City Council - Regular Meeting

So, Thank you. you

It is my pleasure to call to order the regular meeting of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Boca Raton. The date is May 26, 2026. The time is 10 a.m. If everybody could please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Chair Thompson?

Thankful to be here.

Vice Chair Drucker? Here. Commissioner Grau? Here. Commissioner Sippel? Present. Commissioner Perlman?

Here.

All present.

Thank you, Ms. Siddons. Mr. Director, do we have any amendments to the agenda?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are no amendments to the agenda. Very good.

We can move on then to the minutes. I believe we have one set, the regular meeting of May 11, 2026. Members, are there any revisions or corrections to the minutes? If not, I'll entertain a motion and a second to approve those minutes as presented.

So moved. Second.

Very good. All in favor of approval of those minutes, please say aye.

Aye.

Very good. The ayes have it. We have no presentations. We have no quasi-judicial or related public hearings today, so I can open the door now for public requests. If you want to speak regarding the Community Redevelopment Agency, please step forward, state your name and address, and you will have up to three minutes. Mr. Starkoff, take it away.

Earl Starkoff, 3260 St. Charles Way, Boca Raton. Good morning, Mayor and City Council. My public requests today are regarding the public lands and civic facilities within the CRA. Because today's CRA meeting and workshop and council meeting are all being held consecutively, I'm asking the council to use today to move three matters from continued discussion to final direction and votes. First, I ask Council to direct staff during today's workshops to present the options, deadlines, and costs for placing the Charter Amendment to protect public lands on either the August 2026 primary ballot, the November 2026 general election ballot, or the March 2027 municipal election ballot. I'm asking council to ask its final questions, have the cost-benefit discussion, and prepare the motion to make its final choice at today's council meeting. Second, I hope council will decide today whether to proceed with this downtown civic task force or not. If so, the mission area, I believe, should include the area generally bound by Northwest 24th Diagonal, the library, the parking garage, Dixie Highway, Palmetto Park Road, and Crawford Boulevard. So adjacent buildings, public land, and civic uses are evaluated together. I believe the Police Services Complex RFP must include an interim report during the length of the awarded contract recommending whether the long-term police headquarters should remain within the downtown area or be located where it best serves the full five square miles of Boca Raton with an annex or satellite presence downtown. These matters, to me, have been studied, discussed, campaigned on before and since you've taken office, and it's time for a decision. During today's workshop, Council can ask the remaining questions, staff can provide those answers, Council can have its final discussions, and then the votes on their decisions can be made, all three, at today's Council meeting. It'd be good to enter June knowing that these discussions have been made. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Starkoff. I know you had several questions. I'll ask staff in a moment, if you can, you can take a seat. Certainly. I was saying that I will have staff answer some of your questions in a few minutes once we're complete. Oh, yes. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, Mr. Starkoff. The next card I have is Mike Liebelson.

Mary, do you have the slides we can put up or just for the council hearing? This is it. Thank you. Mike Labelson, 398 Northeast Third Court. I remain very confused as to the status of this task force. I thought there was a resolution to overturn the approval of going forward with that task force. and that was either voted on or was deferred to this meeting to be voted on, but I don't see any mention of it in today's agenda. I just have a couple of slides here. This is the choice not given, and that's the title from a very excellent article in Boca First that Les Wilson did. We can go to the next page. There's two things that came out of this last election. The people spoke very clearly that the $190 million price tag for the police station and the police station to be relocated from downtown was a no. This was a resounding no. Also, they said no PPPs on public land. So I thought that what we're gonna have is a, RFQ for an urban planning specialist to tell us what should we do on the 31 acres, and they can bring in public comment in that process, but to come up with a plan. We can go to the next slide. please go to bocafirst.org. Less has gone a long ways. I'd say 80% of the way to retain the city hall, retain the police station on our existing 31 acres, and also include all of the recreational opportunities that we are looking for. And the reason this is opening up is because we're moving city staff to the new Congress building. This is too much to talk about right now today and in three minutes. Please go to bocafirst.org and look at this plan. It's amazing. It's great. It was developed by a long-term Boca resident, Les Wilson, who uses these areas and only has the best interests of Boca in mind. And it's going to be low cost. It reuses existing buildings. For example, the city hall is renovated into a new community center. It moves the police station, but keeps it on the city campus. And we've got lots of recreation. So this is a good first start. I think it'd be given to an urban planning consultant and very rapidly, I think in a three month time period, get a review of this and expand upon it and bring public comment on it. Thank you.

Anyone else for public requests related to the CRA? Last call for public requests. Mr. We had a couple of questions from Mr. Starkoff, one related to the timing of ballot initiatives being put on the general or primary election ballots. Mr. Kaler, could you just speak briefly about that?

Yes, Mayor and Council Members. I believe the request was from the public was regarding the August 2026, November 2026, and March 2027 ballot date. So the ballot is controlled by the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. She's an independent constitutional officer. She manages, I think it's 38 or 39 municipalities in Palm Beach County, Boca being one of them. The City Council adopted an ordinance and resolution, I'm recalling whether it was in April or beginning of May, directing that the matter be placed on the March 2027 ballot. Corrections, the next available ballot or no later than the March 2027 ballot. The reason why the next available language was used and the August and November date were not specified is because it has been the longstanding and consistent position of the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections that she will not accept and will not place municipal referendum ballot measures on the primary or the general election. I know a number of folks have spoken with her. I have spoken with her multiple times on this occasion and she has remained consistent and steadfast. That is her position vis-a-vis all local governments, not just the City of Boca Raton. I know there are other methods being explored, including a potential mail-in only ballot election does have a some significant cost factors associated with it and this council can certainly direct or request the city manager and city clerk to provide more information regarding that our office does have a message in with the supervisor to get additional information we've not yet heard back from her but the short answer is the resolution is the next available election and or the March 2027 ballot at the latest date

Thank you, Mr. Koehler. That was a robust response there. I believe that since that concludes our time for public requests, we can move on to resolutions and regular public hearings, which we have done. Similarly, for other business and settlements, we can move on to item 10, director's report. Mr. Director, do you have a report today?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have no report.

Thank you, Mr. Koehler. The attorney report?

No report. Thank you.

Great. We can move on to commissioner reports. I'll start on my left. We can go around. Mr. Perlman, any report? No report. Thank you. Ms. Sipple?

No report.

Excellent. Ms. Graf? No report. Thank you, Ms. Drucker.

I'll hold my report to the end of the day. Thank you.

I will do the same. And because of that, we can now adjourn our meeting of the Community Redevelopment Agency at 1010. We will be starting once again with a workshop meeting of the City Council in just a moment. So pause for just a second. Welcome back, everybody. Thank you for your patience. We are here again for our workshop meeting of the Boca Raton City Council. The time is May 26, 2026. First item of business we have is a presentation related to the downtown civic area plan. Mr. Manager, who will be providing the presentation on that item?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll start off the presentation and also have Mr. Lukasik, our deputy city manager as well. speak to this. So this particular item here is in the workshop is really intended to provide a broader discussion regarding several ongoing and upcoming planning and facility initiatives across the city. The first portion of today's presentation is primarily informational and provides updates on planning initiatives already underway. The second portion focuses on the police services complex project. And I just want to note, I also have our lead public works engineer, Mr. Zach Peer here, as well as his deputy, Mr. or Ms. Barak is here. She's a civil engineer as well. And then we've got the acting police chief here, Mr. Dubinsky. The second portion, like I said, focuses on the police services complex project where staff is seeking council direction regarding the proposed engagement approach, timeline, preliminary project framework, and when I mean preliminary project framework, We need to understand the baseline. What is our baseline needs for our police department today? That's where we want to start and then as we go forward in this process throughout the next couple months, we can take a look at what the community desires in terms of future expansion of our police force. But let's look at what we need today and then a funding strategy associated with that potential baseline framework. and that's important because we need to understand the timeline associated with the potential funding strategy and so that's really the focus is getting council direction today on those initial key elements for this potential project moving forward and then finally I'm going to conclude with a broader overview real quickly of our future planning initiatives and next steps just to make sure council is aware and can provide discussion and direction on where to go next if we get some direction today on the police services complex and again I just want to make sure that this is very clear the goal today is not a final decision making on every component about the police services complex but rather it's really to ensure that I can get council alignment on the process sequencing and really the strategic you know way we want to move forward with our police services complex so that is really the goal today and this is what you're looking at is it's update and informational we're going to talk a little bit about the downtown civic area master plan then we'll go into the police services complex looking for council direction as I mentioned and then a brief overview of the future planning of initiatives and so here's kind of where we're at we just we're at q2 if you will at the end of may we're at the downtown civic area master plan uh you approved an rfq process uh the last meeting and we're in the middle of that we're going to talk about that here and then i'm going to talk about the city services building that's 6551 and that operational transformation transition that needs to occur in the next 24 months after that we'll go ahead and talk about the police services complex and then the last thing is just that community master plan So with that, I'll turn it over to our Deputy City Manager, Mr. Lukasik, to talk about the Downtown Civic Area Master Plan.

Thank you, Mr. Serhaney. Good morning, counsel. So just just to make sure that we're all oriented and on the same page. So the direct the policy direction we received from the council at your last meeting was to proceed with the RFQ to pursue or to solicit proposals from consulting firms that will help us do two things. One, go through the public engagement process. That is important to understand what the community needs and wants on the government campus are. I'll use government campus loosely. It's really the city hall site, softball sites, the location we're seeing Pines historic building is, tennis center, memorial park. Really focusing on that area. I know that we've had some conversation in the past about the area east of Northwest Second Avenue. The policy direction we've received is to focus in on the campus by City Hall at this point in time under this scope of work. Also to answer the public question about the task force, the policy direction we received from council was not to use a task force at this time for this scope of work. We did have some conversation about the potential of using Parks and Rec, the Parks and Recreation Board to act as a sounding board at some point in time throughout this process. We can revisit that as we're moving forward with the consultant that we ultimately select. So as it relates to the RFQ and the process timeline, we've accomplished a couple things already. One is we've gotten that direction from this body. Second is that we've issued our request for qualifications documents, so that's already out in public. Staff has been responding to questions that we've already received from a number of consultants, so that process is already happening. Tomorrow we have a pre-submittal conference with any interested proposers that might be out there. So that all is happening right now. The next step then is to receive all those responses from interested consultants by June 5th. We'll have an internal or a staff-based selection committee review those qualifications. and make some sort of decision in terms of a short listing of those firms. So we'll provide a short list of three firms to this council for your future consideration. So that'll happen on June 18th where we'll solidify that short list of firms. June 30th at a special meeting, this council will hear presentations from the three highest rated proposers that staff received. They'll provide you with presentations and you'll be able to ask some questions of them, make a determination in terms of what the highest ranked proposer should be, what the second highest ranked proposer should be, and what the third highest ranked proposer will be. So you'll have about an hour with each firm. So they'll make a presentation. You'll have time for question and answers. So you'll have about three hours, four hours of time to interview, ask questions, and make a determination in terms of your rankings of those proposers. Assuming that all goes well, we'll begin, staff will begin contract negotiations immediately thereafter, hoping to have a contract in place by July 17th. Now, as we've told you before, this is a pretty aggressive timeframe and all of this is designed to help you get to the point of having a master plan for the civic area by January. So with this aggressive timeline, we hope to have a contract in place or negotiated by the 17th that will ultimately be presented to you for your consideration at your July 28th meeting. So that will be the point in time where we can really engage that firm and start moving forward. Mr. Soheni, if you don't mind flipping to the next slide. So then we have a six month process by which we're going to go through the public engagement and the master planning process. The first month, which again, all goes well and we don't have any hiccups along the way, you know, we'll begin in August. That'll be our launch of the project. So we'll be getting the project team oriented. They'll be meeting with you. interviewing you, we'll get our project website up, really just start getting our footing and getting the consultant up and running. The second month, which we anticipate being in September, will be a lot of listening. So our philosophy in this process is going to be listening first, design next. So we want to make sure that we're engaging the public, we get all the data that we need to be able to start understanding what the needs and desires are for the civic campus area, the civic area. The third month in October, we're anticipating, will be a validation of all that information we received as well as getting some further direction. So we'll make sure that the consultant goes back and talks to the community and says, hey, this is what we heard last month. Are we going in the right direction? Is this what you were saying? So we'll get that information. We'll do some deeper diving to make sure that we can get some details in terms of what people were thinking as it relates to what should happen on the campus. The fourth month will be in November. That'll be where we spend some time with a design strut. designing active engagement both in person probably some hybrid strategies we'll do some things online making sure that people can talk to the residents can talk to the consultants as they're starting to refine concepts based upon what we've been hearing next month December we'll refine those concepts and kind of test the concepts that come out of the charrette process so again you know having some open houses having some dialogue with the residents making sure that what's being captured in the charrette process is actually what the community is saying and then lastly in january again going back and checking with the community to make sure that we're on the same page as it relates to the desires for the civic area and ultimately giving the council a final recommendation and a master plan for the civic area. And that master plan will include design concepts, it'll include a conceptual master plan, it'll include some cost assessments as well as an implementation schedule that we can use as a guideline for us as we're starting to go forward in implementing that strategy. I think we'll talk a little bit about how this integrates into a community-wide master plan, but I'll leave it there unless there are any questions for you.

thanks and with that overview i'd like to open up the discussion for council feedback and direction for this particular item uh if there's any i'll pause let's start with questions do we have any questions for staff members no okay then discussion can ensue who would like to go first if any this is really purely informational we thought right okay So no need to force it. Does anybody have anything they want to discuss about this item? If not, we can move on. All right. Go ahead.

Thanks, Mayor. So I'll talk about the City Services Building 6551 Operational Transition Plan. And this project really represents an important functional step in the city's broader long-term facility strategy. As Council knows, I briefed on Thursday, we acquired this building in 25. We initiated occupancy this year in January. The facility is approximately 70,000 square feet. It's two different floors and it was previously operated as a call center and because of that there's substantial redesign that needs to occur and a renovation needs to get done as well really to convert that building into a functional municipal operations center. So staff's completed the initial space needs analysis and is currently moving through design phase. The intent for the building is to ultimately accommodate most of City Hall's operational departments and public facing service functions while allowing future long-term planning opportunities for the next City Hall campus. so this is uh the timeline here um and again assuming uh this proposed timeline remains on schedule construction will begin in early 27 with an operational move in the first or second quarter of 28 and importantly this transition also positions the city for future redevelopment as we're already talking about and really modernizing some of the existing city hall campus including council chambers and core civic functions so that's the present timeline and we will come back to council for the final construction phase and again this building was purchased for 17 million Right now, we're estimating the renovation to be about $8 million. We budgeted for $10 to $12 million, and we'll come back a little bit later in this process. So that's $65, $51, and I'll pause there again, Mayor, just in case there's a question.

Any questions?

Thanks for the presentation. When was the building built, 6551 approximately?

Yeah, I'll have to ask Mr. Beer on the age building date of 6551.

I'll check on that really quick, but I believe it was in 1995.

Is the building hurricane proof? And if so, at what category?

Is that a question for me? So hurricane proof is a really general term. Buildings have identified in the current Florida building code really four categories. Risk category one, two, three, and four, which designate one starts where people really don't occupy the building and it goes up from there. So from a risk category building, as we go through the design phase, that's something that the design team evaluates. But it's very likely that it was built as a risk category two or three building.

Mr. Beer, for example, I went to visit the two police stations in Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale over the weekend. When they build the police stations, they state that it has a certain hurricane category rating. For example, I believe that one of those stations um they they tied it to potential to withstand a category five so can you just explain briefly about when when a building is rated for a hurricane um to withstand a hurricane how does that work and what does it mean when they say that

So it's two, again, two different factors. So a lot of people know, especially in Florida, hurricane speed ratings. So that's your SAFR scale, which is the one, two, three, four, five. They've even proposed a six, but that really hasn't come about. So when you're at your top hurricane wind speeds, that can be anywhere from 175 to 185 miles an hour. those are very very intense that translates to wind wind pressure so not to get into the extreme kind of way down in the technical details but a wind speed over an area of a building generates a wind pressure and so the risk category of the building has to be able to withstand those wind pressures okay yeah the reason I'm asking is because

The purchase price was $17 million for the building. Now we're budgeting possibly up to an additional $12 million to invest in this building, bringing the total to $30 million approximately, potentially. we i'd like to get information about um the the rating of this uh in in terms of hurricane how it may withstand a hurricane given that now the investment is uh going up significantly into this building also um mr zohaney who who is the architect um now that we're you know attempting to outfit this building for an additional 12 million um my understanding is that architectural plans were drawn up for this uh who is the architect and is this architect on the continuing services uh platform of the city the architect is srs i believe and yes to the latter part of your question Have plans already been drawn up for the renovation by this architect?

