Community Development Board - Regular Meeting

This time we'll call to order the 02/17/2026 meeting of the City of Clearwater Community Redevelopment Agency. This time we'll move to item 2.1 on the agenda.

Approve the minutes of the 01/12/2026 CRA meeting.

Is there a motion to approve the minutes?

Yes. So moved. Second.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? Unanimous. Move to item three on the agenda. Are there any citizens here today to be heard on items that are regarding the CRA that are not on today's agenda? Hearing and seeing none, move to item 4.1.

February 2026 Legacy Business Spotlight, Direct Mail two point zero.

Good afternoon, board members, trustees. Jesus Nino, CRA Executive Director for the record. I'm gonna introduce miss Tasha Hadley to present this particular item.

Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Tasha Hatley, CRE specialist. And today, I'm honored to recognize Direct Mail two point zero as February 2026 Business Spotlight winner. This is considered the legacy spotlight because they are longstanding business that have operated for over ten years or more in our downtown redevelopment area.

So established in 2015 and headquartered on 600 Cleveland Street, Direct Mail two point zero has continued to grow while maintaining a commitment to economic activity within our downtown Clearwater district. CEO and co founder Brad Kugeler established Direct Mail two point o with a clear mission, to ensure traditional marketing could adapt and thrive in today's evolving landscape. By blending Direct Mail with modern tracking technology, the company has provided businesses with measurable data driven insights that strengthen performance and results. Beyond innovation, Direct Mail two point o is invested in people, fostering a collaborative workplace and culture supporting educational institutions, charitable organizations, and community food drives. To help share their story, the CRA and public communications have collaborated to create a video.

This video has been shared across our social media platforms, and a full article can be found on our website at myclearwatercra.com. At this time, we invite you to view the video. Thank you.

My name is Brad Kugler. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Direct Mail two point o, and I've been here since April 2017. So I'm starting my ninth year. Direct Mail two point o's relevancy is sort of driven by my past. I was in the DVD and CD business for twenty three years, and it was completely disrupted by streaming media.

I wanted something that I knew I could always innovate on and stay ahead of the technology curve, and DirectMail two point o fit that bill. The services that Direct Mail two point o provides is an enhancement to old school direct mail. Now, direct mail can be tracked just like a digital campaign through QR codes, callback numbers. We've breathed a new life into an old school marketing industry. The work culture is very family like.

I like seeing the employees. I like to be able to work with them hand in hand, walk up to their desk, see how they're doing. If there's something we can do to make it fun or appreciative to come to work, we do that. We love to support the local community, so it's really important to me to give back. We help local learning institutions, beach cleanups to keep this area vibrant and renewed, and what better place to raise a family and grow a business.

Doctor. Rockefeller two point zero greatly appreciates this recognition and the acknowledgment of our contributions to this community. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Okay. That will move to item 4.2 on

the agenda.

Approve the Downtown Community Redevelopment Agency fiscal year twenty twenty five twenty twenty six first quarter budget amendment and adopt resolution 26 dash zero one.

Good afternoon. Ann Lopez, CRA assistant director. This item that I have before you is to, approve the amendments, the first quarter budget amendments for the downtown CRA. Florida statute section one sixty three dot three eighty seven seven, which governs Community Redevelopment Agency Trust Funds, requires that all unspent funds remaining at the last day of the fiscal year be appropriated to an allowable expense. First quarter budget amendment reflects these required adjustments and the amendments allocate existing funds as follows: $217,844.79 to continue supporting our engagement activities, 500,000 for downtown commercial grants and the, development commitment for the demolition of 115 MLK, 200,000 to support infrastructure improvements within the Downtown CRA.

These amendments, do not introduce any new revenue sources, but they instead reallocate existing funds, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Is there anyone here from the public today that desires to speak to this agenda? I'm seeing none. Is there any trustees discussion? No discussion. Is there a motion?

Wait. Before the motion, the resolution. Okay. A resolution of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Clearwater, Florida adopting first quarter amendments to the downtown CRA twenty twenty five-twenty six annual operating budget providing an effective date.

Okay, now is there a motion?

