strike a balance on it, and I think that's still an ongoing discussion. So on the potential for abuse, so I appreciate very much that you do hold your deputies accountable, and you showed that last week. But on the deputy that was arrested for abuse of the various systems, my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that that was not caught by an internal audit that was from a media inquiry on that. So does that mean that we're under-auditing? I mean, we've had these in place for 20 years. Have we been under-auditing for 20 years? I mean, how did we not catch that? Well, we have, again, because he was lying in there is what he was doing. And so, again, the algorithms and the ALPR software are under-development. They are being enhanced. They're rolling new stuff out all the time. And so, yeah, it was one of those where we're not going to catch everything. I don't care whether – but the same thing is, okay, the same thing. Forget about the one with the ALPR. We didn't catch the one either with the driver's license system, David, with FCIC, with NCIC, and all the other stuff. We didn't catch that either, and neither did the state, because you're just not going to catch everything. And a different set of eyes on it. And we've had this before where we've had people that bring stuff to us about what our people are doing wrong, and we police ourselves. We police our people. We hold them accountable. You all know that, okay? You know, I've been in office for 15 years. I've held a lot of people accountable. I don't play, and people know that. They still do what they do. But, excuse me, but, you know, no matter – we can have even these new standards with the new AI and new algorithms and new everything. That's not going to catch everything. It just isn't. So, sure, what I like to say that we caught it, yeah. But, you know, I don't care who catches it as long as we catch it. What I'd rather have is people don't do it, of course. But, you know, again, one of the two had nothing to do with ALPR, and it has to do with systems that couldn't be more heavily regulated and audited. So there's no perfect. So have you implemented any changes in policy or any protocol as a result of that? So as some of these new audit tools are coming out, we are continuing to implement those, and we are actively working on it. But as those are coming out, yes. So as this technology, you know, continues to update with new hardware and new software, you know, it's possible that this technology in the future could have facial recognition and could have cell phone capture and some of those other things and maybe things that we're not even thinking of at this point. So if we do deploy things like that, I would like us to have a discussion about it here publicly rather than it kind of coming up and slamming us on the back end. And is that something that you think that the legislature will, or the federal government for that matter, will try to put some stricter barriers in place and more guardrails on? I hope so. So, you know, you're rest assured, okay, that we are not going to use ALPR in any other way other than we use it right now, in the way I described to you, okay? Because that is no place, because it does get too much. It gets into Big Brother-ish. It gets into constitutional concerns. We have facial rec. We have other biometrics. We've got all kinds of stuff. Everything's staying in its lane. And, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should. And some of that, I hear you, but right now a lot of it's hypothetical because it isn't there. And people say, well, what happens when it gets, if it gets more dense? What happens with this? What happens with this? Well, then it should be addressed at that time. I would support the legislature saying that ALPR systems cannot incorporate facial recognition, cannot incorporate video, cannot do any of those things, and limit it to what we're using it for right now, which is still photographs of cars, of tags, on public roads, documented. That's it. And so I would support that because we don't need all that other stuff. And, you know, of course, you have manufacturers out there. You have companies out there that are trying to make money. That's what they do. God love them. Okay, free enterprise. It's the American way. I get it. I'm with it. But we don't need to be doing that. So you don't have to worry about that here. I'm not doing it because I don't think it's right. Right. Thank you. And I think that's a great question. So that policy that you believe in is what your department will follow. Right. Bob Walterian, you know, 30 years from now decides to retire. I'm kidding. Whenever that is. How do we know the policies going forward are the ones that you share? And how do we know that those would be implemented at the same? Because I think we're on. I'm not saying we're all on the same page on everything, but that's where we're kind of. Yeah. Well, I think that's where the laws have to come in. And that's where the laws have to change and evolve, just as they have. You know, we've had a lot of different biometrics. Again, from we have rapid DNA, we have facial recognition and we have, I mean, it's all kinds of stuff and it all has to evolve. And the same thing with this. And that's why we have state legislatures. This is why we have, you know, Congress. This is why we have and put these rails in place as this stuff comes up and it evolves. That's what's happened with everything else over time. So I think that, again, there's no doubt, no doubt, as it should, the Florida legislature is going to take this issue up and put the right guardrails in place. The balance is protect privacy, have the public confidence in what we're doing, at the same time accomplish. All these success stories matter. Look at the video. Look at what it's doing. I mean, as a colleague of mine said, it's the greatest public safety invention since the two-way radio. And it probably is. What this is doing with safety and what we're able to accomplish with this, we can't not have it. We just have to do it in the right way. Well, we had a case just last week where a young man was dropped off in downtown Dunning and went missing. And I don't know the end of the story. But I'm just saying, at the front end, the idea about a community coming together and using all tools possible to find them. I mean, they went door to door to try to see if the ring cameras could catch. And I'm just saying, they were doing everything they could to try to get this person back. It's somebody's grandson, son, daughter. We got to make sure that we're doing it the right way, as you said. But I mean, that was just recent. And again, I have no idea how it was found and all that stuff. It's immaterial. But the point going in was, I want all the tools that we can doing it right way to find people in need, whether it's criminal or just the Alzheimer's example. Sure. There's more people being followed with ring cameras than there are with ALPR. There's no doubt about it. Because these things aren't videotaping. Yeah. They're taking a still photograph. That's it. Yeah. Anything else around the table? Yes. Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Bob, I just want to thank you again for coming here and having the discussion. There's not, unfortunately, there's not a lot of faith and confidence in government these days. So we have to have these discussions and we just have to be transparent about what's going on out there. Sure. Thank you. Of course. Commissioner Nowicki, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Sheriff, for being here today and going through the presentation. I did have a couple quick questions, though. So, you know, as Chair Eggers knows, if you wait long enough, my questions will bubble up. So thank you for indulging me. I think a lot of us got an email from a resident a couple weeks back talking about the major county sheriffs of America and how it listed Flock, Axon, and Motorola as major sponsors. Do you have any information on that or, you know, and you said we use those three. So what's your point? What's your point? They are. They're sponsors of the association. So what's the point? And the association put out a lot of information about their companies. Don't go there. Okay. I'm not. I'm telling you the way it is. I'm telling you that this is fact and this is objective. And what you're insinuating is offensive. Okay. So don't even go there. I'm not being bought and paid by anybody. And that's a bunch of BS. Didn't say that. No, that's where you're going. And don't go there. We all got an email about it. I don't care what you got. There's a whole lot of other sponsors as well. And I don't have anything to do with them. I don't get the sponsors or have anything to do with the sponsors. Wasn't my intention. Well, you did. Oh, sorry. You interpreted that way, sir. There's no interpretation. You know exactly what you're doing. Just trying to answer a constituent's request. What's your next question? Thank you. Um, so it says these cameras, uh, just collect sightings, um, of license