Tampa City Council Workshop- 09/24/26

morning everybody welcome to Tampa City Council workshop I would like to call this meeting to order and who has the invocation this morning moment of silence can everybody stand for a moment of silence please Miranda would you lead us in the play thank you clerk would you please call the roll Miranda here Minnescarco here Hurtek Young Vera Carlson Clendenin here we have physical quorum councilwoman Hurtek is here she just stepped out for a moment but she'll be back any minute okay first up on the agenda we're going to talk to Ms. Abby Feely good morning council Abby Feely administrator for development and economic opportunity this morning we're here to talk about the fee study to workshop the fee study that was completed by Raftalis with us this morning is Joe Williams from Raftalis Tristan Townsend from Raftalis as well as JC Hutchinson our building official from and and chief building chief building official and construction services manager I need a little bit more coffee Eric Cotton development coordination manager Dennis Fernandez our historic preservation manager and Brandon Campbell our director of mobility since the fee study included all of those areas I'm going to turn over to Joe Joe is really going to present to you on the study what we did how we did it what it showed us and we do have a recommended fee schedule as I mentioned to you in previous updates that schedule includes what we call kind of level setting and practicality of some of those fees these fees are only recommendations before you today we're here to start a dialogue to have a conversation to talk about what those fees are how like I said how they were determined where we're going with this what implementation of this would look like over a number of years in addition to that we will be having a public meeting on October 21st at Hannah City Center we have set up a website on the fee study that has the document out there we've also set out some correspondence to our advisory groups that our teams meet with on a regular basis as well as all of our cell users in anticipation of sharing this information we also have Dana Crosby with us today from the city attorney's office if there are any questions in relation to how this relates to Senate bill 180 and us increasing these fees the way we are looking at this is for a March 1st effective date which would go in with the water and wastewater fee increases that you all have already approved and it is a multi-year and I'll let you go into that a little bit but for construction services it's over five years and for development coordination historic preservation it would be three years so we also have some comparison for you today of how we are in relation to other cities what's going on and we'll go from there so I'm going to turn it over to Joe and what we'd like to do is work through the entire presentation and then we are going to work as a team to answer any questions that you may have before we turn it over Councilwoman Hurtick I just wanted to say please make sure you send us all those invites yes that we can put them on our calendars you got it thank you thank you good morning Joe start with your name please good morning Joe Williams from ref tell us thank you for having us and it's been great great effort working with the city and the various divisions departments on fully trying to fully understand everything that goes into providing these services so if we can jump into the presentation perfect we'll take you through the scope a little bit and there there's a good amount of slides I'm going to try to do this in about 15 to 20 minutes hold on one sec there we go we're trying to get the presentation on okay everyone sees it we got it good to go all right so we're going to try to do this about 15 to 20 minutes there's a good amount of information but leave some room for questions you know not go through everything in hey this is your show pure detail you go so that's that's the idea we have and we definitely want to be able to answer some good questions so when we first got engaged you know we really were focused on the building fees construction services division and then talking through with Abby and others there was a desire also to look at development coordination the architectural review boards the city clerk fees for petitions related to a lot of these fees that we'd be updating and the mobility right-of-way there's some administrative related fees in their department that hadn't been updated in many years either and as we'll talk about a lot of these fees even date back to the early 2000s 2000 2006 in some cases construction services was a little bit more recent but they're still pushing a good eight years or so since really being updated so how did we get here so construction services again back in 2021 they did a major upgrade to their their billing software their permit software and again we'll talk a little bit about their existing fee structure we won't dwell on it too much but there's thousands of individual rates on their various schedules so once that was created in the new software it was really hard to update and manage over time so we've gone through a major simplification effort trying to make it so that it can be updated more efficiently each year going forward we understand that there is various policy direction over time again covid was a huge factor and a lot of this on keeping fees level not looking at specific increases during a challenging time so that that has contributed and changing legislative landscape the florida section florida statutes sections related to especially the building fees has been updated tremendously the past five or six years and it's created a lot of additional regulation timelines things on jc's department that have required you know increase in staffing increases in other costs to administer a similar level of effort and to meet all those requirements so he's had he's had that that issue and then the permit activity again has sort of it spiked early in the coveted years and then it's it's starting to normalize again now and there's also hurricane activity so there's a natural ebb and flow in the permit activity and we're sort of on a slight slight reduction in that area right now and that leads directly to permit revenues so our approach again study approach we want to look at what is the full cost of administering these departments when someone comes in for a specific type of permit what is all the staff effort and related necessary overhead costs of operating department that go into providing these efforts so that's what we've identified in the study we've worked with staff on an initial phasing plan we'll talk about certain fees where we calculated a cost that was staff felt was relatively high and we've we've in the recommended plan some of those have been set below the actual cost that we've calculated again there's several factors that go into that you do have some latitude within your fee setting to set fees below the actual cost um and again we we met in detail on every workflow every fee with staff on understanding what goes into each one of these things who's involved how much time are people spending on average cases and that's how we've developed the fee study so construction services really what i'll hit on here this is the this is the building department you know administering if there's new construction changes on properties for accessory structures additions of pools major like construction type things electrical plumbing and this is pretty strictly governed by florida statutes especially on the revenue expense side at this point um so it's about 100 employees and 22 million dollar annual budget right now so going a little bit so on the on the left side you'll see a small relatively small snapshot of the existing fee schedule clearly printed by our cfo yeah and it's you know it's small on purpose we don't want you to try to read all the fees but again this is um if you opened up one of these schedules on the city's website there's probably seven different files that each have five to ten pages of fees that look just like this um it's all tied back to the international business code um construction types and occupancy types and huge range of fees again very hard to administer and update so it took it took a lot of work and a lot of massaging of the data to get it to where we felt comfortable recommending a new fee structure but that's what we have on the side here is a residential grouping and a commercial grouping and what the fees we're showing you are for new construction there are some discounted rates with a very similar structure for other types of phase buildings or shell buildings or tenant improvements things that are related but relatively lower effort for the building department based on all the planner views and inspections that go into things so simplification of the fee structure um revenue enhancement i'll touch on this one a little bit basically what's happened is over the past several years again with all the additional regulations that have been improved introduced the department has grown so there's there's been a growing staff to meet all the timelines the regulations all those things that go into it revenues have stayed about stable even slight decreases the past few years again this this is a department where if nobody pulled a permit there would be zero dollars coming in right on the utility side you at least have base charges people need to use water it's consistent revenue here it can go from zero to you know 20 million in any given year now you're typically operating in the 14 to 16 million dollar range the past several years as we showed you jc has a budget of 22 million for this upcoming year and it's been at that level for the past few years or so okay so we needed revenue enhancement when we simplified the fee structure we made it so that when we set those rates there was additional revenue that was going to be generated and then that sort of strung through the process on then we have each of the individual permit fees which are more fixed fees for services if you come for a mechanical permit which typically or a plumbing permit simple plumbing there's a fixed fee for it so those fees are increasing as well that's going to generate additional revenue there's resubmittals additional plan review fees things like that so we're getting additional revenue from a few different areas so this is a in this so a couple of different things there's the enhancement fund and there's the primary operating fund that jc has this is really a picture of the primary operations fund you can see it's less than 22 million the enhancement fund is a additional surcharge added onto the building permit that covers a lot of the technology vehicle related costs of the department so this is really just the operating fund and you can see that in 2026 the revenues which are the line the green line are pretty well below the expenses for the department and it's again it's been like that for a couple few years now but what what we have to say is during during covid and kind of that time when activity was higher and before a lot of the new regulations came the op the division was operating at a surplus had accumulated a fairly strong cash reserve position and the past few years have really spent it down so we'll show you that on the next slide it's been spent down we're at the point where the 27 budget if there was no rate adjustments is showing that we probably would be relying on the general fund to support the department so now we have these rate adjustments identified we're hoping to not be in that situation it's beginning in 2027. so that's the slide you see we're we're down below five million dollars in a cash reserve position for a 20 million dollar department florida statutes allows you to have a reserve balance up to the average of the prior four years of budgeted expenses for that department so again we could we could have a balance closer to 15 to 16 million per statutes but we've we've spent it down um kept fees low or level over the past several years so we're kind we're kind of just at that point where we need to start moving back in the other direction to be a fully sustaining special revenue fund we're this one specifically is set up as a special revenue fund it's supposed to operate like a business supposed to generate the revenues to cover the costs of operations that's the general intent so small list of some example fees and again this is this is demonstrated to show you that there's there is a wide range of different impacts um in the in the full report you know there's exhibits there's longer fee tables showing you all the different fees fees we want to just show a few examples here um again not not going to go into great detail but there there is a range it's it's not all 15 sometimes it's 30 sometimes in rare cases there's some small decreases um and again that that goes into some of the discussions with staff on trying to keep reasonable fees in certain areas consistency for for different types of things so just a high level example again we you know we worked with the department's detailed reviews detailed workflows in this accessory structure it'll serve two purposes so we summarized it to a pretty high level right intake and processing so this includes some correspondence with the applicants along the way plan review inspection time and then some vehicle usage time and there's other overhead factors kind of built into there so this one right we we calculated a fee of 480 dollars working with staff this is one of those fees where it's very homeowner application based where they're going to be getting a shed or another small structure on their property and if we're setting the fee too high there's some level of concern that people will stop coming for permits and then it's going to be a more costly effort to pursue after the fact permits um you know trying to get them to pay comply so it's much better for the department and the city overall to have the permits come up front as they're supposed to more efficient better process so that is considered and not going to the full fee in this situation and there's a few other fees like that along the way residential and commercial so that's that's kind of a first pass again these are initial recommendations we're all kind of here looking for feedback and there's going to be the community meetings to get additional feedback as well we have some comparisons um really the the highlight here is that you'll see that we are going to be increasing fees for different types of construction activity but we don't feel like we're going outside of a lot of our neighbors or other areas in the state and there a lot of these communities that are on the comparison do have a fee structure that may or may not be um in alignment with the most recent florida house bill 803 updates so they likely will be pursuing updates to their fee schedules as well or or may actively be so we'll just we'll say that there's a lot of changing legislation where building fees are being updated all throughout the state right now yeah just a few more examples if there's if there's any questions on these we can come back to them i didn't want to yeah we hold the questions until you're finished for the presentation go through too many you know the details now okay so that's that's really the the building fund construction services division as we call it in tampa the next one is development coordination so a lot of you feel like this is an appropriate place to pause for questions or do you i think we could yeah i think that'd be council have any questions councilwoman here um can you go back um to the slide that had the really really small font yes the dentist font yeah the dentist the dentist slide the dr dr dr font um so the thing that concerns me about this is that as as the building gets larger the rate gets smaller and i really don't want to be incentivizing larger residential properties um commercial that's fine but residential what we're trying to do is build more housing housing here and some of that's going to be smaller by nature um anything that's above 5 000 square feet they really need to be paying that 33.35 i'm sorry i just like if you're if you're building a massive home then you can afford massive like fees like that i just i don't have any i don't have any sympathy for that but if you're in tier one and tier two those are the places that i want to bring down because those that's what we need to incentivize we need to incentivize smaller homes so for me i might flip that whole thing i don't know how we would do that but really we want to incentivize more smaller houses okay um also the old the other thing that that comes to mind is affordable housing set asides as we're looking at these fee increases we also really want to look at people who are building affordable housing and by affordable housing i mean owner occupied and if they're owner occupied i really believe we need to reduce or or eliminate funding or fees for affordable housing that people are going to owner occupy now there still might be a reduction or something for apartment buildings but really and by ami if if we can't reduce them wholly something by ami um but again i'm talking about ownership for residential i don't really know how i i mean i know we probably need to do something for commercial but home ownership residential i just had a really good conversation with habitat and they are looking at ways to buy to build more housing and this is one of the things they said could tremendously help them a reduction in impact fees because all they do is build owner occupied and that's that's to me is very important so thank you otherwise this was very interesting but also if you go you skipped through quite a few like you were just showing us if you could go to the last one of the of the variations of between different cities um yeah the the last this one no one more oh no okay then go back go back and go back one more this concerns me our proposed are going to be lower than hillsborough county already is and i know that we but i understand so my guess is that what we're trying to do is incentivize people building this stuff within the city is that the is that the reason that we're we're sticking kind of lower here there there's a relationship between you know setting the tiers and the cost recovery and as building scale it doesn't always the effort from the department doesn't always scale quite as fast that's fine but i was just curious because that hillsborough county is a significantly more and so i'm just curious uh hillsborough county generally is because it's our true next door neighbor um i'm interested i don't know that was hillsborough county in all of these comparisons okay it was so but this is the one that just made me stop for pause and i wanted to make sure that that was like a rationale because we don't have a lot of commercial we and we do need to keep the commercial that we have and incentivize more so is that one of the reasons that we're and whoever has their phone that's making those jingles if you could turn that to mute that would be great um abby feely when when we looked at that um with joe and the team i i don't know at this point in the study it was really about cost recovery what is it taking us to do the work and are we you know and then when you look at the other legislation that joe was mentioning private provider has to be done in certain amount of days and you have to meet that or you pay back fees so it was looking at operationally the review times the intake all of that not necessarily on paper now how will this impact the development so i every point you're raising is great and i'm i'm tracking and because on affordable housing also like we offer right now you know expedited permitting we offer no connection fee um no no i always get capacity fee and connection fee messed up but for water and waste water so we have other things we have not by statute been able to waive impact fees okay so that's a statute so that's a statutory requirement but i'm you know my brain's going as you're talking about how do you get a law on something how do you ensure at co there's actually an affordable person in there when they walked in the door it's kind of like the bonuses we give too how do you make sure somebody goes and says i'm bonusing for lead they go out there the building never was lead certified but then they got all the bonus density so some of this i just have to continue to kind of work through but sure i i jotted down well i appreciate it but also the secondary thing i would love for someone to talk to hillsborough county like how are they coming up with these numbers it doesn't mean that we need to do that that we need to go to these numbers because i do believe that being lower for commercial really does incentivize commercial to stay within the city limits but but how are they how are they coming up with those numbers and we just because they're our neighbor yep and jc probably can also talk too because of he sits on boaf which is building officials across the state you know how other municipalities also are looking at that yeah no no that's really fine those are just my my first impressions but this is great so far councilman carlson then councilman miranda yeah first point of order mr chair um especially on workshop days could you please uh nobody's done this yet but could you please enforce the rule that we have to be called on to speak and that we don't interrupt each other because i we're going to have probably more um you know back and forth later but i want to make sure that we do in an organized way um because the because just like we can't hear the public can't hear if we're talking over each other um so so just for the for the public this is this is the fees we're paying not impact fees right we're not talking about impact fees here correct this is just application okay uh just to clarify that now um and the law says um you can have us you said just to repeat what you said you can have a certain um uh uh uh uh fund on top of it a reserve fund on top but we can't charge is there a certain percentage that we besides the reserve fund is there a certain percentage kind of markup that we can charge on top of what the actual cost is or it's just it's just we charge the actual cost plus uh whatever the reserve fund is we can charge the actual cost of the department plus if you have the ability if you have cushion from where your current reserve is to where your reserve can be justified you can set the fees a little bit higher to fund a reserve and fund future capital replacement needs um and miss feely mentioned a um an expedited fee i did is that in here did i miss that or is that could you just talk to us about those fees like if somebody want what did you i forgot what you called a rush fee or expedited fee an additional fee no the legislation abby feeling the legislation from the state requires if you're using private provider okay that reviews have to be done within 10 days when the provider private provider submits that it has to be done within 10 days if it's not within 10 days you start paying back the fee to the applicant at certain percentages for the amount of time it takes longer so going back to the ftes and how our ftes have increased part of that's because of the state mandates to complete reviews within certain times because we don't want to return fee you know we want to keep the department's table can i ask you i know i know um your office gets a lot of complaints because there's so much growth in our area and and you've come before us several times and talked about how you're trying to address that right now we're talking about cost recovery with the process you have and there's a lot of money there but um is is is there a higher level of service that we could offer um if if if customers have to trade off between speed and and cost and is there so on set aside the the the outside services is there a way that if somebody needs to do something urgently that they that they could pay more is there like a expedited team that you could put on that we could charge an extra fee for or is there are there extra people that you could hire that we could then do cost recovery on so that we could provide these faster instead of if my question to you is if we provided more more resources to provide a better service or a faster service would that help you and then and then how would we cost recover that so right now as joe mentioned sometimes the permitting ebbs and flows right we do keep two teams on contract um and and we have gone to using one of those teams for our tenant improvement so if you're coming in just to get a tenant improvement you went across the street to the sun trust it was office you're gonna put your office in there now um those we use an outside team to do those now those reviews get done in three days for the building part they still require life safety review which is the fire element of this which life safety does get reviewed as part of the permit process but they're part of tampa fire rescue and the fire marshal's office are we recovering any of that cost in here um we we do have fire in certain because the budget for fire has always has been under under what it should have been for years if there's a way to do cost recovery where we could help expedite that because what i pass on the complaints that miss feeling she always does a great job with her staff of responding to them but a bunch of them are around the fire review and if if we could make sure that the the team and fire is covered by these costs jc hudgeson uh chief building official so to your there's two pieces of your your question there for the expedite yes we could offer a it's in the system to be double the fee to do it in half the time however your the concern that was just brought up is that because we are the one-stop shop i can expedite the building side but the other pieces that you know whether it's fire or other pieces storm water solid wet so now it gets a little tricky because we could finish our part but we don't technically give you the full review so we don't necessarily promote it as much as we should there are options we do have a large-scale project team that deals with the larger projects as we go through um we also had tiered permits we didn't really get into that too much so you have the building permit which is your all-inclusive everybody looks at everything then we