Move to approve agenda item 4.2. Second.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? Unanimous. Thank you.

Thank you.

Agenda item 4.3.

Downtown revitalization.

And Jesus Nido, CRE executive director for the record. This item is your item to discuss any issues you would like to discuss about the downtown.

Any questions for the director regarding this agenda item? Kissimmerman Meenal.

Thank you, Mayor. I don't have any questions. I appreciate this continuing to be on our agenda because there are so many awesome and great things going on in the downtown district. I think there are gonna be those moments when it's time to brag about them and tell the stories. The construction's going, cranes are all over the place and we've all been praying and begging for these opportunities for a long time and they're upon us. So I think we keep spreading that story. I know the downtown branding and the city branding opportunities are moving forward. We're excited about that, but I hope we all just keep continuing to share that hope and optimism of the direction of our downtown and our city. So thank you for this opportunity.

I'll say I attended the Market Marie on Saturday. Great turnout. It seems like that keeps getting more and more momentum. Construction doesn't seem to be, you know, dissuading people from coming downtown for that great market. Parking lot was full.

I had to wait for a parking spot get in. So that continues to be a great draw for our downtown too. So hopefully we can continue to help our businesses, particularly on Cleveland Street benefit from the activities and events. I know we had a concert Saturday night that seemed to go well too that we're continuing to draw more and more people to the park, and hopefully that'll filter out throughout the downtown and help folks succeed. With that, we'll if there's anything else on that, we'll move to item 4.4.

Update on placer.ai product.

So this is an exciting item for our department, the Community Redevelopment Agency department. So today we're going to have Parks and Recreation, Mr. Chris Cook, give a presentation, a demonstration on the placer.ai platform. Before he does that, I did want to give you a little bit of history on how this came about. So the initial purpose of pursuing the pacer.ai platform was to better equip the city council, the community development agency trustees, and the DDB board of directors to better understand the traffic that's coming into the downtown because of special events.

To give you more reliable data on attendance instead of just word-of-mouth, basically reporting individuals that put together their event, then just kind of guesstimating what kind of attendance is occurring in the downtown. And also just because the placer.ai tool, it also provides other information and market data that's going be very valuable for the CRA department, parks and Recreation, Economic Development and Housing, and other departments. So we're pretty excited. So as far as how it occurred, initially when I first started, was trying to get this product. I was pushing for it, pushing for it, because then I also found out that Parks Recreation was also pushing for it.

Of course, we got slapped down a little bit, said you have to go through the procurement process to make sure that you make it competitive for other type of entities that do the same type of work that Place dot ai does. So it did go through that process. There was multiple proposals that were submitted, and ultimately, Placer dot did end up getting awarded the contract that was signed by the city manager. So this all occurred basically in late twenty twenty five, and then in late, yeah, late twenty twenty five, and the agreement was thereafter signed. So just to give you a little bit of breakdown on the cost of it, so it is $50,000, and that cost is being shared by the CRA department, Parks and Recreation and Economic Development and Housing, with the CRA contributing $25,000 Parks and Recreation 20,000, then Economic Development and Housing 25,000, I mean, a total of 50,000.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to and also, we're Pacer dot ai is providing intensive training for city staff to learn how to use the product, and a lot of us are already learning how to use it and become pretty proficient in it. So Mr. Chris will give you a demonstration.

Good afternoon, everybody. Trustees, Board members, Chris Cook, Parks and Recreation Senior Manager. I think the idea here is to show you the usability and how simple it can be, so they found a Parks and Recreation person to come and demo some software for you. A couple of the things that I and maybe as you see some of the ways that we drive through here, any questions that you guys have or things that you find might help you in decision making, make sure we get those answered for you because there's we're still scratching the surface and having those intensive trainings that Director Jesus had mentioned. So we can find if we don't know the information, we can certainly find out if it's capable, and they are adjusting and adapting the software all the time too.

So even if they don't do something, doesn't mean we can't ask them to. So the first thing I'm going to show is especially related to Downtown CRA. They have a district that's been created, right? So it's already mapped. And the nice thing with this is we can just pull open a market report.

