Forward Pinellas Board meeting on 7/8/2026 - Jul 08, 2026

I hope everybody's doing well. Our chair is under the weather today, so we wish her the best, and we hope that she feels better soon. So the moral of that story is you all are stuck with me. So if you would please rise and join me, I pledge. Thank you for that. So let's go around the room and do some introductions, and we'll start over here with my friend Mike. Yep. Mike Eisen at Tarpon Springs. Good afternoon. Yes, good afternoon to all. Thank you for allowing me here to share my ideas and thoughts. Good afternoon. Ann Marie Brooks, Mayor of Madeira Beach, representing the beach communities. Good afternoon. Tom Reed, Vice Mayor of City of South Pasadena, representing PSTA. Good afternoon. Chris Johnson, Vice Mayor of City of Largo. Good afternoon. Council Member Brandy Gabbard, representing the City of St. Petersburg. Chris Shearer, Pinellas County Commission. Good afternoon. Whit Blanton, your Executive Director. Brian Scott, Pinellas County Commission. Tom Shelley, Deputy Mayor of Bel Air, and representing the North Inland Communities. Good afternoon. Council Member Mike Menino, City of Clearwater. Council Member Richie Floyd, City of St. Petersburg. Mayor Karen Love of Gulfport, Florida, representing South Inland Communities. Well, thank you, everybody, for that. And I know Mayor Moe is on her way and will be joining us shortly. So with that, we'll move on to citizens to be heard. Tina, are there any citizens wishing to be heard and any items not already on the agenda for action by the board today? No, Chair, there is not. Okay. Thank you. Mayor Moe, welcome. Okay. Next, we'll move on to the consent agenda. Does any board member wish to pull any item from the consent agenda? Hearing none, do we have a motion? So moved. Motion by Commissioner, Council Member Gabbard. Second by Vice Mayor Johnson. Okay. Any discussion? Hearing none. All in favor? Any opposed? Okay. Passed unanimously. Thank you very much. For the record, there were no citizens wishing to be heard on the consent agenda today. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Now we will move on to our public hearing items. And the first one of that is we have item number 5A-1, case CW26-08, City Clearwater. And we do have two presentations on this item here. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Marcy Stenmark with the Planning and Development Department. Before you is a proposed countywide map amendment to the planned redevelopment district within North Greenwood. And the city has a companion feature land use map amendment for the North Greenwood area. We've been asked to provide some information to you this afternoon regarding this amendment and the community engagement that has led to the amendment. The overlay was recommended by the North Greenwood CRA plan, which was a community-led effort. The CRA plan was adopted in 2023 after extensive community engagement. The outreach included property owner and occupant mailings and surveys. There were meetings and workshops and also roundtable meetings with the Faith Leadership Community Roundtable. The CRA plan has several goals, including public safety, mobility, poverty reduction, housing affordability, quality of life, and investing in use. I'm sorry. In youth. The CRA plan also recommended a zoning tool with design guidelines to allow for more housing options, such as duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and small apartments. The goal of the plan is to create more choices so people can stay in the community as their needs change, including seniors, young adults, families, renters, and property owners. Creating the overlay is a four-step process. We are currently working on action items one and two. One is a comprehensive plan amendment to establish the overlay and bonuses. The second is the future land use map amendment to apply the new overlay. And that is where this meeting fits in today is in action items one and two because it requires a countywide plan map amendment. We will also then be working on a community development code amendment and a zoning map overlay to apply design standards because anyone who would wish to apply for the bonus would need to meet design standards for their new development. In 2024, after the CRA plan was adopted, we held a series of meetings, including listening sessions, a kickoff meeting, and a game of zones workshops where participants looked at different development types and talked about how many units might fit per acre. Due to the impacts of the hurricanes, the department's focus was paused to work on post-storm permitting. We have resumed work starting last winter, and part of our discussion at that time was how did we want to move forward with the community's goals to allow people to age in place and provide more housing types. And it was decided after much discussion by the staff and consultant team that an overlay would be the appropriate land use tool moving forward. And that is because people can choose to opt into the overlay. Property owners are not required to participate, and it provides flexibility for how they use their lot. Because it's a countywide amendment as well, a traffic study was prepared, and we were evaluating the maximum potential buildout. I wanted to mention that we don't expect that this area will develop to the maximum potential because it is an opt-in system. Not everyone wishes to participate, and also we don't expect everyone to develop at the maximum amount. The traffic study found that there would be an acceptable level of service on all roads that we studied except for one segment on alternate US-19 and Myrtle Avenue. And that the transportation network would remain acceptable, and this is likely due to the unique street grid and connected streets. This is the language regarding the potential overlay, and we are proposing a bonus of up to 40 units per acre and a 1.1 floor area ratio bonus for non-residential. So the residential bonus is up to 40 units, and the non-residential is up to 1.1 floor area ratio. I wanted to note that the countywide plan allows for a maximum density of 45 units, and we're proposing 40 units. So what we're proposing is a little bit lower, and also the countywide plan allows a maximum floor area ratio of 2.0, and we're proposing a maximum of 1.1. I'm going to go through a series of maps to show you the CRA area as well as the areas to be excluded, and this is showing the CRA boundary, which is over 600 acres. We're going to be excluding the central business district area, which is at the southwest corner of the CRA, and that's because it is already in the downtown Old Bay Character District and subject to those regulations. We will also be excluding water, preservation, open space, industrial limit, transportation utility, and also land within unincorporated Pinellas County. There are seven future land use classifications that would be part of the overlay listed here. There are four residential and three non-residential and mixed use. I wanted to provide some information to you about the community meeting that we held on June the 30th. I also wanted to thank you very much for continuing the item on last month's agenda so we could have this meeting. The meeting was held at the North Greenwood Recreation Center, and we had approximately 50 people attend, not including staff. We also had several staff members in attendance. Staff from Planning and Development, the CRA, and Economic Development Department presented information about the CRA plan, the ongoing implementation, and the next steps. During the meeting, we provided the public hearing schedule, and we also promised we'd be back in September for some more community meetings about the upcoming Community Development Code amendments and design standards, because we want to make sure that we are checking in with the community about those standards and that they could support them how we're moving forward. I've been asked to share some information about the concerns that were raised during the meeting and how we responded, and I wanted to indicate that we heard from the community of a concern about increased property taxes. We did share some information there that we talked with a property appraiser. The overlay itself will not directly result in increased property taxes. However, the area is in the CRA area. It's a CRA. We're hoping for redevelopment and reinvestment, so over time, those reinvestments may affect property values. There's also a Florida Save Our Homes program that limits how much the assessed value can be increased each year for homesteaded properties. There was a concern raised about the Marshall Street Wastewater Plant and if it can handle more development, and we mentioned that we recently did a water reclamation facility master plan, which calls for consolidation of the plants. There's also a concern raised regarding developers coming in and buying up property or gentrification, and we did talk about how the overlay is an opt-in system. No one is required to participate. Property owners can choose if they wish to participate in the overlay. And also, the CRA plan has a chapter and an equity statement that talks about reinvestment and redevelopment in the neighborhood or in the area, and that gentrification can potentially occur over time at some level because the area we're hoping for reinvestment and for redevelopment to occur. There was a question about impervious surface requirements and if they still apply, if a floor area ratio bonus is applied, and the answer is yes. We are not. We're going to require an affordability requirement. Instead, we're going to be proposing a new mix of housing types that are not currently allowed today and encourage a diversity of housing types. And people were asking if their house burns down, could they rebuild based on current zoning, and the answer is yes, if it was nonconforming. We received some letters before today's meeting asking for a meeting with staff regarding concerns about anti-displacement. We wanted to let you know that we will be holding a meeting with the individual who requested the meeting to talk about those ideas. And I wanted to share with you, we assessed the proposed amendment based on our community development code. We found that it meets the comprehensive plan, the countywide rules. It will not adversely affect the use of property in the area. There's sufficient public facilities and will not impact natural resources. Our next steps in the process include a countywide, I'm sorry, there's a CPA hearing on August the 11th, a city council second reading on October the 1st, and then we will be having meetings with the community starting in September regarding the community development code amendments. We anticipate finishing up those code amendments around February of next year. And I wanted to mention that they're all bundled together and that the overlay will not become effective until the community development code amendments are passed. So the earliest that the overlay would be effective would be February of next year. Next, I would like to introduce Jesus Nino, our CRA director. He would like to provide some information to you about the CRA. Thank you. Thank you, Marcia. Good afternoon. Jesus Nino, CRA executive director for the city of Clearwater. Chair and board members, thank you for allowing me to speak. So first, I'd like to share briefly a little bit about the CRA's perspective. So last night, which was July the 7th, the North Greenwood Community Redevelopment Area Citizens Advisory Committee took action on this particular item, so that it was presented by staff to the CAC, and they unanimously voted for this particular initiative here to move it forward. In addition, the committee reaffirmed its support for the city's efforts to develop a local zoning overlay that does reflect the community's vision for North Greenwood. I'd also like to recognize the Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition, who's here in the audience, is also in support of this initiative. So this amendment is the first step. It creates the foundation for future land use and zoning changes that do support the community's vision and help address longstanding slum and blighting conditions in the area. It also opens the door for projects like the recently approved The Grove, which is a mini-container village in the North Greenwood area, which is led by the Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition, also for new infill housing for future mixed-use redevelopment along the Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue corridor. And throughout this process, CRA staff, the Citizens Advisory Committee, residents, business owners, and other property owners have worked together to try to move forward the goal of the CRA in that area. So anything that CRA does, CRA staff, advisory committee, we all work together to plan for that community. We don't plan for them. We plan with them, and we collaborate. So those priorities are also reflected in the adopted, like I mentioned, North Greenwood CRA plan. So this is a big tool that's going to help us move our vision forward to create a prosperous community. So from the CRA's perspective, today's action is about more than just land use designation. It's about creating a framework for redevelopment that reflects the community's vision. We believe that the best plans are created together, and our goal is simple, to improve the community and create more opportunities for residents and businesses in North Greenwood. And thank you for the opportunity. Thank you very much. Before we move on to the Four Pinellas presentation, do we have any questions for either Jesus or Marcy? No? Okay. Move on to our next presentation. Good afternoon, Emily. Good afternoon. Thank you to City of Clearwater staff for just giving a little bit more background on this before I dive into our countywide review for this case. Okay, so this case is a 461.5 proposed countywide plan map amendment. That's the acreage of this site. And this is within the North Greenwood community redevelopment area. And this amendment proposes to transition multiple existing countywide plan map categories to the planned redevelopment district category or PRD category. And the proposal is intended to establish a coordinated redevelopment framework, as the city mentioned. I did want to start with just kind of a broad overview of how a zoning overlay differs from base zoning. So basically, property owners within this overlay area that is being proposed can choose to develop over with the overlay standards or existing zoning regulation standards. So as Clearwater City staff mentioned, it is optional. So just a quick location depiction. This subject area is located within the North Greenwood community redevelopment area, and it's immediately north of downtown Clearwater. So again, the proposed amendment functions primarily as a redevelopment framework rather than direct development approval. And more importantly, the overlay operates as an incentive-based framework, so future redevelopment projects would still require compliance with the comprehensive plan amendments, community development code standards, and qualifying design criteria. So this amendment comes to us as a Tier 2 amendment. It's reviewed as a Tier 2 amendment because it represents a substantive modification to the planning framework governing the North Greenwood CRA. And although this proposal does not directly approve specific development projects, it does establish a new countywide redevelopment structure intended to facilitate mixed-use redevelopment and additional density and intensity through qualifying redevelopment standards. So the visual depiction of this, this amendment would consolidate multiple existing countywide plan map categories into that PRD category, which is the purple that you see there. So the proposed overlay does establish the bonus density and intensity standards that are tied to the qualifying redevelopment projects. So just kind of reiterating what the city showed you, they're proposing residential densities up to 40 units per acre and non-residential intensity up to 1.05 and mixed-use intensity up to 1.5. And I did want to show that, again, these standards do remain below the maximum thresholds for our countywide category for the planned redevelopment district. So consistency with our countywide rules, the proposal is supporting redevelopment within an existing urbanized area that's already served by infrastructure, transit, and public facilities. It also would support several adopted countywide strategies related to infill redevelopment, multimodal transportation, housing opportunity, and coordinated reinvestment as well. Touching a little bit more on the transportation impact analysis that the city did provide to us, it did identify an increase in projected trips under the maximum theoretical build-out analysis, which did trigger additional transportation review requirements that the city did complete and provide to us. So we considered this area, we considered the surrounding strong multimodal characteristics, so that includes the transit services that do exist, including the Pinellas Trail. The city also has adopted a mobility management system that we took into account. This provides mechanisms for transportation mitigation as well as