Community Development Board - Regular Meeting

This time we'll call to order the 05/18/2026 meeting of the city of Thirdwater Community Redevelopment Agency. We move to item 2.1 in the agenda.

Approve the minutes of the 04/20/2026 CRA meeting.

Is there a motion to approve the minutes?

So moved. Second.

All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Unament. Move to Agenda Item three, Citizens to be Heard Regarding Items Not on Today's CRA Agenda. Is there anyone to be heard on a CRA item that is not on today's agenda? Seeing none, we'll move to item 4.1.

Afternoon. Jesus Nino, CRA Executive Director. I'm going to introduce you to miss Tasha Hadley our CRE specialist to present this item.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sasha Hadley CRE specialist. And today, I'm pleased to recognize Downtown Pizza Bar and Grill as our twenty twenty six business spotlight winner. Located at 428 Cleveland Street in Downtown Clearwater, this restaurant is a popular destination for food, entertainment, and community gatherings within the district. Co owner Dan Mahoney acquired the restaurant in late twenty twenty four and continues to bring new energy to the Downtown Clearwater Clearwater dining scene.

Conveniently located near the Bay Care Sound and the Capitol Theater, this restaurant this restaurant provides residents and visitors with a welcoming place to gather before and after events. Known for his New York style thin crust pizza, this restaurant is also popular for his wings, pasta, seafood, and Italian favorites. Throughout the week, guests can enjoy entertainment nights featuring music bingo, trivia, karaoke, and helping create a lively atmosphere on the Cleveland Street corridor. Beyond this weekly entertainment, the restaurant also participates a community focused initiatives like Running for Brews, a weekly five k social run, and Hello Cleveland Street, a concert series alongside neighborhood neighboring businesses bringing live music to the 400 Block. To help share their story, the CRA and public communications team collaborated to create a video highlighting the restaurant and showing its growing role within the community.

The video has been shared across our social media platforms, and you can find a full article available on our website at myclearwatercra.com. Downtown Pizza and Bar and Grill supports the city and CRA's shared goals of strengthening downtown activity, supporting local businesses, and encouraging community engagement within our redevelopment areas. At this time, we invite you to view the video showcasing downtown pizza, sports bar, and grill.

Hi. My name is Dan Mahoney. I'm the, one of the co owners and the manager of Downtown Pizza Sports Bar and Grill, which we acquired in November 2024. People feel comfortable coming to a concert, have a beer, watch a sports event, get ready to go to the sound. We have trivia here on Wednesday night, karaoke on Thursday, music bingo on Tuesday, four merchants here on the street assembled Hello Cleveland Street concerts, which we've done quite successfully since January.

We've had about 10 of them located right outside across the street. We think that those events are gonna really help foster a sense of community here. They've been a lot of fun. We are best known for our pizza. It's a New York style thin crust pizza, which is really delicious. Chicken wings, shrimp scampi, the chicken marsala, chicken piccata, eggplant Parmesan. We really take a lot of time and care in preparing all the items that we serve. We're open daily during the week from 11:00 till ten at night. And then on the weekends on Friday and Saturday or if there's a big sound or Capitol Theater concert, we'll go till 12:00, sometimes beyond that.

Congratulations, Dan. We hope Downtown Pizza continues

to be as popular as

it is today. It's already very popular. Would like to say a word or two?

Yeah. I'll just quickly say it's been a pleasure to be a part of the Downtown community and as was previously stated, trying to do my part to be making it as much of a destination as possible and I can see the livelihood increasing, you know, daily, monthly. So I think it always is a team effort. Pleased to be part of that team. Thanks.

Thank you. Move to agenda item 4.2.

Downtown revitalization.

This is your particular item to discuss. Any items you wish to discuss not on the agenda? Anybody

any trustee have anything to discuss? Ahead. Councilman Renato.

