City Council - Jun 15, 2023

Welcome to the City of St. Petersburg City Council Meeting. Your elected officials are Mayor Ken Welch, District 1, Copley Gerdes, District 2, and Council Chair Brandi Gabbard, District 3, Ed Montenari, District 4, Lisette Hanowitz, District 5, and Council Vice Chair Deborah Figg Sanders, District 6, Gina Driscoll, District 7, John Muhammad, and District 8, Ritchie Floyd. Good afternoon, everyone. We will call to order the June 15, 2023 City Council Meeting, beginning with a roll call. Driscoll? Here. Muhammad? Here. Floyd? Here. Gerdes? Here. Gabbard? Here. Montenari? Here. Hanowitz? Here. Vic Sanders? Here. Okay, we will begin our meeting today with an invocation that will be given by fellow Council Member John Muhammad, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Will everyone please join me in standing? Let's pray. In the name of the one true God who is known by many names, we beseech your help and ask your mercy. You are our nourisher and our sustainer. So before we ask you for anything, we'd like to thank you for everything that you've already given us. We thank you for the opportunity to serve and provide leadership and direction for the city of St. Petersburg. In this sacred moment of prayer, we come before you with hearts full of hope and a burning desire to be agents of change and transformation. We recognize the power within us to shape the world around us and to make positive impacts on the lives of others. We seek your guidance and blessings as we embark upon this noble journey. Dear Lord, give us the clarity of vision to recognize the areas of our city that are in need of change. Illuminate our minds with innovative ideas and creative solutions, empowering us to think beyond boundaries and embrace new possibilities. Help us to see the interconnectedness of all beings and instill in us a deep sense of empathy and compassion for all those who are suffering. Fill our hearts with the courage and resilience to step forward and take action. Strengthen our resolve in the face of adversity, knowing the path to transformation is always met with challenges. Grant us the perseverance to overcome the obstacles and the unwavering belief in our ability to make a difference. Dear Lord, guide our intentions that we may be rooted in love, justice, and equality. Help us to navigate the complexities of this world with integrity and the commitment to fairness. May our actions be fueled by a genuine desire to uplift others, to create spaces of inclusivity, and to dismantle systems of oppression. Keep us mindful of the impact that our choices have on others and its contributions to their well-being. Dear Lord, ignite within us a passion for learning and growth and inspire us to seek knowledge and engage in meaningful conversations and remain open to new perspectives. Help us to recognize the value of collaboration and the strength that comes from diverse voices working together. May we be agents of unity, bridging divides, and fostering understanding. And finally, Lord, we'd like to invoke the spirit of gratitude and appreciation as we recognize the incredible contributions of the dedicated staff, committee members, and partners. Bless those in our state, federal, and county, and city governments. And bless the members of our community who volunteer their time and direct their efforts towards organizing for positive change. We are grateful for their tireless efforts and continuous support as we all work together for a brighter, more equitable, and sustainable future for ourselves, our family, and our city. In your name we pray. Amen. Amen. Pledge to the allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You may be seated. Council Member Mohammed, thank you for that beautiful invocation. I appreciate you doing that today. All right, Council Members, we have an agenda before us. We have a request to add item G2 and to pull CB18 to report. So with those changes, I'll entertain a motion for approval. Second. Seeing we have a motion and a second, Clerk to, no, no request to speak. Please open the machine for voting. Council Members, enter your votes. Seeing as all Council Members have voted, Clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve the agenda passes unanimously. Okay, and we have a consent agenda before us. Do we have any public comment on the consent agenda? We do not, Madam Chair. Okay, with that, I'll entertain a motion for approval of the consent agenda. Move approval. Second. We have a motion and a second. Seeing no request to speak, Clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council Members, enter your votes. Seeing as all Council Members have voted, Clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to pass the consent agenda passes unanimously. And at this time, I'm going to turn it over for just a moment to City Attorney to do a staff introduction for us. Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I just wanted to allow all of you to put a name to a face. This is Martin Musici. He's the newest addition to our department. We couldn't be happier to have him. He's going to be working primarily in labor and employment, which is a vacancy we've had for quite a while, and finally found what we think is just the right fit. So I just wanted to thank you for confirming him. Absolutely. Thank you for being here with us today. Have any words you'd like to share? Good afternoon. Thank you for the – it's a privilege and honor to get to serve the people of the great City of St. Pete, and I look forward to working with everybody. Absolutely welcome. Thank you for being here with us today. All right. We will now go ahead and move to an item of good news, item E3. And joining us today is our Community Enrichment Administrator, Mike Jeffries, and also joined by Ms. Maria Scruggs. Hello. We're going to tag team this good news. It's too good to not share. So as I was listening to Councilman Muhammad's prayer, there were a lot of words that really resonated with this item, so collaboration and teaching and continued learning. I stand before you today to give you our plan as we look to fund the stand-up portion of the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Reading program. I know that you've all heard about the program. I know that you've seen presentations. Today, we are funding the portion from this summer moving to the new fiscal year. So the portion that we're funding today is slightly different than what you've heard in the past. It's $95,000. And again, that is the stand-up portion. We're standing this program up so that we can be ready for the new school year, so that we can be ready for the new students that are coming forward as the summer ends. So I typically am long-winded. I won't be. The mayor would like to share a few words, so I will yield my time to the mayor. Welcome, mayor. Sorry I didn't see you up there whenever I did the introduction. I've been dieting, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being with us today. Madam Chair, it's great to be here today for bringing this good news forward. Thank you, Council Member Driscoll, for making that request. This is an exciting day for us, and I just wanted to reset a little bit for the community that I know we all believe that one of the best investments we can make is in our young people and education. We are actively recruiting a Youth and Education Opportunities Director, I think. How many dozens of applications do we have? 200. 200? Wow. Okay. So that is going to be an active part of how we as a city make a bigger impact on education. And part of that is not only reaching out to existing programs and seeing how we can make it more effective, but partnering with agencies that are bringing innovative new approaches to try to address the education gap. Some of our neighborhoods, as we know, have a big literacy gap, and we need to be innovative in ways to try to address that. So this is what this is about. Back in my previous life, in 2019, I think it was, I attended a workshop at Enoch Davis. We've been talking about this for a number of years. There's great community support. Our school board member, Edmonds, has spoken here in support of it. And so we're really excited to get the ball rolling. There will be other programs that we're supporting as well. But among all the pillars, the Youth and Education has the biggest payback, and that's where we're going to make this investment. So I'd ask you all to support this. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you, Maria, for your perseverance. You're quite welcome, Mayor. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. It is always a pleasure to be before this very distinguished body. Mayor Welch, I certainly want to thank you. And, yes, you are accessible and have been quite a bit over the past two years. And as a result of your grace welcoming us today, I also wanted to make a presentation to the council members as well as to the mayor. And I did check with Jackie that the gift is in the framework of the gifts that we're allowed to extend beyond council. So we have shirts, which one of you, we align for right side. And you too, Mike. Okay. And I'd like to introduce Morgan Nelson, who will also come up with me. Morgan is a staff member of Sarah Mollo, our chief public defender. And Sarah and I have developed a real strong relationship as in our passion in the criminal justice system. And we certainly recognize that in order for us to be worked out of a job, that we've got to ensure that our children are educated. And we know that one of the fundamental places that we can start with that education is to ensure that they can read. And that is the focus of the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign, where the focus is not about us starting an individual program, but us addressing what we learned. And I think it was, Mayor, it was actually 2018 in my former role as president of the NAACP, when we learned at that time that only 25% of African-American children in the Pinellas County system were reading on grade level. And also a part of that research, we learned that in spite of the reading deficiency, that we had spent on excess of $43 million in public dollars on after school, before school, and summer literacy programs. So it didn't take a whole lot to figure we did not have a great return on our investment. And since that time, myself and others, as you can see in the community, as well as all of the youth serving, the majority of the youth serving organizations have been working on a strategy that we believe will ensure that in this generation and beyond, that the African-American children in St. Petersburg will be reading proficiently. So we have a brief presentation that, like Mike said, is very different from what we did the first time. And our focus more on this one is about the deliverables that we hope to accomplish over the next several months. First of all, one of the primary functions, and I won't read everything because you all actually have these in your packet, just highlight some of the deliverables. One of the fundamental successes or actions that we have to take is a formal MOU with the Pinellas County School Board. And the reason that has to occur is that the family navigators who are a part of the instrument of the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign will actually be located in the targeted schools. And we wanted to make sure that what happens with those relationships are directly aligned to what the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign is trying to accomplish. And as you can see, one of the deliverables relates to two family navigators who will be assigned to Campbell Park August 15th, which is the week, I think, before school or the week after, first full week after school. One of the other deliverables that we want to highlight is the fact that we have a literacy consultant who we have recently hired. And the literacy consultant's primary role is to ensure that the instruction that children are getting in school is aligned with the instruction that they are getting from our literacy partners. And if you all can remember from our previous presentation, the majority of the youth-serving organizations in St. Petersburg are formal literacy partners to the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign. Next, we want to talk about a website because we want to focus on this is a literacy marketing campaign. It is not a literacy program. And as such, a website that has been developed, the importance of being able to maintain that website, keep it updated, and keep it active is very much a part of the success of this campaign. And the others are very processed kind of deliverables that you have in relating to your governance structure, monthly meetings, our presentations at our Habitat home dedications. I think we've done now seven dedications as one of our marketing strategies where we partner with Habitat for Humanities and all of the homes that have children in South St. Petersburg. We participate by giving the children to those adults books from the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign. And Regina actually attended one this morning, and she texted me and said the baby couldn't wait to tear open the gifts to get those books. And that's how we're going to build this focus on literacy in South St. Petersburg. We want to talk about our financial reports being a key part of this on deliverables, which are very important. I am a certified public manager in the state of Florida, so accountability is very much important to me. So making sure there are fiscal houses in order and all that supports that. Lastly, board members, same process kind of deliverables, but once we start getting into the programmatic deliverables, we want to ensure we have an estimated and talk with our partners that we anticipate in this short period of time that we'll be able to get 66 students enrolled in the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign, in large part because we're not actually out knocking on doors and handing out flyers trying to recruit. That was one of the key pieces of the partnership with Campbell Park, is that we're actually there. We've actually targeted the number of children that are not on a great level, and then being able to have staff there to engage them while they're there. 66 students with our vision hearing screenings. Our partners for our vision is Florida Preserve. Our primary partner that will be doing vision screenings. And then our mental health assessments are being done by our partners, Diverse Behavioral Health, Dr. Carlia East and Zanita Ellison. And others are just kind of process deliverables, and I think the next fail. Yep. Basically, that's the kind of process deliverables that you want to make sure that your governance structure is in place and that you're able to be accountable to not only the taxpayers of the city of St. Petersburg, but to our children and families that we're doing the best that we know how to do to ensure our babies can read. And at this time, I'll entertain any questions or comments or concerns that anyone may have. Thank you so much, Maria. And would you have everyone that's with you stand so that we can recognize everyone? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Council Member Driscoll, for pulling this. Oh, sorry. You've got people online as well. We'll thank them for attending virtually as well. So, Council Member Driscoll, thank you for pulling this item. If you want to go ahead and say a few words. Thank you, and thank you, Maria, for the quick presentation, demonstrating your commitment to accountability. And what I have appreciated from the beginning is also your commitment to a data-driven approach to this. As I have researched literacy efforts in other areas of our country, the most successful ones are the ones that start, continue, and finish with data. And the success is going to create a pathway for these students, no matter what path they choose, because if they can't read, they can't lead. You are creating our next generation of leaders, and that starts with us becoming a city of readers. Your commitment, and having spent a little bit of time with everyone on this, I just absolutely feel nothing but joy today, knowing that this is truly happening now. Because I know that your hearts are in it, and that you're truly committed to really getting to the root of the challenges with reading, because we know that sometimes that goes beyond the classroom. And, you know, something as simple as, this child's never been to the eye doctor before. They can't see. So, you know, just things like that that are so important. You're going to be helping the schools, helping the parents, helping the community identify what those barriers are to children knowing how to read. The pandemic exacerbated a problem that already existed on a crisis level in the black community. This is going to turn that tide, and I am so, so proud that the city is now going to be standing behind you and standing with you as you move forward in this campaign. Thank you, Mayor Welch, for your support of these efforts, and thank you, Mike, for being such a great city partner with this organization as they move on to begin with this new school year that's coming up. So, thank you very much, and I happily move approval. Second. Councilmember Mohamed. Thank you. Thank you, Maria and team, for your effort, your persistence, and diligence in this effort. I don't want to be redundant or long-winded, but when we had our conversation, we talked about the process that it takes to get this going, and in some cases, it takes longer than we expected. I mean, that was my experience as a community organizer. There's always that urgency of now and entering into a process of trying to get something done when you see a need as great as this can be daunting and overwhelming sometimes, and it's a labor of love. And when we think about labor, I've witnessed it three times, having actually participated. But the process of labor, conception is always fun. So, you ideate, and you have these ideas about what you want to do, and that's the brainstorming piece. And we enjoy that part of the process, but then the real work of assembling teams and putting, you know, things together and, you know, the growth of the movement, and you start running into challenges. I think morning sickness is a part of that, too. And so we experience that as a part of our labor, you know, to bring people together, and you start having disagreements. I know I had some a little bit, you know, my wife couldn't stand me sometimes, but that's a part of this process. And so being able to see you go through this process, continue to endure your team working with you, and, you know, knowing when to push and then knowing when to breathe and step back a little bit is another part of that process. And so I'm very excited to see where we are now, I like what Mike said about the stand up piece, because that's, you know, the delivery. But then we have to nurture it, sustain it, feed it, grow it, and continue to make sure that we ensure the success of the program and the initiative and the campaign. And so I'm excited to be able to support it and looking forward to seeing what the budget looks like for FY24 as we continue to support the program. So thank you all for everything that you do in this effort, and now is your moment for us to applaud and celebrate the birth. Yay! And then continue to work. So thank you, Madam Chair. Vice Chair Fink Sanders. Thank you. Okay, so Maria, you know when we've had the conversations, and I always applaud when it comes to trying to provide services and resources, and especially when it comes to our children. And I think you know initially I wasn't on board, still not on board, because when I look at deliverables, and when I look at Pinellas County School Board's MOU, when I look at the data and the statistics, I haven't seen any of that. Pre or post test, I haven't seen it. And so we've had that candid conversation. You know where I was going with that. The piece that brings me to an ease with this is knowing that the city found it necessary to get involved. The piece that brings me pause are the so many other organizations out there that had to follow a whole another process, and are still actually doing the work, and haven't seen that favor. So I look at it holistically as to where we are in this point and in this juncture. Now I still haven't, I got a couple of questions hopefully that you can answer for me. Absolutely. Your board members, do you have those board members yet? Of course, yes. Do you have the 20 that you? We do not have the 20 yet. Okay, okay, okay, and there are certain- Incorporated board. Okay, incorporated, okay. And the, are you talking about the rec center, right, or elementary? Campbell Park, I'm sorry. Elementary. Elementary, okay. So I guess because in my conversations, there was no real school board commitment to the program. So I'm just trying to figure out where the partnership is with the MOU, with Pinellas County Schools, and when do you plan on having that MOU, and what that partnership looks like. So I think that's another reason why I was kind of at a pause when I talked to you, because I didn't have that information. Okay. But of course, you know, I'm going to celebrate what is out there for our children, because, you know, I love that fact that we're trying to get them to read. I love that fact we're trying to get them to another point. But there were just a lot, some questions that I had going into it, and then you clarified for me, that it was a campaign and not a program, and I'm still hesitant. I'm going to move forward, but I just wanted for the record that I'm still very hesitant. I hadn't seen any stats, hadn't seen any data, hadn't seen any pre or post tests that's actually showing where the improvement was and where it is, and how we are going to assess that moving forward. And if I'm missing something, please clarify that for me, but I just want to make sure that if we are, if we're starting a precedent, that we need to look forward to other organizations that actually have data and statistics to come forward and get the same treatment. Because there have been a lot of them out there for a very long time with the same passion, the same labor of love. I don't think, you know, labor pains differ from person to person, but the labor of love is still there. So I just want to applaud the effort, applaud the mission, applaud the purpose. But I would have loved to have seen just a little bit more of the information that we talked about moving forward. But again, you have been consistent. You have been, you have been a strong advocate for our children learning to read. And for that, I do apologize, I do applaud you for that. But thank you for listening to me, but I do still want to get that information moving forward. And again, congratulations to the team that stepped up to help our children and how we're going to see. But I'm looking forward to seeing how this is going to roll out and it opening the doors for other organizations to come on through to help get it done. Now, did you want me to address your question? So, well, you can, because the MOU piece, you still don't have that. And I'm still trying to get clarification on that. Let me clarify. Okay. The Pinellas County School Board has walked along with us since 2018, since its inception. As you know, the current superintendent, Kevin Hendrick, was the assigned staff by Dr. Michael Garrico to the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign. And now that there was a transition, of course, with Stephanie Woodford stepping into his position, they have the MOU draft. It's in hand. They're ready to move forward. And I will be meeting with Stephanie Woodford just to go over a couple of questions to finalize the MOU. But this could not move forward without a formal. We have an informal relationship. But the importance of this has been to focus on the issue of sustainability, is that you have organizations that are committed to the process. And one of the things, and you talked about research and what works. What does not work in a collective impact model is efforts that have been led from the top down. The innovation behind the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign is it is the black community that is stepping up with its collective resources and partnering with institutions to ensure this is not an issue that is going to be resolved by one person, one organization, or one entity. And I think one of the innovation parts, strategies that I hope that was attractive to the mayor was the fact that every youth-serving organization is an active partner with the Phyllis Wheatley Rise to Read campaign, as evidenced in a formal MOU. And the district was the last one. So you know approximately when you're going to have the MOU? We're meeting on the 20th to finalize their questions, but should be before we go into implementation. So June 20th. Okay. And this is going to be during the before and after care at Campbell Park Elementary? I'm sorry? When is the program going to run? Is it going to be after school at Campbell Park Elementary? It is in a program that runs. Well, initiative. So when are the services going to be provided? The primary services that occur within the school is the family navigators enrolling the child with the family support. Okay. The actual services are already being done and being paid for from the Boys and Girls Club, our club, Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation. I wanted to talk about Mike for a minute, who from day one said, my staff are going to be a part of this. Library services, parks and recreation have been here from day one, making sure that one of the things that we do is whatever the instruction that is occurring within the literacy partners is that it's aligned to what children are getting in school. That's for the role of the literacy consultant. Okay, so really it's the navigators actually doing the referrals. The navigators are actually doing the enrollments because they're physically located at Campbell Park and the other schools that will be in the pilot. They are enrolling them. They're having the parent orientations at Campbell Park. And then they are linking them to our literacy partners as appropriate. Okay. And all of those literacy partners are the ones that you just named? The Shirley Proctor Puller? Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation, and Regina can help me if I leave anybody else out. The City of St. Petersburg Parks and Recreation, as you know, you all have tutors in the schools. The City of St. Petersburg Library Services, as you know, you have a plethora of reading programs that our children will be linked to. And what that does is expose our families to a lot of programs that I know my child grew up in going to the library and spending the summer at the library. Not many children in our community did that. So it was important to have those relationships up front and publicly. Thank you. Because it was from day one without a whole lot of fanfare that he, Freddie Williams from the Boys and Girls Club, Bridget Heller said, oh, yeah, yeah. They recognized that. And the numbers that were important. And when we talk about data, it's important to understand what data we're talking about. The data that we actually had was the data that said 25% of African-American children were not reading on grade level. We then broke it down and looked at each school, Campbell Park, John Hopkins, and at 2022, which is the last time our children have been assessed, we had out of 132, I'm sorry, 162 African-American children that were tested for the ELA, 132 of them were not reading on grade level. Let's do the math. And then what we did, we said, okay, we're public administrators. We're public people. Let's look at how much we've spent. We looked at juvenile welfare board. We looked at the Pinellas County school system. And we looked at Pinellas County government. And we said, how much money have we spent on after-school program, before school, and during school, focusing on literacy? That was in excess of $43 million. Due to math, it wasn't a real good return on our investment. That was the data, the appropriate data, to determine the need. Then we start looking at the research. It's what works when you're talking about culturally relevant programming that attacks. How do we organize this? That's how we got to the collective impact model. The thing was, we chose to do it differently. We didn't. It was not somebody telling us how to do it. It was us asking people to do it with us. And we know that this strategy just has not worked. Nobody can point me to one successful program where it's been top-down. But where you have the community engaged in its various resources, collecting with its community partners, saying that this is something that we can do together with a strategy and focus on African-American children reading proficiently. Thank you. So that's the information that shows the need. So when we come back, you'll now have the number of students, where they were in reading proficiency, and then where they are afterwards with your involvement. You got it. So you have no initial data, but you plan on providing that next year. Exactly. Okay. We have to establish the foundation of where the children are when they enroll, a part of their individual success plans, have all of their literacy scores, and then, of course, what we're tracking based on their enrollment is how those scores improve. Gotcha. Okay. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Thank you, Chair. All right, Council, we have a motion and a second. Seeing no other requests to speak, Clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing all council members have voted, Clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Chair, the motion to approve agenda item E3 passes unanimously. All right, thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mike. All right, we will now go ahead and move on to open forum. Clerk, please read the rules for open forum. If you wish to address city council on subjects other than public hearing or quasi-judicial items listed on the agenda, please sign up with the clerk. Only the individuals wishing to speak may sign the open forum sheet. Clerk, hold on one moment until the chamber clears. Sorry, we can't hear you. Please proceed. Only city residents, owners of property, business owners in the city, or their employees may speak. All issues discussed under open forum must be limited to issues related to the city of St. Petersburg government. If you are speaking to an item on the agenda, you may only speak once during the open forum or when the item comes up on the agenda. In order to provide an opportunity for all citizens to address council, each individual will be given three minutes to speak and after which the microphone will be muted. If you wish to address city council through the Zoom meeting, you must use the Raise Hands feature button in the Zoom app or enter star 9 on your phone at the time the agenda item is addressed. When it is your turn to speak, you will be unmuted and asked to state your name and address. At the conclusion of your comments or when you have reached the three-minute time limit, you will be muted. All raised hands will be lowered after each agenda item. Regardless of the method of participation used, normal rules apply, including the three-minute time limit on comments. The requirement that any presentation materials must be submitted in advance of the meeting and the rules of decorum. If live public comments is disrupted by the violation of the rules of decorum, the chair is authorized to accept public comments by alternate means, including by e-mail only. And, Madam Chair, we do have some speakers. Okay, and do we have any speakers in Zoom? No, we do not. No? Okay. So call two at a time, please. Jack Tuskill and Walt Diggers. Please step up to either podium. State your name and address for the council. You'll have three minutes to address council. Thanks, council. Jack Tuskill, 107th 8th Avenue, southeast. I'm chairman of the Albert Whitted Airport Advisory Committee, and I've spoken before this body lots of times. Mr. Tuskill, can you bring the mic a little bit closer? Yeah. Can you hear me now? Okay. Thank you. You want me to start over? No, you're good. Okay. I appear before you today to ask you that later today you're going to hear a presentation on the airport's master plan and its airport layout plan. I would like to have you accept it. The last airport master plan that was accepted by the city was in 2007, so it's time for another one. An airport master plan affords the FAA and the Florida Department of Transportation with a forecast of the needs for the airport 5, 10, and 20 years out. The master plan also contains the airport layout plan. The airport layout plan you can think of as a plot plan. Those of you that are in real estate know what I'm talking about. If there's a need for a runway improvement or extension, hangar expansion, or new equipment locations, it's got to be shown on the ALP. Between the master plan and the ALP, the regulatory and grant agencies have a clear picture of what Albert Whitted needs for future maintenance and growth. It is not shown on the ALP or discussed in the master plan. It won't be entertained by the FAA. So you've got to show them what you plan to do. They funded the study. So did the state of Florida a little bit. So I ask that when the time comes this afternoon that you accept the master plan in the ALP. Thank you. Thank you. Council Chair, Council Members, ladies and gentlemen, I'm Walt Driggers with the Friends of Albert Whitted Airport, a 501C3 that we created in September of 2022. And I'm excited to give you a quick update of some of the things that have been happening at Albert Whitted Airport, first of which is the control tower is on track to handle approximately 100,000 movements this year. We had meetings with our immediate neighbors at the airport, University of South Florida, the Innovation Hub, and the U.S. Coast Guard. And we're collaborating with these entities to create exciting, informative, and forward-looking events, activities, and programs for children and adults alike. Friends of Albert Whitted Airport was pleased to see that the city recognized and put forth a proclamation acknowledging the value of soul relief on the airport. The efforts of soul relief during last year's aftermath of Hurricane Ian was outstanding as they delivered first responders and supplies to the Fort Myers Airport while many of the major roads were closed. It reminds us that St. Petersburg is fortunate to have Albert Whitted Airport downtown not only as a launching point for relief activity, but also it's a receiving point should Pinellas County experience what Fort Myers area did last year. Albert Whitted Airport adds significant to the safety of our community. We did some scholarships. Earlier this year, 19 deserving young people received $75,000 of training scholarships, flight training scholarships, all funded by the generous donations of Friends of Albert Whitted Airport. Several of you were in attendance there when we had Captain Barrington Irving, a world record-holding aviator, as we presented the scholarships. We look forward to continuing the scholarship program, which enables equitable and inclusive opportunities to help young aviators and scientists make their dreams become a reality. We expanded this opportunity to a younger group of up-and-coming aviators at our recent Aerospace Day. Students from several area schools and organizations, including Dunnellan High School, Academy Prep, and the prestigious sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, attended this event, which featured workshops, presentations, and hands-on learning opportunities from leading NASA scientist, pilots, Nicole Stott, our local astronaut, who spent 104 days in space and shared that with the children. The Young Eagles program, in the past 10 to 12 years, over 3,000 children, 18 to 17 years old, have flown at Albert Whitted Airport because of the Young Eagles program. May 17, the new EAA chapter, 1602, conducted the first Young Eagles flights, and in fall, you can expect more Young Eagles events, larger Young Eagles events, to expose children to aviation right here in downtown St. Pete. It brings tears to my eyes to see the joy, excitement, and discovery in the eyes of the kids and the parents after each of their flights. We applaud the loving, open-minded, progressive parents who understand it as their responsibility to expose children, their children, to the experiences so as possible. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Next speakers, please. Esther Matthews and David Sokol. Sir. You said my name first, right? Yes, ma'am. Okay, all right, fantastic. Esther Matthews, City of St. Pete, greetings, everyone sitting on the dais. So my comment, my... Your address, please. Oh, 4051 Haynes Road North, St. Petersburg, Florida, 33703, I think it is. The conversation I'm bringing today is a point that I brought up at the CAC meeting this month, and it's tied to the South St. Pete CRA Micro Fund that was issued and administered by the Greenhouse. It was brought to our attention during our meeting that there was no formal review process, that it was up to 40, I believe 35 or 40 applications that was taken, and then it was closed off. And the first however many it was, those are the ones that received the funding. Now, I have been a part of review processes for grants for many years. And I know that, especially with an administration, that there should be a formal process in place. That process should include a rubric. That process should include a group of individuals that review all the applications and all of the data that the applicants needed to provide to ensure that they were, in fact, upholding the requirements of the process. And so I am a bit concerned that, in fact, that was not done, that it was a top 35, 40, or 45, and then it was closed. And not closed on the site, but closed internally. So you still had an additional XYZ applicants completing the process with no knowledge that their application and their documentation was going nowhere and not being considered. So I just wanted to make note of that. It was brought to the attention. I am requesting public information on it to see what the full process was. So I will be back if, in fact, the process was not a proper one. And I'm going to ask that the city and this council board and the city administration look into it, because if we did not honor the fidelity of a process that's been in place for a really long time, if we did not provide the proper information to the businesses that, in good faith, submitted their information for this micro fund that they have been waiting on since last year, and we just took the top people of however many and then moved forward with expending or awarding that, that should be a concern for not only this body, city administration, but the community as well. And I wanted to put a voice to that, because it did come to us in the CAC, and we will be looking into it further. Okay. Hi, David Sockle, 302nd Avenue North. I was here last week. I spoke to you about frescoes. I'm here to address that issue again. First of all, Councilman Muhammad, I just want to say I was very impressed by the invocation, as well as your analogy. I don't know what your calling is, but you definitely, people are going to come find you, because that's impressive. When I spoke to you about frescoes, I was giving you a brief history. Today, I just wanted to touch on, I think, as a tenant of the city of St. Petersburg, I have an obligation to help be a good city resident, good community member. And so today, I just wanted to touch on some of the ways that I've given back to the city over the past 10, 20 years since I've taken it over. Typically, we get requests, I don't know, 40 times a year, 50 times a year for a donation for some type of charity auction or something going on. And it's our norm to always say yes. We will give a gift basket valued at about $150 with wine, shirts, gift cards, glasses, all types of stuff in there. And as well as drink cards for the number of people attending the events. We've also done larger things. For example, when Katrina came out, Katrina hit us on a Tuesday. On that Thursday, I held a free party, free. You had to make a donation of a minimum, I think, I forgot what I said, 25 bucks. But free food and free drink, it was all New Orleans type food. But 100% of the proceeds was given to the Red Cross that night. So everybody that came in, we wrote them a check before they left, 2011, we had a crisis closer here. And that was two, three falling officers within a month's period. We went ahead and held a fundraiser for those officers. I did the same thing, free food, free drink, everything for three hours, mandatory donation. And then that night, we handed a check to the officers that had formed the fundraiser group that were selling the t-shirts directly right then and there, I think it was like $10,000, $15,000 we just handed them that we raised up. We continue to support lots of charity groups around town. We've done everything for Bayfronts, All Children's, Mike Evans Foundation, AIDS, Research, Dream Fund. I could go on for a half hour on all the different groups that we've supported. And I just, as I kind of come to a close, we consider Fresco's type of a family. And we try to do things that help our family. And this past year, we had a 20-year anniversary party that I did free food and drink. All you have to do is, once again, make a donation. And everybody who came to the party made a donation. And what we did was, each person that came could designate a teacher at an elementary school. And then I wrote checks of $100 each for 100% of the proceeds I received to all of the teachers that had been nominated by all of the attendees. As part of our support of giving back to the community. So I hope instead of giving frescoes to a billion dollar corporation from out of town, you'll consider keeping it local. Thank you. The last speaker is Evan Jones. Mr. Jones, please step up to the podium, state your name, address for the record. You'll have three minutes to address Council. Good afternoon, Council. Evan Jones, 2314 Woodlawn Circle West in St. Petersburg. I'm here to address the Woodlawn townhome development for the third time. As a proud resident of St. Pete, I think certainly literacy and enhancing literacy is an absolute essential thing for the future of the city. We also have to be concerned about the lives of these children. We have a development that the developer continues to only have one entrance and exit to the seven units that they have on this six unit lot. And if they just eliminated one unit, they would have access to 16th Street. And it would cut down 80% of the traffic that we're expecting in Woodlawn because the only entrance right now is going out onto a one-way street that creates first responder issues. They can go into the development, but they have to back out. So sanitation, fire department, police, they can go in, but they can't get out. And that requires changing the median and a permitting issue. And that brings me to the issue that with everybody in traffic that's been involved from Tom Whalen, Elizabeth Abernathy, and last evening or two evenings ago, Ms. Lissett and the head of traffic planning was at our neighborhood association and they were, Ms. Lissett greeted me personally, but the head of traffic planning was not aware of the issue. He knew a lot about speed bumps, humps, and tables, but he was not aware that this safety issue existed in Woodlawn. Please, we need a second entrance on 16th and 22nd. It's way away from the busy intersection of 16th and 22nd. There's a popular medical clinic right across the street that has 30 or 40 cars that go to it. On our side, it could be easily accommodated. The last thing I want to address is when I was here, it was only two weeks ago, I mentioned the RAISE being a community asset. I think from an antitrust exemption perspective, legal needs to look into that exemption because as a community asset and a competitive protection that Major League Baseball has as part of the antitrust exemption, there are ways that the RAISE cannot do what they're intending on doing. Thank you. No more speakers? No more speakers. Okay, we will close open forum and we will go to our report items starting with item E1. We are joined by fire emergency manager, Amber Boulding, to give our disaster operations plan update. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Amber. All right. It's a pleasure to be here and to see everybody today. I always love to come talk about disaster planning on a blue sky day, so all good things. All right. So I would like to preface my presentation today to talk about a culture of preparedness. And that's something over the last few years, you know, Megan and I have worked really hard on is really creating that culture of preparedness. Because when you look at what a culture is, it's making preparedness the normal. It's including all of our stakeholders, internal, external, to make preparedness something that we want to do and not something that we have to do. So it's shifting that mindset. So we're really excited to talk about our culture and how we've grown that culture in the city of St. Pete, especially internally, that involves all of our city departments and leadership and everyone has an active role when it comes to emergency management, which is fantastic. From that culture of preparedness, we actually had an opportunity to speak at the Governor's Hurricane Conference this year in West Palm Beach. Megan and I led a panel made up of ourselves. Brian Eichler from Parks, the Pinellas County Emergency Manager, and the City of Pinellas Park Emergency Management came. And we talked about what it is to build a culture and how to be successful in creating municipal emergency management programs. Because municipal EM isn't required. So how to have a successful program when that program isn't required. And we've really done that here in St. Pete with all of your support and, you know, the city leadership and all the city departments. And we really showed that and was able to, you can see in the picture, show a room full of other fellow municipalities, you know, how we do it here in St. Pete and share that great message. So that was exciting. All right, so we will jump right into our programmatic updates. We're going to take a quick look at what happened last year because it really feeds into how we've operated this year, which will then inform, you know, where we're going from here. So just a quick summary last year. Each year we start with planning meetings primarily with our emergency preparedness coordinators, which are by a city or administrative policy. Every department in the city has a primary and a secondary emergency preparedness coordinator that we work with. So that's how we really integrate preparedness, you know, into all levels of the city. So we start our meetings off with them. Where are we? Where do we want to go? We gauge their interest. We see what the needs are in the departments. And that's how we build off, you know, what are we going to look at this year? What gaps can we fill? What strengths can we really capitalize on? So from that, we create a situation reporting workshop. And so this was a workshop that we led on how are we making sure that we are documenting what we're doing during a disaster, whether it's a hurricane or a red tide or COVID, how are we making sure that we have a big picture of what all city departments doing, all what city departments sub EOC centers are doing, and compile that information. And this was lesson learned from years past. So we did this workshop to help streamline that process. And the more we can streamline and template a process, the better and more efficient we are. So we were actually, with Hurricane Ian, able to take that process that we developed with our department stakeholders from their input, and we were able to put it to use. And, you know, our situation reporting was much more successful, much more improved over years past. So that was something that we were excited to see that worked. You know, one of those gaps that we filled and then it became a best practice. And finally, you know, with Ian, lots of lessons learned with Ian. And with any disaster, you know, the silver lining is we can learn from it and we can get better. We're still learning from Hurricane Ian. We're still talking to our neighbors to the south to see what they continue to go through. You know, we've learned that recovery is not a quick process. It's a very long process that can take months, years, to years and years and years. So those are things that we're still soaking in, we're still having meetings about, and we're still talking about. So from last year, we'll look at this year. As I said, we met with those internal partners last year. We did a complete training needs assessment at the end of the year so we can assess our departments to see what they're missing, what they're looking for from preparedness. And so Megan and I were able to put our heads together in January of this year to build a timeline on what this year was going to look like, what we needed to prioritize. We had the what we need to get done, like our disaster operation plan is for update this year. And what we would really like to do, how we can keep departments engaged, how we can, you know, keep the momentum going, you know, and keep filling those gaps and moving forward. And so I'll get into each of these. So this is our program cycle that we came up with. Our goal was to keep everyone active. You know, when we talk about a culture, we wanted to move away from you guys are the hurricane response department. You know, what do you do the six months out of the year that it's not hurricane season? And so it's really actively engaging everyone because it's more than just hurricanes. It's all disasters, all hazards. And how are we going to effectively manage that with everything the city has? So we wanted to engage everyone. So each quarter we plan to do a workshop or an exercise to keep, you know, everything relevant to keep filling those gaps that we find and to keep everyone moving forward and always improving. So in March, we did the job action sheet workshop, which I talked about. The second quarter here in June, we just finished up our annual EOC training, which was our operation EOC ready, which I'll talk about in a moment. And then for the third and fourth quarter, those we're still planning for those, but we anticipate a radio communications workshop, which it might grow into a more general communications and redundant communications workshop that will be scheduled for August. And then we'll end the year with an EOC tabletop exercise coming in November of this year. Big initiative this year is the 2023 DOP update. So right now, and I'll actually get into that, we update the DOP right now every two years. So it is up for update this year. But with this cycle, we're going to change it to a five year review cycle. And that is actually industry standard for emergency operations plans, that five year cycle. That doesn't mean that we don't update or revise as needed. As I said, with every disaster activation or response or with every exercise we run, we're always having lessons learned from that. So, you know, as organizational changes are made or as lessons are learned, we can always revise the disaster operations plan. But when it comes to a full formal revision, we're going to change that to that five year cycle. And that allows us to dedicate more time into that process. And with that process, I have it laid out a little here. So we put up our timeline for the DOP review. And this is tentative as we move forward and barring any disasters this summer. We want to make sure that it is a very integrated process into all departments. You know, we joke that, you know, emergency management is usually in front of a room of people way more smarter than they are about it. We don't run the operations on the ground. We just help maintain that big picture and pull it together. So when it comes to updating the disaster operations plan, it's vital that we're integrated in with every city department that has responsibility in that plan. So we have 10 chapters in the plan, which emergency management is responsible for. And then we have 23 annexes to that plan that are more operational based. And all 23 of those annexes have a primary department and a secondary department that's responsible for those annexes. So when we do these DOP updates, we do what we call a DOP shop. So we reach out to those departments. We have them review. And then we set up 30-minute to an hour phone calls or Zoom meetings or in-person meetings if needed to talk through those changes. Encouraging the departments, you know, let's look at best practices. Let's look at where the gaps are. If it says it in the plan and it's not something we do or it doesn't make sense, then let's change it. We want to take off the, you know, the blinders and get out of the silos. So we use those DOP shops to really make this a viable living document. So right now we've started those DOP shops and we kind of went on a small pause with the launch of hurricane season. And now we'll be moving back into those DOP shops and really going through those line-by-line reviews. So as you can see, it's quite the undertaking. We anticipate by October to have that promulgated plan for everyone. All right. We'll move into trainings, exercises, and events. So this is more of what we've been up to lately and what's taken our time and what we hope to do. So I mentioned last year we did a training assessment. And this was we wanted to make trainings that were useful to people. No one wants just another meeting to go to. If the meeting's not useful, you're not getting something out of it, then we don't want to waste everyone's time. So we did a training needs assessment and we found out what's important to departments. And really what came back was there was incident command needs in there. There was continuity of operations needs in there and there was EOC type needs. So we put together a training plan by group. So you'll see executive policy group, the EOC sub-centers, the emergency preparedness coordinators, the city EOC staff, everyone assigned to the EOC. And then finally the emergency management staff, what we complete each year and the schedule is up there. So this is just suggested, it's not necessarily mandatory. But we wanted to make sure we had a document that helped meet our administrative policy 080100, which says that you can see here that our departments are competently trained in their emergency