project-level reviews that would be required as development proposals come forward to the city. Portions of this area are located within the coastal high hazard area, so we did have our additional evaluation criteria that had to be met. So our staff evaluated evacuation access, shelter capacity, and the potential population increase associated with the proposed overlay, while taking into account that it is an optional overlay, and it's not a by-right increase. So graphically showing the shelter capacity analysis that we completed, so basically under theoretical maximum build-out scenario, so this would be maximum build-out occurred, the projected shelter demand associated with the amendment does remain substantially below the available shelter capacity in the serving area. So based on the submitted analysis, we found that there is sufficient shelter capacity within the surrounding area that would be able to accommodate the projected increase in population at the maximum build-out. Staff finds this amendment consistent with the purpose and requirements of the planned redevelopment district category in the countywide rules. The area does contain the interconnected mix of uses and urban development characteristics contemplated by the PRD category that we've established in the countywide rules. I did also just want to note that Fort Pinellas did receive some public comment, mainly in the forms of phone calls, emails, and written correspondence. Many of the conversations that I had were informational and focused on kind of understanding what the proposed overlay would do and what could potentially happen to their property, how it would affect individual properties, and the timeline for any future redevelopment as well. And then all of this public comment did result in Clearwater staff holding those additional public meetings that Marcy spoke about as well. So we'll just conclude here that we find the proposed amendment consistent with the countywide rules and our strategies. We also found that the transportation impact and coastal high hazard area analysis could be adequately addressed through existing regulatory and mitigation frameworks that the city provided. So based on the submitted materials and our review, Ford Pinellas staff would recommend approval. And that's all that I had, and I'm open for questions now at this time. Thank you, Emma. Any questions for Emma? Mike? So when this is done, do they also take into consideration whether the infrastructure can supply all of these extra locations, or is that too early in the process? So with Clearwater's review and as part of their CRA review, they do look at infrastructure capacity. Okay. The other question I had is when you put up the amount of shelter area in case of coastal high hazard, do they figure in other locations that also might be utilizing these locations? Because I know for a fact Tarpon Springs does not have any shelters, so they are counting on Palm Harbor and et cetera, et cetera. So when we see these results, this is just for Clearwater, or is this for Clearwater plus whatever else could come in there in the event of a hurricane? So we drew basically a radius around the area of the North Greenwood location, and we took in all of those shelters into account. And we did a build-out analysis based on the resources that we have kind of that stated the numbers that potentially would go there if a hurricane event was to happen. And then we factored in the potential population increase of the numbers of the amendment. Does that answer your question? That's for the project, not for the other places that could come in to shelter. So our numbers that we did the study with were based on the national hurricane evacuation information that's online. So we took those numbers, and then we factored in, yes, North Greenwood's population increase. I realize there's no clear answer to this. Yeah, there's not an exact answer. It's a guesstimate. I know that. Okay. Thank you. But as you can see, there's plenty of space. Yes. It's where I'm going. All good, Mike? Chair, thank you. I do have some comments to make, not necessarily questions for staff. So I can hold that until the appropriate time. I don't want to take up anybody else's time if they had questions for staff. I mean, you can go now. That's fine. Yeah, perfect. We'll go for you, then we'll go to Richard. Perfect. Thank you. I want to hear with you. Thank you. I first wanted to thank this board for supporting the continuation of this item. I think that was an important decision to make. What it did was it gave our staff, as has been said a couple times, a little more time to go back and sit in our community and do some additional engagement sessions with our citizens advisory committee, as well as some of the community members that did have some opposition or concerns regarding this optional overlay district. So I appreciate this board's continuation. I appreciate our staff's willingness to get out in the community again and make sure that engagement and those deeper discussions were had. And I appreciate our North Greenwood Redevelopment Area Citizens Advisory Board in those deeper discussions that they had. I think it's important in these processes that the quality of the process is as important as the policy in ensuring that it's handled transparently, that it's handled with patience, and that the process is handled respectfully. And I commend all staff members from Ford, Pinellas, City of Clearwater, and our Citizens Advisory Community Board for handling it that way. This one caught me a little bit off guard because our CRA in the Greenwood community was, as it was noted, was formed in 2023, and it wasn't driven by City of Clearwater staff. It wasn't driven by electeds. It was truly a community vision. And that community, our North Greenwood community, worked hard, worked hard for a number of years to ensure that it was their vision and it was their direction and guidance for the future of our North Greenwood community and that they had the adequate tools, and not just for growth and development, but for protections. And a lot of these concerns that I see that have popped out since this overlay district was proposed are a lot of the very concerns that are legit. I don't want to take away from the legitimacy of them. Those are fears and concerns when these things come about. But these are also fears and concerns that were discussed in deep lengths within our community for a number of years, which led up to the creation of that CRA in 2023. So I think some members of the community were kind of caught off guard, like, we went through this, we've been through this, and now we're circling back. So I commend all sides for having the patience to kind of go back over it, walk back through it, and get a better understanding for it. But I think at the end of the day, there are some important things with it. It's optional. It isn't required. I think that's an important distinction. I think it's also important to acknowledge a couple things. This does not force density increases in our North Greenwood community. This does not remove residential protections, which is very important in our community, and it doesn't override homestead rights. And I think those are all very important components to this amendment. I know myself I'm going to fall right in line with our city staff, with our North Greenwood Redevelopment Area Citizens Advisory Board, with our Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition, as well as with Ford Pinellas, and think this amendment should be unanimously approved going forward because it is a big benefit to the future of our North Greenwood community. So thank you. Thank you, Mike. Richie? Thank you. Thanks for that context. You know, whenever we have cases like this, I always view my goal as, like, determining where legitimate concerns are, mitigating them, eliminating them if possible, and then determining if it's something that could actually have a negative impact on people. And I think we've done a good job of that. My one question is, and I don't know, it might be more appropriate for the city, but is there information on home ownership rates in the area that could be provided? Because if you own a home here, like, this is no problem at all. But if you're a renter and all of a sudden the property you live in is much more valuable as redeveloped, that can lead to displacement. And I haven't heard about mitigation for that aspect of it. So I didn't know if anyone could provide any context for that. I don't have those homeowner numbers for City of Clearwater offhand right now. I will invite the city to speak on that, or we can get back to you on that. Yeah, I ask because, you know, we have communities in St. Pete that want to see certain things get done and open themselves up for investment, but there's concerns because, like, a portion of the community might be 80% renters, and, you know, rezoning that area would probably imply that a lot of those people would be displaced. And so – and I'm not opposed to still opening areas up for redevelopment and doing overlays and stuff like that because of it. I just usually want to see that aspect of it mitigated as best as we can. And so that's why I was hoping to get context for that. Good afternoon. Lauren Matske, Planning and Development. I went old school and brought my book, so it took me a few minutes to flip. But I brought the CRE plan itself, so this would be the data and analysis piece from around 2023. And at that time, approximately 35% of the residential properties are owner-occupied, according to the homestead exemption data published by the PCPAO. When looking at only single-family residential units, about 47% are owner-occupied. This indicates that about 65% of all residential units and 53% of single-family residential units in the CRA are renter-occupied. So there is a higher percentage of renter-occupied to homeowner-occupied. And has any consideration been given to mitigate, like, the effect of the large financial incentive you might have to redevelop your property once an overlay would go through? So some of the conversations that we've been having are, you know, the partnership, of course, with the CRA and the Citizens Advisory Committee in terms of their role, helping prioritize the strategies as more tax increment comes in. So I wouldn't want to speak to exactly what the CRA itself has in mind for that. But certainly with all of the dialogue that's taken place over the last month or so, it's definitely become apparent that we need to be having those conversations. We just respectfully think, you know, that's a different piece to this, but still an important piece. Yeah, I agree that it's definitely a good place, a good thing for the CRA to tackle. But, you know, you bring a plan forward that could potentially amplify displacement of people. Like, it's going to be part of the conversation. Again, I'm going to say, you know, CRA Executive Director for the City of Clearwater. And I hear loud and clear, like South St. Pete, you know, we do have programs in place where we're always trying to help individuals improve their existing homes, especially individuals that are homesteaded so they can stay there. We actually even put in incentives for individuals that have been there a long time to stay there. But we also work very closely with our housing division for down payment assistance programs because we do want to encourage individuals to buy their homes there. But we are very new CRA, so we're trying to learn from places like South St. Pete, East Tampa, other places around Florida so we can help those individuals stay in those communities and actually become homeowners. I appreciate that. You could learn some from us. You could learn some of what not to do from us as well because I think we could have done a much better job. So I'll give you that caveat. But, okay, all right, I'll leave it there for now. Thank you. If I may add, and I won't find the right page, but I would like to mention a lot of what came up in the development of the CRA plan, which I was part of as well, was just especially the current opportunity being that there are so many vacant parcels. So when we talk about that it not being built out to its maximum development potential, we are still hoping that those vacancies that exist throughout the area will start to fill in because that also can be perceived as a detriment to the community itself. I'm trying to flip. I found it. Sorry. I totally should start bringing my laptop. So according to the property appraiser's data, there were 350 vacant parcels within the CRA, comprising 49.7 acres or 8.2% of the CRA area. Admittedly, some of those are city-owned. And so with these changes, that gives us the ability to work with the partners that we have long established to help lead by example with the type of development that we know that the community has expressed an interest in, specifically starting to reinvest in the Martin Luther King corridor, rebuilding the historic main street that's been clearly expressed as important to the community. Yeah, that's totally fair. And yet we have the same thing go on with like vacant parcels. But some of that speculation as to how much more valuable their property might be in the future based off us doing things like that. So doing things like this. But, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, obviously I would say I'm supportive of us moving something like this forward. I just want to make sure that there's a plan for people who, you know, rent and may be pushed out because of that. Yeah, just that there's mitigation, same as any other topic that we've talked about, that we're mitigating as best as we can. Sure. Oh, never mind. I lost my train of thought. It's okay. Sorry about that. I understand where y'all are coming from, so I feel good. So I'm good, yeah. I'm sorry. I apologize. What I wanted to say was also something that was important. Marcy had touched on it, you know, post-storm where we regrouped with our team. And part of the reason for doing the overlay, but specifically an optional overlay, was to help reduce, you know, the potential for that speculation. The city worked with Forward Pinellas in 2015 and did a wholesale rezoning of our U.S. 19 corridor, different everything about that. But we immediately saw that the speculation went up. The prices for those properties went up, and we were aware of that, you know, being something we did not want to encourage in this area. The other part that I would say is we've talked about, you know, residential, commercial, and mixed use, and it was touched on the importance for us to protect our primarily residential areas. And the overlay also allows us to do that because at the zoning level, we'll be able to fine-tune those boundaries with the community as part of our community outreach and have a mixed-use area, a residential-only area, and then the commercial area. And that way we can continue to maintain, you know, this area is largely residential. So when we worked through the game of zones with the community, it became very clear the scale of development that they want is more compatible with more of a single-family home. In the planning world, we talked sometimes about gentle density or, you know, things that just fit in the missing middle type of housing, and we wanted to reaffirm that vision with them. And that's where we brought the models and helped place buildings. And it was very clear that the desire was, you know, two, three units, maybe not – they reaffirmed that they do not want wholesale larger complexes, despite whatever kind of ownership, condominium, or apartment rental, you know, within the community because it breaks apart the fabric that they have. So those are all the things that we're going to continue to work towards. So, ideally, we will end up with that mix of rental and continued home ownership because home ownership is also important. But the displacement back to the very original part is in our game plan to continue to work on. Thank you. Mike, and then we'll go on. Yeah, thank you, Chair. Thank you, staff. Mike to Mike. Council Member does bring up great points, and I think we'd – this is probably the perfect time to acknowledge the fact that those very concerns are part of what drove, that community vision, and they were seeing the location, the geographic location of their community is just on the outskirts of downtown. They were seeing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being dumped into developing downtown, and we know what development's ripple effect does. It's also just down the corridor attached to the water in a marina. There's a beautiful Pinellas Trail system that we're all familiar with that runs through the neighborhood, as well as we're now, as a county, building the new multimodal transportation facility. And I think what the community did see is they saw what that could do to their community if they didn't have those tools and mechanisms to try to protect their community, to protect homeowners, to protect renters, to protect historical buildings in the history, was it could have just all went away because of mass development and people moving in and buying up houses and things. And that was part of why the CRA was created so that that community and our community could then have a little more control and