plates, just license plates. Or is it a broader photograph of like a sidewalk, um, bus stop potentially. It's just not a license plate. It's a whole vehicle, incoming traffic on the other side, sidewalks, right? I mean, it's just not a license plate. They're trained on a lane on the vehicle lane, right? And some are wider than others. And so as it's trained on the vehicle lane, whether it's one lane, two lane, three lane, it's trained on the lane. Um, of course, as a car is going down the road, the interstate, et cetera, is that it is going to get more than just the tag. It's going to get the car. It could get the car next to it. It could get anything that is within that frame, certainly. But it's not trained on anything other than to maximize a still photograph of the license plate. Okay, that's the intent, of course. Um, but, um, law enforcement agencies kind of based on the videos can search for other things outside of a license plate. Cause I think in the video in South Florida and Orlando, they said they had no license plate. They just had the vehicle description. So they were able to go in there and search just based on a vehicle description and get that information of where cars were based on the description they put in. So you can search for other things besides license plates. Well, that's what I said. I use that in my examples during the presentation, like the red Toyota that left, uh, the Chick-fil-A is, is that you can put in red Toyota. You can, uh, put in, uh, and it gets to the AI capability of it. Um, you could put in, um, green Cadillac with a luggage rack. Okay. So you can put in certain things that would also help isolate the particular vehicle that you're looking for. So is that what you're talking about? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the, my understanding, like when we, we talked and, you know, watching some of the press conferences was, you know, someone can just go and search for a license plate, but it seems like they can search for other things in this system besides a license plate. And I guess that's what I'm. Well, the other things you can search for would be the other things on the car. So you could search for a roof rack. You could search for a bumper sticker. You could search for, so those things, but I don't, yeah, but that's a given and sure, that's the way it should be. Because again, you can capture the tag of the cars as they're going by. You may have a lot of cars that go by, but the one that committed the crime had a sticker in the back window, had a roof rack, had, you know, some unique characteristic and you don't know which one it was, although it was the one. So you could put in that unique characteristic of the car, of the vehicle itself. So sure. Of course. I mean, that, you know, that's no different. A roof rack that's sitting out there and say, you know, tell me in the last five minutes, it's any whatever yellow Nissans that went past that camera that had a roof rack on it. So, yeah. Okay. Thank you. So the cameras essentially just collect and retain vehicle sightings, even when the driver vehicle is not suspected of any crime. Yeah. It's capturing every, of course. I mean, that's, it's capturing every car that goes down the road. Okay. And then just kind of, you know, lastly, I mean, you know, I'm not a lawyer or anything like that, but it was interesting. The case in Oklahoma you mentioned last, you know, week, and it was more, maybe you would have much more knowledge of it than I would, but it's more about like dragnet surveillance was kind of like the issue I think was that, um, that these cameras, ALPRs are essentially a dragnet surveillance and was used and recorded or took images of a car, um, without any, uh, reasonable and articulate suspicion of a crime committed or about to be committed by people. And that's kind of the carve out in the fourth amendment where you can use search and seizure is that if an officer can articulably and reasonably say that a crime was committed or is about to be committed, but this ALPRs do dragnet surveillance of images without that articulate suspicion of a crime committed or about to be committed. Would that be accurate? Uh, there's a lot there. So again, in that particular case, there was no issue with the fact that ALPRs take a photograph of every car going down the road. So I can go out and do that right now. You can do that right now. Anybody can, you see it. It's all out there. Nothing about the query aspect of it. What the judge had concern about was you use the word dragnet. That word is not in the opinion, but what, what is in there as far as it was more of a mosaic type effect of having cameras from Missouri to California. So the, the premise that you state is correct about what the judge's concern was that, but again, it's on that one aspect of it because, so, so you bring it up, let's flush it out. So what happened was, what happened was the cop was on the side of the road. The cop saw a car. Sheriff, I missed that first part. Excuse me. Go ahead. The cop was on the side of the road. The cop saw a car coming eastbound with a California tag. He's working highway interdiction. His experience tells him that people come from California or coming east and they have meth. So he fell in behind it. He saw two traffic violations that were recorded with the dash camera. One was following too closely and the other was an improper lane change. So he stopped the car. He engaged with a driver. He saw some things that were suspicious to him. He wrote the driver a warning, didn't give her a ticket. At that point though, he asked her for consent to run his dog on the car. And she said, no, that's not how you do it. That's not in compliance with the law because then he was detaining her longer than necessary. So that was a problem. While he had her in the car and he was there, he went into the ALPR system. And that's when he began his search and saw that she had gone from Missouri to California, was on the cusp of California and Arizona, and had this tremendous amount of hits and was using that as part of his justification for what he did for his cause. And that's what the judge said, is that type of knowledge information, and it was actually in there too, he had access to over a 30-day period, that you're dragging that. But that is not all these other cases. That's not any of these cases. That's not any of this. That's not the one time for the Chick-fil-A robbery. That's not any of this. So that's what is still needing to be flushed out by the courts. That is what was the subject of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals oral argument last week. There are some cases out there, and that is something where there may need to be some guidance from Congress or from the state legislatures and from the courts about using them in that network setting. Right now, I can tell you, here in Pinellas County, is that there's not enough cameras where we would have that problem. Could you? If they're tied to other ones, yeah, it could happen. You could have an Oklahoma situation. This is where it is being addressed and is being looked at, and it is a very discrete issue in the Oklahoma case. It's not the rest of this. It's a very discrete issue, and it's an issue that needs to get addressed, needs to get flushed out. But it's no different than everything else that has to do with the Fourth Amendment and search and seizure in the courts. Things happen. People do things. The courts start analyzing it. The courts start making decisions and issuing opinions. It goes to the appellate courts, and eventually it makes its way up to the Supreme Court and the body of law on it. So for the longest time, when we were tracking people with cell phones, we didn't get any warrants. We just did it, and it was fine. And people got convicted, and they went to jail. And people got convicted, and they went to jail. And we kept tracking and tracking and tracking. And then the tracking of the cell phones got to be so big and so dense and so much that the court said, you know, we're going to pause on this. This is evolving. This is becoming. And then the Carpenter case was decided. We got – there's a number of examples like that, and I think that's what we're going to see here. Not on all the rest of this, but on the tracking aspect of this. I think that that's what we're going to see. Yeah. Thank you for that clarification. And, you know, not to get into, you know, legal history, but, I mean, it was like kind of like that Knott's case from like 40 years ago that really a lot of these appellate courts are using as like justification of an employee who stole chemicals. And then law enforcement used a beeper to track somebody after they committed or had suspicion of being committed a crime. So thank you. And then just – we'll ask you on the white paper. I don't know if this is maybe for you or staff. It says that flock cameras can search people by clothing, jewelry, tattoos, race, with alerts when someone matches a profile in our county white paper. Is that accurate? I don't know that they do that. Okay. I don't know. That's what our white paper said. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that they do that. Put it this way. I don't know that any time that we ever used it for that or we use it for what I told you for. So I don't know. Well, thank you, Sheriff. You know, I appreciate you. I have the utmost respect for you and your office. I've told you that a lot of times, and I apologize, you know, personally if, you know, what I said was out of line, not my intention at all. And I do apologize to you for you, you know, for that. So not my intention, and that's all I have, Chair. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Chair, I just had a quick question. I know you've been up there a long time. You're fine. I appreciate you being here very much. I just want you to know that, you know, I implicitly trust you. I've been pretty sure I voted for you for three times. And I... What about the fourth one? What about the fourth one? I think one time... Pretty sure for three. Well, you've been around a long time. So I wanted you for service today. I know, four. Well, one time you didn't have an opponent, so that's not fair. So one time you did both. Anyway, I think that the vast majority of Pinellas County residents entrust you implicitly and your deputies and your force. What I wanted to ask you about, just really quickly, is the end users that are described in your contract. Nobody's brought up the contract. I actually read your contract through. The end user description is very broad. And I think a lot of people are worried about who else gets to access this system because it's not defined. And I didn't know if you'd had a defined list sent to you. I mean, like, I'm getting questions like, is the United Nations Police Force allowed access to your... They might be. They're law enforcement. FBI, CIA, sure. Everybody knows they're going to be able to use it. Is the IRS allowed to use it? Is the police force of San Francisco, if they're accessing the system, do we know who they are? And so I'd like to know how the end users are defined, whether you've got a list that you've kind of looked at and said these people are fine, they're not fine. And then the other question would be on the flock system access itself. If we had a police force out in California and somebody was tracking their ex-wife in Pinellas County, would you be alerted to that? Was there any way you're going to know if they're using the information that's collected by your system out in California? Or would it be up to them to figure it out? To see whether... So, in other words, your question, the last part of the question is, is that if you had somebody in California that was improperly using our system... Or, in other words, they put a tag in, but it captured on our network. Right. And the person was improperly doing it. I don't know. I think that that's what's in the works with it. Because it requires... All the agreements require that we audit, that they audit, and that if there is something in there, that we share that misinformation or share that inappropriate information with the other one. That is in the agreement, the sharing agreements that we do have. So, but would it, you know, hit 100% of the time right now? Again, I think that's some of the stuff that they're developing. I think that's what a lot of people are worried about. It makes me nervous as well. Yeah. So, you're not going to know, because we know you would arrest your people. We don't know what they're going to do out there. Yeah. And then, just one other thing I thought maybe you could look at, and nobody seems to be talking about it. I've noticed, I have maps where all the locations of these cameras are. Some of them are close to our critical infrastructure. Some of them are close to our, I mean, there's some close to McDill Air Force Base. So, we might want to think about, do we really want to have cameras that close to vital infrastructure or defense departments? I mean, do you... You said somewhere near McDill Air Force Base? Yes, there's, yeah, I have a map. That's over Tampa. That's not ours, huh? Well, I know, but it's all part of the whole system, and maybe we do here, too. I mean, do we have them out in front of our courthouses? Do we... Right. Our judges need to be protected? What's the problem with them near critical infrastructure? Well, I don't want foreign adversaries tracking the whereabouts of our nuclear scientists that are running our nuclear plants. You know, this is a national system, so I'm just... I don't know. See, I don't think it would be helpful if you had one, because if you had somebody that was, like, you know, doing something nefarious near some critical infrastructure, and they were driving by, doing surveillance of it, casing it, et cetera, and you got somebody that was suspicious in the area, and somebody said, oh, it was a black car that was driving by five times, and the person was acting this way, and you say, okay, when it's a black car, you document it, but if you have an ALPR system nearby, you get the tag of it. I would think it would be helpful. Could be. I'm not saying it wouldn't. I'm just wondering if anybody thought about it now that way, so... Yeah, I mean, some of the places that we put them are there for a reason. I would say some of them are probably near some critical infrastructure. Good. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Commissioner Shearer. Appreciate those questions. Anybody else before we wrap this topic up? Again, Sheriff, thank you for that conversation, and I think there will be... ongoing conversation, and you're at least equipping us with additional information. Hopefully, our residents will pick up on this presentation, at least understand those differences. There will be some people that have philosophical issues, Fourth Amendment, and all of that, and what I would say to them is we're going to have continued cases that get tested, and that's what our court system is all about, and to your point about the 42 cases that have been adjudicated as non and not a problem with the Fourth Amendment issue. I think that will continue to be tested, and that's what this is all about, to continue testing what we do. Okay. We're going to move on to from... So, can I just thank the Sheriff for coming before you vote? I did not see your hand. Sorry about that, Commissioner. Go ahead. Well, I failed to put my hand up, so that was my fault. So, I just wanted to thank the Sheriff for coming in. He had a lot of information, and I found it very insightful, so I appreciate him coming. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. We're going to go from automated license plate recognition deployment to e-bikes. So, I'm not sure who's going to lead that conversation, but anybody? Okay. So, Whit Blanton from... Whit Blanton's on his way up, and he's going to take the lead. We wanted the Sheriff to be here because, obviously, there's an important linkage with any efforts that we would want to undertake. So, with that, Whit. Welcome, Whit. Thank you for having me. Good morning still, Commissioners. I wanted to just give you a little bit of an update on the e-bike situation and provide some statewide policy context. I want to thank you also for the productive discussion that you had back in August. And so, we have been working with your staff to begin looking at some possible ways to approach this, and we're just seeking any additional direction you might have today. So, just a reminder, under Florida statutes, the legislature has passed some guidelines for e-bikes. They have all the rights and privileges and duties of a bicycle. You are not required to have a license, registration, or insurance to use one. You may not modify an e-motor, and e-bikes must comply with Consumer Product Safety Commission standards. In that legislation, the e-bikes have been classified into three distinct classes. I'm not going to read all the words up here, but they are pedal assist or throttle capable, and they can go up to 20 miles an hour or 28 miles an hour, depending on which class they're in. You have to have 750 watts or less, and you have to have pedals. There are some other devices that are out there. The electric personal assistive devices are covered in state statutes. Those are for generally people with disabilities, and they need mobility assistance. And then there's another device that has been characterized as e-motors. These are electric motorcycles, essentially. They are not defined in Florida statutes, and they have become increasingly popular. And I think Commissioner Scott found some cheap on the Internet. Last year, we had Senate Bill 382 that was introduced and passed by the legislature, passed overwhelmingly. It would have required that micromobility operators yield to pedestrians and provide an audible signal when passing on trails, common courtesy. It would have required a 10-mile-per-hour speed limit within 50 feet of a pedestrian on the sidewalk. It also would have established a micromobility device safety task force to develop recommendations, and that would have been