So we're currently in design. And so we have preliminary plans that have been drawn up and then we will convert that into final plans.

And there was a was there a design intent that informed the plans? I mean, it needs a needs analysis. Was that drawn up?

Yes, that's correct.

Okay. Can you please have that sent to all of the members of the council? And I would like to schedule a walkthrough of the site with the council in conjunction with the architect and the plans. Absolutely. So we can gain insight into this. With an additional 12 million now of retrofitting and renovation, this is now becoming a substantial cost to the building.

Yes, absolutely. And just to be absolutely clear, that was budgeted previously was the price of the building at 17 million and budgeted for up to 10 to 12 million. That was part of the full package when the previous council purchased that building.

And let me add, too, that I think part of your presentation just now was that the current allocation for the fitting is $8 million, not $12 million. Is that right?

That's an estimate, yes, sir.

Okay, good. And as much as I'd like to have another meeting with you all at this new building, I think we should have to do it separately because you can't. It's not a public meeting. It's a sunshine issue. You can't have us all there at once. So I'm happy to do the walkthrough. We'll just have to do it separately is all.

and um finally yeah but Mr. Zohini did say that the it's contingent it's a possibility that it's could go up to 12 million potentially they've accounted for that possibility so that's why I mentioned that um yeah I agree I think we I definitely would like to tour the building with the architect and the plans and um my final question is uh Once these plans are complete for the work to take place at the building, how is that process going to be procured in terms of selecting a contractor?

I'll defer to Mr. Beer on the process options for procurement in the construction phase of 6551.

Yeah, so we just had a dialogue with the purchasing manager. Generally, the purchasing code identifies that the first opportunity is to go out and do a bid process, so a hard bid. That is design, then bid and build. But based on the complexities and this being a renovation, we have to move people in and out and there's likely going to be retrofitting that happens. Staff has identified that a construction manager at risk is the process that we're going to move forward with and that is a qualifications-based competitive solicitation. So it can happen concurrently. It's also a timing procurement method where as we move through 60% to 90% designs, staff will develop a qualifications-based package to put out for qualified construction managers. They will bid not identifying a price. They will bid on their qualifications, and the city will have them as part of the team. So the construction manager becomes part of the design team. They come in, they do value engineering, they evaluate the design proposals, they look at the existing building, they provide their construction and contracting expertise, and then they develop what's called that's in the pre-construction services phase that would be awarded to them. Then they would go through the process and develop what's called a guaranteed maximum price. So that is a price that is not exceeded and that price would come back before council in the form of an agreement and that would allow the contractor to move forward. That is the likely method that the city will proceed to deliver this construction.

Just to be clear, so the city is going to take the plans from SRS and

put those out for an RFQ RFP process for bids and the city is going to take charge of the bid solicitation and collection is that correct it's really complicated but again there's been a lot of discussions about procurement so they're going to put out a qualifications based proposal to select construction manager The construction manager is at risk, so they take on the risk of the contracting. When they're selected, they evaluate the design plans for constructability, develop a pre-construction sequence, and then that construction manager on behalf of the city, the process is fully transparent, they put out bid package to subcontractors to be able to build the job. So the city has access to all those bids, all of the different vendors that come in. You're going to have your MEP, your structural, electrical, everybody that's going to be involved with that. and then the construction manager shows those bids to the city, develops that guaranteed maximum price, and if the city says, you know what, that's not within our budget, that's not going to work, they go back and then they reevaluate that process.

And if it's acceptable to the city, is the construction manager at risk? Will they oversee the project, and if not, who does?

The construction manager oversees the project, yes. They would be considered the general contractor for the project. Okay, thank you.

Any other questions as it relates to 6551? Ms. Drucker?

Just feedback, thank you for the discussion. I agree with Mayor Thompson, don't want a Sunshine Law violation. So when I don't attend events with all parties on this day is because I'm not interested in that. Second, as we continue to delay these processes and I know the residents have such a lot of information on police station, on civic areas, the longer we continue to wait, cost will continue to rise. So that's just an observation that we should all be making and we all know. And I also just want to tell the council, at least for my sake, is we're policymakers. I often call ourselves architects of policy, and we're budget overseers. I'm not interested in the minutia of moving people around. That's not what we were elected to do. I will leave that to city manager and the city staff that's very equipped. And in terms of the police station, I will leave that information on what the needs are to keep our public safety to the police department and, again, the city manager. Thank you.

Any other questions as it relates to 6551? No? All right, then we can move on. What's next?

Thanks, Mayor. So I'll move on to Police Services Complex. So big picture here, the next portion really focuses on the whole complex project and where we're seeking broader policy direction from Council this afternoon. As Council's aware, the March referendum demonstrated that while the community recognizes the importance of public safety infrastructure, additional outreach, engagement, and education are necessary before advancing a future funding initiative. Staff's recommendation is to utilize the community advisory panel to help lead and facilitate the public engagement process moving forward The intent would be for the panel to assist with community outreach education regarding the police department's operational and facility needs and gathering feedback from residents regarding priorities and potential site considerations for public opinion in addition we recommend retaining an independent polling and survey firm to better evaluate community feedback from the prior referendum and assess voters priorities and concerns moving forward funding approach from that standpoint we're seeking direction from council on whether or not to pursue a general obligation bond potentially that aligns with March 27 election cycle that policy direction is important because the funding approach will ultimately drive the overall project timeline And from a preliminary project framework perspective, I took a look at what our needs are in general. And we had ADG take a look at what our needs are today. This is what our needs are in 2035 and what our needs are in 2045. So my recommendation is we start with a baseline and we don't have to get into an exact number today. But we know that our building's 45 years old. We know that it's 60,000 square feet. We know that we need a bigger facility. And what we need today is approximately 94,000 square feet. and we don't have to debate that today but but just generally speaking a number around 90 000 square feet is really helps us preliminary plan and to talk to a community on what size and scope looks like for our needs today and and so for site locations for further community evaluation generally there's a central location and a downtown location as well and and so I just want to make sure that we're not recommending any location today to council we just know that they're the obvious two locations is central and potentially one downtown so as far as today goes we don't have to make that decision but it's important to just start to understand what our potential needs for a police department today, what would they look like at those two different locations. So for a proposed timeline, it's uh you know really it's the community advisory panel they would return to council in october with feedback and recommendations related to their outreach findings they would look at community priorities and then at that point probably site preferences in october that are coming back from the community and then following that discussion that the community advisory panel will have with council then you know we could return back in November for consideration if council at that point wanted to to push forward with the funding option of a bond for the March 27 election or another funding direction if that wasn't the case and then also at that point we can further define that preliminary scope that I'm talking about You know the rough numbers about ninety thousand square feet, but through this process we might find it's eighty thousand square feet We might find it's a hundred and five thousand square feet But we'll know a little bit more as we continue to work that through that process. So I that's really kind of where we're at and this is um the overarching timeline so i talked about phases here there's fundamentally 10 basic phases the community outreach and polling get get the findings back to council look at that preliminary project scope again what's the potential ballot language if we're going in that direction and then if that's the case there's a community ballot education process that we're going to have to execute that's phase five and then that leads us up to the election and then right now what you see on this slide is two site locations these are we could have three or four more if we find out from the community but as of right now you've got a downtown location and a central location and that's just a very rough estimate of if this went to referendum and voters said yes on it that's a rough timeline between a downtown and a central location option so big picture for today is you know do we have this right do we have the engagement strategy the funding approach and then that sets up staff to understand the timeline at which we want to work with the community advisory panel on to get back to council with those findings and then go forth on a funding option and a timeline. With that overview, I'll turn it over to you, Mayor, for discussion.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Suhaney. I'll have a couple of comments for us to start with. First was, it sounds like your recommendation, staff's recommendation now, is that we proceed towards a construction of a new police headquarters that's roughly the size of 94, 95,000 square feet. Is that right?

That's correct.

Let's just humor me for a moment and say that we were to continue contemplating moving it to the location in the corner of Spanish River Boulevard and Broken Sound. as had been asked of the public in the past. If we were to apply that square footage, did we determine or did ADG determine how much that potential station would cost?

yes so if we looking at the minimum 94 000 square feet at that location and again meeting today's needs of the footprint associated with today's needs uh would be to build a 94 000 square foot main headquarters that's 55 million the site work associated with that would be about 20 million that's 75 million and then of course we've got a unit storage and a couple other things so all of that the building aspect of that would be about 80 million is a rough number now that that's not including full program costs that's not furniture that's not technology that's not all the other things that go with fully programming a project So I just wanna make sure we understand that because that's what gets confusing. If you looked at the last referendum, you had a major project. It was $192 million. What was that? Why was it 192? It was built for 2045 requirements. This, what I'm proposing is, what do we need today so we understand that? And then the other thing, that was full program costs. And not priced per square foot for building. So again, I just want to reiterate It's about 80 million to build what I just described and then if you fully program it out It's it's gonna probably cost another 30 to 40 million. So about a hundred and twenty million dollars is Everything associated with turnkey for the police department headquarters to walk into that facility And it's very important to note that

All right. So just to recap, so the 94,000 square foot station, which is now and has been for at least some period of time, staff's recommended size of the station would cost something in the range of $120 million all told. Is that right? That's correct. Okay. Let's take a few steps back down memory lane for a second. So the bond question that was on the ballot in March asked for permission to borrow money up to $175 million. We had discussed, and we go with Chief Muccio and Mr. Zervas, and some of us had discussions about what that bond question would look like and what the needs the staff felt were appropriate. We had discussions about what the ramifications of that number and things like the renderings and what it looked like. We had significant discussions at the time about that. But after the measure failed, so it failed in March, I had had several meetings with the staff since then, immediately following the election, and indicated that I think it makes sense that, look, I think everybody recognizes we need some form of a new police headquarters. You can debate where it's going to be, you can debate how much you're willing to spend on it, but I think some sort of a new headquarters was required. And so I had asked staff, why don't we go back and try to re-engineer our program on this so as to bring the number down significantly And we're not at this point yet, but also make it look, from my perspective anyway, somewhat less extravagant. And so since then, this is going back to March, that has been the staff's mission and what you have been working on in that time. Is that right, Mr. Sahany?

That's correct, Mr. Mayor. Okay.

So it has not been the case, so we're clear about this, it's not been the case that the staff or the city has been intending to proceed with a police station that would cost $190 million. Is that right?

That's correct. Okay.

And we have, every week before our meetings, we have a process called an agenda review, which I must say has taken on a different scale in the last few weeks and months. In the old days, meaning a few months ago, the agenda review would be me and you speaking on the phone or meeting in person. One of what I think has been a very good innovation that you've brought in the following in the last few months was you have now our agenda reviews for everybody not just it's me individually speaking with members of staff but all the members of the council get that benefit uh you have like the a lot of the significant leadership the senior leadership at the city so there's you're there you have our two deputy city managers our cfo is there we have our uh development services director is there in the past or public works and engineering director is there. So we have a significant amount of staff manpower at these meetings where we're able to go over these agenda items, right?

That's correct.

Okay. And we had our last agenda review. It was last Thursday. Is that right? Is that when we did? Yes. Okay. So as part of that agenda review, I'll recap what we talked about. When this item came up, this is Thursday now, we talked about how the staff had gone to ADG and asked them to re-engineer the police headquarters program. And the number that was communicated to me on Thursday, mind you, was $120 million for this 94,000 square foot station, right? That was information that you all had conveyed to me?

That's correct.

Did similar information, and I'll ask my colleagues this, did similar information get communicated to each of you in that time?

Yes, the discussion that I had with city manager and an entire team of staff, that was a discussion I had at 1.30 on Thursday.

Okay. Ms. Grout, is that information that was conveyed to you?

Yes.

Ms. Sippel, was that information conveyed to you?

Yes.

Mr. Perlman, was that information conveyed to you?

It was conveyed that discussions were being had with ADG to revisit the scope of the work because at that time prior and at the last council meeting, staff had on the table, and this was two weeks ago, staff had on the table that the $190 million, 190,000 square foot station on the table at the last meeting.

Mr. Zohaney said- Mr. Perlman, I don't mean to interrupt, but I was just asking the question, was the $120 million figure conveyed to you? No, no, that was not conveyed to me, no.

What was conveyed to me was that staff was revisiting the $190 million, 190,000 square foot station and initiating discussions with ADG to revisit that size and scope.

Okay. Well, here's why I bring all this up. Because I value transparency, as I think we all do. And I think it's important that accurate information get placed in the public realm. And when, because the reason I'm bringing all this up, in case folks are wondering why, is the next day, our agenda reviews are on Thursday. And that was the date that the $120 million figure was conveyed to us. The next day, an email went out saying that the staff is intending to proceed with a $190 million Taj Mahal police station when that was simply not the case. It had not been the case. It hadn't been the case at least since March. And I think it's important that we, maybe, let me leave it this way. I think it's important that we fully use and avail ourselves of the agenda review process. You have the city attorney, the city manager, two deputy city managers, a CFO, a building services department director, and a public works and engineering director sitting in the room available to answer any questions about anything that's on the agenda or anything at all, frankly. I think it makes sense for us to use that time to get information particularly about matters that are going to be discussed on the agenda and use that fully because that is how we help rebuild public trust because right now I have in my email inbox I don't know 200 or so emails that I have to answer saying that the information that they were given was wrong that the information about the $190 million police station was simply not correct. And I'm going to do that. It's going to take me a little while. But it would really help the process, the rebuilding of trust, and the unification of this community if we could all please be mindful of the fact that we have a difficult enough job as it is to create policy. We don't need to be creating more issues for ourselves by firing up members of the public with information that's simply not true. And I think a lot of that could, confusion could have been dispelled or averted simply by fully availing ourselves of the agenda review process. because I think you've would you recognize Mr. Perlman now that the staff is not recommending that we pursue 190 million dollar excuse me yeah 190 million dollar police station we're at that point now right thank you may I respond sure yeah yeah so Mr. Thompson so you're referencing an email that came out of Save Boca Inc the political committee that was sent out on Friday morning so

So I'm actually, I wear two hats, I guess you could say right now in a sense. I'm a council member. I'm also the chairman and president of Save Boca. As the president of Save Boca and the chairman We were reviewing what was discussed and put forth publicly. Because again, Save Boca is a political organization. We're not privy to private meetings with staff and so forth. At the last meeting, Mr. Zohaney, we had on the table the $190 million, 190,000 square foot police station, which was the current state of the project and the current scope of the project two weeks ago. Mr. Zohaney stated at the meeting, We would look at the police department facility separately and my recommendation is we would be able to do that pretty much tomorrow with council approval because we don't have to have an RFP RFQ process for that facility. So two weeks ago, Mr. Zohaney indicated staff's intention to proceed with the $190 million station with no RFP, RFQ process. And by the way, Mr. Thompson, you stated just now that it has been staff's recommendation for some time to proceed with this new idea, this new $120 million station, which by the way, 120 million, 150 million, 190 million, You're talking like we're dealing with monopoly money here. I deal with real money and so do the taxpayers and the voters of this city. We're not dealing with monopoly money here. So that's not the case that they've been talking about a $120 million station for some time and that they are not intending to proceed with the $190 million station because That was the plan, that was the plan that was being talked about at the last meeting to move forward pretty much tomorrow with no RFP. And by the way, we have here, these are hundreds, you did reference the email that came through from Save Boca and this is the response here. These are the hundreds of emails and thank you to all the citizens who sent this in. demanding that the city does not proceed with this 190 million dollar Taj Mahal demanding that an RFP process take place and telling telling us they want the station in downtown and hundreds of emails are here and now now we're talking about by the way we we have the answers there you have mr zohaney presented an idea to have a pushing this station out with a six-month community feedback uh process for the police station you're looking for an answer Obviously, it seems to me that you're looking for an answer that's really right here in these hundreds of emails that have come forward. You're looking to manufacture an answer that doesn't match the reality, because look, the reality is right here. This is what the people want.

Mayor Thompson, point of privilege on the right.

What exactly are you looking to find out here? What answer are you looking for? We keep hearing from the residents over and over and over. So we have what we need here. The answers are here. And I'd like to, can we, Mary, can we get on the screen the slides?