have a tier below which is your miscellaneous permits so those are those don't take us long and we have a project process for that and then we have trade permits so somebody just coming in to get a hot water heater those are actually we've expedited those as fast as we can those are already instant issuance so as soon as the contractor comes in he's a licensed contractor he wants to replace a water heater at somebody's home as long as he's a licensed contractor and pays the fee issue so then at that point it's on the inspection so some of these things we've already sped up as about as fast as we can and and practical as we can to still make sure we get the reviews the thing i would the thing i would just encourage you all to do and and working with the consultants is um my colleague pointed out that our our costs are lower than a lot than the county and other cities that you which you have on this chart here um it could be that we're just more efficient and and and that we don't spend as much but the other thing is that if there are expedited services or ways that we can improve customer service i would just ask you all i know you do this already but i would ask you all to take another look at it just to see that because real estate is so much of a big part of our economic engine in our area how can we move some of these faster i would like to get every day 10 compliments on how awesome they think you guys are and when you fix the problem they think you're awesome but it but you know the the it's a it's a an issue that's been with the development community forever and if we could solve that by raising their rates by 20 cents and have a team that gets these done faster that would really make a lot of people in the community happy i wonder mr perry could i call on you real fast if we don't raise the rates can you tell us who's paying for this where the money's coming from to cover the set the the um deficit michael perry deputy chief financial officer once um the construction services fund goes negative balances then it'll probably have to come from the general fund and can you just tell i i know the answer but can you just for the public tell where that comes where who pays that who pay i'm sorry sir who pays who pays the general fund the general fund is primarily property taxes and other taxes and other user fees so i think the point is that um what the public would like is for is for us to be fair if somebody's using a service we charge a fair amount for the service we're not trying to make a profit we're just trying to charge a fair amount for the service what the public doesn't want is to subsidize somebody else's services and so if we can help keep property taxes low for example by making sure we're covering somebody else's cost if somebody's not using a cost they'd like to not pay for it they'd like to not subsidize somebody else's cost so anyway thank you councilman miranda oh thank you mr chairman something called my a little figure there that you had for automobile cost can you come back with that figure it was i know it's a small amount and the reason i'm asking that question it's a small amount within the larger amount going in or part of my answer to myself my question to myself is what i'm posing to you now is is that money taken put into a separate account to repair to replace the car so see if we can get that one back i want to make sure if it's going if it's a car that you're charging for is it going in to replace the car and a fee where it's not touched so as joe mentioned also and i'll let him jump in we the enhancement fund that is the surcharge on the permits pays for all the technology cars you'll see in the years we've brought budgets to you in and that spend down of the enhancement fund that does that is the replacement of our cars on a regular schedule we are not under fleet we are separate from that um so the inspectors um that all comes out of enhancement fund and there is a plan for replacement but the question is is it going to a special account but for a technology or whatever that you're using that you have to replace so at the time you have to replace them you already got the cash going in yes you have that yes that is how we have done it and we've replaced all of our vehicles i'm sorry i'm looking at jc we've replaced all of our vehicles now and now we're we're on a regular schedule for their maintenance and replacement as well as all of our computers that's all paid for that separate you said the word now that means from now forward or you've had it in the past we've had it all right so then you have an account now that you don't have to go to the general fund or any account to buy a car you buy it from that fund that is correct all right thank you very much that is correct and and the other thing i wanted to add to that we've even decreased that cost because we've now gone to virtual inspection on many of those same day trade permits the ac um i'm sorry roof um hot water change out we have someone dedicated to do virtual inspections on them every 15 minutes to half an hour they plug out virtual inspections all day they don't use a car they don't go out in the field they're at hannah um and they do all of that virtually so we've continued to use technology to try to make improvements and cost savings in those areas one more question so then in and logic what we're doing here is creating something like well we have a water wastewater solid waste and parking you're producing your money to carry your own account or everything correct and that enhancement but we've been able to have that up until just a few in the last two years where we've started to dip and we've had to then rely on on the general fund because and and this year jc actually i think cut close to two million dollars from his budget because um of the permit activity and because of the reserve we had for so long so when jc came on in 2020 and i came back to the city in 2020 that reserve was high and that's where we got on the regular schedule for vehicles we got on the regular schedule for computers we made those changes and enhancements got everything and spent down because we're only allowed to carry so much from the state we we have to kind of be within those guidelines as well and thank you and i know you have a difficult position different job because now when you lose somebody from that division it's very difficult to replace that individual talent recruitment is challenging yes thank you thank you miss field a question for you don't go far um the issue that councilman carlson brought up and that expect to be able to get some of the stuff because you know the things that we hear and you have the other departments that are not necessarily within your control is it possible to sign a interdepartment mou between these departments so they under clearly understand looks like with a fire issue this uh an applicant is going through the expedited process that that would bind fire to that as well so from what i see that we run into roadblocks sometimes i would say utilities um and and i can tell you um jc eric and i have and um have recently met with brad brandon yuan continuing to look at process improvement how do we ensure things we've talked about integrating the utl back into the bld to make things more seamless we continue because you have to get a utility commitment the utl is a utility commitment before you go in to get your permit on a lot of new construction so we continue to look at process improvement i mean i i don't want to commit i we can talk to chief trip and we could see because that falls under the fire marshal's office i mean all those all those lines of business if you guys had a interlocal agreement that you know there's a so that you have common language that you all understand that when a system is moving through that process that everybody is moving through the same process i would tell you our common process is we're all on the second floor at hannah when something comes in jc's team walks down to the fire team we work together you know st joe's was just in and this and we say hey guys we're working together to get this stuff out the door what does that look like can we make you know and and it is a mindset because some people are like well i'm doing it the way it came in the system and it's like well we've got to do what's best for our city you know and work together so i think well that's normalizing that we could still talk about that but i i i do think it's part of capacity it's part of capacity matter yeah i i because i'll be the few times that i've gotten and it hasn't been like jc's department has been hanging up somewhere else so if we were able to figure out so obviously there must be something there so if we could figure out a process that everybody's speaking the same language and you know if everything is um you know gold tagged or something you know that they know that they're this is something that's a priority project they have to move through it and you know get it done because that person is you know have that expedited service i think that might be helpful and so i appreciate that and also for councilwoman her text points on the affordable and thank you for throwing out habitat for humanity because they said they do such a great job um being able to fit this fee structure for an organization like habitat for humanity and and those especially those third parties that have a process of the insurity that you talked about about you know post occupancy and all those i think that really helps respect for those for those classifications and providers i think that would be really really helpful um and uh yeah no i so i appreciate the direction that you guys are going with those with those two caveats if we could fix that with the with a common procedure that cuts cuts across business lines with their internal of the city and being able to incentivize the bottom tier versus incentivize the top tier i think those are both points well taken councilman carlson i see your light is back on did you want to could i just add in um a minute ago we talked about fire fires environment involvement so if you look at this as a it's not an enterprise fund but if but if you look at it as like a business within the um you also mentioned stormwater and some of the other departments and if we should we should maybe you're doing this already but we should look at this as a larger service pool and one of the ways to get in our department cooperation is is financial incentives and so if for example we're not doing any cost recovery at fire and they could if they could if there's for example i don't know what the number is but let's say 200 000 or 500 000 a year in cost recovery that we could put into this rate that's money that they could spend on new equipment for fire firefighters same thing with stormwater if if there's several hundred thousand of additional maintenance that they could do because we're doing cost recovery on this that could be helpful and then there's an incentive built in for whoever is the head of the department because the more cost recovery they can do the more services they can provide you all and you'd have to have checks and balances but then it would allow them more services so they can improve their numbers and efficiency in their main line of business this may not be something for you all maybe it's something for jc or somebody else but um the diy projects you know you talk about hot water heaters it just seems funny to me that in 2027 that we're even talking about uh permit fees for hot water heaters since nobody's pulling to permits for hot water heater replacements we're going to home depot and we're buying our own hot water heaters and we're putting them in so do our who is looking at these things and going in 2027 is this something that we really should be doing i i i will let the chief building official of the year for the state of florida answer that question so we we deal with that a lot um we have our owner permits which allow the owners to do that work uh to your point okay that owner comes in does that work themselves they sell that property in five years that next owner comes in that owns that property water heater bursts insurance claims they call and say who pulled the permit do we have any way to claim and get that money back so for us any modification to a structure requires a permit there are certain exemptions under certain sizes certain flat work in your yard things like that but any modification to a structure should have a permit what we do is we do take out the plan review side so as you're mentioned for a hot water heater we're not reviewing the plans for that you install it staff's coming out we do a plumbing final we do a gas final that's it when we do a ac condenser change out once again no plan review straight to inspections staff just wants to put their eyes on it that's all we want to make sure that it's being done correctly so to your point i understand but also it's for not necessarily the safety of the current owner that's doing that work that may not know how to do it but it's for those future owners that will also occupy that structure and making sure it's done correctly but again like i mean i get gas i mean i do get gas because of the liabilities with gas but for like a electrical i mean it's a great such a great example of a hot water heater it literally is putting threads on a threads on everything and nylon threads on and plugging it in go ahead yeah i i think you overestimate um i think our generation might be one of the last that kind of does that stuff themselves just gonna just gonna throw that out there i think a lot of people now are just i am i am i am shocked at the amount of things that people pay for i am i'm pitching for the folks that go to home depot and lowe's okay i agree but i'm just saying i am shocked that the things that people won't do themselves well like so if i so i have a ladder let's say a attic stairwell and the ladder broke and i need to replace my attic stairs would that require a permit no okay now why why wouldn't that require a permit because that's a repair so ideally you're repairing the actual ladder now if i'm really saying i'm replacing it correct with a new set a new set of stairs if you're replacing it with a new set of stairs that's built into the same thing no you wouldn't need a permit okay okay interesting so that's what i said there's certain exemptions for electrical socket replacement i'm just trying to find i'm trying to find out what i'm doing against the law and what i'm doing legally i can send you the full list but there's so like for electrical socket replacement so any any individual receptacle yes you can go to home depot because you're retying that into the existing system now if you're doing the wiring back to your main panel box okay now you need a permit you see what i'm saying so there are i can change out a plug but i just can't run the home there you go home there you go you're chasing your receptacle i mean your fan your ceiling fan you're replacing the same fans going in the same place you see them like those kind of things you don't need a permit for so there there's a list but ideally once you start to get into the bigger systems that's that's what you see that hot water heater just throws me off because the electric but it's electric hot water it's it's a plug and play yeah they're very simple okay i'm done and would you like to disclose any stuff that you've done without permits one other thing one other thing and it's just my curiosity when you're doing these affordable housings you're charging for the for the uh sidewalk how can it be affordable housing where they got to pay 290 a foot to put the sidewalk and then they got to pay the house insurance and the taxes on the house there is no affordable housing this is not what we're here no i know that but i'm just saying it out there is no affordable housing as far as i'm concerned to what it should be and it has nothing to do with baseball okay why don't we finish the presentation oh you have something else can i just say one last thing you mentioned a couple chain stores and that the chain stores employ locals and that's great and they use subcontractors but we also have a lot of great independent entrepreneurs that we should support famous tate is one of them and but there are there are a bunch of others and it's it's fun going to a local store and seeing the flexibility they have in in delivering things and getting them put in okay continue mr chairman mike perry dc if i just want to clarify that projected fiscal 2026 no general fund money will be given to the construction service division self-sufficient i just want to make sure we make that very plain and clear to every everybody what about the next year 27 it's projected but again what what's happening is they jc and and he's done a good job on the 27 budget he's reduced his budget and he reduced head step head count the budget is is fully loaded but he manages during the year to keep his expenses low so it it decreases the impact on his fund balance councilman i don't i'll just i'm just going to be clear i don't like to hear that he's reducing his his head count because just one but still i'm like those are areas where we still had some money uh i mean i know we're going to be talking about this in october this is now on my list of things i want to talk about because this is a department where we're constantly hearing we need more people so even if it's just one head count we can help you with that so i know i know but i just this is not a department that needs to be reducing costs we we do a lot of thing i just want to mention like sorry abby feely we had our um one of our assistant building officials retire after 43 years he was handling two duties right he was the assistant building official and he was the floodplain manager we took that position we broke it into two we now have a dedicated floodplain manager we now have dedicated assistant building so we offset these by also process improvements um that we're working through with our accreditation which is also running with this as well so um we we tried to be extremely mindful of that and delivering the service you know we've gone from teams that would look at commercial projects residential projects and tenant improvement we've broken that all up now we have a residential team we have a commercial team i told you about tenant improvement so jc continually looks at where can we be fiscally responsible where can we make the process improvements and go from there as well so um i thought i think it was one was it it was it was one fte so okay i've got to really expedite this process because i got to get home and change out my hot water heater so could you could you finish with the process yes thank you um and just to reiterate the great discussion we've had great discussions like with like this with staff throughout the process they really know what they're doing we feel really confident in the time estimates and everything that's gone into developing the fees because they're they're all really engaged and really knowledgeable um all right if we can go back to the presentation perfect so i'm going to jump to development coordination um so really the the high level introduction here is these are these are typically processes that are happening before the building permit process um these these fees have been in place for a long time let me look at my my quick cheat sheet here so i can give you an estimated time frame 2006 um so about 20 years at this point and again this is this is eric's department 29 ftes about almost a five million budget and so here we go a few examples so you can get a feel for the types of things that they're doing again the report has the full fee list um and so site plan districts right de's design exceptions probably hear about those all the time um so a lot of a lot of different things that they do and this is not a special revenue fund it's more of a fund within the general government so the approach we took was not necessarily forecasting revenues for the department as much but really diving into every single fee that every single permit or service that they administer that has a fee tied to it and really fully loading and building up those costs with the right overhead that they have in their department these specific staff that they have employed if they use any vehicles they're not as heavily reliant on inspection activities um so again wide wide range of results 20 years later and we're just showing you on this slide the first phase of a lot of these fees and a lot of them are reflected as a equal increase over three years so you know the example for the site plan district two thousand six hundred dollars now three thousand six hundred dollars on the on the first phase if you look at the schedule it would be pretty similar increases for the next couple years after that on that type of service we do have a few examples so a variance and again this is based on time that it takes staff and the total cost of the department so there may be different processes in other places there may be different local ordinances things that require more effort potentially so we're still very very competitive on the on the scale of fees that we have for variants and a pd which is a larger type of project so again you can see we are increasing and we do expect to increase over the next several years as well above this point but even if we were at sort of that five thousand fifty five hundred dollar level we see we're still well within range of where others are charging right now so that's really the and again i'd say that construction services was more of the the bigger initial presentation effort because they are a special revenue fund there's more consideration there on having reserves and having full revenue sufficiency established these other departments we put a lot of work and there's a lot of fees that go into them but for this presentation we wanted to highlight a few of the examples and talk to you a little bit about what the departments do so this is dennis's department the architectural review and historic preservation his fees date back to 2001 2000 2000 so even a little bit longer again these are really those couple areas throughout the city that have the additional overlay districts require additional reviews to meet just meet the specific requirements in those depart in those districts that are above and beyond the typical building code or other codes that you have um he has seven ftes about a million dollar annual budget and again you know this dates all the bat all the way back 26 years ago so we have fees that are fairly old not recovering the cost of providing service right now so if we're doing new construction you know we have we're first phase is going from that 250 up to about a thousand dollars and these are these are the calculated costs these are general fund divisions so again you have there is latitude on where you ultimately set the fees it's just a trade-off between full cost recovery on the applicants who are submitting and having staff time involved on these versus using other funding sources to offset it so this one we you know we talked with dennis about comparisons there's there's a lot of variation throughout the state and there's not quite as many of these to compare to so we didn't provide comparisons specifically on these these are these are going to be based on the actual cost that we've identified with his department and then the city clerk has a few fees petitions for reviews really once once we get into this point where the departments have made determinations given their opinions on things and then it gets challenged brought back either to the department or the council really between legal and the division heads department has there's a lot of time that goes into additional research preparing staff reports preparing documentation having meetings attending council meetings were necessary so some of these do increase the cost involved is significant compared to the current fees you know again just to reiterate that these these are general government fees they did generate just general revenues that go into the into the budget but these are the costs of what's kind of behind those efforts when these different petitions are brought forward you know so one one in particular is the burial latina commission if there's a decision made there and it gets petitioned or appealed you know currently there's only a 50 fee associated with that and really it's caught it's costing the city they can between legal and department heads close to four thousand dollars of time going into that so that's a consideration moving forward and mobility right-of-way so this one again this was really focused on the administrative costs of administering these different fees we did have some discussions with the department early on about potentially getting significantly more involved on some of these fee calculations like if you're closing down a road or a sidewalk for a period of time are there additional costs related to the inconvenience or the use of those facilities we didn't end up going there in this study that's a little bit beyond our scope and expertise for designing those types of fees so we focus on the administrative related costs you know so personnel benefits overhead of running the department any use of vehicles that they have um so these you know again if there's lane closures or if you're putting a permanent structure in the right-of-way if you're using a sidewalk so these are the these are the fee calculations again a range of impacts uh some some appear to be larger changes but just looking at the lists you know these are there's staff time that's involved and staff costs have increased these best information we have these are from about 2006 was the last update on these fees specific parts of the fee structure for mobility so it's been a long time there's been a lot of changes to the processes how these are administered so that that's the presentation on the fees happy to talk anymore as i'll be introduced earlier i think she'll maybe come up and say it again for everyone's benefit but there's there's more meetings to be had more information that's been posted and available this is our preliminary recommendation thanks joe um abby feely uh this is a hard conversation right we haven't updated fees in a long time the cost of doing business as you know retaining good talent getting people in we have 3 000 open