presented by just a few days ago. And it would have required law enforcement data to collect specific information on micromobility devices outside of the standard crash form. And right now, we are in a transition period where our crash data sometimes has information about e-bikes or e-scooters, but it's not a standard part of the crash form. And I think that's something that is continuing to evolve. And we know law enforcement officers are adding that in the notes. The governor vetoed this primarily over concerns about how local governments would respond to this law, especially tracking speed limit and things like that. So this did not pass. We do expect it to come back in some form in the next session. Based on this legislation, it gives local governments some authority to set some standards. And some of our Pinellas County municipalities have enacted these restrictions. E-bike operators may be required to possess a government-issued photo ID. It doesn't have to be a driver's license, but some sort of photo ID. You can adopt minimum age restrictions if you would like for e-bikes. You can restrict the use of e-bikes on specific facilities and beaches, and we have had that happen in some of our beach communities. And you can adopt a minimum speed limit on sidewalks and set speed limits on trails. Did you say minimum speed limit? A maximum speed limit. I probably said minimum, yes. Some people might like that. But a maximum speed limit of 50. And there is a hodgepodge of ordinances that have now been introduced and passed across the state of Florida because of the vacuum at the state level. I think Orange County just passed one. But the Palm Coast e-bike ordinance has been shared. It's a pretty good indicator of where some of the local governments are heading. This one establishes a minimum age requirement of 11 years old. It prohibits passengers from, unless the device is specifically designed for passengers. It requires a government-issued ID. Five-mile-an-hour speed limit in school zones within 50 feet of a marked crosswalk or an intersection corner. And it prohibits operation of off-road electric motor-driven cycles on any public right-of-way, those e-motos. And it introduces some civil penalties. So that's Palm Coast's approach. I also know the Orange County School District passed a law that restricted them from being used on school grounds. With that second-to-last bullet point, the prohibit operation of off-road, does that mean sidewalks? It really means off-road vehicles from operating on public property or right-of-way, including sidewalks. And those e-motos are generally sanctioned on private property or off-road, or they're motorcycles that need to be operated in the street. So that's a little bit of gray area. Okay, I was just going to say that didn't, that wasn't answering my question, but I understand the gray concept that you're talking about. Right. So some of these e-bikes that we're using are, they're using the sidewalks on either side of the street. It's not like, well, you stay over here, because people walk both ways so that they don't really pay any attention to that. But that's one of the conflict points. Sidewalks are certainly a conflict point, whether it's an e-bike or an e-moto or a regular bike. Yeah. You know, for sure. Yeah. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of our complaints, not only on the sidewalks, but on the busier parts of the Pinellas Trail, where we have all kinds of users out there. It's interesting, that photo ID thing. You know, I just think of how can we make the connection between the purchase and the ongoing use of a child, you know, I call it a child, and they are of age in that area, connecting it back to a parent. Right. That has, you know, the ultimate authority, if you will, on discipline. And it seems to me that taking their child down to a DMV to get that photo ID done not only puts a certain responsibility in the back of that child's mind, but it also connects the parent to their everyday activity. And, you know, we may not like, again, a privacy issue and all of that, but this is a child of a parent who's still under their legal control. So, I don't know, to me, that's the one area that I find problem with in their current system is that it seems like the parents are doing good things for their kids. They go get the bicycles, and then kids, as kids do, I can kind of remember back that far, you get creative with what we're doing. Sometimes the creativity is not so pleasant. But, again, there's not a parent on the hook for that activity. And I think with that kind of thing, it points right back to that parent, many of which would be mortified by some of the activity that we've seen. Not my kid. He knows better. You know, my mom said the same thing, probably. So, we think we've taken care of those elements. Anyway, any comments? I do want to just mention that I'm working with your staff on some legislative platform, perhaps, that will come back to you for consideration when you engage your legislative delegation. Because there may be some things you would like to see happen statewide that maybe you don't want to do locally that would be more appropriate at the state level. I think local home rule has a lot of good input for our state to consider. And hopefully they'll listen to our white paper on e-bikes, because, I mean, I think we need to develop one that gives them our opinion on maybe what we think. So, anyway, comments or questions, discussion? Barry, go ahead. When we were discussing this and we went through kind of the areas that you have authority over, the state has prompted you from, you know, a lot of things. Could you go back to that slide up there while we're talking about this? Yeah, the one where we, yeah, that's right. Thank you. Yeah. You know, and so I had a conversation with the sheriff, and, you know, and you have a task force, and so we can talk about the task force, and the sheriff's office is represented on the task force. But you've been going through ideas, right? You know, and the whole, the whole key to this is enforcement, though. And so the sheriff and I had a long conversation regarding some of these ideas. And so I just wanted him to be able to kind of weigh in on that, because, you know, as good as Tristan is, he's not going to be out patrolling the trail on the weekends. It's going to be the sheriff's office enforcing that. And, and, and, huh? You can deputize me. Well, I'm not going to deputize Tristan. You know, he wouldn't pass that background check, but, hey, you know, the, you know, he, he, we were trying to, so we had a conversation about what's practical, you know, and what, what we should be doing, and what are the things that the legislature should be doing. And so I wanted the sheriff to provide some context to that and his thoughts as we kind of have this discussion. Sounds good. Thank you, sheriff. Yeah, so I, I think, uh, based on the feedback that I'm getting, we've made great progress on the problem. Um, I would say probably a year ago, it was the number one complaint that I was getting, uh, emails, phone calls in person, and I think many of you as well. And we've put a lot of directed patrols out there, a lot of enforcement effort, and I think we've made great progress. Um, it certainly is not resolving the issue totally, but, but we're much better than where we were. Um, something nuanced I just want to mention to you all is, is that e-bikes are vehicles under Florida law. So all the traffic laws in Florida are in Chapter 316, and e-bikes are vehicles. So under Florida law, and this is a little inside baseball nuance, but you have motor vehicles, and then you have vehicles. E-bikes, like bicycles or vehicles, that means that they are subject to all of the motor vehicle enforcement laws related to conduct. So careless driving, reckless driving, DUI, all those, you can get a DUI on an e-bike, you can get a DUI on a bicycle. So we don't lack for enforcement tools, and the biggest thing that we see is the conduct. You know, it's kind of like the theme of the last discussion. It's not the thing, it's the people. It's not the e-bike. A lot of people love e-bikes, enjoy e-bikes, and some of them, what I'm going to get to in a second, are using it for their primary mode of transportation. And we have to be careful we don't infringe on that. It's the people who are doing it and properly misusing it. So I think that the emphasis, the focus, should be on the conduct and our enforcement of that misconduct. And I think that's where we are making progress. So it doesn't matter who they are, if they're a 13-year-old or a 33-year-old, we can give them a ticket for careless driving. We can enforce that so that we rein in them as far as buzzing by people on the trail, on the sidewalk, driving too fast. Now, I supported and worked on the bill that was vetoed this past legislative session. I know for a fact, because I've talked to the sponsors, there will be bills coming back in the legislature in the 2027 session on this. There's no doubt about it. A couple of things I just think we