Before you, we have a couple members of the city council who would like to be heard on the right.

But I have the floor. May I finish?

Well, not anymore you don't. So Ms. Grau, go ahead.

Thank you, Mayor Thompson. i just also want to clarify regarding the say boca email that was circulated where we all received hundreds of emails it was very misleading it's confusing to the residents i'm very concerned i'm also very frustrated because you made it seem like the city is maybe moving forward with the same 192 million dollar police station proposal that voters clearly rejected on march 10th let me be clear that is not what is happening The referendum failed. The public deserves to know that we heard them. But it's also important to correct the record. We are not ignoring the referendum. We are not blindly proceeding with the same plan. In fact, we are revisiting the plan, which is the fiscally responsible thing to do. We are reviewing what was previously proposed, evaluating the scope, the size, the location, the cost, and the process still makes sense. And we're trying to determine what residents are willing to support. Thank you.

Anyone else? Ms. Drucker?

My only feedback is that we had a meeting on Thursday. I had a meeting on Thursday. We all had independent meetings with the correct information. And we cannot continue to pin this community against the city and the council. We have a lot of work to do for our residents. We have a lot of work to do for our entire community that doesn't focus on the failed referendum and I agree with you Deputy Mayor Grau that we're looking at everything over that we already have to make better decisions because the referendum failed and I will not sit up here because basically one of our council members is calling us liars because four of us had the correct information and one member did not have the correct information So I find that very troubling. And we are not at that point. The point that we're at now is discussion so we can move forward and start implementing these changes that affect our community. And I am not part of the Save Boca movement. And I did receive many, many emails. And I did not see the original email that went out from Save Boca. But what I can tell you is I'm apologizing to those residents because you're being given the wrong information. And I appreciate you taking the time to reach out to us, but I'd rather you reach out to us when you have correct information so we can have healthy and proper dialogue. Thank you.

And I'm going to touch on something very quickly. One is you said, Mr. Perlman, that you are not privy to private meetings with staff or that Save Boca isn't. Well, it's chairman is. So then in a way, it absolutely is. And let me push back on one more thing. Two weeks ago when we had our meeting, it was not the scope of the project to go forward with a $190 million police station. It was not. It is false. Staff was saying that they were going to be, and that's true, which was communicated to you, that part was right, that we were reassessing whether a station at this location of Spanish River Boulevard and Broken Sound Parkway Boulevard, rather, could be reengineered. And I think a $70 million savings, which is what the difference in price is, is not monopoly money. That's a significant savings. That is a significant savings. So I applaud the fact that the staff was working towards doing that without having undertaken any kind of polling or assessment from the electorate to determine what the community wants. We heard the community said it was not willing to let the city borrow $175 million for a police station. We heard that loud and clear. Our staff heard that loud and clear. At no point Following the election were we pushing forward and proceeding with a hundred and ninety million dollar police station That is simply false and I agree with with mr. Rucker I feel somebody's lots of people are owed an apology on that because hundreds of people sent us emails Predicated on information that was simply not true and that is that is a problem But let me say let me conclude by saying this In this role We have to have the city's best interest at heart. We have to be putting the city first. I think all of us as council members, we have a duty, and the city attorney's probably going to correct me, but we have a fiduciary duty to put this city first. It's difficult to wear two different hats at the same time. If you're going to take the job of being a policy maker and a council member seriously, you have to have this city's interests first. And part of the job for this new group, and we're a few months in, so we're not new. But one important job of this group is to rebuild the trust with the community. And I take that seriously. Mr. Perlman, I believe you take that role seriously. I know you take that role seriously. If we're going to rebuild trust with this community and move forward together, which is what I think we were elected to do. then we need to be very careful with how we speak about our staff the information provided by our staff what the intentions of our staff of what the city is so I would really just please urge think about that before we undertake the kinds of communications we're talking about here because it creates division it creates confusion it creates uncertainty and I would I for one I probably speak for many of you would like to go through some of these meetings that we're having like this without having to to dig out of a hole like that okay so that that I think is all I have to say on the issue I don't believe we've heard from Miss Sipple on this yet do you have anything you want to add I agree 100 this email did not go out once but twice and it's unacceptable

I even responded on save Boca that the information was inaccurate and. know people choose to believe who they want to listen to but jamming up an email box with 600 emails so that we can't actually do the work that we've been hired to do because we're being swamped with emails some threatening and all of them based on false information it's a waste of our time and it's a waste of yours And I'm sorry that was done to you, but I attended the same meeting that everybody else did, and I was given the same information that apparently four out of the five members were.

Mayor Thompson. Can I end on one thing? Sure. Also, we understand everybody's passionate. I'm very passionate. I'm Cuban, for God's sakes. I'm a Cuban-American. A lot of passion. The threats. are not funny. We're elected officials. That's a felony. You're threatening a public official. I'm taking it very seriously. Mr. Sohaini knows that. We've had discussions. The threats are real. They're viable. We're real people with real families. So do not threaten me or my family. You will be charged. We have an incredible police force, some of you sitting here today. I will not walk around town being threatened or intimidated. So you're on notice. If you're listening, if you're hearing, you're on notice. I also have rights. I'm an elected, but I'm also a person. So stop the nonsense. Keep your information to personal, to a limited. Talk about the issues. You could meet with us at City Hall. I met with some of you having coffee. You could talk to me. We sometimes don't agree up here. We still have level of respect for each other. But when you're threatening a public official, it is against the law and it has to stop. So just letting everyone know. Watch what you write, words matter.

Mr. Perlman. Yeah, thank you. There's a reason there's no trust in City Hall. When you try to sell out the most valuable land from underneath the feet of the people, when you try to push forward a $190 million police station, after the last year and what's what's happened there is no trust thankfully save boca and and the citizens of our our community stood up and and stopped what was what was happening because Without that, this $190 million station would be being built right now, actually. And Tara Frisbee's project would be going up right now because that council, they had that on the fast track plan, a very fast track plan. Meanwhile, city staff just presented, had a presentation here saying that we're not starting construction on the police station until 2029, in three years. so now you're saying okay okay so now you've lowered it at the last meeting at the station was 190 million now they're saying staff is saying they got it down to 120 million but the timetable factors into the cost by the time this staff has this project constructing when construction commences in 20 in 2029 we're going to be right back at 100 150 170 maybe even back to 190 million by that time mary can can um can we get the slides up please and um is do we have the clicker oh can i get the clicker thank you so the current the current timetable of that staff just presented to us for the for this police station is a very painfully drawn out long-term process. They have a community engagement period for six months, eight months, trying to figure out what the community wants, which we have right here. The people already told us what they want in the hundreds of emails that came through. They don't have construction starting until 2029 in three years. The projected completion date of the project is 2031 in five years. The people sitting here, we might not even be around by then. I mean, these are three-year terms. So who knows who's gonna be around? Who knows? At that time, the project could be back to 190,000 square feet. I mean, they're not getting started until we might not even be around. So that's a five-year delay in five years by the time this station gets completed. And if it does, that would be a good result. Usually projects like this, they take way longer. So five years would be a good result. We might be into the mid-2030s by the time this thing gets done. We know that lengthy timelines cause big issues. We know that construction costs escalate significantly as time progresses. When Fort Lauderdale voters approved their new police station in 2019, they approved a $100 million bond. That's what they thought they were going to pay. The project didn't get started until, they didn't break ground until 2023. By that time, the cost ballooned 150%. Now, they're paying $150 million instead of what they thought they were going to pay, $100 million. and they've had a lot of problems. That's the size of station that Boca was intending to proceed with, which now staff is saying they're bringing it down, which that's good to hear. If we don't take care of this, the police department is here. We know that the chief is here. We know you need a facility right away. Why are we prolonging this? I want to get this facility for you right away. And some slides coming forward are going to show that this lengthy timeframe is not necessary. You don't have to suffer through another five years or more of operating without a proper facility. And as we know, the timeline, they say five years, but it could be seven, eight, who knows how long it could be. Meanwhile, Tara Frisbee was on the fast track. Staff, they were working around the clock. Point of privilege. They were working around the clock to facilitate the progress.

Hold on a second.

Hold on a second. Point of privilege.

Point of privilege. Ms. Drucker, yes, please.

I have a point of privilege. Learn your parliamentary procedures. We are not talking about this. The only direction the staff needs to have today from this council, you could have these conversations offline on your own time, city manager and staff. Our only direction today is to give guidance to city manager on what he discussed earlier today. That's the intent of this meeting and that's why I'm here today, to give that direction. I'm not here, Mayor Thompson, to listen to all these conspiracy theories and things that are inaccurate. So can we focus on what we're supposed to give today to city staff so that we can at least get moving so that we can start the right process of input?

Thank you, Mr. Drucker. I would think it would make sense for us to confine our comments to the police station. These are all confined to the police station.

The scope, the timeline, and the whole process that they're seeking direction on.

Let's keep it moving.

Yeah. So we're not getting going to build a station for three years as per the recent presentation given by staff. Meanwhile, Terra Frisbee was on the fast track. The unsolicited proposal came through on October 24th, 2024, and it was slated for council approval one year later on the October 28th vote, which we all know, had Save Boca not got involved, that would have been rubber stamped. It would have gone through, and within one year, it would have been approved, and these buildings would have been going up right now. memorial park would have been a demolition site the condos would have been going up on top of it and city staff that was terror frisbees was was staff's number one priority and they fast this is not the topic of conversation right here we have just the cape corral police station this is a very interesting case study which can be applied to Boca because we don't need to wait. We don't need to force this police station to wait five years or more for a new station. So the Cape Corral police station, Cape Corral, is it Cape Corral or Cape Corral? Coral. All right, Cape Corral. So Cape Coral, they actually completed, they utilized a fast track hybrid design and construction process in which the plans and the construction were fast tracked into a hybrid approach that enabled them to complete their police station in one year. They actually completed 100% of the site engineering, 90% of the structural engineering, and a 30% complete set of construction documents. The 30% set of construction documents were sent right away out for competitive bids. They procured 201 bids from various subcontractors in 47 disciplines of construction. And the project was done efficiently and streamlined. And they actually got the GMP down by $4 million. It was lower than anticipated. And this station was built. within one year. And that was design and construction. They began sourcing competitive construction bids while the plans were being finalized. And I think that we can use this as a lesson for our own station and get this done for the taxpayers. Because again, let's look at what happened in Fort Lauderdale. And by the way, I was there over the weekend. This is a picture from the weekend of the Fort Lauderdale police station. They're still doing construction there. This has been an over seven years process for the city of Fort Lauderdale. The projected cost was $100 million. Due to the extended timeline, it ballooned to $150 million. There was four years of pre-construction and They're still working there after seven years. So we can get going on this. We can get this done for the taxpayers. We don't have to, and honestly, This is the timeline that's been proposed by staff is it's going to highly impact the cost. And we are not being respectful of the taxpayers by proceeding on an elongated timeline like this. We owe the taxpayers more than that. This is irresponsible. We can do this better. And we can be a better steward of the public's money. than allow this to be drawn out and allow this to be the cost to balloon with this current timeframe building after three years. And honestly, we have the money to do it because we don't need to take out a bond. I sat down extensively and had a great discussion with Mr. Zervas, the CFO, and we have We have between $150 million to $200 million in available funds right now that we can use. Across the general fund, which has 43.2 million of unassigned funds, we have the five-year capital improvement fund. We have over $50 million there. We have $57 million in the land proceeds fund. We have over $50 million in the CRA fund. And by the way, I've also met extensively with Mr. Kaler. And the CRA money can be used for the Memorial Park improvements and the community center if it's done in the right way. So when you look at all of this, And by the way, in the last two meetings, because if we build, we could potentially build a new city hall, sorry, a new police station. I mean, I'm glad you came down. When you look at the population, for example, in Boca, when the police station was built, it was incredible. It was built in 1987. The population was around 58,000 people. And it's a 30,000 square foot facility. So the population hasn't doubled. It hasn't doubled quite even in that time. So even if we build a station double the size at 60,000 square feet and we Using Bradenton, which they were accomplished an incredible square footage price at roughly 700 a square foot. We could be building a police station right away at 60,000 square feet, which would be double the size from 1987 at around $50 million. And we've already authorized, we've already authorized $50 million worth of capital improvement.

Mayor Thompson, we have gone completely off the rails.

Ms. Drucker, I'm assuming he's coming to a conclusion pretty soon. Yeah, I'm going to finish. I'm assuming he's coming to a conclusion very soon.

Yeah, so we've already authorized that last meeting and upcoming in this meeting, very likely going to be authorizing In conjunction, assuming the agenda is passed today, it would be $50 million in utility services capital improvements. That could potentially be the cost of the police station, and we've already authorized that for the Utility Services Department. I mean, do they have more money than the city at large? We can proceed with this right away, and we can get this done for the taxpayers at a reasonable price and be fiscally responsible. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments, Ms. Sipple.

May I ask a question?

Please.

So when was the Cape Coral Police Department built?

Yeah, so actually, this is actually a great example of how much construction- 17 years ago. Yeah, so let me explain.

So this is- 17 years ago.

And it was $21 million. Post pre-COVID.

2009.

Members, I appreciate the- Pre-tariff. Hey, guys. 200 a square foot. Mr. Crumman, please. That's how low it was. I appreciate the passion, but just do all of us a favor. Let's allow each one to finish before somebody speaks at the same time. But the point's a good one. Any other? Yep, Ms. Crow.

Yes, I just have one question. So when we get these Save Boca emails, is it John Perlman sending those emails?

I actually, the mayor was asking me this a while back. Those emails are sent, any emails coming from Save Boca are sent by the political organization, Save Boca Inc.

Political organizations act through people. Which person sent it?

It says john at saveboca.org.

Yeah, any email coming from john and say boca.org. It's a big organization. We have hundreds of volunteers. We have thousands of 10s of 1000s of supporters throughout the city. Any any communication coming from john and say boca.org is an official communication coming from say Boca Inc, the political committee.

Does the chairman of the say Boca political committee approve of those emails before they're sent out?

The answer is that the political committee sends them out, and we have hundreds of volunteers and thousands of supporters who are involved with the organization. And it's a political committee. That's where it's coming from.

No, that was a different answer to a question that wasn't asked. I said, does the chairman, which is you, of this political organization approve of these emails before they're sent out?

As the chairman and president of Save Boca, I'm always keeping updated and informed on all of the ongoings of Save Boca Inc. Emails, social media communications. As the president, that's my responsibility to review those and be keeping updated on everything that's going on with the organization.

So we can conclude this part of our conversation this way. You're not willing to acknowledge that you are the one that sends or approves those emails. Is that what we're hearing from you? Those are emails sent by Save Boca. Which acts through people, and you're the chairman.

I am the chairman of Save Boca, yes.

Okay, all right. All right, any other questions? Maybe we get back to the police station. OK, so staff is looking for consensus and direction by us on the police station question. So in my view, I think there are a couple of decision points. One is that the direction you all were seeking, Mr. Soheni, related to the engagement strategy and the funding approach, as well as the timeline and this project scope. Is that right? That's correct. OK. So I guess we can touch each of them one by one. I mean, on the engagement part, I happen to think that we can probably bring some of the timeline in. Community engagement, of course, is good. Public input, of course, something we value. But I think this is one where we can probably have a little less time dedicated to that so that we can move the timeline up some, potentially a lot. the important part that we have to meet is if we're going to be asking the referendum we're going to asking the residents to approve a bond we need to do that with sufficient time that they can get the language on the ballot by March of 2027 or sooner I suppose so maybe it's it let's let maybe we have that discussion first okay so And let me just pose the question, then we can each get to it. The question being, is the financing for a new police station something that we're willing to undertake through a bond question? Let's start there. I, for one, believe that that is the right approach. We don't have enough time right now to dispel everything that we heard about the city's financial position. But it's safe to say that we don't have $100 million or $50 or $70 million in our budget right now that wouldn't drastically affect a whole series of other things that we do. So we can't just allocate that initially right now without taking out a bond. So the question I think maybe we pose is, Is the City Council in favor of having a bond question sent to the voters? Let's start there. And I'm a yes for that.

Yes, I'm in favor of that.

Okay. Ms. Drucker?

Definitely in favor of that based on the property tax discussions that are happening right now in Tallahassee. Yes, a bond referendum would be the right way to protect our taxpayer dollars.

Okay. Mr. Perlman, I imagine your answer is no. I think you've outlined that. Ms. Zippel?

Yes.