And I'll just walk you through some of the details that it shows directly in here. And for the purposes of a few minutes in here, I'm just going to add one filter in here, which is a specific date. And the mayor had mentioned the Market Marie, so we'll pull open a Market Marie date, and we'll get some data here for the district on that specific date. So just give a moment, it'll pop up. Okay.

So as you can see, it's just got some market population metrics that has we can show year over year. We can go farther back if we'd like. This specific model is going to show residents as well as workforce. Oh, we wanted to get a screen working.

Oh, here it is.

It's on now. Oh, okay. Sure.

It's on now. It's January.

It's not that much.

It's just a simple remote. Let's confirm.

Okay. Thank you. So it's got general population numbers. I think we've mentioned at the last about how the data is given. So this would be unique people we're looking at.

So even as you see over the course of some hours that I'll show a little bit later, this would be a unique populace. So the same person isn't pinging and showing up over the course of several hours if they're at an event or a location. So because I picked one date, we don't have another date to show it for. But it will show us some of the top visited places that people that picked up in this model on this date, locations that they've been to frequently, and then it gives kind of that hourly breakdown that I mentioned. So this was during our duck season, we'll call it.

So we did see higher traffic at different times of the day. But as you can see, Market Marie, there's clearly a bump in that attendance you can see between ten and two. As we keep going down a little bit further, there are demographics that are broken down, brings up education out of market visitors, income variables, demographic breakdowns that they have some ways that they've packaged some different demographics together that I think is interesting and just gives us a good idea on who's attending which events. And part of our role in Parks and Recreation is to have events that speak to a wide audience. So this is a good tool that will help us make sure that we're providing entertainment and things for all sorts of different audiences.

So what I'll show here real quick too is we'll just use that same date, but a little bit of a more drilled in area. So what we can do is create kind of our own map. We can do this anywhere in the city. So if we want beach information, we want softball information like we just had, we can do that. If we want to drive up Cleveland Street, We can create our own map.

And then now it's going to let's see. The festival one I like for this model because it has out of town visitors specifically or out of area specifically in here, and it'll take just a second to populate. So this would be in that hand drawn map that I showed you specific to that. The fastest, sorry about that. But as you can see, we can drill through data pretty quickly and do custom reports.

So again, as we see so this is showing eleven twelve thousand visitors on that date, on that Saturday, the Market Murray date from January. The average time that they were there was seventy three minutes. Again, it doesn't have any we can do trending data, so this can help us look at what last year on this date without an event compared to this year. So that's where the visit trends would be helpful. And then here's just some additional info that we get from the going and drilling down into event details.

We can see where people are coming with some of our tourism markets, I already did a quick one on the softball tournament from last weekend. You can really see the red pockets from where those teams are located, where those colleges are. So for an event like the Market Marie, not surprising that we're drawing so heavily from within the Clearwater market. The again, it's got audience overviews that do a comparative to Florida. You can change that to nationwide, to different states. You can use it against the census information, but it's got good comparative details there as well as different ways to look at charts.

The

this one I like from an event perspective because it tells you within 15 miles of other events that are taking place on the same date and time. So we can make sure as we're planning things that we're doing so keeping in mind what else is going on in the community and how we rank against those. So on a Saturday in January, the Market Marie, that time that we put in, was the number one festival in the area according to this data. So again, some of these things that will update as a staff is some of the addresses that are in the Placer software are repetitive, right? So we have Winter's Dolphin Tale Adventure as an old listing.

But we can clean up some of these locations so that it just gives us even better data. This shows us where they're coming from before and going after. So a lot of people came from home and went home after for this event. And it's interesting to see on the data where they will come from and where they will go and then some of the routes in which they have to get there. So traffic engineering can benefit from this.

We can see where traffic flow is going, specifically we think of fourth of July and how we make traffic patterns with closures. This will be really helpful. I've already shared with some of the traffic engineering folks some of the software already. And then here's the data that we showed with numbers during that event specifically. We can dive in and see how many times individual users have visited, either similar event, same event, different events.