duty. All right, I'm going to move through this quickly. We already talked about the job action sheet workshop a little. So with, actually I haven't, I talked about the situation report. So the job action sheet workshop was a workshop we did the first quarter of this year. And this is something we did as a lesson learned from Hurricane Ian to help us streamline our processes for what is to be expected from an activation. Whether it's an activation in the city EOC or the sub EOC. Sometimes you're tapped just in time for that job or sometimes because it's a disaster and there's lots of moving parts at the same time, things can slip through the cracks. So we held a workshop that had our idea of what a job action sheet looked like at each level, you know, between executive policy group, EOC staff, and the EOC sub-centers. And then we brought all those folks into a room to talk about it and to workshop it. Does this make sense? Would you do this? Do you not need to do this? What are we not thinking about? And so based on that feedback, we were able to fully develop this job action sheet that will now be implemented whenever there's an EOC activation. And that's with the buy-in and the final approval from all of our department stakeholders. We held our annual Hurricane Expo on June 1st at Campbell Park Recreation Center. It was a great success this year. We had, I would say, about 300 folks that came through. They were able to, you know, learn a lot of information, get their preparedness kit started with some freebies that our community partners handed out. It was really cool this year. We had a pop-up sandbag site on that Stormwater Pavement and Traffic Ops came and set up. So as residents came into the expo, they can leave and then go get their sandbags for the year. So we gave out, or Stormwater gave out, 520 sandbags and 50 empty bags that staff could fill themselves. We thought that was really neat. And again, another best practice that I think we'll try to do each year. Operation EOC Ready. This occurred last Friday on June 9th. So this was our first annual exercise slash training of this caliber, really. In the past, we've done lots of trainings, but we've never had a formal EOC staff training. And as successful as our EOC was during EAN, it was also a big lesson learned that, you know, it was really show up and let's do what we do and let's respond. But it could have been more efficient. The communication could have been better. So we worked on that. We took those notes, we listened, and we put together Operation EOC Ready that addressed, you know, any of those gaps and those concerns. So in here, we laid out the organization of the EOC, what to expect. We rolled out those job action sheets. And all the participants actually got to take a tour of the police department to see what those areas are that they'll be sleeping in, that they'll have downtime in. And just what it means to be in the EOC. So huge shout out to the police department, all their hard work and their partnership to make that a successful event. We had about 50 EOC staff that came out. So that's EOC staff and the executive policy group. So we're going through surveys right now to find out, you know, what everyone enjoyed the most and really what we can improve on, because we do anticipate this being an annual meeting. All right, and I would be remiss if I didn't give a 2023 Atlantic hurricane season update. So for this year, we're expecting an average season. There's a 40% chance that it is a near normal season, and then equal 30% chance that it's above normal or less than normal or less than average. And at the end of the day, that really means nothing. And it really does. And that's what I want to impress upon everybody, because we always hear, what's the forecast for this year? La Nina's gone. El Nino's here. It's going to be a quiet season. And none of that matters because, as we know, it only takes the one storm. Last year was a perfectly average season, right? Nothing spectacular about last year. We had, you know, 12 to 17 named storms. We only had a few that made landfall, you know, in the mainland U.S., but one of those made landfall really close to us. So, yes, we have our forecast. Yes, it's supposed to be near normal, but we always want to stay vigilant. And that's what we try to impress upon, you know, the city staff as we're planning for these things. And we're going through lessons learned, and we're improving our plans, and we're looking at recovery and long-term recovery and learning from our partners. Because we know that no matter what the season is supposed to be, it only takes that one storm. And there it is. Amazingly close to Tampa Bay. And it was about 60 to 70 miles from, you know, what we saw here with some debris and down, you know, down trees, down power lines to the complete devastation from Fort Myers Beach. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you so much, Amber. As always, very informative. Thank you for everything that you do for us. I always feel like we're in good hands when you're up there at the helm. So, Councilmember Montaneri. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Amber, for the update. Every year around the beginning of hurricane season, I always want to have you come in and kind of give us just a little refresher on what the do's and the don'ts and start thinking about plans. And I'm glad that our city is always prepared. But we live in a fast-growing state and in a fast-growing region. And we all know that, you know, we've got 3,000 or so new residents coming to St. Petersburg a year. But within the region and statewide, we've got about 1,200 people a day moving to the state. And a lot of people are coming from areas of our country that don't live or haven't lived through tropical storms or hurricanes. And they've never experienced that before. So we need to kind of, every year, kind of do a little refresher on do's and don'ts. Where do you live? Are you in an evacuation zone? Do you have a plan? And just get people back in the mindset. So I appreciate the update. And I'm glad that we had that Hurricane Expo and we could start getting people back in the mind frame of keeping an eye on the weather, keeping an eye on the tropics. I understand there's a tropical wave coming off the coast of Africa right now. So we may be dealing with some sort of tropical storm soon. So we'll keep pushing it away. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Driscoll. Thank you. If looking back at last year and the response of our residents, do you have any new advice for this year? Or do you want to underscore advice to our residents as they check their lists and stock up on supplies and make their plans? What lessons can we share with residents that they should learn as well? I'm so glad you asked. What I can't impress upon enough is you have to know your risk. And we've done several neighborhood meetings. We've gone to, you know, condo communities and apartments. And what you have to know is what's your storm surge like? What's your evacuation level? Or do you have to evacuate for storm surge or not? Because if you don't know that, you can't have a plan. From what we saw down south, I deployed to Charlotte County post storm. So in the weeks after. And Charlotte County was on the north side of the storm. It had extreme wind damage. They didn't have the storm surge. And they were missing roofs, signs, you know, cars were flipped. But all of that could be repaired. You know, it's a recovery, but it's not a years-long recovery necessarily. We went to Fort Myers Beach. And the storm surge, when you get into storm surge, it's not something you can survive. So when I talk to residents, and if I can tell you anything, is you have to know if that's one of your risks. Because if it's one of your risks, you have to go. You have to go. Don't be that person that says, well, it never comes here. Or if it gets bad enough, then I'll go. Because when it gets bad enough, it's too late to go. So know your zone. You can look it up on the Pinellas County website. You can go to St. Pete's website. You have to know. KYZ.PinellasCounty.org will tell you your zone. And if you learn nothing else, you have to look at that storm surge. We run from the wind. We hide from the wind. We run from the water. And that will be the soapbox I will always stand on now, is that storm surge. Because it is shocking to see down south. Thank you. And that was KYZ as in Know Your Zone. KYZ for Know Your Zone. Right. PinellasCounty.org. .org. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Muhammad. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Amber. Hello. It's good to see you. You too. So just one quick question. And this was actually inspired by the outreach that we've done together in past years, working with Child's Park Neighborhood and some other things that we've done. Are you aware of any ways that municipalities are supporting residents who may not be able to afford the supplies? Because a lot of people are barely getting by, and so now you give them a list of things that they need to go purchase. What type of programs or initiatives or things are you aware of that help with that? So I would start to say in the best of scenarios or situations, it's hard for anyone to buy seven days, you know, up front. So looking at it, you know, from a blue sky day, it's starting early. So, again, it's looking at what your needs are and start working on it now. So maybe it's a little bit this week and a little bit next week. And it may seem small to a resident, you know, like what is two cans of ravioli going to do for me this week? But it adds up. So starting small, it doesn't have to be buying a kit and spending $500 at the grocery store today. It can be $10 this week, $10 next week. That's a start. There's social service agencies, you know, throughout the county that I'm happy to provide a list for that will be there to, you know, help try to fill those gaps. But what we really want to encourage and empower residents to do is to take action now, you know, to feel empowered to, and we say to be your own first responder. Because at the end of the day, you know, the city can have great plans, there's great services out there. But if we're not responsible, you know, to take that forward step, you know, first and make those plans or, you know, to be prepared or know if you have to evacuate or where you're going to shelter. You know, there's only so much that we can do. So to understand what the risks are, I think is the first step. And then let's talk, you know, and get those kits together to know if you can stay or if you got to go. Thank you. And I look forward to getting that list. It's good seeing you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Well, my only comment, Amber, because you do such a fantastic job of getting the information out to the residents, is to kind of piggyback a little bit on Councilmember Mohamed's question. You know, this year there are two tax-free holidays. We just ended one. There will be another one later in the summer, early fall. Does the city promote that? Do we send that out? Because I can't remember during the first one seeing any sort of, like, social media campaign about that. I would have to double check with marketing. I want to say we do have a whole hurricane marketing plan where they push the information out. I will double check. I know through county channels it was pushed. And I can't verify that we reshared, but it's a great point. Yeah, I mean, that would, I think, be a request. Just to your point, I mean, the taxes add up, right, on all of these items. So, and the list is pretty robust. It's bigger this year. It is. It's bigger. I mean, they've certainly expanded it. So, that right there is an excellent opportunity for residents to have a saving, you know, some savings when they're purchasing these items. So, I know that's something I try to always tell residents about whenever I know it's coming. So, if we could maybe just put a pin in that and do a little bit more public service announcement. We're focusing more on even recovery items this year. Right. Right. And I'm sorry to go back to Councilmember Mohamed. Yeah. 211 is also a great resource. So, you can call those Blue Sky to help connect to those resources now for disasters. Perfect. Well, thank you again. Always good to see you. Thank you for being at City Hall on tour last night. Always great to get that information out to residents. So, we appreciate you and appreciate you coming today. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thank you. We will move on now to item, we're actually going to take item E4 and E5 together because they do correlate and we have the same speaker. So, labor relations training and training manager, Kristen Morey, is with us today. So, Kristen, please go ahead. Greetings, City Council, Council Chair Gabbard. I'm here today to provide a brief report on two labor agreements that we have before you for a vote. And because they're so similar, I'm going to combine the report, but just understand these are two separate items for voting purposes. The first one being E4, which would cover our blue and white collar units at the city. And E5 is the professional bargaining unit labor agreement that would be before you. Again, my name is Kristen Morey. I'm the labor relations and training manager at the city and the chief negotiator for the city as it relates to our bargaining units. As of today, the city and FPSU SCIU have tentatively agreed to terminate the current agreements and enter into new three year agreements. And those would start, provided they are voted in favor of today, June 19th, 2023. So, really just next week is when those agreements would start. The new agreements will continue to pay our progression increases through the end of this fiscal year. And then starting with next fiscal year, we would offer three and a half percent general wage increases for each year. Again, for three years, as well as step progression increases on an employee's classification date. That's kind of their anniversary date when they started in their positions. Those steps are new to these units and they're offered to all three units, blue collar, white collar professional. And those are to employees who haven't reached the maximum of their pay bands. And these agreements also provide for some additional updates. They also provide for provisions because we're starting in June instead of at the fiscal year. And then it'll also end in June, which is a little bit atypical. But we've provided for making arrangements to make sure that we get all of those raises in through the end of the fiscal years. So, we've made those provisions. The units voted on those already, as I mentioned. And blue collar, 97% voted in favor of the agreement. Blue collar, 96% of the white collar voters voted in favor. And 100% of the professionals that voted on this voted in favor of these contracts. So, great contracts. We're very pleased to bring them before you. And I will open it up to any questions, if you have any, about the bargaining agreements. I know I glossed over them fairly quickly. There aren't many changes from the last agreement to this agreement other than the pay. So, Kristen, I just wanted to make sure legal has advised that we can vote on them together. But really, it's your preference if you want us to vote on them individually. So, I'll leave that really up to you, I guess. Well, I would say if we're going to vote in favor of them unanimously, then let's go ahead and package them together. Well, since I don't have a crystal ball, let's see what the body wants to do for a motion. Okay, how's that? Councilmember Floyd. Thank you. This was on consent agenda. And I just wanted it to come to reports because last year we did not have a smooth sailing when it came to these agreements. And so, I'm really grateful for how things went and appreciative of how the administration negotiated them. And really, the forward thinking-ness and getting everything going as fast as we can. So, I'm grateful and I just wanted to have it out in the public. And with that, I'll move approval of both. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second for both E4 and E5. Seeing no other request to speak, clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve agenda items E4 and E5 passes unanimously. Thank you so much, Kristen. Thank you. Thank you for your hard work. We appreciate you. All right, we will move on now to item E6. I believe this item was pulled by Councilmember Driscoll. So, Councilmember Driscoll, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. I requested that this item be pulled from consent simply because it had been added to ads and deletes very late on Friday. And with this being a contract for a program that we've been supportive of in the past, but there was very little backup here as to how the program had been going and how the money would be spent. And so I wanted to get a little more detail and also give us an opportunity to recognize those who are working on this program before we vote on it. Thank you, Councilmember. Amy Foster, Housing and Neighborhood Services Administrator. You may remember that just earlier this year in January we had an annual report presented to Council. We have the provider here as well as the staff member that manages the contract if you have any questions specifically. You should have also received their annual report that they turned in at the end of their contract, which was at the end of May. So we'd be happy to answer any specific questions. And just for introductions in case folks are not familiar, we have Esther Matthews who gave the update in January as well as the CEO of PERC, which is Michael Gelazo here to answer your questions. Thank you both for being here with us today. It doesn't look like we have any questions right now. So, well, yeah, we do. All right, as soon as I said it, then they popped up. So, Councilmember Muhammad. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for being here. And thank you for the work that you're doing with this program. We definitely appreciate it. And just had a question about the goals and the metrics in the backup material around strategic direction. But before we get there, it's the street team direct contacts. Is that for a year? Was that 54 for the year? That was up to the date of the report. We're currently at 79. Okay, thank you. There was a question about some videography that's happening and stories that are being captured. Are those public or what happens with those and how can we view those? So with the approval of the individuals that are telling their stories, they will be placed on social media. So what we're doing at this time is doing a true capture of all. We're at, I believe, 12 now. And it's going as far back as 2001. And so we're looking to get 15 and then we're going to push it out on social media. And it will be readily available to whoever who wants to see it. But to be clear, it's from their eyes. So you'll only see the eyes. You'll only hear the stories. There really will be no identifying information to say, yes, that's Esther Matthews. Sure, sure. I just wanted to get the story because I know when I hear hidden voices, I remember the concept was like elevating the stories and letting people know that they're not alone in their struggles. And so just wonder where those stories are being stored and how they're being distributed. Absolutely. Thank you for that. Collaboration and partnership. Does your team partner with the Not My Child initiative? Are you connected to that in any way? Absolutely. So we partner with Pastor Irby. We partner with Keys for Life. We partner with Florida Restoration Coalition. We partner with several smaller organizations that are community driven, not just in South St. Pete, but also the broader reach of Pinellas County. Really looking to, although the initiative initially and still remains very focused on District 6, we recognize that Pinellas County is experiencing true trauma and true loss. And so we want to make sure that the doors of PERC and the opportunity to be a part of Hidden Voices is countywide. In particular, we had a family that came in that experienced a loss and they came from Tampa. And so the word is getting out that Hidden Voices is in place. Certainly we could not necessarily provide a true handoff of resources, but Deshawn Mims, who had to leave, she was here earlier. She spent almost two days working with this family and connecting them to resources in Hillsborough County. But not just the connections, actually calling and making sure that the resources were valid and valuable to that family. Thank you for that. Mm-hm. And then with the, going back to the strategic direction and the goals measurements. Mm-hm. The first one, reducing gun violence in South St. Pete. And I see where the 49% comes from. We're looking at the total from the prior year to get that. When we talk about successful reintegration of returning citizens, it says this goal is being met through the Tiny Homes project and it has 100%. And I'm trying to understand what that 100% of what? Is that 100% of the people in the Tiny Homes program? I just, I want to know what that, can you say a little bit more about that one? Absolutely, it is 100%. So the partnership that PERC has with the correctional facilities, those individuals come. They go through the Tiny Homes program and then they are placed. At the last cohort that just graduated last week, Friday, I believe, all were placed. Mr. Josso, if you could come up to the mic, please. I know, I'm sorry. If you could, when you come to the mic, state your name. I'm Michael Gelazo. I'm the CEO Executive Director of PERC. In that specific program, I don't remember honestly the last class where we didn't have 100% placement before graduation. Okay. We would have to probably go into early last year. And one of the things that Esther probably was about to mention is one of the things that we did in launching Hidden Voices and kind of in partnership with sort of the idea with Council Member Fig Sanders is to do the pre-release. For people coming back into the South St. Petersburg CRA, we actually go to Polk CI and the Polk Work Camp and the Community Release Center in Alargo Road Prison and let them know about Hidden Voices and the resources we have. So they're actually coming through that way. And it's kind of a selling point in the sense of that we're really dealing with gaps of employment pre-release. So we do have 100% placement now. When you get two or three years out, we have an employer partner who only 96% are still there. And they've hired over 24 of our guys. So it's really a fascinating program, and I'd be glad to do a presentation on that alone some other time. But the number of people we've been actually able to place in pretty high paying upwardly mobile jobs is cool. And what's neat about the outreach side of that by going into the prisons, and that's where we'll get occasionally someone who supposed to release the South St. Petersburg, they ultimately released the Tampa, but still come to us. So we do see that some. Absolutely, thank you for that. And maybe in the future reports I'd like to see the number of people. So is that 100% of 10,000 people, or is that 100% of two, right? So just how many people that actually represents. Similar question around the school to prison pipeline in Pinellas County. We're at 90% with that particular measurement. Again, 90% of how many or what? All right, so what we can do, and with your permission and Ms. Foster's permission, I will this week compile all numbers and do the true data for you so that you'll see of 100, 90% was met. All right. Just to ensure that I'm not publicly putting out a number that I don't have in front of me. Thank you for that. But I'll have that. And again, it's not to put you on the spot, it was just- No, I'm okay with the spot. To see what that is and how many people that represents so that we can really get a sense of the impact of the program. I can do that. I won't have my hand, but I'll- Thank you. And also, just lastly, I know one of the members of the team recently lost their son to suicide, and so my heart goes out to her and her family. And thank you all for being there and what you go through. I have a pretty good relationship with her and doing some work with her father, and so I definitely just wanted to let you know that. And if she's watching or if she sees this, please extend my deepest sympathies and consoling this to her and her family. Thank you for that. Thank you, Councilmember Muhammad. What I think is important in this work, for those who have worked in community engagement, as you have, we understand that the data is important, right? So the story is told by the data, but the story is also told by the humanistic side of what we're doing. And so when I came to this body at the earlier part of the year, I talked about a young lady who had spent two years in prison, who was now full-time working for PERC. And I want to be clear that that young lady on Tuesday, her son took his own life. So now we have a young lady who is working, serving the people who have experienced trauma while dealing with trauma herself. And that's the importance of hidden voices. So when we got the call, we immediately responded. We immediately went on site. We immediately ensured that not only were we there as coworkers, but we were there as the hidden voices team to support whatever the need is and whatever the need was. And we continue to do that. But she's not the only one who's experienced. We had another worker who was employed by PERC. Her son took his life three weeks ago. So it's vitally important that when we talk about the work and the programs and what we're doing that we understand that this is real stuff happening. Yes. On the ground, right now today. And it's not a pie in the sky person. It's someone that comes into the doors every single day, shows up, who has experienced something previously, and is now right back in the place of trauma. Absolutely. And so thank you for recognizing that and putting a voice to it. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you, Madam Chair. House Member Driscoll. Thank you. On the memo, it said that 71 families were, in 2022, 71 families and individuals are enrolled and receiving intensive services. Can you just take a brief moment to talk about some examples of those services that are offered, not just to the individuals, because that part's a little clearer, but what about for the family? Right. And so we had a family that came in, we had a mother that came in and she had experienced a loss. In the case management or in the conversation that was completed with that mom, she found that she had two school-aged children, and those school-aged children were being affected by the loss as well. So we were able to work with cohort of champions, which is also under the umbrella of PERC, and partner those children and enroll them in that program. And so it's the knowledge of all of the programs that fall under the umbrella, and just making sure that when the conversations are had, we're not just looking at the right now reason that they're in, the full holistic need of the family. And we have a family now with Prince and his team. They were homeless, right? And so the children, one of them was an adult. He wanted to find work so that he can help his mom. So we actively engaged in helping him to do that. They had a need. Here's a young man who has no money, family has no money. He's looking for a job, and his cell phone is off. We were able to support getting that cell phone turned back on. And so it's hard to say it's a cookie cutter concept. It's honestly, when they walk in the door and they say all of this is going on, being skilled enough to know, okay, so this can connect, this, this, this, and all right, let's work it. And let's work it in a fashion that it will be intentional and it will solve what's taking place. But not just stopping there, putting the success plan in place and the follow-up in place to make sure that we're following up. And typically when they come in, it's a follow-up of at least the first week twice, and then once a week, once a month, so on and so forth, just to ensure that they're continuing with that success plan and if any other needs arrive, that we can meet those. And oftentimes, hidden voices, because we're speaking about hidden voices, may not necessarily have the fiscal wherewithal to solve it. But the intentional community connections and the intentional community resources and the intentional community relationships ensures that no family walks out the door without support. If I could add to that too, it really falls under the banner of comprehensive case management, council member Driscoll. So what we do is if someone comes in, we're going to do an individualized case plan based on an assessment. I'm certainly glad to share that assessment tool with anybody who'd like to see it. But we try to get pretty comprehensive to understand what's going on with someone. In all the years we've done this work, no two people look alike. The people's issues or what their risks are, what their needs are, and how we build responses, changes from person to person. But our role with hidden voices is we're going to do that initial assessment. We're going to see what's going on, and then we're going to try to put them into the appropriate program with us or with other programs with other partner agencies. But comprehensive case management, intensive case management is, it's not a cookie cutter approach. It's sort of a, it's not one size fits all. It really depends on the individual and spending the time with the individual. And that's really how we get to where, when we look at trauma or we look at risk needs, and then we build the responses, like I said, accordingly. And that could be anything. It could be housing. It could be a referral to the same if it works. It could be. Right, right. So it's a very personalized approach. So we document all of that. And then in a case where something like cohort of champions gets engaged for a certain individual, the funding that we have for this program, is that then shared with cohort of champions? Because they have their own funding. Right, so it's not shared, there's no funding in Hidden Voices. We would love it, but there's no funding in Hidden Voices that can pay for some of the needs out there. So for example, another family had a need for mental health for their children. Their children were in cohort of champions. Well, cohort of champions can pay for mental health. And so it's the connection to that mental health provider, and cohort of champions is the streamline for that. The adult is still enrolled in Hidden Voices. The children are enrolled in cohort, and cohort is providing the mental health services for the children. Okay, so a lot of it's really just referrals and not- Absolutely. Okay, so 71 in 2022, under this agreement, the city is asking that you connect 25 newly returning residents with jobs or soft skill trainings and hosting for events. So with 25 people, that's just under $4,000 per person. Can you give just a general explanation of how that money is spent on that person? Because tell me why, if someone is skeptical out there, why don't you just write that person a check for $3,500 and let them help themselves? So council member, I think the misunderstanding here is how the budget is spent. So the budget is utilized to support staff who are doing comprehensive case management, which is a service. It is not being spent on the, you know, food for a home and counseling for a home, as you're describing, right? And so the 25 newly exiting citizens is in addition to, so that 79 that they're serving right now, some of those have been enrolled in the program for a year or more. So they're going to continue serving folks who've been enrolled in the program for some time. We're asking to track newly enrolled people this year in addition to those that they are already serving, using those case managers that are doing comprehensive case management. So there's not an amount per family. It's not like we're buying $4,000 worth of food. We're providing a service provision. Hopefully that makes it a little bit clearer. So it's more the overall administration of the program with the assistance and the referrals and what's needed to do that outreach. Because the outreach is pretty extensive, looking at the annual report. Correct. Okay. And the OJT. You want to talk on that? Yeah. Another component of it is that when we originally created this, some of the work, not all of the work, are with street teams that we've created not only to do events, which Esther can talk about events, but we also have been doing a litter project ongoing for a number of years. So we have groups of four guys who go and clean in certain areas, and that helps with the OJT. This isn't the only funding we have for Hidden Voices. We've always had a private foundation. That's part of that, and I'd be glad to submit a budget as well that outlines that, too. They prefer to remain anonymous. That also helps with the administration of the on-the-job training program, too. Okay. Excellent. Thank you so much. That's all I have. Thank you. Council Member Montaneri? Thank you, Madam Chair. It's good to see you, Michael and Esther. So Council Member Driscoll and Council Member Mohammed asked some of the questions that I had, because I kind of had a disconnect between the 79 people that are being served and the 25 people that are in the, that's written into the agreement. But I did want to circle back to the report and on the successful reintegration of and reentry of returning citizens. It says that the goal was met through the Tiny Homes Project. I'm not that familiar with the Tiny Homes Project. Can you give us, give me just a little overview of that and how was that goal met? All right. So I'll let Michael talk about that. It's probably important to talk about the certifications. So what we're doing in the Tiny Homes Program is we're stacking certifications, we're providing training. We actually are working with some people who are pre-release at the Community Release Center, as well as people in the community. I think at the earlier meeting we may have mentioned Amber Woods, who had finished the program as someone who was referred to us for Jordan Park. She was practically homeless. She has three kids, I believe. Four. Four. She finished the program, she went to work at Habitat, starting at $20 an hour in January. She's now making $22 an hour and is in their program to be permanently housed. But what we do in that program, it's 10 to 12 weeks, depending on holidays and stuff like that, where they're getting stacked certifications in OSHA 30, NCCE, our core, NCCE, our carpentry. They get forklift certification and licensing, as well as workplace readiness and an intro to manufacturing. So they get all these stacked certifications and we have employer partners. Honestly, I know it sounds kind of crazy when we use numbers like 100%, but we actually have employers and that list is growing of people who try to hire them before they actually finish the program. So it's really, it's been a fascinating thing to see in terms of, it's such a tight labor market, but we just happen to have a group that we're able to work with and be able to do that. But we're stacking those certifications. They spend part of their time on OJT with us, either working on a tiny house. That's a long story. I'm not going to look at my friend, Rob, when I talk about that, but we have been working on habitat houses forever, other construction projects. And I'd say before, sometime in the fall, we will go back to building tiny houses on trailers, actually behind the wall at the community release center. The last group that just graduated built a fence, a shed, and we're moving trailers over there so we can build on site, which, as you know, is in the community release center, is in the South St. Petersburg CRA. So it's a stack certifications program followed by pretty good employment, and that's where we get those numbers. Okay, so people come into the program, they get this training, these certifications, and then they're working on habitat? Well, they go to work. They'll go to work for, some have gone to work for habitat. We've had a big employer partner in TSC Industries, which is not construction, but it's advanced manufacturing. They have 24 of our people permanently employed, as of a report that I saw last week. We've sent more to them, but over the course of a couple years, there's some level of attrition, or a couple people moved away, that kind of stuff. And I don't know if I just answered your question, because I lost my train of thought. No, that gives me a little insight. I just wasn't that familiar with the Tiny Homes Project. And then when I saw the 100% number. Yeah, I know, but it's really what we're seeing. Yes, and Council Member Muhammad, I thought, he asked the question, 100% of what? Right, and so we're really looking at what we've been able to do is roughly 60 plus or minus people per year specifically in that program. And it is accurate that we're putting 100% right now. It won't stay that way forever, I would assume, but we're able to place people completely before they graduate. It's been really a great success story of the things we do. Okay, all right, well, thank you for answering. And I'm glad to come at any point, if City Council would like, and give a full report on the Tiny House Program, because the data is really fascinating in that. Okay, all right, thank you, thank you, thank you, Madam Chair. Vice Chair Fitzsanders? Thank you, I don't have any questions. I, you know, I just want to say thank you. What you do and the population that you deal with, I think, I don't know if PERC is the only receiving agency of those returning back into the community in, I know, St. Pete, correct? And with that being said, the fact that you've still been able to keep it going. You know, a lot of times community gets involved, and there's a bigger picture than the personalities. You look at taking those that are coming back into sometimes a volatile situation to help make that transition a little more smoother for the life that's ahead of them. And when we initially had this conversation, it was not only to provide the services to them and their families and the families of the victims, because this impacts neighborhoods, communities, a city. And when I brought this to you, you didn't hesitate, you know, to want to help and provide those services. So I'm hoping, you know, that moving forward, that we can find additional funding to serve more people. I know mental health was one of the major components that we're still trying to work on, but unfortunately, we don't have the funding for that. Yes, we have partnered with Enough is Enough, and Reverend Irby, as a matter of fact, part of the slogan, last year was Enough is Enough. So we were in strong partnership for that. I had the number sent to me from Chief K on our homicides and them decreasing from when we first started. Am I going to take credit for any of that? Absolutely not. But I am going to take credit for employing and utilizing you as an agency to help get it done and to do it with professionalism and keeping me in the loop with what's going on. I'm even happier now that we have Administrator Amy Foster, who's going to continue to monitor this program, because I know she's going to make sure we're on point. I know she's going to make sure we're on point, and I appreciate that. But I do want to say thank you, because what you do is some people might not find it important. You don't have to impact 5,000 people for it to be enriching. If you say that one person, that one person in our community that needs your type of encouragement, to me, it's worth it. To me, it is worth it. So I just want to say thank you. I want to thank Council Member Driscoll for giving us a little bit more light so the community and everyone can see just how much you're actually doing for our community, but more importantly for those returning citizens who are already, I don't want to say behind the eight ball, but may feel that they have nowhere to go, that they have no resources, that they have no support, and you have been there. And I thank you all for that. Thank you. Thank you for your vision. Council Member Fick-Sanders, I just wanted to follow up briefly and mention a couple things. Since we did talk about children who have lost their lives recently, I want to make sure everybody's aware of 988 as the crisis lifeline that anybody should call who's experiencing a mental health crisis. That's staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I also wanted to mention to your mental health conversation, one of the things that we've been working really hard on as a city over the last year is really integrating all of the grant-funded and aid-to-private organizations so things aren't happening in a silo, right? And the social service hubs will be able to provide additional mental health support to those who are in Hidden Voices, to those who are in Cohort. We're really excited. I was going to write you all an email later this afternoon, but since we're here, I'll go ahead and mention the grant committee chose the awardee for the hub last Friday. It is a collaboration between The Well with Dr. Butler, PERC, as well as Gulf Coast Jewish Family Services. We're still working through details. It'll be later this summer before a social service hub actually launches. But we wanted you to know that all of this work is being integrated together because we do continue to hear that this mental health piece is sorely needed. And we really believe that these millions of dollars are going to make a huge difference in the community. Thank you so much for that. I appreciate that. And Councilmember Mohamed also shared earlier, and I was going to say, please give, and I want to call her name, but give her my condolences for her recent loss because she has been an integral part there. And when one of us hurts, all of us hurt. Absolutely. So definitely give her my condolences, and I'll stop by there. I will. So I'm real big on success stories, and I just want to say because of the visibility of that Hidden Voice team, and I don't take credit, I'm sad that she had to leave, but she's committed to PERC, probably more than she's committed to y'all. I'm so sorry. But the work must continue. The intention that she has moved forward with partnering with community organizations, Florida Rights Coalition reached out to her and requested that they be allowed to send between 60 and 70 individuals in groups of five to do the community service hours under Hidden Voices. And so they will be working with her, with her community events. They will be working and doing some shadowing of things taking place with tiny homes and all of the things that are taking place under the umbrella of PERC. They will be able to participate in that. And I don't know about y'all, but I believe that when people commit their time with intention to things taking place in the community, they buy into what's taking place in the community, and they don't return. And so I'm looking forward to that partnership. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council members, we have a resolution for approval, and we do not have a motion yet. Approval. Second. So we have a motion and a second, seeing no other requests to speak, and no cards, other speakers. Okay. Open the machine for voting, please. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all present, council members have voted. Clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve agenda item E6 passes unanimously, with Council Member Hanowitz being absent. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Okay, we will move on to our final report item, item E2, and we are joined by our airport manager, Richard Lesniak. I can never say your last name. Will you please say it for me? Lesniak. Lesniak. I always want to make it fancier, so I apologize. Development Coordination Manager, Chris Balestra, is also with us today, and Doug DiCarlo, I believe. So we have the whole team here to talk about the Albert Whitted Airport. So please, take it away, Richard. Okay. Well, good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the City Council. As the Chair said, I'm Richard Lesniak, the airport manager at the Albert Whitted Airport. The resolution item before you today is for the final adoption of the airport master plan and the adjoining airport layout plan. This was a planning process. I'm sorry? I'm sorry. Oh. This was a planning process. We started a few years back. We had secured grants from both the Federal Aviation Administration and the Florida DOT that provided 98% of the funding for this study project. Shortly after securing the funds, we did a competitive process and hired environmental science associates, or ESA, as we commonly refer to them. And as you noted earlier, we have Mr. Doug DiCarlo from ESA here. He was the primary planner on this master plan and has really done a yeoman's job of shepherding us through this process, especially with a lot of back and forth we had to do with the FAA. So I'm going to turn it over to Doug, and he's going to go into a very brief presentation on the master plan. Now, I should note that some of the longer-serving council members may remember that we did come forth, I think, before three different BF&T meetings over the last couple years to kind of give updates on the master plan. So for you, this may be a bit of a review, but I know we do have some new council members as well. So hopefully this should just give you a clear kind of overview of the master plan process and kind of what the final recommendations are that came out of the master plan. And certainly when Doug is complete, we'll open it up for any discussion and questions you may have. So with that, Doug DiCarlo. Thank you, Rich, and good afternoon. Again, Doug DiCarlo with ESA Airports. We have our offices in Tampa, but I'm a resident here in Pinellas County up in Palm Harbor. So I always joke, depending on the traffic, sometimes I feel like a local, and other times I feel like I'm very far away. As Rich said, this has been a long process for a number of reasons, COVID being one of those factors that kind of slowed us down and a lot of back and forth. But I think we've gotten to a point where we have a pretty solid plan for the airport's future that is very flexible, too. And I'm going to kind of go over that process for you. Real quickly, the reason we do an airport master plan, in order for your airport to be eligible to receive either federal or state aviation grants, the projects that you're applying for or putting in applications for need to be represented on an airport layout plan, as we commonly call an ALP. And that ALP needs to be updated from time to time. And in support of that ALP, you will do updates to the overall master plan. And that master plan is a very comprehensive study, as you'll see in a second, both written and graphic form. It has a very collaborative effort. We do a lot of outreach with the users, the tenants, the public, certainly you as the sponsor, the city staff. And overall, it looks at a 20-year time frame. That's the basic parameters that the FDOT and FAA want us to take a look at. So there's kind of a short, intermediate, and long-term horizon that we consider. This is the general process that we go through in the 20-year master plan. Again, the right, excuse me, the left side there, you start off, you know, with the project initiation, getting everything started from, you know, getting under contract, getting some surveys done. We started kickoff meetings. We had websites. But what you really do is you get right into an inventory of what you have on the airport facility at the start of the process. The hangars, the airfield, runway, taxiway systems, all the different features and infrastructure that you have out there on the airport, as well as the surrounding community. What is around the airport, what type of land uses, those different features are all inventoried. We then get into the aviation forecast, which for a general aviation airport like Albert Whitted really consists of two items, and I'll touch on those in the next slide. The number of based aircraft, those that kind of are stationed or live here, if you will, at Albert Whitted year-round, and then the type of activity they produce, as well as other users, the operations. This is one of two elements that absolutely needs to be approved by the FAA and FDOT, and as you see there, this shows how long this process has been going on. We had the 20-year aviation activity forecast approved by the FAA and FDOT back in August of 2019, so that was also prior to COVID. As many remember, about six months later, it started. Once you get out of the aviation forecast, we start looking at facility requirements. We really basically compare what the forecasts are showing as the demands or needs for the based aircraft and activity levels with what you physically have on property, and we start defining some basic minimums. Do you need changes to taxiways? Do you need additional hangars? Do you need more fuel facilities? Those kind of items are what come up. We simplify as basically air side, land side, or even terminal components. There's also, on the right side, kind of the back half of the study, we start looking at some environmental factors to help us look at alternatives or options moving forward. In this one, we took a heavier look than we might normally for some airports, given what you do have surrounding your airport, which is obviously Tampa Bay and the marina to the north and the port to the south, and certainly a number of community elements to the west, not the least of which is USF and the medical community and that sort of thing. So the environmental looks at all those different features at a number of different levels and just, again, provides us an overview, as the name says there on the first bullet, of what's around us so that we can make better educated decisions as we look at alternatives. The alternatives start to compare what options we have to provide or produce improvements over the course of, again, the 5-, 10-, and 20-year horizons of the study. What's very important in this alternative analysis, you start looking at some of the best air side options or land side options, as well as some of those terminal or building options, but you may have to make compromises. The best airfield alternative may conflict with the best building or hangar alternatives, et cetera. So this section kind of works out to have a refined alternatives and then ultimately a recommendation. And into that fold of evaluation of those different concepts and options is certainly some of the environmental factors that I mentioned. This culminates into the airport layout plan drawing set. We commonly refer to this, again, as the ALP. There is one sheet actually called the ALP, but in your case, it's actually about 22 sheets in the entire drawing set. So while the ALP is the main sheet showing all the different proposed improvements over the 5- and 10-, over the 20-year horizon, there are also a number of other sheets that provide additional detail on things such as the airspace or the imaginary surfaces protecting each of the ends of the runways, as well as land use plan, property maps, and things of those sort. This is the second component of the overall process that must also be approved by the FAA. And, in fact, you can see there on that first bullet, it was finally, after a number of iterations back and forth that Rich alluded to, it was finally submitted to the final FAA review on March 5th of this year. And we just got literally approval Tuesday of this week. FDOT actually approved it in April of this year. So we've gotten through those two key milestones. The final component, kind of what I call where the rubber meets the road for people like Rich that manage the airport and certainly your finance side, is developing the development program or the capital improvement program. And this, again, is a 20-year horizon. And this is where we start taking all the different proposed projects and prioritize them based on a number of factors. It could be certainly the cost, the availability of grants, the need, you know, maybe some pavements in worse condition than others. So we start prioritizing that. And as you can imagine, like any other budgeting type of exercise, there's a lot of tradeoffs, compromises, et cetera. This 20-year capital improvement program is, again, an essential element of the overall process to make sure you're eligible for federal and state grants. And this is something that Rich has brought to you in the past. You may have only seen it maybe in the first two or three years, but for his, you know, budgeting purposes. All right, I'm going to move through the next slides. I wanted to make you all make sure you had a good understanding of the overall planning and process and the different elements. Real quickly, for the operations or the based aircraft that were in the forecast, again, we looked at the existing number that were there when the study started or what we call the base year, and then we projected those out 20 years. So you see there was growth in both the number of expected planes to be based here and the activity. What's important is kind of buried down there on that last line item is that when we do these forecasts that were approved much earlier in the process, it has to be an unconstrained forecast. Basically, what that means is no facility limitations. What will the market bear? What type of activity could be accommodated here if, no pun intended, the sky were the limit? This is kind of important for your airport because you do have a lot of facility limitations. Again, you're surrounded almost on three sides by water, the community to the fourth side, and it's just, quite frankly, a very small airport, and a lot of it's presently developed. The operations you see there started, I know the numbers are small, but they started around, when we started the study, it was just under 84,000 annual operations. I think you heard earlier in the public comments, but I can say we projected out to about 117,000. That number from 2018 dipped significantly during COVID, as it did for all airports in Florida and certainly across the nation. Then it came back up, as it did for most airports here in Florida. And the number you heard earlier today, which is true, is now we're about at 100,000 annual operations per year at the airport. So it's certainly recovered well and grown faster than we predicted at the beginning of the study. The premises of the facility requirements really hinged upon the fact that since your last master plan, I think I neglected