permits at all time in jc's shop with close to 20 some thousand processed a year you see the work that eric's team does with bringing you uh they'll be here tonight with your rezoning reports the variance review board the barrio latino commission the arc the hpc these are all the boards that are running with the work that's coming out of construction services and the development coordination team which then feeds the economy of the city as develop new development comes online new people move into homes um so as joe said what was presented to you today was the recommendations that came out of the study what it cost to do the work in addition to some level setting that was done by staff one of the things um you know all trade permits stayed 155 even though it showed certain things should go up variances or some adjustments were made and then we felt it was really important for us to show you where we are and compared to other cities and what they're charging i know a couple years ago when the county went up to rate make their pd ten thousand dollars people were like oh my gosh you know there'll be no more development um but really making sure that the fees are representative of the work that we're doing so i think we're not proposing full cost recovery to you today we're providing you with what came out of the study um we did not bring a fee resolution today we we want to have conversations on this um and how that will go so as i mentioned at when we started um we will have a public meeting at hannah october 21st six um i think it's 6 p.m one of them is 6 p.m one's on six it may be 6 30. um it's on the fee study page uh we continue communication i know there are people here today who received our communication on that uh we do have the website that is up and running um and what we would like to do is see how we can come back to you with a fee resolution november or december looking at a march first effective date of the fees that are decided on for the first year just to recap a little bit about jc's fees would be a five-year progression um and that fee schedule was provided in the background materials today development coordination historic preservation that is a three-year um approximately 15 percent a year on that three year for those adjustments um with that we are available to answer any additional questions um or take additional feedback direction um here today with you and we appreciate your time and and attention this morning councilwoman hartek thank you can you go back to the pd one thing if i can jump in before you ask your question on that one thing i found interesting so you know a pd for gas works and a pd for a single family are treated the same in our system and the amount of work varies greatly when those those come in so well what i wanted to say is that um the cost for a pd um i believe our chair would agree should be high i have the note right here it's good to be higher because we really want to disincentivize pds like our goal now not right now but we will once we have our new land development code the whole goal is to disincentivize pds so that people use what the what the base zoning because that's why we're redoing our land development code so that might not be something that we change now and make higher but this is something i really want to be high to disincentivize pds once we pass our land development code now i don't think we should really mess with it too much i don't really have a problem with this going up a thousand dollars i think that's low personally again for what we're trying to do in the city after the land development code we should probably keep it more stayed um my big concern though if you can go to the review costs um and y'all knew this was coming uh petition for review we normally get um the folks that are petitioning for review tend to be our tend to be neighbors tend to be um neighborhood associations these are people that cannot afford four thousand dollars um so i kind of want to look at i i just don't see going from two hundred and seventy one dollars to four thousand dollars as being something that's going to be reasonable i don't know what to i don't know what that number looks like but when you when you have that public meeting and when you're putting stuff out this is one of the specific questions i want you to ask because oftentimes it's people coming in trying to that they're concerned about um their neighborhood and they're concerned about what's being developed next door uh we need to make that reasonable and reachable even if that's something that we have to eat i'm okay with that so that's interesting the two things i wrote down was pd and petition for review what there's historic yeah those are the two things that i identified as well um i i and i get i'm not on the uh incentivized dissentivized because of course this is cost recovery for actual cost of the city these things however though we do have if we're going to be subsidized and we can choose what we're subsidizing what we're not subsidizing and this the uh petition for review is something i think that because of generally the folks that use that process it shouldn't be so cost prohibitive that would so penalize the average citizen for uh positively trying to impact their community um on the pd thing ditto i um we need to i love that we the euclidean stuff should be easy and low cost pds are uh should be more should be more burdensome and difficult to get through and should be and we should recover every bit of the cost plus building into reserves uh on the pd's side of this house so but everything else i'm fully supportive councilman i think as much as possible with all of these we should especially in the public hearing show what the cost is you said we're not going for full cost recovery um i think except for maybe the folks who are using this um everybody else would not like to subsidize it so um if if we can show what the actual cost is that would that would be helpful um to justify why we're doing it because we're not we're not just trying to change rates um just to try to get more money we're trying to actually cover the cost because it's not fair to everybody else to subsidize it thanks yeah so i'm it's difficult in this than these review the review to ship a review because of the the pomp and circumstance of it all how many people are involved in that stuff i mean if you really that's it that's a tough one yeah can i yeah yeah absolutely so on on that point also is there a cost recovery for the legal fees at all on these um because if somebody if somebody um asked for a a review then it's not just the the um the clerk's office that looks at the legal department's looking at too is there i mean what's the cost of that it must that must be really high we we had the the city's legal time city staff legal time built into those fees there are additional fees if you have to pull in an outside uh hearing officer type of situation there there is a note on the existing city clerk fee schedule about additional per hour for that type of service but the 4 000 includes city internal legal division department heads and the clerk's office very good any further questions hearing none i'm gonna allow the public to speak if anybody in the public would like to comment on this and it's only on this particular item item number one good morning council my name is edward briggs i'm here on behalf of domain homes i want to start by saying we're not opposed to city covering the real cost of service no one wants construction services or zoning running fees that don't reflect what actually costs to review or inspect a home as well as retaining and hiring quality staff that's a fair goal and if some of these costs generally have not been collected properly in the past we understand that gap needs to close eventually first these fees i want to point out to you don't get absorbed anywhere by us we we build exclusively on info lots in the city which means almost every home we build already includes a tear down and almost every lot has mature trees that trigger this city's tree evaluation fees once these fees are fully phased in that's close to that's close to two thousand dollars more per home in construction services fees and loans and if that lots and sits in hyde park simile heights tampa heights eboard historic preservation review can run close to five thousand dollars none of that gets absorbed by us it goes straight into the price of next home somebody in city is buying and that home is already expensive the median home sale price in tampa right now is over four hundred thousand dollars every dollar we are talking about tonight land this morning lands directly on top of that number second the size of some of those increases we saw the pier city comparison this morning's presentation and on routine building and zoning fees tamper proposed rates actually come in below the average of the peer committee shown that's a fair result and we're glad to see the city did that work but the comparison didn't cover everything in this study the feet the fee the fees to appeal to the burial latina commission decision to the city clerk is going from fifty dollars to four thousand dollars an increase of nearly eight thousand percent and it wasn't part of tonight's benchmark several other city clerk appeal fields follow the same pattern increases ranging from one hundred percent to nearly fourteen hundred percent in a single step with no phase in at all that is not a fee update anymore that is a penalty on anyone who dares to challenge the decision those are the fees we'd ask council to look at specifically since they sit outside the comparison we just saw this morning finally the timeline based on this morning's presentation council is expected as we know to vote on this resolution until late fall with the fees themselves not taking effect until it looks like next spring that means there's real time between now and then to get this right we ask that the time to use specifically on the fees to jump straight to their full amount with no phase in the same way the rest of say was facing gradually devoid rate shock we're asking for two we're asking for a couple things use the months between now and the council vote to look at the largest increases especially the ones with no phase in at all the same gradual treatment the rest of the study received and separate also the fees that are legally required under statute 553 and those are simply now being a policy decision decision so council can weigh each one of its own terms rather than approving this as a single package thank you so much for the time thank you mr briggs and just fyi i through my automatic pilot mode this morning i didn't wait to the end of the workshop to call for public comment because i don't get used to this this was a one-off miss miss pointer stephanie pointer and you're wrong for changing it because each one of these items this morning is very important oh i'm sorry can i have my time since you're talking over time thank you um okay so this is only for construction services and the 3.1 million dollar loss that you're projected for 26. where's where is it for the other departments because mr perry just stood up here and said no we didn't put any money from the general fund and from construction services but did we for land development um i i've here here's the thing i'm going to tell you this somebody way the hell high up in this administration has said repeatedly that bob buckhorn used to run around telling everybody he was never going to raise any of these fees bob buckhorn bragged about it now our current mayor i've never heard that she's said anything about it but the bottom line is that i as a citizen should not be paying for the new day domain home i as a citizen should not be paying for whatever construction is going on at gasworks that should not be coming out of my tax dollars it should never be that way i don't care if we make one penny off of any of construction services or land development not one penny should we even make but we should be breaking even i have to agree the petition for review is probably too much the the petition for review where they take it to a hearing master first is stupid it's a waste of money nobody should ever do it because it still has to come to council it's ridiculous okay um but i will say that there are applicants who actually bring stuff in that they bought a house and the adu was already there and they're doing a petition for review to get themselves back in compliance i don't think that's ridiculous for them um but like when i'm looking at some of these interesting little pop-ups and somebody's going to come here and cry about it okay so an in-ground swimming pool you're raising it to a thousand dollars well you know what when i moved here in 2015 when i put in my pool it cost fifty thousand dollars now it costs a hundred thousand dollars to put in a pool okay so one percent of what it costs to put in that swimming pool is not outrageous the roof fee is going from 177 to two hundred and thirty dollars i i this powerpoints are coming up here too fast that's a twelve thousand dollar project i just priced a new roof on my 13 year old house which is ridiculous because any place else you could have a roof on your house for 30 years but again we're back at you know it's not unreasonable but these prices we should not be paying the citizens who are sitting in this room should not be following bob buckhorn's policy of floating development for our city thank you i need to know where i can get a roof for twelve thousand dollars yeah good morning council steve michelini i i think that there's there's some issues here regarding cost versus benchmarks and you're trying to recover costs but there's no benchmarks in there to meet in order to facilitate the process and frequently you have to you're in the process not for 30 days not for 60 days sometimes 90 days sometimes 120 days so if you're having to pay resubmission fees which was not addressed in this those should be uh commensurate with the amount of time that is taking to get your permit out um and and i i was mistaken but but i thought joe williams said he was in for full cost recovery he said that not me so i i understand the phasing but um we're talking about fees that in some cases are a thousand percent or more than that that's ridiculous your your your appeal fees should be no more than what the original application fees and councilwoman you asked what they should be they should be the same as what the original application fee is and that that'll give you a benchmark to work from the hearing officers are paid for by the applicant so that's not an expense necessarily to the city you have to put the money in in order to have an appeal the pds i think they skipped over a part larger pds are a base fee plus an acreage fee that goes on top of that so a single lot is not the same fee as a large thing like the gas works the variance the appeals i just already said that the euclidean zonings and site plan review i think generally the fees for the permit side are not that bad but the processing fees that they've added in here are out of line they're just way out of line um you need to talk about the salaries what are the salaries and what is the cost benefit that's being applied for for what you're doing their notes and their their email uh there says here that it's dropped so the demand is dropped but they're adding 15 as a contingency just just because they need to be able to justify this one of the other things in here is um it's calculated on current it's not being go going into the current budget this this is not in there so why is the uh urgency to have this adopted before the end of the year give us some time to look at this stuff and and meet i'm asking specifically for a separate tbba meeting where they can review these these fees with the tbba the actual stakeholders and not have one meeting on october 21st to review this and then bring it back to you in november which is just a few weeks after that so we'll be happy to accommodate that i just think that the infill development and those costs should be commensurate and the timeline should be set so if you don't make it make it for two or three submissions then the refund should be applied the same as they are for private providers thank you next please good morning everyone my name is jessica cox i'm the executive director with the american fire sprinkler association i represent the local fire sprinkler contractors first i just want to credit to the city's permitting team we genuinely appreciate the permitting process they do a great job we talk to other municipalities and say hey this is the standard so we do appreciate the job that the team does here processing permits we do have some concerns with the the increase in fees that we wanted to bring to your attention we do understand that increases have not happened in a while so we do understand some increases but we feel like they're a little bit aggressive a couple of the ones that we're specifically looking at are the underground and fire main spikes those ones are going up pretty extensively whereas storage tank fees are decreasing so we're not seeing and some of the fire alarm fees are also decreasing one of our big things is the fast track permitting we did put this and we were able to get this in place a few years ago to help ensure that our life safety systems are fixed when there's just a small impairment that needs to be made these fees are significant significantly increasing and one of the things with that is with some of the property managers and property owners immediately fixing these deficiencies we want to make sure if there's a couple of painted sprinkler heads or a hanger that needs to be fixed that they're taking the time to get that permit and make that that adjustment making sure that our systems are ready when needed and one other point to this is we've recently seen lowering of life safety standards coming from tallahassee specifically the permitting fees and costs have become astronomical some of the building owners look for workarounds we've seen this play on tallahassee with school choice expansion where changing occupancy and small private schools are actively pushing to lower or bypassing fire sprinkler requirements entirely because of infrastructure costs are too high so we just want to bring this to your attention um want to say again thank you for the permitting process that city of tampa does but we are against the extreme um hikes and um us that you would consider to slowly increase these fees so thank you for your time thank you very much next speaker please uh hello council my name is alex galusian um i am one of the owners of mga homes we're um truly a mom-and-pop shop it's me and my dad only um we pour our heart and souls into every single house that we build and um these fees would would hurt us a lot and ultimately we would have to pass them on to our clients um i'm not here to say that we don't need to increase the fees or anything like that i would just say we should give this a lot of time and consideration i mean we're talking millions of dollars here um so i just i had a few points that i wanted to point out about the report just some things for you guys to consider as we all know these are some pretty substantial increases um one thing that concerned me was the data only went back to 2025 i feel like that's um it's not enough statistics to get an accurate reading um the major assumptions rely on budgets and estimated time rather than fully disclosed actuals having a very hard time tracing where a lot of the 2025 numbers are coming and going from um i spotted just one calculation issue this is not a slight on the consultants or anything but it's just a point of like let's really pay attention to this um revenue seems to be the main driver for setting rates again this is a government operation i i also am in the camp like zero dollars in and out should be the goal you know true up at zero and i would just like to encourage the consultants to price in the available efficiencies and avoided cost opportunities i think those should be priced in um i know we have some technology like acela but there are other things out there um honolulu the entire state of california seattle just tried it they're all doing um a tech or ai review of at least simple things california is doing all residential completely with ai honolulu's doing something that would have benefited me actually it's a preliminary check kind of saves all the time of the initial plan review when you upload it'll tell you what's missing so i don't have to wait whatever so those are my six things i wanted to point out um just my one experience the building department has always been good and fair but they're so understaffed and i think there are ways that we can help them cheaper than just automatically boosting these fees by 41 percent a year um thank you for your time thank you okay that concludes public comment councilwoman her tech so as far as um some of the things is there a play is there a specific email for this and if it there is if you could tell us what it is and make sure that it's on the website for this it is that's all been corrected i believe it is dgm fee study at tampagov.net so d d as in dog g as in george m as in mom f ee st u dy at tampagov.net okay great because i think a lot of the folks who who commented today should absolutely make sure that they get those i mean i saw you writing notes but still um tell other people email because they they really will read those and put those in but not only that after october 21st whenever you're coming back to us i really think that you should bring us back this new information and everything you learn from these emails from that meeting i think we need another conversation before a vote so that's what i'm going to ask for it doesn't necessarily need to be in a workshop manner it can be a little bit quicker than that it can just be a staff report maybe on that day we could have you know four staff reports instead of five or something like that but but that way we have a little bit more time because i i i just don't see us from going from this to adoption that quickly so i think that's what that will be my ask not a problem yeah one thing and maybe this is for the consultant but uh it would it would be helpful if we if you if you could go back to the last time these fees were increased and look at what the subsidy was each year by the general fund it's probably a a very large number but it would be helpful to to show what the rest of the public how much the rest of the public subsidized it i don't know what the numbers let's say it's 10 million dollars since 2001 that's a lot of money that the rest of us subsidized when we didn't need these services um i think it would help help to talk about it thank you mr feely i also in the interest of public disclosure since one of the last public speakers talked about ai i think it'd be helpful if you just spend a minute talking about what we're doing with ai sure um and i could ask jc if he wants to come up um we actually just applied for a hud grant hud had a grant out to help um affordable housing productivity through the utilization of ai within the permitting system unfortunately we did not receive the grant i think it went to two municipalities i think one two or three municipalities um across the country but prior to us applying for that grant we were already in process we had done an rfi request for um information on companies that were providing ai while there is press about cities using ai for a full plan review we are really not aware of that happening i want to be straight up about that um we did we do track um we're always tracking los angeles was talking about it other cities were talking about it what we're seeing is that it is predominantly happening at that intake phase um putting stuff in seeing if they're meeting sufficiency do they have their energy calcs do they have you know other things do they have their florida product approval that needs to be in the permit and being able to spit that out pretty quickly to let people know you're missing these things just at the intake portion so um we are working on that but we are we do have something on the horizon with acela that i would like jc to spend a couple minutes talking about with you so you know where we are working to integrate that in to make that more seamless for our service delivery and before he says i i think that what's important is on an intake phase because nine times out of ten when we seem to have a permitting issue it is it is omissions in that first application and that and that's that delay in that first 30 days that caused the problem so hopefully this is something that you guys are doing proactively to address that that issue and i think historically just to add that a little bit you know historically like we've been the checks and balances um where people will put in what they think is a permit submission it's missing 12 things we go back then they come in with those 12 things and now they've got 20 comments and they want to know i didn't have any comments the first time well you didn't have a sufficient package so in addition to that in the past six months we have put in a sufficiency checklist that is available for people to see using human skill you know here's what you need to come in the door with to be sufficient for a full review under your first review we also have obligations to review that within a certain time and and get that back to them as well but i'll turn it over to jc because he we really are fully engaged in ai and how it can help us better deliver services to the citizens and clients of tampa jc hudgeson chief building official um so we have two we have a pilot currently um working with um acela so it's ei ai plan check so as you mentioned it's literally digitizing that sufficiency checklist that uh directive philly just brought up so therefore to your point yes there is a queue so even if they submit it we have up to five days to look at it we look at it in three days or less but still to your point that's the delay like still a person has to physically look at it and go through it excuse me so what we're looking to do is have that be done through the ai so some of the ais that we've seen the models they can do a yes no answer so ideally to your point if it has energy code documents do you have your site plan if it's over a certain square footage the system can logically figure that out so we're