Mayor, thank you. I think we have some pretty big discussions coming up here relatively shortly in a week or so, so I don't want to beat this one up, but I know we're all very excited and hopeful for the direction that we're going in our downtown and the activation, not just on our county properties, but our city properties, as well as our downtown collaborating partners that are really activating downtown. And the energy from the branding consultants that were here really tells that story and helps us tell it. Exciting. Thank you.

Right. Move to agenda item 4.3. Mr. Battle.

Sure. Mr. Mayor and members of the council and everyone on day as we're going to defer this item, which is the results of the valuation committee results for property on South MLK until June. So just to ask if we can move that this item and we'll bring it back at that time.

Any objection? If not, then we'll move to action item 5.4.

CRA director's report for May 2026.

If we can get the report up on the screen, please. It's up already. Just wanna interrupt there. Thank you again. Jesus Nino, CRA director for the record.

Today's report is pretty exciting compared to all the rest of the items you heard from the DB and earlier. So this is for the director's report for May 2026. So we'll give you updates and for you and for the public for downtown CRA updates, North Breenwood CRA updates, and property disposition updates. So as far as for the downtown, we're excited to inform all of you and the public that Emily's family restaurant does have new ownership. Mister Nicholas Pastas, if you haven't met him, I would encourage you to go say hello to him.

So from what I understand, he has plans to improve the visual aesthetics of the restaurant. It's been there historically for many, many years and decades probably. But staff has been in communication with them and to see what kind of assistance we can provide them, any type of grants we may have, or just general city assistance just to have that business friendly atmosphere towards him. For the Osceola Garage parking garage, it's gonna be our next item for our May 28 for our 05/26/2026 community outreach meeting right here at the library chambers. So for the community out there, this meeting will take place from 3PM to 4PM right here in the council chambers you're invited.

We also have city staff that's going to be there from economic development and housing and public works to answer any questions. These meetings do. They're starting to get more and more attendance from the community, so we really appreciate that. That means that our staff is spreading the word more and more. For the Re imagine Clearwater Main Library Cultural Destination item, staff is continuing to work diligently to move this item forward.

We do have two staff members, one from Amber from Arts and Culture and one of our CRA staff members. They're going to be traveling up to Philadelphia this week for the annual meeting for the twenty twenty six American Alliance of Museums conference. So they're already actively trying to book individuals to just to interview or talk to, see if they have any interest in coming to Clearwater. So hopefully they come back with a lot of information and a lot of good leads. So for downtown engagement, we're starting to ramp up our efforts as far as our community engagement.

And I'm using that word intentionally, community, because that means more than just the merchants. It means pretty much anyone that resides, does business, or is in our downtown. So we're staff conducted 26 engagements. Recently, this was with merchants. This one is a small little win, but we have been kind of working on this for a while.

This kind of started all because of the 405500 Block Cleveland Street activation initiative. So it kind of spread a little bit further than those two blocks. This is the installation of bicycle racks for the community to use from the 400 Block all the way to the 700 Block. In addition, we also had some installed at the Mercado Park. This is some of the projects that are coming at least being advertised for our downtown.

I'm not going to get into a lot of detail, but this one has been out there in the media a lot, so I decided to share here as well. This is for the $50,000,000 entertainment destination plan for Clearwater or the EVO Entertainment. And this is and I also wanted to highlight that there is demolition underway at the feature site at the 700 Block Of Cleveland Street. In addition, as you're already aware, there's demolition permits that are being pulled for the 600 Block Of Cleveland Street. Also, Good Life showroom opens at 331 Cleveland Street.

So if you need more information for the community out there watching, you can always go to the clevelandstreetalliance.com website to obtain additional information. The North Greenwood, the update is that North Greenwood, the North Ford Elementary School, the roof wrap is already installed, so that will prevent any additional leakage as far as from rainwater. I apologize if this mic isn't completely up here. I moved it around too much. So we've already put the wrap up and started over the elementary school so that it prevent any additional rain leaking into the building and causing any further damage.