Okay. So we have direction here on moving forward with a police station bond question. I know it may not be the, I guess really what's left then is the timeline and the preliminary project scope. I'll tell you all my view on this. I think that staff did a very good job in going back and working with a consultant that was previously retained to work down the number on a potential cost for a police station that is significantly less than what was previously discussed. $70 million savings, I'll reiterate, in my view is a significant savings. Are we getting a police station headquarters that's going to serve our city for 30 years necessarily? No, we're not because we're not getting a 2045 full program. We're consciously getting something less than that, but I think that makes sense. for the for the time being, because every day that goes by that our police department has to work in the existing facility, I believe, is is not the best use of the phenomenal talent that we have there. So I believe that we can. Here's my view. I think we go back to the voters in March of twenty, twenty seven or earlier, if possible, and asked them to approve a bond issue of, I believe the number was $100 million, which is significantly less than the $175 million that was discussed previously, and that we continue to move forward with the police station headquarters being relocated. I know you weren't asking for direction on that, but I'm here relocated to spanish river and uh broken sound the reason i say that is that is not that was not something that was done in order to clear the land to make room for any kind of other programming downtown no that was because our police services department indicated that that is a preferable location in order to help keep our residents safe for a whole host of reasons they were outlined previously that that is a superior location in my view and I trust them on that so my preference would be it may we start on this is can we move forward with a 120 million dollar police station financed up to 100 million dollars through a bond referendum and having it move forward at the location on Spanish River Boulevard and broken sound. That's my view of it. I recognize reasonable minds can disagree on all of those things, but I think maybe we start, we hit that and if we can form consensus on that, then the staff has their answers. Who would like to respond first? Ms. Grau.

I guess I'll go ahead. As my husband was a chairman of the Financial Advisory Board for many years, he did spend a great deal of time looking at the finances. And the board's recommendation was $125 million. So I don't know if everyone would be comfortable with that amount. It would give us a little extra cushion to work with.

Okay. So that view would be we would ask the voters for $125 million of proceeds in borrowed money, not $100 million. Okay.

Yes. Yes.

Very good.

And that vote was four to three, just to let you know.

from the Financial Advisory Board. All right, very good. Ms. Drucker.

So when I met with Mr. Service and the team of Mr. Sohaini last Thursday, that was one of my questions on the reserves. Because we're entering this area, we don't know what's going to happen with property taxes. That's going to impact us moving forward. It's good to have a little bit of the cushion. I would agree with that. just because we don't know the unknown and we don't know what's gonna be given to the cities, what's gonna be taken from the cities. And I understand that people out there, a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions on the property taxes in general. And it's one of those things that I said, there's a podcast that I did a few weeks ago that I said, you can't take it from one place and not expect to take it from another place. So we're going to have to figure out how that's going to affect our city. So by allowing us a bond at a little bit of a higher level, I think it'll give us that cushion and it'll give us for any kind of missteps. And then because we were so back up for a minute for transparency for the viewers and the listeners, $120 million project, $100 million was going to come from the bond, $20 million from our reserves. And I feel more comfortable with a higher bond and less of the reserve in case we need to pull those reserves and we're not going to get into how we handle that that's we've already discussed that on this day is but our reserves a lot of them are earmarked so the more we have on reserves the more it protects our city from any potential fallout with reduction in property taxes okay so it sounds like i hear two in favor of a bond question of 125 million dollars okay anyone else miss simple

I'd like to ask Mr. Sohaney, when you say that you're building out for 2045, what exactly does that mean?

yeah so um miss simple so so just let me kind of give you the big picture so uh previously the design was for 2030 2025 2035 and 2045. on the last bond measure it was a 2045 build out which was what is our police department needs in 20 years and let's build that fully. Just to give you an understanding, the square footage that was proposed in the last referendum for a 2045 full build out was 164,000 square feet. in this proposal again not not just using a baseline the today's needs are 94 000 square feet so you can see there's a 70 000 square foot drop between a 2045 and what we're proposing just as a preliminary uh square footage number to use from of 94 000 square feet and um and that's that's the basic difference does that help answer the question

Yes, I was just looking at the population using the Palm Beach County population allocation model. It's only expected to go up to our current population is 101,000, almost 102,000 now. 2050 has it as 120,000. Tampa, which is currently under, I'm sorry, not Tampa, Tallahassee, which is currently under construction has doubled the amount of population we have is building 137,000 square foot facility. But I do agree with the bond.

And if I may ask, is it, are we okay with $125 million bond number? Okay.

Yeah. I, unfortunately I researched the price. Police departments are extremely expensive no matter who you use.

Mayor Thomas.

Mr. Rucker.

Just a question, just because I want to make sure everybody in the community understands that even though we're going to a reduced square footage, we're planning out for less amount of time. We're still having a very safe building. The public safety is not being put at risk for us saving, you know, whatever the amount is that we were doing from the referendum in March. I want to make sure we put that out there very clearly.

Yeah, I agree. Are you able, Mr. Sohaney, to have somebody speak to that from an operational perspective?

Yes. I will have actually the acting police chief, if you want to speak to our current operational shortfalls in terms of space and this future project.

sure thank you our current operational issues right now related to patrol is that we don't have enough space to conduct briefings right now our briefings if we have any kind of major city event We have to have our briefings outside. Our briefing room currently does not have the capacity to hold our briefings indoors. In inclement weather, we have officers standing outside on the back patio and we're yelling to give them operational information. Obviously, outside there's nowhere to present information. We don't have any facility that can handle that at the police department. additionally a lot of our detective bureaus are split up so we have different units within the detective bureau and unfortunately some of them have to be at 6500 and some of them are at the police department and so that creates a lot of issues with communications we're not able to effectively share information we've got some of our crime analysts up here and we have some at the police department we also have a lot of shared spaces we've done a lot of conversions of closets so we have closets where they were designed to be like coat jacket closets they're now housing two or three employees who have desks inside of them we have polygraph rooms that are just improperly placed because we don't have space so we're not able to conduct interviews there's noise issues operationally we've outgrown our property and evidence so those are so those are some things that we're looking forward to resolving with the new police department

And I think all the more reason why we should move as quickly as possible on this. The bond question is a function of timing in terms of when we can get on the ballot. Outside date would be March of 2027. Maybe there's an opportunity for there to be an earlier such opportunity. But my hope is that, so in the time between now and then, we can undertake, I think, the community engagement. There's nothing really left to be done. I think we've identified, it sounds like. maybe from a couple members, Ms. Sipple and Ms. Grau, are you okay? My suggestion was we move forward with the relocation. Is that something that you all are okay with too?

Are you talking about relocating to the Spanish River Boulevard? Yes. I think that should be part of the public outreach. OK. Yeah. I mean, has anybody reached out to the committee advisory board to see if they're willing to to do this outreach for us?

They I spoke with their chair recently and she was I didn't speak specifically about whether the police services headquarters should be part of their task, but they were eagerly under awaiting a new task. So I think that would be met with a degree of approval by them. So that's not an issue. Ms. Drucker.

I mean, obviously everybody knows that we've been talking about this, so I believe that the central location for the police service station should be in Spanish River, but I also believe there should be a station in downtown and in part of our conversations, we should definitely have And I think one of the team members, we kept calling it a substation, but I think it just has to be a station just because the city has grown. It's a lot of activity in the downtown. So even if our central headquarters are in the central area of our city, I believe that we still have to have some discussion in the downtown to leave a station there. So I think that I'm in favor of, yes, the central station with additional station in the downtown.

Very good. Ms. Sipple, any views on the relocation question or we want to have that be part of the engagement process?

I think the resident should have the say in the location.

Okay. Mr. Manager, does that give us the direction you were looking for?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Okay.

Mr. Thompson. Mr. Perlman. Yeah. In my view, you come to the table with $190 million station, then you bump it down to $120 million station. With the timeframe here, it's going to likely shoot right back up to $190 million. You can't put 190 million on the table and then cut it down to 120 and say, in my opinion, and then say, this is reasonable. You're still gouging the taxpayers for something that they didn't ask for. And that was evidenced in the hundreds of emails that came through. And Ms. Sipple, by the way, that was a good insight. You were looking at the population increase, the predicted population increase, which you said by 2050 it's only going to go up based on your information from 104,000 to 120,000. It's ticking up slowly, whereas if you look when the original station was completed, basically Essentially, we want to now build a station three times the size of what it is now. It took 55 years for the population to triple to what it is today, from the early 70s until now. To tell us that we need three times the size of a police station in 10 years, that doesn't make much sense to me. I think we can do it more responsibly. And I think that this station is still gouging the taxpayers for something that they didn't want. And that's my opinion. Thank you.

Yes, Mr. Perlman, that is your opinion. I believe that can conclude our discussion on the police services headquarters. We can move on then to, I believe it's the, you had more on the community master plan. Just real quick. Okay, go ahead.

Thank you. So just for the community master plan, just want to point out that there's a lot going on, obviously, here, folks. really phase all this out so there's a lot of things to consider uh once we get moving on the police services complex uh you know east of second avenue we need to come back take a look at that we also need to take a look at the parks and recreation as a broader piece you know everything outside of memorial park i met with beach park district and just so we're all tracking we're going to have a joint meeting with the beach park district uh october 27th and then the other things that I wanted to mention is we're going to come back with you know whether or not and how we're going to take a look at our downtown land development code we need to update that by 2028 so that's coming here shortly as well as things like lerp and midtown so again I just want to mention you know a month ago we started with this broad community city-wide master plan And now we've parsed it out. We've parsed it out to the downtown civic area master plan. We've removed the police department piece from that. We just talked about that. right and then we've got these other things that were in this broader plan that need to be addressed and i just mentioned some of those so um the the staff is going to put together some rough ideas and courses of action over the next month or two and that'll come back to council for further direction discussion and guidance and that's all i have pending your questions okay any questions related to to that members no

Then we can conclude our discussion on the downtown civic area plan, and I think we can cross off the list the police services complex. We can move on then to a presentation on the softball fields, and I see at least one interested member of the public there. Mr. Sahany, what do you got?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Stevens will make the presentation.

Mr. Stevens, welcome.

Thank you. Good morning. Mayor, Council Greg Stevens, Recreation Services Director. So obviously, over the past few weeks, we've had, you know, a number of inquiries from the public and whatnot from our user groups questioning some of the equity in the field assignments and whatnot between youth softball, youth baseball. And, you know, something that the department takes very seriously. So is the city and something that we've been looking at our facilities and amenities, you know, across the board and how we work to resolve that. So I hate to ruin everything by bringing you kind of the end of the presentation first, but we've actually feel like we're in a good place with this right now. We've had a lot of discussions with the public and with the league president and the board. And this was some news as of last week that we've worked out the field assignments and whatnot to allow youth softball to move to the Spanish River Athletic Complex in Countess to Hornley Park. So I think we are in a good place there. It's not probably the end all solution, but at least right now it gets us in a good place moving forward. So kind of moving from the conclusion back through the process, I just wanted to start out by saying basically, you know, the goal was to evaluate and reallocate existing field assignments to achieve a more balanced distribution of fields and amenities as we've heard batting cages, bullpens, concessions between baseball and softball field user groups. We've also been examining the park and field sites for possible upgrades for the inclusion of requested amenities. So basically it's been looking at the park system across the board, looking at Memorial Meadows Park and then seeing what we could do as far as either keeping the group at Memorial Meadows, how long would that take, versus reallocating to space at another location. So some of the outcomes, we've had meetings with the softball parents and league officials. The desired outcomes for youth softball to have access to the same amenities available to youth baseball, including bullpens and batting cages. There was a desire for a four-field complex with batting cages, bullpens, storage, dedicated parking, and concessions. There's a desire to have all the games and practices in the same location to create a sense of community and for onsite supervision and maintenance staff there for rain and for field preparation. Again, we don't have maintenance facilities at all the parks, so sometimes that's not something that can happen in every location where we have athletic fields. Continuing with meetings with the softball parents and league officials that when we talked about Memorial and Meadows Park, these were the questions regarding renovations at those sites. So we looked at renovations to concession and vending and storage building, the batting cages with lighting, Memorial North, Memorial South, and Meadows, an additional bleacher with awning covers from Memorial South, improvements to bullpens and lighting for all fields, restroom improvements, improved field maintenance options, additional security and scoreboards. These are all items that had come up just looking at the Meadows Park and Memorial site. Just quickly looking at a few things to show you, this is Meadows Park, and you'll notice something when we look at Meadows and Memorial. All three of the fields, you know, when they were built, that they are very tight in space. All three of the fields are actually usable field-wise for softball, but they are small compared to use for baseball and for other activities. They're also very tight down the sides of the fields as far as looking at putting in bullpens and batting cages. So when we looked at meadows, if we didn't want to go in and take out a lot of established long-term oak trees and whatnot were there, really the best location to put it is outside the outfield fence. and this is a very atypical place to locate a batting cage. Typically in any kind of baseball, softball sport, you have the batter trying to pick up the ball coming from the pitcher and the last place you would typically look at putting things is behind the outfield fence. But again, these sites were very tight and there's very limited opportunities to put these amenities in other locations. So this is Memorial Park, the north field. We were looking at the possibility of a double batting cage down the left field line. This was something that we could probably do there. We would have to relocate fencing and whatnot for access to the fields for lighting maintenance and whatnot. But there was a possibility there. And again, going to Memorial South, this is the field closest to City Hall. Again, no room down the sides of the field really to put much of anything, but we would look at a single cage and the outfield behind the fence. Again, not the most desired location. So some of the estimated cost of the improvements, and again, this is not overall Memorial. These were just more towards the softball fields. For lighting of the three fields and the amenities, again, this is Memorial North, South, and Meadows Park. This would be adding batting cages and adding lighting for the batting cages and bullpens. We were at about 920,000. The construction of three to four batting cages would be between 240 and 300. Bleacher pad and awning, scoreboards, restroom improvements. You can see the dollar amounts we're looking at there. So before we talk about softball, it's kind of important to understand about baseball. There's been a lot of information that's been brought out to the public, a lot of information brought to council in the presentations and discussions here. And it's something to understand that, you know, one thing that I've heard a lot of is that, you know, baseball has one location. They play all their games and practices in one place. And we really, the inventory fields and the size of the groups that we're dealing with, that's not exactly accurate. And it's not really possible based on the size of the organizations and the amenities that we have in our different parks. So, for example, the youth baseball teams are scheduled in practice at several locations, include Sugar Sand, Patch Reef, Don Estridge Middle School, Countess to Hornley Park and Hillsboro Park. And remember that these are fields and whatnot that are owned and operated, some of them by the district, some by the Beach and Park District, some by the city, but that we operate the fields and whatnot for the district as well. And there are amenities that vary from park to park. Youth softball does not play in practice at any one location. They practice that are spread out across the city. And when you start looking at these amenities, Sugar Sand Park has scoreboards, batting cages, and concessions assigned to youth baseball. Patch Reef has scoreboards and batting cages, but concessions there are assigned to either lacrosse in the spring or tackle football in fall. Don Escher's Middle has no batting cages, scoreboards, or concessions, and neither does Hillsboro or Rio Park Northfield. Basically, what you look at is you look at the inventory of fields across the city. A lot of the city fields that we have were built probably 30, 40, 50 years ago, and a lot of them were built in neighborhoods. The Beach and Park District came along. They built Patch Reef Park in the 80s, Sugar Sand Park in the 90s, and actually funded the construction of the Countess de Hornley or Spanish River Athletic Complex fields approximately 2013. So these are newer complexes that were built with some of the newer amenities, but the amenities are not consistent across the board at all locations. So we looked at basically the staff reviewed the user groups, their needs, including the appropriate field size for each age group, and the associated amenities. And that's also something very important to understand is that when you look at Memorial and Meadows, while youth softball can play on the fields there, You can't move youth softball to a larger field and move the people using the larger fields to the fields at Memorial and Meadows. The sports are two different age groups who require different base distances, fence distances, pitching distances, all these things. So there's a lot that actually goes into scheduling the fields and making sure that we can maintain balance out the use and preparation for all the fields for all the groups. So as we looked at youth softball, one of the big things that we had heard a lot of is looking at Patch Reef Park. But as we looked at Patch Reef, the three fields there, and relocating the activities there, the need for permanent mounds, the needs for the larger fields, multiple base distances, those types of things, we would actually be eliminating some of the user groups that were there and also taking space away from multiple groups in order to make that happen. So basically what we came down to was looking at two different solutions. One was the softball staying at Memorial and Meadows and a wait for the amenities to be to improvements to be phased in. Batting cages don't get built overnight. Lighting projects don't happen overnight. These are not improvements that were going to happen by this fall, possibly not by this spring. So you're probably looking at, you know, anywhere from several months to a year for a lot of these amenities to happen. The other was to move the Countess to Hornley Park, also known as the Spanish River Athletic Complex, where field assignments can be arranged to allow for immediate improvements and access to amenities for this coming fall, for the 2026 fall season. The benefits to County of Stornly Park include four fields at one location. There's two existing batting cages. There's park rangers and athletic staff stationed on site. There's a maintenance facility on site for field preparation after rain. While we did try to look at keeping all the activities in one location, there is some shared use Monday through Thursday on the fields, but we can have all four fields available for use on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, allowing all the games for the league in one location, which really creates that sense of community that was desired It would also be available for tournaments and things that the softball leagues have not been able to host due to some of the limitations on the fields where they're allocated currently. Other benefits of Countess de Hornley Park and using this accommodation there is that it can accommodate youth softball for the foreseeable future. It allows more time for the evaluation of the proposed amenities at Memorial and Meadows Park. Again, at Memorial and Meadows, some of those amenities can be made, but we're really forcing amenities into locations they typically would not go. We would be spending a lot of money putting those amenities in. And then while we looked at master planning, those amenities may not stay where we were putting them in the long term. So this allows for the Memorial Park in downtown master plan to be completed prior to expending funds on the amenities where they may not be permanent, allows for the recreation master plan that follows with the city and the greater broker tone Beach Park District properties to determine best overall locations for the recreational needs. Additionally, going through this exercise and hearing from some of the council members and, you know, working with the public, the Recreation Services staff, along with Brian Arms, we did meet with the president and the board from Boca Junta Softball on May 13th and again on the 20th. There were a lot of emails and whatnot going before that. Working with communications, we were able to come to agreement with them on the 20th that they would move to Town of Stornly Park. And that announcement was made on Thursday, May 21st. And I'm sorry, as partly what I was starting to say is that based on the overall discussion, some other tasks that we are working on is that we've initiated a review of our current residency requirements for use of our athletic fields and facilities, including a review of the policies used by our surrounding cities and counties. Emphasis will be placed on working with our youth sports providers to ensure residents have priority in registering, especially for high demand programs and activities. But it's important to understand that residency is something that's been brought before the council and before the Beach and Park District a number of times over the years. It's a very passionate subject. The changes or whatever we may propose can impact the existing groups. For example, some leagues don't have enough resident participants to exist. other leagues will tell you that certain age groups don't have enough participants for them to have certain age groups and certain sports so it's something that really has to be looked at carefully and across the board and most of all it's something that the city and the beach and park district have to come to terms with a standardized policy something that both would be willing to work with and agree to because again the facilities that we operate and maintain from the department standpoint are owned by both entities both the city and the district And that concludes my presentation. If anybody has any questions, happy to answer.