working with acela the hope to have that is early next year we're in a pilot with seven other jurisdictions with acela and their digital plan room to be able to upload the plan room documents and then be able to scan it to to confirm if it's um sufficient to move into plan review the second part is kind of the the tougher part is just the plans there's not one set of plans you get a you know you go from a hospital you go to a strip center you go to you know um apartment complex so they're all kind of different this the ai systems are still trying to learn how to physically you know we have language models which are great so the words great but the physical things and being able to do the imagery is where the block is currently right now so a lot of cities are testing it but they're doing it kind of behind the scenes because they're using the ai to test it and then they're checking most of the companies that we've talked to still take say it will take at least 18 to 24 months to still be comfortable enough with the results to say hey ai can do it on its own so right now we're still um using what most of them are calling was human in the loop ai so they'll make the review then you still have to have a physical person look at it go through the checklist and the ai will say hey we're fairly comfortable this is a code violation some of them they'll say it may be a judgment call or this one doesn't meet the code so then once again the staff then but that would help if you're going through you know 300 sheets for a plan review then have the ai to at least do that initial scan over for you and then you go back in and kind of confirm or deny those results so we're working with acela to integrate both of those through our plan room so we hope to have that hopefully by next summer next fall but at least the intake part we hope to have early next year thank you very much councilman miranda thank you mr chairman thank you for every everyone who spoke i believe what you said however when we have to make a decision it's got to be based on the facts that are real i'm not saying what you said was unreal but if you have a business and you're creating property that you're building in hillsborough county or in the city of tampa if you go down animal drive or 22nd street or you go down uh 7th avenue all the way to hillsborough county does it cost you more or less to get a permit that's my question to myself from what i saw here today it costs you more in hillsborough county than it did in tampa so you're the same individuals building the same and i'm not here to chastise anyone but you're building the same houses for the same cost but it costs you more to get a permit there than it does here am i right or wrong i don't know from what i saw so are we right or are we wrong are we meeting our expectations to give you the service that you dean and demand that you want and not only are we in the pinch i guarantee you the pasco county hillsborough county have the same problem we have in staffing they are very valuable employees just like your employees are and when you have a great electrician working for you or a great individual who does the stucco work and they're gone they're very difficult to replace because all of them are working that's the problem we have today and that division if somebody leaves here they got to borrow it they're going to steal somebody i hate to say that word from some other division who's already trained because they don't have time to train them they have zero experience so they have to go out and i think the last two we got was from pasco county if i remember i'm not sure of that because i see some people that were new here working and planning and zonings so i'm making an assumption on my part but as it costs more or less to build the house and get your plans built and certified and go inspect them during the process in hillsborough county or tampa that's the main question we have here because the salaries and the costs are the same that's all mr chairman thank you okay if no other discussion i think i think you've captured enough information from this council to move forward and we'll put this one to bed for now thank you so much thank you guys for showing up okay for items number two and three i suspect that they're we can open them up together because i've got proposals that incorporated in so we can do two and three together um i have sam printing as we speak the recommendations from the charter review commission um so and here they are i guess sure yes that'd be great this is this is something i did okay well so mr shelby is going to start kick us off with a just a brief introduction of the timeline where we started and where we're at mr shelby start with your name please make sure we'll everybody see that good morning members of council martin shelby city council attorney where the acoustics are much better here you you can zoom in a little bit on that because it's awfully somebody's done that is denser o'hero font and i'll push it down a little bit push the doctor well actually we're already now physically push it down we're already right here right now okay there you go okay can you push it up okay let me do that i'll push it out there there you go that's good that's good okay perfect okay that's what how the acoustics people don't realize they're talking out there we can hear everything even whispers up here it's crazy but this does make a difference and actually from where i sit i'm able to hear the speakers much better as well um here we are on uh september 24th for the initial review of the recommendations and proposed amendments to the charter uh at the conclusion of this i have a uh a proposed motion that i'm uh going to ask somebody to make to bring this back because if you see the next time according to this timeline is the next thursday on october 1st city council will have a final review of the recommendations and proposed amendments to the charter you will then approve the charter amendments that you choose to be submitted to the voters and at that time you will direct the crc legal council who you have retained for this purpose to draft the ordinance setting the ballot questions in summary language and at that time you will set the first reading for the ordinance on november 5th of 2026 at which time on november 5th it comes back for first reading and then the second reading and adoption of the ordinance is on november 19th as you can see we're moving rather quickly here because the ordinance is then forwarded to the mayor for her signature and we have a placeholder date of either december 3rd or 17th dependent on the date of a potential mayoral veto to allow for reconsideration of the ordinance by city council which then requires a two-thirds vote if council chooses to override the drop dead date that we all have to remain my remind remain mindful of is january 4th of 2027 because that according to the supervisor elections is the final deadline of submission of the ballot language for the march 2nd 2027 municipal election and that's for them to put it into spanish as well so that's uh councilwoman sure which date which page the last page so my question is does the mayor have a deadline for which she can veto yes i believe it's 15 days okay making sure thank you y'all should have good experience with that one okay yes is there any other questions for mr shelby on this process process questions okay that that means no i think that's it yeah i think that's a significant question because the last time one of the times that we talked about this they um the administration slow walked it and at the end blamed us for deciding at the last minute when it when actually they had delayed it for months okay so this councilman uh constant woman her type um i'll wait until we get to that part sorry okay so before you uh this document is the um structure items that the charter review commission had recommended so this is what you have before you that is newly printed and off the press you have another document that is on my letterhead was the list of the questions that we had submitted to the charter review commission um for their their consideration and then you have just a plain black and white page this first one is independent inspector general that is a document that i've created for your consideration for the items that i felt like were worthy of discussion today not to say that i know some of these other items may be important for other folks but these are the ones that i felt were structurally worthy of our consideration and discussion today um and that one would consider would take into account the salary issue as well councilwoman her tech um how do we want to how are we organizing this how are we going to go about this are we going to go based on the strike through well i think why don't we why don't we do three minutes of discussion from each council person about where their head is at because this is a workshop this is an opportunity for us to have you know just for just general discussion in the beginning okay that's fine we have plenty of time because i want to get i want to get out here about one o'clock so we have plenty of time and mr chairman yes martin shelby city council attorney just a reminder council that when you crafted this resolution you allowed this process today to be exactly what the chairman says that's why next week there'll be no official action necessarily today maybe some direction but there will be no official basically what will come what we'll come back with is um action items for you to um present to the legal council if you choose to move forward to give us the framework okay so why don't we do this um charlene set the clock for five uh timer for five please and we'll start i see councilwoman her tech so you want to kick us off yeah go ahead um so i'm looking at this amended sections the the part from um just so people and i don't know if there's a way that we could put this on the screen for folks to read along um mr selby would you be willing to be our vanna white he does not have the hands for it well but no bring i would bring more than one yeah bring all the all of these things uh alan's thing the questions the questions i'm gonna let other people deal with but but alan's thing in this is what i want to can you pause my time until he gets up there thank you do you want me to bring a legislative aid into this yeah yeah yeah we can get okay can we get a volunteer legislative aid sam if you can't get anybody else to do it sam can you come out here and help us out please and be our vanna white because i really believe that we should have people like as we're talking about it the public should be able to see what we're talking about here what what is we just wait somebody's we'll just wait for a second oh stephanie will be our vanna white no no no hold on yeah we need maybe we can borrow the clerk's copies yeah perfect the most dangerous thing sam thomas has done is going to uh uh costco or wherever he does and gets the big bags of candy i know i mean it's constant yeah like you yeah i mean sam sam thomas is best or worst thing he's done i i'm a thousand percent with you can you bet yeah go back yeah there you go by the way yes you you got that got the hands for it um so lisa can you go to to the second page page two and you can start my time again uh so i'm just gonna say i don't know how i don't know that the rezoning process of a zoning hearing officer has any support with this council um i'd be i'd be shocked uh i don't necessarily think it's a bad idea in the long run i just don't think that we're quite ready for it also i believe that this should be handled during the land development code updates we're having some conversations about this there so that's just my two cents um if you could go to page five sure yeah yeah anybody have an interest in this okay well there you go problem solved yeah um so then page five of eight the progress of city projects this is fascinating and this clearly i don't think they understand the cost of projects because any funded project in excess of a hundred thousand dollars that would take us that would take us multiple council meetings and i just don't know if this is a needed thing we get updates every six months on major projects through the city i i just i'm now i'm asking for me just looking at this initially i just don't well or i mean i'm fine opening it now if you all want to comment on it now so we can just get it done we might as well councilman if you can pause the councilman's time i do want to make a just a general comment as an overview the charter is likened to the constitution yeah and mind you there are multiple ways for council to communicate as you know the charter allows you to pass resolutions and the charter also gives you the legislative authority to enact laws by passing ordinances there are ways to address obviously it's very easy to to rescind a resolution or change a resolution or amend a resolution and it is much more difficult although not impossible to do the same for an ordinance and that requires notice in a public hearing so what i'm saying to you is that when something is in the charter and the voters approve it the law requires that if anything to do with it from that point forward has to be presented back to the voters at an election through the process so i guess for me i just instead of letting i mean you can talk during your time but do we have like a show of hands if we think this is a good idea okay well then yeah we'll wait for this was something that i wanted to talk about but what i had given to um my appointee to to discuss during okay the crs yeah um and then uh the i'll i'm going to allen's uh it's just a black and white that says inspect independent inspector general okay uh so i agree wholeheartedly with this um especially the fact that we should not have the mayor the council the city attorney this this independent inspector general idea is great but it should not be touched it should be wildly independent it should have none of us should have fingers on it except for um the day-to-day operation can be addressed by ordinance the ordinance that the city council puts together i think this is a great idea i know other people want to talk about it so i'll let them um going to number three which uh which is council oh no i'm sorry number four which is salary this is while i understand the chair's desire to settle this once and for all for here i do believe that we could also do this through ordinance and it depends today if we decide to do that um we we could and and again i can see both sides my concern is i don't know that this would pass versus if we just do it ourselves and do this today um that that would be my that would be my only concern so those are those are the first things i want to say you're correct my intent my intent on that was just to have this question asked and answered so no future council no future councils have to be put in this position mr shelby i've just been requested it is very difficult especially for the purposes who are doing this um by audio and not by the screen if you could just read what it is you're referring to specifically so that you all have it in front of you the public necessarily might not well i guess that's true but the thing is that's that might be difficult to read it's your call but the thing is for the purpose of the record maybe just be more specific thank you okay okay anything else okay councilwoman young wanted to speak next and then let's fear okay so with the um so the progress of the city projects pretty much so how that came about i remember when we were at a cra meeting and i think it was you councilman who had made a motion to have like this progress tracker of the cra projects and um many times i get a lot of questions from my constituents about and they're like hey what happened to this i thought you know this was supposed to be happening at this year that year um for example with palmetto beach with the seawall and and so i've had some constituents ask what happened to that and then we have you know go and of course ask and see you know where it is and then it's like oh well this is this is kind of where it is but it was more so just to have um a more um like accountability and transparency when it comes to projects of course we're not the city's not it's you know the project load is different than what's happening in the cra but just some kind of of accountability measure so we can say this is what's happening with this project here here is where we are with the project so it may not be something that is necessarily in the charter um if that's not you know the council's pleasure but just some kind something that we can you know go back to and look at and there's some accountability when it comes to projects that are happening because like well what's going on with that and then finally so you know you know it's not until someone asked that we realized oh we're waiting for the state to or we're you know and you wouldn't know it unless you ask so that was kind of where this came from was just trying to have some type of accountability and transparency when it comes to the projects that we're doing in in our community so that was kind of where that came from that's that's it that's all mr shelby and if you don't if council does not want me to chime in on informational things but this is something that perhaps came up this year when you reviewed the budget you know particularly a park in south tampa that people had concerns about that have just appeared at what expense your cip that you pass the resolution every year is a planning document and in an ideal world you plan things five years out and if all goes well everything moves up every year and then you add new projects to the end of the five years now what's happened or what can happen is because of changing economics or changing priorities or changing policies of whoever the administrator is the cip can change sometimes maybe perhaps with a new administration next year's cip may be dramatically perhaps different so however you set it up purpose is to be able to more accurately track projects within the cip so you can find out what happened to something that you may not have been aware of that when you passed the cip change the process what mr shelby said okay yeah um i don't miss i mean my input on that is i understand the intent i don't necessarily believe it's a charter issue so i would unless there's somebody who really feels strongly about this i don't think it should be in the charter yeah i mean i think we can handle that via a resolution did you want to talk about that one if i may uh so am i is this general speaking time or just on this topic were you done with your is that all you wanted to say yeah we can always go back again this is a workshop we have we can be more informal councilman beer thank you sir so a couple of things obviously the inspector general i strongly support that i think that's a great idea i see my appointee mr cohen who's here good to see alan um and i i i think this is a great great great idea um because then you can get a more objective analysis on allegations of ethical violations corruption different things like that and i think there will be vast support in the public on this issue so i i i i i salute that i think that's wonderful um which version though well that we'll talk about that yeah i know i know i know and you're right councilwoman that that our fingerprints must be on it as little as possible uh yeah because we don't yeah we we don't want any uh puppet strings to be alleged or to be interpreted in any way and and so that'll certainly by the way i don't think i'm going to be here to vote on this so i'm just talking in the wind here right but for whatever it's worth um and then with regards to the um to yeah i know you're going to be here to vote on no no yeah yeah that's what i'm saying they're certainly going to be here on on october so part of it yeah yeah yeah oh yeah no but but then with regards to the spending issue i know why this is put in i mean when when and this says capital projects but there could be other budget allocations i think about the special needs internship program that if i didn't obsessively stay on that it would have never happened and that i think i had to run through like three years of that until it's fully operational um the returning citizens program um the office of returning citizens which is now getting up so there are things that you pass as a council member that it's incumbent on you to push them and keep them on the agenda and keep them front frame of mind that being said there is also a great public interest in making sure that these issues are by virtue of procedure um brought up before council whether it's a capital allotment whether it's a program and so forth how you write that in exactly that that that's going to be into details but i am open to something in the charter um that does specify that for just for the record i am open to something again the devil or whatever would be in the details but i certainly am open because i've seen that happen with my own programs that i've tried to push obviously you have station 24 which is a larger example when we got design funding in 23 and it's taken three years to do the groundbreaking um but that's a bigger thing i'm not worried about that in as much as the smaller programs so that's it thank you councilman carlson yeah just on on these two issues um to the last one we we we had the the situation station 24 what was it 15 million that we allocated and then we found out the next year that they just didn't spend it and then they didn't they spent on something else and didn't tell us that that when we moved it that we moved it to something else we also have the example of um uh tampa union station which was actually a cra project but they decided just not to do it because the city owns it and it's take it that's been funded for six or seven years and it took most of that time for them to even start same thing with jackson house where it was a cra project they just decided not to tell the jackson house that we had allocated the money even though there was a press conference about it that we weren't invited to i think the problem is not giving updates because we can ask for updates all that's doing is kind of embarrassing them the problem is that we have no we have no authority we can allocate the money but we can't force the administration to do anything and so if we have projects that we want to go forward that the public wants public can come here all the time we can approve whatever we want we can even approve budgets but they won't do it if it's an administration that's not collaborative they just won't do it if they and they and in this case this administration just didn't tell us that they didn't do it and they refused to even talk about it so it's a horrible situation the other thing with inspector general we've had and i can go through this more later but we've had multiple multiple examples where this administration has used city staff legal staff communication staff political staff against city council members to do investigation of city council members um uh i had an editor tell me that that a person from staff um gave a um uh or offered a a uh an opposition research folder on me um they there was allegations by staff that they saw one of the mayor's staff going around to staff members during the last election raising money for during the day raising money for my opponent and rallying people to to volunteer i filed multiple complaints with um with some with hr some with the the chief of staff some with the mayor's office and some with the legal department and there's no recourse whatsoever it doesn't matter how bad um the these folks act um uh they do things that are definitely unethical and some of them may be illegal but there's no mechanism to stop them from doing it and um you know when they come after city council members for political purposes and attack and then they'll say oh well there's no evidence that was reviewed and there's no evidence there absolutely is evidence there's hard evidence the problem is not that there's a lack of evidence the problem is that there's no mechanism to punish them for doing it and so we need an inspector general there's also conflicts of interest that have never been disclosed we've got a former mayor who's lobbying this mayor i've talked to at least two or three of his clients who have told me to my face that he's lobbying and the mayor has no record of it and the media writes that he just um is not a lobbyist because he hasn't registered as a lobbyist well that's unethical so what do we what do we do about these things somebody can lobby the mayor and the administration set up meetings on behalf of their clients and and just not disclose it and say they're not a not a um not a lobbyist and in at least one case the mayor didn't even have it on our calendar and the reporter had to go dig to find out who was there um i mean there's all kinds of unethical things happening in this administration and the last administration and there needs to be a third party that can investigate it the mayor has control of the communication department the political department and the legal department nhr to come after us and we have no recourse whatsoever to stop them from doing those unethical things but also to stop them from the unethical things that they're doing on their own thank you councilwoman young um i was trying to find the page but i believe to your your first comment about uh we're talking about projects and the in the money that is allocated i think there was a suggestion made i can't i cannot find what page but to have um you know whatever money is allocated to a project that it you know you have to spend it within that fiscal year on the project okay that's the one the clintonian questions which number was that i think i circled it number 22 yeah yeah 22 uh be required to expand within the same fiscal year in which the budget is approved yeah so i mean i think that that is and even if again going back to like the the accountability and the in the transparency if we allocate something and then we find out oh well we haven't we haven't done it yet well now you know we've allocated this money two three four years and it hasn't been spent yet on a certain project so again it may not be something i don't know if it's something that goes in the charter but just some kind of you know something that gives it some tea to say we you