have those tools and mechanisms to do the very things that staff are discussing on down payment assistance, helping build more affordable housing projects, rental assistance programs to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, rehab services to help fix up some of those existing homes. So you do bring up a great point, and I think that great point is what brought us in this direction of the CRA was to have those protections in place. And I know staff will do a good job of continuing to move forward and ensure some of those protections and mechanisms are in place. But great, great point. Thank you for sharing that. Thanks, Mike. Thank you, Chair. Councilman, that was a great point. You jogged my memory. That's what I love when we discuss these things. And maybe, Mike, you're the one that can answer this question. When we do these town hall meetings and you get all this information that you've been explaining to us, which is a wealth of information, do you do also check to make sure that you're getting feedback from the renters as well as the owners? Because I know that we have a CRA that's fairly new in a new area. And the one thing that always scares me with that is who's giving me the information in order to compile the results. And so if you're getting it all from people that are in the investment or owners, I don't know. The question I guess I got to ask is, are the renters as enthused as the owners? What is your measuring stick? That's a difficult question, but it is a good question. And I think the Citizens Advisory Committee does a great job of spreading the word and via social media, via city staff newsletters and communications on calendars. At the end of the day, you can't force engagement and participation. Sure. But I do know that the web that they cast and that net that they cast to incorporate all of the community is large. And they do grab all of it. At the end of the day, do you sit down at the end and question everybody that comes in and out? Are you a renter? Are you owner? What that is? That's a tough process to do in that. But I do know the attempt is there. The interest is there. And the community behind me could probably speak more to what that demographic makeup is that does voice their opinions. But I can promise that they are invited to the table. The doors are open to all segments of the community and not just those investors or developers or staff. So you want me to ask for a raise of hands behind you? Who's no, I'm just kidding. But, you know, I understand this. I go to a lot of these meetings myself and it's always the squeaky wheel gets the oil. And it's the people that have a vested interest in the income, you know, producing. But that's why Councilman Floyd's comment jogged my memory and my question when I hear that, I think I heard you say 65%, was it, that is renters? That's a lot of renters in that area. And they could easily be displaced. I'm not against this CRA. It's just I would like to not see, you know, a vast removal of people because everything has gone out of their means. So those are great points. I think we do have to recognize that the community we are talking about is the most impoverished community in all of Pinellas County. And we don't say that lightly. Sure. Something has to be done as a community. And the community has stepped up, created the vision for their community, engaged the community immensely for years. And this is a direction that we're slowly moving as a community to ensure that we don't continue to share that same fact that our North Greenwood community is the most impoverished community in Pinellas County. And that takes all of us. It doesn't just take city officials. It doesn't just take North Greenwood community members. I would ask all of us to take an interest in it. And if we have such a deep concern as we do in here, step up and help as community leaders. And let's make a difference in our Pinellas County and Clearwater region to ensure that this neighborhood isn't the most impoverished in all of Pinellas County. Any other questions? Okay. I got a couple. Are there any height restrictions in this overlay or in the current base zoning? So for my review, this is at the countywide level. Which is what we are voting on for today. So that's not something that we consider when we do our countywide review. But if you want to speak on the height, more than welcome to for Clearwater City staff. Lauren Matske again. That is the work that we've started on the staff level, translating the things that we heard in those earlier community meetings into the Community Development Code, our land development regulations. That will be the work that we're committed to doing in the fall with the community. So we'll write something and we'll get their feedback on it. But truly recognizing that residential properties, if the desire remains, the vision remains to have any new development consistent with the pattern that's there, heights would need to be limited in those areas. Whereas three to four stories could be potentially compatible, of course, on a main street. So like Martin Luther King, transitions are always important too. And those are things that we've enabled elsewhere in our special planning districts in the city of Clearwater. Okay. I think I know the answer to this next question here. But are any of these properties, could any of these properties be subject to live local? Well, currently anything that's zoned commercial or in our commercial general district would be available for a live local project. So that's already within the CRA, some of those? Yes. That's regardless of location in Clearwater. So what we're being asked to do here today is to not, we're not approving any specific developments. We're just, it's just an overlay. Anyway, so for the benefit of members of the public that are here now or maybe watching, when a project is being approved, okay, a developer comes through, a homeowner and says, I want to do this, okay, walk through that step. What does that process look like? And what does that community input look like at that level? So first I'll just reiterate, yes. So this is what the recommendation for the countywide plan map amendment. So this is changing the countywide plan map from all the existing categories to the PRD classification, which allows City of Clearwater to be able to utilize their optional overlay. So in terms of when a building comes in, that would go to the City of Clearwater in terms of a development proposal, and they would review it. And it's my understanding that they have incentive-based development with this overlay. So if they're opting in, there are certain criteria that the developer would have to meet in order to be able to utilize the bonus of the overlay. It answers your question. So it would be approved by the City of Clearwater? Correct, yes. City Council? Yes. All right. Any other thoughts or questions before we move to public comment? No? Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. With that, Tina, do we have any proponents, opponents, or other citizens to be heard on this item? Yes, Chair, we do. We have three proponents wishing to speak and one opponent today, and the first proponent that we will call on is Gloria Campbell. Okay. Ms. Campbell, if you could go to the podium, you have three minutes. Good afternoon. Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Gloria Campbell. I am the Executive Director of the Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition. We are the organization that Councilman Menino talked about that led the grassroots effort, community grassroots effort, to create the North Greenwood CRE, the only CRE created in the county from a grassroots effort. We reached out, and we have different organizations, everything from churches to civic organizations to people who are property owners, residents, renters, were part of this effort. Councilman Menino and Councilman Floyd actually told my story already. Councilman Floyd, I was part of the Southside CRA group when that started, and one of the things as we moved to North Greenwood that I said was we were going to try to correct some of the things that didn't go right in the Southside. And so that was one of our primary goals. Some of those things included being sure to, first of all, make sure that the community was engaged at every level. We literally walked the streets of North Greenwood handing out cards to residents, whether they were renters, whether they owned property, whatever, and said, this is what's coming. This is what, hold on to your property if you're a property owner. We also contacted people who owned property in the area who were renting their property to give them an idea of what was coming because we saw that happen in the Southside. By the time people recognized what was happening, the property was gone, so we wanted to protect that. This overlay was a result of another tool that we talked about that we could use to, number one, protect and build and make sure that the community was engaged. We were part of the selection process for the consultants that actually helped us to develop the goals for the overlay. The criteria was someone who, number one, looked like us, number two, who had worked in an environment where this was the case and knew how to help the community be sustainable. All of those were met by the city. As mentioned, we did this two years ago. This would have already been done, we thought, but then who could have predicted two hurricanes back to back? We are here today in support of this overlay. We recognize that there are members of the community that are concerned, and they should be, and I welcome them because one of the things we've had to do and that we've struggled with is getting all segments, everybody. I often say to people when they say, oh, I didn't know that, the first question is, where do you get your information? Because obviously, we're not putting it where you need to get it, and so that becomes then a gathering point for us. So we have engaged at all levels. Everyone is invited, as I often say, to have a seat at the table. We're about community, and we're about making sure the community wins. Thank you. Thank you, Gloria. Next. Next, we have Kathleen Beckman, Ms. Beckman, and you'll likewise have three minutes, ma'am. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I'm Kathleen Beckman, former Clearwater City Council member. I served on the council probably for four years from 2020 to 2024, and first I'd like to say thank you, Council Member Menino. You just nailed it as far as the history, the engagement, and the work that's been done. I've been involved with this CRA work for the last seven years, proudly advocated for ARPA funds to jumpstart the work, and I'm telling you it has been work. It has been a labor of love for members of the community. I'm a member of the Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition as well, which continues to be leaders in the community. The intentionality in reaching out to the community, and there wasn't, you know, we did reach out, but it was truly grassroots. So it was collaborative from the very beginning, the work that we've done with community meetings and allocating those ARPA funds. And so I would say, you know, I'm strongly in favor of approving this overlay. It meets the goals of that plan. That plan is a phenomenal plan. The North Greenwood CRA plan, it's about this thick. It's probably, I don't know, close to 200 pages. But when I was approving that plan and going through it, we all went through it with a fine-tooth comb, and it comes directly from the community. And it is the result of those meetings, it is a result of educating, collaborating, understanding, and it is a phenomenal plan. And this overlay honors that plan and works towards those goals that were developed over a number of years from passionate, informed engagement. So thank you very much. Thank you. Marilyn Terman. Good afternoon, Ms. Terman. You'll have three minutes, too. Good afternoon. Thank you all for allowing me a moment to speak. My name is Marilyn Terman. I am the vice chair of the North Greenwood Citizens Advisory Committee. I have had the pleasure of being a part of the Clearwater Urban Leadership Coalition since its inception. And I can tell you, when we got, received word, of course, we can visually see the things that were not happening in North Greenwood, but understanding that it was the highest concentration of poverty in the entire county. It compelled the members of this community to come together and first educate our community on what a CRA was and how it would benefit us. So this labor of love, and the reason that I call it a labor of love is because since September 19th of 2019, we have had meetings every fourth Tuesday at 630. I have missed one meeting, and that was because I was at a candidate for them. So that being said, I am so committed to this work. I love my community. I want to see things be better in my community. And I know the hard work that we have put into this. There's a saying that says, you can always make more money, but you can never get your time back. And the time that we have put into this, Ms. Gloria talked about everybody had an opportunity to come to the table. That meant from the person in the pulpit to the person on the corner, everybody, everybody had an opportunity to come to the table and be a part of this effort to revitalize our community and make it a community that we were all proud of. What I'm happy to know about the overlay plan is that it does give us the options. It gives us the options to be able to do things to expand and grow beyond what we currently have. It's one thing to be a consumer. It's another thing to own some stuff. And I don't know how much you all know about the upcoming Container Village project called The Village at the Grove. We are so very, very, very excited about the opportunities and the businesses that will be housed there. And this overlay plan will give us the opportunity to do some things that we might not be able to do otherwise. And the last comment I want to make is about the housing. When I think about, we all know there's been a housing crisis. And when I think about this overlay plan and the ability to have accessory dwelling units and those things in place, it's kind of like that village mentality in my mind where when I think about the fact that some family members have had to move to distant places and that we have the ability to come together and provide housing opportunities in our community because we can expand and do ADUs or have duplexes. I think triplex is another middle housing. I think this is the correct term for that. And my time is up. Thank you. I am in full support of this. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Any other public comment, Tina? That's all the proponents. We do have one opponent who wishes to speak today, and that's Ms. Katrina George. Okay. Please come up. Good afternoon. My name is Katrina George. I live at 1276 Eldridge Street. I am within the CRA jurisdiction. I want to address something stated publicly about this overlay. The city representatives have described participation in this overlay as voluntary, saying no homeowner is required to change their zoning, but the city's own ordinance language directs land use designation itself. So the actual factual land use map change applies to every parcel in the amended area, regardless of whether any owner uses the bonus provision. I'm asking the city to clarify in writing whether homeowners may decline the designation itself, separate from declining the bonus program. I also want to raise a specific question, factual problem with the record you have today. The notice for KCW 2608 states that the amendment affects approximately 491.5 acres, but the city's own ordinance exhibits this, the same amendment that shows two different acreages, figures 674.2 acres in the one version and 627.8 acres in another. These figures don't match each other, and none of them match what's before the board. I'm asking that this be resolved before any recommendation is made. There is a related question about the industrial limit category. City Council minutes from March 30th show off shows that staff requested moving industrial limits parcels from the overlay. But the notice before Purnell's Fort today still includes employment, the countywide equivalent of land use limited. I'm asking which version is actually controlling. Beyond the notice today, my deeper concern is protecting the people who already live and work in North Greenwood. I'm asking for two specific things, both grounded in existing Florida law, not new authority. First, that the defined percentage of the North Greenwood CRA Trust Fund, the tax increment revenue, Florida Statute 163387, already allows to be used for affordable housing. Be dedicated to property tax assistance fund for the legacy owners facing rising assessments because of this overlay. Second, that the city adopts a temporary exemption of the increased amendment value of home improvements for property owners who held home status exemption before this overlay, modeled on the Florida existing historic preservation. Tax exemption under section 196.1997 and 196.1998. One of the, um, thank you. Mr. George, you can finish if you'd like. I'm sorry? You can finish if you'd like. I'll close, um, today. Um, one of the issues that I want to also bring up is the fact that you all are stating, that the city is stating that proper notice was provided to us as residents. That's not totally correct. Um, one, the, um, uh, I didn't, I have 104 signatures that I've submitted to the board, uh, from residents of North Greenwood with no notices of these, uh, movements for the rezoning. What we were receiving or what we actually saw within the community is actually notices of a container mall. That's the information that we saw or I was provided. Nobody knocked on my door. Um, I didn't receive a card, um, from the June 8th meeting. I didn't receive a notice. Um, and from what I've spoken with Laura, she stated that, um, some of the churches weren't even, uh, notified. So, again, it's proper notice, um, and some of the timings of these meetings. Yesterday's meeting was at 530. Who can get to a 530 meeting leaving from work? Um, these things aren't being, um, you know, and there are no real, um, safeguards right now in this plan for our community. Um, again, as, uh, Representative Floyd stated, for the renters in the area, we're concerned about, uh, displacement. We saw this with the North Greenwood apartments. Uh, they were kicked, all of the residents were kicked out of North Greenwood stating that they were upgrading the area. All of a sudden, 20% were able to, uh, be able to move back in. Those neighbors were never compensated, nor were they, uh, given, um, opportunities to move back. So these are the things that we want. We want to make sure that, um, uh, we're not going to experience moving forward. My thing is, I'm not against forward movement. I'm against the way that it's set up where there's no protections. Thank you. Tina, any further citizens to be heard? No, Chair, there's no further. Okay. All right. Hearing no more, uh, we will close the public hearing. Uh, do we have any other questions? Q&A from the board. Hearing none, what is it? Richie, did you have a? I'll just say, uh, I want, wanted to get a full picture from the community feedback as well. Um, I see no reason for us not to move it forward, but, uh, because we're just here, like, deciding on land use things. Um, but, yeah, I definitely heard from the city, uh, that some of my concerns, uh, will be addressed going forward. And so I'll just rely on y'all, um, to make considerations for some of the displacement concerns that I brought up. So, and I, uh, see you nodding in agreement, so I'll leave it there. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay. What is the will of the board? Move for approval. Second. We have a motion from Mayor Moe and a second from Commissioner Scheer. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Okay. Uh, now we will move. Yes. I just want to, I'm headed to the Florida League of Mayors. I just made sure we had a quorum. Yep. So, excuse me for coming in and leaving. So. All right. We'll let you off the hook this time. All right. You might have to chair the next meeting. All right. Now we'll move on to item, uh, uh, 5A2. KCW 26-11, City of Clearwater. Um, does any member of the board like to, would like to see a presentation on this particular one here? No? Okay. Uh, hearing none. Um, do we have any questions? Thoughts? No, I have. Okay. Any, Tina, do we have any members of the public that would like to speak on this item? No, Chair, we do not. Okay. All right. Hearing, uh, none on that. Um, then we will, uh, close this particular, uh, public hearing. And what is the will of the board? Move approval. Okay. Second. Motion from Ricky. Second from Tom. Okay. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, everybody, for that. Um, okay. Um, I would like to, uh, just so we don't, um, lose any other members here in case anybody has to leave early. I would like to move, um, 6E up, uh, first, which is our last remaining action item, which is our fiscal year 27 PPC budget and millage rate, uh, recommendation. So, Rodney, come on up. Uh, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Uh, Rodney Chapman, division manager. And, um, I guess I'll say I'm excited to present the, uh, FY 27 budget to you all. Um, as you hear from me each year, I, uh, you know, I remind you all that I volunteer for this. And, um, as a matter of fact. That'll teach you. That's not completely accurate. This is 2017. And I always tell you all that, uh, it's complex. It's never easy. The goalposts always move. And definitely that is the case for FY 27. So I'll, uh, get right to it. Um, the budget requests that we're submitting to you all for recommendation to the County Commission is about $8 million. Uh, what you see here is a breakdown of the, uh, the revenue, uh, categories for the submittal beginning with the beginning fund balance. In other words, that's the amount that we start with, uh, given that, uh, that sort of carry over from the previous, uh, budget year, uh, we have about, uh, about 2.3 million in average loan property taxes. Um, and that's based on a projection from the property appraiser that the, our, our increase will be about 4.3% for, uh, FY 27. Uh, we get another 1.4 million in, uh, the revenue column for the MPO. Again, uh, the planning council covers those, uh, costs for the MPO and then gets reimbursed. So that's the money that the planning council gets from the MPO. And then there's two supplementary line items on the revenue side that are very small in nature. It's just a projection from us as to what we can expect from our local assistance that we provide to the cities. Uh, and then just a small amount of interest we get from an interest bearing account on the expense side. Uh, these are the six primary expense categories, uh, about 2 and a half million in salaries and benefits, another 1.4 million in our operating expenses. And that includes everything from rent to our audit, our accounting, our intergovernmental service charges from Pinellas County and so on. Uh, we also pay the property appraiser and tax collector, uh, commissions for the tax revenue they collect on our behalf. So you see that they're about $67,000. And then just like last year, we have divided the reserves into three, uh, line items. Uh, there's reserve contingencies, uh, reserve fund balance, and then reserves for future years. Uh, and you see the, the ways those are unlocked consistent with Florida statutes in parentheses. So as in prior years, we continue to find, uh, effective and creative ways to spend our reserves. That's often, uh, the message from the County Commission and our approach has been and continues to be, uh, an adjustment to the rate as well as, uh, working with our, our city partners to find, uh, ways to advance, uh, projects that are aligned with the mission of Fort Pinellas. So for FY27, that will continue to be the strategy. We will, um, complete the final phase, hopefully, of, um, the ordinance update for the county's multimodal impact fee. Uh, that's been a project that's been ongoing and we've had to modify the approach because of some changes in state law, uh, or whether to, to send bill 180 house bill 429 and now hospital 1329. So the state continues to pass a legislation impacting impact fee in our ordinance update. And so that, uh, hopefully we'll come to a close this year and we can wrap up the ordinance update in, um, FY27. And you can see that is a jointly funded project between us, uh, Pinellas County, city of St. Pete, Clearwater and Largo. Uh, the other project that we plan to pursue for FY27 is a partnership with the city of Largo. Uh, this project came to us, uh, because, uh, TD Cenex is one of three fortune 500 companies in Pinellas County. They are located in the Bay Vista office park, which was built back in 1984. So you, some of you who have been on the board for a while may recall the term flight to quality when we did the Teals update. The idea behind that is, uh, employers now are looking for a bit more in where they're located. Typically employers like TD Cenex want Class A office space and Bay Vista office park is more like Class B, Class C. And there's competition for employers like that to go to Class A office space that have, uh, the amenities and services that these employers expect. And we've seen in the past where employers like this have gone to, uh, Midtown and Water Street in Hillsborough County or into downtown St. Pete. So, uh, Largo has asked that we work with them on developing a redevelopment master plan for Bay Vista office park to come up with a series of strategies to, um, with the goal of retaining and keeping, uh, TD Cenex as well as other, uh, employers within that very important office park in the city of Largo. Uh, we also, we plan to work with the city of Dunedin to develop, uh, a downtown master plan update, uh, this project is, uh, twofold. Uh, one is a market assessment to understand how the market has changed over time since, uh, downtown has successfully redeveloped their, uh, Dunedin has successfully redeveloped their downtown. And the other part to the project is to, uh, develop a, um, a set of guidelines or standards that memorialize the, the great things about downtown Dunedin. It's got a lot of character. It's got a lot of amenities, but a lot of what you see down there is really coming from the, uh, their housing and, and redevelopment manager. And so we're going to work with them to put that in a plan and a series of standards. Uh, we also plan to work with, uh, partners at FDOT, uh, the county and the city of Clearwater to, uh, execute a corridor study for, uh, for the Gulf to Bay Boulevard corridor. Uh, the limits of that project will be basically from, uh, McMullen Booth Road, uh, through downtown and end at the roundabout. Uh, the overall goal is to, um, do a couple of things. One is to figure out a solution for the intersection there at Gulf to Bay and Belcher. Uh, it's been studied for quite a while and there hasn't been a resolution to that. And so we, we hope that the study will find a solution to one of the most, um, dangerous intersections in the county. The other important piece to it is, uh, we've been in communication with county administration and think that the timing of the study could support the redevelopment of the downtown campus for Pinellas County, uh, which is going to be vacated and then redeveloped. So, uh, those are kind of the two signature pieces of that quarter study. The other couple of things that are in, uh, the budget, you've heard us talk about the countywide trail planning initiative. Again, that's just that, uh, pilot program, uh, position for about two and a half years or so that will work across, uh, jurisdictional boundaries to advance trail planning, uh, countywide. And then, uh, you know, you've heard me talk about the, the need to have, uh, support from our lobbyists as we work to, um, amend the special act. So all total those, uh, equal about $691,000 and that's, uh, our plan to try and further spend down reserves. So I can't, uh, talk to you all about the budget without addressing, uh, property tax reform through the joint resolution 1F. I'm sure you all are very familiar with it in your roles, uh, with your respective cities. Uh, I think I've shared with you in the past that it, uh, it also has impacts to us. Uh, fortunately the property appraiser has a great dashboard that estimates what the impact would be if it passes to all the taxing authorities across the county. So what you're seeing here is, uh, what that reform would mean to the planning council. So the chart up at top is, uh, that blue line is, uh, the current tax law and homestead exemption and how much revenue the planning council would derive from the current rate and the current exemption. The yellow line shows you, uh, what, uh, will happen if the referendum passes in November to, uh, those revenues the planning council collects for its operations. And you can see at the, uh, on the chart to the bottom, that's a percent breakdown of how much revenue, um, will be lost over, um, the years through 2030. And you can see it's anywhere between 14 and 24% of our revenue, uh, will, uh, will be lost, uh, if that referendum passes. So in order for us to be, uh, good stewards of, um, the tax dollars that also provide you with, uh, proper information to inform a recommendation on our millage rate and budget, we've been working with, uh, the Office of Management and Budget to develop a five-year forecast, uh, looking forward between FY28 and FY32. We have done this in the past with them, um, but it's taken greater urgency given, uh, the potential impact to the revenues for the council based on the increased homestead exemption. So what we have done is, um, and you know, all you all know, I'm a share your work kind of person. So I've got about 10 spreadsheets up here. Um, we've looked at scenarios that forecast what happens to, uh, the planning council operations if the referendum passes and what that drawdown looks like on reserves, as well as what if the referendum doesn't pass and again, what, what that does to, to reserve. So, um, what we are comfortable with at this time is to recommend to you all that we could reduce the millage rate to the rollback rate. Uh, what that means from a revenue perspective is in that first year, uh, that is effective. We lose about $420,000 less in property tax revenue, and then about $620,000 less in property tax revenue thereafter. The forecast, uh, also has some assumptions that were built in, uh, on the revenue side. So, uh, what I've provided in your backup, and I'll show you a couple of slides, um, after this, what that looks like. So 5% annual increase in property tax revenues, uh, some other increases in revenues, and then a 10% increase in expenses. Again, to develop a forecast, you got to make some assumptions. I'm not saying that we have a crystal ball and we know what the future is going to be like, but OMB felt like these, uh, percent assumptions were pretty solid. So, um, what we had determined that by adopting the rollback rate, there would be a, uh, predictable drawdown on reserves over the next four or five years to balance the budget. Uh, if you look at FY31, the reserve balance will be about $700,000, uh, again, maintaining or adopting that millage rollback rate. So, any questions on that? I know it's a lot, um, but I'll try to reinforce a little bit of what I just told you all. So, what you're looking at here is one of the spreadsheets for the forecast, uh, it is what we have, um, calculated based on the current millage rate. So, you can see that in yellow, it's the 0.0175. Here are the five years, so FY28 through FY32. And then this top portion of the spreadsheet are the revenues with, with our rate, and then those assumptions that I told you about, about revenue growth. There's also assumptions that were put into the forecast to, uh, estimate our expenses going out those five years. The thing that I want you to, um, kind of focus in on is what does that do to reserves? So, reserves are down here. And then you can see where we are right now at FY27 and that systematic drawdown of reserves in the intervening five years. And you can see at the very bottom how much extra, or how much reserves are being drawn upon over time to balance the budget. So, that's at the current rate. We also did, uh, various scenarios all the way down to look at the financial picture if we reduce the millage rate down to 0.0145. So, again, same assumptions for those five years. Now, the reserve line item here, you can see the drawdown there in 28, then 29, and then we're negative in 30, 31, 32. So, um, this last spreadsheet is what we're recommending. The rollback rate, according to OMB, at this point is 0.0171. Again, same five years, same assumptions, reserve level, this is what the request looks like here in about $8 million. But again, even at the rollback rate, you can see the drawdown on reserves. And then we're okay in FY31. It's FY32 where, um, we're negative. But if we were to adopt the rollback rate, we would start to make other changes, most likely next year, on, um, kind of right-sizing our expenses to make sure that we are in a positive financial position, again, going out those five years. Rodney? Yes. These, all these assume Amendment 3 passes? Yes. Okay. Do you have one with the rollback that, if it didn't pass? Pete, can you switch to the overhead? Well, Commissioner, I don't have one with the rollback, but the closest I have to that is, this is at the current millage rate, and then if it doesn't pass, in FY32, we're still at about $3.2 million in the reserves. Okay. So, the way we've been approaching this is, um, just kind of really trying to be physically prudent for our agency. And, um, this ballot is, um, you know, initiative is going to be voted on by the voters in November. We don't know how that's going to turn out. Um, the voters are going to have an opportunity. And we will spend down our reserves to the tune of about $300,000 by the year, uh, 2032 if it passes. So, it, the, the reserves are going to get spent down. Yeah. In the meantime, uh, what we've outlined here is roughly $700,000 of reserve funding that we are putting into the 27 budget. Um, that is a commitment to begin spending down those dollars. If the amendment doesn't pass and we only go to the rollback rate this year, uh, we are going to come back to you next year with a, with a little bit