to mention this on the first slide, the last master plan was completed in 2007, so that's been some 13 years ago. Since that time, the type and size of aircraft that operate at the airport have changed. Some of the smallest were what were considered the critical or design aircraft at that time, have now moved up a few categories to what you see there on the screen. That's a Pilatus PC-12. You have a number of them based at the airport here today. So that changes what we have to look at for the FAA standards. And I think that Rich kind of again alluded to that, that there was a lot of back and forth as to how best to accommodate some of these changing design surfaces and setbacks that we need to have because every inch out there counts, again, being a small airport. And, again, the previous master plan didn't really accommodate that because the growth just of those size aircraft weren't anticipated at that time. So a lot of the improvements that you see are hinging upon making runway 725. That's the main primary runway that runs pretty much east-west that you see on the aerial photos of the airport. was how that runway can be, how we can plan to make that runway accommodate the existing traffic as well as potentially even more in the future. Also taxiway geometry and then, of course, I mentioned it in general terms again, airside and landside facilities, but that easily translates to hangars. During the based aircraft forecast, I mentioned unconstrained. You currently have almost, is it 200, Rich? 200 people on your waiting list. You have more on your waiting list for hangars than there are currently based at the airport. So the demand is there. Can you accommodate those 200? No, it's probably physically not possible given the property. And to that effect, I believe the city has actually stopped accepting adding people to the waiting list because it's just not realistic at this point for the ones that are currently on there. So definitely the demand is there. So we had our hands full trying to figure out how to best accommodate what projections we saw. So this is almost my last slide. This is kind of the drawing or the figure that went with the capital improvement program. And I know it's small. I apologize. And we can certainly answer questions, or I don't know if we can even zoom in. But what you basically see is the projects in magenta or pink are the five-year projects, or the first five years, the short term. And then as you kind of look over to the column or the table on the right side, the yellow is more the intermediate term, so the five-ten-year horizon. And then the blue, or cyan, as some might call it, is the longer term. So in a nutshell, the capital improvement program, the projects that we are looking at in the short term, as you can kind of see there on the bottom, almost left side of the facility, is all hangars. But there is also some runway work that the FAA would like to see us do sooner than later related to, again, the changing design standards with the aircraft that are flying there today, as well as projects that Rich has going on right now for you, which is updating the fuel farm, the electrical vault for the airfield lighting systems, and even the equipment, some of the equipment in the air traffic control tower. The yellow for the intermediate term is, if you look closely, again, I apologize the size, but it's still more hangars. I think one of the few exceptions is there's a maintenance facility. But that actually translates to hangars because your current maintenance staff at the airport is occupying hangars, or at least one hangar in some of the storage areas associated with the hangars. And then in the long term, there are more hangars because that is the demand. The airfield's really in good shape. I didn't really touch on that before. The pavement has been well maintained by you as the sponsor. As most of you, I'm sure, are aware, the north-south runway, what we call the crosswind runway, was recently rehabilitated and reconstructed in actually a slightly shifted position for various reasons. So the airfield's really in good shape. So the longer-term projects for the airfield include the runway extension, which a lot of people have heard and seen about. And this is, quite honestly, there's a long path ahead of this project becoming a reality. That's documented a number of ways and times in the master plan because there's certainly cost-benefit studies associated with it, environmental aspects. But one of the things we like to do, and certainly the FDOT and FAA want us to do on these master plans, is you've got to protect for that capability or that possibility in the future. And why that's important here and while it does stick out into Tampa Bay is because if you were to go straight off that runway, for those of you that fly here or have certainly looked out even as far as you can across the bay, we have MacDill Air Force Base almost right off the end of that runway. So by getting this onto the airport layout plan drawing set, it enables the FAA and DOT as well, but certainly the FAA, to protect that airspace for the airport in case there are changes with what MacDill's doing or even up north with Tampa International and St. Pete Clearwater International. So some of these projects are, quite honestly, to make sure that we have that capability because, again, that runway extension project is in the 15, I guess the 10, I'm not sure exactly off the top of my head, the environmental for it would start much earlier. The cost, the economic side of it would occur next, and then there would certainly be design and that sort of thing. But it's really kind of a 10 to 15 year project at best. And then, of course, the future remains to be seen as to, you know, if that demand materializes or not. This is based on the current fleet mix. I can tell you the fleet mix changes over time, certainly for all airports, and the aircraft get more sophisticated. We're seeing that a lot of the airplanes don't need quite as long a runway takeoff as they did in the past, just with newer technologies and better aircraft performance. So that, in a nutshell, is the 20-year plan, all the projects that were put into the master plan. And then the last thing I wanted to mention here was I kind of touched on this early in the process. We did have quite a bit of stakeholder and public involvement in the process. There were a number of meetings from the initial kickoff meetings. Certainly, the tenant and users were invited to participate. I'll jump down to the bottom bullet there. At the very beginning of the study, we set up a project website that had surveys and ways for people to ask questions or certainly learn more about the study. As elements of the study, working papers were developed and even some of the public workshop materials, those were all published on the website and made available. It's still an active website today and will remain that way through at least the end of the year and can continue as long as the city wants. But we also had a technical working group associated with this. A couple of the members are here with us today, and we appreciate their participation and attendance. And those, I think we had at least four of those. And, again, I mentioned the public workshop that we had some time back at one of the USF facilities, which had a good turnout. And with that, I know I kind of ran through it, but as Rich said, we'd be more than happy to answer any questions you have about the master plan that we've put together and that the FAA and FDOT have been partnered with and have recently accepted. Okay, very good. Do we have public comment on this item? We have one card manager. Okay. Evan Jones, please step up to the podium, state your name and address for the record. You'll have three minutes to address counsel. Good afternoon again, second time. I'm not running for office. I'm not stalking anybody or disappointed look in the scabber. This is not the best. Mr. Jones, if you wouldn't mind, just state your address, please. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. 2314 Woodlawn Circle West in St. Petersburg. My card says I'm for and against. Just seven years ago, or I should say 2007, I rollerbladed several neighborhoods and put flyers on doors for supporting Albert Wood at airport. So I'm a huge fan in what's happened over the last 20 some odd years. I continue to support and am amazed at the popularity of the airport. It's not the best use of our public and private needs, and I will just say in two instances, the Grand Prix and there's 80 some odd acres at Albert Wood Airport. Florida State University is 100 acres. If you take out football fields and so forth, it's about the equivalent same size. This is not the best use. In the time that I'm up here speaking to you all, you can Google on your GPS, St. Pete Clearwater Airport, and right next to St. Pete Clearwater Airport is the old former Airco golf course that's owned by the city, right next to the airport, and all the facilities that we're talking about could be housed on Airco golf course. And through that process, you can get better public-private use from the land that exists there, the community enlightenment of what the future for aviation is, and we're all well aware of what the future is for aviation. And it may not be the planes that are landing there and housed there and hangers for and so forth that there could be a better use and symmetry, duplication, because if you look at that Airco golf course, it's right next to the north-south one way, the east-west runways, and all of what's in Albert Wooda could be incorporated there. So I'm just letting you know that that exists as a possibility in deference to everyone else that's here that loves Albert Wooda and uses it. Thank you, Mr. Jones. I love it. I love it, too. Thank you. Thank you. No more speakers? No more speakers. Okay. Councilmember Montaneri. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Chris, for being here. This has been a long master planning process, five years, you know, from June of 2018 to June of 2023. And I appreciate the diligence and the input that has gone into creating this master plan. There's a lot to kind of take in. And I want to spend most of my time talking about slide number six, which kind of outlines all the different projects that you have. But let me just start my questioning, if you can put slide six up, please, with the airport layout plan, pulling it up. My first question is on the eastern side going out in the bay. Basically, you've got the red line of the border of the airport, and if the runway extension were to be accomplished, I take it that little portion in magenta is going to have to be, how would that work for the city to acquire that land? You're talking the little area, the little corner? Yeah. It's my understanding that, so I guess, let me back up and say that line is specific to the airport property, but it's my understanding the city actually owns the land beyond that. So it's technically all city land. Okay. That was my understanding. Okay. So the current airport layout and airport property line is the red line, but that magenta line, the city owns that property, that submerged land there? Okay. Okay. All right. Good. So you talked a little bit about the 200 people that are on the hangar waiting list. Can you talk a little bit about commercial hangars, and is there a waiting list, or what's the demand for commercial hangar space? So I don't have exact numbers, but I can tell you, obviously, I have a lot of conversations with Shelter, who's our FBO. They maintain the waiting list, and if the city built more large hangars, we'd have more jets, more larger airplanes that we have there. Now we'd have some more of them. We also have heavy demand for the small stuff. So the demand, anything we build, I think it's full as soon as we put the shovel in the ground, no matter what type of fleet we're trying to accommodate. You know, I think we've been very fortunate, historical, I guess it's the old, you know, real estate adage, location, location, location. In all the years I've been there, even back in, was it 08, 09, when the economy really tanked, we've, I don't believe we've ever dropped below 100% occupancy. So, and quite frankly, now, it's my understanding, Clearwater Air Park, Tampa Executive, all the airports within Tampa Bay are pretty much all in the same boat. They're all full, and they all have a large waiting list. There's a large amount of people moving to Florida, and certainly a certain segment of that population are pilots and are looking for places to park airplanes. So it's becoming a regional, if not statewide, type impact, really. Okay. Thank you. On the west end of Runway 725, you've got that area in blue. Can you speak to the need for shifting the runway threshold? Why does the FAA want that? I'll tag to you a bit. So, actually, before we did the master plan study, we had done a Runway 725 feasibility study, you may remember, and there's something that's called the Runway Protection Zone. It's like a trapezoidal-shaped kind of a safety zone that's off. There's one on every single runway, and currently the Runway Protection Zone, at that end, currently sits on top of USF's campus. Ideally, the FAA would like that Runway Protection Zone to be on an airport property and cleared and maintained and controlled by the airport, because currently we don't. So the idea, and again, necessitating the extension, it's not just an extension, it's actually a shift of the runway as well as an extension. The idea is to bring that Runway Protection Zone onto the airport property, but when you do that, you have to displace the landing threshold. And, obviously, you'd lose length, so you have to try to make that up on the east end. That's why you have the extension. And the length that's been, the ultimate length that's been determined is based on the most critical aircraft, which I believe is a Cessna citations. A little smaller Cessna. Well, the smaller Cessna citations, I can't talk, Cessna citations, that we believe is going to be the critical aircraft at some point within maybe the next five to ten years. Okay. At the range we're going. All right. Good. And I just want people to understand why there is, the FAA wants to have the runway shifted, and because of the critical aircraft, you lose the runway length if we shifted it without doing the extension, and that's driving the extension. Plus, we're going up in the size of the aircraft that are operating out of the airport. All right. And specific to that blue area, we have it currently shown as additional aircraft parking, tie-down parking, because if you see, obviously, as I said, we've got heavy demand for hangars, so we're looking to stick hangars everywhere we can put hangars. And that includes places that currently are being used for aircraft tie-downs, so those get displaced. The idea is to, we thought this would be a good area. I will say that the FAA has kind of, the issue of having the RPZ clear, that's something that it's going to probably require some further discussions with FAA down the road when we get to that, you know, that point. So that's going to be a sticking point we're going to have to clear with them. Okay. The increase in the operations, first of all, an operation, and we're talking about 100,000 operations a year, just an operation is one takeoff and landing, is that correct? Takeoff or landing, yeah. Takeoff or landing, okay. And so over the next 20 years, we're expecting the operations to go up 20%? I think, yeah. That's a good round number, yes. Okay, and so with that sort of activity at this airport, and so everybody knows about the talk about studying the airport for other purposes, what's the capacity of other airports around the region? Do you mean as in? Operational. Operationally. Right. I mean, of all the Bay Area airports, whether you talk about Tampa International, certainly St. Pete Clearwater, just north of us that was mentioned by the gentleman, they're all very active airports, but none of them are reaching a capacity standpoint for operations. The FAA, when you start getting at 60% of the theoretical capacity calculated for an airport, then you start planning improvements, and those can come in a number of different forms, and at 80%, they hope you're designing and constructing and that sort of thing. But Tampa International, for a number of years, has had a third parallel runway on the books, and it's actually right, it would be parallel to the Veterans Expressway, but they don't have the demand for that yet. St. Pete Clearwater International has quite a bit of capacity. They are able to use their primary runway for their commercial service and certainly the Coast Guard and, well, the Air National Guard is kind of out of there or less in their operations, and then they use the crosswind as much as they can for their training activity, the smaller general aviation types. Here, there is a capacity calculation that was done as part of the facility requirements, and even at the 120,000 roughly or 117 for the out years of the forecast, that doesn't take you to the theoretical capacity of the runway. Certainly, it's busier, but there's still capacity in that respect. If you're talking hangars, Rich certainly mentioned before, all airport, it is definitely a statewide and almost a national, but definitely a statewide issue that everyone's got waiting lists. Okay. And I appreciate you. I apologize. I didn't point out, Council Member Montenori is right, one takeoff is considered an operation and one landing is an operation. So every time a plane comes and goes, that's two operations. And the other thing I wanted to clarify is we talked a lot about based aircraft, but those operations are conducted not only by the based aircraft, but certainly what we call the itinerant users, the people that come and go. They may come just to the restaurant. They may come for business. There's a lot of those users, too. So it's not just the people that live and stay here. It's the visitors also. Okay. Good. Thank you. Right in the center of the diagram, north of the Albert Whitted Water Treatment Facility, there's that area in blue, and it's labeled L1 through L11. Are those projects dependent on the runway being lengthened? Yes and no. Okay. The north portion, the L11 and L9, they are, because you have another zone called the runway visual zone when you have two intersecting runways that's currently in place. If we shift the runway, that runway visual zone shifts eastward and it opens up that property to be able to develop. So from that standpoint, that north portion is the southern portion is really contingent upon the final decision on the wastewater treatment plant site. Okay. Yeah. So, and I should note that the schematic on the treatment plant site is based on discussions we've had with the water resources department in terms of what they're looking at for plans for the site for the future. So that's, so basically we get about a third of the north section of that treatment plant site back for quote-unquote airport use. Okay. Thank you. My next question goes into the future of general aviation and drones and air mobility operations. I know we've had some meetings with different companies that want to bring vertical and takeoff electric-type vehicles. Has that been worked into this plan? And can you speak to that a little bit? Well, it's funny. Doug and I had this exact discussion about an hour ago. So, yeah, this is the, currently the hot topic in aviation. It's the urban air mobility and what it means. And in 2025, I think the FAA is supposed to be approving the first of these new aircraft for flight. And, again, you really kind of have two segments. You have the UAVs, if you want to call them, and the EV tools. That would maybe somebody, either a private person, would buy it for personal use, like they would a Cessna or a business would buy it. And then you have the other side, which I think takes most of the discussion, is kind of the Ubers of the sky. There's been a lot of popularity around that concept. And, you know, the integration of these, at least in the short term, it's not that different from the standpoint of an aircraft is an aircraft. One's powered by gas. One's powered by batteries, right? In a lot of ways, they're probably similar to a helicopter. A lot of them will operate. Although, as Doug was educating me, they're much slower, usually, than a helicopter. So, you know, certainly there's airspace integration, which is really kind of an FAA thing. But from an infrastructure standpoint on the actual airports, you know, they'll take up a parking space just like a regular older airplane would. They'll need hangar space of probably similar size just like a regular airplane would. The real bigger challenge is integrating this technology into the existing infrastructure. And what I'm talking about is, obviously, we've gone through a number of years with Tesla cars and how they get charged, where they get charged. You're going to have the same problem here is all these new aircraft need to be charged somewhere. How long does it take them to charge? There's operational issues. You know, can you take up a spot for a half hour to charge it? Well, you know, I mean, there's a bunch of logistical and other things that still kind of need to be figured out. So, I think the technology is definitely here. It's definitely coming. Is it going to, you know, two years from now, is this guy going to be littered with, I don't know. I think it's going to be a little farther down the line than a lot of people like to think. And plus, you know, we're kind of on the initial edge of this technology. I'm sure you're going to have a lot of startup companies, a lot of failures, a lot of consolidation. It's going to be the Wild West, I think, for lack of a better term, for a while, why they get this all integrated. You know, certainly the long-term plan is autonomous, we're no pilots. But, you know, again, the first ones that come out, they're going to have pilots in them. So, it's going to be like just having another airplane in the air. It's just powered differently. Okay. I don't know if you want anything. Yeah, and excuse me, and like Rich said, we did talk about this a little bit earlier. And the AAM or the EVTOLs, that industry really came before this master plan was effectively complete with all the back and forth we have at the FAA from a facility standpoint. But I don't think that would have really changed much because the other side of that, what Rich just described to you, is who's going to accommodate them. Yes, they're going to operate similar to aircraft we have today, whether they're rotorcraft or smaller fixed wing, or in sequence with them. But if we had this information at the very start of the study, I don't know if that would change much because, again, you just don't have the space. And would I have recommended to have a city of St. Pete, EVTOL, the electric vertical takeoff and landing, as they're calling them, facility? Probably not because you just don't have the space for what you do need. Is it going to be someone like Shelter or St. Pete Air? I think that's really the route it would go. They're going to be treated. And they're going to be the ones that really need to think about if that's a real business entity for them. They need to get the charging stations into their facilities, much like they do with the avgas or the jet fuel. So it was not officially incorporated or mentioned in this report, but I think, as Rich described, they could certainly be accommodated here if and when they come, if that helps. All right. Well, very good. Well, Doug, thank you for sharing your expertise with us. And Rich and Chris, it's been just a pleasure working with you all on the airport. Albert Woodhead Airport's been just a foundational structure on the waterfront of the city of St. Petersburg for many years. And it's going to be here for years to come. And thank you for coming up with and working on a master plan that is visionary and takes our airport into a very bright future. Thank you very much. Thank you. Council Member Driscoll. Thank you. And thank you for the overview of what was a riveting opportunity to read more about the airport and what the current conditions are and what our potential plans could be for the future. I certainly appreciate all of the work that went into this. I know it's not easy. And even, as you mentioned, since this was done, there are things that have changed. And, but, you know, starting from the beginning, what grabbed me right away was looking at this FDOT study in 2019, showing the local economic impact of the airport. We've been talking a little bit about studies of the airport lately. And here we've, we've got one right here that gives us some really fantastic information. I thought it was, it was encouraging to see that the total impact just in visitor spending was estimated at over 16 million. The total employment, 665. I mean, we're talking jobs here. The total business sales, over 79 million. I mean, this is a pretty, pretty significant economic impact for something that we historically have not had to put a lot of taxpayer dollars into, thanks to grants that we received from the FAA and FDOT. With the existing conditions, I mean, we knew Albert Whitted Airport is at the, is at the top of the list statewide when it comes to general aviation airports. And this study really reinforces that, showing the growth that we've seen, not just since 2007, but in recent years. And when you figure in what's been happening with our economy in St. Petersburg, since the, since coming out of the pandemic, you know, the, the activity is more intense and I think it's, it's clear that that's shown at the airport as well as at other locations throughout our city. Having that wait list really indicates that we, it's time to look at more hangar space. The impact of that runway I found to be fascinating, not just on what types of activity we can, can happen at the airport and what types of planes or how that changes. And, and I, I learned a lot from reading this. I did have to Google a few words along the way, but I, I learned that it's not always bigger aircraft that we're talking about, but different kinds that can do more than, than what we have the ability to accommodate right now. And the, but going beyond the, the airport, moving that runway would give the USF St. Petersburg campus, for instance, the opportunity to grow and go a little bit more vertical as so many of us must now in, or so many entities have to, if they want to expand, it's got to be upward. And what that, what that creates is a path for the university to grow. And that's extremely important. And of course there are other entities in the area that can benefit from this as well. And having those increased heights, I think it would benefit the hospitals in more than one way. I mean, um, Johns Hopkins, all children's hospital and Bayfront health, both rely on Albert Whitted airport for, um, for their aircraft and moving patients. And think of how they could expand. And when you start talking about EV toll, uh, technology and what the future holds, that's just as important as this runway, if you ask me, because that's going to be here before we know it. And my question regarding that is, can, will these plans be able to accommodate that? You said, these are different, these are different types of, um, aircraft. So let's say we get to the point that