know these are the projects that we want to see we want that we've allocated this money for it to be done it needs to be spent within this time frame it needs to get done so whatever that whatever the language is or what that looks like but and whether it's in a charter or not but just something so we're not because i've heard plenty of times even before i was on council it's like these projects take forever and take forever to happen so what do we do or how what can we do so that we can make sure that that doesn't continue to happen down the road we saw that in real time this year with paving that we had allocated all that money for paving and it didn't get spent just you know i i've actually handwritten a note on there on this i've got uh on that page i've got 22 is that should be held with it by an ordinance i think that 15 we should be able to deal with that with an ordinance and those are the two those are the two that were hot button items for me that should be able to do what about 16 16 is a hot button um you have that uh uh lisa you have that page if you could put that up it's it's i have it up this one oh sorry you do i'm sorry you're you're like way ahead of me i'm sorry that would be required to be a charter i know but i think that that's something that that we did ask them to discuss and that's the biggest one really that was that that that was untouched yeah that would have to be a charter amendment for sure but but i do believe that we should discuss that today as as i don't know i feel like i feel like we need to go in some type of order i feel i i think i think this is we're kind of flushing it out throwing it all out there and then we can we can we so this is a broad net and then we'll start focusing as we people council members have the conversation i see councilman ran his light is on yeah thank you thank you thank you very much uh when you look at the administration no matter who's there who's in the council and you look at what happens sometimes it happens because there's no other way of doing it for the pipes program the pipe program was started years ago we're spending 35 to 40 million dollars just repairing pipes every year every year every year so finally we decided sometime back that we're going to have a pipe program change all the pipes on the ground water and wastewater at about 2.9 billion dollar cost we started collecting the money at two dollars a month for water and wastewater now it's up to eight or nine dollars a month because the cost we were doing a mile was costing us a million and a half dollars a mile all of a sudden went to four and a half million dollars a mile because the cost outside they that's what happened we had to stop it now who do you blame the council the mayor the cost who it wasn't us was it them i don't believe it was so who was it the contractor it stopped and now they're starting on another area from what i talked to brad on it the other day so we're doing it limited we've done about 78 or 80 miles of that and 200 miles of one of the other forget which so we're making progress but these progress you don't have a city that has no buildings or no nothing you have a city that's already going and doing well and you've got to replace what you have at the same time you have all the things going on around you it is not easy we do not control costs the cost is what we have in labor and we can do something we started doing some of that our own so you look at different causes what does it cost to start something new i'm not here to blame the administration or blame the council but we can pass all we want but if the cost goes up who are you going to blame there's a lot of things here that are in paper that i read and i said yeah who's gonna who's gonna you you everybody and i'm not against what you said earlier about the gentleman or the lady whoever's going to be the uh inspector general who's going to look at him or her is that what we're starting you got to have confidence in yourself before you have confidence in somebody else and if i got to tell the mayor to go to hell i don't give a damn who the mayor is i go see him and i tell him but i'll never criticize any mayor when i'm on this dais because i'm criticizing my city that's how i operate thank you very much thank you councilman carlson yeah and i i think i think uh councilmember moran's point is good about um you know who's gonna who's gonna review the ig i think i think that the the the the overriding issue though is is in the first few points on the on this um clandett and sheep what we're calling it but it is who has control of the city attorney's office right now we have a city attorney who seems very very even with all of us but we've had city attorneys who don't act in the best interest of city council actually it's the one the letterhead lisa and is it the letterhead one yeah and if we if we had control of the city attorney if we had the right to fire the city attorney and i think we should have the right to fire the mayor's senior staff we should have fired the communication director and the political director already years ago but um uh i mean there's just been too much political chaos in this city and we need the taxpayers should not be paying for it people on the outside want to do it that's fine but not people being paid and i mean an example in the city attorney's office 2018 and we found this out by accident in like 2020 2018 a city attorney wrote a two paragraph memo saying it's my opinion that that the city council no longer needs to review or approve settlement agreements it's completely wrong it was completely against the charter and we found out by accident and we had to fight the city attorney at the time he's a great person but we had we had to fight to make sure that that that the city attorney followed the charter the uh the city attorney has no right by charter to change the charter and and that's what happened they the city attorney approved hundreds of settlement agreements without city council approval and that should never have happened another example is the same city attorney uh who was there in 2008 and also here in 2019 presumably is the one who didn't put the charter amendments on the on the ballot the charter the charter review commission approved them the city council approved them before my time and the city attorney didn't put them on the ballot what is anybody investigating why that happened was that because the mayor at the time ordered it not to happen uh or or did somebody just make a mistake i mean how can a city attorney make a mistake like that and then you have more egregious ones where um you know 20 20 20 21 where uh city attorneys proven in the media from public records city attorneys spent hours and hours with people who are suing or threatening to sue at least three city council members and if if a if a mayor is using the city attorney's office as a weapon against city council or they're doing things that are not ethical or illegal we need to have the right to fire them and if we get a city attorney like we have now who's listening to both sides then uh then we might not need an ig okay so um mr mr shelby as we as we further in this conversation if you could start taking notes i'm very poor at that well i i expect you to improve your i expect you to improve your skill level i think i'll do the best but my suggestion is how about this we'll tell you what you need to jot down yeah and and and by the way there is really no reason why you can't do it by motion and vote i understand that but what i would stick with me if you could if you could capture if someone points out something very specific that needs to be captured no mr shelby's sitting okay let's we're not going to talk about this i have to i have to think and write at the same time yes i can't chew and go so if you would just capture if and if i have to point you and say please capture that that would be fine could we could we could we housewoman her tech i mean miss scharf is truly the best note taker if you want to throw your facilitator your aid under the bus and ask her to come out here that'd be great miss scharf if you want to come out here or if you can keep the notes yourself in your office whichever works would you like her out here it's up to her i mean there's been yeah so miss scharf it's your choice but if you could take notes and i want you to start with this one we are not doing section 2.15 or what yeah that being the rezoning process we've decided no on that no act no action no action on that so um if you could go to the next page please which is three of eight the one thing i forgot to mention was the appointment on section 6.03 they basically took out the nomination and went back to confirmation that's a no-go for me i believe there was also reference in the report that that actually went to the voters that change it did and was approved by the voters it was approved by the now what the crc is recommending is that you undo what the voters had previously voted on and and that's one of the reasons i'm saying no to it uh but also the one of the reasons that this is very important is because we currently have an interim chief of police and that's illegal okay so real real quick um sam would you please make three uh a copy of the documents we're looking at that one the charter review commission one the uh one on my letterhead and then the uh suggestions that i printed out so that we can give that to kelly so she's making notes she has actually a copy in front of her if you need just the hard copies that you make copy come grab mine and you can copy them on the machine so sam if you could do that i'd appreciate it so i just wanted to bring that one up for a quick vote to see if anybody thinks that we should go back to the mayor appointing the voters already voted on that okay so is that does anybody think that that's a good idea to go back to the mayor appoints may i just mr mr council carlson yeah i just want to add the the the city council i forgot the year 2020 or something we we put this on the ballot and the voters voted on it and now they're trying to change it back and so yeah this has already been decided okay so then miss scharf 6.03 appointment we're taking we're not approving that can i just add one more yes sir no to the to the point about the police chief also we that was put in there also intentionally because because uh the last administration i think this administration too i can't remember exactly had people as interim forever um yep and um i think one of them was the cf the cfo during the last administration it was a great person but they should have been appointed and and i actually talked to um uh chief owens and um uh bennett about about making the interim chief permanent um he's got to know that whoever wins may pick somebody else but it for the sake of the community i don't think we should have an interim police chief anyway i think that whoever's police chief should be police chief they need the authority to do it because public safety is too important agreed and that's that's exactly what i said i think that um interim chief owen is doing a phenomenal job i really love him i think that he should have the title um if something were to happen in this city uh we need we need to have someone whose job it is that can't be switched immediately people need the the confidence in the chief and him being named interim just says that we don't have the confidence and i have the confidence in him and i think all of us do i don't know why we wouldn't just approve him so i mean i i 100 agree with you on that uh so so far we have said no to section 2.15 and section 6.03 and then we're still debating 7.12 do we want to just go through these and just approve just go by section well and then we can go back are we are we done with general discussion okay then if nobody wants to have any kind of general discussion that's fine that could be our next direction okay so section 2.03 the only quick there's a it's just yeah to require the attendance of the members meaning that members of city council have what certain days that they're allowed to miss on meetings what is that exactly it says compel and then switch to require the attendance of the members and to enforce the same by finer penalty if they so so elect i don't know what what is the what what is the legal definition between compel and require and why was that is any of the members from the charter review commission remember what that discussion was about why why what is the difference between uh compel and require can you please put that back up there you go and if i may mr chair i was actually you you said that i if we could recognize our the members i think three oh yeah oh that'd be nice yeah if i may that would be lovely yes i mean i see two who else is here i see three four because we have the interim okay yeah yeah yeah come on up you guys want to sit close to us so that we can call you up if we have to just come up and introduce yourselves just say for a thank you alan cone the uh vice chair of the charter review uh commission and i i came here today because number one i wanted to thank all of you for this opportunity to to make a mark on the city that we all love uh so much i don't know if it's an appropriate time to to uh unless you have specific questions um yeah no speeches we're just talking so introduction is fine thank you bobby would you like uh introduce yourself good morning council bobby creighton charter review advisory commission member i would also like to express my deepest gratitude for the honor to be able to serve on on this commission it was the uh the privilege of a lifetime in my civic involvement um to date and uh i guess i'm here if you have any questions but the caveat of we did deliberate a lot of this as a group and i would not want to um speak on behalf of anyone who isn't present today we understand yeah we definitely understand allison he was my appointee yes did an incredible job i mean he was looking at the city charter no speeches going back to the no speeches no speeches no speeches go ahead um good morning um still morning yes allison hewitt alternate it was exceptionally energetic discussions um when you think that you start a meeting at six that will go until nine that you think you're going to end early oh we never did um look at that you guys are already politicians you get a microphone and you have to you have to give a speech always because you know me in this this podium i've got to make my statement but um want to say thank you for uh the alternate position um thank you for allowing us to learn about the charter and we are here for um questions because all of us here definitely participated i want to say thank you to the other commissioners who are not here because they're working but um thank you to them as well and just so you know people ask me if they should be here and i said don't you know that you didn't have to be so this is not a indictment of why other people are not here they actually asked and i said no so um we have one more who's here no i thought oh no never mind i thought oh um so which does anybody does anyone what is the difference between compelling require mr shelby or you guys what was what was the discussion there sure i'll take a stab at it um i i from my recollection feel free to help out if you have details but um the it was thought that the word uh compel implied some degree of force such that i suppose there was like a legal kind of standard there for the word compel it has a little bit more weight i think than than require did that's just my personal recollection yes we had several lawyers on the commission who felt that was uh too impactful when you could achieve the same results with uh require that's fine and just as i can martin shelby city council attorney this section in the charter creates the ability to do that but i will share with you that there is no mechanism in existence now that has enforcing fine or penalty it says if they so elected as to this point there is no remedy that's been created by council councilman hartick but there's nothing to prevent us it says council members may may adopt by such bylaws regulations and rule procedure yes so if we found there was a problem we could fix it with rules and procedure yes you have okay that's well then that okay so i'm not hearing any objection we accept the rule language in section 2.03 from the charter review commission without objection okay staff is at the end okay and two point yeah that's that is a yes we're accepting the language in 2.03 from the charter review commission i'm uh so in section 2.04 staff um allocated within yeah yeah i i agree is there any objection to that language i'm hearing no objection we accept the language from the charter view commission in 2.04 2.08 this is about the readings mr shelby would you like to chime in on this one no comment on this mind you this is um this is pursuant to the requirements of general law which is open-ended but it's in chapter 166 which may change um but um i have not reviewed this for legality you have an excellent attorney who's representing the charter review commission so i have no so hearing no objection will accept the language in 2.08 any objection hearing none okay we're going to accept the language in 2.08 what is it reading reading no wait reading regarding um when two readings require when two the the amendment would be pursuant to the requirements of general law when two readings are required ordinances shall be read only by title on two separate days and it goes on from there but it's regarding how the passage of ordinances for cttv as much as everybody loves looking at my face on tv if you guys could just leave the documents up on the public monitor so people to review while we're having this discussion yes just you just have to imagine and what we look like okay we we've already eliminated 2.15 that was the rezoning process rezoning hearing that was by unanimous unanimous consent affirmative okay so we've got uh term 6.02 um councilwoman her take my guess is that this they they did mention somewhere in the charter review commission i believe someone said that there were quite a few things that didn't make it in councilman carlson alluded to it earlier i think this is one of the things that was inadvertently left in because i'm almost positive we took out anything that had to do with 1979 um and all of these dates but so i think this was just missed still i don't think there's anything wrong with this i agree i i i say we accept the language without objection for 6.02 what this is is terms so this is the terms of the council members and it talks about the 1979 municipal election right so when they have a little old yeah it was so yeah it's it's it's it's it's stale okay so i don't hear any objections we're going to accept the language from 6.02 by unanimous consent well we've already agreed by and just one more time by unanimous consent to uh to not accept the language in 6.03 under appointment i hear no objections that's on unanimous consent that is gone okay oath or they struck through a resident of the city and is let me ask a question what does that mean that they do not have to live in the city of tampa no the idea meaning who an elected somebody running for these positions does not have to live in the city of tampa am i reading it wrong or what this is 6.05 it says that the officer is mr creighton yeah you raise your hand or they can win and then move in mr chairman i just want to clarify for the clerks uh when you say by unanimous consent that's really not a mo it's not on a motion and vote at this point you're just listing them at this time this is preliminary yeah okay thank you yes are you on 6.05 yeah yeah the oath says you struck through a resident of the city and is so there was um apparently a transmission error in some of the charter amendments that were approved in the the last round um i forget the exact details well we understand that part so this this actually accepts the other language that had been approved and trans was supposed to be transmitted right so so this language doesn't change whether or not an officer has to be um a resident of the city it deals whether or not when they swear their oath that they that they are which is a little you have to live here in a certain period of time before you qualify and all that no i what i was going to suggest is that there there maybe we could segregate the issues that we were informed about by our attorney in terms of just the cleanup uh of uh issues from the last charter review and uh whether it was dates or the what was we understand in the chat may i may i inquire mr shelby just to clear up any confusion because there has been talk about correcting errors that might have been did did the charter review commission actually work uh through those to be aware of them was made aware of them and is included now in this process of its recommendations i just i just need to know the answer to that because i just want to make clear because um uh as you know the city attorney has prepared a memo with regard to items um and i just want to know if they're incorporated if if to your knowledge they were brought to your attention as a board and you incorporated that in your recommendations we did and just to provide clarity that the charter um doesn't require certain officers to to be residents of the city for example the the chief of police or the the cfo if you read the language in the oath each officer of the city before entering upon discharge etc shall swear that the officer is a resident of the city conflicts with language elsewhere in the charter right that says you're right now as i've read through the paragraph i agree i think we should accept this language yes thank you yeah well mccarlson because because it because we we no longer require the department heads to yeah yeah right right correct well but elected officials have required and you're and you're also in yeah entitled to hold so they've already got that in so it's yeah no no no everybody councilman carlson yeah um i was trying to find the exact language but um i voted against make making taking away the residency requirement i know the majority of you all voted for it but when it went to the ballot language um the way it was translated the effect of it is that it asks the public do you think that city council and the mayor should be required to be residents of the city and it was completely misleading i only i noticed that by the time it was too late i went to the city attorney at the time and said this is biased it shouldn't be allowed and the only remedy i had was to file an individual lawsuit to stop it which i didn't want to do but um but that's another example of how misleading language was interpreted by what city council said had the correct language been there that the mayor's direct reports this takes away the requirement that the mayor's direct reports um have to live in the city it might not have passed but it passed because the the quick reading of it is that city it required city council to live we understand but that question has been asked and answered socially nothing on our table not really because the public the public um responded to a misleading uh yeah but that would still require additional action beyond what we're doing right now though so well that's a great it would be a great opportunity for the inspector general to go in and find out why that happen no it's seriously because because it was misleading and it was done you know at the at the same time um uh the there is a uh a term when i was on the charter review commission i tried to get term limits for city council and the mayor um we were not the mayor at the time fought us on the term limits for the mayor under city council when i first got in we did put a charter amendment to require not more than i think four terms of city of city council and uh the mayor's packs this mayor's packs ran ads saying that it was a devious plot by city council to extend their terms by another 20 years and i mean there's all this misleading uh chaotic stuff going on out there and somehow we have to clean this up we can't that's what we're trying to do no but we're at the end of this term and that this was passed under false pretenses and it should be revoked and put back on the ballot okay um the next salaries let's put a pin on this because it's this will be part of the other further discussion what happened with oath what happened to 6.05 we're going to accept we're going to accept the language of 6.05 no so i agree with councilmember carlson i i this isn't something i wanted and it went through and i'm not thrilled by it so here's the problem though council i know i understand what you're saying in that we haven't we it's already done please don't interrupt sorry but please don't interrupt i'm just saying that that if you all want it to go through that's fine but i don't so i'm just i'm saying no now here's the problem then you have it you have an inconsistency yes and i think we should fix it like councilmember carlson said but again if ever if if we don't have it if we don't have a majority that want to fix it then that's fine okay but our charter chairman i'm sorry what what no the the fix is to make sure that the actual language said doesn't say city council and mayor and only speaks to directors which that was not the language that made it on the ballot councilmember carlson is correct okay does this need does this need greater scrutiny and maybe we have to bring in the city uh attorney's office yes who worked on this because i just yes let's let's do that um so i know they're listening uh city attorney's uh study if you would look at the charter view commission's proposed language at 6.05 for consistency with the charter and what was elected what was voted on by the uh members by the citizens of the city of tampa and how we can fix fix that for consistency we're putting a pen in 6.06 may i ask mr chairman i'm sorry i was going to say also 6.05 we shouldn't just have the city attorney we should have the crc attorney look at that as well that would have to probably be next week then on that i i because i he certainly he's not he's not present and he wasn't invited no but yeah i i okay then never mind that one that cost us money and i know if i i irrespective of that at this point in time per your agreement with mr tinkler ken tinkler kenneth tinkler of carl carlton fields he now becomes your attorney for this purpose and and uh he did he did he did he did he did ask if