more aggressive millage rate reduction at that point, or another commitment to show how we're lowering the reserve, reserve spending in the future. But I can't in good conscience recommend the aggressive millage reduction that we were talking about two months ago, just because, um, by fiscal fiscal year 30, we would be, I think it's over $300,000 in the deficit situation, which would have a real impact on our staffing ability and ability to function. Um, and as we've talked about a little bit with the subcommittee, um, you know, planning departments are probably not well protected, uh, when the millage rate, um, when the millage, when the homestead extension is, is extended. And I don't think there's going to be a lot of capacity for local governments in Pinellas County to undertake planning activities. And with the charter, uh, requirement that we do countywide planning, uh, we may be the last county planning department standing. Um, and I think demand will probably increase on our services. Um, it doesn't mean that everybody's going to cut their planning department, but it's kind of like parks and recreation. It's going to be one of those things that people will say, well, that's not police and that's not fire. That may be something that, that could, could cut. So, um, we're proposing, we go to the rollback rate that, that does not require a super majority, uh, which would be a requirement of keeping the millage rate as is. So, and we do think we have more reserves than we need. So the way we've kind of balanced this out from a staff perspective is let's demonstrate to the voters. Let's demonstrate to the elected officials that we can reduce our millage rate because we are bringing in more revenue than we need right now. But at the same time, if the amendment passes, we're going to be needing those reserves to keep us going for the next three to four years. Questions? Mr. Chair? Yeah. Thank you, Chair. Uh, Rodney, on the, um, the, the, the charges for other services, uh, that that's what the interlocal governments pay for. No, no, those are the revenues that we receive from the MPO. So you remember me saying that, um, the PPC fronts the costs of the MPO and then the MPO reimbursed the, the PPC on a quarterly basis. So that money, um, that we get back from the MPO shows up as revenue. So where, where, where are you showing the revenue that you get when you charge other? Oh, I should, right. Uh, I didn't see it on this. Oh, it's, it's very little. Is it right there? It's less than $5,000. Okay. All right. I didn't realize that. Okay. And that's an estimate because projects may come up in the fiscal year where, um, we want to do a 50, 50 commitment, so, and the, I was confused about the personnel services. They, they, uh, dropped a million eight and, um, 26 and then they're going to bump them back up to 2.5. I didn't, I didn't, and for 27, we take those numbers from OMB. So we only, we have control of most of those nine items, but for the personnel, the salary benefits, those things, we get those figures from the office of management budget. So it's probably a question for Chris Rose. That's a $600,000 question. For some reason, I, I didn't see what the, the justification for that bump was. It doesn't include any additional staff persons other than the trail planner position. Okay. So yeah, I really don't understand the number now because it goes from 1.8 million to two points, almost 2.6. So I don't know why that number is jumping up. And the reason I asked because the budget that I studied that I really liked was this 0.0165 because I thought, uh, that budget I really liked because, I mean, we don't need all these reserves. They can't be used for the MPO. Uh, this, this one that you gave, gave us that says 0.0165 would actually provide not just a millage rate reduction, but it would actually provide a small, you know, tax, uh, tax cut. Um, and I think that would be something that we could show the citizens to that we rolled it back more than a millage rate. We're actually, you're going to get your reduction in your taxes this year. Uh, and the deficit's very, very small on that budget. And, uh, I believe, uh, I, I just don't understand the, the number, but I think it's very close. It's manageable. So I think we could do more if we wanted to, I just wanted to point that out. The 0.65 everybody got in their packet, it works. It wouldn't run a, we wouldn't run out of reserves until 2032 if nothing else changes and something else would change. So just pointing that out. I mean, I love the rollback, but we, I think we could do better if we wanted to a little bit, just a little. Ultimately, this is a recommendation to the board of county commissioners. Right. That's correct. Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Scher. Any other thoughts or comments? Mike. Uh, just a statement last night, we did our budget or our, one of our first ones. And, uh, just the early feedback, what we have is, uh, 64% of the poll is in favor of this, uh, property tax, uh, you know, cutback and savings. So I'm glad to see that we're doing this and that we're being conscientious because it's looking like it's going to fly. Anybody else? All right. Tina, do we have any members of the public that wish to speak on this item? No, Chair, we do not. Okay. All right. Um, what is the, uh, will of the board on this? Move approval. Okay. We have a motion from Ricky. Second from Tom. Can we clarify what the motion is for? Is that for the staff recommendation of the millage rate reduction? Yes. 0.0171, the rolled back rate? Yes. Okay. Now, um, now exhibit A, Rodney, does not have the correct numbers on it. So we have to be updated and attached to the resolution, the resolution that you all adopt. And that will occur after this action. Make sure it's all okay. Okay. Just make sure that's on the record. All right. Is there any further, uh, discussion on this item? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. So we have, uh, Mayor Love was in opposition? Okay. All right. Uh, motion carries. Thank you, everybody. That was our last action item. So now we can go into, uh, our presentation. Don't everybody leave. All right. All right. So now we'll go back up to item 6A, PSTA activities report. Thank you, Mr. Chair. The PSTA board met on Wednesday, uh, June 24th, 2026. The board meeting began with a special presentation on the two marketing awards PSTA won at the Florida Public Transportation Association award ceremony last month. First, an award for PSTA's 40-year history book. And second, for the ridership and marketing of PSTA's newest limited stop premium service route, the SPARK, in St. Pete between Eckerd College and Grand Central Station. The board approved several items during the June meeting. These included a renewal of PSTA's employee health benefits for fiscal year 27. Funding agreements with several nonprofits under the Transportation Disadvantage, or TD, grant program, that's administered by the state. As the community transportation coordinator of Fort Pinellas County, PSTA is responsible for all TD services in the county, which includes the administration of TD bus passes, paratransit, and nonprofit-eligible trips, so they can provide transportation to their own TD-eligible clients. The nonprofits include Neighborly Care Network, PARC, ARC, and the Homeless Emergency Project, funding over $5.8 million over the next five years. The board also heard one information update from PSTA CFO, Debbie Elias, who presented a summary on the fiscal year 27 operating and capital budget. We will receive budget updates again in July and August before final adoption in September. And the next PSTA board meeting is Wednesday, July 22nd at 9 a.m. And that concludes my report. Thank you, Tom. All right. We'll move on to item 6B, regional activities report. Okay. I'll handle this one. I'll go fairly quickly. I just want to let you all know that we have kicked off our regional transportation planning prioritization process. I'm not going to give you the full name. It's a bunch of Ps. But this was a grant that was awarded to the Hillsborough County MPO or TPO, and we are partnering with them and Pasco County. So it's an early form of regionalization. We had the kickoff meeting about a week ago, and Chelsea and Caitlin of our staff are kind of the point people for that, and they have hired a consultant, and we are integrating the regional benefit cost analysis tool that our staff develop machine gave you that presentation last week. And what we were doing is we were looking at transportation trends, transportation projects, and determining a methodology that will be consistent across all three MPOs for prioritizing transportation projects. And we're all really excited about this project because we all do it a little bit differently. But as you know, transportation doesn't stop at a county line. So the goal is to begin outreach and engagement immediately. We'll have a website live in August. We will create a project dashboard that will guide the analysis and development of recommendations for prioritization for all of the MPOs to integrate best practices. And the goal is to bring a unified process to our committees and our boards this November so that it's ready to use in our project prioritization for next year. And so I just wanted to give you a heads up that we are coordinating regionally on that. And the goal is to have this to where it can telescope and identify regionally significant projects, but also projects at the local scale that are evaluated similarly, that might not be regionally significant, but are still meaningful to local communities. So that's underway, basically just a heads up. And then another heads up is many of you have participated or at least seen the reports on the regional competitiveness report that the Tampa Bay Partnership undertakes. And they've been doing that now for, I believe, about 10 years, where they benchmark the Tampa Bay region against other comparable regions around the country. Some are a little bit bigger, some are a little smaller, but they're all in many ways similar to ours. They are opening up that process to sort of reevaluate what we've accomplished, where our trends have taken us over 10 years, and where we need to go next. And so we are being invited to a meeting at the Urban Center 2 building in Tampa on Kennedy Boulevard, Wednesday, August 5th, to continue that conversation about what that means. And I wanted to let you know that I am going to be on vacation, moving my daughter to Texas. I won't be able to participate, but our staff will. But I think you all are welcome. If anybody's interested in being engaged in the regional competitiveness report, we can certainly have any RSVP for you if you would like to participate in that, and share your thoughts from a Pinellas perspective. So just food for thought. And that's all I have to do. Thank you, Whit. Any questions for Whit? All right. We will move on then to item 6C, East Bay Drive, Roosevelt Boulevard. Good afternoon, board members. Good afternoon. I'm Ramon, principal planner at Ford Pinellas. And I have here with me Amanda Chornaby with Renaissance Planning, who was a consultant on this project. And I'm here to provide an update on our final corridor study for this roadway that we have been working on for well over a year now. And in that last year, this corridor study has been undertaken in three different phases. First, a review of the existing conditions. The second phase involved a mobility evaluation, which you can think of almost as scenario planning and stress testing, the future conditions of the corridor. And then finally, phase three involved recommendations, some of which I provided a preview of here that I'll go over. They include recommendations for enhanced pedestrian crossings, as well as improved transit facilities, such as opportunities for bus bays along the corridor. So I will present that towards the end. But to take a step back and tell you why we are studying this corridor, East Bay Drive and Roosevelt Boulevard is identified as one of our priority investment corridors. And this is a framework that we have adopted in our long-range transportation plan, where we identify corridors based on their potential to link jobs, housing, and job training opportunities. And this corridor in particular serves both local and regional purposes. But what's really happened along this corridor, there have been several improvements and planning efforts undertaken by various entities, ourselves, FDOT, the City of Largo, PSTA. And what we have the opportunity to do is provide a cohesive vision for this corridor, which we try to do for our other investment corridors as well. East Bay Drive, Roosevelt Boulevard connects directly to the other two investment corridors that we have completed or are completing, such as US-19. But something that's really key about this is while Alt-19 and US-19, those corridor studies required coordination among multiple municipalities, and in the case of US-19, multiple counties, this roadway actually just goes through the City of Largo. So we are looking at one land use vision that is involved in this corridor. But ultimately, the leads on this project were ourselves at Ford Pinellas and FDOT. We both jointly funded this project and coordinated across the phases. The City of Largo, PSTA, and Pinellas County were active stakeholders throughout the process. The corridor study looks at the segment from 20th Street, which is just west of HCA Florida Largo Hospital, if you are familiar, and goes all the way east to Lightwave Drive, which is right before St. Pete Clearwater International Airport. So we're looking at about seven miles of the corridor that we kind of looked at in different sections. And ultimately, the purpose was to evaluate how to improve safety, mobility, and operational access along East Bay Drive. And as I mentioned, we undertook this in three different phases. And I'll kind of break down the three phases. And today, I'd like to provide context that we are presenting this as just an informational item to you. Our corridor studies often have a lot of information to digest, so we want to make sure that we answer your questions. But at the September board meeting, this will be in front of you for just a recommendation of acceptance, as we typically do with our corridor studies. So with that, I'd like to set some important context for the corridor, because there's a lot going on here. Starting with the land use context, there are several activity centers within the City of Largo and specifically along this corridor. But the three I'd like to bring your attention to are the West Bay Drive Community Redevelopment District directly to the west, which you just a couple of months ago saw extensive presentations on and know that Largo has updated their standards to really continue developing their downtown, provide opportunities for mixed uses. And similarly, to the right, we have the Tri-City Activity Center. This is something that was adopted about five or six years ago. And while this area is the node surrounding US-19 and is very auto-oriented, the City of Largo standards provides that opportunity to improve transportation access as well as create more of a sense of place around this area. And then the last land use area I'd like to draw your attention to is the Target Employment Center, which Rodney actually talked about in his budget presentation. This involves Beavis to Office Park. And I'll reiterate that TD Cenex is just one of three Fortune 500 companies in our county. And in addition to the land use in place, we also need to make sure that the transportation infrastructure surrounding this area is up to par. And this area is where the corridor turns into Roosevelt Boulevard, of course. Moving on to some of the efforts that have already been planned, implemented, or underway. I won't go through every single one of these projects, but this table and this map here is meant to communicate to you exactly how much is being done on the corridor. The map on this slide shows you the areas for planned improvements, and you can see much of the corridor has been programmed for resurfacing by FDOT. All of these resurfacings, projects one, two, and three, I can confirm involve separated bike lanes. So, for example, from Highland to Belcher, the bike lanes are separated, or separated through raised separators, so not flex posts, but something a little bit more visually appealing. But all of this is to say that this corridor is continuing to improve, and what we have the opportunity to do is fill some of those gaps in safety and operations. In addition to FDOT's planned projects, Pinellas County does have jurisdiction over the roadway from 20th Street to Clearwater Largo Road, specifically within our project segment, and they also have a resurfacing plan, namely to improve business access and also provide a wider 10-foot sidewalk on the south side of West Bay Drive. In addition to having roadway jurisdiction, Pinellas County also manages all of the signals along this corridor through the county's very robust ITS-ATMS program. And all of the signals along this study segment have either been implemented with signal retiming improvements or are going to be. For example, in the third bullet, you can see that the signal retiming are planned for seven signals from 20th