That was excellent. Mr. Stevens, thank you. Members, any questions for Mr. Stevens? Mr. Perlman.

Mr. Stevens, first of all, I want to thank you for your incredible work on this. You've done an amazing job to find a solution for the softball program. And I know you've worked really hard. So thank you very much. Can you just pull up the slide for a minute on the cost for the lighting, the batting cages? Okay, first of all, I've visited the batting cages at the Sugar Sand Park for the baseball facility, and I've also seen the batting cages at Countess de Hornley. I mean, they're primarily made of netting and chain link fences, so to be paying $75,000 per cage that that doesn't make sense to me so prior to commencing i'd like your office to please send me all the all the you know bids or whatever you have information on that because i want to review that regarding the the nearly a million dollars on the lighting for um is that is that first of all is that for memorial park and meadows park and what where is the lighting what what are we what is that money going to be used for

Okay, so this will be updating the lights on all three fields. As we looked at building batting cages, wherever those may be located, also properly lighting the bullpens, you have to bring the lighting levels to the proper level. And the lights that are there are approximately 25 years old, so the lights all have to be upgraded. We can't just put new lights in that, you know, we have to re-aim lights off of the existing poles and we are up here updating all three fields to led lighting that would be more modern cost effective would also allow us to have the same technology for the batting cages and the field so again this is for all three fields as well as batting cages that we would add and also for adding proper lighting to the bullpens that are located on the sides of the fields okay the the proposal whatever you have for pricing on those two elements and proposals send them um to the city manager and for our review thank you

Can I ask a question too, Mr. Stevens? So the cost that you've identified for improvements to Memorial and Meadows, are we anticipating actually moving forward with those improvements now if the plan is to have softball become a resident at Spanish River Athletic Complex?

No, and as a matter of fact, when I shared the second slide that showed the league moving, today's presentation was initially going towards laying out the options of where we thought we would be. But fortunately, we've been able to meet with the league president and the board to make that happen sooner. They were coming up on registration. We need to get that information out. So the options, basically, we were looking at, again, as we went back to, was either the league stays at Memorial, and we looked at putting these options into play. or the league moved to count as the Hornley where we have time to really reevaluate and see whether these are the right amenities and the right location. So currently we are not looking at doing this. Uh, the league is, is agreed to, to relocate. We're relocating our programs around and this would all be part of upcoming discussion potentially during the master plan discussion for the site here at Meadows and Memorial.

Very good. Any other questions? If not, then I think that we can conclude our discussion on this item and move on to the final presentation for the day, after which we'll have public comment on all the presentations that we've heard of or from. And this last presentation is going to be on freestanding emergency facilities. Mr. Sohaney, who will be making the presentation?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Our Development Services Director, Mr. Shad, will make the presentation. Thanks again, Mr. Stevens.

Good morning, afternoon, whatever it is, Mayor and City Council, Brandon Chad, Development Services Director. So this is going to be a recap of the freestanding emergency ordinance that has been pending for some time and and is still pending. So I'll get right into it. The purpose of this workshop is to provide the city council with the background and overview of prior city actions with respect to freestanding emergency facilities, to summarize the previously considered and still pending code amendment, to present some comparative data from other jurisdictions, and to offer factual background to assist the council in its future discussions on this matter. So there are currently no freestanding emergency rooms or freestanding emergency facilities located in the city. As I've mentioned in the past, this is a fairly new concept under state statute where an emergency room is physically not in the same location as a hospital. but they have been allowed for some time. We don't have any again in the city right now. There was one previously considered at 1001 Telecom Drive that was approved by the Planning and Zoning Board in 2025 and at that point an appeal was filed by a neighboring property owner and the City Council upon appeal reversed that decision and denied the application that has been appealed to Circuit Court and that matter is currently pending. Additionally, there's significant background. Ordinance number 5698 was adopted in August of 2024, reducing citywide the parking requirements for medical offices. Based on some data that was presented at the time, Specifically excluded from that reduction in parking requirements were something we called outpatient surgery centers, which was defined to include emergency rooms. So, therefore, that lower parking requirement does not apply to these freestanding emergency facilities. The city initiated the code amendment that I've been discussing, which would allow, would specifically address freestanding emergency facilities as opposed to being silent on the matter and therefore being an interpretation as to where and how they would be allowed. So this would specifically address such facilities and would require them to go through a conditional use process and establish regulations. And, um, there was some, there were some changes to the ordinance as it was considered, but the most recent version would allow them in the following zoning districts, the medical center, the city commercial general, the city commercial high office, the before district and the LARP or the LERP district. Um, there were some additional locational requirements in terms of not being a budding single family to being on an arterial and so on. This map, um, shows, uh, the parcels that would be eligible for such facilities under those location requirements that are zoning district. Those are, um, on an arterial and not a budding single family. Um, the ordinance would also have created a definition and some supplemental standards, including, as I was just mentioning that the, The facility would have to have a vehicular access point that is both on an arterial road and not within a school zone. Again, cannot abut existing or zoned single family. And additionally, would be a requirement that there be at least one dedicated ambulance loading and unloading area that does not interfere with site circulation. While that proposed ordinance would have or would reformat parking provisions regarding these facilities, they would not actually change those parking requirements. So there is no proposed substantive change to the parking requirements for these facilities in that ordinance. The proposed ordinance was reviewed by the Planning and Zoning Board back on January 8th of this year, and the board voted six to zero to recommend approval, but with some changes, some of which have been incorporated and some of which have not. So the first recommendation was to add the LERP district. That has been incorporated. The most recent version of the ordinance has that. It would propose to keep the arterial frontage requirement but allow access to the vehicular access to be not from the arterial in the case of a corner property. That has not been added to the ordinance. To clarify, the proposed ordinance as it stands would require both frontage and access from an arterial. It would also have removed, the board recommended removing the restriction on access within school zones. That was not added to the ordinance and would have required a one-mile separation between these facilities. Again, that has not been incorporated into the ordinance. This map shows what a one-mile radius those circles, what those would look like to give you a scale idea. So on January 6th, the City Council held its first of two required public hearings. When the ordinance was heard for the second public hearing, the Council declined to adopt the ordinance and asked for some additional information. And so staff subsequently provided that additional research. Specifically, we were able to verify the existence of 18 freestanding emergency rooms in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties spread across 10 jurisdictions. And I've put in parentheses here how many of the facilities each of those jurisdictions has. Additional research, the Council wanted to know if these were standalone sites or if they were in some type of shopping center or similar multi-tenant property. And we found that three of them were in multi-tenanted properties and 15 were on standalone sites. We found that 14 out of the 18 had frontage on an arterial road and all 14 of them with frontage on an arterial had vehicular access from that arterial. All 18 had a covered ambulance drop-off area, and five out of the 18 have a separate dedicated ambulance parking area. In terms of turn lanes, 11 out of the 18 facilities had a dedicated right turn lane into the property, and 12 out of the 18 had a dedicated left turn lane into the property. Five out of the ten jurisdictions that had these facilities have code provisions that are specific to these facilities. And I'll summarize them quickly now. Palm Beach Gardens requires conditional use approval in select commercial and institutional zoning districts with a minimum parking requirement of one space per 200 square feet. Palm Beach County requires similar requirement that it has a frontage on a major street, also requires it be fully screened from any residentially designated property. City of Westlake permits these not as a conditional use, as a permitted use in mixed use in medical zoning district, again, with a one per 200 parking rate. Pembroke Pines permits the facilities across a wide range of districts. Their requirement is three and a half parking spaces per thousand, so converted into per 200 square feet. That's a little lower than the others at .7 spaces per 200. Pompano Beach recently adopted an ordinance in January allowing these facilities in certain commercial industrial districts on a minimum one and a half acre lot with emergency vehicle access only from an arterial collector and additional access and buffering requirements within 500 feet of single-family or two-family residential. Um, that is the research and the information that has previously been presented by, uh, by staff. Uh, we're here to answer any questions. Obviously the council may choose to revisit this amendment, um, or request additional information or, um, any other direction that the council would like to give, but this is a, uh, no action is proposed today. Whereas this is a, um, informational workshop. And, and again, I'm here for any questions.

Great, thank you, Mr. Shad. And just to clarify, there's no pending application for anybody looking to put in a free standing emergency room in town, right? No, other than the one that's under appeal in court, there are no other applications. Very good. Members, any questions? Mr. Perlman.

Thank you, Mr. Shad, for the presentation. I'm holding the ordinance here in my hand. Who wrote this ordinance?

So the first version of the ordinance was proposed by former Deputy Mayor Naclis. We, me, rewrote it in many respects to clarify the language and so on, but the original genesis was from former Deputy Mayor Naclis.

Did the former Deputy Mayor Naclis write this document? Was she the author of this document, and if not, who was the author?

Um, I, I believe that, uh, Laney's attorney, um, Bonnie Miskel worked with, um, uh, former deputy mayor knockless on the ordinance. And again, uh, city staff, um, worked on the ordinance subsequently to that. So it's a, I'd say a collaboration. I'm sorry. You said whose attorney you said Bonnie Miskel, but whose attorney is that? I just said she was a land use attorney. I didn't say who's attorney. Okay.

Okay, is this the same attorney that represents the adjacent property brick that appealed the original passage of the freestanding emergency room?

Yes.

Mr. Kaler. It's been revealed that Bonnie Miskell, who's a lobbyist representative of the adjacent property that appealed the approval of the freestanding emergency room, wrote this ordinance. Does the city of Boca allow ordinances and laws written by lobbyists to be codified into law in the city of Boca?

the process for adoption of an ordinance is a public hearing and adoption by the council if the question is the genesis of those ordinances any member of the public can propose ideas to the council so just to confirm a lobbyist within the city of boca raton can write an ordinance and that ordinance can be codified into law is that correct A lobbyist has no independent ability to control the process of the council, but you are correct that a lobbyist can propose an idea to an elected official and an elected official can introduce a matter and seek to persuade their colleagues of the policy in that ordinance.

Okay, so in this case, the ordinance was written by Bonnie Miskel, a lobbyist of the adjacent property that appealed the approval of the freestanding emergency room. That ordinance was then facilitated, I guess you could say, brought to the council by the former deputy mayor, Fran Nachlis. Given what's happened in this situation, this ordinance as it stands before us, can this be codified into law in Boca Raton?

Yes, if it follows the process under the statutes with notice and public hearing, and then there is a discussion and a vote, that would be the process. So, yes, to answer your question.

Thank you. Thank you for explaining that. That's deeply troubling to me, that lobbyists in the community can be codifying laws in our community. So we're going to need to look into this further, and I'm going to do my own work as well. Thank you.

Ms. Drucker.

Mayor Thompson, so with that added, by the way, just for everybody for transparency, because we have to always dispel rumors and fake information, often developers will come and they work with Council members or deputy mayors or mayors on text amendments. I can speak for myself and Mayor Thompson. We've sponsored text amendments. There's nothing hidden. It's all in writing. Everything comes. We work with legal to get the right information, not only to protect the residents, protect the city, and make sure that we're getting the best product. But now that we're adding some of that stuff, maybe we should add political action committees when they introduce ordinances to the staff. Maybe I would like to see how that plays out. Maybe we should look into not only lobbyists, but PACs that submit information to council members for ordinances and codification. I would like a little research on that myself. Thank you.

Anyone else? The topic being freestanding emergency rooms.

The topic is freestanding emergency rooms, yes, but I also, and I'll put that in writing post-meeting, but I think it's time we have that conversation.

Anyone else? Ms. Grau? Ms. Sippel? No questions? Okay. That was strictly for informational purposes only, so I think that concludes the time we have allocated for presentations, but we do have time at this moment for public comment as it relates to any of the topics discussed during the aforementioned presentation period. So if you're interested in being heard as part of public comment on any of those items, please step forward, state your name and address, and you'll have up to three minutes. First name on my card is Mike Liebelson, so take it away.

Mike Labelson, 398 Northeast Third Court. Can we just put that third slide up, Mary? Do you still have that? Yeah, that one. Perfect. I just want to get back to the scope of the RFQ and what we're going out to consultants to take a look at. As I understand it, it's now just the 17 acres. So it's the left side of what I've put up there, the existing recreational fields. I'm not quite sure what we have to plan there, but I think that we should at least be going for the full 31 acres because that allows this kind of innovative approach that again, Les Wilson came up with at bocafirst.org, where he relocates the new police department and the new city hall and keeps them downtown i think it's going to be a lot less expensive actually than moving to spanish river because you're not going to have the 20 some odd million dollars of land development infrastructure that has to work at Spanish River for the police station but we don't know I mean that's that's still open should it be downtown or Spanish River but this is a great option and if we limit the RFQ and the planning firms to just look at what's to the left here the green diagram I think we're losing out on these innovative approaches so and I think that's really what we want to see the planning firms take a look at something innovative and that ties in with the entire downtown so let's not leave it up to just the 17 acres so that that's really what I want to know bring up i don't know how far the rfq process it seemed like we started with an rfq that included the entire downtown potentially the entire cra then it seemed to be 31 acres now it's 17 acres and i don't know what that takes six months to take a look at, we certainly don't need an RFQ for for a firm just to, you know, collect public comment. And we already have most of the recreational stuff on that left hand side. But I think innovatively, we should be looking at the 31 acres at a minimum. Thank you.

Thank you. Next on my list I have is Diana Cooper.