he wanted if council wants him to be present um the decision was made this is a preliminary discussion next week he can be invited to be here yeah so so though you y'all know that um mr tinkler the attorney that we contracted with for the charter review commission commission he is still on retainer um he's finished the work with the charter review commission when we decide what is going to make it to the ballot or not make it to the ballot he's going to review that product for us so but that'll be that's that's additional work he's going to create the product he's going to create because he's going to do it and he's going to he's going to craft the language and put it in the form of an ordinance for your review correct council on her take um i don't think we should put a pin in 6.06 i think we might just let's just have the discussion okay i think that there's i think that we can do exactly what you said if you could pull up number four on um council member clendenin's the blank page the independent inspector general one yeah the one that starts within this yeah if you it's it's like the second to last page it says number four city council compensation thank you so i i really believe that we can do this by uh ordinance and there was there was not an appetite for this at the beginning of our uh um term but i believe now at the end of our term when the majority of us or at least okay not the majority but three of us are going to be leaving i think that now is the time to have this conversation i i agree with this particular model of 50 percent of the mayor's base salary and that was fought for by council member carlson that's where it came from yeah and so i think this is perfectly fine and i think we just do an ordinance and get it done yeah the only i mean because if you put if you put compensation in the charter i think that is i think that's too tight remember it's only a formula i understand but i a a i believe in this i i think it would have a hard time passing b i really do think that that it's just not a i think this is an ordinance issue i do not think that we should be talking about salaries in our charter okay so then do we actually just eliminate 6.06 then i mean how do you no because 6.06 just says um the salaries of officers the city may be increased or decreased at any time by the concurrence of the mayor and a majority of no fewer than four votes this is for staff this is salaries for staff when we're talking about salaries for us i think the ordinance would do just fine and i think we could ask um the city attorney's office to come up with an ordinance that says just this and let's just get it done does anybody have opposition to it at this point i know councilmember vieira you had a lot of opposition earlier but now that you're leaving office um and this would obviously not be for us this would not start until the next council if i can okay forget it forgive go ahead mr mr no no no i just want to know it's presently your salary is set by resolution this looks like it adds well it well it says it looks like it adds or ordinance of the council um but i just just your your salaries as you have adjusted them it was done by resolution it would probably i mean i think i i agree i agree with councilwoman hertech if we wanted to do this by i think ordinance would be better that would take that would leave the gravitas would be there and it would it would eliminate this stuff the back and forth we have on this councilman for your other than councilman how much does the mayor presently make i should know about 200 000 it's like 189 or something like that yeah i mean look i i i could support a salary range in that regard my big challenge was you know voting for something um and and uh doing it after an election uh it was more of a procedural issue i do i did think uh council's salary needed to be raised that was more of a procedural issue something in this neighborhood i could support i don't want to marry myself to this well and again the projection is next october again next fiscal year so a year from now but yeah but not only that the most important reason we're having this discussion is because somehow when this was when this was done uh after the election when we when councilwoman henderson focused on this somehow it ends in may like it goes back to fifty three thousand so we have to solve this and we don't we cannot kick this can down the road any further yeah and um and so and i and i would support even something more than what i would be comfortable with for a position like this to take it out of the hands of council members with a set with a set salary and formula so that it's not politicized that's that's the biggest issue for me that was my thinking yeah that's the biggest thing chairman mr shelby then councilman miranda yeah martin shelby city council attorney uh it occurred to me that i think what council needs to have in front of you is the ordinance excuse me the resolution that now controls because i believe the way it's the way it's stated is your salaries do increase so the mayor's salary today was not just for the cola pardon just for the cost of living allowance yeah no and wasn't it no i tied it to um atu atu cola cola but again it ends in may right so that's kind of moved so even that happened in front of us because it ends in may yeah councilman miranda i can only say this that i believe that i know i didn't and i'm sure the other six members didn't either none of us rent for office thinking of the salary you ran for office to make the city better than when you had it the day before you got elected and that's what it's all about now that we're here we're discussing salary that's all i'm going to say okay um so councilman mcrawson yeah i think i think whether it's by ordinance or resolution or by charter i think it needs to be a formula so that future city councils don't have to vote on it again um uh i feel and and and and like council member her text said this is going to affect the next city council not us i'm termed out it's not going to affect me at all um by the way uh the packs that ran negative ads against me last time ran three waves of direct mail saying i had raised my salary and and i got elected by 60 percent so it doesn't matter anyway um but uh i believe in good government and if we were earning fifty two thousand or something like that before that's not enough for somebody to survive it's like sixty percent ami or eighty percent ami and and our legislative aids are paid more than that i i want city council members to be honest people who can dedicate their full time and to get the kind of people we need we should be paying more than a hundred thousand a hundred when when i was uh when i was in college a hundred thousand was a huge amount of money because people were earning like twenty thousand when they graduated but now now kids graduating college are earning a hundred thousand plus because of inflation and we need we need honest people we need people who can afford to pay for tickets to go to events um uh you know when i when i go to an event i reimburse uh uh folks for it so that so that i don't even have to count it because it's not a gift and if i'm paying them for it and and we need people to make enough money to be able to do that councilwoman young to um to councilman bureau's point saying having something kind of set in stone so that it doesn't become politicized i think is important i oftentimes people ask me so what else do you do i don't have time to do anything else though you don't have another job no this is it like this is not and this is just you know from from my experience but i think having something so that we don't because nobody it's like the conversation that you know is important but you really don't want to have to have and so if you have something so that you don't have to you know even people know like man it would be nice but they don't want to say that out loud they don't want to talk about it so if you have it already whether it be by ordinance or resolution so we don't have to continue to have that conversation it doesn't become something where someone's putting out an ad and saying oh well you they're going to raise their salary just you know leave it set in stone so we don't have to keep going back to it you know what i want to set in stone is this this this assertion has been repeated so many times about part-time full-time this is not a part-time job and and by the way the definition with the mayor's position is not a part-time job they and there's no it doesn't differentiate itself in in the in the in the charter we are working i know councilwoman young you were here when i got here yesterday you were here when i left yesterday i mean uh so i mean we know how this goes and we're uh councilman menescalco yeah no i'm glad that you brought that up you know regarding the mayor i once caught a glimpse of her calendar i don't know how she does i mean it's from morning to night that's one thing my wife can attest of you know that common of a part-time job i think i sit on seven or eight boards and i try to get on another board but um it just do you want to go on another board would you like one of my boards i already i can't but when and i'm sorry my wife isn't here she doesn't come to the meetings but i get calls at eight in the morning on a sunday you know when they have your personal cell phone it's different you're on call we get complaints we get requests we get and i'm glad because i know what i signed up for and i'm here to serve the community but it's not part-time and then the events that we go to and then the community events and the neighborhood events and the association meeting i mean it goes on and on it is a full-time job you can make it part-time but none of us make it part-time because i see how hard everyone works here um so i just want to clarify that and uh that's it thanks councilman randy well i guess i have to confess i had three full-time jobs in city hall the racetrack and the restaurant when i used to be part on a cafe and you know what never tired me out i'm 86 and i still do what the hell i want but you've quit the other two jobs no i did not you retired no i did not they fired you no they did not you're getting close they're getting close they call me i work one day a week starting in november to may very good only because i speak another language i i saw council carlson first and i'll get back to you yeah the only thing is um if you i would rather leave the full-time part-time thing out but if you um if if it's in there it needs to be not not exclusive because yeah no i i just i just wanted because you know the most inaccurate assertion if repeated often enough assumes an error of truth and that is what's happened with this is people keep repeating oh it's a part no it's not it doesn't say it's a part-time job it doesn't say it's a it's just a it's just a job it is just a job no more than any no more than when you get hired with anything you know any other type of leadership type of you know if you're a ceo or you're whatever you are a director of a company it's a job it doesn't tell you it's a full-time job or part-time job it's not like you don't punch into a clock councilman carlson finish your work and then councilman hartek yeah just just to add you know i could give you lots of examples i think the best most ethical governments pay their people well so there's no incentive to take freebies and cheat and um and even if we change it to a hundred thousand dollars any of the seven of us can earn easily double that in the private sector so it is it's not that it's not that um uh anybody's trying to make money off it or or upgrade their job any any of us could earn more than that okay councilwoman her tech then yes so i'd like to make a motion to ask staff to come back with an ordinance that uses number four as its base of the document that the document that he had that's on the screen right now it's called city council compensation i'd like to direct staff to come back on october 15th excuse me hold on just a minute i'll get i'll get you i'll get staff a copy actually this is not this is not staff this is not the city when you say staff you mean no you see an ordinance and we're doing an ordinance oh and oh you're doing a specific ordinance ordinance for this yes not not an ordinance we're not doing the charter we're doing this ourselves as an ordinance understood which is why i want city staff city legal staff to come back on october 15th ideally um that's if that's not enough time uh that probably isn't enough time so let's do november 5th i'd like um city staff to come back on november 5th with the this ordinance proposed ordinance that follows number four and um i'm going to throw chair under the bus and have um since this was something that you wrote down i'll have city staff talk work with you on getting this done does that is that fair yes okay so that's my motion and then i'm sure oh and then i know he wants to talk i have a motion i have a second councilman veera uh yeah no you know folks were talking about their experiences and everybody's different for me i've i've been in office about 10 years and i've done about 100 town halls and i know that there's there's people that for them stuff like that and going into the community is very very stressful it's it's it's for me that's not work if that makes sense um like i i do my legal practice i'm a mediator um i i handle cases um and everything i had to go to missouri for a client a couple weeks ago and i'm a very involved in active city council member everybody's different there's a reason why you have a lot of lawyers in public office is because and that's a a benefit of the practice is that our practice can be amenable to being in office and then managing your caseload but everybody is different and what this allows people if i may mr shelby um what what this allows people to do is is to um god i lost my train of thought no that but yeah yeah okay yeah yeah this allows somebody who's not in a in a vocation or a career where they can't manage their caseload where they can't manage their work the way other professions can and earn a good salary and that's why i support this i think this is good so thank you we we have legal staff in the room come on up justin vaske legal department um we're talking about salaries um back in 2024 in september we passed a uh salary resolution for city council and you know one of the things i heard was that there's like an end date to it of may of next year um in this particular resolution which marty has a copy and i have copies for city council there's no end date to it okay okay good thank you for that clarification thanks i appreciate that by the way i i don't know whether we have to get you a copy of what they're making reference to that's on the screen i'll make sure sam sent you a copy and also uh it's being requested to be done by ordinance is the first meeting in november sufficient time to be able to come back to allow for it to go through the process well the deadline for the 15th agenda is like next week so it's a little tight so november 2nd is it does you want to be longer than november 2nd november 5th would probably oh no no my motion was november 5th that's right and then thank you mr vaske i apologize because that is what i was told obviously something got lost in translation so thank you for the correction okay no worries okay i have i have a motion on the floor i have a second is there any further discussion here yes yes so just to just to clarify the salary does not revert back to the 50 something thousand that was prior to this correct justin vaske legal department no it does not okay okay thank you very much i have a motion i have a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed nay okay if it would have reverted back motion passes with manaskako and moray and the voting no okay very good thank you okay and that being said i think 6.06 we should accept the charter review commission language okay is there any objection to accept the charter review commission language in 6.06 that's fine okay we're moving on to 7.05 millage so i have a question for this for mr vaske 7.05 with the millage my concern with this and um you you can see it it's on the screen okay um is that state the state law number is put in there i'm concerned about that because state law changes all the time would it be better just to leave the word state law i know it says as it may be amended from time to time but that makes me uncomfortable it's it's been that statute for probably 30 years i understand what you're saying my preference would be to leave it leave it alone i mean obviously we can clean it up at some point in another election so can can we just put the words in accordance with state law and just leave it at that i would be more comfortable with that would you be more comfortable with that may i ask a question of mr baske no i didn't i thought you said you didn't want to just keep it i i would i would prefer to keep the florida statute 200.5 okay so you do think this is fine yeah i just wanted legal hold on thank you martin shelby city council attorney what does 200.065 relate to that's it relates to our budget process and everything else what about as to the trim notice uh yeah i think it might be in there as well what about dr 420 that has to go to the state i don't think it's specifically referenced like if it's not referenced by 200.065 then i'm concerned because it's a policy that's not well no it's not a policy frankly the question is is that a legislative function you know that's something i'd have to look into and that's true but that's a discussion yeah we you and i have had that conversation yes we have and that's why i'm concerned about if 200.065 does not mention the truth in millage then then it might be a problem it might be better that if it does have to comply with state law and a municipality has to notify the state per the trim notice requirement of what the maximum millage rate would be perhaps that is a legislative function we'll talk about that at a future date justin vaske illegal department i just recommend that i get a minute to actually review this the statute because i'm getting cough off okay no no problem i was just i was just randomly asking well let's let's stop there for one second because i think what he just brought up is something that we probably listen while we're in this process let's let's talk about this and as you're reviewing this maybe you could throw this into your review we have we because of the change in state law of when we have to notify the state of millage it does not coincide with when we passed our millage for let for legislative do we have a conflict and does that have to be resolved hey i would really have to look into that because i don't know exactly what we submit is it just a proposed i don't know or are we bound well in other words but since you were doing that that's why i wanted to throw that out there so when you're doing that review if you could look at that in your review if if so if we had to make some modification to be in compliance i think this would be an appropriate time to look at it okay okay all right okay okay councilwoman her tech i know we already passed that motion i i'm just i would prefer to take the the number out and that again is just me just because uh so that's going to be my recommendation is that we take the actual statute out because nowhere else do we really use the statutes um and i'm just uncomfortable and worried because we're taking stuff out that that talks about you know 1979 so anyway that's just me if nobody else agrees that's fine i'll support it because because of legal's recommendation to leave it in i think i would give them the difference okay so then i motioned that we accept that i'm going to ask that i'm going to have to look into it too because i want to see what 200.065 says so for right now i think uh we have a motion to accept the language of uh section 7.05 from the charter review commission is there any objection hearing no objections by unanimous consent yes okay we'll accept that okay okay now we're adding going back to the 7.12 on the progress again i think this should be an ordinance and i'm fine with that when i was looking through the document so the city of jacksonville does have an ordinance for um i guess for similar language as long as there's just some kind of accountability because i think of myself when or us when you get a dollar it's in your pocket for what maybe a couple hours a few days if somebody gave me 15 million dollars i'm gonna spend it so i want to be sure like if we allocate money for something for a project that we're spending it that we're being accountable to the community with the projects letting them know like this is where we are this is what's happening so however that's drafted whatever the language looks like i just want there to be that accountability and transparency would you be willing to write that ordinance and bring it to us then work with city staff on it sure okay okay so i'm gonna hear that unless there's any energy around this that we are not going to accept the language in 7.12 and instead councilwoman young is going to write a proposed ordinance and submit it to date to be determined yeah date to be determined i'll probably because we kind of have it something outlined here and from number 22 from the other documents so we can use that very good councilman yes sir mr chair but i again for the charter review i wanted to salute them for 7.12 because this even though it may not necessarily get in there by ordinance it will so one way or another it'll get but thank you all for this because this does tackle a very important issue because again when you pass something as a council member that is a unique project to something you had envisioned you have to stay on otherwise it could evaporate so this is good so thank you everybody for that with the charter review and council okay 9.02 personnel and it's just it this seems like a no-brainer now can we can we uh accept that language so we're going to accept the language of the charter review commission for 9.02 without objection hearing no objection it's unanimous okay 10.06 yes one actually i believe the state of florida just said no city elected official can can't be i think it's six years now it's now six years and that's a state law this is kind of null and void because the state has already so to delete that section completely or would you give that to tankler to have him review that i believe you know you're going to coming up soon have a review of your city's ethics code because city ethics code now deals with that and it may have to be the city's ethics code may have to be amended if it council's pleasure to be consistent with state law can we assign this to mr tinkler or yes actually i think we could just simply solve it by saying until one year after the expiration of the term which to which they are elected or um in accordance to a state law yeah that's that's that's in conflict which controls right because that's a or um i don't know i don't know how this i don't know how this came up i think this requires i think i'm gonna have to work okay fine then then send it to okay so we're so for 10.06 we're going to send us back to mr tinkler for conformance with state law and current policy and i'll and also perhaps chapter two of the city's that's absolutely policy yeah yeah so 10.07 initiated referendums okay that's by unanimous consent with regards to that i have no thoughts on this me either what number is that again sir 10.07 initiative and referendum what was the thoughts on that for anybody from the charter review commission oh y'all have no thoughts either so it is it's 10.07 which is the initiative and referendum section and you guys added a bunch of language on the the bulk of the language was the so it was insertion of the zone zoning the comprehensive plan and then the procedures to be followed for citizens initiatives and referendums will be provided by ordinance in accordance with and it quotes the statute well actually goes on beyond that mr chairman um it actually puts a um restrictions on the ability no i don't want to put restrictions on the ability because you're inserting i i don't believe that state law that says once passed will not be amended more frequently than once every two years or only within a time frame within 90 days after a general election so do you guys remember the conversation surrounding this is that because when mr cohen charter review uh commission i think that came from mr tinkler so he would have the details yeah let's send this back to tinkler for review and explanation yeah 10.07 back to tinkler for review and explanation okay may i say something yes sir i i think i know the fellow who started over this back in 1972 but i'm not sure uh but when you look at the city you're talking about 10 of the people who it says here who are qualified to vote so in other words registered voters pardon me yeah registered voters so then if you run what you're saying they're qualified to vote if you run in a district do you have to have the same amount of those that run city ride or not this is just citizen initiative and referendum pardon me this is just for citizen initiatives and referendums this is not about running for office well it should be then if it's the same thing basically but i'll yield yeah so 10.10 charter review why go to um 12 years instead of eight because that was that was the question we just asked an answer correct no um because this this issue uh the county does it every five years and the reason that we went to eight that's what i'm saying it was that it was just one day yeah we just went to eight no i mean it went to eight in 2023 when everybody voted on it i really think that this is an asked and answered question i don't think we should change it until um at least another charter review commission i i'm i'm uncomfortable with mr the only thing that i don't have a problem with is citizen participation including dedicated city staff for administrative and research support to allow for a comprehensive process but i don't know that that needs to be in the charter i believe that can just be part of the ordinance which yes i agree councilman vera thank you sir you know and i and i tend to agree on the 12 years but if if the members here are here um had opinions on that i would if if i may just voted on i know and that's that's why i'm curious because we just changed it um if nobody we don't seem