Street to 4th Street. And from Highland to 58th Street, the signals have already been retimed, which essentially covers the entire corridor. So operational improvements have also been underway. In addition, if you aren't familiar, the county, through its ATMS program, also has programmed this corridor with intelligent video analytics, which gives the county the ability to assess congestion and adjust signal retimings in real time, and in addition, monitor near-miss incidents. And this is something that we're tying into our Safe Streets study as well, as we look at the intersections and segments around the county, which haven't made it onto the high injury network yet, but are kind of on that edge of safety concerns. Lastly, with transit changes, you might be familiar that PSTA implemented its updated bus network in October of 2025. And that actually saw a doubling of frequency along this corridor, which is served by Route 52. So it went from 30-minute frequency to 15 minutes. And you can see in the third and fourth bullets that since that implementation, PSTA has seen increased weekday ridership as a result of that frequency increase. On the transit side as well, we have been working with PSTA the last couple of months to identify potential locations countywide for bus bay implementation. This is something that has come from board members at both Ford Pinellas and PSTA. So this corridor study was an excellent opportunity to incorporate those recommendations. So that was a whole lot of improvements and activities that are already underway. And so I'll reiterate that the purpose of our corridor study is to bring that together in a cohesive vision and fill those gaps. And when identifying some of those gaps from a safety perspective, a very high-level overview here is that you can see the crashes have steadily increased the last couple of years, especially in those post-COVID years, both overall crashes and bicyclists and pedestrian crashes. A lot of that has been due to the lack of those facilities along this corridor, which are now being implemented through those resurfacings. And generally, where there are pedestrian hotspots, a lot of pedestrian activity, there is a commonality between that and the crash hotspots. Namely, you can see County Road 1, Alt-19, as well as Highland Avenue as well, which gives access to a lot of residential destinations. When we consider corridor capacity, I know that traveling east-west on this corridor feels like every single one of our corridors is at a deficient level. But this corridor actually, especially when compared to its counterpart directly to the south, Olmerton Road, does have some capacity. I know it doesn't feel like that when we're driving it, but the numbers tell us otherwise. What I will say is that the level of service is varying depending on the segment and the intersection that you're approaching. And the highest traffic volumes are between Keene Road, which is County Road 1, and US-19. So it kind of points us to where there's opportunity for improvement there, but also gives us some wiggle room to consider where there is capacity, how do we implement these safety and operational improvements. So with that, I'm going to turn over Phase 2 to Amanda, and then I'll be back to talk about the recommendations. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amanda Chornaby. I'm a project manager with Renaissance Planning, the transportation and land use planning firm that was tasked with completing Phases 1 through 3 of the East Bay Corridor study. So as Nasheen mentioned, I'll be providing an overview of Phase 2 that was completed earlier this year in February. So Phase 2 had two goals, first of which was to gather stakeholder and public input to get feedback on corridor issues and potential improvements. And two was to model future growth in the corridor based on the activity centers identified in the Largo Comprehensive Plan to understand how this may affect travel, demand, congestion, and mode choice. So several outreach methods were utilized to solicit feedback from the community. This included a mix of in-person and virtual stakeholder meetings, in-person community events, such as at the Largo Saturday Night Market and at Largo High School, and an online survey that received over 100-plus unique responses. During these in-person community events, dots and poster boards were utilized with the public to identify where there were intersections, sidewalk, transit, and bicycle concerns along the corridor. Additionally, these poster boards were utilized to identify prioritized improvements to address those issues. Key findings were consistent across all engagement methods. Safety concerns were primarily located at intersections along the East Bay Corridor, and some of the most requested improvements were related to separated protected bicycle lanes, wider sidewalks, and improved lighting. Others emphasized the need for better bus stop amenities, and as Nasheen mentioned, pull-out bays to reduce traffic delays and improve safety. Lastly, feedback from drivers noted concerns about congestion and aggressive driving behavior. So to test the impacts of potential growth and increased travel demand in the corridor, Phase 2 modeled a scenario to shift an increase in jobs and housing to the corridor, reflecting adopted city land use plans, future land use regulations, and defined activity centers. The analysis began with a planning assessment that modified year 2045 person-trip tables from the Tampa Bay Regional Transportation Analysis Model to efficiently test differing land use scenarios in the study corridor, and it should be noted that at the time, 2045 was the latest when we completed the study. Travel demand data from Replica was also reviewed to better understand walking and biking demand in the corridor, as the Tampa Bay model does not develop walk and bike trip details. Insights from both the planning model and Replica were used to create the future land use scenario. Year 2045 traffic analysis zone forecasts were modified to reflect the scenario, and a full model run was made to estimate future year traffic levels in the corridor. Overall, the results showed that the land use pattern and vision coupled with multimodal investments can result in a significant modal shift along the corridor. So, the map here depicts the resulting shift in the estimate at the traffic analysis zone level between the adopted 2045 and the future scenario. As you can see in the future scenario, where there are multimodal investments coupled with the land use changes, there is a shift of jobs to areas like the places that Nasheen mentioned, West Bay Drive, CRD, the Tri-City Activity Area, and the Bay Vista Office Park. Similarly, there is a shift of dwelling units near those same activity centers along the corridor, effectively creating a corridor that aligns people with transportation infrastructure to get them where they need to go. And so, while the shift does not change the total number of trips in the corridor, it does change the distribution of trips and shortens the overall trip length by 20 percent and lowers vehicle miles traveled by approximately 30 percent. This basically means more users utilizing alternative modes of transportation besides a motorized vehicle. The modeling aligns with community feedback we heard to focus on improvements at key intersections near activity center areas. And so, for anybody who wants to read more in depth about the corridor mobility evaluation, Appendix D and the Phase 2 report details this out more if you're into the nitty-gritty details. And so, with that, I'll hand it back over to Nasheen to cover Phase 3. Thanks, Amanda. So, with the context of the existing conditions along the corridor and then essentially the scenario testing that we did, we worked closely with the consultant as well as the City of Largo to identify the priority recommendations along this corridor. And so, today I'll give you kind of an overview of those recommendations and some examples. But what I want to provide context on first is the varying right-of-way widths along the corridor, which essentially inform how much room we have to make certain improvements. And you can see we have a more narrow right-of-way, more on the western end, and it widens as we get to the eastern end. So, this is just context for how we looked at this corridor based on its segments and the feasibility. And while our recommendations are really on a project-by-project basis identifying very specific improvements that can be made, it's also important for us to have a long-term vision for the corridor. This typical section in front of you shows the potential for improvements from US-19 to Lightwave Drive, which is the last eastern portion. And you can see currently at the top that there are no separated bike lanes, but then the potential shows the ability to incorporate that. And this is actually something that is under-designed by FDOT. This typical section is not the design plan itself, but the resurfacing that is under-designed currently will incorporate those separated bike lanes. And the lane widths here also reflect the lane widths that are being implemented through the remaining resurfacings that are underway from Highland to Belcher and then Belcher to US-19. So, there's an opportunity for this corridor to have continuous bike lanes and the opportunity to connect into the Pinellas Trail, which is on the western side of the corridor. But that is the long-term vision, and what we're really focused on with our corridor studies or trying to do with our corridor studies is have projects that come out of them because ultimately projects need to be incorporated in our priority list, in the transportation improvement program that you approved last month. So, with the consultant, with the City of Largo, we identified pretty much every single improvement that needed to be made. I think there was a list of maybe 800 different improvements, and a lot of those were ADA noncompliance, like curb ramps, tactile warning pavers. So, we got down to that level of identifying every single sidewalk, every single intersection. But then, how do you prioritize that? How do you identify which projects we need to move forward now? So, with the help of our consultant, they developed the scoring criteria, and then all of the projects were scored and then put into the buckets of the recommended strategies in front of you. And in working with the City of Largo, based on their priorities, their community feedback, we also identified the kind of key intersections where improvements could be seen or should be seen, and those are listed in front of you as well, which are also supported by the data. But I will start to go over some of the recommended strategies, and I'll start with the enhanced transit facilities that were recommended. As I mentioned, we have been working with PSTA to identify a methodology and a way to prioritize locations for bus bays countywide. So, while this corridor study was underway, we thought it would be great to have some recommendations that utilize that methodology. And we kind of scored these locations based on some initial criteria, the first being crash exposure at a bus stop, the number of routes serviced by a stop, so the number of times a bus or a different route might actually be stopping at a stop, as well as the land-use context, because, of course, transit riders are going somewhere after the bus stop. And then we, based on all of the bus stops in the corridors, scored them based on these criteria, and the picture at the top of the slide shows you the highest scored location for East Bay Drive specifically, which is the stop at 2nd Street. This is right across from Largo Central Park, and I had to put a box around this bus stop, because when I looked at this picture, I couldn't tell where the bus stop was. So, that is to help you identify, and you can see that aside from a sign, there are no other facilities. And what we will do with PSTA is to kind of narrow down some of the locations, not just on this corridor, but countywide, because this is just an initial screening criteria. We have to determine right-of-way feasibility. We have to determine if, you know, the curb needs to be moved, all of those other design recommendations or considerations that go into this. And we will be working with PSTA staff to give an update to their board, as well as you all, as we advance this. But this report does include some recommendations for bus space. Moving on to pedestrian improvements, the study also identified mid-block crossing recommendations. This was something that the Largo City Commission also provided feedback on and wanting to see, especially due to some of the very long distances for pedestrian crossings. So, for example, on the eastern end of the corridor from 62nd Street to 58th Street, you have to walk half a mile until you cross. In this weather, I would not recommend it. So, what we have done is identified those top locations. And above here is an example of how a mid-block crossing could potentially be incorporated, especially where there's already a median, because you are crossing three lanes of traffic on each side. And these are the top locations. And then a little bit more of an extensive recommendation, which would be less in the short term and probably more in the midterm, is considering improvements to intersections. The picture here on the top of the slide shows you the existing intersection at Belcher Road. You can see that it's a very wide intersection. The pedestrian crossings are quite long. And there are often lots of turning movement conflicts. And some of these improvements could potentially improve both the pedestrian safety as well as the operations along or within an intersection. And these locations that are scored here scored the highest in the report. And the one that I want to point out to you is the number one location at Bay Vista Drive, where while this corridor study was underway, we actually tried to start implementing the recommendation based on a request we received from TD Cenex from Bay Vista Office Park to incorporate a signal at this intersection, given the very high speeds along this segment of Roosevelt Boulevard, and the fact that right now the age of work-from-home and hybrid environments have been changing. TD Cenex pretty much is completely back to office, which means that all those cars are now going back into that office park. So currently, an intersection control evaluation is underway by FDOT, and we're awaiting the results of that in the next couple of weeks. So as far as the implementation of this project or of this study, as I mentioned, our goal is to identify projects and then ultimately move them into our project priority list and then coordinate with partners as needed, for example, in implementing a signal at Bay Vista Drive. And as I mentioned, today's presentation to you was just informational. I'm here to take your questions and comments, but we will be taking this to the Largo City Commission at their next work session. Our technical coordinating committee has also received this presentation. I gave it to them last week, and they will be providing a recommendation to you all, and this will ultimately come back to you in September for approval, if that's how you wish to move forward. And immediate next steps include continuing to coordinate with FDOT and Bay Vista Office Park, as well as coordinating with PSTA on those shorter-term transit improvements. But with that, I'm happy to take any questions, and Amanda is here as well. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Questions, comments, thoughts? I just wanted to say thank you to the team. We greatly appreciate the partnership with you all and also FDOT. The bike lanes are already making a huge difference. So just thank you for that, and we're excited to partner with you throughout this process. So just thanks to everyone involved. Thank you, Chris. Anybody else? I like all the bus bay ideas. It's great. I thought you might. Yeah. We did those just for you. Particularly right there on that stretch there. Yeah, I know. That's my daily... That's my daily route, so I get it. And as for your inability to see the sign, we have authorized new, larger, higher-print signs. So I bet your point was well taken. Thank you. Board members, I just want to add one little thing. I think Amanda did a really nice job highlighting, you know, what we're really trying to accomplish here in Pinellas County as we redevelop, and that is, you know, the magic bullet here is shorter trip links. And if we can get more mixed-use housing, housing closer to where jobs are, ensure that we retain those jobs here in Pinellas County near where people live, then we're in a lot better shape than a lot of other counties because they're having to drive longer distances to get to those destinations. Look at Pasco County, for instance, which didn't really plan for a lot of commercial activity. And their residents are all forced to get on, like, one major road where we have more of a network of streets. And so this plan really does show that with redevelopment, with smart transportation investments, that we can reduce trip links. We can, you know, not everybody's going to want to get on a bike or walk, you know, as Nusheen mentioned, in this heat. But if a small number of those people start doing that, that's fewer trips on the road. But it's really the shorter trip links because that's the death knell of transportation is forcing people to get in, you know, a 15-, 25-, 30-minute drive every time to go anywhere. You don't have to do that in this quarter. This quarter's ripe for that. So I think this demonstrates that even in a very developed roadway environment, you know, high-speed arterial, we're not going to take away any lanes or anything like that, there's still measurable opportunity for improvement. I think that's the big takeaway I have. Yes, great points. Great points. Thank you very much. All right. Now we'll move on to item 6D, 22nd Avenue North Trail Crossing Study. And I've been looking forward to this one because I am extremely familiar with this particular trail crossing. So you're saying you've had some near misses? Yes, I have had a few along that stretch of road. Yes, indeed, I have. So how you doing? Kyle Simpson for Pinellas staff. And as noted, here to talk about the study that we did in partnership with the city of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County on the trail crossing of 22nd Avenue North in St. Petersburg. So the crossing, just for a little context, looking bird's eye view, you have Alt-19 kind of in Tyrone Boulevard in the upper right corner, and then Tyrone Mall. An important thing to note about Tyrone Mall is that's a huge transfer point for PSTA. They have nine routes that stop there, and the stop itself is on 22nd, and so all nine of those routes cross the trail to make a loop in the neighborhood to head back east. So there's a lot of bus traffic across this crossing. It's a cleaner look, again, from the top down. And then as a driver view, this is kind of what it looks like today. It's four lanes. There's kind of sort of a median. We wouldn't really call it a refuge, but there's kind of planters there to enable the rectangular rapid flashing beacon to be put in the middle. And then, again, there's the bus. There's pretty good sight lines, generally speaking, and there is traffic, but it's not that much traffic as we'll get into. So it's an interesting case study that really came to the forefront after a fatal crash that happened in late 2024 actually involving a PSTA bus. And so we worked with the city after that and the county to identify this location was overrepresented for Pinellas Trail crossings for crashes, and so we wanted to take a deeper dive into why. So the scope of this project included looking at how the existing configuration operates, basically how people driving or on the trail interact with each other and what are the volumes of vehicles and then trail traffic. And then based on that data, what are some improvements we can make to make it work better for everyone? So looking at vehicle operations, the posted speed limit out there is 35, and the actual speeds are really close to that, which doesn't happen a lot, and that was actually really good to see. Vehicle volumes, the darker bars are the weekday, and then weekend is the lighter orange bars. Post-pre-COVID, we saw, especially on weekdays, pretty defined a.m. and p.m. peaks, but now it's kind of consistent throughout the day with a more definitive peak in the p.m., and then weekend traffic has always kind of been consistent midday and started later, and so this kind of is similar to any other roadway we would see around the county. We look at trail volume, so the graph on the top is weekday in 15-minute increments, so we actually see really consistent use throughout the whole day. And then the bottom one is one Saturday. These counts were taken November 12th through 15th in 2025, so that's a Wednesday through Saturday. And on the weekend, we'd have well over 100 trail users crossing this intersection an hour, and so that's a really high volume for a crossing. So over those four days, we counted just under 3,000 trail users crossing here, and 88% of those were on a bicycle of some sort. 8% were on their feet, and then 4% were on a scooter, in a wheelchair, on a one board, on a skateboard, kind of anything else that they could be moving on. So as I said, there's rectangular rapid flashing beacons, and those require the user to press a button to turn it on. Flashing beacons, they don't change the law. They just draw attention to somebody there, but they don't change right-of-way. State law says that a driver shall stop for someone in a crosswalk, so this just enforces that someone is there. But we were interested in kind of how trail users interacted with that, and we found over those four days that basically one out of every three trail users activated the beacon. That could be because they arrived when there wasn't traffic, and so they just went when there was a gap. It could be that they waited until traffic cleared and then just went when they felt safe. There's different. We didn't go out there and say, why did you do this or not? But just from the video footage that we had, that's what we found. And then another interesting tidbit from that review was that of the one-third that pressed it, quote-unquote, it only activated 64% of the time. So that could have been someone's biking by. They didn't, like, stop, kind of just hit at it, but didn't actually hit the button. So that was an interesting thing that we can take back with our design recommendations and considerations. We did find that on the weekdays, the number of people that activated the RFP was higher, so it was 40% on weekdays and 31% on weekends. That probably could correlate with the difference in traffic volume. So on the weekdays, there were around 12,000 vehicles a day passing through there, and then on the Saturday, there was 9,000. So there's opportunity for more gaps where someone would just feel comfortable continuing on because there's no motorist to alert to their presence. So then we looked at how do drivers interact with trail users. And so we found that when a trail user was at the crossing, 63% of the time there was a vehicle kind of in the mix. 91% of the time when that happened, the driver yielded to the trail user. The one on the bottom, 95% of the time that the trail user turned on the flashing beacon, the driver yielded in accordance with state law. That's really good numbers. It's kind of what we see with most flashing beacon assemblies around the county. They are effective when used, but we do see they're a little bit more, when someone's on a bike, getting them to slow down and turn it on is just a harder ask. So then we looked at near-miss conflicts. So these are what are things that could cause concern and that we want to look into further where something's a close call but doesn't show up in our crash data because the crash didn't happen. Luckily, so how we measure this is it's called post-encroachment time. So basically if someone is going... Sorry. Wake you up. So if someone's going on the trail and then someone's driving on the street and they pass within a second, within two seconds, or within three seconds of each other, we note that. And so there's different ways to interpret this. We saw that most instances of this were when someone on the trail passed within a second or two of someone driving. So that means kind of they yielded for the vehicle and then went behind them. So it wasn't a close call necessarily. They both probably knew what was going on, but it shows up in our data. The second most common was when a driver kind of opposite of that. So a trail user is there and a driver cuts behind the trail user really close. So that's a little bit more concerning. It could be where someone on the trail thought a motorist was stopping and they didn't or they cut close. So that could be where we get into the situation where someone, a trail user, feels like it was a close call and it was uncomfortable. And then with this type of crossing where it's two lanes in each direction, there's the issue of multiple threat. So that's where the driver in the curb lane stops, but then the driver in the left lane does not stop. Technically speaking, that's illegal. If there's someone stopped at a crosswalk, you shall stop. But there's a difference between what we should do and what actually happens. And so that was a big focus of us, especially knowing that there's a lot of bus traffic here. And this actually was an issue that we noticed a few times through the review of the camera footage that some of the most close incidences occurred when someone in one lane stopped but in the next lane did not. So then looking at the crash data from the last five years to 2021 to 2025, we maintain a system. And then we also looked at the state system, Signal 4. We had the one fatal crash in 2024. That involved a user. So someone walking activated the flashing beacon. Vehicle stopped for them. They started crossing. Someone on a scooter noticed that traffic had stopped and kind of went to cross. When they went to cross, a bus started continuing after the first pedestrian had crossed, and there was a collision which resulted in a fatality. That instance, we found that 8% of the 3,000 crossings that we monitored, 8% of those crossings happened where basically someone entered the crosswalk after someone else had turned the flashing beacon on. So the beacon is timed to, if someone hits the button, it's at a walking speed, and so it'll flash, say, for 20 seconds and then turn off if someone else doesn't hit the button. So that was a concern that we noticed and has shown up in our crash data. Other than that, there weren't too many layering issues for us. There were, it was pretty consistent with trail user types, so most of the crashes involved bicyclists, but most of the trail use is bicyclists, and then the one scooter crash was the fatality. Most of these were in daylight hours with clear weather, kind of also consistent with when the trail is used. And just to note, when we look through the written narrative, 10 of the crashes occurred when it was noted that the RFB was activated, noting that would require either a witness or the driver or trail user saying so. Again, that doesn't change the law necessarily, but it is an interesting fact. Three drivers directly said that a bus blocked their line of sight of a trail user that was involved in the collision. And then three of the crashes involved that kind of multiple threat issue where you might have someone going northbound on the trail and someone coming southbound, and they stopped for one person and then didn't see the other person coming. And then also two reports noted. Sun glare, that's a difficult one with roads that go due east-west, but something that we can take into consideration with design recommendations. So based on all that, went back and developed some potential alternatives, starting from kind of the least intensive to the most intensive. So the first option would be the clicker. It's so good that we can't move forward. Dead clicker. Thank you. There we go. So the first one is just updating the signage with current standards out there. Can you advance the next? Thank you. Going forward would be formalizing the medians. So right now they're kind of just landscaped medians, but not a refuge island. This would make it a refuge island and raise the crossing. So this would be consistent with FDOT has a standard now for raised pedestrian crossings on state roadways. Currently, it's not allowed in St. Petersburg per their comprehensive plan, but it's our understanding that the city intends to work through a comprehensive plan update sometime in the near future to allow this in the future on their collector and arterial roadways. And so this could be a good option to address some of the issues that we saw. Another alternative we looked at was adding kind of chicaning medians on the trail itself. We go to the next. And then also doing a, we call this like a Z crossing or a 45. So positioning trail users where as they cross the intersection A, they have to slow down if they're on some sort of wheeled device, and it positions them to look at the direction of traffic that they're crossing. And so it would have a kind of dual purpose effect. We go to the next. And then the most aggressive is doing a lane pinch through the crossing. So this would be just for the crossing location going down from two lanes in each direction to one lane. This one would require additional analysis and study based on current Florida statutory requirements. So this was thrown as an option, but it is currently not being considered. We continue to the next. There we go. And then, so this is the same lane pinch, but with the 45. Next slide, please. And then the preferred alternative that was come through. So we shopped all these around to our bicycle pedestrian advisory committee, as well as the city's bike ped advisory committee and their complete streets committee. And so this would add a raised crossing as well as the 45 degree alignment for the trail. So this has the benefit of slowing down basically all users. We see that when everyone is going at a slower speed, when things happen, everyone has more time to react to that and ability to, you know, prohibit basically conflict from happening. So this was a good option that everyone felt kind of addressed all the concerns that we saw out there. If we continue to the next. So at this point, we passed this along to the county and the city. They were involved throughout the whole process. It will be, it's a city road. So they're in lead for what happens in the future. They do have FDOT and a good partnership has identified funding in fiscal year 28 that could be available to implement these improvements. And we will be, provide all the assistance as required or as requested from the city and FDOT as we move forward with this. And if changes are made in the future, we have committed to go back and look at what impact they had and if it's something that could be implemented at similar trail crossings throughout the county. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Questions for Kyle? No? Well, I got, oh, Mike. Go for it. Yes. I'll answer to anything. Don't worry. So I'm going to apologize to start this off because this whole situation of what I've just listened to has been a pet peeve of mine. I've been sitting on the School Transportation Safety Council, and for years I've been speaking about why can't we have a motion sensor at every one of these intersections. It is just beyond me. As Whit knows, I have an e-bike. I travel the trail all the time, Tarpon Avenue. They don't even consider going near that thing. They buzz across at 30 miles an hour, and then they dodge the vehicles that are going up and down on Tarpon Avenue. We've all seen it. That's what happens in all these things. You're going to have the weekend biker is the one that will sit there, push the button, hope for the best and whatnot. But the skin-tight people flying across 30 miles an hour, they're not stopping. And you cannot expect the cars to be able to see everything that goes on. I know when you get down in my neck of the woods in Mears, there's a huge area of grass that you cannot see going south when you're traveling east. You just cannot see. So there is a stop sign there. Some people stop. Some people almost run into the people, you know, the people that are coming down the trail. We have to have to not count on people's consideration. We have to think beyond the ability, their abilities, and there has to be a motion sensor there to be able to warn the driver that somebody is coming and flashing. This will stop also that next person that comes behind the person that, you know, you have that timer. The timer will be reset again by the – we have the technology. We just don't use it. When I delved into it, from what I understand, the FDOT didn't have anything on their list that warranted a motion sensor, as they didn't have anything on the list for a school light, which is not what we're talking about. But we have to, you know, wake up and understand if we want to save, you know, pedestrians and we want to save people, we have to make sure that we put electronics into this. Because I'm seeing what you presented, and I appreciate it all, but that's not going to solve the problem. Yeah, so you bring up a good point, and that is something that we looked into, and we went around to – so basically today, there are sensors that kind of – and there actually is one on the trail at an intersection in Clearwater. When there are higher volume crossings – Oh, good then. Yeah, the current – the challenge is if it's just always flashing, it reduces its effectiveness. And so we were trying to see if there is a kind of off-the-shelf item that we could recommend where it uses camera technology to kind of see when someone's in the crosswalk versus not. So right now, if it activates, it activates for a walking speed. So whereas 90% of the people crossing are on bike, every time it turns on, it's going for as if someone's walking across. So we wanted to see, could we implement passive detection? You're creating your own accident. I know. Have it, yeah, where you don't have to press the button, but then it's also not activating – a bunch of stale activation where, you know, the lights are flashing but no one's in the crosswalk. Unfortunately, we weren't able to identify that at this point, but