Hi, Diana Cooper, 3240 Equestrian Drive, Boca Raton. I wrote good morning, but I guess good afternoon. I wanted to take a moment to not ask for something, but genuinely say thank you. This past Saturday at my house, I hosted a college softball watch party with my daughter's team. The pool was full, the pizza boxes were everywhere, and moms were crowded around my coffee table teaching the girls how to do the book. So a lot of four, five threes or whatever that, however that goes. And if you haven't been watching the Softball World series, I highly recommend. But what stood out to me most were the conversations happening between the kids. The girls were excitedly talking about all the things they'll get this fall at Spanish River Park. And throughout the day, their brothers kept chiming in with comments like, oh, you get nice water fountains now. You get batting cages now, too. And you'll have fields together like ours. If you think I'm persistent when I want something done, just wait till you see how persistent I am when it comes to thanking people when something good happens. So truly, thank you to the BRSA board and to the city council for working together to find a solution for our girls for this upcoming fall season. Here's the things Diana is excited for list. I'm excited to walk into practice and see friends and families sitting in neighboring bleachers instead of being separated by parking lots. I'm excited for siblings from different teams to throw footballs and play together without parents yelling, if it goes into Palmetto Road, don't go after it. I'm excited for girls to take a quick restroom break without running through a parking lot to the city council building. I'm excited for a little sense of safety inside a park. I'm excited for fields with an onsite maintenance crew, although we all know that Jim truly did his best at Memorial Park. I'm excited for batting practice inside actual batting cages instead of hitting off a tee into a fence. I'm excited for my in-laws to come watch games without needing folding chairs because somehow I feel like I always ended up on the side with no bleachers. Fall 2026 is looking bright, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who helped make that happen. Thank you for investing in girls in sports.

Thank you, Ms. Cooper. Next on my list is Joseph Majus.

Joe Mages, 254 Northeast 5th Street. Mr. Perlman, you mentioned wasting time and how we couldn't afford to do that. So we're two hours into a meeting with an agenda that has nothing on it, and we just sat through an hour-long charade over a fake email that was sent by you about $190 million police station. That's not going to happen. so the reason trust doesn't exist here is because of the misinformation that is being spread by john at save boca.org you told the last council and the people the residents the last council was trying to take away the right to vote with that second petition that you were circulating that was simply false Secondly, now you're talking about $190 million police station when it's clear that every member of the city council got the same information that it was $120 million, not $190. That was made pretty clear by Mayor Thompson and the entire council when polled. So To quote former Mayor Singer, I don't know if this is a failure to understand or if you're intentionally misleading people, but it is absolutely disrespectful and disgusting to the residents that you're playing them essentially and insulting their intelligence when you circulate this misinformation. And I use the term you because notably for the second time, we haven't been able to get to the bottom of who John at Save Boca.org is. But I know who it is. I know for two reasons. One, because on your candidate oath next to your printed name and signature, which you turned in and swore to Ms. Siddons that that was you, you put your email at john at saveboca.org. And secondly, I've watched you send emails from john at saveboca.org. So please stop doing it. Thank you. Thank you.

Next on my list is Jonathan Ungin.

Jonathan Ungean, 6501 Congress Avenue. So to kind of piggyback off Joe, I could read a text message from Mr. Perlman that says, email me the links and docs, yada, yada, yada, at john at saveboca.org. But regarding the police station and what Mr. Wilson had presented and I saw presented here, I don't know if you all are aware of what underground parking costs, but it's like $100,000 to $200,000 per parking space, let alone we're talking infrastructure from 40, 50 years ago. massive massive costs there's a reason why people don't do it here and that's it so also that was central to boca raton probably uh 40 50 years ago whenever you know it's not central anymore that police station i know you're holding up the list of all the people that sent the emails to all these council people but the city's a lot bigger than a couple hundred people. And it's grown considerably. So where that station goes should be in a central location where police feel it's safe to have not high rise buildings nearby potentially, not right next to a train tracks, which we all saw in Ohio when a train potentially derails what it can do. And that would shut down our police. And then to Mr. Perlman's credit, the last line of questioning was great regarding the freestanding ER. A conflicted person did write that. And I presented that, and if I realized that that was on this agenda, I would have had that up there. But the important part of what Mr. Shad presented or didn't present is a lot of the things that we're proposing exist. For instance, not having an entrance on an arterial road yet fronting it, Palm Beach County just passed that. He didn't really glance over that. just glanced over it but didn't exactly state it a frontage is different from an entrance and it restricts it at this property and if it works in so many places why do we feel the need to restrict it here so i do think that this takes a lot further looking into um that and you know engaging and involving and listening to the community Which this was being steamrolled on behalf of a property. That was next door to limit it at specifically that property, and that's the ordinance we got. So thank you, Mr Pullman for that.

Thank you, Mr Ungeon. Next up is Paige Hunter.

Hello, Paige Hunter, 200 Southeast Meisner. I want to know what the city is going to do about the increase in hostile and aggressive homeless activity, specifically in downtown Boca, aside from providing them with transportation literally to our doorsteps. Whoever came up with the brilliant idea to provide transportation to our community should be fired. The fact that there was a shooting across the street from where I live and the shooter is still on the loose is insane. I moved from Los Angeles to avoid that, and here we are. I did not pay $10 million to live in a city that allows this, and you guys need to do something. does can you respond though or is this just like this is the time where the community gives us concerns and raises questions for us at the end of our public comment period we will have answers we can provide you some answers to some of your questions okay well yeah that's the concern that i have is there's homeless people everywhere everywhere i don't know where you guys live but it is completely unacceptable there's bus stops in front of multi-million dollar condos I don't understand what's happening here.

Thank you, Ms. Hunter. Next on our list is Dr. Lorraine Blank.

Lorraine Blank, 545 Northwest 7th Street. Coming back to the master planning initiative, because I'm concerned you're doing a disservice to the city. And a lot of the fighting and disharmony that's going on here is because you're starting different planning processes without having a master planning process. You're planning different consultation processes on different parts of the elements of what the city will look like. and so according to the timeline the civic area master plan will be completed after the um the downtown plan will be completed before the civic the the wider community plan and that really doesn't make sense you're concerned about time and i understand that but you have to consult with the entire community about everything because the entire community downtown is, it's their community too, it's their downtown. So you can't just ask them about the police station and you can't ask downtown people about downtown. You have to ask everybody about everything. And you can do that in a cost-effective and time-effective way. Then you'll have a complete idea of where the city should move according to the people. then you can plan from that but right now you have a planning process that's looking at a small part of downtown that's not looking at the eight acres across the street from the memorial park we don't know what that will look like and that could affect what the park should look like we don't know where things will move and that will affect what downtown will look like so i'm saying to you step back consult on all of what the city should look like, develop your master plan, and then you'll easily move to the rest, and you'll do it within the same time period, but you'll do it more effectively, efficiently, and the city will develop more trust in what you're doing, because right now you're fighting, because you're doing different parts of the process, and it's not clear who's making decisions about what. so transparency consult the public on everything at one time have have your meetings make decisions have your master plan for the city and then move to the rest it'll be a more comparing transparent and less contentious process thank you thank you dr blank next up brianna hackquist

brianna hanquist 5710a coach house circle boca also with me again our thaddeus and ted are advocates for parks green space and wildlife these guys don't have a voice or attorneys money for campaign contributions and they can't vote so they rely on humans to speak for them and we all want to thank the council for not plowing up our urban forest at Sugar Sand Park. So they still have their home. They're very happy. I went to tell the real Thaddeus about it and he looked at me and went back in his burrow, but he's happy. Now we have to just clean it up and restore it to its original beauty. I also want to speak on supporting the freestanding ERs. There is a new one at Federal in Hillsboro, if you haven't seen one. I want to backtrack a little bit real fast on the history of Boca Raton. back in april of 1962 there were two little kids nine and three who accidentally drank some milk that was poisoned by a neighbor they were rushed to the hospital but unfortunately it was bethesda was too far away they didn't make it and they died If you don't know, these kids were Debbie and Randy Drummond. Mom Gloria rallied the community together to build a hospital so this wouldn't happen again. And September of 1967, Boca Raton Community Hospital opened. Our town has grown quite a bit since then. More people, more roads, more traffic, constant gridlock, and we've probably run into the entitled folks who don't think they even need to move over for emergency vehicles. we really need to look at freestanding ers to eliminate the time and distance for people who are having an emergency and need assistance so the tragedy of debbie and randy doesn't happen again thank you thank you miss hagquist richard warner

Richard Warner, 1322 Southwest 9th Terrace. I was sitting at home watching and I felt compelled to come here. first i want to recognize that this is the 25th anniversary of my merit capitals city championship in softball and we played that game at jc mitchell next as long as we're talking about softball i know this is unpopular but i think those eight acres i know this is painful for brightline but i think those eight acres on the east side of Second Avenue would be wonderful for softball fields and lights and a significant police presence, whether it's the police station or a significant police station people talk about the geographic change and i know the geographic center of boca raton is pretty much an fau however i think if we did a crime map i think it's way east of there and therefore maybe we need to be more significantly where we are or somewhere in that area in my humble opinion uh also i heard ms drucker uh complaining about threats i haven't heard any threats i've heard disrespect and disagreement but i haven't heard anybody threatening any city council but if people have they should be investigated and it should not be tolerated i agree now uh I don't know about the bond issue as opposed to Mr. Perlman's accounting. I have a feeling the bond issue is required because the lunatics in Tallahassee seem focused on eliminating property taxes. So the bond issue would be necessary if that actually occurs, and it might. but i i think it is legitimate to look at what we're doing with public money and it's not something that should be just totally discarded the concept is check check and balance thank you thank you mr warner earl starkoff again

My trophies earlier than yours. Earl Stargoff, 3260 St. Charles Way. I'm here because I'd like to readdress the question that I raised on the election choices. City Attorney, thank you for the information you provided. My reaction, and there's no offense in any of this because you provided accurate information, but to my view it was reporting on the stated policy of the supervisor of elections and you proffered the march 27th date to the city council but it did not fully answer my question which is why i'm readdressing it having participated in four august elections that included primary officials federal officials and the beach and park district i believe that august 26 is the best date to hold the municipal question of do we or do we not pass the uh amend the charter amendment simple as that I know from my own experience that there is a widespread city participation in those elections, particularly since they include other local issues and officials, even though they may not necessarily be municipal elections. As a layperson, and this is what I'm getting at, I questioned the authority of the supervisor of election to hold that opinion as the exclusive right of the constitutional office. The Florida supervisor of elections has substantial authority to administer and manage elections, but ordinarily does not have sole or unilateral authority to prohibit otherwise lawful municipal elections from appearing on the same ballot as state and federal elections absent statutory, charter-based, or court-authorized grounds. So I would ask that the city attorney uh confirm the limits of the legal authority of the supervisor of elections directly so that the city council can make the decision as to whether they choose the march 27 election or the august 26th election which is what i personally endorse So then please offer that and then let the Council decide which choice fits within the city's best interests. Thank you.

Anyone else for public request or comment rather as it relates to the presentation items that we heard from?

Good afternoon, Shannon Otto, 233 Northeast 31st Street. Thank you for what you're doing this morning. We appreciate having these meetings. The Civic Center and the police station and all of that downtown. When I think of the city, the actual city downtown, I really do think of it where it used to be, where we have had it in the past, where it was originally. I know many people, you know, want to say that, oh, you know, our city is expanded. Well, our land hasn't expanded that much, right? I mean, the land's not growing. I understand there's some more people that are here and all of that. But when I think of where are we going to do our parade, we're never going to do it on Congress. We're never going to have a parade here. We're never going to have a Greek fest. We're never going to have an art fest. We're never going to have anything like that. Our downtown is where we have our parade. It's where we have our activities that are open. A farmer's market, right? When you go to Delray, where's their farmer's market, right? It's there on the avenue. That's their downtown. So I understand we need a better police station, a facility for our policemen. We are so grateful for them. Of course we are. But I am back to years ago, you, not this city council, but some people on the city council, let the police station deteriorate. to the level that they have the challenges that they have and for all your talk of the love of them you let their building deteriorate and one of the reasons is because your goal was to do what you're doing now this 6500 building during what the wu flu as i call it but the covid so during covid when y'all moved out here right this was a temporary location Okay, so it's been purchased. I guess you have purchased the other building the other 65 Building but my thought is Sell it Sell these buildings go back Fix what's downtown what is originally was and is downtown fix it make it better and better update it. I mean, we're not talking wood. We're talking, you know, we're talking cement blocks. We're talking bring it down to the studs. Maybe, like I've said in the past, the police station's front area where the parking is was originally way too big. use that property like you can and then secondly I do want to talk about our elections we used to do our elections Boca we the people used to hold our elections here now it's the county that does it we need to bring that back and make it here okay thank you thank you anyone else for public comment

last call okay we'll close the time for public comment as it relates to the proclamations or rather presentations that we had on subject one of our agenda we can move on to board interviews we have no such interviews future agenda matters items of public council concern I don't believe we have any we can move on to review of regular agenda items does anybody have any questions about what is going to be covered during a regular agenda in about you know an hour Hearing no questions, that's good. We can move on to public requests, which I know we just gave an opportunity to. If you want to come up and say the same things all over again, you can do that, but there's no need to. We heard you. By the way, why don't we have Mr. Sohaney, could you address some of the questions that were identified during public requests?

thank you mr mayor yeah first of all i'll just address homelessness uh obviously that's a very complex problem uh it's a regional issue that's impacting multiple communities and of course in south florida of course boca raton is one of them and in boca raton we've got multiple organization organizations and service providers that offer assistance and resources to homeless individuals which of course that can contribute to transient populations that are coming into and throughout the area so for the city you know the challenge is for us to balance compassion with public safety and quality of life for the residents and that's that's kind of what we're looking at so in our police department we're at you know we're actively taking a look at parks as for example an activity so last February the city council adopted a trespassing ordinance and and for our city parks and there's a formal trespass Warning procedures that are now underway for our city-owned properties in particular. We're installing signage And we're in the process of it as I speak pretty much It's at six priority parks and that's Sanborn Square Wildflower Park Silver Palm Park Memorial Park Lake Wyman Park and Rutherford Park so that trespass ordinance uh signage is in progress and that's going to go to the rest of our parks along with that trespass ordinance there is enforcing it and then there's a implementation process that's that we're underway as well so and and by the end of the summer for sure we'll have that complete implementation process complete and that'll allow us to as as a police force to um enforce that new ordinance that was passed in February so that's step kind of number one of what we're doing right now the other thing is uh in our Parks and Recreation Department we have our park Rangers So I've directed the staff to move the park rangers from our Parks and Recreation Department to our Police Department. So that progress is underway. We've got a standard operating procedure, a formalized process that's in draft form, and then I'll have that draft in about a month or two. And that is how we take the park rangers and turn them more into a policing activity based group of folks, if you will, that are embedded in the police department from it. So from an interoperability standpoint and a public safety standpoint, that makes a lot more sense. So those are the two big measures that are underway. And then again, you know, this is a very complex problem. We can't police ourselves out of this. We can't arrest our way out of this. This is going to take an entire community effort and a community initiative to understand how to manage the homeless population in the city of Boca Raton. you know what services do we want to have and how do we manage that population that are the residents of Boca Raton if you will and that is a lot more than the city can do that requires everybody in the city to come together and figure out ways to do that there's a lot of nearby communities that are doing you know fairly well at that del rey is one of them and there's fort lauderdale as well so we've as a staff we've taken a look at that but it's a much broader problem that requires a lot of input from the community so that's the short answer to that uh mr mayor and i'll turn it back over to you if there was another question i'm missing

No, I believe that covers it for now. And Ms. Hunter, I got your email. You had sent one this morning. I was getting ready for this meeting, but we're going to get back to you with additional information because we do care deeply. You sat through a meeting where we discussed at length the needs for making sure that our public safety remains a top priority of ours and that we have allocated a significant amount of resources, as you've heard, towards making sure that that stays to be the case, continues to be the case. So we do care deeply about that. But the situation, particularly as it relates to homelessness, is a tricky one, but one that we are working towards and working with our our nearby partners and our regional partners to make sure that we that we address it. If anybody else is interested in public comment, I have good news for you. If you hang on to our regular agenda, you'll have another opportunity to speak then. I believe that brings us then to the city manager reports, beyond which you've already spoken about. Mr. Sahandy, do you have anything else? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Nothing else. City attorney report, Mr. Kaler.

I don't have a report. Thank you, Mayor.

Okay, so then it moves on to we have council member reports. If we have any, I'll start on my left. Mr. Perlman? No report. Very good. Ms. Sippel?

No report.

Thank you. Ms. Grau?

No report.