have to be careful about is that we don't do any harm. And what I mean by that is this. There are a lot of people who don't have a driver's license for a number of reasons. Some of them is they're habitual traffic offenders where it's been suspended. So you can ride a bicycle and you can ride an e-bike because that's a vehicle, not a motor vehicle. You don't have to have a license for a vehicle. You have to have a license for a motor vehicle. So a lot of people, it's the only way they're getting to work. And you see people that are using these e-bikes. We have to be careful. We want people working. We want them employed. We want them to be productive. Same thing with kids going to school. You've got to be careful with the age is that go to the school throughout Pinellas County. And a lot of those kids that live so close to the school that they can't take a bus, but far enough away their parents don't really want to walk in, is they're riding e-bikes. So that's something you've got to be careful with, a minimum age of 11. These kids, a lot of them are riding e-bikes, requiring people have ID on them, et cetera. So I think there's a lot of things here to just be concerned about. And I'll tell you, though, from an enforcement standpoint, we don't need any more tools. Now, I think that the law that we proposed, which was to require, use an audible signal on passing, 100% support that, that you slow down to a certain speed when you are passing pedestrians. Those kinds of things, those are all good. But some of these other things that are in here and in that Palm Coast ordinance, I have some concerns about because we don't want to harm people who need to operate these things. So that's my take on it. And again, the thought behind, in my comment about the photo ID was really people that are using them to go to work, they probably already have an ID, some type of ID, whether it's for voting or, again, I'm not trying to be presumptive. Okay, go ahead, Sheriff. Some may not, you know, and I do think that that's something we have to be careful about, or you should be careful about, because some of these people may not. It depends upon what kind of ID that you're requiring. You know, again, it's the only trend. Well, I'm trying to look at it from the parent's perspective of people, of the kids that are misusing their e-bikes. That's, and I know we have to be careful of the unintended consequences, so I appreciate your comments. Yeah, I just, I think the parents, a lot of times, they get the things and the kids just go. Yeah. And they kind of lose track, and there's nothing that really, other than a policeman knocking at their door saying, hey, we've watched your kid a couple times, you know, I don't know. Well, when the kids get, and the parents, they're getting $166 tickets and moving violations, and so, you know, we start, you know, with that, and we are doing some of that, and, you know, that sends a message. I think it's, I think the thing that we have the greatest impact in changing behavior is with enforcement of the misconduct, you know, regarding the misconduct, whether it's careless driving or running stop signs and all the other things. Pulling wheelies into the front of your car. Right, all that, and, you know, and all that falls within all the traffic laws today that we can't enforce. And one of the challenges is that when they're doing it in concentrated areas, it's easy for us to go in and have enforcement efforts, but it's what people are seeing, it's the one-off on the side street, and it's, you know, we've got to be there to see it, so, but that holds true whether you have an ordinance like this or not. We still have to be there. What do you, the concept of, and again, this is, I'm just not thinking about it from an implementation standpoint, but more from just an awareness standpoint, creating a county task force of made up, maybe even made up of some parents who have e-bikes in their families, just having the conversations about e-bikes and just, you know, bringing awareness to it, not necessarily, I mean, they would have to bring anything to us for changing rules and regs, but I'm just trying to bring more awareness to parents. I think that's what you have now, isn't it? You do have a task force for that. We do. Oh, okay. Yeah, we have a task force. They've been working on this, and the sheriff's office is part of that, and I think part of that. My apologies. Part of that is to increase the public awareness to make, you know, and I'll let you speak to that, but to your point, make parents think about what you're giving your child and sending them, you know, free reign out into the city. Well, yeah, that's what I would like. I would like to see a couple parents that have e-bikes on there to give their perspective on it and to be a voice, but anyway. So we're calling this a working group, but it is broad-based. It covers a number of municipalities. It's even got some of the rental operators for e-bikes and law enforcement, of course. In addition to that, we have the Pinellas Trail Security Task Force, which has law enforcement representatives, and that's focused primarily on trail security. 20 years ago, it was focused on crimes that were happening on the trail, and we've generally eliminated those crimes or largely eliminated those crimes by having some visual detection on the trail for safety. What about going into schools from an education standpoint? We certainly would welcome that. It's hard to get time, you know, in the curriculum, but we have done that in some schools. Our staff routinely interacts with the school district to do that, but it's a one-off. We're invited in. We do a bike rodeo, things like that. Education and awareness, that's my biggest concern. That's the grassroots. On the buyer's side of these, not necessarily what we're doing. I think what we're doing is pretty good stuff. And your staff is doing a great job. We have the courtesy campaign that's directly aimed at users. There's probably more we can do collectively on just educating parents and schoolchildren. So having the lower speed limit when you get around residents is something that both of you kind of like the idea. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but having a rule in place that says slow down when you're around people makes some sense to you. That's part of the courtesy campaign already. So, you know, I think it's just a question of how you enforce it. Courtesy campaign. I don't know what we're supposed to be doing versus your courtesy campaign or whatever. So I just want to make sure that we are doing, if we want to, doing what we can do. So it's a slide back to the four areas that you can regulate. So, again, there's preemption here. So these are the areas that you can focus on. Other areas would have to be done through legislative action. Right. Okay. It doesn't say we have the ability to slow down. To slow down around pedestrians. It's not within that authority. We can't do that. That's something that you said Palm Beach has. I mean, that's what was in the bill that got vetoed. Oh, okay. Was to make them slow down. But to be honest with you, is that there's a statute that's called Speed Too Fast for Conditions. So if you have somebody that's operating a vehicle and there's pedestrians around and they're buzzing by them, you can cite them under the Speed Too Fast for Conditions statute. So what I'm saying is that we already have a lot of the tools to accomplish it. But I would also support, and that's what I did with the state law, to put it in there just to make it clear to everybody what a safe speed is and slow down at least 15 miles an hour and use an audible signal when you're passing a pedestrian so that they know and they can be aware. But I hope that passes this year. Yeah. And it's real. I mean, there are some kids, and not all kids, okay? There's some kids that are creating interaction problems with seniors in parks right now. And I'm not saying maybe it's 1% of our kids, maybe it's 5%, I don't know. But it only takes one encounter with a senior that falls over, hits their head on a rock, and not intended to do that, just trying to be cute about something. So worst case. Thank you. Commissioner Scott, excuse me. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Bob, you're absolutely right. It really comes down to enforcement at the end of the day. Whatever we pass, whatever the state pass, it comes down to enforcement. So I really thank you for, you know, paying attention to this and, you know, putting some resources towards it. And I've noticed that a lot of other police departments are as well. I know St. Pete's been doing a lot down on the trail, and I really appreciate that. So just your opinion on this. I mean, you've said that you kind of have the tools that you really need. Should we, do you think we should just kind of wait and see what comes out of the legislature this year? I would. That's kind of what I'm sensing. I mean, if I were you, I would, because I think it has a really good chance of something getting done. There's a high interest in it. I know it's going to come back. I also think that there is something to be said for consistency and continuity. Right. And what we talked about last year is we need to get something that works in Miami-Dade County and Madison County, in Lafayette County and Broward County, so that we don't, but it works for everybody everywhere. And that was the whole goal of the task force that was supposed to be, which I think we had that right, and we had the right players on it, and they had to have a report in by January so that you could have a bill by the March session. But, of course, you know, again, it didn't happen, so it is what it is. But there's still a really, really strong interest, and something's going to come back this year. Okay. But it's so close now. You know, even if you went through a drafting process and getting it through everything you have to get through here, you may not even get it passed here before the legislature act. So at this juncture of it, now, if they don't do anything this year, well, that's probably a different discussion. But if they do something this year and it meets the needs, I would wait. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Great question, Commissioner Scott. I think that's a good point. Any other questions for Witt or for the Sheriff? Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Okay. We have Employment Sites Program for Public Infrastructure and Agenda Briefing. We have food? Okay. It's 12.15. Everybody good with taking a half-hour break and then finishing up after that? All right. That's what we'll do. We're adjourned temporarily. Thank you. For lunch, appreciate that, as always, taking care of us. We're going to jump into item four, which is our Employment Sites Program for Public Infrastructure. Barry, go ahead and get us started. Well, that is the topic. And Dr. Cynthia Johnson is on her way up to present on this topic. Good afternoon, Commissioners. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. And thank you so much for the opportunity for us to present the Employment Sites Program, which you are very familiar with. But we're presenting our public infrastructure component, which is the second component of the program. And so today, I would like to introduce you to a new team member. Her name is Denise Kelly. We recruited Denise from industry. She's been with our team almost a year now. And she is in charge of the Employment Sites Program. So I'm going to let Denise run the show today, and then she'll be introducing our partners. One of the things with the Employment Sites Program, we really took into account all of the feedback we got with the first phase of the program. And we enhanced the program. And you'll see some results of that when you start to hear about the third-party technical review. Denise? Welcome. I know you've been here a year, but welcome. Good to have you on board. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here. Is this on? Can you hear me? Thank you for the introduction. So we are today going to present two projects. And that will include some background information on the ESP program in general. We're going to go over the application eligibility assessment, which was done internally by county staff. And then Jared and Chad from Kimley Horn will go over the third-party technical review that they conducted. And finally, they'll give their recommendations on the two cities that were part of this first round of public infrastructure. Broadly speaking, the Employment Sites Program has three categories. Site development, we're right now in the eighth round of doing site development. And today, we're doing the public infrastructure round, which is our first public infrastructure round. And then lastly, land acquisitions. We haven't done any land acquisitions yet. And I'm going to introduce Jared. Jared and Chad from Kimley Horn, and I'll take it from here. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, Jared Schneider with Kimley Horn. Thanks so much for having us, y'all. So I'm going to pop through this. Yeah, as Denise mentioned, there's really four different categories in the ESP program. There's transportation, energy, water, wastewater, information systems. So that's really what was included in the ESP program. The real purpose is to look at gap funding. It's not to be maintenance. It's really capital improvements. What is the gap just to get us over the hump? And then there's a number of economic benefits you can see from listed on the screen here that we talked about for the ESP programming, really encouraging private investment, economic development. Again, we were looking at areas, and I'll show a map here that are key investment areas, and really trying to accelerate projects that the city may do, but it may be a longer stretch, but it's to speed up the project. There are a number of things that happened that staff conducted to let our city partners know about this program. There was two webinars, and this is stretching back over last year, but there was two webinars, 11 project meetings, and then staff scored applications. There was two applications, one from Pinellas Park and one from St. Pete that got carried forward from those, I'll call them pre-app meetings, those project meetings. So today, what I'm going to talk about in transitioning now is our third-party technical review, and I want to thank Chad Davis here with me. Chad took hundreds and hundreds of pages of technical information from our applicants and really tried to summarize this into a concise manner here today for you all. But, yeah, I'm really going to talk about our third-party review. So what we did is we independently took the to-do diligence analysis from Pinellas County staff, and then we reviewed them from an engineering perspective. And I just wanted to show this map. I think this is an important map that we're all aware of. This is the target employment centers. And what we are doing is really evaluating are these projects in those key employment centers that makes up our largest, you know, employment in the county. And both applications are in the Gateway area. That's our largest, one of our largest employers in the entire region. So it's in that purple that you can see on the screen. Our review is really focused on reconfirming the data provided. We had a number of phone calls and follow-ups, so I appreciate both Pinellas Park and St. Pete staff being open to us asking additional questions and asking for additional information. And then we had our funding recommendations that I'm going to display to you all. Real quickly, that area seems to mirror what our MPO group for Pinellas identified as that business hub. Correct. Other than maybe a little area up in Clearwater, an area up in Oldsmar, but that being a primary area for job growth. That's a target employment area. Thank you. Yeah, and the point is to invest our infrastructure in these areas and some key corridors around the county. I'm going to hop real quick into what our evaluation criteria included. We were really looking at, again, do the applications meet the ESP program intent, the policy guidelines? Again, we're looking at filling a gap. Is it a capital improvement project? Is it helping expand our industrial or employment base, not merely a maintenance project? And then from a number two project review, is it feasible? Again, I just mentioned that. Is it a capital project? And then from a third aspect, is it providing the recipe for some additional employment? Is it having a positive impact to be able to expand our employment base? Again, really focused in those key areas in purple. I'm going to transition now and talk about both applications, starting with Pinellas Park. And real quickly, we'll have an overview slide for each, just a little bit of information here, and then we talk about our recommendations. So the overview for Pinellas Park, what they're looking at is to kind of orient us here. We're in the gateway area, but there's US-19 that cuts across going northwest. We have Gandy, 275, so kind of that key mid-county area. And blue is the target employment center. That mirrors what I was just presenting in the purple. And then what this project is is 2.74 square mile improvement for sewer capacity for lift station 30 service area, and that's in that red area. So I just wanted to orient you all. So that's where the project location is. Total project cost is around $6 million. The gap funding that Pinellas Park requested was around 13% of that project cost, so coming in at $750,000. I'll provide a little bit more information here on the next future slides, but we reviewed it, felt the funding recommendation, we lined up with their gap request. One other thing that we thought was important was to look at the application, really dig in. Did we agree with the employment numbers? So we have existing employment of 70 businesses in the area. We had several target industry employees impacted, so it's around 1,600 in this area. And then what we did is we also went out to the businesses and asked qualitatively, what's your need? So there's