they're being used, can they be, can they be, um, housed in the regular hangars that we're talking about right now? Or do, and do we even know yet if there's a special type of hanger where they will have to be stored? How can we get ready to be known as the home of this new technology? So I think generally speaking, based on the existing companies who are WISC, for example, Lilium, there's a number of other ones out there, based on the aircraft they're developing, the simple answer is yes. They're a very similar size to a traditional airplane. And so it's, it really, it really comes down to storage capacity and whether it's traditional fixed wing or whether it's EV tolls, it's just a matter of how much space you have to accommodate all them. So, you know, we're definitely, we definitely don't have a lot of elbow room and, and there is already heavy demand from fixed wing airplanes. So yeah, we're definitely, uh, the airport is, is getting close to a point where it is going to reach a capacity because we just don't have the room, room to grow. But if some of those airplanes are EV toll, I, again, I think the only significant infrastructure you have to look at changing is the electrification. How do you charge them? Where do you put those chargers and incorporating that? That's that, as I see it, that's probably the biggest on ground challenge of, of this new technology, I would say. Okay. Well, and knowing that, um, as we move forward with, with plans for specific improvements, I know that we can, um, incorporate those elements into the plans so that we're ready. Um, I think there's real opportunity in that type of innovation for St. Pete, and, um, we don't know how fast that's going to move, but it appears that the timing could be just right. So I look forward to hearing more about that, um, as this moves forward. Um, one question, this might be for legal. There, um, was something near the beginning about, um, that when we accept, hi, when we accept this, then it gets, it needs to be, um, changed in the comp plan. Does that require a different vote, a different round of meetings? Um, or does this, does this effectively make that change without the need for, um, addressing the comp plan separately? I think we're going to have to change the comp plan separately, insert the new map and a new reference. Okay. What would be the timeline on that? I think, uh, Ms. Abernathy is here to shed a little more light on that process. Good afternoon, Elizabeth Abernathy, director of planning and development. I heard comp plan. So I came out. It's like a trigger word. It totally is. Um, we will need to take this as an amendment, um, through the Community Planning and Preservation Commission and then to you, um, we're thinking we may package that with the change we need to make for Senate Bill 102, um, since they are statutory, essentially statutory updates that we'll, we'll need to make. So we'll probably be bringing that package depending on your action today, um, CPPC in July and then perhaps August, uh, to get those maps updated in the comp plan. Okay. Great. Thank you so much. It's good to know, uh, what's next because I noticed that this isn't, this isn't it for the master plan. And, um, you know, after today, I, I, I wouldn't want this to be just placed on a shelf. It's something that we need to refer to again and again as our city continues to grow. Um, so I just appreciate this, uh, work that's been done and really see it as the next step in, um, continuing to make great history at Albert Whitted Airport. Thank you. I'll move approval. Second. Okay. We have a motion and a second. Seeing no further requests to speak. Clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Chair, the motion to approve E2 passes unanimously. Very good. Thank you. City Council will recess and then, um, convene as the CRA and take up item CRA2. And we are joined by Mr. Corey Miliska today. Hello. How are you today? Thank you for joining us. Yes. Thank you. And you have a presentation for us. I do. They will pull it up for you. Just a moment. Good afternoon. Cory Miliska is the only official with the Development Review Services Division for the City of St. Petersburg. Before we eat today, we are looking at a project that is located at the northeast corner of First Avenue South and 17th Street South. We're reviewing the proposed plan for consistency with the in-town redevelopment, in-town west redevelopment plan. This is just a zoom in of the aerial here, showing Tropicana Field, just catty corner to the subject property, as well as the interstate is located to the west of the subject property. The goal of this redevelopment plan is to provide a specific development focus for the dome district that supports the in-town west redevelopment area and capitalizes on opportunities generated by Tropicana. Objective one of the plan calls for establishing a cohesive development pattern, visual identity through land uses, that reinforce the downtown as well as the stadium redevelopment and development through creation of highly visible and intense activity nodes, and reinforces retail along Central Avenue and the First Avenue corridors. The existing conditions here, you're going to see the zoom in of the subject property on the right-hand side of the screen, to the east side are existing townhomes, to the north side is the True by Hilton Hotel. To the west will be a future redevelopment of the 1700 block there, and to the south is surface parking. And to your left-hand side, you'll see the existing two-story building that is actually a kiddie cafe. The property, like I said, will be demolished to accommodate the proposed use. The proposed site plan is before you. It does consist of a subject property that is approximately 10,000 square feet. The zoning is DC2. The property project is valued at $25 million. It will consist of an eight-story building with 97 dwelling units. There will be ground floor amenity space. All proposed units will be less than 750 square feet. And therefore, no parking will be provided on site. Some of the smallest units will be within the 350 square foot range. This is just a zoom in of the first floor. You'll see some of the outdoor amenity space here on the east side that is visually accessible from First Avenue, as well as the lobby area. And then you will have some of the ground floor units and bike parking. This is just a color plan calling out the different uses. This is the elevation along First Avenue South. Again, you will see that the lobby entrance here, as well as this will be viewed through part of the building to see the actual open space from the street. The proposed building will be identified as urban and modern style of architecture, as described by the applicant's architect. The base of the building will have a mix of storefront windows for the many space and the corresponding fenestration for the residential units. The lobby entrance also will be from First Avenue South. There's also the dedicated outdoor seating area for the residents, also on the ground floor to the east. This is the west elevation, which will front onto 17th Street. The upper levels of the building will provide glazing and fenestration, as illustrated by these elevations. The building is finished with a mix of materials, includes masonry patterns, aluminum awnings, and glazing. The use of the horizontal projecting elements at the upper floors will provide shade. The development supports the mass transit options that are currently available. We'll continue the walkability of the mixed use retail multifamily character of Central Avenue. This is the north elevation, which will abut the alley. Again, the design provides a change in materiality, as well as various masonry patterns to break up the blank portions of the facade. Providing visual interest from the alley and the multifamily adjacent property, as well as to the hotel that's to the north. This is the eastern elevation, which is visible from the two-story townhomes to the east. Again, this provides the differences with the materials, breaking up the overall facade. And here's some 3D renderings, looking down, again, at the building. The elevation or 3D viewpoint here is looking down from First Avenue South. The left-hand side of the screen is if you're floating over the Chase Bank. That's more along Central Avenue. These are just some shots of the amenity areas that'll be provided on Level 5. Here's some street views, again, with the right-hand side looking from the south side of First Avenue South, back at the building. And then if you're over on the other intersection looking from the southwest, looking to the northeast at the corner of First and 17th. Additional views along 17th Street here, as well as the alleyway. Here's a rendering placed more within the context. Again, showing the hotel to the background, the townhomes to the, your right-hand side of the screen. The proposed development, which is outlined in the staff report, is permitted within the DC2 zoning district. This will continue the redevelopment of downtown as described in the comprehensive plan, as well as the redevelopment plan. The building is urban in scale, with pedestrian oriented street level features, including the provision of storefront window system. Consistent with other urban buildings, and streetscaping, including planters and street trees that will accent the building. Mixed use developments with the floor area ratio up to 7.0 are allowed in the DC2 zoning district. The applicant is proposing a floor area ratio of 6.29. If the CRA approves this item before today, this will go before the development review commission for site plan approval. The applicant's request will be reviewed in accordance with the procedural changes that were adopted by city council on December 16th, 2021. Which now provides the CRA to review, excuse me, and to take place first, before site plan approval. As well as a multitude of the design regulations that are included in the redevelopment plan. Staff does recommend approval of the attached resolution, finding that the eight story building with 97 dwelling units and ground floor residential amenity space is consistent with the plan, which is located at 1663 First Avenue South. Thank you, and I'm here for any questions. Move approval. Second. Councilmember Driscoll. All right, that must be a leftover from last time. Okay, Councilmember Montaneri. Thank you. Well, I've got a question about parking, since there's none here, I want to hear from the developer or somebody from the staff how they're going to deal with the parking issue. What's the representative of the applicant, she can speak on that behalf. All right, Katie, good afternoon. I want to know what the plan is here. Good afternoon, Councilmembers, Councilman Montaneri. Yes, we have an entire presentation, but we don't need to go through it all. We just knew that there might be a few specific questions. So the developer himself is here, Benden Road Development. They have similar projects like this around the country, one specifically being constructed at Water Street. From a parking standpoint, there is bicycle parking available for every unit, and this is obviously right on the Sunrunner. As Corey mentioned, the units are micro-units. These are smaller than even the 750 threshold in the code. They're furnished micro-units, and so the expectation is truly that residents would utilize public transportation. That said, in addition to bicycle and public transportation, once the project is leased up, based on the leasing and what is going on with the tenants, the developer would expect to enter into potentially parking lease agreements with surrounding property owners as necessary. In Tampa, they have 104 units, 80 studio units, and 24-1 bedroom, and they provided seven parking spaces. So going down to none was not an unusual ask, especially right on a transit line here in St. Pete. Okay. Well, maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but I'm not just concerned about the residents that live there. I'm concerned about the retail, the restaurants, the bars, and all these other, all the businesses in this area. I remember when we, during COVID, when we put up barricades so that restaurants could expand their outdoor space. And as we got through COVID, we had, I believe it was the Edge District, was adamant about getting those barricades out of there because they needed the parking spaces so that the restaurants could thrive. So I'm very concerned about this development. I understand that there's another one that's right behind this one that's going to be in the proximity of this building. And so I'm concerned about how all this is going to work. Certainly appreciate those comments. I think when the council made the code change a year ago, two years ago, to eliminate parking for units that were under 750 square feet, that was certainly a policy decision for you all, balancing those types of issues, right? So whether the residents and the retailers and how that would work out. I think our client feels strongly that the influx of residents that will live here will be a benefit to those retailers. I appreciate that you're thinking of people driving into downtown and wanting to park there. This will also provide additional residents that are right next to these retailers and restaurants and other businesses to be able to patronize those. So certainly appreciate that concern. I think from what our client has indicated in their experience on other projects and their expectations in Tampa is that truly bicycle and public transportation are going to be the primary modes of transportation for their residents. And that if necessary, there would be minimal leases entered into, and so there would not be that type of impact that you're concerned about. Certainly from a policy standpoint, I can appreciate that's something you all will want to watch as these projects continue to come through. Okay. Can you talk about people with disabilities and how, you know, if they can't ride a bike and, you know, if you don't have any parking, you don't have handicap parking, so? Certainly. As with any housing development, it would comply with any Fair Housing Act and ADA requirements. Okay. Well, I had a meeting with the staff earlier this week, and we had a discussion about a year ago at a PS&I committee meeting about parking requirements downtown. And I know that we have some restrictions with some legislation that passed this year when it comes to addressing this. But this is an issue that affects our city, and I'm very concerned about going down this path, and especially when it comes to our businesses and the effects that it's going to have on our businesses. Most of them operate on very, very thin margins, and if there's not parking, people will go someplace else. We had a meeting earlier today, and, you know, parking just comes up all the time. And we do have PSDA. You're correct. It's right on the Sunrunner line. But PSDA still has a long ways to go. This isn't like living in Washington, D.C. People do have options. Yes, they can ride a bike. Yes, they can get on the Sunrunner. Yes, they can have an Uber. But I know that there's going to be a lot of residents living here, living at this place that are going to have a car. And I'm just, I'm worried about congestion in the neighborhood. So thank you for answering my questions. Thank you, Madam Chair. Okay, well, thank you, Corey, for the presentation, and thank you, Katie, for the clarification. I actually just wanted to lend my support for a project such as this, because getting those smaller units inherently helps lend itself towards our affordable housing initiatives. That's something that we have talked about as long as I and Councilor Driscoll have been on this council. It was one of the first things, I think, in our HOUT committee in that first year that we started talking about very robustly, was reducing those parking restrictions and how we would do that in a smart way. Linking it to those smaller units, I think, is the perfect way to do that. I don't believe that a developer would even invest in a project if they did not believe there was not a market for people who were not looking to own vehicles. It is the future of communities. It is the future of downtowns and of urban, dense areas to be less car-centric. And so if we don't have policies in place that support that, where it makes sense and where a developer believes that they have a market to support that, then we're really missing the boat. Continuing to build, continuing to provide all of these parking spaces for a future generation that isn't really looking for that, I think we have to have a balance of both. And this isn't the first development that we've done this with. I think this will be, what, the fifth, Corey, that we have approved in the time that we've had this. Some of them do limited, but, I mean, this is going to be the fifth one with zero. So I'm very much in favor of this project. I think the developer, I think, is here maybe. I mean, when I look at it, I think it looks beautiful. It really fits the bill for, you know, something that we're looking for, especially in that particular area. Right along the Sunrunner, it's how it was meant to be. And so we're starting to see it all come together. So I very much am in support of this. I'm in support of us continuing to utilize these restrictions and the zero parking for the, you know, all micro units. I am fully in favor of us continuing down this path because I believe it is the future of communities such as this area. So thank you for bringing this project forward. We have a motion and a second. So, clerk, there's no request for comment? Okay, from public comment. Then we will open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve CRE2 passes unanimously. Okay, we will adjourn as the CRA and reconvene as city council and take up new business. Item F1, Council Member Floyd. Thank you, Chair. I am respectfully requesting a referral to the September 14, 2023 Housing, Land Use, and Transportation Committee to discuss commercial corridors and Sunrunner corridor slash station areas use, land use, and zoning updates. And this is a staff request, so I'll move approval. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second. No cards on this item? Madam Chair, no cards. And Council Member Driscoll. Thank you. I'm just was wondering, and Council Member Floyd, if you don't know, then, oh, I was just about to check to see if station area was another trigger phrase for you if you'd come out. Is this related to the community discussions that are taking place about the transit station area plans? Yes, this is our next initiative we're bringing forward to you. Okay, because from something that I saw, I didn't see where this was the next step. Is this before it goes to forward Pinellas? It's a little, I'm having a little trouble with the sound because the people outside security is going to go out and ask them to be quiet. Okay. So I can quickly explain where we are. So this next package is looking at the Sunrunner corridor, that activity center, and the station areas, but at the same time, we're going to bring forward changes for the commercial corridors. While we were looking at this next step of making the zoning code to each of the zoning districts that that's how we regulate density intensity in the activity centers, we determined it made sense to bring you the commercial corridor changes as well at one time rather than have two separate packages because they're both involve amendments to the zoning code text. So coming up June, I think it's 21st and 28th will be the design charrettes that are scheduled that are specifically for the two urban stations so we can get community input on those two stations. There will be future land use text amendment that we'll be bringing forward, and we'll be working through the summer and presenting in September at HLUT with your consent. The proposed zoning code text and map changes are what we want to bring to you in September in a workshop format before we bring it to you in a public hearing format, and we'll be continuing to do outreach and work with the community through the summer into the fall. I do have a goal of bringing it to you for adoption in December, but as we go out to the community and we get feedback, hopefully we'll be able to stay with that schedule. But that's the goal is completion by the end of the year. Okay. So August, from the calendar I'm looking at, August was supposed to be first reading. So that is for the comprehensive plan text amendments. What I'm going to be bringing to you in September are the zoning, the specific zoning code changes. I know it's confusing because there's a lot of steps to this. And the piece that has to go to Ford Pinellas and the Board of County Commissioners is that first piece, the text amendment. That's what I thought this was about. Right. So that's what you'll hear first. This will be the follow-up of the zoning piece that only goes to your board for Community Planning and Preservation Commission, the Development Review Commission, and then to you for final adoption. The Ford Pinellas will do a consistency review administratively, but it does not go to their Ford Pinellas board and the Board of County Commissioners for approval. So this was the most expeditious way to get it, to move it forward. And I know it's confusing. So thanks for bearing with me on how we're kind of breaking these pieces up. It's two different parts of the same. Exactly. All related to the same concept and subject area, but with breaking the different steps in a way to try to get us to an end point of the end of this year. All right. Thank you. In your very efficient Liz way, which we always appreciate. I try to do it efficiently, also least confusing way, but sometimes those don't go together. That's okay. Thank you for the clarification. So we have a motion and a second. Thank you. And no cards on this item? Madam Chair, no cards. Okay. Clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve item F1 passes unanimously. All right. We will move on to council committee reports. Take up item G1, which is our H-O-U-T from June 8th. And Council Member Floyd. Thank you, Chair. Yes, I have the council committee report from June 8th, 2023. And we have here a resolution authorizing the mayor or his designee to advertise the city's draft fiscal year 23-24 annual action plan and to execute all other documents necessary to effectuate this resolution. So I'll move approval. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second. Any cards on this item? Madam Chair, no cards. And no requests to speak, so please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve agenda item G1A passes unanimously. And we will now go to item G2, which is the BF&T committee for June 15th. Council Member Gerdes. Thank you, Madam Chair. I am respectfully requesting approval of a resolution amending the city's investment policy, municipal funds, and alternate investment policy to delete certain specifically prohibited investments and investment objectives due to changes in state law. And I'll move approval. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. No cards on this item and no requests to speak. Clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, the motion to approve agenda item G2 passes unanimously. All right, City Council, that concludes our business before our public hearings at 5.01. So we've got a 30-minute break. Just wanted to let you know we are not planning on ordering dinner at this time. So if anything changes or we get long, we can always make change to that. But enjoy your 30 minutes. We'll see you back at 5 o'clock. And take up item I-1 and I-2, our preliminary assessments. We're joined by Coates Compliance Assistant Director, Joe Waugh. Move approval, I-1 and I-2. Second. There we are. We have any cards on this item? Okay, and no requests to speak. So clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, agenda item I-1 and I-2 passes unanimously. Thank you. Is there a problem? They're good. He thought he missed. Okay, thank you. He thought he missed. Okay. Thank you. All right, very good. Thank you, Mr. Waugh. All right, we will move on to item I-3. Clerk, please read the title. I-3, proposed ordinance number 1152-V. An ordinance approving the vacation of a 20-foot wide north-south alley, generally located at 685 and 699 First Avenue North and 694 Arlington Avenue North, between lot 15 of Wright's addition to Orange Park addition and lots 22 and 25 of the Gulf Peninsula Improvement Coast subdivision, setting forth conditions for the vacation to become effective and providing for an effective date. And I have no cards for I-3. Move approval, I-3. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Do we have any cards on this item? No. And no request to speak? No, Madam Chair. Clerk, please open the machine for voting. You have to clear from, I think, the last one. No, that's the last vote. I have my apologies. No, you're fine. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, Clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, agenda item I-3 passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you for being here. All right, we will move on to item I-4. Clerk, please read the title. Item I-4, proposed ordinance number 1153-V, an ordinance approving a vacation of a 16-foot wide alley generally located at 1421 Central Avenue, setting forth conditions for the vacation to become effective and providing for an effective date. And we do have some cards. Okay. Good afternoon or good evening now, Mr. Boyard. How are you this evening? Good, thanks. Okay. Do you have a presentation on this item? I do. Move approval. Okay. Second. So we have a motion and a second, but we do have cards on the item, so let's go ahead and go to public comment. Okay. I'm going to call two at a time. When you hear your name, please go to an open podium. State your name and address for the record. You'll have three minutes to address city council. First two speakers are Brian Dion and Jake Holhaus. I do have a presentation as well that was submitted. Has his presentation been viewed already? It has. It has? Okay. Mr. Holhaus, if you want to go to the other podium, so when we're ready for you. The applicant, is he the applicant? Yes. Represent. Yeah. You do have three minutes, so are you? Yes, we're ready. That's okay. Let me see here. One moment, please. It's the staff and Mrs. Booker Creek, the applicant. Can you turn the lights? Okay. Please. Good evening. My name is Brian Dion from Johnson Pope, 491st Avenue South, St. Petersburg, Florida. This item today is a vacation of an alley located generally between 1421 and 1431 Central Avenue. Along Central, the alley is a 16-foot wide alley, and it bisects four lots owned by my client, Booker Creek Ventures, LLC. This is a picture of the plat with the alley being highlighted therein. This is a zoomed-in portion of the properties along Central and the alley. I do want to call to your attention that the northwest to southeast portion of the alley is not part of the vacate request, and Booker Creek shown on this plat is completely private property, and we have a survey that also shows that. This is our legal and sketch that was provided that is also going to be part of the ordinance should it be approved. This is a zoomed-in portion of the alley that's being vacated. This is the alley from Central looking south, I'm sorry, looking north to the property. It's the brick portion of the alley, and this is it looking north towards Central. The property is locally owned by a private company intended to be used as a green bench brewing site, which is a local business through a long-term lease. Green bench brewing is signing a long-term lease with the property owner. This is a rough concept of the site. As you can see, the creek is on the right-hand side of the site, and they would utilize the alley as the alley vacate portion as open space. This matter went to Development Review Commission on March 1st, and they recommended approval. There are five criteria that need to be met by the petitioner. The first one is that there is inclusive of any drainage, pedestrian easements that would need to be retained. There's three special conditions that were provided by staff. The first one is that all utility providers have to find off and not oppose or not object. We have the no objections from all utility providers. The second one was a stormwater easement is required. This is a preliminary plat that we provided that shows Boca Creek, again, on private property. And in the south portion, there is a requirement for an easement, a stormwater easement, so that there can be adequate city access to maintain the creek, which we have already agreed to provide. These are the surrounding properties to the alley. Again, they're all owned privately. Criteria three would be if there's an adverse impact from the alley, which, per staff report, there is not any adversion from the vacate. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Holhouse, did you have a presentation as well? I do not have a presentation. Okay, then please begin your three minutes. Good evening. My name is Jake Holhouse, 3443 First Avenue North, St. Petersburg. I am one of the partners of Booker Creek Venture. So, you know, we've got this warehouse there that we've had vacant for about 20 years. We've been talking to Nathan and Steve from Green Bench Brewing about how to do something cool that's really, you know, community-centric and has a, you know, new brewery-type concept similar to what they've done, as we've seen the creek side there. And in research with Nathan, we found that, you know, state statute does not allow them to have the warehouse and then have alcohol transported across the city alleyway over to be able to allow somebody to enjoy the courtyard there. And so, as a result of that, we came here to request a vacation of the alley. Thank you. Thank you. Any more cards on this item? Yes. Nathan Stonecipher and Roger Curlin, please go to an open podium. You'll have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Nathan Stonecipher at 2476 Avenue North in St. Petersburg. I'll be very brief. I'm one of the co-owners of Green Bench Brewing Company. We've been visioning this project for the last five or six years and have always really appreciated and enjoyed the creek front in this location, and it's never been enjoyed by a large group of people before. Most of the residents in St. Petersburg do not know that this even exists. It's our goal to create a quaint, beautiful, unique environment for people to enjoy our product, I hope. As well as the creek front there, and it's as simple as that. The reason we're doing this, as Jake stated, was because we can't transfer alcohol from the warehouse to the landscape creek side without the alley vacation, and it's our hope that we get this approved, and then the entire city of St. Petersburg can enjoy this space. Thanks so much. Thank you. Roger Curlin, 4535 6th Avenue North. I am the Executive Director of the Edge Business District Association, and we are here as our board in support of the alley vacation. And as the previous speakers have stated, this will enhance the district and actually increase the number of people that can enjoy that beautiful area. Thank you. Our last speaker is Leslie Curran. Leslie, please go to an open podium. You have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Thank you. Leslie Curran, 1234 Dr. Martin Luther King Street North. Thank you for the opportunity. I'll just really agree with the previous speakers. I had my gallery in that location for almost 10 years and can tell you it's a beautiful site. It's too bad that more people don't see it because that alleyway is the only public part of that property. The rest is all private property. So I think that the idea that Nathan Stonecipher and his partners have to open it up is really a benefit to the community. And really, if we want to do anything to help Booker Creek, maybe one of the things we need to look into is a master plan for the entire Booker Creek. Because there are other portions of it, north and south, that can use some upgrading. And really, kudos to Dan Harvey, who has gone above and beyond over the years, really beautifying that creek, holding cleanups. And I think it's really a good idea and would ask for your approval. Thank you. No more speakers? Okay. And did we have a motion and a second at the beginning, I think? Yes. Seeing no request to speak, clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, agenda item I-4 passes unanimously. Very good. We will move on now to item I-5. Clerk, please read the title. In the item I-5, proposed ordinance number 546-H, an ordinance concerning the regulation of rights of way, sidewalks, and other public paths for vehicular or pedestrian travel within the city, making findings related to such regulation, amending city code to restate the regulation, prohibiting the placement of tables on the right-of-way to include table light objects, and to expand the area in which the regulation applies, and providing an effective date. And we do have a number of cards. Okay. And we are joined by our police legal advisor manager, Laura Rowe. Do you have a presentation for us this evening? I do. Okay, council, would you like to see the presentation on this item? No, it doesn't sound like it, so why don't we just go ahead and go to our public comment, and then maybe council will have some questions afterwards. Thank you very much. Okay, very good. So let's call two at a time, please. Okay. When I call your name, please go to an open podium. You have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Jeffrey Hilaire and Jake Joffman. You can start, sir. Okay. Hello, my name is Jeffrey Hilaire, and I want to state that I'm against ordinance. Sir, I need you to state your address for the record, please. Okay, 2211 North Florida Avenue. Okay, my name is Jeffrey Hilaire, and I want to state that I'm against ordinance 546H for many reasons. First off, how someone provides for their family is what you may see, the table that's out on the sidewalks, and it's considered to be a public nuisance. In front of the bus station is where I normally go. There were three people that needed an ambulance, and we called them due to them almost passing out. And others, we help others to make issues, make calls. In the 90-degree heat, we're there with bottled waters and cold drinks on the side of our tables. We have set up on sidewalks, so believe it or not, we're servicing the community. Biden passed the EBB during the COVID time, which is the ACP program, and the sole mission is to get free Internet out to the families who couldn't afford it likewise. So that's why you see people like myself set up outside of the Grand Central Station, along with other companies giving out devices to the community. This has been an opportunity to employ individuals who can't keep traditional hours of a job due to their unique schedule. Now they're able to earn an honest living and help the community because the government reimburses companies for tablets given out to the community. And honestly, it's been a win-win for everyone except the individuals that don't understand, and they see it as a nuisance. So they basically bully us off of sidewalks, bus stations, and other locations where there's a lot of high traffic and make it able to, and so able to, okay, so I was told by an officer that I had, in order to do business on the sidewalk, I had to get a permit from the city hall, and when I went to the city hall, the clerks, they had nothing that they can give me. So that puts me in an awkward position. You know, how I see my, how I see it is this program has three years left, and with inflation going on and rising prices, letting us, I think it's the only right thing to do to let us continue to do business and peace. Whether you issue us a permit to be on those sidewalks with tables and tents or give us, it doesn't matter, just give us an opportunity to be able to choose, again, you know, the type of job that we chose to have. Everybody's not cut out for a traditional job. Anyways, I want to leave with these words. It says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not every aspiring business owner can afford to lease or purchase real estate starting out, so being able to set up a table on a sidewalk is the next best thing. So I just want to leave with that. Hello, my name is Jake Gaffan, and I live at 10070 South Yacht Club Drive, Treasure Island. I urge the members of the council to vote no because this bill would severely limit my organization's ability to distribute Narcan across the intended area, as well as many other community organizations' ability to carry out their jobs efficiently and effectively. In addition to that, living in St. Pete and growing up here, something that has always been like an activity of my friends and I, especially being a part of the MIRA program at St. Pete College, was going out and busking or going out and engaging with the people who are out on our streets, adding to our cultural life of our city. And it really is nerve-wracking that this bill is going through, not only because of its lack of care towards our homeless friends and neighbors, and our friends working towards community organizations, but it's going to hurt the cultural lifeblood of the city. So I urge you to vote no. Thank you very much. Next two speakers. Melissa Thorpe and William Kilgore. Please go to an open podium. You have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Hello, my name is Melissa Thorpe, 4,000 24th Street North, St. Pete. There's no need for this law to be expanded. I walk around St. Petersburg all the time, and I'm not bothered by any tables or other aspects this unjust law addresses. And I'm, frankly, a clumsy person, and it just doesn't bother me. These small vendors are part of the fabric of St. Pete, part of what makes our city great. Tourists enjoy our street musicians. That's what you care about, right? Tourists, money, money at the end of the day. I see tourists dancing around the Janus block on the weekends, and those are the kind of stories people tell their friends, and then their friends come down here to visit. I don't think we should violate the First Amendment rights of the most marginalized members of our city, our homeless population. If a homeless person wants to write their needs or situation on a piece of cardboard, the government should stay out of it. It's none of your business. You will not deny those of us who choose kindness, compassion, and generosity the opportunity. We are done with this government overreach. The very First Amendment right we acknowledge is freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and writing on cardboard is protected speech. Stop violating the rights of our most vulnerable neighbors. We are a community who cares, and we demand our local laws and ordinances reflect that. Thank you. Hey, thanks, Chair. My name is William Kilgore. I reside in the Ponce de Leon neighborhood. I'm with the St. Petersburg Tenants Union. Yeah, here to speak, echo these comments. I know I was here at the first hearing. I sent you out an email this afternoon. If you didn't see it, please give it a look over. Look, so look at what's happening out front of the council chamber, you know, right now, out front of City Hall. We've got tables set up, podiums, things like that. You know, our group frequently does that. I know you all know that. We set up a table outside of City Hall and things like that. And this is taking away not just that, but because of the definition of these covered items, things like I mentioned, podiums, street performers, props used by them. That is going to be a big issue. This is broadly worded at best. It's lazy legislation, frankly, but at worst, it's just a way to drive people out of the city, working people out of the city, all at the behest of real estate capital. I think it's shameful. I think it needs to be stopped. You all need to stop and think about what you all are doing, you know, because, you know, and like Melissa mentioned, the homeless issue, you know, you've got a shopping cart or something. I know I mentioned this last time, but you have a sign affixed to it on that item. People, it's causing people to gather, just as the, you know, law enforcement, legal counsel explained, you know, it's an item. It's not, it doesn't necessarily have to be a table, but it's something that's causing people to gather, and then that becomes a covered item. And that's a huge problem because it allows officers to just seize the property. You're taking out the written warning, the official warning, so, you know, it's the cop's word against yours whether or not they gave you a warning, you know, because we're tracking, and we are tracking what they're doing to the homeless population with some of these other ordinances, like the sleeping ordinance, which they've increased enforcement, by the way, this year. They've got 118 citations for that. Homeless people are disproportionately affected by municipal violations. It's just used to target people and incarcerate, and it's all happening very quietly. You know, the homeless folks aren't speaking out about it, you know, and people aren't seeing it, and it just seems like everything's going fine. You know, but I'm concerned for our organizing groups like us who are critical of the city government. Now it's chilling our speech. It's chilling our speech because we have to look over our shoulders, and we've got a giant group of cops like we do right now out front of this peaceful, wonderful event. Y'all should come and join it after. You know, I mean, it's, you know, it just, it's one more thing that we have to worry about being hassled about, and that's a problem. And we don't need this in the city. The street performers, all these people who are going to be affected, these folks are what give our city charm and appeal in all of that. So I urge you to vote no. Vote no, and we're going to keep an eye on it, and we're going to keep cracking it if it passes and see what's happening. So thank you. Next two speakers. Carla Correa and Syl Molston. Please go to an open podium. You have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Please. Go ahead. Okay. My name is Syl Molston. I live at 76 4th Street North, Suite 1396 in St. Pete. Yeah. And I am, I'm against agenda item I-5 today. I'm involved with an organization called Food Not Bombs that regularly serves the homeless in Williams Park and Mirror Lake. And that would, this law would dramatically hinder our ability to serve our most needy citizens, the people who are at their lowest of their low, are struggling just to get food and water. And this law is an active attack on people who are already suffering so much. It is cruel. It is cruel. It is, it's uncaring. There is no soul. This is soulless. And this is also going to affect the artistic ability of our, of our city. The thing that draws so many people here, so many tourists, so many incomes, so many jobs. And, you know, a lot of artists, like the people who made this painting and that one, started off making things on the street and selling to people who would buy, and they built up from there. And not only are, is this bill going to hurt homeless people, is it going to hurt marginalized people, it's also going to hurt our future children, because we're going to lose so many pieces like that, because the government decided to clamp down when no one was being hurt and stop them from ever being able to paint that. And especially in a time when the LGBTQ community in Florida is under attack, laws like these that allow more pushing down on protesters and infringements on free speech are a threat, especially in, in Florida right now with DeSantis trying to make it illegal to be trans. And it's, I just think this, and it goes against the values of any, anything, any American politician stands to stand for, which is the Constitution. And it goes against the First Amendment and attacks the working class. You know, this is an attack on, you know, I imagine many of your constituents and many of the people who voted for you and gave you this power and this responsibility to serve them. This is attacking them. No one, the, the people, the majority of people who voted for you don't benefit from this. The people who gave you money did, but that's not who you're beholden to in our, in a democracy. That is all. Thank you. Carla Correa, 345 Fifth Avenue North. I'm here with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the St. Pete Tenants Union. And of course, we're here to demand that all council members vote no on the expansion of the table ban, which is really a ban on free expression in downtown public spaces in an attempt to further criminalize poor and working class people. Instead of expanding police powers to harass artists, protesters, and the most vulnerable in our city, the homeless who would be subject to citation or arrest and seizure of property under the expansion. The city council needs to be focused on solving the most pressing issues that plague residents here in St. Pete like the rapidly accelerating cost of living for workers. As we speak, residents are rallying outside starting at 6 PM, demanding that the Tropicana Field be kept public and not sold off to developers who see nothing but an investment opportunity in this city that we call home. The demand is also that the land be used for public housing, which is desperately needed to release the burden of working class people here in St. Pete. A recent report by FAU revealed that in order to not be rent burdened here in the St. Pete area, one must make at least $85,000. It's time that we as workers stand up for ourselves and not allow city council to make these decisions in favor of the ultra-rich without opposition. Mayor Welch is proposing a whopping $17 million increase to the police budget. We're seeing massive investments in police in cities all across the country as conditions worsen. And what do the police do? What is the role of the police in our society? It's to protect the system that we live under and to protect the rich. But people are only going to take this for so long. People are organizing everywhere you see. We're seeing an uptick in labor militancy everywhere. We're seeing an uptick in protesters for the LGBTQ community and for public education and for every other issue. We need to continue organizing around our needs. If you are listening to this and you are against this measure, please join us tomorrow at the UU St. Pete at 7 p.m. for the St. Petersburg Tenants Union meeting. Anything that we demand, we're not going to get it unless we organize. Thank you. Next two speakers, Lydia Guevara and Emily Fuchs. Please go to an open podium. You have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. And while you're coming to the podiums, I just want to remind everyone that the rules state that we are to stay on the topic that is being voted on. So if you could please make sure you do that in your comments. Thank you. Please, go ahead. My name is Lydia Guevara. I live at 3455 2nd Avenue North. I'm here with the St. Petersburg Tenants Union. And I'm here to tell you to reject this amendment. This amendment is targeting homeless people, protesters, and performers. Homelessness should not be criminalized even further, especially when rent is becoming increasingly unaffordable and you will not put money towards housing people or offering sufficient support services. And so many people are suffering, a lot of which comes from the action or inaction of our city government. And people deserve to be able to protest it on our own sidewalks. Performance or performers and artists deserve to be able to make a living. It is already hard enough. This amendment would only benefit the wealthy and corporations. It is cruel and should be voted down. That's all. Thank you. Hi, my name is Emily Fuchs and 76 4th Avenue, sorry, 4th Streets North. And I am against item number I-5. I have seen the city of St. Pete make many mistakes over the years. They will always say that this is about public safety. You will say it is going to help manage the city better. It's going to help with development. It's going to help with tourists, but it never is about those things. It may be about tourism, but it's always anti-homeless. It's always anti-low income. It's always going to cause rent increases. It's always to push artists out. It's always going to push out people who have been here for generations in favor of developers, in favor of police initiatives. It's never going, never is about public. And it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate it always turns this way. Because, you know, the average person may look at this and be like, well, what do they complain about? It's just a table. It's just a table. But no, it's not just a table. I work for an organization, Florida Harm Reduction Collective, and we pass out Narcan. We pass out HIV self-test kits. We pass out water, food for houseless and low-income people and people at risk for overdose. And we need to be able to do that. We need to be able to do that in accessible areas. We don't need it to have vaguely written laws that could cause this not be possible because it, I mean, as we see the state of Florida, the protests are really under attack, and I don't want anything that would just be so vaguely written to feed more into that. And I really urge you to really consider what you're doing. I want to urge you to consider the things you vote on, to consider your actions, how they will affect the future. They will affect the future. They will affect how people will enforce these ordinances, enforce these laws, how the police will enforce them for their benefit. It's always, it's never going to help the people it's supposed to help. So, thank you. Thank you. Next speakers. Next two speakers, Austin Willis and Jules Marone. Please go to an open podium. You have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Please, sir. Okay. I live, my name is Austin Willis. I live at 1818 18th Avenue South. I think it's pretty obvious that tables on the sidewalk or on, like, green space next to a sidewalk is not a real problem. Like, I don't think any of us that's ever been a problem in our lives. Like, that's obviously a fake thing. Like, that's not any more real than, like, saying that a person standing on the side of the road panhandling is like a, that's like a huge, like, traffic issue. Like, that's obviously not the reason. You know, these jaywalking laws and stuff, they're not really to keep anybody safe. You know, putting somebody in jail or fining them a fine they can't pay and then putting them in jail, that's not keeping anybody safe. Um, so, yeah, it seems pretty phony to me. Um, it seems clear that the goal of ordinances like this is to protect the consumer experience of, you know, yuppies, people with disposable income that can go downtown and they can go to bars and restaurants and spend a lot of money without ever having the displeasure of having to look at a poor person or, God forbid, be asked for money. You know, like, I understand that's really scary for some people for some reason. So, this is just the next step in, like, pushing people away to that end because it makes developers more money. They get more sales. And, um, you know, property values go up and stuff. And, like, you know, when you make sleeping illegal, that's obviously directly targeting the homeless. You know, when you make panhandling illegal, that's obviously it's directly targeting the homeless. You know, they got nowhere else to sleep. They got nowhere else to go ask for money. Um, and this is targeted at groups like Food Not Bombs, uh, you know, that act as kind of like a rock for people. It's like a place you can go every week and, uh, eat and, uh, hang out with your friends and discuss your problems, discuss whatever, what's going on in the city. And if you can't lay all the food out on a table, how is that going to happen? You know, it's a beautiful community thing where everybody can come together. It doesn't cost the city a dime. It's a beautiful, organic thing where people in the community can come together and share food and share each other's time and be happy like a real community. And you people just want to destroy that for no reason. Like, if I, it's like, it's like one of the few things that you can be proud of as somebody who lives in St. Pete that something like Food Not Bombs exists and you just want to destroy it for what, for what? Um, and yeah, I mean, there, that, it's not just Food Not Bombs, you know, there's plenty of like Christian charity groups that just decide one day, I want to go out to the park and feed people because Jesus told me to or whatever. And, uh, you know, now you're criminalizing that and that seems pretty evil to me. Uh, and it's just taking away people's freedom. Like, I want, if I want to set up a table, I should be able to set up a table. Why not? You know, it's a free country, right? It's supposed to be a free country. My name is Jules Marone and I live at 445 Del Mar Terrace South. And I'm here today because I not only agree with everything that everyone before me has said, I'm also here to bring a voice to the people that some, some of you think you're representing. I only moved here two years ago. I am one of those people that can go out to a bar and spend money. I am the person. Most people will not look at me and know that my brother was homeless for five years. And that is something that is very important to me to bring justice to not only his situation, but to the people of St. Petersburg that were affected by the drug epidemic that we all know that Florida played a huge role in. And now, you know, 10, 15 years later, we're seeing the aftermath of that. People deserve to be able to be on sidewalks. They are public places for people to gather. I spend my time on a lot of the sidewalks of St. Pete, sometimes right next to an unhoused individual. People with a soul will not care that they are near homeless people because they, too, deserve dignity. And this ordinance directly harms them. And I strongly urge the council to reconsider and vote no so that people, artists, people who, artists bring people to St. Pete. I moved here because St. Pete was an artist district. And this protesters' pride is coming up. That puts us all at risk that if we want to go to pride, which is something that brings a ton of people to St. Petersburg specifically. We're the largest pride festival in the state. You all know that. So why are we implementing measures that only harm the things that are actually bringing a lot of income into the city, if you think about it? That shouldn't be the most important thing, but I am trying to speak the language of those that are in the positions of power. Thank you. Our final