Finally, Ms. Drucker?

No report.

Okay. So I likewise have no report. So we're going to take a brief pause and pause for lunch for about, you guys want to recommence our regular agenda or regular meeting at say 1 30. Is that too soon? Is that good? Everybody good. Staff's okay with that. All right. So we will conclude the meeting of the workshop meeting of our Boca Raton city council. We'll reconvene at 1 30 for a regular meeting. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you

After a short recess, your City Council is back in action with our regular meeting. The day is still May 26, 2026. The time is now 1.34 in the p.m. The first order of business we have is our invocation. I'll ask Council Member Stacy Sippel to please administer it.

thank you for allowing us to be here today may a higher power guide us this afternoon with wisdom humility and compassion may we make the decisions that are thoughtful fair and in the best interest of the residents we are honored to serve And in remembrance of Memorial Day yesterday, may we never forget the brave men and women who gave their lives for our country. May their sacrifice remind us that freedom is never free. And may we honor them not only with our words, but through our service, our gratitude, and our commitment to our community and country. Amen.

And now the Pledge of Allegiance, please. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Ms. Sittons, a roll call please.

Mayor Thompson.

Thankful to be here.

Deputy Mayor Grau. Here. Councilmember Drucker. Here. Councilmember Perlman.

Here.

Councilmember Sippel. Present. All present.

right everybody welcome back mr manager do we have any amendments to the agenda thank you mr mayor there are no amendments to the agenda okay very good and we can move on to the minutes we have two sets of minutes the workshop meeting of may 11th and the regular meeting on may 12th 2026 are there any revisions or corrections to those sets of minutes If not, I'll entertain a motion and a second to approve the measure as presented. Who's going to help me out?

So moved.

Very good. Ms. Sipple with the second. Second. Very good. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, Ms. Well, and so we can move on now that the minutes have been approved. We can go to our presentation. We have a presentation today by the Boca Raton Historical Society. So please give it up for Ms. Olivia Hollis, the Executive Director for the Boca Raton Historical Society, who will give us a presentation. Hello, Olivia.

Thank you, Olivia Hulao, 71 North Federal Highway. Good afternoon, Mayor Thompson, Deputy Mayor Grau, members of City Council, City Manager Sohaini, and city staff. Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit more about the Boca Raton Historical Society and the Schmidt Boca Raton History Museum. Okay. Yes. The Boca Raton Historical Society is dedicated to preserving and sharing Boca Raton's rich history through exhibitions, education, public programming, community engagement, and historic preservation. At the same time, we strive to create a welcoming cultural space where residents and visitors can come and gather, learn, connect, and take pride in the stories that shaped our city. We are building a community within a community, and we truly believe we are Boca's museum. The Schmidt Boca Raton History Museum also serves as an official visitor information location for the Palm Beaches. Over the past several months, we have continued to see strong community participation. As of May, the museum has welcomed more than 6,000 visitors, hosted 23 community programs, and reached more than 650 students through field trips and educational presentations. As many of you may have noticed, but Historic Town Hall is now beautifully adorned with patriotic and beautiful bunting inspired by late 1950s archival photo from our collections. The installation is part of our broader America 250 initiative, visually connecting the community to both our nation's history and Boca Raton's local heritage. Aside from our permanent interactive exhibits that you see here on the slide that highlight our local history, our current special exhibition, The 14th Colony, is now on view through August 27. This exhibition explores Florida's often overlooked role when it remained loyal to the British crown while the 13 colonies declared independence. You'll see interpretive displays, rare Revolutionary War artifacts from local collectors, historic imagery, and period costumes from the Wick Theater. We also continue to present America 250 inspired lectures and youth workshops throughout the summer. In partnership with the Festival of the Arts Boca, Summer Sips and Sounds is back with three live concerts connecting attendees to our history through music. Free Fun Saturdays, one of my personal favorites, held on the first Saturday of each month, offers free museum admission along with family-friendly activities throughout the day, helping make history accessible, interactive, and welcoming for all. And we are open on July 4th, which happens to be on a Free Fun Saturday, so please join us. Everybody is welcome. Bring your families. Looking ahead, we are preparing for another important milestone, Historic Town Hall Centennial, and we will be planning special programming and community-wide engagement. On behalf of our Board of Trustees and our staff, I would like to thank the City of Boca Raton for its continued support, and we invite everyone to the museum as we together preserve the past, engage the present, and inspire the future, thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Halos. Members, do we have any questions for Ms. Halos? No? Well, thank you again. And let me say one more thing, and that is that not only have they provided fantastic programming to our community and offered a great service in having a museum denoting our history going back as far back as it goes, but they, the Historical Society, are not afraid to get their hands dirty. and these are folks who have come and helped clean up hundreds of pounds of trash over the course of time in the surrounding areas uh of downtown so thank you again for that miss hollis and we look forward to our wonderful partnership together the city and the historical society so thank you thank you thank you everyone yeah yeah that's right exactly well done Next item on our list is board appointments. We have none. We also have responses to workshop information requests. There were none of that. So we can move on to our consent agenda. Does any member of the council wish to remove any item from the consent agenda? And please let us know which item you'd like to have removed. Anybody? No? Very good. Any members of the public wishing to be heard on the matters contained within our consent agenda? Now's the time for you to please be heard on that. So if you'd like to step to the podium, give us your name and address. You'll have up to three minutes to comment on the consent agenda only. Anybody? Okay, very good. If there is nothing to be said there, I will entertain a motion and a second to approve the consent agenda.

So moved.

That sounds like a second. That is a second. Okay. Very good. Any other discussion? No, it's a concept agenda. Can you get the roll call, please?

Grau? Yes. Drucker? Yes. Perlman?

Yes.

Sippel? Yes. Thompson?

Yes.

Motion passes, five votes to zero.

Very good. Resolutions and other businesses, we have other business, we have none. We have no quasi-judicial related public hearings. So we can move on to regular public hearings, item 12A, ordinance number 5785. Madam Clerk, could you please read the title of ordinance number 5785?

Ordinance number 5785, an ordinance of the city of Boca Raton, Florida, amending chapter 28, zoning, article one, section 28-9, standard application processing procedures for development approvals to establish lobbyist certification and disclosure requirements for development applications, providing for severability, providing for repealer, providing for codification, providing an effective date.

Thank you, Ms. Siddons. Mr. Sohaini, who will be making the presentation on this item? Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Development Services Director, Mr. Shad, will make the presentation.

Good afternoon again. Brandon Shad, Development Services Director. So the background of this ordinance is that there is a countywide ordinance that requires lobbyists to register with the county, and that's administered by the Commission on Ethics. What this ordinance would do is require that as part of the app development approval application process that applicants submit a certification that identifies anyone that is permitted to speak on behalf or represent that applicant before the city council, any boards or staff. and would require that that certification say whether that person is registered as a lobbyist or alternatively if they are exempt from the lobbyist registration requirement. So this is part of the completeness review part of development approval applications. So essentially, that's the first step. We make sure everything is there that's supposed to be. And depending on the type of application, of course, this is application forms, plans, studies, drawings, all those kind of things. This would just be one more of those things that is checked off the list as being provided. The applicant will be required to keep that updated throughout the process. As a matter of administrative practice, the staff will, again, at the end of the process, say just before a public hearing or similar, ensure that everything is up to date. Additionally, this ordinance would require that any time an applicant's representative is speaking to the City Council or another board at a hearing, that they verbally identify themselves, who they're representing, and the fact that they are lobbyists, if in fact they are. That is the summary. I will be happy to answer any questions, and that's the presentation.

Thank you, Mr. Shedd. Councilmembers, any questions for staff on this item? Mr. Perlman.

Thanks Mr. Shad for that presentation. The countywide code for lobbyist registration, is it the case that a lobbyist has to register when they intend to communicate with city officials, county officials, or anyone of similar status with respect to all communications?

I'm only tangentially familiar with the lobbyist registration ordinance, because it's not something that we enforce. But that is my understanding, essentially, is that yes, if they're going to represent the applicant, then they do need to register as a lobbyist, unless they're exempt under the provisions of the county ordinance.

Right, so the countywide ordinance requires that lobbyists register when they seek to petition officials. Mr. Shad, this ordinance that we're considering today, is it correct that the revelation of lobbyist status would only pertain to applications of developments?

I didn't catch the one word you said.

Yeah, so is it the case that the ordinance that we're considering today, that the revelation with respect to the BOCA code solely pertains to a scenario where a developer is submitting a development application to the city?

Yes.

Okay. So we just learned, we had a very good discussion earlier today about what happened with the freestanding emergency room. It was approved by the zoning board. The adjacent property filed an appeal with the city council. which was upheld and currently the owner that wishes to proceed with the freestanding emergency room has subsequently taken this to court and it's in litigation right now. Simultaneous to all of this occurring, Miskel Bachman, which is a lobbyist of developers and represents the adjacent property owner, the one that is trying to block this freestanding emergency room, crafted law. They crafted an ordinance in which, in effect, if it were passed into law, it would not enable them, based on the way it was written, for this freestanding emergency room to be built. Is that correct?

So the ordinance as it's proposed was not in effect at the time the application was processed. So I can't, you know, I didn't re we didn't review it against a prospective ordinance that wasn't in place. I can't say for sure, but generally I do think you're right. Yes.

Okay. So just confirm. So if this law, which was written by Miskell Bachman as a lobbyist on behalf of the adjacent property owner, if this was in law today, as it stands, as it was written by them, would the adjacent property owner be able to build a freestanding emergency room or not?

I can't say for sure, but I do think it would be a barrier to that, yes.

Okay, so it's a barrier, so it would not enable them to. So as we see here, the ordinance that's on the, so we see here that developers and lobbyists are deeply entrenched within the fabric and operation of this city government. Two weeks ago, we were speaking about CIMDs. I was made aware of the fact that when this law was crafted, which by the way, anyone who wasn't watching last week, this is a law that enables residential developments in commercial and industrial zones that do not allow residential developments currently. There was a round table, that's the way it was described to me, in which developers, lobbyists, and city staff sat around and developed the framework for this new zoning that was passed by the city council in 2024. Mr. Kaler, can you please tell us what are the laws that surround lobbyists and developers. Well, let's start with lobbyists. What are the rules? Point of privilege.

I'm sorry, Mayor Somsang. Can we go back to the matter at hand, which is ordinance number 5785? Lobby discussions, I don't, there's litigation matters that you're bringing up and we're all here. Could be deposition on cases like that. Like, don't feel comfortable with this discussion. Let's stick to the topic.

Can we confine our questions to matters that relate to ordinance number 5785?

Yes. So this ordinance before us is incomplete in the sense that if a developer can bring forward an ordinance and can codify laws into BOCA, and can go through channels in which they aren't revealed because the way it was done, it was unclear. It was not revealed who was the source of this law. It was revealed today that it was. I don't see that, if they're writing the laws of Boca, How is them identifying themselves in a development application going to help when they're crafting the laws by which development applications are governed? We can leave it at that today, but as a follow-up, and I'm going to meet with Mr. Kaler to get more information, I want to understand based on what came out on the CIMDs of developers, lobbyists, and staff meeting together behind closed doors. I want to know also about that and what the laws prevent, if anything, with respect to situations like that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Perlman. Any other questions for staff?

Just a point of clarification. When the CMD, because I was on the council, happened, because I have to feel like I have to dispel a lot of not factual statements today being made by a fellow council member, it's all public record. You can request the records of how we came up with the CIMD, and it took two and a half years to get that legislation on the books. So, again... You've got to get your facts straight.

Any other questions for staff in relation to ordinance number 5785? If not, then we can open the public hearing because this is a public hearing. And if anybody wishes to speak on ordinance number 5785, please step to the podium and you will have three minutes after you give us your name and address. I do have a card here for this item. Joe Grappert.

i was going to say good morning but uh that's uh good afternoon now uh joe graubart 120 southeast fifth um i'm not so aware of the new information that uh councilman perlman um is is questioning my hope what he brings up is addressed So it's new to me. I'm here this afternoon to speak in favor of 5785 that establishes lobbyist certification and disclosure requirements for development applications. as introduced by Deputy Mayor Grau. I read a short article relating to this legislation in Tappan to Boca by Luis Perez, and his quote is, critics said developers had undue influence in City Hall and accused city leaders of backroom dealing and making decisions without public input. As a resident here, I find it difficult to argue with this and therefore share this perception. However, optimistically, I am encouraged by the direction this newly elected council is taking. Additionally, just like ex parte communications and meetings with developers and lawyer lobbyists and special interests, which really simply means outside of the sunshine and not in public, are verbally announced as procedural requirement at quasi judicial hearings thus ensuring all parties with a vested interest as well as the public are fully apprised this verbal lobbyist disclosure as i've just learned now should also be required at all city meetings including boards and committees when the applicant is asking for something The recent meeting which required announcements of these out-of-the-sunshine ex parte communications by many of you, our elected officials, are indicating that in many cases now they are not even happening, which I encourage. And when they do, at least city staff or department heads are in attendance. This is well needed and certainly very refreshing. it is a key element of good governance to always do the public's business in public in the sunshine and not in the shade lastly i think it's going to be a long and difficult uphill battle re-establishing credibility and confidence in city hall gratefully with the hopeful passage of tonight's legislation and more to follow it's a move in the right direction towards good governance and thank you and thank you for your commitment to a better city

THANK YOU MR. GRABHART ANYONE ELSE WISHING TO SPEAK ON ORDINANCE NUMBER 5785 MR. RUNCHIN JONATHAN UNGEAN 6501 CONGRESS AVENUE SO I THINK IT'S A LITTLE DUPLICATIVE THIS BUT I DO THINK THAT IT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED UM WHAT A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT need to be registered if they're on the application uh with the architect need to be registered as a lobbyist where does the line get drawn additionally the terror frisbee and sorry i literally ran across the street to get here but uh where would the line be drawn because um For instance, let's look at Tara Frisbee. People who spoke were promised things such as the sale of a land if it got approved. Would that be a lobbyist? The print shop, for instance. So the inverse of it, if things do get passed, do they need to be registered? Things to think about. On the inverse of it, let's just say there's a landowner that owns a property next door. They may be the biggest landowner in Boca Raton. They may have people who are architects and whatever else that they ask to speak out against something to protect their own interests. Are they lobbyists for the interests of their neighbors next door? So I do think there are things to be thought about in this to create more transparency. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Rungeon. Anyone else? Ordinance number 5785. Last call for public comment on ordinance number 5785. You may. Can I close the public comment portion first? And I will do that, and I recognize Deputy Mayor Grau.

Yes, I requested that this ordinance be brought forward because I believe in transparency in the development review process is essential to remain maintaining public trust This ordinance is straightforward good governance measure It requires applicants for the development projects to disclose who is being paid retained or authorized to communicate with City Council the CRA City boards advisory board bodies or city staff on their behalf In simple terms, if someone is trying to influence a development application, the public should know who they are and who they represent. This ordinance does not ban lobbying. It does not prevent anyone from advocating for or against a project. It simply creates a clear and consistent disclosure requirement at the beginning of the application process and throughout the review. If additional representatives or lobbyists are brought in later, that information must be updated. It also requires anyone appearing before the city council, the CRA, or a city board on behalf of the applicant to state who they represent. That ensures residents, staff, boards, and council are all operating with the same information. This ordinance works alongside existing Palm Beach County ethics and lobbying registration laws. It does not create new county lobbying rules. Instead, it adds a city level disclosure requirement within our development application process so that the applications are not considered complete until the required disclosures are provided. The goal is simple, more openness, more accountability, and more public confidence in how development decisions are reviewed.

Thank you, Ms. Grau. We may have shifted into the discussion portion, which is good, but I think normally we'd want to have a motion and a second, and then we can continue with discussion. Is there anyone interested in making a motion to approve ordinance number 5785?

Motion to approve. I make a motion to approve ordinance.

All right. Excellent. Deputy Mayor Grau, get that one. We'll give a second to Ms. Zippel. Does that work? Second. Excellent. Okay. Anyone else have anything they want to say about this ordinance? I'll just say that it may not be complete, but we can add to it as circumstances arise. I think it's a good step. It's a step in the right direction for sure. And if there's anything else we can add to it later on, because we find that it needs to be addressed, we can do that. Mr. Kaler reminds me that he had some comments about some of the comments that were made by the public. Can we hear from him on that, Mr. Kaler?