to have opinions okay well maybe maybe maybe they weren't the champions of that i don't know again i said i i would agree by the way allison hewitt a lot of the that conversation came from as fast as development in tampa is changing that that there should be an opportunity to look at what is governing uh tampa as you guys are vastly trying to have to review ordinances and rules as it relates to development and changing in the city so if we this actually slows it down i mean yeah this slows down the chart if we if they were to adopt the change yes but it would give you time to see if things are working rather than you having to change while you are trying to monitor and not all of you but council in general yes since the voters just voted on this i just don't i don't have an appetite for this is everybody that has an appetite for this well you know when this first came up when the charter review commission was established with under councilwoman capene and in that era we hadn't had a look at the charter since like 1975 or 74. the thing is if you look at you know sticking and just staying with the eight years look how much the city has changed in eight years and what has happened i mean we have you know the pandemic in between and everything i think 12 years is just is too long yeah and leave it at eight years and again people just voted they just voted on it yeah so is there any appetite i know i say then we reject the language changes in 10 10.10 10.10 is reject charter review is rejected okay um article 11 11.3 all looked at official and yeah so that i yeah it was without objection let's accept the language in 11.03 okay now the big one um i'm going to say i i want let me put it right on the table i want to reject the language that is in the charter review commission because it's not strong enough i want to i i want to take um your language and um if lisa if you would it's the first page of this inspector general one first the second and then uh it's the first the second and the third so let's just leave it on if you can zoom out a little bit and then that way we can leave it on for uh public the public to look at while we're talking about it um on each page but i i strongly believe that uh so for me someone mentioned earlier how to who inspects the inspector general well there's a retention committee and that committee that is their job um so i i'm i'm fine i believe that the inspector general will be uh judged by the people who are on this board but i want to take the mayor and the council people off um which i think yours does yeah so um the only thing i don't see on here is that um your appointment do you not have you don't have an appointment process um um or yeah yeah we do oh f sorry i didn't see the thing down at the very bottom yeah that's that's what we do through ordinance after after oh okay so you want to do that through ordinance but my only problem with that is that i like the fact that in the charters that they're very specific about who it should be and people members of of the judiciary yeah the problem with that if you look see the problem is you look at that okay about the concern of the political circumstances you're right you're right you're then and so and i mean by the way so we we do an ordinance of the selection committee and then that still comes back to council for an affirmative five yeah yeah correct yeah yeah any further discussion uh you know i mean i support this uh inspector general position because i mean we have a our own ethics commission uh locally we have a state ethics commission but beyond that you know something like this would be you know truly independent and like you said uh council member her tech leave the mayor and the city council completely out of the process so it's not tainted in any way um and then you have the selection committee they choose that person it's unbiased or you know as unbiased as you can be and uh and take it from there but i appreciate this thank you go ahead i have one question that concerns me though and this goes back to our same problem that we're having with our cra right now is that our cra still has to abide by the hr oh no this these people wouldn't be no no but but actually they would be because wouldn't we be moving the auditor department under this it's not it's not addressed see i believe that the entire auditing department should be moved under the inspector general um miami beach does that and it's it's a really phenomenal uh oh i don't i did not anticipate that if i can mr chairman um let's see hold on i have it somewhere do i have um i think that i think we should we should approve this but i also think that maybe to be determined let let um well let mr tinkler maybe speak on it but also maybe is there how do how do we get someone to come and talk to each of us about this if i can go ahead mr john my suggestion at this point in time is if you like the concept direct him to come back with language that meets the charter that stands the test of time and still allows you through ordinance to be able to create the way you want because what i was going to say if i can is just as this may cause you and the administration to rethink the role of the internal auditor and to whom it reports it will also cause you to need to rethink the ethics commission which now works through the ethics office which is now run through the hr department correct i think this is going to create a domino effect exactly so i make a motion to send this number one independent inspector general to uh mr tinkler for review specifically looking at the city of miami beaches um inspector general and how they put the auditing department under that but also looking at um um that could be done yeah but again i i just i would like him to weigh in on it i have a motion i have a second i see lights i saw carlson and beer i haven't heard from council carlson in a while so council carlson yeah i just wanted to add if if hr um the ethics commission and the auditor and the city attorney all report to the mayor then they all can be weaponized as they have been against city council and so we have to change that they they they should represent the city not not um not the mayor the mayor needs to have control of it of administration uh but when hr refuses to do an investigation uh when when something is happening against city council our city council has made aware of something that the mayor's office is doing then uh then that's wrong the we we need to make sure we have some controls of it and i'll come back to that in a minute but i think it's a good idea to put the ethics commission under underneath this so we'll ask we'll ask mr tinkler to look at that um councilman vera and then we're getting we need to move on because we've got a specific media issues to deal with for a different break at one okay councilman vera thank you mr chairman so so correct me if i'm wrong under subsection c we're taking out the mayor and city council correct no we're not we're not we're not using this language at all we're going this language language and we're asking mr tinkler okay so to write better language okay so we're not accepting this language what so good so what what i was going to suggest is if that we do include membership in your bar associations along with george edgecomb we include me hinted with the tampa hispanic bar that's that well if we do that that's going to be dressed in ordinance okay so i guess i won't be here but remember me hinted in the hispanic bar that's all miss sharp just for the notes so you're going to reject the provided language correct and then you're sending mr tinkler your your suggestions okay got it um so my um you know that with with looking into the audit issue and the ethics commission audit and ethics yes okay um so you know the mayor of miami beach right i do so i i when i was thinking about this and looking at miami beach i knew you did and so i thought maybe you might be able to reach out to the mayor and talk to them about how they handle hr well if they're at the florida league of cities conference tomorrow i will see them tomorrow well then that would be great because because my concern is the same concern we have with our cra is that because it's because the staff who work for the city full-time still have to abide by the hr rules they're still required to have a someone they report to that's the problem that we're having with our cra right now and so how do we how do we make sure that these people are truly independent of hr and of of all of that and so that's my that's and it's a concern that councilman carlson has brought up over time and time again and we have to fix that with the cra i just don't know how we're going to solve it yeah that's a tough one yeah yeah mr carlson yeah i just want to add to that um just for anybody listening it's not that we think that the cra staff shouldn't follow hr rules they absolutely should but but by the by the agreement that the cra has with the city uh the city staff and the mayor's office should not be running the cra but they are because there's a there's a not so subtle threat that you do what i say or i'm going to fire you only the cra board should have the right to fire them but they can't they can't move forward and do what the cra board wants because the mayor's office has their thumb on them and and that's the influence of the hr and and i think the hr department is way too politicized as well um you know one of the complaints i filed a few years ago um uh i copied the city attorney in the hr department guess who responded to me the chief of staff yeah and part of the complaint was about the chief of staff and so how is it that how is it that suddenly the mayor's office knows everything that goes on within the city on these on these activities it shouldn't happen like that when you have a complaining when we or an employee has a complaint against the the the mayor or her staff it should be handled privately and not not um taken up the flagpole like that okay let's let's let's let's kill this conversation here let's let's let's we we have to we we're trying to get i'm trying to get us out of here in 45 minutes i understand and listen i've been listening to accusations a long time maybe we're to have an investigation of what you just said sir find out who in the hell telling me the truth well we may have an ig here shortly uh okay right now so um why don't we this is this is mostly your this is a little bit your issue i i have a proposal on the mayoral term limits and in my packet page that's number two oh no you're on the right you're on the right right thank you so are we done with yeah and so uh well i mean just make sure i guess is there any are we good unanimous consent on the inspector general there was no vote that's what i'm saying are we good with the unanimous consent on the inspector general moving forward we all need to vote can we just say all in favor all of them well yeah we we haven't we're just yeah we haven't done it yet but i did i said i said to send it to mr tinkler i made a motion but with unanimous consent okay we have motion we have a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed i said thank you okay so now we're going to mayoral yes term limits yes yes yes yes okay um i mean this this i kind of adopted this out of some of the conversations that we've had in the past agreed um thousand percent can i just man councilman carlson before somebody put writes a front page story about this it it wouldn't that this election would be at this this vote for this would be at the same time as the mayor's vote correct and so it would not apply to whoever is elected the next time correct so it's not it's not something that's punitive toward anybody's running right now correct okay is there any objection to sending this to mr tinkler for language okay without objection unanimous consent item number two will send to tinkler oh this is a good one item number three can i mr shelby would you like to set this one up because we've had we've had a lot of conversations about this chairman i i prefer the way you're handling it okay very good okay if there's something i need to chime in on i don't i don't have a problem with this but i want to figure out a way to put in um item number 16 that the question that's on the letterhead it's on the second page uh should tampa city council be able to initiate amendments to the city budget during the current fiscal year i think these two things might come together um overriding ex of executive orders and initiating amendments to the city budget i think both of these things are super important to um bring some some uh levity back to or some more subs balance back uh i think that we should be able to override executive orders but i also also think we should be able to initiate um budget amendments mr shelby could you please for the public could you please for the explain what happens when it and what council's remedy is if the mayor signs an executive order that conflicts with something that the that the uh city council has done you have you have a charter crisis well that goes that goes to the quid that goes to the questions that you've prepared and you sent to the um uh charter review commission that you dated january it's 22 questions that you asked and and and that's what you're referring to now i believe councilwoman number 16. i just want to point out if i can those are two separate issues and they would be dealt with in two separate sections of the budget one of them relate excuse me of the charter because one of them relates to uh um budget and finances and the other one relates to the duties then i apologize i will rescind that i just wanted to make the comment but i think number three overall i have no problem with and if i can mr chairman mr chairman excuse me um but the thing is i think you've we've distributed that you've distributed this again to council correct because this would be the opportunity for you to discuss anything in here such as you we're working through it okay that's good so let's so so i guess the issue is when you look back specifically to the situation of let's say take into account the police review board what happened was that the city council initiated the concept of creating a police review board and it was moving forward in that direction and the mayor at the time said that uh it was opposed to it and i believe was quoted in the paper saying we'll not create a kangaroo court and what happened and at that time as the city council was moving forward the mayor issued an executive order dealing with the subject and then informed council that had lost authority over the subject and it was now controlled by an executive order and that created a major issue amongst city council and the question is what controls is it an executive order and can the issuance of an executive order preempt your legislative ability to create and pass a law or on the other hand if it is your authority as all legislative matters are vested in the city council if you pass a law that then conflicts with the mayoral executive order then which controls which has precedent and this goes to what council has been discussing for a long time there is no mechanism in the charter to be able to resolve that and what has happened in the past is that the city attorney is requested to opine and relies on one line in the charter that says the city attorney is the legal officer who speaks for the city and that has been relied upon historically as saying whatever the city attorney opines is what goes and that's how we resolve it and the question has repeatedly come up when there is a conflict between the administration and the mayor enacting policy what is city council's remedy under its role to be able to address that if there is a conflict okay council carlson yeah for the first thing i object to is is the term strong mayor um did i use that term no no no it's in here in this writing in this writing technically it's correct um except that some mayors uh especially the last two look at that as being kind of um like dictatorships and uh that's not the intention of of that the term strong mayor is not in the charter anywhere um if we're going to refer to it we should call the executive mayor because that's really what strong mayor means all it means is that the mayor doesn't sit on city council the mayor the mayor runs the the organization but i would i would be okay um i would be okay limiting this to um conflicts as defined in the charter um and and also the the financial um conflicts um but three conflicts we run into one was um naming of buildings um a couple city council members seven years ago proposed naming buildings and the uh the mayor put together a committee came back with recommendations and then passed an executive order and we said you can't do that and then the city attorney's office even said oh no the city the mayor has the right to name buildings and at least i argued no you don't uh the mayor may be in charge of um uh you know managing leases and other things but the the mayor can't sign a lease without our approval can't paint a building without our approval and can't do a number of things without our approval so just because the mayor in theory oversees real estate and manages doesn't mean the mayor can name something so we signed a an ordinance to cut to codify the um the executive order it turns out the the um the city attorney changed it even during that time which shouldn't have happened um it banned p it banned buildings from being named after people who committed civil rights abuses which this administration then went ahead and did um 2018 i mentioned the city attorney at the time wrote a two paragraph memo saying that city that city council uh the mayor the city attorney's office doesn't have to approve um uh settlement agreements which was completely false against the charter and uh on the on the one that um mr shelby mentioned um the the con this i wasn't here at the time but this the resolution of the conflict is that the city attorney's office hired a former um uh florida bar president gwen young who came in and and um weighed in on it but that was not a pure process although she's a fantastic person very honorable person the mayor's office still had control the city attorney and that process so it wasn't an independent review so the point is that if if there's a conflict in the charter we definitely should have the ability to overrun it if it's a conflict and the money we should have a bit but part of the problem we have is the city because we don't have control the city can i just finish marty can i just finish because we don't have control the city attorney's office because technically by the charter the city attorney reports to us and the mayor but in practice the city attorney reports the mayor and any attorney will tell you that their opinions will depend on who they report to and so because the city attorney does not directly report to us and because we don't have firing authority there have been many misinterpretations of the charter in favor of the mayor against the city council and so those those are the kinds of things before we run out of time we need to talk about having the ability to fire those city characters yeah that's what i want to be cognizant of the time for that very reason so so i say that we just move forward and send this to mr tinkler my only um other thing that i wanted to say which of course i didn't write down so chemo brain just um uh we'll delete that first line tampa has a strong mirror form yeah well i mean that doesn't this is just right it's fluff yeah this is just fluff this isn't going in the part i'm just saying this is this is what should go so my recommendation is that we send this to mr tinkler um uh to look at and add um oh well okay so that's my motion okay i have a motion second from councilwoman young is there any objection hearing no objection okay we'll send that to tinkler for review okay okay and that's it we already answered yeah we already did city council compensation yeah okay we're done yeah we're done with that part that there's still other issues on the um questions that we're going to discuss yep exactly um councilman carlson wanted to yeah yeah at the beginning yep okay at the same time can we just cherry pick my my only i i would like to maybe ask mr tinkler to come back with a a modification of the charter to give city council the right with super majority vote to to fire either the city attorney and or the mayor's uh yeah number seven direct report oh no i'm sorry uh can they put the questions up yes thank you those are the questions oh can now can cctv put them up please thank you but that so that's kind of a summary of several of these just that the the remedy to the to the that's number 12 the remedy to the conflicts and they flip it over it's number 12. the idea that the city attorney represents in the in by charter represents us and the mayor but has been used as a weapon against city council is that we should have the power to to fire the city attorney by super majority the city attorney the city attorney is is is um easy to understand because by charter they they are our attorney we have our own attorney but the city attorney reports to the or represents the mayor the city council and the uh department heads and the committee members um not just the mayor but in practice that the person is only representing the mayor and if we have the right to fire the person by super majority then they're going to listen to us correct i agree i disagree no employee can have two bosses and if we're going to have the right to fire people who the hell wants to be city attorney who wants to be a department head i mean it i don't understand if we want a separate government that's four and one that's four and one where the mayor sits with us i mean but you can't have one party and the other party looking both ways it's about the public not about me and what i want it's about what what what good are we doing for the citizens that we serve whether they're right or wrong that's up to the courts take it a court but i am not one that's going to give the city away by dividing this government i just won't do it that's all i got to say okay councilman maniscalco did you want to say anything on this one so i young do you want to say anything on this one i i motion that we send this to tinkler okay i have a motion and i have a second from councilman maniscalco i'm sorry to send number 12 question number 12 to tinkler to bring us a language okay okay so i have a motion from councilwoman i'm her tech a second councilman maniscalco here at first um all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed aye please motion carried with miranda voleno and vera b and absinthe vote okay hold on councilwoman her tech well no if he has more i just want to add to that and and um clarify for the public the city attorney uh represents the city but also through that represents all these different entities and so if a city attorney has a conflict they ultimately represent the city so anyway understand councilwoman her tech um item number seven um and and i would i would like to this is should the city council attorney be allowed to hire additional staff and outside attorneys subject to budget approval of city council um so i think it's it shouldn't just be city council attorney it's should the city council be allowed to hire yeah so instead of just city council attorney so if i take the attorney out and and just say should city council be allowed to hire additional staff that only works if we do something with 16. and it's also yes but that's again so that was my secondary one that i wanted to talk about so we can we can talk about them together so i think it should be so the city council the city council should be allowed to hire additional staff subject to budget approval or to to the budget period so if i can so i would hold on mr shelby please yeah please let me finish so should the city the city council be allowed to hire additional staff subject and just period there's no subject to anything just should we be allowed to hire i think we should be allowed to hire additional staff as necessary so that's going to be my thing for tinkler going along with number 16 which is on the other side should tampa city council be able to initiate amendments to the city budget during the current fiscal year and i believe that we should be able to do both of those things and so i would like mr tinkler to come together and bring a language to that effect okay mr shelby two separate issues two separate sections of the charter let me read one but they have one one has to happen before the other one can happen well let me just say this let me just read to you there is a section relating to hiring other staff in your charter and i just think it's going what you have to you you have to be able to give direction this is what it says other staff the city may create the city council and this is in section 2.04 staff the city d other staff colon the city council may create and fill other staff positions for the purpose of assisting in the performance of its latest legislative function semicolon however comma such other staff positions must first be approved by an affirmative vote of no fewer than five members of the city council semicolon funds for such positions must be found in the city council budget and any additional costs thereof must first be approved by the mayor okay well then i apologize um that i thought i didn't realize that made it through on the last one well that's been that's been that's been in there since like but again then you have the issue with with the mayor the mayor so yeah so i think we should be able to take that mayor part out um so that's section hold on so what section was that two point this is two point this is 2.04 staff sub d okay other staff sub d got it thanks and then what about 16 16 we're going to talk about the um mid-cycle budget amendments yes here it goes let me find it budget changes 7.07 budget changes the city council upon the recommendation of the mayor shall have the power from time to time during the fiscal year after the adoption of the annual budget therefore by resolution to reappropriate to any municipal purpose any funds not needed for the purpose originally appropriated or to appropriate any unappropriated cash surplus to any municipal purpose and this has been around it looks like since the 1970s well and that's what that's the practice that we use that the budget amendments are initiated recommended