public speaker is Truman Faith. Please go to an open podium. You'll have three minutes to address city council. Please state your name and address for the record. Hello, everyone. My name is Truman Faith. I live in 5167-463. My concern is the possible infringement of the I-5, infringement of the freedom of speech. I was born in China. I grew up there. I was arrested and detained in the concentration camp just because my meditation practice of Falun Dafa, maybe you heard about it, is Qigong-style meditation practice in public areas and focused on the moral self-improvement of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. So I was detained in the concentration camp and tortured to almost death. I have so many scars there. I escaped to the U.S. about 11 years ago to enjoy the freedom and also to defend the freedom. I joined the U.S. Air Force now as a reserve. So after work and also on weekend, I came to the pier to just demonstrate the meditation and also the genocide or the persecution in China. So what I did exactly in China for my harassment is I just, at the time, the government had hundreds of thousands of big banners, like 10 feet long, one by one, on the street to demonize the practice. I just manually wrote the letters on just two inches long, one inch wide, the dark tape, and then put them in the public areas. Just because of that, I was detained and tortured to almost death. But I'm still lucky because I didn't die. Many people died for that, just for that, just for one to speak or to just show. So, you know, I was arrested just because two inches long sleep, but the government can, you know, use all resources to demonize you. So that's my concern. Now I'm concerned whether my freedom of speech, just of demonstration, will be, you know, eliminated or deprived in public areas. So if you, if we don't have freedom of speech in public area, it will lose everything, including your life, maybe. So that's my concern. Thank you so much. Thank you. The final speaker? Yes, ma'am. Okay. City Council? Council Member Driscoll. Thank you. And I think we have some city staff here. Chief DeMonte is here and others from the police department. I wanted to thank everyone who spoke on this item. I really want to focus on clarifying some misconceptions about the ordinance, which actually has already been in place for a while now. So we have some history to look at, which really should guide us as we look at this vote today to expand these boundaries. So I wanted to find out, Laura, since, since the ordinance was first put into place, do we have, do we have a record of different citations that have been given or what's the history on the enforcement of this? We've only written one citation under this ordinance, and it was to a gentleman that asked us to write him the citation. Most of the time when officers make contact with individuals who are in violation of this ordinance and educate them, they're able to move their table to an area where tables are allowed and permissible and continue their conduct on, you know, untroubled by further police contacts. The one individual that we made contact with just felt very passionately that he should be allowed to place his table where he had it placed, and he asked us for the citation so he could fight it that way. So that's why we issued the one citation. Okay, okay. Any formal complaints or lawsuits regarding violations of the First Amendment or anything that we should be made aware of? No, ma'am. Okay, okay, and the ordinance really doesn't address anything other than tables and table-like objects, right? And has there been any issue with that? Because that has been, that's already in place. So has there, have we had any issues with those definitions in conversations between the police and folks who have objects in the sidewalk? If I understand your correction, is there, are you asking if there's any confusion for folks who are out in the right-of-way as to what is or is not a table and whether or not it's allowed? To that end, no. Once officers have been able to educate folks on what is permissible and what is not, it's, like I said, we've had great compliance with this issue. The issues that we see are that tables are starting to appear on rights-of-way in other parts of the city, and they're really starting to expand their scope. And as the city increases areas that pedestrians want to visit and want to walk to, more walkable areas of the city, these tables are a much greater concern because they're blocking that access. So pedestrians who want to use the right-of-way are unable to, they actually have to step into the roadway to walk around tables. Okay. And that kind of leads me to asking, and maybe Chief DeMonte can help out with this, as far as for emergency services. I mean, you're the top guy when it comes to determining what constitutes a clear path for safety reasons, whether that's a hallway out here or a sidewalk downtown. Right. Thanks for having me here tonight. And I think it's fair to say that I recognize there's a lot of emotion tied around this issue, and I understand people want to express themselves, and there's certainly a time and a place for all that to take place. It's not for me to decide where and how that should take place. I think I just want to speak generally about what we are responsible for in the fire service when we're called for service for either a fire emergency or medical emergency in a rescue situation. For us, there's really three main points that kind of tie into part of this, and I'll let you be the judge how much of this really applies. We have ingress issues into buildings and structures and us arriving at a scene and parking in the street and then making our way. As quickly as possible into a building to render aid, whether it's medical emergency or a fire emergency, anything really that stands between us and in the entryway to a building could potentially slow our response, getting us into a building and providing the aid that we've been when called to provide. So, you know, whether that's tables, you name it, anything that's between us and getting in quickly is potentially a problem for us. And I'm not here to regulate what exactly happens on those sidewalks and those patios and the permits, but that's certainly a concern for us. We always work around it and we navigate and we do the best we can as quickly as possible. Another issue that is probably a little bit more important here is not so much ingress into a building, but it's egress from a building. So when there is a fire emergency that requires people to exit a building very quickly, especially in a large commercial or residential building, we definitely have code that guides us and says you need to have this much width available when you're exiting a building. And it really requires that exit width to be maintained out to the public way, so it has to get people away from a building safely and quickly in an orderly manner and get them out to the public way, not just out the door of the building and then running into a large group of people or tables or easels or whatever might be set up in there. So we really want to see open egress available to the occupants of the building in the event that they have to get out. And I think the third thing that a lot of folks don't think about with what we do is there's a few things that we really count on when we're doing our job, and that's having access to fire hydrants that oftentimes, and especially in the downtown area, are kind of close to buildings on sidewalks. We have fire department connections on buildings that people walk by all the time. They have no idea what they do, but it's really important for us to have access to get to those very quickly and put our hoses into the building and augment the life safety systems in the building. So those are really kind of the three issues that cause some concern for us. So, again, I'm not here to speak for or against, just want to put that out there that those are concerns and things that we think about when we're providing our services. Thank you. And that's why we have plenty of regulations around sidewalk cafes and why they have to have a permit. And there is a limit to the number of tables and chairs that a sidewalk cafe can have and where they have them is very specific because of the reasons that you've given here. So that's why we allow it, but they have to follow some pretty strict guidelines on that. That's true, and that is also kind of a moving target, though. I know those permits are given for that to take place, and those tables oftentimes are not permanently mounted somewhere, and those can migrate a little here and there. And I think sometimes that the owner-operators don't quite understand the significance of exactly where those things should be to allow us that access into the building and give occupants the way out. Right, and even with those businesses, I think it was last year or the year before, we increased the required sidewalk width that they have to allow. So because, just like with this, we're looking at a city that's got a higher level of pedestrian traffic, and we've got to make sure that we maintain safety. Yes, ma'am. All right. Thank you so much. Now, Laura, regarding the areas, there was more than one comment from the public with concerns about not being able to have a table or table-like structure or pass out information in our parks. Could you speak to that for a moment? This ordinance would not apply to parks or other green spaces throughout the city. So if you are having a table in the park and you're feeding the homeless or whatever other, you know, good work that you want to do, this ordinance would not apply to you. This is limited to exclusively rights-of-way, and it's for exactly the same reasons that Chief Diamante just explained. And I would also note that if you are able to request and get a permit from the city in order to place your table, so beyond just a sidewalk cafe permit, that's an opportunity for the city to look at those things, like where fire hydrants are placed and where that access is, and we can help guide you in where you put that table if it's adjacent to or on the right-of-way, and make sure that it's placed safely so that everyone can maintain that access. That's one of the reasons that this does not apply to folks who have a permit to be on the right-of-way. It does not apply to park spaces. That's not the kind of areas that we're concerned with here. It's really just the right-of-way. Right. Okay. All right. Great. Thank you so much. That's all I have for now. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Floyd. Thank you. I just wanted to get clarification on one thing that was brought up earlier about just businesses on the sidewalk, because we talked about this previously. It was like we were talking about donations and how, you know, selling things needs to be a permitted activity, but, you know, one speaker brought up giving things away but getting reimbursed by the government. Is legitimate business operations affected by this? It's like things like that. They're entitled to use the sidewalk right now, and I just wonder if you can speak to that at all. I want to make sure that I understand the question that you're asking. Are you asking if there's a distinction between a table that's being used for commercial activity and a table that's being used for non-commercial activity? I guess, yes, but I think to be more clarifying and direct, right now, if you wanted to operate as a commercial business on a sidewalk, you'd have to have some sort of permit or authorization, correct? Yes, sir. To do so lawfully. Indeed. Yeah, yeah, and that doesn't mean that's not even if, like, even if you're not selling things, maybe you're providing a service or you're. There are other types of commercial activity that's not just selling goods. Yeah, yeah, because when we talked about this previously, there was people doing this but requesting donations, and so that was sort of how they were skirting around that? Yes. Okay, okay. Okay, and could a legitimate business be requesting donations? I'm not familiar with any of the examples of conduct that we've kind of dealt with related to this in the past, being an example of a legitimate business that's out there, and instead of conducting the business that they are accustomed to, they are instead asking for donations. The more usual pattern that we found is that there are folks who are trying to sort of get around the requirement that you need a permit in order to engage in commercial activity and business and selling and vending in the right-of-way. And by doing so, to do that, they are setting up a table, they're offering, like, goods for display, or they're providing a service. Maybe they're, you know, making something for somebody or something like that. I don't know. But they're, maybe they're letting someone hold their snake for 10 minutes and take a picture with it or something like that, right? And they are saying, look, we're out here, you know, if you want to give us a donation, give us a donation. But, you know, snake photos are free today. You can give us a donation if you like your snake photo. And if that's the situation, really what they're doing is engaging in commercial activity in the right-of-way, but by calling it a donation, we're not able to use any of the enforcement mechanisms that we have for that kind of conduct under city code. And so that's why we have this table ordinance to get at the real heart of this, which is blocking the right-of-way. Okay. Thanks for that clarification. I'll just reiterate what I said last time. I understand the impetus for this, and I definitely see where we're having some issues in the city. But whenever I, and not but, in addition, I see how PD has given us every reason to believe that they would use this sparingly. But I have to vote on something that is probably going to exist 10 years from now when it's a different administration and different police officers and different PD. And so I'm looking at it as, is this something that has the potential to disproportionately impact people, unequitably impact people? And it could. I don't believe it will, but it could in the future. And so that's where my concern falls for it. But I really appreciate you giving the clarification. Thanks. Council Member Muhammad. Thank you, Madam Chair. Council Member, if I may have a moment to just make a brief clarification. So just to be clear, in addition to the right-of-way, this would also cover walkways within a peer district. It would cover walkways within a public park, landscaped areas, bushes and grasses that could get trampled on and damaged, but not grassy areas within the peer district or a park. So just to be clear about the scope of this, it does go beyond what's technically the right-of-way, but all of the grassy areas, as Ms. Rowe said, are outside the scope of this. Thank you. Right. And these areas of vegetation are immediately sort of appurtenant to a right-of-way or another walkway or pathway, just like Brett said. Council Member Muhammad. Thank you. So I just want to make sure that I heard it right. So you said it's only been one citation that has been written, and that one was requested? Yes, sir. Okay. And so that means it's not like a wide-scale problem or a huge issue that we're dealing with currently? It's not something that we have to deal with with issuing citations. Anytime that we're looking into a municipal ordinance violation, and I could have someone else speak to that, we engage in education first. We have the evaluation period, the education period, and then we take enforcement action. And this is not something that we have to often engage in an actual enforcement on. Right. So that means our community policing is working. You're having a conversation with people. You ask them to comply. People comply. Would you say that that's the case? Okay. All right. And so what we're proposing is something that's, I hate to use this word, but it sounds like preemptive, like we're trying to get in front of something that we see coming? It's not. It's actually something that we are currently seeing and experiencing. It's just that because of the existing ordinance, it applies to a very narrow area of downtown, and we're now starting to see the same activity that was really limited in scope to that sort of main downtown area expand down to the pier district and expand west, even down to 34th. We have more areas that are being created that are walkable, more areas of development that are going through, and that's why we are concerned about preserving those pedestrian pathways and right-of-way in those areas. And we don't think a conversation would be able to handle that like we're handling it currently? We would actually engage in the same sort of enforcement that we're currently engaged in the current prohibited zone. Our strategy for enforcement would not change. We would still engage in evaluation, education, before any sort of enforcement action were taken. That's the philosophy of policing that we employ. That's the philosophy of policing we've employed since this ordinance was initially enacted. That's why we only have one citation for it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Okay. Well, we have a motion and a second, I believe, from way earlier, I think, or did we not? Okay. I'll move approval. I'll second. All right. So motion and second. Seeing no further requests to speak, clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Seeing as all council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, agenda item I, 5, passes 5 to 3, with Council Member Driscoll, Gabbard, Gerdes, Hanowitz, Montaneri, voting yes. Vic Sanders, Floyd, and Mohamed voting no. Thank you. We will now move to item I, 6, our quasi-judicial proceedings. Clerk, can you please read the title? And first, before you do legal, we have ordinance A and B on this. So can we take those together? Yeah. Okay. The clerk could read both, and then you can vote on both. Very good. Will you please read both titles, please? You may actually wait and see it. Looks like several people are leaving the chamber, so we'll give it just a second. Proposed ordinance number 755-L, an ordinance amending the future land use map of the comprehensive plan for the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, by changing the future land use map designation for a 0.79-acre parcel located at 118 66th Street North from residential slash office general to planned redevelopment mixed use. Paul, would you please state the abbreviation there, too? Okay. The R slash OG. Located at 118 66th Street North from residential slash office general R slash OG to planned redevelopment mixed use PR-MU, providing for repeal of conflicting ordinances and provisions thereof, and providing an effective date. Proposed ordinance number 787-Z, an ordinance amending the official zoning map of the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, by changing the zoning of a 0.79-acre parcel located at 118 66th Street North from corridor residential suburban dash one CRS dash one to corridor residential traditional dash one CRT dash one, providing for repeal of conflicting ordinances and provisions thereof, and providing an effective date, and we do have one card. And will you please go ahead and swear everyone in? Speaking on this item, do you swear or affirm that the evidence you're about to give will be the truth? We'll begin with a presentation by city administration. Yes, good evening. Britton Wilson, city planner for the record. Presenting amendments to the future land use map and official zoning atlas for a 0.79-acre site located at 118 66th Street North, initiated by 3W LLC. And the purpose of this amendment, as stated by the applicant, is to allow for the development of 19 townhomes. This is an area of the subject property, which is located within a larger triangular-shaped land area. The subject site consists of an east-facing double lot, containing one single-family home that was built in 1954. To the north are three more single-family homes. To the south is a single-family home that was converted into office space. To the west, separated by a 16-foot-wide paved alleyway, is the Park Vendome condominiums, which consists of two three-story walk-up multifamily buildings built in 1968. And north of the condos are four townhomes. To the south of First Avenue North is a Walgreens, and the west-central shopping center, where the 66th Street Sunrunner Bus Station is located on the east side of the parking lot. As identified in the comprehensive plans future major streets map, the subject site is encompassed by three major roadways of Pasadena Avenue North, 66th Street North, and First Avenue North. This is the future land use map, showing the subject site designated Residential Office General, or ROG, which is proposed for amendment to Planned Redevelopment Mixed Use, or PRMU, and the hatched area represents the Central Avenue Corridor Activity Center overlay that provides an increase in residential density and development intensity, as this area has been identified as an appropriate location for concentrated development. This is a zoning map, showing the site as currently zoned Corridor Residential Suburban, or CRS1, which is proposed for amendment to Corridor Residential Traditional, or CRT1, to be consistent with the abutting property to the south and the 1st Ave North parcels that are also zoned CRT1. The property to the west is zoned Neighborhood Suburban Multifamily, or NSM1, and to the south and southwest is Corridor Commercial Suburban, or CCS1. And the subject site, along with the joining three lots to the north, were all rezoned in 2020-12 from NT3 to the current CRS1 for the purpose of office space that never came to fruition. The change in zoning from CRS1 to CRT1 will provide for an increase in residential density by seven units. It will double the potential for non-residential development intensity, but the height and the impervious surface requirement will remain the same. And there is a slight increase in the allowable workforce housing density bonus. As noted in the staff report, the proposed amendments are consistent with many policies of the comprehensive plan. And to highlight a few here, the proposal furthers these policies as the subject site is located on or near three major roadways served by the Sunrunner Rapid Transit, and is in keeping with the character and the established zoning pattern of the area. The requested amendments also further the recommendations of the Sunrunner Development Study, as the subject site is located within a short 325-foot walk from the existing 66th Street bus station located in the Central West Shopping Center, and where the subject area is identified by the study as having potential for redevelopment with higher density and intensity than what the current zoning allows for. The plan also calls for traditional walkable building and development formation. And this study was accepted by City Council last April. Included in your packet are ten public comments. One in support of the proposal, two in support with conditions, and seven comments in opposition. The condition of support is a site plan related condition to be addressed at the time my site plan review, as they are requesting that any redevelopment of the site be accessed by 66th Street and not use the shared alleyway. The other concerns are related to the increase in density or intensity. And with that, staff recommends a finding of consistency with the comprehensive plan and to approve the proposed future land use change to PRMU and zoning change to CRT1 because it furthers provisions of the comprehensive plan as it is consistent with the neighborhood's established land use and zoning pattern and is consistent with the Sunrunner Development Study. And that concludes my presentation. Myself and the applicant are here to answer any questions you may have. Okay, and now we'll move to a presentation by the applicant. No presentation. And there is no opponent. Correct? Legal? That's correct. There's no registered opponent, Chair. Okay. So then we will go then to cross. No, there's no cross. Public comment now. Okay. So how many cards do we have on the item? Just one? Okay, please. Tim Luecking, please go to an open podium. State your name and address for the record. You'll have three minutes to address City Council. Tim Luecking, 6645 First Avenue North. I just want to address that the traffic in the area right now is pretty bad. We do have numerous accidents at the corner of 66th Street and First Avenue North. We have no traffic like at the end of First Avenue North and South Pasadena. But also 19 homes on .79 acres is going to bring a lot more congestion in that area. Plus just a lot inconsistent with what is along 66th Street now, which is basically single family homes. We fought years ago to keep, when they did change the zoning, to keep the alleyway from being used by that property because it is just that. It's an alleyway and we don't want that used because of our own cars backing out. We don't have really enough land there not to use the alleyway to back out. It's also 55 or older in my building, which most of them are older. It's still drive. We have approximately probably 22 to 25 permanent residents there, where if you're looking at 19 multifamily units, just saying that you might possibly have two in each unit, let's say 40 people, 40 vehicles, on less than an acre of ground. It just is completely inconsistent with the area, and we'd hope that you reconsider and leave the zoning alone where it stands. Thank you. Thank you. That was our only card, you said? Okay, so we'll go to cross by city administration? If city administration wants to cross the one gentleman spoke. Staff waves, thank you. Okay, and by the applicant, no. Okay, closing, so closing by city administration? Staff has no closing. Okay, and closing by the applicant, no. All right, we will go ahead and close the hearing and go into executive session. Move approval. Second. Okay, so we have a motion and a second. Seeing no request to speak, clerk, please open the machine for voting. Council members, enter your votes. Yes, council member Gerdes, could you re-enter? Is it? Seeing as all present council members have voted, clerk, please tally and announce the vote. Madam Chair, agenda item I-6A and B passes 7 to 1 with council member Gerdes voting no. All right, very good. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Wilson. All right, now we will go to our final open forum of the day. We have no speakers. No speakers for open forum, so we will close open forum and go to announcements. Announcements. It was actually, council member Gerdes, do you have any announcements? Thank you, Madam Chair. First and foremost, I hope my colleagues enjoy a couple of weeks off from council. I hope you get to enjoy the time off. I know our family is going to try to enjoy. I don't think my wife knows what she's getting into with me home on Thursdays, but also I just wanted to wish our community a happy Juneteenth on Monday. And then also to all the fathers, both here in the room and everybody listening, happy Father's Day this weekend. And I hope you get a little spoiled and have a great Sunday. Thank you, Madam Chair. Absolutely, and happy Father's Day to every father. And with that, meeting adjourned. Thank you, everyone. Have a great break. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great break.