Just very briefly for the council and the public, the ordinance is not intended to sweep ordinary citizens or neighbors or community members in that category of lobbyists. And similarly with a landscape architect or an engineer or a planner, those folks. The key is, again, whether someone's being compensated or retained as a representative under Palm Beach County lobbying registration code, which has been in effect believe since 2011 if not before then and so someone speaking on their own capacity looking out for their community their their own property interests neighborhood concerns that wouldn't be captured and again with with technical consultants again the issue always under the independent of this ordinance which is a disclosure requirement for development applications is is whether you're not a lobbyist just because you speak on something. The question, the issue is what role are you performing? And, and again, if you've been retained specifically to advocate, um, and, and you look at the definition in lobbying and you're attempting to influence governmental decision making, um, you know, it's, it's gonna look at, uh, what role you're playing. So I just wanted to make that clear. Um, and, and this ordinance doesn't change any of that existing law.

Very good. Any other comments? If not, I think it's time for the roll call. Ms. Siddons?

Drucker? Yes. Perlman?

Yes.

Sippel? Yes. Thompson?

Yes.

Grau? Yes. Motion passes, five votes to zero.

OK, very good. That concludes our regular public hearings. We can move on to regular public hearings and settlements. We have none. So we now have time for public requests. I have a couple of cards left. If you are interested in speaking, please step to the podium, state your name and address, and you will have up to three minutes. I have a card here from Mike Liebelson. I do not see him in the audience. So anyone else wishing to speak during public requests, now's the time. Last call for public requests. We will close the time then for public requests and move on to item 15 on our agenda, introduction of ordinances. The first one up is ordinance number 5786. Madam Clerk, could you please read the title?

Ordinance number 5786, an ordinance of the city of Boca Raton authorizing, pursuant to chapter 13, article three, code of ordinances, an amendment to an existing lease of approximately 5.12 acres of city-owned land, generally located at 1531 West Palmetto Park Road, to extend the expiration date of the lease from June 12th, 2034 to June 12th, 2044 to allow for the continued operation of a hospice facility and to update other lease terms, including a required capital improvement investment by the lessee, providing for severability, providing for repealer, providing an effective date.

Thank you, Ms. Siddons. Who would like to introduce this item?

Mayor Thompson, I'll introduce ordinance number 5786.

Thank you, Council Member Drucker. Now we move to ordinance number 5787. Madam Clerk, could you please read the title?

Ordinance number 5787, an ordinance of the city of Boca Raton authorizing the city manager and city clerk to execute a non-exclusive construction and demolition, CND, debris collection and disposal services franchise agreement with Classic Recycling Inc. pursuant to section 14-21 code of ordinances, providing for severability, providing for repealer, providing an effective date.

Thank you, Ms. Siddons. I'll introduce number 57, ordinance number 5787. Can we turn now to ordinance number 5788?

Ordinance number 5788, an ordinance of the city of Boca Raton amending chapter 12, pensions and retirement, article three, general employees' pensions, section 12-81, definitions, code of ordinances, to provide a definition for actuarial equivalent, amending section 12-85, optional forms of retirement benefits, code of ordinances, to authorize limited post-retirement changes of joint pensioner or beneficiary. providing for repealer, providing for codification, providing an effective date.

Thank you, Ms. Siddons. Who would like to introduce this item? I'll introduce Ordinance 5788. Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Now, Ordinance Number 5789.

Ordinance number 5789, an ordinance of the City of Boca Raton amending Chapter 12, Pensions and Retirement, Article 5, Executive Employees Retirement Plan, Section 12-160, Code of Ordinances, relating to the definition and calculation of average final compensation to clarify and align with longstanding plan administration, providing for severability, providing for appeal, providing for codification, providing an effective date.

Thank you, Ms. Sittons. Who will introduce this last item for us?

I will introduce ordinance number 5789.

Thank you, Councilwoman Sippel. I believe that concludes our introduction of ordinances. We can move on to quasi-judicial public hearings, variances, and appeals. We have none. So we can move then to the city manager's report. Mr. Sahaney.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. For public safety, just before I begin this update, I do want to briefly acknowledge the shooting incident that occurred Sunday night or early Monday morning at about 1230, night in downtown Boca Raton. Police and fire rescue personnel responded immediately, secured the scene, provided emergency medical assistance. and the investigation still remains active we put a press release out yesterday and if there's when there's more additional information we'll put another press release out i just want to thank the police officers i know our acting police chief is here as well as our fire department they they did a really rapid response very professional and i got a lot of good comments from that so thanks for for your support there uh traffic enforcement initiative just real quickly since may 11th we've issued about 1800 citations and then the traffic stops have increased about 80 percent since we began this initiative in early may and we're taking a look at all the different uh public education public education efforts as well and we're posting those on our city media platforms just to keep our residents informed of what's going on with uh traffic enforcement We also install flashing stop signs at the intersection of Southwest 12th Avenue and Palmetto Park Road They've been approved and ordered and actually they're not installed but they're being delivered and we'll install those shortly again That's Southwest 12th Avenue and Palmetto Park Road Police chief recruitment process continues to move forward. We interviewed eight candidates and we're evaluating finalists right now for a second round of interviews and those interviews will start June 5th and then we anticipate to have an offer around June 9th and then with a start date of sometime mid-June to mid-July. For infrastructure and operations, I get a lot of emails on our beach seaweed operations, and I just want to make sure everybody knows we continue daily to manage that at our public beaches, and of course in front of Gumbo Limbo as well, and be sensitive to the sea turtle nesting activity in there. But we remove the debris and trash, and then we do what we can with seaweed management. Obviously there's a lot coming in at once right now, And I just want to reiterate, you know, we focus on our guarded public beaches, Spanish River Park, Red Reef Park and South Beach Park. And then the private beachfront properties and condominium associations, they coordinate the cleanup in front of their properties with private vendors. so just again there there's a public beach piece of this for removal and then there's a private property piece that's not related to the city and that's through private vendors also big shout out for our water treatment plant recognition I want to recognize our utility service team we just recently received a 2025 outstanding water treatment plant award from the Florida section of the American Water Works Association again this marks the second consecutive year that the city has received that statewide recognition and for excellence in water treatment operations and i can tell you water treatment is not a simple thing and to be able to do that two years in a row speaks volumes to the people we have and the resources and the priority we put forth in clean drinking water so again my hat's off to everybody for that Workforce organizational initiatives, recreational services reorganization. I mentioned this a little bit previously, but Ocean Rescue was in our Parks and Rec Department. That has been moved to our fire services, and that'll be complete officially on July 1st. So thanks for doing that quickly. Emergency management as well. I move that to our fire services department. That is complete. Mentioned earlier that we're moving all the park rangers from parks and rec to the police department. We've got a standard operating procedure draft that I'm reviewing. and then I'll hand that off to the new police chief and we'll implement that that's going to take a little bit more time because we are looking at that skill set a little bit differently and that is more of a police action skill set as we make future hires so a lot going on there to integrate those folks into the police department but that's a good move there The other thing is our communications division and we've enhanced that division significantly and we'll probably have all of those changes made by August 1st and then beautification. Beautification was in our parks and rec that is in transition to public works and Mr. Beers got that for action and we anticipate that being done in the next three to six months. For community updates, real quickly, Development Services has put something together, and it's a project tracker. And if you go on our website previously, we had basically all the projects listed in order. It was organized in a PDF, a color PDF. Well, we still have that, but now we've got all of it online that you basically click a link, and it's updated real time. So you can keep track of the different projects and what the status is. And again, that's on the development services section of myBOCA.us. And you can follow those projects through the various stages of review and approval process. So again, great job by Development Services for pushing that out. And then the last thing is hurricane season's on the way. we've got a clean and cut program just that's going to be may and june again take a look at your vegetation around your residence and the city has that clean and cut program offered to help you clean up that and get ready for that season so prepare early and again we've got a lot of this information on alert boca and then also just again encourage to sign up for alert boca emergency notifications for this hurricane season or for any emergency and that you can to enroll you can text alert boca to 38276 alert boca to 38276 and then mayor one thing I did want to go over is the schedule just to remind council for our June schedule on June 18th we added a budget meeting that commences at 1 30 p.m. and then on June 30th as previously mentioned by our deputy city manager Mr. Lukasik that we've got that special RFQ for the civic area plan that is on the calendar now and that's June 30th and that is at 10 a.m. then the other thing i wanted to mention is our budget meeting going forward in september and and we're required you know every municipality is required to to review the budget at a certain particular time frame relative to the florida state statute and for now we have we have a meeting september 8th and it's normally we do all three meetings on september 8th because of labor day and so what we will add most likely on september 8th is just a third meet our fourth meeting if you will and that would be the uh the budget and that that would begin at 5 15 p.m and again that's subject to council approval but it would be on the same day september 8th and then again on september 22nd we have again uh all meetings uh scheduled for the same date uh because of yom kippur and that would be the final budget meeting that's required that that would be later in the day as well at 515 so we don't have to discuss that now mr. mayor but just want to give everybody a heads up and we can discuss that you know the next meeting and that's all I have very good Thank You mr. so Haney mr. Kaler so the attorney report no report thank you thank you and we'll go on to council member report starting on my left mr. Perlman

No report. Thank you. Council member simple.

No report.

Thank you. Deputy mayor grow.

No report.

Thank you. Sorry. Council member Drucker.

I have a report. Real quick. So a couple of things. I'll fit as you get the slides up, staff. But as we get this ready to go, I mentioned a little bit about Florida property taxes. Florida legislature is delivering today. There's a lot of stuff that came out during the weekend. So I haven't, obviously I've been in the meeting all day, so I haven't really track this information today. So I'll do some research and whatever we're going to report, you'll probably know before our next meeting, because it'll be, and that's around a lot of discussions about the budget first, and then whether the governor is going to call a special election, I mean, a special election, a special session on property tax reform. In addition to that, last week, Deputy Mayor Grau and I sit on the MPO, which are Palm Beach County. I'm the chair. She's one of the governing members. There was a lot of conversations around Palm Tram. Just to put on people's radars, they're trying to cut funding from a county perspective. There's a big meeting on Thursday I'll be listening into, even though this body doesn't have any jurisdiction over that, or neither does the MPO because we're a federal funded planning council. If they cut routes, if they cut certain ways of people moving around. It could impact our service industry. So we're definitely keeping tabs on that, at least I am. Also on Friday, then on Friday, SCFRTA met around tri rail and also funding. I have not been able to go back and listen to that meeting, but I am definitely tracking anything transit and mobility that affects our everyday residents, especially our workers, I always track. So two things, that's the third thing I want to talk about. And lastly, a few weeks ago in our council meeting on May 12, one of my fellow council members, Mr. Perlman, accused me and staff of being in cahoots and a conspiracy theory in relation to an event that transpired at Miser Park at the studio. And what I wanted to do is, because it'll be my job until the day I leave this dais, to dispel any misinformation. We have not always agreed, the people in the audience, or with the way I think, the way I do things, but I can always tell you I've always come from a good place and from a place of truth. So what happened in that meeting, because I'm the MPO chair for the county, that's a metropolitan planning organization. Our executive director came to us and asked us to do a presentation by staff. Mr. Perlman said that I gave this presentation. Can we please pull the agenda first? It was part of, correct. So I received the agenda on April 20th. This presentation took place April 22nd. As you can see, I did the welcome. I was not part of the presentation because it wasn't my presentation. It wasn't my presentation to be held. The only reason why I was involved is because I'm a Boca Raton council member, former deputy mayor, and I'm also the MPO chair. So I welcome the individuals that were at this meeting. Some of the people in the audience were at this meeting, sitting here today, and that was the entire thing that I participated, was really welcoming people to our city. Anytime I could get business leaders, community leaders, any leaders, residents, constituents to welcome them to the city and showcase our area, I will. And the reason we picked Meisner Park is because Meisner Park is considered a transit-oriented development. And that was what was happening on that day. And there was no conspiracy. The second thing, if you could put the presentation, I won't go through the presentation. Some members in the community have asked for the presentation, and I've already shared the presentation. I didn't have this presentation on April 22nd. The first time I received this presentation was on May 13th. There's an email with that as well, because I asked Mr. Sohaini for the presentation. So the reason I bring this up, and some of you might think it's petty, and trust me, I have better things to do than keep you all here today. because I want to be very transparent of the things that are being said that are not factual. There was no conspiracy theory. I never saw this presentation before the date, April 22nd, 2026. I did not have a copy of the presentation till May 13th, 2026. So anytime anyone calls me a liar or tells me that I am in cohort with our staff to take away public land or do things that are incorrect, I will call it out. because I lead on facts and I lead on data. And just because someone calls me out and says things about me that are not correct, I will always come back with the facts. And we could go through the presentation or if anybody wants a public record, we could post a presentation. You can see what was discussed. But again, I hope that as we continue leading this community forward that we show up to this days with actual information and really truthful information. Whether we agree or disagree, I never sit up here calling people liars or calling our city staff conspiracy theorist because I don't operate that way. I've been on this days for six years and I know how to lead. and I know how to get data, and I know how to do my research, and I know how to show up prepared. And with that, I'll conclude my comments. Thank you.

Very good. I have just one quick item I wanted to mention. Yesterday, the city held its- Can I respond to this?

Because she was mentioning my name.

She did, so I suppose, please make her brief.

Yeah. look we can frame it however we want to frame it the reality is this this presentation took place miss Drucker and city staff led the introduction and the presentation and slides were in this presentation that was still contemplating a transit-oriented development on the very eight acres that was in question with the terror Frisbee referendum that terror Frisbee had targeted and that was turned down and as we know the RFP currently being issued has shelved those eight acres and does not include it so in conjunction with the fact that this presentation was given and that fact it's a trouble a troubling situation in my view thank you

Mayor Thompson, I will have to put up the slides, unfortunately.

No, I don't.

Yes, please put up my slides.

May I make the suggestion? Nope.

You're not going to silence me, sorry.

We can put it to bed just right now and just let it be done.

It's not going to be done. I'll have the last word. Please put up the slides. Sorry, I had to do this because the truth has to always prevail.

Council Member Drucker, it is a public record.

But I still have to put it on the file. So I'm going to go really quickly. I'm not going to do the presentation. It's not my presentation to give. But I do want to tell you what, like right here, so that it's on the record. So if you want to go back, I'll give you a couple of minutes to see what we discussed. TOCs are called communities in Miami. They call it communities. Our 15-minute city, we gave a little precursor. I didn't, whoever, Mr. Shad and Mr. Beer that presented, how people are creating communities, et cetera, et cetera. We talked about all of our developments in the city, not only the downtown. We talked about Miser Park, Brightline. We talked about the link that's getting built, Town Center Mall. We talked about brick areas where they have transit-oriented communities, rail. Our plan mobility was discussed because this is how we planned it in order to get people moving around efficiently, effectively, and consistently. We talked about the parts that we have in the city. Meisner Park, Town Center, Brick, Link, Brightline. We never talked about Government Center. Brightline is a TOD area. Everyone knows that. We talk about it every week that we come out here. So again, these are all of our areas, whether they're developed or not, this is where they're at. Nothing was discussed about government center. Nothing was discussed about the public land. Nothing was discussed about City Hall in this presentation. And then again, we went back to urban living and that's the beginning of the presentation. So with that, I conclude my comments.

OK. Thank you. I wanted to give a shout out to staff, Mr. Sohaini, in that yesterday we held, the city did its Memorial Day ceremonies. And the first one was at the cemetery. And it was very well, it's a solemn occasion, of course. Remember, it's not a celebration, by no means a celebration, but it was a remembrance. and a commemoration and I thought that once again the staff did a fantastic job in making sure that this community does not forget the important history of the service members who gave their lives in defense of this nation and I thought that that was a an important it's always an important day but we did it a very good job with that once again and i want to make sure you heard that for me although i'm sure i've told you already and you were there but it was i think a fitting a fitting tribute to the lives that were lost in defense of this country and after that we held our memorial park plaque unveiling which i thought was also and likewise a very well done ceremony we had members of the public participate with us mr patton was there And I thought that it was another good instance of the community coming together, showing that the history of this city and of the folks who helped defend it, both the city and this country, is never forgotten. And I thought the staff did a magnificent job in making that happen on relatively short timetable. to handle the tone and manner of the ceremony the way that they did I think was a very very fitting thing and I wanted to make sure that you heard and that the community heard that we did a good job on that one because we certainly did thank you mayor I believe that concludes our business today so if no other business comes before us we will conclude our meeting the time is 2 22 in the p.m. thank you everybody

Thank you. Thank you.