three there that we can talk more about, but we had a number of responses back from some of the businesses positively saying, yes, this is a project that we support and that we need to continue to expand our operations. One other thing we did is we looked at what's the estimated employment growth in this area. Ford Pinellas, Witt was just here, does an industry standard employment growth, so we vetted that, looked at that. And what we saw in this red area, you can see some red lines, there's an estimated employment growth by year 2050 of just over 3,000 in this area. All right, so what this does, this is a table. I'm basically, Chad and I have summarized the three criteria we were talking about. You know, does it meet the ESP program intent? We reviewed the project details from the applicant, the target employment impact. I just displayed those numbers. So we felt the forced main replacement, the rehabilitation of a master station number 30 to increase the sewer capacity of this area, which shows on this screen 720,000 gallons per day, and we vetted that as well. We felt it met the criteria, and so that was our recommendation for funding for the Pinellas Park application. And you talk about target investment area for jobs. And one of the things that this county has done, basically at the bequest of the state some 50 years ago, is to create a plan to protect our light industrial area. We have a lot of light industrial in this area. For jobs, for companies to come here and expand to have higher-paying jobs for our residents to afford to live here, all really structured in a really important manner. And, again, to the impact of coming in and telling us how to use light industrial, to me, is offensive. And I think that's the kind of thing that we have to really start illuminating our state representatives on how important and why it's important to preserve this light industrial. We have examples where we have light industrial area and a piece of it set aside for housing and working together to have a housing component so they're close to work. It makes sense when we work together like that. And that's the kind of thing that I like to have more control of at the local level. I think we do it pretty responsibly. Just a little side comment. Go ahead. Agreed. Yeah, keep that flexibility for the future for employment. All right. Now I'm going to transition to the St. Pete app. Actually, before I do that, the letters of support we had for Pinellas Park were, I'll just read those off real quick, Norris, Precision Manufacturing. We had Florida Electrical Service, Course Revival, IANA Plastics and Engineering submitted letters of support on that one. Transitioning into St. Pete, we had a number of applicants or businesses respond to the county, Raymond James, NDH Medical, and Plasma Therm submitted letters of support for this project we're going to present. So transitioning to St. Pete, they really had five total projects in one, if you will. Same kind of map orientation of Pinellas Park. We're a little bit further east. So kind of the road that runs off the coast we all know is Gandy. And then you have U.S. 19 to 75. So, again, major, major employment area in our county and our region with over 60,000 jobs in this kind of larger gateway area. St. Pete looked at it as kind of five small projects for one that would help with one larger lift station service area. So that's that red lift station 63. The total project cost came in. They had around $18 million, and the gap funding requested was $4 million, which was 22% of the total project cost. After our review of kind of these smaller five projects, our funding recommendation was $2.2 million. And I'll show you why we came up with that recommendation here in a minute. Let me back up. There we go. So this really summarized the five projects that we just had on the map. They had the Sand Martin Bridge Utilities Relocation, Equalization Storage Project. Essentially, that's just adding more wet water storage, lift station backup, lift station 63 force main, lift station 63 master, lift station rehab and hardening. You'll notice the green, again, we took the three different categories, and we really felt three of the projects met the ESP criteria, but there was really only one that met all three criteria. And the reason why is it was that Sand Martin Bridge Utilization Relocation, it increased the capacity, sub-aqueous capacity under Sand Martin Bridge there. And that was really the only project that met the project criteria for ESP, met the target employment impact, and the others really didn't have a gap funding piece to it, or they didn't have funding to it. There was also several of these were more based on maintenance costs, and so that's where you'll see the orange, where we felt it didn't meet the criteria. The Equalization Storage Project, the second one there on the table, that was also a very good project. It just didn't have funding applied to it from the city. So we said that doesn't meet the criteria. So with all that, the recommendation is for partial funding for St. Pete's application of $2.2 million. Remember, their application request was for $4 million, and that $2.2 million is for that Sand Martin Bridge Utilities Relocation. This is a summary similar to Pinellas Park of the employment. There's, to Commissioner Edgar's point, there's a lot of employment in this area. So you have to really look at it as we stripped out the existing target industrial business impact of over 100 businesses and then over 11,000 employees. But there's, you know, when you hear employment, it's a lot of other employment in this area as well. Then we looked at Ford Pinellas' growth projections out to 2050. Again, that's an industry standard that they use through FDOT. They had an estimated employment growth of 9,800 in this area out to 2050. So just to reiterate, again, the recommendation for St. Pete is that $2.2 million for the third-party review of Sand Martin Bridge Utility Relocation. They do have a roadway project or bridge project, as many of y'all know, I'm sure, already. That is under design and construction, I believe, is tentatively for 2027 through 2030. So this is separate, but it's almost like when you're going in for heart surgery and you fix something else when you're in there. That's what this is kind of about. The project provides 6 million gallons per day in capacity for wet weather capacity as well. And this is, yeah, really just boils it back up. Again, Pinellas Park, full requested amount is what we saw through our review of $750,000. And then St. Pete, partial funding of 2.2 mil. And I think the point that you did on the public funding or, excuse me, private funding, the program that we've been using in this public funding is gap. It's easy to say if they're going to get 90% of it, they don't probably scrutinize their own projects enough. But when you talk about gap funding, which is critically important, it stands the test of their own scrutiny. I talked to one person who, one city manager who had an application and they were going to get the gap piece, but they really looked at the project itself and said it was just too much and too expensive for how little it was going to provide. So they did their own kind of thought process. Now, if they were going to get 90%, a project that may have not been worthwhile, they may have gone ahead with it. And that's the kind of thing that I think this is such a responsible approach to making sure that the project stands on its own before we get involved. So thank you for that. Are there any comments or questions, anybody that they have? Okay. Doctor, do you have anything else? We just want to say thank you to the commission. The employment sites program is so very critical to our economic strategy. And so being very thoughtful through this process of how we utilize these public funds to create new opportunities for our citizens to have access to high-waste jobs. So on behalf of the team, we just want to say thank you. And this program is really turning out to be a game changer for us because the development community, right now we have eight, for round eight, we have 11 applications. So it is quite popular, and it is producing great fruit. So thank you so much. Yeah, and I think the other thing I would make a comment on is this was a Penny for Pinellas project that our residents voted on. They said it was important to have an economic peace for more jobs for either themselves or their kids or parts of their family. But it is very targeted to create that infrastructure element that brings more jobs or brings more capacity, industrial capacity, to our county. And they said it was important. It felt kind of under that umbrella of county funding before the county and the cities took their parts. Yes. Along with affordable housing. So that had an element, and this affordable housing had an element, and now in this part has an element. And I think it's done some really great work to solidifying some of these businesses and their infrastructure needs. So I'm really excited about it. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Any other questions, comments? Okay. Thank you. Thank you all. Appreciate it. All right. We're going to go on to our agenda review. And, Barry, it's all yours. All right. We'll start out. You see you have a partner presentation with State Representative Cheney regarding some money she's bringing back for 31 for our pump station project, various other presentations. Down under public hearings, you have a countywide map amendment from residential rural to public semi-public. It's currently developed with a community assembly. They're going to upsize that in similar type use, but for a larger community assembly building. It's, and they're going to remove a connection to Keystone Road. City of Dunedin, countywide map amendment, public semi-public to retail services. These are, this area has typically been used by their parks division for various functions. They want to repurpose this for private use and put retail services, which is similar to the surrounding area. Moving over past some reports and things over to item 13. This award of contract to five firms for continuing mechanical, electrical, and plumbing professional engineering services. This is through our construction and property management area. So they provide as needed services up to $500,000 per firm over a five-year period. Item 14 is annual agreement with the Sheriff's Office for our environmental lands deputies. Item 15 is an award a bid to Central Florida contractors for infrastructure repair work order contracts at six sites that were damaged from Hurricane Helene. A lot of that will be reimbursed through emergency, federal emergency management and state of Florida emergency management reimbursements. And to the regular agenda, the first item is memorandum of understanding. And this is for the utilities building in, in downtown 14 South Harrison. This covers the space occupied by the county clerk. And then item 17 is similar in that, again, the utilities building, but space occupied by public works staff. Item 18, we're going to request that that be pulled. We need to do some additional environmental review for that property before we bring that forward. Item 19 is a first amendment to an agreement with Miles Partnership for digital marketing services. So one, they want to do exercise a two-year term extension, and they also want to increase the spend for that contract through the end of 2028. Item 20 is exactly what you heard, approval of the Penniless Park and St. Petersburg Employment Sites Program. Item 21 is affordable housing program. This is to reclassify for this apartment complex. The, they're going to ship, put the funding over to the ship funding, and that then frees up penny for funding from our housing program. And so they, this is an eligible project. We can utilize ship dollars, and then that frees up more projects that we can do under our program. So that adds $7 million back to that? That adds $7 million back to that. Now, understand that we have six applications requesting $26 million, but this does provide more, more. But we were down, too. You can, you can approve more under that program with this, with this. And I think that's the reason Bruce targeted that, is it was good use of funds. There's a time limit on the use of the ship funds. So he's just trying to maximize the amount of projects that we can get done. Item 22 is a grant application with St. Petersburg and Sheriff's Office. This is for our Byrne Memorial Assistance Grant Program. Item 23 is an agreement to terminate with Suncoast Centers, the Sexual Assault Victims Examination Program. I know, and again, this, this is an ongoing thing. I know the hospitals are having conversations with them regarding how they're going to assume those services. And so that's, you know, kind of in the works. Do we have them on board through the end of the calendar year? Yes, this, this, here, yeah, this goes through the end of this year. Am I correct on that? Yes. So it still goes through the end of the year. And I'm assuming before we, when we get closer to that date, that we'll have something in place as a replacement. We won't, but the hospitals. But we're monitoring it. For them. Yes, we are monitoring that. And, and Karen is obviously on top of that discussion. And again, you're probably going to see different ways of doing it. It's up to the hospitals, how they provide that, you know. I don't, I. One hospital may want to internalize it. Another hospital may want to contract to have those services. But, but that's. The ultimate goal is to have the services available. Yes. For our residents. Correct. To get in a bad spot. Correct. Okay. All right. So you'll keep us posted on that as we move through the next month or two. Matt, Matt's shaking his head, so yeah. I just don't want any gaps. No, no, no. We, we, we understand that. This, this moves to terminate it. It puts it squarely on the, on the responsible party. I mean, you know, that, remember that, that organization was providing it. It was probably going to be switched anyway, because there's other funding sources in play. We were just one piece of that. I get it. Thank you. Item 24 is an award of bid to Conan Graham for the Ridgemore Boulevard Booker Creek Bridge Project. Oh my. Previously. Oh my. You're, you seem excited. You seem excited. No, I'm excited, but it's going to be, you know. Yes. There's, there's going to be some project, some growing pains with that. I'm going to have Kelly out there at the bridge, making sure that the cars get by. She'll be a flagger. They wouldn't be able to see her, but that's a different issue. All right. An award of bid to preferred materials for the 2027 pavement. This is package number two. Questions on that? I didn't, I didn't see what area that was, but what areas are we covering on that one? McMullen Booth, Curlut of 580, Local Group B, says Landsbrook B. So I'm assuming you get where that's at, some areas in resurfacing in Clearwater and Largo. I've got a growing list of patched roads, and I want to make sure that we're hitting those. Well, we're hitting them. We've got, we've still got 150 miles of roads to, to, to, to get to. So no excuses. We'll, we'll eventually get there. There's some pretty bad ones out there. And item 26 is the same thing, except package number four. We hit one and three last time. We're hitting two and four this time. So, um, item 27 is a change order, um, to the agreement, change order number two of the agreement. Uh, this is for one of our manufactured homes, um, communities. Um, the original award was in 2024. This, uh, change order number two increases the agreement by 475,000 for additional unforeseen work, um, caused by field conflicts within the sewer lines. Moving on over to item number 28. It's an agreement with quantum health for employee benefits, concierge services. What this really provides is, um, is it helps our employees with navigating the, uh, the best, um, uh, services that they can, um, get. It, it, it, it provides a higher level of service. We had part of that. What you're doing is you're shifting it out. We had a part of that within the existing contracts. So we're pulling it out of that and doing it as a separate agreement and they provide a higher level of service. And again, HR believes there's a return on investment on that for our employees and provides better service for our employees. Hello, Amanda. You're up. She seems startled. I want to start. This is my first time. Um, 29 is our proposed ratification of the initiation of litigation in the subject case. Uh, in this case, we did get the, uh, chair's approval to initiate litigation. We, we, we filed for and received an emergency temporary injunction to prevent, uh, displacement of soil and illicit discharge into cross Bayou Canal. So we're just going to be looking for ratification of that. Thank you. Anything on the County attorney report? There may be a couple of things that, uh, Joel will bring up on Tuesday. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Amanda. Item 31. I will have a County administrator's report. Item 32 are appointments to the medical services advisory council item 33 are appointments to the panels County educational foundation authority and then kind of commission new business. Okay. Um, that was a lot today. Um, I thought really, really good presentations. I was really glad to see the, the sheriff in the house doing what he did. I liked Tampa Bay waters update. I mean, it gets, I know sometimes it gets a little bit, uh, much, but I think it's a really important time. And we've been getting some good news with some rain. So, um, hopefully that is a better state. And then our, our funding that we just talked about, I think, you know, really good workshop items. So, um, with that said, um, anything that for the good of the order around the table from the commissioners, I mean, obviously we'll have that conversation about this topic on Tuesday. So if anything comes up, um, obviously we'll, we'll address it. Then anything else vary from your perspective. Okay. The meeting is adjourned. Thank you.