by the mayor and then they initiate it yeah that's the process that's used right but we can't initiate one not as that section is presently written that's what we want to change so what do you how how is it you want to change that language and or what is the effect that or what direction do you want to give mr tinkler with regard to that section so just saying we want to change it so that city council can initiate amendments so that's that's just let him so your direction would be asked mr tinkler to it uh to evaluate section 7.07 of the city of tampa charter to um modify to allow tampa city council to make or suggest midterm cycle budget amendments without without wait let me just without mayor with initial but but with it without initial initial yeah without initial recommendation from the mayor that's what i would do here's a here's a question for council she can still build veto and we'd have to write a veto and i'm going to share with you if you quite remember and i don't know whether it's coming in the new chapter 27 changes but the concept of a cycle that there were only two cycles a year that you could have provide amendments to um chapter 27 do you recall that yeah okay that did not always exist but what happened during the um the period of the um two i guess after two after i was here because i saw it happen what would happen is that the city council would be making sometimes at each individual meeting changes to chapter 27 and it became very impossible for that department to be able to keep up with the changes that city council was requesting therefore it was proposed to city council to quantify it or limit it to let's say the times of the year or perhaps by a super majority vote in this case so that you don't have because there's a whole process that takes place with regard to financial resolution mr shelby i think that's a perfectly fine thing but that if if that applies to city council it should also apply to the mayor i'm not taking a position i'm just i'm just i'm just sharing with you that that i want you to be able to give direction to mr tinkler so you want to just make it so that it doesn't have to be recommended by the mayor correct so that this is so again once again section 7.07 is that what you said what you read 7.07 direct mr tinkler to evaluate that to modify the language that would allow tampa city council to make mid-year budget amendment recommendations and period okay so i have a motion by chair clandina i have a second from councilman meniscalco question is that is that by by major simple majority vote or by well then then account because the mayor could make a veto and then it would have to come back to us for a override with with the super majority yeah okay and that and that's what you'd like in there yes okay yes okay so i have a motion and a second all in favor aye any opposed okay okay now um i i see a couple of other things i'm going to take an iou on the uh debt i think we could do that via ordinance i think that when when number 15 i believe that when we need to clarify and and it's that when we are submitted with a proposal it should be very clear how that i mean i understand that they have it in a catch-all this could be paid for by blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah but it was we've seen in the past we see with hand we see a fair oaks lc a lot of these projects it's not specific and i think if if it is if a project is going to be paid for by debt from the moment that it is brought to the attention of city council there should be a line in that proposal that this project is going to be paid for by this type of debt and the type of debt that it's going to be paid for and that if you if you vote on the affirmative on that you are that we are very clearly that it's designated every single proposal is brought forth that it's not buried in it's not buried into a paragraph it has to be a standalone paragraph um highlighting how that is going to be paid for so that it and it's consistent with every single uh cost that we vote on if if debt is part of it it has to be highlighted in a very specific and standardized way i'm going to work on that this is just for information i'll take this as an iou to work on this as to have a motion for a future council meeting to submit to legal to bring back to us so just so you know i'm going to take that as an ordinance i don't think that's appropriate in the charter because it's one of those items but i think we can deal with this via ordinance and not via charter um we already talked about councilwoman young's issue we're going to deal with that with via ordinance uh 22 22. um uh yeah and what else is anything else that's outstanding that you think we need to deal with with these issues that i think we've covered all the highlights to do we need to marty do we need to make a motion to approve the ones that we did by unanimous consent yeah i think i think no i think we're just going to bring those back to the next one that's what the thing i miss scharf looks like she has some questions can you come up to the microphone you can't and then state your name and miss sharp i just want just for the record i want you to know i did not volunteer you to do this your boss did okay kelly scharf legislative aide um just please confirm what you wanted on section 2.04 as it relates to question number seven um actually what that i need to change that i rescind um question number seven and instead what it really is is question 14 on the other side um it should city council be allowed to hire additional staff so so i it is section 2.04 subsection d and you're you're asking you want mr tinkler to look at it what's the we want mr tinkler to add language to um or the mayor did you want the mayor well that that's all about budget amendments yeah this is about but so this is uh and to we also want him to remove that the mayor has to approve that so let's restate it from the beginning please okay sorry no it's item number 14 should city council be allowed to amend the budget to hire additional staff to carry out their legislative duties which is under 2.04 subsection d but taking out the fact that the mayor has to approve such budget changes and that passed by unanimous consent yeah that was unanimous consent and so i'd like to restate that motion i'd like to um so all actually i need to amend the motion to to not be number seven but to be number 14. well again this what we're doing today is a workshop okay we are crafting the information that's going to come back to us at the next meeting for actual definitive votes okay okay so this is just getting this is just getting directing tinkler for the work product and so and you know so we'll still have another bite of the apple okay is there anything else is there anything we haven't discussed today that people feel like or feel compelled to just to talk about okay i think i think we accomplished an awful lot okay yeah is there anybody in the public that would like to address any of the issues that we've just discussed in this item and that is reference the changes to the charter two and three two and three yeah these are not written on that's true changes the charter and the proposed budget ordinances that we've discussed all the items we've discussed including proposed ordinance changes good afternoon is it after stephanie pointer um i'm glad that we're not discontinuing the salary increase in may um uh and and i 100 it took four votes before we got to let's raise your salaries it took three times of shooting it down so it was ridiculous and i don't want city council members going back to the urban league and threatening them in order to get into events so i think you guys should make a living wage doing the job so that clowns don't act like that in public and embarrass the entire city um and i probably know better than anyone in the city of tampa um who has never received a paycheck from the city of tampa um how hard your job is and how little you make per hour doing it um and and at no point in time should it be anything i would 100 support it being tethered to the mayor's salary whatever her salary is whatever his salary is whatever whoever sits over there at t bob it should be absolutely tied to that and um we should be paying our elected officials a living salary because you do have to go pay to get into things you do have to pay to park i mean if you go pay a park across the street it's 30 bucks for the day or whatever so i i'm just so proud of you guys it just makes my heart gross two sizes today that we won't have to be threatening uh the urban league again thank you alan cone vice chair of the charter review commission i wanted to thank you uh once again for allowing us to participate in in this process from the beginning i had hoped that we would do something that would help the city meet the moment uh and that we live in and obviously there is was a lot of push and pull in terms of our our deliberations and that is our system of government in the end we passed what we could do by consensus and i am incredibly and proud of what we did in terms of the inspector general we have heard the frustrations from this chamber from time to time we have heard the public's frustrations with government in general people are increasingly cynical about government and by having an inspector general we are adding an independent mechanism to investigate uh allegations of wrongdoing or corruption whenever they take place we were very deliberate when we were working on this not to fill in every blank because we wanted the city council to create this inspector general in the way that best serves the city so we did that deliberately it was about creating a system that has transparency and uh councilwoman young and councilman vieira spoke eloquently about the frustration that you all have and the public has had that you set aside money for projects in the city and some projects get built very quickly others do not and the public is quite often left wondering what happened to that issue that we knew we got money for and it shouldn't be that the city council has to on an individual basis come back again and again and again to find out what is the status of their project i'm glad it's going to be done by ordinance or however it is accomplished because people need to have confidence that when they come here and they lobby members of the city council and money is set aside for projects that are important to their community that it is done and if it's not done that there is an explanation uh forward so again i appreciate uh the honor of taking part in this process and i'm hoping this is not the end of my public service but just the beginning thank you very much thank you very much next speaker start with your name and you'll have three minutes i'm britney llewellen um good afternoon chair and members of city council um before i begin i want to thank each of you for your service to our city um i'm a tampa native a former city of tampa employee and a resident who has followed the charter review commission's work closely over the last few months much of my involvement in that process has focused on the establishment of an independent inspector general in my july public comment i emphasized to the commission that the decisions they made and those they left for the future would determine whether an ig could fulfill its intended purpose today that responsibility comes before you an ig can exist on paper and still lack the independence authority staff or resources necessary to provide meaningful oversight last week i emailed each of you additional information outlining four structural safeguards that i believe are important to creating an effective office of inspector general those safeguards included operational independence meaningful investigative authority dedicated full-time staffing and stable funding independence matters because an ig may have to investigate the government it oversees authority matters because an ig needs access to the information necessary to do its job staffing matters because a city as large as tampa requires dedicated oversight funding matters because an oversight office cannot truly be independent without stable resources none of this assumes wrongdoing effective oversight should identify inefficiencies weaknesses and systemic problems before they become larger and more expensive for taxpayers my own experience working for the city of tampa is what originally led me to start paying attention to these systems but what i am asking you to consider today is much larger than any individual experience if tampa is going to establish an ig the question should not simply be whether we create the office the question should be whether we create an office capable of doing the job we are asking it to do as you review the recommendations i respectfully ask that you preserve the structural safeguards necessary to make that possible and give tampa voters the opportunity to decide whether they want those protections embedded in their city charter thank you next allison hewitt just a brief suggestion one of the things that was brought up on every issue was by the the members of the commission is what are we trying to address right now why are we having this conversation and so i say that to say that in your institutional documents i suggest as the next city council come up with representatives that they try to select someone who is paying attention to what's happening to is active in this process because that we had to have several people come in to be able to explain it because the people you did select did take their responsibility and said what are we addressing now and it would have been helpful if a lot more of the board actually watched the meetings participated in the meetings to be able to bring some of the things that you all have brought up in your conversations up so i just ask you consider as you are writing your institutional documents and making recommendations for the next board who makes the recommendations that they consider appointing people who have shown that they are following what the city council is going through and addressing thank you thank you next good afternoon bobby creighton um just wanted to step up and once again express my my deepest uh gratitude again it was the privilege of a lifetime to be able to serve on this uh this commission um and more than anything it was just so much fun i i i learned more about local government and how it works and other local governments than than i ever thought i would have um i'm not great at making speeches i always showed up with a laptop a binder and you know a notebook to feel prepared um so i feel a little undressed here with just a little sheet of paper but um one one thing to also consider is there there are many different ig models and charters and in local governments in in florida and to miss lewellen's point i think she made a great point that funding um is is also a contingency of independence in some charters or in some ordinances where igs exist in local governments there's a funding minimum there's there's different formulas for how to fund it and that can get pretty intricate and pretty in the weeds and you know from a policy perspective so i think this is definitely one really worth fleshing out within that time period allotted in the in the charter i think it's six months or so you have to formulate the ordinance language to really dive in and figure out what would work best for for our city like i said there's lots of different models so there's a long discussion to be had about that but once again just wanted to come up and express my my gratitude and thank you thank you bob hey what's going everybody chagrad dos a couple of things i believe in a fair day's paper a fair day's work as well and you all are definitely worth more than 52 000 but i'd like to see you all create a clear definition for terms like they do at the beginning of state statute you know they define the terms this thing officer i think needs to be clearly defined for the voters and um i actually am a walking billboard for the need for an ig you know uh somebody needs to investigate waste fraud abuse of power misuse of um office or what have you and a lot of the people have lost their faith in government you know i i have i believe in the system because i'm a veteran but it's the stewards that have drawn my you know i draw my attention the stewards that we put in power are not doing what so many of us have asked him to do um but my problem with the way that the inspector general and yours was set up um is that he couldn't initiate certain actions and having an inspector general without you know having a watchdog without teeth it's kind of like having a pet you know this person can't be beholden to the people who are going to grade him or her uh as they try to do their job and and looking out for the people uh last week i even remember and actually this guy actually has to pay or he's restricted even when it comes to requesting public records that means he ain't no different than me shit you know i gave me a bill for ten thousand dollars i made a request for public records so you're going to tell me that our inspector general would have to pay the same thing or he has to go through the same process that any other citizen would go through to get public records and another thing that this city needs to do is every time somebody makes a chapter 119 request that information should be made available to the public now my chapter 119 request came on the heels of me at the end of a legal situation a criminal case where it should have been turned over to me during my brady discovery during just regular discovery i found out about it later on then the city said well we had it we had it when you were being prosecuted but we didn't turn it over but if you want it now we want ten thousand dollars for it and there's seven thousand emails which is in and of itself um insane the commission i think it was a six three vote that you all said to put this thing on the ballot let's put on the ballot let the people choose and to the people of champa show your asses up one of these no i know most people are probably doing that jay thing working i don't want to use that word too much but somebody's they're probably at work but we need to be more participatory especially young people you know we got to get out here and participate in the politics that affect your lives on a daily basis as always imparting no she's not here well actually tomorrow i'll be at the greatest institution of higher learning in the city of tampa saying hello to the class of the 1996 team and the winningest black coach in the history of hillsborough county darlene elson shout out to the greatest institution of higher learning in the city of tampa the university thomas jeffson high school mr dos mr shelby has a copy of that you had asked me about and by the way it does have an initiative i highlighted underneath there for you so man yeah go ahead um i want to when it comes to that particular inspector general i would like uh that mr tinkler receive both a copy of miss luellen and mr creighton's emails on this matter because i think they had really good points okay so if we can make sure without objection i'm sorry oh we have one more speaker after we just talked about that michael randolph may i can just follow up on i don't recall seeing them okay um miss scharf can you please print out miss luellen and mr mr creighton's emails in full and bring them here so we can uh uh so that you put them in the record and if i could have them electronically too yeah and then forward them you should have them because they went to city council as a whole yeah as a whole i saw them yeah okay um mr randolph thank you for your patience and i apologize for almost missing you after we've been reminded at least three times in this meeting thank you can you hear me we can hear you loud and clear thank you so much tampa is one of the fastest grown and most start with your name mr randolph you got to have your name oh i'm sorry michael randolph okay tampa is one of the fastest growth and most dynamic cities in florida yet for years our city council has been compensated far below the level of responsibility the job remains today city council members oversee multi-million dollar multi-billion dollar budget make decisions that state housing or poor building transportation cities say transportation system public safety neighborhood development and economic growth the workload has become full-time in a practical sense even though the pay does not reflect this when cities grow as rapidly as tampa the complexity of government grows with it city council expected to respond to constituents elevate development proposal navigate states and federal regulation and long-term decisions that affect generation what historically historically tampa salaries had lagged behind other major cities making it harder to attract and retain high quality individuals when conversation is so low only people with independent income or festival job can afford to serve this limits diversity reduces accessibility and knows the pool of candidates who truly want to serve community fair compensation compensation also strengthen ethical ethical um government when city council members don't have to rely on outside employment they can dedicate their full-time attention to city needs and avoid potential complete ventures a well-paid city council is better positioned to make independent decisions the cost of increasing salary is small compared to the impact decision the city has to make for the future with infrastructure investment public safety the city needs this raising city council salaries is not a perfect this is a strategic investment investment and public accountability and represent to leadership and finally i want to thank the city clerks and their staff for getting me on today i had some problems and i also recommend they get a salary increase as well thank you i i i believe our city clerk just seconded that motion thank you mr randolph we always appreciate your comments okay that concludes our regular scheduled business um we are mr shelby uh i believe i would appreciate two motions number one i'm working on this oh you are because you are yes i thought you're going to go to new business i'm sorry well this would be a new business for that right no this is part of the same item okay and and it also i i would before you even get to the uh the request for a uh next week is to actually do a a i don't know if you did it piecemeal but to to i guess be able to um uh encapsulate the fact that city council uh accepts all of the recommendations that it has made today to be able to pass it on to the attorney i make a motion that we accept all the recommendations today to pass along to the um mr tinkler i have a motion i have a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed okay very good the animus chair i move that a time a time certain of 1 30 p.m next week october 1st for final review and approval of city of council of charter amendments to be presented to voters and then direct the crc legal council at that time to bring back an ordinance for the first reading that places the charter questions on the ballot for march 2nd 2027 ballot okay why 130 because i have not been if i can i'm sorry martin shelby um there are no review hearings scheduled for next week uh but there may be discretions uh is it and this is my next question to you is it council's request to have mr tinkler here at that time yes yes oh that's why this time's certain okay so i have a motion and a second all in favor aye any opposed okay and can you also just make that a motion please to invite mr tinkler to be here yeah our staff and sam sam if you're listening please let's make sure that we invite mr tinkler to invite command his performance next october 1st at 1 30 p.m okay um i'm just we'll take that on i don't need a motion for that i'll just make sure it happens and since i've got the microphone let me uh i know i'm sorry i know i'm sorry so i have had some uh coordination with development uh some of the development coordination staff and they are backed up in cases um and they need an extra evening hearing in december this happens it's happened before because of having fewer evening hearings in november and december because of the holidays so we've got to build a bit of backup so i've coordinated with them and the clerks to uh and i'm going to make a motion that we add an additional evening meeting on december 3rd at 501 p.m second at 315 east kennedy boulevard with no more than six cases and they could be rezoning as abs or comprehensive plan amendments only my my recommendation is only if we limit staff reports to four for the day meeting for the day meeting actually i'd say listen what do we have on there now we have nothing on there now okay i'd say let's eliminate staff reports to two okay limit staff reports to two okay for for the december 3rd now i will have to say miss young or councilwoman young when i joined council it was right after 2020 and not only we were so backed up we had to add a second meeting every month so we did a full regular meeting and this was like brand new for me i i i was new to council and so it was it was awful we had a full year well yeah and this is that we have to it was unbelievable it was it was just anyway so yeah so i have a motion from um uh chair clendenin a second from um council member maniscalco to add a december 3rd me evening meeting but also limiting staff reports to two uh all in favor aye today meeting at the day meeting any opposed okay very good i passed unanimously okay uh new business councilman carlson councilman vera thank you no no no no don't ruin your you're growing your record um social action and arts funding applications last day september 30th for a fire prevention week you have until september 25th to register online at tampa.gov slash fire to get your free smoke alarm and then also i just want to thank um adam purcell with the mobility department we were at the tampa high civic association meeting last night which went very very well and so i just want to thank him but also the mobility department everything that they're doing um in regards to transportation in the city of tampa they are they're they're they're rocking and they're going to get us a streetcar here yes councilwoman hurts that no no that's not very good move to receiving five panels from matteskalko second council miranda all those in favor say aye aye opposed i said we made it by 1 p.m