And again, as Jesus had brought up at the beginning, we want to provide you when looking at funding sources and making funding decisions the information that helps you know the kind of impact that these events are having. So if there's any specific pieces of info either that weren't covered here or things that we can have to present to you before an event comes for a funding request or even in the post event request, we'll be happy to get your information, field it, and put it together. So with that, any questions? I will do my best to answer questions. I'm not the expert on this, but I'd be happy to Mr. Mack.

So I'm on the website. I just went to placer.ai. How do you bring up specific, like Clearwater? Do we have to log in for that or

Yeah. So as a city, we have a number of logins that came with that investment that was made, and so we'll have as long as you're an active user for the city, you have access to these kinds of reports that the general public wouldn't have.

Okay. Right. Chancellor Menino?

You done, sir?

Yeah.

Makes us different as a municipality will be how we capitalize on that data we collect. Sometimes people can get lost in data. I think our team will be successful in navigating that. I just had two quick questions for you. Is there a monthly or yearly subscription that comes along with this software?

To my knowledge, yes, we have a year long agreement. It might be longer than that because of the procurement process we went through. Okay. But there is a subscription process that we went through.

And that will be broken down CRA, Parks and Rec and Housing and Economic Development, I assume, or?

That's who helped fund the project, but as I shared earlier, if traffic engineering is looking for information, we're happy to do this across all lines to make the city better.

Absolutely. And then the last one, help me just better understand, define out of market visitors. Is that out of that district or the map you create or?

Yeah, thank you. And just so I don't take up more of your time driving through this. There is some click downs. You can include residents, you can include businesses, so that your numbers will grow if you want to see the overall market report and how many people are there. But that specific one through festivals that I chose, I like that one because it is from people who live outside of a 15 mile or do not spend enough time where it shows that they work within that 15 mile.

Gotcha. Very cool. Thank you so much, and thanks for demonstrating it.

Else? I want to say a couple of things. One is that for me this information is really important, because I know this is St. Pete Clearwater is using similar technology, maybe even Placer, and they are really learning a lot about how many out of town folks visit events that they sponsor. Some, they've been surprised that a heavier number of out of town residents have participated in an event than they thought, and then there's been others where they've been sponsoring events that they've been told, hey, it draws folks from all over, and it turns out their data isn't showing that at all.

It's mainly local folks. So for the TDC, that's really important because the whole point of the bed tax is to draw tourists in, and I think that helps us kind of define for us at CRA and the downtown development board, you know, what can we use our funds to maybe supplement or to, you know, use for local, attract locals, where maybe bad tax money, the TDC money isn't going to be there for that event in the future. So that's very helpful. And I think the other thing I see too is, you know, we've always talked about, you know, what role could the beach and visitors on the beach play in the revitalizing downtown? Are there things that we could offer to attract that large population that comes and goes?

It was absolutely packed this past weekend. The beach was. Hard to find a room. Couldn't get a dinner reservation, particularly on a I don't know why, on the February 14, you couldn't get a dinner reservation, even if you were the mayor. But I think that this, you know, could help us kind of learn more about what kinds of things are happening downtown that do attract those folks to come in off the beach, and maybe that's, you know, something we can use for further success.

So for me, this is really, really helpful, and for all kinds of departments, not just Parks and Rec, and as you pointed out, police department has to control traffic and all these other departments that can really learn a lot from this and provide better service to our citizens. So, I think it's a good thing. Okay. Thank you. Would that move to item 5.1?

Again, hey, Susanino, CRE executive director for the record. Going back to the pacer.ai item, I did want to thank the IT department. They were critical in helping us select the proper platform to use for the foot traffic and data collection that the platform does provide us, especially David Pearson and Mr. Dan Mayer. So enough of that, but just wanted to put that out on the record.

So this is the February 2026 Director's Report. So the items we'll go through is, like every month, is the downtown activity and the North Greenwood CRA activity. We do want to start highlighting more and more, and we're starting to get help from other departments. And now that we do have mister Christopher Edwards here with economic development and housing, the new director, so I'm not sure if I'm the first one to introduce you to him, but he's the man back there. But this department and other departments are going to be critical on planning and development to help us start identifying these new businesses that are coming down to the downtown.