So staff is also planning to do some type of community event out there. I'm not sure if Mr. Battle would like to say anything about that, But Night at North Ward or whatever name we come up with, so we're starting to plan that internally with Parks and Rec Planning, Economic Development and Housing, Mr. Battle's office, and the lead will be Ms. Adra Aja with Economic Development in partnership with CRA staff. And we'll bring you more details on that community event once we're it's fully vetted out. Do you want to add anything to that, Mr. Battle? You're good to go? This is a little bit more statistics of what we're doing.

We're still in the pre marketing phase. So staff is continuing to meet with individuals that might be interested in submitting a proposal when that window does open up. And all the media coverage has just been extraordinary. Mr. Battle, Audra and a few other staff members have been interviewed as far as what we're doing with North Ward in the future.

As far as the North Green Greenwood Community Advisory Committee, we did have the special meeting that occurred to discuss the 706 North Missouri Avenue project also known as the Armory. And our next meeting is proposed to be Wednesday, June 3, from 05:30 to 6PM at the North Greenwood Recreation Center, room one. So anyone that's out there watching this, you're invited to attend. As far as property disposition, as was noted earlier, the property of Washington Avenue and MLK site has been deferred to the next meeting. And we'll make sure that all the developers are here to answer any questions if you may have of them.

Other properties we're moving kind of through the process as far as moving certain properties from city ownership and to CRA ownership and once that's complete we'll quickly start advertising and noticing some of those properties. Some of the more prominent sites are out there are, for instance, what we call the creative contractor site located at 618 Drew Street. There's a lot of interest from developers right now in that particular property. So once it is transferred over to the CRA, we'll quickly notice that particular property. In addition, we have the site located at 115 MLK.

That's currently owned by the CRA. And once our legal team gets a little bit more caught up, we're going to go ahead and as far as what they're dealing with all our properties, lot of work. It's a big list and a lot of work under a few attorneys that are dealing with that. So once they're caught up a little bit, we're going to quickly release a notice of disposition for the 115 MLK property located there in the Prospect Lake District of downtown. That concludes my presentation. Open for any questions.

Questions for the record. Council Member Fischeta.

Back to the northward. I see that you've gotten some email replies, telephone inquiries, some meetings were held, and some maybe two type site tours. What was the feedback that you got? Any anything you'd like to share with us?

So as far as and I do have staff back here, so if you wish, you can come up as well. But as far as some of the, you know, the feedback we got, this is an extraordinary site, extraordinary building, has a lot of potential for us, those individuals, is what they're saying, to come in here and potentially do something with the building. Obviously, it historic. We would like to kind of preserve it as much as possible. So that does throw in a little bit extra cost. But right now, we're hearing nothing but great things as far as the potential to redevelop that site.

I'll add one other piece to it, and this may be something that Jesus may not want to say because it's not as positive, but one of the one of the groups that toured it has significant interest at first, and they came back and told us that the cost to preserve it or for their project is just too expensive based on what they want to do. So we're hearing excited about it, opportunities, but this particular user had a very specific function and it would have required them to renovate it to a standard that cost more. In other words, they wanted to do something that was educational based, not for profit based, and didn't have necessarily a, I would say, a profit driven approach to it, but more of a use potential with respect to the end user. Whereas the other users that he's speaking about, most of the interest has been in the private development space for mixed use development in terms of how do you use the existing buildings and what can you build new or how can you build new product on the site. So I just want to make that clarification because I think that's what you want to know is like what are they telling us in addition to, hey, look, we like it, it's great, is it going to be free, is it are we going to have to pay for it?

But those that is kind of a little bit more specific feedback for you to think about.

Yes, thank you.

Any other questions for the director? Hearing and seeing none, thank you for your report. Move to Item six on the agenda, and that is to adjourn the 05/18/2026 meeting of the City of Clearwater Clearwater Redevelopment Agency.