it's something that I know FDOT's interested in and some of the districts are working on. It's something that we noted in the report that passive detection is a good option, especially combined with noting the user type and trying to address kind of those concerns that you identified. Let me just go into this one more. Yes, there's always extenuating circumstances, and there is a spot in Dunedin I know that the light could be going on all day. And in those particular areas, we need to have a red light, not a flashing light. And it's to stop the bicyclists. It's to stop the pedestrians from walking across. Just have a red light. I know I've spoken a number of times about Klosterman and Alt-19. I just saw some posts that people don't even want to have that do not turn on red there. They just don't want it, and they don't obey it. I was almost hit there because the person's looking to the left and straight, sees nobody coming. The intersection there is at an acute angle, and there, if you don't put an arm down to stop the people, they're going to make that right on red. And I luckily was able to give it all the gas I had on my e-bike or I would have been hit. So there always are going to be the one or two or three areas where we have to think outside the box. But for the most part, a motion sensor at each one of these intersections is golden. That's all I have to say. That's my pet peeve. Thank you, Mike. Any other thoughts? So I got a couple thoughts. So I agree with the preferred alternative. To me, that's the one that makes the most sense to me. Putting medians on the trail, don't do that. That's going to get people hurt. They're going to run into them. They're not going to pay attention to them. I was thinking along the same lines as you were, Mike, that there would be a great way if we could just automate the RF, the beacons. I think there may be a false sense of security in that, though, is that people think, well, it's off. I can just clear through. And I worry about that a little bit, too. The technology certainly exists to do that. I mean, I've got on any serious cyclist these days, you've got a Garmin up front, and you've got a flashing red light in the back that's actually a radar. And it tells you when a car is approaching before you can ever hear it. So you're aware of something that's coming up on you that's going to overtake you long before you can ever hear it. So that type of technology is certainly out there. The only concern I have is that people get a false sense of security. Oh, the light's on. I can just keep going. Yeah, that was another concern with it being not a regulatory device. Right. Yeah. Right. But I like the preferred alternative here. I think that's the best option. Anything else? No? All right. Thanks, Kyle. Thank you. All right. So my understanding is on the special act review subcommittee. You all wanted to meet one more time. So we're going to hold on that one until next meeting, and then we'll move on to data center overview. It's coming up. I do want to say that the subcommittee made a lot of good progress today. So I think we'll be ready. And we've just got a couple more things to work out. So stay tuned on that. Thank you. I need to say at the beginning that, giving credit where it's due, that this data center's project was mainly the product of Emma Wenick. I helped out, and I'm helping out today with the presentation. Thank you, Tina. So we have been asked to look at this very important emerging issue. We've drafted a white paper, which is in your packets. We looked at trends for data center development and the planning implications that our communities need to be aware of. Our goal is not to advocate for or against data centers, but just to provide information. Could someone advance the slide for me, please? Okay. That one. Thank you. So why are data centers suddenly such an urgent issue? Well, the industry is being driven by an explosion of demand for artificial intelligence or AI, as well as cloud computing and other industry trends. The amount of data center capacity in North America has increased by more than 12-fold since 2020, and demand is still outpacing supply. So these facilities are needed to support the digital economy, but they're also causing growing public concern. Some of these facilities take up enormous amounts of land. They can consume very large amounts of electricity and water, which can drive up costs for those utilities or even create scarcity in local communities. And some of them can also create pollution or intrusive levels of noise and other impacts on their surrounding communities. And for all of those impacts, data centers actually generate relatively few jobs. They are mostly automated. So all of these issues have put them on the forefront of our land use planning concerns. Not working. Thank you. And I need you to click two more times. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As far as we're able to determine, we don't have any data centers in Pinellas County currently, but it's been fairly well publicized that Pinellas Park has received an application to build one. It's for a smaller edge facility on just three acres of land. But even so, its projected electricity use would be four megawatts, which is the equivalent of about 2,500 houses. And there are just a lot of unknowns about its potential impacts. So the city has come to the conclusion that they need more time to draft regulations to address those concerns. They are pausing the application and exploring the possibility for a formal moratorium. And that is a decision that is echoing around the state. There is a growing list of jurisdictions, mostly counties, that have enacted either limited moratoriums or outright bans. And that is to give them more time to evaluate the impacts of these data centers and to develop the regulations that adequately protect their communities. Next slide, please. So our staff is supportive of the city's determination after studying this issue. Our determination is that data centers don't clearly fit in with the countywide rules. We haven't been able to identify a land use definition or a category that can accommodate them. The closest thing we have in terms of addressing the potential impacts that they have would be heavy manufacturing. But these aren't manufacturing uses, and their impacts aren't quite the same. So we have talked with our planners' advisory committee, and we determined that no other community, as of now, has heard of any serious proposals to build these. And everyone is really just at the very beginning of thinking about how to address these issues as they arise. So after a discussion at last week's meeting, PAC voted to establish a subcommittee to begin working through the potential policy and regulatory implications. And one more time. Next slide, please. These are not just technical planning issues for staff to solve. This is also a matter of policy. So we are requesting your direction for how you would like us to approach the issue as countywide staff. Should we work toward a single countywide policy approach? That could include a formal determination that we don't have a land use category that can accommodate data centers. That would be something that the local governments would need to be consistent with as well. We could also potentially explore whether something like a countywide moratorium would be possible or desirable. And should we begin working to develop amendments to the countywide rules? Again, every community would need to be consistent. We would work with the PAC subcommittee. That's not something that would happen overnight because there's a lot more research that would need to be done. So it would likely be sometime early next year at the earliest. But those things would be our recommended approach as staff. There is strength in numbers. If we are all on the same page across our local governments, then that gives us a stronger legal foundation for responding to these applications in a way that protects our communities. So that is our report. I'm happy to answer any questions. Otherwise, I will request your direction. Questions? All right, Mike, and then we'll go to Richie. Thank you, Chairman. I have a couple. I would be a little hesitant on a single countywide ban. My kind of issue on resolve stems from Clearwater Gas Company serves over 17 local municipalities. And two of the biggest pushbacks we hear so often on data centers are stresses that are put on the grid as well as the use or waste use of water and consumption, which is obviously rightfully so should be concerns. But when you have the ability to convert something like to natural gas, where there's plenty of it, and a local company that supplies all the municipalities, as well as I think a lot of our municipalities have challenges in how we get rid of wastewater. Is there ever discussions about natural gas as well as how we use recycled wastewater versus I'm just wondering if that's come into the discussion? There are different impacts based on how these facilities are powered and what type of cooling they use, which is where the water consumption comes from. So that would be part of what we would study. When I say countywide approach, I don't mean to say that this would be exactly prescriptive, that every local government would need to regulate these uses the same. The coordinated countywide approach would mainly be taking a pause, crafting countywide rules before local governments start to approve these proposals. Thank you. And to that point, yeah, I think I would be supportive of a pause moratorium. I don't know what language we're using because I don't have answers to things like that. And to hear, at first I was like, oh, the one in Pinellas Park's, you know, not very large. And then to hear that it was the amount of electric usage is 2,500 homes was kind of stunning for me. And I just don't feel like I have enough info to be able to make any sort of educated decision on uses like that. But beyond that, I just, I don't know if you could speak more to like what we anticipate seeing over time or what other communities have seen as far as like demand for these things to be built. Because we don't have any here and there's only been one tangible proposal. So I don't know if you could speak to that. We are working to reach out to some of our local industries that have a presence in the data center field. We haven't made a successful connection thus far, but we are trying to get a better sense of that. Okay. Yeah. That's, yeah. I mean, that's another reason for me to have hesitations. I'll leave it there for now. Thanks, Richard. Any other? Mr. Chair? Oh. Sorry. Chris, we got you and then we'll go to Richard. I think, you know, our city would be for a coordinated policy approach. We definitely are starting to talk about this now in our planning board. So, you know, having some coordinated efforts on this and a pause while we figure it out, you know, it seems wise. Thanks, Mr. Chair. I totally agree on the pause and figuring it out. But I will just tell you all, you know, one of the most interesting things about being an elected official is kind of that balance between this incredible staff that does their work and we have the same staff at the city, but then balancing that with the public and their understanding of things. And I can tell you that I have never seen a more unifying topic in the year of our Lord, 2026, than data centers and, you know, the way our county is built and built out in some senses, the way a lot of our zoning works is, you know, my concern is, you know, it comes before us as a conditional use. There's no formal application, but it comes before us that way. And if we approve that, it opens the door and we have a tremendous amount of zoning that's adjacent to neighborhoods. And I just, I'm usually the guy that's like, hey, let's be reasonable and let's get to the facts. This one, I'm like, nope, nope, not doing it. So it's not worth it. So definitely study more. There are places that are definitely appropriate for them, but at the rate at which the legislature decides what we can and can't zone whatever and the changes that can come from that, it's not worth the battle for me here in Pinellas County. So definitely supportive of a pause that probably ultimately goes towards go elsewhere. I just wanted to say we do need a one-year ban and we need a policy in place before we accept these. Thank you. Mr. Chair, one more thing. Sorry. The other thing, too, because obviously there are data centers in Pinellas County. They're part of other uses, hospitals and so on and so forth. We all understand that. But part of that discussion, just putting it out there, is when you have a data center that supports, you know, infrastructure, cloud computing, those things, that and an AI data center so that I can make really great AI images of myself should not be held to the same standard or expectation. I think that should be definitely a thought process that, you know, hey, if this is supporting critical infrastructure for government, health care, what have you, that's got to be different than, you know. I know it's a hard – it's not something we can decide, but just putting that thought out there because that's a difference to me as well, right? And I should have clarified. When I said there were no data centers in Pinellas County, we were talking about the standalone data center. Understood. Understood. Just the public is like, well, they're already here, the three proponents of data centers that showed up. Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything that's been said here. And, you know, Pinellas County does not have, as you mentioned, we don't have a land use, you know, category for data centers. But because we don't have one, if it's not listed, then it's excluded is the way it's been told to us. So do we need to update that? Maybe we do. I think an approach that we're going to consider looking at at the county level is more – is resource-based. If we're going to get an application for something that's going to use, you know, pick a number, X amount of water or X amount of, you know, electricity, that it has to be voted on by the Board of County Commissioners. You know, so there's a level of accountability and process that has to go through that. So I think that's something that we're going to look at at the county. Richie? I want to add one more thing, sort of just context for the conversation. My main concern, or at least the thing that's concerned me the most when these have come up, has been impact on our energy grid. And we're going to be reliant on what other counties do around what the utility companies approve because our energy grid is all interconnected. So I hope that we can use our relationships with our colleagues in nearby jurisdictions to have this discussion as well. I've seen, like, a hyperscale one, I believe, was approved in Citrus County not too long ago. And that's going to impact, you know, energy usage for us as well. It's all the same grid. It could impact our energy bills. And, you know, at crucial times whenever the grid's under high demand, that's there now. And so that's been one of my biggest concerns. And so I think the conversation needs to be broad, needs to include, you know, jurisdictions nearby. And I don't know if we have any leverage, but, like, conversation with utility companies at the very least. One positive is that we're seeing a lot of counties and some nearby that are looking at, that are either passing or considering moratoriums as well. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Anything else? All right. So now we will move on to the director's report. Well, the good news is I don't have much. I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow I should be getting a draft of the preferred scenario for the regional MPO in terms of the structure of the staffing, outsourcing, cost, full-time equivalency of staff. And I will pour into that, review it, and I will let you know what that looks like. But the good news is they're making a lot of good progress. We have – we're going to have a lot of good information. And I think that's setting us up to have all that information available in August. And then we'll distribute that to you all, and we'll have it ready for the next TMA leadership group meeting. So that will be early October. So, okay, great. That's all I've got. All right. Upcoming events, we've got informational items, which are in your packet. If anybody has any questions about that, you can – I do want to note that there's an MPO Advisory Council training in Gainesville that's in your packet. And if you're interested in that, it's just a one-day. But I highly encourage you all, if you haven't done the MPOAC training, it will make this job a lot easier for you. I promise. It will. I did it. It's worth it. And Gainesville is a fun town to go to. All right. Anybody else have any other business to bring forward? Mike? Just a last comment. Just wanted to thank you for stepping up and stepping in as our substitute teacher today. I think you did a phenomenal job. I hope I did okay. So you were stuck with me for the day. You did a great job. All right. Good. All right. Well, today was a longer meeting, so I appreciate everybody coming in and sticking it out here. So thank you very much. And with that, we are adjourned.