So we'll try to get better and better to report that to you every month. But this month, we do wanna highlight Golfside Pizza and Subs because they're located in the corner of in the 500 Block, 530 Cleveland Street. They've been open now for a few weeks, and so far, just the feedback we get from them that the service that they've been provided by the city departments, it's spectacular. And they, so far, have been successful within those few weeks, and hopefully, with us helping them and providing them any kind of resources they'll need, they'll remain successful there.

So

I know that the direction was that miss the councilwoman we went to share. She would be basically the liaison, so mister Battle and myself and other staff members did meet with her. And we'll give you a quick little update here as far as what occurred so far up to date. So today, this is for the Clearwater the Re imagine Clearwater Main Library Cultural Destination Initiative. So staff is actively targeting organizations, associations, and individuals that are in that industry, either directly or develop it or just provide data. And we have engaged over 147 plus organizations than some of the key partners that is it not on your screens?

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worry. We are this is a multi department team that's starting to engage these organizations, museums, cultural institutions, and just catalytic individuals out there in the market that do this type of work to activate these type of libraries. So we have economic development, we have Amber, she's with arts and culture, we have public communications, we have parks and recreation, just multiple departments helping us make that contact. For instance, you know, we've interviewed the creative Pinellas with Edgar Hall, Clearwater Historical Society, Florida Rama, Great Explorations Children's Museum, Zero Empty Spaces, Heather Wake Studios out of London, mont Properties, locally here with mister Ruttenberg, Museums of Science and Innovation. We have industry up there, but it's actually Museum of Science and Innovation, Maps Museum, and this is just a few of them.

There's many, many more individuals that we've been interviewing. We've been traveling to them, you know, Economic Development and myself, we've been traveling to St. Pete, to Tampa, and anywhere that makes sense for us to travel fairly quickly. For instance, we just met with the CEO of Mosey, and we're also going to provide him a personal tour of the library just so he can come in and kind of take a look at what we got and see if he can identify stakeholders and partners that he might be able to identify to bring to the table.

So,

again, we're doing direct interviews. We're exploring discussions individuals in the industry. Again, that's with cultural institutions, arts and creative organizations, place making developers, regional stakeholders. We're also starting to see if we can do interviews. For instance, we had councilwoman and the mayor do an interview with 82 degrees, which is locally.

And we're also working with economic development and housing to see if we can create some time of subtype some type of publication and industry publications. And obviously, have the regular social media that we're exploring, that we're posting items on. Just to give you a little bit of the timeline so far, you know, back and before the end of the calendar year, we did bring this item to you at the end of the year, and basically we did get the direction to move forward starting January 1. So we've been doing that since January 6 and through April 17 are I went a little bit too fast there. So in planning phase one, you know, September 16 to December 1, that's when we brought it to you to get that direction to move forward.

Then we also had the planning phase from December 1 against January 6 on how to strategize internally and how to market this a little bit better and just kind of learn from lessons learned from the past. Then January 6 to 2026 to 08/17/2026, we've been doing pre marketing. That's where we do this targeted outreach and interviews, monthly reportings, starting to schedule tours of the library, and just implement any kind of stakeholder feedback. Then the final phase would be towards the end of the year where we'll continue to do tours, but we'll also issue a call for development concepts for the library. Or if there's some type of catalytic project that comes in before that that has an awesome proposal, then we could entertain that with city management and potentially bring that to you early or just advertise it early to open that window up.

So before I move on for that particular slide, I wanted to see if Mr. Brattle had any input because, you know, he was part of some of those interviews, I'm not putting you on the spot or anything. But we are getting a lot of feedback, and we're scheduling these tours. So we're continuing our monthly community outreach meetings. At the last meeting sorry.

Not sure what happened here. So at the last meeting, we had the Denizio group here at the library, and they gave a presentation on the downtown project that they're working on. I think the feedback from the community was well received that they're we're bringing those individuals that are actually doing the construction to them so they can ask questions. So our next meeting we do have is scheduled for February 24. And that meeting, we're gonna have our city engineer and public works and other staff kinda start giving update on the downtown construction and get their feedback.

Right now, what we're doing is we do have public works staff and CRA staff. We're doing those one on one meetings with the downtown merchants in the community just to kinda get their feedback on certain construction activities or certain plans that public works may have. In addition, it's not on this particular slide, but we do have mister mister Ruttenberg. He's going to with Fairmount Properties. He's agreed to come in and be one of the guest speakers.

He's in, I think, summertime, according to staff. Am I correct? Yeah. So he's pretty booked, but he's agreed to be able to do that in the summertime to come in and talk to the community about, you know, downtown activation and projects he's working on. So this is for the Cleveland Street District signage that we just had installed. This is as part of the Cleveland Street activation project. So we did have a few signs that are very nice. If you haven't seen them, you know, they're beautiful. They're located in the 405 Hundred Block. This says Cleveland Street District.

Then you've all seen the construction of the new pavers that are being installed there at the corner of the 500 Block in front of the building where you're located. Then for North Greenwood, we had a lot of activation as far as the grants. Right now, to date, since July 2024, we have a total of 52. Of those 52, 18 have been completed, 15 are under construction, then six of them are under review, then 13, we are already engaged with those residents to see how we can help them. And as far as the commercial grants, we still have four approved projects and two projects that have been completed for the North Greenwood area.

Then for the North Ward Elementary School, staff continues to to advance forward North Ward Elementary School redevelopment through council coordination, site engagement, and targeted outreach. I do wanna thank Economic Development and Housing and mister Battle that have taken the lead on this particular project. But because it is located within the North Greenwood CRE area, we continue to give you updates here because it's just easier to do that. From time to time, it will come to you as city council work sessions like in the past. So after reviewing the shrink-wrap options, the orange orange material will be used to cover the structure.

The first site tour was held January 16 with positive interest. A project brochure and landing page have launched. Then media is release issued with public communications. Developer outreach is underway focusing on historic preservation experience. And there is articles out there that you can read.

Then the CAC meeting, the next one we have scheduled is for March, 05:30 to 06:30PM at the North Greenwood Recreation Center. We'll we'll continue to introduce CAC members to the public, and we'll continue to hear that feedback from the public and bring any anything that bears from those CAC meetings, we'll bring it to you. That concludes the presentation, but I also had one more particular item that I think almost slide here. So Ms. Mailer Interman and Ms.

Gloria Campbell wanted me to share this. So last night they had a business showcase basically for businesses that are potentially gonna be selected to move into the mini container village that they're working on. So that occurred last night from 06:30PM to about 09:30PM at the Curtis Museum. So I was part of that panel that heard those small businesses that have potential to move in to use the mini container. So it was a pretty well attended meeting by the community, by the businesses.

And some of those businesses that are going to move in, they have very interesting concepts. And this is a partnership, so we have a partnership with St. Pete College, we have a partnership with Pinellas County Small Business Development Center, SCORE and many other partners, financial institutions that are all at the table to help the mini container project be successful. That concludes the presentation.

Okay. Any questions for the director? Vice Mayor?

Not so much questions, but actually commentary. So I want to first thank our manager, Jennifer, for allowing me to have that opportunity to be to have a brainstorming session with our assistant city manager, Mr. Baram and Jesus. And I really appreciated the opportunity to have a good discussion, share our thoughts, and as well as our research. And I brought with the with my with me, and I shared with you all some of the research that I had, and I was so pleased that you also shared the same results that I did, two of which were two locations that were international, which to me showed that we are pushing forward and we're thinking big.

I think one of them was an AI company for Japan and the other one in London. So I was very pleased about that. The second thing which I found a little bit surprising and I'm grateful for is the idea that Mr. Battle opened up my mind to different opportunities that we should look at. So I always enjoy and put value to expanding our minds, so I really wanted to thank you all for that. And I look forward to working together with you all. And like I offered at that meeting, I'm willing to be part of that process if you guys wish.

That's it. Anybody else? Okay. Thank you. With that, we'll move to item six, which is to adjourn the February 17 meeting of the City of Clearwater Community.